Eric Rasmussen

I'm so very glad to have this as part of my collection. I adore the layout and aims of Bate & Rasmussen's RSC Complete Works, even if I ultimately believe the more all-encompassing scholarship of the Ardens is the pinnacle in Shakespearean research. But every home should have a complete works, and the RSC is top-notch.

Of course, a "Collaborative Works" is always going to be divisive among reviewers, and my own mind is both rapturous and doubtful about this edition. The plays herein are show more freshly edited and lovingly presented, with a vast amount of detail about the authorship question, stylistic analysis, recent productions, and an overall view of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. (One of the most important changes in scholarship in the last 50 years is a renewed willingness to see Shakespeare as a creative working in an active theatre industry, rather than some gloomy tower-bound "author" creating plays.) While I'm academically conservative, it is true that the academic establishment has a tendency to grow defensive against change, and I welcome the editors keeping Shakespearean scholarship on its toes. Some of the plays here almost undoubtedly have the Bard's blood running through them, and it's great to see them being revived.

If I have any issues, it's really only that there could have been MORE. The editors openly admit that "The London Prodigal" is very probably not by Shakespeare. I'm completely fine with that. As they point out time and time again, this notion that plays by Shakespeare are instantly valid for our day and age while others are simply archaic is absurd. These plays are vibrant and enjoyable, as well as reminders of the great variety and versatility of the theatre of an entire age. So I suppose my shame is, after reading the introduction and reasons why some plays were omitted... well, why not include a few more? Make this a brand new "Works", to bring so many plays back into people's homes?

Anyhow, that's a slightly ambitious point. I'm very happy to have this. Bate & Rasmussen may have drawn the net too wide in search of Shakespeare (even if I think it is too narrow overall) but it's surely better to encompass all of Shakespeare plus some assortments, than to omit some of his words simply out of some sense of tradition? show less

It is hardly debatable that the two most important publications in terms of modern English language are the King James Bible and the First Folio of Shakespeare. In 1623, two actors who had worked with Shakespeare sought to publish a collection of his work in order that the acting company could profit rather than the many knock offs that were circulating at the time. Only about 1,000 copies were printed, of those 232 remain accounted for. How do we know this? Because of the work of Eric show more Rasmussen and his crack team of Folio Hunters. Rasmussen formed his team in 1996 with the expressed aim of documenting as many surviving copies as possible and determining their provenance in the process. The Shakespeare Thefts can be looked at as a highlight reel of what they have been able to accomplish.

What they have done is to uncover “a fascinating world … populated with thieves, masterminds, fools, and eccentrics, all of whom have risked fortunes and reputations to possess a coveted First Folio.” What makes this book an enjoyable read is hearing these tales and the lengths they have gone to attain what is arguably the most famous book in the collecting world, such as, a nineteenth-century bricklayer who stole a Count’s personal copy and sold it for wrapping paper to shopkeepers, an accidental theft by a 20th century Pope, a shoe salesman disguised as a professor who stole one right out of a college reading room; and then there is my personal favorite involving a playboy living off stolen credit cards, Cubans, and the Folger Library. (I won’t spoil it. You have to read it to believe it.)

If this book has a flaw it is that there is little flow to the narrative. It reads as a series of stand alone essays with little if anything moving in a linear direction. There are many tales of books they feel are out there but that they have failed to find. As a reader I kept waiting for the author to get back to those stories and tell me they found this one or that one, but this never happens.

Overall though I can strongly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys Shakespeare, or simply appreciates books for their own sake. It is a very quick read and by the end you will know more about how books are made, faked, stolen and retrieved than you did before. What more can you ask of a book. show less

I love that someone has taken the enormous trouble to catalogue and make detailed examinations of the first editions of a rightly famous book. I love learning about generations of loving or malign ownership. I love reading about dastardly thefts, eccentric Lords, bizarre marginalia and cat prints across pages. I just wish that I could have loved this little volume more. While the bones were there for a great book, I found the narrative too disjointed, and in parts, repetitive. With some show more judicious and disciplined editing, this could be so much better. If, like me, you enjoy 'books about books', the charming bits will outweigh the minor lapses. show less

A British fantasist whose playboy image is a sham; a New York couple drowning together while on holiday at a resort in Maine; and the unintentionally sticky fingers of both Pope Paul VI and the author himself (pp. 91-92): each makes an appearance in Eric Rasmussen’s The Shakespeare Thefts: In Search of the First Folios (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). This volume serves as the popular equivalent of a “Behind the Scenes” documentary for Rasmussen’s monumental scholarly project of the last show more two decades: to track down and catalogue in exhaustive detail as many as possible of the 232 known extant copies of the 1623 First Folio of Shakespeare’s works, considered by many to be one of the most important and prized printed books in the English language. Rasmussen’s collaboration with Anthony James West and a team of “First Folio hunters” has issued in the thousand-page The Shakespeare First Folios: A Descriptive Catalogue (Palgrave, 2012), a hefty reference tome that documents the history of this key Shakespearean volume. Although half of Shakespeare’s plays had been printed in quarto (or booklet) form during his lifetime, this posthumous printing was the first to contain the other eighteen of the Bard’s thirty-six plays. Nor was it by any means a mean operation: the book, which some thought more handsome even than the printed bibles of the age (p. xiii), sold for the equivalent of three month’s’ wages for a skilled tradesman.

An object thus whose provenance was from the start exclusive to the wealthy, most copies of the book have spent the four centuries of their existence as coveted markers of status, their ownership records a laundry list of the western world’s famous, powerful—and eccentric. Ownership of a First Folio connects the preening yet conniving Spanish Ambassador to the court of King James I (Ch. 1) with the man whose collection endowed Harvard’s great Widener Library after he died on the Titanic (pp. 50-1) and the family of Diana, Princess of Wales (p. 106). While their copies were legitimately bought, the stories of those sought in less reputable fashion mark the core of this book. From a bumbling band of petty thieves in 1940’s New England (Ch. 15) to the most famous book collector of nineteenth-century Britain and his biblio-kleptomaniac son-in-law (Ch. Ch. 9), Rasmussen tells their tales with a light and entertaining touch, making the volume a quick and fanciful read.

Interspersed with the tabloid details that make this work sure to sell, however, are personal and introspective chapters (mainly the even-numbered ones) in which Rasmussen lays out the fundamental root of why the First Folio drives so many personal passions and yet is equally worthy of scholarly attention. The latter was the motivation for the descriptive catalogue: the journey of each First Folio reveals the journey of western culture and society. As one of Rasmussen’s other major projects, Hamlet Works ( http://www.hamletworks.org ), shows, the marginalia of each successive owner offers valuable insights into the intellectual, cultural, and emotional reception of Shakespeare’s writings. For example, if the First Folio that belonged to Count Gondomar, Spanish ambassador to the court of King James I, ever turns up, it may offer insightful comparisons to a copy of the Second Folio (1632) that passed under the pen of the Spanish Inquisition (pp. 8-9 and photo). Other physical evidence in each book—animal paw prints across certain pages, odd pale-red stains, and even a bullet hole—offer tantalizing clues to the history of readership.

It is the personal connections to these books as objects with a past, however, that drives Rasmussen’s passion and gives a soul to what might otherwise be an entertaining but otherwise superficial account. While the Durham thief Raymond Scott’s description of the joys of connoisseurship—“When you touch an antique, you seem to reach back through the centuries to the person who actually created it,” (p. 32)—may simply have been another part of his assumed persona, that connection across the centuries is also at the root of Rasmussen’s passionate pursuit of the First Folios. His account of his own purchase and restoration of a portrait thought to be of Shakespeare (Ch. 10 and photos) would come off as uncomfortably pretentious if it were not for the wide-eyed, boyish innocence that animates it. It is in the very materiality of these antique objects that we find that mysterious power of connection: those with whom we share an intellectual journey have also physically touched and interacted with this book or that painting. The relationships between the material object and each successive human to experience that object bridge the awkward gaps of time and space, so that in the book’s own pages, yesterday and today become intimately present to one another.

If The Shakespeare Thefts were geared towards more of an academic audience, it might make more explicit the theoretical movements of such a meditation upon objective materiality. As it is, the splicing of thrilling vignettes with sometimes very personal reflections can seem sometimes disjointed and jarring, and that awkwardness extends also to the occasional one-sentence paragraphs which feel either fragmentary or overly-edited. At the same time, this disorientation may simply reflect the frustrations that frequently arose in the quest of the hunters to stitch together a narrative of each First Folio from fragmented and disjointed evidence. Perhaps the book itself feels incomplete because Rasmussen still has not been able to see Kamijo family copy in Japan, despite over twenty years of waiting (Ch. 4). show less