 From Folio to Fantasy
byLev RaphaelLev Raphael ends his summer Shakespeare survey with reviewing a book about one of the world's great literary treasures, Shakespeare’s First Folio. He also surveys books considering the question of Shakespeare’s Catholicism and the autobiographical traces in his work, and offers some final thoughts on Shakespeare Denial. Years ago, attending a conference in London, I was set on fire at a pub. How did it happen? Standing in a crowd not far from the bar, chatting, having just enjoyed a Black and Tan, I didn’t pay close enough attention to the man next to me. He was smoking, and between puffs held his cigarette down at arm’s length by his side. I had my light summer jacket tied around my waist and the end of his cigarette met one of the dangling sleeves, starting a blaze. I stared down in shock at first, but managed to rip the jacket off and stomp out the flames just in time. The arsonist slipped off without an apology, and nobody in the crowd offered help, sympathy or even another drink. I was not a happy tourist, but unexpectedly, there was soon something funny about the incident. That’s because fire became a weird theme of the rest of my week in London. Everywhere I went I seemed to find a plaque which in passing denoted that this particular historic building, like the Banqueting Hall for instance, had burned down at one time or another. “What is it with Brits and fire?” one friend asked. Another joked, “It’s amazing anything is still standing in this city.” I thought of fire and London while reading Paul Collins very engaging The Book of William. It’s a study of the history of Shakespeare’s First Folio, the first collection of his plays published in 1623. But it’s much more than that: it’s a tour book of literary and not-so-literary London, a series of amusing detective stories, a study of Shakespeare’s fame, and a meditation on the place of books in our lives. Fires rage throughout. There are publishers ablaze with the desire to crush their rivals; authors inflamed by visions of riches and renown; actual fires like the 1770 one that destroyed the last recorded copy of Shakespeare’s lost play Cardenio; fires during the Blitz that severely damaged the attic where Samuel Johnson worked on his magisterial edition of Shakespeare’s plays; and of course the Great Fire of 1660 which not only destroyed much of the old city, but devastated London'’ book sellers. It gobbled up thousands of old and rare volumes of all sorts, including many hundreds of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays that now are nothing more than names in a register, like Shakespeare’s sequel to Love's Labour’s Lost. And then there’s the gorgeously silent, invisible fire when the book opens at Sotheby’s on the eve of a spectacular book auction: Practically speaking, this auction room and its contents are on fire. But it’s the slow burn of books, a combustion through yellowing and foxing; one so imperceptible that it warms rather than consumes, like a living presence pressed against your skin. Sotheby’s on preview day is where they glow the warmest, these heirlooms and attic treasures, these cast-off orphans of royal libraries and county manors: they shake off the dust to be cradled in the hands of bibliophiles filing in off New Bond Street. One of those rare books is a First Folio and Collins uses its reverential display and subsequent sale as a springboard to unravel the strange twists and turns of the various Folios of Shakespeare’s works, and the people along the way who hoped to profit by their editions. or become famous, like Alexander Pope. In his case, the edition he produced of Shakespeare’s plays was so sloppy and so riddled with idiosyncratic edits that he was mocked and it failed miserably. Pope’s running battle with another author and editor makes for hilarious reading, as do the fancies and foibles of the various publishers, printers, and profiteers flocking to the flame of Shakespeare’s genius, or at least his growing saleability. There are wonderful stories here of the difficulties of compiling the First Folio and the troubles with later editions as well, stories that make you feel you’re tromping the muddy streets of Jacobean and Georgian London. Collins has a novelist’s gift for detail and a journalist’s eye for the telling quote. It’s a short book, but one to read slowly and savor. Contemporary readers and viewers of Shakespeare will be fascinated by the mistreatment of Shakespeare’s work in the 1600s and 1700s, its performance along with clog dances and pantomimes, its brutal rewriting to fit period fancies. The plays and the man were saved in the late 1700s partly by the great actor David Garrick who led the movement to enthrone Shakespeare as a literary God and Genius (that aspect of the story is very well-covered in James Shapiro’s Contested Will). Garrick mounted a multi-day festival of praise, and Stratford-on-Avon discovered how much money there was to be made on its native son. Money is a theme throughout, as we watch once-neglected Folios skyrocket in value and we travel from a rare book dealer in Tokyo to a vault in Washington, D.C.’s Folger Library which houses a rich collection of First Folios, which over their history have had “a habit of getting lost. Most of them have disappeared in the last four centuries . . . Aside from getting sliced up by dealers, going down in ships, or getting incinerated in vast urban conflagrations, Folios also faced both neglect and theft.” Some have been repaired with leaves from other Folios, some are almost pristine, and one remarkable one was heavily annotated on every one of almost 900 pages by a Jacobean-era scholar. Perhaps most amazing of all is the fact that every known copy of the First Folio has been minutely scanned for differences in stains, inking, binding, etc. and so each massive volume is in effect an individual, as recognizable to experts as any one of us would be to police through our fingerprints. Collins’ book radiates a love of London, a love of Shakespeare and most especially a love of books, those avatars of civilization and culture, those love letters to unborn readers: “Books have tangible presence alongside their ineffable quality of thought: they have a body and soul . . . our books will outlive us." And so will our Kindles and iPads, but will anyone write about them in such a valedictory fashion? * * * Was Shakespeare Catholic? Secret Shakespeare by Richard Wilson explores the subject in great detail and though the audience for this book is primarily academic, I found it fascinating for the ways it made me look at a number of the plays differently. Wilson sees the Elizabethan era of state paranoia playing out in Shakespeare’s recurrent scenes of spying, disguised identity, public demands for loyalty, rebellions real and planned. Heavily researched and annotated, the book makes a sound case for concluding that Shakespeare was “born into a Catholic elite up to its neck in plots against Elizabeth on behalf of Mary Queen of Scots [and] a suicidal Counter-Reformation milieu.” A wide array of relatives, friends and members of his patronage circles were executed for treason, and Shakespeare’s response was, in large part, silence. If you can tolerate the academic prose, there’s lots to relish here. * * * Rene Weis’s Shakespeare Unbound: Decoding a Hidden Life is far more accessible and entertaining. Weis defiantly refuses to separate the plays from the life and doggedly searches through both to forge connections. He roots the book in Stratford-on-Avon and we get a wonderful sense of the town's history, topography and street life, Shakespeare’s neighbors and his lifelong connection with his “countrymen,” as they called themselves. The book is a juicy speculative steak, well marbled with “probably,” “might have been,” “must have,” “might well have,” and “hard not to imagine.” Is it as nourishing a meal as Peter Ackroyd's massive Shakespeare biography? Not quite, but it does do what The Washington Post said, makes “Shakespeare’s serenely beautiful lines buzz with a new life.” It's a perfect book for summer reading. * * * As the Times Literary Supplement recently noted, the “authorship controversy is a sorry story, with its core of undiluted snobbery, its self-generating conspiracy theories, its manipulated evidence, its reductive view of plays and poems as fiendishly difficult crossword puzzles.” But it's weirdly entertaining, sci-fi alternative literary history all the same. So for readers who want a truly in-depth look at what that passes for reasonable discourse and intellectual inquiry among the Shakespeare Deniers, I highly recommend Irvin Leigh Matus’s Shakespeare IN FACT. He meticulously marshals evidence against the craziest accusations and it’s well worth reading for his thoroughness and for the light he sheds on Shakespeare’s time and on the Deniers, whose work is a “gallimaufry of scraps and nonsense.” Mark Twain is supposed to have said that “To a man with a hammer everything looks like a nail.” That perfectly describes the Deniers, some of whom find arcane proof of their conspiracy theories in things like hyphens appearing in Shakespeare’s name on various title pages of various plays. This speaks volumes to them, but it’s as meaningful as a parrot’s squawk. Matus explores at length how hyphens were freely (mis-)used in Elizabethan type-setting as well as how spelling was wildly irregular in this period. Drawing conclusions from such misrepresented “evidence” is twaddle, but it’s the Deniers’ food and drink. When you read their screeds, you begin to feel you're watching what H.G. Wells in another context described as “a magnificent but painful hippopotamus resolved at any cost, even at the cost of its dignity, upon picking up a pea, which has got to the corner of its den.” Along with the nature of Elizabethan and Jacobean printing, Matus looks at the dating of the plays, their writing and performance, the ridiculous quibbling over how Shakespeare’s name was spelled and pronounced, the rise of Bardolatry, and every major “question” bruited by Deniers. In his attempt to keep Fantasy from dethroning Fact, he’s written a dogged but diverting book. And there’s the rub. As Australian radio commentator Mark Colvin has eloquently put it: “There are plenty of theories that never quite die. There seems to be an irreducible (though tiny) number of people who refuse to believe, against all the eyewitness testimony and all the documentation, that millions of Jews died in the Holocaust. Some are convinced that the 1969 Moon Landing was staged on a Hollywood back lot. There are people who say, regardless of the thousands who watched two planes fly into the World Trade Centre towers, that the towers were blown up by the CIA or Mossad. Many thousands of children have gone unvaccinated because their parents believed in an abusive and dishonest British doctor; a surprising number still support him even though he’s been convicted and struck off. The good news is that no-one’s going to die, or be persecuted, or attacked, because of a sensationalist [theory] about Shakespeare. But if a lot of people believe in it, it will be a step back for scholarship, rationalism and a culture in which evidence is judged on its merits, not on how well it fits our favourite theory.” Books mentioned in this column:
Lev Raphael grew up in New York but got over it and has lived half his life in Michigan where he found his partner of twenty-four years, and a certain small fame. He escaped academia in 1988 to write full-time and has never looked back. The author of nineteen books in many genres, and hundreds of reviews, stories and articles, he’s seen his work discussed in journals, books, conference papers, and assigned in college and university classrooms. Which means he’s become homework. Who knew? Lev’s books have been translated into close to a dozen languages, some of which he can’t identify, and he’s done hundreds of readings and talks across the U.S. and Canada, and in France, England, Scotland, Austria, Germany and Israel. His memoir My Germany was published in April 2009 by the University of Wisconsin Press. You can learn more about Lev and his work on his website. Lev has reviewed for the Washington Post, Boston Review, NPR, the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, Jerusalem Report and the Detroit Free Press where he had a mystery column for almost a decade. He also hosted his own public radio book show where he interviewed Salman Rushdie, Erica Jong, and Julian Barnes among many other authors. Whatever the genre, he's always looked for books with a memorable voice and a compelling story to tell. Contact Lev.
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