An introduction to the Padua First Folio

Abstract

This is a brief introduction to the copy of Shakespeare's First Folio currently located at the University Library in Padua and known as the Padua Folio. The volume is considered the earliest Folio copy to have been used as a promptbook by an acting company. It is the only copy of Shakespeare's First Folio in Italy. The essay contains a brief history of the University Library and a detailed catalogue record of the Padua copy, along with a bibliography of relevant sources and a discussion of previous scholarship.

Introduction

In recent years, the First Folio has come back in full force in the public eye thanks to the celebrations on the occasion of the 400th anniversary of the poet's death in 2016, which prompted a series of cultural initiatives, articles, and essays. ¹ Momentous discoveries in recent years have brought to light no less than two unknown copies of the Folio, in St Omer, France, and on the Isle of Bute, Scotland. ² Very recently, a copy belonging to Mills College in Oakland, California, was auctioned and sold for a record price, confirming the continuing interest for this supremely collectable volume. ³ Finally, in a significant discovery, Jason Scott-Warren attributed the manuscript annotations found in one of the copies of the First Folio (housed in the Free Library of Philadelphia) to none other than John Milton. ⁴ All these recent discoveries contributed to a renewal of interest in the volume on the part of the general public; as for Shakespeare scholars, experts, and enthusiasts, the Folio never really went away. To use the words of Emma Smith, it appears that modern people are not immune from ‘foliomania’, the malady that gripped those who established the Folger Shakespeare Library in the nineteenth century, driving them to hunt copies of the First Folio all over the world. ⁵

Mr. William Shakespeares comedies, histories, & tragedies. Published according to the true originall copies was published in London by a heterogeneous group of people including Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount, hitting the stalls in late 1623, seven years after Shakespeare's death. The 950-page volume is a fundamental text for Shakespeare scholarship, as the witness for 18 of Shakespeare's plays (or half of Shakespeare's dramatic canon). ⁶ The volume contains none of Shakespeare's non-dramatic poetry, marking a significant departure from the other famous folio edition of the collected works of a contemporary dramatic author, Ben Jonson's Workes of 1616, which is not limited to drama. The First Folio, with its prestigious format, ‘signals the transformation in the social positioning of theatrical literature’ in early modern England. ⁷ Certainly, the size of the book, along with its format and price, and the contemporary success that saw copies being quickly sold out all testify to the high status reached by Shakespeare the dramatist a relatively short time after his death. ⁸

The first print run of Shakespeare's Folio is estimated to have numbered about 750 copies. ⁹ The book was printed on medium-quality crown paper; it was sold unbound for 15s and bound on wooden boards for £1. The high price did not scare away buyers, as the first edition was sold out in less than nine years. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, the book has acquired almost the status of a relic, becoming the single most sought-after volume for book collectors all over the world, and among the most valuable books in the history of book-dealing. ¹⁰ Of the original 750 copies, about 230 are known to be still extant, of which only 40 are complete; ¹¹ one-third of the total existing copies, about 80 exemplars, is preserved among the holdings of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, while the remaining two-thirds are scattered among several different institutional holdings and private collectors around the word. After the United States, the country holding the most copies is the United Kingdom, housing about 50 copies of the First Folio. Only seven copies are known to exist in Continental Europe (in Paris, St Omer, Berlin, Cologne, Stuttgart, and Padua, plus one copy belonging to a private owner). ¹² The Padua copy is the only one extant in Italy; it has been registered among the Library's holdings since around 1840 and is the only copy of the First Folio known to have reached the Continent before modern times, at least until recently (as the copy in St Omer is thought to have reached France before 1736). ¹³

This essay focuses more closely on an account of the exemplar preserved in Padua, Italy, among the volumes of the Biblioteca Universitaria. The Padua copy (Padua, Biblioteca Universitaria, Rari N.S.1) has been known to scholars for some time; however, as Gwynne Blakemore Evans pointed out in his survey of Shakespearean promptbooks, despite the volume having been ‘discovered’ multiple times by different scholars, not much progress had been made for what concerns its history, and specifically its provenance. ¹⁴ Until recently, the concise words of Sidney Lee were still the most appropriate to describe the provenance of the Padua Folio: under the entry for ‘History’, Lee only offered a laconic ‘nothing known’. ¹⁵

The Biblioteca Universitaria was founded in 1629 by the Venetian Republic, for the ‘comfort, decorum, and greater ornament’ of the Studium in Padua. Shortly after its foundation, in 1631, it was moved from its first quarters to its permanent lodgings in the Sala dei Giganti in Palazzo del Capitanio, the seat of Venetian power in town. The library's holdings were accrued over almost 400 years through several single donations (from professors in the university, travellers, local scholars, etc.) and acquisitions, but also thanks to its being a copyright library, with the right to a copy of everything printed in the Venetian territories in Italy and abroad. Following Napoleon's suppression of religious institutions in 1810, the library acquired a great number of manuscripts, incunabula, and early printed books from about 40 different religious foundations in the surrounding area. The holdings were newly augmented after the unification of the Italian Peninsula, when a second round of suppressions of religious institutions brought around 13,000 volumes into the library. The Biblioteca Universitaria also acquired the holdings of the Natio Germanica, the most important among the corporations of foreign students in Padua. In 1912, the entire library was moved to its current lodgings, a state-owned building purposely designed by the engineer Giordano Tomasatti for library use, and the first such building in Italy. ¹⁶ Today, the holdings of the library comprise 2,745 manuscripts dated between the eleventh and twentieth centuries and 1583 incunabula. In addition, the Universitaria holds 9,622 cinquecentine and more than 100,000 printed books dating from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century. Among these is the First Folio, an extremely rare find in libraries outside the United Kingdom and the United States and one of the most significant volumes in the library. Part of the library's holdings have been digitised and are now freely accessible to the public, including a complete digital version of the Folio.

The Padua First Folio: A summary description

• - Collocation: Padua, Biblioteca Universitaria, Rari N.S.1 (i.e., ‘Rare Books, New Series, number 1’).

• - Reproductions: a complete digitised version is freely available through the Internet Culturale website. ¹⁷

• - Format and measures: folio format, the outer boards measure 339  ×  219 mm. The leaves have been trimmed at some point, as is evident from some of the marginal annotations, showing a tight margin and sometimes missing letters.

• - Previous descriptions: the most detailed description of the Padua Folio is provided by Eric Rasmussen in his 2012 catalogue. Other descriptions include the one provided as part of Sidney Lee's 1902 census and the one made by Anthony West as part of his census, published in 2003. More information can be found in the catalogue descriptions provided on the Italian website Internet Culturale and in the catalogue of the Biblioteca Universitaria. ¹⁸

• - Consistency and conditions: the volume has a total of 600 leaves. Seven of the nine leaves containing the prefatory material are original, as are all the leaves containing the text of the plays. ¹⁹ The first two leaves, containing the original frontispiece and the first address ‘To the Reader’, have been lost and have been substituted by facsimiles. These leaves must have disappeared quite early in the history of the volume, as one of the first recorded entries for the Folio, dated 1801, reads ‘frontispiece lacking’. In the ‘Catalogue’ listing all published plays at the beginning of the volume, the plays are divided into Histories, Comedies, and Tragedies. Troilus and Cressida was added to the volume after the page containing the Catalogue had been already printed, apparently due to some difficulties in obtaining the rights to the text; as a consequence, the title of this play does not appear in the index and has been penned in by readers in several of the existing copies. ²⁰ The Padua copy accordingly displays the handwritten title, included on the ‘Catalogue’ page as the first item in the ‘Tragedies’ section. A set of two endpapers has been added at the front and back in modern times. The copy displays several signs of damage and repair, detailed in Rasmussen's catalogue. The pages have been described as ‘light, yellowish-brown with periodic foxing’. ²¹ The different sections of the volume are paginated separately, and the copy displays a few pagination errors, as documented by the collation of the volume on Internet Culturale. The corrections, printing errors, and printing stage of the pages have been documented by Rasmussen.

• - Binding: the volume is bound in full leather on wooden boards, described as ‘dark brown, almost reddish, leather, possibly calfskin’; Rasmussen reports that ‘the outer edge of the front board and corners are slightly scuffed. A white sticker in the seventh panel has black printed text: “biblioteca | universitaria | padova” around the outside with “rari | nuova serie | 1” in the centre’. ²² According to Casson, writing in 1936, the original wooden boards and covers were kept, and only the spine was altered, with an added overback, when the book was first rebound at some point at the end of the 1800s. ²³ This binding was lost when the volume was last rebound in the 1960s. The volume displays six raised bands on the spine and a decorative double fillet, blind-tooled on the front and back covers.

• - Contents: The first nine leaves of the book contain the prefatory and paratextual material, including Ben Jonson's address ‘To the Reader’, the iconic portrait of the author by Martin Droeshout, and the dedication to the Herbert brothers. This prefatory material is found in a different order in different copies, probably because the volume was initially sold unbound and the prefatory material was arranged differently by different binders. ²⁴ The Padua copy lacks both the frontispiece and the first address ‘To the Reader’; the two modern facsimile pages are followed by the rest of the prefatory section. The order of the prefatory material is as follows: address ‘To the reader’ signed B. I. (Ben Jonson) in a facsimile copy; frontispiece in a facsimile copy; dedication ‘To the most noble and incomparable pair of brethren’ William and Philip Herbert; address ‘To the great variety of readers’ penned by Heminges and Condell; the poem ‘To the memory of my beloved, the author Master William Shakespeare and what he hath left us’ by Ben Jonson, plus three poems, respectively, by Hugh Holland (‘Upon the lines and life of the famous scenicke poet, Master William Shakespeare’), Leonard Digges (‘To the memorie of the deceased authour, Maister W. Shakespeare’), and I. M. (‘To the memorie of M. W. Shakespeare’). Then follow the page listing the ‘Names of principall actors in all these playes’ (the list of actors prominently includes Shakespeare himself), and the ‘Catalogue’, with the title of ‘Troilus’ added in pen. The plays then follow in their customary order.

• - Annotations: the numerous manuscript annotations present in the Padua Folio constitute ‘the special title to interest’ to the book; most of these annotations are in the form of prompt notes, and the copy was almost surely used for an actual performance. ²⁵ According to Smith, the annotations on the Padua Folio represent the earliest extant example of manuscript performance notes in a copy of the First Folio and as such are extremely interesting to modern scholars trying to understand the contemporary production and staging conditions of Shakespeare's plays. Three plays have been heavily annotated by either a reviser or a prompter: The Winter's Tale, Measure for Measure, and Macbeth; significantly, none of these plays apparently existed in a portable format in early modern times, which may explain why the prompter chose the Folio as a play text, instead of a cheaper, more convenient edition. ²⁶ The annotations to these plays come in three main types: characters’ and actors’ names (more often indicated only by initials), stage directions (entrances, exits, music), and vertical lines presumably indicating cuts performed on the original text. ²⁷ The cuts to the plays have elicited puzzled responses from critics, especially seeing how the most sententious and indeed most poetic material has often been elided. This is especially evident in the cuts to Measure for Measure, where, for example, most of the speech pronounced by the character of the Duke in 3.1 (p. 70), generally considered one of the poetic highlights of the play, has been left out. In Macbeth, the anonymous annotator has cut the long dialogue between Macbeth and the murderers in 3.6 (p. 143) and part of Macbeth's famous speech in 5.5 (p. 150). ²⁸ The cuts are dependent on the overall performance time of the plays at issue, rather than on decorum or political expediency, as no major and actually no minor characters have been left out of the performances, although the number of extras is often reduced. ²⁹

At least two hands have been identified in the manuscript annotations: Hand A, found in Measure for Measure and Macbeth, writes in an easily legible italic script, while Hand B, who wrote the prompt notes in The Winter's Tale, uses an older-fashioned mixed (secretarial/italic) script, with more letters maintaining a secretarial form. ³⁰ To these can be added the hand that left pencilled crosses in several plays in the first section of the volume (Love's Labour's Lost, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, All's Well that Ends Well), possibly for the purposes of commonplacing. Other notes are present, such as pen trials and personal names.

Critical history of the Padua Folio

The first published account of the Padua First Folio is represented by an article contained in The Scotsman and published on 11 July 1895. ³¹ The Scottish scholar John Robertson, the author, met with the then director of the Biblioteca Universitaria, Marco Girardi, and wrote that the Folio was found ‘amongst a number of uncatalogued books’. ³² He also reported on the missing frontispiece, which he believed ‘explains [the Folio's] disappearance from the library shelves and catalogues’. Girardi collated the Padua Folio with the facsimile published by Chatto & Windus in 1876 and verified the text's completeness, saving for the two missing leaves mentioned above. ³³ In his article, Robertson also gave a brief account of the annotations, correctly identifying them as prompt notes and connecting the copy to the realm of theatre performance. He also recognised the vertical lines used to cut the text of the plays but incorrectly read an annotation (on p. 151 of Macbeth, located at the bottom of the page) as the Italian word ‘ritirata’ (instead of ‘retreate’), prompting him to suggest that the volume could have belonged to ‘some Italian actor or theatrical company’. ³⁴ Shortly after Robertson's ‘discovery’ of the Padua Folio, in September 1895, Girardi entered into a correspondence with the London-based antiquarian and bookdealer Bernard Quaritch; their letters are preserved in Padua among the documentation folder attached to the Folio. Quaritch offered Girardi his help to sell the volume, should he wish to do so, but Girardi was ready to refuse, answering that ‘he had no intention whatsoever of selling the copy of Shakespeare's Folio of 1623 that can be found in the library, where it stood as one of its most precious rarities’, testifying that he knew full well the value, cultural as much as commercial, of the volume in his care. ³⁵

The Padua Folio was listed in Sidney Lee's census, published in 1902. ³⁶ Lee had launched an appeal for information on First Folio copies around the world from the pages of the journal Athenaeum in June 1902. The appeal was answered by Emilio Teza (or Tezza), professor of Sanskrit and comparative literature at the University of Padua. ³⁷ Teza highlighted the prompt notes, listing the annotated plays and connecting the copy to a theatre company; moreover, he was the first to identify two different hands in the annotations (possibly with the addition of a third hand). ³⁸ In his census, Lee briefly described the Padua Folio as ‘History: nothing known. Condition: wanting fly-leaf and title; early MS. notes, made apparently by an acting manager’. ³⁹ Two decades later, on the tercentenary of the publication of the First Folio, a series of Italian studies witnessed a renewed interest in the Padua Folio and its provenance. ⁴⁰ The first two articles appeared on the Florentine literary magazine Il Marzocco in 1923. The first, by Giuseppe Gargano, mentions the Padua Folio near the end, calling for more research to clarify its history, and tentatively puts the copy in relation to English students of the University in Padua. The second, by Bruno Brunelli, examines the Padua Folio in more detail. The author described the older binding in basil (or soft sheepskin) and was the first to suggest a connection between the Folio, the Biblioteca Universitaria, and suppressed religious foundations, which however went unnoticed until very recently. Brunelli also agreed on the connection between the volume and English students residing in Padua in the early modern period, suggesting the book might have belonged to a student theatre company active in that city. The third article, by Gian Napoleone Giordano Orsini, was published in 1932 in Civiltà Moderna; summarising contemporary recent developments in Shakespeare scholarship, Orsini evaluated the annotations in the Padua Folio, highlighting how the cuts to the text do not alter the number of characters in the three annotated plays and noting the addition of a famous prop in the form of a ‘cauldron’ to the witches’ scene in Macbeth. Finally, he reproduced the annotations in an Appendix to the article. The next scholar to investigate the Padua Folio, Leslie Casson, was not aware of these developments, but had read Robertson's article in The Scotsman. He examined the Padua copy and in 1936 described the volume as ‘in excellent conditions … The cover-boards of the binding are apparently original, the back alone having been renewed when the book was rebound and restored at the end of the last century’. ⁴¹ He focused on the annotations, describing the two hands that wrote them and correcting Robertson's reading of ‘ritirata’ in Macbeth with the English ‘retreate’. He also examined the cuts in Macbeth, showing how the metrical structure is preserved even when speeches are cut at the half-line. Finally, he suggested several plausible connections between the annotated names of actors in the Padua Folio and theatre companies active on the Restoration stage, but could not tie the volume to any specific company.

The most popular and enduring hypothesis on the previous ownership of the Padua Folio has perhaps been Gwynne Blakemore Evans's suggestion that the copy could be connected with Sir Edward Dering's residence, Surrenden Hall in Kent, which is known for having hosted theatrical performances in the early modern period. Dering, one of the first named owners of a copy of Shakespeare's First Folio, had a keen interest in the theatre, and apparently both purchased play texts and staged plays in his house, among which were Shakespeare's. ⁴² In his account of Shakespeare promptbooks published in 1960, Evans described the Padua Folio as ‘almost certainly in its original English binding’ (the only part that had been restored at that point being the spine) and provided a detailed description of the endpapers. Images of the endpapers provide precious information to modern scholars, as the leaves themselves have now been lost due to the volume being rebound, along with any marks and notes. Evans dated the two hands in the annotations to the early part of the seventeenth century and more precisely to the years between 1625 and 1635. If his dating proved correct, he wrote, ‘the Padua Macbeth and the other Padua prompt-books represent the only pre-Restoration Shakespearean prompt-books now extant’. ⁴³ Finally, Evans connected the actors mentioned in the annotations to several people ‘who took part in an amateur performance of Fletcher's Spanish Curate produced by Sir Edward Dering at Surrenden between 22 October 1622 (the date on which the play was licenced) and the summer of 1624’. ⁴⁴ He also highlighted how the cuts in the Padua Folio displayed some continuity with established theatrical practices, which points to the volume belonging to a professional company, rather than to a gentleman amateur. Evans called his own hypothesis into question in an article published in 1967, where he considered the evidence offered by a copy of the quarto edition of James Shirley's Loves Crueltie, which was annotated for performance by the same ‘prompter-reviser’ that had worked on the Padua Folio. Given that the copy of Shirley's play can be dated to ‘1640 or later’, an association with Dering proved more difficult to establish. ⁴⁵ According to this new evidence, Charles Shattuck, in his descriptive catalogue of Shakespearean promptbooks published in 1965, dated the prompt notes to around 1640, a dating repeated by Rasmussen. ⁴⁶ A note in Shattuck's hand is preserved among the documents folder attached to the Folio in the University Library, correcting Robertson's reading of ‘ritirata’. ⁴⁷

In 1988, from the pages of a local magazine, Francesco Giacobelli, Professor of English Literature at the University of Padua, suggested that the Padua Folio might have belonged to the English travel-writer Mary Wortley Montagu, who might have taken the copy to Venice during one of her long stays in the city, from where the Folio was then transferred to Padua. Giacobelli suggested that the Padua copy could be connected with the eighteenth-century poet Alexander Pope, whose copy of the Folio has not been traced and who had enjoyed years of warm friendship with Montagu. ⁴⁸ Nevertheless, these suggestions are unsupported by material evidence and have since been discounted. Rasmussen's 2012 survey and Anthony West's history of the First Folio add several details about the Padua copy, including a full transcription of annotations and detailed information about watermarks, printing errors, and stages of production. However, these scholars have not been able to add much information about the provenance of the volume, besides confirming that the Dering hypothesis has been definitely dismissed. ⁴⁹ Others who have offered appraisals of the Padua Folio are Emma Smith, who dedicated some pages of her 2016 book to the Padua copy, and Jean-Christophe Mayer, who investigated the annotations in the Padua copy as part of his survey of Shakespeare's early readers. ⁵⁰

Conclusions

None of these independent ‘discoveries’ of the copy of a Shakespeare First Folio in Padua brought on a sustained interest in the volume, and no scholar has seemingly managed to shed light on its history and provenance in the many years during which the volume has been known to the public. Several hypotheses were made, but without any kind of evidence to support them, they fell out of favour with scholars and were abandoned. One of the reasons for this was that, with the notable exception of Orsini, almost every scholar that examined the Padua Folio chose to focus on the annotations, to try and identify the theatre company to whom the volume belonged. This has proved particularly difficult, as information on Restoration theatre is quite limited and the annotated names themselves do not offer much personal detail. No scholar, up until now, has focused on the bibliographic details and thus on the institutional and conservation history of the volume, which may yield valuable information on when, and in which circumstances, the volume made its way to Padua. Evans highlighted that Padua is the setting for The Taming of the Shrew, which makes it appropriate to find a copy of the First Folio among the holdings of its University, a ‘nursery of arts’ where English students, diplomats, and other types of travellers were frequent guests in the early modern period. ⁵¹ Moreover, English residents abroad, in Italy as elsewhere, amassed libraries of English books that worked as intellectual ‘retreats’ for both their owners and travelling Englishmen who happened to be in the area. ⁵² As the following essay will show, the association of the volume to the Veneto region has proved to be even closer than most scholars have suggested.