The original question ... Hamlet Act III,
scene i, from the 1623 Folio edition on
show in Sotheby's. Photograph: PA
Time to start saving? Anyone who suffers from bibliographic sticky fingers will have a hard time browsing today's papers, adorned as they all are with lush images of what is apparently, now, the most famous tome ever.
An unusuallly complete copy of the 1623 First Folio of Shakespeare's plays is going under the hammer at Sotheby's in July, and went on show to the press yesterday. Said to be likely to fetch anything between £2.5m and £3.5m, my hunch is that the figure will soar as foreign investors, tempted by its being toured around the globe before the sale, start sniffing around.
Not often that you get the chance to put a genuine Shakespearean relic on your corporate card, after all (and some pretty flashy corporate cards will be on display, you can bet, come the day of the sale). But really - why all the fuss?
I find it difficult to understand the slack-jawed awe with which this particular object is being treated. Fevered brows and weak knees usually attend the sale of big-name literary documents, sure, but these almost always bear the imprint of the author.
Whether it's a scribbled signature or a doodle in the margin, we have come to value the all-important authenticating mark that declares a writer has actually made physical contact with the text in question. It speaks of that fleeting, elusive thing, a form of human contact from beyond the grave, or even (given the way many of us feel about Shakespeare) the briefest touch of the divine.
In the case of the First Folio, however, it's hard to think of a blander book. Mass-produced by the standards of its day, it is almost free of visual interest (that godawful portrait of the author aside). It is, of course, a book of theatre scripts - and scripts, then as now, while they're interesting to perform are rarely that thrilling to look at.
Nor did the author have, as far as we know, any involvement in actually putting the book together; by the time it came to be printed he had been lying six feet under Stratford Parish Church for half a decade.
The Folio is, in fact, a tombstone rather than a living piece of art. And although it saved the texts of 18 plays from the dustbin - something for which we probably have to thank Shakespeare's colleagues rather than the author - it's genuinely difficult to see what we gain from being so fascinated by a book whose contents have already been mercilessly squeezed for every last drop of juice.
In fact I don't think it would much matter if, as some commentators fear, this particular First Folio - miraculously intact though it is - disappears into private ownership after its spell in the limelight. Maybe it'd be better for everyone if it did. That way we could make some attempt to care about what really matters: the words themselves, rather than the form in which they happened to be published.
