Marginal Math

This semester I've been teaching a large Shakespeare lecture course in one of the precious few auditorium classrooms on campus. The class that meets immediately before ours couldn't be more different: an Engineering course called "Dynamics" which is described with phrases I haven't thought about in years (vector calculus? multiparticle systems?)  The instructor of that course always leaves cryptic formulas on the chalkboard, which, of course, we often promptly transform into a symbolic trajectory of the play we happen to be reading (we can plot Hamlet's trajectory on this axis; Ophelia, unfortunately, remains static...). More to my immediate purpose, though, it's reminded me of the intersection of early modern reading practices and math problems -- or, to put it more prosaically, the penchant of readers to scribble math problems in the  margins of their books, utilizing the valuable real estate of the page as a piece of proverbial scrap paper. Here are three examples I've come across in our Special Collections library.

Carnivalesque #90

Welcome to the newest edition of the early modern Carnivalesque -- Anchora is especially pleased to be hosting this month, since I've lately been emphasizing the "slowly" in this blog's motto.

Jael & Sisera, via Rachel Clark (see below)

How to Read like a Renaissance Reader

In the Renaissance, reading always demanded writing. Readers were trained to encounter a text with a pen in hand in order to mark up -- and hence actively engage with -- the text. Simple reading alone was not sufficient; the proper scholarly reader needed to actively use the text, taking the time and expending the effort to fully comprehend its meanings and implications. Reading was also aimed at some practical or intellectual goal: a used text was inevitably incorporated into one's own writing.

"Miscellaneous collection of sermons"

In a previous post on a collection of plays, published separately but bound together I mentioned that other kinds of relatively small pamphlets -- like sermons -- were often bound together in the same way. In fact, sermons and plays share many features in their printed forms: they are records of a performance (or at least relate to a performance event, however you want to define "record" in this instance); they were often considered as equivalent literary or stylistic texts; and of course they are materially similar -- usually slim pamphlets in quarto that could conveniently be bound together. So in this post I want to show you just such a collection -- as it is cataloged (record here), a "miscellaneous collection of sermons." But this collection of sermons is not as straightforwardly religious  as you might expect, since the binding includes a surprise of sorts.

Red Velvet

In the last two posts, I looked at several civil war era pamphlets: some which had once been bound together, but which now possess only ghostly traces of their onetime companions, and a couple of single-sheet pamphlets in quarto which remain unopened to this day. This post likewise looks at several separately published works -- this time in folio -- which remain bound together, far more sumptuously than the slim, cheap quartos in those previous posts. No, unfortunately the title of this post isn't an allusion to cake, but the binding is no less rich.

in quarto

In my last post I looked at a few short pamphlets from the era of the English civil war -- pamphlets that were so short, in fact, that they consisted only of a single sheet in quarto. These slim pamphlets were, at one point, bound together in a larger volume, both for convenience and for preservation -- thin quartos were notoriously ephemeral, which is why few copies of each edition often survive. In this post, though, I'm going to look at a couple of pamphlets that were never bound with anything -- and indeed, never quite made it through the entire process of becoming proper pamphlets.

Laudian Ghost

In my last post I looked at a collection of plays, published separately, that had been bound together by an early owner. This was a very common practice, particularly for slim pamphlets printed in smaller formats like playbooks, sermons, and newsbooks. In this post I want to look at some newsbooks that were, at one time, bound together, but which have since been broken apart -- along with some ghostly evidence that reveals what one of the pamphlets was bound with.

A very straightforward title

"a collection of plays, published separately"

For reasons that will become clear, an alternate title for this post would be "PLAYS are not BOOKS," which might also have served as an alternate title for the previous two posts.

Those last two posts, on Shakespeare and on Jonson, considered their respective folios not as monumental books, but instead as collections of removable parts -- collections, that is, of sections (and even individual works) that could be, and indeed were, removed from the book, and which subsequently lived textual lives of their own. This called into question the very definition of a "book," as a coherent material object, not to mention, due to the canonical status of both authors, the very definition of a coherent form of authorship.

This post builds on the previous discussions by showing an actual exemplar of the kind of play collection that, particularly, the Jonson folio resembles. Printed plays would normally have been sold without a binding -- as slim quartos, they simply weren't substantial enough to bind on their own -- and, since they were normally printed in the same format, and thus were about the same size, many owners and erstwhile play collectors would bind several plays together into one volume. It was a natural and convenient way to preserve and organize a collection, and other similar kinds of pamphlets (particularly sermons and newsbooks) were often treated the same way. These collections are variously called nonce collections, or coupled books, or sammelband. The best known such volumes today are the few surviving volumes of the Pavier quartos, the collection of ten Shakespearean plays published c.1619 by Thomas Pavier, and which were meant to be (and in some cases were) bound together. (Here is an example, from the library at TCU).

Iowa doesn't have any 17th century play collections, but we do (remarkably) have a few from the 18th century, the oldest, best and most interesting of which is shown here:

Breaking Jonson Apart

In my last post (Breaking Shakespeare Apart) I showed how one of the most important and monumental literary books in the world--the Shakespeare first folio--is anything but monumental, and is, indeed, perhaps not even a book. Rather than a definitive and complete whole, it is better thought of as a collection of removable parts--both within the printing house, where the contingencies of business impacted its contents, and in its subsequent life, where copies have suffered the vagaries of time (and of owners keen to sell off their copy bit by bit). In this post I want to look at the book that is often seen as the crucial model for the Shakespeare folio--Ben Jonson's Workes (first published in 1616), a book that is quite literally Jonson's own monument to himself. However, even though Jonson presents his book as a definitive, whole object--the embodiment of (his idea of) his complete works--it, too, is easily broken apart.

Breaking Shakespeare Apart

Remember when my students broke Shakespeare?  If you recall, during a class session in special collections, my students broke off the front board of the binding of our most important Shakespeare book, a copy of the Second Folio (1632), a moment which I reveled in, since it allowed me to teach a few valuable lessons about the Shakespeare folio--which is commonly called the most important book ever in the history of the English language ever and even the most important book ever in the whole entire history of the world ever. (Except maybe the bible; and I'm not exaggerating as much as you  might think). That moment of minor vandalism took the folio down a few notches, at least for my students, for a few reasons: 1) it's not even a copy of the First Folio, it's "just" a Second Folio; 2) part of the preliminary matter, including the title-page, are later facsimiles inserted to make up a complete copy; and 3) it showed, with great immediacy, that a folio--any Shakespeare folio, and by extension any important symbol of literary or cultural value--is a material object made up of many different physical elements, a fact which calls into question not only its status as a literary icon, but as an actual bounded and complete book. That is, it asks two central questions: what is (our idea of) Shakespeare? And what, exactly, is a book?

This page is a sacrilegious facsimile!

Re-membering Shakespeare

The endpapers of a manuscript in the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University may -- or may not -- contain an early quotation of Shakespeare. I first encountered this manuscript in the Remembering Shakespeare exhibition that formed part of a series of events called Shakespeare at Yale. The exhibit was curated by David Scott Kastan and Kathryn James, and they produced a lovely exhibition catalog. The image below is taken from the Beinecke copy of Peter Idle's Instructions to his son, which once belonged to Thomas Dowse, who transcribed two lines that can be found in Shakespeare's poem Lucrece, first published in 1594. But it is unlikely that Dowse was thinking of Shakespeare when he copied these lines into his book.

Her Book

This past weekend, I attended the Past, Present and Future of the Book conference held at nearby Cornell College. It was one of the more intriguing book history conferences I've been to (and not only because one of the keynotes featured an out-of-tune ukelele with a hidden book inside). The conference brought together both academics -- like Iowa's very own Matt Brown (the director of the UI Center for the Book) -- and book artists (such as Peter Thomas who played the aforementioned ukelele). It was a chance both to discover and celebrate the book-work being done locally, and to think more broadly about the role of craft in the digital age.

I was there to deliver a report on the survey of STC books we've done here in the Iowa Special Collections over the last year or so -- a report that was part of a joint presentation with Rachel Stevenson, the undergraduate researcher who actually did the work of surveying the collection. Most of what I had to say has appeared here before, in a post I called "less known libraries" which considered the differences between our own survey of STC books -- which focused on used books -- and a previous survey conducted in the 1960s, which focused only on books of established literary merit. Rachel's part of the presentation was a distillation of the honors thesis she's been working on, which takes as its subject a copy of Spenser's 1679 Works annotated by an eighteenth-century woman reader (!). What follows here is a version of her conference paper, which, for a number of reasons, I'm calling "Her Book."

Mangling Shakespeare

A few days ago the "After Deadline" column at the New York Times ran a feature called "Mangled Shakespeare." The column covers issues of grammar and style in the paper, and this piece focused on the (mis)quotation of Shakespeare in the pages of the Times. At the risk of delivering a pedantic response to a purposefully pedantic column, I'd like to defend the mangling of Shakespeare here.

Anonymous Marlowe

A week ago I attended the annual MLA conference in Seattle, where I gave a paper called "Anonymous Marlowe," which gave me a chance to not only de-face the famous portrait of Marlowe below, but to argue (kind of) that Marlowe did not write everyone's favorite Renaissance lyric, "The Passionate Shepherd to his Love." Because this was the first time in a while that I've given a truly provisional, in-progress, and perhaps speculative paper at a conference, and because I found the Q&A and post-panel feedback so helpful and illuminating -- not to mention the fact that I'd like to participate, if only meagerly, in opening up a big conference like the MLA to a wider audience (search for the hashtag #mla12 or simply read this) -- I'm posting some of what I said here, along with some of the images I used in what otherwise would have been an ephemeral PowerPoint show. Enjoy, and let me know what you think.

New Year, New Address, Same Blog

On Jan. 1, I announced on twitter that Anchora has moved to a new address: you can now find the blog at adamghooks.net  All the existing links, etc., should still work -- but if they don't, please let me know!

Anchora will remain the same blog, but I hope to add a few new features to the site in the new year, and to start writing a few different kinds of posts -- such as reports on the graduate seminar in early modern textuality I'll be teaching this semester. A few weeks back I added the first new page, called Books @ Iowa which lists some of the many fantastic digital projects (mostly relevant to book history, or at least bookish in some way) hosted here at Iowa.

In the immediate future, I'll be posting a version of the MLA paper that I'll be giving in Seattle later this week, "Anonymous Marlowe." You can find abstracts for the panel, "Booking Marlowe," here.