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.
He called in Mr. Rasmussen, a professor at the University of Nevada in Reno and the author of “The Shakespeare First Folios: A Descriptive Catalogue,” who identified it within minutes.
“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.
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.
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