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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).

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In bibliography, book history, collaboration, libraries, marginalia, milton, paleography, reading, shakespeare, writing
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CALL FOR PROPOSALS: Cambridge Elements in Shakespeare and Text

June 16, 2022 Claire M. L. Bourne

Image courtesy of Aaron T. Pratt, Harry Ransom Center (University of Texas at Austin).

Along with my co-editor Rory Loughnane (University of Kent), I am delighted to invite proposals for Cambridge Elements in Shakespeare and Text, a brand new series of short books about the textual histories, present, and futures of the Shakespearean text.

We are interested in work that thinks in new ways about textual matters around Shakespeare and stretches the boundaries of what might be considered “a Shakespearean text.” We especially welcome proposals from early career scholars and those with something to say about textual matters around Shakespeare from the vantage of fields outside book history.

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In bibliography, book history, collaboration, editing, research, shakespeare, writing, CFP
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SHAKESPEARE / TEXT: Contemporary Readings in Textual Studies, Editing, & Performance

June 16, 2022 Claire M. L. Bourne

One of the great highlights of the difficult last few years was editing Shakespeare / Text, a collection of twenty agenda-setting essays about the study and use of the Shakespearean text over time and in our time. The collection was published in 2021 by Bloomsbury under The Arden Shakespeare imprint. It is part of a new series called Arden Shakespeare Intersections, general edited by Sonia Massai, Farah Karim-Cooper, Lucy Munro, and Gordon McMullan.

Written by 21 leading experts on textual matters, each chapter challenges a single entrenched binary—such as book/theater, source/adaptation, text/paratext, canon/apocrypha, sense/nonsense, extant/ephemeral, material/digital and original/copy—that has come to both define and limit the way we read, analyze, teach, perform, and edit Shakespeare today.

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In bibliography, book history, collaboration, shakespeare, theater history, writing, editing
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Featured
Making Q1 Phylaster: Quartos in the Classroom (Redux)
October 16, 2016
book history, collaboration, pedagogy, playbooks, teaching w/ book history
Making Q1 Phylaster: Quartos in the Classroom (Redux)
October 16, 2016
book history, collaboration, pedagogy, playbooks, teaching w/ book history

Last year, I started reserving a day in each of my Shakespeare courses for students to "make" quartos. I wrote at some length (almost exactly a year ago) about the experience of making Q1 Hamlet with my students at VCU and posted instructions, information about supplies for the activity, and a link to the sheets (which I made from EEBO printouts).

This semester, I'm teaching a senior seminar called "Early Modern Drama: Manuscript, Print, Performance" that focuses on the material-textual processes that facilitated the making of theatrical performance and printed texts of the plays. So far, my students have reverse-engineered scribal backstage plots of Doctor Faustus, performed a scene from the same play using cue scripts, and "made" quartos.

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October 16, 2016
book history, collaboration, pedagogy, playbooks, teaching w/ book history
Thoughts Towards an Essay: Typography is/as Pedagogy
January 21, 2016
book history, pedagogy, typography, pilcrows, reading
Thoughts Towards an Essay: Typography is/as Pedagogy
January 21, 2016
book history, pedagogy, typography, pilcrows, reading

This coming March, I'm participating in a seminar at the Shakespeare Association of America Annual Meeting called "Teaching Textual Studies in/through Shakespeare," organized by Sarah Nevill and Brett Hirsch. I considered writing about one of the assignment I designed for my Shakespeare course last term—making a quarto or adopt-a-book. I thought writing about them at some length would give me occasion to reflect on what worked well and what I need to tweak if I use them again. Both assignments were attempts to teach early modern textual histories at an institution that has special collections that skew sharply post-1900, so I thought I might also discuss these assignments in that context. 

But then I remembered a conversation I had with a few people on Twitter last year...

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January 21, 2016
book history, pedagogy, typography, pilcrows, reading
book history / bibliography / pedagogy / &c sessions at #mla16
December 22, 2015
conferences, mla, pedagogy, collaboration, book history, bibliography
book history / bibliography / pedagogy / &c sessions at #mla16
December 22, 2015
conferences, mla, pedagogy, collaboration, book history, bibliography

This January, I will be presenting a paper at the Modern Language Association (MLA) convention for the first time. It won't be my first time at MLA (I've been before for job interviews), but it will be my first time navigating the convention's extensive line-up of panels, roundtables, &c.

To that end, I've compiled a list of sessions that constellate around my interests in book history, bibliography, remediation, and pedagogy. This list is not designed to be comprehensive but rather to give others who might be interested in similar fields a starting point for their own #mla16 itineraries.

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December 22, 2015
conferences, mla, pedagogy, collaboration, book history, bibliography
 
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