The Shakespeare Thefts Read Online Free Page A

from one of Fidel Castro’s bodyguards.

CHAPTER TWO
FIRST FOLIO HUNTERS
    All days are nights to see till I see thee, And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me
.
    —William Shakespeare, Sonnet 43
    A reclusive millionaire presses a concealed button on a bust of Shakespeare. A steel door opens to reveal a secret, climate-controlled gallery in which a stolen First Folio is illuminated; it is the crown jewel in a stunning rare book collection.
    I have never seen this happen—in fact, I’ve made it up.
    Although the details are fanciful, the joy of illegitimate possession is not. My team of researchers and Ihave spent decades examining more than two hundred surviving copies of the First Folio, and we believe there are more out there. Over the course of four hundred years, copies have been destroyed—one was lost when the ocean liner
The Arctic
sank in the North Atlantic in 1854; another was incinerated in the Chicago Fire of 1871. Yet the truth is this: The overwhelming majority of copies that cannot be accounted for probably have been stolen, by agents ranging from servants who “purloined” a First Folio in the 1600s (see Chapter 19 ) to a Depression-era New York shoe salesman who stole a copy from a liberal arts college and then gave himself up in a drunken stupor because he was worried that it might fall into the hands of Adolf Hitler (see Chapter 15 ).
    The Art Loss Register, the world’s largest private database of lost and stolen art, antiques, and collectibles, reveals that 52 percent of all pilfered rare books and works of art are taken from private homes with little or no fanfare thereafter. 1 Private owners often don’t report these thefts (fearing, perhaps, that publicity will only lead to other thieves targeting their property). A First Folio is a coveted treasure, so the reticence about publicity is understandable.
    My team’s goal is to make the First Folio the most documented book of all time. With the completion of
The Shakespeare First Folios: A Descriptive Catalogue
,we are close to achieving that objective. 2 How many books published four hundred years ago can be traced back to their first owners? Not many, you’re thinking—and you are correct. Yet our research has now confirmed that copies of the First Folio still extant were purchased in the 1620s by the Earl of Bridgewater; Viscount Falkland Henry Cary; the Bishop of Durham, John Cosin; the Bishop of Lichfield, John Hacket; Lord Thomas Arundell; Admiral Robert Blake; Colonel John Lane; Colonel John Hutchinson; possibly Sir Edward During; and a lawyer named John Hoskins.
    Our hope is that information about these and other owners throughout history will prove fascinating to social historians. By recording in the
Descriptive Catalogue
the marginal manuscript annotations in all First Folios, we hope to provide material for those who are interested in four hundred years of reader responses to Shakespeare’s plays; moreover, the details of those copies marked up for performance should provide theater historians with substantial food for thought; book historians will value the records of bookplates, armorial stamps, watermarks, press variants, and bindings. Editors of Shakespeare who need to consult the original text will surely appreciate knowing not only the location of extant First Folios but also which ones are complete and which have been “made up” with leaves from later printings or even pen-and-ink forgeries.
    How did we find 232 extant copies? In 1902, Sidney Lee, an English biographer and critic, compiled
Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies: A Census of Extant Copies
, which rightly claimed to be the “first systematic endeavour to ascertain the number and whereabouts of extant original copies of the Shakespeare First Folio.” 3 Through perseverance and hard work, Lee located 152 extant copies and was knighted for his efforts.
    But Sir Sidney didn’t locate all of the copies then in existence. Several years after his