Latest news with #FirstFolio
Atlantic
18-07-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
What to Do With the Most Dangerous Book in America
Recently, I was invited to the Dalkey Book Festival, in Ireland, to speak at a session titled 'Books That Changed the World.' I assumed that, as a Shakespeare scholar, I was expected to talk about the global impact of the First Folio. Instead, frightened by what has been happening in America, I decided to choose a book that is changing the world right now. For that, I turned to a 1978 novel I had long heard of but never read: The Turner Diaries, by William Luther Pierce, a physicist and the founder of the neo-Nazi National Alliance. I knew that that the novel had once served as a deadly template for domestic terrorists such as Timothy McVeigh, who drew from its pages when he planned the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City, and Robert Jay Mathews, whose white-supremacist gang took its name, the Order, from the novel; a member of the Order killed the Jewish radio host Alan Berg. I also knew that it had inspired John William King, part of a group that dragged James Byrd Jr., a Black man, to death behind a pickup truck. As King shackled Byrd to the vehicle, he was reported to have said, 'We're going to start The Turner Diaries early.' The book is a vile, racist fantasy culminating in genocide, but it isn't just a how-to manual for homegrown terrorists. What has been labeled the 'bible of the racist right' has influenced American culture in a way only fiction can—by harnessing the force of storytelling to popularize ideas that have never been countenanced before. Literature can be mind opening, but it can also be corrosive, and there is no exaggeration in saying that The Turner Diaries and books like it have played a part in spreading hateful ideas that now even influence government policy. Seeking a copy online, I was led directly to Amazon. I was surprised to find the book available on that site, which had reportedly stopped selling it after the January 6, 2021, insurrection. Before then, according to a New York Times article about the ban, Amazon had marketed the book alongside a warning identifying it as 'a racist, white supremacist fantasy.' Amazon had justified the sale of what it acknowledged to be an 'infamous work'—one that has now reportedly sold as many as half a million copies—because of the novel's 'historical significance and educational role in the understanding and prevention of racism and acts of terrorism.' I found that to be a sound policy; I would no more ban offensive books, which need to be studied and analyzed, than I would prevent scientists from investigating infectious pathogens. It was only after reading the novel that I fully grasped why Amazon had previously decided to remove it from its site after a mob of Donald Trump's supporters attacked the Capitol. Proud Boys had helped organize and lead that assault, encouraged a few months earlier when Trump was asked during a presidential debate to condemn the group and replied: 'Proud Boys, stand back and stand by!' The month before the January 6 attack, in a livestreamed video, Joe Biggs, a Proud Boys leader, described government officials as 'evil scum' who 'deserved to die a traitor's death'—to which another leader, Ethan Nordean, replied, 'Yup, Day of the Rope.' That was the name that Pierce gave, in The Turner Diaries, to the day when enemies are lynched, 'a grim and bloody day, but an unavoidable one' orchestrated in hopes of 'straightening out the majority of the population and reorienting their thinking.' The appearance on January 6 of a gallows with a noose hanging from it outside the Capitol visually reinforced the allusion to that defining moment in the novel. Biggs and Nordean were later sentenced for their roles in the assault to 17 and 18 years in prison, respectively. (Trump commuted their sentences.) The Turner Diaries tells the story of Earl Turner, who, in the closing years of the 20th century, participates in a revolution that begins as a race war in the United States and results in the annihilation of nonwhite people (and those aligned with them) from the planet. It is told through a series of diary entries that Turner makes from September 16, 1991, to November 9, 1993, the day he pilots an airplane into the Pentagon in a suicide mission. July 19, 1993, is an especially exciting day for him, as Turner witnesses 'what surely must be one of the biggest mass migrations in history,' the evacuation of Black people, Latinos, and immigrants at 'a rate of better than a million a day.' Once nonwhite people are gone, he writes, the 'air seems cleaner, the sun brighter, life more joyous.' The diary entries are framed by a foreword and an epilogue, said to have been written in 2099 and reflecting back on these world-changing events. The novel, which is horrifying and heartless, slowly acclimates readers to greater levels of violence and hatred, with healthy doses of propaganda justifying large-scale murder. Black people are depicted as rapists and cannibals, Jews as rapacious and controlling, and white people who believe in a multicultural society as race traitors who also deserve to die. I purchased the $30 paperback, now in its third edition, the first to be published under William Pierce's name rather than his pseudonym, Andrew Macdonald. The book was advertised on Amazon, shockingly, as a 'futuristic action-adventure novel.' The pitch for the book had gotten a thorough makeover, the stain of extremist violence whitewashed by a seemingly innocent, policy-based appeal. Amazon no longer warned customers that The Turner Diaries was infamous; it offered only the publisher's description of the novel as one 'that warns us of how American society might unravel if the immigration and racial policies being pursued then—which are being pursued to an even greater extent today—were allowed to continue.' This language, which existed on sales pages before January 6, also appears on other sites where the book has remained available online, including Books-A-Million and On Amazon, the book's publisher, which is presumably the creator of the alarming description, was listed as the innocuous-sounding Cosmotheist Books. A search for the publisher leads to the National Alliance, which invites new members committed to 'a thorough rooting out of Semitic and other non-Aryan values.' Amazon was sharing profits from the book with a neo-Nazi organization, one that I was now indirectly funding. That the book had appeared for sale again on Amazon now that Trump is president again didn't strike me as all that surprising. The start of Trump's second term calls to mind familiar themes from the novel. I am not suggesting that the president or those in his immediate circle have read it—only that the book, now in circulation for roughly half a century, has informed the thinking of people who yearn to 'make America great again' by expelling immigrants and appealing to white grievances. In The Turner Diaries, those who have governed America are blamed for granting 'automatic citizenship to everyone who had managed to sneak across the Mexican border,' and liberalism is derided as 'an essentially feminine, submissive world view.' Anger is also directed at the mainstream media: 'One day we will have a truly American press in this country, but a lot of editors' throats will have to be cut first.' When the current Trump administration reportedly pushed out two Black military leaders, General Charles Q. Brown Jr. and Lieutenant General Telita Crosland, following Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's broader calls to rid the armed forces of DEI, I couldn't help thinking of Turner's lament that the U.S. Army was more than 40 percent Black, and that 'the day will come when we must make our move inside the military.' In May, Trump invited white South African refugees to America. When asked by a journalist why he had done so, he repeated the sort of discredited claims of white genocide that fill the pages of The Turner Diaries, while blaming the press for covering it up: 'It's a genocide that's taking place that you people don't want to write about.' (South Africa does have a very high murder rate, but overwhelmingly, the victims are Black.) The roundups and expulsions in the novel rhyme with the Trump administration's error-prone but unapologetic deportation strategy. Some purges in The Turner Diaries are based on mistaken identities and false accusations, but 'there was no admitting to the possibility of mistakes'; acting with 'arbitrariness and unpredictability' was part of the plan. On June 15, Trump posted on Truth Social words that echo the novel's xenophobic rhetoric: 'We must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America's largest Cities' to 'reverse the tide of Mass Destruction Migration that has turned once Idyllic Towns into scenes of Third World Dystopia.' It may be a coincidence that the Los Angeles metropolitan area, to which Trump has deployed Marines and the National Guard, is the site deliberately chosen in the novel to trigger the violent clashes that foment militarization in the country. I would be interested to know whether Stephen Miller, the Trump adviser responsible for overseeing the recent harsh immigration roundups in Los Angeles, has read Pierce's novel; we do know that he sent emails to Breitbart News recommending Jean Raspail's 1973 The Camp of the Saints, a novel that the Southern Poverty Law Center has called 'a sort of anti-immigration analog to The Turner Diaries. ' The center's website still warns about the dangers of both books. Recently, I went back to Amazon, only to discover that The Turner Diaries had disappeared: By early June, the site had erased all traces of the novel. The title had even vanished from my browsing history. I reached out to Amazon; a spokesperson referred me to content guidelines prohibiting the promotion of 'hate speech' and confirmed that the title had been discovered and removed. What they wouldn't tell me is why it had been briefly available, even on Amazon's sites in Germany and Canada, countries where The Turner Diaries has been banned. I wondered whether the books' appearance was a subversive act by an employee who holds extremist sympathies, or was perhaps authorized by someone who had seen Amazon's CEO, Jeff Bezos, squelch the endorsement of Kamala Harris in The Washington Post (which he owns) and donate $1 million to Trump's inauguration. But this is speculation. What is badly needed is transparency. The Turner Diaries may remain invisible to many Americans, but its effect on what is happening in the country today is plain to see.
Spectator
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
From apprentice to master playwright: Shakespeare learns his craft
Pub quiz masters with a taste for William Shakespeare are spoiled for choice when it comes to red letter years. The playwright's birth and death, the building and burning down of the Globe, and the publication of the First Folio (1564, 1616, 1599, 1613, 1623) are all dates that sit dustily in the corners of many of our brains, ready to be summoned when trivia duty calls. But 1576? Not so much. Shakespeare was 12, ink-stained and anonymous at grammar school in Stratford-upon-Avon. Which only goes to show that untrammelled bardolatry isn't good for theatre history, because even while tweenager William was memorising his Latin vocab a turning point in English drama was under wayin Shoreditch. In that year the actor and joiner James Burbage (father of the future star Richard) signed a lease for half an acre of the former Holywell priory, tapped his brother-in-law for investment on the airy promise of future riches and set about constructing the Theatre, the country's first complete and purpose-built commercial playhouse. (Those qualifications are important: adapted or multipurpose venues had been used by companies of players for many years.) It was timber frame, polygonal, three storeys high, lime-plastered and gaudily decorated, and within a few years of its construction already iconic. In 1578 a city preacher took aim at the 'gorgeous playing place', named after 'the old heathenish theatre at Rome, a show-place of all beastly and filthy matters'. This suburban Coliseum was soon followed by others – the Curtain, the Rose, the Swan, and, before the century was out, the Globe, itself fashioned from the Theatre's timbers. Big amphitheatres needed to lure audiences through the door with a constantly changing repertoire. Burbage's innovation created the conditions for a whole new theatre industry and a brand new profession with an undecided name. 'Playwright' was originally a slur, associating writers with laborious craftspeople such as cartwrights and shipwrights; and 'playpatcher' was no better. Most dramatists liked to pretend they were still 'poets'. But, as Daniel Swift argues, the Theatre and the art that emerged from it need to be understood in the industrious, ambitious context of manufacturing and trading London, where the livery companies (guilds of craftsmen and merchants) formed the bedrock of the urban economy and the city's civic consciousness. It was members of the Worshipful Company of Carpenters who built the Theatre, and it was guild infrastructure – pathways to employment via apprenticeship; a collectivist attitude to financing – that enabled the old companies of touring players to plant themselves in the capital as permanent amenities. There was never to be a Worshipful Company of Thespians, but guild members (Grocers, Bricklayers, Mercers and more) are everywhere to be found in the story of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre. There has been a recent crop of excellent books about the vibrant state of public performance in the decades before Shakespeare, as well as the rich artistic culture of the guilds themselves. The script for the annual Lord Mayor's Show – the closest thing the English Renaissance got to an Olympic opening ceremony – was a coveted gig for London's playwrights. Swift's concern is with the guild-mindedness of the early pioneers of English commercial theatre – the 'start-up comedians', as the pedantic writer Gabriel Harvey called them. (He meant players who are socially pushy, not actors who base themselves in WeWork offices.) And naturally the big beast here is Shakespeare, who emerges in Swift's reading not as a 'minor deity but a labouring writer' – whose acquisition of genius can be understood as the artisan's progress from apprentice to journeyman to master. It is refreshing to read an accessible history of Shakespeare's pre-Globe career, although the observation that we seldom consider his twentysomething years in London will come as a surprise to fans of Shakespeare in Love or the television series Will. And I wasn't sure what to make of Swift's invitation to imagine Shakespeare as a literal playwright's apprentice, his 'name upon that indenture, bound for a term of seven years to learn the art and mystery of playwriting'. It's hard enough to keep the conversation about Shakespeare's biography grounded in sanity without inventing documents that could never have existed. But I was taken with the idea that the standout works of Shakespeare's early career – Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream – can be imagined as his 'masterpieces': not just exemplary achievements in art – although they're that, too – but the accomplished artefacts produced by a graduating journeyman to prove his skill and range and claim his mastership in a trade. It's a nifty way of acknowledging Shakespeare's debt to imitation, inspiration and collaboration. There is plenty to interest the passionate Shakespearean here; and although the book contains some transcriptional errors and a few howlers (including a citation from that undyingly persistent 19th-century forger John Payne Collier), it offers provocations to scholars, too. And in the story of Burbage's litigation-plagued Theatre we learn a valuable lesson: never embark on complex building projects with your in-laws.
Scroll.in
03-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Scroll.in
How to live through the end of the world: Read William Shakespeare's play ‘Cymbeline'
Written in 1611, Shakespeare's Cymbeline is a raw mess – full of feeling and as messy as life. The 18th-century man of letters, Samuel Johnson decried the play as a work of 'unresisting imbecility', a hotch-potch of incongruities. It's true that it's hard to even know what kind of play Cymbeline is. The First Folio, the first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays, presents it as the last of his tragedies. But it's also, all at once, a history play, a pastoral, a fairytale, a pantomime and a tragicomedy. Set in ancient Britain at the time of the birth of Christ, Cymbeline stitches together three plots. In one, Posthumus (the banished husband of Innogen, King Cymbeline's daughter) accepts a wager with Iachimo that the sleazy Italian will not be able to seduce his wife. In the second, after 20 years, King Cymbeline's abducted sons (and Innogen's brothers) are restored to him. And in the third, refusing to pay tribute to the emperor, tiny Britain picks a fight with the majesty of imperial Rome. In the age of anxiety What makes Cymbeline such a potent play for our own age of anxiety is how Shakespeare weaves a tale about the collapse of everything known, as connections dissolve, and lays out how we may discover ourselves anew in the radically altered world. Written late in his career, in Cymbeline, Shakespeare rips up all the ways he's been doing things and suddenly starts afresh. Here, some few years before his retirement, he foregoes the complex psychology of his great tragedies and opts for archetypes of fairytale and romance. But in striking out for this new artistic territory, he also turns to himself as his own best source. Like an ageing rock band contracted for one last farewell tour, in Cymbeline, Shakespeare's back playing the hits. Like King Lea r, Cymbeline is set in ancient Britain. Sneering Iachimo is Iago's ghost and Posthumus, a dollar-store Othello. Innogen is Shakespeare's last cross-dressing heroine, passing as a boy, a faded echo of witty Rosalind of As You Like It and sad Viola of Twelfth Night. There's fun in Rosalind and Viola's changed identities, but Innogen puts on boy's clothes to escape. Her father condemns her as disobedient for marrying Posthumus, and instead pushes her towards her step-brother, the fatuous bully Cloten. Innogen's time as a boy is joyless, as she learns that her beloved Posthumus wants her killed. She's a new person now, not Innogen, but 'Fidele'. Unmoored, adrift, she unwittingly finds her brothers, falls ill and mistakenly consumes a drug that puts her into a sleep so deep she appears to be dead. She wakes from this seeming death beside a headless body that she takes to be her murdered husband, but is in fact the villainous Cloten. Desperate with grief, she touches the flowers that have been strewn on the corpse, and smears herself with his blood. It's as stark a scene as Shakespeare ever wrote in its unstable unity of tender beauty and suffering. Innogen sighs: 'These flowers are like the pleasures of the world, This bloody man, the care on't,' and in that conjunction sums up the extremities of life and of this play. When a Roman soldier finds her, she tells him: 'I am nothing; or if not, Nothing to be were better.' Dying to live Politically, too, things are disintegrating. The play multiplies broken bonds, unpaid debts and contracts denied – including both the marriage contract, and the debt of tribute owed to Rome by Britain. Following Innogen's passage through suffering and figurative death, Posthumus undergoes the same process. He has already earned his name by outliving his parents. Reduced, like Innogen, to all but nothing, believed to be dead, but actually in prison, Posthumus receives a vision of his dead family and of forgiving Jove, the divine father of the Roman Gods. Love and social unity have died, but in this mystical scene, the possibility returns of renewal. Both Innogen and Posthumus must 'die' to live. Off stage, in distant Bethlehem, a nativity takes place that signals the death of the old Rome – but also the regeneration of all things. And so the story commits itself to the reconciliation achieved in wonder. This is a play where the word 'miracle' becomes a verb, just as Innogen and Posthumus, and old, foolish King Cymbeline himself come to understand how even the most distressed life may open to bliss. 'The gods do mean to strike me to death with mortal joy,' declares an amazed Cymbeline, as the play offers us a vision of that astonishing unity of suffering and redemption. We may doubt that such wonder could exist for us today. But Shakespeare's full look at the worst enables us too to imagine the sense of hopeful possibility found in his brilliant conclusion. It is a wonderful play.
CNN
24-04-2025
- Entertainment
- CNN
Rare set of first editions of Shakespeare's plays could fetch $6 million at auction
A set of the first four editions of William Shakespeare's collected works is expected to sell for up to £4.5 million ($6 million) at auction next month. Sotheby's auction house announced the sale on Wednesday, Shakespeare's 461st birthday. It said the May 23 sale will be the first time since 1989 that a set of the First, Second, Third and Fourth Folios has been offered at auction as a single lot. The auction house estimated the sale price at between £3.5 million and £4.5 million. After Shakespeare's death in 1616, his plays were collected into a single volume by his friends John Heminges and Henry Condell, actors and shareholders in the playwright's troupe, the King's Men. The First Folio — fully titled 'Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories & Tragedies' — contained 36 plays, of which half were published there for the first time. Without the book, scholars say, plays including 'Macbeth,' 'The Tempest' and 'Twelfth Night' might have been lost. Sotheby's called the volume 'without question the most significant publication in the history of English literature.' Related article World's oldest Hebrew Bible sells for a record-breaking $38.1 million About 750 copies were printed in 1623, of which about 230 are known to survive. All but a few are in museums, universities or libraries. One of the few First Folios in private hands sold for $9.9 million at an auction in 2020. The First Folio proved successful enough that an updated edition, the Second Folio, was published in 1632, a third in 1663 and a fourth in 1685. Although the First Folio is regarded as the most valuable, the third is the rarest, with 182 copies known to survive. It is believed the third book's rarity is because some of the stock was destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666. The Third Folio included seven additional plays, but only one — 'Pericles, Prince of Tyre' — is believed to be by Shakespeare.
Japan Today
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Japan Today
Set of Shakespeare folios to be sold in rare London auction
A First Folio edition of William Shakespeares' plays (1623), considered one of the most important books in English literature A set of four Shakespeare folios estimated to be worth more than £3.5 million ($4.7 million) will go on sale in London next month, auction house Sotheby's said Wednesday. The First Folio, published in 1623, was the first collection of William Shakespeare's plays and is considered one of the most important books in English literature. Without it, up to half of the writer's plays would likely have been lost, including "Macbeth", "Twelfth Night" and "Julius Caesar". Around 235 of the 750 copies believed to have been published during this initial printing have survived. A new print run in 1632 gave rise to the Second Folio, which contained amendments to the initial folio, while the Third Folio containing seven additional plays appeared in 1664. The third is the rarest of the folios, with many copies believed to have been lost in the Great Fire of London in 1666. The sequence was completed with the Fourth Folio in 1685. Generations of bibliophiles have dreamed of owning a full set, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to achieve with fewer copies in private hands. The last time all four were offered as a single lot was in New York in 1989. The set to be sold by Sotheby's on May 23, with an estimate of £3.5 to £4.5 million, was brought together in 2016. "The folios were large, expensive, and prestigious publications that embodied a claim that Shakespeare, a professional writer in the commercial theatre (rather than a poet writing for an elite), had created a legacy that deserved to be passed down the ages," Sotheby's said. "The vast majority of all four Folios are to be found in institutions and this is a rare opportunity to acquire a complete set," it added. The First Folio was published about seven years after Shakespeare's death and contains thirty-six plays, eighteen of them printed for the first time. Famous diarist Samuel Pepys bought a Folio in 1664 and King Charles I read and annotated a copy of the Second Folio while imprisoned in the 1640s. © 2025 AFP
