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  In May 1922, Punch published a cartoon of Autolycus, a “collector of trifles.” Uncle Sam is shown making off with England’s treasures: The Blue Boy by Gainsborough purchased by Henry Huntington, and a copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio. He eyes Shakespeare’s bones for possible future acquisition.

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Note to the Reader

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  “The Good [That Men Do] Is Oft Interred with Their Bones”

  Chapter 2

  “Adieu . . . Remember Me”

  Chapter 3

  “Whatever You Do, Buy”

  Chapter 4

  “My Shakespeare, Rise”

  Chapter 5

  “Had I the Money, You Would Come . . .”

  Chapter 6

  “Had I the Means, I Would Not Hesitate . . . to Buy . . .”

  Chapter 7

  “The Most Precious Book in the World”

  Chapter 8

  “A Shakespeare Discovery”

  Chapter 9

  “Do . . . Devise Some Way to Get the Books”

  Chapter 10

  “The False Folio”

  Chapter 11

  “I Am an American”

  Chapter 12

  “Portrait of a Collector”

  Chapter 13

  “Thou Art a Moniment, Without a Tombe”

  Chapter 14

  “It Is the Key to Our Hearts”

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  A Note on Sources

  Bibliography

  Appendix

  Notes

  Index

  To my first teacher, my mother, Rosemarie Greb.

  And in memory of my father, Lewis Mays, who, as a lad of seventeen during the Second World War, left the countryside for the sea and, aboard HMS Nelson, defended Shakespeare’s England.

  Thou in our wonder and astonishment,

  Hast built thyself a live-long monument.

  —John Milton, “An Epitaph on the Admirable Dramatic Poet, W. Shakespeare”

  And now I will unclasp a secret book,

  And to your quick-conceiving discontents

  I’ll read you matter deep and dangerous.

  —Henry IV, Part 1

  Note to the Reader

  THROUGHOUT THE text, in order to make it easy for the reader to keep track of which copy of the First Folio is being described, I have used a numbering system proposed by Anthony James West in The Shakespeare First Folio: The History of the Book, Volume 1. Numbers in parentheses refer to the West assigned numbers, preceded by a W, and Folger Library assigned numbers, preceded by an F.

  Prologue

  “He was Not of an Age, but for All Time!”

  —BEN JONSON

  IT STARTED, as many great obsessions do, with an unremarkable incident, an encounter between a man and a book. It happened during the Gilded Age, in New York City. Henry Clay Folger was a recent graduate of Columbia Law School living in rented rooms, working as a clerk at a local oil refinery, and trying to make his way in the world.

  He walked into Bang’s auction gallery in Manhattan with, as he later admitted, “fear and trepidation.”1 The books to be sold that day overflowed from the shelves. As an undergraduate at Amherst College he had studied literature, including Shakespeare, whose plays he “read . . . far into the night.”2 He had continued reading for pleasure ever since. He saved every book he ever read. He had always been a collector. At college, he made scrapbooks for his most trivial ephemera, including theater and lecture tickets. But his hoarder’s impulse was still in search of a grand obsession.

  Henry had never bought a rare book. The closest he had ever come was when he purchased a gift for his young wife. She shared his literary enthusiasm, so he had bought her an inexpensive facsimile of the First Folio of the collected plays of William Shakespeare. He had never seen a real one. The old book that caught his eye at Bang’s was not, however, a coveted First Folio published in 1623, but to his amateur’s eye it seemed close. It was an authentic Fourth Folio, printed in 1685; it was a less valuable edition than a First. Its antiquity excited his fancy. He bid on the book until the auctioneer hammered it down to him for $107.50. He asked if he could pay in installments. When he took it home, he and his wife gazed at the familiar engraving of Shakespeare on the title page. They turned the thick, durable rag paper pages, and savored the familiar words of the plays they both loved, and which they had read many times before in cheap, modern editions. Holding that old book in his hands changed Henry Folger’s life, just as the publication of its first edition more than two hundred fifty years earlier had come to define its author’s.

  Soon, Folger found himself in the thrall of obsession. The young man who could barely afford a hundred-dollar book would spend a year’s salary for another one, and devote the rest of his life, and millions of dollars, to chasing the rare books he coveted. The apprentice clerk would rise in the world of Gilded Age titans—John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, Henry Huntington—and join them in a frenzied competition for some of the rarest books in the world. Soon, he would own more volumes than he knew what to do with. They would overwhelm his shelves, his rented rooms, and then his home, and fill secret warehouses and storage lockers to their ceilings. Before long, Henry Folger’s books would dominate his life. But in this ocean of books he prized one above all the others.

  Today, it is the most valuable book in the world. And, after the King James Bible, the most important. In October 2001, one of the First Folios sold at Christie’s for more than six million dollars. No more than 750 copies were printed, and two-thirds of them have perished over the last 391 years. Around 244 of them survive, and most of those are incomplete. Shakespeare’s First Folio—Folger wanted to own them all.

  As Victor Hugo wrote, “England has two books, one of which she has made, the other which has made her—Shakespeare and the Bible.” Published in London in 1623, Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies revolutionized the language, psychology, and culture of Western civilization. Without the First Folio, published seven years after the playwright’s death, eighteen iconic works, including Macbeth, Measure for Measure, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Twelfth Night, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest would have been lost.

  Recognizing that every folio was superficially the same book but that each surviving handmade copy was in fact unique with its own idiosyncratic typographical fingerprint, binding, and provenance, Folger decided that the only way to rediscover Shakespeare’s original intentions and language—what he called “The True Text”—was to buy every copy he could find and subject it to meticulous comparative analysis.

  Believing that the mysteries of the folios could be fully understood only in the context of their time, he amassed an equally stupendous collection of artwork, books, letters, manuscripts, and antiquities from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. He wanted to own Shakespeare. And he did. He came to own more copies of the First Folio than anyone else in the world, more than even the British Library, the ultra-repository in Shakespeare’s homeland. Folger collected more than twice the number of copies known to exist in all of England. How this happened is more than the tale of one passionate bibliophile. It is a story of the Old World giving way to the New, of the power of modern economics a
nd transatlantic trade, and of the irresistible democratization of taste.

  Everyone knows William Shakespeare. He was born in 1564, and died in April 1616. He wrote approximately thirty-nine plays3 and composed five long poems and 154 sonnets. He failed to publish his collected works—during his lifetime plays were considered ephemeral amusements, not serious literature. By the time of his death he was retired, was considered past his prime, and by the 1620s many of his plays were no longer regularly performed in theaters. No one—not even Shakespeare himself—believed that his writings would last, that he was a genius, or that future generations would celebrate him as the greatest and most influential writer in the history of the English language.

  Harold Bloom has argued that Shakespeare transformed the nature of man and created modern consciousness. If that is so, then the First Folio—not the works of Darwin, Marx, or Freud—is the urtext of modernism. If the Bible is the book of God, then Shakespeare is the book of man on earth. We use the words he invented, we speak in his cadences, and we think in his imagery. The epitaph that fellow poet Ben Jonson penned for William Shakespeare proved to be prophetic: “He was not of an age, but for all time!” Without the First Folio, the evolution from poet to secular saint would have never happened, and the story of that book is an incredible tale of faith, friendship, loyalty, and chance. Today, few people realize how close the world came, in the aftermath of Shakespeare’s death, to losing half of his plays.

  Henry Clay Folger, however, remains one of the least-known industrial titans of his time. Folger, from the twilight years of the Gilded Age through the comet’s arc of the Roaring Twenties, built the greatest Shakespeare library in the world, transporting it across the Atlantic piece by piece and hoarding it in thousands of unopened shipping crates, locked away in secret New York warehouses. And yet his life remains curiously unexamined. He is a forgotten man.

  This is a story of resurrection, of a magical book and two men, an American millionaire and an English playwright—the man who coveted the First Folio, and the man who composed it.

  Chapter 1

  “The Good [That Men Do] Is Oft Interred with Their Bones”

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Julius Caesar

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE died in April 1616, on or around his fifty-second birthday. He was mourned by a small group of devoted family members, friends, and theatrical colleagues. His most productive years and major creative accomplishments were long behind him. Several years earlier, in 1610 or 1611, he had retired to his hometown of Stratford, in Warwickshire. Had he lived longer, it is doubtful that he would have picked up his pen again and written significant new plays or poems. He had abandoned the stage to assume new roles: real estate investor, landowner, and businessman. Indeed, his death entry in the parish registry lists him not as “Poet” or “Playwright” but as “Gentleman.”

  The circumstances of Shakespeare’s death and burial were modest, unlike the dramatic, violent, and fantastic deaths experienced by many public figures in Elizabethan and Jacobean England; death by burning at the stake, beheading, imprisonment and torture, or, as in the case of Shakespeare’s literary peer Christopher Marlowe, being stabbed above the eye in a rowdy tavern brawl (possibly a bizarre assassination plot) was not uncommon. Without violence or political intrigue, William Shakespeare died at home in his bed from an unknown illness. As recently as January 1616, he had been in good health, and when he expired three months later no cause of death was recorded. About a half century later, the Reverend John Ward, vicar of Stratford, made an unreliable and probably apocryphal entry in his diary on what killed Shakespeare: “Shakespear, Drayton, and Ben Jonson, had a merry meeting, and itt seems drank too hard, for Shakespear died of a feavour there contracted.” Given that the diary entry was made so much later, it was probably based on town gossip rather than personal knowledge.

  Whatever ended Shakespeare’s life, he died within one hundred yards of the place where he was born. The chapel bell, familiar music from his boyhood as it summoned children to school, pealed for him once again to mark his passing. The bell tolled to honor not a great artist but a prosperous local parishioner. The theater was a suspect trade in Stratford, and none of his plays had ever been performed there. The Puritans condemned acting as a vice and had kept the trade and touring companies of actors out of town. Indeed, the borough chamberlain of this small countryside place had once paid Shakespeare’s own acting company, the King’s Men, not to perform in the town hall. Thus Shakespeare, because he was a dramatist, was not Stratford’s favorite son.

  If his family followed the funerary customs of Renaissance England they would have had his body wrapped in a winding sheet on the evening of his death, either the sheet he died on or a finer linen sheet in the household accompanied by flowers and fragrant herbs. Rosemary, symbolic of remembrance, was favored for its pungent yet pleasing odor. “There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance, pray you, love remember,” says Ophelia in Hamlet.1 A female servant or midwife would have cleaned and dressed him for burial, then wrapped him in the sheet. If the servant was an old woman long in the family’s employ she might have had the privilege of wrapping the deceased at both ends of his life. Then his friends and neighbors would have viewed the body at his home.2

  The body would then have been “watched” by a member of the household—as a sign of respect but also to be sure he was fully dead and would not awaken in the grave—until it was moved to nearby Holy Trinity Church, and buried indoors, beneath the floor in the chancel, along the north wall.

  The inscription that was cut into the big, flat gray stone that sealed Shakespeare’s body in its tomb evidenced his fear of being disinterred:

  Good friend for Jesus sake forbeare,

  To dig the dust enclosed here.

  Blessed be the man that spares these stones,

  And cursed be he that moves my bones.

  The verse refers to a common and ghoulish practice of the time. Whenever burial grounds became overcrowded, gravediggers emptied the old graves of their occupants’ bones, dumping them in the charnel houses to make way for fresh corpses.

  In Hamlet, Shakespeare wrote of such a dead man evicted from his grave to make room for the drowned and still-wet Ophelia. The gravedigger clown picks up a skull that has lain in the earth for “three and twenty years.” Curious, Hamlet asks, “Whose was it?” The clown answers, “This same skull . . . was . . . Yorick’s skull, the King Jester.” Hamlet takes the disinterred skull in hand. “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath bore me on his back a thousand times . . . Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your jibes now?” When Hamlet throws down the skull, and the gravedigger tosses Yorrick’s inconvenient bones into an undignified pile, they are consigned to the trash heap of memory. Did Shakespeare have these very scenes in mind when he composed the warning that would admonish visitors to his own tomb?

  News of his death could travel no faster than a man on horseback. Within a few days, it reached London. When it did, that great city—scene of his many triumphs as actor and author—did not pause to weep. His fellow writers and performers mourned that one of their brightest stars had been extinguished, but his loss did not reverberate in wider London as a national tragedy.3 His theater friends and admirers there did not march in a procession to his Stratford graveside or to London’s famous Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey, where the immortal poets Geoffrey Chaucer and Edmund Spenser were memorialized. Shakespeare’s April twenty-fifth burial away from London made such honors impossible, even if anyone had been inclined to render them. Nor did his friends write poems of eulogy. In no way did the people of England respond to his death with a gesture that suggested they believed a great man had died.

  The circumstances of Shakespeare’s birth were no more illustrious than those of his death. He was born in the town of Stratford-upon-Avon around April 23, 1564. Stratford’s Holy Trinity Church recorded his baptism on April twenty-six
th. It is assumed but not certain, based on Elizabethan custom, that he was born three days earlier, on a national holiday, St. George’s Day, celebrating the patron saint of England. Stratford was a thriving market town, connected to London trade via a stone bridge across the river Avon, though it had been recently ravaged by the plague.

  Almost all the information about Shakespeare’s childhood and early life has been lost. We know that he was the son of John Shakespeare, a man who made and sold gloves, was the town ale-taster, and later became Chamberlain of the borough of Stratford. We know he had seven brothers and sisters. Beyond that, we know little more than what can be recovered about the early life experiences of any typical sixteenth-century English child born into his class and region. In 1582, when he was eighteen, he married Anne Hathaway, a woman eight years his senior. They had three children: a daughter, Susanna, born within six months of the marriage, and then twins baptized in 1585 (a son named Hamnet who died very young, and a daughter named Judith). That year, when he was twenty-one, the historical Shakespeare disappeared from view for the next several years.

  Probably by the end of the 1580s, when he was twenty-five, but no later than 1592, when he was twenty-eight, Shakespeare left Stratford for cosmopolitan London. When he arrived it was still a walled city, medieval in its look and layout, crowded, dirty, noisy, dangerous, exciting, and prosperous. Exactly why, how, or when he went to London no one knows. But he arrived there at an unprecedented moment in English arts and letters. Elizabeth I was in the fourth decade of her reign, and in her capital city there flourished a thriving theater scene.

  Christopher Marlowe and the University Wits were writing the greatest dramas of the era. The Wits were educated poets and included Cambridge graduates Marlowe, Robert Greene, and Thomas Nashe, as well as Oxford men George Peele, Thomas Lodge, and Thomas Lyly. Thomas Kyd, although not university trained, was also part of the group, writing plays, including the hugely successful Spanish Tragedy, full of ghosts, blood, and revenge. Equally popular was Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, a violent tale of a man devoured by his military ambition and passions. In the late sixteenth century these playwrights and poets transformed English drama from monotonous, hidebound verse, delivered in a stilted, unnatural style, to the rich, action-filled poetry of early seventeenth-century blank verse. They knew one another, lived near one another, dined and drank together, sometimes whored together, and, occasionally, coauthored plays together.