Greg Doran, former artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, examines one of the surviving copies of Shakespeare's First Folio, at Stonyhurst College in Lancashire.
THE VIEW FROM MY WINDOW
Four hundred years ago, the first edition of Shakespeare’s collected plays was published. On a quest to view every known copy left in the world, acclaimed director Greg Doran arrived in Auckland this week to see one of only three surviving First Folios in the Southern Hemisphere. As told to Joanna Wane
“The artistic director’s house at Stratford-upon-Avon is up in the Welcombe Hills, just a seven-minute walk from the theatre. There’s a bay window that looks out on a beautiful sycamore tree where you can sit and watch the passing of the seasons. Sometimes you see foxes or deer and occasionally there’ll be cows or sheep in the field. It was a very idyllic, calming little haven to be in during the various traumas of the past few years.
Tony and I had lived there on and off since 1989 — and it was the house where he died. [Doran’s husband, the renowned Shakespearean actor Sir Antony Sher, died of cancer in late 2021.] We had a studio where he painted and when the house was reconstructed, they found some wood from the old theatre stage and put it into his studio, so here was the wood that Laurence Olivier and all these great stars had walked on.
King Lear was the last Shakespeare we did together, as a special project for the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death in 2016 and then we revived it again in 2018. Tony loved King Lear in the same way that I sort of feared it. My dad had dementia and for years I couldn’t even watch the play. I just found it too hard. One day, Tony said, “Let’s read it again, because I don’t think Lear has dementia. Something else is happening there.” Being here for the opening night [of Michael Hurst’s new production for the Auckland Theatre Company] just seems like fate. It’s still a very timely play.
In 1973, when I was a schoolboy, we trooped down to Stratford and saw Eileen Atkins in As You Like It. I floated out of the theatre on a cloud. On our way back up to Preston, apparently I said to my mum, “That’s what I want to do when I grow up.” I started at the Royal Shakespeare Company as an actor but there were lots of actors who could play floppy-haired young romantics so I decided to dedicate myself to the craft of directing instead.
In 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death, two of his mates, John Heminges and Henry Condell, pulled together all his plays to produce a complete works. They did him an astonishing service, really. If it weren’t for them, we wouldn’t have half of his plays today. No Macbeth. No Twelfth Night. We wouldn’t have The Tempest or Julius Caesar.
It was a real labour of love and a real struggle, because all the plays that had been previously published [in cheap quarto editions] were the property of the people who’d bought them. For instance, Troilus and Cressida isn’t mentioned on the contents page but got squeezed in between the histories and the tragedies, so the pagination is all to pot. We fetishise this book, I recognise that, but it’s not a beautiful work of art.
The first person to buy a First Folio — actually, he bought two — was a landed gent from Kent, who came up to London and kept very good accounts of his time there, including the plays he went to see and the money he spent on food and clothing. They cost about the same as a beaver hat. [In 2020, Christie’s sold a copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio for US$10 million, making it the most expensive work of literature ever auctioned.]
Of at least 750 copies printed, 235 have been found. Three copies are in Stratford and the theatre owns one of them. The actors are allowed to thumb through it, because it’s a working copy, but I didn’t really know much about it. Then I discovered that in 1964, on the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth, the Vatican invited the Royal Shakespeare Company to Rome. So three actors trotted off and took our First Folio with them to be blessed by the Pope. I’m not quite sure who thought that was a good idea. Had nobody read King John? The Pope doesn’t get a good press in Shakespeare, largely.
Anyway, Pope Paul VI is presiding and the entire College of Cardinals are assembled to watch the actors perform some extracts from the plays. Then they are introduced to His Holiness and hold up our First Folio for him to bless. Unfortunately, the Pope mistakes the gesture and says, “Oh, thank you very much,” and hands the book to his waiting cardinals! Only a swift bit of diplomacy prevented an international incident.
I’ve come to realise that every Folio has a story, if not always quite as dramatic as that. In 1998, a copy on display in the Cousin’s Library at Durham Cathedral was stolen. Ten years later, a man walked into the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC and told them he’d been given this old English book by some friends in Cuba.
Of course, in seconds, they knew it was the stolen Folio, because this is the most studied book in the world. He was a strange sort of fantasist who was having an affair with a dancer in Havana and turned up at his trial dressed as Elton John, but he actually lived in a semi-detached house with his mum in the northeast of England. [A career conman, Raymond Scott was sentenced to eight years in jail for handling stolen goods and committed suicide in prison.]
I think I’m about halfway through the entire collection now and visiting each of them for the first time is exciting. People have made notes in the margins and underlined passages. Last week, I saw 10 copies at Meisei University in Tokyo — one had a set of muddy cat pawprints across half the page and another had a rather beautiful pencil drawing of a dachshund.
There’s only one First Folio in Africa. None, apparently, in India. I don’t believe that. In 2016, two previously unknown copies were discovered [in Scotland and in the US] and I’m absolutely certain there are still more to be found.”
A BLOODY DEED: The Secrets of Auckland’s First Folio
A catalogue recording the provenance of every known copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio shows Sir George Grey purchasing the volume for £85 from a London bookseller. He presented it to the City of Auckland, along with the rest of his personal library, in 1894, and donated a second copy to Cape Colony (in what is now South Africa), where he also served as governor. The only other surviving copy in the Southern Hemisphere is held in Australia at the State Library in New South Wales.
Doran, who has viewed First Folios in Germany, the US, Japan, and Australia, as well as all 50 copies in the UK, was in Auckland on Thursday to see New Zealand’s sole copy, in the Sir George Grey Collection at Auckland Central City Library. Pencil notes added in the margins over the years include quotes, text corrections and doodles.
In Hamlet, “a bloody deed” has been written twice at the foot of one page, with the second version scrubbed out. Tentatively attributed to a reader by the name of Anne Hearle, whose signature appears a few pages later, the reference echoes Hamlet’s exchange with his mother after he’s mistakenly killed Polonius.
“The line is the turning point in the character of Gertrude, because whether she knows her husband was murdered, or is ignorant of that, makes it a completely different story,” says Doran. “Whether that’s what this reader is pondering is fascinating, but it looks like evidence of interesting analytical thinking about the play.”
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