< Much Ado About First Folios — the world's largest Shakespeare collection reopens

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The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, home to the world's largest Shakespeare collection, is emerging Friday from a four-year hibernation almost entirely transformed. New museum spaces, new leadership announced, new programming outreach. The jewels of the library's collection - 82 copies of Shakespeare's "First Folio," printed 400 years ago - will now be on public display for the first time. NPR's Bob Mondello got a sneak peek.

BOB MONDELLO, BYLINE: So much has changed at the Folger library since it closed for renovations in 2020 that it makes sense that the show reopening its performance space is called "Metamorphoses."

RENEA S BROWN: (As Myrrha) Change me. Let me glimpse the secret...

MONDELLO: This adaptation of an epic Roman poem is all about change, which was not an accident, says Folger programming director Karen Ann Daniels.

KAREN ANN DANIELS: The choice of "Metamorphoses" at this time in the Folgers history was about our internal metamorphosis as much as it was about our external metamorphosis.

MONDELLO: External being the library's vastly expanded physical plant, internal being a reconsidered relationship with a city Daniels thought would relate to "Metamorphoses" if they did it right.

DANIELS: The play could really talk about and lean into the larger history of the populations of D.C. So I'm totally thinking Chocolate City, and that's really where my idea came from.

MONDELLO: That idea was to do the play with an all-Black cast, a notion director Psalmayene 24 wasn't sure he was on board with at first.

PSALMAYENE 24: I questioned why we would do that in 2024 and then the police killing of Tyre Nichols happened.

MONDELLO: A Black FedEx employee fatally injured last year during a traffic stop by Memphis police officers who were also Black. The director says he worked through his grief at the incident by incorporating elements of the Black diaspora into "Metamorphoses" to celebrate Black humanity.

PSALMAYENE 24: So, in some ways, this play is a response to America's own proclivity for lethal anti-Blackness. And when you do a show like this at a place like Folger, it says something about how not only Folger Theatre is changing but how American culture is changing, how D.C. is changing and how universal the stories that pass through this theater actually are.

MONDELLO: The impulse to reach that more universal audience is what led Folger library director Michael Witmore to spearhead the $80,000,000 rethink that is about to go public - a wholesale metamorphosis, if you will, of a building and a mission that had been, frankly, functioning quite well.

MICHAEL WITMORE: Well, you have to remember that for the first part of the Folger's existence, it was primarily a research library, and it was serving scholars who were studying everything from animal husbandry to lyric poetry to theater, but we have the facilities and collection to do more. And this renovation allows us to take a world-class research library and surround it with a cultural institution that is a destination.

MONDELLO: And what does that destination look like? In some ways, the elegantly low-slung building appears much as it has for decades. Deco classical, in keeping with its neighbors the Library of Congress, Supreme Court and U.S. Capitol, all literally just down the block. But on the side facing the Capitol, a landscaped garden beckons visitors...

GREG PRICKMAN: Underground. We're essentially standing pretty much right below the threshold of the 1932 building.

MONDELLO: Librarian Greg Prickman. He oversees the collection and exhibitions and notes that this newly excavated space is designed both to display and to shield the collection.

PRICKMAN: Today's a great example. Very bright, sunny, kind of hot. As we head down this ramp in front of us, you will see it's much darker in there.

MONDELLO: Because ink fades and 400-year-old paper yellows. Still, even in comparative darkness, there's a lot to see - the walls covered floor to ceiling by illustrations digitized from the collection.

PRICKMAN: All printed so they look like pages. They're sheets that are hanging. It's all very tangible. People can go up to the wall here. You can actually put your hands on this.

(SOUNDBITE OF PAPER FLAPPING)

MONDELLO: Flappable corners? Won't they be irresistible to paper-shredding 10-year-olds?

PRICKMAN: I'm not particularly afraid. I would say, if a 10-year-old is pulling on one of these pages, I actually am pretty happy because that means they're interested. They're engaged. They may not know, you know, who these characters are, but they might know that that's a cat with a rocket strapped to its back. And they might be curious about what's going on in that image.

MONDELLO: Adult visitors will be more drawn to the display cases, especially a huge one in the middle of the room that glows softly, quietly announcing itself as the library's crown jewel.

PRICKMAN: 82 copies of Shakespeare's "First Folio" that Henry and Emily Folger collected in their lifetime. These copies are all the book that was printed in 1623, which was the first time that Shakespeare's works were collected into a single volume.

MONDELLO: Definitive then, or at least a benchmark for scholars, except that no two of them look the same. Some are skinny, others massive.

PRICKMAN: These were all printed in 1623 in the print shop of William Jaggard and his son Isaac. But over the intervening 400 years, a whole lot has happened to these books. Sometimes they get damaged and parts are removed. Sometimes parts are added from other copies.

MONDELLO: Does he have a favorite?

PRICKMAN: I do. I can show it to you, if you want to see it.

MONDELLO: He walks to the far right side of the display.

PRICKMAN: It's right over here. It's copy No. 30, the only copy in this collection that has the original binding that was put on when this book was first purchased, not long after it was printed. So if you wanted to see - what does Shakespeare's "First Folio" look like when it was just another, quote-unquote, "new book"? - that's the copy that you're going to be looking at, is No. 30.

MONDELLO: The exhibition space has all sorts of other things as well, a printing press...

PRICKMAN: Built for us to show people how this book was made.

MONDELLO: With interactives nearby.

PRICKMAN: The process of printing without having to get their hands dirty.

(SOUNDBITE OF PRINTING PRESS CLANKING)

PRICKMAN: By sliding that in and pulling this...

MONDELLO: Also videos, maps, open "First Folios" you can read, a screen that spits out Shakespearean insults and lots of rare manuscripts in a space called Out of the Vault, which, of course, made me want to see the vault, which is not open to the public - so I asked. We started walking.

And now we go down.

PRICKMAN: Now we go down, yes.

MONDELLO: How far down does this go?

PRICKMAN: Basically, three underground levels.

MONDELLO: We descend to an imposing steel bank vault door, behind which is the area containing the quarter of a million other volumes in the Folger's collection, where my first thought is it's cold.

PRICKMAN: It is, and that's because that makes the books happy. It's in the 50s. It's chilly.

MONDELLO: There are also 100,000 objects down here.

PRICKMAN: Props, costumes, models, pieces of the tree. Is it the mulberry tree? Objects associated with Shakespearean legends. I'm not the one to tell this story.

MONDELLO: That's OK. I looked it up. Shakespeare allegedly planted a mulberry tree at his home in Stratford. More than a century later, its then-owner got so tired of people asking to see it that he chopped it down and the town's carpenter used the wood to make Shakespearean souvenirs, so many that they pretty clearly didn't all come from one tree. But the Folger has some.

PRICKMAN: This is the rest of the secure vault area, and it stretches basically from 2nd to 3rd street.

MONDELLO: One room, called the small book room, is literally that - filled floor to ceiling with volumes that were...

PRICKMAN: Circulating during Shakespeare's time, very much in the heart of that early modern English and European moment. So Shakespeare might have seen one of these books. It's entirely possible.

MONDELLO: Much cooler than a mulberry souvenir. All of this in the service of words written more than 400 years ago, words that are also available digitally.

PRICKMAN: It's a both-and. We digitize in order to create access, and we exhibit materials in order to create access. The originals remain.

MONDELLO: And their presence here in Washington was a big part of the intention of Henry and Emily Folger. Again, Folger Library director Michael Witmore.

WITMORE: We need these words and these stories to elevate our sense of what's possible as citizens. And when you think about what happens in the Capitol, which is where words - I mean, you may not agree with them. You may think they're funny or shallow, but it's where words really matter, including when the court is looking at what those words mean. So to put a Shakespeare library where his works are being performed and where people are working through the poems and other things right in this spot, I think, is a big bet on the importance of the humanities and the arts in a functioning democracy.

MONDELLO: A bet the Folger is placing anew on Friday. I'm Bob Mondello.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

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