Shakespeare's the Thing

Shakespeare's the Thing, one of the Exhibitions at the Folger, was shown in the Folger Great Hall from January 28 to June 15, 2014. Kicking off William Shakespeare's 450th birthday year, this wide-ranging, often unexpected display draws from our unequalled Shakespeare holdings.

From Russian and Czech translations to a musical score by Felix Mendelssohn, from centuries-old printed editions to Salvador Dali set designs, Shakespeare's the Thing offers a wealth of responses to Shakespeare's genius. Join us in exploring four frequent ways of encountering the Bard: fixating on Shakespeare, printing his works, performing his plays, and depicting the man and his characters, from Falstaff to Cleopatra.

Curation

Shakespeare's the Thing was curated by Georgianna Ziegler.

Georgianna Ziegler is the Louis B. Thalheimer Head of Reference at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

After receiving a doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania in early modern English and French literature, Georgianna taught at Davidson College and Wofford College in the Carolinas. She then returned to the University of Pennsylvania where she served as Curator of the Horace Howard Furness Shakespeare Library in the Rare Book Department, while also teaching classes in English literature and pursuing a library degree at Drexel University.

In 1992, Georgianna came to the Folger where, in addition to her reference and teaching work, she has curated several exhibitions, notably Shakespeare's Unruly Women, Elizabeth I: Then and Now, and Shakespeare's Sisters: Voices of English and European Women Writers, 1500–1700, as well as co-curating exhibitions on mapping, on Shakespeare in children's literature, and on the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery.

Georgianna is an active member of the Renaissance Society of America and the Shakespeare Association of America where she served as president. She has published on Shakespeare's heroines, on Elizabeth I and Elizabeth of Bohemia, and on the calligrapher Esther Inglis. She has recently finished a book manuscript, Domesticating the Bard: Women and Shakespeare 1790–1890.

Curator's insights: It Ought To Be Fun

"We wanted to do something special for 2014 to celebrate Shakespeare's 450th birthday," says Georgianna Ziegler, curator of Shakespeare's the Thing and the Louis B. Thalheimer head of reference at the Folger Shakespeare Library. "My idea was that it ought to be fun. It's like opening up the Folger vault, all of the weird, funny, wonderful stuff as to how people related to Shakespeare. You can open it like opening a birthday present. What's inside?" The exhibition, she says, is also a look at "Shakespeare through things—the things that people have created about him and their ideas of him."

Those things, of course, are wide-ranging. Among other examples, Ziegler points to the forger William Henry Ireland's faked love letter from Shakespeare to Anne Hathaway, complete with a lock of real hair; a Shakespeare-themed Barbie; the Seven Ages of Man cards once given out by a soap company; early Shakespeare editions, beginning in 1709; and several translations, including Hamlet in Sanskrit and "beautifully illustrated" Shakespeare plays in Russian and Czech.

A copy of the iconic 1623 First Folio appears here, too, with a focus on the title-page portrait of Shakespeare. While the First Folio through the 1685 Fourth Folio were printed, the engraving was repeatedly touched up, creating four distinct variations, or states. "In all the time I've been here," says Ziegler, "we've never shown all four states before. We used two Folios and two single leafs for the exhibition, all originals."

To assemble and shape this diverse mix, Ziegler and exhibitions manager Caryn Lazzuri began with suggestions from the Folger staff. "It was crowdsourced," Ziegler says. "We asked what items they were fascinated by in the collection." Replies came from the specialists who work with the collection every day, and from other staff members as well. Their proposed selections inspired the exhibition's four themes: fixating on, printing, performing, and depicting Shakespeare. Each is identified with a banner in the exhibition hall. "You can do them in any order," says Ziegler, "or wander at will."

Where possible, Ziegler favored "things that were eye-catching," she explains, including designs by Salvador Dali for As You Like It and works by Wyndham Lewis for Timon of Athens, a suggestion by Folger development director Essence Newhoff. "We paired that one with Frank Mowery's book binding for the Folger 60th anniversary in 1992, which is also in a geometric, modernist style. They seemed to go together, and they look well."

Folger Theatre artistic director Janet Griffin proposed "the Jean Hugo designs for a French production of Romeo and Juliet in the 1920s," Ziegler says. "I had shown that book when Janet had visitors to the library." In the exhibition audio tour, Griffin describes the stunning 1924 Paris production, "just eight years before the Folger opened," in which costumes with "iridescent linear designs glowed under what I suspect was the equivalent of black light—quite a psychedelic experience."

Ziegler also notes the special appeal of a copy of an 1886 Paris edition of A Midsummer Night's Dream in which watercolors cover the text. "It's an amazing book; every page is painted. It's really quite beautiful." The artist Pinckney Marcius-Simons "was fascinated by Wagner's idea of uniting music, literature, and the arts," she explains, so he painted directly on the printed play. The art book has been fully digitized for the exhibition, so that visitors can explore the pages through an on-site display. "We wanted to look at the whole book. I think 'luscious' is the word for it," Ziegler says. "It's really a luscious book."

Contents of the exhibition

Shakespeare's the Thing exhibition material

Image Gallery

To view images of exhibition highlights, visit this Flickr photo album.

Scholar's insights on Shakespeare's the Thing

Explore four and a half centuries of Shakespeare with Folger staff and others close to the library as they discuss special highlights featured in this exhibition. Read on to learn more about Shakespeare's the Thing.

A Famous Forgery

Heather Wolfe on William Henry Ireland.

I've always been fascinated by the fact that William Henry Ireland was able to temporarily convince the literary world that he had made the most important literary discovery ever.

William Henry Ireland was a *really bad* forger of Shakespeare manuscripts with a too-good-to-be-true story of how he came to own them. Nevertheless, he managed to capitalize upon his deceptions after he was found to be a fraud.

Case in point is this fake letter from William Shakespeare to his wife Anne Hathaway. Written in a terrible imitation of an English secretary hand and carelessly burned around the edges to appear "ye olde," this copy was actually written out by William Henry Ireland after the forgeries were discovered. It appears here next to a printed reproduction of his original forgery, in an album that he put together for a curious collector over a decade after the original forgeries were made.

Many other versions of the forgery survive, including a handful at the Folger which Ireland created both to sell and to give to supporters. This is the only one at the Folger with a lock of hair, however. We're not sure where the hair in our copy came from, but one could assume it came straight from the head of William Henry Ireland himself.

While many people initially believed that the documents were authentic, the handwriting and spelling were so unconvincing, as was their literary merit, that it soon became apparent that the entire archive had been concocted. This letter is a prime example of William Henry Ireland's flowery style leading to his own unraveling.

Heather Wolfe is Curator of Manuscripts at the Folger Shakespeare Library. She has curated or co-curated many of the Folger exhibitions including Technologies of Writing in the Age of Print, Letterwriting in Renaissance England, Word & Image: The Trevelyon Miscellany of 1608, and The Pen's Excellencie.

Editing Shakespeare

Barbara Mowat on editor Nicholas Rowe.

Nicholas Rowe was a lawyer who switched careers and began writing for the London stage. When he was asked to edit Shakespeare's plays in the early 1700s, he searched everywhere for Shakespeare's manuscripts, but they had already disappeared. Rowe was thus forced to base his 6-volume edition on the early printed texts—the 36 plays collected in the 1623 First Folio and printed in the Folios that followed, as well as the few plays that he could find that had also been printed individually in small quartos. His edition, published in 1709, made the plays available and accessible to a wide readership in many ways. Among the most important: he modernized the spelling and punctuation; he occasionally replaced a word that seemed incorrect; he standardized characters' names; and he added stage directions. He also used material from quarto editions of Hamlet and Othello to add to or correct the Folio texts. His edition became the basis of subsequent texts for many years, and many of his textual corrections and his decisions about characters' names have stood for centuries.

Barbara Mowat is Director of Research emerita at the Folger. In addition, she is co-editor, with Paul Werstine, of the Folger Shakespeare Library Editions, which are the basis for the Folger Digital Texts and consulting editor for Shakespeare Quarterly.

Rival Richard IIIs

Robert Richmond on rivals Junius Brutus Booth and Edmund Kean.

There is so much happening in this image and the more I look, the more I enjoy it. While it is open to many interpretations, my reading has always been that this piece is more than just a commentary on the storied rivalry between Junius Brutus Booth and Edmund Kean, competing in the early nineteenth-century in warring productions of Richard III. A closer look at the red-faced cigar-smoking manager, the patent clapping machine, and the box office man tallying up the take suggests a struggle with the commercialization of theatre at this time. The deeply-felt rivalry served neither actors nor audience—only the management who lined their pockets with the proceeds. And as a British-born director staging Richard III at the Folger, the clash between these two performers always reminds me of that familiar tussle of ownership over Shakespeare between the UK and the US. Edmund Kean was the greatest British actor of his generation; Booth, (though a native Englishman) was soon to become the most prominent actor in the United States. What I find so relevant about this "cartoon" is that here, at the Folger, I have found the place where this conflict has been fully resolved. In this remarkable institution, the universality of Shakespeare, his work, and his relevance is housed under one roof.

Robert Richmond is director of the Folger's 2014 production of Richard III. He has directed previous plays with the Folger including Twelfth Night, Othello, and Henry VIII.

Jean Cocteau's Romeo

Janet Griffin on Jean Cocteau's Romeo et Juliette.

Having just had Romeo and Juliet on our stage this fall, we were thrilled to see this version of Shakespeare's greatest love story. Jean Cocteau's Romeo et Juliette, a wonderful example of surrealist theatre. It relied a great deal on choreography and found meaning beyond the simple text. While we at Folger take great store by the text, this Cocteau production would certainly have been an amazing night in the theatre - and one which I would have jumped to present when it played in Paris in 1924—just 8 years before the Folger opened. I know our audience would have embraced the daring of the piece. The costumes, designed by Jean Hugo, a gifted artist of France's avant-garde and the great grandson of Victor Hugo, were impressive with their iridescent linear designs which glowed under what I suspect was the equivalent of black light—quite a psychedelic experience! This limited-edition volume with its splendid hand-colored illustrations is a testament to the remarkable ways in which great artists through time have retold Shakespeare's moving tale of woe.

Janet Griffin is Director of Public Programs and artistic producer of Folger Theatre.

Modernist Timon of Athens

Essence Newhoff on a Wyndham Lewis illustration for Timon of Athens.

The Folger has a strong culture of philanthropy. My job here is to match the inspired generosity of donors with the passionate work of our staff. I'm intrigued with the story of Timon of Athens, a play that, in many ways, chronicles an individual who wants to be a philanthropist, but goes about it all wrong, and is so cheated by his friends that he ends up hating all of humanity. This Wyndham Lewis illustration for the play, drawn almost exactly 100 years ago, is riveting. Lewis, along with the poet Ezra Pound, was a leader of the briefly lived but influential, London-based modernist movement known as Vorticism. The Guggenheim describes the Vorticists' style as "combining machine-age forms and the focused energy suggested by a vortex." Here you see a character, presumably Timon, with his hands outstretched. Lewis doesn't note the Act or Scene he is illustrating, so the viewer can question: is this Timon being generous and giving? Or is he trying to wring the necks of those who betrayed him (and in turn all humankind)? Are his wrists together in a symbol of his feeling shackled by his situation? It's a highly visual representation of this play, and I love peering into the moment of history when Lewis created it.

Essence Newhoff is the the Folger Shakespeare Library's Director of Development.

Four states of Shakespeare's portrait

Erin Blake on different "states" of the Droeshout portrait of Shakespeare.

The copper printing plate that Martin Droeshout engraved was touched up twice during the printing of the First Folio in 1623, and once more for the Fourth Folio, sixty-two years later - that is, the print exists in four different states. Although there are 4 Folios and four states of the portrait, the various states don't correspond to the editions of the Folio—states 1, 2, and 3 are all found in the First Folio.

In this case, you can see one of each of the four states.

Only four examples of the first state survive. Two are at the Folger: one still bound in the book, and the one at top left, disbound before the library purchased it. Look at the right-hand side of the collar, below Shakespeare's left ear, to spot the main difference between the first state and the rest: in state one, Shakespeare's head doesn't cast a shadow on the collar. Because so few examples exist, it's assumed that Droeshout realized pretty quickly that the portrait looked odd, so he went back and added the shadow.

The differences between the second and third states are minor: a highlight in each pupil and an extra strand of hair.

But the fourth state is heavily re-engraved. Droeshout's original lines grew shallower as the plate wore out, so they held less ink, and printed thinner and paler. Whoever touched up the plate in 1685 used cross-hatching to darken it. Look at the facial hair in state 4 at the bottom right of the case, and you can see how the wavy lines making up Shakespeare's moustache and soul patch now have diagonal slashes across them.

Erin Blake is Curator of Art & Special Collections at the Folger Shakespeare Library. She has co-curated many previous Folger exhibitions including The Curatorial Eye: Discoveries from the Folger Vault, Word & Image: The Trevelyon Miscellany of 1608, Fakes, Forgeries & Facsimiles, and David Garrick, 1717–1779: A Theatrical Life.

Supplemental materials

Video

Heather Wolfe, curator of manuscripts at the Folger Shakespeare Library, shares her fascination with William Henry Ireland's forgeries, among them a fake letter from William Shakespeare to his wife, Anne Hathaway.

Janet Griffin, director of public programs and artistic producer of Folger Theatre, selected this wonderful example of surrealist theatre, Jean Cocteau's Romeo et Juliette, for its daring design.

Listen to why Essence Newhoff, the Folger's director of development, finds this Wyndham Lewis illustration for Timon of Athens so riveting.

The First Folio title portrait of Shakespeare by Martin Droeshout appears in four different "states," explains Erin Blake, Curator of Art and Head of Collection Information Services at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Barbara Mowat, Director of Research emerita at the Folger, explains how Nicholas Rowe's 1709 edition of Shakespeare's plays became the basis for subsequent texts over many years.

For Robert Richmond, who directed the 2013 production of Richard III at Folger Theatre, this political cartoon not only illustrates a nineteenth-century actor rivalry but also brings to mind a greater tug-of-war between the U.S. and the U.K. over Shakespeare.

Related programs

Talks and Screenings at the Folger

• Shakespeare's Birthday Lecture: "Shakespeare, Biography, and Anti-Biography", Brian Cummings, April 3, 2014
• Shakespeare's 450th Birthday Bash, April 6, 2014, Photo Gallery on Flickr
• "Shakespeare in America", James Shapiro, May 12, 2014

Folger Theatre

• William Shakespeare's Richard III, January 28 – March 16, 2014
• William Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona, April 17 – May 25, 2014