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Origins of a Lifelong Passion |
Excerpted from Georgianna Ziegler, "Duty and Enjoyment: The Folgers as Shakespeare Collectors in the Gilded Age," Shakespeare in American Life exhibition catalog. Folger Shakespeare Library, 2007.
A combination of enjoyment and duty, which might be traced to America's Anglo-Protestant roots, lies at the heart of some of the major collections formed in this country during the late nineteenth century by the likes of art collectors Isabella Stewart Gardner and Henry Clay Frick, and book collectors J. P. Morgan, Henry Huntington, and Henry Clay Folger. All of these families made their money in the hard-driving days of American industry, on the backs of steel, coal, railway, and oil workers. All but one of the collectors inherited wealth; only Mr. Folger came from humble beginnings and gradually built his own much smaller fortune. And all but one of the collectors diversified; only Henry Folger and his wife Emily Folger seem to have collected as a team, both focused on and passionate about one subject—Shakespeare.
Henry Folger was born on 18 June 1857, the eldest of eight children, descended on his father's side from Peter Folger, sire of an old Nantucket family, whose members included Benjamin Franklin's mother. In the fall of 1875, Henry entered Amherst College. His letters, college scrapbook, and essays show his reading in the current novels of Dickens, Hawthorne, and Bulwer-Lytten, his interest in musical events, and his sense of the dramatic, including one occasion when he and his friends donned costumes for a supper party.
For Christmas of his freshman year, his brother gave him a one-volume edition of Shakespeare's Complete Works, which still survives, full of quotations about the Bard by Folger's contemporaries—Thomas Carlyle, Mrs. Browning, Abraham Lincoln, and especially Ralph Waldo Emerson—that Folger copied in over the years. By the time he was a senior, he had written essays on Portia and Shylock, won a prize for an oration on Tennyson, whom he compared to Shakespeare, and bought a ticket for 25 cents to hear the aging Emerson give a talk. It was Emerson who made all of Folger's brushes with Shakespeare coalesce into a passion that would remain the focus of the rest of his life.
Frank O. Salisbury. Henry Clay Folger. Oil on canvas, 1927. Folger Shakespeare Library.
Frank O. Salisbury. Emily Jordan Folger. Oil on canvas, 1927. Folger Shakespeare Library.