This Secret Garden by Justin Cartwright

Author:Justin Cartwright
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2008-11-16T05:00:00+00:00

From his tower room, Chris Fletcher leads me to the New Bodleian across Broad Street. Clive Hurst is waiting in a fine room, one of the few untouched rooms of the New Bodleian. The exterior may look like a municipal swimming bath, but in here there is a kind of confident solidity, characteristic of inter-war architecture. Hurst is the keeper of Oxford’s Shakespeare First Folio, and Head of Rare Books. There are still two hundred and forty-seven First Folios of the original run of seven hundred and fifty, so this is far from the rarest manuscript in the world. But it can be shown to be the oldest still in its original binding. Bindings, I am learning, are the palaeontology of archivists. First Folios may not be rare, but they have been subject to a powerful and quasi-religious movement of what has been called ‘bardolatory’. The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC has seventy-nine copies; Henry Clay Folger, its founder, established his museum in 1930 right at the centre of Washington life, as if to suggest a sort of national spiritual link with the Bard. He had been deeply affected in the middle of the nineteenth century by a lecture given on the Bard at Amherst, where he was a student, by Emerson.

The First Folio was collected by Shakespeare’s actor colleagues John Hemminge and Henry Condell in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death: thirty-six plays in all, eighteen of which had never been published before. Some were in Shakespeare’s own hand. In their preface Hemminge and Condell regret that Shakespeare is not alive to help them: the plays came from many kinds of sources, and in very different states of accuracy; some were based on actors’ memories, which are regarded as ‘bad quartos’; there are author’s early drafts for actors – ‘foul papers’ – and fair but unreliable copies from professional scribes, commissioned by the editors. The First Folio runs to over seven hundred pages.

Clive Hurst opens the tooled box that contains Oxford’s First Folio. Mr WILLIAM SHAKEPEARES COMEDIES, HISTORIES, & TRAGEDIES. Publifhed according to the True Originall Copies is there, decorated with Martin Droeshut’s famous, if rather odd, engraving. Shakespeare looks faintly alarmed.

Why, I ask, is it special? Clive Hurst explains that it was received in 1623 by the Bodleian under the terms of their agreement with the Stationer’s Company in loose sheets. It was bound in 1624 by William Wildgoose and entered into the library’s catalogue. It was chained in Arts End until about 1664, when it was replaced by a copy of the Third Folio, which contained another twelve plays. It was sold, the records suggest, in a group of superfluous books to Richard Davis, Oxford bookseller, for £24. In 1905 Gladwynn Turbutt, a Magdalen man, came to Oxford with a First Folio, wanting to know what to do with it. Because of the brown calf binding and the waste paper that lines the binding, identical to other paper Wildgoose used at the time, and because of

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