How Cool Is This? The Vault at the Folger Shakespeare Library

We were overwhelmingly fortunate to be permitted to visit the vault at the Folger Shakespeare Library yesterday.  Here are some of the treasures we saw: Tthe first and oldest known printed reference to Shakespeare.







A First Folio from 1623, with the famous wood cut of Shakespeare.










 Queen Elizabeth's own personal (!) copy of one of the earliest editions of the bible written in English.  A





An expurgated version of Shakespeare, where the deletions had been made by a monk who was from the Jesuits.







 And, one of my favorites, the stage directions for Paul Robeson's production of Othello in 1930.  He did it in London because a black man couldn't do it on stage in the US at that time.