Stolen Shakespeare folio goes on display
A copy of Shakespeare's First Folio which was stolen 25 years ago is to go on display for the first time in more than a decade.
The book was taken from Durham University's Cosin's Library in 1998 and reappeared 10 years later at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C.
It was badly damaged and returned to Durham in 2010. Antiques dealer Raymond Scott, from County Durham, was jailed for eight years the same year for handling the stolen copy, but was cleared of stealing the treasure.
The exhibition, Shakespeare Recovered, will run from 4 April to 2 November at Palace Green Library in Durham.
The First Folio, published in 1623, was the first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays.
It includes 36 plays, including Anthony and Cleopatra, Macbeth and The Tempest and without it these works might have been lost.
Stuart Hunt, director of university library and collections and University Librarian, said: "Having been at the centre of an international theft and recovery, Durham's First Folio is truly exceptional.
"The vandalism it sustained left it extremely vulnerable.
"But with this comes an opportunity to closely examine an iconic object in new ways and discover more about Shakespeare's world and legacy."
Visitors to the exhibition will be able to see multiple pages side by side.
The original binding has been exposed, revealing details of how books were made in the 17th Century.
Technological advances have also allowed experts to discover its hidden secrets, including centuries-old doodles.
Hand-made replicas, showing how it would have looked in the 1600s will also be shown.
Tony King, the university's senior collections care and conservation manager, said: "While the vandalism of the Folio is tragic, its current condition reveals parts of the book that would otherwise be hidden."
The book was originally purchased by Bishop John Cosin in the 1620s and added to his library in Durham in 1669.
About 750 copies were originally printed, but only 235 are known to have survived.
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Playwright and director Robert O'Hara has turned his puckish attention to 'Hamlet,' treating Shakespeare's tragedy not as an august cultural treasure that has held the world's attention for more than 400 years but as a squeaky plaything that can be exploited for eccentric fun and games. It goes without saying that his new adaptation of 'Hamlet,' which had its premiere Wednesday at the Mark Taper Forum, isn't for purists. But Shakespeare's drama can withstand even the most brazen attack. Oh, the crazy stagings I've seen! None more so than the 1999 New York production by performance theorist and director Richard Schechner that turned the play into a pop-cultural hallucination, featuring a weed-smoking Hamlet with a Jamaican lilt, ghostly reminders of Marilyn Monroe and Shirley Temple and a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern costumed as rats. By this standard, O'Hara is proceeding quite tamely. 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I was delighted that she was granted a prominent place in the adaptation's second act, but it's a shame that, like all the characters, she becomes a pawn in O'Hara's prankish plot. If this description seems harsh, perhaps I should mention the cocaine revel Claudius (Ariel Shafir) instigates with the First Player (Jamie Lincoln Smith), Polonius (Ramiz Monsef) and a version of Rosencrantz (Ty Molbak) and Guildenstern (Danny Zuhlke) who would be right at home in a 'Dumb and Dumber' movie. These nimble performers gamely rise to the occasion, but the comic adrenaline at this point has a numbing effect. If you're going to do 'Hamlet,' at least probe some of the play's moral and psychological mysteries. O'Hara is more drawn to the plot puzzles that have encouraged interpreters to weigh in with their own crackpot notions. He would have been better advised to do what James Ijames did in his Pulitzer Prize-winning play 'Fat Ham' — respond to Shakespeare's classic through a completely autonomous work of art. Shakespeare's 'Hamlet' provokes endless fascination precisely because of its unresolved nature. T.S. Eliot famously called Shakespeare's tragedy 'the 'Mona Lisa' of literature.' O'Hara does little more than graffiti a mustache on this inexhaustible theatrical canvas.
