This exhibit celebrates the Elizabethan Club’s rare book collections, largely assembled in the early 1910s by a young Yale alumnus who was inspired by his Shakespeare lectures. The exhibit constellates around the 1623 First Folio but tells a broader story, foregrounding early modern printers, 20th-century bibliographers, and booksellers today. We’ll see how the First Folio established Shakespeare’s iconic status. But its longer history reminds us that Shakespeare’s position as valuable cultural property—with early editions that can sell for exorbitant sums— was not necessarily inevitable.