One of the strengths of the rare book collection at Vassar is English literature. Users can access titles relating to many of the key figures in the literary canon, including, of course, William Shakespeare. The bulk of these items are housed in the Grille Collection, a general grouping of rare and valuable books.
Though the extent of the holdings cannot compete with the large research libraries in the United States and abroad, they are nevertheless impressive, and there are many notable works in our collection. What is more, many of these works have interesting histories, and have come to the college through gifts, bequests, and purchases. Some highlights are noted below. The Special Collections Library does house, however, significant examples of the seventeenth century folios, large format books which collected together in one volume the works of Shakespeare.
The fragment includes the pages of The Merry Wives of Windsor. Of course facsimiles of the full first folio, printed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, are also available, in the Main Library and Special Collections.
Amazingly, Vassar also possesses full original copies of the second, third, and fourth folios, published respectively in , , and Patricia L. This copy is especially interesting for its contemporary annotations and corrections. Since the four folios differ from one another in various ways number of plays, changes in the texts, presence of paratexts, etc. In the eighteenth century, the study of the corpus of works intensified, and editors looked more closely at the texts of Shakespeare.
William Shakespear , which appeared in , and is noted for being the first work to feature illustrations of scenes in the plays, and a biography of the playwright. In Samuel Johnson put out The Plays of William Shakespeare , with a famous preface, and explanatory notes throughout. Some eighteenth century editions featured comments and notes of multiple editors, and were quite popular.
