VIDEO: Re-Reading Milton Re-Reading Shakespeare (SRS • June 30, 2020)

July 1, 2020 Claire M. L. Bourne

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.

Milton's Shakespeare: A Digest of Media Coverage

September 18, 2019 Claire M. L. Bourne

Suggested emendations to the text of ‘Romeo & Juliet’ in the Free Library of Philadelphia’s First Folio. [Reproduced with kind permission of the Free Library of Philadelphia’s Rare Book Department.]

Since my last post, there has been a flurry of media interest around the news of the very real possibility that the copy of the Shakespeare First Folio at the Free Library of Philadelphia once belonged to—and is indeed annotated by—John Milton. Jason Scott-Warren floated this claim on Cambridge’s Centre for Material Texts blog early last week. His post was shared and vetted widely on social media and quickly picked up by the mainstream press.

It has been heartening to see at least some of the coverage pick up on the way Jason was able to identify Milton as the plausible reader of this book, rather than focusing squarely on the discovery. In particular, see the pieces in The Philadelphia Inquirer and The New York Times and listen to Jason’s interview on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row. For a corrective to some of the reporting that characterizes the book as previously “hidden” and “languishing” in the Free Library, see Free Library rare book curator Caitlin Goodman’s op-ed for The Inquirer.

Click through for a digest of media coverage. I will continue to update this list, so please feel free to contact me if you come across an article, radio bit, or TV segment not listed.

With(out) Milton: Dating the Annotations in the Free Library of Philadelphia's First Folio

September 13, 2019 Claire M. L. Bourne

Detail of manuscript emendation and bracketing in the Free Library of Philadelphia’s copy of Mr William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (1623). [Image reproduced with kind permission of the Free Library of Philadelphia.] — Detail of manuscript emendation and bracketing in the Free Library of Philadelphia’s copy of *Mr William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies* (1623). [Image reproduced with kind permission of the Free Library of Philadelphia.]

Book history is full of dead ends, lost threads, and rabbit holes that lead to nowhere. You can work for a decade, as I did, on a single book—observing, describing, analyzing, hypothesizing, gathering corroborating evidence, following up on provenance leads, etc.—and still be left with gaping holes in the narrative of why the book ended up where it ended up and how it ended up in its present state.

For me, that book is an annotated copy of Mr William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (1623), known colloquially as the First Folio, now housed at the Free Library of Philadelphia’s Rare Book Department. More than 250 copies of this book survive and many of them show some evidence of early readership. So what makes this one different? Access, for one. In 1899, the book attracted the attention of Sidney Lee, who would be the first person to attempt a comprehensive census of extant copies of Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. It has also been described in Anthony J. West’s Census (2001) and Eric Rasmussen and West’s more recent Descriptive Catalogue (2012). But it has never attracted scholarly attention, most likely because it would be very difficult to find unless you knew to look for it. It is not catalogued online, nor has it been digitized. Furthermore, it is housed in a public library that, despite its impressive special collections, is not frequented by many scholars working on early modern drama. Indeed, I heard about this copy by word-of-mouth from Peter Stallybrass when I was a graduate student in Philadelphia. He thought the annotations were interesting, and he encouraged me to see what I could find out.

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