Books A couple of weeks ago I had the privilege of being in the audience for a live recording of Greg Jenner's Radio 4 podcast You're Dead To Me at the Shakespeare North Playhouse in Prescot. Not having listened before I didn't really know what to expect and it was mostly a chance to see the new theatre without the distraction of having to watch a play and acting. The guests were Professor Farah Karim-Cooper, Professor of Shakespeare Studies at King’s College London and Co-Director of Education & Research at Shakespeare’s Globe, and the comedian Richard Herring.
The podcast, which you can listen to here, offered the bare bones of Shakespeare's biography and some of the publishing history of the First Folio and there wasn't much about either that didn't already know. But I did find out that Richard Herring only has one testicle, which was funny when he mentioned it on stage but is of course very serious because his other ball was removed because of testicular cancer, which he talked about in an interview around this time last year which is posted on his website. Richard also talks about the podcast on his blog and some of the retakes that were needed to make it clean for radio broadcast.
After the show, a queue quickly built up towards the theatre's exhibition area because on tour and on display is the Grenville First Folio. Usually on display in the British Library, where I originally saw it back in 2016, I'd completely forgotten it was going to be in Prescot (my memory is terrible these days). So after a pretty decent coffee in the on-site cafe and a visit to the shop to let the crowds dissipate, I wandered down into the now nearly empty display space to have another look. It's pretty sparse, mostly information boards offering some background and an introductory video projected on the wall.
It's commonly called the Grenville Folio because the long-time Member of Parliament and First Lord of the Admiralty Thomas Grenville bequeathed it to the library on his death. Still, he wasn't the first known owner of the volume. As Eric Rasmussen's The Shakespeare First Folios: A Descriptive Catalogue describes, that would be Dr John Monroe a physician at Bethlehem Hospital who sold it to James Midgely, Jr at a Sotheby's sale for £13 13s who then sold it in 1818 to Grenville via a bookseller for what was then the record price of 116 guineas, around £10,000 in today's money.
The Folio was amongst 20,000 books that were passed to the British Library almost all of which had been rebound by Grenville as they entered his collection much to the annoyance of later scholars who wonder what information they might have gleaned from the discarded pieces. Presented on a transparent display lectern, the binding which Rasmussen describes as "sumptuous full goatskin stamped with a coat of arms" does stand out from some of the more somber bindings I've seen but also doesn't quite fit the pages it contains.
As is customary in these kinds of displays, there isn't much to see, it's about being the presence of the book. Just as it is in the British Library, it's open on the frontispiece and the Droeshout engraving of Shakespeare's portrait with Ben Jonson's To The Reader opposite which ironically means that none of the playwright's own words are being shown. Neither is the note with Grenville left on the first leaf which says "This first edition of Shakespeare is an original and perfect copy, and was purchased by me in it’s first binding & in it’s original state. T.G.". Grenville wanted to leave no doubt about his ownership.
