Read the full story from the summer 2011 issue of the Folger Magazine

Surely It Hasn’t Been
Folger Director Gail Paster Dishes on a Memorable Tenure
Highlights from a marvelous, thoughtful, and
occasionally hilarious discussion between Folger
Director Gail Paster and board member David
Gardner during Member Appreciation Weekend,
in the words of a scholar-leader who just “wanted
to pay the Folger back for all it’s given to me.”
2003
The Folger marks the 400th anniversary of the
death of Elizabeth I with library-wide programs,
including its first exhibition audio tour, and a
touring panel display.
Reconstruction and repair of the underground vault
begins. During the eighteen-month project, portions
of the collection are moved and reshelved seven
times but the Folger never closes.
The first four of eight Greg Wyatt sculptures of
Shakespeare’s plays, half-size replicas of works
created for a Stratford project, are installed in the
Elizabethan Garden.
2002
Gail Kern Paster
named director, the
fifth in the Folger’s
seventy-year history.
2004
World premiere of Melissa Arctic,
a play by Craig Wright, inspired by
The Winter’s Tale.
Creation of Mellon Foundation
Fellowship Endowment, permanently
endowing a one-year fellowship at
the Folger. A second fellowship
endowment is added in 2007.
You can’t know an institution until you sit in the
director’s chair and really try to be its steward.
Claire Duggan
Apparently, Everybody Gets
“Imposter Syndrome”
I thought that because I had had such
a long and deep relationship with the
Folger—first as a graduate student writing
my dissertation here, then as an
assistant and associate professor at GW
using the Folger as my research base, my
intellectual home, and then coming on
board to edit the Quarterly—that really
there was very little left to know. Boy, was
I wrong! You can’t know an institution
until you sit in the director’s chair and
really try to be its steward. I sat in my beautiful office and
I thought: This office is magnificent and I don’t belong here.
I sort of felt like “bring your daughter to work day.” I was awed
and humbled and thrilled.
One of the first things that happened to
me was that then-Chief of Security, King
Johnson, and Melody Fetske, our director of
finance and administration, said, “Okay, we’re
going to take you on a tour of this building,
the real tour of the Folger Shakespeare
Library.” You have not been on a tour of the
Folger until you have seen the air handlers,
until you have seen the mechanical room,
until you have walked above the Great Hall—
there’s a catwalk area above the Great Hall.
There are doors that lead to doors. And so they took me on this
tour and I went home and had a total panic attack: “Oh my
God, oh my God, the mechanical room! The mechanical room!
Am I going to have a quiz?” I just thought, I can’t do this!
But actually, I haven’t been back to the air handlers since.
Passion Helps... But a Thick Skin Is Essential
I certainly didn’t understand what it might be like to be responsible
for things like fundraising. A wonderful friend said: “Gail,
fundraising is not that hard. You need two things. You need a
passion and you need the ability to have somebody say no to
you and for you to be undaunted and say, May I come back?”
FOLGER MAGAZINE 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

Nine Years Already ...
By GARLAND SCOTT
He said, “You have the passion, just
develop the thick skin and you’ll be
fine.” That was great advice.
The Jangliness of Command
When you’re an English professor,
you know where you’re going to be
at 9:30 Tuesday morning because
you’re going to be teaching your
class. You have responsibility for
your students and for the content
of your lectures, there’s committee
service and there’s seeing students
outside of class. You are pretty much a solo practitioner. So
it took some getting used to the rhythm of administration,
which I think is a fifteen-minute interval. You can expect
to be interrupted every fifteen minutes and you just sort of
get used to the jangliness of that rhythm. And now in fact
when I don’t get interrupted every fifteen minutes I think:
Okay, what’s the matter? Is something going wrong here?
Claire Duggan
Welcome to the Folger, Mind the Puddle
What I didn’t know and wouldn’t know for a month, until
we developed water in the rare book vault, was that the
Folger really needed very serious infrastructure renovation.
I said to Melody Fetske, “Okay, I want to know everything
that this building needs. I want to give it to the Folger
Board and then we will decide what to do about it.” We
handed the board a ten-page list of things that needed work
and we set ourselves the goal—between that point, which
was the fall of 2002, and our anniversary year of 2007—of
getting it done, and we did. I wanted the building to shine
for the 75th anniversary and I think it really did. Of course,
keeping it shining is a big problem.
I did manage to get some amazingly generous federal
support to help us when we had our leaks. I went to this
wonderful Senator and said, “We have a world treasure
here and we’re leaking!” I saw the Senator a couple of years
after he’d really helped us and he said: “Madame Director, I
haven’t seen you in a while. You must not have any leaks!”
2005
Dedication of the Babette
Craven Art Vault, housing
illustrations, photographs,
porcelains, theatrical
memorabilia, and small works
of art.
Charles, prince of Wales, and
his wife Camilla, duchess
of Cornwall, visit the Folger,
attending a workshop with
local public school children.
The Folger Library Committee of the Amherst Board of Trustees becomes the
Folger Board of Governors on July 1, a significant change in governance.
Lloyd Wolf
2007
The Folger Shakespeare Library celebrates its
75th anniversary with the theme “Shakespeare in
American Life.” A three-part radio documentary,
narrated by Sam Waterston, is heard on more than
200 US public radio stations and NPR Worldwide,
and Folger Magazine makes its debut.
The Folger is a really good example
of the humanities in action.
2006
A new digital photography laboratory and
the Werner Gundersheimer Conservation
Laboratory mark major improvements in
imaging and conservation of the collection.
Folger Theatre joins in the citywide
Shakespeare in Washington celebration
with an all-Shakespeare schedule for the
2006-07 season.
Folger Consort stages the early
English drama The Second
Shepherds’ Play, complemented
by a Folger Institute conference.
The play is the subject of the
first Folger podcasts.
With funding from the Mellon
Foundation, the library begins
online cataloging of its full
56,000 manuscript collection.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 Summer 2011

2009
Folger acquires the largest painting
in its collection, James Northcote’s
Romeo and Juliet, which measures
nine by eleven feet.
Folger Education partners with PBS
to create educational online content
in conjunction with the airing of Sir
Ian McKellen’s King Lear.
2011
Folger Theatre’s Hamlet wins
the Helen Hayes Award for
Outstanding Resident Production.
The Manifold Greatness
exhibition, national traveling
panel display, and website,
developed with the Bodleian
Library at Oxford, marks the
400th anniversary of the
publication of the King James
Bible.
The Old Reading Room is
renamed the Gail Kern Paster
Reading Room.
2008
Teller (of Penn and Teller) and Aaron
Posner co-direct Macbeth with stage magic
and horror effects; the filmed production
becomes the first Folger DVD.
Folger staff identify a stolen First Folio (taken
from Durham University ten years earlier) after
Raymond Scott walks into the library with the
book, seeking an appraisal.
Folger establishes its presence in social
media: YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter.
The Shakespeare Quartos Archive
website launches with digital facsimiles of all 75 Shakespeare quartos—small,
one-play editions that include the earliest printings of many of the plays.
2010
Publication of The Two Noble Kinsmen marks the
final Shakespeare title of the Folger Editions, a
completely re-edited series that published its first
titles in 1992.
The acquisition of the Rosebery collection makes
the Folger a major archive for the English Civil War.
The Folger partners with Alabama Public Television
to create a fully staffed video production studio at
the library.
Why are we redefining what it is we’re
looking at? Because we’re changing.
The Humanities in Action
It seems to me that what we can offer, to as many audiences as
can access us, is that we are doing the humanities right. We’re
supporting scholarship, we are acquiring books, we’re conserving
books, we are teaching kids, we are teaching graduate students,
we are entertaining audiences. The Folger really hits its stride on
those occasions when everything is working in tandem—scholarly
conferences, exhibitions, theater, concerts, lectures, and education
programs focusing on a singular topic. It absolutely did for Henry
VIII in 2010.
Pocketful of Psalms
When I go down to the vault to show visitors the books, some
of my favorites are our personal Bibles, especially these tiny little
psalters. Imagine you were an overworked seventeenth-century
mother and manager of your household and you had had a hard
day and you needed a little spiritual consolation. You had your tiny
book of psalms that you could open and “look to the hills, from
whence cometh your help,” and you could put it in your apron,
and you could carry it around with you.
We have a number of these tiny little books and one of them,
my favorite, a 1637 psalter, is embroidered. On the front of the
book is this beautiful embroidered picture of David with his slingshot,
and on the back of the book is David carrying the head of
Goliath. I love that that from 1637 until today this book has been
cherished and preserved.
The Power of the Book
Another book I love is a 1631 edition of posthumously published
poems of John Donne. This is a book of Donne’s poems and its
early owner, probably its original owner, has read, and read, and
read this book.
There are these little pen ticks in the margins that are
passages that this reader wanted to go back to, wanted to
remember—just the way we write in our own books. In
the back of this book, this owner had indexed Donne’s
poems by topic. Age, Fame, Fortune, Death, Death’s
Dying, Death’s Discipline. And with page numbers.
Here’s an example of an ordinary book from the seventeenth
century that somebody loved enough and wanted
to consult enough to create an index to go back to.
And to me, that’s why the digital book will never replace
the physical object, ever. Because of those markings.
James R. Brantley
There’s Always a New Question
It isn’t so much discovering new things, if you will, as formulating
new questions, and the new questions are always there. If you
FOLGER MAGAZINE 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

think of the last forty years in scholarship, you’ve got
major new intellectual trends. Think of the interest in
women’s history, the interest in feminist scholarship.
Think of the interest in post-colonial studies. Think
about the way in which we’re constantly redefining
what it is we’re looking at.
Why are we redefining what it is we’re looking at?
Because we’re changing. The dialogue that we have
with the past is a dialogue that we control, after all.
We are the ones that are asking the questions.
So even as, in some ways, you might say that we
keep circling around the same evidence—Hamlet, or
the English Civil War, or any other of the aspects of
the past that the Folger is peculiarly and uniquely
appropriate to serve as a research base for—the questions
that we’re going to ask are always going to be
different.
For example, one of the relatively recent interests
among a younger generation of scholars is actually
in the history of environmental thought. Here we are
worrying about the future of our planet. We know that
our present environment is the result of past practices.
People are starting to think, How did Shakespeare’s
contemporaries think about and manage their environment?
Twenty-five years ago there were a few people
asking that question, but there are many more people
asking it now.
We are a curious species, and there is always something
more to learn, there’s always some new question
to ask.
What Dreams May Come
What we want to do is continue making the institution
as accessible as we can. We will be moving forward
with digital initiatives, I know. Truthfully, we
have no choice. This is what the public has every right
to ask us and we have every reason to want and feel
obliged to do.
We are blessed with a rich endowment, we are
blessed with a loyal and interested membership. I
think that the mission is clear. As long as you can
keep your eye on the mission, and believe in the mission,
then your path is set. And then you really do
know how to go forward.
When I got here, I knew from having experienced
it for a lot of years that the culture of the Folger was
just remarkably wonderful. Even as it had its ways of
doing things, the Folger wasn’t afraid of embracing
the future. n
Michael Witmore Named Folger Director
On July 1, 2011, Michael Witmore, a scholar of
Shakespeare and early modern literature as well as
a pioneer in the digital analysis of Shakespeare’s
texts, takes office as the Folger’s sixth director in
its seventy-nine year history.
“There are great treasures within the Folger, and
the Folger has found a way to make those treasures
face the outside world. There is a great power to
that,” Witmore recently told the Washington Post.
“The greatest challenge we face in the humanities
is to show those who do not know what we do,
what we do. It is better to show than to tell. The
Folger is one of those places where there is plenty
to show.”
Witmore comes to the Folger from the University
of Wisconsin, where he has been a Professor of
English since 2008. In addition, he directs the
Working Group for Digital Inquiry, a group of humanists
who use computers to assist in traditional
humanities research; currently, they are mapping
the prose genres of Early English Books Online
using techniques from bioinformatics and corpus linguistics.
He holds degrees from Vassar College and
the University of California, Berkeley.
His most recent book, Landscapes of the Passing
Strange: Reflections from Shakespeare (2010), a
collaboration with noted writer and photographer
Rosamond Purcell, was inspired by a painting in the
Folger reading room that Witmore saw while on a
research fellowship. It is also the subject of a Folger
exhibition in the fall of 2012, tentatively entitled Very
Like a Whale, which Witmore will co-curate.
Of her successor, retiring Director Gail Kern
Paster says, “The appointment of Michael Witmore
as the next director of the Folger is a brilliant one.
He is a Shakespeare scholar with broad interdisciplinary
interests, great creative energy, and an eloquent
understanding of the critical role the humanities
will play in our nation’s future. I know he is the
right person to lead this great library into the heart
of the twenty-first century.”
Jessie Eisner-Kleyle
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 Summer 2011