By Rebecca Rego Barry for the Guardian, 14 March 2016
An auction in Los Angeles on 22 March reveals a side of the rugged American film star Charlton Heston that his fans and detractors might have missed. Heston, who died in 2008, won an Academy Award for his part in the epic Ben-Hur (1959) and later served five terms as president of the National Rifle Association (NRA).
But Heston considered himself to be a Shakespearean actor at heart. He once said “the great roles are always Shakespearean”, and he made his Broadway debut in Antony and Cleopatra. So it may not surprise that Heston owned some books by the Bard. And he kept not ordinary reading copies, but instead several rare Shakespeare volumes.
His collection included four original leaves from the first four collected editions of Shakespeare’s works, also known as Folios (1623-1685), bundled alongside limited edition reproductions for resale in 1935 and now estimated to sell for $3,000 to $5,000; three comedies removed from a Second Folio (1632), estimated at $3,000 to $5,000; and four tragedies removed from a Second Folio, estimated at $5,000 to $7,000.
The two greatest rarities from Heston’s Beverly Hills home library, however, are a 1673 edition of Macbeth and a Hamlet from 1676. Referred to as quartos, these slim, pamphlet-like editions of individual Shakespearean plays are also known as player’s editions, in which “the emphasis is on the contemporary performance”, explained Adam G Hooks, professor of English at the University of Iowa and author of Selling Shakespeare: Biography, Bibliography, and the Book Trade. “The Hamlet in particular is an interesting artifact,” he said, “since certain passages were omitted from the performance, and marked typographically in the quarto.”
0
0
0
0
Comments