Last week, I posted an account of making Q1 Hamlet quartos with my Shakespeare students. You can find a pdf of the sheets I made for this activity here.* To produce these sheets, I used the good old fashioned technique of cutting up EEBO printouts and taping them back together.
Read moreMaking Q1 Hamlet: Collate, Fold, Stab, Stitch
Last week, the students in my Shakespeare in Context course—the very same who are working their way through the Adopt-a-Book assignment I've written about here and here—spent a single 50-minute class period constructing a quarto of The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet Prince of Denmarke (1603). This is not a book history course, even though (1) I use the textual histories of the plays to teach close reading; and (2) we study textual afterlives in order to think about the non-authorial agencies involved in creating "Shakespeare" over time and space.
I've been excited to see so many of my colleagues at other institutions (Aaron Pratt, Piers Brown, Megan Heffernan, to name a few) report back about how their classes fared with similar quarto-making activities and have been following along with great interest as my colleague Joshua Eckhardt's graduate seminar (re)creates a Virginia Company sermon from scratch in the VCUarts print shop.
Read moreAdopt-A-Book Assignment: PART 2
As a wrote about a few weeks ago, I have asked the students in my Shakespeare in Context course to adopt an edition of one of the plays on the syllabus and write about it. The only stipulation is that the book be a "used" book (and, yes, library books count). I've come to think about my students' individual efforts to acquire their books together as a process of building a special collection unique to this class. When they hand in the third and final part of the assignment in November, I'll have 32 different editions of Shakespeare on my desk, many of which I will be seeing in person for the first time.
I have just finished reading my students' descriptions of their books and wanted to share a few observations:
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