The Folger performance history collection includes a massive array of resources on past productions, including about 250,000 playbills and some 2,000 promptbooks. Although Shakespeare is well represented, these materials are not restricted to his work. Films, recordings, and more continue to be added to the collection, as do the papers of major theatrical figures. Some highlights of the collection are shown here, with more information about the scope of our performance collection below.
An overview of the performance history collection
Playbills and other ephemera
"Ephemera" is a general term for cheap, often fragile, items that were never meant to last for long. Needless to say, this makes them more likely to be rarities today, and a challenge to conservators. The ephemera collection at the Folger includes more than a quarter of a million playbills, primarily from the 19th century, and not limited to Shakespeare—an invaluable resource for research into American and British stage history. Scrapbooks, programs, theater tickets, paper toys, and more round out the collection.
Promptbooks
The Folger has about 2,000 promptbooks, roughly half of which are for Shakespeare productions. Promptbooks, the marked copies of plays prepared for professional productions, are among the best evidence for details of staging, effects, costumes, and cuts and adaptations of the text. Some of them are working promptbooks, reflecting the process of creating a production by its makers; others were produced as souvenirs, designed to capture the end result of a production, rather than its creation.
Films and recordings
The Folger has a substantial collection of Shakespeare productions on film, video, and DVD, from silent films to recent television and movie versions. Other materials in the collection, including press kits, souvenirs, and working screenplays, add context to works on film.
The Folger also holds many audio recordings, ranging from a dozen Victrola records to modern digital recordings.
Costumes and props
The Folger performance collection includes about three dozen complete or partial costumes, most of them from 19th-century or early 20th-century Shakespeare productions. Stage props include crowns, scepters, swords, money (for the character of Shylock), and a tambourine.
Actors and actresses represented by full or partial costumes include the married team of E.H. Sothern and Julia Marlowe, Ada Rehan, Lewis Waller, Charles Kean, Edwin Booth, and Herbert Beerbohm Tree.
Objects
The Folger collection of objets d’art is anchored by the Babette Craven Collection of Theatrical Memorabilia, one of the strongest postwar collections of early English ceramics. The Craven collection includes numerous rare English ceramic figures from potteries such as Derby, Bow, Wedgwood, and Minton, as well as plaques, tiles, boxes, and more. All of them celebrate figures of the 18th- and 19th-century English stage.
There are almost countless Shakespeare-themed objects in the Folger collection, including snuffboxes, teapots, and spoons. Many of the wooden examples are said to be carved from the wood of a mulberry tree that once grew at New Place, Shakespeare's last house at Stratford-upon-Avon.