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ABSTRACT
The Folger Shakespeare Library has 82 copies of First Folios, which is more than a third of the surviving total of 235 copies in the world. The married couple Henry and Emily Folger acquired these copies between 1893 and 1928. Most of the available posthumous narratives that discuss the Folgers’ zeal for collecting First Folios concentrate primarily on Henry Clay Folger’s biography and financial backing of the couple’s book collecting project. Only secondarily, if at all, is the focus on Emily Jordan Folger’s contribution to the collection. By calling attention to her Master’s thesis ‘The True Text of Shakespeare’, completed at Vassar College in 1896, this article suggests that greater acknowledgment of Emily Jordan Folger and her role in the collaboration is not just an ethical obligation but also helps us understand the intellectual framework of the Folgers’ seemingly compulsive efforts to collect, above all, multiple copies of the First Folio. This understanding, furthermore, casts light on the Bardolatrous reverence of the First Folio as a fetishistic cultural embodiment of ‘The True Text of Shakespeare’ in late nineteenth century USA.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
2 Mays, The Millionaire and the Bard, xvi.
3 Ibid., 103.
4 Ibid., 98.
5 Ibid., 96. The quotation is from Rosenbach, Henry Folger, 105.
6 Bristol, ‘Henry Clay Folger, Jr.’, 114–75.
7 Smith, Shakespeare’s First Folio, 43–4.
8 Grant, Collecting Shakespeare, 97.
9 Wright, ‘Huntington and Folger’, 72. Here Wright also shares an anecdote: ‘A California friend of Huntington’s once observed him in a New York auction room avidly bidding. Since Huntington was known normally to buy through an agent, this friend approached him during an intermission and remarked on the unusual event. “Sh-sh-sh, I’m not buying, I’m selling”, Huntington replied. He was busy running up the price of some of his duplicates’.
10 Wright, ‘Huntington and Folger’, 73.
11 Smith, ‘The Formation’, 66.
12 Ibid., 66.
13 Ibid., 66.
14 Ibid., 72.
15 Ibid., 73.
16 West, ‘Sales and Prices … (PART ONE)’, 501–2.
17 Ibid., 500.
18 Ibid., 509.
19 West, ‘Sales and Prices … (PART TWO)’, 76.
20 Ibid., 79.
21 Ibid., 87.
22 Ibid., 88.
23 Galbraith, ‘Collectors’, 147–8.
24 Ibid., 148.
25 Ibid.
26 Grant, Collecting Shakespeare, 36.
27 About Emily Jordan Folger’s work at Vassar and beyond, see her entry in ‘Vassar Encyclopedia/Distinguished Alumni’: https://vcencyclopedia.vassar.edu/distinguished-alumni/emily-jordan-folger/.
28 Blayney, The First Folio of Shakespeare, 42. Quoted in Grant, Collecting Shakespeare, 36.
29 Folger, ‘The True Text’, 4.
30 See ‘Emily Jordan Folger “1879”’: https://vcencyclopedia.vassar.edu/distinguished-alumni/emily-jordan-folger/.
31 Ibid., 1.
32 Ibid., 25.
33 Ibid., 2, 4, and 5.
34 Ibid., 4.
35 Ibid., 7.
36 Ibid., 7.
37 Ibid., 8.
38 Ibid., 60.
39 Ibid., 62.
40 Gibson, The Philadelphia Shakespeare Story, 184.
41 Ibid., 185.
42 Ibid., 184–5.
43 Furness, Othello, v–vi.
44 The radical change in Furness’s editorial policy is beyond the scope of this article but is a fascinating subject. Furness interrupted his work on the Othello edition during Helen Kate’s long illness and returned to it months after her death. In a private letter, dated two years after Helen Kate’s passing, Furness writes, ‘I have flickerings of interest which live for a minute. The adoption of the First Folio as my text has proved the most abiding. The printers are in the middle of the Second Act [of Othello], and two or three months should see the whole completed, if I don’t commit it in disgust to the flames before then’. HHFJ, The Letters, 237. Anthony James West also makes an intriguing point when he points out that Furness purchased a First Folio in 1871 and reminds us that 18th century and early 19th century editors ‘all used their Folio as part of their working library’. ‘With Furness, however, this tradition ceased. I have found no later editor who owned a First Folio’. West, ‘Sales and Prices … (PART ONE)’, 499. In this sense, Furness’s radical change is, in fact, a last act of a long editorial tradition.
45 Dávidházi, The Romantic Cult, 2–3.