“First” look The book that introduced the world to the Bard is coming to Oglebay
A multi-panel exhibition exploring Shakespeare’s impact, then and now, accompanies the First Folio display.
A First Folio on display at Folger Shakespeare Library
The Droeshout engraving of William Shakespeare
A Shakespeare First Folio copy will be on display in the Mansion Museum in Oglebay Resort.
No one knows how William Shakespeare died 400 years ago last month, or whether his demise was protracted or sudden.
On the one hand, he signed a will just a month before his death, which could be a signal he wanted to get his affairs in order before he “shuffled off this mortal coil,” to use his own words from “Hamlet.” By the same token, however, Shakespeare stated in that will that he was in “perfect health.” And a few contemporaries speculated that Shakespeare met his end as a result of “a fever” contracted after a bout of heavy drinking.
When he was laid to rest in the chancel of the Church of the Holy Trinity in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, a few days later, there was almost certainly no expectation that the playwright and actor would remain celebrated and revered a full four centuries later. Participating in the theater in the 16th and 17th centuries was considered a faintly disreputable line of work, and it was, in fact, entertainment fashioned for the masses, not high art meant to be enshrined and parsed for our betterment. But Shakespeare is now routinely near the top of the lists of the most influential and important people to have ever enjoyed a sojourn on this planet, alongside Jesus Christ, Isaac Newton, Muhammad and Aristotle.
When he died, Shakespeare was as old as Michelle Obama, Nicolas Cage, Russell Crowe and Rob Lowe are today, but making it to 52 in 1616 was no mean feat, considering that the average life expectancy was about 35 years-old, pestilence frequently raged across the landscape and knowledge of human health was rudimentary at best. Nevertheless, Shakespeare packed a lot into those 52 years.
He married, fathered three children, became a partner in two theaters, became wealthy and purchased property. Along the way, he wrote plays that are just about universally considered to be the greatest ever concocted. Anyone who penned “Hamlet,” “Macbeth,” “King Lear,” “Julius Caesar” and “Othello” would be considered a shoo-in for the canon, but when you add in “The Merchant of Venice,” “Romeo and Juliet,” “Richard III,” “Henry V,” “Coriolanus,” “The Tempest,” “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “As You Like It,” and on and on, the breathtaking scope of his achievement becomes apparent. Power, jealousy, lust, greed, benevolence – the whole panoply of human emotion is represented in Shakespeare’s work, which ranges from dramas and comedies to histories and tragedies.
As you are reading this, there is every likelihood that, somewhere in the world, actors are staging something by Shakespeare. Someone else is reading a play or a sonnet by the Bard.
“Shakespeare is constantly being performed,” said Annette Drew-Bear, a professor of English at Washington & Jefferson College who is a scholar of Shakespeare and Renaissance drama. His work endures “because of his ability to present human emotion, including love, the timeliness of his plots and the fact that we can relate to them.”
And were it not for a couple of enterprising colleagues of Shakespeare, swatches of his oeuvre might well have entirely vanished in the mists. Seven years after he died, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two members of a company for which Shakespeare wrote, decided to assemble all the Shakespeare plays they could find and put them between two covers. Using the London printers that went by the full name of the Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers, the Shakespeare First Folio was published in December 1623. It contained almost all of his plays, with the exception of “Pericles,” “Two Noble Kinsmen,” a collaboration for which Shakespeare later received partial credit, and a few others that Shakespeare is believed to have written but are now lost. The First Folio had a run of about 750 copies, researchers now believe, and a little more than 200 of those survive today. Previously unknown copies do turn up occasionally – one recently did at a Scottish estate – and 89 are in the hands of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., the institution named for Henry Clay Folger Jr., the wealthy president and chairman of Standard Oil of New York who was a dogged collector of First Folios.
Coming in at 630 pages and initially costing about $240 each in today’s dollars – they now fetch millions at auction – there are subtle variations across the exisiting First Folios because proofreading was happening at the same time the books were slowly coming off the press, according to Georgianna Ziegler, the associate librarian and reference librarian at the Folger Shakespeare Library.
“The typesetter made mistakes,” she explained. In fact, one play, the seldom-performed “Troilus and Cressida,” isn’t listed in the table of contents, though it is contained within the First Folio.
To mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, the Folger Shakespeare Library is dispersing 18 First Folios to all 50 states, so that they can be widely seen and appreciated. In Pennsylvania, it will arrive at Elizabethtown College near Lancaster in November, and, starting Monday, a First Folio will be at the Museums of Oglebay Institute in Wheeling, W.Va. It will be at the museum though June 12, and be accompanied by an assortment of special programs and events.
In order for Oglebay to get the nod, it had to fit specific conditions where climate control and security were concerned. Lighting levels, to cite one example, have to be set just so because light can slowly degrade paper.
“It was a competitive application,” according to Christin Byrum, the director of Oglebay Institute. “We had the right mix of things that the Folger was looking for.”
Several special events are surrounding the First Folio’s appearance at Oglebay. This weekend and next, Towngate Theatre is hosting a production of “The Dresser,” the Ronald Harwood play about an ailing stage titan who is preparing for one final performance of “King Lear.” On May 21, “ShakesBEER in the Park” will have special beers, 17th century foods and entertainment by the Rustic Mechanicals, West Virginia’s only traveling Shakespeare troupe. Then, on May 29, the Rustic Mechanicals will return for a performance of “The Tempest” at Oglebay’s Anne Kuchinka Amphitheater.
On June 4, the Society for Creative Anachronism will offer demonstrations of armored combat and rapier fighting, show off period artifacts and offer lessons on customs from the late medieval period.
Finally, on June 11, “The Gravedigger’s Tale” will tell the story of “Hamlet” from the perspective of the play’s gravedigger. The interactive yarn will unfold at Oglebay’s Mansion Museum and at Wheeling’s Greenwood Cemetery.
“Almost everybody has a personal connection to Shakespeare,” Byrum said. “His stories are so timeless.”