Transcripts For CSPAN2 The Millionaire And The Bard 20161023

Here we go. Ill start over. Welcome. My name is susan, and i work for the uwmadison libraries as a special collections librarian, an english language humanities librarian. Welcome to the wisconsin book festival. I would like to introduce today our author, andrea mays, who will be talking about her book with this fantastic cover, the millionaire and the bard. Tell you a little bit about andrea mays. Like henry folger, possessed by a lifelong obsession with shakespeare and his times. Ann create ya spent much of her andrea spent much of her girlhood holed up in the library listening to vinyl recordings. A graduate of stuyvesant high school, she was not only a protege of frank mccourt, but also his mentor. Andrea has degrees in economics from the State University of new york at binghamton and from ucla and teaches economics at cal State University at long beach. She was a president ial appointee to the u. S. International trade admission where she served as economist to the chairman. She divides her time between california and washington. The millionaire and the bard is her first book. Its an excellent read about an extraordinary book, the first folio, and about Henry Clay Folger and his wife emily folger. Passionate fans of shakespeare and passionate, obsessed collectors. They are the founders of the Folger Shakespeare library in washington, d. C. , and thats their gift to the United States, the people of the United States. I will not say much more, but i will let andrea mays tell this story. Thank you. [applause] hi. Welcome, everybody. Thank you for coming out. Im going to talk a little bit about the book, how i came to write it, what its about and why the timing of this book was incredibly fortunate. And and im also going to give you an assignment, something to do starting november 3rd. Theres going to be a copy of a first folio that you can visit at the university of wisconsin, so ill get to that at the end of my story. So, first, i want to talk a little bit about how i came to write this book. How did the idea come to me, what, you know, spurred me to do this. My obsession with shakespeare began as a lot of obsessions i think do, as a result of an excellent teacher who introduced me to the plays of shakespeare starting in middle school and then working my way through high school. I had excellent teachers for elizabethan theater, and i was bitten by the bug, and we were off and running. Ive been reading the plays, seeing the plays be performed since then. When9 came time to write a when it came time to write a book, someone recommended to me that i do write about something i already knew a Little Something about so that i was not going to be starting from ground zero and perhaps spending a great deal of time with something i didnt enjoy. And so my sister said, well, how about shakespeare, something related to shakespeare. Wasnt quite sure exactly what subject to write about because thousands of books have been written about shakespeare. And so what could i do that was a little bit different. Is so heres how it happened. I start with shakespeare in high school, and be then i run we use the folger editions of the shakespeare plays in high school, so if you have not used a pollier edition of the plays folger edition of the plays, theyre paperback books, and on the one side is the text and on the facing page are definitions. So its very helpful. You dont have to go to the bottom, to the back of the book, and that was my first exposure to this folger something or other. Later at ucla in law school i came across a Henry Clay Folger as a defendant in the famous standard oil antitrust case from 1911, and i wonder if thats any relation whatsoever to the folger editions, hmm. Then i moved to washington, d. C. In the mid 1980s and walked by the Folger Library every day on my way to work. At some point i went into the folger for one of their tours and asked a docent where the money had come from that built this collection and built the library, and the docent said mr. Folger worked for an oil company. [laughter] and i thought this was something that was worthy of a little more research, a little investigation, and that was how i started weaving the two stories together. I grew up in new york city surrounded by the trappings of the gilded age. So the carnegie mansion was across the street from my church, the frick mansion was across the street from the bus stop i got off at in middle school, our science trips were up to the rockefeller preserve and so on, so ive been surrounded by the gilded age since i can remember, and all of that comes out in the book, the millionaire and the bard. So really what the millionaire and the bard is about, its two separate stories, two periods of time, elizabethan and jack bianco, london mostly, and new york during the gilded age and how we move from one story to the other is connected through a book. And thats the book that i wrote about, shakespeares first folio. So let me digress for a minute and talk for a moment about who shakespeare was. So you may be aware that this is the 400th anniversary of shakespeares death. This year. So many events are going on around the United States to celebrate or commemorate this event including the exhibit at the university of wisconsinmadison which ill talk a little bit about. When shakespeare died so were celebrating 400 years later the great works that this man left behind. When he died, it was by no means sure that he would become the secular god of english language literature. He was, he had contemporaries who were extremely talented. Its not like he was the only play wright of the era playwright of the era that we still remember, but when he died, only half of his plays had been plushed, and none of those had been published, and none of those with his permission. So let me explain why that would have been. At the time there was no copyright law. The copyright act, the act of queen anne did not come into existence until 1709 in england and, therefore, the author had no Property Rights in their own plays. They would essentially sell the plays to the Theater Companies outright. And then the Theater Companies didnt want to publish the plays because anyone who got hold of a copy would be able to perform a play in competition with them. So they at no time want the plays performed they didnt want the plays performed. So how did half of the plays, nonetheless, get out into, get published . And the answer is pirates, okay . Not aargh pirates [laughter] but pirates. The printers would, for example, hire a minor player from the acting company to recreate play as they knew it, and they would say, you know, come on in, have a seat. Hamlet, go and then they would just write down as fast as they could whatever they came up with. Sometimes with some interesting and not so great effects. Another thing they would do would be to send a stenographer out into the audience when the play was being performed and have them right down as quickly as they could whatever was going on in the play. Again, with sometimes mixed results. So half of the plays, including hamlet, were already published and in sort of paperback versions. Is so if you took a very large piece of paper, folded it once, folded it in quarters again, that would be about the size of a paperback book, and a single play would be published in that format by these pirate printers. The other half of the plays we know about because there were diarists at the time who attended plays, who wrote about them, but we would not have had copies of them had a book not been published by shakespeares friend seven years after shakespeares death. Isso its 1616, shakespeare die. When he goes into the ground, half of the plays are in danger, again, of evaporating. And two of his friends, fellow actors in the globe theater or company, decided to collect shakespeares plays, edit them and publish them as a memorial to their deceased friend. They made a a couple of interesting decisions. Is so one was they were going to publish this all in one volume. And in order to do that, they would have to do it in an extremely large format. So about 13 inches by 8 inches is the format. So if you had a very large piece of paper and you folded it only once, that would be a folio size. And it was extraordinary to publish plays in that format. In part, those works sorry, that size had been reserved pretty much for serious works of religious or political importance, not for something as ephemeral as plays. And you might be aware of the history of the theater during elizabeth and james reigns that the puritans had a great deal of power in parliament including one of elizabeths trust add visors advisers. The puritans were against theater because it was an offense to god to pretend to be something that you werent. So imagine at the time that elizabeth is reigning that only men and boys are on the stage, not women. So not only were they pretending to be something they werent, but these were boys pretending to be women. This was more than the puritans could handle. So these two men, john hemings and henry condell, two great, Unsung Heroes of english language literature whose names almost no one knows, but you do now, collected the sources that would have been available to the them including these paperback versionings of the plays. Versions of the plays. Whatever manuscripts they might have had available to them as members of the Theater Company because they would have owned the manuscripts outright. And they came with something that no other publisher could have had, and that was the knowledge of how the plays had been performed because they were acting in those plays with shakespeare or under his direction. So when it came to taking, lets say, a cordo version of hamlet and reading a soliloquy, they might say, no, thats not how we did it. This is how it went. Thats to not how we performed that. So they essentially became the first editor of shakespeares and left us with the versions of the plays that we know today. So the sources that they might have assembled no longer exist, and theres no diary from hemings or condell telling us what it is that they did, but we sort of surmise what were the sources that might have been available to them. What are some of the plays that would have been lost . Oh, you might be familiar with some of them. How many of you read macbeth in high school . That is one that would have been lost. No macbeth, no tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, no sound and fury, no [inaudible] thank you. No rosalind, no tempest, no full fathom five thy fathers lies, those were pearls that were his eyes. Nothing of him that doth change but the suffer sea change into something rich and strange. All of that would have disappeared had this book not been published. So anthony and cleopatra and a long list of 16 plays 18 plays that would have disappeared had the book not been published. So the book is plushed in 1623, this giant volume you could have bought in sheets, so just the paper for a pound. Then you could have brought it to your favorite binder, and they could have bound it to your tastes. And the original binding, 17th century bindings for these books became extremely valuable and extremely coveted in the collecting world. So now im going to talk a little bit about how the first, this book we call shakespeares first folio, how that evolved, the collecting of that evolved through the centuries. And the answer is it became a fetish object. It is not an especially rare book surviving in a number of 235, although 236 is about to be announced, so stay tuned for that. 235 copies are known to survive. Where the cordo editions of the plays are far more rare. Is so only two with copies of one of the corps does of hamlet survive, and neither of them is complete. So the one many in the British Library is missing one page, the one at the Henry Huntington museum in pasadena is missing a different page, and is so together it formed one complete copy. There is a single known, surviving copy of titus andronicus, the first play of shakespeares that was published while shakespeare was alive, and that single copy was found in a library in sweden and later bought by henry folger. So that is the only copy remaining in the world, and i have held it. [laughter] all right. So the first folio, as i mentioned, became a fetish object particularly prior to the gilded age, but particularly in the gilded age it was a the fetish object for collectors. Mostly collectors would want a single, excellent copy, big original 17th century binding containing all the plays, and then theres some leaves in the book that are particularly valuable. Those that you would expect over 400 years to get the most damage. The first page and the last page, the last page is the last page of cymbalene, the portrait9 page that includes that engraving of shakespeare that we all know so well. Thats partly on the cover of the millionaire and the bard. That, by the way, is one of two known likenesses of shakespeare not done from life, there is no portrait done from life that weve discovered yet, but done while people who knew shakespeare were still alive. So when hemings and condell collected these plays and they engaged the artist to do the engraving, they could have said, no, thats not what we looked like. More hair, less hair, shorter moustache, brighter eyes. Whatever it was, these were people who knew shakespeare and, therefore, could have said this is what he looked like. The other likeness, by the way, is the effigy of shakespeare in Stratford Upon Avon Trinity Church which also was done, commissioned by his soninlaw and, therefore, someone who would have known what he looked like. So the typical collector would have wanted a high spot including that portrait are page, for example. And there are many copies of that in the folger collection. But that is one of the more valuable pages in the book. Let me talk a little bit about oh, so the high spot. So someone like Henry Huntington, j. P. Morgan would have collected a really beautiful, complete copy, and then they would have gone on to something else. So the huntington collection has first folios in it, but it also has jack london and Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln and all kinds of other things. Henry folger was different from these collectors many that he single mindedly pursued anything related to shakespeare. Now, when i say anything related to shakespeare, it could be tangentially related. It might have been a source material, it might have been related to something that shakespeare might have known about or an event that shakespeare might have known about. But basically, single mindedly collecting shakespeare. So let me talk a little bit about who henry folger was, because most people dont know who he was, and that was part of the reason to write the book. Henry clay folger was born this brooklyn in the 1830s to middle class family are. His father was a miller in supplier milliner supplier. He went to amherst college, and while he was at school, his fathers business went bankrupt, and he moved back to new york city, enrolled in city college of new york which was tuitionfree at the time, and because a friend that he had gone to school with said, no, no, henry, you have to finish at ham herself, he was able amherst, he was able to get a loan that enabled him to go back. The man who arranged the loan for him later became his mentor and employer, charles pratt. And ill talk a little more about him later. He appears as a character a little bit later on as does his son, charlie pratt, who ends up being one of henrys lifelong friends, not at least in part because he introduced him to his wife. So henry finishes amherst, moves back to brooklyn, enrolls in night school at columbia for law school and goes to work as a clerk in the Pratt Oil Company. The Pratt Oil Company in brooklyn is then taken over by standard oil of new york with john d. Rockefeller at the helm. Pratt becomes, again, an executive in the Standard Oil Company, and henry starts at the bottom as a clerk and works his way up, eventually becoming president of the Standard Oil Company of new york. 1911 the antitrust case against standard oil results in it being split into 36 different companies, the largest piece is standard oil of new jersey, the second largest is standard oil of new york, and that is the one that henry becomes the president of and then later becomes chairman of the board. So from being a clerk, he works his way up to being chairman of the board of the Standard Oil Company. So nine to five he is writing excuse me, hes running the Worlds Largest corporation, and then after work he goes home, and and his wife who was a shakespearean in her own right, she had written her masters thesis at vassar on the true text of shakespeare he and his wife would go through catalogs and order things for their collections and open the packages they packages that arrived, examine the books, read the books rm they were not dilettantes. They read and examined the books they bought. They wrote about shakespeare, went to the play, read the plays, examined the plays. They were very much involved in the shakespeare world together. They would examine these books. Emily would write out an index card with all the bib lo graphic information including where they had purchased it, what its condition was, who the dealer was, etc. And then they, when the husband that they rented on clinton hill in brooklyn became so full with the books that they could no longer fit any in there, they would take the books down to the basement, wrap them and put them boo a case into a case. And when the case was filled, they would ship it off to storage. And they did this case after case after case after case in various fireproof warehouses in manhattan and brooklyn. And when the room in the warehouse became filled with cases, they would rent another room. [laughter] and i looked at bills for one particular to havage room at a Warehouse Storage room at a warehouse in brooklyn for over 30 years, they paid storage fees on that. So at the very end, there were almost 2,000 cases that they had packed full of materials and put away. How could you possibly hope to find a