Shakespeare’s Renowned First Folio Arrives at College Museum

Just as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men playing company once toured England over 400 years ago to perform the plays of William Shakespeare, the First Folios of the man regarded as the most influential writer of the English language are about to embark on a grand tour of their own. As part of this yearlong, nation-wide tour, one of them will pause for display at the Middlebury College Museum of Art from Feb. 2 to 28 in the exhibit “First Folio! The Book that Gave us Shakespeare, on Tour from the Folger Shakespeare Library.”

Shakespeare’s First Folio, published in 1623 – seven years after his death – is, to our knowledge, the first book ever to record the complete collection of his plays. Of the 750 editions published, an estimated 233 survive. 82 of these are held in a special vault at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C., according to the Folger website. It is the largest collection of First Folios in the world.

This year, to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, the Folger Library is taking 18 of its editions out of the vault for public viewing. A copy will pass through each of the 50 states of the US, as well as Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico. Middlebury College will serve as the only host site in Vermont.

While the application process to be a host site involved countless people collaborating over the course of a year — notably, community partners, the Ilsley Library, the Town Hall Theater and the Vermont Humanities Council — two figures on campus were particularly involved: Professor of English and American Literatures Timothy Billings, who wrote the grant application, and the Director of Special Collections, Rebekah Irwin, who coordinated logistical and event planning.

Billings admits to being “in love with Shakespeare for over 40 years.” His admiration began from a viewing of Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, which he saw with his mother at the age of six or seven. Growing up, his parents regularly took him to Shakespeare productions, often at the Ashland Shakespeare Festival at the Angus Bowmer Theater in Seattle, which Billings’s architect father helped design. Billings went on to study Shakespeare during and after college, and got the rare chance to see Folger’s collection of First Folios during a summer fellowship.

“There’s a special vault inside the vault — which is where the very, very precious things are held,” Billings said. “Most researchers never get to see that. They lay them on their sides because setting them upright puts pressure on the bindings, so the safest way is to have them all horizontal on each shelf. You see all these bindings, all different, some of them are gorgeous and ornate, some of them are really just dark and simple. All 82 of them. It’s a stunning thing to see.”

Each First Folio is unique, both in its binding and its interior, due to the printing and publishing practices of the time each was made. Billings explained that in Shakespeare’s time vendors sold books as interiors; the customer would buy the pages of one or several texts sewn together and take them to a binder, who would then create a cover for the pages, as simple or ornate as the customer could afford. Because of the stop-press correction process used by printers at the time, each Folio contains pages with features exclusive to that version.

“And so the particular one that we get has its own history and carries with it the lives — in this very tangential way, this kind of aura of the lives — it has touched along the way,” Billings said.

Irwin shared that paper produced for the Folios further distinguishes the editions and their histories. “Paper during that time and the early renaissance was made using rags. Rag pickers was a medieval term for the very poor members of a social class who would gather rags and those rags would be made into paper. So the paper from books that are really old is actually quite beautiful and in very good condition compared to the paper that was made, let’s say, in the 1870s. The paper that the First Folio’s made out of is beautiful paper and in wonderful shape,” said Irwin.

While each Folio boasts its own physical features and personal history, all of them together have contributed to the legacy of Shakespeare. Each Folio contains 36 plays. Of those, 18, including Julius Caesar, Twelfth Night and even Macbeth had never been formally recorded and would have been lost had they not been printed in the Folios. The fact that the Folios were published at all, and preserved so well, has also played a role in forming Shakespeare’s place as an emblem of Western culture.

And then there is the unspoken, obvious reason why the Folios are so valuable: the stories inside are really, really good. “Even when I re-read Shakespeare I’m continually taken aback and even surprised at how good some parts are,” Billings said. “Just when I’m starting to feel blasé with overfamiliarity something smacks me, and I think, ‘This is just so damn good!’”

Because of the rarity and value of these Folios, security and safety are major priorities during this tour. Not even Irwin, who has coordinated so much of the project, knows how the book is getting to Middlebury or where it is coming from. She asked. They haven’t told her. According to Irwin, it’s coming in a sensitive, specially made box, equipped with temperature, light and humidity controls.

Once on campus, the Folio will remain in the box for about 12 hours before being handled. The museum will maintain proper temperature and light conditions, as well as humidity levels right at 50 percent, ideal for book preservation.

“Paper is like skin,” Irwin said. “Our conservation manager will often say that all of our books are organic, and they’re dying, rotting, like anything else. And so we just do everything that we can to slow the decay process. With this special book, we have to not just slow the process, but try to get as close to stopping it as we can.”

She added, “For every day that a book is kept in bad conditions, it reduces the life cycle by years. There have been scientific equations that can show that the paper will degrade faster for every temperature degree below its ideal set-point.”

The exhibit taking place at the Museum will include multi-panel displays provided by the Folger Library, in addition to digital content and activities. “The scholars at the Folger are first rate, so the material we’re getting from them is going to be superb, I have no doubt,” Billings said.

The College has collaborated with the greater Vermont community to provide as much free programming to as much of the public as possible surrounding the Folio, including visiting and resident speakers, workshops, theater performances, film screenings, a folio festival featuring live Renaissance music and more.

While none of us will ever know what it was like to hear Hamlet’s famous “to be or not to be” soliloquy from the mouth of Richard Burbage, who played him in the work’s original productions on the Elizabethan stage, the upcoming exhibit will give college students and Vermonters alike the rare chance to read the words of that very speech on a page almost as old as Burbage himself. It’s the closest thing to time travel we’ve got.