The book of good acts - Coriolanus 5.2.20
Take the escalator to the second floor of Auckland Central Library, turn left and you’ll probably walk right past one of the world’s most valuable and important books. Displayed inconspicuously in a glass case is a copy of the 1623 Shakespeare First Folio, containing pretty much all his plays. Shakespeare was seven years dead when Mr William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. Published according to the True Originall Copies. “Folio” refers to the size of the book, roughly 31cm x 21cm.
Its presence here raises questions about matters that might seem as far from Shakespeare as the book is from its place and time of origin – about how we treat artefacts, how we assign value to culture, a possibly dark imperialist purpose, the role of libraries, and indeed whether a public institution should own an item worth up to $16 million when so many people – at least half of those spoken to in the course of writing this – don’t even know it’s there.
The Auckland library’s folio was the gift in 1894 of former governor and prime minister Sir George Grey, who paid £85 for his copy.
The initial project was driven by John Heminges and Henry Condell, two actors from Shakespeare’s company who would have known the writer and appeared in his plays. We have no Shakespeare manuscripts of any kind. And at that time, plays were seldom published.
That this occurred in Shakespeare’s case is testament not just to the esteem in which his work was held, but also to its perceived commercial potential. The close connection between poetry and profit was important to Shakespeare, a famously shrewd businessman who invested energetically and died wealthy.
It took the actors and the publishing team two years to complete the project. Copyright law was as straightforward, and as entertaining for the non-specialist, then as it is now. The publishers had to buy back copyrights to individual plays from at least eight people who had bought them previously.
One play that is in the book – Troilus and Cressida – is not listed on the contents page, quite probably because the owner of its copyright was holding out and it didn’t become available until the last minute, after several copies of the book had been printed.
Talk about drama.
All this is important because, as University of Auckland Emeritus Professor Mac Jackson says, “Shakespeare is the greatest writer in English. And this includes pretty well all his plays.”
Under the circumstances, Heminges, Condell and the others involved did a remarkable job of getting it right. A couple of co-written plays have been added to the canon since, but, in general, this book has reliable texts of everything we know that Shakespeare wrote for the stage.
More remarkably, in one of the great close shaves of literary history, 18 of his 37 plays are not recorded anywhere else. Without this book, we wouldn’t know the half of it.
Such fan favourites as Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Twelfth Night and The Tempest would be unknown to us.
The First Folio has many remarkable aspects, but the most discussed is its dollar value. At publication, it was a hefty but not extortionate 15 shillings, or “two months’ wages for an ordinary skilled worker”, according to the Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s First Folio.
Prices rose relatively sedately, until the 19th century, when a First Folio mania drove its price to giddy heights.
As rare books go, it is not particularly hard to come by. About 750 copies were printed, and there are believed to be 235 in existence. Currently, you can walk into the store of London rare book dealer Peter Harrington and pick up a copy for $12 million.
Last month, the Auckland library copy attracted a visitor from England – Royal Shakespeare Company artistic director emeritus Greg Doran, who is on a British Council-sponsored mission to view every First Folio in the world.
Emma Smith, professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of Oxford, explains the First Folio’s significance to history: “That 1623 book is the moment when Shakespeare’s plays properly get handed over to a new and unconnected set of readers. Before that, they’ve been performed for people living in that same world with that same sort of historical sense. People who could have met him or bumped into him. For me, 1623 marks the moment when it’s up to us now, whether we make anything of these works or not.”
Put forth thy hand. Reach at the glorious gold - Henry VI Part 2 1.2.11
One of the most unusual and, for want of a better word, Kiwi qualities of the Auckland First Folio is just how accessible it is. One might reasonably assume that such a valuable item would be kept under Fort Knox-type security provisions, brought out like the Holy Grail on special days and kept well away from the dirty hands of the great unwashed and unlettered the rest of the time.
“It’s one of the really striking and wonderful things about that New Zealand copy that it’s one of the most accessible, to the public who own it, of all the copies anywhere in the world,” says Smith, who got her hands on it when she visited in 2014.
In some libraries, you may use your own eyes to look at the book, but a professional’s hands will turn the pages for you. Smith sees the accessibility as more evidence of the book’s importance: “Sometimes we say, ‘It’s too important for you to be able to look at.’ If it’s so important that we can’t have a look at it, how important can that be?”
In Auckland, anyone who wants to is welcome to ask to see the book, with its stamp saying “Free public library Auckland. Sir George Grey Collection” scattered throughout. “If your drive to look at this item is strong enough, then you can request it,” says Jane Wild, principal curator of rare books. “We don’t have a problem making that available. But we do have a responsibility to make sure that books don’t get damaged. We have a level of supervision and a level of care. So, you’d have to have clean hands, you’d have to be monitored.”
For a molecular-level examination, at your own speed, the library has recently completed digitising all the book’s pages so they can easily be accessed online.
Wild takes pride in public interest in the book. “The 400-year celebration is putting a bit of a spotlight on it. There’s not many books that people would want to be photographed with. This is the first time we’ve had a display case that’s got security and environmental controls, which means rare books can be displayed beyond the Reading Room.”
Our darker purpose - King Lear 1.1.18
It’s all thanks to the vision and part of the difficult legacy of connoisseur and colonist Grey, who left his magnificent library to the city of Auckland.
The gift came with – and maintains – a democratic kaupapa. “A lot of scholars in the 19th century thought Grey was wrongheaded to give an important library to this end of the world – the illiterate, uneducated peasants over here,” says Wild. “We’ve held on to the kind of bequest that Grey deliberately gave to Auckland and done our best to make sure that it is an accessible library. You don’t need to show a letter from a professor or an institution to get access.”
This act of generosity has recently been tainted with accusations focused on it as an act of cultural imperialism.
As Smith writes in Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book, “In his peroration [at a well-attended public meeting] on the new library, Grey expressed his immediate aim ‘to flood the Pacific with learning, and to dominate with a just and righteous supremacy – not of tyranny but of intellect’. The cornerstone, inevitably, of this ambitious cultural and ideological and colonial project, was a Shakespeare First Folio.”
In a recent episode of the excellent Shakespeare Unlimited podcast, Chris Laoutaris, author of the recently published Shakespeare’s Book: The Story Behind the First Folio and the Making of Shakespeare, put the charge against Grey in extreme form.
The gift, he says, was “an apparent act of philanthropy insidiously disguis[ing] darker aims because he was absolutely intent … on almost obliterating local cultures and replacing them with what he saw as the pinnacle of culture, which was British culture.”
Taihoa, e hoa.
What Laoutaris sadly fails to see is the rich ambivalence of Grey’s gift. It would be regrettable if his view were to become widely established, based as it is on a misunderstanding of Grey, who, for all his considerable crimes, respected Māori culture. There are plenty of colonial sticks with which to beat the governor without resorting to charges of misusing Shakespeare.
Furthermore, if his aim was to use Shakespeare to repress Māori culture, he seems to have failed miserably.
As Jackson observes, “Māori really have appropriated Shakespeare, so the appropriation doesn’t just go the one way. Māori have benefited enormously and have done some wonderful things. The Māori Merchant of Venice, for instance, was fantastic. Doing Troilus and Cressida [in te reo] at the Globe in London. It’s natural a colonial governor would want to bring to New Zealand the monuments of Western civilisation. Grey also collected a tremendous amount of Māori and Polynesian material. It wasn’t trying to supplant Māori culture. It was trying to enrich the culture of the colony where he was the governor.”
In fact, Māori have long revered the playwright and the Shakespeare-Māori nexus is a remarkable example of bicultural cross-pollination.
Actor and activist Rawiri Paratene has been a committed Shakespearean since he saw his first play, Hamlet, as a teenager and decided on the spot he wanted to be an actor. “I could understand everything and it was beautiful. It’s a beautiful play,” says Paratene, who has described Shakespeare as the second-biggest influence in his life “after my grandfather and grandmother”.
What is it about Shakespeare that makes for such a good fit with Māori culture? “It’s the universality,” says Paratene. “He’s a bloody genius. And he knows about the world. All the characters are flawed – and that’s great. They’re all real people – even the minor ones.”
He was part of the Globe to Globe tour that travelled to nearly 200 countries performing Hamlet from 2014 to 2016. And he was the driving force behind the all-Māori, te reo version of Troilus and Cressida that was performed as part of the World Shakespeare Festival that accompanied the London Olympics in 2012. This was the colonised taking their taonga back to the imperial centre in triumph. In Paratene’s view, the First Folio should be treated with all the respect such a gift deserves.
We can afford no more at such a price - Love’s Labour’s Lost 5.2.223
It may be vulgar and miss the cultural point, but at some stage in any discussion of the First Folio, the question of the prices it gets comes up. It’s just so much money. In October 2020, financially strapped Mills College in California sold its copy and raised NZ$16 million. Even people who don’t much care for Shakespeare like the sound of $16 million.
Normally, the value of a rare book resides in just that: its rarity. But the First Folio’s value lies in its contents and its status as the pinnacle of English literature. Smith is keenly aware of the mismatch between the book’s price and traditional sources of value, and the paradox inherent in it all.
“It’s a bit like whether the ubiquity of images of the Mona Lisa make the original more or less valuable,” she says. “They probably make it more valuable, because it’s more recognisable, but they also give it a sort of slightly kitsch quality, even the real one. So, there is something odd about the mismatch between the cheap availability of the contents of this book and the enormous price.
“The record price of US$10 million was during Covid. I was looking at that auction thinking, ‘Surely we’ve got such a lot to worry about, this is not going to be a big thing.’ And I suppose it was inevitable, looking back, that it would make a huge load of money, because it seems a reliable gold-standard kind of investment in troubled times, which is very, very strange.”
Auckland’s libraries are not exactly rolling in money – some branches are closed for earthquake and other safety reasons and show no sign of reopening soon. Is it right to hold on to a book that many don’t even know is there when budgets are so tight?
After all, it’s not like a valuable painting in a gallery, which people can revisit to find new kinds of enjoyment on each viewing. The book does not reveal layer upon layer of significance each time you gaze upon it.
The contents themselves are widely available in innumerable editions. Even this particular First Folio’s contents are now available online, page by page, and scribble by scribble.
It is a lot of money tied up in one book. Smith acknowledges the issues are not straightforward: “That makes it really difficult – to think you’re sitting on an asset of some millions of dollars, while kids can’t get to read books or whatever.”
Auckland is unique: “There are very few copies now in public libraries, so there doesn’t tend to be that sharp trade-off [between value and how money could be used]. But it’s certainly true that lots of educational institutions have thought, ‘Is this our priority?’
“Mills College was pretty much going bust [and, in fact, did go bust]. If you’re a public institution, which is making difficult budget decisions and priority decisions, this looks like a very expensive hobby. And you could certainly make the case that money could be better spent on some other aspect of that library’s work. It’s less easy to make that case in New Zealand, because it’s the only copy in the country, so it’s a more important piece of heritage.”
Auckland Council expenditure control and procurement committee chair Maurice Williamson is charged with looking at the long-term plan that will decide future budgets. He is at pains to point out he was not involved in this year’s budget arguments.
He was also not aware the city-owned such a valuable book. “Wow,” was his response to the news.
As to the best way to deal with such an item, he said, “I would have thought that that’s a discussion people will want to have. Do we need to own an enormously valuable asset, and does it need to be kept in public ownership? The fact that there may be a small number of people go in and look at it, when they can look at it on a video screen or whatever, is that worth some of the other services the library might have to cut?
“It’s a very difficult question. I’d be foolish to think of a judgment call right now, but someone’s going to have to make that at some point.”
There’s no question in the mind of Richard Hills, chair of the council’s planning, environment and parks committee, which is responsible for libraries.
“I would have to look at the legal side of things around keeping it there. But my understanding is that the bequest should always be kept for the people of Auckland. I personally wouldn’t support any sort of attempt to sell on or get rid of those sorts of collections. When we come to things like closures or upgrades of libraries, that needs to be budgeted separately and is budgeted through our renewals programmes.”
The First Folio is safe for now. “I think, maybe that stamping was a really good thing that we did,” says Jane Wild. “Because we’ve made ours uniquely ‘Auckland free public library’ all the way through it. It was gifted to the people of Auckland. Ours wasn’t a top copy when [Grey] bought it, but I can’t see us ever testing [its price]. Because it’s part of the Auckland library bequest and we would defend that. Staunchly.”
Of course, if someone were to give the Auckland library $16 million today, they probably wouldn’t spend it on a First Folio at Peter Harrington booksellers. But then, the book didn’t cost the city a penny. To Rawiri Paratene, as it is a taonga gifted to the people of Auckland, it should not be disposed of. But he is also aware that Shakespeare was an astute businessman, and he thinks he knows what the playwright would do if he had a book worth that much: “He’d sell it.”
Faults that are rich are fair -Timon of Athens 1.2.12
The Auckland First Folio is not a pristine item. In fact, most existing copies are distinguished by marks and scars that once would have been seen as faults. Notes to self, children’s drawings, favourite bits noted, approving commentaries, scribbled handwriting practice – all these are now seen as valuable aspects of the books’ history, making each a unique item.
For one thing, such “damage” shows that these books have been read. “My heart drops when I see a completely clean Folio that no one seems to have ever had a look at,” says Professor Emma Smith of the University of Oxford. “Those early marks of readers are really fascinating, because it gives us a sense of what this book’s doing before it becomes famous and valuable.”
It’s thanks to his annotations, says Auckland Central Library’s Jane Wild, that we know that “Charles Grylls in Cornwall owned it in 1676 or so. That’s the earliest ownership proof. And it looks like someone called Anne Hearle, who seems to be a descendant of his, owned it a little bit later. She did a lot of practice writing in it. And maybe Charles Grylls was the guy who wrote, ‘I’ve read it already’, in Latin against a lot of the titles.”
Also, although Shakespeare was good at what he did, the Folio has errors and readers felt comfortable taking up their pens and correcting their copies when they spotted typos. Smith notes, as one of many instances, that where the Auckland book’s Taming of the Shrew has “Mo sir”, someone has written in “No Sir”.
Then as now, when people struggled with Shakespeare’s vocabulary, they put in a bit of effort to work out unfamiliar words. For instance, the unusual word “unaneled” in the Folio’s Hamlet is explained by a note in the margin as “unanointed”. Massey University’s Hannah August lists this and other corrections on the blog Heritage et AL.
As well as individuals’ reading habits, the book’s battle scars can tell us about library practices of the past. The library stamps were not the misstep of an over-enthusiastic librarian, but a sensible precaution to discourage thieves. It was effectively the security technology of its time. “We don’t stamp any more,” says Wild.