|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Arthur Wainwright narrates the story of the first edition of Shakespeare’s works on the occasion of 445th birth anniversary of the great dramatist on April 23 Shakespeare’s birthday is traditionally celebrated on April 23, as he was born on the St George’s Day in 1564. In this context it is interesting to consider the saga of the first edition of his published works dated 1623, which are known as Shakespeare’s First Folio and cost as much as Rs 30 crore a copy in international rare book auctions.
Without the First Folio, we would not have, the evil that men do would not live after them; there would be no seven ages of man; music would not be the food of love; no one would drink from a poisoned chalice. After all, the Globe theatre, where the manuscripts were probably stored, burned down in 1613 — during a performance of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII. This folio is all the more important in history as in Britain, Cromwell’s Puritans banned all theatre literature in 1642 and it was only after 18 years with the Restoration of the British monarchy in 1660 that these restrictions were removed. Prof Stanley Wells, an eminent Shakespearan scholar remarked in 2002, "Without this folio, Shakespeare would not be known as the great dramatist and this book is the most important book in English literature". Shakespeare himself was careless about the publication of his plays, for his money came from takings at the theatre. The actual printing of the folio was likely done between 1621 and 1622 and the book was on sale by the end of 1623; the Bodleian Library, in Oxford, received its copy in early 1624. The 960-page book measures 15 x 10.2 x 2.4 inches ( 38 x 25.8 x 6.2 cm). As far as modern scholarship has been able to determine, the First Folio texts were set into type by five compositors, with different spelling habits, peculiarities, and levels of competence. The cotton rag paper on which it is printed was not high quality by the standards of the day, but it lasts much better than the paper that nowadays fills most printed books. Look at the yellowing pages of valuable modern first editions, soon to become friable, and the First Folio seems a robust beast. Some 750 copies were printed, but today only 230 survive, the majority (147) in north America. The First Folio’s original price was 1 pound, the equivalent of about $220 today. But in the four centuries its valuation grew from $35,000 in the 1960s to $9,00,000 15 years ago and in 2006, microsoft billionaire Paul Allen paid $6.2 million (almost Rs 31 crore) for a copy. But all of them are not in good condition and only 40 copies are complete. Some are in poor condition, others have pages missing (the Oriel-Getty copy lacks two leaves from Romeo and Juliet), pages replaced with later facsimiles or have been cannibalised with leaves from other copies. The Folger Library in Washington DC, established by the American oil millionaire Henry Clay Folger, owns a staggering 82 copies. Meisei University in Tokyo has 12. There are fewer than 30 copies of the folio in Britain: one is in private hands, after the late Sir John Paul Getty is believed to have paid Oriel College, Oxford, around $5 million for a copy six weeks before his death in 2003. Thanks to the eccentricities of the Jacobean printing house and the depredations of time (readers removing pages), many surviving copies are incomplete, valued only at $400,000. The First Folio was printed with a curious carelessness; it swarms with misprints. The comedies, histories, and tragedies are separately paged, and there are numerous errors in pagination and in the signatures. These are of considerable bibliographical interest, as many of them were corrected while the book was being printed, and they help us to identify any particular copy in the edition. But the pursuit of folio-spotting remains unparalleled in literature, beginning with Thomas Dibdin’s first census of folio owners in the London area in 1824 and Sidney Lee’s worldwide folio census in 1901, detailing the condition and identifying marks of every known copy. University of London scholar Anthony James West has been crisscrossing the world in the survey’s fourth and most insanely ambitious iteration, a decades long project of travelling to examine every folio in existence personally. Scholars spent years in the 1950s and 1960s using a bizarre optical contraption known as a Hinman Collator to compare folios for textual variants: No two copies have been found to possess exactly the same combination of pages. Such verification has
ensured that no thief can steal a copy of the First Folio and
sell it. In 1998, one antique book dealer stole a Shakespeare first
folio from the display case of Britain’s Durham University and tried
to sell it in USA, stating that he obtained the book from a Cuban rare
book dealer. The Folger Library in Washington DC (with 79 first folios
in its collection), where he took the book for an authentication
certificate, checked its files and immediately recognised it as the
stolen volume from the Durham University.
|
Only 18 of Shakespeare’s
plays were published in his lifetime and it was not until 1623, seven
years after his death, that the so-called complete works — a total of
36 plays — appeared, in what is now known as the First Folio,
including 18 that had never been published before. Among those making
their first appearance were Macbeth and Twelfth Night.
According to scholars, those two plays might have been lost forever had
the First Folio not been published.