Update of the History of the Shakespeare First Folio

Abstract

This update of the Shakespeare First Folio History (2001) volume by Anthony West gives selected events in the story of the First Folio since 2001, complementing the update of West’s Census volume in the previous issue of this journal.

WITH THE FOURTH CENTENARY of the First Folio (1623) having now passed, the edition continues to have an eventful life. This article updates my First Folio History volume (2001).¹ It gives selected events in the story of the First Folio since then, complementing the update of my Census volume in the previous issue of this journal.

The first First Folio to go abroad

The identification of the first First Folio to go abroad has changed over the years. Sidney Lee, in his 1902 Census of First Folios, said a copy of the Folio (West² 159/Princeton) ‘is reputed to have been the property, more than two hundred years ago, of the far-famed Boston minister, Cotton Mather (1663–1728)’.³ In 1976, the collector William Scheide, by then the owner of this copy, countered this statement, convincingly supporting his case.⁴ It was then accepted that this same Princeton copy was the first Folio to go abroad, but at a much later date: it contains an autograph of ‘William Parker Junr. 1791’. Parker was an early owner of W159.

In 2009, a Dutch scholar informed me that the autograph ‘Constanter’ which I had recorded in Folger 75/W133 belonged to the polymath Dutch book collector Sir Constantine Huygens (1596–1687). This led to a much earlier date than that of the Princeton Folio (W159). Huygens’s copy of the First Folio appears in March 1688 in the catalogue of a bookseller in The Hague. The book returned to England later, as evidenced by the autograph in it of ‘Miss Stodart 1761’. The history of the volume is then traced in the Census (pp. 192–93) to Henry Folger’s purchase in 1928.

But when did Huygens buy the Folio and when did it leave England? It was Huygens’ practice to record his date of purchase on the title pages of his books. With the help of a picture taken with ultraviolet light of the portrait page of Folger⁵ 75, which the Folger Shakespeare Library kindly sent me on request, one could see clearly, not only ‘Constanter’, but ‘1647’. It is possible he purchased it from Samuel Browne, a Royalist English bookseller who had escaped Puritan London in 1646 and started out in The Hague ‘with stock he himself … brought over from London’.⁶ There were two other English books in Huygens’s collection marked ‘Constanter 1647’. It seems likely he purchased the volume from Samuel Browne in The Hague and that the first emigration of a First Folio was in 1646.⁷

The theft and recovery of the University of Durham First Folio, W7

There are three recorded thefts of the First Folio. W154 was stolen from Williams College, Williamstown, MA, in February 1940, and recovered the following August. W218 was stolen from the Owens College (Christie Library), Manchester, in 1972, and has not been recovered.⁸ W7 was stolen from the University of Durham Library in December 1998. I gave it two entries in the 2003 Census: in its rightful position as the seventh volume, and among ‘Unfound’ copies. In June 2008, a Mr Raymond Scott walked into the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, with a Folio; he asked for it to be authenticated and left the volume with the Library. It was quickly identified, using the Census. The Library informed the police. Mr Scott maintained it was an uncatalogued copy and in July telephoned me, asking for my help. Though I was happy to accept a funded trip to the Folger, when I said I would first get in touch with the Durham and Folger Libraries and the Durham Police, he hung up.

In due course, the Durham Police retrieved the volume from the Folger, impounding it in the University Library. They indicted Mr Scott with theft and handling stolen goods. Over the next two years, however, he continued to claim it was an uncatalogued copy. Durham Police then asked me to act as an expert witness for the Crown Prosecution Service and to write a report. I examined the volume under the eye of two police detectives—a new experience for me. It had no binding or binder’s leaves; and it lacked its first preliminary leaf, the portrait leaf, and its last leaf, all of which had identifying features. However, with detailed information from the Durham Library and my own archives, and from the Folger’s meticulous examination of the volume, I used twelve pieces of evidence—including sewing supports, press variants, dimensions, creases and tears, and holes in certain leaves—to prove with certainty it was the Durham Folio.⁹

Mr Scott was brought to trial in June 2010. The Folger Librarian and I were among the witnesses. Counsel for the Defence soon conceded, and Mr Scott was found guilty of handling and exporting stolen goods. He received six years in jail for receiving stolen goods and an additional two years for taking stolen property from the UK. The Durham First Folio was legally restored to its home.

The Folger Shakespeare Library First Folio exhibitions

For their summer exhibition in 1991, the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, mounted ‘The First Folio of Shakespeare’, curated by Peter Blayney.¹⁰ One of the features of this exhibition was the display of twenty-four First Folios, demonstrating the uniqueness of each copy.

Two decades later, the Library decided to mount another First Folio exhibition. They asked me to curate the Summer Exhibition of 2011. Its title was ‘Fame, Fortune, & Theft: The Shakespeare First Folio’, and in the three months of its duration (3 June to 3 September), it was visited by over 7,000 people.

The exhibition’s themes included:

The exhibition was held in the Folger’s Great Hall. Exhibits were displayed in fourteen glass cases and several vitrines. There were numerous panels and portraits including Henry and Emily Folger hanging on the walls, as well as the actual models of the Charlton Hinman Collator and the Carter Hailey Comet Collator that had been used for studies of the First Folio.

The exhibition attracted much attention. There were articles in The Washington Post and The New York Times. The Folger organized a lecture in its Elizabethan Theatre, which I gave, attended by over two hundred people. There were receptions on Capitol Hill. And the Folger published Foliomania! Stories Behind Shakespeare’s Most Important Book (cited below). This is a handsome folio volume, expertly edited by Owen Williams (then Assistant Director of the Folger Institute, my co-curator), with Caryn Lazzuri (then Exhibtions Manager, who transformed my First Folio knowhow into visual brilliance). Its first opening mirrors that of the First Folio, with facsimiles of Ben Jonson’s verse opposite the portrait title page. It contains nine articles on the First Folio and is very generously and beautifully illustrated in colour, with the endpapers showing the spines of forty-seven Folger First Folios.

How the Folger’s holdings of First Folios increased

Henry Folger personally assigned numbers to seventy-nine copies. This was the number always mentioned as the Folger’s holding. In 1991, in The First Folio of Shakespeare (cited at n. 10), Peter Blayney notes that the collection ‘ranges across a whole spectrum of completeness from perfect copies to defective leaves’ and, referring to ‘three major collections of uncatalogued leaves’, concludes, concerning the number of copies, ‘the best strictly numerical answer to the question is 82’.

In 1996, in the Folger’s very own Shakespeare Quarterly, I wrote a note, giving detailed evidence why these three sets of uncatalogued leaves should be counted as copies.¹¹ In the Census, I numbered them (in italics because they were not officially recognized as copies) Folger 80, 81, and 82 (W138–140). When drafts of the articles for Foliomania! came in, some scholars referred to ‘79 copies’, others to ‘82’. I suggested to Owen Williams that he ask the Librarian which we should use. In the foreword to Foliomania! the Librarian wrote that the number was ‘revised upward to eighty-two copies’.¹²

The conservation, digitization and accessibility of the deposit copy, W31

Perhaps the most fascinating history of all First Folios is that of the Bodleian deposit copy (W31). A quick look at (only) its early history illustrates this. At the turn of 1624, the dispatch from London in sheets to be deposited in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, in accordance with the agreement between Thomas Bodley and the Stationers’ Company, exemplifies the emergence of modern copyright. As the Bodleian was the only ‘deposit’ library at the time, W31 is unique among First Folios as being the sole ‘deposit’ copy. It was also unique for some years in being the only copy not in private hands. The Library’s record of its delivery on 17 February 1624 to the Bodleian binder, William Wildgoose, is the only seventeenth-century record of the binding of a First Folio. Unusually for First Folios, this copy retains its original calf binding; and because it has not been rebound and trimmed, it has wide margins. A gash in the fore-edge of its upper cover is the only such evidence for a First Folio having been in a chained library.

This Folio contains remarkable evidence of early (and perhaps later) readership. Given that Bodley was against acquiring single plays (e.g. Quartos) for his library, we can assume the chained First Folio in the Bodleian offered the first opportunity to most Bodleian readers to peruse or study Shakespeare. And many of them did, as evidenced by the state of the leaves in 1905. They were soft, frail, flimsy, and discoloured; and some extremely thin. Corners were torn or turned up. There were folds in the paper.¹³ In short, the leaves became very fragile; the binding, too, was badly worn and damaged.¹⁴ Despite the extensive wear and tear, and the loss of one preliminary leaf, the volume contains one hundred per cent original text leaves—which would make it, excepting its poor condition, ideal for digitization.

To move now to the remarkable, most recent chapter in W31’s history.¹⁵ In August 2012, Emma Smith, now Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, Oxford, led a project to conserve, digitize, and publish this Folio freely online.¹⁶ By the end of 2012, supported by Vanessa Redgrave, Christopher Fry, and Sir Peter Hall, the project raised £20,000 from some eighty donors worldwide. This was later supplemented by generous additional funding.

Preparing the volume for digitization was a complex undertaking. Specialists from Rare Books, Conservation and Collections Care, Imaging Services, the Bodleian Printing Workshop, and its Digital Library Systems and Services all contributed. The volume was stabilized and the leaves were extensively conserved. For example, the innumerable tears to the paper were painstakingly repaired; with the use of (very fine) Japanese paper, pasted with wheat starch, the repairs are scarcely visible. The volume was duly photographed and digitized and the facsimile was launched online on the anniversary of Shakespeare’s birthday, 23 April 2013.

No matter what your interest is in Shakespeare, from student and general reader to the Shakespeare scholar, here is a treasure trove of images to browse or study. On opening the website (cited at n. 16), one is presented with great choice. For example, one can read the digital text, view the high-resolution images of each of the pages (and of the binding, from all angles), and download images and text. The document is both human-readable and machine-readable. It is a valuable contribution to the accessibility of the First Folio and to Shakespeare.

The Folger Shakespeare Library First Folio tour

In 2016, to mark 400 years since Shakespeare’s death, the Folger Library took the First Folio on a year-long tour to all fifty states, Washington DC, and Puerto Rico. Eighteen copies of the Folio were involved in the exhibition ‘which also included panels and digital content’. This project, challenging for both security and logistics, was called ‘The First Folio! The Book that Gave Us Shakespeare’.

The locations included museums, universities, public libraries, historical societies, and a theatre. The Folio was ‘displayed open to Hamlet’s famous “To be or not to be” speech. Each … host location also planned public events and activities, often including additional exhibitions’.¹⁷ The Folger published a second issue of Folioliomania! in conjunction with this travelling exhibition. On page vii it lists the fifty-two hosting locations. After the tour, the Folger welcomed the copies back to Washington with an exhibition: ‘First Folio! Shakespeare’s American Tour’. This chronicled the books’ travels and celebrations of Shakespeare by American communities.¹⁸

Sales of institutional Folios

At the turn of the present century, there was a generally felt disapproval of, even dismay at, the notion of a university library selling its books. One source of this feeling in the UK had been sales of books by the John Rylands Library, Manchester. It had already sold one of its First Folios (W147/Lilly Library) in the late 1920s; then in 1988 it sold important, rare fifteenth- and sixteenth-century continental books. Among cognoscenti in the book world this sale was widely condemned.

In 2013, the University of London began to explore the possibility of selling one of its two sets of the four seventeenth-century Folios. This was the set bequeathed by Sir Louis Sterling in 1956 and included W22. Word seeped out, spread rapidly and generated a strongly negative reaction on both sides of the Atlantic. There were articles in the Guardian and the Times, the latter with the headline: ‘A tale of sound and fury over “stupid” move to sell Shakespeare’s priceless folios’. The Bibliographical Society launched an online petition.

Professor Henry Woudhuysen, Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford, turned down a request for his support for the sale from the Director of the University’s Senate House Libraries. His long letter, which circulated widely, embraced such issues as the uniqueness of each volume, their cultural and bibliographical significance, the responsibilities of a research library, the moral right to sell, the intentions of the donor, and the risk of putting off prospective donors. The letter demolished the University’s case for the sale. The Sterling Folios remain at Senate House.¹⁹

From another viewpoint, one surely cannot help sympathizing with any librarian faced with major financial pressures and a serious shortage of cash for both book acquisitions and ongoing expenses. Let us suppose a constrained library has an extremely valuable holding. The University of London hoped to raise £3 to £5 million for the Sterling Folios, the Oriel College copy (see below) fetched a reported £3.5 million, and the hammer prices for W27/Dr Williams’s and W50/Mills College (see below) were £2.5 million and $9.978 million respectively. Can one be surprised at the alluring temptation to turn such an asset into ready and much needed cash?

The fact is that the success of the remonstration against the disposal of the Sterling Folios is rare. Despite similar attempts to retain the Folios described below (with the possible exception of the Meisei Folios which seem to have departed before people who cared were aware), the following were all sold in the current century:

Oriel College, Oxford, W33, in 2002.

Dr Williams’s Library, London, W27, in 2006.²⁰

Meisei University, Tokyo, Japan, W202 and W203, in 2014.

Mills College, Oakland, CA, W50, in 2020.

The Folio’s worth and new record prices

A table in West, History, p. 62, gives nineteen new record prices for the First Folio from £10 in 1787, via two leaps—to £35.7 in 1790 and to £716.1 in 1864—to £691,040²¹ for W175/Lee 148 (now privately owned) at Sotheby’s in New York in 1989.

In my years dealing with the First Folio, a routine question has been: ‘What is it worth?’ Typically the question has not been overtly materialistic; there just seems to be an inherent human curiosity to know the worth of a famous, unique, and valuable object. On one occasion I experienced the question relentlessly before a large audience. It was the inaugural Shakespeare lecture at my club in London, the Reform. (It is the only club in the world, unless one counts the Elizabethan Club at Yale University, to own a First Folio.) Three times the same gentleman asked how much the Club’s Folio would fetch. I hedged twice, not wanting to encourage a move to sell the book (though the Club sorely needed funds to maintain its magnificent Barry building on Pall Mall). The third time, I simply said the volume was not in a condition to attract a wealthy, avid book collector. Happily, the Club still holds its Folio.

There have been two new record prices in this century. On 8 October 2001 at Christie’s in New York, the Berland Folio, W145, achieved the new record price of $6.166m. (£4.111m.), including the buyer’s premium. (Parenthetically, in 2006, I had thought the Dr William’s Folio, W27, might attract a new record price. It is a fine copy. But the atmosphere in the auction room was dead and the bidding lacklustre. It just reached the low end of the estimate range, with a hammer price of £2.5m.) On 14 October 2020, at Christie’s in New York, the Mills College, Oakland, CA, Folio, W50, achieved the most recent record price of $9.978m. (£7.7m.), including the buyer’s premium. The ‘Census Update’ article in the previous issue of this journal gives the information on the sales of these three volumes.

Digitization of, and works about, the First Folio

Chapter 3 in West, History, is ‘A Survey of First Folio Facsimiles since the Early Nineteenth Century’ (pp. 145–74). At the end, the Survey records two CD-ROMS and three digitized First Folios. By 2020, according to Sarah Werner’s blog, there were twenty-four.²² These include Folios in the Bodleian Library (the deposit copy: see Section 5 above), in the Folger Library (four copies plus six additional copies that were on the Folger First Folio Tour, described above), at the Bodmer Foundation, Geneva (a very fine copy, perhaps in the best condition of all First Folios), at the University of Leeds, at the University of Pennsylvania, in the Bibliothèque d’agglomération de Saint-Omer, and in the Württembergische Landesbibliothek, Stuttgart.

In addition, West, History (pp. 41–42) records the titles of forty-seven works on the First Folio published in the twentieth century. The Folio continues to invite attention in the present century. Ten works are referenced in what follows.

Norika Sumimoto, Revised Index (Tokyo, April 2005) to Akihiro Yamada, The First Folio of Shakespeare: A Transcript of Contemporary Marginalia in a Copy of the Kodama Memorial Library of Meisei University [W201, Meisei I] (Tokyo: Yushudo Press, 1998).

Paul Collins, The Book of William: How Shakespeare’s First Folio Conquered the World (New York, NY: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2009).

Owen Williams, ed., Foliomania!: Stories Behind Shakespeare’s Most Important Book, 2nd edn (Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 2011).

Eric Rasmussen & Anthony James West, The Shakespeare First Folios: A Descriptive Catalogue (Basingstoke and New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

Stephen H. Grant, Collecting Shakespeare: The Story of Henry and Emily Folger (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2014).

Emma Smith, The Making of Shakespeare’s First Folio (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2015).

Andrea E. Mays, The Millionaire and the Bard: Henry Folger’s Obsessive Hunt for Shakespeare’s First Folio (New York, NY and London: Simon & Schuster, 2015).

Emma Smith, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s First Folio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

Emma Smith, Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

Anthony William Russ, ‘Shakespearean Constituencies: Editions of Shakespeare Published Before 1709’ (2020).²³

Ben Higgins, Shakespeare’s Syndicate: The First Folio, its Publishers, and the Early Modern Book Trade (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022).

Amy Lidster, Publishing the History Play in the Time of Shakespeare: Stationers Shaping a Genre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022).

The discovery that the manuscript in the First Folio in the Free Library of Philadelphia, W179, is John Milton’s

W179 is a distinguished Folio. I examined it in 1993. It has one hundred per cent text leaves and all nine preliminaries. It has an early calf binding. It has a notable provenance, including ownership by Marsden Perry, one time rival of Henry Folger as a Shakespeare collector. A. S. W. Rosenbach, the preeminent American First Folio dealer, purchased Perry’s Shakespeare collection in 1919, calling it ‘the then finest collection of Shakespeare books in America’ (Census, p. 235).

Rosenbach sold the set of four Shakespeare Folios to Joseph E. Widener, collector and bibliophile. His son and daughter presented the set to the Free Library. Notably, the volume contains some forty seventeenth-century annotations, remarked on by Sidney Lee in his 1902 Census as ‘MS. Notes of value’. Lee made a detailed examination of the annotations: he spoke about them at an 1899 meeting of the Bibliographical Society and published on them in the Athenaeum in the same year.²⁴

In September 2019, Jason Scott-Warren, University of Cambridge, had a eureka moment. He recognized John Milton’s handwriting in photographs of the annotations referred to above. Milton (1608–1674), a great admirer of Shakespeare, was already famously associated with a Shakespeare Folio. His first published poem is ‘An Epitaph on the Admirable Dramaticke Poet, W.Shakespeare’ in the preliminaries of the Second Folio (1632).

The annotations appeared in an article by Claire M. L. Bourne, University of Penn State.²⁵ In a blog, ‘Milton’s Shakespeare’,²⁶ Scott-Warren first quotes from her ‘rich analysis of the manuscript annotations’. For example, the annotations are ‘highly unusual in character’; the reader is ‘very attentive to misprints and metrical error’; in two plays he ‘corrected the Folio text from the Quartos’; and in all but four plays he made ‘common place markers, indicating passages of special note or broad applicability’. Bourne ‘tentatively dates’ the annotations between c. 1625 and the 1660s.

But the evidence Scott-Warren uses to support his conclusion that the manuscript is Milton’s is ‘strictly palaeographical’ (my emphasis). He gives twenty-one illustrations comparing words and letter-forms in W179 with known Milton manuscript in such works as his commonplace book and ‘Lycidas’. The announcement caused a stir, both in public and in the scholarly world. It was widely reported in the press on both sides of the Atlantic. Scott-Warren said he received ‘a very positive response from several distinguished Miltonists who are confident that this identification is correct’.²⁷ Subsequently he and Bourne collaborated. The fruit of their collaboration is very rich indeed; their three virtual talks demonstrate this.²⁸

One subject Dr Bourne addresses in the talks is the provenance of W179 before 1899, the earliest documented date in the volume’s history I had found for the Census. I mention provenance first from personal interest: discovering the infinitely varied stories of First Folios was one of the great satisfactions in the research for my two books. Speculatively, Scott-Warren and Bourne seem to believe the Philadelphia Folio was part of Milton’s library. Starting with clues from Lee’s Census, Bourne attempts to fill in his missing evidence, but is not successful. Nevertheless, given the nature of the annotations and the stretch of time between their likely earliest and latest dates—i.e. Milton seems to have had the book for a long time—it is tempting to believe W179 was in his library.

In these talks, their analysis of the many annotations is intriguing. They relate them to Milton’s poems and to his career; they examine Milton’s use of the 1637 Quarto editions of Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet to emend the Folio text; they observe that, when Milton makes an emendation, he sometimes crosses out the original reading, but sometimes leaves it standing—perhaps indicating an acceptance of the notion of variant readings. In dating the marginalia they use not only the 1637 Quarto date, but also Milton’s shifts from using an asterisk to a cross and from using an epsilon ‘e’ to an italic ‘e’. The discovery that John Milton made these detailed annotations and markings in W179 is a remarkable literary event. As one listens to Scott-Warren’s and Bourne’s close examination of them, one feels (as they suggest) one great poet studying and responding to another great poet.

Footnotes