The Millionaire and the Bard

by Andrea Mays

  After Plimpton’s brief remarks, a musical interlude, played on period instruments owned by the Folger Library—treble viol, viola da gamba, and clavichord—preceded the principal address by Dr. Joseph Quincy Adams, the library’s research supervisor. Entitled “Shakespeare and American Culture,” it was a full-throated celebration of the Anglosphere. Adams compared the importance of the Folger Shakespeare Library with that of the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument:

  In its capital city a nation is accustomed to rear monuments to those persons who most have contributed to its well-being. Amid . . . Washington D.C., three stand out conspicuous above the rest: the memorials to Washington, Lincoln and Shakespeare. They stand out as symbols of the three great personal forces that have moulded the political, the spiritual and the intellectual life of our nation.

  Although Shakespeare, Adams argued, was English and not American, the poet exerted on American language and life an influence that preserves English culture among a “people who now occupy a domain vaster than the Elizabethans dreamed of.”9

  After Cadman’s benediction, Emily left the stage and welcomed the attendees. “The list of guests following the dedication was both lengthy and notable. I stood in the Founder’s Room to greet old friends and new. They passed in a long line, each with a word of kindness and congratulation.” That night, she returned to the Hay-Adams Hotel, overlooking Lafayette Park and the White House. “Back in my room alone I knew that the dream had come true at last. I was humbly grateful.”10

  The Folger Shakespeare Library may have opened, but it would take years to catalogue the collection. The enormity of the task was staggering. Henry and Emily had spent most of their time acquiring materials, not sorting or cataloging them. Unaided by a librarian, and with only the help of Henry’s Standard Oil secretary, Welsh, they were unable to stay current with the backlog of their acquisitions, even for the books Emily had catalogued; it would take years to replace the sixty drawers full of her handwritten and typed four-by-six cards with a library catalogue. It took months for the staff to unpack and organize enough materials to even open the doors to scholars.

  Emily’s first research project was not Shakespearian, but biographical. Henry Folger had planned to write a book titled Ventures and Adventures in Collecting. But building the library had occupied so much of his attention that he never sat down to draft the memoir. All he left behind were a few unfinished pages from a manuscript he never completed. It was no more than a summary of his triumphs as a collector. This roll call of books reads more like a press release than the introspective insights of a driven bibliophile. But, brief as it is, it remains the longest surviving piece of writing that he ever set down about himself or his collection: “A study of the check lists of the Folger Shakespeare Library soon to be installed in its own building in Washington, D.C., show it to be much larger, and extremely more interesting and valuable, than even those who have helped in assembling it had supposed,” Henry began. Then followed, one after another, a long list of his greatest acquisitions. He never finished it.11

  Emily was impressed by a long Washington Times article that praised the library’s architecture and decoration. She engaged its author, Frank Waldo Fawcett, to undertake Henry’s biography, but nothing ever came of it. Fawcett performed some desultory research, contacting a few of Henry’s business acquaintances and relatives to extract personal observations and reminiscences. An envelope marked in Emily’s hand with the name “Waldo Fawcett” on it contains all that remains—and that was perhaps ever done—for this aborted project: just ten typed pages of notes.

  In 1932, Emily received an honorary doctorate from Amherst College. Citing her as the “enthusiastic, tireless, and discriminating companion of Henry Clay Folger in the collection of a unique library of the works of Shakespeare; generous benefactress of Amherst College and of the lovers of letters throughout the whole world; the degree which 18 years ago Amherst College appropriately bestowed upon your husband it now, with the same hood as symbol, confers upon you”—transferring from Henry to her the responsibility of carrying the library forward.

  By mid-1932, the work on the library’s north façade was still not quite done. In April, on dedication day, only six of the bas-relief sculptures had been in place. In July 1932, John Gregory reported to Emily that he and his carvers had just finished the seventh (Richard III) and eighth (Romeo and Juliet) panels. The high reliefs were carved by the Piccirilli Brothers, who carved in marble Daniel Chester French’s Lincoln Memorial sculpture, the lions Patience and Fortitude that flank the entrance to the New York Public Library on Forty-Second Street and Fifth Avenue, and the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery.

  Late in December 1932, Gregory gave Emily Folger a wonderful Christmas present. He sent a letter informing her that he had just completed his marble bust of Henry, and it awaited her approval. For a sculpture not done from life, but from the artist’s memory refreshed by photos, it was a remarkable likeness.

  By 1933, the reading room was fully opened to scholars. The first years were haphazard, with tens of thousands of items uncatalogued and inaccessible. Researchers could not make use of materials that could not be found.

  In 1935, another white marble palace rose within sight of the Folger Shakespeare Library. In 1929, the Chief Justice of the United States, former president William Howard Taft, lobbied Congress to give the Supreme Court its own building one block east of the Capitol. At that time, the justices were neglected stepchildren with an inadequate home within the U.S. Capitol. The cornerstone of the new courthouse was laid in October 1932 and the building completed in 1935. In a great irony, the Supreme Court built its bigger palace next to the one built by the chairman of Standard Oil. Thus, the Folger Library stands forever in the shadow of the Supreme Court—an eternal reminder of the blow that the Court struck against Standard in 1911. Henry never beheld it, but he knew it was coming. Today, when you exit the Folger, and step onto East Capitol Street, the first thing you see is the back of the Supreme Court. Henry might have preferred that his library cast a longer shadow.

  Emily Folger enjoyed her regular trips to Washington: “When I visit the Library today I find it a happy place, and I think of Henry being present there, rejoicing in its completion. . . . I think, too, of how the Library expresses his ideals, his personality, his thought, his hope, his faith.”

  By 1936, her health was in decline, and she knew it. Her correspondence early that year reveals that she was unwell. “I cannot write clearly because I am not clear,” she wrote to librarian William Slade on January 24, 1936.12 She died a month later, at home, at 6:30 AM on February 21, 1936. She was seventy-seven, and had outlived Henry by six years. Her funeral was held in Glen Cove, New York, the following Sunday.13 After her death, she made two final contributions to the library. The first was a generous sum of cash to secure its future. Her other bequest was very strange.

  Epilogue

  IN THE decades following Emily Folger’s death, the Folger Shakespeare Library prospered. Indeed, it became a bigger and better institution than Henry and Emily might ever have hoped. What began as a single-mindedly Shakespearian effort evolved into a time capsule of the whole culture and history of early modern England and Europe. The 1938 purchase of Sir Robert Leicester Harmsworth’s massive collection of 8,000 books printed between 1475 and 1640 was the tipping point. The Folger has grown into one of the greatest private libraries in the world. Even for scholars with no interest in Shakespeare or English literature, the Folger Library is a repository of indispensable materials—books, manuscripts, broadsides, objects, musical instruments, artworks, and more—for the study of music, art, law, science, economics, and politics of Europe during the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I. In many ways the library still reflects the personalities of its founders. In an unintentional tribute to the Folgers’ chaotic buy-now-and-catalogue-later ethos, the library still has not, to this day, catalogued the entire original Folger collection. Several hundred thousand
playbills await digitization. Thousands of documents in Henry’s personal archives have never been individually catalogued. As recently as 2012, the librarian was unable to even estimate how many loose, orphaned First Folio pages reside in the collection, or what plays they are from. It is possible that Henry Folger bought enough unbound pages to assemble one or two more complete First Folios. In the catalogue room’s stacks of wood drawers—the Folger still uses catalogue cards, in addition to computerized files—readers can find old-fashioned typed catalogue index cards. In the archives are the index cards that Emily wrote out by hand more than one hundred years ago.

  The Folger Library maintains the culture of modesty and secrecy established by its founders. Although the exhibition hall and the theater are open to the public throughout the year, the rest of the building—the two reading rooms, the Founders’ Room, the underground hidden book stacks, and the treasure vaults—are off-limits to all but staff and a select group of “readers” whose scholarly credentials have earned them a place in the institution’s inner circle. Once a year in April, on the Sunday closest to Shakespeare’s birthday, the public is invited for a peek inside the library and to an Elizabethan festival—complete with costumed Queen Elizabeth—of games, music, and theatrics. In April 2012, to celebrate the eightieth anniversary of the library’s dedication, a pair of Henry and Emily look-alikes welcomed visitors to the exhibition hall.

  There have been many changes since Henry and Emily’s era, many of which they would have approved. In the early 1980s, a second reading room, the New Reading Room, was built adjacent to the old one. And the air-conditioning system that so confused Henry has long since been extended throughout the building. In the summer months, it cools the reading rooms well below Henry’s target of eighty-five degrees to an Arctic chill more comfortable for books than humans. A state-of-the-art conservation laboratory ministers to bookbindings and works on paper. Outside, on the west wall near the Puck Fountain, the small magnolia tree from which Emily plucked a fresh leaf in 1932, on dedication day, has grown into a sprawling giant that blocks the once-splendid view of the Capitol dome from the executive offices. Although the tree symbolizes the longevity of the library, Henry, who fought so hard to secure the site and its spectacular view, might today order it to be cut down.

  Other changes would please Henry. Before he died, he worried that the Great Depression might interfere with his plans to complete construction of his library and to give it the lifeline of a proper endowment to secure its survival. Today the Folger Library is on sound financial footing, and ranks as the second-best-endowed private library in the world. And it would delight Henry to learn that his library accomplished one of the dreams that prompted him to collect so many First Folios in the first place: the complete collation of all eighty-two of his copies in a page-by-page comparison to detect the unique fingerprint of each volume. A mechanical visual device invented after the Second World War—the Hinman collator—enabled the human eye to examine two First Folios side by side and discern even the most minute textual or typographic differences between them. Folger would have been disappointed that, even with the postwar technology of the Hinman collator and its updated computer equivalent, collation of copies of the First Folio did not result in the discovery of any momentous textual discrepancies. A word here, a line there, a misspelling—these differences were not, as it was hoped, enough to reveal the “true text of Shakespeare.” What Henry could not have known was that collation would permit inference about how—and in what order—the plays in the First Folio were printed.

  Two other changes would disappoint Henry. In the almost eighty years since Emily’s death, the Folger Library has made a prodigious number of important acquisitions for its collection. The sheer quantity, quality, variety, and research value of these materials would thrill Henry. But, in an era of high prices and limited budgets, there is one book that the library will never buy again. Since Henry’s death, the Folger Library has never bought another copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio. This has not been for lack of opportunities. Between 1930 and 2013, almost eighty copies have come to market. Meisei University in Japan purchased twelve of them. In 2006, when Sotheby’s auctioned one of the finest examples in the world, the Dr. Williams copy, Henry would have been smitten. The description of the folio in the sixty-page auction catalogue was mouthwatering: “A tall and exceptional copy . . . no loss of text other than a few letters, has suffered little damage, is uncleaned and has not been repaired . . . [N]o other such textually complete copy of the First Folio in a mid-seventeenth century binding is known to survive in other than institutional hands.”

  In condition alone, this volume equals any of Folger’s best ten First Folios. But its alluring history would have caused Henry to prize it above all of them save one, the Vincent copy. The volume offered by Sotheby’s had been owned by only two individuals since the 1600s: Dr. William Bates (1625–1699) and Dr. Daniel Williams (c. 1643–1716). Since 1729, the folio had been in the collection of the Williams library, which specialized in the history of nonconformist theology. One sentence in Sotheby’s description would have tantalized Henry beyond measure: “It has therefore the longest uninterrupted ownership of any copy in the world.” If the Dr. Williams copy had come up for sale during Henry’s lifetime, he would have given his ultra-command, reserved for only the rarities that stirred his soul: “Buy without fail.” The Williams copy sold for $5.2 million, the world-record price—so far—for a First Folio.

  At the library that bears his name, there is little remembrance or recognition of Folger’s other life, the one that paid for it all. A few years ago, an exhibition catalogue published by the Folger Library made a vague and reluctant acknowledgment that Henry had once “worked for an oil company.” That was was like saying Steve Jobs or Bill Gates had once worked for a computer company. Another library publication notes that “Folger . . . made [his] money in the hard-driving days of American industry, on the backs of . . . oil workers.”1 That misguided statement reveals a sad misunderstanding about economics and the founder, and a disdain for his business.

  In a library filled with signs and symbols that evoke the age of Shakespeare, there is none that evokes the industrial age of Henry Folger. Had Henry foreseen that a library built by petroleum would one day suffer amnesia about its origins and about him as a man of commerce, he might have commissioned John Gregory or Brenda Putnam to sculpt an oil derrick, refinery, railroad tanker car, or gasoline pump—adorned with Tudor roses—to stand beside the bas-relief of Lear or the Puck Fountain. Henry Folger was a brilliant, ethical American businessman. He was an unapologetic industrialist. And the Folger Shakespeare Library is a triumph of American capitalism and philanthropy.

  The Shakespeare Library is Henry Folger’s great monument, but other landmarks to his life and quest survive in the United States and in England. In New York City, in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, a modest home still stands at 212 Lefferts Place. In 2010, when the house was placed on the market for a little more than a million dollars, the real estate agent’s listing failed to note that it was once the rental residence of the most famous Shakespeariana collector in America, or that millions of dollars in rare books and manuscripts had once passed through its door. On the Gold Coast of Long Island, the only home that the Folgers ever owned still stands on a two-acre parcel.

  In Manhattan, Henry’s old office building at Twenty-Six Broadway still stands, but the former headquarters of Standard Oil no longer dominates the skyline, and its illuminated beacon no longer sparkles above the harbor, a short walk away. The lobby looks almost as it did in Folger’s day, with the names of John D. Rockefeller and several of his partners, including Charles Pratt and Henry Flagler, still embedded in decorative tiles in the walls. The old clock still tells time with metal hands cast in the shape of the logo SONY—for Standard Oil of New York. In a nod to its former life as an epicenter of American capitalism, Twenty-Six Broadway now overlooks a plaza dominated by the enormous Charging Bull sculpture mad
e famous in Merrill Lynch advertisements. Nearby, the old Cunard building remains, but the line’s great vessels no longer transport America’s elite—or Europe’s treasures—on Atlantic crossings.

  In London, several of the venerable booksellers patronized by Henry Folger, including the great Sotheran and Maggs firms, are still in business. The former recently celebrated its 250th anniversary. But the London firms no longer maintain a brisk trade in rare Shakespeariana, and it has been a long time since one of them offered an example of a fine First Folio. The Americans, in particular Henry Folger and Henry Huntington, largely depleted England’s reserves of First Folios, choice quartos, and other rarities long ago.

  Near St. Paul’s Cathedral, rebuilt after the Great Fire of 1666, you can stand at the old wall that once surrounded London. You can walk to the intersection of the Barbican and Aldersgate Street, just beyond Cripplegate, at the northwest corner of the wall, and, at the old sign of the Half Eagle and Key, you can visit the birthplace of the First Folio. Here, in 1623, stood the shop of its printer, William Jaggard. No plaque or monument marks the spot.

  But not far away, in the churchyard of St. Mary Aldermanbury, there stands one of the most unusual monuments in all of London: an open book carved of stone, set against a pink-and-gray granite plinth, and crowned with a large bronze bust of William Shakespeare. Set above the book is a stone scroll bearing the legend FIRST FOLIO. The left-hand page represents the title page, and cut into it is the full name of the volume and the place and date of publication. Cut into the right-hand page is an excerpt from the preliminary leaves, containing the message to the reader from Heminges and Condell. Set into the face of the plinth is a tall, rectangular bronze plaque that sings the praises of the two men who created the First Folio and rescued from oblivion the Shakespeare we know today: