About
The Research Cluster
At the centre of the First Folio Research Cluster is a book, Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. It contains thirty-six plays that were compiled by Shakespeare’s colleagues, John Heminges and Henry Condell, and it was published in 1623 by Edward Blount and Isaac and William Jaggard. Ben Jonson acknowledged the publication milestone, commending the alleged timelessness of Shakespeare’s art (“He was not of an age, but for all time”) as it was newly materialized in a physical object:
Thou art a monument, without a tombe,
And art aliue still, while thy Book doth liue,
And we have wits to read, and praise to giue.
A copy of this book (also known as the First Folio) now “lives” at the University of British Columbia at UBC Library. It was formerly owned by a private collector in the US and was purchased for UBC in 2021 through Christie’s New York; the acquisition was funded by a consortium of donors from across North America and by the Department of Canadian Heritage. UBC’s copy is only the second such volume in Canada (the other is in the Fisher Library at the University of Toronto). This is, therefore, a critical moment in our institutional history.
From one angle, UBC now has stewardship over an artefact that has the capacity to engage the imagination of students, faculty, and the public alike. From another angle, the acquisition of this book is, of course, not unproblematic. Because of the fundamental role that Shakespeare’s drama, and canonical western literary texts more broadly, have played in the naturalization of settler colonialism, the First Folio now sits awkwardly in a university that is committed to decolonization and reconciliation. The events that we host seek to forefront this awkwardness. We wish to acknowledge the generosity of the donors who made the purchase possible, while also interrogating the colonial legacies of Shakespeare in Vancouver (and Canada) today. 2023 is the most apt year in which to undertake this project, since it marks the 400th anniversary of the Folio’s publication.
Although the Folio is not a particularly rare book—there are 235 known copies, a third of them housed at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.—they have become, as Emma Smith describes, “things to be read, imposed, gifted, traded, deified: thinged.” In nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century North America, Folios were purchased by ambitious and well-monied collectors as well as by aspiring public and private library collections. If Shakespeare’s collected works became “widely acknowledged as the central literary achievement of English Culture” and indeed “a fetish of Western Civilization” as Stephen Greenblatt states, then the possession of a First Folio was a marker for the nouveaux riches of the distinction generally reserved for Old World collections. The Folio functions, as Jyotsna Singh observes, as “a key signifier within colonial discourse, while demarcating the familiar binaries: barbarism and civilization, tradition and modernity.” We are thus inspired to ask, what does it mean for our university and our city to possess this book now, in the early decades of the twenty-first century?
In spring of 2021 a collective of scholars, under the leadership of Dr. Hallie Marshall (Theatre and Film, UBC) and Dr. Patrick Pennefather (Theatre and Film, UBC), successfully applied for Research Cluster Funding from the University of British Columbia. The stipulated goals of the cluster are to:
- facilitate use of the newly acquired First Folio as a research/creative tool
- catalyze research and creative projects tied to the First Folio
- facilitate constructive conversations about the place of the western literary canon in Canadian culture and identity
- use the First Folio to engage with international research communities and with the broader Vancouver community beyond UBC and SFU
The First Folio enables us to ask questions about a heritage we have uncritically celebrated for too long and, in the process, reorient our perceptions about the premodern past and its surprising relation to both the present and future of the places in which we live and work. We hope to spark discussion about how early modern books have undergirded colonial infrastructures while also considering the potential, even surprising, value that they might still have for different constituencies. We broach these conversations with this question: “Is the Folio for all time and for all people?”
First Folio Digitization
UBC Library has made this copy of the First Folio openly accessible to the public by publishing a digitized version of the volume online through Open Collections. The First Folio arrived at UBC in September 2021 and, almost immediately, work with UBC Library’s conservator Anne Lama began in order to plan for its 2D digitization. The digitization of the Folio represents a major milestone in UBC’s digital media plan for the volume and aligns with a mandate to ensure digital access to this rare cultural treasure.
“Given the widespread interest in Shakespeare and the First Folio, we wanted to make a beautiful, high-resolution digital version of our copy available for instruction, research, and pure personal enjoyment to people not just here at UBC, but across the globe,” says Chelsea Shriver, Rare Books and Special Collections Librarian at UBC Library.
