Rare, valuable First Folio comes to Library and Kansas City.
There is a majesty about the book, a sense of history that’s both profound and fitting.
Only an estimated 750 copies of Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies – popularly known as the First Folio – were printed in 1623, and fewer than a third are known to remain in existence today. The 900-page volume was the first compilation of all of Shakespeare’s plays, and without it we likely wouldn’t know Macbeth, Julius Caesar, The Tempest or 15 more of the Bard’s works that hadn’t been published to that point. They’d have been forever lost.
Sold originally for one British pound, copies of the Folio now are valued in the millions of dollars.
One of them is headed for Kansas City, going on public display as part of a special traveling exhibit at the Kansas City Public Library.
“First Folio! The Book that Gave Us Shakespeare” opens in the downtown Central Library’s fifth-floor Missouri Valley Room on June 6. It runs through June 28. The Library is making the exhibit the centerpiece of a six-month “Show Me Shakespeare” celebration of the Bard and his works that includes presentations by nationally renowned Shakespeare scholars and authors, stage and musical presentations, film screenings and discussions, workshops, and an array of children’s and family activities.
The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., is placing 18 copies of the Folio on tour this year, commemorating the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. A single host site was selected in each state, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico.
The Kansas City Public Library, which has made special events programming a signature, was announced as Missouri’s site early in 2015.
“Kansas City has had a great theatrical tradition, including some of the finest actors of the 19th century coming through the city with Shakespeare productions, and a great repertory theater and lots of other, smaller theaters,” Director Crosby Kemper III says. “And the Library is a good place to do this. We’ll not only have the First Folio but can give it context with lectures by some of the world’s best experts on Shakespeare, our “Script-in-Hand” series and other great programming. That will make it, I think, a really rich experience for our patrons and people across the Kansas City area.
“For most people,” he says, “this will be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to come close – very close – to one of the most influential books in history.”
The First Folio was published seven years after Shakespeare’s death in 1616 in Stratford-upon-Avon, England. Two of his fellow actors, John Heminge and Henry Condell, deemed it important to preserve his works, and compiled 36 of his plays in the book.
Prices for privately held surviving copies of the Folio underscore its value. One sold for $6.2 million at Christie’s auction house in London in 2001. Another went for $5.2 million in 2006. The book coming to Kansas City is valued at somewhere between $2 million and $4 million.
The exhibit also features interpretative panels that explore Shakespeare’s historical significance and include both digital content and interactive activities. The book, itself, will be opened to one of the most quoted lines in the world: “to be or not to be” from Hamlet.
Among the Library’s featured “Show Me Shakespeare” speakers:
• Andrea Mays, author of The Millionaire and the Bard, the acclaimed book about Folio collector and Folger Library founder Henry Folger (on May 24).
• The University of Nevada-Reno’s Eric Rasmussen, one of the world’s preeminent Folio authorities. He was summoned in late 2014 to verify the most recently discovered First Folio in St. Omer, France (June 7).
• Tina Packer, founder of one of the largest Shakespeare festivals in the country, “Shakespeare & Company” in Lenox, Massachusetts, and the author of Women of Will: Following the Feminine in Shakespeare’s Plays (June 13).
• Peter Holland, the McMeel Family Professor in Shakespeare Studies in the University of Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters and a past president of the Shakespeare Association of America (June 23).
Performances include a June 1 installment of the Library’s popular “Meet the Past” series in which Kemper interviews Shakespeare as played by Kansas City author Mark Robbins.
Introducing … the First Folio
Sound drums and trumpets! …
The First Folio’s 23-day visit to Kansas City will start June 6 with pomp and ceremony on the front steps of the Kansas City Public Library’s downtown Central Library. The public is invited to join local dignitaries, musicians and other performers including the Heart of America Shakespeare Festival’s affable mascot, Good Will.
Festivities begin as the Library’s double-leaf bronze doors open at 9 a.m. Attendees can be the first to view “First Folio! The Book that Gave Us Shakespeare,” a special exhibit on tour from the Folger Shakespeare Library. Featuring a rare, valuable copy of the First Folio — the first printed collection of the Bard’s plays — it remains on display in the fifth-floor Missouri Valley Room through June 28.
–Steve Wieberg
