The younger poet paid tribute to his forebear in an epitaph published in the Second Folio of 1632, in which he testified to the ‘wonder and astonishment’ that Shakespeare created in his readers. If this book is what I think it is, it’s quite a big deal, since Shakespeare was, as we know, a huge influence on Milton. But nobody, in the age before digital cameras, took photos of curved vertical pen-strokes. One description refers to lots of curved vertical pen-strokes, perhaps akin to those that fill the margins of the Folio. The description of the annotations in one of these, Heraclides of Pontus’ Allegoriae (1544), now held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, sounds at least promising. The Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts lists nineteen books that have been thought to survive from Milton’s library, though many of those are lost, spurious or disputed. Palaeographers have also suggested that Milton dropped Greek-‘e’ after he returned from a visit to Italy in 1639, so that detail might also allow us to date the annotations. Wishfully, I’d suggest that this might be due to his desire to imitate the forms of print when annotating. One interesting thing (confessing for a moment) is that the annotator of the Folio seems to use the ‘modern’ Italianate form of ‘e’ rather than the ‘Greek’ epsilon-shaped ‘e’, which Milton uses a lot in the poems of the Trinity manuscript, though rather less in the prose. Obviously, in the style of this kind of analysis, I’ve suppressed all the information that doesn’t with fit my claims. On the left we have the Folio, on the right the Trinity manuscript. Let’s start small and relatively unrevealing, with ‘the’. Here I’m going to offer some words and letter-forms for comparison. This just looks a lot like Milton’s hand. But the evidence that makes me want to suggest that it’s Milton is strictly palaeographical. So this reader is intelligent and assiduous. On the basis of the various texts cited and of the binding, which likely dates from the early Restoration, Bourne tentatively dates the annotations between c. Bourne suggests that these are not marks for cuts but are instead commonplace markers, indicating passages of special note or broad applicability. Finally, our reader added marginal markings to all of the plays except for Henry VI 1-3 and Titus Andronicus. (Someone, perhaps a different reader or the same reader using a display hand, transcribed the Prologue to Romeo and Juliet, which is missing from the Folio text). The reader also added a few smart cross-references, to Tottel’s Songs and Sonnettes for the Gravedigger’s song in Hamlet, and to Samuel Purchas’s Purchas his Pilgrimes for the identity of The Tempest‘s deity Setebos and he supplied the second verse of the song that is sung to Mariana in Measure for Measure. In several cases, the reader corrected the Folio from the Quartos, but his emendations were by no means slavish, and were accompanied by other textual changes that seem to have been inspired by his own sense of what was needed in the particular context. She demonstrates that the annotations are highly unusual in character, having been added by a reader who was very attentive to misprints and metrical errors, and who in two cases–those of Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet–was comparing the Folio text with the text supplied by a Quarto edition of each play (Q5 in the case of the former, and one of Q3-5 for the latter). Bourne offers a rich analysis of the manuscript annotations in a copy of the Folio now at the Free Library of Philadephia. In a recent article (‘ Vide Supplementum: Early Modern Collation as Play-Reading in the First Folio’, in Kathy Acheson, ed., Early Modern English Marginalia ), Claire M. I’m going to claim to have identified John Milton’s copy of the Shakespeare First Folio of 1623. However, I’m going to make my own unwise pronouncement on the basis of just a few hours of research. In this as in other cases, there’s usually a lot of wishful thinking, plus copious spinning of the evidence to make it seem plausible, and elision of anything that doesn’t seem to fit. I was myself a little bit brutal when, five years ago, we were treated to the supposed rediscovery of Shakespeare’s dictionary. It’s always annoying when someone tries to claim that they’ve discovered a lost literary artefact.
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