Free The Shakespeare Thefts by Eric Rasmussen

buy the folio. Subscription forms and letters from donors that were sent during the fundraising drive have been saved. These letters clearly convey the strong nationalistic sentiments surrounding keeping the volume in England and returning it to its rightful place at the Bodleian. One impassioned donor wrote on letterhead from the Rockford Inn, Brendon, North Devon: “It would have been a shame if it had been purchased by an American.”
    The volume returned home to the Bodleian on March 31, 1906. 4
    British nationalism would again rear its head in 1990, when Christie’s offered “the only extant First Folio to have belonged to a Seventeenth-Century English Dramatist” for sale. The copy was originally owned by William Congreve, the great Restoration playwright, who wrote such plays as
Love for Love
and
The Way of the World
. He coined the phrases “music has charms to sooth a savage beast” and “heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.”
    When the copy was purchased by the London bookseller Quaritch for Meisei University, the application foran export license was challenged “on behalf of the nation,” on the grounds that Congreve’s Shakespeare Folio should remain in England as a part of the country’s national heritage. But the challenge was unsuccessful, and the volume became a part of Meisei University Library in August 1991.
    This prime Meisei copy has a unique and distinguishing feature: It once belonged to Thomas Killigrew, a loyal follower of King Charles I, and it suffered a bullet wound. The bullet traversed through the first half of the folio leaves, stopping at
Titus Andronicus
. (Punsters might suggest that
Titus
is an impenetrable play.)
    This is one of the dozen First Folios housed at the Meisei University Library. The guardians of this extraordinary collection understand its value, and they have built what is essentially a bank vault in which to house it. The security system is phenomenally strong. To see the books, you must first go through heavy doors with bars, until you, too, are in the vault.
    Meisei’s safeguarding of its First Folio is the exception. As counterintuitive as it may seem, rare book rooms are almost invariably without much security whatsoever. Sometimes the books are located in a separate space, but there are no bars, there is no bulletproof glass—you go in and say you’d like to see a book, and it is brought to you. The main protection for books at the Bodleian Library was an oath, taken by all users:
    I hereby undertake not to remove from the library, nor to mark, deface, or injure in any way, any volume, document or other object belonging to it or in its custody; not to bring into the library, or kindle therein, any fire or flame, and not to smoke in the library; and I promise to obey all rules of the library.
    In 2005, one hundred years after Gladwynn Turbutt astonished the world by turning up with a long-lost copy of the First Folio and more than a decade after the cherished Congreve copy had bidden England adieu for Japan, I too acquired a small piece of England’s cultural heritage.
    I bought an oil painting of Shakespeare. An auction at Sotheby’s offered four centuries of paintings from an old Scottish family, the Elphinstones, ranging from a portrait of the fourth Lord Elphinstone painted in 1625 to one of the wife of the sixteenth Lord Elphinstone painted in 1913. In England, this kind of event is … well, commonplace and lackluster. The family has largely died out, no distant heirs want old family portraits, they all go up for auction, and they sell for a few thousand pounds each.
    At this auction, there was an oil painting, a portrait of a man traditionally thought to be William Shakespeare. It was painted around 1610. It didn’t cost very much because no one pays much attention to these auctions.I bought it because the Elphinstones had a long history with the Johnstoun family, and there was a Scot named William