Whereas the acquisition of the First Folio by George IV might be considered trophy collecting, and the Second by George III as the act of a scholar and bibliophile, the purchase of the Third Folio was part of a concentrated campaign by William IV to complete gaps in the Royal Library. The collection had been seriously depleted in its scope and magnificence when George IV gave George III’s King’s Library to the nation.

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On William IV’s accession to the throne in 1830, there was no official royal library. The magnificent King’s Library of George III, of at least 65,000 volumes, had been given to the British Museum by George IV in 1823 (and now forms part of the British Library). This included George III’s copies of the First, Third and Fourth Folios of Shakespeare’s plays, though not his Second. This had been retained by George IV for its royal provenance (it had previously been owned and annotated by Charles I). George IV also owned his own copy of the First Folio, from his library at Carlton House, his old London residence. William IV and his librarians began the process of reassembling an official royal library, using collections in store belonging to his predecessors, but also with new acquisitions. This copy of Shakespeare’s Third Folio was one such, acquired in 1836, for £13 (between £800 and £900 today) at the sale of the book collector George Wilkinson.

The publication of the Third Folio of Shakespeare’s plays in 1663 followed the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II in 1660, and the end of the English Civil Wars and the Interregnum, when all London theatres had been closed. It was a of 1632, by the publisher Philip Chetwind. He had married the widow of Robert Allot, the holder of rights to many of the plays published in the Second Folio, and thereby gained the publishing rights to much of the Folio text. A second impression, produced in 1664, went much further than being a reprint of the Second Folio. It was issued with seven extra plays ascribed to Shakespeare: Pericles, The London Prodigal (attributed to Shakespeare in the only quarto edition of 1605, but widely disputed today), The Puritan (attributed to WS on the titlepage of the 1607 quarto edition, but now often ascribed to Thomas Middleton), Thomas Lord Cromwell (first published in quarto in 1602, attributed to WS), Sir John Oldcastle (first published anonymously in 1600 and then attributed to Shakespeare in the 1619 quarto edition), A Yorkshire Tragedy (first published in 1608, and attributed to Shakespeare, but now generally assigned to Thomas Middleton) and Locrine (first published in quarto in 1595, attributed to WS, now thought to be by the dramatist and pamphleteer Robert Greene). Their inclusion in the Third Folio gave them a certain authenticity, but only Pericles, first published in quarto in 1609, is still recognised as being written, at least in part, by Shakespeare. He is believed to have written approximately half of the text, possibly in collaboration with the pamphleteer George Wilkins.

With only around 50 copies of this edition of the Third Folio listed in catalogues, this edition is a rarer survival than the First Folio (extant copies of which number 233); this relatively low number is usually ascribed to losses of unsold printed copies during the Great Fire of London in 1666, when the area round St Paul’s Cathedral (the central location for the London book trade) was destroyed, including the vaults of St Paul’s where many booksellers stored their stock.