the_jana•14d agoProlific Poster

PSA: I found out a single page of original Shakespeare draft sold for $9.2 million

I was just browsing the British Library's online collection last week and stumbled on a fact that totally threw me. Apparently there is only ONE surviving page of Shakespeare's handwritten drafts for any of his plays, and it's from the play Sir Thomas More. I could not believe that's it, just a single messy page with edits scribbled all over it. They think he wrote it around 1603, and the page got valued at over 9 million dollars. It got me wondering, what ordinary looking document from our world would be worth that much in 400 years? Has anyone else gone down a rabbit hole on old manuscript prices?

2 comments

2 Comments

parker_thomas14d ago

You're falling for the scarcity trap. That 9 million price tag is more about rich people playing games with their money than actual historical value. Sir Thomas More isn't even one of his famous plays, nobody reads it. The only reason that page is worth anything is because there's nothing else to compare it to. Just look at how the market works with rare books and manuscripts. A Gutenberg Bible went for way less than a modern art piece by a living artist. The value is fake, driven by hype and a handful of billionaires who treat these things like baseball cards.

juliag1014d ago

Well I completely disagree with @parker_thomas here - that single page is priceless precisely because it has Shakespeare's actual edits and second thoughts in his own hand, which tells us more about his creative process than any clean copy ever could. The fact that it's messy and from a lesser-known play makes it even more special to historians, not less.