The Fourth Folio, the last of the 17th-century editions of Shakespeare's works, and the most grandly produced. There are two settings of the title page of this edition. The other has the names of H. Herringman, E. Brewster, and R. Bentley in the imprint, with a variant state adding that of R. Chiswell. To judge from institutional holdings, this title with the Knight-Saunders imprint is much the rarer of the two settings.
This finely bound copy is from the library of Frederick Perkins (1780-1860), of Chipstead Place in Kent. He was the third son of John Perkins, founder of the brewing firm of Barclay, Perkins of Southwark, which by 1809 was the largest brewery in the world. The brewery was formed in 1781 when Perkins and Robert Barclay, of the Barclay banking family, purchased Henry Thrale’s Anchor brewery from Henry’s widow, Hester. Dr Johnson, a friend of the Thrales, commented, “Sir, we are not here to sell a parcel of boilers and vats, but the potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice.” Frederick succeeded his father as head of the brewery and started collecting books about 1820. He left his library to his second son, George, who died in 1879. The greater part of his library, rich in Shakespeare quartos and folios, was sold at auction by Sotheby, Wilkinson, and Hodge on 10 July 1889.
The 1623 first folio was edited by John Heminge (d. 1630) and Henry Condell (d. 1627), and seven plays were added by Philip Chetwin (d. 1680) for the third folio of 1663, of which only one, Pericles, is today recognized as the work of Shakespeare. This fourth folio was a straight reprint of the third, issued by Henry Herringman in conjunction with other booksellers, with three settings of the title page. In common with the Third, the Fourth Folio dropped the final “e” from Shakespeare's name, a spelling that persisted until the beginning of the 19th century.
The most immediately striking aspect of the Fourth Folio is its height: Herringman and his co-publishers used a larger paper size to increase the number of lines per page and decrease the bulk of the book. Although this is the only edition in which each play does not start on a fresh page, it is in a larger font and more liberally spaced than the three earlier editions. (The two pages of L1 are set in smaller type, presumably after the discovery that some text had been omitted.) The printer of the Comedies has been identified from the ornaments as Robert Roberts.
The Fourth Folio remained the favoured edition among collectors until the mid-18th century, when Samuel Johnson and Edward Capell argued for the primacy of the First Folio text.