The Shakespeare Thefts (2 page)

Either way, if the First Folio hadn’t been published, we would not have
The Tragedy of Macbeth
or
The Taming of the Shrew
. Or
Twelfth Night
. Or
Julius Caesar
. So we owe a marvelous debt to Heminges and Condell, two actors who, having dipped their toes in the world of publishing, were never to do so again. Their one effort, the First Folio, is regarded, along with the
King James Bible, as one of the most significant books in the English language.

There were three reprintings of
Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies
in the seventeenth century. The Second Folio was published in 1632, the Third Folio in 1664, and the Fourth Folio in 1685, but today, the First Folio of 1623 is the rarest and most coveted. The majority of extant copies are in public institutions; the rest are in the hands of very private collectors, and only rarely are any available for sale. Few of the copies are complete, many have faux pages made by a well-known forger, and all have suffered some damage. Perhaps this makes them more valuable, and too often they “go missing.”

In their address “To the great Variety of Readers” in the First Folio (see photo section), Heminges and Condell encouraged prospective users not to read the folio in bookstores but to “buy it first,” since the fate of the book depended on the “capacities not of your heads alone but of your purses.” They repeated the imperative with some force: “Whatever you do, buy.”

The original price of a First Folio, bound in calfskin, was £1—an
enormous
sum in an age when a skilled tradesman could expect to earn £4 in a year. It put the book squarely within reach of only the wealthy; the earliest known owners include three earls, two bishops, a lord, an admiral, two colonels, an ambassador, a knight,
and a lawyer. Over the centuries, not much has changed. Indeed, the privilege of First Folio ownership continues to be something of a fetish among the superrich. In the early years of the twentieth century, railroad magnate Henry Huntington bought four copies, while Henry Clay Folger, president of Standard Oil, acquired an astounding eighty-two copies. In the 1970s and 1980s, Meisei University in Tokyo purchased nearly every copy of the First Folio that came on the market, ultimately accruing a dozen. More recently, in 2001, Paul Allen (cofounder of Microsoft) paid $6 million for a First Folio, and, in the following year, Sir Paul Getty paid $7 million for his.

The Shakespeare Thefts
explores what my team of First Folio hunters and I learned while cataloging,
in situ
, each of the known copies and searching for those that have vanished. Like a Shakespearean play, we uncovered a fascinating world between the covers of one of the world’s most expensive printed books, one populated with thieves, masterminds, fools, and eccentrics, all of whom have risked fortunes and reputations to possess a coveted First Folio.

The Gondomar Copy

No, lord Ambassador, I’ll rather keep that
.

—
Shakespeare’s King Henry VI

England had no resident Spanish ambassador for the latter part of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. The defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 had soured things between the two countries. Following the accession of James I in 1603, regular diplomatic relations resumed. Count Gondomar, one of the greatest private collectors of books in Spain (and one of the earliest purchasers of a First Folio), took the post of ambassador in London in 1613. In the early
nineteenth century, the bulk of his collection eventually became part of the Spanish Royal Library, but the fate of his First Folio remains shrouded in mystery.

Gondomar arrived in England with a bang, sailing into Portsmouth Harbor surrounded by Spanish warships. Contrary to custom, none of the vessels lowered the Spanish flag. As one can imagine, the English were not amused. In fact, they were enraged. The ranking English naval officer threatened to launch an attack against this new armada if the colors were not struck.

Having gotten everyone’s attention, Gondomar—whose motto was “
Osar morir da la vida
” (risk your life and dare to die)—boarded an English ship and asked that a message be sent to King James. He declared that the flotilla had entered Portsmouth in a spirit of friendship and should be treated accordingly and insisted that he could not with honor strike his sovereign’s colors. Gondomar then requested that, if an English attack was imminent, he be allowed to return to his ship so that he could take part in the fight. The new ambassador had rightly guessed that the peace-loving James—a contemporary epigram described him thus: “
Rex fuit Elizabeth, nunc est regina Jacobus
” (Elizabeth was King, now James is Queen)
¹
—would not start a war over the presence of a flag on a diplomat’s ship. He was right: The king sent word that the Spanish colors could remain at the masthead.

So Diego Sarmiento de Acuña, Count Gondomar—book lover and master manipulator—took up residence in London and soon became the most hated man in Shakespeare’s England.
²

His contentious arrival was a harbinger of things to come. The English people were bitter about the wars with Spain, which had dragged on from 1585 to 1603, and the national coffers were still drained. Best-selling pamphlets were soon published that detailed “the wicked plots carried out by Seignior Gondomar for advancing the Popish Religion” and offered lurid accounts of “his treacherous and subtle practices for the ruin of England.”
³
To protect himself from assault by the general populace, Gondomar took the unusual precaution of being carried about London in an enclosed “litter” pulled by donkeys. His reputation was not bolstered by the well-known fact that he suffered from an anal fistula, which necessitated his use of an open-bottomed “chair of ease” (see photo section).

However, as unpopular as he was with the people, the count was no fool, and he ingratiated himself with James I, presenting himself as a kindred spirit, a scholar and lover of books. Gondomar—no doubt aware that James preferred male company
⁴
—flattered the monarch, reportedly telling James, “I speak Latin badly, like a king, whereas you speak Latin well, like a scholar.”
⁵

Did Gondomar speak Latin badly? We don’t know, but we do know the two men became close friends: They
joked and laughed and hunted together, drank from the same bottle, and called themselves “the two Diegos.”
⁶
We also know that throughout his life, James had close relationships with male courtiers, the true nature of which is debated by historians to this day.

In any event, Gondomar was a wily ambassador, and his obsession—indeed, the chief aim of his diplomatic mission—was a delicate one: to secure a marriage between Prince Charles, heir to the British throne, and the Spanish king’s youngest daughter, the Infanta, Maria Ana. James, perhaps wanting to prolong their conversations, or perhaps borrowing a move from Elizabeth’s playbook and stringing the suitor along rather than confronting the obvious obstacles of religion, let the idea of a “Spanish Match” continue to be a staple of court discussion for the better part of a decade.

During that time, Gondomar feasted with great nobles (including the Lord Chancellor, Francis Bacon, with whom he frequently discussed philosophy) and conscripted several highly placed members of the English nobility to serve as paid agents for Spain. A book lover to the core, he whimsically disguised their identities in his accounts with names taken from classical epics and chivalric romances. In November 1617, for instance, he records a payment of 4,000 ducats (about $8,000 in today’s money) to “Priam” (Catherine Howard, Countess of Suffolk) and 2,250 ducats each to “Socrates” (Admiral
William Monson) and “Florian” (Lady Drummond).
⁷
It is not inconceivable that during their leisure Gondomar and King James discussed
Daemonologie
, a treatise the king wrote, in which he opposed the practice of witchcraft, and which provided background material for Shakespeare’s
Tragedy of Macbeth
.

And that leads us back to that missing First Folio. In September 1622, Gondomar declared that “the decision has been taken, and with enthusiasm, that the Prince of Wales should mount Spain.”
⁸
The English were dead set against a Catholic princess, but Prince Charles, then twenty-two, was advised to go to Madrid to claim his bride at the very same time that work began on the first section of an ambitious nine-hundred-page folio that would bring all of the late William Shakespeare’s works into print for the first time.

The first section of the folio to be put to press was the comedies. And on February 18, 1623, when Prince Charles and his friend George Villiers, first Duke of Buckingham and one of his father’s favorite courtiers, set out for Spain, it truly was an adventure reminiscent of Shakespeare’s comedies of disguise. The men headed to Madrid wearing beards and hoods and traveled under false names (Thomas and John Smith). To quote from
Twelfth Night:
“If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as improbable fiction.” Despite their attempts at subterfuge, the prince’s expedition was no
secret. His English subjects were deeply concerned about the physical safety of the heir to the throne. Therefore, when news of his arrival in Madrid reached England, it was celebrated with public thanksgiving, bonfires, and bell ringing.

In July, as the middle section of the Shakespeare folio containing the history plays was being printed, a historic secret marriage treaty between Charles and Maria was ratified in the Chapel Royal at Whitehall, but it left a fundamental issue unresolved: The Spanish were insisting that Charles convert to Catholicism. It turned out that the Infanta, Maria Ana, had no intention of marrying a non-Catholic. And the English steadfastly refused to acquiesce to this demand.

Charles left Spain and returned to England on October 5, brideless. On the upside, he was still Protestant and safe. A jubilant country held a service of national thanksgiving in St. Paul’s Cathedral. In Jaggard’s shop, meanwhile, just a stone’s throw from St Paul’s, Shakespeare’s tragedies were coming off the press.

A few weeks later, on November 8, 1623, the magisterial collection of
Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies
was finally available for sale. Count Gondomar, the hated foreigner, had failed in his matchmaking, but he was one of the first purchasers. Acquisition of the magnificent book, freshly bound in old English calf with yellow silk, may have taken the
sting out of the merciless satirical attacks that were now being aimed at him.

In 1624, Shakespeare’s acting company, the King’s Men, created a sensation performing Thomas Middleton’s
A Game at Chess
—an allegorical play that dramatized the failed negotiations for the marriage between England and Spain—smearing Gondomar as a villainous “Black Knight” engaged in a deadly game of international intrigue. (The troupe went so far as to buy discarded items from Gondomar’s wardrobe for the role.)
⁹
Gondomar had returned to Spain, but his successor recognized the satire and complained to King James: “There was such merriment, hubbub and applause that even if I had been many leagues away it would not have been possible for me not to have taken notice of it.”
¹⁰
It played to packed houses for nine consecutive days until the Globe Theatre was closed by order of the king himself.

While this play was amusing the masses and irritating the new ambassador, Gondomar was back home in the city of Valladolid, where his neighbor Cervantes had written
Don Quixote
. (Cervantes had died on April 23, 1616, the same day as William Shakespeare.) Here Gondomar was the object of attention for a different reason: His library was hailed as one of the wonders of the age. It included 3,000 titles in Latin, 900 in Italian, 262 in French, and more than 60 in English, including works prohibited by the Spanish Inquisition.

The count died not long after returning to Spain, in 1626. Although he was twice married—first to his niece and then to his cousin—Gondomar’s library did not stay in the family. The majority of his spectacular collection became part of the Spanish Royal Library—but
not
his copy of the First Folio. It went missing.

The censors working for the Inquisition had long lists of books that were to be burned if they were imported into Spain and other lists of books that were to be expurgated of offensive material. Shakespeare’s works appear to have fallen in the latter category. The fact that the Shakespeare Folio was a title of concern for the Inquisition ultimately may help us definitively identify the Gondomar First Folio. A copy of a Second Folio (also from a library in Valladolid) in the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC (where it is housed along with fifty-six other copies of that edition) bears the license of Guillermo Sanchez, the censor for the Holy Office (or Inquisition), on its title page. In this particular Second Folio, the twelve leaves containing
Measure for Measure
were torn out. Inquisitor Sanchez no doubt saw a play about a friar (actually a disguised duke) who proposes marriage (twice) to a novitiate as anti-Catholic. Also, lines mentioning popes, priests, or Catholic doctrine were deleted throughout the folio. On the final page of
Henry VIII
, these lines extolling the infant princess Elizabeth (later to become Elizabeth I,
the Virgin Queen) are blacked out (see photo section), presumably because the censor saw them as an insult to the Virgin Mary:

Four comedies receive a special mark of commendation: At the head of the text of
The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Comedy of Errors, Much Ado about Nothing
, and
The Merchant of Venice
, the Inquisitor has inserted the word “good.”
¹¹
(I don’t know of any other book written in the English language about which the Spanish Inquisition made a positive literary judgment.)