This is a talk with Eric Rasmussen of the University of Nevada, Reno, about his work in locating and cataloguing full descriptions of over 200 copies of the Shakespearean First Folio, the large book that made Shakespeare, Shakespeare. This year is the 400th anniversary of the publication of this edition, entitled Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies and published in 1623.
This is a talk with Eric Rasmussen of the University of Nevada, Reno, about his work in locating and cataloguing full descriptions of over 200 copies of the Shakespearean First Folio, the large book that made Shakespeare, Shakespeare. This year is the 400th anniversary of the publication of this edition, entitled Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies and published in 1623.
This is speaking of Shakespeare conversations about things Shakespearean I'm Thomas Dabbs broadcasting from Aoyama University in central Tokyo if you are joining us on YouTube you should know that this program is also available on your favorite podcast platform this talk is with Eric Rasmussen of the University of Nevada Reno Eric is a well-known critic and editor and perhaps best known for his work on finding and cataloging full descriptions of over 200 copies of Shakespeare's first folio we will find out today what's new in the world of first folio Shakespeare this series is funded with support from the Aoyama Gakuin University Institute of the Humanities and also with the generous grant from the Japan Society for the promotion of science Eric thank you so much for joining us today I think it's your afternoon and it's my early morning uh and we're into summer here in Tokyo and you're in California but you're in the Tahoe area is that correct right now that's right Tom the pleasure to be with you afternoon morning wherever we are wherever we are in the world well your name and is known to us in the biz as an editor and a Critic and uh name the dolphin finds a place on our bookshelves and we could talk about that and maybe will but I think the most immediate topic is you and your team's work uh to give full comprehensive bibliographical descriptions of every copy of The Shakespearean first folio that you can gain access to and it's a process that involves a lot of searching also and a search that leads you and others across the world and into some amazing and unsuspected locales are dealing with some uh interesting personalities um real immediate locales and historical locales we can only visit in our Mind's Eye uh as your book on uh the folio thefts shows there are intriguing narratives that accompany extent and sometimes non-extant or missing copies of the first folio and this search is coupled with additional and I should have vote joyful and be awful narratives that belong to the search itself so you're uh I think you've recently authenticated a found first folio and may I ask you to tell us that story or any other story anything that's hot off the press and first folio news well the the the the the story The the story you're thinking about is was a copy in San Omar in the north of France um and it was interesting I I got a um an email out of the blue from the the librarian at a public library who said I think I may have found a first folio and I said I think you didn't um because I I get a handful of these inquiries every year or so and the the real problem is that in the 19th century as soon as photolithography was invented among the first books that they started reproducing using the new technology was the Shakespeare first folio and they were so happy with how authentic it looked that they often would not put any identifying marks on it that said this is a copy or this is a facsimile and so these books are now 200 years old and age has conferred genuine Antiquity upon them so it's understandable if a librarian or an owner finds one and thinks oh this is a this is this is an original and the difference is that in Shakespeare's time uh books are printed on rag bound handmade paper with chain lines and watermarks and in the 19th century books were printed with wood pulp paper usually without watermarks and to an expert it's immediately obvious uh which is which but to the undertrained eye then not so much so anyway I got contacted by uh this fellow in Santa mayor and and he said I think I might have a first folio and I said I think you've probably got a facsimile but you know what I'm I'm curating an exhibition at the British Library so I could take the Eurostar over and and take a look at it for you so I did and but sure enough it was a first folio and what was really interesting is this Library this public library unbeknownst to me this public library owned a Gutenberg Bible uh they they had inherited their collection from a Jesuit college uh and that was in in Shakespeare's time it was illegal uh for Catholics to go to university so Catholics had set up colleges along the North Coast of uh the continent uh in in in Spain in in France in in the low countries in which there they could send their their young men to college and so this was this was part of a Jesuit library and what was fascinating about this copy is that the Jesuits had a long-standing tradition of theatrical performance but the young men could not play female roles that was a rule and so they had gone through um in the first folio the uh Henry IV part one and every time the host disappeared someone had crossed off the last ESS and and made her into a host uh and so they they they had they had made her mail and there's one place in particular when Falstaff says is not my my hostess of the tavern a most sweet wench and someone had not only crossed off the ESS in Hostess but it crossed off wench and written fellow um which is which is very sweet I mean it you just you just sort of loved the idea that here are these young Jesuit students who who have found this play Hey look there aren't many women in this we can we we can do this and so you know first folios are always fun to see the signs of use to see that that they were not treating these as Priceless collectors items uh which they weren't these were these were books to be used in this case books to be used for a dramatic performance by um College college actors uh so that that was really fun the the interesting thing about the aftermath of that story is the uh when I did a an interview with the New York Times They said well is there anything particularly interesting about it I said well you know the you know the name Neville that's written on the front first page of the book happened to be the front page of the Tempest and we know that there was a family named at the scares brick family and Edward scaresberg we know went from England to San Omar and when he went he took the the Alias uh uh Neville uh so maybe um this was his book that he brought over with him maybe he wrote on it when he was there but and that's all I said but the headline was uh new discovery proves that Shakespeare was a secret Catholic Oh and and this went absolutely viral oh well uh but uh what you what you pointed out is that these books not only uh were used books uh but also uh possess a history sometimes you can find it and sometimes you can't and uh there in your in your book on these searches uh there's just these wonderful Journeys through the history of literary
misdemeanors it reminded me a lot of Richard arctic's book The Scholar Adventures you know and these names uh I've done a lot of work on uh Collier but uh Halliwell Phillips of course and uh these these eccentric types and uh the bodilian copy that apparently was ripped off the chain and uh it goes missing for a while and it comes back it almost becomes uh a kind of character and another drama the folio itself uh in a sort of in a mystery but recently I think that uh there was a folio copy that uh sold for quite a lot of money and I I wanted to know if you had any idea what's going on with that recent sale yeah I mean the the Mills College copy um had a really interesting history uh it was owned by a guy named Mad Jack Fuller who was a a very eccentric Member of Parliament he um he apparently uh is is buried he created a pyramidal tomb for himself in Sussex I believe and he's he's buried sitting in a I sitting upright in an iron chair with a roast chicken and a bottle of port in front of him uh uh awaiting the um uh uh the second coming um which is all very eccentric and weird and the kind of thing we like to point out of oh look at these look at these these crazy owners but he also was a slave owner who uh owned plantations in Jamaica and uh advocated quite quite seriously in Parliament for the retention of slavery and and so we have to always sort of take it take our our our our our oh is it are they fun are they eccentric well wow this was a this is a bad person as well anyway Mills College in um uh in Oakland tiny little uh liberal arts school um really decided they could no longer afford to to keep this this very expensive book because these things aren't you can't insure them and uh and in any case um sold sold for 10 million dollars which is a a new new record for first folio and it it it's it's a it's a very interesting Market in the in the six in the 70s and 80s the um the Japanese uh were buying every first folio that came on the market many of which ended up in may say uh uh University and there's one there's one sort of quirky copy which I I I think I mentioned in the book where we it was a private family who owned uh this copy and when we first approached them they said uh we're sorry um the the her husband put in the in his will that no one can see this uh copy of the first folio until 13 years after his death we sort of said wow that that sounds weird but we dutifully came back 13 years later and they wanted nothing to do with us and the the the really tricky pit here is that we know from from dealer catalog descriptions that the copy they own has a red stain on the corner of many of the pages and we also know that a copy was stolen from the University of Manchester in in England the John rylands library in the late 60s that also had red stains on the corner of each page so it could well be that this is the long lost Manchester copy and that the perhaps the husband knew this and did not want to saddle the family with the shame or the guilt of of owning that that stolen copy so we we've never been able to see we haven't been able to see that one yet but that's that's one of the few we haven't seen yeah it makes sense uh that that might be the reason that people are closed off I mean usually uh uh of course with your reputation uh were there a lot of uh there are a lot of charlatans out there and there's a long history of uh uh dirty dealing uh with in the book trade but uh your by reputation you would be very trustworthy and you'd think that you know if you uh they would be very uh willing now you did visit the may say library uh may say University Library uh and us go into the Vault that uh is very difficult I think still to get access to is that right it is it is tricky to get access to may say it and it's it's interesting because I have some very good friends and colleagues there who've been very very helpful and one of them took me aside one day and said you know we're just so sorry that you have to come here to look at books that properly belong in your country and I said why do are they belong in my country but it it and and also may say is quietly de-assessioning uh their copies they have sold they used to have 12 they sold two of them um they they they've kept the the what what many of us consider to be the important ones the heavily annotated uh copy that was with annotations but in early Scott looks like an early Scottish reader and I mean my personal favorite they have William congreves copy uh and and the the 18th century playwright and Congress copy has a bullet hole going through it oh yeah I mean I absolutely love that it has a bullet hole because you can't possibly yeah if that this is a big book it was it's lying on a table it would not take a bullet somebody had to be holding that up in this really weird Riff on my first folio saved my life uh but I I would I would pay a lot of money to know how how that happens but someone has gone through and carefully repaired every page where there was a bullet hole going through it um I I'm not positive where the bullets stopped I like to think it was Titus because Titus is an in a tropical play right um Titus well that probably there if we could ever uncover it uh I've spoken with colleagues of mine in the Shakespeare Society of Japan and it's amazing how little information we have about the history of those purchases by um uh someone I think it was the president of may say University in the late 70s or 80s during the economic bubble a lot of Japanese collectors and areas are buying modernist art and so forth and Van Gogh sunflowers uh it was a big deal at that time too yeah and warehousing it basically it was It was kind of viewed by the owners of stock and not really for public viewing or access or anything like that and may say uh at that time may have been part of that tradition and then all of a sudden now not all of a sudden over time they realized they had some this big treasure that you might expect well you would expect it at the fold your Shakespeare Library or uh and uh some major world-class Library uh and uh so for I've heard that the people have had trouble getting access but they do have a website and I think they did digitize at least one of it and also I think they have more than just the uh first edition they uh oh they they have many many seconds and thirds and and fourths and and other you know astounding item when you when you get down into this Falls it's a little creepy because you realize that that Madame curie's notebooks must be radioactive and you're in this confined space with them wonderful artifacts to have but they they could be toxic as well oh oh yes um yeah uh but um they're they're they're at least safe uh I think they're very safe there uh and uh and so it apparently uh your book uh came out a few years back and I I wasn't sure in the interim uh if you've been back to Japan to view more copies uh and have you seen every uh first folio at may say have you been able to I have I have seen I have seen all 12 and now now they're only 10. uh they're only ten and you don't know where the two went because uh we do one one of them is ultimately wound up at the University of British Columbia and they were they were very very very excited about this this this acquisition and uh it is one of the very few copies in in Canada so that has that has gone to a public institution the other is with a fry with a dealer who I believe is looking for a private owner but I don't know any I don't know that I can reveal any details I don't know that I know them um I did but I did recently uh take a trip to India where back in a hundred years ago in 1923 when there was a lot of hoopla about the 300th anniversary of the first Foley of course this is the 400th anniversary but um the uh a librarian down in it at the University of roorkee a little technology School in India said I I I've checked uh all the descriptions of what a first folio is supposed to look and I I think we have one and and he provided the um uh the dimensions which were very big and the times literally supplement uh notice this and said wow um if they have that's amazing and it's and it's and it's huge and and with with Unapologetic imperialism said we think it should be sent home to the British Library
but I sort of
love this was announced to the world and everyone uh wow this is this is this is an amazing Discovery and then it disappeared and for 65 years uh no one heard anything of it until it was rediscovered in the 1980s by a new librarian at uh Rocky um who once again uh announced it to the world a story was published in the Wall Street Journal about this discovery of a a Shakespeare folio that was in a box and it was hidden in the back of a closet and then it went underground again and it wasn't until after my book came out that the new library in there in I think 2019 rediscovered it and said oh we had this this copy and so I I said well I I need to go uh make a make a journey and and take a look at this and I went to this Library oh my goodness they received me the entire Library staff showed up on the steps of the Mahatma Gandhi library and I I received Flowers and gifts and there was photographers and I I I I guaran I do this a lot I can guarantee you book historians are usually not received this way um and they they they took me in and they gave me a tour and they have a special rare books room built specifically for their treasured first folio and they have a copy of India's Constitution it's a very it's a lovely facility and then but then when I sat down with the book I mean the one way as I mentioned before that you can distinguish a book an original from a facsimile is the chain lines and the watermarks the the watermarks that were used to make paper were were a tiny wire was stitched a little pattern into a into a wire screen and that wire would often break and so the watermarks didn't last very long they didn't they could produce a certain amount of paper and in the first folio which took a lot of paper to print we we have found 21 uh unique watermarks watermarks that don't appear in any other book uh save for a couple that were printed in William jaggered shop in the same period that the first folio is being printed and so we uh all I needed to do was find one of those watermarks and I could attest that they had an original first Folia and the the folio was huge it was about the margins were about an inch wider than any other I've ever seen and I've seen many of them um and I couldn't find a a watermark anywhere and uh the The Librarians were were very disappointed they've treated this book royally they built a special uh place for it they'd even had carbon carbon dating uh uh done on the the text and and they showed me the results of their carbon dating test which said you know this proves that this paper is hundreds of years old or the wood pulp in this paper is 100 the wood fibers are 100 years old and I said well well yeah I mean but the the paper that was used for Shakespeare's folio was made of linen it was rag it wouldn't have wood fibers in it it was only uh 19th century fact similes that were made and I I think I've identified the it was the 1966 six facsimile um excuse me 1866 fact simile that um what is probably what they have which was the first facsimile ever produced using the new technology of photolithography and I kind of thought that maybe because they're a Technology College they that would have meaning for them but I'm I I they they were they were pretty disappointed I'm sorry oh boy talking about the bursting the balloon well I guess the reception we that that would be uh a very hard thing to do uh to go in and usually I think you said usually there's a case there's also the cases and uh am I saying this right the Harris uh yes John Harris yes could you explain some of that to uh yeah I mean the the so in uh in the 19th century when uh wealthy owners uh were missing a page or two of their first folio and really wanted to make a complete copy this is the age before Xerox before photolithography before photography and they they would hire there's a fellow named John Harris and he would do very meticulously crafted pen and ink facsimiles of first folio pages and they were so brilliantly executed I mean they're just thing they're just works of art uh and it and the the British library at one point decided though that maybe he was a Forger and so they would make him sign every page so whenever he produced one of these facsimiles for someone there's a tiny little John Harris signature uh planted somewhere but whatever I find one of these uh an inner private owners copy libraries copy I'm very excited because this is as far as I'm concerned that the ability of someone to recreate a printed page using just pen and ink with this exactitude is is marvelous I it's amazing how often owners don't share my excitement because they see it as a non-original page this is this is a this is a fake this is a facsimile uh and and so I I understand that that I mean I I think I mentioned this in the book but one of the what are the most fascinating owners I know who was replacing Pages was a private owner in in Manhattan very wealthy lived in a six-story brownstone um ain't nothing but McDonald's morning noon and and and and and and uh dinner and so there were actually McDonald's rappers quite a few of them and his folio had been chewed on by rats and I chewed off all the corners now I believe this happened this wasn't related to the McDonald's this was uh before he had purchased it the corners had been uh had been chewed on at someone and so his the way he reconstructed this is korich the book dealer in London used to have in their basement a stack of first folio pages that just stray individual pages that that should a owner ever need to make up make a copy complete they would have the final page of symboline or something like that and so he bought I think upwards of 200 individual pages and then instead of putting them in to his copy he cut off the corners from the new pages and then affixed them to the corners of the chewed off pages and I was just like okay this is your book but who does that oh my oh my the eccentricities uh out there uh I recently spoke with Emma Smith who's also written on the first folio and she had a chance to go up to uh an island off the coast of Scotland uh to see a copy that was uh rebound into three different volumes and uh and it turned out I it's authentic and have you seen that copy at the I I have not seen the Butte copy the the the owners are are keeping it very close to the best which is they're that's their privilege it's their it's their copy I have spoken to the librarian and we have set up perhaps doing something in Zoom where she could use a light sheet and my team and I could identify the watermarks and there it's just it would be useful to have the data from that uh to sort of complete the set yeah well this is something I want to make abundantly clear not everybody knows this but you have been working for years with a team to go into over 200 copies of the first folio Page by Page and this was an adventure that was done by Charlton Hinman back in the early 60s and nobody was more Relentless than Charlton you know uh and I mean when you follow him that's uh you know it's a meticulous I guess it would be tedious work but you look at every single page in leaf and document exactly what's happening you look at marginalia uh anything is a full description of every page and The Binding uh and the histories of uh Province uh Providence and um and so forth this is a massive undertaking so I imagine it's just continuing now right it just yeah we we think we have now finished every uh we because we've done this in America copy uh and and we're trying to get as much data as we can on on the new Butte copy um but the thing you know these folios keep coming to light I mean there was a woman who a few years ago died in testate in London and a first folio was a a sort of battered one was found among her effects and they had to use uh forensic genealogy I didn't even know there was such a thing as forensic genealogy to track down uh an air uh to who inherited this first folio so from from a relative he didn't even know he had and so you know these These are kind of the Antiques Roadshow sorts of stories which it's always possible when we think and it's just an essay we think that there were probably 750 or so copies printed originally that was the amount that it would have taken to perhaps break even on the cost of this very expensive book and uh to date we made we found less than a third of those so it's you know the thing is especially small quartos could go missing they could get lost really large folios they're sort of like family Bibles it's very hard to to lose one of these in the shuffle and so you know there there there may be there may be more there we you know I keep I I keep following up leads I go to India to track down leads um but it it's hard you know who knows uh what what will serve us next and you know you're right the the all of the work we do on the book we're hope we we hope that this will be of use to someone we hope that someone will come along working on marginaley I know we we found one copy in the Folger that we call the feminist copy because it was annotated by quite a number of early female owners and female ownership is is a great research interest these days and so we we kind of hope that someone may be able to use this material we also think that anytime if a book were to be stolen we now have a complete fingerprint of that book and we can tell with some Precision that exactly what you know what what was written on what page what pages are missing where there are ink Lots where there are and and so should be recovered they uh police can identify it as as happened in the case with um the Raymond Scott copy this was a fellow who walked into the Folger Shakespeare Library with a copy of what looked to be a first folio claiming that he had purchased it from one of Fidel Castro's bodyguards and the Folger said wow this looks um interesting I think yeah we'll take a look at it and it turned out it was a copy that had been stolen from the University of Durham and Raymond Scott the individual in question lived a few miles away from the University of Durham in the new in the north of England and also had suddenly acquired this collection of Lamborghinis and this taste for Dom Perignon Champagne and the guy was a nut job he he would show up at his trial uh in a horse-drawn carriage with a you know a a cigar in one hand a cup of noodles and the other proclaiming a horse a horse my kingdom for a horse oh my gosh and but he would but he was sentenced to six years in in prison and largely I mean the the deciding um of evidence was there was a a small wedge-like shape that had been uh cut into troyals and Crescent nobody even knows why but there was just this little very very specific hole that had been etched out in Frozen and we had a record of that from before the theft and the copy had that particular uh identifying Mark um so this is the longest sentence that was ever given to someone for our rare books left yeah well how do you steal this is a large book for those uh among our viewers who haven't seen one is large it's uh it would be very difficult to steal uh you know you could see these some of these smaller quarto editions or uh duodescimal or something slipping into someone's pocket and they're getting they get past the guards how does that happen how do you get the entire book out of the library uh well this this particular theft um was was during an exhibition where they had uh in in the exhibition cases they had a number of the Treasures of the library including 9th century manuscripts and the Anglo-Saxon King elfrik and things like things of this nature and a parent my recollection is that their first folio every they they used to take it out of the the exhibition case at night and or replace it with a facsimile in any case they hadn't done that this particular and thieves broke in and stole about a dozen items um many of the first folio's been recovered but many of the items have are lost and so this was this was an actual kind of missing impossible theft where uh and you know the problem is University libraries often don't have the sophisticated uh uh anti-theft systems uh that that that you would you might think that these million dollar items ought to have but no no one can afford that and often no one expects that that someone's going to break into a library um so that was that was that that was that was a big that was a big theft we were really I'm really pleased for Durham that the copy has come back but I but I'm I I remain uh you know saddened that that the other items all of them unique all of them Priceless are are are gone yeah uh well how uh if I may ask that this takes a a lot of resources to be able to do all of this traveling to look around to have a team of people doing this this so uh your your funding sources if that's uh permissible to ask dude uh how do you fund all of this travel and all of these uh you know people get paid for doing this it seems like it's a an enormous project yeah I mean the the the the the the interesting thing is you when Trace is back it's history so it began with a guy named Anthony James West who um was a uh a British uh an Englishman who went to Harvard did an MBA in the 1960s and then took British management or took American business management practices back to England where no one was really thinking that way and he became a partner in Booz Allen the management event consultant firm he ran their South America office in Rio de Janeiro he was one of forbes's richer men in the world and had a midlife crisis in in his 50s and decided he really his real love was was Shakespeare and he wanted to go do a PhD so he went to University College London uh to to work on his Doctorate and when he was looking for a um uh a dissertation idea his supervisor said well you know no one's done a census of the first folio since Sydney Lee back in 1903 why don't you do that and so Anthony threw himself into it uh with with verb and he spent 15 years traversing the world looking for first folios he found 70 more than we knew of in Lee's census and which is amazing um but he also spent his entire personal fortune and I've never decided whether that was Noble or foolish um but he you know it it and then and what Anthony had done is he he discovered these things but he not spent much time with them he would sort of authenticate take a few notes and then with the intent of coming back and so I put he approached me and and I put together a team of research assistants largely professional friends of mine and grad students of mine and we threw ourselves into it wholeheartedly we we had some research funding for my from my University but basically people were traveling on the cheap and and and and working Gratis and and and we we then went back to each copy and as you say uh really spent some time to do to do fall analyzes uh and recording the the data from from each one um and you know it has been largely a labor of love um it's been it's been kind of wonderful in this first folio year to see how many people are traveling around the world carrying our copies of the uh the first folio catalog I know Greg Doran the uh the former artistic director of uh the Royal Shakespeare company is on a personal first folio journey and he's going around the World um with a copy of our catalog tucked under his arm he calls it his bar Decker which I think is very sweet oh that is so what year are we talking here uh roughly the beginning of your project so so Anthony started his work in uh the 1990s um my team and I came in in the early 2000s and worked on it for about a solid decade and then brought out the catalog in in 2011 and 2012 and we've continued to update it since with the uh with with the new discoveries and one of the real problems was deciding how you organize a catalog such as this and one of the decisions Anthony had made he wanted to do it geographically which makes a kind of sense uh the ones that are in the British Isles the ones that are in America the ones that are in uh the rest of the world the problem of course is that these These are portable so many of them have migrated to to different countries and and and and different places since then so simply coming up with a with a system for how you uh we we we we have numbers but it's all it's it's it's very difficult I'm not I don't get upset when everyone moves from Tokyo to British Columbia but it but it does mean that I've got to relocate that thing that's right um that's right they keep moving uh it's not it's not like you're doing a an archaeological site that stays where it is at least you know uh and um also the uh things happen you know you have uh fire flood all kinds of things can happen you have eccentric personalities who can walk out of uh Durham University Library with a copy and um so uh so this is just it's never ending I just think this is just wonderful to have a project that's so much fun for so many people uh that gives you work to do this enjoyable even though it could be tedious at times that uh that doesn't have an an end date um well you are uh your your career you uh are the uh or I think well you worked with Jonathan bait on the RSC uh editions of Shakespeare you're involved with the uh internet Shakespeare editions I saw your name there uh some years ago and uh there's uh I I have I know the people who are doing that or some of the people um and uh so I wanted to talk a little bit about your editorial work also that uh and not and not just let everything be overshadowed by first folio uh you are you are involved with any editorial projects now or um yeah I'm I am on the the board of a the new new Cambridge Shakespeare which is just uh just got gotten off the ground quite quite fascinatingly is the the general editors are three are three female Scholars very very talented female Scholars who it and it there has been such a male dominance in the editing of Shakespeare for so long um there's there's even a story about how when um the the art the Arden Shakespeare uh when it was suggested that that they they ask a woman to edit Hamlet one of the general editors quit rather than than allow this to happen and and so it's it's a it's a really nice sea change um to see a a diversity of voices um coming coming into editing and you know I we we as you mentioned Jonathan bate and I um did the the uh the complaint works for the Royal Shakespeare company and and that was that was a lot of that was interesting because we were working fairly closely with the actors and and often there's there's a disjunction between the the the the the the editors the critics and the performers and the two often don't talk to each other and it what we would do um and it was it was it was quite wonderful um is if if you discover a a textual issue for instance um there's a line at the the the climactic line of much to do about nothing is when Benedict says to Beatrice piece I will stop your mouse and he kisses her and then he shuts her up for the rest of the line for the rest of the play and that's an interesting moment because it's like okay he won and there's this you know and it the the audience applauds the people on stage applaud that's fine but the problem is that that's not Benedict's line in either the early quarters or the early folios it's Leonardo's line and Leonardo uh Hero's father Beatrice's uncle and editoring Lewis Theobald in 1730 um decided oh this can't be Leonardo and he assigned it to Benedict and every editor since then has given that line to Benedict we went into the rehearsal room and the RSC actors happened to be uh doing much to do about nothing and said hey is there any way this line can work if it's Leonardo's and the Act without missing a beat the actor playing Leonardo stepped up and he cupped Benedict's head and he cupped Beatrice's head and he brought them together in a kiss and he said peace let me stop your mouth and we all went oh my gosh it works and it not only works it's better it's better it's not Benedict having uh dominance over Beatrice it's Leonardo fulfilling the the plan that he had hatched all along of bringing the two of them together and and it's it's moments like that where you can really interact with um with with you know you I they can they can teach actors can teach editors things as well as editors teaching actors things and in our our current the second edition that we just brought out for the RSC we went through and stripped out all of the editorial stage directions so every time I mean one of the things that's very tricky about um modern editions of Shakespeare is that editors feel compelled to put in stays directions to help readers with the stage action and that's fine there's nothing inherently wrong with that except most actors most students don't know that those those stage directions in Brackets are not part of the authentic text they're just editors guesses at what's what's happening there and and editors often get things wrong I mean it's just it's it's so remarkable in the history of editing you know it was Nicholas Rowe the first editor back in 1709 who said that that uh Lear and and the fool are Anna Heath everybody talks about the heath there's no Heath in King Lear that's just Nicholas Rose saying they're on a heat um anyway so what what we decided to do um because we're working with the Royal Shakespeare company is to take out the all of those editorially added stage directions and replace them with things that RSC Productions have actually done at those moments in the play and it's it and it really gets interesting when they've done different things because you know does Hamlet uh address you know a little more than can and less than kind you know directly to Claudius does he say it aside does he say it to his shoe um it it it it matters to me for my students to to get to get the idea of there is no one the way to do this there are multiple ways to do this they're they're they're they're differing interpretations some can have more validity than others and some can be more appealing but giving them not simply my idea of what that stage direction should be but uh really sort of collaborating with actors and directors and here are uh two or three different ways that this could be done I think really gets them thinking about the multiple possibilities that are that are latent in these plays and the and maybe the reasons why you might want to see more than one production to see you know a a another approach some people who are doing something differently maybe a way you haven't hadn't thought of before so I'm very proud of uh are taking the step in doing this and it really you know before the RSC Edition was not in name only but it had less direct links to the Royal Shakespeare company than and then we do now so I'm I'm very pleased by this and hope hope that people have a lot of uh get get some really get some get some good use out of it um you mentioned the internet Shakespeare with uh and and that you you know some people who are working on that project this again was spearheaded by a man named Michael best who really saw that the electronic medium gives us the opportunity to do things that we don't would have to do in print you know if there is a textual variant that you know very famously when Othello commits suicide uh there it's a question of whether he sees himself as a as a base Indian who threw away threw away a pearl that he didn't understand its price was it was he a Savage you didn't get the value of it or was he the base Judean who threw away a pearl oh this is like Judas uh a betraying Christ um that's a very different reading and in in print you have to select one or the other but in in the electronic mode you could you could have a text that kind of morphs quietly between the two and alerts readers that there's a difference there and again you know as I was just talking about with the stage directions gives them the multiple possibilities that are that are in this text without necessarily having an editor pick one and say yes that's the one you've got to go with yeah well I do some work in digital Humanities uh do a lot of work there um over the past 10 years or so and uh in particular and uh in this series we talked with uh Janelle jenstad and she uh explains some of the technical challenges that uh in the history of that uh and um I've discussed with several other Scholars some of the problems uh Tiffany Stern uh they're trying to make the decision that uh Arden what you know how how much do you digitize do you make a museum out of the text and no that nobody wants to do that and I'm thinking you know you don't need to and you have Wikipedia you have all kinds of online resources to to click to if you're online reading an Edition but I still use the uh it was the David Bevington at uh Chicago where you were schooled right uh that Edition and it's uh still out there uh Janelle made sure that we that you have access to it even though they're kind of rebuilding things uh within a more durable programming uh it's it's really a digital um equivalent of trying to preserve uh real hard copy additions you know you have to you have to build a space there that uh that will be usable 20 20 30 years from now but uh uh and and then the tricky thing about about digital Humanities and it's people like David Scott Caston have been arguing for years is that if you own a book if you own David Bevington Shakespeare and it's on your shelf you have that you can go to that you can refer to it it's there if you're relying on a digital platform that it is some somebody else maintains it and owns it it could it could disappear it could not be there anymore and this has happened recently with the the Cambridge uh edition of Ben Johnson that they they made a decision when they published this to publish the plays and the introduction to the notes but put a lot of the textural essays and and the other kinds of material on a digital platform with the assurance that it would be kept running as long as as Cambridge University press well it now appears that that may not be the case and it may may vanish uh in in the near future and and many of us are just up and arms many of us who supported the the electronic textual Revolution about look at all look what we can do now that we aren't limited a few page counts anymore and and and we're at the point now with with so many of these things no longer available um just just wondering what what wondering what we should do or what I mean we're scrambling obviously to find anyone the new home and probably will but yeah well uh one solution that I think is uh extremely viable and I've heard people who are the podcast of people talking about this is if you build it with a certain way you can put the whole thing on a USB and you can replicate the USB and you can actually own a copy of the USB and it all works offline uh even uh yes I think I'm right without well you're not depending on a bunch of servers you have to bounce things off of but the uh it's such a a great teaching uh tool now that we have overhead projectors in every classroom we can put you know the text up there and click and there's a fine annotation and you know I'm in a second language situation so it's helpful to be able to do that uh and a lot of my better students are still very text bound right but during class it's great to have that uh do you have uh one of the great things I think that one I'm hoping for I'm somewhere behind me I have uh Peter blaney's two volume work on the you know the entire everything and I was looking for some information on a a printer uh and publisher uh uh Reginald Wolfe in the mid 16th century and I was going through and it led me to a footnote in volume one and then I had to go to volume two and look up something and go it was you wonder if uh there was some kind of joke being played on me uh but I think I was thinking if there was some way to digitize this and I'm thinking also about catalogs like yours and so forth sure there's in some ways much more usable with uh searchable searchability and so forth and now that we have the uh the um space to put it on you know it used to be the hard drive space was a real commodity and now we have kind of Limitless space for things images and all kinds of things so uh what do you think that's going I it it would be I mean the the huge problem is that um Publishers don't have the money and but they own the copyright and so we have been uh you know we have been trying to get I mean as you say um you know Peter blaney's uh work any any kind of reference works certainly our catalog not first folios doesn't have to exist in a thousand page uh volume it would be so much more accessible electronically and the uh because you because because Publishers references divisions have been affected by University uh monograph budgets you know shrinking to to nothingness and they they are not in my experience they they are they are not inclined to go to the expense of of putting something up uh electronically and digitally and it's not something that the individual authors have the the legal capacity to do because we don't we don't hold the copyright so I I I I will I will I will cite you I will I will tell my Publishers that you know the world is waiting uh or or the handful of users who really do need it on occasion and do want to look at something specific uh it would make all the sense in the world to have these and if if they had come out a decade later you know now would be a place where you you could make an argument it just needs to be digital we don't need to do that there does not need to be a a hard copy of of of this volume and I'm I'm one of the general editors of the new barrierum Shakespeare and that's what we're we have moved with the new very Orum to a completely digital platform and the the the the the final volumes that are currently in the pipeline um we will we will have in hardcover version but there too a very arm oh my God oh my goodness um that that's great that that's hypertext you know waiting to happen and uh it it really is great we we're partnering with Texas A M yeah uh to you to make make that in an entirely digital project which is which is which is very gratifying yeah and you can do both uh because I I I'm like you I I don't uh you know you have to have electricity you have to you know the uh the power has to be on and the book seems more trustworthy of course books can be uh lost and subject to all kinds of things but uh both can be done we spoke with uh well on this series with Laura Mandel at a m Texas A M and uh she brought us up to date with what they were doing so far but I I'm seeing now more um intervention from the uh scholarly uh Community because you know with the internet archive and now Google will just throw up an entire book and it's very useful to uh have that book uh if you're using it for research to say oh I you know I have books behind me and these are two I'm sure with all kinds of uh well not dog years but I put little sticky notes in places and write little notes and then I forget what it was all about and so forth you know I end up rediscovering something or that sort of thing so that I do find that digital research um uh good but there are just a lot of things you you like thumbing through the pages because there's a type of browsing there's a Serendipity I guess is the word I'm looking for that only happens uh in a in a book shop or in a library in a Personal Collection um but uh this this history of Personal Collection the thing that you're doing is so transferable and scalable to other types of knowledge it isn't just limit it to the first folio I I I think so and and you know there have been sporadic uh catalog resumes of important books um Galileo uh and and so forth but I I I'd like to see it with others I know there's there's a guy in Amsterdam named Will Sutton who wants to do a catalog of the uh extant copies of the Shakespeare sonnets I think they're only 13 so I don't think it'll take him a long time but it's it's that kind of thing that yeah that'd be kind of useful to see you know what what what the watermarks are what the those those those that sort of data um and and who knows what what use it will be um I'm not sure they're going to be teams going around the world looking at Leaves of Grass but maybe well you never know I found myself a few years back diving into fueler it's uh Office of the Rebels the thing that the 1908 and uh it was put up on internet archive and suddenly I found out you know I'm trying to figure out if they did make an ass's head in the office of the rebels now I could look through the entire catalog or I could search you know the spellings were different and that sort of thing but you and it's just an amazing what you could find with um in some cases going kind of down in you know into a rabbit hole uh on certain things but uh I I'm I'm a big uh advocate of both uh and uh I have kept you now for over an hour uh Eric I know that you're busy it's just the incredible amount of work that you have done uh through throughout your career is there anything that we need to know about that's maybe coming up soon or uh that you'd like to uh get out there give an advanced preview for um this this is this is the folio this is the folio's birthday year and so there are uh uh all sorts of events and happenings I'm I I've been involved with a uh a documentary a two-hour long documentary that's being put together by uh uh Richard Denon um who is he he and his wife did the Shakespeare uncovered series and they're doing such good interesting things with this with this film they they found a uh a cartag or a calligrapher in in Brussels who is emulating uh Elizabeth and secretary o'han and he is producing what the printer's copy for the first folio must have looked like including the uh the way certain letters might have been misread and things like that um it it's uh and Emma Smith is in it and Tiffany Stern and Jonathan bate um so I it will be out in November and I I hope everyone enjoys it okay that's just wonderful well I'd like to ask you to stay for a moment after we finish but I wanted to thank you so much for coming on kind of on short notice and uh I'm sure that uh my colleagues here in Japan who uh kind of who watch these things we have a small but very enthusi enthusiastic art uh I'm sorry audience uh where it was fit audience though few but you know and specialize in students and growing uh but uh thank you so much for joining us today oh thank you Tom it's been a pleasure