Frick Pittsburgh displays rare Shakespeare folios
Sam Lemley, curator of special collections at Carnegie Mellon University Libraries, with one of the university’s Shakespeare Folios
Curator of Special Collections Sam Lemley with the university’s Shakespeare Folios.
Shakespeare’s Third and Fourth Folios are being scanned at Carnegie Mellon University’s digitization lab on Penn Avenue.
The “Inventing Shakespeare: Text, Technology, and the Four Folios” exhibit photographed on March 9, 2023, at the Hunt Library at Carnegie Mellon University.
A Shakespeare First Folio, one of the rarest books in the world.
It was 1623 and William Shakespeare, denizen of Stratford-upon-Avon, England, playwright and part owner of an acting company, had been laid to rest seven years before, with the warning that “curst be he that moves my bones.”
John Heminges and Henry Condell, two old actor friends of Shakespeare’s, decided it was time to gather together the plays that Shakespeare crafted over a span of about 20 busy years and put them between two covers. Shakespeare’s plays had been printed previously in inexpensive, disposable forms, but the resulting weighty, hardcover volume, “Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories and Tragedies,” was meant to immortalize the works and give them a sense of permanence.
And it’s hard to overstate the importance of what Heminges and Condell accomplished by doing this. Had they not gone ahead with what we now know as Shakespeare’s First Folio, the bulk of the Bard’s work could have been lost forever. That means we would have been deprived of masterworks like “Macbeth,” or less celebrated offerings like “Cymbeline.” Few would question that the Shakespeare First Folio is one of the most important books ever published.
It’s also one of the most sought-after. Only 230 copies remain out of about 750 printed. About a third of them are housed at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. On the rare occasions when one turns up on the market, it typically sells for millions of dollars.
One copy of a First Folio is in the special collections of Carnegie Mellon University Libraries, as well as three additional folios that followed. Altogether, CMU has seven folios, and they will be displayed through October at the Frick Pittsburgh in Point Breeze in the exhibit “From Stage to Page: 400 Years of Shakespeare in Print.”
According to Dawn Brean, chief curator and director of collections at the Frick Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon was looking for a way to mark the 400th anniversary of the First Folio’s publication and “they really don’t have great space to put exhibitions of their collections, so they were looking for a partner and they came to us. It just felt like a natural partnership.”
After the First Folio arrived in 1623, a second one was printed in 1632, followed by a third in 1663 and a fourth in 1685. The Second Folio largely repeats the contents of the first book, with some changes in language. The Third Folio added seven new plays, only one of which — “Pericles” — is now believed to have actually been written by Shakespeare. The Fourth Folio repeated what was in the third.
“Our idea of (Shakespeare) continues to evolve, and the folios are really a marker of that history,” Brean said.
Sam Lemley, curator of special collections at the Carnegie Mellon University Libraries, noted that the later Folios have been “historically dismissed,” but they “are just as fascinating and played a significant role in preserving Shakespeare through time…”
He added that by gathering all four folios together in one room in “From Stage to Page,” “it offers a fuller, more nuanced view of how Shakespeare was kept in print and read in the first century after his death.”
Other items in the Frick’s collection will be displayed in the exhibit, including a box set of Shakespeare’s plays owned by Henry Clay Frick and materials used by the Frick children in their studies. During the run of the exhibit, the museum will have a discussion on Shakespeare’s enduring appeal and how it relates to contemporary life and culture on the third Friday of every month at 2 p.m. There will also be screenings of movies from the 1990s and early 2000s adapted from Shakespeare plays, such as “10 Things I Hate About You” and the version of “Romeo and Juliet” that starred Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes.
Carnegie Mellon also is having a companion exhibit, “Inventing Shakespeare: Text, Technology and the Four Folios,” in the Hunt Library Gallery. It explores the technologies that have been used to study the folios since 1950.
Additional information is available at TheFrickPittsburgh.org.