Evening Post

Evening Post, Volume CXII, Issue 124, 21 November 1931, Page 12

Evening Post.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 1931,

THE FIRST FOLIO

Writing in April, 1906, Sir Sidney Lee put the British total of First Folios of Shakespeare at 106 and | the American total at 61, and he estimated that, if the strong westward set of the tide continued, "the chances are that at the close of the next quarter of a century the existing ratio of American and British copies, 61 to 106, will be exactly reversed." By 1915 Lee had increased the total to 180, and there was no indication of any change in the tide, for he remarked that "of 14 first-rate copies which were in England in 1902, five have since been sold to American collectors." The westward drift was just as remarkable for the quality as for the quantity of the treasures that were carried away. Sir Sidney Lee lived to see what he had described as "on the whole the finest and the cleanest" of extant copies—the "Daniel" or "Burdett-Coutts" copy—added to the list.

The purchaser was Mr. Henry C. Folger, of New York, and the particulars of his magnificent bequest which were supplied by our New York correspondent a fortnight ago suggest that by April last, which marked the close of the twenty-five years covered by Lee's prophecy, the reversal which he foretold must have been fully achieved.

There are 70,000 volumes by and about Shakespeare and the Elizabethans in the Folger collection, and the library is built to accommodate twice that number. Most precious are the very early editions. Of* the first folio, published in 1G23, the library owns 79 of the 200 known existing copies. One of these is the perfectlypreserved copy, formerly owned by the Baroness Burdett-Coutts, for which. Queen Victoria gave her a special casket.

Ten years ago Mr. Folger's Shakespeare library of 20,000 volumes was considered to be the finest in the United States. Before his death it had increased to 70.000 volumes, and now, with a princely endowment attached, it belongs to the nation, fn 1907 Mr. Folger was congratulated by Sir Sidney Lee on the possession of no fewer than eight copies of the First Folio—"a record number for any private collector." Year by year he continued to beat his own record, the greatest single achievement being the purchase for £8600 in 1922. of the perfect copy already mentioned, and to-day, according to our correspondent's report, the number is 79 out of a total of 200 existing copies.

Before he had finished, Mr. Folger must have come very near to beating the British total off his own bat. The proportion is almost 40 per cent, of the extant copies, or possibly it is a full 40 per cent., for in all that Miss Henrietta C. Bartlelt said in 1922 was that "nearly 200 survive," and Sir Edmund Chambers, writing last year, said no more than that Sir Sidney Lee. had "located over 180 extant examples of the First Folio." At 40 per cent. Mr. Folger's collection would represent just the same proportion of 200 surviving copies that these copies represent of the original edition of 500. But all the long-accepted statistics —the 500 copies, the price of £1 for the Folio, and the price of 6d for a Quarto —are more or less conjectural. Dr. W. W. Greg has pointed out that an edition of less than 1000 copies would hardly have reimbursed the publishers unless the Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery paid very liberally for the flattery of the dedication, and without any knowledge of the comparative figures an amateur may hazard the suggestion that the bigger the edition the less the wonder of so large a survival. Some interesting particulars of the extant decorations of the memorial library in Washington, for the building of which Mr. Folger bequeathed 2,000,000 dollars, were supplied by our correspondent.

Level -with the street, so that they may arrest tho attention of the passerby, are nino bas-reliefs, each illustrating a Shakespearian play._ Above the long, silver-grilled, modornisticallydesigned windows are inscriptions from Samuel Johnson and Shakespeare's two fellow-players, John Heminge and Henry Condell, who published the first folio edition of his plays.

Either in prose or in verse it could not have been difficult to find an appropriate inscription in Johnson, but it is particularly pleasing to know that two much smaller men whose names will probably be unknown to ihe average passerby in Washington have also been drawn upon. Even tlte Shakespeare-reading world knows little of Heminge and Condell be- ; cause their preface to the first collected edition of the plays has disappeared as completely as the Translator's Preface has disappeared from [the Authorised Version of the English Bible. And, our scholars, who [know all that there is to know about it, and have guessed a good deal more, are mostly more concerned to show what an unholy mess these actor-editors have made of a job for which they had few qualifications beyond loyalty to their dead friend and fellow-worker than to spare a single word of gratitude for an in comparable service lo literature. Heminge and Condell's conception of their task as they express it in their dedication is certainly of a kind to disarm pedantry.

"We hano but collected them (the plays), they write, and done an office lo tho dead, to procure his Orphanes, Guardians; without ambition cither oi; sfilt'o-proflt, or tame; oiicly lo koepc the nipmoiy of so worthy ;i J''iicud, & iJ.'Vllnw al'mo, ns was our Shakespeare,

by humble offer of his p'layt's, to your most noble patronage.

But it is by tin: freer talk uf the address "To the Great Variety of Readers," with its sweeping attack on the Quarto editions to which they were really much indebted, and its apparent claim to a hundred per cent, authentic text, that the editors of the First Folio have attracted the heavy metal of the modern critic.

It had beue a thing, wo confesse, worthio to hauc beue wished, that the Author himselfe had liu'd to hauo sot forth, and overseen his owno writings; But, sinco it hath bin ordain'd otherwise, and he by death departed from that right, wo pray you do not cnvio his Friends, the office of their care, and paine, to hauo collected & publish'd them; and so to hauo publish'd them, as where (before) you were abus'd with diuersc stoJne, and surreptitious copies, maimed, and deformed by the frauds and stealths of iniurious impostors, that expos'd them: cuen those, arc now offer'd to your view curd, and perfect of their Hnibes; and all the rest, absoluto in their numbers, as he concerned them. Who, as he was a happie imitator of Nature-, was a. most gentlo exprcsser of it. His mind and hand went together: And what he thought, he vttered with that easinesse, that wee hane scarce received from him a blot in. his papers.

But the fate of the men who fathered the "Orphanes" which the poet himself had apparently deserted in his lifetime has not been in accordance with this prayer of theirs or with their deserts. The ingratitude of posterity is well described by Mr. Crompton Rhodes. Referring to a contemporary tribute, he writes:—

After this quaint tribute came a century of silence, then two centuries of disparagement and abuse, varied by ;i little mild patronage. For generations men of letters have answered their petition by envying the friends of Shakespeare their office, by denying their care and pain, by charging his pious fellows with ambition of self-pro-fit and fame. Only one of their wishes has been respected,l the faults have been all theirs, the reputation all Shakespeare Js.

Professor Raleigh sums up as follows the nature of the service thus rendered to the world by the two men who, as he points out, were with Burbage the only professional friends mentioned by Shakespeare in his will:

The affectionate bequest to them in the will, taken in connection with their own statements in the preface to the Folio of 1623, gives them high authority as editors; even though their work is deformed, in parts, by seditious blunders. . . There is no escape from the .Polio: for twenty of the plays it is our sole authority; for most of the remainder it is the best authority that we shall ever know.

And among the twenty plays that Heminge and Condell thus saved from the rubbish heap were "Twelfth Night," "Julius Caesar," "Antony and Cleopatra," "The Tempest," and "Macbeth." For such a service these "pious fellows" of Shakespeare deserve something better than the indifference of the world and the scorn of the critics.