This is the first of five blog posts where we interviewed each member of the Binding the Bard bookbinding competition panel of judges to hear about their thoughts on Shakespeare, the First Folio, books, art, and inspiration.
Sir Gregory Doran
Tell us a little about yourself and how you find yourself involved in the Binding the Bard bookbinding competition.
During this past year, as Artistic Director Emeritus of the Royal Shakespeare Company, I have been travelling the world looking at as many extant copies of the First Folio as I can. I realise they all have extraordinary stories to tell. None more so perhaps, than the Durham Folio. It was on a visit to the Cosin’s library with Professor Emma Smith that I became involved in a conversation about what might happen next to that mutilated volume. The prospects are very exciting.
What is your favourite Shakespeare-adjacent memory?
Most recently, that would be a moment in rehearsals in Stratford for the last play in the Folio, Cymbeline.
We got to the last scene of the play where the heroine, Imogen, is finally united with her husband, Posthumus. He, thinking she has been unfaithful, had ordered her honour killing, and now, understanding he had been tricked, howls in grief.
Imogen, still in disguise as a boy, rushes towards him. Any other writer would have finished there. But Shakespeare pulls the carpet from under our feet. Posthumus, seeing this strange boy advance towards him smacks him to the floor.
As we rehearsed this moment, the company were shocked by the sudden unexpected violence. They couldn’t believe that was what the text actually meant. It’s such dangerous dramaturgy. Posthumus is stunned, not only has he recovered the woman he had so loved and so mistakenly wronged, but now he has punched her to the ground. He gets his second chance, and promptly blows it. It’s a rollercoaster ride.
Once the chaos settles we witness the tenderest of reunions. Imogen slowly stands, stares her husband resolutely in the eye, puts her arms around his neck and dares him to throw her away for a second time.
Posthumus then utters arguably one of he most ineffably beautiful lines in the entire canon. “Hang there like fruit, my soul, till the tree die”. It reminded us all why we love Shakespeare, and what treasure we would have lost without the First Folio.
When considering the Durham Folio, what do you personally feel makes it special?
What makes it special ? It is of course its recent traumatic history. Nothing else as dramatic happened to it in over three hundred years. There have been other copies of the folio that have been stolen. Thieves grabbed a copy from the Christie Library of Manchester University in 1972, which has never been found. An English professor who visited the copy in Williams College in Massachusetts in 1940, walked away with it in his briefcase, having replaced it with a copy of Reynard the Fox. He was in fact a shoe salesman who had been hired by a syndicate of hoodlums from Buffalo. But when they didn’t pay him he got drunk in a bar one night and spilled the beans. So the police arrested him and were able to recover the Folio and return it undamaged.
But no Folio story I know is as traumatic, (and ultimately tragic for the man accused and convicted of his part in its theft) as the Durham Folio. We have with this initiative the possibility of creating a happier outcome for the Cosin’s Library copy, but its story will always fuse an intriguing mix of absurdity, high drama, and shock, that is worthy of a Shakespeare play.
Can you share some thoughts with us on the First Folio, or describe your relationship with this book?
Each copy of the First Folio I have seen feels radioactive in some special way. Every time I do a Shakespeare play in Stratford-upon-Avon, I show our RSC copy to the acting company, and let them leaf through it. It’s a special experience. They often say it brings them as close to the mind, and thinking of Shakespeare as they are going to get.
On one particular occasion, referring back to the Folio, we noticed a single stage direction (in The Taming of the Shrew) which had been repositioned by Alexander Pope, and accepted by every editor since. Reverting to the Folio position radically altered the meaning of the whole play.
So many of the copies I have seen have very grand nineteenth-century bindings, by Riviere or Bedford or Zahensdorf, in green or red morocco with elaborate gold tooling and hand-marbled end papers. They are designed for the aristocratic libraries of august stately homes. I would love to see a binding that says this book is for everyone, that looks less like a Family Bible and more like a book of magic, elemental, tantalising and profound. A binding which announced that Shakespeare is our contemporary, and as Ben Jonson said “Not of an age, but for all time”.