An ‘archival discovery’ about a charred 17th-century Shakespeare Folio

In a sealed glass case behind a locked paneled door in the historic Henry Lea Library at Penn is a burned 17th-century Shakespeare Folio, the blackened paper creating a ring around scorched pages with a few readable sentences.

Part of the Penn Libraries collection, the charred Folio belonged to Edwin Forrest, the great Shakespearean actor and Philadelphia native, in the 1800s. The relic is described in an essay about “archival discovery,” published in the fall issue of Shakespeare Quarterly, written by Penn School of Arts & Sciences faculty Zachary Lesser, the Edward W. Kane Professor of English and associate chair of the English Department, and Whitney Trettien, associate professor of English and faculty director of the Price Lab for Digital Humanities.

Lesser, Trettien, and Sarah Reidell, the Margy E. Meyerson Head of Conservation at the Libraries, will discuss the burned Folio during a virtual event on May 8, “Shakespeare at Penn: Uncovering Mysteries and Relics at Penn Libraries.”

According to Lesser and Trettien, Edwin Forrest’s extensive collection of early modern English drama was heavily damaged by a fire in his Broad Street townhome in January 1873, shortly after his death. Among the books destroyed were his copies of the First, Third, and Fourth Folios of William Shakespeare; the Second Folio, now at Texas A&M University, survived for reasons that are unclear. Shakespeare expert and Penn Trustee and benefactor Horace Howard Furness went to Forrest’s home to save what was left of the rare volumes. At the time the volume now in the glass case was identified as a copy of the First Folio, one of the most valuable books in the world.

The Shakespeare First Folio brought together for the first time 36 of William Shakespeare’s plays in 1623, and three subsequent editions followed in 1632, 1663, and 1685. Forrest’s executor and longtime friend, James Oakes, preserved it as a relic in the sealed glass case, which was displayed at Forrest’s house after it became the Edwin Forrest Home for Decayed Actors.

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In fact, it is not a First Folio, write Lesser and Trettien. The reliquary that “had been catalogued, discussed, and displayed as a First Folio for a century and a half in fact contains the remains of his Third Folio” of 1663. The confusion can be understood as there is a card in the reliquary with handwriting partly visible: “[Shakesp]eare / [Fa?]mous Folio of / 1623.”

Mitch Fraas, Penn Libraries director of special collections and research services, first noticed in 2015 “that a line visible on the central fragment in the case did not correspond to the reading in the First Folio,” the essay says. “Once he alerted us to the variant reading, it was easy enough to collate all these legible bits against the four 17th-century Folios and to establish, beyond a doubt, that what was in the glass case are the ashes of Forrest’s Third Folio.” Included are parts of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and “The Merchant of Venice” and isolated bits of “Coriolanus.”

“No one realized the burned Third Folio survived because no record pointed to its existence,” the essay says. The Third Folio is actually more rare than the First, according to the Shakespeare Census, which Lesser directs. It currently lists 229 copies of the First Folio but only 182 copies of the Third. So, what happened to the remains of Forrest’s First Folio? There are 10 pages, all heavily burned, from the end of “Romeo and Juliet” and the beginning of “Timons of Athens” in the Penn Libraries, not in the Forrest Collection, but rather among the papers of Furness, which came to Penn in 1931. Furness probably brought them to his home on Washington Square after salvaging them from the remains of the fire in 1873 to compare with his own copy of the First Folio, which is now in the Penn collection.

The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., sought to borrow the reliquary from Penn for an exhibition in 2011, but the contents were deemed too delicate to transport. The Folger made a replica from a 20th-century copy—the charred pages arranged in a glass box—of the First Folio. “It is telling that, even within very visible Shakespearean collections with detailed, item-level description and robust curator notes, such discoveries remain to be made,” the essay says.