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! The Case for John Milton as the Reader of the Free Library First Folio
Three and a half years ago, in September 2019, Jason Scott-Warren suggested that the handwriting in a copy of the Shakespeare First Folio in the Rare Book Department at the Free Library of Philadelphia might belong to John Milton. His claim was based on images of the marginalia published with an essay I had written about the 700+ handwritten inscriptions in the book and what they revealed about how one (then-anonymous) early reader engaged with the Shakespearean text. (The essay was published in Early Modern English Marginalia, edited by Katherine Acheson, for which Jason had also written a chapter.) My independent findings about the reader just so happened to match the Milton context well, both in terms of dating and modus operandi.
At long last, our article identifying Milton as the former owner and annotator of the Free Library First Folio—“‘thy unvalued Booke’: John Milton’s Copy of the Shakespeare First Folio”—has been published in Milton Quarterly (vol. 56).
Read moreVIDEO: Early Modern Typography / Race / Gender (Bibliographical Society of America)
In 2021, the Bibliographical Society of America graciously hosted a conversation about the intersection of typography (specifically, how typography was described, discussed, and understood to function culturally and politically) with discourses of race and gender in early modern England—and in our own moment.
The virtual roundtable covered how early modern typography—broadly construed as the design and disposition of type on paper and within the bounds of the book—was anything but a neutral container for the publication of early modern writing.
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