Review: Three books that shed light on Shakespeare's world

THE MILLIONAIRE AND THE BARD. By Andrea E. Mays. Simon & Schuster. $39.99.

MAPPING SHAKESPEARE'S WORLD. By Peter Whitfield. Bodleian Library. $69.

Victor Hugo once wrote, "England has two books, one of which he has made, the other which has made her – Shakespeare and the Bible". The 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare's death is on April 23. A cornucopia of Shakespeare exhibitions and publications in 2016 will celebrate the writings of the "sweet Swan of Avon", as Ben Jonson described him in the introduction to the 1623 first edition of Master William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies – as the "First Folio" was originally known.

The Making of Shakespeare's First Folio, by Oxford University Professor Emma Smith, documents "the human, artistic, economic and technical aspects of the birth of the First Folio", which was published in November 1623, some 7½ years after Shakespeare's death. Two actors, who edited the plays, John Heminge and Henry Condell, did not acknowledge Shakespeare's collaborators, nor is it clear why they left out poems and certain plays such as Pericles. The cost of printing the 750 copies, however, might have been a consideration given the First Folio runs to 950 pages.

Nonetheless, posterity is grateful to them, and printer Isaac Jaggard and publisher Edward Blount, who carried the financial burden. Without their collaboration, 18 of the 36 plays, including Macbeth, Julius Caesar and The Tempest, would have been lost. Previously, Shakespeare's plays had only been sold in ephemeral quartos, the equivalent of today's paperbacks.

Shakespeare's appeal in 1623, moreover, was no greater than some of his contemporary playwrights. Jaggard and Blount had no certainty of commercial success. They could not have known the First Folio would become one of the most valuable books in the world. A copy of the First Folio sold at auction in New York for $US5.6 million. In 2003, Oriel College, Oxford, controversially sold its First Folio. It was purchased by Sir Paul Getty for a rumoured £3.5 million.

Smith reveals the complex economics of the production of the First Folio. Only 244 copies, most of them incomplete, have survived. The Bodleian Library, the publisher of Smith's authoritative work, itself has a remarkable First Folio survival story to tell. Its copy, in sheets, was received in late 1623 shortly after publication, but the subsequent bound copy was discarded in 1663 when the third edition of Shakespeare's plays was published.

Fast forward to 1902, when the original Bodley copy, known as the Turbutt Folio, was brought into the library. A frenetic, and ultimately successful, subscription appeal was made in 1905 to the British public to prevent it being bought by the aggressive American collector Henry Clay Folger (1857-1930).

Professor Andrea Mays, Professor of Economics at California State University, convincingly documents the background to Folger and his bibliomania in The Millionaire and the Bard: Henry Folger's Obsessive Hunt for Shakespeare's First Folio. Folger was far from poor, ending up as Chairman of the Board of Standard Oil of New York, but, even in his time, First Folios were not cheap. In 1903, he paid $US48,732.50 for the Vincent/Sibthorp Folio.

Folger persuaded his wife they should devote their finances to their quest of First Folio and Shakespearean purchases, even to the extent of their never owning a house. Mays writes, "Like Faust, he was a prisoner of a notion not his own". Folger ultimately acquired 82 First Folios, now held in the Folger Library in Washington, although he died before the library opened.

The concentration of copies in Washington has proven useful to scholarship, because no one copy is exactly the same. Each copy has its own typographical and binding provenance, as demonstrated by Professor Charlton Hinman in his groundbreaking Printing and Proof-reading of the First Folio of Shakespeare (1963).

Henry Clay Folger would surely have been pleased the library is taking a "Fleet of First Folios" around America in 2016 in exhibitions which it is estimated will attract 750,000 visitors. Mays writes, "The Folger Shakespeare Library is a triumph of American capitalism and philanthropy". Would that we now had similar bibliothecal philanthropy when the National Library of Australia and university library budgets continue to be cut.

Peter Whitfield begins Mapping Shakespeare's World with the statement, "Shakespeare never wrote a play that was explicitly set in the world in which he lived, Elizabethan London". Shakespeare's plays, ranged from Hamlet's Elsinore to Cleopatra's Alexandria to Othello's Cyprus.

Whitfield reveals that many of Shakespeare's locations were carefully chosen and that he relied on his audience to recognise the geographical settings through their knowledge of paintings, drawings, contemporary maps and geographical texts. Whitfield's profusely illustrated book is divided into three sections, covering the Mediterranean classical world, European cities and courts and British plays. The then known world is indeed all of Shakespeare's stage.