Shakespeare’s First Folio Auctioned For $10 Million At Christie’s

With only 235 copies known to exist, is auctioning the great Bard’s first folio now a multimillion dollar business?

By: Ringo Bones

Published back in 1623, seven years after the great Bard’s death, this was the first collected edition of William Shakespeare’s plays. The edition sold on Wednesday, October 14, 2020, was the first complete copy to go under the hammer at Christie’s since 2001, when one fetched for $6.1m (£4.9m) – the previously held record price for an auctioned Shakespeare’s First Folio.  About 235 copies of the book exist, but only a handful of complete versions are known to exist and most of them are held in private hands.

The copy auctioned at Christie’s on Wednesday was previously owned by Mills College in Oakland, California – a private college that owned its complete copy of Shakespeare’s 1623 First Folio since th1960s. Unfortunately, the identity of the buyer was not immediately known at the time when the auction was finalized. Auction house Christie’s had conservatively estimated the value of the Mills College owned First Folio at between $4 million to $6 million.

What’s so special about the Mills College’s copy of the First Folio is that it is one of the only of the handful of the 235 existing copies of the book that is complete. One previously owned by Oxford University was sold for £3.5 million back in 2003. Only five or six of the 235 copies are documented to be fully complete copies and all of them are in private hands. Shakespeare’s First Folio was the first printed book to incorporate 36 of his plays together – 18 of which would otherwise not have been recorded. If the First Folio was never published, there would otherwise not have been copies of such plays as Macbeth, Twelfth Night, Julius Caesar and The Tempest.

William Shakespeare: World’s Greatest Literary Character Creator?

Even though how he exactly does it is now lost to posterity, but does William Shakespeare qualify as the greatest literary character creator of all time?

By: Ringo Bones

Despite were still in awe in Shakespeare’s power of character creation, his methodology on how he does it seems lost to posterity. And unlike more contemporary literary geniuses – like Tom Clancy for example – who had managed to release a book stating their creative methodology of character creation that also includes their specific inspirations – the great Stratfordian bard was derived the fortune of releasing one. Nonetheless, the cast of characters that Shakespeare wrote are not types or allegorical abstractions, but living men and women with the mingled qualities, often the inconsistencies, of life itself. His characters seem so real that they often mislead readers into taking them for actual historic characters whose motives, actions, and mental states can be analyzed like those of Julius Caesar or King Henry V. The sort of magic that has cast too strong a spell on unwary readers, yet it is just this magic that carries us to Arden with Rosalind or let us revel at the Boar’s Head with Sir John Falstaff. It is, no doubt, too much to say that Shakespeare’s range of characters has universal qualities.

But it may not only be me that finds it strange the kind of characters that are absent from the Shakespearean Characters’ gallery. Despite of his plays containing more Biblical references than his contemporaries, Shakespeare never did a portrait of a saint. Given that the age he lived in is often called the age of voyage and discovery, none of his characters had ever led men beyond the far horizon akin to Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan, Vasco Da Gama or Sir Francis Drake. Weirder still, there are no Shakespearean Characters based on a popular outlaw and rebel – such as Robin Hood. And yet Shakespeare’s range of characters far exceeds that of the most gifted of his contemporaries.

Shakespeare’s gallery of women characters was especially impressive, where extremes are represented by the likes of Cleopatra and Dame Quickly. His heroines have been much praised for their practical qualities, their tenderness, and their readiness to forgive. Something more might be said of their infinite variety.

When it comes to the retinue of his created characters, Shakespeare has been accused of a lack of democratic sympathy. No doubt he disliked the common herd; but of his sympathy with the individual commoner there can be little doubt. He laughs at the impudence of bully Bottom in The Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the officious stupidity of Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing – but with a kindly laughter; these too are men and brothers. He appreciated at its true worth the homely wisdom of the common man – as seen in the shepherd Corin – for example in As You Like It, or in Hamlet’s gravedigger. Most of all he paid homage to the common man’s trait of loyalty, embodied in old Adam in As You Like It, and in Gloucester’s tenant in King Lear, ready to succor his blinded master, “come on’t what will”. Homely wisdom and enduring loyalty are permanent qualities in human nature, and it is this recognition of the permanent that gives Shakespeare’s characters their perennial appeal.

Non Stratfordian Shakespeare: It Began In The Victorian Era?

 Did doubts over the authenticity of authorship of William Shakespeare’s works actually started in the Victorian Era – as opposed to a 21^st Century movement?

By: Ringo Bones

Contrary to popular belief – the non-Stratfordian movement, a school of thought casting doubt on the authenticity of authorship of William Shakespeare’s works wasn’t started in 2011 with the release of the Roland Emmerich film titled Anonymous whose plot revolves around the insinuation that it was Edward de Vere The Earl of Oxford – as opposed to William Shakespeare himself – is the true author of Romeo and Juliet and other plays and works attributed to Shakespeare. The truth is, for more than two centuries after his death in 1616, the belief remained unshaken that the great bard himself – William Shakespeare of Stratford, a prominent member of the King’s Company, wrote the poems published under his name and the plays assembled in the Folio by his fellow-actors.

Suddenly, about 1850, a doubt arose which has persisted in some quarters to this day. It is hard to determine the cause of this “Victorian Doubt”. Possibly it sprang from the Victorian belief in the necessity of formal education, linked with the notion that Shakespeare of Stratford was illiterate. The Scottish essayist and historian Thomas Carlyle (1795 – 1881) was well-known in labeling William Shakespeare as a “poor Warwickshire peasant”.

The notion of William Shakespeare’s “illiteracy” goes back to a well-known comment by the English dramatist and poet laureate Ben Jonson (1573 – 1637) that goes: “Shakespeare had small Latin and less Greek”; it should be remembered, however, that Ben Jonson was a great Classical scholar, accustomed to express himself as easily in Latin as in his native tongue. There is every reason to believe that the young Shakespeare received at the Stratford Grammar School a sound Classical training, even though from Ben Jonson’s perspective, Shakespeare seemed to have “small Latin”.

However, since learning was assumed to be a prime necessity in the creation of literature, the Victorian era skeptics naturally settled on the most learned of the Elizabethan era bards – i.e. Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626) – as the probable author of the works passing under Shakespeare’s name. It was an unfortunate choice, since of all Elizabethan era “men of letters”, Francis Bacon was probably the least capable of writing these works, a fact which may easily be verified by comparing Bacon’s essay Love with Romeo and Juliet or the Sonnets. This theory, bolstered by the supposed discovery of cryptograms in the First Folio, ran to fantastic extremes, culminating in the alleged discovery that Francis Bacon was the unacknowledged son of Queen Elizabeth I and an English courtier named Robert Dudley the 1^st Earl of Leicester (1532 – 1588), and therefore the true heir to the English throne – as well as the author, not only of Shakespeare’s plays, but of the great body of Elizabethan literature. It may be stated with a degree of assurance that this particular theory is no longer acceptable.  

To advance the claim of any other than William Shakespeare of Stratford to the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays is, to speak plainly, to disregard the weight of all contemporary evidence. This evidence culminates in the testimony of the English dramatist and poet laureate Ben Jonson. Jonson knew the actor Shakespeare, who had performed repeatedly in Jonson’s plays. Jonson was well-known in criticizing the extravagance of Shakespeare’s style and noted some of his mistakes, yet Jonson hailed Shakespeare as a dramatist who might challenge “all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome” had done. If there were any mystery about the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays, Jonson would have known of it. If Jonson knew and yet hailed Shakespeare in such terms as these – he – the most independent and self-respecting Elizabethan man of letters, would have been a common liar.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream Themed Cocktail Parties: Shakespearean Inebriation?

Are A Midsummer Night’s Dream themed cocktail parties the most inebriating of Shakespearean spin-off traditions?

By: Ringo Bones

Although I’ve never been invited into one, or lucky enough to have wandered into one, back in the 1990s, it is said that Midsummer Night’s Dream themed cocktail parties are usually celebrated whenever there’s a bar that’s within a comfortable walking distance of a campus with students old enough to drink. Usually held near the end of June in the northern hemisphere, the festivities are largely inspired by William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream – the great bard’s work of comedy where four young lovers find themselves in an enchanted forest full of fairies, magic and mischief. It is not just the bar that is decorated to resemble the stage of A Midsummer Night’s Dream – the participants are also encouraged to dress like the characters of the play and – most important of all – the cocktail drinks that are served are all inspired by the setting and the characters of the comedy. More often than not – some are even inebriated enough to give an impromptu Shakespearean performance of epic proportions.

I was invited into one back in June 2001 by our local Shakespearean acting troupe, but to my then ignorance of such events, mistaken it for just an after performance party of their own production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Though this wasn’t as elaborate to the one that they’ve posted on Facebook back in 2007 when they did A Midsummer Night’s Dream themed cocktail party in a bar somewhere in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

Sadly, in the age of the COVID 19 pandemic, it seems that all A Midsummer Night’s Dream themed cocktail parties in 2020 will be held with social distancing in mind. But, still, maybe Shakespeare will agree that this is a great tradition that needs to be preserved.

William Shakespeare: The Biblical Bard?

Given that his works contain more biblical references than any of his Elizabethan contemporaries does this mean that Shakespeare was a “biblical bard”?

By: Ringo Bones

Legend has it that a decade after his death, the authors of the King James Bible had reached a consensus that Shakespeare could have single-handedly written an English language version of the Holy Bible twenty years before King James issued such edict.  And when they’ve found out that Shakespeare’s works contain more biblical references than any of his Elizabethan contemporaries, had they’ve pondered too, that Shakespeare could be a “biblical bard”?

It could be said that a certain philosophy of life is implicit in Shakespeare’s plays. It was, in the main, an unconscious philosophy. He has been called, indeed, the least moral of writers because he had no moral lesson to proclaim, no sense of what is called “poetic justice”. Cordelia dies in her father’s arms for no other reason than that she was the captive of a strong and ruthless man. Such – Shakespeare seems to have thought – was the way of the world; it was for him to declare that way as it was, not as he thought, perhaps, it should be. A man or a woman’s life on earth was a mystery to Shakespeare, and “the rest is silence.”

Taken as a whole – his works and what of his contemporaries have thought of him – Shakespeare had neither the faith of the Catholic in the doctrine of the Church nor the Puritan’s assurance of individual salvation. Yet his unconscious philosophy was firmly based on Christian ethics, on charity that endures all things, on the brotherhood of man that implies tolerance and readiness to pardon. The Deadly Sins of Catholic theology were no mere abstractions to Shakespeare, but active forces working for destruction, and against these it was man’s task to contend to the uttermost. Shakespeare was no fatalist to accept passive endurance of evil; again and again he urges that man’s powers and virtues were given to him not to waste in idleness, but to shine like torches giving light to others. And when the inevitable end comes, man should meet it calmly.

It is not a comfortable philosophy; Shakespeare is not one of those who sit at ease in Zion. Yet it is a wholesome and “manly” one. Shakespeare – the Elizabethan dramatist – has still a word to say in behalf of Christian Civilization.