Worlds Elsewhere (21 page)

London's replica Globe was already being planned, Cohen told me cheerfully; so Staunton had gone under cover. Built on a shoestring budget of $3.7 million (£2.2 million), the Blackfriars had opened in 2001, six years after its cousin beside the Thames. He denied there was any hint of competition, but I wasn't so sure: hearing later that the Bankside Globe had plans to build its
own
indoor theatre, modelled on designs from later in the seventeenth century, the American Shakespeare Center had upped the ante. Their next project was called ‘Globe II': a replica of the second, tile-roofed Globe raised in 1614 after the first Globe burnt down. Fundraising was being conducted via their phone number: (877)
MUCH-ADO.

Shakespeare wouldn't entirely have recognised the American Blackfriars, Cohen admitted. Planning issues had prevented them from adding windows (which would have helped light the original, as well as providing much-needed ventilation). More controversially, the Staunton fire department had been chary about lit wicks and the smoke. The candlelight they used was electric. ‘We did what we could, with the money, in the time,' Cohen said. Settling on to my wooden bench, I thought they had done an impressive job, by any measure.

I had tickets for
Cymbeline
– a late play, and so entirely suited to the space. Rude-mannered colonials were not in evidence: it was a well-groomed crowd. On the bench in front of me was a woman in her early seventies, splendidly clad in camel coat with a sweep of honeyed silver hair. Next to her was a man in an exquisite grey suit, purple silk scarf cascading from his breast pocket. Clearly when one came to the theatre in Staunton one came in one's finery.

Happenstance though it was, it was a pleasing touch. One of the main attractions of playgoing in the Jacobean period – especially in a ‘private', indoor theatre – was the opportunity it offered for gawping at folk off stage as well as on. Jacobean Londoners were a fashion-conscious bunch, obsessed with luxurious fabrics, rich colours, expensive jewels and gewgaws. Ornamental hairpieces (some of which were made by Shakespeare's erstwhile landlord, the Huguenot exile Christopher Mountjoy) were pieces of art in themselves. At the London Blackfriars one could pay extra to sit on the stage and be seen – a practice the Virginia Blackfriars had joyously brought back to life, placing a row of stools either side to make seats for ‘gallants'.

After a brief and energetic burst of banjo, the Blackfriars company launched into
Cymbeline.
It, too, was brief and energetic. Speeches were taken at a gallop; in no time at all, the plot was up and running. Imogen, sole remaining child of King Cymbeline, has married the commoner Posthumus Leonatus against the wishes of her father (and, even more, the wishes of her wicked stepmother). Posthumus is banished; Imogen follows him, and so begins a wild and troubling journey of self-discovery. She dons the garments of a man to recover her husband and – though she doesn't yet realise it – her brothers, Guiderius and Belarius.

The costumes were a melange of Jacobean and early-twentieth-century, but the actors' confidence in this bare, unadorned space felt entirely authentic, and Shakespeare's late, meaty dialogue sounded to my ear fully plausible with an American twang:

Bah Jup'tuh
… It remained an enigma, the question of how Shakespeare might have heard (or spoken) his own lines; at the London Globe I had attended performances by actors trained in so-called Original Pronunciation, which sounded to me like broad Somerset inflected with the slatey nasal twang of Lancashire. One thing everyone could agree on, however, was that East Coast American, with its neat terminal
r
s and light medial vowels (
pass
to rhyme with
ass, scenario
as
‘scen-ai-
rio') was much closer to the language Shakespeare and his audiences understood than the fluting tones of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

I was most intrigued by how the ASC would handle a tricky aspect of Shakespeare's late plays, their fondness for spectacular staging. Following the experiments conducted in Jacobean court masques, where no expense was spared on eye-popping scenography, the London Blackfriars was seemingly equipped with a battery of high-tech special effects: a hoist in the ‘heavens' via which actors could be flown on to the stage; elaborate trapdoors through which performers were propelled at speed; a company of resident musicians to provide magical sound effects.
Cymbeline
's stage directions call for any number of tricks to dazzle the eye – a cunning device to make it appear that the doltish Cloten has been beheaded; an ‘apparition' of ghosts to musical accompaniment; the entry of Jupiter himself, who ‘descends in thunder and lightning, sitting upon an eagle' before casting a thunderbolt.

There were no godly descents on offer that night: a golden-robed Jupiter simply strolled on to the upper-level balcony to the crashing of some backstage ironmongery (a device for flying in
dei ex machina
had been another casualty of the Virginia Blackfriars's tight budget). But Cloten's death had a satisfying gruesomeness, amplified by the harrowed expressions on the faces of the on-stage gallants.

I loved it. Fast, tonally all over the place, with more switchback turns than a mountain pass, the production made sense of
Cymbeline
in a way that a more austerely conceptual version wouldn't. Conducted on a stage not much larger than a tablecloth, the sword-fighting was properly perilous, and one of the most famous lyrics in the English language, spoken over the body of the disguised and apparently dead Imogen, was delivered with a touching lack of preciousness:

It might have been the tiredness, but I was dabbing my eyes at that. Ambushed by the late plays once again.

IF YOU WANT TO GET A FIX
on the importance of Shakespeare to a certain kind of American life, you have only to glance at a street plan of Washington DC.

First, trace the twin diagonals of Pennsylvania and Maryland Avenues as they rush towards the west frontage of the Capitol building. Then nudge your eye gently right. Above, to the north, sits the marble lozenge of the Supreme Court. To the immediate south is the Library of Congress's Jefferson building – a blowsy, Beaux-Arts affair, crowned with a squat pimple of a dome. Next door is the Adams building, raised in the 1930s when the library ran out of book stacks.

The building to look for is the fifth. Tucked next to the Adams, it completes the arrangement, which is as severely patterned as any Renaissance garden. It is the Folger Shakespeare Library, the world's vastest Shakespeare archive, home (at the most recent count) to 256,000 books, 250,000 playbills, 60,000 manuscripts, 200 oil paintings and any amount of other Shakespeariana. The brainchild of collector Henry Clay Folger and his wife Emily, it sits enclosed on two sides by the United States's central library, in the shadow of Congress, just across the street from the highest court in the land. In this most symbolic of cities, it is hard to see how it could be more symbolically embedded.

There is another conceit, meticulously planned by the architects. Sketch an imaginary plane back west from the library's front wall, and run it straight through the Capitol and along the National Mall. The line brushes the Washington Monument, before running headlong into the Lincoln Memorial – plumb through what the library's first director,
speaking at its opening on 23 April 1932, called ‘the three [men] whom Americans universally worship'.

Lincoln, Washington, Shakespeare: the Pilgrim Fathers, who had fled England precisely to avoid diabolical iniquities like Shakespearian drama, would doubtless be appalled.

Deep in my map as I came up past the Capitol, the Folger sprang out on me by surprise: a slim, art-deco cigarette case of a building, its marble shining bone-white in the sun. It looked for all the world like a minor government department, or the embassy of a small but strategically important country. Bardonia, I supposed.

I had a meeting, bang on 9 a.m., with Michael Witmore, the Folger's director. Escorted to his corner office, I tapped gently at the door, which was half ajar, and poked my head around. Glossy green carpet, helipad-sized desk, with the windows giving on to a panoramic view of the Washington skyline. There was only one word for it: presidential.

A few seconds later, Witmore appeared behind me, bearing two steaming mugs emblazoned with the Folger logo. He looked pretty presidential himself – pinstriped suit and shining shoes, sandy brown hair, a youthful mid-forties.

Quite a view, I said, looking out of the window and towards the Capitol dome, glimmering in the light.

He eased back behind the desk, mug in hand. ‘In DC, our culture is politics. And Shakespeare is a writer who is very good for people who think about the world in political terms.'

A former professor at the University of Wisconsin who had done graduate work at Berkeley and UCLA, Witmore was a new arrival at the Folger. He had qualifications in scholarly fields I barely knew existed: the crossover between Renaissance rhetoric and bioinformatics; data-visualisation in Shakespeare's texts. He had only been in the post a few months.

I asked him to sum up what the job involved. He offered a well-practised smile. ‘Secretary of state for Shakespeare … I exaggerate, of course.'

Perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised by the politico-corporate atmosphere: Henry Clay Folger had been, after all, a businessman.
Born in New York City in 1857, the son of a millinery dealer, he got a job in the nascent oil industry partly to pay himself through Amherst College. After graduating, he raced up the corporate ranks – first as a clerk at a small oil firm, then, in 1881, joining what became Standard Oil. By 1909, he was one of Rockefeller's juniors. By 1911, he had become the first president of Standard Oil New York.

All along, Folger nursed a secret passion. After paying 25 cents to hear Ralph Waldo Emerson lecture at Amherst in 1879, he had become fixated on Shakespeare. He bought a copy of a talk Emerson had given during the 1864 tercentenary, and read it cover to cover. He upgraded his one-volume complete works to a thirteen-volume edition. In a copy of Thomas Carlyle's
On Heroes,
he underlined Carlyle's statement that Shakespeare was ‘the grandest thing we have yet done'.

When he met the woman who would become his wife, Emily Clara Jordan, passion became infatuation. A graduate of Vassar College, Emily wrote her master's thesis on the ‘True Text of Shakespeare'. Henry's wedding gift to her in 1885 was a facsimile copy of the 1623 First Folio, so that she could ‘see Shakespeare's plays as they were originally given to the world'.

‘It becomes a group effort between the two of them,' Witmore said. ‘They seem to have egged each other on.'

The Folgers were soon collecting: at first modestly, buying a copy of the 1685 Fourth Folio for $107.50, paid for on credit (a copy of the same edition as that probably owned by the Virginia planter William Byrd). As their wealth and influence expanded, so did their ambitions. In 1897, they acquired their first major Shakespearian haul, including rare early editions of
Romeo and Juliet
and
The Merchant of Venice
and much else besides. Among them were four copies of the First Folio, this time originals: infinitely more valuable than the Fourth.

The same rapacious deal-making that Henry practised on behalf of Standard Oil transformed the genteel world of rare book and manuscript dealing. For forty years the Folgers posted agents across Europe, operating under pseudonyms, keeping close watch on everything that looked as if it might come up for sale.

They were shameless. One precious collection was prised out of the hands of the ailing Bishop of Truro after his son-in-law was offered cash in hand. Another tranche of books was poached off a rival collector after his stocks took a nosedive. The Folgers mastered a unique kind of alchemy: transmuting black oil into Shakespearian gold. In one five-month
period in 1917 they spent $780,500, nearly $15 million in today's money, all of it on books and manuscripts.

‘
The Tempest
reads well anywhere but especially so at the seashore, and best of all in mid-ocean,' wrote Henry on one transatlantic shopping expedition. There were stories that when they went away they carried a card index in their chiffonier. Perhaps needless to say, they remained childless.