Why I Loved the Star

February 16, 2016 Claire M. L. Bourne

A set of asterisks in The Adventure of Five Hours (London: Henry Herringman, 1663), T3229, Folger Shakespeare Library — A set of asterisks in *The Adventure of Five Hours* (London: Henry Herringman, 1663), T3229, Folger Shakespeare Library

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about stars.

In early November, Twitter replaced its ★ button with a ♥ button. Many Twitter users reacted negatively to the change, lamenting the loss of the ★'s neutrality, on the one hand, and its multi-valence, on the other. Clicking ★ underneath a tweet never automatically signaled agreement, but it is hard not to feel you're agreeing with a tweet when you click ♥ (especially when Twitter itself explicitly equates ♥-ing something with liking it).

The other day, I was writing about the use of asterisks in seventeenth-century English playbooks...

Thoughts Towards an Essay: Typography is/as Pedagogy

January 21, 2016 Claire M. L. Bourne

Detail of The Tragedy of Hamlet Prince of Denmark (1676), Horace Howard Furness Memorial Shakespeare Library, University of Pennsylvania, PR2807 A1 1676b. — Detail of *The Tragedy of Hamlet Prince of Denmark* (1676), Horace Howard Furness Memorial Shakespeare Library, University of Pennsylvania, PR2807 A1 1676b.

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...

"Beloveed [sic] Plays"

September 24, 2015 Claire M. L. Bourne

Ann Boner records her opinion of THE ATHEIST (1684) in the margins of this quarto, bound with B5326 (Copy 2), Folger Shakespeare Library.

I have a new piece up at The Collation, the Folger Shakespeare Library's research blog, about a heavily used, read, and damaged sammelband of eight late seventeenth-century play quartos. If you're interested at all in bindings, collection practices, traces of early reading (play-reading specifically), female readers, and/or ciphers (yes, ciphers!), then this might be worth a read. I have more questions about the book than I do answers, so I'd be grateful for your reactions, ideas, or suggestions (either here or over on The Collation).

For the full text of the post, click here.

READ MORE . . .