1/5/2024 0 Comments Macbeth first folio![]() ![]() “Some of his greatest plays only survive because of this book half of Shakespeare’s plays would have been lost to history,” says exhibition curator Gregory Mackie, associate professor of English and Norman Colbeck Curator, UBC Library Rare Books and Special Collections, in an interview at the gallery. The book contains 36 plays in total-including Macbeth and Julius Caesar, which sits on the facing page at the gallery-many of them passed down through history only because of this publication seven years after Shakespeare’s death. There were many pages the team who acquired the book could have turned to in its display of this beyond-rare new prize in the UBC Library collection. Of the estimated 235 copies that remain worldwide, there is only one other version in Canada-in Toronto. And looking at it in person, as Stir did this morning, is thrilling-no matter how much you know about the Bard. Measuring about 8.5-by-13 inches, the precious book is at the centre of the just-announced For All Time: The Shakespeare FIRST FOLIO exhibit, presented by the VAG with the UBC Library. On close inspection, the edges of the pages still hold much of their gilded sheen, enclosed in red morocco leather decorated with gold. Ornate scrollwork adorns the page atop the title in original Elizabethan script: The Tragedie of Macbeth. SET BENEATH A glass case on the fourth floor of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Shakespeare’s 399-year-old First Folio now sits open to the first scene of Macbeth. ![]()
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