But they shared one thing. A passion for on the one case writing and the other case collecting but put them in the context of their lives if you would, please. Guest shakespeare was writing around the 16 hundreds. His life 20 years before, 20 years after during the reign of elizabeth and james i and he was a wellknown playwright poet. He was also a businessman and a shareholder in the Theater Company in london. And and hes he is very well known for being a businessman. Henry soldier was the chairman of the board of the company the Largest Corporation in the world and the most reviled corporation as well during the gilded age. Shakespeare wrote these plays after he died his friends decided to create a memorial volume and published 36 of the node node known 38 plays of shakespeare had written and they are connected across time and across the ocean and the book saved the play from obscurity and henry the chairman wanted to own every known copy of the first. Host theres Something Interesting a sacred term referring intuitive that way he was anything but complementary about those in the gilded age. Guest they built these magnificent mansions and they have collections of art and they had had at the european a big european treasures that estate. Henry was quite different than most in the gilded age that we know of jpmorgan and the like. He came from very modest means and worked his way up the rankings of the latter but he never built a mansion, he never owned a house until he retired. He was in a rental house in oakland, lived a very modest life and kept secret his obsessive passion for collecting host he could have built a better house if he didnt spend so much on the manuscripts. Guest but he displayed some of the artwork at his home and most of the work that he collected but manuscripts musical scores and instruments three dogs and on and on anything related to shakespeare he looked at and studied and then when the house was full to the brim, he would take them down to the basement, wrap them up and ship the box to a warehouse. I looked at receipts for storage fees for 30 years for some of the rooms he rented. One by one he would fill up these warehouse rooms with treasures, make an inventory and a note of which box within which room and over years of accumulated room after room in brooklyn and manhattan. Host theres a tv show called hoarders and i wouldnt race to the element of guest if you are a person obsessed with collecting recyclable bottles are contemporary newspapers or magazines and you stack them in your house to where you cant walk through your house, we might say you have a borderline personality or this interferes with your normal living henry acquired things on a scale that were valuable and interesting. You have a connection with the collector as well dont you you want to talk with james was once in a known author and a big collector. Guest a bit of a collector is an understatement. You are being kind to him. Part of my research was informed based on the fact that hes been collecting objects manuscripts since he was 10yearsold and hes amassed an enormous collection that i havent seen before extent. James has had to put many of his objects into storage because there is no room for them. Host that you know of. Guest right. Host james is also the author of a number of books but particularly, one of my favorites manhunt for John Wilkes Booth after the lincoln assassination. But lets go back a little further than that. Can you talk a little bit what a folio is come the many members may not know what it is coming into the two men that you are too earlier. Guest which refers to the size of the book. 13 by eight approximately depending how its been shaved down. Guest like a magazine size that would be closer to half the size. What made it interesting is it conveyed some gravitons prior to the first but that size has been reserved for political and religious tracks in the gravity. Certainly not plays that were not regarded as literature. They were regarded as amusement for the masses. The first was a memorial volume that john hemming put together as a tribute. He died in 1616. If percolated off six years after shakespeares death. It wouldnt have been known to history had enough said. They saved them for prosperity. Many of the manuscripts possibly the only copies of the manuscripts have gone up in flames at the glen oaks figure. Imagine what the world would have had if that hadnt happened. Talk about how the fire came about in contemporary america recently. Guest theyve had a history with fire but more on that a little bit later. The theater was like the other theaters in london tried to attract patrons and held 1500 people with enormous structure. They added special effects and one of the special effects might have the good idea of what he was a real cannon. Guest . They shot off a cannon upon the arrival of henry viii and some of the lauding that was in the canon floated up to the roof and it caught fire and burned to the ground in two hours. Several years later, but at this time the government had enough and they outlined until 1994 when the restoration was completed. And no cannons were being fired. Guest host it required them to get permission which i used to practice once an altar creates something he or she owns the rights to that forever unless it is a work for hire and the estate would then get that Property Value that shakespeare but shakespeare had either licensed or sold the works to other people. Guest it was long after this. So the way that the plays were paid for the company is bought them outright. The Theater Company would have paid for the plays and then they would have had the right to perform or to publish. If they have found to do that they hold them held them very closely. There was a single copy of someone in charge of the manuscripts because they feared other Theater Companies could get them and perform the plays and not paid any royalties, so they figured if we have the right we want to have the only copy that they are and we dont want others performing the lead. Host i know from the movie shakespeare in love which contained some historical accuracy is a huge amount of rivalry between the players and the theatrical Companies Rising to the level but perhaps that was exaggerated in the film but we know that it was a little popular entertainment. Guest there was a little Competition Among the companies. By the end of the career he retires back and by that time the only Theater Companies left part of the reasons related to the puritans prohibiting the production of the plays. They didnt literally shut the theaters down but thats also demonstrated in shakespeare in love. Either for the plague or later the puritans would say they were an abomination that against god pretending to be something that you want and with men playing the part of women they were even more upset about that. That woman is a woman. Yes, right. Guest host i was also fascinated as a business journalist and i covered the graphic arts to learn about the blind printer fascinating how the first folio was constructed and went to 900 pages. Talk little bit about that. Guest yes if we start at the end of the story. Without many copies to compare it is difficult to draw the inference about how the book was printed so having many Copies Available to compare sidebyside helps you figure out how the coffee was printed. The long end and short of it is that the book was printed from the inside out. You didnt print page one and page three. You printed them in little booklets and started at the middle and then use if it to type living from the inside out. This meant two things. The printer had to estimate how much would fit on the page so that you would be able to fix this little book with exactly. If you have too much room not so much a problem. You could virtually doublespaced the text. If you ran out of space you might have to excise a line from the speech in order to make the text fit into today if you are using microsoft word you would have justified. Well, you couldnt do that. You have to handset type. Host on the books today via tarpaper copybooks but the paper in many of todays books in popular fiction it doesnt last very long. Talk about the paper and actually we will talk a little bit more about the presentday collection of the folio but talk about if you would want is the paper made of them is in danger or will it be five years continues . Guest the answer the answer is yes. Theres some the paper that was used for printing the first was highquality paper from normandy france. Thats where the best paper came from and that is what they used imprinting the first folio. And part of that was to convey the importance of the volume again to say this is something important and something special. Something like the paperback book which would be at half the size would have been printed on lower quality paper. It would have been more brittle and more likely to disintegrate which is why they are much more rare. And they have survived with pretty good numbers. They suffered infestations, people. But all Things Considered all Things Considered a pretty good number of them have survived. Host they were not doing this out of the goodness of his heart. They estimated it made sense to print than he had to sell them or someone had to sell them. How did they get into the stream of commerce . Guest they were sold mostly out of the printers shop. And all of the paper warehouses that have been around the cathedral said it is for what broadway is to theater in the United States, so it would have been the locus of the bookshops. So that was in part a geographic but in part planned by the crown because the crown wanted to know what was being printed and what ideas were being disseminated so they would have been under the eye of the crown. Host what would it have cost at the time . Guest it would have cost account which was a pretty hefty sum of money. A quarter sized by contrast might have cost five or 6 pounds host the first copy of the press is probably the same as the 10000 copy. That wasnt the case of the first. There were differences and variations because of the length or the actual construction of the book itself . Guest one is that corrections to the tech were made while printing was going on so you might be printing and the printer comes over and pulls off the press and makes corrections to it has it reset to make the collections and misspellings for example sometimes they put the actors name instead of the name of the character then it would be stacked with the other pages and then later collated into the copies and then the new pages that were printed off would have the correct divergence over every page there was a single proof sheet and some uncorrected pages and then some corrected versions if you correct that the 900 pages every copy is slightly different. Host so was he the one overseeing that where were the images very involved in that as well . Guest the work was primarily before hand so they would have taken the sources available to them the already printed or published versions that have been available for the edited them an entity had acted in these plays. They had been friends with him a long time so they knew they could look at the ones that have been published and say thats not how it was and then edit to the version of the more commonly know and then the memorial recreations and this all would have been how they edited essentially these plays. Once the manuscripts were transcribed it was probably not so much isaac but his son who would have done the corrections. Host shakespeare to my surprise they didnt really become popular until sometime after his death. People enjoyed his work but it was 140 years until his popularity began to soar. What happened to the first ones first one for the marginalized or did people recognize that someday this would be a valuable book . Guest i dont know that the collectors are the actors were producers thought at the time some day people will recognize how great this is. In fact over the period of time we had english civil war and then they prohibited the plays from being produced which meant there were no new plays being written and they were not being performed so it was quite sometime but some time but not until the restoration of the plays again come back to this page and by then the producers start to change the ending. Host ive had several movies made in hollywood, i know how that works. A particular actor owned a copy of the folio. He was a very wellknown actor who edited the play himself producing them in london, for example rromeo and jjuliett he produced that with happy endings are were sad endings. A few of the plays he cut an act or two to keep it moving to keep it moving more quickly so by the time we get to 150 years after they are quite different than what we remembered and its by going back to the first one that we have a good idea of how they would have been performed at the time shakespeare was still alive. Host this brings up an interesting point. I found fascinating is all of a sudden you see a copy of the third when opening up only one of which was attributed. Where did the others come from . Guest each of them got further and further away from the original text as they had edited the play so again they would have acted in these plays there are hundreds of mistakes introduced and then eventually the first filled out in nine years and they had at the plays that you referrer and if i could dig into my attic and say i got a manuscript and then 20 years posthumously published as the work and thought they could make a little extra money saying the its better than the first. Host they mustve had some value for those that would want to have the whole panoply of. Guest most of the collectors wanted the hotspots, to good quality copy of one of each. He wanted every copy he could get his hands on good coffee bad copy was missing the plays, torn pages from insect board holes more or less the volume shipped for years. He wanted them all. Host according to my family genealogist i defended from the oxford is that the correct way to pronounce it . The conspiracy theorists that feel they didnt write the play do not subscribe to that so im not going to hit you up for any royalties. Talk about that because it because people do find it fascinating. Guest there is a group of people they believe wrote the plays to shakespeare and few things are important to know one is that in his lifetime nobody doubted at 150 years before someone that i dont think that this man really wrote the play. There isnt a voluminous evidence of even his existence. There are no Grammar School records that show that he went to the Grammar School. He didnt go to the universitys. Without the University Education is one of the candidates. Christopher marlowe is another, francis was the most popular and wrote a book is actually that francis had written these plays. She went to england supposedly to research. She did any research she observed the atmosphere and into doing the interviewing. She had written the introduction and the buck and ended up in an insane asylum at the end of her life soap she had an interesting life on her own and that alone doesnt mean that her hypothesis is incorrect. However we have a lot of evidence that he lived in london and wrote plays. He acted in the plays. The english word tremendously accurate record keepers and they would have if they record but who had written the plays and shakespeare mentioned that the dozens of times so they would have known whose plays and the preface to the white devil. We have a lot of information about connecting shakespeare to the play. Host i did have to point out to my cousin the floridian that edward died before the tempest henry viii and several others as well and he said he couldnt have hidden them under his banner. Guest he continued to have plays published years after he died. Guest very smart. Guest you mentioned back mac beth. From that we have records of about twice as many and by the time shakespeare had died only half of the plays had been published and were secure. But hemmings published the other half and arguably without that book they would have been lost to history there would have been no tomorrow and tomorrow. The tempest, no julius caesar, no cleopatra so some of the most important place we know from shakespeare the high school would be studying if they were the Unsung Heroes of English Literature that they say is in the extinction. Guest dont we have them to thank for the picture of shakespeare . Guest we do. There are two images of shakespeare. One she made out of plaster but that was commissioned after although it was seen by his family members who would have said thats not what he looked like if it had been a problem. He commissioned to make an image which would be the title page and by the way this is the first time the picture was on the title page in a prominent position. They would have provided some kind of a secondary source sketch or something that we dont know and then they could have set a little more than a little less, whatever it was like a Police Sketch artist although they probably had to do that with the original source because it would be hard to erase. But at least they didnt know shakespeare would have seen the image and decide thats not what he looks like at all. Host weve been talking about the british isles. Lets cross little bit. Shakespeare and theater in general didnt catch on quite as much in colonial days until much later. I had a wonderful quote from your book about the increased matter who said this person whos been corrupted by stage plays are seldom and with much difficulty reading and so it took a little while for shakespeare to get some footing in america. Guest with pics of a century for almost the same reason the plays would have disappeared in england and that is the puritans who had shut down the production of the plays in england were the ones who came to the colonies and they wouldnt allow them to be produced here either so it is about a century before shakespeare started even on the frontier. Guest tell us about the confluence of shakespeare and fulcher. When did he become interested and when did he really start to get an inkling that i need to possess this mans play . Guest i think it happened with many collectors over a period of time. He was setting the play at amherst college. He heard Ralph Waldo Emerson deliver a lecture and then became interested and read his lecture on shakespeare and thought okay this is with a closer study and four the rest of his life he