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Senate House Library

Exhibitions

Most recent exhibition: Shakespeare’s First Folios: a 400-year journey 

Shakespeare’s First Folio (SHL)

The First Folio is one of the most valuable and intently examined in the world and an icon of English literature. It ensured the survival of Shakespeare’s plays and over the last 400 years it has been duplicated, republished and collected in many ways. Senate House Library’s exhibition explores the history of this iconic book through its reproductions as facsimiles, how the text was repackaged and republished and how the book became prized by collectors, including Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence and Sir Louis Sterling, whose First Folios are now treasures of the Library’s collections.

The exhibition ran from 21 November 2023 to 29 February 2024. View the Library's digitised First Folios in the digital galleries