A Noble Visage: The Famous Droeshout Portrait of William Shakespeare

A Noble Visage: The Famous Droeshout Portrait of William Shakespeare

Nov 29, 2023 | Literature, Recent Articles, Shakespeare

The engraving that graces the frontispiece of the first Four Folios is one of the most recognizable portraits in human history. It holds a profound relevance bordering on an almost religious quality. It is also one of the few depictions of Shakespeare that scholars have widely agreed legitimately shows what Shakespeare looked like, but the question remains, where does this image come from and what makes it such a reliable source for depicting Shakespeare’s appearance?

The Chandos Portrait: A Potential Inspiration for the Engraving

The Droeshout engraving holds many similarities with an earlier portrait of Shakespeare known as the Chandos Portrait. Painted during Shakespeare’s lifetime sometime between 1600 and 1610, the Chandos Portrait is one of the two most famous portraits that are believed to depict Shakespeare. It is named after the 3rd Duke of Chandos who was a former owner of the painting which now sits in the National Portrait Gallery in London.

Although it is not possible to determine with certainty who painted the portrait, the most likely candidate is an English painter, John Taylor, a respected member of the Painter-Stainers’ Company who was described in a note written in 1719 by George Vertue as Shakespeare’s “intimate friend’. Due to the similarities between the oil painting and engraving, it has been strongly suggested that the Chandos Portrait served as a reference for the later engraving which was created after Shakespeare’s death.

The Droeshout Portrait in all Four Folios

The Droeshout Portrait is depicted on the frontispiece of all Four Folios and is printed alongside a poem To The Reader by Shakespeare’s friend Ben Jonson in which he praises the accuracy of the engraving’s likeness stating that the engraver has managed to “outdo the life” and has “hit his face” accurately, failing only in managing to depict Shakespeare’s wit for which the reader will have to read the plays collected together in the folio.

In contrast to the Chandos Portrait which depicts Shakespeare as a distinctly bohemian figure with an earring dangling from his ear, much more the image of a Elizabethan playwright and poet, the Droeshout portrait squeezes him into formal court costume, which has the effect of making Shakespeare look somewhat stiff and unnatural. That has led some people to question the authenticity of the Droeshout Portrait however Jonson knew the playwright well and vouched for the portrait’s resemblance to his good friend. 

The Droeshout Portrait as it appears in all Four Folios.

There are distinct versions of the portrait, or what is known as “states”, printed from the same plate by Droeshout himself. There are only four examples of the first state making it exceptionally rare. It is very likely that the first state was used as a test printing by the engraver so that he could see whether any alterations needed to be made to the engraving. For most copies of the First Folio, and for all copies of the subsequent folios it was the second state which was used. This had some changes from the first state including heavier shadows and minor differences in the jawline and moustache.

As a whole, the portraits in each of the first Four Folios appear to be the same with the exception of the Fourth Folio where the portrait has been placed on the opposite side above Ben Jonson’s poem across from the frontispiece. While to some the portrait appears smaller than it looks in the other Folios, this is simply not true, as the same engraving plate was used for all four of the Folios. It is simply an optical illusion caused by the re-location of the portrait from where it was originally placed in the other Folios.

The Other Portraits of Shakespeare

There are many other portraits claiming to be depictions of Shakespeare that were created either during his life, or within living memory. Many of these are claimed to have been painted from life, The Chandos Portrait being the most legitimate. The two depictions that have been unambiguously stated to represent Shakespeare are both posthumous. One of these is the Droeshout Portrait and the other is the bust in Shakespeare’s funerary monument at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-Upon-Avon.

Of the other 15 or so portraits that claim to be of Shakespeare either the sitter is unidentified, or the depiction is debatable. For instance, the Soest Portrait, which was painted 20 years after Shakespeare’s death is said to have been painted from a man who looked like Shakespeare and not Shakespeare himself. The Chesterfield Portrait, another posthumous depiction of Shakespeare is generally assumed to be based on the Chandos Portrait, which indicates that the Chandos was accepted as being representative of Shakespeare within living memory of the Bard.

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“Not of an age, but for all time”: The Legacy of Shakespeare’s First Folio

“Not of an age, but for all time”: The Legacy of Shakespeare’s First Folio

Nov 8, 2023 | Literature, Recent Articles, Shakespeare

This month marks the 400th anniversary of one of the most important books ever published: Shakespeare’s First Folio. It has been credited with shaping and solidifying Shakespeare’s influence on the English language – the literal and literary heft of the First Folio granting Shakespeare’s works a prominent and permanent place in the English literary canon. However, at the time of the Folio’s publication, many of Shakespeare’s plays had started to fall out of fashion and were staged less frequently. The First Folio was the first book solely dedicated to printed plays ever to be published in the prestigious folio format – an imposing size usually reserved for religious texts such as Bibles and collections of sermons. This folio format lent a gravitas and importance to Shakespeare’s plays, marking them out as something far beyond mere entertainments, and in the process established the world’s most important literary canon.

‘The Play’s The Thing’

In Shakespeare’s day, plays were written to be performed, and rarely printed – and as a result many were lost. The real importance of the First Folio rests on the fact that it contains 36 plays by William Shakespeare, half of which had never been published before. Of Shakespeare’s plays, only five are missing – Pericles, Prince of Tyre, The Two Noble Kinsmen, Edward III, and the two lost plays, Cardenio and Love’s Labour’s Won. Without the First Folio, 18 of Shakespeare’s plays would have been lost forever, including some of his most loved and well-known works such as As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Macbeth, Julius Caesar and The Tempest.

A pair of hands holding open Shakespeare's First Folio on the first page of The Tempest.

The plays themselves were typeset from varying sources; many, including The Merry Wives of Windsor and Measure for Measure, were set into type from manuscripts prepared by Ralph Crane who was a professional scrivener employed by the King’s Men (the acting company in which Shakespeare belonged). Many others were taken from what are known as Shakespeare’s foul papers – working drafts of a play.  When these working drafts were completed, the author or a scribe would then prepare a transcript or fair copy of the play. These copies were heavily annotated with detailed stage directions needed for a performance, and usually served as prompt books used to help guide the performance of the play.

An estimated 750 First Folios were printed in 1623; currently 233 are known to survive worldwide. More than a third of these are housed at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., which is home to a total of 82 First Folios. On the private market they are exceedingly rare and highly sought after. One can expect a copy to fetch a price tag in the millions of pounds.

The Birth of Shakespeare’s Canon

The unpublished plays were the property of Shakespeare’s theatrical company, the King’s Men, with manuscripts in the possession of Shakespeare’s two fellow company members and friends, John Heminge and Henry Condell. They compiled the contents of the First Folio in 1623, seven years after their friend’s death, by which time most of Shakespeare’s plays had fallen out of the repertoire. Were it not for the First Folio, the scattered papers would have been worthless. With its great heft and imposing appearance, the First Folio established the Shakespearean canon for all time.

In book form, the plays found a new lease of life and sense of permanence. The First Folio was reprinted in 1632, again in 1663, and in 1685, the four Shakespeare folios spanning the century, eclipsing the rival collections of Ben Jonson and Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, the English dramatists who collaborated in their writing during the reign of James I (1603–1625). Shakespeare was the only dramatist to achieve four folio editions in the 17th century, so the publication of the four editions in relatively quick succession set the seal of distinction on Shakespeare’s reputation as England’s foremost playwright. Shakespeare’s Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, already a little old-fashioned in 1623, were among the first to be revived in the Restoration, when the theatres reopened for business after the enforced darkness of the puritanical Commonwealth. They have continued to be performed ever since.

Two pages from the First Folio.

The Printing of the First Folio

The publishers of the First Folio were the booksellers Edward Blount and father and son, William and Isaac Jaggard all members of the Stationer’s Company. William Jaggard is sometimes seen as an odd choice by Heminge and Condell to print the First Folio because he had previously published works by other authors under Shakespeare’s name, and in 1619 had printed new editions of 10 Shakespearean quartos to which he did not have clear rights, some with false dates and title pages which are referred to as the False Folio by Shakespeare scholars.

The printing of the First Folio was probably done between February 1622 and early November 1623. It was listed in the Frankfurt Book Fair catalogue to appear between April and October 1622, however modern consensus is that this was simply intended as advance publicity for the book. The first impression had a publication date of 1623, and the first recorded buyer of the First Folio was Edward Dering, an English antiquary, who made an entry in his account book on December 5, 1623, recording his purchase of two copies for a total of £2.

Some pages of the First Folio were still being proofread and corrected as the printing of the book was in progress. As a result, individual copies of the Folio vary considerably in their typographical error with around 500 such corrections having been made in this way with the typesetters changing out and resetting the type in the middle of printing. These corrections consisted only of simple typos and clear mistakes in their own work. There is much evidence here to suggest that the typesetters rarely if ever referred back to their manuscript sources.

One error in the printing process was that the play Troilus and Cressida was originally intended to follow Romeo and Juliet, but the typesetting was stopped, potentially over issues with rights to the play. It was later inserted as the first of the tragedies and does not appear in the table of contents.

Frontispiece from Shakespeare's First Folio with the author portrait.

Preface to the Folio and The Droeshout Portrait

Ben Jonson, one of the most important English dramatists of the Jacobean era, wrote a preface to the folio addressed “To the Reader” is sits facing the famous engraving of Shakespeare on the opposite page. The engraving opposite Johnson’s preface is known as the Droeshout portrait and it serves as the frontispiece for the title page of the First Folio. It is one of only two works definitively known to be a depiction of Shakespeare and is thought to be based on an equally famous oil painting known as the Chandos portrait. The copperplate engraving used by Martin Droeshout to create the portrait for the First Folio was subsequently reused for all three later folios. The plate began to wear out from frequent use and had to be heavily re-engraved and re-touched with each subsequent folio.

The Book Collector’s Prize

Of the surviving copies of the First Folio most are missing some of their original leaves, with only about 56 copies complete, and many of those have been “made-up” with leaves supplied from other copies. It was during the 19th century, when the First Folio became firmly established as a popular item with book collectors, that many “improvements” to copies were made, it was common for early calf bindings to be discarded and replaced with shiny red goatskin shimmering with gilt.

The most assiduous folio hunter of all time was the president of Standard Oil, Henry Clay Folger, who bought his first First Folio in 1903 and whose Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, now has the world’s largest holdings, comprising 82 copies, of which 13 are complete. The vast majority of First Folios are similarly housed in major libraries, universities, and other institutional holdings. Only 27 or so copies remain in private collectors’ hands, and only six of those are complete.

Complete copies of the First Folio emerge in commerce once in a generation. The first complete copy of the 21st century was from the library of the Chicago collector, Abel E. Berland, sold at auction by Christie’s in New York, on October 9, 2001. Known as the Canons Ashby copy and bound in early panelled calf, c.1690-1730, it had passed three times through the hands of the famous Philadelphia bookseller, Dr A. S. W. Rosenbach. Like most complete First Folios, it was not perfect and had its title-leaf and two, possibly three, other leaves supplied from another copy. It sold for $6,166,000 to Paul G. Allen, co-founder of Microsoft

Nearly 20 years later, the same auction house sold a complete First Folio that had been bequeathed to Mills College in Oakland, California, for $9,978,000. The relatively small price uplift over two decades reflects the truth that no two copies of the First Folio are strictly alike. This copy was bound in full blind-stamped russia in about 1810 and had been shown at the 1951 Festival of Britain Exhibition of Books. It had the first leaf with Ben Jonson’s verse address “To the Reader” inlaid, a few letters on the title and a portion of the portrait restored, and the last leaf re-margined. It was 15mm shorter than the copy bought by Paul Allen, having been trimmed very close at the top of the leaves, often removing the upper box-frames. These factors were enough to keep it from breaking the $10m mark. Even so, it remains the most expensive work of literature ever auctioned.

Earlier this year, in 2023, we offered a First Folio for sale at £6.25 Million which has now sold.

A section of text from the Shakespeare play, Hamlet.

A Wordsmith Without Equal

Shakespeare’s primacy as the earliest and greatest writer in modern English has led to some unsupportable claims made for him. It used to be argued that he was a preternaturally inventive wordsmith, with a huge number of original coinages attributed to him. But he wouldn’t have been so popular in his lifetime if he couldn’t make himself understood to the general playgoer. What Shakespeare displayed was an extraordinary linguistic ability to redeploy parts of speech in unexpected contexts, a process of transference known as functional shift. In Troilus and Cressida, for example, he describes how “Kingdom’d Achilles in commotion rages”, where he converts “kingdom” from a noun to an adjective. It’s the earliest instance of this usage recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary and just one of many such that we can assume to be Shakespearean creations. Shakespeare may not have plucked new words out of thin air (a phrase first found in The Tempest), but he had a special gift for combining words to create resonant phrases that made their way out of the First Folio into the English language. Only one other book, the King James Bible of 1611, has had such a profound and lasting influence on the common stock of English phrases.

William Shakespeare: Bard and Muse

It can be argued that Shakespeare’s is the shadow that all subsequent writers in the English language find themselves trying to escape from under. While Shakespeare was known for adapting existing stories and myths, it is his versions which have stood the test of time laying the foundations for subsequent re-imaginings and interpretations.

Many important modern writers, including Toni Morrison and Margaret Atwood, have created work either in response to or inspired by Shakespeare’s plays. The Bard’s ghost haunts the Scylla and Charybdis episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses, in which Joyce’s alter-ego Stephen Dedalus presents his “Hamlet theory” to a group of acquaintances in the National Library of Ireland.

The title of William Faulkner’s masterpiece, The Sound and the Fury, is taken from a line from MacBeth, as is Agatha Christie’s By the Pricking of my Thumbs, while David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest is taken from a line in Hamlet.

Even Disney has played its hand at Shakespearean adaptation most notably with The Lion King not to mention the countless film adaptations of Shakespeare’s work by famed directors such as Derek Jarman, Julie Taymor, Peter Greenaway and Kenneth Branagh.

Reinterpretations of Shakespeare’s work are not only limited to the Anglosphere with works in many other languages having been influenced by the plays collected in the First Folio; a particularly good example of this is Aime Cesaire’s Une Tempête, a post-colonial reimagining of The Tempest.

 

Sections of this article were previously printed in an issue of Antique Collecting.

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Peter Harrington Summer Catalogue 2016: Staff Favourites

Peter Harrington Summer Catalogue 2016: Staff Favourites

Aug 12, 2016 | Childrens' Books, History, Illustrated Books, Literature

Items from the Summer Catalogue are on display at 100 Fuham Road

Items from the Summer Catalogue are on display at 100 Fuham Road

“Let us go, then, exploring, this summer morning, when all are adoring the plum blossom and the bee.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando (Summer Catalogue, item 256) (SOLD)

Spanning almost three centuries, our Summer Catalogue brings together our most interesting recent acquisitions. From a collection of poems addressed to a prima ballerina to a record produced by the first African American record label, this selection of rare items is as charming as it is surprising.

Members of Peter Harrington staff have chosen their favourite items from the catalogue to share. To view the entire catalogue, please click here.

Pom Harrington

The Arabian Nights, BurtonThe Arabian Nights, Richard F. Burton, 1885–8

Perhaps the best-known translation of the collection of Middle Eastern and South Asian folk tales most often known as the One Thousand and One Nights or the Arabian Nights, Burton’s The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night was originally published in ten volumes, with six further volumes entitled The Supplemental Nights to the Thousand Nights and a Night. Owing to the nature of their content and the strict Victorian laws on obscene material, these sixteen volumes were printed as private editions for subscribers only.

Burton’s translation has not lacked for both admirers and critics over the years, but his idiosyncratic style of translation is perhaps best summed up by Jorge Luis Borges in his essay on ‘The Translators of The Thousand and One Nights’: ‘In some way, the almost inexhaustible process of English is adumbrated in Burton – John Donne’s hard obscenity, the gigantic vocabularies of Shakespeare and Cyril Tourneur, Swinburne’s affinity for the archaic, the crass erudition of the authors of 17th century chapbooks, the energy and imprecision, the love of tempests and magic.’

The Works, Oscar Wilde, Published: London Methuen & Co, 1908-22Capture

First collected edition of Wilde’s works, limited to 1,000 sets on handmade paper. The texts were mostly taken from the last editions to be supervised by the author. Copyright in The Picture of Dorian Gray was held by Charles Carrington, so that volume alone appears with his Paris imprint. In 1922 Methuen announced the discovery of a new play by Wilde, For Love of the King: a Burmese Masque, and published it as a pendant volume to the original 14-volume set. The play was denounced by Wilde’s bibliographer Christopher Millard, and, although Methuen won a court case against him, the work is generally accepted to be a forgery by Mabel Wodehouse Pearse, née Cosgrove.

Ian Smith

BOETHIUS., David Hume, Published: Antwerp Ex officina Plantiniana, Apud Ioannem Moretumm, 1607BOETHIUS., David Hume, Published: Antwerp Ex officina Plantiniana, Apud Ioannem Moretumm, 1607 – SOLD

A remarkable association copy, from the library of the Scottish philosopher David Hume, of one of the most notable works of western philosophy, this being the first Bernartius edition, with Hume’s bookplate (State A) to the front pastedown.
Hume was an enthusiastic reader of classical literature and a self-proclaimed Ciceronian too. In his autobiographical essay, published posthumously in 1777, Hume reported that between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one he read “most of the celebrated Books in Latin, French, & English”, admitting that he was “secretly devouring” Virgil and Cicero when he should have been reading law. The influence of Cicero in particular pervades Hume’s work – his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion are modelled on Cicero’s De Natura Deorum, and the Essays on Happiness draw strongly on De Finibus – a fact which numerous commentators such as Peter S. Fosl, John Valdimir Price, and Humean editors Norman Kemp Smith and Martin Bell

An article by David Edmonds and John Eidinow outlining this extraordinary clash in more depth can be found here.

Capture2The History of England, Catharine Macaulay, 1769 – SOLD

Often referred to as the first Englishwoman to become an historian, Macaulay wrote her History of England from the accession of James I to the elevation of the House of Hanover between 1763 and 1783. From being relatively unknown, the popularity of her History brought her almost overnight celebrity. The work was praised by William Pitt in the House of Commons, and Lord Lyttelton wrote that Macaulay was ‘a very prodigy’.  Her republican ideals also brought her approval in America and she became acquainted with Benjamin Franklin, Josiah Quincy, Benjamin Rush, Richard Henry Lee, John Adams, Ezra Styles, and Jonathan Mayhew through her work.

Glenn Mitchell

 Capture11The Making of the English Working Class, E. P. Thompson, 1963 – SOLD

A highly influential publication in English Social History from New Left historian E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class appeared in 1963. Thompson’s aim was to ‘rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver, the ‘utopian’ artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity.’ (p. 12). This copy is a first edition, and a rare find in its original dust jacket.

 Adam Douglas

les miserables victor hugoLes Misérables, Victor Hugo, 1862

First edition. The Brussels edition of Les Misérables takes precedence as the first published edition, as the first two volumes were issued in Brussels on 30 or 31 March 1862, preceding the Paris edition by four or five days. The remaining volumes appeared on 15 May 1862.
Copies in the original wrappers are rare in commerce. ABPC locates two copies only in the last 40 years, omitting the latest, that sold in Brussels at Henri Godts Auction, 11 December 2012, wrappers chipped in places, for 36,000.

109810The Heroycall Epistles of the learned poet Publius Ovidius Naso , Ovid, c. 1584 – BOOK SOLD

Ovid’s Epistulae Heroidum (Letters of Heroines) is a collection of fifteen poems written from the perspective of the heroines of Greek and Roman Tragedy, addressing their various lovers who have abandoned, betrayed and mistreated them.

The Heroides is thought to have had a significant influence on the work of Shakespeare, and this first English translation was likely the version he would have known. The rhetorical virtuosity of Ovid’s heroines can be traced in characters such as Katherina (The Taming of the Shrew) and Beatrice (Much Ado About Nothing) and direct and indirect references to Ovid are to be found throughout his plays.

 

 

 

109810_7

 

 

Holly Segar

What’ll You Have?, Julien Proskauer, 1933 – SOLD

Published in New York in 1933, this copy is inscribed by the author just thirteen days after prohibition officially came to an end in America: ‘To Jacquline-or Jo, as we know her, this book is given for she is of that younger generation to whom this book is dedicated x. With the author;s best wishes Julien J. Prosakauer. Dec 18, 1933.’ Also inscribed are several uncommon cocktail recipe variations, including a ‘Queen Jocelyn’.

 

 

 

 

Pippi Långstrump, Astrid LindgrenPippi Långstrump, Astrid Lindgren, 1945-48 – SOLD

The first editions of the first three Pipi Longstocking novels, Pippi Långstrump; Pippi Långstrump går ombord; Pippi Långstrump i Söderhavet (1945-4), in the original Swedish. Originally told as stories to her daughter Karin, Lindgren later wrote the first manuscript during a convalescent period in 1944. After being rejected by the publisher she originally submitted it to, Lindgren revised the story and entered it into a children’s book competition run by relatively new publisher Rabén & Sjögren, which she won. It was then published with illustrations by Ingrid Vang Nyman in 1945.

 

123 Summer 2016 Catalogue Peter Harrington Rare Book ShopCatalogue 123: Summer 2016

View the entire catalogue

 

The Birth, Death, and Rebirth of an English Genius: Shakespeare’s First & Second Folios

The Birth, Death, and Rebirth of an English Genius: Shakespeare’s First & Second Folios

Apr 23, 2012 | Early Modern Books, Literature, Shakespeare

Tradition holds that William Shakespeare was born on 23 April, in 1564, though it’s impossible to know the date for sure. What is known is that he was baptised at Holy Trinity, the parish church of Stratford-on-Avon, on the 26th of the month, so was probably born sometime between the 21st and 23rd. The 23rd of April is also recorded as Shakespeare’s date of death in 1616, and it is this untimely event that we have to thank for the preservation and promotion of his works in the First Folio, and ultimately his enshrinement as one of England’s great geniuses.

Shakespeare was only 52 when he, Ben Jonson, and the poet-playwright Michael Drayton “had a merry meeting, and itt seems drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a feavour there contracted”. As a memorial, his friends and fellow members of The King’s Men, John Heminges and Henry Condell, decided to produce a collected edition of his plays.

Eighteen of Shakespeare’s plays had been published during his lifetime, individually in cheap and probably unauthorised quarto editions, some of which became bestsellers. These often error-riddled editions are described in the First Folio as “stol’n and surreptitious copies”, and some seem to have been reproduced solely from the memories of actors trying to make a little cash on the side. This continued after his death, and in 1619 the publisher Thomas Pavier and printer William Jaggard produced ten quarto plays ostensibly by Shakespeare (though two were not actually his work), and this may have spurred Heminges and Condell to complete their own collected edition and reassert the King’s Men’s authority over the texts.

It wouldn’t be an easy process. Though the King’s Men held the copyrights to many of the plays, it took years to negotiate for others, which remained with the publishers of the quarto editions. Though these publishers did not have what we today would consider intellectual priority over the works, they had been the first to enter them in the Stationer’s Register, which gave them the copyrights. Some even had to be brought in as partners, earning shares of the proceeds of the First Folio based on how many plays they contributed. Willaim Jaggard himself served as the head printer on the project until his death in 1623.

The printing began in early 1622 and took around two years to complete, with the earliest known sale of a First Folio occurring in December 1623. The choice of the imposing folio format was vital to the book’s success, “giving the volume the instant status of a classic:  it is a weighty tome, a book for individuals’ libraries, a collection perhaps to be owned rather than read… It was also expensive, probably not less than 15s. a copy and often costing £1 or more”. Prior to this, theatre in England had been considered low-brow, and no collection of plays had been published in such a lavish manner. The First Folio elevated not only Shakespeare’s reputation but that of playwriting in general.

Most importantly, the First Folio included 36 of Shakespeare’s 38 known plays, 18 of which had never before been printed and would probably have been lost to history if not included. And the texts, edited by Shakespeare’s close friends and his fellow writers and actors, are considered the most authoritative of all early printings. Shakespeare’s reputation today rests largely on the publication of the First Folio.

Despite its expense, the book sold well enough that a second edition, the Second Folio, was required in 1632. Published by a syndicate of five firms, copies appear with one of five different imprints depending on which publisher sold them. Our copy, pictured above, has the scarcest imprint, that of the publisher John Smethwick, who owned the rights to four plays: Hamlet, Romeo & Juliet, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and The Taming of the Shrew. Despite the importance of these titles, Smethwick’s small contribution of four plays meant that his share of finished copies was relatively low, and his imprint correspondingly scarce. Also of note–the second Folio contains the first appearance in print of John Milton, who contributed a poem to the Effigies leaf that did not appear in the first edition.

Two more folio editions of Shakespeare’s plays were published by the beginning of the eighteenth century, followed by a number of important editions edited by authors such as Samuel Johnson and Alexander Pope. Today, though, the most highly sought-after editions are still the early folios, with the First Folio becoming one of the most valuable books in the world. Around 750 copies were printed, but only 230 survive, and of those only 40 are complete. Most extant copies are held in libraries, and in the last decade, only three have been sold at auction, all achieving prices in the millions of dollars. As much as we hate to have second-best books here at Peter Harrington, the Second Folio is a second-best we’re glad to have, as it is the earliest edition of Shakespeare that is practicably obtainable on the market.

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Knowledge is Power: Shakespeare, Bacon, & Modern Cryptography

Knowledge is Power: Shakespeare, Bacon, & Modern Cryptography

Oct 24, 2011 | Articles, History, Military, Naval & Aviation, Science & Technology

The Shakespeare authorship controversy has been an 150-year-old battle that seems a no-win situation, but that doesn’t mean there’s no silver lining. In a fascinating and little-known by-way of history, the authorship controversy led directly to some of the most important 20th-century advances in a seemingly unrelated field: cryptography.

The belief that Shakespeare did not write the works attributed to him originated in the mid-19th century, coinciding with an upsurge in his popularity and with the Victorian interest in puzzles and mysteries. Though more than 70 candidates have been proposed as the true author, the most popular option for many years was the natural philosopher and politician Sir Francis Bacon. 

As a young man Bacon lived for several years in France, where he studied statecraft and learned about cryptography, a field in which that nation was leading the rest of Europe. He developed his own “biliteral” cipher, which used the letters a and b to generate the entire alphabet, like this:

a = aaaaa

b = aaaab

c = aaaba

d = aaabb

… and so on. But if used outright this was still identifiable as a code and could be broken. Instead, Bacon needed to disguise the fact that the message was in code, and the power of his cipher lies in his realisation that a and b don’t have to be letters–they can be anything that can be divided into two classes. For example, regular text and bold text. To warn a secret agent to “fly”, Bacon could send a message saying the opposite:

do not go til i come

aabab ababa babba

fly

Here the words “do not go til I come” are meaningless to the intended recipient; all that matters is the pattern of plain and bold text, where plain letters stand in for a and bold letters for b, which in turn code for the true message. The cipher was ingeniously flexible, meaning that Bacon could “make anything signify anything”. Poetry, numbers, musical notation, even a drawing or a group of objects could disguise a secret message.

Though Bacon developed his cipher in the 1570s it wasn’t fully published until his first philosophical work, The Advancement of Learning, appeared in its Latin edition of 1623. He did, however, discuss ciphers in general in the first edition of 1605, and in the reproduced passage below he explains that anything may signify anything – “omnia per omnia” – by “infoulding”, or encoding, it:

The Advancement of Learning 1623

Elizabeth Gallup

Elizabeth Gallup

Returning to Shakespeare, one of the most well-known Baconians, an American school teacher named Elizabeth Gallup (1838–1934), became intrigued by the biliteral cipher. She believed that Bacon had used it to encode secret messages in the printed versions of the Shakespearean texts, with subtle differences between typefaces being the key to the cipher (the difficulties this would have presented to early modern printers seem to have been overlooked). To Gallup, the biliteral cipher proved that Bacon was not only the author of Shakespeare’s plays, but also the son of Queen Elizabeth and brother of the Earl of Essex, and that he had written works attributed to Christopher Marlowe and other authors, as well as five previously unknown tragedies based on contemporary events. She even travelled to London in the belief that the missing manuscripts were still hidden in the neighbourhood of Islington.

At the beginning of the 20th century a wealthy and eccentric Baconian named George Fabyan founded the Riverbank Institute, a private research organisation housed on his estate in Geneva, Illinois. In addition to departments investigating medicine and agricultural science, there would be an American Academy of Baconian Literature, which Elizabeth Gallup was hired to direct. Here she set out to research the biliteral cipher using new photographic techniques, and began producing books and articles explaining her work.

Photos of the Riverbank Laboratories

Photos of the Riverbank Laboratories and the equipment used to investigate the biliteral cipher in early modern texts.

In 1915 a young biologist named William F. Friedman was hired to run Riverbank’s Department of Genetics, but found himself drawn instead to Gallup’s department. As a child he had been introduced to cryptography by Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Gold Bug”, and he was interested in the bibliographical and and photographic methods the team used. He was also attracted to Gallup’s young assistant, Elizebeth Smith, herself an expert cryptographer. Once he began working with the Baconians it became apparent that Friedman had “an intuitive grasp of cipher systems that must have been breathtaking” (Sherman). Soon he was creating many of the cryptographic images used in the department’s publications, as well as producing his own work such as the first description of the index of coincidence, an important tool in code-breaking.

At the outbreak of the First World War Riverbank was the only institution in the United States with expertise in cryptography, and in a short time William and Elizebeth were cracking codes for the war effort and training the US military’s first unit of elite cryptographers. In a beautiful example of the power of the Baconian cipher, Friedman had his recruits pose for a group photograph that used their bodies to encode the phrase “knowledge is power” (click here to see a decoded version of the photograph – the soldiers facing the camera represent a and those facing away represent b).

William Friedman with an AT&T cipher machine

William Friedman with an AT&T cipher machine.

In May 1917 William and Elizebeth Smith married, and in 1918 he volunteered for military service, serving as the chief cryptographer to General Pershing. After the war the couple moved to Washington D. C., where both played important roles in the development of government cryptanalysis (a term that Friedman had himself coined). Friedman became chief cryptanalyst for the War Department in 1921. He helped develop the United States’ most important cipher machine (SIGBA) and his numerous books and articles formed the foundation of modern, scientific cryptography. Elizebeth worked for the War Department and the Navy, and later during Prohibition for the Treasury, where she cracked bootleggers’ codes. William Friedman’s greatest success came at the outbreak of the Second World War, when his team broke the Japanese code PURPLE, allowing the US to intercept high-level Japanese diplomatic communications (including the order to cease negotiations that preceded the attack on Pearl Harbor). After the war he worked for the new National Security Administration, and retired in 1956, after more than thirty years as the government’s leading cryptographer.

William and Elizebeth’s work came full-circle  in the 1950s, when they turned their attention back to Shakespeare and produced The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined, a masterful work on the Baconian controversy. Published in 1957, it conclusively demolished the theory that any encoded messages are present in early editions of Shakespeare. Despite being debunked, the early Riverside publications that gave “the world’s greatest cryptographer” (Kahn) his start are highly sought-after by modern book collectors, and we were lucky enough to had two of these volumes in stock:

The Keys to Deciphering the Greatest Work of Sir Francis Bacon. Geneva, IL: Riverbank Laboratories, 1916.

Fundamental Principles of the Baconian Ciphers and Application to Books of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Geneva, IL: Riverbank Laboratories, 1916.

Many of Riverbank’s publications were produced in unusual formats using materials suggestive of  17th-century England, such as the the light-brown reverse calf in the image above. The Riverbank team also took advantage of new photographic techniques, and many of the pages in these books are reproduced entirely photographically rather than by traditional printing methods. Originally published in very in low numbers, these fragile materials made the books even less likely to survive, and they are rare today, with only five copies of Fundamental Principles of the Baconian Ciphers known to be held institutionally.

Title page.

The Baconian Bi-Literal Cipher.

An explanation of Bacon’s cipher (click to enlarge). Note William Friedman’s signature on the lower right – this appears on many of the pages that he created for these publications.

Examples of the purported a and b letterforms in the works of Shakespeare.

Elizabeth Gallup’s theory rested on the use of two different types in the early editions of Shakespeare. Much of the The Keys for Deciphering the Greatest Works of Sir Francis Bacon is given over to analyzing the two forms of each letter. Unfortunately for her theory, it was common for early modern printers to use a variety of type, not all of which was identical. And it would have been almost impossible for the compositors to identify tiny variations in the letters while setting the type.

Example of a Bi-Formed Alphabet.

The Bi-Formed Alphabet Classifier.

The Bi-Formed Alphabet Classifier

The two removable guides shown above were meant to be used while reading the Shakespearean texts, for quick and easy identification of the letter-forms. Both include Friedman’s signature.

The cipher as used in the list of principal actors.

On the left, the original catalogue of Shakespeare’s works, and on the right, Gallup’s “updated” list.

Though it doesn’t make the authorship controversy any less troublesome, we can take some comfort in thanking Bacon and his followers for many of the cryptographic breakthroughs of the 20th-century. As James Shapiro writes in Contested Will, “…Mrs. Gallup never achieved the fame sought, but their work on ciphers helped win a war”.

To learn more about these subjects you can explore the resources outlined below:

  • How to Make Anything Signify Anything is an excellent piece by William H. Sherman published in the winter 2010/11 issue of Cabinet magazine. It contains a more detailed discussion of the bilateral cipher and of Friedman’s work at Riverbank, as well as some excellent photographs (and the Knowledge is Power photo is available as a poster). Sherman is also the author of two of my favourite book history publications, John Dee and Used Books.
  • The Friedmans’ interest in books extended to the mysterious Voynich manuscript, which they spent much of their free time trying to decode.
  • Academic and blogger Holger Syme has written several excellent pieces on Anonymous and the Shakespeare controversy, particularly People Being Stupid About Shakespeare & Enough Already. His RSS feed is a must for anyone interested in the early modern era.
  • Contested Will, by James Shapiro, examines the origins, history, and cultural implications of the authorship controversy. Shapiro has also written an excellent take-down of Anonymous published in the New York Times on 16 October.
  • The Shakespeare Authorship page is a comprehensive collection of resources on the authorship controversy, with the editors on the Stratfordian side.
  • One of the world’s most famous unsolved codes is the CIA’s Kryptos sculpture, which remains uncracked by even the brightest minds in the security field.
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