Thou Lovest Me, My Name is Will
Smitten by Shakespeare
Make but my name thy love, and love that still,
And then thou lovest me, for my name is Will.
Sonnet 136.13–14
BRITISH BOOTS, NOT BOOKS, made imprints in North America only a few years before Shakespeare died in 1616. Virginia was settled in 1607, Bermuda in 1609, Newfoundland in 1610. More than a century passed before an amateur acting company put on the first Shakespeare play in America, a performance of Romeo and Juliet in New York in 1730, after which interest in the Bard grew quickly. Virginia and Alden Vaughan write that the first production of Shakespeare in America by a professional acting company occurred in 1750.1
America’s founding fathers shared the growing ardor for Shakespeare. In 1744, Benjamin Franklin was responsible for a six-volume set of the Bard’s works to be delivered to the library company of Philadelphia. In 1772, John Adams hailed Shakespeare as “that great Master of every Affection of the Heart and every sentiment of the Mind as well as all the Powers of Expression.” In 1787, George Washington attended a performance of The Tempest in Philadelphia. Thomas Jefferson wrote that a “lively and lasting sense of filial duty is more effectually impressed on the mind of a son or daughter by reading King Lear, than by all the volumes of ethics and divinity that ever were written.”2 A copy of Shakespeare’s 1623 First Folio slipped into the country first in 1791. By the early 1800s, editions of Shakespeare’s works were being printed in Philadelphia.
Especially in New England, reading Shakespeare was acceptable, but performing him was tempting the devil. Baptist, Quaker, Presbyterian, and Lutheran pastors adjured parishioners to avoid the theater, which could lead to debauchery. In the Puritan atmosphere of mid-eighteenth-century Massachusetts, fines were levied on both theater owners and actors, a stigma that lasted more than a century. Groups gathering for a serious reading of Shakespeare, however, escaped recrimination. The Shakespeare Society of Philadelphia was founded in 1851, principally by lawyers, who gathered in formal attire for evening readings and literary discussion after the remains of an elegant dinner were cleared from the table.
Early Shakespeare in America often appeared in altered, highly popularized versions. New characters and dialogue were introduced. Dance and music were added. In some performances, texts were bowdlerized to refrain from offending prudish audiences. In the not-always-friendly rivalry between American and British actors, some dialogues became burlesque. Some plays suffered extensive cuts. Ethnic stereotypes arose when Shakespeare was performed in blackface with plantation dialect. Some plays were interpreted as pantomimes or minstrel shows.
Shakespeare’s works gradually permeated the country, until the playwright was idolized like no other writer. As scholar Michael Bristol noted in 1990, “Shakespeare is an American institution.” Bristol perceives a “massive transfer of authority and cultural capital to American society,” where “Shakespeare has been identified with general or universal human interests, or to put it another way, with social and cultural goodness.”3 Emerson turned Shakespeare into a verb: “Now literature, philosophy, and thought, are Shakespearized.”4 The Folgers, together, would cement the identification of Shakespeare with a newly confident American culture—“our national thought, our faith and our hope,” as Emily put it later.5
Emily and Henry Folger grew up in the mid-nineteenth century, when many American family bookshelves held only two volumes: the Bible and Shakespeare. Eliza Folger sang Shakespeare songs to Henry in his infancy. Although Shakespeare did not figure in his grade school curriculum, Henry likely was first exposed to the Bard by Homer Sprague, an English teacher at Adelphi Academy.
When he was only seven years old, Stephen Lane Folger gave his oldest brother, Henry, his first Shakespeare. Homesick Henry was eighteen when the freshman first returned from Amherst to Brooklyn for vacation. The thick single volume of Complete Works was fresh off the press that same year at the Philadelphia publisher’s, Lippincott.6 Had any other seven-year-old brother ever chosen such a consequential present? On an end paper the recipient inscribed in a large hand in dark pencil, “Henry C. Folger Jr, from his brother, Xmas 75.”
While the pages with plays and poems are practically unmarked, Henry filled the title page and the blank pages at the beginning and end of the book with quotes about Shakespeare, as he would later do in the commonplace books he wrote with Emily. His annotations are all in the small clerk’s hand of his later years, not the larger handwriting displayed during his college letters home to his parents. He penciled lines in poetry and prose written by Hippolyte Taine, Thomas Carlyle, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Abraham Lincoln, Charles Lamb, Thomas Babbington Macaulay, and David Garrick, before ending from Henry Hallam’s History of Literature, “The name of Shakespeare is the greatest in our literature; it is the greatest in all literature.” Henry quoted Emerson more than any other author, selecting most passages from “Shakespeare; or the Poet” from Representative Men (1850).
On the contents page, it is easy to miss that various numbers of tiny dots are indicated with a pencil before the name of each play.
Five dots: Hamlet
Three dots: King Lear, The Merchant of Venice
Two dots: As You Like It, Richard III, Henry VIII, Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet, Othello
One dot: The Tempest, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, All’s Well That Ends Well, The Winter’s Tale, Macbeth, Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, Henry V, Troilus and Cressida, Timon of Athens, Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra, Cymbeline, Pericles
No dot: The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Much Ado About Nothing, Love’s Labor’s Lost, The Taming of the Shrew, The Comedy of Errors, King John, Richard II, Henry VI Parts 1, 2, and 3, Titus Andronicus
Do the dots indicate readings? Appreciation? Impossible to say. If it were the more numerous the dots the higher the ranking, Emily was unequivocal that Hamlet did not remain in first place. “King Lear was his favorite,” she wrote after her husband died, “doubtless because of the patriarchal element which is its motivating force. Mr. Folger felt its power, received into his heart its message. Again and again he turned to it, working over its values with untiring zeal, pondering its integral components, exploring its reserves of beauty and truth. The characters of Cordelia and Edgar he particularly admired; the poor, storm-beaten old King he respected as a symbol of fatherly love and sacrifice.”7 Perhaps as the collector aged he resonated more to an older dramatic character.
Henry probably did not study Shakespeare with Rev. Heman Humphrey Neill, Amherst’s only professor of English literature because Folger later reported, “Quite by chance I started the reading of Shakespeare without instruction, and continued it simply because it gave me so much pleasure.” Writing John D. Rockefeller in 1895, he implied that he first applied himself seriously to Shakespeare in 1877. In a letter to the president of Amherst College in 1909, Folger disclosed with some irony that “My own interest in Shakespeare started from writing for a Shakespeare prize, offered at Amherst for only a year or two, which, by the way, I failed to get.”8 Emily joked that her husband turned assiduously to Shakespeare because he was piqued at not winning the prize.9 Folger’s Adelphi Academy classmate William W. Davis served as president of the Shakespeare Association at Amherst; Folger did not join. Folger did join a Shakespeare discussion group, however, that took place in the room of his Brooklyn friend and Amherst fraternity brother, Frank Babbott, in 1877–1878. The group read plays aloud. Henry quoted Shakespeare in his papers, as his scrapbook indicates.
In spite of these earlier examples of exposure, Emily considered that Henry’s epiphany took place on Wednesday evening, March 19, 1879, when he sat on the edge of seat 33A in Amherst’s College Hall. President Seelye introduced the speaker to a sparsely attended audience: several students, a few professors, several townspeople. The lecturer had been in failing health for five years and would succumb to tuberculosis three years later. It was his final visit to the college. Slowly, his daughter Ellen helped to accompany to the platform the seventy-six-year-old Ralph Waldo Emerson. He did not speak of his admiration for Shakespeare but lectured on a different topic, “The Superlative or Mental Temperance.” Fascinated, Henry found Emerson’s language to be of rare elegance and inspiration. As Emily later put it, Emerson packed so much thought and beauty into condensed sentences that Henry considered them to sound Shakespearean.10 Hearing frail Emerson in person made a profound, lasting impact on the senior, almost ready to make his way in the world.
The Folger Library has preserved Henry’s twenty-five-cent ticket stub to the lecture in the Founders’ Room. The Folgers also asked for a Shakespeare quote by Emerson from his poem “Solutions” to occupy pride of place over the immense fireplace in the reading room.
England’s genius filled all measure
Of heart and soul, of strength and pleasure.
Gave to the mind its emperor,
and life was larger than before.
Not sequent centuries could hit
Orbit and sum of Shakespeare’s wit.
The men who lived with him became
Poets, for the air was fame.11
In 1882, Henry started the first of nine hefty journals called “commonplace books,” in which he noted memorable literary passages and references to books he read by English or American writers. This volume contains mention of Shakespeare in a quote from Emerson from Representative Men. He was steeped in Transcendentalist thought from mid-nineteenth century America, as well as that of the Romantics and their descendants in England. He began the second volume in 1883, where he quotes Henry David Thoreau from Walden. The third volume in 1884 contains quotation of Shakespeare by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Victor Hugo, William Hazlitt, and Horace Howard Furness. Commonplace volumes in the later 1880s include both Henry’s and Emily’s handwriting. On occasion, she entered a Shakespeare quotation or commentary and he offered an interpretation of what she had copied. Sometimes their notes are commingled, showing already the Folger brand of team effort. The fifteen hundred pages of these commonplace books show the breadth and depth of the Folgers’ literary sensibilities. Emily’s role as writer in the commonplace books increased over time, while Henry’s waned. In addition, Henry made many marginal notations in a few books from his personal library that Emily presented to the Folger Shakespeare Library in 1933. Notable among these are: Emerson’s Essays in the second series published by Houghton, Osgood and Company, 1880; the 1870 edition of The Poetical Works of Elizbeth Barrett Browning in the James Miller publication; and On Heroes and Hero-Worship by Thomas Carlyle in Chapman and Hall’s 1840 edition. On the flyleaf of the last book, and dated December 1879, Folger copied Emerson’s phrase, “There is no history, only biography.”
Among the many aspects that made Shakespeare irresistible to the Folgers was his breadth. They took pleasure in enumerating the number of crafts and professions the Bard knew intimately. Their astonishment echoed the worldwide audience who admired Shakespeare’s familiarity with many trades. Sailors praised his knowledge of the sea. Physicians marveled at his grasp of medicine, which anticipated Harvey’s discovery of blood circulation. Authors wrote diverse treatises on Shakespeare and the law, the Bible, botany, ornithology, classical antiquity, art, music, and folklore. They wrote on Shakespeare the archer, the angler, the horseman, the tailor, the Freemason, the dramatist. As Henry Folger declared, “There is a long shelf of books in my library, every one a tribute to Shakespeare’s technical knowledge in the line of which the writer is at the head. As he becomes master of a subject, each expert finds that Shakespeare has anticipated and gone beyond him … Truly he came nigh to being all things to all men.”12 In the Emersonian language that Folger so respected, one loved and read Shakespeare as “the universal poet, the supremest master of human utterance.” Folger wrote that he praised or blamed many authors; reading Shakespeare, however, elicited only wonder.
Another object of the Folgers’ veneration became the best theatrical interpretations of Shakespeare’s works. The couple’s admiration of the British actress Ellen Terry illuminates how they expressed their love for Shakespeare. Emily and Henry appreciated Terry’s portrayals of Shakespeare’s strong women: Portia, Lady Macbeth, Juliet, Queen Catherine, Cordelia, and Beatrice. When Terry performed in New York, she often gave dramatic readings. In 1910, at the Music Hall of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, she spoke on “Shakespeare’s Heroines Triumphant.” Emily wrote up the appearance in a commonplace book. After evoking the church scene between Benedict and Beatrice in Much Ado about Nothing, which Terry considered the finest love scene in literature, Emily scrawled in the margin, “Don’t we agree with her!”
In addition to their immense enjoyment of Terry’s live performances, Henry eyed the script she used for the staged reading. Standing, she read her lecture from a folio written in her own hand. Several days later, the actress opened her fan mail. “I am very desirous,” one letter began, “of adding one of the manuscripts from which you have been reading on your American tour, and if I might choose, I would ask for the one entitled, ‘Shakespeare Triumphant.’ Is there any hope that I could persuade you to let me have it? I would of course expect to pay for it.” The letter was signed “Henry C. Folger.”13 Folger never obtained this piece. The Folgers also purchased a terra cotta bas-relief bust of Ellen Terry in an ebony frame, a phonograph recording of her voice, autograph letters, and several photographs of her in starring roles.
Intent on learning how actresses were drawn to playing Shakespeare, Emily did not always have as much luck as her husband in her quests for Shakespeare memorabilia. From Terry’s manager, Emily received this response to a request: “Miss Terry thanks you for your kind letter and regrets that her many engagements will not permit her to write you as you wish. Miss Terry feels that if she were to just snatch a minute to write you, she would not be able to express herself as she would wish on what is really so long a subject.”14 From another favorite Shakespearean actress, British-born Julia Marlowe, Emily again failed to extract a direct answer. She received only a message that the actress was first inclined to study Shakespeare by reading the plays as a child. Henry was delighted to add to their collection several of Julia’s costumes.
Emily did not relegate these wardrobe treasures to storage as she would a book; she wore them. Guests taking the baths at the Homestead in Hot Springs, Virginia, had to walk from their hotel rooms to the baths through long serpentine corridors. To complete this promenade with grace and dignity, ladies adopted the habit of dressing up, often in trimmed chiffons and elaborately embroidered silks. But Emily Folger’s bath costume was unique: she donned the purple robe Julia Marlowe wore as Portia in The Merchant of Venice.15
Beneath the Folgers’ relentless pursuit of such physical tokens of Shakespeareana lay their conviction that Shakespeare’s writings were unsurpassed in literature, and a source of national inspiration to Americans. Henry did not use the word “idealism” in his correspondence or the few writings he left, but Emily employed the term in 1932 when speaking about her late husband at the Meridian Club in New York. Mr. Folger “visioned the cultural value, the ethical and social value of the beauty and idealism of Shakespeare. The poet is one of our best sources, one of the wells from which we Americans draw our national thought, our faith and our hope.” Although they deeply revered Shakespeare’s aesthetic value, the Folgers also saw the poet as a model to inspire their countrymen. In the same address, Mrs. Folger told the audience that her husband “understood the relation of Shakespeare to the Bible and to English literature in general and to American idealism in particular. It fascinated him, just as it had fascinated Washington and Lincoln.”16 In a recent biography of Lincoln, Fred Kaplan confirms this by observing that much of Lincoln’s powerful rhetoric rests on his veneration of Shakespeare’s language.17
When Henry Folger commented on Shakespeare or the interpretation of his plays, he was not just devotee and collector but scrupulous student. Folger studied the plays intently and watched performances with a critical eye on the interpretation of the playwright’s word. While generally a bashful, restrained man, Henry could be forward when interpreting the Bard. He confidently laid out an extensive interpretation to actor Hugh Sothern:
The glory of your Hamlet is not so much that it is improved with time as that it is fast becoming your personal rendering of the part. And it is that which encourages me to venture a suggestion of a bit of “business” which I believe will approve itself to you as you have time to ponder it.
The killing of Polonius always seems rather brutal and an extreme punishment for his incompetence as a royal advisor. To many it is the only unreasonable thing that Hamlet does. Now Shakespeare is never unreasonable and a slight change will set this awkwardness right. Hamlet promises to come to his mother’s chamber. Then follows the scene of the King at prayer. Use for this the room to which Hamlet comes to meet the Queen, putting a priedieu in an alcove at the side. Hamlet enters expecting to find his mother and stumbles upon the King kneeling in this alcove. Hamlet and the King, in turn, go out. In a few minutes Hamlet returns calling to his mother as he comes. The audience will understand he calls to warn away the King so that he may see his mother alone. But Polonius has entered with the Queen and hearing this calling, slips into the alcove where the King has been kneeling, drawing the arras across it. When the Queen cries for help Polonius responds from the alcove and the audience understands at once that Hamlet thinks it is the King he is stabbing because he last saw him in the alcove. This gives Hamlet a valid excuse for his act (taking the audience into his confidence) and eliminates what now seems brutal and bloody, blemishing Hamlet’s nature as nothing else does. It is quite in accord with the original text and certainly with the spirit of the play.18
It is not known whether the actor agreed with Henry’s suggestions. Folger succeeded with Sothern’s leading lady and wife, Julia Marlowe, in an epistolary exchange about interpretation. In 1904, Folger wrote her to suggest an improvement in the potion scene in Act IV of Romeo and Juliet. She agreed to try it. In 1907, Marlowe wrote to thank Folger for his further recommendation in how to deliver the “worm i’ th’ bud” line in Twelfth Night (2.4.123).
The line “Now Shakespeare is never unreasonable” slipped easily from Folger’s pen, indicating the extent to which he elevated the Bard to something near the voice of God. While perhaps reproachable for Bardolatry—a common phenomenon into the twentieth century—Folger supported his position tenaciously. In 1900, the Folgers thrilled to the first elaborate production of Hamlet in America in fifteen years. They were especially rewarded that year, when Sarah Bernhardt also starred in a French prose version of Hamlet in New York. After Hugh Sothern retired from the stage, the Folgers still attended the dramatic recitals he gave in Elizabeth, New Jersey.
Emily kept a play diary from 1906 until 1930, in which she offered wide-ranging analyses of 125 Shakespearean performances—including a few in Italian, French, and German—that she saw in New York and occasionally in Stratford-upon-Avon. Often she attended matinees with family and friends. Henry managed to accompany her to half of them. Several times she returned a week or so later to attend a second performance of the same play to see whether the actors had benefited from criticism. She recorded the names of the actors and actresses, which actors “caught the spirit of the play,” their vocal quality, glibness of speech, eye contact, facial mobility. She noted whether the costumes were “well-colored” and “historically accurate,” if the scenery was “poor” or “elaborate,” whether the waits were long, if the actors were well made up, which actors required prompting, how many “lispers” or actors showed deficient elocution, the quality of the orchestration, what the critics—often the celebrated Edwin Winter—wrote in the press about the theatrical interpretation, how full the house was, how many encores. In this remarkable collection of personal observations, Emily also recorded comments by people sitting near her. In Emily’s view, the greatest sin was committed when the “true text of Shakespeare” was cut; she would scornfully write “Cut! Cut! Cut!” To the Folgers, Shakespeare was serious and inviolable. While in 1906, Emily found Julia Marlowe “at her best,” the following year Emily considered her “stagey” and her costumes worn and dingy. In 1909, both Folgers were still down on Julia. In her play diary, Emily mused, “We still think that Miss Marlowe doesn’t comprehend the part. One critic says that she makes Cleopatra into a Julia Marlowe. Quite true.”19 In 1910, Emily found the actress “not poetical.” Even the best actors and actresses sometimes failed to meet the rigorous Folger standards. The final entry in the play diary was not a play at all but a “talking movie.” On February 5, 1930, Emily saw Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford in the first American feature-length talking Shakespearean film, The Taming of the Shrew, created the preceding year.20 Emily judged it as “Of course not Shakespeare, but entertaining. Besides, it’s amazing what 35 cents can offer!”21
Family and friends speculated about which Folger was the driving force behind the dynamic duo. Referring to Emily’s obtaining a master’s degree at Vassar in 1896 on Shakespeare, her nephew Judge Edward J. Dimock held that Emily “would not have pursued an interest in Shakespeare” had she not married Henry.22 Pointing out that the Jordan family could not have financed graduate study for Emily, he speculated that her deep interest in Shakespeare evolved from her relationship with her husband. The journalist James Waldo Fawcett, who worked closely with Mrs. Folger in the last years of her life, observed,
Especially as Mr. Folger’s collection of books by and about the great Elizabethan poet grew did Mrs. Folger prove herself his invaluable helpmate. In the beginning Mr. Folger probably had a slight advantage over his wife. But Mrs. Folger adjusted the balance by taking her M.A. degree in Shakespeare, the course being laid out by Dr. Horace Howard Furness. As the years passed Mrs. Folger’s acquaintance with Shakespeareana became as full and detailed as her husband’s. She was his librarian, clerk, and amanuensis. It was her responsibility to maintain a catalogue of books offered for purchase, of books actually bought, of books to be acquired. She read the booksellers’ lists, marking interesting items for Mr. Folger’s consideration. She regularly reviewed the periodical publications referring to Shakespeare. She collected thousands of clippings, papers, magazines, and pamphlets dealing with their special theme.23
Henry and Emily showed their intense, total commitment to Shakespeare in complementary ways. It is hard to imagine that their personal mutual devotion was not strengthened by this common passion. Many peers commented that for this childless couple the Shakespeare books became surrogate children. If “no profit grows where is no pleasure ta’en,” then it appears that Henry and Emily Folger heeded Tranio’s advice in The Taming of the Shrew to “study what [they] most affect[ed]” (1.1.40).
Emily achieved serious academic credentials. In 1896, she was one of only 250 women in the country to be awarded a master’s degree. Her degree also drew the Folgers close to a couple with equal passion for Shakespeare, Horace and Helen Furness. Delighted that Emily was one of the rare Vassar B.A.s to study for a master’s in English literature, the college administration had been initially at a loss to offer her a Shakespeare mentor. Vassar accepted that Shakespearean scholar Furness, although not affiliated with the college, propose a study outline for Emily, monitor her progress, and determine in absentia her readiness to receive an advanced degree. Her thesis title, “The True Text of Shakespeare,” is a critical theme for the Folger collection. The Folgers’ relentless pursuit to acquire numerous copies of the 1623 First Folio expressed, in large part, their desire to ascertain the most accurate, genuine original text from Shakespeare’s hand. All the texts differed in some ways, and Furness was one of the first Shakespeare scholars to research the question of a true text. First Folio specialist Peter Blayney wrote that Emily’s thesis contained no original thinking but followed “the then-prevailing rules by arguing, point by point, to an unexceptional conclusion.”24 Emily most likely undertook the graduate program in certain belief that the exposure to Shakespeare’s First Folio would make her a more competent, useful partner to her bibliophilic husband.
On Good Friday every year, the Folgers traveled to Wallingford, Pennsylvania, for a short visit to the Furnesses for what their host jokingly called “endless Shakespeare gossip.” The visits always included Shakespeare readings and commentary by the erudite Furness that would leave Folger spellbound. The two couples looked forward to these visits as the social and intellectual apex of their year. Helen Furness had published a book on Shakespeare’s poetry. Before he died in 1912, Horace Furness edited eighteen of the plays in “variorum” editions—that is, volumes providing copiously annotated texts filled with critical commentary spanning generations. When the Folgers walked up the front lawn, Furness burst out the door to blast a welcome on his trumpet. He thanked Emily for the poems she had sent him. One of Furness’s many letters to Emily—posted in small white envelopes sealed in black wax—read, “The picture you draw of working with your husband moves me deeply.”25 After the guests settled in, Furness proudly showed off some recent acquisition or improvement, such as a new fireproof room to house their valuables. After dinner, the two couples repaired to the library of 12,000 volumes on Elizabethan drama for deep discussion. Folger visits to the Furnesses brought alive the past. In the late 1880s, before they had met Furness, Emily and Henry had copied in their commonplace books Shakespearean commentary by Furness to ponder and discuss. One line read, “If there is one quality in which Shakespeare is forever Shakespeare, it is in the unity of his characters, in the thorough individuality, in the absolute truth to themselves.”26 Furness had become mentor and friend to an inner circle of Shakespeare worshipers. When Furness died in 1912, he was holding a rare Shakespeare volume he had had specially bound as a gift to the Folgers.
When Henry Folger received an honorary doctor of letters degree at his alma mater in 1914, he called it the greatest honor of his life. In a statement of gratitude that revealed the Bard’s allure for him, he wrote for an Amherst audience: “Collect Shakespeare, and you will soon find yourself in the very best company. I have prompt books, annotated and thumbed by the great actors—Garrick, Kean, Irving and Booth; volumes studied by the great poets—Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Lowell and Walt Whitman, Southey, Gray and Burns; and those used by the great masters of prose, Dr. Johnson, Hawthorne, Thackeray and Scott. One volume is crammed with notes made by John Stuart Mill and Thomas Carlyle.”27 When the Folgers went to college, they read those great authors; a third of a century later, they owned significant parts of their personal libraries.
Folger read Shakespeare the way he collected books: slowly. He savored words and phrases, concentrating not only on sense but also how lines would sound on the stage. Emily easily filled scores of pages in her play diary comparing a recent performance with expectations and with her detailed memory of previous Shakespeare stage productions. The Folgers knew the material so intimately that it gave the couple limitless opportunities to rail or to praise different interpretations, to discuss and admire the original text. The inexhaustibility of the subject constituted for them a final proof of Shakespeare’s genius. After Henry died, Emily looked deeply into what she understood to be her husband’s attraction to Shakespeare:
Henry Folger’s original interest in Shakespeare was instinctive. It was a natural expression of his own spiritual character. The inner light of his mind was reflected in the age-dimmed but still bright mirror of the poet’s work. Science affords no satisfying explanation of such phenomena. Certain souls respond to certain souls, but no theory yet evolved is competent to furnish a complete analysis of the relation. The rich collection of books and manuscripts which Mr. Folger formed was, in effect, a bridge between the man he was and the man Shakespeare must have been. A certain maturity of the spirit on Mr. Folger’s part is implied. Small-minded men do not entertain such enthusiasm. I think nothing else, perhaps, could be said of my husband that would be most just or more comprehending than that he was capable of appreciating Shakespeare to the full.28
Only rarely did the Folgers take time away from dogged pursuit of Shakespeareana. Each spring, and sometimes in summer, they motored in their chauffeur-driven Lincoln to the Homestead in Hot Springs, Virginia, where Emily took the baths and Henry played golf. From suites no. 527 and no. 529, which they booked each year, they heard the country birds and admired the flower beds. Their vacation was only partial, for their luggage held an abbreviated catalog of the Shakespeare collection. Henry kept up a vigorous correspondence with friends and dealers; he sent urgent cables and checks, trying not to miss any important sales.
On the Homestead stationery on February 11, 1918, Henry Folger wrote porten tously to a real estate agent to inquire cautiously about purchasing land on East Capitol Street for an eventual Shakespeare library. After Henry died in 1930, Emily continued to make the voyage to “The Hot,” as she called it, for her health, and to see the many friends the couple had made there. She would also stop in Washington, DC, to monitor the progress of construction at the Folger Library.
Eleven times between 1903 and 1923, the Folgers took a slow cattle steamer across the north Atlantic to make pilgrimages to Stratford-upon-Avon. They made these voyages with John Robinson, a venerable, white-bearded, Shakespeare-spouting sea captain of the SS Minnehaha, operated by the Atlantic Transport Company. The Folgers preferred to travel across the ocean aboard this freighter with their friend at the helm. The 250 first-class passengers were kept far from their bovine traveling companions. Other bulky cargo included automobiles and grand pianos. The Folgers looked forward to the Sunday services with a choir made up of the stewards. Wrapped in a heavy coat, stretched out in a deck chair, Henry Folger read his favorite play for ocean voyages, The Tempest: “It is fragrant with salt spray picked up from wave crests by driving winds. The enchanted isle of Prospero seems to have risen out of the surf.”29
No one accompanied the Folgers to the pier for their departures to England. That’s how they wanted it. In contrast, when Samuel Clemens brought his family back to New York on the same SS Minnehaha in 1900 after three years in Europe, a clutch of reporters met them as they descended the gangplank.
In Stratford, the Folgers stayed at the Golden Lion Hotel, called Ye Peacocke Inn in Shakespeare’s time.30 They enjoyed plays at the Summer Shakespeare Festival and visited the Bard’s birthplace. In London, they consulted rare Shakespeare volumes in the British Museum and sealed major book deals. At the Berkeley Hotel, the Folgers met John Anderson of Anderson Galleries, a New York City auction house. Emily jotted diary notes about her British stays. From their first trip in 1903, Folger brought back a First Folio.
One Christmas, Captain Robinson gave the Folgers his painting of Anne Hathaway’s cottage. Touched by the gesture, Folger assured the captain that the painting hung in honorable company in the Folger house: “You may guess how satisfactory the painting is when I tell you that it has been hung over Hayman’s portrait of Quinn as Falstaff, painted from life and used as the basis of the well-known engraving, and at right angles to Sir Joshua Reynolds’s portrait of Garrick.”31 The Folgers sent Robinson a complete set of the Furness variorum editions of Shakespeare. They gave Captain Robinson and his family seeds from Shakespeare’s garden in Stratford, and Renee Robinson offered Emily poppy seeds to take back to America. A special treat for the Robinsons occurred when they motored from their residence in the northwest London suburb of Watford to Stratford-upon-Avon as guests of the Folgers to attend a Shakespeare performance.
The Folgers joined many Shakespeare societies in England, among them the Malone Society (named after the celebrated late-eighteenth–early-nineteenth-century editor of Shakespeare, Edmond Malone) and the Oxford Bibliographic Society. In Stratford-upon-Avon, they were asked in 1909 to subscribe to the Shakespeare Club. The rules: “to read, study, and discuss the works of the Poet and the historical memories of his town and neighborhood; also to encourage the delivery of original papers relating thereto, and in other ways, to do honour to the memory of the Poet.” The mayor of the borough, who served as society president, handwrote from the “mayor’s parlour” an elegant invitation festooned with his red insignia. “I need hardly say, as you are a student and admirer of our illustrious townsman I shall be delighted to propose you at our next meeting.”32 Both Folgers joined the club. When in 1929 Stratford mayor Sir Archibald Flower proposed Henry Folger to be elected governor of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Folger declined. “I know my limitations, and am already quite overwhelmed with the work which has to be done—and will not be done by anyone if I fail to do it.”33 The British realized that American support for Shakespeare organizations and causes in England was substantial. English and American Shakespeareans united in successful efforts to rebuild the Stratford theater that burned in 1926. In America, the Folgers showed their admiration for Shakespeare by supporting various institutions dedicated to spreading the Bard’s fame.
In America, they joined the American Shakespeare Foundation, the Shakespeare Club, and the Shakespeare Association of America in New York City, as well as the Shakespeare Society and the National Shakespeare Federation in Washington, DC. Federation officers wrote Folger a moving letter on May 14, 1930, less than a month before his death, reporting how Shakespeare’s birthday was celebrated for the first time on the site of the Folger Library. While Folger disliked publicity, he must have felt a tinge of excitement that finally his long-planned Shakespeare memorial was taking shape. While the Folgers regularly paid dues to these organizations, they did not attend meetings or respond favorably when asked to loan materials for special exhibits. Not only were they totally focused on their collecting, their treasures were inaccessible, crated and stored. In April 1930, the Folgers heard from the Shakespeare Society of Philadelphia. A letter reported the death of Horace Howard Furness Jr., the society’s dean. He knew Shakespeare’s plays almost by heart and had carried on his father’s work of elucidation through new variorum editions of Shakespeare’s texts.34
Aware that Shakespearean gardens had grown very popular in the United Kingdom, the Folgers set about sponsoring offshoots in America. Frederick Law Olmsted Sr. designed two Shakespeare gardens in New York that the Folgers financed: in Prospect Park in Brooklyn and Central Park in Manhattan. Since Shakespeare’s plays mention more than two hundred plant varieties, many gardeners find making gardens of them a challenge. The Permanent Shakespeare Birthday Committee of New York arranged for planting Shakespeare gardens on more than a dozen public school grounds. Ever the meticulous scholar, Folger insisted that park authorities prepare identifying labels for every plant. In Brooklyn, plant labels included excerpts from plays and sonnets, introducing children to botany and the Bard at the same time.35
Henry Folger turned to his alma mater when contemplating how he might deepen students’ appreciation of Shakespeare. In November 1909, he wrote Amherst president George Harris with an offer: “I would like to do something to stimulate the reading and study of Shakespeare at Amherst.”36 The Amherst Student announced the “Folger Prize” for advanced students. First prize winner received $100, second $50, and third $25. Essays had to be at least ten thousand words, typewritten (a novelty), and submitted under a fictitious name, with identification of the author in a sealed envelope. In May, the English Department received the first batch of essays, with submissions by “Hyperion,” “Dante,” and “Cicero.” Folger imposed one condition: the college must send the winning essays to him for his Shakespearean library, a mighty tribute to the undergraduate authors.
The donor managed the prize program with characteristic zeal and direct involvement. Disappointed, he admitted, by the standard of Shakespeare study in his Amherst days, Folger hoped many students would submit essays, a hope often disappointed. The crop of essays was especially lean in the war year of 1917, when students were dispersed on agricultural assignments or in military training. Folger communicated directly with George B. Churchill, head of the English Department, as well as with several of the prizewinners. He queried Churchill periodically to be sure the college still thought his essay project worthwhile. Churchill understood that the number of submissions was a factor of the extra work the contest essay demanded. Nevertheless, he enthusiastically approved of the incentive as a worthy climax to the Shakespeare course. When a prizewinner sent a letter of thanks to Folger, the collector wrote back, acknowledging that even as an Amherst student he had vowed to offer some Shakespeare prizes as soon as he had the means to do so. Faithfully each year, Folger sent a $175 check to Amherst for prize money.
Miniature color-tinted portrait of Henry Folger with bushy thicket, 1930. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library
Miniature color-tinted portrait of Emily Folger with brooch and necklace, 1931. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library
Buoyed by his success with the limited prize program, Folger wrote the Amherst president to suggest broadening students’ exposure to the poet by creating a Shakespeare Room in the college library. The college responded with delight but asked that Folger agree instead to underwrite the establishment of an English reading room. (The college had already received financial backing from other alumni to purchase thousands of volumes for eleven other departmental collections.) Folger agreed immediately, and sent crate upon crate of English literary works, often duplicates from the many estate sales he had won at auction. One shipment consisted of forty-three volumes, a set of the Praetorious photographic facsimiles of the Shakespeare quartos. Folger explained to Churchill that “these volumes seem to me to be more serviceable than the original quartos.” The gem of Folger’s literary gifts to the Amherst library was two genuine leaves from a Gutenberg Bible. The college president thanked Folger profusely for the leaf, which was in exceptional condition, with “three chapter initials, as well as the very rare head watermark.”37 Folger drew the line in his largesse to Amherst campus life and resources, however, when fellow alumnus and Shakespeare collector George A. Plimpton suggested, “I hope sometime we can arrange for you to go to Amherst and give a course of talks on your collection. I am sure it would be most interesting and helpful to the men.”38 Henry Folger, besides being averse to the limelight, could not spare the time; he was nursing his plan for a far grander contribution.
In 1931, as the Folger Shakespeare Library was finally taking shape in Washington, lead architect Paul Cret, from his perspective, spoke of Henry Folger’s love of Shakespeare:
It was his love for the noble beauty of Shakespeare’s poetry and his eagerness to inspire that love in others, which guided the whole development of his plan for the Shakespeare Library. The merely practical purpose of the merely practical man would have found their realization in an institution without interest for anyone but Shakespearean specialists. But Mr. Folger wished for something wider in its appeal—not a study hall for scholars only, but a shrine for his marvelous treasures that might awaken some sense of Shakespeare’s living value even in the unlearned and unread. Thus, his project grew from a conception of a simple reading room into that of the building as it stands today.39
Cret worked closely with Henry Folger for only a matter of months, but it was long enough to take the measure of the man. When Henry and Emily Folger wrote their wills, bequeathing most of their estates to a well-endowed library in the nation’s capital, it was the ultimate sign of their love for one another and for Shakespeare.