by Andrea Mays
In 1790, Irish-born lawyer and friend of Samuel Johnson Edmond Malone, considered the best of the eighteenth-century Shakespeare editors, published his ten-volume octavo edition of the plays. The number and variety of editions that appeared between Rowe’s in 1709 and Malone’s eighty-one years later indicates the increasing amount of scholarly and commercial interest in Shakespeare’s works, and the reverence in which he was then held.
As Shakespeare rose in esteem, so did prices for the First Folio. In the mid-eighteenth century, a copy of the First Folio was still affordable. Samuel Johnson, close to abject poverty, owned one, as did many of the editors of Shakespeare. As late as 1777, a First Folio could still be purchased for five pounds. Prices rose during the Revolutionary War. Soon, booksellers began to give the volume more prominent notice in their catalogues, rather than a brief listing under the “miscellaneous” section. In 1781, Thomas Payne featured a First Folio on the cover of his catalogue.14
Within a few years of the war’s end, prices had risen sevenfold. At a famous sale in 1790, the Duke of Roxburghe paid a record price of £35 14s for a copy of the First Folio. Thomas Frognall Dibdin described the dramatic purchase in his book Bibliomania:
A friend was bidding for him in the sale-room: his Grace had retired to a distance to view the issue of the contest. Twenty guineas and more were offered from various quarters for the book: a slip of paper was handed to the Duke, in which he was requested to inform his friend whether he was “to go on bidding.” His Grace took his pencil and wrote underneath, by way of reply,
“Lay on, Macduff;
“And damned be he who first cries, ‘Hold, enough!’ ”
Such a spirit was irresistible, and bore down all opposition. His Grace retired triumphant, with the book under his arm.
By the end of the eighteenth century, discriminating collectors demanded perfect copies of the First Folio complete with no missing pages, and with all preliminaries present. To satisfy collector demand, a cottage industry grew around the work of making defective copies perfect. Bookbinders, sellers, and artisans replaced missing pages, trimming them to size to match the folios into which they would be inserted; stained pages were washed so as not to stand out; engraved Shakespeare portraits from later folios were disbound from their original volumes and inserted into First Folios; and artists even drew by freehand ingenious and near-perfect pen-and-ink copies of missing pages, or even of the Shakespeare portrait. Some of these alterations would defy detection for more than two centuries.
The price of the First Folio tripled over the next thirty years. In 1818, at the Saunders Library sale, the Grenville copy brought £121 16s. Individual copies of the First Folios already had proper names, usually from their illustrious previous owners. Some skeptical observers considered it the high-water mark for First Folio prices and predicted that never again would a copy fetch so much money. Collector and bibliographer Thomas Frognall Dibdin wrote that it was “the highest price ever given, or likely to be given, for the volume.” His pronouncement proved to be one of the most colossal errors in the history of book collecting.
The study of Shakespeare became further professionalized when in 1840 four eminent editors and scholars—John Payne Collier (who in 1831 had published in three volumes his influential The History of English Dramatic Poetry to the Time of Shakespeare; And Annals of the Stage to the Restoration), the Reverend Alexander Dyce, Charles Knight, and scholar-collector James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps—established the first Shakespeare Society. Knight’s and Collier’s editions of Shakespeare represented material changes from the predominant Edmond Malone 1790 text. Charles Dickens and English Shakespearian actor William Charles Macready served on the council of the organization. The purpose of the Shakespeare Society was “the elucidation of the productions of our great Dramatist.” The Society’s papers, published between 1844 and 1849, are really the first example of a Shakespeare journal. The volumes of papers included essays on English theater history, the study of Elizabethan culture, the sources of Shakespeare’s plays and music, editorial suggestions, and more. Not the least of the Society’s accomplishments was to introduce the commonly accepted modern spelling of Shakespeare’s name.
The club was to be short-lived, however. Collier’s reputation was so elevated by the Society that he was asked to issue a new edition of Shakespeare’s works, which he published in eight volumes between 1841 and 1843. A few years later, he announced a stunning discovery. He had found, so he claimed, a copy of the Second Folio filled with marginal notations and emendations in a contemporary hand. The notes were not merely corrections, but contained stage directions and even new additions to Shakespeare’s text. When Collier was exposed as a hoaxer who had forged the notes, his career as a scholar ended. The Shakespeare Society folded.
In the 1850s, another sign of Shakespeare’s apotheosis appeared—the emergence of specialty dealers who made it their business to know all there was to know about all things Shakespeare. Halliwell-Phillipps was the first great dealer in Shakespeariana, and thus he had a huge influence over the sale and pricing of First Folios. According to one expert, “The interest in collecting the early editions of Shakespeare had never entirely disappeared, but its real revival was due to the unflagging industry of the laborious Shakespearean scholar J.O. Halliwell.”15 In 1852, Phillipps issued a catalogue of “Shakespeare reliques,” books, manuscripts, and other material that he sold to the collector Lord Warwick.16
By the 1850s, more than 225 years after the publication of the First Folio, Shakespeare’s literary reputation was secure. But something else was in the air in early Victorian England, and he was undergoing an additional transformation. Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle expressed the feeling as well as anyone when he declared: “This King Shakespeare, does he not shine, in crowned sovereignty, over us all as the noblest, gentlest, yet strongest of rallying-signs; indestructible; really more valuable in that point of view than any other means?”
Carlyle predicted that Shakespeare would live forever as an eternal touchstone to the English-speaking world: “We can fancy him as radiant aloft over all Nations of Englishmen, a thousand years hence. From Paramatta, from New York, wheresoever, under what sort of Parish-Constable soever, English men and women are, they will say to one another, ‘Yes, this Shakespeare is ours; we produced him, we speak and think by him; we are of one blood and kind with him.’ ”17
Carlyle captured the moment when Shakespeare became celebrated as more than a great author. He was much more than the most important playwright and poet in British history. Now he transcended literature. His name became synonymous with empire, civilization, and the Anglosphere. His apotheosis, now complete, spanned a trajectory of more than 225 years. And now, by the middle of the nineteenth century, Shakespeare was no longer just the greatest author in the history of the English language. William Shakespeare was England.
Across the Atlantic, Shakespeare’s American apotheosis began much later. From the publication of the First Folio in 1623, it had taken about 150 years for Shakespeare to morph into a secular English god. From the establishment of the first permanent, English-speaking North American settlements in Jamestown and Plymouth, Shakespeare’s rise in the New World would take more than two centuries.
While Shakespeare was all the rage on the stages of cosmopolitan London, North America was still a wilderness. When Englishmen landed at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607 and founded the first permanent American settlement, they brought no plays or actors. The same was true a few years later, when in 1620 the English landed at Plymouth, Massachusetts. Indeed, actors were unwelcome in the early colonies. What vital role could such idle, frivolous characters play in the life-and-death struggle for survival in the New World?
American Puritans were no more tolerant of the theater than their counterparts back in England. In 1687, in Massachusetts, Increase Mather complained, “Persons who have been corrupted by Stage-Plays are seldom, and with much difficulty, Reclaimed,” and in 1714, plays were bann
ed in Boston.18
Shakespeare’s plays did not reach America until more than fifty years after the publication of the First Folio. William Byrd II of Virginia possessed a copy of the Fourth Folio of 1685, and a separately printed quarto copy of Macbeth had reached America by 1700. Harvard and Yale had acquired copies of the collected works by the 1720s. In 1730, the first known performance of a Shakespeare play in the colonies—Romeo and Juliet—took place in New York City, more than 130 years after Shakespeare’s works were first performed in England.
The Revolutionary War generation embraced Shakespeare in print. In 1746, Benjamin Franklin had the Library Company of Philadelphia purchase a six-volume set of the collected works; Richard III was performed in New York City in 1750; John Adams wrote about the “great Shakespeare”; and in 1771, Thomas Jefferson recommended Shakespeare as essential for a gentleman’s library. George Washington owned a copy of Shakespeare’s collected works in his private library at Mount Vernon.
Still, by the time of the Revolutionary War in 1775, not a single copy of the First Folio, published more than 150 years earlier, had crossed the Atlantic. Instead, the colonists collected later English editions, or one of several American editions published by the late 1700s. The earliest known First Folio to arrive in America was autographed by its owner, William Parker Jr., in 1791. Within a half century, six copies were sold in the United States, then nine more in the following decade. In the 1830s, as young French observer Alexis de Tocqueville traveled through the country, he found Shakespeare present in “the recesses of the forests of the New World.” He recalled “reading the feudal drama of Henry V for the first time in a log cabin.”
In 1847, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon raised money to buy the house where Shakespeare was said to have been born. The campaign was successful, perhaps in part due to the rumor that American impresario and exhibiter of oddities P. T. Barnum wished to buy the house, dismantle it, and ship it to America.19 Oddly, Barnum also prefigured the historic preservation movement in America, which began in Deerfield, Massachusetts, and Mount Vernon, Virginia. The impudent American’s tactic to preserve something was to buy it. Barnum prefigured the Gilded Age moguls and their European buying sprees, and European resentment.
Two prominent Shakespearian actors, American Edwin Forrest and Englishman William Charles Macready, knew each other and crossed each other’s paths as they toured Britain and the United States performing the plays. Forrest, First Folio owner and the first true American theater “star,” was a muscular, physical, flamboyant, energetic actor known for his powerful voice. Macready possessed none of those traits. More a scholarly, introverted performer, he possessed a more elite, aristocratic following than did Forrest, who was immensely popular with the working classes.20
By 1845, they had seen each other perform for decades, had socialized amiably with each other’s family, and recorded their encounters in their respective diaries. Forrest was the younger of the two by thirteen years, the American challenger to Macready’s position in English theater as “the Eminent Tragedian.” Both enjoyed theatrical success.
But Forrest, a man “whose enormous ego matched his physical proportions,” was not well received in England during his 1845 tour. He seized upon the reason for his surprising failure: Macready must have poisoned the British press against him. In retaliation, during a performance of Hamlet in Edinburgh, Scotland, Forrest hissed at Macready, who was outraged; the friendly veneer was off, as was the friendship.
From 1845 through 1849, the two men separately toured the United States, each performing Shakespeare’s plays in all the big theater towns: New Orleans, Boston, Philadelphia, and New York.
It had been only sixty-nine years since the colonies declared their independence. And the new nation was in a boundary dispute with Britain once more. President James Polk’s rallying cry in setting the boundaries of the Oregon Territory was “Fifty-four Forty or Fight!” American nationalist anti-English feeling was stirred up further by Charles Dickens’s writings, which expressed his outrage that the United States still permitted slavery and over the uncouth behavior he observed as he traveled through the country. On May 10, 1849, Forrest and Macready were each scheduled to play Macbeth in separate theaters in New York City. A passionate dispute erupted among their fans over who was the better Shakespearian actor. Anti-English sentiment ran hot, augmented by class warfare between the working and upper classes, and the argument led to madness and violence. On May 10, Forrest was performing at the Broadway Theatre for the coarse and boisterous blue-collar men and women. Macready was performing for people of refinement, concerned with their outward appearance and dress, at the white-glove Astor Opera House uptown. Broadsides, posted by Forrest supporters at Tammany Hall, incited fans to express their nationalistic displeasure with the English by meeting at the “ENGLISH ARISTOCRATIC! OPERA HOUSE!” asking “WORKING MEN SHALL AMERICANS OR ENGLISH! RULE IN THIS CITY?” Instigators supplied Forrest’s fans with free tickets to crash Macready’s performance. Many of them were turned away at the door of the Astor Opera House that night, and thousands of them surrounded the building. They attacked the Astor, threw stones, and rioted. Macready fled for his life through the back door, never to perform on an American stage again. To quell this “Shakespeare Riot,” the mayor of New York called out the state militia, which fired on the wild mob, killing at least 22 and leaving 120 injured on the streets of Manhattan.
Notwithstanding the violence in New York, prominent American authors began to celebrate Shakespeare not only as a great writer but also as something more—as a vessel that transmitted the core values of Western civilization from England to America. His works accounted for a quarter of the plays performed in America during the nineteenth century, with his popularity reaching beyond the cities into the countryside and out to the frontier. Shakespeare’s reputation was evolving from literary icon into Anglo-American cultural hero, and his earliest printed works—especially the First Folio—became coveted relics that connected a modern audience to “King Shakespeare.” As had happened in England, Shakespeare was now more than mere entertainment. He had become a symbol of civilization, of the superiority of the Anglosphere.
By the 1850s, Shakespeare was an Anglo-American hero. Although his reputation had conquered America, few original sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Shakespeare source materials—folios, quartos, and the like—had crossed the Atlantic. Indeed, as late as 1857, ninety-five percent of all known copies of the First Folio remained in England. A proud Britannia hoarded her literary treasures to which she had given birth. But in that year, unbeknownst to her, in Brooklyn, New York, a boy was born who would one day do everything in his power to turn that state of affairs topsy-turvy. By the turn of the century, he would declare Shakespeare his cause, proclaim his obsession with all things Shakespearian, and seek to convey the material culture of Shakespeare to America. He would not be content to worship Shakespeare; he wanted to own him.
Chapter 5
“Had I the Money, You Would Come . . .”
—HENRY CLAY FOLGER
IN 1635, twelve years after the publication of the First Folio, an undistinguished man named Peter Folger emigrated from Norwich, England, to Watertown, Massachusetts. He later lived on Martha’s Vineyard before settling on Nantucket in 1663, off the coast of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He married in America and had many children, one of whom, Abiah, became Benjamin Franklin’s mother. The family was involved in the whaling industry, which provided oil for the lamps that illuminated preindustrial America. In the early 1800s, two hundred years after the first Folgers came to Nantucket, Samuel Folger, a direct descendant of Peter, married and had several children, including three sons, Henry, Edward, and James. In 1849, these three brothers left Nantucket for San Francisco, en route to the California gold country to make their fortunes in mining. Fourteen-year-old James stayed in San Francisco, where he became a carpenter and worked in a mill that he later purchased.1 In that era, San Francisco cof
fee drinkers bought, roasted, and ground their own beans. Young James Folger, possessed by an entrepreneurial spirit, saw an opportunity. He roasted and ground the beans, then delivered the product in bulk to groceries to save consumers from the inconvenience of grinding their own beans. Later, he packaged and sold ground, roasted coffee to miners. His innovation lay not in inventing a new product—coffee had been around for many years—but in offering customers that product in a new, convenient, ready-to-brew form. From this small enterprise, based at 101 Howard Street in San Francisco, grew the Folger Coffee Company. Later, his brother Edward returned to San Francisco and opened a whale oil business next to James’s coffee mill.
Henry Folger eventually left California and moved to Brooklyn, where he married grade-school teacher Eliza Jane Clark, opened a millinery supply business, and had eight children. His first son, Henry Clay Folger Jr., was born in Manhattan on June 18, 1857. Two things—one a cultural phenomenon already in place on the day he was born, the other a monumental discovery made when he was two years old—would shape Henry Junior’s destiny. By 1857, William Shakespeare had conquered American popular culture. The great actors Edwin Forrest, Junius Brutus Booth Sr., James H. Hackett (soon to become a favorite of Abraham Lincoln’s), and Charlotte Cushman toured the country and became some of the nation’s first “stars” by performing Shakespeare. Soon Junius Booth’s sons and fellow actors, Edwin, Junius Jr., and John Wilkes, joined them onstage as American celebrities, worshipped by devoted “fans.” The love of Shakespearian drama was part of the spirit of the age into which young Henry Folger was born.
Then, in 1859, when Folger was two years old, oil was discovered in Titusville, in northwestern Pennsylvania. Long before strikes in Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and California, Pennsylvania served for decades as the main source of oil production in the United States. The crude oil revolution would define this child’s life and make it possible for him to live his dreams.