by Andrea Mays
Trowbridge advised Folger to hire Paul Philippe Cret. Born in France in 1876, Cret had studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Lyon and Paris, the influential art school with a history dating back to 1648. After serving in the French army in the First World War, he moved to the United States, where for more than thirty years he would teach in and later head the architecture department at the University of Pennsylvania. Cret’s first important project (1908–10) was the Pan American Union Building (now the headquarters of the Organization of American States) in Washington, D.C. Other projects included the National Memorial Arch (1914–17) at Valley Forge National Historical Park, and the original Barnes Foundation (1923–25). Folger liked what he saw and made a quick decision, hiring Cret on Trowbridge’s recommendation, and then engaging Trowbridge as consulting architect.
Chapter 13
“Thou Art a Moniment, Without a Tombe”
—BEN JONSON
EARLY ON, Henry and Emily Folger revealed their overall vision for the building. More than three thousand miles and three hundred years removed from Shakespeare’s place and time, one block away from the U.S. Capitol, and across the street from the Library of Congress, the idea of erecting a gigantic English cottage would have been out of place, so despite their love of all things Elizabethan, they wanted a modern but classical exterior, not the half-timber and whitewashed plaster ubiquitous in Renaissance England.
Trowbridge and Cret envisioned a modern building, too, designed with a streamlined aesthetic, pared down to classical forms. The architects proposed a two-story rectangular structure clad in white Georgia marble, without columns or excessive external adornment, accented with stylish Art Deco touches, including railings, decorative window grilles, and doorways all fashioned from aluminum.
Cret and Folger reached a happy compromise. The library would become two different buildings, one concealed within the other. The architect’s vision would rule the exterior design, but the Folgers’ Shakespearian taste would dominate the interior. On the outside, Cret’s design would harmonize with its surroundings: the Capitol, the Library of Congress, the Russell Senate Office Building, and the soon-to-be-built Supreme Court Building. Inside, Folger’s library would indulge his Elizabethan tastes with a riot of dark wood wall paneling and high beams, stone blocks, ornate and exquisite carvings, elaborate stained-glass windows, huge chandeliers and torchieres, and a Great Hall complete with a gigantic hearth and massive sixteenth- and seventeenth-century-style furniture. The Great Hall was designed as a high-ceilinged public exhibition hall, filled with glass cases of Folger treasures on display. The Folger Library would be an institution with two personalities. To passersby, the exterior would suggest the federal buildings of twentieth-century Washington. To those who ventured inside, the interior would, in an instant, transport visitors back more than three hundred years to Elizabethan or Jacobean England. Like a play within a play, the architecture of the Folger Library contained secrets.
Letters and memos preserved in Folger’s private files reveal the degree to which his library was the product of his singular imagination. He valued Cret’s talent, and deferred to the architect’s broad vision, but on issues involving specific decorative elements for the exterior, Folger’s proposals prevailed. Henry also suggested additional rooms, not included in Cret’s original renderings, and almost every visible decorative element. The collector looked to Trowbridge to interpret and implement his dreams. Henry and Emily wanted the library’s interior to mesmerize visitors with words, signs, and symbols. Emily wrote that they intended the library to represent “the First Folio, illustrated.” Thus, Henry would call for stained-glass windows, crests, floor tiles, quotations cut in stone, and symbols—including the ubiquitous Tudor rose—carved in wood. He chose every design element to communicate a specific meaning—many of them sophisticated and obscure. The symbols, images, and sayings formed a silent composition that only he and Emily could hear. In balance, they created a harmonic resonance that conjured up the spirit of Shakespeare’s England. Folger exercised great care in choosing them, specifying their exact spelling and punctuation, preserving archaic forms. In the realm of these secret words and signs, only a time traveler or a scholar could comprehend and decode them. The documents that Folger left behind show his profound influence on his library. Indeed, almost everything there today has its origins in a letter or memo signed by Henry Folger. These papers, uncatalogued and forgotten, are echoes of Folger’s fervid and passionate state of mind during the two years he was in the grip of his last obsession—building his treasure house.
At the beginning, he tried to give his architects an idea of the true scope of his collection, and how he envisioned the library might operate. After outlining the sheer bulk of the books and printed materials that would need to be housed, Henry turned to the Shakespeare-themed art he had accumulated. He informed Trowbridge “there must be a thousand or more water-color drawings . . . [including] Cruikshank’s Birth of Shakespeare, which is famous and was the center of attraction in the Marsden Perry Library.” Folger added that there were oil paintings, too. “We have never tried to buy paintings or other Shakespeare illustrations . . . but when paintings were offered, not too costly and they seemed worth while, we have taken them and put them away in storage.” In looking over his checklist, Folger admitted, “They are more in number than I had supposed.” Folger enclosed with his letter an inventory of more than two hundred oil paintings, including seventeen portraits of Shakespeare. Predictably, he warned that this information was secret. “I would like to ask that this list be used by you for your private, personal information, as I do not feel ready yet to give out any announcements about the size or character of the collection.”1
And still, Henry was not finished buying paintings, if the price was right. On one occasion Folger refused a set of drawings based on The Winter’s Tale that Rosenbach offered him. “I buy illustrations only when they appeal to me as being very cheap. I do not doubt that the price you name is a fair one, still it is not low enough to tempt me.”2 In October 1928, one “case of paintings” and one “box of four paintings” arrived in New York. In November, he purchased two First Folios for $22,500 (W 136, F 78) and $5,375 (W 137, F 79). The first contained replacement pages from a copy of the Second Folio, including the title page, mounted and altered to make it look like one from a First Folio title page. It also contained juvenile drawings on several of the preliminary pages. The second copy, with brittle pages, lacked all the preliminaries. These two additions brought his collection to eighty-two copies. They were the last two copies that Henry ever bought.
Folger could not afford to keep collecting unless he kept careful watch over his construction budget. A month after spending more than $75,000 on the two books, he wrote Trowbridge that the library was starting to look too expensive:
The cost seems to total more than I had hoped would be shown for the structure. I had been carrying in my mind a total cost of, say, $750,000, so that the cost of the building and land would be about $1 million. We wish the structure to be fitting both to the location and to the material to be housed, so we do not wish to cramp it. If necessary we can take some funds from the Endowment, or can extend the time of construction, postponing a part of the actual expenditure.3
When Folger saw some of Cret’s preliminary drawings for the library’s principal public space, a huge rectangular room that ran three-quarters of the length of the building, he feared that the architects had misunderstood his wishes. Folger had in mind that the reading room would be a harmonious mixture of a Tudor-style great hall with a trussed roof but with “the warm atmosphere of a private home.”4 In a long letter to Trowbridge dated December 20, 1928, Henry set down in writing for the first time how he expected his library to function:
Studying the attractive drawings of the ground plans for the Washington Library leads me to think I might do well to give you and Mr. Cret some idea of how we expect the Library to be used. Sketch “A” has in the body of the main roo
m five tables, and Sketch “B” eight tables, giving the impression that the room is to be used as a reading-room. But I doubt if this will be the case. It will not be a reading room in the way reading-rooms are used generally, nor even as a room for study, because our Library is too special in its character, and the contents are so costly and limited in scope.
Folger reminded Trowbridge that the “main room” did not require so many tables and chairs because few people would ever be allowed to set foot in it:
You once spoke of having the general effect intimate, rather than imposing. This would be more in keeping with the limitation of the collection. The Lenox Library, which stood on the Fifth Avenue property now occupied by the Frick Home, was restricted to Americana and Shakepeariana. Admission was secured only by ticket, which had to be obtained a day or two before and named not only the day but also the hour for admission. The visitors were treated as guests and were made at home by the custodian. The result was that only those who had real business at the library came to see it. That, of course, carried the limitation to an extreme, but our collection should not be offered freely to all comers, and the Library should not be looked upon as a reading-room nor a comfortable rest-room.
In the New Year, Folger turned to the library’s single grandest decorative element—a huge stained-glass window set in the west wall of the reading room. It would be visible only from inside, and its theme was of vital importance to Henry. His original concept was to replicate the window in the rear of the chancel in Holy Trinity Church, where Shakespeare is buried. He modified that idea, asking that each panel of the tracery window depict a phase from Jaques’s “Seven Ages of Man” speech from As You Like It. Its universal truth appealed to Folger, and he typed out the quotation for Cret:
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant . . . ,
Then the whining schoolboy . . . then the lover . . .
Then, a soldier, . . . And then the justice, . . .
The sixth age . . . [then the] Last scene of all,
That ends this strange, eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
(Act II, Scene vii, lines 139–142, 146, 148, 152, 156, 162–165)
Folger also proposed oriel stained-glass windows—popular in Tudor architecture—in the south wall of the room. They would illustrate the coats of arms of those instrumental to the performance and publication of Shakespeare’s plays: King James I, James and Richard Burbage, John Smethwick, William Aspley, and William Jaggard.5
Throughout the project, Henry’s attention shifted back and forth between aesthetic and practical questions. In February 1929, he instructed his architects that he wanted visitors to be able to drive up to the library in their cars: “There will be need of some way of coming up to the building in an automobile, for protection at night and in stormy weather.” And did Cret and Trowbridge expect the library staff to carry boxes of books up and down the stairs? “As yet we have seen no provision for an elevator, which would seem to be needed to move books and other heavy parcels from the street level, or the basement, to the upper floors.”6 Folger also wondered whether an exhibition hall—a long hall parallel to the main reading room—was practical:
In your letter of the 23rd, you express for us our own views about the Shakespeare Gallery. The proportions and design are so well done that we cannot find fault. Still our enterprise is first of all a Library, not a Museum. And the setting may be . . . more beautiful than the contents. We have only a few real Museum Pieces. Most of our items are interesting because they are Shakepeariana rather than artistic.7
Despite his reservations, Folger accepted the proposal.
Cret and Trowbridge had been pressuring their client to allow them to publicize their role in the project. Future commissions depended on their ability to showcase their work. It was only fair, they suggested, that they inform colleagues and potential clients of their talents. Predictably, Folger refused, complaining that if dealers learned of his plans, they would “advance the prices” of items he wished to purchase. It was an unreasonable posture. Book dealers in Europe had been “wise” to Folger’s not-so-secret obsession for years, they had already read about the library from the April 1928 New York Times article, and additional publicity about the project would only confirm what they already knew.
Henry’s consulting architect would not relent. In a letter dated March 7, 1929, Trowbridge suggested language for what he described as a “booklet containing an explanation of my particular form of service as advisory architect and I wish to include in it some reference to the Folger Shakespeare Foundation.” Professing sensitivity to Folger’s fretting about publicity and its potential harm to his book-hunting escapades, the architect added, “If this is not the sort of thing you would like to have stated, I will be very much appreciative if you will give me suggestions. I do not think this booklet will bring about real publicity, as it is going to individuals and not to newspapers or magazines, or other publicity mediums.”
Henry surprised Trowbridge by capitulating two days later: “[O]f course feel free to refer to the Shakespeare library in your booklet if you think it may help you. And the paragraph you quote is all right, except that I would prefer to have omitted the line ‘said to be the finest collection of its kind outside of the British Museum.’ ”8 Perhaps Henry believed his collection to rival that of the British Museum? That month, Trowbridge published his booklet, a small, four-by-six-inch pamphlet bound in gray wrappers. He deleted the objectionable line about the British Museum.
After studying Cret’s plans, Folger proposed the addition of two spaces within the building. Henry looked forward to using his library, and he imagined spending long hours there with Emily poring over catalogues, handling their treasures, and enjoying themselves. But they could hardly sit at a table in the main book room, in full view of visitors and employees—they were too reticent for that. Henry had another idea, which he proposed to Trowbridge in a letter mailed from the Homestead in March 1929:
Don’t you think it might be well to consider providing in the Shakespeare Building a room or two for social purposes, where we can meet business callers and friends informally? I will hope to spend some time, myself at the Library, quietly, away from the working force and visitors. I suggest two rooms with a lavatory. The rooms should have good light and air, with a fireplace, but not, necessarily, an outlook.9
Cret designed a two-room suite—a reception room and a private room—for his patron. Given that the Folgers lived in New York and were not planning to relocate to Washington, it was surprising that Henry did not call for a small private apartment to be built inside the structure. But he did ask for something larger and much more daunting. By April 1929, Folger concocted a scheme to include a theater inside his library, to be located at the east end of the building, on the Third Street side. Folger considered copying a lesser-known Elizabethan theater, but then settled on the Globe. He explained to Trowbridge in a letter in late April: “[W]e had better do what we can to make the Theatre a reproduction of the Globe. . . . [Shakespeare’s] reputation was made by what he accomplished at the Globe.” But Cret could not make the design work. Perhaps it was better, Folger wrote, to “construct a theatre which will suggest the several Elizabethan theatres, in a general way, rather than try to copy simply one of them.”10 Folger’s plan was eccentric. He requested no dressing rooms, and had no plan to put on plays. The playhouse would exist merely to evoke an Elizabethan mood, and serve as a venue for academic lectures.
In the spring of 1929, Folger’s concerns swung again from artistic to practical. He knew that once his books were concentrated in one place for the first time, a fire or other disaster could destroy his entire collection. As long as
his books remained dispersed in storage units scattered throughout New York City, a fire at any one warehouse would endanger only a portion of his collection. “[M]any of the items,” Henry cautioned Trowbridge, “are unique, so that if they are damaged or destroyed they cannot be replaced.”11 He questioned whether using so much wood—furniture, paneling, beams, and more—might “detract from a perfect fire-proof construction, as is necessary for the library books. I suppose there are several ways of avoiding this. I enclose a sketch of asbestos, which may be suggestive.” He enclosed a newspaper clipping that included a photo of a home library, with the caption “Panels of Asbestos are now used to simulate ancient oak.”12 In the end, however, Folger approved fitting out the library with Appalachian oak.
He also had practical concerns about lighting, wondering if enough natural light would pass through the giant “Seven Ages of Man” stained-glass window to illuminate the main room. He asked Trowbridge: “Do you think that the chandeliers sketched into the reading-room are in keeping with the plan of the room? Might it not be better to try having hanging lanterns, suspending them from the end of the arches, and supplementing them, where necessary, with torches coming up from the floor, giving, as far as possible the Elizabethan atmosphere.”13 In the end Folger chose both types of illumination.
By late summer 1929, Folger focused on what he considered the three most important decorative elements of the exterior: sculptures, quotations, and a fountain. Henry viewed the long, East Capitol Street façade as the “front” of the library. He located two entrance doors there, and decided to decorate the middle stretch of the wall with nine marble panels bearing relief sculptures depicting characters and scenes from nine of Shakespeare’s plays. In a letter to Cret, Folger revealed his choices: Titania with fairies, from A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Shylock and Portia, from The Merchant of Venice; Falstaff and Prince Hal, from Henry IV Part I; Richard and the two young princes from Richard III; Romeo and Juliet in the balcony scene; Julius Caesar in the “Et tu, Brute?” scene; Macbeth and the weird sisters; Hamlet and his mother, Gertrude; and King Lear and the Fool. Folger also specified the act and scene numbers for the scenes.14