The Shakespeare Thefts (8 page)

One of the unique things about seeing a First Folio: You get a sense of how its previous owners handled it. The heavy wear and tear on the pages of
Romeo and Juliet
found on this particular copy suggests, rather charmingly, that the young Oxford students thumbed the pages of this play about teenage love more often than any other. Which leads me to the chain: apparently aware of the possibility of theft, the librarians secured the volume with a chain; a Bodleian statute from this period dictates that such valuable books be “chained to the desk, at the upper broad window of the library.”
¹

It is not known what happened to the folio after it was bound to the shelf in the Bodleian. It was listed in the library’s 1635 catalog, but oddly it does not appear in the 1674 catalog, which lists only the Shakespeare Third Folio. It is possible that upon the acquisition of the Third Folio, with seven plays not found in the First (six of which, ironically, are no longer considered to be Shakespeare’s work), it may have been sold as superfluous to the Oxford bookseller Richard Davis in 1664, the year in which the Third Folio was published, in a packet of books for £24.
²
As gut wrenching as this may seem, it
was common practice for libraries to get rid of old editions when they acquired new ones, so even First Folios could have been considered out of date and sold off.

In any event, the book was lost to the Bodleian for several centuries.

Then, in January 1905, an undergraduate named Gladwynn Turbutt appeared at the library with a First Folio he had found in his family’s library. (His is a distinguished family; several of the Turbutts served as High Sheriff of Derbyshire, the oldest secular office under the crown.) In a scene that must have been like an episode from
Antiques Roadshow
, it turned out to be the original Bodleian copy. Turbutt was showing the book at the request of his father, William Gladwynn Turbutt, who wanted the binding examined for restoration purposes. The book had obviously been ripped from a chain—there is a prominent gash in the fore-edge of the binding where the clasp for the chain was attached.
³
This certainly makes it seem as if the book was never sold as superfluous but stolen.

The publicity surrounding the discovery had the unintended effect of suggesting that the folio was for sale. It attracted the attention of Henry Clay Folger, who would be president and later chairman of Standard Oil and would go on found the Folger Shakespeare Library. Through the book dealer Henry Sotheran, Folger offered £3,000, twice the going market value for a First
Folio at the time. Turbutt had intended to keep the folio as a family heirloom, but the huge sum of money proved enticing. (At the turn of the century, £3,000 had the purchasing power of roughly $150,000 today.)

Turbutt Sr. decided to sell. But his love of Oxford and (perhaps) the idea of such a quintessentially English treasure leaving the country made him a strategist. Now that he had an offer in hand, he turned around and gave the Bodleian the right of first refusal, offering the book to the library at the same inflated price he knew he could get from Henry Clay Folger:

A request has been made to me, through Mr. Sotheran to sell my 1st Folio Shakespeare for £3000. This figure, of course, far exceeds the value which it would probably command in the open market, apart from its special interest. The … offer somewhat alters the opinion which I had previously formed i.e., of making it a family heirloom, because, as you are aware, death duties will continuously make very heavy charges upon the resources of each generation
.

W.G. Turbutt Oct. 24 1905

The men of Oxford—this was 1905, and women were not admitted until 1920—decided that they were not going to let a treasure like the deposit copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio slip away. An appeal to “the hearts
of all Oxford graduates and old Oxford men” was published in the
London Times:

That after two and a half centuries we should have the extraordinary chance of recovering this volume, and should lose it because a single American can spare more money than all Oxford’s sons or friends who have been helping us, is a bitter prospect. It is the more bitter because the abnormal value put on this copy by our competitor rests on knowledge ultimately derived from our own staff and our own registers. But from so cruel a gibe of fortune this appeal may perhaps yet save us.

Donations poured in, and surely people wondered how such a valuable copy of the First Folio got into the Turbutts’ attic. We still don’t know, but the last solid clue we have about this copy is the supposition that bookseller Richard Davis may have bought it legitimately when it was sold off by the Bodleian, having been superseded by the Shakespeare Third Folio in 1664. We know Davis himself died in 1695, and then the book simply drops off the radar. We can next track it back through the Turbutt family, to the collection of Richard Turbutt, of Ogston Hall, Derbyshire. He was an active collector who lived between 1689 and 1758 and who frequently turned to F. Cogan of London to make his purchases. It was his great-grandson, William G. Turbutt, who instructed his own
son, Gladwynn Turbutt, to take the damaged folio into the Bodleian for examination.

It is gaps in provenance like this that drive First Folio hunters wild.

At the end of the day, the men of Oxford did raise the £3,000 to buy the folio. Subscription forms and letters from donors that were sent during the fundraising drive have been saved. These letters clearly convey the strong nationalistic sentiments surrounding keeping the volume in England and returning it to its rightful place at the Bodleian. One impassioned donor wrote on letterhead from the Rockford Inn, Brendon, North Devon: “It would have been a shame if it had been purchased by an American.”

The volume returned home to the Bodleian on March 31, 1906.
⁴

British nationalism would again rear its head in 1990, when Christie’s offered “the only extant First Folio to have belonged to a Seventeenth-Century English Dramatist” for sale. The copy was originally owned by William Congreve, the great Restoration playwright, who wrote such plays as
Love for Love
and
The Way of the World
. He coined the phrases “music has charms to sooth a savage beast” and “heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.”

When the copy was purchased by the London bookseller Quaritch for Meisei University, the application for
an export license was challenged “on behalf of the nation,” on the grounds that Congreve’s Shakespeare Folio should remain in England as a part of the country’s national heritage. But the challenge was unsuccessful, and the volume became a part of Meisei University Library in August 1991.

This prime Meisei copy has a unique and distinguishing feature: It once belonged to Thomas Killigrew, a loyal follower of King Charles I, and it suffered a bullet wound. The bullet traversed through the first half of the folio leaves, stopping at
Titus Andronicus
. (Punsters might suggest that
Titus
is an impenetrable play.)

This is one of the dozen First Folios housed at the Meisei University Library. The guardians of this extraordinary collection understand its value, and they have built what is essentially a bank vault in which to house it. The security system is phenomenally strong. To see the books, you must first go through heavy doors with bars, until you, too, are in the vault.

Meisei’s safeguarding of its First Folio is the exception. As counterintuitive as it may seem, rare book rooms are almost invariably without much security whatsoever. Sometimes the books are located in a separate space, but there are no bars, there is no bulletproof glass—you go in and say you’d like to see a book, and it is brought to you. The main protection for books at the Bodleian Library was an oath, taken by all users:

I hereby undertake not to remove from the library, nor to mark, deface, or injure in any way, any volume, document or other object belonging to it or in its custody; not to bring into the library, or kindle therein, any fire or flame, and not to smoke in the library; and I promise to obey all rules of the library.

In 2005, one hundred years after Gladwynn Turbutt astonished the world by turning up with a long-lost copy of the First Folio and more than a decade after the cherished Congreve copy had bidden England adieu for Japan, I too acquired a small piece of England’s cultural heritage.

I bought an oil painting of Shakespeare. An auction at Sotheby’s offered four centuries of paintings from an old Scottish family, the Elphinstones, ranging from a portrait of the fourth Lord Elphinstone painted in 1625 to one of the wife of the sixteenth Lord Elphinstone painted in 1913. In England, this kind of event is … well, commonplace and lackluster. The family has largely died out, no distant heirs want old family portraits, they all go up for auction, and they sell for a few thousand pounds each.

At this auction, there was an oil painting, a portrait of a man traditionally thought to be William Shakespeare. It was painted around 1610. It didn’t cost very much because no one pays much attention to these auctions.
I bought it because the Elphinstones had a long history with the Johnstoun family, and there was a Scot named William Johnstoun who had owned a First Folio in the 1600s. That First Folio was sold by Christie’s in June 1980, purchased by the book dealer Quaritch for £80,000 and acquired by Meisei that same year. It now resides in the library’s famous vault.

William Johnstoun annotated the margins of the book heavily. All of the white space is filled with his writing; mainly he liked to sum up the thematic import of passages with pithy sayings. For instance, at the head of the scene of
The Merchant of Venice
in which Antonio explains that he must borrow money from Shylock, Johnstoun writes “spending beyond a man’s means.”

There is also something more remarkable. On the page where Shakespeare’s friend Ben Jonson wrote his appreciative verses about the engraved portrait of Shakespeare, someone has written in the margin “upon the memory of my uncle.”

My uncle
. Meaning that Ben Jonson was related to the Johnstoun family!

So, I thought, here’s William Johnstoun, an early fan of William Shakespeare. He has a connection to Ben Jonson. What are the chances that this family really
did
own a portrait of Shakespeare?

On that day, at that ill-attended auction, I gazed on that painting that no relative would even store in
an attic. I looked at the man in the painting
in the eyes
. And damn, if they didn’t look like Shakespeare’s. For me, simply owning a four-hundred-year-old oil painting seemed pretty amazing. The Shakespeare link was an interesting
possibility
. I told myself I was buying the portrait for its own sake. But honestly, those intelligent eyes… . Nationalism, a chain on a shelf … not even a bullet would have stopped me from making the winning £1,000 bid.

The Sir Thomas Phillipps Copy I will have such revenges on you both, That all the world shall—I will do such things—What they are, yet I know not: but they shall be The terrors of the earth
.

—
Shakespeare’s
King Lear

Book collectors, as a class, are known for their eccentricities. And yet, even among this decidedly quirky group, Sir Thomas Phillipps stands out. In 1798, when Phillipps was all of six years old, he already owned 110 books. He is said to have declared, “I wish to have
one copy of every Book in the World!!!”
¹
—and, true to his word, he spent
his life attempting to fulfill this ambition. When Phillipps walked into a bookshop, he often purchased everything in stock; when he received catalogs from book dealers, he would buy every item listed; he would send agents to book auctions with instructions to secure every lot (much to the dismay of representatives from the British Museum who were trying to build the nascent British Library but were routinely outbid by Phillipps).

It is safe to say that the man was a bibliomaniac.

Sir Thomas was not born into privilege—he was, in fact, the illegitimate son of a textile manufacturer and a barmaid—but he was born at the right time, as his success as a collector owed something to the glut of books and manuscripts that came onto the market owing to the dispersal of the monastic libraries in the wake of the French Revolution.

In the Phillipps estate, Middle Hill, sixteen of the mansion’s twenty-one rooms were used only for the storage of books. Phillipps’s fear of fire was so great that he commissioned a carpenter to craft specially designed coffinlike boxes with drop-down doors on the sides in which to store his collection. By his reasoning, the books could thus easily be carried to safety in an emergency. That the flammability of wooden containers did not concern him is a cause for wonder; in any case, visitors frequently remarked on the spooky atmosphere at Middle Hill, since it was filled with hundreds of these
“coffins,” lined in rows, and stacked four or five high in each room.

Phillipps also feared that beetles (and, to be fair, they infested the estate) would eat his books if another food source were not readily available. To avoid this problem, he scattered firewood throughout the house—a counterintuitive move, one would think, for someone with a phobia about fire—but in his mind this feast of logs would satisfy the wood-eating beetles and they would leave the books alone. One can only imagine what guests thought about this habit.

Of Sir Thomas’s three daughters, his eldest, Henrietta, was the one who worked with him and who, he may have thought, shared his love of books. A characteristic diary entry of Henrietta’s from May 1839 gives a glimpse into their household activities, “Writing [i.e., transcribing manuscripts] in the morning. Papa busy with his Heber manuscripts in the Dining Room.”

Phillipps was delighted to welcome scholars who came to consult his collection, none more so than a young Cambridge undergraduate named James Orchard Halliwell, who first came to his attention in 1841, when Halliwell had dedicated
Reliquae Antiquae
, the first volume in a series entitled
Scraps from Ancient Manuscripts
, to Sir Thomas. Halliwell was only twenty-one years old at the time, but he had already published two dozen works on various literary and antiquarian subjects
and had also built an impressive library of his own, which included 130 manuscripts, mainly concerning mathematics and astrology. Halliwell’s impulsive and reckless book buying while a teenager had saddled him with an almost unbelievable debt load (“through indiscretions at Cambridge, I am in an
immediate
want of £300 or £400 [the equivalent of about $40,000] to pay some urgent bills”
²
he confessed in an application for a loan), a fact that apparently did not sway Sir Thomas from inviting Halliwell to stay with him as a guest at Middle Hill.