The Shakespeare Thefts (16 page)

Heywood is notable for publishing the only expression of resentment known to have come from Shakespeare’s “gentle” lips. The playwright was “much offended,” Heywood wrote, with an unprincipled publisher who “presumed to make so bold with his name” as to put it to a book of which he was not the author. (The publisher, it turns out, was William Jaggard, who went on to publish the First Folio after Shakespeare’s death.)

Back to Christopher Beeston: Despite his relatively short association with Shakespeare’s company, he made a favorable impression on Augustine Phillips (an actor and one of the six main investors in the Globe Theatre). We know this because when Phillips died in 1605, he left Beeston money. In fact, in death, Phillips linked Christopher Beeston and William Shakespeare, for he left them each thirty shillings of gold (worth £1.5—a large sum at the time).

An interesting high—or low—point in Phillips’s career: In 1601, when the Earl of Essex planned a rebellion against Queen Elizabeth, he thought a good way
to get Londoners in the mood to overthrow a monarch was to watch a performance of
Richard II
. He paid the actors to perform, and Shakespeare’s company put on the play the day before the intended coup. The rebellion went nowhere, Queen Elizabeth was not amused, and the authorities found the timing of the performance and the attempted uprising less than coincidental. It was Augustine Phillips who had the unenviable task of explaining to the queen’s Privy Council the role that the acting company had played in the abortive coup. He apologized and explained that they had done it only for the money.

Christopher Beeston had a long, full life in the world of theater; he was the manager of the Cockpit Theater on Drury Lane at the time of his death in 1637. Note the date—it is certainly possible that he owned a copy of the First Folio. Did he use the thirty shillings he inherited to buy it?

The record remains silent on this point, but it is thanks to his free tongue with John Aubrey—the seventeenth-century equivalent of a gossip columnist—that we have this vivid description of Shakespeare (immortalized in Aubrey’s
Brief Lives
): “he was a handsome, well-shaped man, very good company, and of a very ready smooth wit.”
¹

Christopher’s son, William Beeston, was also chatty with Aubrey—he was the source for the biographical
detail that Shakespeare “understood Latin pretty well, for he had been in his younger years a schoolmaster in the country.” William Beeston followed in his father’s footsteps as an actor and theater manager—and he was an innovator. Whereas stages in Shakespeare’s day generally were bare, with only an occasional prop (such as Yorick’s skull in
Hamlet
), Beeston’s playhouse revolutionized the English stage by employing scenery.
²
This speaks to us over the centuries: William Beeston was interested in making the experience of theater as lifelike as possible.

And this brings us back to the First Folio. When William Beeston died in 1682, an inventory of his personal property was taken. It notes that a volume of “Shakespeares plays” is missing, having been “purloined & embezzled” by servants.
³
These servants aren’t named and so are all but impossible to trace. After examining the marginalia in so many copies of the First Folio, I can say without hesitation that this is one that my entire team would give their eyeteeth to see. What stories did Christopher know about Shakespeare’s personal stage directions, his notes on how to perform certain characters? And what did Christopher tell his own son, who went on to add scenery to performances to make them more compelling? Were any of these anecdotes or notes written down? Wouldn’t the best place to record how to
emphasize a word be
next
to that word, in the margin of the play, in your copy of the First Folio?

In the archives of the Folger Shakespeare Library, there are promptbooks from productions of
Hamlet
. You can see the books from Edmund Kean’s and John Barrymore’s
Hamlet
. Both have notes filling their margins made by these great actors as they found their way into the character. The mind boggles to think what either of the Beestons could have written in their copy. (
To BE or not to be … To be or NOT to be …
how would Shakespeare himself have read it?)

We have no idea where William Beeston got his Shakespeare folio. He may have inherited it from his father, but we just don’t know. We cannot trace its provenance. No one has seen it since at least 1682. If this book is sitting in anyone’s attic, I hope they will make it and themselves known.

This hope is not entirely vain. Consider this: Just a few years ago, Anne Humphries, a housewife in South Bramhall, Stockport, Cheshire, inherited a First Folio when her second cousin once removed (one Lilian Frances Cottle, the wife of a tailor’s cutter) died intestate. The volume became hers without her having any inkling that it existed. (Cottle’s own neighbors were shocked when a search began after her death for surviving relatives who would inherit a First Folio.) Humphries sold
the volume, which was not in the best shape, at auction in 2004 for £160,000. May the Beeston copy appear one day in a similar way, and may my team be the first to examine it!

The filching age will steal his treasure

—Shakespeare’s Sonnet 75

The good news is that, thanks to the publication of
The Shakespeare First Folios: A Descriptive Catalogue
,
¹
the First Folio is now “the world’s worst stolen treasure.”
²
This is not just me blowing our collective horn; Paul Collins, author of
The Book of William: How Shakespeare’s First Folio Conquered the World
, characterizes our “decades-long project of traveling to examine every folio in existence” as “insanely ambitious.” He further notes that because of our research—which has provided
a fingerprint of the watermarks, manuscript marginalia, bookplates, bindings, and press variants unique to each copy—“the surviving First Folios are now the most minutely studied published works in history.”
³

This is extremely satisfying. Over the course of the past ten years, the team often
has
felt insane. Finding these copies, getting access to them, and examining them was an ongoing process, one that seemed might never be completed. Knowing that stolen folios can now be identified immediately—as was the case, for example, with the Durham copy that Raymond Scott brought into the Folger Shakespeare Library—makes us proud. When we look back on times we got stonewalled, times we had horrible experiences traveling to out-of-the-way places or were locked in vaults next to radioactive material in order to go page by page through a four-hundred-yearold book, we now think, “Yes. It was all worth it.”

The less good news is that because of our research, any First Folio stolen in the future will be so identifiable that it almost certainly will
have
to be sold on the black market, with more secrecy—and perhaps with more disguising done to it—than ever before. As Robert K. Wittman, the only undercover agent from the Federal Bureau of Investigation who specializes in art crime, observes, “Most art thieves quickly discover that the art in art crime isn’t in the theft, it’s in the sale.”
⁴
According to Wittman, stolen books and art usually fetch just 10 percent of their open-market value on the black market.
⁵

Still, 10 percent of a $6 million book might be motivation enough.

When the Durham copy was stolen, the thief believed that simply discarding the first and final pages was enough to disguise it. Now that we’ve exhaustively cataloged what every known and accessible First Folio looks like, including annotations, bindings, missing leaves, lost or obscured text, marginalia, bookplates, armorial stamps, and watermarks … what will those with pockets deep enough—and whose lust for a First Folio is great enough—do to the books to attempt to disguise them?

Rare map dealers look for things called “library folds.” When we see them, we are immediately suspicious. They imply that someone has cut a map out of a book (probably out of a library with little security) and then folded the paper to smuggle the map out. In the course of our research, my team has identified so many “folds” for each First Folio—all of them will send up red flags—that I can only imagine what types of vandalism truly motivated thieves will dream up and execute in order to mask them.

Ironically, over the centuries, legitimate owners (in the name of improvement) have done much to unintentionally disguise the identity of their books. Bindings in original calfskin are almost always more valuable, but people who have paid a good sum for a book often have a yen to rebind, putting their purchase into
new covers with ornate decorations. In our experience, about 95 percent of the extant First Folios have been rebound. The people who do this think they are increasing the book’s value by discarding a worn binding and making it “elegant.” However, genuine collectors hate this; scholars hate it even more, because these types of cosmetic changes help hide provenance, whether intentional or not.

Also, you lose something—literally and figuratively—every time you rebind a book. When you do so, the pages must be trimmed, and it often happens that what gets sliced off is manuscript marginalia. And so you’ll find half a word in a seventeenth-century hand—and the rest is lost. For example, team members Mark Farnsworth and Sarah Stewart examined a volume at the Folger that we believe once belonged to a man named Thomas Longe, who was a fellow at All Soul’s College, Oxford, in 1600. He became the vicar of Eynsham, Oxfordshire, in 1617. His is an autograph that can still be read, but
another
name appears in the volume, dated 1695. We can read “Mary Wat”—and the rest has been trimmed away. Was her name Mary Watkins? Mary Watson? Mary Waterford? It is very frustrating to be unable to trace possible early owners due to the “perfecting” done by later binders.

At the F. W. Olin Library at Mills College in Oakland, California, there is a copy whose first recorded
owner was John “Mad Jack” Fuller—perhaps most famous today for his unusual pyramid tomb in the churchyard at Brightling, East Sussex. (Local folklore holds that he is entombed sitting upright in an iron chair awaiting the resurrection, in full evening dress, with a bottle of port and a roast chicken in front of him.) A letter to Fuller from the famed Shakespearean editor Edmund Malone, dated 1809, characterizes this volume as “a fine copy” but adds the caveat that “the margin being cut very much away, diminishes its value.” Imagine what the fascinating Fuller might have written had there been margins left for him to do so!

Washing is another way to ruin the history of a book. To make a centuries-old folio look “first class,” some purchasers erase stains and marginalia by having a binder “wash” the linen pages. To do this, it is necessary to pull the volume to pieces, soak the leaves in hot water (and perhaps other chemicals), and then hang the pages to dry. Needless to say, much that would fascinate my team is lost in this process.

It is so much more satisfying to see a copy like the one that is at Boston Public Library. In the mid-1840s, it was sold by Thomas Rodd, the younger (1796–1849), a London bookseller who took great care with the volume (and who dealt with approximately forty First Folios during his career). His cleaning was careful and conservative, for Rodd hated “washed” books, preferring to
“see a book black as the ground than after its undergoing the ordeal of infernal wash tubs and lyes.”

Happily, today restoration is turning away from cosmetic and toward authenticity. A copy that is currently in the hands of a private owner in New York has undergone a remarkable transformation since being acquired in 2002. This owner has worked tirelessly to restore and improve its overall condition. Not only have damaged portions been carefully repaired, but the owner has sought to replace facsimile leaves with originals. At the time the team viewed the folio, only a few facsimile leaves still needed replacing. The owner knows that it might not be possible to find the remaining leaves but plans to continue to search.

The team’s search also continues. When
The Shakespeare First Folios: A Descriptive Catalogue
went to press, we noted that one copy included in the Lee
Census
, the Edwin Forrest copy, exists today only as “ashes and charred pages” at the University of Pennsylvania. But what about those copies that have been stolen? The volumes that have vanished? Until we have proof that they no longer exist, we will keep looking for them. We will keep our ears to the ground and our eyes open—and who knows? Those that have been filched or are being hoarded may rise again, not ashes at all, and the stories behind Shakespeare’s First Folios will continue to amaze us.

The London book trade in Shakespeare’s time was regulated by the Stationers’ Company, a trade guild made up of printers, publishers, booksellers, and bookbinders.
¹
The printer of a book owned the type and the press. The publisher acquired the manuscript, paid for copies of it to be printed, and sold them wholesale and retail. The imprint on a Shakespearean quarto usually identifies the printer (often only by his initials, perhaps to emphasize the greater importance of the publisher), the publisher, and the bookshop (usually the publisher’s own) in which copies of the book could be purchased: “Printed by
W.S
. for
John Smethwick
, and are to be sold at his Shop in Saint
Dunstans
Churchyard in Fleetstreet under the Dial.” Early London bookshops were substantial buildings, often four stories tall, identified by the pictorial signs (e.g., “the Dial”) mentioned on title page advertisements.

The publisher would acquire a manuscript that he or she (widows occasionally took over the family business) deemed publishable, register it in the Stationers’ Register, and obtain approval of the text by the ecclesiastical authorities (or by others to whom this task had been delegated, such as the Master of the Revels). The publisher would select a master printer, and the two would then decide on the format, type size and design, paper quality, and number of copies likely to be sold. The publisher would supply the printer with the manuscript to be printed and a sufficient amount of paper for the print run.