7 Durham University Library

Books  Durham University's First Folio is reputed to have almost the longest single ownership of all extant volumes. It was originally owned by the churchman John Cosin, who is thought to have bought it shortly after its publication around 1630. Exiled to France in 1644 for his loyalty to the monarchy, notably Charles I, Cosin's Folio was housed with his extensive book collection at Peterhouse, Cambridge. After the monarchy was restored in 1660, Cosin was made Bishop of Durham and built one of the country's earliest public libraries on the green near Durham Cathedral. In 1672, he bequeathed his collection, including the Folio, to the clergy of the diocese. It remained in the library—now called Cosin's Library—for centuries, until the collection was passed to Durham University in 1963.

Then, in 1998, the Folio was famously stolen. In 2010, the BBC made Stealing Shakespeare, a documentary about the affair narrated by David Tennant. In summary, an eccentric book dealer named Raymond Scott brought a First Folio to the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., for authentication, claiming he had acquired it in Cuba during a holiday with his girlfriend. Experts quickly identified it as the Durham Folio. When Scott returned to the UK, he was arrested and convicted of handling stolen goods, although authorities were unable to prove he was the original burglar. Scott unalived himself in prison two years later, maintaining his innocence to the end. However, an interview with a local newspaper, later quoted by The Guardian, suggested there was more to the story.

Once its identity was confirmed in court with a witness statement from Anthony James West—author of the most current census of Folios at the time—it was returned to the university. Staff then began the process of stabilising it. As you can see from the above image, the goatskin binding, added in 1845 by Charles C Tuckett & Son, was removed while the book was missing, as were the title pages and the final leaves of Cymbeline, presumably in an attempt to hide its identity. To date, the University has decided not to rebind the book.   One of the few benefits of the vandalism is that it has offered unprecedented access to the binding and the pages themselves, allowing for observations that couldn't be made with an intact copy (you don't teardown a book worth millions of pounds just to see what's underneath).

The Folio is currently on display at an exhibition in Cosin's Library that runs until the end of October. It's housed in a glass cabinet, allowing for a 360-degree view of the book, including its spine and back. Surrounding it are double-sided glass cases displaying pages that are still loose: the list of principal actors, the contents page, John Heminges and Henry Condell's introduction ("To the great Variety of Readers"), and odd pages from Cymbeline. Usually on these visits, the most I can see is whichever pages are on display and perhaps the binding, so this is a welcome change, even if the circumstances that led to it are grim. The university has also released a video offering an excellent view of the gorgeous Cosin's Library:

That video was almost the closest I was going to get to seeing the Folio. After hearing about the display, I booked an overnight trip to Durham from Sunday to Monday, planning to visit the cathedral on my arrival day (it had its own exhibition on the Magna Carta)(she did not die in vain) and see the Folio the next morning.  Durham Cathedral is as gorgeous as its reputation suggests, and I especially recommend its museum. Apparently, it doesn't have the same footfall as the rest of the building, but it houses numerous important relics. These include the extraordinary wooden coffin of St Cuthbert; the saint himself, along with the Venerable Bede, is buried elsewhere in the cathedral in his own tomb. As a bonus, you can also see the spots where the Asgard scenes were filmed for Avengers: Endgame.

After finishing at the Cathedral on my first day, I realised the First Folio exhibition was nearby, so I decided to pop in to check the opening hours for Monday and see if I needed to book a space. The very helpful person at reception informed me that the library, and therefore the exhibition, were closed on Mondays, but that I had arrived just in time for the final entry of the day.  In other words, if I hadn't happened to drop in, I would have travelled all the way to Durham for no reason—much like a recent, trip to London with its lack of various fruits. Fortunately, just this once, Rose, I was in the right place at the right time and was able to see the Durham University First Folio. It's one of the documents listed in my guide on this journey, The Shakespeare First Folios: A Descriptive Catalogue, and one that I thought was going to be among the most difficult to see.

The Absence of the Folios.

Books  You may have noticed recently the publicity surrounding the sale of four Shakespeare Folios at Sothebys later this month.  Here's a version of the story in the Smithsonian Magazine although there were dozens of others, mainly reprinting the contents of the press release.  It's a rare occasion when F1, F2, F3 and F4 are being sold as a single lot.  Having made a similar trip in 2022, I immediately booked tickets for London, for yesterday, to view the First Folio and glance at the others.

This was possibly going to be the first and last time I could see it, especially since it isn't actually on the list.  The four Folios originally surfaced at a Christies sale in 2016 (although I didn't notice).  Christies listed them separately but they were snatched by a single buyer which is why they're together now.  The four of them then cost the buyer around £2.5m, which considering the 2022 sale of just a First Folio in a nice display case went for £2m, this was a bargain.  The other volumes usually go for several hundred thousand pounds each.

It's the provenance from the Sothebys press release which allowed me to make the connection with the Christies sale.  Both auction houses mention in their sales details that F1, F3 and F4 they were bought around 1800 by the collector George Augustus William Shuckburgh-Evelyn then sat on a shelf in the family mansion for centuries until there was a clear out. The Second Folio was added by whoever bought the lot at Christies in 2016 and selling them again as a job lot now.

George Shuckburgh-Evelyn, as the Wikipedia lists him, was a politician, mathematician and politician.  He pioneered the the collation of price indexes.  He observed changes in the boiling points of water at different pressures aiding the collaboration of thermometers.  He built his own telescope and observed features of the lunar surface.  He has a crater on the moon named for him.  He also served in the House of Commons as a Member of Parliament for Warwickshire from 1780 until his death in 1804, so his ownership of the Fs was apt.

Since the catalogue of all known First Folios was published in 2012 and this didn't surface until 2016, it's effectively unlisted and hasn't been seen by academic eyes.  Who knows if Eric Rasmussen has dropped by in the meantime readying material for a second edition.  Nevertheless, I was all ready to take in the couple of pages Sothebys had chosen to show us during the viewing period.  Would there be notes in the margin in Shuckburgh-Evelyn's own hand.

The empty space and title of this post will indicate that nothing went to plan.  Wandering into Sothebys, I was surprised by how quiet the auction house was but assumed that was due to it being the middle of the afternoon.  Feeling slightly under-dressed in my Frozen princesses t-shirt and jeans, I asked a security guard where the Folios were on display.  Blank face.  Don't know.  I asked another, similarly no idea what I was talking about.  She pointed me back towards the reception desk.

Reception confirmed what I feared.  They'd been withdrawn from sale and weren't even in the building.  The explanation he seemed to be given by someone on the phone was that they might be in the process of being offered around British institutions first before potentially leaving the country which made sense.  I was surprisingly sanguine about it.  I should have been suspicious when the page at the Sothebys website went offline.  But I assumed it was a technical error.  Too many outlets had written about the sale for it not to be happening.

After a cup of coffee in the restaurant, in a bid to make the trip not feel completely wasted, I walked to Covent Garden and finally visited the London Transport Museum, which is certainly too big to visit an hour before closing, especially if your body's tired of travelling and bought a few fridge magnets.  After a burger and fries at Five Guys, it was time to return to Euston and catch the train home.  It's a sign I'm getting older that I think I'm still getting over all of the walking I did on Friday.  My heart don't with to roam.

Yesterday, a piece by Kate Maltby went up on The Observer website which offers a more detailed explanation as to what happened to the Folios:

"... a funny thing happened when I rang Sotheby’s and started asking questions on behalf of The Observer. The auction, I was suddenly told, had been cancelled. The listing was scrubbed from the website; the “set” had been privately sold.

"This may be cockup rather than conspiracy: two antiquarian sources suggested to me that the private sale had been in the works for some time, and that “the sale should never have been announced” publicly. At last week’s London’s Rare Books Fair, where Stephen Fry and Graham Brady were among the men in suits queuing outside the Saatchi Gallery, the gossip was of furious collectors outmanoeuvred by a megabid."

So there we have it.  This Folio remains inaccessible even to academics as whoever bought them at Christies in 2016 has sold them to another private buyer.  If Sothebys hadn't made the sale public, us normals would never have known about them.

But I do hold Sothebys somewhat responsible for my predicament.  Rather than simply yanking the press release from the website leading to the generic 404 and some intimidating telephone numbers, a more helpful option would have been a note saying that the item had been removed from sale and that viewings had been cancelled.  Even Tesco tells its shoppers when a product has sold out.  Anyway, I've emailed Sothebys with that suggestion and this Tesco gag.  Let's see what happens.

26 National Art Library

 

Books  In Eric Rasmussen's catalogue of Shakespeare's First Folios, the 'manuscript annotations' section typically covers about half to three-quarters of a page. However, this copy features two full pages of dense text and a separate paragraph of general notes.  That’s because a previous owner took it upon themselves to correct the text in red pen, going through four history plays, changing every comma to a semicolon, underlining any artillery terms in King John, and sporadically ‘correcting’ modern English spellings to more contemporary versions (‘marlemas’ written above ‘Michaelmas’).  

Rasmussen suggests these annotations were the work of John Forster, the biographer and literary critic who was the final private owner before bequeathing his library to the National Art Library (now part of the Victoria and Albert Museum). However, the man who gifted it to him, Joseph C. King, a schoolmaster best known for educating two of Charles Dickens's sons, was the only other known owner.  Purely fantasy, probably, but it’s easy to imagine him poring over the text with the same zeal he applied to his students’ scripts, tutting and shaking his head as he proofread Henry VIII, writing ‘confessions’ above ‘commissions’.  That’s probably why these pages were chosen for display—they’re the least scarred.

Ticking this folio off the list was a happy accident.  For the past six months or so, I've been travelling down to London again thanks to Avanti Superfare, with mixed experiences.  The cheapness of the tickets has the caveat that because they're seat filling you don't know what time that will be.  Almost every month it's been the 11:45 am from Lime Street which means not arriving at Euston until 2:00 pm, with a return ticket at about 7:45 p.m., not so much a day trip as an afternoon 'rager' (if you can compare being overwhelmed by the intellectual brilliance of others in ancient buildings to drinking five Jägerbombs and chundering in a strangers garden which in my post-alcohol world you certainly can).  

What with that chronological uncertainty, this was my last trip down to London for a while (or at least until the price become low enough  for me to be able to afford an earlier journey) so I decided to return to the Theatre & Performance galleries, which were the site of my first visit.  The space has changed considerably in the past nine years.  Originally it was somewhat chronological with models of the original playhouses in the first section and sense of beginning at the beginning.  Now its much more thematic and based in crafts, with costume, set design, props and the rest given their own sections.  Fortunately Kylie's dressing room is still present and correct with its good luck lipstick greeting from Dannii on the mirror.

But still, right at the beginning, is Shakespeare's First Folio, and I surprised and delighted to find it wasn't the same edition displayed in 2016 and featured on television but the aforementioned volume last owned by Forster.  As you can see from the photo, it's displayed against a black background, mounted with a fair gap from the protective glass and for some reason parallel to a join so that it's impossible to look at it straight on, let alone get a picture of it.  You can just about make out that it's the second two pages of A Midsummer Night's Dream (146 & 147), the kids deep into the initial explanations of who loves who at that point.  If I'd known about the red "corrections" at the time I would have looked for them but they're not obvious from the photograph.

In terms of physical differences from other copies, Rasmussen notes in the First Folio catalogue that the authorship of a couple of plays is also questioned.  The title page of Cymbeline has "Not Shakespears, any part of it" written across it (don't tell Michael Blanding) and Titus Andronicus says "Not Shakespeare; scarce a word" even though Henry VI is right there.  Recent research from Brian Vickers (well, from 2002) suggests it could have been co-authored with George Peele so perhaps the statement might be partially correct.  Once it came into the National Art Library's possession they stamped it with 'Department of Science and Art 1876' in block capitals, along with 'Forester Bequest'.  It's also incomplete.  The preliminary pages (introduction and so forth) are 'poor-quality printed facsimiles'.  Every copy is different.  Next.

14 British Library

Books   After completing my visit to the Sir John Soane's Museum, I headed to the British Library to see which of their First Folios is currently on display.  Fortunately it isn't the copy exhibited at the Shakespeare North Playhouse last November but a different one to tick off the list (or make bold and put [IRL] afterwards), with the shelf mark C.39.k.15 and available to also view online at First Folios Compared.  Two down from their collection, three to go.

The Shakespeare First Folios tells us this particular copy is notable for containing "one of only four extant impressions of the portrait in its first state".  As this Folger article explains, subtle changes were made during the print runs of the Folio.  In the first Shakespeare's head doesn't look like its attached to his body and so the plate was modified to introduce a shadow behind his head.  This is the only BL copy with this version.  The others are at the Folger and the Bodleian.  Outstanding.

The provenance for the book is fairly straightforward.  It was bought in about 1820 by John Delafield Phelps of Lincoln's Inn who judging by this list of items and subsequent posthumous auction catalogue from 1842 was a big collector of things.  What wasn't sold off was bequethed to his nephew, William John Phelps, who was also at Lincoln's Inn and became a Justice of Peace for Gloucestershire and High Sheriff in 1860 and then passed down through a couple more generations of the family.

The genealogy of the family is labyrinthine by the way, stretching back (as far as I can tell) to Matthew Hale, the jurist born in Shakespeare's lifetime who worked for both Royalists and Oliver Cromwell during and after the civil war and who's writings are still being quoted today - he's even mentioned in Roe v Wade.  None of which is really relevant to the book, but is at least a demonstration of how some Folios found their way into families with prominent establishment roots and stayed there.

The book was eventually inherited of a Captain A.W. Clifford and was purchased in a posthumous sale by the rare bookseller Bernard Quaritch who appears a lot in the folio catalogue (and whose titular company still exists) who paid £4200 and then flipped it to the British Museum for £11,900, who could afford it thanks to the aid of Tory Politician Charles Young.  Incidentally the Folio catalogue doesn't say who any of these people are.  I'm filling in the blanks as we go along.

The book has been in public ownership ever since, firstly on display at the King's Library and then moved the British Library when that became too small for purpose.  At some point in its life the book has been "washed" in which a volume is suspended in water then slowly dried in order to remove stains.  This may have been before the British Museum took possession, because they've placed their stamp in numerous places. 

Further sightings:

It's this copy which appears in The King & the Playwright A Jacobean History, the presenter-led series by James Shapiro from 2012 which focuses on the plays from Shakespeare and his contemporaries under James I.  Shapiro is shown entering the grounds of the British Library and then this shot with the line "And here it is ..."

This looks to be the same room that David Tennant viewed 13 British Library in Shakespeare Uncovered.  Shapiro talks about the pleasure of turning the pages and lists some of the plays which we wouldn't have where it not for the Folio.

21 Sir John Soane’s Museum

Books  At about this time last week, I was sat in a small, atmospheric library in a Georgian town house with a Shakespeare First Folio on the table in front of me.  Touching the bound single plays from a folio at the University of Liverpool was a huge privilege.  But this was my first chance to see a complete book without the barrier of a glass case, to be able to turn through the opening pages as they were originally printed and read the text just as someone would have done throughout its life.  Facsimiles offer a sense of what this must have been like, of course they do, but they don't have the smell from four hundred years of life or the sheer sense of occasion of being in the presence of a precious object and as was the case here, being left alone with it.  Reader, I may have sobbed a bit.

When I emailed the Sir John Soane's Museum about seeing their copy of the folio, I didn't think that they'd agree, especially because it wasn't for academic reasons, just because I'm an enthusiast.  But they couldn't have been more accommodating.  Their copy is especially interesting because one of its previous owners has had the book washed and pressed and inlaid into newer paper around the edges, cleaning away any imperfections and leaving scope for the reader to leave marginalia.  The volume is also thicker than the other due to extra pages having been added between the genre sections and at the front and back presumably also for adding notes.  It's a reminder that for much of their lives these were working books and not treated with the reverence with which we do now.

This work was carried on behalf of the historic actor John Philip Kemble, brother to the slightly more famous Sarah Siddons.  There's a painting of Kemble playing Hamlet by Sir Thomas Lawrence in the Tate's collection and he would have owned this book when he was at the height of his career (and there are plenty more images of him during that period and after).  The provenance before him is murky but it came into his possession in 1807 and he sold it on auction in 1822 to James Boswell the younger, whom we last met when talking about one of the Bodleian Library copies who had Edmund Malone's copy as a loner until he bought this.  Boswell then sold it on again in 1925 (perhaps having completed work on his volume of the plays) and it was picked up by Sir John Britton on behalf of Sir John Soane.

The librarian at the museum was kind enough to dig out from the files an original letter from Britton to Soane detailing the processes of the procurement:

Along with a copy of the museum's own publication The Cloud-Capped Towers': Shakespeare in Soane’s Architectural Imagination by Frances Sands, Alison Shell, Stephanie Coane and Emmeline Leary (2016) which includes a transcription of the text:

Amazing.  As Rasmussen and West's The Shakespeare First Folios relates, the notes of the original curator of the museum, George Bailey explain how Soane commission Britten to buy the book without naming a price with Britton leaving late for the sale and reached the sale room within moments of the Lot being put under the hammer.  Fortunately for Soane he won it.  Soane had a full set of all four Folios.  He also had a bust of Kemble by John Gibson.

Spending time with the Folio meant I was able to look at some details which are usually hidden or at least very difficult to see in display cases.  The replacement binding from when Kemble had the volume reset: 

The printmakers credit:

The soot burn within the new margins which shows that it was definitely used in this later state.

The list of principle actors.

Not to mention the ability to choose which play I wanted to photograph for the opening image of this blog post (see above).  It's unlikely a copy on display in an exhibition would be represented by this play.  

After about twenty minutes, I bid my farewells to the librarian and headed out into the steaming hot weather and back next door to join the queue for the museum itself.  

Sir John Soanes was a leading British architect who specialised in neo-classical architecture.  The son of a bricklayer, he rose to such prominence that he built the original Bank of England, the Dulwich Picture Gallery, the building which now currently houses the Cabinet Office, was clerk of works at the Royal Hospital Chelsea, St James's Palace, The Palace of Westminster and built an extension to the Freemasons' Hall in London.  But he also designed and built the town houses where the museum now resides on the edge of Lincoln's Inn Fields, an even posher version of Falkner Square in Liverpool, large enough to accommodate tennis and netball courts and the rather nice Pear Tree Cafe where I had my evening meal of welsh rarebit.

The museum was the result of an act of parliament a few years before Soanes's death in which he disinherited his son and instead stipulated that the house and contents would pass to the care of trustees who on behalf of the nation would preserve the property much as it had been when he died.  The reason for this was: Soanes was a collector, of paintings, sculpture and statuary, furniture and books, his library number over seven and a half thousand volumes and he had numerous archaeological objects including the Sarcophagus of Seti I.  These objects are displayed across the numerous rooms, filling spaces with fascinating objects.  This website has a Quicktime panorama of a typical space and their own website has some VR explorations.  Here's what it's like to be inside the space:

As an architect Soanes knew all about light and how it illuminates interiors.  In one of the spaces the sun was blasting through the skylight windows striking against the relief underneath.

One of the volunteer invigilators stood in just such a light in the basement and she glowed.

As you can imagine, my main point of interest was the Picture Gallery, a space roughly the size of a modern train carriage containing such things as Piranesi's architectural landscapes drawings, Sir James Thornhill's Sketch Design for the ceiling of the Queen's State Bedchamber at Hampton Court Palace, Watteau's L’Accordée du Village, three paintings of Venice by Canaletto and two sets of Hogarth paintings: A Rake's Progress (which is only accessible briefly each day for conservation reasons so I missed it) and The Humours of An Election.  The latter has another Shakespeare connection in that according to a tour guide it was bought straight off the painter's walls by David Garrick after a dinner party.  Here is a guide to the whole room.

Wandering around the museum, I did keep my eyes open for any other Shakespeare merchandise and sure enough there were at least two busts, an plaster copy of the Edgar George Papworth portrait:

And at the top of some stairs, a reproduction of the Shakespeare funerary monument from Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-Upon-Avon.  In 1793, during Soanes's lifetime, Edmond Malone (yes, him again) persuaded the vicar of the church to paint the original monument white, so this is how it would have looked then.  The colour wasn't restored for another sixty tears based on the remaining pigments which could be seen behind the white paint later. 

After leaving the museum and the aforementioned dinner, I had to find something to fill the period before the train home.  But that's a story for another time.

222 Craven Museum and Gallery

Books   Since there's now a checklist and everything, I've been trying to decide what to call the endeavour of trying to see all of the first editions of the collections of Shakespeare's plays and it's not until I was standing on a platform at Leeds Station waiting for the connecting train between Liverpool and Skipton that I decided to go back to my very brief flirtation with drawing lines through train class numbers in another type of book and decided I've been Folio Spotting.  I'm a foliospotter.

So this erm, foliospotting trip was to the Craven Museum and Gallery in Skipton which has a partial edition in its exhibition space.  As Rasmussen and West's The Shakespeare First Folios (the foliospotters equivalent of the Diesel & Electric Loco Register) indicates there aren't actually that many copies internationally that you can apprehend, most of them only brought out on special occasions either for security reasons or due to their fragility.

The Craven was recently nominated for a Art Fund Museum of the Year award and it's this report in The Guardian which prompted me to book at ticket to Yorkshire.  The last time I visited Skipton was in my undergraduate days when you could travel anywhere in West Yorkshire by bus from Leeds at the weekend for 60p.  Skipton would have been the furthest I went, two hours there, two hours back.  I'm not sure I would have had the patience now, although it was roughly three hours from Liverpool by train.

Judging by the accession number. the book seems like a very late entry into the catalogue because it had only recently been made available to the public as a First Folio.  For much of its time at the Craven it was been designated as a Second Folio, and it wasn't until 2003 that the scholar Anthony West, the West of the The Shakespeare First Folios, studied the pages and determined that they were from the 1623 original.  As he and Rasmussen say, "Security was immediately increased".

But it took until March 2011 for the necessary funds to be gathered for the current secure display case to be added to Craven's exhibition, which is accompanied by video explaining the importance of the book narrated by Yorkshire's own Patrick Stewart and wall panels describing the provenance of the book.  The Craven Museum was recently refurbished (hence the nomination) but judging by the descriptions this corner seems like it's much the same as it was ten years before.

The provenance of this folio is minimal.  The trail begins with John James Wilkinson, who after selling his cotton and tobacco business became a naturalist studying marine insects who also had an interest in literature, but there's no indication of how he acquired it.  When he died in 1919, the Folio was inherited by his sister Ann who then bequeathed it to the town of Skipton in 1936, which is when it was misidentified as a Second Folio.

The Guardian piece suggests it then sat in a cupboard beneath a sink for the intervening decades until the new identification.  It was probably easily overlooked because as you can see from the digitised version, it's missing the title pages and comedies so without the front page you could imagine various staff over the years not really thinking it was anything more than a pile of old papers because why would they even have a Shakespeare First Folio?

Now that I am foliospotting, I'm going to have to step up my game.  There are still plenty of documentaries to look at but with the re-opening of the Folger Shakespeare Library and its display of all the Shakespeare folios they own, I'm already looking at the logistics of visiting Washington DC.  How can any foliospotter turn down the opportunity to see our equivalent of Llandudno Junction traction maintenance depot?

39 The Shakespeare Centre: Royal Shakespeare Company

Books   Cleopatra and Me: In Search of a Lost Queen is a half hour presenter-led documentary from BBC Four in 2019 in which Shakespeare scholar Dr Islam Issa investigates how the resolute leader he grew up with as part of his Egyptian cultural heritage has become weakened and sexualised over the years, a process which he thinks may have started with Shakespeare.  He speaks to other scholars and actors and comes to the conclusion that it's possible to embrace all of the different versions of Cleopatra because it only goes to show how multifaceted the historic figure was.

An exploration of historic sources necessitates a visit to The Shakespeare Centre in Stratford Upon Avon, during which he meets Rev Dr Paul Edmonson, Head of Learning and Research at The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, who demonstrates how passages from Plutarch's Life of Julius Caesar were all but transcribed into verse by Shakespeare, Enibarbus's the description of Cleopatra's barge floating along the Nile ("The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne" that sort of thing).  

During this demonstration we see what looks like an early edition of Plutarch and a First Folio.  The Shakespeare Centre has three copies of the Folio which narrows things down considerably in terms of identification but there are only two shots of it:

Fortunately this was more than enough.  The binding matches the images of the Royal Shakespeare Company edition which was scanned for the First Folio's project which can be seen here and neither of the books photographed for the Shakespeare Trust website.

This is the volume I thought was on display in the exhibition at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre which I wrote about here.  This is the one which in 1964, three members of the RSC took to Rome to be blessed by the Pope after they gave a recital of Shakespeare's plays at the Palazzo Pio in front of the pontiff and a couple of thousand guests.  Unfortunately something was lost in translation, the Pope wasn't adequately briefed and he assumed it was a gift and accepted it as such.  After some diplomatic shenanigans, the folio was eventually returned.

How did it end up in the possession of the RSC?  Rasmussen and West's catalogue The Shakespeare First Folios has an incomplete provenance.  The first known owner is Samuel Molyneux Madden, author of one of the earliest science fiction novels, Memoirs of the Twentieth Century.  After disappearing from view for a hundred years, it was acquired by Shakespeare scholar James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps in 1865 before being sold on in a sale, following his death, to the brewer Charles Edward Flower, co-founder of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre.  He donated the volume to the theatre's library.

As you can see from this image of the inside pages, even in 1889, the First Folio wasn't thought to be a sacred enough document that Flower thought it was fine to put his name in the front.  On the opposite page there's a typed note from John Goodwin, Publicity Manager of the RSC outlining the aforementioned Vatican incident along with a remark from Halliwell-Phillipps about variations in printing around Henry VI Part One.  

Other sightings:

This same edition also appears in Cunk on Shakespeare, as you can see from the binding.

It's part of a very funny sequence which parodies how presenters in history documentaries always wear clothes around objects, especially books even though as Paul Taylor, Head of Collections, Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, points out, if you wear them you're more likely to damage the book because you lose the sensitivity to the paper that touch provides.

Shakespeare First Folios: A Checklist

Books  Let's formalise things.  Since it looks like my latest mad project is going to be looking at all the extant First Folios either in person or on a screen, find after the fold a complete list of all the First Folios in existence as per Eric Rasmussen and Anthony James West's The Shakespeare First Folios: A Descriptive Catalogue.  Their version offers a bit more geographical detail but this list has been simplified for ease of use.  After each location you'll see that they're marked depending on whether the linked blog post talks about a Folio I've seen in the real world [IRL], on screen [TV].  I've also linked to a complete digital version [complete] where available and partial [partial] when it's just a page or two or the binding.  It's unlikely I'll be able to tick all of them off (especially if they're in a vault somewhere), but it's a finite goal.

32 Bodleian Library

 

Books  Twelve Books That Changed The World (2006) is a book and four part ITV documentary series in which Melvyn Bragg highlights a series of British volumes which he thinks, have had the most profound effect on humanity.  There are the obvious choices: On The Origin of Species, The King James Bible, Principia Mathematica and the Magna Carta.  The more specific choices: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Married Love, On the Abolition of the Slave Trade, Experimental Researches in Electricity and The Wealth of Nations.  The probably aimed at the channel's core audience: Book of Rules of Association Football.  

Over the years I've been hoarding documentaries about Shakespeare and found this on a DVD-R which I must have recorded off-air at the time.  This would have been in the period when I was recording from a separate Freeview box direct to disc so everything is in the wrong aspect ratio  (which is also why all the screenshots on here look a bit weird).  It opens with a trailer for GMTV followed by an advert for digital switchover to offer some historic context and includes weather forecast which probably also captures perfectly what life was like in the UK in 2006:

The grand finale is the First Folio.  There's not much you can do with ten minutes of screen time, so Melvyn offers a brief outline of how the book was published, a mix of scenes from the plays (mainly sourced from the BBC Shakespeare although there's a bit of Branagh and Kurosawa sprinkled in) and contributions from Yale University's Professor Harold Bloom and the then Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library Dr. Gail Paster who aid Melvyn in collectively offering a general sense of the historical importance of the Folio in the development of the English language.  There's also a nice moment when some international acting students translate the text into their own language.

There are actually three different Folios in the programme (four if you count a facsimile used when Melvyn's quoting from the preface).  Dr Paster has one of the Folger copies on the desk beside her, but its in profile and there's not enough visual information to work out which one.  There's a single shot of the contents page of a folio which isn't the one seen elsewhere (we'll get to that).  Despite having an unfolded crease down the middle I've not been able to identify from Rasmussen and West's catalogue The Shakespeare First Folios which copy this is from.  The third is the one which is the reason why we're here.

A slow vertical pan reveal Melvyn sat behind a table covered in a black cloth with the First Folio before him.  Although it might have been obvious to some of you which of the Oxbridges this is, I was sent off on a tangent by the book which uses images from the Cambridge owned editions.  Did I phone the rare books section at Cambridge University to see if the numbers connected to the picture credit meant anything?  I may have.  Did they?  No, no they didn't.  Not that it mattered.  I soon realised the shields on the chairs were from Oxford which led to the Bodleian which has large sections of its rare books collection digitised and available to view online.

The Bodleian Library has two Folios of which this is probably the more photogenic.  The other, Bodleian Library Arch. G c.7 is the original deposit copy sent by the Folio's printmaker William Jaggard to the library.  There's much to be said about how it was sold off as worthless to a local bookseller when the Third Folio was published in 1664 and only returned to Oxford in the early 1900s after they outbid the Folger library.  That copy doesn't appear on screen because as you can see from the digital scan it was not taken care of to say the least with whole chunks of the pages torn out.  The section listing its condition in Rasmussen and West's catalogue stretches to three and a half pages.

The digital scan of the copy which does appear, Bodleian Library Arch. G c.8 also has had a difficult life but at least the relevant pages are intact and for the most part looks very impressive on the table in front of Melvyn.  I was ultimately able to confirm which copy it was because a shot of title page include a partial glimpse of the opposite side where the "To the Reader" unusually appears has been pasted in from another source, a Fourth Folio edition if the pencil note underneath is to be believed.  The title pages from Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet which are shown also match this copy, the latter notably because of a burn mark at the top of the page.

The history of this folio is pretty straightforward.  The provenance begins with eighteenth-century literary scholar Edmond Malone (there's a Reynolds portrait of him on his Wikipedia page), a man after my own heart who devoted part of his life to trying to deducing the order in which Shakespeare wrote his plays.  This was published in the complete works edited by Samuel Johnson and George Steenvens in 1778, an order which is still largely followed.  Malone later fell out with Steevens, notably when he published his own complete works which he said would be "more scientifically and methodically edited than the Johnson–Steevens edition was ever likely to become."

As part of his research Malone collected many books including the Folio, although it's not known where he procured it in 1780.  He treated it as a working copy and/or scrap book and there are notes about the nature of the play strewn throughout, various engravings of luminaries like the Earl of Pembroke pasted in and a facsimile of Shakespeare's signature.  How much of this was Malone or the previous owner isn't clear although its pretty startling to see a Folio treated in this way.  On one page Malone has even included in what's supposed to be an engraving of Shakespeare taken from the Steevens' complete works with a note underneath explaining that it's not actually the playwright, but James I.

On his death, he left a lengthy instruction to his brother Richard, Lord Sunderlin, that the lot be given to Trinity College Dublin.  But Richard was an Oxford man, so decided to ignore all that.  He initially loaned the collection to James Boswell The Younger, son of Samuel Johnson's biographer who was working on the second edition of the Johnson/Steeven complete works.  After Boswell died, Richard finally deposited the Elizabethan books including the First Folio to the Bodleian in 1821 and auctioned off the rest.  It's been there ever since, appearing in two Shakespeare exhibitions in 1916 and 1964.

But what about the contents page?  Although the Bodleian edition is in pretty good order, the box at the bottom of the page contains a note from Malone in which he noticed how Troilus and Cressida seems have have been a late addition, which is a bit too much detail for a fifteen minute segment about the book late night on an ITV Sunday.  Two Oxford Colleges, Queens and Wadham both have their own copies but the entries in The Shakespeare First Folio don't mention the crease you can see above and best will in the world I'm not going through the rest of the book trying to match it.  Perhaps it was filmed as a pick-up when the crew visited the Folger library?

Further appearances:

This copy also appeared in the 2002 series Great Britons in which the BBC tasked the public to vote on who they believed to be the best people in British history.  After an initial vote, the top ten nominees each received a presenter led documentary in which an advocate, in Shakespeare's case Fiona Shaw, offered an argument as to why their candidate was the best.  32 Bodleian Library appears in two shots, the title page with the tell tale pasted in "To The Reader".

The other shot is of the cover, during a crossfade from the bust in Holy Trinity Church.  In the end, Shakespeare was fifth behind Churchill, Brunel, Princess Diana and Darwin but ahead of Newton, Elizabeth, Lennon, Nelson and Cromwell.  

13 British Library

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 sombre 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.

Further sightings:

This copy has appeared on television back in 2009 as part of From Page To Screen: Hamlet, a BBC Learning Zone schools programme about the making of the RSC production starring David Tennant.  It's very easy to identify thanks to the distinctive binding also it also helped that there are also shots of a Q1 copy with the British Museum stamp on them and I assumed the crew filming b-roll would have gathered all of this coverage on the same day.

They appear in a sequence in which the play's director Gregory Doran is explaining the different versions of the play and how the production used Q1's alternative structure, notably the placement of the To Be Or Not To Be speech (see my review).

Three years later, this edition would emerge again, in the Shakespeare Uncovered episode about Hamlet fronted by David Tennant, who is shown the three different versions of the play in a Q1, Q2 and this First Folio from the British Library collection.  We see the same page from Q1 again:

Here's the traditional shot of it being opened to the title page.  Note again the distinctive binding.

There's also a shot of the binding with Grenville's coat of arms stamped in gold in the middle.

18 Dulwich College Library

 

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".

You can read more about the Folio 400 celebrations here.

The University of Liverpool Folio Pages.

 

Books   This morning, I fulfilled a life long dream and was finally to touch and breath the same air as pages from an original First Folio.  For a few years now, I've been travelling the country to see some of the complete books in various exhibitions and institutions, partly as a reason to travel but also because of the fascinating history each of them has.  But I'm under no illusion.  This isn't an academic endeavour.  It's a fannish pilgrimage and up until now, the closest I thought I'd ever get to seeing these pages was through a glass display case, not having an educational reason for consulting the texts.

But a couple of weeks ago, whilst idly looking through local library catalogues for something else, I noticed that although the University of Liverpool's special collections department doesn't have a complete First Folio, it does have a portion, two plays, Taming of the Shrew and All's Well That Ends Well along with a second, third and fourth editions.  After contacting them, it turned out they'd be very happy to let me visit and have a look and for the past couple of weeks have been filled with a nervous energy as I waited for my appointment to view the texts.  Between this and Sunday night's Doctor Who its been quite a nice couple of days.

As you can see, the two plays are bound in a single leather cover which is tightly stretched at the spine which necessitated a large number of sponge book cushions and very careful opening.  After the endpaper is the final page of As You Like It, followed by the other two plays as they would appear in a complete volume.  The catalogue entry doesn't offer a provenance, so I'm intrigued to know what happened to the rest of the book.  The corner of the page facing The Taming of the Shrew has been turned over.  Here's the reverse side:

Which would suggest that these were once part of a complete volume because why else would someone want to save their page?  The library has asked me to include class numbers for each of the volumes.  This is SPEC Y62.5.14.

The census by Eric Rasmussen and Anthony James West suggests that some of the folios are mash-ups, brought together from various sources.  The edition which burnt in the fire at Birmingham was example of this type of volume.  The Folger Shakespeare Library has loose pages in its collection and they're still valuable on their own, presumably because of their age.  Might some them once have been part of this copy?  It's estimated that about 750 copies of the First Folio were originally printed so its a miracle that on top of the extant 233 anything else still exists.

None of which captures how it felt to open the book and turning to the back page of As You Like It and then on into the other two plays.  Running my fingers across the surface, I'm struck by how rough the pages are and despite the thickness of the paper, how fragile.  Did I smell them?  I did.  Musty.  Old.  Seeing these sides through glass is one thing.  Turning them as so many others will have since they came out of the printers at Jaggard's shop is something else entirely.  On the other it's the book.  

The aforementioned page turning isn't the only human intervention.  Although these pages lack marginalia, someone has made an attempt to correct the famous printing error on page 250 of All's Well That Ends Well with a small pencil circle over the incorrect number 2:

The pages are also spackled with the tell-tale brown stains of someone having read this close to either an open fire with floating soot trails or else smoking.  For twenty minutes, I found out what it must have been like for the compilers of various Folio surveys over the years to greet one of these books and have to minutely detail these variations.

Although the third Folio is temporarily unavailable, I was also able to have a look at the second and fourth printings.  The Second Folio (SPEC Morton 334) is rarely treated with the same reverence as the First, perhaps simply because it was second.  But it's no less grander a book with even more dedications at the front and despite the apparent change in print shop ("Printed in London by Thomas Cote, for John Smethwick, Willam Alpley, Richard Hawkins, Richard Meighen, and Robert Allot, 1632") seems have used the many of the same plates used to prepare the earlier volume.  Rather than being corrected, the printing error is back with a slightly different correction:

It's also more beautifully bound.  It was part of a gift made to the library by the bookseller in 1969.

The Fourth Folio (SPEC H88.01/oversize) is much less distinguished.  The cover on the University of Liverpool copy is falling off, it feels cheaply bound and has less of an aura, despite it still being over three hundred and thirty years old.  Re-typeset and coming fifty years after the first edition, the dedications are crammed in at the front of the book printed in boxes often on the same page, with Shakespeare's portrait relegated to the frontispiece with one of Ben Jonson's odes.  Despite being re-typeset with in a smaller font, it's also an even larger volume because of Pericles and the six plays Shakespeare didn't write crammed in at the back.

Honestly, it was such a privilege to spend time with this and the other two volumes, especially the two plays.  Now, whenever I see one of the full volumes exhibited or even on television, or reading about its preparation in an Arden edition introduction, I'll now have a sensory memory of at least one small portion of the book.

Images of the books are courtesy of the University of Liverpool Library.