Literature Folio 400 is a series of events and exhibitions to mark the four hundredth anniversary of the first Folio of Shakespeare's play. The majority of the displays were on the weekend of his birthday and pretty difficult to get to from Liverpool in a day (even if I hadn't been working), but the book owned by the Dulwich College Library is on display at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich until the 24th September and having already booked a day trip last Friday because the tickets were surprisingly cheap (£60 all in), I decided it was the ideal opportunity to cross an otherwise pretty inaccessible copy off the list.
The Folio's on show in the Maritime London section of the museum, an intimate exhibition space on the ground floor of an outer atrium which is otherwise spacious and on that day busy with school groups on the usual end of term visits making memories. As you can see from the photograph, there's the usual hushed lighting and contextual text which creates the impression that the visitor is seeing something extra-special. No matter how many of these items I've seen and even touched over the years, it's almost always with a sense of awe.
The Dulwich is also unusual because Eric Rasmussen says in his concordance The Shakespeare First Folio, "the fragmented copy exists in two bound volumes, Comedies and Histories". The comedies aren't even complete with only nine of the fourteen plays and six pages from Romeo and Juliet grafted on. If there was also a volume for the tragedies, it's become lost somewhere along the way, presumably before it became part of the library's collection. This is a rare occasion when its possible for a display to include two sets of pages from a Folio.
The accompanying text does a good job of summarising the provenance from the Rasmussen book, describing how Dulwich College was founded by 1619 by Edward Alleyn, the Elizabethan tragedian portrayed by Ben Affleck in Shakespeare in Love, son-in-law of Philip Henslowe, the owner of the Rose Theatre (Geoffrey Rush). This copy was owned by William Cartwright the son of a friend of Alleyn who seems to have bequeathed it to the library on his death in 1686. This is not a Folio which has travelled much., although the damage listed in Rasmussen indicates it has been well used.
One volume is open on the title page of The Tempest the other on Richard III, Act 1, Scene 4 in which Clarence dreams of falling from a ship bound for Burgundy witnessing the wrecks of other ships have gone before:
Methought I saw a thousand fearful wrecks;
Ten thousand men that fishes gnaw'd upon;
Wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearl,
Inestimable stones, unvalued jewels,
All scatter'd in the bottom of the sea:
Some lay in dead men's skulls; and, in those holes
Where eyes did once inhabit, there were crept,
As 'twere in scorn of eyes, reflecting gems,
Which woo'd the slimy bottom of the deep,
And mock'd the dead bones that lay scatter'd by.
As the text label suggests, this captures "the contradictory attitudes of the time towards the sea - on the one hand they represent economic opportunity, on the other a vast, wild and dangerous space." Later in the scene he talks of "the tempest in my soul".
No comments:
Post a Comment