This will be the last post of 2014, and I'm including two links below, in case any of you didn't see the charming, fund-raising video made by the cast of Downton Abbey, with a sparkling guest appearance by George Clooney. So watch it - it's in two parts. Slightly lame and cheesy, as all tongue-in-cheek spoofs are, it's a great way for Scriveners to sign off for 2014.
The AWG holiday party took place in mid-december and was marked by elegant and tasty food that was brought by everyone - thank you so much, you went all out. This included gravlaks, made by Caroline, Nachos/texmex style brought by Linda, and the desserts included biscotti from Peggy, a mouth-watering chocolate dessert from Leslie, and a luscious Dulce de Leche cake made by our new member Kris.
And Dalene brought us platters of oysters from La Poissonerie - here she is below. Unfortunately, your editor failed to take any more photos once she hit the buffet (it was the oysters wot done it), so I must just assure you that we all had a great time. And thank you to those who came who made it a lot of fun.
Mariannick, Susan Rey, Robin C, Cerese, Katharine C
A group of us - lit up by lights ! - assembled for our December coffee at the Mercure. Wonderful space in which to take a moment in the midst of all the holiday busyness and celebrate our friendship and camaraderie.
Thank you to Cerese for arranging these get-togethers. We are made so welcome by the staff of the Mercure, who are so very courteous towards us.
The Garden Group made the journey into the foothills of the Cevennes for a morning of
decor-making in December.
We were missing some planned participants (Peggy F, Leslie L) due to ailments of the season. Hope everyone is better now
The Divided Loyalties Conference was held on
November 28th, within the Nelson Mandela
Center (formerly the Maison des Relations Internationales). Masterfully delivered by our cherished, newfound friend,
Mr. Andre TESSIER du Cros, this conference delighted and enlightened us
on the challenges of dual nationalities and loyalties during WWII, from
the perspective of Mr Tessier's beloved mother, Janet who left the
legacy of her experience in her memoirs and book entitled "Divided
Loyalties".
AWG President Jessica introducing the speaker. Marit from Le Bookshop is to her left
An attentive audience - numbers were not high (big storm outside)
Jessica helping with the laptop
Andre had a well-prepared lecture with powerpoinrt presentation
Editor: AWG has kindly donated a copy of Janet Tessier du Cros' book to FOAL.
FAWCO, with 16 participants, was one of the largest
delegations at the Forum. FAWCO member Sara von Moos was one of the
organizers.
Ten FAWCO clubs were represented: AWC Berlin,
AWC Lebanon, AAWE Paris, AWA Vienna, AIWC Cologne, AWA Rome, AWC The
Hague, AWC Bern, AWC Zürich, and, of course, AWG-LR.
AWG-LR's delegate to the Forum, Maggie
Friends from FAWCO
Mother & Daughter played and sang to great acclaim
FAWCO delegates
Former FAWCO President Kathleen Simon and her
husband Andrew graciously opened their home and their numerous bedrooms to nine
of us. Many of us brought goodies from our regions (including some of my
2010 and 2011 wines) for the Sunday night pot-luck, but it was definitely not
all partying.
Mists over Lake Geneva
A group of us, including FAWCO President and
several Vice-Presidents, did a Clubs in Motion stint early Monday
morning before heading to the UN for registration and the opening session of the
Forum.
I felt SOOOOO relaxed last night, but managed to
prepare a relatively early supper for my family. Then I fell asleep on the
sofa. When I woke up, I moved to the bedroom, but, for once, did not even
open my book before falling asleep again.
Susan, Sue, Jan and Anne
This morning I felt truly rested, and have been
back on the go ever since. Looking forward to taking my family to the spa
too. Thanks again.
The book, the 233rd known surviving first folio, was found in a public library near Calais.Credit
Denis Charlet/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
First folios of Shakespeare’s
plays are among the world’s rarest books, intensely scrutinized by
scholars for what their sometimes-minute variations — each copy is
different — reveal about the playwright’s intentions.
Now
a previously unknown folio has surfaced at a small library in northern
France, bringing the world’s known total of surviving first folios to 233.
“This
is huge,” said Eric Rasmussen, an American Shakespeare expert who
traveled to France over the weekend to authenticate the volume. “First
folios don’t turn up very often, and when they do, it’s usually a really
chewed up, uninteresting copy. But this one is magnificent.”
The book was discovered this fall by librarians at a public library in St.-Omer,
near Calais, who were sifting through its collections for an exhibition
on English-language literature. The title page and other introductory
material were torn off, but Rémy Cordonnier, the director of the
library’s medieval and early modern collection, suspected that the book —
cataloged as an unexceptional old edition — might in fact be a first
folio.
“It
was very emotional to realize we had a copy of one of the most famous
books in the world,” Mr. Cordonnier said. “I was already imagining the
reaction it would cause.”
Few
scholars have yet seen the book. But its discovery among holdings
inherited from a long-defunct Jesuit college is already being hailed as a
potential source of fresh insight into everything from tiny textual
variants to the question of Shakespeare’s connection to Catholic
culture.
“It’s
a little like archaeology,” James Shapiro, a Shakespeare expert at
Columbia University, said. “Where we find a folio tells us a little bit
more about who was reading Shakespeare, who was valuing him.”
The folio, whose discovery was first reported by the regional French newspaper La Voix du Nord, is not the rarest book the St.-Omer library owns. It also has a Gutenberg Bible, of which fewer than 50 are known to survive.
But few books hold the first folio’s value — one was sold at Sotheby’s
in 2006 for $5.2 million — or its mystique. It contains 36 plays,
nearly all of Shakespeare’s output. Printed in a run of about 800 copies
in 1623, seven years after the playwright’s death, it is considered the
only reliable text for half of his plays. (No manuscripts of any
Shakespeare plays survive.)
Today,
first folios are tracked like rare black rhinoceroses, right down to
their disappearances. One is known to have burned in the Great Chicago
Fire of 1871; another went down with the S.S. Arctic off Newfoundland in
1854.
New
ones come to light every decade or so, Mr. Rasmussen said, most
recently in the library of a London woman who died without a will. “It
was a mess, with a bunch of second-folio bits mixed in,” Mr. Rasmussen
said.
The
St.-Omer folio, which is to be put on display there next year, will no
doubt draw legions of visitors. It also, Mr. Rasmussen said, may feed
one of the more contentious disputes in Shakespeare studies: whether the
playwright was a secret Catholic.
That
claim, Mr. Rasmussen said, has long been the subject of much
“intelligent speculation,” most prominently of late by the Harvard
scholar Stephen Greenblatt. The discovery of the folio in St.-Omer provides a bit more ballast, he said, if hardly a smoking gun.
Mr.
Rasmussen pointed out the name “Neville,” inscribed on the folio’s
first surviving page — a possible indication, he said, that the book was
brought to St.-Omer in the 1650s by Edward Scarisbrick, a member of a
prominent English Catholic family who went by that alias and attended
the Jesuit college, founded when Catholics were banned from England’s
universities.
“People
have been making some vague arguments, but now for the first time we
have a connection between the Jesuit college network and Shakespeare,”
he said. “The links become a little more substantial when you have this
paper trail.”
Jean-Christophe
Mayer, a Shakespeare expert at the University of Montpellier III,
France, cautioned against making too strong a connection, but noted that
a library in the northern French town of Douai also owned some early
transcripts of Shakespeare’s plays. “It’s interesting that the plays
were on the syllabuses at these colleges,” he said. The new folio, he
added, “could be part of the puzzle of Shakespeare’s place in Catholic
culture.”
The
St.-Omer folio will also help with the dizzyingly intricate piecing
together of the most authentic versions of the plays. The text of each
surviving first folio differs subtly from the others; compositors in the
print shop constantly made corrections, introducing many textual
uncertainties that still bedevil scholars and stage directors alike.
The
St.-Omer folio, Mr. Rasmussen said, also contains handwritten notes
that may illuminate how the plays were performed in Shakespeare’s time.
In
one scene in “Henry IV,” the word “hostess” is changed to “host” and
“wench” to “fellow” — possibly reflecting an early performance where a
female character was turned into a male. “I’ve never seen this kind of
gender switch in a Shakespeare folio,” Mr. Rasmussen said.
Even after years of inspecting first folios, Mr. Rasmussen sounded a little amazed at the discovery in St.-Omer.
“Here
was a text everyone knew about, that had been in the library’s holdings
for four centuries,” he said. “It’s about as ‘Antiques Roadshow’ as you
can get.”
Correction: December 1, 2014
An article on Wednesday about the discovery of a Shakespeare
first folio at a small library in northern France misidentified the
auction house that sold another copy in 2006 and misstated the price. It
was Sotheby’s, not Christie’s, and the price was $5.2 million, not $6.8
million. The article also misspelled and omitted part of the name of a
university in France where Jean-Christophe Mayer, who commented on the
discovery, works. It is the University of Montpellier III, not the
University of Montpelier.
