After an $80 million expansion, the Folger Shakespeare Library is reopening with a more welcoming approach — and all 82 of its First Folios on view.
Social media is awash with pictures of jaw-dropping libraries, elaborately styled home bookshelves and all manner of drool-worthy Library Porn. But for understated dazzle, it’s hard to compete with a wall in the new basement galleries of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.
For decades, the library’s 82 copies of Shakespeare’s First Folio — the largest collection in the world — were locked away in a vault, with access granted only to select scholars. But now, anyone can enter the public galleries and see them displayed in a special wall case, laid flat with spines out.
In the dim, curatorially correct lighting, they glow like some kind of mysterious dark matter. But during a preview of the building, which reopens this weekend after a four-year, $80 million expansion, the Folger’s director, Michael Witmore, reached for a sunnier metaphor.
The Folio — a collection of 36 of Shakespeare’s plays, published by his friends in 1623, seven years after his death — is “the ultimate message in a bottle.”
“And the miracle is that every generation opens up the bottle and it turns out the plays, the message, was addressed to them,” Witmore said.
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Source: Theater - nytimes.com
