by Andrea Mays
Andrea has degrees in economics from the State University of New York at Binghamton and from UCLA, and teaches economics at California State University at Long Beach. She was a presidential appointee to the U.S. International Trade Commission in Washington D.C., where she served as economist to the chairman. She divides her time between California and Washington, where her Gilded Age townhouse—the residence of Daniel Chester French while he sculpted the Lincoln Memorial—stands in the shadow of the Folger Shakespeare Library. She hopes to own her own copy of the First Folio someday. This is her first book.
Follow her on Twitter @AndreaEMays.
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A Note on Sources
THE LITERATURE on William Shakespeare is vast. It is, to borrow a phrase associated with biblical heretic John Wyclef, “as wide as the waters” of the ocean sea. I do not pretend to catalogue it here. The complete bibliography, which no scholar has ever compiled, contains tens of thousands of books, pamphlets, journal monographs, newspaper articles, and various ephemera. Any attempt to cite every item with conceivable relevance to this book, when I could never read them all, seemed pointless and useless to a reader who wanted a starting point from which to learn more. The bibliography that follows is hardly comprehensive and represents, with few exceptions, little more than a selective shelf list of the several hundred titles I used while researching and writing The Millionaire and the Bard. These are the books and articles that I found most helpful in several subtopics of Shakespeariana.
The paucity of source material on Shakespeare’s life has not discouraged a number of authors from attempting biographies of the Bard. Most of them, recognizing the limitations placed on them by the thin historical record, have constructed their narratives from the outside in rather than from Shakespeare’s inner life, about which very little is known but about which much is inferred. Thus, many books about Shakespeare are about his context—the life, culture, commerce, agriculture, literature, theater, and arts of Elizabethan England and the Jacobean era. They may not be able to reconstruct Shakespeare’s life, but they can recreate the world that surrounded him. Other books try to extract Shakespeare the man—or at least his opinions, nature, and influences—from his plays and poems, but these efforts are more properly the province of literary criticism, not biography. That said, there are several excellent and enjoyable books about Shakespeare. Anyone wanting to read a first book on the subject would do well to begin with any of the following: Peter Ackroyd’s Shakespeare: The Biography, Bill Bryson’s Shakespeare: The World as Stage, Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, or Stanley Wells’s Shakespeare: For All Time. Ron Rosenbaum’s The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascoes, Palace Coups details the skirmish over how Shakespeare should be performed and is the best book I have read on the subject. Irvin Lee Matus’s Shakespeare in Fact is an invaluable collection of material. For encyclopedic coverage, see the three-volume William Shakespeare: His World, His Work, His Influence, edited by John F. Andrews.
Often overlooked by modern readers, the preliminaries to the First Folio remain vivid testimonials from Shakespeare’s contemporaries, who speak to us across time. Ben Jonson’s “To the Memory of My Beloved, Mr. William Shakespeare and what he hath left us” shimmers with the greatest tribute of all, praising Shakespeare as the “Soule of the Age,” then declaring “he was not of an age, but for all time!” In their appeal to “The great Variety of Readers,” editors John Heminges and Henry Condell warrant that the plays in this book will “draw, and hold you.” Thus, we must “Reade him, therefore; and againe, and againe.” The same must be said about the preliminaries. No one should read one of Shakespeare’s plays without reading them first.
The best short introduction to William Shakespeare is David Bevington’s delightfully erudite 105-page introductory essay that appears in Bevington’s sixth edition of the plays, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare.
Regarding the plays themselves, I recommend the Folger Library editions of the individual plays, published by Simon & Schuster. For a single-volume collection of all the plays, I recommend David Bevington’s The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, not only for the annotations, but also for his thoughtful and imaginative introductory essays to each play. Bevington’s edition is my personal favorite, but there are other fine, single-volume collections of all the plays.
To read about the London fire, see Neil Hanson’s The Great Fire of London: In that Apocalyptic Year, 1666 and Adrian Tinniswood’s By Permission of Heaven: The True Story of the Great Fire of London. For actor David Garrick’s grand folly and Shakespeare fantasia, see Christian Deelman’s The Great Shakespeare Jubilee. For John Boydell’s quixotic art project, see Wilfred H. Friedman’s Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery. For Shakespeare in America, see Michael D. Bristol’s Shakespeare’s America: America’s Shakespeare, the museum exhibition catalog Shakespeare in American Life, edited by Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan, and their book Shakespeare in America. Also see Shakespeare in America: An Anthology from the Revolution to Now, edited by James Shapiro. For the most notorious Shakespeare event in America, see Richard Moody’s The Astor Place Riot and Nigel Cliff’s The Shakespeare Riots: Revenge, Drama, and Death in Nineteenth Century America.
For the history of the First Folio, Peter Blayney’s brief but comprehensive forty-page study, The First Folio of Shakespeare, and Foliomania: Stories Behind Shakespeare’s Most Important Book, edited by Owen Williams and Caryn Lazzuri, are fine and informative introductions. To go back to the beginning and read the plays as they appeared when collected for the first time, see The First Folio of Shakespeare: The Norton Facsimile, especially the second edition containing Peter Blayney’s introduction. Also, for a detailed description of a fine copy of the First Folio, see the Sotheby’s auction catalog, The Shakespeare First Folio, 1623: The Dr. Williams Library Copy. For early, incomplete efforts to create a census of First Folios, see the census of 1902 and the census of 1906 by Sidney Lee, Henry Folger’s nemesis and lifelong literary irritant.
For more on Standard Oil, John D. Rockefeller, and the business to which Henry Folger devoted his prodigious business talents and stellar professional life, one must contend with Ida Tarbell’s landmark two-volume The History of Standard Oil. The culmination of her obsessive, one-woman assault against the man she demonized as the “world’s oldest living mummy,” Tarbell’s work carved in stone a stereotype of Rockefeller and Standard Oil that survives in the popular mind to this day. A more balanced approach than Tarbell’s can be found in Allan Nevins’s two-volume John D. Rockefeller: The Heroic Age of American Enterprise and in his one-volume follow-up, John D. Rockefeller, Industrialist and Philanthropist. Also essential is History of the Standard Oil Company (New Jersey), a three-volume study published between 1955 and 1971. Especially useful are volume one, Pioneering in Big Business, 1882–1911, by R. W. Hidy and M. E. Hidy; and also volume two, The Resurgent Years, 1911–1927, by G. S. Gibb and E. H. Knowlton. Ron Chernow’s Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller is the best modern biography. More recently, Steve Weinberg’s Taking on the Trust: The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller, while it captures the fevered antibusiness temper of the times, accepts too many of Tarbell’s claims at face value and ultimately presents too sympathetic a portrayal of the crusader herself. The full book arguing Rockefeller’s side of the 1911 case with the insights of law and economics and modern antitrust jurisprudence remains unwritten.
For more on Henry Folger, the memorial book published after his death, Henry Folger: 18 June 1857–11 June 1930, contains valuable essays, including “Henry Folger as a Collector” by the great dealer A. S. W. Rosenbach and “Biographical Sketch” by George E. Dimmock. Stephen Grant’s biography, Collecting Shakespeare: The Story of Henry and Emily Folger, offers a detailed account of their private life together a
nd brings Emily out of the shadows.
For more on the history of the Folger Library, see The Folger Shakespeare Library: Washington and also Joseph T. Foster’s 1951 National Geographic article “Folger: The Biggest Little Library in the World” and Marie Severy’s 1987 National Geographic article “Shakespeare Lives at the Folger.” Stanley King’s Recollections of the Folger Shakespeare Library and Louis B. Wright’s The Folger Library, Two Decades of Growth: An Informal Account are valuable works by library insiders.
Last, and deserving of a singular category devoted to them alone, are the works of the great First Folio scholar Anthony West: The Shakespeare First Folio: The History of the Book, Volume I; An Account of the First Folio Based on its Sales and Prices, 1623–2000 and The Shakespeare First Folio: The History of the Book, Volume II; A New World Census of First Folios. Reading these books, one cannot help but notice that Anthony West’s energy and determination in pursuit of the First Folio equal those of Henry Folger. A third volume, The Shakespeare First Folio: A Descriptive Catalogue by Eric Rasmussen and Anthony James West, extends the series. The three volumes (with more to come) contain an amazing, sometimes mind-boggling, amount of factual information about all known copies of the First Folio. If one wants a detailed narrative or technical description of a particular copy—provenance, binding, sales history, prices, defects, marginalia, size, and more—West’s books are indispensable.
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Bibliography
Manuscripts and Primary Source Material, in the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C.
Documentary Files (one file for each of the seventy-nine copies of the First Folio), stored in the Library’s Catalogue Department:
Copy 19: Henry Clay Folger, letter to John Camp Williams, December 1905.
Copy 58: Bernard Quaritch, letter to H. C. Folger, July 29, 1910.
Case Files 1999:
Henry Clay Folger, letter to A. H. Mayhew, bookseller, Charing Cross Road, May 17, 1915.
Lady Durning-Lawrence, letter to A. H. Mayhew, June 11, 1915.
The Revd Fulford Adams, postcard to A. H. Mayhew, 1915.
Folder 1 (one of thirteen folders at the back door marked “Correspondence Folios and Quartos” in dark green filing cabinet in closet 2 in the Catalogue Office as of September 1992):
Printed letter from Sidney Lee, 108 Lexham Gardens, Kensington, London W., February 1901, accompanied by his two-page questionnaire, “Schedule of Particulars of the Shakespeare First Folio” (along with cover note).
Letter from Sidney Lee, May 9, 1902, presumably to Henry Folger.
Folder 2:
Labeled “First Folio, F2, F3, F4” (Folger’s Price List).
A typed document (not dated) with the heading “Collected Works: First Folio: 1623,” with a note added “Copies from Mr. Folger’s list in his priced catalogue (Mr. Slade’s copy).”
Tin Box in Catalogue Department:
“Copy of S. de Ricci Note Book—First Folios . . . made before his 1932 visit to the [Folger Library]”—a series of typewritten slips, one for each folio copy with occasional handwritten notes.
Also:
A. C. R. Carter, his handwritten notes in his own copy of Lee’s Census.
Henry Clay Folger, his handwritten notes in his own copy of Lee’s Census.
George Stevens to I. Reed 1777–1800 (bound volume) from the Shakespearean Library of Marsden J. Perry: George Stevens, letter to I. Reed, October 5, 1790.
Several letters and other documents in Boxes 21, 23, 28, 29, 33, 37, 56, 57, and 58.
Shakespeare’s First Folio
Baldwin, Thomas Whitfield. On Act and Scene Division in the Shakespeare First Folio. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965.
Bartlett, Henrietta C., and Alfred W. Pollard. A Census of Shakespeare’s Plays in Quarto, 1594–1709. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1916 (revised, 1939).
Bate, Jonathan, and Eric Rasmussen, eds. RSC Shakespeare: The Complete Works. (Includes “The Case for the First Folio” by Jonathan Bate.) New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Also found on the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) Shakespeare Companion website (Palgrave Macmillan), 2007. http://www.rscshakespeare.co.uk/pdfs/Case_for_Folio.pdf.
BBC Four (British Broadcasting Corporation). The Secret Life of Books. Episode 2 of 6, “Shakespeare’s First Folio.” (30 minutes.) http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04gv5zy. The complete broadcast can be found at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6U7WpTQdr0g.
Blayney, Peter W. M. The First Folio of Shakespeare. Washington, D.C.: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1991.
________. “Report on the Condition of the Two Copies of the Shakespeare First Folio” (now Meisei 8 and 9), unpublished, May 1985.
Cole, George Watson. “The First Folio of Shakespeare: A Further Word Regarding the Correct Arrangement of Its Preliminary Leaves.” Proceedings of the Bibliographical Society of America 3 (1908): 65–83 (also self-published by author with corrections, New York, 1909).
Collins, Paul. The Book of William: How Shakespeare’s First Folio Conquered the World. New York: Bloomsbury, 2009.
________. “Folio, Where Art Thou?: One Man’s Conquest to Track Down Every Copy on the Planet.” Smithsonian 37, no. 6 (September 2006): 67.
Dawson, Giles E. “A Bibliographical Problem in the First Folio of Shakespeare.” Library 22 (1941–1942): 25–33.
De Ricci, Seymour. A Nobel Fragment, Being a Leaf of the Original First Folio of William Shakespeare’s Plays, Printed in 1623; with a Bibliographical Essay. New York: Dingwall-Rock, 1926.
Flatter, Richard. Shakespeare’s Producing Hand: A Study of His Marks ofExpression to Be Found in the First Folio. London: W. Heinemann, 1948.
________. “Some Instances of Line-Division in the First Folio.” Shakespeare Jahrbuch 92 (1956): 184–196.
Fleming, William H. “Bibliography of First Folios in New York City.” Shakespeariana 5 (1888): 101–117.
Folger, Henry C., Jr. “A Unique First Folio.” Outlook 87 (November 23, 1908): 687–691.
Folger Catalog of First Folios. Research Libraries Information Network, DCFG91 or 2.
Greg, W. W. “The Bibliographical History of the First Folio.” Library (second series) 4 (February 1903): 258–285.
________. The Shakespeare First Folio: Its Bibliographical and Textual History. London: Oxford University Press, 1955.
Gregory, Dan. “Devil in the Details.” Fine Books and Collections 6 (July/August 2008): 27–31. https://www.ilab.org/eng/documentation/171-devil_in_the_details.html.
Hinman, Charlton. “Cast-off Copy for the First Folio of Shakespeare.” Shakespeare Quarterly 6 (1955): 259–273.
________. “ ‘The Halliwell-Phillipps Facsimile’ of the First Folio of Shakespeare.” Shakespeare Quarterly 5, no. 4 (Autumn 1954): 395–401.
________. The Printing and Proof-Reading of the First Folio. 2 volumes. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963.
________. “Variants and Reading in the First Folio of Shakespeare.” Shakespeare Quarterly 6 (1955): 279–288.
Horrox, Reginald. “Tables for the Identification and Collation of the Shakespeare Folios.” Book Handbook 1 (1947–1950): 105–176.
Howard-Hill, Trevor H. Ralph Crane and Some Shakespeare First Folio Comedies. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1972.
Ireland, W. H. An Authentic Account of the Shakespearian Manuscripts. London: Printed for J. Debrett, 1796.
Jaggard, William. Shakespeare Bibliography: A Dictionary of Every Known Issue of the Writings of Our National Poet. Stratford-on-Avon, U.K.: Shakespeare Press, 1911.
Kiffer, Selby. “Collecting the Book That Breaks the Rules: The Shakespeare First Folio at Au
ction.” A Folger Shakespeare Library Podcast given by a senior specialist for books and manuscripts at Sotheby’s as a part of the lecture series to accompany the Folger exhibition, Fame, Fortune, and Theft: The Shakespeare First Folio, June 29, 2011. http://www.folger.edu/template.cfm?cid=3861.
Kiffer, Selby, et al. “The First Folio: A Four Hundred Year Obsession.” A 6 minute 45-second promotional video for the Folger Shakespeare Library exhibition Fame, Fortune, and Theft: The Shakespeare First Folio, 2011. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WicxFbaSxgE.
________. Notes and Additions to the Census of Copies of the Shakespeare First Folio. London: Henry Frowde; Oxford University Press, 1906. Reprinted from Library 7 (April 1906): 113–139 and then revised May 1906.
________. The Shakespeare First Folio: Some Notes and a Discovery. New York: Macmillan, 1899. First appearance in Cornhill (new series) 6, no. 34 (April 1899): 449–458.
Lee, Sir Sidney, ed. Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies: Being a Reproduction in Facsimile of the First Folio Edition, 1623, From the Chatsworth Copy in the Possession of the Duke of Devonshire, K.G. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902.
________. Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies: A Supplement to the Reproduction in Facsimile of the First Folio Edition (1623), From the Chatsworth Copy in the Possession of the Duke of Devonshire, K.G., Containing a Census of Extant Copies With Some Account of Their History and Condition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902.