Literature The Morgan Library & Museum owns two copies of the First Folio and I was able to identify which copy this is using the Rasmussen book, mostly from a description of the binding ("the cover design has a goldtooled square within a square with floral gold tooling within the inner square and at the corners") but also due to an incident which happens on screen during a segment of the BBC's Shakespeare Uncovered about Macbeth presented by Ethan Hawke.
Part of series of programmes broadcast in 2012 to coincide with the London Olympics cultural festival which included the likes of David Tennant on Hamlet (which I reviewed at the time) and Trevor Nunn on The Tempest, each hour long programme is about what you'd expect them to be with potted histories of each play, an exploration of their cultural significance and performance clips usually from the BBC and also Shakespeare's Globe with which this was a co-production.
The tone is reverential. In whispered tones, Hawke explains the location of the folio as its wheeled on the pictured trolley and placed on a clear perspex stand so that the actor can forthrightly enter the library room via the rotunda and encounter the book ("Curator John Bidwell has retrieved it from the vault"). Hawke hesitates before he touches it then begins leafing through the pages because frankly who wouldn't. At this point we notice he's kneeling on the floor in front of it.
After a shot of the title page of Macbeth, he says he's seen his favourite speech, then notes how strong Shakespeare's body of work is that when you reach the end of Macbeth, "you're already in Hamlet". Eventually he settles on a page and says, "it kind of suits the end of the Scottish play that there's a slight burn on the final page of Macbeth. Somebody was upset and their cigarette fell as Macbeth fell", at which point he runs his finger over the burn mark and makes a hole in the page.
This same hole was then subsequently noticed by whoever later visited the folio to assess it for the descriptive catalogue and noted in the "repairs and damage affecting text section: "Macbeth ll6 tear repair 62 mm from foot affects three letters. ll6v tear repair 59 mm from foot affects 61 letters. nn4 hole affects two letters b23" (my italics) (nn4 simply means this is the fourth note - these observations of very densely printed).
The library takes its name from its founder, the banker and collector John Pearpoint Morgan, yes of J.P.Morgan fame, and he thought of this as being of inferior interest the other two in his collection. Apparently numerous other parts of the text have been lost to damage and this folio has been extensively been repaired with some of the missing text having been replaced with a manuscript pen facsimile (rather like on of the Folios at the British Library).
At the conclusion of the segment, Hawke "reads" his favourite passage, the Tomorrow and Tomorrow speech, although he clearly knows it by heart. He then stands turns around and walks away as a Shakespeare expert describes were Macbeth is psychologically at that point in the play, the folio having played its part in telling the story and gained another tiny addition to its history.
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