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SHAKESPEARE: THE FIRST FOLIORalph Berry

F OLIO, a sheet of paper which is folded in half, making two leaves orfour pages. Eold it again and you have a quarto, with one sheet sup-plying eight pages. The folio format makes for a large, prestigious

book, which has to be bound; quarto is half the size, suitable for a paperbackedition. That was the format in which a number of Shakespeare's plays hadbeen printed, during and after his lifetime, and the Collected Plays (as wewould say) came out in 1623, seven years after his death. Now known asthe Eirst Eolio, that volume is the focus of the world's collectors, scholars,and - occasionally - thieves.

One such showed up recently, when a man took a stolen copy of the EirstEolio to the Eolger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., to have thecopy authenticated. He was immediately arrested and then charged by policein Durham. The book had been stolen from a display case in the University ofDurham. No doubt this book dealer displayed naivety, but the man went to theright place. If you want to know about first folios, go to the Folger. They haveseventy-nine copies there.

Oddly enough, the First Folio, for all its fame, is not really a rare book.Some 240 copies are known to be in existence. It is thought that perhaps1000 were printed, with a price at £1 (forty times the cost of an individualquarto). That made it expensive, and the copies must have been fairly welllooked after. Sooner or later, a third of the extant copies fell into the handsof a great collector, whose name dominates the later story of the book: HenryClay Folger.

Folger (1857-1930) was not a man of huge wealth to begin with. Hebecame however President and Chairman of the Standard Oil Company,and devoted his large income to buying books. These he housed eventuallyin the Folger Shakespeare Library, a monumental gift to the nation. Withina classical exterior is a Tudor interior; within that are steel vaults controlledfor humidity and temperature, so as to guarantee the absolute security of thelibrary's treasures.

The rarest of these treasures are the Shakespeare quartos. They yield onlyto a mighty hunter. Nothing conveys better the flavour of Folger's early daysthan John Quincy Adams' account of the pursuit of the first edition of TitusAndronicus. It had turned up among the possessions of a Swedish postalclerk, which he had inherited from his father, and the find was reportedin 1905:

Mr Folger was thus enabled to read of the discovery in an eight-line dispatch toThe New York Times of January 11. In great excitement he cabled to his Londonagent, Henry Sotheran and Company, to send a representative post-haste to Sweden

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to negotiate for the purchase of the treasure, and then waited, he tells us, in growingapprehension. Five days later came over the wires the laconic message: 'Representa-tive now in Sweden'; the following day came a second message: 'Bought. Cableimmediately two thousand pounds direct to account of Petrus Johannes Krafft,Ricksbanken, Malmo, Sweden'; and a short time later the prize was in his hands.

It is still the only known copy to exist. The world knows of the folios, but thecollector dreams above all of landing a quarto. Only two copies are known ofthe 'Bad' First Quarto of Hamlet. One is in the British Museum, the other inthe Huntington Library of California (that great 'collection of collections,or library of libraries'. Henry E. Huntington had bought up the Duke ofDevonshire's library). Not even the Folger has that.

Other libraries have not been idle, of course. The British Museum hasfive copies of the First Folio. George III got there first, ahead of the Ameri-cans, with his Royal Library (incorporating David Garrick's collection of oldplays). Trinity College, Cambridge has two copies, and the superb BodmerLibrary, Zurich, has one. That is because Martin Bodmer made it a rule neverto buy a duplicate, and always to insist on a copy in first-class shape. (Someof the Folger's seventy-nine are pretty beat up.) The Bodleian is a specialcase, and there's a curious story there.

The Bodleian's Fir.st Folio was received on publication, under the arrange-ment with the Stationers' Company. This copy was sent to be bound by Wil-liam Wildgoose, and was duly returned to the Library. It appeared in the 1635appendix to the 1620 Catalogue. But it did not appear in the 1674 Catalogue,which lists only the Third Folio (1663). The clear presumption is that theFirst Folio was considered out of date and was sold as superseded by theThird Folio!

The Library accounts show that in 1663-4 Richard Davis, the Oxfordbookseller, paid £24 for 'superfluous Library Books sold by order of theCurators'. Almost certainly, that entry marks the legal departure of the FirstFolio from the Bodleian. Posterity can only gape at the value-system thatheld the Third Folio (which is a page-for-page reprint of the Second Folioof 1632, with some corrections and some new errors) to be superior to theFirst. So the First Folio was lost to the Library - for 240 years.

And then it reappeared. In January 1905 an undergraduate, G.M.R.Turbutt, brought to Falconer Madan, the Bodleian's sub-librarian, his father'scopy of the First Folio. It had been a family possession for over 150 years.Strickland Gibson, a prominent collector, recognized that the copy came ina contemporary Oxford binding, and that it had come from a chained library.More, the tooling of the leather was identical to that of the books sent toWildgoose that same day. Further evidence of the binding confirmed theconclusion: the Turbutt Shakespeare was the original Bodleian First Folio.

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It was surely selected by the Stationers as an ideal specimen of a mostimportant book.

Drama followed. Madan broadcast the discovery, through a note in theAthenaeum. Gibson read a paper to the Bibliographical Society in Londonon 'The Localization of Books by their Binding'. This publicity attractedwide interest. Was the book for sale? E.W.B. Nicholson, the Librarian, haddiscreetly offered to buy the book at independent valuation. The thought ofsale had not occurred to Madan. He was soon undeceived. Enquiries andoffers came in, from sources including Henry Sotheran & Co. who musthave been acting for Folger. The romantic appeal of the Turbutt Shakespearewas heightened by its condition. The wear and tear of Romeo and Julietshowed that the young graduates of Oxford read the play more often thanany other. (Which also showed the limitations of their knowledge: the mostdensely, obsessively sexual play in the canon is Measure For Measure.)And now Folger ordered Sotheran's to offer £3,000 for the book.

That was a very large sum, twice the market value of an ordinary copy ofthe First Folio. Turbutt's intention to keep the book as a family heirloommelted. He offered to sell the book to the Bodleian at the same price as Fol-ger's, and gave the Curators until March 31st, 1906 to find the money. TheCurators agreed, energized by Nicholson, and a public appeal was launched.Money was slow in coming in; influential people aided the cause; Turbutthimself abated £200 of the price; and the money was raised, just in time.Nicholson had performed a great service for the Bodleian, at a time whenthe largest sum previously paid by the Library for a single volume was£22L10s.0d. spent on a collection of Anglo-Saxon charters in 1891. Still,the moral was well put by A.W. Pollard: 'It's a bad way of going to workto advertise a book for its owner first and then try to buy it of him'.

The First Folio is accessible to anyone through photographic reprints. HowardStaunton, a fine Shakespearean as well as the unofficial World Champion ofchess, directed a photographic facsimile in 1866. There have been varioussuccessors. My own copy is of the popular Yale photo-offset edition of1954, prepared and edited by Helge Kokeritz and Charles Tyler Prouty.It cost me $6.95.

The up-market facsimile was published by Norton in 1968, and is dis-tinctive. The Yale edition simply reproduced the best available single copy.For Norton, Charlton K. Hinman chose the best copy in the corrected stateof each page. He had invented a machine that enabled him to collate fiftycopies of the First Folio in the Folger Shakespeare Library. In all, Hinmanused thirty of the copies at the Folger to assemble the clearest pages, usingthe technique of fine-screen offset. With the Norton Shakespeare, and Shake-speare's Plays in Quarto, a facsimile edition of copies primarily from the

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Huntington Library (edited by Michael J.B. Allen and Kenneth Muir, Univer-sity of California Press, 1981), the general reader can get as near to the ori-ginal texts of Shakespeare as is humanly possible.

This can be an exhilarating experience, with an austere, astringent fresh-ness. A modem reader expects a formal act-scene division. In ten of the folioplays, there are no numbered scenes, only acts. In the quartos there are nodivisions of any kind. Again, a scene-setting was customary in editions fromRowe onwards: 'Scene 1. Elsinore. A platform before the castle'. There are noscene-settings in the folio. Is this a limitation? Directors such as Trevor Nunnprefer to work from a photographic reproduction; there is no interferencefrom later editors to come between them and the original text. In the sameway, distinguished actors such as Philip Voss work from the original texts,which give them invaluable clues. What the folio/quarto reproductions pro-vide is the shock of the new.

What, in broad, are the supreme virtues of the First Folio? The bookis vouched for by its editors, John Heminge and Henry Condell. They werefellow-actors and friends of the late Shakespeare. Both were left gifts in hiswill. They did the best they could in a huge task for which they were notprofessionally trained, and for which there was no precedent. The Foliobroke new ground in that it is the first volume devoted solely to the collectedplays of any author. (Shakespeare's poems are excluded.) Ben Jonson hadindeed published his Workes in 1616, but that contained his poems andmasques. We can take the decisions of Heminge and Condell as honest,well-informed, and conscientiously implemented.

For half the canon, the folio is our sole source. We would not haveTwelfth Night, Macbeth, As You Like It, and fifteen other previously unpub-lished plays, without Fl . There is a less elemental but subtler reason for valu-ing those plays which exist in both quarto and folio versions. They give ussomething approximating to Shakespeare's second thoughts.

It is reasonable to suppose that the folio version of a two-text play mayrepresent Shakespeare's conscious revision. Drama is a matter of re-writes inall ages. This applies to the two great tragedies. King Lear comes to us via thequarto of 1608 and the folio. There are many slight verbal changes: the bigone is that Fl does not contain the Mock Trial scene of Lear on the heath.Is this a purposive cut, or a simple error of transmission? No director everparts willingly with the Mock Trial.

Then, Hamlet. We have at least four texts which have to be taken withvarying degrees of seriousness. The 'Bad' quarto is a pirated, vamped-up ver-sion for a touring company, but its stage directions are vivid. Some featuresare linked with a German touring Hamlet-p\a.y, Der Bestrafte Brudermord.The 'Good' quarto of 1604-5 is a serious and totally credible text. But thefolio version introduces new material on Hamlet's encounter with the pirates.

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and discards the final soliloquy. This is a stunning loss. Did Shakespearereally intend to drop 'How all occasions do inform against me' as superfluousto his purposes? G.R. Hibbard, in his Oxford edition, thought so. The argu-ment continues, and will for all time.

What quarto-folio gives us is an ever-deeper insight into the mind ofShakespeare. We can see that restless mind changing, improving, emending,discarding. Is 'Then I defy you stars' superior to 'Then I deny you stars'? Itis Fl against Q2. Take your choice. In these matters I am not inclined to yieldto the 'final' decision, if it is that, of the author. I go with directors who willcheerfully opt for the folio text of King Lear, in the main, and preserve theMock Trial. In the same way, I could not bear to part with Hamlet's finalsoliloquy. But it is fascinating to think that Shakespeare might have reckonedit dispensable.

And now the Folio has put in a refulgent re-appearance. An Americanplaywright and collector, John Wolfson, has announced that he is bequeathinghis collection of 450 Shakespearean texts to the Globe Theatre, Southwark.This splendid gift will be housed in a new research centre there, a few yardsaway from the site of the original Globe. The star of the collection is a FirstFolio in prime shape, the glory of the nation's literature. The shrine willcontain its authentic relic.

Note: The section on the Bodleian is based on L.W. Hanson, 'The Shake-speare Collection in the Bodleian Library, Oxford', in Shakespeare Survey4(1951).

Ralph Berry spent most of his teaching career in Canada but has also taughtin New Zealand, Australia, Malaysia, Thailand and Kuwait. His manypublications include The Shakespearean Metaphor and Tragic Instance: theSequence of Shakespeare's Tragedies.

Readers of Anis Shivani's article 'Whatever Happened to the American ShortStory' in the Summer 2009 issue of Contemporary Review might wish toknow that his short fiction collection, Anatolia and Other Stories, will be pub-lished in October. (Black Lawrence Press. $16.00. ISBN 978-0-615-28282-7.)The eleven short stories have a variety of settings in different countries.