Worlds Elsewhere (22 page)

Witmore stood up, and gazed out at the skyline. ‘I think Mr Folger genuinely loved Shakespeare and felt it spoke to him, as many Americans of his period did. But it's also a desire to possess, to get hold of a cultural legacy that was empowering on a global scale.'

Yet empowering
how
? Other Gilded Age potentates such as William Randolph Hearst and Henry Clay Frick lined the walls of their sprawling palazzi with Old Masters and Roman statuary. You couldn't do that with dusty old books. Neither of the Folgers was a professional scholar; Henry was so busy building up financial reserves and spending them that he barely had time to read. Crates piled up, unexamined, in warehouses and at their home in Brooklyn Heights (rented, so they had more money to lavish on Shakespeare). Academics desperate to steal a glance at their astonishing collection were turned away. In 1899 Folger wrote to a friend confessing that his ‘modest library' was for ‘the most part as yet unread'.

Witmore smiled. ‘Did Mr Folger understand the full magnitude of what he was doing? I think he understood the magnitude, but not the specifics.'

A plan began to form. Quietly, in the late 1910s, he and Emily began to look at sites on Capitol Hill. They eventually settled on a row of houses on what is now East Capitol Street. Disaster threatened when the site was earmarked for an extension of the Library of Congress, but Folger, stunning lawmakers with the announcement that he had a collection of ‘national significance' to offer, got his way. In 1928, the architects set to work.

‘The part I find very striking,' said Witmore, ‘is that he says, “Initially I thought of placing this collection in Stratford-upon-Avon next to the man's bones, and I could have built it in New York City, which is where my peers have built their libraries, but I would like to locate it in Washington as a gift to the nation,
for I am an American.
“'

It was quite a thought – keeping all this Shakespeare in the United States rather than repatriating it had somehow become a patriotic act. One-nil to America.

Yet Henry Folger never saw the project through. In 1930, just two weeks after the cornerstone for the building was laid, he went into hospital for a minor operation and unexpectedly died. When the library opened in April 1932, Emily Clay Folger was left to welcome guests from across the world, led by President Hoover, on her own.

I wondered aloud if this accounted for the library's faintly morbid feel. I'd only been inside an hour, and it felt – there was no avoiding the issue – a touch deathly.

Witmore was twiddling a pen. ‘You realise we're also a mausoleum?' I didn't.

‘Oh
yeah.
If you go to the reading room, there's a plaque on the wall, between their portraits.' He was grinning broadly. ‘Mr and Mrs Folger are right behind that. It makes us one of the few places on Capitol Hill where bodies are buried.'

Later, I looked for the plaque. It was right where Witmore had said.
TO THE GLORY OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE AND THE GREATER GLORY OF GOD
, it read. God may have been greater, but Shakespeare got top billing.

After the sober, federal-looking exterior, the Folger's interior came as a shock. The main reading room was outlandish: a brazen piece of fakery that looked as if it had been built by a Hollywood set designer striving to replicate the most maudlin aspects of an Oxford college, at a scale four times larger than reality.

Lined in baize-green carpet, it was nearly the length of a swimming pool. Suspended from the hammer-beam roof were three gargantuan iron chandeliers that could have doubled as torture implements, and, at one end, an oversized stained-glass window. Thick Renaissance tapestries lined the walls, above bookshelves in sombre oak. Huge logs lolled in a stone fireplace the size of a two-storey building. All it lacked was a hunch-backed buter playing fugues on the organ, and perhaps a spaniel or two snoozing in the armchairs. At least the scent was authentic: antique paper, drying book spines and carpet, with a top note of floor polish and air conditioning.

On the wall at the far end, I saw as I neared it, was a full-size wooden copy of Shakespeare's funerary monument in Holy Trinity church, Stratford-upon-Avon. Back in England I had always thought that this ugly Jacobean half-bust, framed by a dinky architectural surround, gave
the poet the expectant air of a fairground automaton, as if his eyes might suddenly start flashing and the quill in his right hand spring into action. This morning, his American doppelgänger looked supercilious and mildly bored.

Also, it was freezing: Nordic winter to the Southern heat outside. Presumably this was for the books' sake. A handful of researchers sat bolt upright at their desks, bundled in scarves and jumpers. The pale light reflecting up from their laptops gave them the ghoulish look of medical specimens. A duteous hush prevailed, broken only by the occasional agitated flurry of laptop keys.

One woman flicked a glance at me, filed me as of limited scholarly interest, and turned back to her screen.

A Polish academic once told me – happily, I think – that you could lose yourself in the Folger's collections. Descending staircase after staircase, walking past steel bookcase after steel bookcase, I saw that it might literally be true. In the vast vaults below the reading room, the strip lights gave everything an underwater tinge. I could feel the vibration of the air conditioning in my teeth. It was like being in the refrigerated hold of a container ship. One could spend weeks down here, and no one would ever know.

I had asked to see the most treasured part of the Folger library: its holdings of early printed books and manuscripts, kept under lock and key deep beneath Capitol Hill. I was told to present myself bright and early the following morning, and meet a curator called Erin Blake.

I found Blake standing in front of a colossal steel bank door, fifteen inches thick and studded with a fearsome armature of locks and levers. An electric bell jangled as she swung open the gate inside.

She smiled mischievously. ‘It goes off automatically whenever we open and close the door. If you hear one bell and not the second, watch out. We come running!'

No part of the Folger holdings is as valuable as the so-called STC collection, named after the Short-Title Catalogue, which aims to list every book published between 1475 and 1640 in Britain, Ireland, the British Empire and the United States. The Folger has some 55,000 of these precious antiques, nearly half the catalogue, including such mouth-watering examples as early printings of Chaucer's
Canterbury
Tales,
published by Caxton in 1477, and the first edition of Newton's
Principia Mathematica
(1687). Only the British Library and Oxford's Bodleian have more.

But I wanted to get my hands on something properly unique: the Folger's extraordinary collection of Shakespeare First Folios. Blake led us around the corner, into another section of the vault.

‘Drum roll, please,' she said.

In front of us a wall was filled with a flock of squat books, each roughly the size of an A4 folder and a couple of inches thick, lying flat on their backs to protect their spines. The Folios were dressed in a variety of outfits. Some were bound gaudily in crimson or chocolate leather and tooled in extravagant gold filigree; others had much duller bindings, scarred and chafed with age. Blake pointed to one hulkingly unattractive copy, which looked as though it was wrapped in rhino skin that had darkened to the colour of tar.

‘Seventeenth-century calf. They would have all looked like this originally. But Shakespeare was such an important figure for nineteenth-century collectors that they wanted to make sure they had bindings worthy of him, so they threw away the originals. Much to our chagrin.'

This was the world's largest collection of Folios?

‘Oh, yes! By a factor of about seven. There are eighty-two, depending on how you count them – some are incomplete. About a third of the copies that exist. The world's second-largest collection is now in Japan.' She allowed herself a flicker of a smile. ‘What do you guys have in the British Library? Six, now, I think.'

Trying not to feel too wounded, I asked if one could put a price on the collection.

‘I don't know where you would start. A good Folio went at auction a few years ago for four and a half million dollars, and that's not even the most expensive. The one before that went for six million-plus.'

I attempted a rapid piece of arithmetic. Assuming–what, an average of $3 million per copy? More? That meant the best part of $300 million on this wall alone. But of course if you put them all on sale the market would collapse.

Why eighty-two copies of exactly the same book had ended up in a vault in the middle of Washington was one of numerous mysteries about Henry Clay Folger. By the standards of many rare editions, the Folio is dirt-common; of the 750-plus copies printed, around 230 are still in existence, in collections as far-flung as Meisei University in
Tokyo and the state library of New South Wales – a global web now so complex that one scholar, Anthony James West, has devoted a career simply to tracking them down. Individual copies vary in condition (some have hand annotations, others a particularly starry provenance) but in many respects the Folio is a reasonably straightforward mass-produced seventeenth-century book.

Blake slid out a copy from a middle shelf, and placed it carefully between us. It had a flashy gold-and-yellow binding that should by rights have enclosed copies of
Reader's Digest.
She eased it open, her fingers moving slowly across the large pages. The famous frontispiece, with Martin Droeshout's even more famously doleful engraving of Shakespeare; a fawning joint dedication to the Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery; an address ‘To the great Variety of Readers'; commendatory poems; finally, in pole position on page 1,
The Tempest.

If the Folio bore an uncanny resemblance to a tombstone, there was a reason. When a consortium led by Shakespeare's fellow actors John Heminges and Henry Condell began serious work on the book in 1621, five years after Shakespeare's death, it was intended as a volume commemorating a life's work – a compendium of thirty-six plays that had previously existed either in so-called ‘quarto' format or never (in the case of eighteen texts) appeared in print at all.

Quartos were cheap pocket editions, often haphazardly produced, their name deriving from the fact that they were assembled from folding sheets of paper in quarters, meaning the print shop could squeeze four leaves or eight pages from each sheet. Folios, by contrast (from the Latin
folium
or ‘leaf'), were double the size and correspondingly more prestigious – a format generally reserved for grand works of theology, history or philosophy. In Shakespeare's day, printing mere playscripts in double-columned folio was extremely unusual: Ben Jonson had been the first to attempt something so bold, publishing his own works in folio in 1616. That Heminges and Condell did the same for Shakespeare was a mark of the high esteem in which he was held. But as an object, there is little unique about the book unromantically called
Mr William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories,
&
Tragedies,
which went on sale in London in autumn 1623.

If you were
really
interested in Shakespeare's working methods, Blake explained, you would do better addressing yourself to the shelf nearby, on which sat perhaps a hundred slim volumes, some not much thicker than a paperback pamphlet and bound in a merry riot of black,
red and gold. This was the Folger's collection of quartos. From a scholarly point of view, the quartos were often far more fascinating. The earliest printings of Shakespeare's scripts, many published during his lifetime, they revealed more about how his plays were actually acted and understood than the prim-and-proper, Sunday-best Folio.

Every quarto had a tale to tell. Several were set from the playwright's ‘foul papers' or working manuscripts. Others contained telling slips, such as the cock-up in the 1599 second quarto of
Romeo and Juliet
that printed the name of Will Kempe, the star comedian who'd once visited Helsingør, instead of his character.
Hamlet
was printed in two rival quartos, in 1603 and 1604. The first was apparently unauthorised, a garbled version perhaps cut down for a touring troupe such as those played in by Kempe or cobbled together from the memory of an actor (it contains such poetical delights as ‘To be or not to be, ay, there's the point').
Hamlet
's second quarto, loudly advertised as ‘newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much again as it was', seems to have been issued to set the record straight, perhaps by a piqued author. Other quartos are truly irreplaceable: the Folger's
Q1
Titus Andronicus,
a slender volume published in 1594, is now the only copy in existence anywhere in the world.

But the Folios have all the glamour. In the late eighteenth century the book began to acquire the patina of fabled antiquity. Stoked by reverence for the Immortal Bard, First Folios started to sell for higher and higher prices. Had you turned up at Edward Blount's bookshop near St Paul's cathedral in November 1623, you could have bought a brand-new First Folio, hot off the press and bound in plain calf, for £1, roughly equivalent to 44 loaves of bread (unbound, it was even cheaper: 15 shillings). In the 1750s it was possible to get hold of one for just over £3 (100 loaves); by the 1790s the cost had leapt to £35 (900 loaves). By the 1850s, it would cost you 5,000 loaves.

From there, prices went wild. By the early twentieth century a copy of the Folio cost roughly the equivalent of 96,000 loaves. In October 2001, when a pristine First Folio went on sale at Christie's in New York, it fetched not $2–3 million as estimated, but a stupefying $6,166,000 (£4.2 million). Near enough 6 million loaves – a lot of bread, in every sense.

American enthusiasts such as the Folgers were largely to blame for this runaway inflation. In 1902, of 158 known First Folios, 100 were in British collections and 39 in the United States. Today, the figure is almost exactly reversed – 44 in the UK, 145 in the US. Foliomania is
an American fetish, one that has long since priced out less dazzlingly wealthy collectors and libraries.