Folger Shakespeare Library

• 1. Introduction

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  The Folger Shakespeare Library holds 82 copies of the 1623 First Folio, the book that preserved roughly half of Shakespeare's plays for posterity. Of the 235 known surviving copies in the world, more than a third sit in a single building on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. That building is privately endowed, administered by the trustees of a small Massachusetts college, and surrounded by plants taken directly from Shakespeare's own texts. What kind of place is this, really? How did it get here, and who built it? The story begins with a single purchase in 1889: a 1685 Fourth Folio, bought by a Standard Oil executive who had no idea what he was starting.

• 2. The Collector Behind It

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  Henry Clay Folger was a graduate of Amherst College and Columbia University who rose to become an executive at Standard Oil of New York. His collecting habit started modestly in 1889 with that Fourth Folio, but over the following decades it grew into something no institution could match. He and his wife Emily Jordan Folger shared the obsession, working together on the collection as a joint enterprise rather than a solo pursuit.

  Toward the end of World War I, the Folgers began looking for a permanent home for what they had gathered. They settled on a site in Washington, D.C., adjacent to the Library of Congress, a neighbor that would lend their project immediate scholarly credibility. The land was occupied by a row of townhouses, and Folger spent several years quietly buying up the separate lots one by one.

  The Library of Congress had actually marked the site for its own expansion, but in 1928 Congress passed a resolution releasing the land for Folger's project instead. That resolution was a turning point. The cornerstone was laid in May 1930, but Folger died soon after the ceremony. He left the bulk of his fortune in trust, with Amherst College named as administrator.

• 3. Building a Vision in Marble

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  Folger's search for an architect began with an acquaintance named Alexander B. Trowbridge, who had redesigned a home in Glen Cove, Long Island, in the old English style the Folgers favored. Trowbridge signed on in 1928 but preferred a consulting role and steered the project toward French emigre Paul Philippe Cret.

  The two men shared a vision: a neoclassical exterior stripped of decorative fussiness. The Folgers had initially wanted something entirely Elizabethan, but they accepted the argument that a neoclassical building would sit more naturally among the other structures on Capitol Hill. The Elizabethan spirit was preserved another way. Nine carved marble reliefs wrap the front facade, depicting scenes drawn from A Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, King Lear, Richard III, Hamlet, and Henry IV, Part 1, moving left to right across the building's face. The sculptor was John Gregory.

  Inside, the architects switched registers entirely. The building's interior follows a Tudor idiom: oak paneling, plaster ceilings, a large stone fireplace that has never been lit. The stained-glass window overlooking what is now the main reading room was designed by Nicola D'Ascenzo, who filled its panes with the Seven Ages of Man soliloquy from As You Like It. Painted on the theater ceiling is the line from the same play: "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players."

• 4. Opening Amid Hardship

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  The stock market crash of 1929 reduced Folger's estate to something smaller than he had planned, though still substantial. Emily Folger stepped in and supplied the funds needed to finish the project. The library opened on the 23rd of April 1932, the anniversary of what tradition holds as Shakespeare's date of birth.

  Emily remained active in the library's administration until shortly before her own death in 1936. The first official reader through the doors was B. Roland Lewis, who used his access to produce The Shakespeare Documents: Facsimiles, Transliterations, Translations, and Commentary. The first fellowships went out in 1936, the same year Emily died.

  Early exhibitions gave visitors a sense of the collection's range. Ralph Waldo Emerson's personal copy of Shakespeare's works, an Elizabethan lute, and Edwin Booth's costume for Richard III all appeared in those early shows. Then the Second World War changed everything. Thirty thousand items from the collection were loaded up and transported under guard to Amherst College's Converse Library, where they sat for the duration of the conflict, kept safe in case Washington became a target.

  Former U.S. President Calvin Coolidge, an Amherst graduate, served as the second chairman of the board of trustees in those early years.

• 5. What the Collection Contains

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  Beyond the 82 First Folios, the Folger holds more than 250,000 books spanning the mid-15th century to the present day. That total includes 229 early modern quartos of Shakespeare's plays and poems, 119 copies of the Second, Third, and Fourth Folios, and around 7,000 later editions of Shakespeare's works printed in more than 70 languages. For books in English printed before 1640, the Folger's holdings make it the third largest collection in the world.

  The manuscript collection runs to some 60,000 items, ranging from letters by Elizabeth I and John Donne to documents in the hand of Mark Twain and Walt Whitman. Among the most remarkable is the earliest known staging diagram for any play in England, held within the Macro Manuscript alongside the only surviving copies of three early morality plays: The Castle of Perseverance, Mankind, and Wisdom. The collection also holds the only extant complete copy of the first quarto of Titus Andronicus, published in 1594.

  Other singular items include thirteen letters from John Donne describing his personal crisis after marrying Anne More without her father's consent, a list of quotations George Eliot compiled while writing Middlemarch, and the childhood copy of Cicero's De officiis belonging to the future Henry VIII, inscribed in his own hand: "Thys boke is myne Prynce Henry." For performance history specifically, the Folger holds 250,000 playbills, 2,000 promptbooks, costumes, recordings, and props, plus upwards of 90,000 works of visual art.

• 6. Programs and Public Life

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  The library's first director, Joseph Quincy Adams Jr., served from 1940 to 1946. It was a later director, O.B. Hardison, who shaped what the Folger looks like to a public audience. Taking over in 1969, Hardison brought the Elizabethan Theatre into compliance with Washington, D.C. fire safety codes, which finally allowed professional theatrical productions. The Folger Theatre Group formed in 1970, and its early shows included Dionysus Wants You!, an adaptation of The Bacchae as a rock musical, alongside a production of Twelfth Night.

  Hardison also founded the Folger Institute in 1970 to coordinate academic programs across the institution, and the O.B. Hardison Poetry Series, which has brought readers including Octavio Paz, Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg, Seamus Heaney, and Rita Dove to the library since that same year.

  Folger Consort, the library's resident early music ensemble, was founded in 1977 by artistic directors Robert Eisenstein and Christopher Kendall. The ensemble performs medieval, Renaissance, and baroque music at the Elizabethan Theatre, the Washington National Cathedral, and the Music Center at Strathmore. Since 2006, Folger Consort has won Best Classical Chamber Ensemble at the Washington Area Music Awards five times.

  The Folger Theatre has, since its 1992 inception, staged over half the plays in Shakespeare's First Folio and earned 135 Helen Hayes Award nominations, winning 23. From 1982 to 2021, artistic producer Janet Alexander Griffin guided that output.

• 7. Education and Access

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  Educational outreach at the Folger began in the early 1970s, focusing on active learning approaches to Shakespeare for K-12 students and teachers. Teachers attend day-long and month-long programs at the library, and the Education department publishes materials for classroom use. The Emily Jordan Folger Children's Shakespeare Festival, founded in 1980, allows elementary students to perform every spring. The Secondary School Shakespeare Festival, founded the following year, brings students from grades 7 through 12 to perform half-hour Shakespeare scenes on the Folger stage.

  The Teaching Shakespeare Institute runs as a four-week summer program for middle and high school teachers, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Fifty teachers attended the inaugural session in 1984; the annual cohort is now capped at 25. By 2015, more than 775 teachers had completed the program.

  The Folger Institute, which has coordinated scholarly research since 1970, runs the Folger Institute Consortium, linking resources across more than 40 universities. It also runs the Center for the History of British Political Thought, founded in 1985 to promote scholarship on three hundred years of British political ideas.

  Online access expanded significantly in 1996, when staff and readers gained access to "Hamnet", the collection's first online catalog. The public gained access to that catalog in 2000. The Digital Image Collection, known internally as LUNA, now provides over 80,000 images of the collection under a Creative Commons license.

• 8. Renewal and Continuity

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  The Folger and its theater underwent major renovations from 2018 to 2024, with the building closed to daytime visitors from January 2020 until its reopening on the 21st of June 2024. The project added a new learning lab, new exhibits, outdoor gardens with a Juliet balcony, and a reimagined great hall housing a cafe called Quill and Crumb.

  The garden at the east end of the building features plants drawn from Shakespeare's plays, opened in 1989 among four magnolias Emily Jordan Folger had planted in 1932. In 2003, sculptures by Greg Wyatt joined those plants. The west garden tells a smaller but stranger story: sculptor Brenda Putnam was hired in May 1930 to create a statue of Puck. Decades of outdoor exposure gradually weakened the piece, and in 2000 Puck's right hand was found across the street at the Library of Congress. The original statue was moved indoors and restored, and now stands near the gift shop.

  Dr. Farah Karim Cooper became director in 2024, following Michael Witmore, who had led the library since the 1st of July 2011. The Dering Manuscript, one of the collection's most prized items, remains the earliest known manuscript for any of Shakespeare's works. Its continued presence in the reading rooms of a library on Capitol Hill, inside a building whose marble exterior was carved with scenes from Macbeth and Hamlet, reflects the singular ambition Henry Folger set in motion with a single purchase more than a century ago.