The Shakespeare Thefts (12 page)

An officer immediately set about looking for the correct set of keys, and as the woman stood waiting, she turned to Sarah and asked why she was there. Sarah told her she was going to be examining the Shakespeare First
Folio. The woman said she hoped Sarah had brought very warm gloves, since it was always cold during the winter months in the archives. The security officer reentered the room, and the woman wished Sarah a good day and left with her dogs in tow.
¹
Sarah was soon to learn she had just met the Duchess of Norfolk.

The castle itself is now the location, each summer, of the Arundel Festival—a cultural event featuring music and theatrical performances. Shakespeare’s plays are performed outdoors, in “the Collector Earl’s Garden,” a formal garden that was conceived as “a lighthearted tribute” to Thomas Howard (1584–1646), the twenty-first Earl of Arundel, known as the Collector. He was a great art collector, and some of his treasures are now at Oxford and the library at the Royal Society in London. The garden is divided into formal courts. Its grand centerpiece is the rockwork “mountain” planted with palms and rare ferns to represent another world, supporting a green oak version of “Oberon’s Palace,” a fantastic spectacle designed by Inigo Jones for Prince Henry’s Masque on New Year’s Day 1611, flanked by two green oak obelisks. It is a unique place to listen to the words of William Shakespeare: a new garden, but located on a property that traces its history back to 1067.

What struck Sarah on the winter day that she examined the First Folio was how different the castle must seem to visitors in the summer. The morning she was
there was wintry and gray, and everything was cast into shadow. She felt (if not for the occasional electric light fixture) that she might have been walking down passages in the sixteenth century. The shortest way to the archives was through the great hall. Massive wooden beams support the roof, and the off-season is when every wooden surface in the castle is waxed and polished. Waxing roof beams requires several men to strap themselves into climbing harnesses and negotiate the structure like acrobats. The whole setting gave her an out-of-time feeling, even when she was shown to the bathroom, which remained exactly as it was when it was newly built—in the Victorian period.

I like to imagine that the spirit of the twelfth Duke of Norfolk, after jotting his math problems, would enjoy walking out onto his former estate to admire the new gardens that the eighteenth Duke has designed to emulate the twenty-first Earl of Arundel’s tastes. Perhaps the ghosts of both would still feel at home at Arundel Castle and could join the living duke to watch a performance of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
. If the current duke so desires, he can read along with the performers from his private copy of the play—a First Folio, not a third.

Royalist Copies, Puritan Copies

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England
.

—Shakespeare’s
King Richard II

The civil wars in the mid-seventeenth century tore England apart, pitting the “royalists,” supporters of Charles I and Charles II, against the Puritan “parliamentarians,” led by Oliver Cromwell. The most fascinating owner of a Shakespeare folio during this tumultuous period was the figure at the vortex of the civil war: Charles I himself.

Following his surrender to parliamentary forces in May 1646, Charles was placed under house arrest at
Hampton Court Palace southwest of London. He requested reading materials, including his beloved Shakespeare folio (in this instance, the Second Folio edition of 1632, now in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle), in which he wrote “
Dum Spiro Spero
” (while I breathe, I hope).

Charles appears to have been a careful reader of Shakespeare’s text: On page 262 of
Twelfth Night
, he supplied a missing speech-heading, making it clear that the line “Now, the melancholy god protect thee” should be assigned to the “
Clo
.” [Clown], Feste, rather than to Duke Orsino:

Now, the melancholy god protect thee, and the tailor make thy doublet of changeable taffeta, for thy mind is a very opal. I would have men of such constancy put to sea, that their business might be everything and their intent everywhere, for that’s it that always makes a good voyage of nothing. Farewell.

On the page listing the actors in Shakespeare’s company, next to Joseph Taylor’s name, Charles wrote “acted the part of Hamlet”—evidence, perhaps, that the king had experienced Shakespeare’s plays in performance as well as on the page.

The imprisoned king also amused himself by thinking up new titles for the plays in the volume. On the
table of contents page, he wrote “Benedick and Beatrice” next to
Much Ado About Nothing
, “Rosalind” next to
As You Like It
, “Pyramus and Thisbe” next to
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, and “Malvolio” next to
Twelfth Night
. Charles seems to have felt that Shakespeare’s comedies, like his tragedies and histories, ought to be named for their most interesting characters. Given the king’s personal circumstances, the pride of place that he accords to the tormented and wrongfully imprisoned Malvolio—who says, “
Why have you suffered me to be imprisoned, / Kept in a dark house”
—is both telling and moving.

On November 11, 1647, Charles escaped and fled to the Isle of Wight in a small boat. The remarkable fact that he took the cumbersome folio with him testifies to its status as one of his dearest possessions. Unfortunately, Charles had wrongly assumed that the governor of the island was sympathetic to his cause. He was captured when he arrived and imprisoned in Carisbrooke Castle; he and his folio were then sent to Windsor Castle, where he awaited trial and, ultimately, execution.

The king’s fondness for the book was apparently common knowledge. The poet John Milton, in a tract justifying the execution of the king, likened Charles to the evil Richard III and employed an apt quotation from Shakespeare’s play; Milton noted that he did not choose
an obscure author with which to attack the king but “one whom we well know was [Charles’s] closet companion of these solitudes, William Shakespeare.”
¹

During his two years of imprisonment, Charles was attended by Thomas Herbert, officially a “Groom of the Bedchamber,” but whose true function was that of jailer and spy. (He was later knighted by Cromwell for his services.) Herbert wrote that he had enjoyed a close personal relationship with the king and that Charles had given him many gifts “in testimony of his royal favor.”
²
These gifts included the cloak that Charles wore on the morning of his beheading, a silver watch, and “a cabinet with some books.”
³
But the veracity of these claims has been called into question.

Herbert had journeyed to Persia in his youth and had published a popular account of his travels in 1634, introducing English readers to such Oriental delights as coffee: “a drink as black as soot, wholesome as they say but not toothsome; if supped hot it comforts the brain, expels melancholy and sleep, purges choler, lightens the spirits, and begets an excellent concoction, and by custom becomes delicious.”
⁴
Contemporaries noticed, however, that Herbert included descriptions of places that he had not actually visited, appropriating narrative material from other writers without acknowledging the source. The amount of plagiarized material increased significantly in each successive edition of his book.

Scholars have characterized Herbert as “a man constitutionally incapable of telling a direct truth”
⁵
and concluded that he had “helped himself” to “royal possessions” after Charles was executed.
⁶
It appears that the authorities in the seventeenth century were skeptical about him as well. When the monarchy was restored in 1660, Charles II set about recovering those portions of his father’s property that had been embezzled during the commonwealth period. In a letter preserved in the British Library, Herbert asserted that he did not have any of Charles I’s “papers, books, or writings.”
⁷
When pressed by the commission, however, he apparently turned over an English translation of Calvin’s
Institutes
in which he had written “T. Herbert his Majesties book.” The book has been housed in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle ever since. But Herbert did not turn over the Shakespeare folio that was in his possession in which he had written, “
Ex dono serenissimi regis Car. servo suo humillas T. Herbert
” (“A gift of the royal King Charles to his humble servant T. Herbert”).

And so my team and I began to hunt it down. We discovered something curious: There seems to have been at least one unifying factor between friend and foe during this polarized period of British history—a desire for a copy of the Shakespeare First Folio. Remarkably, through our research, we discovered that key players on
both sides
of the conflict owned (still-extant) First Folios.

Among the royalist owners: Colonel John Lane, who sheltered Charles II in his country house, Bentley Hall, after the catastrophic loss at the Battle of Worcester in 1651. (The king famously continued his escape disguised as the manservant to Jane Lane, the colonel’s sister.) Then there was John Cosin, the Bishop of Durham (whose copy of the First Folio was stolen in the late twentieth century and “returned” by Raymond Scott in the early twenty-first). Cosin was an archroyalist who fled to France in 1644 with other supporters of Charles I and spent the next sixteen years in exile.

Similarly, the dramatist Thomas Killigrew, another First Folio owner and a royalist playwright, followed Prince Charles into exile on the Continent. At some point, Killigrew’s copy (which is now in Meisei University in Tokyo) was struck by a musket bullet that penetrated halfway through the volume. Did it save his life?

If it did, it would not have been a fact celebrated by the Puritan parliamentarians, who had a fundamental opposition to theater—they closed the London playhouses in 1642 and demolished the Globe Theatre in 1644. Puritan sermons characterized “filthy” stage plays as “the bellows to blow the coals of lust, soften the mind, and make it flexible to evil inclinations.” You would think that any copies of the First Folio that fell into Puritan hands would have been destroyed. But
that is not the case: we have found that many leading parliamentarians owned copies of the First Folio. The religious and cultural implications of this fact are fascinating. Why would Puritans buy and keep an extremely expensive book that seems to fly in the face of everything they believed in? Was it acceptable to read plays and offensive only to perform them? We don’t have the answer to this conundrum, but we know Puritans did own First Folios.

A copy now in the Folger Shakespeare Library was once owned by Colonel John Hutchinson, who signed the death warrant of Charles I (and subsequently died a prisoner of Charles II). Another was originally owned by Admiral Robert Blake, the “Father of the Royal Navy,” who won major naval victories for Cromwell against the royalists. (Blake was buried with high honors in Westminster Abbey in 1657, but when the monarchy was restored, his remains were disinterred and thrown into a common grave. His folio has had a better ending: Today it lives in London’s Reform Club.) A third copy, also in the Folger, was owned by Edward Scarisbrick, who was among those falsely accused by the famous perjurer Titus Oates of being part of a plot to assassinate Charles II.

As for the king’s copy (the ultimate royalist’s folio), last believed to be in the hands of a man “constitutionally
incapable of telling a direct truth,” another century and a half would pass before it would be returned to Windsor. During the course of its journey, it somehow found its way into the library of the great eighteenth-century book collector Dr. Richard Mead. Although Mead’s father Matthew had been a parliamentarian—Cromwell appointed him curate of St. Paul’s Shadwell (a historic church in east London), and Charles II subsequently ejected him from the church and drove him into exile in Holland—Richard reconciled with the monarchy, tending Queen Anne on her deathbed and becoming the personal physician to King George II. His library was said to have been the “most public” in London, open to all who wished to consult it.
⁸

Following Mead’s death in 1754, the Charles I folio was purchased by Mead’s friend and pupil, Dr. Anthony Askew. At Askew’s death twenty years later, the volume passed to the famed Shakespeare editor George Steevens. Any editor can make a mistake; for his part, Steevens seems to have misunderstood the ownership inscription inside the folio, “
T. Herbert
,” which he glossed with the annotation, “Sir Thomas Herbert was Master of the Revels to King Charles the First.” (The Master of the Revels was in charge of arranging royal court entertainments, and censoring plays intended for public performance.)

At the auction of Steevens’s books in 1800, his Shakespeare folio was bought for King George III. Although Americans generally remember King George for his madness (and the American Revolution), he actually was a quintessential scholar-king, one who quickly corrected Steevens’s error, writing on the same page: “This is a mistake, he (Sir Thomas Herbert) having been Groom of the Bed-Chamber to King Charles I, but Sir Henry Herbert was Master of the Revels.”

There’s many a man hath more hair than wit
—Shakespeare’s
Comedy of Errors

—Shakespeare’s
Comedy of Errors

When you hunt for First Folios for over a decade, you can become a bit obsessed. For instance, I dwell on that private copy in Tokyo. I have a connection in Japan, an American who has worked there for some time and has developed a nuanced understanding of Japanese culture. I met with him several years ago at the Tokyo restaurant in which Quentin Tarantino filmed the famous fight scene in
Kill Bill
. An ironic location, perhaps, to strategize about culturally sensitive ways that we might approach the First Folio owners (we didn’t want to appear to be stereotypically
aggressive Americans demanding that we had a right to see their property) that ultimately might help us gain access. But we did not move closer to getting a look at it, not even by a hair.