William Shakespeare died in April 1616 at the age of 52. Seven years later, two of his theater colleagues banded together to publish the first complete edition of 37 of his plays, which became known as the First Folio. History often bestows fame posthumously, but Shakespeare had already achieved in his lifetime a popular and literary acclaim that comes to only a few.
And during a period in which it was relatively rare to print a run of bound books, each hundreds of pages in length, the very act of publishing the Folios acknowledged that Shakespeare was, as his rival and admirer Ben Jonson wrote in a paean in the First Folio, “not for an age, but for all time.”
It’s estimated that there were around 750 First Folios printed, of which, according to the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., 233 still survive.
The First Folios are so prized that when one turned up last month in Scotland, in the estate of a marquess, it made international news, as did the discovery in 2014 of one in a small public library in the town of St. Omer, near Calais, France.
Rauner Special Collections Library at Dartmouth College is one of the American institutions that boasts a First Folio.
It was bequeathed to the college, along with other first editions of Elizabethan literature, by alumnus Allerton C. Hickmott, who graduated in 1917. It is the second most requested item at Rauner after a first edition of The Book of Mormon.
Although the First Folio is not currently on display at Rauner, there is a small exhibition in the library’s reading room featuring different editions of Hamlet, dating from 1637 to 2008.
In this quatercentenary of Shakespeare’s death, there have been commemorations and celebrations in the U.K. that include numerous lectures and tours of Shakespeare’s London and his birthplace, Stratford-Upon-Avon.
In the U.S., the Folger has sent some of its First Folios on a 50-state tour to colleges, libraries and museums. (Currently it is on view at Amherst College in Massachusetts: it has already toured to Middlebury College in Vermont, and the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester).
The collection of Elizabethan literature, and material pertaining to Elizabethan literature, that Hickmott gave to his alma mater is extraordinary, said Jay Satterfield, the Special Collections Librarian at Rauner.
Hickmott was a “major player in Shakespeare collections,” Satterfield added. After Hickmott’s death in 1977, part of his collection came to the college, and the rest was given by his widow, Madelyn Hickmott, a collector in her own right.
Hickmott, a well-to-do insurance executive in Hartford, Conn., wrote in a 1958 essay in the journal The Book Collector that in the early 1930s, at the height of the Great Depression, feeling the “need to relieve the pressures of the times,” he wandered into the office of a famous New York book dealer, James Drake, who suggested that he look closely at 17th century literature.
Hickmott, who’d studied science at Dartmouth, was already a bibliophile when he sought out Drake, but he then fell under the spell of not only Shakespeare but also the playwrights Christopher Marlowe, John Ford, James Shirley and the team of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher.
Hickmott set about acquiring their work, and in 1933, for a mere $4,200, he bought at an auction of the holdings of a noted Cleveland book collector, the First Folio that Dartmouth now owns, Satterfield said.
Even then that sale price was deemed a bargain. In 2006, a nearly flawless First Folio was sold in London by Sotheby’s for 2.8 million pounds, or roughly $5.2 million in 2006 dollars.
While the First Folio lists in its table of contents 35 plays, divided into the comedies, histories and tragedies, there was a slip-up in the printing, said Brett Gamboa, an assistant professor of English at Dartmouth who focuses on the performance aspects of the plays. Gamboa also contributed the performance notes for the third edition of The Norton Shakespeare, and has directed Shakespeare productions.
Troilus and Cressida, one of Shakespeare’s later plays, is in all the First Folios but is not listed in the table of contents.
Due to a printing error — nobody really knows what happened, Gamboa said — Troilus and Cressida was left out of the table of contents but was slipped in between Henry VIII and Coriolanus. The First Folios also omitted Pericles, Prince of Tyre, which found its way into subsequent folios.
But then it gets tricky, Gamboa wrote in an email. Scholars are quite certain that Shakespeare collaborated with John Fletcher on the play Two Noble Kinsmen, which was included in later folios. And Shakespeare may also have written some or all of four other plays. There are also mentions of two plays, Love’s Labor’s Won and Cardenio, for which there are no texts, Gamboa wrote.
Scholars reckon that Shakespeare wrote at least 38 plays, and perhaps as many as 44, by himself or in collaboration. For the record, the third edition of The Norton Shakespeare tallies the number at 40, Gamboa said.
There are no known surviving manuscripts of the plays in the Bard’s hand, and only a few examples of his handwriting. Then there’s the perennial and thorny question of attribution. Was Shakespeare the true author, or was, as some noisily contend, the real playwright an aristocrat, the Earl of Oxford?
Given the various conundrums facing Shakespearean scholars, then, many scholars don’t get quite as worked up as do the public and press when, as has happened in the past two years, copies of the First Folios are rediscovered, Gamboa said. The play’s the thing, not necessarily the folio.
“There’s no scholarly consensus around that idea of the folios as the Holy Grail,” Gamboa said, noting that many of the plays were published singly during Shakespeare’s lifetime in less expensive, loosely bound quartos which would have been available to the public.
Once you get past the question of how many plays Shakespeare wrote, you arrive at the scholarly wrinkle of the variations that exist in the text from the quartos to the 1623 First Folio to second, third and fourth, which were published in 1632, 1663 and 1685, respectively. And not all of the folios came down through the centuries intact. People ripped out pages, or even whole plays.
Indeed, the first pages of Dartmouth’s First Folio were damaged at some point in its life, Satterfield said. So, in 1913, a famous reconstructionist did pen-and-ink facsimiles of those pages that are so accurate and meticulous a lay person wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.
That includes the frontispiece portrait of Shakespeare which is considered, along with a bust in the church where Shakespeare was buried in Stratford-upon-Avon, to be an accurate portrait because it was approved by people who knew him.
“When you’re a librarian you admire the artistry of the reconstructor as well,” Satterfield said.
The First Folios raise the question of how we perceive value, Satterfield said. Clearly there are enormous financial, historic and cultural values bound up in the First Folios. In the Elizabethan period, though, there was as much appreciation of the simpler quartos, which were more affordable, Satterfield said.
There’s no question that Shakespeare’s plays had both popular and literary cachet when they were written and performed.
With literacy on the rise and a market for high-end books, Gamboa said, people understood that Shakespeare’s plays were “high art,” on a par with the best of the Roman and Greek playwrights. But they were also prized for their bawdy humor and quick wit, inventive language and labyrinthine plots — and for the great actors, such as Richard Burbage, who wanted to perform in them.
There was a strong appetite for theater in London, Gamboa said. The population of London was then around 150,000 and the Globe Theatre, where Shakespeare’s plays were staged, had no trouble regularly attracting crowds of around 3,000 people to the performances, with their festive and even raucous atmosphere.
“This was what there was,” Gamboa said. “It was a big event.”
As educators, Gamboa and Satterfield appreciate how seeing and turning the pages of a book like the First Folio, or performing scenes from the plays, can excite students in a way that a text about Shakespeare might not.
“Handling such an object is a catalyst for a mental transformation that can occur. It helps place you, it helps your imagination carry you to a place,” Satterfield said.
“There are people who can memorize a speech from Macbeth and take it away forever,” Gamboa said.
Despite his status, Shakespeare is perhaps even underrated, Gamboa said. In some 20 years Shakespeare wrote and collaborated on around 40 plays, of which at least 20 are recognized as masterworks that cross all manner of boundaries. The plays are “very supple in being adapted to other cultures,” Gamboa said. Ben Jonson was a great playwright but when you read him, “you’re very much in a place and time.”
If another playwright had produced over a lifetime even a few of the plays that Shakespeare wrote in his most fertile two decades, that playwright would be world-famous, Gamboa said. But Shakespeare’s genius and prolific output is such that “we almost run out of bandwidth to keep appreciating his work,” Gamboa said.
Nicola Smith can be reached at nsmith@vnews.com.