UBC First Folio Research Cluster

2023 Symposium

Schedule of Events

Friday, November 17

9:00–9:15	Land acknowledgement and welcome
9:15–10:45	Panel 1: Buying and Selling the Folio
10:45–11:15	Coffee
11:15–12:15	Panel 2: Playing with the Folio, Part 1
12:15–1:15	Lunch and informal conversation
1:15–2:15 .	Panel 3: Playing with the Folio, Part 2

Saturday, November 18

9:00–10:30	Panel 4: The First Folio at Work.
10:30–10:45	Coffee
10:45–12:15	Panel 5: Folio Materials
12:15–12:45	Lunch

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Abstracts

Panel 1: Buying and Selling the Folio

Chair: Ronda Arab (Simon Fraser U)

Janelle Jenstad (U Victoria)
Harrison Garside’s Playbook Collection

The Legislative Library of British Columbia owns a 1632 Second Folio and two copies of the 1685 Fourth Folio. How did these volumes come to be in a small outpost on the western edge of the former British colonies? They were part of a larger collection of early modern plays that once reposed in Victoria. The collector was Manchester photographer Harrison Garside, who emigrated to Victoria in 1898, and returned for the tercentenary of the 1623 First Folio to Stratford-upon-Avon, where he died suddenly. Some of his books are now in the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and the rest were auctioned in Victoria in 1923. This paper describes Garside’s collection, traces its dispersal, and brings attention to the lesser known parts of the collection that remain in Victoria. Attending to colonial book collectors offers a window on the roles of ’empire’ in Shakespearean bibliography, and, conversely, of Shakespeare in colonial formation. 

Emma Smith (Oxford U)
First Folio legacies

At the start of the 18th, the 1623 Folio edition of Shakespeare’s plays was simply another second-hand book: the smart Shakespearean would engage with the works via new, more portable, and polished editions by Rowe and successive editors. By the end of the century, it was a desirable and expensive accessory. In part this is the consequence of the changing cultural value of Shakespeare during the period, amplified by editorial labours, theatrical rediscovery, and landmark events such as Garrick’s Stratford Jubilee. However, it is also a significant manifestation of the Georgian culture of luxury and consumption which economists have identified with the wealth generated by slave-produced goods, particularly sugar; numerous wealthy men who owned enslaved people also owned copies of the First Folio. This talk begins to approach this topic and its implications for bibliographic scholarship and the history of the book, including this one. 

Susan Bennett (U Calgary)
The Global Shakespeare Marketplace

What investments support the idea that Shakespeare endures “for all time”? Rather than understand this longevity as the product of special qualities in the plays and poetry that transcend the realities of peoples, places and eras, I suggest it is an effect of systems of theatrical production, publishing, archiving and education. Three examples will illustrate the robust marketplace for Shakespeare in the 21st century: the Folger Shakespeare Library’s 2016 tour of the First Folio to all 50 American states; the critical and popular success of Ivo van Hove’s compilation Shakespeare productions at international festivals and via digital media; and the expansion of global Shakespeare courses at universities and colleges worldwide. 

Panel 2: Playing with the FoliO, Part 1

Chair: Sarah Crover (Vancouver Island U)

Katrina Dunn (U Manitoba)
Actors and the Folio: Material Encounters

Encounters with the material residue of Shakespeare’s creative output continue to be of magnetic and mystical import for theatre practitioners. While collaboration with objects is always a part of theatre practice, fetishized objects that transmit a theatrical lineage have even greater import. Research into the First Folio and suggestions for the use of these texts in rehearsal has changed the way Shakespeare is approached by thousands of actors around the world, purporting to give a more direct access to the playwright’s intent. UBC’s own Neil Freeman has played a seminal role in articulating these acting-based Folio techniques. This paper and presentation will assess the impact of a material encounter with UBC’s first edition of William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (1623) by two Vancouver actors, who will use the encounter to revisit an important Shakespeare monologue they have performed and craft a new performance based on any discoveries revealed. 

Gretchen Minton (Montana State U)
Leaf Taking: Recontextualizing the First Folio

In her 2017 play, The Book of Will, American playwright Lauren Gunderson offers a fictionalized account of the making of the First Folio. The Book of Will focuses on Heminges and Condell’s many hurdles as they gather Shakespeare’s works together to publish this monumental tome, while also celebrating the Folio’s ability to inspire performances far into the future. This paper applies Gunderson’s interest in the Folio as both a manufactured object and a catalyst for reinventions to focus on the book’s individual leaves and the ways in which they are linked to present-day material and cultural performances in unexpected sites. 

Examining individual Folio leaves in disparate locations and contexts can open up ways to think about how the Folio generates vitally diverse performances. This is not just about retrieving the past, but about exploring why this bibliographic artefact still has the power to cause people to recreate and re-perform it—not just on stages, but in archives, at universities, in the political sphere, and far beyond.

Panel 3: Playing with the FoliO, PART 2

Chair: Melissa Walter (U of the Fraser Valley)

Rodrigo Beilfuss (Shakespeare in the Ruins)
Defying the Original: workshopping translations & meditations on Shakespeare as a cultural bridge

Inspired by the life-altering event of being introduced to Hamlet in high-school, when he was a new immigrant from Brazil with very little English, actor-director Rodrigo Beilfuss provides an overview of his experiences working with Shakespeare across Canada, Brazil, the UK and finally the Stratford Festival, and proposes the paradoxical provocation: we should look towards today’s Developing World, and approach the text through translations/adaptations if we ever hope to understand Shakespeare’s “original intentions”. 

It is vital that we combat the idea of translations as “lesser works”, marked by loss and infidelity towards the Original. Could there be gains? Can we improve on the meaning through a different language? The invitation is that we approach translations as an extension of that very Shakespearean tradition of adaptation and textual instability. Through that exploration, we gain access to new and surprising cultural perspectives. 

Rodrigo spent a great portion of the pandemic on Zoom with Brazilian actors and translator Lawrence Flores Pereira, as the group tackled Macbeth, Hamlet and Othello in Portuguese. Workshopping the freshly minted texts, trying out the sound and taste of words – with the playwright/translator present – was the closest Rodrigo has ever felt to being in the same room with Shakespeare himself, working with the man, questioning his choices, and being in his presence. 

Greg Doran (Royal Shakespeare Company)
The Folio Roadshow

To mark the quatercentenary of the First Folio, Greg Doran decided to try and see as many copies of the First Folio as he could, starting with the RSC’s own copy, in Stratford-upon-Avon. He has so far seen copies in the U.K., Germany, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United States. While visiting Japan, he discovered that one of the folios he particularly wanted to see was no longer there. Discovering the Folio was now the proud possession of Vancouver, he is thrilled at this opportunity of catching up with it at last.
In this session, Greg describes some of the his encounters with this extraordinary book.

Panel 4: The First Folio at Work

Chair: Heather Easterling (Gonzaga U)

Linc Kesler (U British Columbia)
The Folio and Indian Residential Schools: Transitions in Culture

As we approach the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s First Folio, a series of events across North America has resulted in a wider public awareness of the Indian residential school system that forcibly removed Indigenous children from their families and communities with the explicit aim of destroying their connection to cultures largely constituted in oral systems of information, replacing them with rudimentary English literacy and Christian doctrine. While Shakespeare, in plays such as The Tempest, anticipates emerging colonialism, it is perhaps less recognized that works such as the First Folio also mark the transition between largely oral regimes of communication, par excellence in the theatre, and a retrospective history structured and supported by the emerging importance of print. As we are now working to understand better the interactions of cultures and classical literacy is now being transformed by its encapsulation in immersive and electronic media, the Folio gives us the opportunity to think about these transitions and their consequences. 

Jyotsna Singh (Michigan State U)
The First Folio and The Tempest as Colonial Books in India

The first play the readers of Shakespeare’s First Folio (1623) encounter is The Tempest, under the generic heading, ‘Comedies.’ This opening sequence in the First Folio displaces our familiar view of The Tempest as one of the ‘Late Plays,’ possibly Shakespeare’s farewell to the stage, with well-worn associations between Prospero’s ‘magic’ and Shakespeare’s ‘art.’ Given that there is no extant quarto edition of the play, its opening place in the First Folio offers a productive counterpoint to difficult, global ‘afterlives’ of The Tempest. Looking afresh at The Tempest‘s textual history from its origins in the First Folio, I will explore how the play has mutated in its interpretations beyond European contexts and meanings to adaptations and translations that foreground the New World and global exploration and discovery. 

Brandi Adams (Arizona State U) 
‘Shakespeare Sells High’: Black American Readers and the 1623 First Folio 

During the tercentenary of the 1623 folio, U.S. newspapers published stories of conquest, capture, and domination as wealthy American men purchased multiple copies of the 1623 Folio. Simultaneously, several Black journalists, editors, and readers addressed their own relationships with Shakespeare and the relative worth of the First Folio in periodicals including The Chicago Defender and The Baltimore Afro-American. This talk examines the history and legacy of these recorded thoughts and conversations taking place in these and other Black newspapers from the mid 19th century to the early 20th century as communities all over the world were planning for and celebrating the anniversary of the publication of Shakespeare’s First Folio. In light of the quatercentenary, this talk also advocates for broader histories of engagement with Shakespeare’s 1623 folio—including those of people who may never have actually gotten to see or touch it—may also provide additional histories of this book.

Panel 5: Folio Materials

Chair: Michael Ullyot (U Calgary)

Misha Teramura (U Toronto)
Disappearing Acts: Survival, Loss, and the Shapes of Literary History

If the First Folio prophesies immortality for Shakespeare’s plays (“for all time”), book historians have become increasingly aware of the precarity of textual survival. From the variable survival rate of early printed books, to the physical fragility of manuscripts, to archives and institutions’ selective priorities of acquisition and preservation, whether or not a text endures over time depends on a complex intersection of economic, political, and material contingencies. Where the First Folio is perhaps unparalleled as a desired cultural commodity, this paper explores evidence about the range of other plays and poems from Shakespeare’s time that have been lost and considers how the dynamics of survival and loss condition the shapes of literary history.

Ben Higgins (Oxford U)
Out of Many, One: Assembling Shakespeare’s Literary Materials

In the early 1620s, before the First Folio was published, thirty different stationers had at one time or other owned a part of Shakespeare’s literary materials. Many of Shakespeare’s books–both plays and poems–had been published, trafficked, and republished within a vibrant community of enterprising book trade agents before some were collected in 1623 and wrangled into a newly coherent canon. How did this underlying history of bibliographic variety influence the creation of the First Folio? By comparing Shakespeare’s collected works with those of the contemporary preacher John Boys (1622), this talk explores the differing structures of ownership that underpinned these two authors. The talk argues that the model of literary authority established for Shakespeare’s writing by the Folio was partly enabled by the continual dispersal of his literary estate throughout his life.

Aaron T. Pratt (Harry Ransom Center, U Texas)
Making a First Class First Folio

In early 1920, banker and stockbroker Carl H. Pforzheimer purchased a First Folio from Sotheby’s. And it was not just any First Folio: it had belonged to the Newdigate family of Warwickshire from at least 1660 until it was sold, giving the volume some of the deepest and cleanest provenance of extant copies. Its leaves were also in nearly impeccable, unsophisticated condition. But there was still a problem: Pforzheimer’s new copy didn’t include one preliminary bifolium and, because of this, was considered imperfect by the collecting standards of the time—and would still would be considered imperfect today. This presentation considers Pforzheimer’s and others’ decisions to supply this “missing” sheet and those decisions’ impact on our understanding of the First Folio’s earliest history.

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Speaker Bios

Brandi K. Adams is assistant professor of English at Arizona State University. Her research interests include the history of reading, the history of the book, premodern critical race theory of early modern England as well as modern editorial practices of early modern English drama. She has written an article on unbookishness, Othello, and American Moor for the journal Shakespeare and has forthcoming articles on Shakespeare’s First Folio which will appear in Shakespeare Quarterly. She has also written book chapters on editing, book history and race for publications including Shakespeare/Text, The Oxford Handbook of the History of the Book in England, and The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Race. She is currently working on her first monograph entitled Representations of Books and Readers in Early Modern English Drama. 

Rodrigo Beilfuss ‧ Born and raised in Brazil, Rodrigo Beilfuss first moved to Manitoba in 2001 as an exchange student. In Winnipeg, Rodrigo has directed and acted in several productions at various local theatres. Recent credits include playing Athos at the Royal MTC’s production of The Three Musketeers, and directing Jessica B. Hill’s Pandora (PTE/SIR) and The Dark Lady (SIR/SOTS). He holds a BA (Honours) in performance from the University of Winnipeg, an MA in Classical Acting from LAMDA (England) and he’s a graduate of Stratford’s two flagship training programs, the Birmingham Conservatory and the Michael Langham Workshop in Directing. Rodrigo spent four years in Ontario with the Stratford Festival, and then relocated back to Winnipeg to be the Artistic Director of Shakespeare in the Ruins (SIR) in the Fall of 2019. He is also a committed educator, and has led classes at various universities, and taught workshops across Canada, the USA, the UK and in his native Brazil.

Susan Bennett is Professor Emerita in the Department of English at the University of Calgary. She is widely published across a variety of areas in theatre and performance studies including a focus on contemporary productions and adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays. Her most recent essays are “Re-thinking ‘Global Shakespeare’ for Social Justice’ in Chris Thurman and Sandra Young’s Global Shakespeare and Social Injustice: Towards a Transformative Encounter (Arden Shakespeare 2023) and “Shakespeare: The World’s Premier Cultural Tourism Brand?” in Robert Ormsby and Valerie Clayman Pye’s Shakespeare and Tourism (Routledge 2023).

Gregory Doran is the Artistic Director Emeritus of the Royal Shakespeare Company. He had been described as “one of the great Shakespearians of his generation” (Sunday Times) and has directed or produced all of the plays in the First Folio, the last of which, Cymbeline, opened in April 2023, and marked his 50th production for the RSC. Greg won a special Oliver Award for outstanding achievement in 2002; he delivered the prestigious Dimbleby Lecture on BBC One in 2016, was awarded the Sam Wanamaker Prize for pioneering work in Shakespearean Theatre in 2012, and the prestigious Pragnell Shakespeare Prize in 2023. He is an honorary associate of the British Shakespeare Association, an honorary senior research fellow of the Shakespeare Institute, and a trustee of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. His latest book My Shakespeare: A Director’s Journey through the First Folio was published this April. Greg is currently embarked on a Folio Roadshow, a personal quest to see as many of the surviving copies of the First Folio as he can around the world, in its quatercentenary year.

Katrina Dunn is an Associate Professor in the University of Manitoba’s Department of English, Theatre, Film & Media where she teaches in the Theatre Program. Her scholarly work explores the spatial manifestations of theatre as well as ecocritical theatre. In 2022, she was awarded the Richard Plant Award for the best long form English-language article on a Canadian theatre or performance topic by the Canadian Association for Theatre Research. She is currently adapting her dissertation, Empty House: Real Estate and Theatricality in Vancouver’s Downtown, into a monograph for UBC Press. Katrina’s long career as a stage director and producer has had considerable impact on the performing arts in western Canada and has been recognized with numerous awards. 

Ben Higgins is a Tutorial Fellow in English at Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford. His first book, Shakespeare’s Syndicate: The First Folio, its Publishers, and the Early Modern Book Trade (OUP, 2022), won the Shakespeare’s Globe Book Award in 2023. His research focuses on the literary and material cultures of the early modern period, with particular focus on Shakespeare, book history, and editorial practice. For Arden Shakespeare he is working on an edition of The Comedy of Errors, and with co-author Dr Alice Leonard, he is writing a book about unusual spaces of literary activity in the early modern period, including ships, pockets, Frost Fairs, and coffins, among others.

Janelle Jenstad is Professor of English at University of Victoria. She directs The Map of Early Modern London (MoEML) and Linked Early Modern Drama Online (LEMDO), and co-coordinates The New Internet Shakespeare Editions (NISE), Digital Renaissance Editions (DRE), and The MoEML Mayoral Shows anthology (MoMS). With Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Mark Kaethler, she co-edited Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media (Routledge). Her articles have appeared in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Shakespeare Bulletin, 
Renaissance and Reformation, Scholarly Editing, and Digital Studies/Champs Numeriques. Chapters appear in Teaching Early Modern Literature from the Archives (MLA); New Directions in the Geohumanities (Routledge); Early Modern Studies and the Digital Turn (Iter); Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers (Indiana); Early Modern Studies and the Digital Turn (Iter); Making Things and Drawing Boundaries (Minnesota); Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study (Routledge); and Civic Performance: Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern London (Routledge). She is the winner of the Canadian Society for Digital Humanities Outstanding Achievement Award for Computing in the Arts and Humanities, the Faculty of Humanities Research Excellence Award, and the UVic REACH Award for Knowledge Mobilization. For more details, see janellejenstad.com.

Linc Kesler has degrees in English literature from Yale and the University of Toronto, and for the first twenty years of his career taught Early Modern literature, literary theory, and a few other things in Oregon, where he also led the establishment of the state’s first ethnic studies department. In the past twenty years at UBC, he served as the first director of First Nations Studies in the Faculty of Arts and then worked in central administration on Indigenous strategic initiatives as Director of the First Nations House of Learning and Senior Advisor to the President on Aboriginal Affairs. He led the development of the university’s first Indigenous strategic plan and other initiatives, including the establishment of the Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre. Since becoming an emeritus professor, he has returned to research and is completing a book, on Early Modern drama, time, and causality.

Dr. Gretchen Minton is Professor of English and College of Letters and Science Distinguished Professor at Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana. She has published extensively on Shakespeare and his contemporaries, including several critical editions of early modern plays, including Timon of Athens, Twelfth Night, and The Revenger’s Tragedy. Her 2020 monograph, Shakespeare in Montana: Big Sky Country’s Love Affair with the World’s Most Famous Author, is the winner of several regional book awards. In addition to her scholarly work, Minton is a dramaturg, script adaptor, and director. She is the dramaturg for Montana Shakespeare in the Parks and the co-founder of Montana InSite Theatre, which is dedicated to site-specific performances that use classical texts to address current environmental issues.

Aaron T. Pratt is Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Curator of Early Books and Manuscripts at the Harry Ransom Center, a special collections library, archive, and museum at The University of Texas at Austin. His research and teaching focus on bibliography, the history of the book, and the literature and culture of early modern England. His writing has appeared—or will soon appear—in a number of venues, both academic and public, including Fine Books and Collections, Shakespeare Quarterly, Shakespeare Studies, The Library, and edited collections published by Oxford and Cambridge. His first major exhibition, The Long Lives of Very Old Books, is open at the Ransom Center through the end of the year.

Jyotsna G. Singh is Professor at Michigan State University, US. She teaches and researches 16th and 17th-century literature and culture including Shakespeare, travel writing, postcolonial theory, histories of Islam, and gender and race studies. Key published books include Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogues: ‘Discovery’ of India in the Language of Colonialism (Routledge); Shakespeare and Postcolonial Theory (Arden); and A Companion to the Global Renaissance (Wiley Blackwell). She co-authored an early book, The Weyward Sisters: Shakespeare and Feminist Politics. She has also received fellowships at the Folger Shakespeare Library, John Carter Brown Library, Queen Mary College, University of London and Oxford University (St Catherine’s College). She is currently co-editing (with Mathew Dimmock) a new Edition of Shakespeare’s The Tempest for Cambridge University Press.

Emma Smith is Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, Oxford. She is the author of The Making of Shakespeare’s First Folio (2015, second ed. 2023) and Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book (2016, second ed. 2023). Her work focuses on Shakespeare’s reception in print, performance and criticism. She has worked as a dramaturg, is Associate Scholar with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and the 2023 Sam Wanamaker Fellow at Shakespeare’s Globe. She is currently working on an edition of Twelfth Night. 

Misha Teramura is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Toronto, where he researches and teaches the literature of the English Renaissance. His work has appeared in such journals as ELH, Shakespeare Quarterly, Modern Philology, English Literary Renaissance, RES, Early Theatre, and The Chaucer Review, as well as in the edited collections Lost Plays in Shakespeare’s England, Loss and the Literary Culture of Shakespeare’s Time, and Shakespeare/Text: Contemporary Readings in Textual Studies, Editing and Performance. He is currently completing a book titled ​Paper Plays: The Material Lives of Early Modern Manuscript Playbooks and is editing Henry IV, Part 2 for the Arden Shakespeare Fourth Series. He is also a co-editor of the Lost Plays Database (with Roslyn L. Knutson, David McInnis, and Matthew Steggle) and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. 

Sponsors

We would like to thank the generosity of the following sponsors, whose support has helped to make this symposium possible.

• The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
• UBC VPRI First Folio Research Excellence Cluster
• UBC Public Humanities Hub
• SFU English Department
• UBC Dean of Arts
• UBC Department of English Language and Literatures
• UBC Department of Theatre and Film

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