William Shakespeare wrote and collaborated on about 38 plays during his life. “Henry VI, Part II” was his first play to be performed from 1590 to 1591, while all of his big, well-known tragedies — “Hamlet,” “Macbeth,” “Othello,” and “King Lear” — came later. The Royal Shakespeare Company tells us that “King Lear” was probably written sometime after 1603 and first performed in 1608. Shakespeare died in 1616, and by 1623 the first collected volume of his works — the First Folio — was published (pictured above). The edition of “King Lear” from “Antiques Roadshow” came 32 years later in 1655. It was a smaller, cheaper, paperback edition called a quarto — like a folio-sized book, but folded again into quarter-sizes pages. And as appraiser Devon Eastland writes on PBS, it was in pretty bad shape.
Eastland says that the quarto’s seller, Mike, had just kept “King Lear” on a shelf with some other 17th-century books. The book’s binding was failing, its cover page was frayed, and it felt like it was going to fall apart when handled. And yet, even taking such a poor condition into account, Eastland valued “King Lear” at $10,000 to $15,000. Not only are quarto editions less common, but the publisher — Jane Bell — was a woman, which was rare for the time. Besides, the book could be restored. Eastland herself restored it, which helped it sell for a high price at auction.
[Featured image by Daderot via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled | CC0 1.0 DEED]
