Where There's a Will

Home , Bad quarto, Second Folio

LOCAL EXPERTS. curator’s insight GLOBAL REACH. Worldwide the Bonhams Group holds Where There’s a Will close to 400 auctions each year in 60 specialist areas. Our Los Angeles REVERENCE FOR THE BARD PERMEATES THE HUNTINGTON office provides local access to the exceptional resources of this global network. By Stephen Tabor Consignments now invited for auctions in all categories. Marking the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s His method was not to hang around bookshops; death, Stephen Tabor, The Huntington’s curator of he preferred to bag whole collections at once, using +1 (323) 436 5552 early printed books, relates how the institution’s high-end dealers like George D. Smith and A.S.W. [email protected] founder built one of the world’s great collections Rosenbach as stalking horses. His fast-growing of the playwright’s works. library therefore incorporated the knowledge and MATTEO SANDONA (1881-1964) In her Kimono taste of numerous discerning buyers who had pre- signed ‘Sandona’ (lower right) hen Henry Huntington turned 60 ceded him. His first notable en bloc purchase was oil on canvas in 1910, he announced his retire- the library of Elihu Dwight Church in 1911. In 36 x 28 5/8in ment, saying, “I believe I am en- addition to a choice collection of the most impor- Sold for $293,000 titled to some rest and playtime. tant works on American discovery and exploration, WhyW shouldn’t I take it?” For one of America’s this netted Huntington more than 50 early copies richest men, this meant a new commitment to of Shakespeare’s plays and poems and placed him book collecting, in which he had been dabbling immediately among the collectors in the field to be with increasing sophistication during his working reckoned with. Of the Huntington’s 30 Shakespeare years. Recognizing that he had to limit his scope, folios, 10 come from Church. he set a goal of building the best private library Huntington’s next big trawl of Shakespeare came dedicated primarily to English and American lit- in 1914 from the Duke of Devonshire. At its core Below left: Actors from erature and history—with a few incidental jewels was a collection of English drama started by John Shakespeare’s Globe in London like a Gutenberg Bible. Philip Kemble, a London actor and theater manager performed a touring production of Much Ado About Nothing in At the turn of the 20th century, reverence for at the turn of the 19th century. Kemble collected not The Huntington’s Rothenberg William Shakespeare’s works was perhaps the most just early printings of Shakespeare, but also later Hall on Nov. 9 and 10, 2015. Photograph by Jamie Pham. powerful engine driving the passions of gentlemen editions, including the now notorious Restoration Below right: On April 17, 2015, collectors. This stimulated interest in all early adaptations, some of which were still being staged students from the East Los Angeles Performing Arts English drama and in original editions of any works in Kemble’s time. The star of this collection is one Academy at Esteban E. Torres that had a flavor of Olde England. Coincidentally, of the two surviving copies of the first edition of High School performed A Midsummer Night’s Dream on the 1894 imposition of estate taxes in Great Britain Hamlet (1603)—and the only one with the title page. the South Terrace of the was starting to force the dissolution of many old (The British Library copy lacks the title but has the Huntington Art Gallery. Fairy Queen Titania, played by Mariah family libraries. Auction houses and antiquarian final leaf of text, which the Devonshire copy lacks.) Gonzalez, was sung to sleep by book firms were flush with rarities that had never This is the so-called bad quarto, containing a corrupt her fairy attendants (left to right): Skyla de la Torre, Wendy before been exposed to an international market. Into text differing widely from the one we are familiar Lopez, Jacey Caceres, Jasmine the resulting feeding frenzy dropped Henry Hun- with today. (For example, in the bad quarto, the Tucker, and Alexa Mendoza. Photograph by Martha Benedict. tington, ready to play, his sights set on Shakespeare. first line of Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy doesn’t

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of The Taming of the Shrew). It also leaves out the poems, among which is a tiny volume in its original limp vellum binding containing the 1599 editions of both Venus and Adonis and The Passionate Pilgrime. Then there are the folios—the hefty collections of the plays published in four editions between 1623 and 1685. Huntington bought four, ten, seven, and nine copies of the respective editions. The First Folio, published seven years after Shakespeare’s death, contains 36 plays, 18 of them printed for the first time. This “authorized version,” prepared by his friends and colleagues from “true originall copies,” is the prime source of our knowledge of Shake- speare’s texts. Another standout among The Huntington’s folios is the Devonshire copy of the Second Folio (1632), with extensive revisions in a EWING ARCHITECTS, INC. “contemporary” hand that turned out to be forg- Master planning and architectural design of a Stephen Tabor (far left), curator exactly soar from the second comma onward: “To be, eries by the 19th-century Shakespeare scholar John of early printed books at The Payne Collier. Though discredited, the notes remain diverse range of project types and styles including Huntington, shows a Third Folio, or not to be, I there’s the point.”) While we would 1663, of Shakespeare’s collected normally place both Kemble and Devonshire at the an object of fascination for authorship conspiracy contemporary, contextual and rustic plays to teachers attending the theorists and students of bibliographical rascality. Shakespeare at The Huntington top of the pantheon of book collectors, both men institute program in July 2015. compromised their achievements by the pernicious The death of Henry Huntington in 1927 marked Douglas s. Ewing, Faia The annual program brings the end of the library’s purchases of early Shake- theater professionals together habit of cutting up their best books (including the www.ewingarchitects.com with teachers, who learn 1603 Hamlet) and mounting the leaves individually speare editions. Even if the institution he founded innovative techniques for had been adequately endowed to compete in the teaching Shakespeare through in paper frames in misguided acts of piety. performance. Photograph by By making further bulk purchases—including marketplace, the supply was drying up. If any first- Lisa Blackburn. the fabulous Bridgewater library in 1917, which sits edition quartos from Shakespeare’s lifetime remain at the heart of the institution’s early English hold- in private hands today, potentially available for sale, ings—and cherry-picking other famous collections, only a few tight-lipped individuals know about them, Huntington expanded his Shakespeare holdings and their appearance at auction will make headlines. while building on his other strengths. The most These early editions are now little-studied for coveted items were the early quartos, the printings their texts: we already know what they say. Instead, of single plays up to the rather arbitrary date of and increasingly, scholars want to find out where 1640. These survive today in an average of only 10 the individual copies have been: who bought them, copies per edition, and the first printings are much how they used them, what they thought of them, rarer than that. Those published before Shakespeare’s and what books kept them company on the shelves death in 1616 carry the most potent magic—the of early readers. As with an archaeological dig, the possibility that the author himself could have turned goal is not to use the artifacts as they were intended AIA DesIgn AwArD AIA Honor AwArD their pages (though there is no evidence that Shake- but to study the evidence that clings to them and speare took the slightest interest in his own plays what it can tell us about the culture that produced once they were printed). Henry Huntington set them. Early Shakespeare editions at The Huntington himself a goal to beat the British Library’s holdings remain in high demand by scholars conducting such of early quartos, and while he fell a little short at research, though their circulation is tightly restricted 73 copies, his collection was thought at the time because of conservation concerns. Scholars return to to be the second-best in the world. (Meanwhile, the original copies with different questions in each the single-minded Henry Clay Folger was secretly new generation. What would the Bard make of it? assembling a collection as large as the other two combined.) This figure ignores a shelf-full of works Stephen Tabor is curator of early printed books at once thought to be by Shakespeare and earlier The Huntington. treatments by unknown authors of familiar plots like King Leir (as opposed to Shakespeare’s King Lear) and The Taming of a Shrew (a different version

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