'A rarity most beloved': Shakespeare folios on display

For one day only, Cornell University Library is putting all four of its 17th-century folio editions of William Shakespeare's plays on display to celebrate the 450th anniversary of the Bard’s birth.

The folios are the earliest published collections of Shakespeare’s work; William G. Mennen, Cornell Class of 1908, donated them to the library in October 1953.

Words from the Author

If there be nothing new, but that which is
To wit, written down, and preserved for all time
I beg you tarry not, for on view you’ll miss
My comedies, histories, tragedies in rhyme.

’Tis a coup for Cornell, three centuries younger
With four folios of plays – and in purest form
In the manuscript collections, two levels under
On the day of my birth, this bright April morn.

‘The world’s a stage’ ‘in some antique books,’
‘A rarity most beloved,’ or so I once said –
Not writ by pretenders, hams, clerics, crooks,
Lest others attach, those rumours be dead.

Neither claimed as de Vere’s nor censored by Bowdler
See these fine plays of mine, before I’m any older!

The one-day “flash exhibition,” titled “Shakespeare at 450,” is Wednesday, April 23, from 10:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. in the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections (RMC), Kroch Library, Level 2B.

Cornell is one of the few places in the world able to put all four folios on display for its community of readers and researchers, said exhibition curator Lance Heidig.

The first folio of 1623, comprised of 36 plays, was the first collection of Shakespeare’s plays in a single volume. Published seven years after his death, it “helped to enhance his literary reputation,” Heidig said.

“The first folio is arguably the most important book in English literature, possibly even in world literature,” said Heidig, Outreach and Learning Services librarian for Olin/Uris libraries and RMC. “This is the first time a folio was devoted entirely to drama. The folio format [vs. the smaller quarto format] was used for reference and science books and collections of great literature, but at that time, plays were generally considered popular entertainment meant to be performed, not read as literature.”

Eighteen of the 36 plays saw print for the first time – including “Macbeth,” “Julius Caesar,” “As You Like It,” “The Tempest,” “Two Gentlemen of Verona,” “The Taming of the Shrew” and “Measure for Measure.”

“It is believed that about 750 copies were produced in that first edition, and 232 are known to survive to this day,” Heidig said. The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., has a collection of 82 copies.

Two of the playwright’s theater colleagues in the King’s Company, John Heminges and Henry Condell, compiled the first folio, “working from a variety of source materials including Shakespeare’s working drafts of some plays, called ‘foul papers,’ and completed transcripts of plays, called ‘fair copies,’” Heidig said.

After the second folio in 1632, seven new plays, including “Pericles,” were added to the third folio in 1664. The fourth was published in 1685. “Even though he had nothing to do with their compilation, these four volumes are the closest we get to Shakespeare’s intentions for his plays,” Heidig said. “They don’t get exhibited very often, but we do teach with them in Shakespeare seminars and classes.”

“We really have an astounding Shakespeare collection here at Cornell,” he said. “One of my favorite items is an 1866 copy of ‘Hamlet’ owned by Edwin Boothe, the preeminent American Shakespearean actor who is remembered as one of the greatest performers of ‘Hamlet.’ He was also the brother of John Wilkes Booth, the man who shot Abraham Lincoln. This copy of the book is signed and annotated by the actor, showing what syllables he intended to stress in his soliloquies.”

Cornell’s collections also include several critical and scholarly editions of Shakespeare’s works from the 18th and 19th centuries. Olin Library also has a complete set of BBC productions of the plays. “We originally had them on videotape, then on DVD, and now they are streamed and available to any Cornellian with a NetID,” Heidig said.

“Shakespeare’s plays are so familiar and iconic that we tend to think of them as being etched in stone, so permanent and unchanging, yet nearly everything about them – individual words, lines, scenes, acts, whole plays and even the question of who wrote these plays – is still being debated by scholars after more than four centuries of analysis and research.”

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Syl Kacapyr