Worlds Elsewhere (23 page)

In fact, despite a recent spurt of interest from Japanese collectors, many countries have never even seen an original First Folio. There is calculated to be just one copy kept in all of sub-Saharan Africa (in Cape Town, part of the former library of a colonial governor); no copies in East Asia outside Japan; and no copies at all kept in India or South America. As Folger had no doubt intended, his Folios not only beat the Brits – they bolstered American cultural hegemony.

Folger called it simply ‘the most precious book in the world': a statement that reveals much about his addiction, but bears little relation to its actual bibliographical value. He collected Folios because they were there to collect, and because he wanted no one else to own as many as he did. That, apparently, was that.

His death presented the librarians with a conundrum. What on earth to do with the embarrassment of Folios cluttering the Folger vaults? It wasn't until the mid-1940s, long after the library opened, that a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Kansas, Charlton K. Hinman, came up with an answer. Analysing photographs of aerial bombardment while serving in naval intelligence during the second world war, Hinman had developed the idea of constructing a machine that could compare pages from two apparently identical copies of a book. Each book would be placed, open, on either side of a flat bed; by looking through a complex series of lenses, one could superimpose their images to see if there were any differences – a punishing process called ‘collation' that until then had taken hours of toil and eye strain and was prone to error.

I had seen the Hinman Collator in a cubbyhole off the reading room upstairs: an ungainly contraption in Bakelite and sheet steel, it was the size of two hefty fridges, and looked like the mutant offspring of an electron microscope and a battlefield operating table.

Hinman dedicated his life to the task of collating Folios, sniffing out each and every variant – typos, corrections, insertions, editorial alterations – in each and every available copy of the book. He finally published his results in 1963. Five years later, he produced the
Norton Facsimile,
a so-called ‘perfect' facsimile of the text – a composite copy made from no fewer than twenty-nine separate copies, error-free, the distillation of all that was wise and good in Shakespearian bibliography.

There was no doubting Hinman's brilliance, I thought as I headed
back upstairs, and his work had helped scholars see the realities of early-modern printing with fresh clarity. But in one way his ‘ideal' Folio was yet another index of the Folgers' baffling quest. A platonic edition, impossibly perfect, it was also illusory.

Years later, another use for the Hinman Collator was found, when the CIA is believed to have purchased one to assist in forgery cases. Courtesy of the Folgers, the Bard of Avon had done his bit for the American military-industrial complex.

On the title page of his edition of Ralph Waldo Emerson's
Essays
Henry copied out a single sentence that caught his eye: ‘Build therefore your own world.' I found it fascinating that it had been Emerson who had inspired the young Folger. Of all the nineteenth-century Americans who had measured themselves in relation to the English Bard, few had done so with as much solicitude and seriousness as the Sage of Concord.

From almost his first contact with Shakespeare as a bookish, excessively religious New England teenager, Emerson was both bewitched and a touch alarmed: the works were ‘sustained on the sensual', he wrote as a seventeen-year-old, and thus to be ‘regret[ted]'.

It didn't take long for Emerson's pleasure in Shakespeare to become less furtively enjoyable. Within a few years Emerson was of the view that the playwright's ‘taste' was ‘the most exquisite that God ever informed amongst men', and by 1835, now in his thirties, he was writing, ‘I actually shade my eyes as I read for the splendour of the thoughts.' ‘Immeasurable', ‘unapproachable', a ‘fixed star', ‘whole', ‘a genius': there was barely a superlative he didn't use. Emerson's relationship with the man he most often called ‘the Bard' was perhaps the most enduring in a long life, and certainly the most uninhibited.

Emerson had been a founding member of the East Coast transcendentalist movement of the 1830s and 1840s, a headily pantheistic religion that combined the philosophy of the European Romantics, neoplatonism, Swedenborg and American nationalism; and it was as a transcendental writer that he understood Shakespeare. Although taking issue with the Romantic view of Herder, Goethe and their ilk that the poet was a child of nature, Emerson nevertheless contrived to deify Shakespeare, elevating him to a position almost
beyond humankind. His famous essay in
Representative Men
(1850) on ‘Shakespeare, or the Poet' asks, ‘What point of morals, of economy, of philosophy, of religion, of taste, of the conduct of life, has he not settled?' It continues in similarly vatic vein:

Shakespeare was both ‘representative' and utterly unique – and his blood surged through the arteries of every patriotic American.

This last was an issue Emerson returned to repeatedly in later life, attempting to square the circle whereby a poet from the Old World could be a harbinger of the New, itself searching (as Germany had earlier searched) for the ‘representative poet' who could capture all that was good and fresh about the United States.

In the manuscript of his tercentenary speech given at Boston in 1864 Emerson admitted this was a paradox: ‘The Pilgrims came to Plymouth in 1620. The plays of Shakespeare were not published until three years later. Had they been published earlier, our forefathers … might have stayed at home to read them.' Another record of the speech credited Emerson with the line that ‘the climes beyond the solar road probably call this planet not Earth but Shakespeare'. It was this speech – with its teasing suggestion that the publication of the 1623 Folio might have been enough to hold back the founding of America – that Henry Folger had read as a student. Perhaps this was why he had become so fixated on the book.

The puzzle about Emerson's copious references is that so few are to actual texts: plays are mentioned, but rarely addressed in detail; quotations reprinted, but rarely developed. Despite his Bardolatry, Emerson remained somehow uncomfortable with the image of Shakespeare as a working playwright churning out scripts for a hungry audience, preferring to regard him as a ‘Poet' above such trifling mortal concerns.

This opened a much more dangerous speculation – that perhaps Shakespeare wasn't Shakespeare at all. Soon after
Representative Men
was published, Emerson received a letter from a schoolteacher and
failed playwright called Delia Bacon, who had become convinced that works of such noble mien could never have been written for the ignorant rabble who frequented the Elizabethan theatre (‘masses … still unlettered'), and that furthermore Shakespeare of Stratford (a ‘stupid, illiterate, third-rate play-actor') was a fraud. From supposed cryptographic investigation of the texts, Bacon had developed the theory that none other than her historical namesake (though not, in fact, her relation), Francis Bacon, was behind them.

Now in her forties, Delia Bacon was desperate to travel to England to continue her research; Emerson encouraged her. With the support of another eminent man of American letters, Nathaniel Hawthorne, her book,
The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded,
eventually made print in 1857, the grassy-knoll conspiracy of its time. After being discovered in Stratford-upon-Avon, eyeing Shakespeare's tomb purposefully and apparently intending to break in, Bacon herself was eventually confined to an asylum.

Like every subsequent attempt to dispute Shakespeare's authorship, Delia Bacon's ‘philosophy' flew in the face of copious historical data, and ultimately in the face of reason. But what struck me here in the heart of Washington DC was something that had previously passed me by: the authorship controversy was largely an American invention.

Popularised in the nineteenth century by a small clique of East Coast writers, among them Bacon, Hawthorne, Walt Whitman and Emerson (who later claimed that Bacon and Whitman were ‘the sole producers that America has yielded in ten years'), American anxieties about Shakespeare's true identity had planted the seeds of doubt elsewhere. In fact the authorship debate wasn't even just American, it was Ohioan – Bacon had been born in a log cabin near Tallmadge on the Lake Erie plains, the daughter of a failed pioneer; the first man to suggest that ‘Shakespeare' was in fact Christopher Marlowe, one Wilbur G. Ziegler, was an attorney from Fremont, 100 miles west.

Among later sceptics were Henry James and Mark Twain, who devoted a hefty portion of his 1909 semi-autobiographical work,
Is Shakespeare Dead
?, to the certainty that the man had never even written the plays. A suspicious number of Supreme Court justices, most recently John Paul Stevens, had subsequently joined the flock, despite being headquartered a stone's throw from a library whose holdings – had they bothered to explore them – amply proved otherwise.

What drove these American doubters? Was it the yawning gulf
between what they knew (or thought they knew) about Shakespeare's life and his godlike posthumous reputation? Distrust of received nostrums? A transatlantic weakness for lords and ladies? The chance to stick it to the Brits and that dumb little tourist trap called Stratford?

Whatever the answer, it was hard to avoid the sense that while the United States hardly had a monopoly on Shakespeare conspiracy trolls, it had certainly done plenty to feed them.

The happy amateurishness of the Folgers' collecting had unlooked-for consequences. When the scholar Joseph Quincy Adams (a scion of the famous presidential family) took over as director in 1934, he quailed at the Sisyphean task before him: no plan of operation, not even an accurate list of the collections. More than 2,000 Standard Oil packing cases had to be shipped from New York and unpacked, over 90,000 items catalogued and found room for.

Some of the Folgers' bequest was well chosen: in the vaults Blake and I cradled a nineteenth-century edition of
A Midsummer Night's Dream,
adorned in diaphanous watercolours of azure and rose-pink by the symbolist artist Pinckney Marcius-Simons. But other objects had more doubtful significance. Another drawer contained a lumpen bronze of Lady Macbeth by Alice Morgan Wright, a (possibly malevolent) gift from Henry's sister that made Lady M resemble a sex toy that had lain too close to a gas fire.

So gimlet-eyed about books, when it came to other parts of their collection the Folgers allowed Bardolatry to cloud their gaze. An object listed as ‘Queen Elizabeth I's corset' turned out to date from the eighteenth century. There was said to have been a box bound in red morocco containing a few auburn tresses, ostensibly ‘A Hair from the Head of William Shakespeare'. I could find no trace of it in the catalogue. But the library had in the intervening period seen fit to acquire a translation of
Hamlet
into Klingon.

It took years to get everything organised, irritating academics who couldn't wait to go fossicking in the Folgers' gold mine. Someone complained that in all the fuss, this new, world-leading library hadn't thought to buy a single modern dictionary.

Gradually things settled. Following Emily's death in 1936, Adams at last got the library under control, filling it out with material that could
balance and support Shakespeare. His star acquisition was the collection of the British businessman and collector Leicester Harmsworth, a spectacular array of over 8,000 English early printed books, which arrived in 1938. The second director, Louis B. Wright, ramped up the Folger's research and publication activities, transforming the library into a major force in historical and literary scholarship.

But there were risks in placing an institution like this so close to the nerve-centre of American power. Rummaging one afternoon through the typescript of a surprisingly gossipy history compiled by one of the Folger's first curators, Giles E. Dawson, I happened upon his account of what happened at the library during the second world war.

It made for eye-opening reading. After the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Adams and his trustees decided to evacuate the most valuable parts of the collection. Staff worked frantically to pack up the Folios, quartos, early books and manuscripts, having arranged to send them to Amherst College in Massachusetts for the duration. Some 200 cartons were loaded on to a freight car.

The train was dispatched and a team headed separately up to Amherst to meet it. But when they got there, the freight car had disappeared. There had been a fault with one of the axles, which had overheated and nearly caught fire. The librarians began to panic. An update arrived: the fault had been caught, but the car had been taken out of the train in Philadelphia. A gang of railroad workers, blissfully ignorant of what the boxes contained, had left them standing outside with no supervision or security.

The precious cargo eventually arrived in Massachusetts. But it was a chastening thought, to put it mildly, that the Folger had come close to losing its most precious holdings – and not once, but twice on the same day. I checked the catalogue again: it seemed Dawson's account had never been published.

Standing one morning among the federal employees and policy advisors as we queued for our daily doses of Starbucks, I found myself mulling Michael Witmore's suggestion that Shakespeare was a primarily political writer, and thus a natural fit for Washington DC. Was anyone actually staging him here? I scanned the
Washington Post
listings, but the Shakespeare Theatre Company, Washington's leading
troupe, was dark – nothing doing during my visit. A young fringe group called Taffety Punk were about to present a version of the early narrative poem
The Rape of Lucrece,
and they had invited me to visit them in rehearsals, but not for a few days yet. In this most political of towns, this most political of playwrights appeared to be on furlough.