Collecting Shakespeare: The Story of Henry and Emily Folger

Chapter Five: The Hunt Is Up, the Fields Are Fragrant: Building a Collection

Chapter Five q q q The Hunt Is Up, the Fields Are Fragrant Building a Collection The hunt is up, the moon is bright and gray, The fields are fragrant, and the woods are green. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . And I have horse will follow where the game Makes way and runs like swallows o’er the plain. Titus Andronicus, 2.2.1–2, 26–27 According to the endowment created in their wills, the Folgers established their library “for the promotion and diffusion of knowledge in regard to the history and writings of Shakespeare.”1 The Folger Shakespeare Library has expanded considerably beyond the collection on the shelves (and still in storage cases) when the facility opened in 1932. Nevertheless, that original collection is a dazzling array of objects: books, manuscripts, essays, pamphlets, magazines, newspapers, playbills, prompt books, autograph letters, autographs, letters, diaries, journals, memoirs, commonplace books, scrapbooks, sheet music, phonograph records, maps, charts, public documents, prints, drawings, engravings, woodcuts, oil paintings, watercolors , mezzotints; furniture, building models, coins, weapons, armor, heraldic documents , tapestries, musical instruments, globes, costumes, scenic designs, stage properties , statues, busts, carvings, miniatures, medallions, figurines, relics, curios, works in stained glass, bronze, ivory, wood, china, ceramics, and marble. The main thrust of the Folgers’ collection was literary. They assembled a full range of literary works produced from 1476, the introduction of printing in England , to 1714, the death of Queen Anne. This is approximately the same period embraced by the more recent term, “early modern age.” They enhanced that literary collection by seeking out other types of books from the early modern era, on politics, law, history, medicine, philosophy, psychology, travel, and the sciences. The couple wanted to offer students and scholars classics on European life to complement and illumine the basic Shakespeare collection. While they concentrated on 76 Collecting Shakespeare antiquarian volumes, the Folgers also acquired contemporary books that bore on their special interests. Before the library was dedicated in 1932, its first director, William Adams Slade, defined what the Folgers had given to the nation: “The most complete and most valuable single collection of Shakespearean works in the United States or anywhere in the world.”2 The Folgers succeeded in gathering as many copies as they could of the Bard’s plays: no fewer than 1,400 different copies of the collected works, amounting to 9,700 volumes. No other library in the world owns as many Shakespeare quartos. A quarto, which has been likened in size to a mass-market paperback , is made by folding a sheet of paper twice to yield eight pages [or four leaves] per sheet. The Folgers purchased 800 copies of Hamlet, more than 500 of Macbeth, and over 400 of both Romeo & Juliet and The Merchant of Venice. These figures include separate editions, translations, and duplicate copies. The Folgers succeeded in amassing nearly two hundred Shakespeare folios—the four seventeenth-century editions of his collected plays—far more than any other library in the world. A folio is a large book size that consists of sheets of paper folded once to yield four pages (or two leaves) per sheet. The founders were particularly pleased to secure volumes that had belonged to well-known persons, from kings to literary giants, and volumes that contained interesting marginalia: comments, changes, interpretations written in the margins. Consider a few examples of their ceaseless acquisition: First Folio (1623): 82 copies, including ones owned by King George III, Queen Victoria, William I King of Prussia, David Garrick, Samuel Johnson, and Edwin Forrest. Second Folio (1632): 58 copies, including ones owned by Elizabeth (daughter of King James I), William Pitt, and Horace Walpole. Third Folio (1663–64): 24 copies, including one probably owned by Alexander Pope. Fourth Folio (1685): 36 copies, including ones owned by William Morris, John Ruskin, Edward Fitzgerald, and George Eliot. The Folgers purposely sought books in categories that would enrich scholarly study. Source books are works that Shakespeare is thought to have used in composing his poems and plays. In addition to familiar source books by Plutarch and Holinshed, the Folgers purchased Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynd (1590), which inspired As You Like It, and Robert Greene’s Pandosto (1588), which influenced The Winter’s Tale. They tracked down Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander (1598), which the Bard copied when he wrote, in As You Like It, “Whoever loved that loved not at first sight?” The Hunt Is Up, the Fields Are Fragrant 77...