Washington is a shining city on a hill, swamp of corruption or tourist destination with some great museums, depending on your point of view. It is seldom thought of as a place of pilgrimage for fans of a certain Elizabethan playwright from Stratford-upon-Avon.
Yet the American capital is about to become a vital stop for devotees of William Shakespeare the world over. In June, the Folger Shakespeare Library on Capitol Hill will unveil a permanent display of its 82 copies of the First Folio, the single biggest collection of the world’s 235 surviving copies.
The First Folio is the first published collection of Shakespeare’s plays, compiled by two fellow actors, John Heminges and Henry Condell, and published in 1623, seven years after the playwright’s death. Without it, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Antony and Cleopatra and The Tempest might have been lost forever.
The First Folios were collected, somewhat obsessively, by the oil tycoon Henry Clay Folger and his wife, Emily Jordan Folger, between 1893 and 1928. Their library opened in 1932 in a marble building close to the US Capitol, Library of Congress and supreme court. It was a useful resource for members of Congress seeking to sprinkle Shakespearean quotations into political speeches.
Bas-reliefs along the north facade depict scenes from the plays while the interior evokes Tudor England with oak paneling, ornamental floor tile and high plaster ceilings. There is a working theatre, which most recently produced The Winter’s Tale. But, for nearly a century, the precious collection of First Folios was hidden from public view in the library vault.
“The only people who could see that shelf were the curators and occasionally a guest,” Folger’s director, Michael Witmore, said at a recent media preview. “That was one of the most private, secure areas of our collection – also one of the greatest.”
The secrecy is about to change thanks to a major three-year renovation that has added two exhibition halls including the First Folio Gallery, where the 82 copies will be shown together for the first time.
Witmore continued: “We wanted to build these spaces because we thought that we could safely and in an exciting way present the very best things that we have.
“We will be able to invite audiences to interact with the book and understand, oh, hey, these copies were bought by women and they were owned in these periods, and these are ones that have this error in them and these are ones that don’t.”
He added: “Eighteen of those plays would probably not be with us if they hadn’t been commemorated and placed in that book, which is kind of like a message in a bottle that’s shoved out there. We wanted to show that book. We wanted to uncork that bottle and we wanted to share with people that the first media revolution of print was really complicated.”
The gallery will also boast a printing press modeled on those that printed the First Folio 400 years ago. Witmore noted that “we realised that people who are used to just accessing text on their devices have no idea how hard it was to create a book.
“We would love to refamiliarise people with how strange and awesome books are and this is one of the ways that we can do that.”
Shakespeare represents just a tiny fraction of the Folger’s collection, which dates from 1530 to about 1730 and includes manuals about how to kennel dogs, artillery manuals, cookbooks, science, religion and occult philosophy. Hundreds of books will go on display including Henry VIII’s schoolbook; the public will also see artefacts from the actor Earle Hyman, who played Hamlet at Washington’s Howard University in 1951.
Former president John F Kennedy once observed: “Somebody once said that Washington was a city of northern charm and southern efficiency.” In that era, the city had a reputation as a cultural backwater, far from the bright lights of Broadway, New York. It seems an odd location for bardolatry but, to Witmore, it makes perfect sense.
“There are 22,000 linear feet of rare books and manuscripts here covering the beginning of the age of print all the way through to the creation of the Atlantic world,” he said. “In the middle, kind of looking at all that, is William Shakespeare, living in a city, London, which has the monarchy, the law courts, entertainment. Much like Washington DC, it’s a city that has an official culture – and then there’s the culture.”
The Folger can appeal to both cultures, Witmore argued, citing a statue of Puck, the mischievous sprite from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which looks in the direction of the Capitol.
“Where all the world’s a stage, we’ve got Puck facing the US Congress and the supreme court reminding them that we’re all fools at a certain point in our lives, and we should be modest about what we know,” he mused.
“Then on this side, we have a beautiful garden that connects with Capitol Hill, which has been a great neighbourhood for us to be in. We would like to welcome hundreds of thousands of people here to learn about Shakespeare, to learn about the living traditions of theatre, music and poetry, to appreciate the history not only of what happened in his lifetime but the history that we are making as we reinterpret this writer.”
The new-look Folger also includes a striking artwork, Cloud of Imagination, a 15ft-tall hanging sculpture by the German artist Anke Neumann, composed of 250 individual handmade paper components, each lit from within by optical fibers. The work is one of three commissions by contemporary artists being integrated into the Folger’s expanded spaces.
