The National Library of Israel has been given a priceless fragment of William Shakespeare’s First Folio, dating from 1623, as part of an extraordinary donation of historic manuscripts.

The eight-book gift puts the Jerusalem library “on the international map in terms of its Shakespeare holdings”, said Dr Stefan Litt, curator of its Humanities Collection.

Three of the donated books are first or early editions of works by Shakespeare. One is the first appearance of his play Antony and Cleopatra, originally performed in 1607, and included — seven years after Shakespeare’s death — in the first print edition of his work, known as the First Folio.

There are thought to have been around 750 First Folios printed, of which 233 are known to survive worldwide.

There is also a copy of the so-called Second Folio, published in 1632. There are thought to be around 250 Second Folios in existence, mostly in libraries around the world, with a few still in private hands. A 2016 sale of a Second Folio fetched $177,500 at auction in San Francisco.

shakespeare

The 1640 first edition of Shakespeare’s poems (courtesy)

The eight-book donation is a massive bonus for the library as it prepares to move into a state-of-the-art new building in Jerusalem next year.

Dr Litt said the books came anonymously from the family of a collector in Israel with “an English-speaking background”. He said: “It turns out there were some original Shakespeare volumes in Israel that we were not aware of. This valuable donation significantly enhances our collection. It’s a big privilege for us."

The donation includes a “small but very beautiful” first edition of Shakespeare’s poems from 1640, incorporating most of his most famous sonnets. “This volume is in really great shape”, said Dr Litt, “almost as if it had been published 80 or 90 years ago. You can hardly see that almost 500 years have passed."

Dr Litt said the connection with the family of the collector, who died some years ago, had come through one of the NLI’s researchers.

“The family said they wanted to make the donation — and these items could so easily have gone on sale. Instead, now the library is on the international map in terms of its Shakespeare holdings.”

There are other rare books in this donation, spanning more than 400 years. Most of the titles had not previously existed in the NLI collections.

The oldest is a novel dating from Venice in 1499, and thought to have been written by a monk called Francesco Colonna.

This was written in “a very challenging mix of Latin and early Roman Italian”, Dr Litt said, and includes more than 170 woodcut illustrations. Fifty years ago the NLI was given another copy of this book — called Poliphilo’s Strife of Love in a Dream — and the new acquisition will enable researchers to make comparisons between the two editions.

There are also two large volumes from Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language from 1755, and a volume containing the plan for the dictionary enterprise from 1747.

model

The National Library’s new building, to be opened next year (courtesy)

The most recent book in the donation is a 1926 first edition of the memoirs of TE Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) — The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, detailing Lawrence’s military adventures in the Middle East.

Dr Litt said that although he, like other curators in the NLI, had an acquisitions budget, he would never have been able to afford to buy the rare books in this donation “without blowing my budget for years.

“I couldn’t [normally] dream of bringing something like these books to Israel.”
He looks forward to displaying the Shakespeare material in expanded conditions in the NLI’s new building.

And he confided that already in the library’s holdings is an unusual 16th-century book, Henrie Cornelius Agrippa’s Of the vanitie and uncertaintie of artes and sciences. Agrippa’s works were heavily influenced by kabbalah, Jewish mystical thought.

But what is really exciting about this volume is that some scribblings on the book’s front page are now believed to include Shakespeare’s signature, leading to the theory that this was Shakespeare’s own copy.

“As always, when it comes to Shakespeare, there are question marks, and we are being cautious, but it’s one of the reasons we are so thrilled to get this new donation, because the books will go so nicely together.”