The Shakespeare Thefts (15 page)

I gave my best guess. “Maybe some adolescents thought there was something dirty in it, given the title?” (I refrained from making naughty jokes myself, but it was a weird way to phrase the question:
Why is
The Whore of Babylon
so well thumbed?
)

In retrospect, I think what they were asking me was if there was some known allegorical association between their family and this play. I really wanted to
be in a position to say yes, but I’m not a Dekker expert. I’d edited Dekker’s best-known play,
The Shoemaker’s Holiday
, for a Norton Anthology, and I know that one of his poems was used in a Beatles’ song (
golden slumbers kiss your eyes, smiles awake you when you rise
), but I didn’t have the answer they wanted and probably seemed a little odd in my desperation to please them.

Oddness in the world of book collectors is nothing isolated. In fact, it is one of the perks of being a First Folio hunter—we get to meet people who are wonderfully eccentric. A copy now owned by Yale University formerly belonged to a man named Henry Constantine Jennings. He was a passionate eccentric who accumulated beautiful marble statuary and other objets d’art as well as books … and ladies’ shoes. It is said that “he obtained shoes from every woman of his acquaintance.”

In the course of my work, I’ve met an individual who lives in a five-story brownstone in Manhattan. He has a fondness for food from McDonald’s, and he is passionate about the First Folio that he owns. The pages of his copy were once chewed by rodents, so when he bought it, most of the corners were missing. With sheer drive, determination, and cash, he was able to purchase
over two hundred
loose original First Folio leaves from the London book dealer Quaritch. This next part is my favorite: Instead of simply substituting the good leaves for the damaged leaves in his copy, he had the corners from
the good leaves
cut off
and then attached to the corners of the defective leaves! (Japanese tissue and starch water was used to marry the “new” originals to the “old” originals.)

If you’re wondering who had owned the copy before, we did too. Frederick Haines, Esq., was the owner at the time of Lee’s 1902
Census
. He was the son of artist William Haines and a trustee of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Upon his death, the volume passed to his son, Frederick Haselroot Haines, who had a long and successful career as a botanist in India. According to a letter held by the current, corner-fixing owner of the volume, the folio then passed to Haines’s second daughter, Gladys M. Haines. From Gladys Haines it wound up in the possession of Quaritch and was sold to the current owner on October 6, 1976, for £2,400 (a relative bargain for a First Folio, no doubt because of the chewed corners).

As passionate as collectors are, they do have their limits. We know of at least one copy of the First Folio that was surrendered due to stench. Its recorded history is relatively short. The bookseller John Fleming (who had a life-size portrait of the Shakespearean actor David Garrick in his New York office) sold the copy to the Heritage Book Shop, owned by brothers Ben and Lou Weinstein, in Los Angeles, California. It was then sold in 1983 for $241,000 to Dr. Patrick J. Hanratty—a
computer scientist commonly referred to as the Father of CADD/CAM because of his revolutionary contributions to the fields of computer-aided design and manufacturing. Hanratty’s interest in Shakespeare had been fostered in his youth when he read
Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare
and worked on productions of the plays with his parents at San Diego’s legendary Old Globe Theatre. In March 1986, Hanratty donated his copy of the folio to the University of California at Irvine—the institution where he did his doctoral work—after noticing that it “had begun to smell, and to smell very badly.” He had toyed with the idea of selling the copy but ultimately decided that he “would like to see it again someday” and that “it would be better if it were available to everybody else, and to myself.” To my knowledge, the University of California at Irvine’s library has never complained about the smell.

The Hereford Cathedral Copy

One of the most treasured items in the Hereford Cathedral Library is the Mappa Mundi, the largest medieval map known to exist today. Dating from the end of the thirteenth century, it is the work of an ecclesiastic (who is believed to have included an image of himself on the map, in the right-hand corner on horseback, attended by his page and greyhounds). It is a remarkable piece of history, drawn on a single sheet of stout vellum. The world is represented as round, and there is a gripping representation of the Day of Judgment.

Perhaps the thief who stole the copy of the cathedral’s Shakespeare First Folio shuddered when he saw
it—but even a vivid Judgment Day didn’t stop him from taking the volume, which has been missing since the English civil wars in the 1640s.

Here’s what we know about this missing copy: Philip Traherne, uncle of the famous poet and theologian Thomas Traherne, gave a First Folio to the Vicars’ Choral Library at Hereford Cathedral around 1626. This library belonged to the vicars who lived in the cathedral around the clock, in order that they might perform required religious rites. The collection totaled 582 volumes. Traherne was an alderman of the city of Hereford, deeply involved in local civic and religious life. The undated record in the library’s “Donors’ Book” reads:

My team has deduced a date for the gift by looking at another book given by Traherne, a copy of George Sandys’s
Relation of a Journey
(1621), which is listed immediately after the Shakespeare Folio in the “Donors’ Book.” The Sandys volume is still in the library and bears a contemporary inscription stating that the book was given to the cathedral by Traherne in 1626.
¹

So the folio remained in the Vicars’ Choral Library from about 1626, we believe, until the civil wars. This
is conjectured from reading the cathedral’s catalog from 1767—it does
not
include the First Folio. We believe that it was stolen at some point during the seventeenth century, along with a 1602 folio of Chaucer’s
Works
, and thus left out of the eighteenth-century catalog.

How do we know a Chaucer was stolen too? Incredibly, the
Works
was at long last found in the 1980s. My team, guessing that the two folios were taken at the same time, started hunting for the missing Shakespeare folio by going to where the recovered Chaucer folio turned up.

The Chaucer had ended up at the library at Rudhale Manor in Hereford, which is the home of descendants of Harbert Westphaling. Westphaling was a leading bishop in Shakespeare’s time and a bit of a character. He is on record as being insubordinate to Queen Elizabeth, refusing to cut his sermon short even after she had asked him to do so. Twice.
²
He died in 1602 (he is still in the cathedral, by the way, buried in the north transept), and the First Folio wouldn’t be published for another twenty-one years. It wouldn’t be donated to the cathedral for at least another three years after this. So we know he didn’t take the book. How did his descendants end up with a stolen Chaucer, and possibly a First Folio?

It is my team’s guess that the volume was stolen from the cathedral and then sold to the Westphaling family with their knowledge of its origins. We think this
because when the Chaucer was returned in 1984, it bore a curious inscription:

Alienated from the College Library, and afterwards part of the Library at Rudhale. Disposed of by y
^e
owner of Rudhale; and afterwards y
^e
property of the Reverend John Jones.

This inscription was signed “Theophilus Edward Jones 1824.”

So the Westphaling family—or at least one of its members—knew that the Chaucer folio had been filched from the library. That person informed someone in the Jones family, and while it didn’t stop the purchase, it did result in the jotting of a note that has become an important clue in our quest to locate that missing First Folio.

There is an annotation in the Chaucer folio stating that John Sirrell gave it to the library in 1622. When the book came up for sale at auction in 1984, it was the Sirrell inscription that enabled the folio to be identified. It was repurchased for the library with the aid of a gift from Miss Eleanor Hipwell, president of the Hereford College of Education and of the International Society of Education through Art.

There aren’t many copies of the Shakespeare First Folio that have been donated by women; the Bryn Mawr College copy, in the Mariam Coffin Canaday Library, is
one of the few. Caroline Newton, a psychoanalyst who studied under Freud in Vienna, translated Goethe’s
The Sorrows of Young Werther
, and was a close friend and supporter of Thomas Mann (her house in Rhode Island provided refuge to the Nobel Prize–winning novelist after he and his family fled Hitler’s Germany in the 1930s), bought the copy in February 1966 for $12,500. A Bryn Mawr alumna of 1914, she gave the folio to the college in 1974.

My team and I believe the Hereford Cathedral copy still exists. Perhaps one day someone will donate it to a library—just as Philip Traherne did four centuries ago.

some owners of First Folios are astonished when we tell them that their copy is not completely original—that it contains some leaves from, say, the Second Folio. As I’ve mentioned, this is not an uncommon finding in a book that is centuries old, but it is disappointing for people who were unaware that they had a hybrid, of sorts.

When it comes to the work of Shakespeare, infinite variety is the norm. Different versions of the plays are found in the quartos versus the folios, and the plays themselves have been performed in vastly different ways throughout history. A few years back, the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) was planning a production of
Hamlet
and contracted David Tennant, then the most popular television performer in all of Great Britain, playing the lead in
Dr. Who
(he also played Barty Crouch Jr. in
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
). It was a coup to get him to play the lead in
Hamlet
. At the time, Jonathan Bate and I were editing the complete works of Shakespeare for the RSC. Its chief associate director, Greg Doran, came to us and said, “I know there is an early version of
Hamlet
—a shorter one.” And he was correct: The earliest printed version of the play, the 1603 First Quarto (the one that Halliwell-Phillipps may have stolen from his father-in-law), appears to have been cut down, perhaps for touring, and so it is about half the length of the version generally staged.

The problem was, this First Quarto version looks like it was reconstructed from memory by an actor—apparently the fellow who played the minor part of Marcellus, one of the sentries who appear at the beginning of the play when the ghost of Hamlet’s father arrives. All of Marcellus’s lines are letter-perfect, the scenes that he’s in are pretty good, but the rest of the play is misremembered and kind of garbled. But it’s not a total loss, because mixed in with the mess is an interesting structure; the short version makes changes that twentieth-century directors like Laurence Olivier and Franco Zeffirelli have also made, such as putting the nunnery scene
before
the most famous soliloquy of all time, the “To be or not to be” speech.

What Doran wanted was the structure of this early First Quarto
Hamlet
, combined with the more familiar
lines from the First Folio. Trey Jansen and I put this hybrid text together, and it was great. It would only take two hours’ traffic upon the stage, it was very streamlined, and you could make the argument that these cuts were authentic ones that were made in Shakespeare’s time. Greg Doran and David Tennant loved it. We all thought, This is fantastic: We’ve got a rock star of a Hamlet, we’ve got a two-hour version that will not numb the bottoms of modern theatergoers, and it’s going to attract a new generation to Shakespeare, an entirely new audience to the play. An announcement about Tennant playing Hamlet was made, and the show immediately sold out for the season. Incredibly, we had a hybrid that was also an original!

And then Patrick Stewart ambled up and said he wanted to play Claudius, Hamlet’s scheming uncle. The production didn’t need his star power because it already had David Tennant. And it was already sold out. However, the fact was, Stewart was good for the role. He signed on and had a look at the script. Stewart didn’t like the cuts that were made to Claudius’s part in the First Quarto, so he had the RSC throw them out. Ultimately, it tossed the whole hybrid and replaced it with a standard three-hour production.

I did not put up a fight, the play went forward, it was an enormous success, and Patrick Stewart won the Olivier Award. Patrick Stewart and I are not on speaking terms, but he doesn’t know this.

In the end, who is to say which one of us was more right? If we ever locate the missing Pembroke copy, perhaps one of the brothers wrote some marginalia about the definitive way William Shakespeare liked to see the scenes in
Hamlet
ordered. Or perhaps in a missing folio that was once owned by the great acting family the Beestons there is a notation that says, “Will mentioned Claudius goes on for far too long—please cut.” I’m holding out hope that these folios, if they are ever found, will back me up. That would be a far greater reward than the one Patrick Stewart won.

The William Beeston Copy

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue
.

—Hamlet, instructing the players on how to act

The First Folio with perhaps the most intimate connections to Shakespeare’s work as it was performed on stage has been lost to posterity. It last belonged to William Beeston, the son of Christopher Beeston, who, at one time, was an apprentice to a leading actor in Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (who later became the King’s Men when James ascended the throne). Christopher Beeston
left Shakespeare’s company early in his career. His closest friend among the actor-playwrights of his day was not William Shakespeare but Thomas Heywood, who wrote: