Yale University Libraries

Yale University owns two copies of the First Folio and this one was used to create the facsimile edition published by Yale. The first known owner of this copy was Henry Constantine Jennings who possessed collections of marble statuary, other art object, books and ladies’ shoes, which, as Rasmussen and West quote, ‘he obtained from every woman of his acquaintance’ (255). However, he did not have the means to purchase all these items and his collection was eventually auctioned off. George Hibbert, a merchant and Member of Parliament, then purchased this copy. He also owned a Gutenberg Bible and edited Caxton’s translation of Ovid’s Six Books of Metamorphoses in 1819. In 1829, part of his library was auctioned, including four Shakespeare folios which were acquired by John Wilks. The next sale of this copy dates from 1847 when the four folios were purchased by John Dunn Gardner. In 1854, this copy was purchased by Joseph Lilly at an auction and then sold it to Henry Huth, a traveller and collector whose library grew with the help of Lilly. The volume was later in possession of Huth’s son, Alfred Henry Huth, who liked to share his book collection publicly. His Shakespeare collection was purchased by Alexander Smith Cochran. Cochran founded the Elizabethan Club in 1911 and gifted the folios from that sale to the Club, together with over a hundred books and manuscripts from the Elizabethan and Jacobean era.