Milton's Holinshed: An Update

July 3, 2024 Claire M. L. Bourne

HRC -q- DA 130 H732 1587 Copy 2 - v. 3 GOD CAPITAL.jpg

Earlier this spring, I worked with Aaron T. Pratt and Jason Scott-Warren to authenticate an annotated copy of Holinshed’s Chronicles (1587) at the Phoenix Public Library as the copy once owned and marked up by the poet and polemicist John Milton. Our preliminary account of Milton’s annotations was published in the TLS in May.

Aaron returned to Phoenix last month to systematically collate and photograph the Holinshed and, while doing so, noticed an astonishing inky intervention (illustrated above, left) that we had not registered in our first couple of passes through the two massive bound volumes. Illustrated on the right is the same initial without the blot from a copy of the same edition at the Harry Ransom Center (HRC -q- DA 130 H732 1587 Copy 2 v. 3).

Jason has just published a blog post on the Cambridge Centre for Material Texts site about this iconoclastic moment. Read it to learn more about what may be going on here and whether Milton is the one responsible.

John Milton's Copy of Holinshed's CHRONICLES (1587)

May 15, 2024 Claire M. L. Bourne

One of several references to John Stow’s *Annales* in the copy of Holinshed’s *Chronicles* (1587) from the Alfred Knight Collection (REF 942 H717c 1586). Image by permission of the Phoenix Public Library.

On March 1, 2024, during a research forum at the Phoenix Public Library sponsored by the newly formed Arizona Book History Group, Aaron T. Pratt noticed two distinctive things about the marginal notes in the library’s copy of Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles (1587): an instantly recognizable two-stroke italic ‘e’ and unusually dark ink. The annotations in the Holinshed were reminiscent of handwritten notes in a copy of the Shakespeare First Folio now at the Free Library of Philadelphia—marginalia that Jason Scott-Warren and I have argued were inscribed by the poet and author of Paradise Lost John Milton.

OUT NOW! The Case for John Milton as the Reader of the Free Library First Folio

February 8, 2023 Claire M. L. Bourne

The “2d stanza” of the song sung to Mariana in *Measure for Measure*, added by hand on the last page of the play in the Free Library of Philadelphia’s copy of the First Folio (RBD EL SH15M 1623, sig. G6v).

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 MORE . . .