The Shakespeare Thefts (10 page)

I didn’t say this to Richard Roth. Instead, Roth, who is bald, said something like, “So they were making him bald so that he’d look more intelligent?”

And I said (I wince to remember this), “Oh yes, with all the brains sprouting out.”

And this turned up too on the
CBS Evening News
, me saying that bald people have brains sprouting out of their foreheads.

It was profoundly embarrassing.

But this is what happens when you are trying to get in touch with something that is four hundred years in the past. When you immerse yourself, as my team and I do, and have done for more than a decade, in the world of William Shakespeare’s writing, you
want
to look into the eyes of the person who created these sublime pieces of dramatic literature. The person who wrote the lines that, over and over again, make you laugh, or shake your head, or recognize a fool. My friends and I are all dyed-in-the-wool realists, and yet we looked at that portrait, we stared into those eyes and we thought, Wow, those look intelligent! Yes, that
could
be him! I am a little embarrassed to say how deeply I got my hopes up. In the end, I took a guess, and I did the research, and it was a miss.

Essentially, I’d been Harrised. The phrase “facsimiles by Harris” occurs frequently in library and sale catalogs of rare and early printed books. John Harris was a master of the art of pen-and-ink facsimile, a skill that was in great demand in the nineteenth century. Collectors not happy with the imperfections in their rare books paid to have missing pages created to “complete” their acquisition. Harris was a master counterfeiter.

Born in 1791, in Kensington, England, into an artistic family, by 1811, Harris was admitted to the Royal Academy of Arts, the most prestigious art school in England. He specialized in miniature portraits but moved on to producing facsimiles of early typographical pages and woodcuts. He worked for a time for John Whittaker, a printer and bookbinder, and he did some work for Earl Spencer. Harris is recorded as giving Earl Spencer credit for suggesting to him that he use his skills to perfect “ancient books of the early printers.”
¹
Harris’s skill is summed up well by Robert Cowtan, who for many years was an assistant in the Department of Printed Books and who wrote in his
Memories of the British Museum
published in 1872:

Mr. Harris is not so much distinguished as an artist as he is famous for his wonderful facsimile reproductions of early wood-engraving and block-printing to supply deficiencies in imperfect books. In this curious art he is
probably unrivalled … some of the leaves that he has supplied are so perfectly done that, after a few years, he has himself puzzled to distinguish his own work from the original, so perfect has the facsimile been, both in paper and typography.

Eventually the trustees of the British Museum ordered that Harris sign any leaf he re-created. Still, his faint signature sometimes escapes the notice even of the most experienced eye. Cowtan emphasized that “Harris’s intention of making facsimiles was entirely innocent and honourable.”

And perhaps that Johnstoun descendant who shaved my portrait with patent yellow and Prussian blue was doing it for honest reasons as well.

The Fiske Harris Copy

So we grew together Like to a double cherry, seeming parted, But yet an union in partition, Two lovely berries molded on one stem

—Shakespeare’s
Midsummer Night’s Dream

There is no record of anyone being murdered for their copy of a First Folio, but there is a whiff of foul play in the deaths of Caleb Fiske Harris and his wife, Emily Stevenson Davis Harris, in 1881. The American couple owned a copy that previously had belonged to James Wentworth
Buller, a British Whig politician; it still had a Wentworth Buller bookplate in it when they bought it. The binding was full red morocco leather in almost perfect condition, and all the edges were gilt. (There was also a note identifying the first several pages as Harris facsimiles.)

The couple was at Moosehead Lake in Maine on October 2, 1881. They stayed at Mount Kineo House, which boasted that “no summer place in this country has more names of the second and third generation on its register each year than Kineo. Sons and grandsons come back to enjoy the life and traditions before them. The cool breezes from the forty mile stretch of old Moosehead Lake, with its four hundred miles of picturesque shore, bring the purest air that blows, as the prevailing winds sweep for miles over an almost unbroken forest.”
¹
Unfortunately, the couple was not to be among those who returned. On that fateful trip they went on a picnic and had what can only be described as a bizarre boating accident. According to the
New York Times
, the Harris couple went canoeing along with their “colored servant,” “two ladies from Baltimore,” and “a guide” to “take an out-of-door dinner” in two canoes. On their return voyage:

In plain sight of the Kineo House, the canoe shipped a little water, and Mrs. Harris involuntarily threw herself to the side of the canoe and, she being quite heavy and the servant
inexperienced, the canoe went over. Mr. Harris held on to one end of the canoe, while the servant, Hedges, clasped hold of Mrs. Harris across the other end, and in this way they floated 20 or 30 minutes, when Mrs. Harris let go and sank. Mr. Harris held on five or ten minutes longer and then sank.
²

Their guests survived. All of which makes one immediately wonder why those who were present in the other canoe (or other hotel guests—the place sported a “wrap-around porch” with a view of the lake) apparently did nothing to aid the Harrises while they were flailing within sight of the lodge. Frustratingly, no explanation is provided in any of the newspaper coverage of the event. The formal inquest determined that the couple (she was forty-two, and he was sixty-three) “lost their lives due to their own carelessness in not having secured an experienced guide and in not following the caution of sitting still in their canoe.”
³

Not following the caution of sitting still in their canoe?

In trying to paint a picture in the mind’s eye of how this event could have taken place, one imagines a husband and wife quarreling. Perhaps one even took a swing at the other, no one wanted to get involved in a domestic squabble, and tragedy ensued. But a quote from the
Providence
(Rhode Island)
Journal
on October 4, 1881, makes me doubt this was the case:

Never was a wedded pair more happily mated. Similar in their tastes, harmonious in their views and feelings, devotedly attached to each other, they had no separate life or inclination; each lived for the other. In one respect their melancholy fate is not to be regretted: they died together, and neither would have willingly survived the other. Her last words, to the man who was sustaining her in the water, expressed the depth of her affection: “If he goes I shall.”
⁴

The Harrises had no children—but they had collected an outstanding library. John Russell Bartlett wrote for the
Providence Journal
in 1875:

Mr. Harris, who has always had a taste for English literature, and formed a very good library of the best writers, both English and American, conceived the idea a few years ago to make his collection of American poetry and dramatic literature as complete as possible, and having once made this a specialty, has pursued it with a zeal unsurpassed by any [other] American collector in this department. To form so large a collection would ordinarily be the work of one’s life, but Mr. Harris has accomplished his work mainly within the last fifteen years.

Without heirs, the Fiske Harris copy of the First Folio, along with the rest of their considerable library, was placed in the hands of Sidney S. Rider, an eccentric
Providence bookseller from whom they had originally purchased the First Folio.

Rider began his career in books as a boy, working at a bookshop on Westminster Street in Providence. After the owner, Charles Burnett, died, Rider took over the business. He stocked the finest editions of English literature and amassed a collection of some fifty thousand items pertaining to Rhode Island history that now reside in the collections of Brown University. The following letter from him, dated 1865, shows he was detail oriented and meticulous and knew his wares:

(The Drayton mentioned here was Michael Drayton, a friend of Shakespeare’s; John Ward, an early vicar of Stratford-upon-Avon, is the source for the anecdotal story of Shakespeare’s death: “Shakespear, Drayton and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting, and it seems, drank
too hard, for Shakespear died of a feavour there contracted.” The Roxburghe Club in London is the oldest bibliophile society in the world. Its elite membership is limited to forty, chosen from among those with only the most “distinguished libraries or collections.”)

But what did Rider do with the Fiske Harris copy? The truth is as murky as the bottom of Moosehead Lake. After the canoeing accident, Harris’s cousin, Rhode Island senator Henry Bowen Anthony, negotiated the purchase of Caleb Fiske Harris’s entire collection from Rider. Anthony, known as the “Father of the Senate,” was then the longest-serving U.S. senator and universally revered as a pillar of wisdom and stability in the unsettled times that followed the American Civil War. He made a discovery after his dealings with Rider: Many key volumes from the Fiske Harris library were missing, including the First Folio. When questioned, Rider replied, perhaps intentionally vaguely, that he had sold the Shakespeare folio in 1883 to someone “in Kentucky.”
⁵

Now, this could be true. There are many instances of wealthy people requesting anonymity when they buy a First Folio. But here’s the rub: A First Folio similar to the Fiske Harris copy eventually wound up in the hands of the Astor family, the wealthy owners of New York’s celebrated Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Since Rider was notorious in the world of book dealing for his unscrupulous
practices, it seems possible that he saw an opportunity to make a personal profit and sold the volume to the Astor family on the sly, then simply fabricated an unnamed individual in Kentucky.

We don’t know which Astor made the initial purchase. Here is what Sir Sidney Lee and my team have uncovered: Caleb Fiske Harris’s entire collection of books was placed in the hands of Rider to be sold. In 1883, the book (according to Rider) was sold to a purchaser “in Kentucky.” The next possible owner is identified only as “Lord Astor.” This is vague; it can apply to any number of members of the Astor family who bore this title during the twentieth century. If the volume was acquired prior to the Astor family moving from America to England in 1891, the first Astor owner would have been William Waldorf Astor, first Viscount Astor.

This is where it gets tricky. We have no idea if William Waldorf Astor was the actual purchaser. But it is an educated guess, going back from the next confirmed owner, the dealer John Fleming. If the book remained in the Astor family until Fleming acquired it, then the chain of ownership would be (after William Waldorf Astor): Waldorf Astor, second Viscount Astor; William Waldorf Astor, third Viscount Astor; and William Waldorf Astor, fourth Viscount Astor. What is certain is that at some point Fleming acquired the Astors’ copy and sold it to Meisei University in 1985.

We don’t know what Caleb Fiske Harris paid for the book in the early 1860s. But going back to the letter written by Rider, the one that mentioned the Roxburghe Club—an interesting bit of history: The organization was founded in 1812 by one Thomas Frognall Dibdin, an English bibliographer, who famously said that £121 and some odd shillings paid for a First Folio in 1818 “was the highest price ever given or likely to be given for the volume.”
⁶
Oh, how wrong he was!

Dibdin was not one for prophecy, but he
was
the vice president of the club. The second Earl Spencer, ancestor of Diana Spencer, Princess of Wales, was the president. (Dibdin was Spencer’s librarian.) The First Folio then owned by the earl (but since sold by the Spencer family) was bound in dark blue goatskin; it had an intertwined “JR” stamped in gold on the front cover within a circle that itself was set inside a large six-pointed Star of David.

Meisei University certainly paid more than £121 when it bought the book from John Fleming (noted for being a less-than-honest book dealer and a “smuck”—even in death, Fiske Harris could not catch a break with book dealers!) The question remains: Are the Fiske Harris copy and the book now known as Meisei 8 one and the same?

Heminges and Condell’s address “To the great Variety of Readers” in the First Folio. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library
.