The story of how we came to know that the copy of the Shakespeare First Folio now in the Rare Book Department at the Free Library of Philadelphia was once owned and annotated by John Milton, author of Paradise Lost, is featured in this new documentary to mark the quatercentenary of the First Folio’s publication. Jason Scott-Warren and I discuss the “discovery” from our respective sides of the Atlantic: he in Cambridge, where Milton was a student almost four hundred years ago, and me in Philadelphia, where his copy of Shakespeare now resides.
Read moreOUT NOW! Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England
My first monograph Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England was published by Oxford University Press in 2020.
It is the first book-length study of early modern English playbook typography and tells a new history of drama from the period by considering the page designs of plays by Shakespeare and others printed between the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth century. It argues that typography, broadly conceived as the disposition of type on the page, was used creatively by printers, publishers, playwrights, and other agents of the book trade to make the effects of theatricality—from the most basic (textually articulating a change in speaker) to the more complex (registering the kinesis of bodies on stage—intelligible on the page.
Read moreVIDEO: Re-Reading Milton Re-Reading Shakespeare (SRS • June 30, 2020)
Yesterday, Jason Scott-Warren (Cambridge University) and I presented some updated findings about and readings of the marked up copy of Mr William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies (1623) housed in the Rare Book Department at the Free Library of Philadelphia. The talk was graciously hosted by the Society for Renaissance Studies and moderated by Daniel Starza Smith of King’s College London.
This particular copy of the first edition of Shakespeare’s plays was almost certainly owned and annotated by the poet John Milton, as Jason first proposed last September after reading an essay I had written about the reader’s marks. (See a digest of media coverage here.) Our talk moves beyond an effort to validate the attribution, as we consider possible timelines for Milton’s engagement with the playtexts based on palaeographic and other kinds of material evidence. How did Milton read and re-read Shakespeare? We also offer a new theory about the book’s provenance prior to its entering the historical record in an 1899 auction catalogue. If you were unable to tune in, a full playback of the talk and Q&A (with cat cameos) is available below.
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