A man on a mission to view every known first edition of a book containing Williams Shakespeare's plays has visited New Zealand.
In his first trip to Aotearoa, Gregory Doran, a former artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, viewed the first folio on Thursday at the Central City Library in Auckland.
Speaking to 1News from the Central City Library's Special Collections room, Doran said it was "just great" to be in Aotearoa.
"I didn't realise that the First Folio would bring me to New Zealand or Shakespeare would bring me to New Zealand but as he has been pretty much a passport through my life, I maybe shouldn't be surprised," he said.
Doran is known for keeping Shakespeare's work alive in today's culture. He began his career with the coveted Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) as an actor before transitioning to work behind the scenes, directing major productions.
"Somehow, because Shakespeare manages to articulate, imagine, Shakespeare gives us words when words fail us. And somehow, people are always able to find those words in those plays," he said.
"That's why we still read him, sometimes reluctantly, but we still read. Every time somebody quotes Shakespeare, there is a different situation and reason behind it."
In 2012, he was appointed the RSC's artistic director — a role he stepped down from in April 2022. Doran will hold the title of artistic director emeritus until the end of this year, helping to lead special projects including bringing to life his 50th production for the RSC.
"I have great joy with Shakespeare in my life. I know it's difficult, it was written 400 years ago, but if you can embrace that difficulty, what opens up is this extraordinary wisdom," Doran said.
"When I was young, what grabbed me about Shakespeare was stories of witches and fairies, guys with donkey's heads and shipwrecks and ghosts, and they were just fabulous stories.
"And then as I grew up, I realised he knows about love and about obsession and jealousy and ambition and then suddenly you begin to realise that the stories are deeply complex politically, and they show all the sides of the story."
Shakespeare died in 1616, but seven years later two of his friends — John Heminge and Henry Condell — put together his works which became known as the First Folio.
Without the books, 18 of Shakespeare's plays, including Macbeth, The Tempest, Julius Caesar and Twelfth Night would have never been published.
"We would still think he was the greatest writer in the world because we'd still have Hamlet and King Lear and Midsummer Night's Dream, but so many of those plays would have been lost forever had his two mates not decided to put together the First Folio," Doran said.
While once identical, today each edition of the First Folio differs from another, having been on their own journeys in the hands of varying owners over the past four centuries before being sold, gifted or lent to places including libraries, universities and theatres around the world.
The First Folio originals are scattered all around the world, with just three in the Southern Hemisphere, including the Auckland edition.
It was gifted to the citizens of Auckland by Sir George Grey in 1894 and can be viewed by anyone who wishes to see a piece of history in person.
Three are held in Stratford-upon-Avon where Shakespeare was born and died, which is also where Doran lives.
The journey to see more First Folio copies
As time dawned on the First Folio's 400th birthday, Doran had the idea to see some other of the 50 copies of the First Folio that are in the UK.
He travelled to Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester and became interested in them with locations all around the world.
With the support of the British Council, he was able to spend time in New Zealand, not only to view our folio, but host workshops with the Auckland Theatre Company.
Doran also found evidence Shakespeare is alive and well in Auckland after viewing the King Lear production currently running and meeting lead actor Michael Hurst who plays Lear.
The last time he saw the play was the production he'd directed with his late husband, actor Anthony Sher — a celebrated British actor — who passed away at his home from cancer in December 2021.
Sher defined the role as Everest for any actor given the challenge of climbing that great play.
When Doran was at the airport getting out some money, he spotted Sir Edmund Hillary on the $5 note.
"Now I know of two people in New Zealand who have conquered Everest," he said.
Doran says Shakespeare has given him words to articulate some of the most profound moments in life but also has given him greater understanding of his hardest times.
"I realised that Shakespeare taught me about grief. People were saying to me, 'oh, I'm sorry about you losing Tony, you'll feel him in the breeze, he'll be in the lapping of the waves on the shore', none of that worked for me.
"But at the end of King Lear, which Tony played at the end of his life, he's holding his dead daughter Cordelia in his arms, and he says, 'thou'lt come no more, never, never, never, never, never'. I used to wonder why Shakespeare had repeated 'never' five times and then when Tony died, the idea that I would 'never, never, never, never' see him again was the attempt to comprehend the scale of that loss.
"He knows us from 360 degrees, he can tell you about almost every human experience."
'People have found it special'
Around 750 copies were published as 'Mr William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories and Tragedies' but the whereabouts of only 235 are known today.
The most recent discovery of an original folio was in 2016 in the Isle of Bute.
Previous to that, a woman in Stockport, in the north of England, discovered someone had left one to her in their will. It had been in the attic of a home
"They do turn up," Doran says.
Some haven't survived the four centuries they've been circulating. At least one is known to have been burned in a fire while another was nearly destroyed in San Francisco's earthquake of 1906.
"There's a dramatic story of a woman running into a burning building to rescue this first folio."
But Doran is convinced some could be hiding in plain sight.
"There are many, many libraries that are simply uncatalogued and sometimes the First Folio isn't even marked on the outside, it's just a brown calf leather cover, so it could well be that people should just get out there and look.
"There are all sorts of possibilities of where they might turn up."
In 2019, Mills College in Oakland, California, sold their copy to raise money for the school. It went for just under $10 million.
"I think if people realise how pricey this book can be, they may look a little harder in their libraries," Doran said. "They are all different."
Central City Library also owns one of the original quarto — a much rarer paperback edition which is how Shakespeare's works were initially published.
Within each existing edition of the First Folios are evidence of them being owned and read over the four centuries.
One of Doran's favourite discoveries was seeing a series of cat paw prints across one of the pages.
"There's one copy and halfway across, over half the page, there are these muddy cat paw prints, but because they only go halfway across the page, somebody's clearly noticed the cat and got rid of the cat. I love that because it's sort of human," he says.
"In New York, there's a copy and you open it, and you can see the rusty outline of a pair of scissors. Somebody's lost their scissors and never found them — they're stuck inside the First Folio."
Some of the editions, including the one in Auckland, have very specific annotations.
"They're intriguing and they are evidence of people reading them over 400 years, that's what's so fascinating.
"What I'm finding on this quest is sort of what happened between the folio being printed and today is how over those 400 years people have read it, people have found it special."
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