by Andrea Mays
TO THE MEMORY OF
JOHN HEMINGE
AND
HENRY CONDELL
FELLOW ACTORS
AND PERSONAL FRIENDS
OF SHAKESPEARE
THEY LIVED MANY YEARS IN THIS
PARISH AND ARE BURIED HERE
* * *
TO THEIR DISINTERESTED AFFECTION THE WORLD OWES ALL THAT IT CALLS SHAKESPEARE
THEY ALONE
COLLECTED HIS DRAMATIC WRITINGS
REGARDLESS OF PECUNIARY LOSS
AND WITHOUT THE HOPE OF ANY PROFIT
AND GAVE THEM TO THE WORLD
It is the only monument in the world dedicated to a book and its editors. There is little doubt that Henry Folger once journeyed to this place. In his archives, in a cardboard folder of documents pertaining to his trips to England, there is a small scrap of paper bearing a single note in his tiny handwriting: “St. Mary Aldermanbury.” The church is long gone, destroyed first by the Great Fire of London, rebuilt and destroyed again on December 19, 1940, during the height of the Blitz of World War II. Only the graves and the monument, erected in 1896, remain.
When a lonely little old man hoards thousands of pounds of stacked newspapers and trash, we call him compulsive and crazy. When a multimillionaire industrialist squirrels away tons of rare books, manuscripts, artworks, and memorabilia, we call him a great collector and a man of exquisite taste. Henry Folger manifested few of the visible hallmarks that characterized the notorious, hoarding Manhattan brothers, Homer and Langley Collyer. Often the personal lives of the great collectors are not fully known; the collection can be the most interesting thing about them.
On the surface, Henry Folger’s normalcy might appear unexciting. It might even seem disappointing that he was kind, humorous, and unpretentious, and that he was well liked and inspired loyalty. His was a selective and singular madness. It did not manifest itself in odd behavior. Folger never murdered a rival, never seduced a young librarian, never stole a rare book, never concocted a fraud, never forged a manuscript, and never squandered a fortune. Neither did his outward appearance or behavior give any indication of the obsession that roiled within him. His compulsion never turned him into a madman. His preoccupation with secrecy never twisted him into a paranoid recluse. Throughout his life, he was a highly functional professional who thrived at the highest level of American business. But for almost forty years, he led a double life. Like Faust, he was a prisoner of a notion not his own.
Henry Folger succeeded in channeling his energies into a socially acceptable pursuit. In so doing, he served his own deepest psychological needs while also benefiting society. In the context of other famous American pack rats, the signs, symptoms, and psychology of Henry Folger’s collecting located him within the spectrum of sanity.
Folger recognized the great irony that confronts every devoted collector. Compulsive hoarders are fighting a battle against time, death, and oblivion. By accumulating objects that will last forever, or at least for centuries, the collector merges his identity with the collection and attempts to make time stand still. If he becomes one with his possessions, he can somehow live forever. That is one of the classic delusions of an obsessive personality.
Henry Folger escaped that trap by recognizing his mortality. The only way to keep his collection intact forever was to let it go, and to donate it in toto to a monument of his own creation. And so in his will he passed on his treasures to a custodian that would outlive him and generations to come: the Folger Shakespeare Memorial, which he renamed the Folger Shakespeare Library.
In Julius Caesar, Shakespeare wrote that the good men do is “oft interred with their bones.” Perhaps it was that verse that gave Emily Folger a most unusual idea. At the east end of the main reading room hang the two Salisbury oil portraits of Henry and Emily Folger. Between the paintings is a passageway that leads to hidden, twin staircases that rise to the wraparound balcony overlooking the Old Reading Room. Upon entering that passageway, you will find yourself face-to-face with a large, rectangular brass plaque. The inscription engraved upon it reads: FOR THE GLORY OF GOD AND THE GREATER GLORY OF SHAKESPEARE. But the plaque is more than a decorative device. It is a door meant to seal shut the opening to a niche embedded behind the wall. In that niche lie the mortal remains of Henry and Emily Folger, who preside together over their palace. After Emily placed her husband there, she arranged that upon her death she would join him. They remain the only American philanthropists ever entombed within their creation. If they haunt the halls of the library, they are benevolent ghosts.
Henry Folger defied the truism that you can’t take it to your grave. His library is his grave. At the end of each day, when the lights go down and the staff and security guards go home, Henry Folger stays behind. In the stillness of the night, amid the hundreds of thousands of books, manuscripts, and other treasures he loved in life and that now rest quietly on their shelves, he, too, abides in silence.
As long as the name of Shakespeare lives, Henry Folger will never be forgotten. As long as the Shakespeare Folger Library lives, Shakespeare’s great books will never be lost. Both men live on through the collection. And that collection will never be broken up. Solid financial footing ensures that no future bibliomaniacs will lay claim to Folger’s First Folios or will defile his pyramid.
The spiritual center of the Folger Library is not, however, the tomb of its founders. Instead, the holy of holies is the network of underground fireproof vaults that house the library’s collection of First Folios and its other most precious books, including the unique Titus Andronicus and the Pavier Quarto. Few people ever enter this sanctuary. The folios are not shelved vertically, standing side by side. Conventional shelving would place too much weight on fragile bindings and gravity would cause the pages to sag. So each volume lies flat. Many of these First Folios have never left the vault for public display. Once, during the Second World War when it was feared the nation’s capital might come under attack, thirty thousand of the Folger treasures were removed from the library and transported in a sealed train car to Amherst College for safekeeping.
When you go to the library today, you can lose your bearings. It is easy to lose sight of the line that divides past from present. The theater is a time machine that transports audiences back to the stages of old London. The vast Old Reading Room, with its enormous stone fireplace, looks like a Cecil B. DeMille Hollywood fantasy set of Queen Elizabeth I’s feasting chamber. The exhibition hall, nearly a city block long, evokes the treasure room of some nobleman’s country house. The leaded glass windows, stripped in 2013 of thick coats of paint that had for several decades blocked out natural sunlight and afternoon shadows, now admit them. Only the electric lights provide a tenuous, visible connection to the twenty-first century. A portion of the collection—and always one First Folio—is displayed in this room. High overhead, resting on a little shelf set into the south wall, is a snow-white marble bust of Henry Folger. In the Old Reading Room, the other great chamber that lies parallel to the Great Hall, a polychromed bust of William Shakespeare—a copy of the seventeenth-century original that reposes in Stratford—sits on a shelf above the Folger tomb and gazes across the room to the monumental stained-glass window of the “Seven Ages of Man.”
The subjects of these sculptures seem so different from each other: an English playwright from the Elizabethan Age and an American industrialist from the Gilded Age, two men divided by vastly different cultures separated by a wide ocean and three centuries of history. But how alike they are. Both remain mysterious. Shakespeare is one of the most famous names in history. But his private life is obscured from us forever because the original sources have vanished. In contrast, Folger’s private papers are voluminous, but he remains little known. Neither man was born to wealth or greatness. Commoners both, they discovered their natural talents and rose in their respective worlds of art and commerce. Both were democratic men. William Shakespeare, whether writing about gravediggers or kings, divined the profound commonality
of man, and empathized with humanity’s frailty and brevity. Not an intellectual or cloistered scholar, Shakespeare wrote to entertain the people.
In one of the greatest understatements in the history of collecting, Henry’s wife noted that he “rather specialized in First Folios.” But, she added, he was also motivated by a “sense of responsibility to God and man. He did not feel that he had been sent into this world merely to live and prosper to himself alone.” Folger stood apart from the millionaires of his time who sought to legitimize themselves by buying the cultural trappings of Western civilization. He wanted to liberate the First Folios that slept on the dusty, forgotten shelves of Europe’s privileged elites and bring them to the New World as a gift to the people. Folger’s ultimate goal was not the ownership of priceless books as vulgar trophies to impress his friends. To Folger, the First Folio was a magical text, “one from which we . . . draw . . . our faith and hope.”
In the end, neither Shakespeare nor Folger lived to see his legacy secured. The poet wrote acclaimed plays, became a theatrical entrepreneur, and earned handsome profits. The industrialist made his fortune, and amassed an acclaimed collection. But Folger died before he saw his library built and his tens of thousands of books arrayed on the shelves for all to see. Shakespeare died before he saw his works preserved and his plays collected between the covers of one book for all to read.
In hindsight, though, Shakespeare’s eighty-first sonnet seems prophetic: “Your monument shall be my gentle verse, / Which eyes not yet created shall o’er-read.” Folger instructed his stonecutters to carve the words of that “gentle verse” into the center wall of his library’s reading room. Verse becomes monument, and monument becomes verse.
Before his death, Henry Folger seemed to project a knowing serenity about what he had accomplished, not in words, but in his appearance. You can almost see it on his face. In a gorgeous, miniature portrait painted on ivory late in life, Folger resembles, in outward appearance, a typical businessman of his era. Handsome, of medium height and build, he wears a dark, conservative wool suit, vest, white shirt, and tie. His snowy hair is groomed into a conventional, neatly trimmed beard and mustache. But it is in the eyes. Bright, alert, they twinkle in a bemused and inviting way. This image is not at all like the intimidating, glowering portraits that Huntington, Rockefeller, and Morgan left us. The corners of Folger’s mouth are just beginning to wrinkle into a generous smile. Oddly, the painting is reminiscent of another work of art executed almost four hundred years ago—the engraved portrait of Shakespeare on the title page of the First Folio. Together, side-by-side, creator and collector smile at us across time, united by that book, and by the treasure house that, thanks to Folger, reunited more copies of the book than any place in the world.
If William Shakespeare could travel from his age to ours, he would marvel at his apotheosis. He had a fascination with the passage of time and the endurance of memory. In the plays, he used tricks of time to curse, haunt, redeem, promise, comfort, resurrect, or immortalize his characters. In some, the players step outside the boundaries of time to experience miraculous, even supernatural, reversals of fortune. The unpredictability of the future is one of Shakespeare’s great, recurring themes. “What’s to come is still unsure,” he wrote in Twelfth Night. Looking back across the centuries, he would relish the drama of his own improbable tale. Time has performed many conjuring tricks, but few so fantastic as the making of the First Folio, and the making of the great library that preserves it. Shakespeare went to his grave a mortal man destined to fade from memory. Four hundred years later, he reigns forever in the library that bears his name. The greatest tribute to Henry Folger is this: If Shakespeare could visit the Folger Library, he would not, based on what he found there, believe that he had journeyed to some future time. He would believe that he was at home in his own.
In the First Folio, Ben Jonson wrote William Shakespeare’s truest epitaph: “He was not of an age, but for all time!” So, too, are Henry Clay Folger and his magnificent obsession.
Finis
Acknowledgments
I WROTE The Millionaire and the Bard under the watchful and encouraging eyes of my husband, James L. Swanson, a New York Times bestselling author and an obsessive collector of rare books, documents, and artifacts. Years of knowing him and observing his collecting habits provided insight into the thought processes of Henry Folger, and vice versa. To a first-time author, he gave priceless advice: “Write about something you love.” I thank him for getting me started on this project, helping me along the way, and for putting the final pieces of the puzzle together with me. This book would not exist without his help.
A team of talented people at Simon & Schuster shepherded me through the journey of writing, editing, and publishing the book, and were vital to its becoming a reality. Thanks to Marysue Rucci, the book found a home at S&S. Jonathan Karp was kind enough to spend a long afternoon over lunch offering suggestions on how to tell this story. My editor, the incomparable and discerning Jofie Ferrari-Adler, improved the manuscript in countless ways. He has an unerring instinct for how to move a narrative forward without getting bogged down in details.
I am privileged to have several friends who are specialists and experts in different aspects of the stories I have related. Anthony James West, from our first meeting, provided fruitful directions for me to pursue, answered countless questions, and shared my enthusiasm for tales of First Folio acquisitions. I value his insight, his expertise, and his friendship. His magnum opus, The Shakespeare First Folio: The History of the Book, three volumes and counting, was an essential part of my research. All other students of the First Folio must stand on his shoulders. David Bevington, Shakespeare scholar extraordinaire and professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, read the manuscript and offered gracious encouragement and kind words. David helped launch this project when he sponsored my application to become a reader at the Folger Library. I also thank Christopher Vizas, all-around Renaissance man and former chairman of the library’s finance committee, for bringing me into the Folger’s fold.
My agent, Richard Abate at 3 Arts Entertainment, deserves high praise for his encouragement and ability to remain calm whatever the circumstances. I value his friendship, patience, and diplomatic skills.
David Lovett, Washington, D.C., attorney, historian, and obsessive bibliophile, provided invaluable assistance in hunting down obscure sources for my notes and bibliography. His lifelong quest to assemble a complete collection of books related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy has made him an incomparable guide in the labyrinth of bibliography. I thank him for his friendship and enthusiastic and generous contributions.
Research for this book required the expertise of archivists in several locations, and in particular I thank the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Library of Congress, the Rockefeller Archives, and the Standard Oil Archives at the Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Betsy Walsh, Head of Reader Services at the Folger, and Head Research Librarian Georgianna Ziegler, together with the Folger Reading Room staff, provided hours of patient and cheerful assistance as I requested box after box of documents, artifacts, engravings, and books. On one magnificent and unforgettable morning, Steven Galbraith, former Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Books at the Folger took me on a tour of treasures, patiently showing me the First Folios, quartos (including the unique quarto of Titus Andronicus), and other confections chilling in the underground vaults at the Folger. Former director Gail Kern Paster, current director Michael Witmore, and former head librarian Stephen Eniss welcomed me and made my time doing research at the Folger productive and memorable. Matthew Darby at Ransom Center Standard Oil Archives provided able assistance. Thanks to Clark Evans, former Library of Congress specialist, I spent a memorable day examining the institution’s two copies of the First Folio. That day had a surprise ending when Clark brought out a dozen exquisite Elizabethan rarities for me to examine.
The Folger Library staff and readers mingle every afternoon
at 3:00 PM when tea is served in the in the basement lounge. I found the conversations and exchange of ideas invigorating and inspiring. I thank the staff and many readers, especially Stephen Grant, Folger biographer, for their encouragement and insights over cups of tea too numerous to count.
Ronald K.L. Collins and Michael F. Bishop, Jr. were my first readers; they were helpful and patient souls, undaunted by tight deadlines. Each made suggestions that improved the narrative immeasurably.
Finally, to the people who supported me day by day so that I could pursue this project: my teenage sons, Cameron and Harrison, who accompanied me on research trips far and wide; my mother, Rosemarie Greb, who cooked innumerable meals for all of us; my sister, Joanne Becker for her moral support and calming influence; and patient friend and reader extraordinaire, Chuck Stender. I could not have finished this book on time without you.
Andrea E. Mays
Long Beach, California
February 1, 2015
About the Author
ANDREA MAYS, like Henry Folger, has been possessed by a lifelong obsession with Shakespeare and his times. As a former student of Frank McCourt (who chronicled those days in his memoir, Teacher Man), Andrea spent much of her Manhattan girlhood holed up in the New York Public Library listening to vinyl LP recordings of performances by the Royal Shakespeare Company. When she was twelve years old, she costarred in the NBC network television show Talking With a Giant. For years, beginning in middle school, she carried around in her rucksack tattered paperback copies of the Folger Library editions of Shakespeare’s plays and haunted the old Bouwerie Lane Theatre. A graduate of Stuyvesant High School, she was not only a protégé of McCourt but also of his own mentor, the legendary New York City public school teacher R’Lene Dahlberg.