The Shakespeare Thefts (9 page)

What this young man, a dandified youth of obscure birth, thought of the coffins and the scattered logs we have no record, but we do have an idea about his feelings for Sir Thomas’s daughter, Henrietta: Halliwell proposed within a year of his arrival at Middle Hill (an estate that Henrietta would one day inherit).

It would seem a match made in heaven for Sir Thomas—but the proposal coincided with the revelation that James Halliwell had stolen manuscripts from Trinity College, Cambridge, and then sold them to the British Museum in London. (Halliwell was never taken to court on these charges, but scholars who have examined his privately published explanations have found them riddled with “inconsistencies and evasions” and concluded that “it is impossible not to believe that he stole the manuscripts.”
³
) The thievery itself, or the excuses—which
enraged Sir Thomas more? What we know for certain is that to Sir Thomas, a book thief who was after his daughter was worse than fire and beetles combined.

He withheld his blessing. But while she may have been a bibliophile, Henrietta apparently loved James Halliwell more, because in 1842 she eloped with him.

And Henrietta may not have been the only treasure Halliwell removed from Middle Hill. For good measure, Halliwell may have stolen Sir Thomas’s most valuable book: the first edition of Shakespeare’s
Hamlet
, published in 1603. Today, only two copies of this books are known to exist. In 1823, Sir Henry Bunbury discovered a copy in a closet in his manor house. The only other known copy apparently was part of the Phillipps collection; an entry in the
Catalogue of Printed Books at Middle Hill
reads “Shakespeare’s Hamlet 1603.”
⁴
In 1858 (while his estranged father-in-law was still alive), Halliwell sold a copy of the first quarto of
Hamlet
, suspiciously missing its title page, to the British Museum for a princely £1,000. As the great Harvard bibliographer W. A. Jackson observed:

The fact that it lacks the title, which might have had the Middle Hill stamp on it … appears to convict Halliwell-Phillipps of the theft and, what in some eyes is an even greater crime, the mutilation of one of the two known copies of the 1603
Hamlet
.
⁵

Moreover, newspaper accounts of the day apparently reported the charge from Phillipps that Halliwell took from him “a valuable volume of Shakespeare’s poems.”
⁶

Phillipps was enraged by the elopement. After this betrayal, he never spoke to his daughter or James Halliwell again.

Although it’s possible that Halliwell acquired the
Hamlet
quarto legitimately,
⁷
Sir Thomas’s suspicions about his son-in-law as an enemy to books were well founded. It is now known that Halliwell had a weird quirk of his own: He habitually
cut up
pristine seventeenth-century books—including several Ben Jonson folios—so that he could paste the snipped-out passages into scrapbooks. This pathology, seemingly at complete odds with what someone who loves and collects and values books would find acceptable—ultimately destroyed over eight hundred books and yielded over thirty-six hundred scraps.
⁸
(Halliwell
really
liked certain things: For example, he liked to cut out cast lists, lists of
dramatis personae
from seventeenth-century printed texts, and paste them into his scrapbooks. Today we actually can match up many of his sliced-out pieces to the books they originally came from.)

This would have driven his new wife’s father mad. Sir Thomas had personally recorded in an early catalog that his own collection was inspired by “reading various
accounts of the destruction of valuable manuscripts.” And now a scrapbooker had wormed his way into the family! To add insult to injury, it was this same destroyer (and thief) of books who, according to the terms of a trust that Sir Thomas could not break, was to inherit (through Henrietta) his estate, Middle Hill.

Craftily, Sir Thomas contrived a way that his precious books and manuscripts would not fall into the hands of his despised son-in-law. It could be done. He couldn’t break the trust set up by Henrietta’s grandfather, but he could undermine it if he moved the collection out of Middle Hill. Thus began what may rank as the most extraordinary migration of books in British history.

In 1863, fueled by spite, Phillipps leased Thirlestaine House—an enormous mansion with corridors so long that he rode a horse from room to room, and a dining room so far from the kitchen that the food always arrived cold (much to the annoyance of Lady Phillipps). He commissioned 175 men to drive 250 cart horses pulling 125 wagons to transport his massive book collection to its new home, less than twenty miles away. The transfer took two years (which certainly undermines the idea that those coffins would have been very useful during an emergency). Phillipps then put a provision in his own will stating that no book was to be moved from Thirlestaine House and also that the Halliwells (and, for
good measure, all Roman Catholics) were banned from entering.

He didn’t stop there. He cut down every tree on the eight-hundred-acre Middle Hill estate and opened the manor house itself up to the elements and to roaming cattle. (There is no record stating if he kept the resulting logs.)

Sir Thomas died in 1872. Henrietta came into possession of the ravaged Middle Hill, and soon after, by royal letters patent, James Halliwell assumed the surname Phillipps, thereby inextricably linking himself and the great collector, becoming James Orchard Halliwell-Philipps.

Henrietta died a few years after her father, and for the rest of his life J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps (as he now called himself) was a rich man. He became an authority on the life and times of Shakespeare, and his remarkable collection of the bard’s work was housed in a bungalow complex, to which he kept adding new buildings, at Hollingbury Copse near Brighton.

During his career as a prominent Shakespearean scholar, dealer, and book collector, no less than a dozen copies of the Shakespeare First Folio passed through the (occasionally scissor-happy) hands of Halliwell-Phillipps (perhaps up to two dozen).

But here’s the interesting thing: Although his father-in-law must have owned a copy, a Shakespeare First Folio
was not found in Sir Thomas’s considerable library at the time of his death. Was it removed from Middle Hill at the same time as the
Hamlet
first edition and Henrietta? And if so, was one of the copies sold by Halliwell-Phillipps truly the Sir Thomas Phillipps copy? If someone out there has a copy of the First Folio with a Middle Hill stamp on it, they haven’t come forward.

It took more than a decade after his death before Sir Thomas’s heirs were able to secure legal approval to break the terms of his will and begin to sell off his books and manuscripts. Despite
twenty-two
auctions at Sotheby’s, tens of thousands of volumes remained at Thirlestaine House. The London booksellers W. H. Robinson eventually purchased the “residue,” uncataloged and unexamined, for £100,000 in 1946. The dispersal continued through further auctions and retail sales, and the tail end of the Phillipps Collection ultimately was acquired by the New York dealer H. P. Kraus in 1977.

Perhaps the First Folio somehow slipped through everyone’s fingers?

If it is out there, one day my team and I will find it. We have some hunches: It
could
be bound in slightly scuffed red morocco (goatskin dyed with sumac) and living (since 1975) at Meisei University. That volume was once part of a collection that A. N. L. Munby believed may have been owned by Sir Thomas Phillipps.
⁹
Or he may have owned another copy, which had been
owned by Barron Field, the Supreme Court judge of New South Wales. This copy is bound in brown Russia leather. The front, back, and spine have gold-tooled fillets and rosettes. It also lives in the vault at Meisei, and has since 1978. There is some evidence that Sir Thomas purchased it at the sale of Barron Field’s library at Sotheby’s on July 20, 1846.

Neither of these copies bears the Middle Hill stamp. If the stamp was removed, as was possibly the case with the
Hamlet
, then, unfortunately, we don’t have enough further information about Sir Thomas’s copy to ever make a positive identification.

Methinks you are my glass, and not my brother
.

—Shakespeare’s
Comedy of Errors

Back in the 1980s, I was at the British Library in London examining the first quarto of
Hamlet
that Halliwell-Phillipps had sold to the British Museum over a century before. As I’ve mentioned, it’s an exceedingly rare book—there are only two known copies in the world. There was a bomb scare, and the patrons were asked to evacuate the building. I quickly packed up my notebooks and left. Once I got outside, I realized that I had taken the first
quarto of
Hamlet
with me. My mind raced:
What do I do?
If the Irish Republican Army attacked the building, I would be seen as a hero; but if it didn’t, I’d be guilty of whatever the British equivalent is of grand larceny.

I returned the quarto, but those few moments of ownership were heady. They weren’t to be matched until 2005 when I bid on—and won!—my portrait of a bald man at a Sotheby’s auction in London.

I took that painting home, looked at the seventeenth-century canvas, at the sitter who was wearing a black doublet and a white ruff, and I saw William Shakespeare (see photo section). The provenance seemed plausible. Also, the back of the painting was inscribed: “Wm. Shakespeare, A.D. 1610.” The writing was crossed out, but still. I have a good library (including a Shakespeare Second Folio in the original calfskin binding that my son Arden refers to as his “college fund”), but this felt like something else.

With due diligence, I took the painting to the National Portrait Gallery in London and had it authenticated: It was indeed painted around 1610, by an unknown artist. Whoever had painted it was clearly someone in the British school of painting.

Word got out about my newly found Shakespeare portrait, and people started to get
very
excited. The National Portrait Gallery had a scheduled exhibition of possible Shakespeare portraits; perhaps it could be included?
The Royal Shakespeare Company, for which I was then coediting the complete works of Shakespeare, wanted to exhibit it as part of its festival that year. A lot of Shakespearean scholars started looking at it, and saying: There’s something about the
intelligence
in the eyes. This is how we want him to look.

The momentum was building. I had heard of Sophia Plender, a conservationist who had just finished restoring a Rembrandt. She was the leading art restorer in England. I spoke with her, and she said, very logically, that we should give my newly acquired painting a good cleaning and then have her do an examination, to see if any restoration work needed to be done. I knew that Sophie’s services wouldn’t come cheap, but, after all, I had only paid £1,000 for the portrait.

I threw caution to the wind and hired her.

She started her restoration process, and CBS news heard about it and was sending over a film crew. I was told the footage was for the CBS program
Sunday Morning
, the casual, weekly newsmagazine devoted to culture and the arts, featuring leisurely twenty-minute stories. I worked up a whole scholarly spiel about the Johnstouns, and Ben Jonson, and Shakespeare’s First Folios, and how this
might well be
an authentic portrait.

About a week before the crew from CBS arrived, Sophie discovered that some overpainting had been done on my portrait. It was meant to make the figure look balder.

Not good.

We had the History of Art Department at University College, London analyze the paint. Sure enough, the man in the portrait was overpainted on the forehead with patent yellow and Prussian blue paints—types of paints that weren’t used until nearly a century after 1610. It was clear to Sophie—and to me—that someone had tried to make this painting look more like the popular idea of William Shakespeare. The image most people conjure up of him is the portrait that is included in the First Folio, an engraving by Martin Droeshout: bald guy, wearing a ruff.

It was disappointing news, to say the least. Still, I had an opportunity to talk on national television about my work with the First Folios and the reason that I had thought the portrait
might
be authentic.

The CBS crew showed up, and I was expecting the avuncular Charles Osgood or the wryly ironic Bill Geist.

Instead, Richard Roth, the hard-hitting investigative reporter, greeted me.

I recognized him as the journalist who had been famously assaulted at gunpoint and then detained by Chinese troops during the student uprising in Tiananmen Square. Richard Roth is many things, but he is not especially warm and gushy. I was a little disconcerted. I started my speech about dead Johnstouns and First Folios, but he interrupted, “Eric, Eric, bad television.”

And I said, “O-kaaay.”

He continued, “I want to know how it
felt
when you thought you had a genuine picture of William Shakespeare, and
you thought you could touch him
through the ages?”

I said, “I don’t know.” I might have chuckled nervously. Then I said, fatefully, “What do you want me to say, I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep?”

As it turned out, this was not a puff piece intended for
Sunday Morning
. It was meant for the
CBS Evening News
, with the ironic story arc: “Shakespeare scholar buys painting thinking it’s William Shakespeare and spends thousands to prove that it’s not.” The national news that night featured me saying: “I couldn’t eat! I couldn’t sleep!”

It was all so impossibly beyond what I’d expected. And it got worse.

Clearly, very early in this painting’s history, it had been overpainted with the intention of making the original figure look like William Shakespeare. My wife, Vicky, still maintains that the portrait
is
Shakespeare, painted before the bard went bald; but a century on, some family member—we all have one—thought the portrait didn’t look enough like the received image of Shakespeare and so had someone “fix” it to make it look more authentic … even though it
was
authentic. Essentially, she believes that someone was hired to make an original look more original. I have seen things just
as strange in the world of books. But be that as it may, the indisputable fact is that the portrait started out its life with more hair and now has less (see photo section).