Eagle Eye Magazine Issue 1 2023

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EAGLE EYE | ISSUE 1 | <strong>2023</strong> QUEEN’S FIRST FOLIO In June 1844, one of the first Great Western Railway trains to arrive in Oxford halted at the newly-constructed station in Grandpoint. Along with passengers, the train carried post and packages including – it seems likely from contemporary correspondence held in the College Library – a box of books from Thomas Rodd, a London bookdealer. One of these, Rodd suggested to the College, would ‘complete all of your series of early editions’ of Shakespeare. The College took Rodd up on the suggestion and agreed to pay him £100 for the 1623 edition of Mr. William Shakespeares comedies, histories, & tragedies (roughly £10,000 in today’s money), adding this volume to the 1632, 1664, and 1685 editions of Shakespeare’s plays held by Queen’s. Although the title of the volume explains its contents, it is better known to us today as the First Folio. As such, it was the first collected publication of Shakespeare’s works, containing 36 of Shakespeare’s plays, 18 of which would be unknown to us otherwise, including The Tempest, Macbeth, and Julius Caesar. Published seven years after Shakespeare’s death by his friends and fellow actors, John Heminges and Henry Condell, the text also helped to consolidate his stature as a dramatist. The ‘folio’ format was typically reserved for important texts, such as editions of classical works or religious texts. Prior to this, those plays that had been published were done so in ‘quarto’ format, meaning the single folio sheet of paper had been folded twice, making eight smaller pages. The ‘folio’ format, with the large sheets of printed paper folder in half to make the pages of the book, was a much more impressive publication: prior to Shakespeare, only Ben Jonson had been published in this way. We also owe to the Folio our image of Shakespeare: his portrait engraved by Martin Droeshout (apart from this image, the only other known contemporary image, the more flattering Chandos portrait, is preserved at the National Portrait Gallery). In 1841, a donation by an Old Member, Revd. Robert Mason, placed the College in the enviable position of being able to purchase such a valuable and sought-after text. The son of a wealthy mill owner, Mason bequeathed £30,000 to the College, stipulating in his will that the sum was to be spent on books within three years. He also donated a substantial collection of Members of the public viewing the Folio on Folio Day Photo: David Fisher Egyptian and other antiquities, and £40,000 to Shakespeare’s portrait engraved the Bodleian. In the end, it took by Martin Droeshout some 10 years to spend the bequest, Photo: David Fisher with much of the resultant Mason Bequest collection now on display in the Upper Library (the more valuable items, like the First Folio, are stored elsewhere). The Folio had been up for a sale a couple of times. Its first, and most significant, owner was the actor, playwright, producer, and theatre manager, David Garrick, who purchased the Folio in the mid-eighteenth century for £1 16s (the rough equivalent of £200 in today’s terms). Garrick left his collection of ‘English Plays’ to the British Museum library, but his widow held on to this copy, along with several other volumes. The Folio retains Garrick’s bookplate, and it is possible that some of the annotations and markings within volume belong to him. In many ways, there is no better association copy to possess, given Garrick’s importance in placing Shakespeare at the centre of the English canon. Was the purchase worth it? Certainly, it can be justified on a number of grounds. Mason’s enormously generous bequest created perhaps the finest collection of any British college library in the 19 th century, and the First Folio cemented its reputation, as perhaps the most famous book by the most lauded of English writers. Its acquisition helped to establish the intellectual coherence of the collection, as well as burnishing the College’s reputation: only Wadham and, until it was sold to Paul Getty in 2003, Oriel colleges could boast a First Folio on their shelves (the Bodleian holds two copies). More importantly, the Folio has been used. For example, one Fellow, Henry W.G. Markheim, appears to have consulted the 1623 copy in advance of his lectures in the late 19 th century. More recently, the Folio has been examined by scholars, including Oxford’s Professor of Shakespeare Studies. Excitingly, Prof. Smith identified for the first-time printer’s proof marks on one page in King Lear (for example, correcting ‘mads’ to ‘mad’), placing the Folio in very select company indeed. Only five other copies are known to contain proof sheets, which provide valuable evidence on the production process: if you look at the copy in the Bodleian, for example, these errors have been corrected by the time that section came to be printed. The text is a valuable aid to teaching, and is carefully brought out and inspected under supervision by students in the English renaissance literature seminar, for example. And this year, to mark the 400 th anniversary of its registration at Stationer’s Hall, the Folio has had several memorable outings at College events, as well as a particularly special viewing by Old Members at Stationer’s Hall itself in a vitrine next to the very register in which its publication was recorded. It’s hard not be pleased that the College accepted the delivery in 1844. Matthew Shaw, College Librarian 10
TEACHING WITH THE FIRST FOLIO Career Development Fellow in English Dr Jen Edwards* uses the First Folio in her teaching. We found out more about how and why she uses this treasure to inspire current students. How do you use the First Folio in your teaching, and what do you think this approach brings to the students’ understanding and appreciation of the works? I tend to hold my first class of the teaching term in the library with Librarian Dr Matthew Shaw – it’s a bit of a literary ‘sweet shop’, where we look at Shakespeare’s Folio(s) and an assortment of other early modern texts from the vault: religious proclamations; anatomy books; pamphlets; poems. Beyond being a real treat, looking at the Folio in particular is useful in helping unsettle the idea of Shakespeare’s works as fixed, stable entities from the get-go: the Folio was published after Shakespeare died, the tripartite splitting of plays into categories of Comedy, History, or Tragedy isn’t his, and some of the plays existed in different versions before the Folio was printed. So, we start with this book, looking at the famous image of Shakespeare (also done after he died), the title page, some of the typos and annotations, and use this to think about what exactly it means to study ‘Shakespeare’. My hope is that students leave the room feeling that these works remain ‘up for grabs’ and open to interpretation. Shakespeare is unusual in that he has his own paper on the English degree at Oxford, but I think it’s important that we don’t just think about him in a vacuum, as being somehow separate from other concerns and work of the time. What excites me as a researcher, and as a teacher, are the crosscurrents between Shakespeare’s work and those of his contemporaries – putting his work in dialogue with, say, writing about medicine or philosophy, can really bring the texts to life. We know Shakespeare borrowed lots of material too so it’s useful to look at some of his sources and see what he takes and what he changes. I guess I also don’t agree with the idea that Shakespeare’s plays are just meant to be performed and not read, which is something you hear often but I have always found this a bit frustrating and reductive – there is so much we can gain from reading these works and from thinking about them as material, printed texts. How do you think students today respond to Shakespeare? One of the great things about studying Shakespeare at Oxford is that students can approach the plays and poems from so many different angles: there is no set way to read or think about these texts, so responses to Shakespeare can be shaped by, for example, an interest in gender studies, critical race, the environment, politics, medicine, translation etc.. It is important for us to keep asking ourselves about Shakespeare’s place in our canon (and to note that our responses don’t necessarily need to be positive to be productive), but each year I have found that students respond to these plays and poems in ways that position these texts not as out-of-date and stuffy, but as timely and urgent. Do you have a favourite Shakespeare play and why? Yes and no (I know that is cheating!). I have definitely had favourites, at various points, but my favourite changes – Othello was the first play I ever studied, ever saw, so it holds a particular power for me, but Hamlet is probably the play I find myself returning to and thinking about the most (surely, I can’t say Hamlet is my favourite? How unoriginal!). I guess my honest answer is that I just really enjoy whatever I am working on at the time, and that that will likely be in contention for top spot whenever I’m asked this question. Right now, that would be The Comedy of Errors and the narrative poems – the latter aren’t plays, obviously, but I want to plug them a little: the poems often get overlooked, and Venus and Adonis was far and away Shakespeare’s most popular work at the time, and it’s brilliant. Can you tell us a bit about your project that looks at issues of distraction at Shakespeare’s Globe? This project began back when I was in post at the Globe in 2019, where I led an oral history project that asked actors and directors how they responded to distractions in the space (a question informed by Hamlet’s line about ‘this distracted Globe’, as well as the grumblings of a particular theatre critic). We tend to think of distraction as a negative thing, but answers to this question often veered towards the positive – yes, noisy planes, bad weather, audience members wandering around can be a bit annoying, but there was a keen sense that distraction could also constitute and contribute to performance in this space in wonderful ways: that it is part of the ‘liveness’ of theatre, a shared experience that brings everyone in the space together during that particular show. The project weaves together things like actor interviews, show reports, and reviews, and pays attention to various distractions like the weather, fainting audience members, the recent global pandemic, and thinks about how those elements generate meaning. My book on this – This Distracted Globe: Attending to Distraction in Shakespeare’s Theatre – has just been published by Cambridge University Press. Jen’s tutorial with a Shakespeare First Folio | David Fisher * Dr Edwards left her post at Queen’s at the end of the academic year 2022-23 to take up a post as Assistant Professor in English and Theatre at the University of Warwick. 11
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Eagle Eye Magazine Issue 1 2023

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