The Shakespeare Thefts Read Online Free Page B
Author: Eric Rasmussen
census appeared, the novelist Thomas Hardy wrote to inform him that “Mr. de Lafontaine, my neighbour in Dorset, is the fortunate possessor of a 1st Folio Shakespeare, which he would like to show you. Your opinion upon it will be highly valued by him, & of great interest to me.” 4
Mr. Alfred Cart de Lafontaine lived at Athelhampton, a fifteenth-century manor in Dorset that he restored and transformed in the 1890s. Hardy was a frequent visitor to the house (which in modern times has been seen in film and television, including being featured in six episodes of
Doctor Who
).
In August 1899, Lafontaine gave a talk about his restoration of the manor to the Dorset Natural History and Antiquarian Field Club. His audience gathered “under the shade of a fine cedar” to hear him recount the work that he had done on the house and garden. As he described the long gallery, or library, Lafontainehighlighted its two most precious items: “a pair of boots worn by King Charles I when a boy” and “also a very fine first folio Shakespeare.” 5
Lafontaine’s copy has never been traced, and as far as we know, Lee never saw it. However, we
do
know that Sir William Martyn built the Hall at Athelhampton around the year 1485 and that it remained in the Martyn family for the next four generations. So the Lafontaine copy may have been the Martyn Copy. What has happened to it?
Tantalizing stories of this kind, the virtual “button on a bust,” intrigued my indefatigable colleague Anthony James West, who has been tracking “unfound” First Folios for decades, after discovering that many of the copies originally recorded by Lee in 1902 had disappeared without a trace. Some had been stolen from institutions (such as Durham University and Manchester University), and quite a number of privately owned First Folios had simply gone missing.
But they are not forgotten—largely because of Anthony James West.
West, a British businessman with a Harvard MBA, was a partner of the preeminent management-consulting firm Booz Allen. In his late fifties, however, he abruptly gave up his business career in order to pursue a PhD in English literature at University College, London. Looking for a dissertation project, Anthony hit on the idea ofcompiling a new census of the locations of Shakespeare First Folios, since the one completed by Sidney Lee was nearly a century old and considerably out of date.
In 1989, Anthony began recording the known copies and attempting to locate others by publishing notices in various journals, searching auction records, and contacting dealers and possible owners. With a combination of tenacity and old-fashioned legwork, he was able to find an astounding
seventy
copies that had not appeared in Lee’s census. Anthony self-funded his research, and within a few short years he had gone through much of his personal fortune. (I’ve never been able to decide whether this was noble or foolish.)
In 1996, Anthony approached me at a reception at the World Shakespeare Congress in Los Angeles, where I was presenting a hypertext prototype for a new electronic edition of
Hamlet
that would enable users to access everything ever written about each line of the play. 6 He asked about the possibility of my putting together a research team to travel the globe in search of First Folios. I said, “When do we start?”
We next met at the Reform Club—the famed London gentlemen’s club from which Phileas Fogg began his voyage in Jules Verne’s
Around the World in Eighty Days
—a thoroughly appropriate venue in which to plan the campaign that would take us to the four corners of the globe. We started to bring our extraordinary team together.
We began with Donald L. Bailey. Don, a close friend of mine since our graduate school days at the University of Chicago, is an attorney licensed to practice in both Illinois and California, but he prefers to spend his time hunting for Shakespearean texts. (He had already tracked down every known copy
Mr. Alfred Cart de Lafontaine lived at Athelhampton, a fifteenth-century manor in Dorset that he restored and transformed in the 1890s. Hardy was a frequent visitor to the house (which in modern times has been seen in film and television, including being featured in six episodes of
Doctor Who
).
In August 1899, Lafontaine gave a talk about his restoration of the manor to the Dorset Natural History and Antiquarian Field Club. His audience gathered “under the shade of a fine cedar” to hear him recount the work that he had done on the house and garden. As he described the long gallery, or library, Lafontainehighlighted its two most precious items: “a pair of boots worn by King Charles I when a boy” and “also a very fine first folio Shakespeare.” 5
Lafontaine’s copy has never been traced, and as far as we know, Lee never saw it. However, we
do
know that Sir William Martyn built the Hall at Athelhampton around the year 1485 and that it remained in the Martyn family for the next four generations. So the Lafontaine copy may have been the Martyn Copy. What has happened to it?
Tantalizing stories of this kind, the virtual “button on a bust,” intrigued my indefatigable colleague Anthony James West, who has been tracking “unfound” First Folios for decades, after discovering that many of the copies originally recorded by Lee in 1902 had disappeared without a trace. Some had been stolen from institutions (such as Durham University and Manchester University), and quite a number of privately owned First Folios had simply gone missing.
But they are not forgotten—largely because of Anthony James West.
West, a British businessman with a Harvard MBA, was a partner of the preeminent management-consulting firm Booz Allen. In his late fifties, however, he abruptly gave up his business career in order to pursue a PhD in English literature at University College, London. Looking for a dissertation project, Anthony hit on the idea ofcompiling a new census of the locations of Shakespeare First Folios, since the one completed by Sidney Lee was nearly a century old and considerably out of date.
In 1989, Anthony began recording the known copies and attempting to locate others by publishing notices in various journals, searching auction records, and contacting dealers and possible owners. With a combination of tenacity and old-fashioned legwork, he was able to find an astounding
seventy
copies that had not appeared in Lee’s census. Anthony self-funded his research, and within a few short years he had gone through much of his personal fortune. (I’ve never been able to decide whether this was noble or foolish.)
In 1996, Anthony approached me at a reception at the World Shakespeare Congress in Los Angeles, where I was presenting a hypertext prototype for a new electronic edition of
Hamlet
that would enable users to access everything ever written about each line of the play. 6 He asked about the possibility of my putting together a research team to travel the globe in search of First Folios. I said, “When do we start?”
We next met at the Reform Club—the famed London gentlemen’s club from which Phileas Fogg began his voyage in Jules Verne’s
Around the World in Eighty Days
—a thoroughly appropriate venue in which to plan the campaign that would take us to the four corners of the globe. We started to bring our extraordinary team together.
We began with Donald L. Bailey. Don, a close friend of mine since our graduate school days at the University of Chicago, is an attorney licensed to practice in both Illinois and California, but he prefers to spend his time hunting for Shakespearean texts. (He had already tracked down every known copy
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