The Shakespeare Thefts (3 page)

All of this information leads us to wonder: Did Gondomar’s First Folio receive similar editorial scrutiny from the Inquisitors? Was it also defaced? In all likelihood, as it entered Spain in the late 1620s when the Inquisition was particularly aggressive in its censorship activities, the answer to these questions is yes.

So what happened to Gondomar’s First Folio? Richard Ford’s
Handbook for Travelers in Spain
(1845) records that in 1785, Gondomar’s heir, the Marquis of Malpica, sold the library to the King of Spain, Charles IV, “but as his Majesty did not pay—
cosas de Espaiia
[literally “the things in Spain” with the pejorative meaning
“what do you expect from the Spanish?”]—some sixteen hundred volumes were kept back and left at Valladolid in the care of the bricklayer who looked after the house. These books soon disappeared.”
¹²

Did the bricklayer recognize the value of the books and sell them? As Anthony James West has pointed out, in 1860, Don Pascual Gayangos, a Spanish historian and bibliographer, wrote to Sir Frederic Madden, Keeper of Manuscripts at the British Museum in London, concerning a Shakespeare folio he had seen at Valladolid, where “as early as the year 1835 or thereabouts I happened to go.”
¹³
According to Gayangos, he had visited La Casa del Sol, “once the residence of Don Diego Sarmiento, count of Gondomar, who was ambassador in England in the time of James.” The house was then in a dilapidated state and uninhabited except for an old servant and his family. The servant led Gayangos to a garret. There, in the middle of the floor of a spacious room, the windows of which had no glass, “were strewn about 500 or 600 volumes in all languages[,] principally Italian and Spanish. Most of them had armorial designs in their vellum covers and on the title-page an inscription bearing
De Don Diego Sarmiento y Acuña
.”
¹⁴
Gayangos recollected that he

picked up among others a folio volume being Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories and Tragedies. I cannot remember which of the four folio editions it was, but I am almost
sure that it was neither that of 1664 nor the more modern of 1685; but I recollect perfectly well that it was very well preserved, was bound in old English calf, and had on the margins much writings, with this peculiarity that in some instances there were crossings of the pen over five or six verses. I did not care much for books at the time, nor was I aware that the volume I held in my hands might be the first edition of Shakespeare’s comedies.
¹⁵

Gayangos asked the old man how it was that “Gondomar’s library having been sold to Charles IV of Spain … these volumes were still there.” He was told that five or six years after the library had been transferred to Madrid, these volumes were shipped from a castle in Galicia, another Gondomar residence, to be deposited in Valladolid.

In 1840, “at the prayer of several English friends,” Gayangos wrote to a friend in Valladolid to inquire what had become of the books. “The answer was that they had been sold to mercers in the town to wrap up their goods.” In 1843, Gayangos visited Valladolid again. A son of the old man, since dead, confirmed “the lamentable news… . There was not one sheet of printed paper remaining.”
¹⁶

And so the fate of the Gondomar First Folio was sadly resolved.

Or was it?

Mrs. Humphrey Ward (born Mary Augusta Arnold, a successful novelist and the aunt of Aldous Huxley,
author of
Brave New World
) reported that Gayangos told her a somewhat different story about his encounter with Gondomar’s copy of the First Folio. The two were serving as examiners for the Spanish Taylorian scholarship at Oxford in 1883. According to Ward, “Senor Gayangos was born in 1809, so that in 1883 he was already an old man, though full of vigor and work. He told me the following story.”

Somewhere in the thirties of the last century, he was travelling through Spain to England… . On his journey north from Madrid to Burgos … he stopped at Valladolid for the night, and went to see an acquaintance of his, the newly appointed librarian of an aristocratic family having a “palace” in Valladolid. He found his friend in the old library of the old house, engaged in a work of destruction. On the floor of the long room was a large
brasero
in which the new librarian was burning up a quantity of what he described as useless and miscellaneous books, with a view to the rearrangement of the library. The old sheepskin or vellum bindings had been stripped off, while the printed matter was burning steadily and the room was full of smoke. There was a pile of old books whose turn had not yet come lying on the floor. Gayangos picked one up. It was a volume containing the plays of Mr. William Shakespeare, and published in 1623. In other words, it was a copy of the
First Folio and, as he declared to me, in excellent preservation. At that time he knew nothing about Shakespeare bibliography. He was struck, however, by the name of Shakespeare, and also by the fact that, according to an inscription inside it, the book had belonged to Count Gondomar, who had himself lived in Valladolid and collected a large library there. But his friend the librarian attached no importance to the book, and it was to go into the common holocaust with the rest. Gayangos noticed particularly, as he turned it over, that its margins were covered with notes in a seventeenth-century hand.
¹⁷

Gayangos told Ward that he then continued his journey to England, where he “mentioned the incident” to the noted bibliophile (some would say bibliomaniac) Sir Thomas Phillipps and Sir Thomas’s future son-in-law, James Halliwell—afterward Halliwell-Phillipps.

The excitement of both knew no bounds… . The very thought of such a treasure perishing barbarously in a bonfire of waste paper was enough to drive a bibliophile out of his wits. Gayangos was sent back to Spain post haste. But alack! He found a library swept and garnished; no trace of the volume he had once held there in his hand, and on the face of his friend the librarian only a frank and peevish wonder that anybody should tease him with questions about such a trifle.
¹⁸

Along with the startling differences between the two accounts—was the priceless folio given to local textile merchants as a source of waste paper in which to wrap their wares, or was it burned to make room on the shelves for more important books in an aristocratic library?—there are more subtle inconsistencies that scholars, such as Anthony James West, believe may have been
intended
to mislead.
¹⁹

To begin with, although Gayangos wrote to Madden that he “did not care much for books” and told Ward that “he knew nothing about Shakespeare bibliography,” at the time of his first visit to Valladolid in the mid-1830s, this was simply not true.

He was, in fact, both a knowledgeable bibliographer and professional book dealer. In 1833, he served as Official of Interpretation of Foreign Languages for the Ministry of State, translating Arabic manuscripts, gathering material relating to the history and geography of Spain, classifying the index of Arab manuscripts at the National Library, and visiting the Escorial Library in search of further manuscripts. In 1836, he traveled to Toledo, where he visited libraries, and Burgos (about eight miles from Valladolid), where he bought books and negotiated the purchase of a library.

Furthermore, there is conclusive evidence that Gayangos was a book thief—indeed, one of his biographers characterizes him as a “bibliopirate.”
²⁰
In 1841,
Bartolomé Jose Gallardo, director of the Biblioteca de Cortes, accused Gayangos of stealing from the National Library, claiming that he had taken (“extraídos”) Arabic manuscripts.
²¹
We also know that he stole
specifically
from the Gondomar collection. It is well documented that a Gondomar manuscript of the
Viaje de Turquía
was transferred to Charles IV’s library in 1806, but it somehow found its way into Gayangos’s personal library, where it was discovered after his death.
²²

If Gayangos stole the copy of the
Viaje de Turquía
, is it too great a leap to suggest that he also took the Gondomar First Folio and then fabricated its destruction? At least some First Folio hunters believe this to be the case. In 1876, the London
Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art
ran this notice on its front page:

Wanted from Spain the copy of the first folio of Shakespeare, bound in yellow silk, and full of corrections and notes in a contemporary hand, which Senor Gayangos saw when a young man in the library of a descendant of Gondomar, the Spanish ambassador here at the time.
²³

Despite this plea, Gondomar’s copy of the Shakespeare First Folio has remained missing. Did Gayangos sell it on the sly? Was he hoarding it for himself? It wasn’t found in his personal library when he passed away in
1897. Not a whisper was heard about it until June 16, 2008, when a fantasist showed up in Washington, DC, with a copy of a book he claimed was a First Folio from Galicia in Spain that he got from one of Fidel Castro’s bodyguards.

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 I
have 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 census appeared, the novelist Thomas Hardy wrote to inform him that “Mr. de Lafontaine, my neighbour in Dorset, is the fortunate possessor of a 1st Folio Shakespeare, which he would like to show you. Your opinion upon it will be highly valued by him, & of great interest to me.”
⁴

Mr. Alfred Cart de Lafontaine lived at Athelhampton, a fifteenth-century manor in Dorset that he restored and transformed in the 1890s. Hardy was a frequent visitor to the house (which in modern times has been seen in film and television, including being featured in six episodes of
Doctor Who
).

In August 1899, Lafontaine gave a talk about his restoration of the manor to the Dorset Natural History and Antiquarian Field Club. His audience gathered “under the shade of a fine cedar” to hear him recount the work that he had done on the house and garden. As he described the long gallery, or library, Lafontaine
highlighted its two most precious items: “a pair of boots worn by King Charles I when a boy” and “also a very fine first folio Shakespeare.”
⁵