Archive for the 'Research' Category

03
Oct

Facts and Theories about the Returne from Pernassus

By madness 0 Comments
Categories: Bibliography, Editing, Literature, Manuscripts, Paper, Parnassus, Printing, Research and Shakespeare
Tags: , , , , , ,

This paper was delivered at the Celebration of Summer Research at the College of William and Mary on September 27, 2008.

Even Newer Facts and Theories about the Parnassus Plays

Hello. My name is Christopher Adams, and I am a fifth-year senior here at the College. I took last year off to study abroad in Beijing, China.

[Slide 1—Title Page]

The records for Cambridge University in December of 1601 record a riot that occurred between the students of Trinity College and St John’s College. According to depositions taken at the time:

Chute [of Trinity appeared. It is alleged] that he & abowte twentye more; did beate mr Binlesse into St Iohns Colledge. / Chute [confesses] that he & others did cast stones, and that he himself flange none but those which were put into his hands by others.

Incensed, one St John’s student named Thomson

Haveinge a drawen sworde in thone hande & a shorte Clubbe in thither with[out] a visor on his face; abowte .8. of the clocke in the evening; dyd come within the Barrs…of Trinitye Colledge…and said openlye…come the porwdest of you oute.

Certainly, altercations between testosterone-laden college students are a dime a dozen; however, what makes this fight of particular interest is the way in which the St John’s student is dressed. He has a visor on his face—at the turn of the 1600s, this meant a mask. Another deposition informs us that Thomson specifically was costumed as a stagekeeper—he was performing in a play, which had just been rudely interrupted by the Trinitarians and their rock throwing.

This fight serves as the background for my talk this afternoon, as the subject of my research is the play in question—The Return from Parnassus.

The Return from Parnassus is the third part of a trilogy performed in December of 1601 as part of a tradition of theater productions during the Christmas holidays; the first two parts were written and performed in 1598 (or 1599) and 1600. The plays were most likely written by a St John’s student or group of students and were performed in the St John’s great hall. [Slide 2—St John’s Great Hall]

The trilogy loosely follows a set of students as they enter Cambridge, proceed to their degrees, and graduate. The Return picks up right after graduation, in which the alums search for employment. Sadly, no one is willing to hire them. Clearly, not much has changed in 400 years. The ending of the play is particularly distressing—especially for me, and probably for most people in this room—as the characters decide to give up all hope of working in the city and become shepherds. Apart from its (sad) commentary on the job market of late Elizabethan England, the play is particularly noted for its biting commentary on the London theater scene. Whoever the author or authors were, he/they had a detailed knowledge of and opinions about the contemporary dramatists of the day, including Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and William Shakespeare.

I looked at three main aspects of The Return. The first—its history, context, and performance—I have already discussed to some extent. Secondly, I examined the play as a text. The Return was printed twice, both times in 1606. A manuscript copy of the play also exists [Slide 3—manuscript first page]—it’s housed in the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC. The Return presents challenges as a text because while the two printed editions contain some minor differences between themselves, the printed editions also vary considerably with the manuscript copy.  The manuscript, in general, is much cleaner and freer from error than the printed editions—in other words, the manuscript tends to make more sense than the print. Of the Latin quotations in the play—and there are many of them since one character, for instance, speaks almost exclusively in Latin, the printed editions consistently make errors, showing, perhaps, either the copy itself was unclear or the compositor—the man setting the type for the printed version—was unskilled in Latin. The manuscript, on the other hand, is much more accurate in this regard. Similarly, there are also other cases in which the manuscript adds in, and occasionally omits, words not present in the printed editions. However, two glaring inconsistencies appear between the manuscript and the printed versions. First, the character of Sir Raderick, the greedy, indolent, womanizing “bad guy” of the play who refuses to employ any of the scholars, is called [Slide 4—Sir Randall from MS] “Sir Randall” throughout the manuscript. Even more striking, however, is the complete deletion of half of Act II Scene II. The manuscript simply leaves a few etc’s in place of dialogue.

These are just a few of the differences between the printed versions and the manuscript, but they represent challenges and choices that an editor must make when dealing with this text. As part of this research project, I, along with two other students, created an edition of The Return [Slide 5—Return Edition]. We emended the text based on the manuscript source and printed editions; we also annotated the text, giving our readers notes to help them understand vocabulary and context that might not be immediately apparent upon reading the play.

So, in summary, I’m interested in the history of the play—who performed it, the context in which it was performed, the people that it mentions—as well as what the play actually says—the words on its pages, whether they be printed or handwritten. However, these two are subsidiary to my true interest in the play, and the focus of much of my research, the play as a printed, hold-in-your-hand object.

Let me back up a bit. Starting my freshman year, I began to get involved in a branch of scholarship known as bibliography. As a discipline, it is interested in looking at books as physical objects—as sheets of paper, as ink-stamped impressions, as binding designs and binding structures. Here, the goal is to recreate what went on in the print shop of the late Elizabethan era—how did this book come into being? Bibliography also has a companion field of study known as history of the book, which investigates broader questions—how did this particular book, or any book, get distributed to buyers? Who bought or read books in a given time period? How did book production and printing change a particular society? In my exploration of The Return I sought to answer questions from both fields by looking at the printing and publishing of the play in 1606 while also looking at how the play was treated and received by its readers throughout the past 400 years.

My methodology for carrying out my research involved traveling to libraries and examining printed copies of The Return. My travels took me to libraries in Washington DC, several in both England and New England, and California. In all, I examined some twenty-two copies of the printed editions.

I would like to explain a bit about what I mean when I use the word “examined.” When English major types use the word “examined” they often use it to mean “examined a text” or performed a close reading of a certain passage. Here what I mean is something entirely different. My examinations focused on the text as text—not its content or meaning—but as letters on the page. They also focused on the paper on which the text appears. My goal in examining copies was to determine how this book came to be printed.

To give an example, I will deal here with paper, since it proved to be the more fruitful investigation. Before roughly 1800, all paper was made by hand by dipping a mould into a vat of pulp. [Slide 6—papermakers] The mould consisted of an outer wooden frame with inner supporting ribs, running vertically along the shorter end of the mould. [Slide 7—paper mould] A thick wire, called a chainline, connected these ribs to the wire mesh that formed the base of the mould. When handmade paper is held up to the light, the imprints of these chainlines are easily discernible. [Slide 8—chainlines & watermarks] For purposes of bibliographic research, since the mould itself is a handmade object—no two are exactly alike—the spacing of these chainlines will be a unique pattern. It is possible to measure the spaces between the chainlines in order to create a “fingerprint” for each mould. [Slide 9—composite model] Essentially, this series of numbers is unique to the stock of paper that came from this one mould. All of this means, then, that you can look at the paper, measure the lines in the paper, and can then tell which paper stocks are the same.

It’s a time-consuming process to gather this data; however, the results that it yields are revelatory. I mentioned that the Return was printed twice in 1606. One of my questions in researching this play was whether or not both editions were actually printed in 1606—it’s somewhat unusual for a play of the time period and subject matter to go through two editions so quickly. And there are instances of printers sticking fake dates on title pages to avoid legal or economic repercussions. However, what the paper evidence has shown is that both editions were actually printed very close to one another. The same stock of paper that is in the ending of the first edition is the same stock of paper that appears in the second edition, showing that the two must have been printed in close proximity to each other.  

So that was the most technical part of my examination. But there is also a lot you can learn from a book by looking at how other people have interacted with it. For instance, simply looking the book’s inside cover is usually an effective way to gather information related to its collecting history and price. Many collectors make some note of the price they paid for their copy. In the case of Return, the earliest note appears in 1852, when one collector notes that he paid 3 pounds 12 shillings for his copy. The price of Return remained fairly low throughout the latter half of the 1800s; however, starting at the turn of the 20th century, book prices became volatile. In 1904, one collector paid 100 US dollars for his copy, but only nine years later in 1913, auction records show that someone paid $22.50. In 1922, a British book-selling firm offered two copies for sale, priced at 210 and 250 pounds. That prices jumped so high so quickly is not unusual, given the players in the market at the time—names such as Huntington, Morgan, and Folger, all of whom collected Early Modern texts.  

In conclusion [Slide 10—Title page], the examination of books as physical objects leads to new ways of looking at the world. Bibliography and book history offer different paradigms for researching and approaching texts. The case of The Return from Parnassus shows that bibliographic methods of inquiry can reveal clues and patterns to a book’s printing history. Important, too, are the historical documents—such as the Cambridge records detailing inter-college fighting—that flesh out the backstory and context of a work. Both approaches are necessary to gain the most complete understanding of a text and serve to further scholarship and push it beyond its traditional boundaries.

22
Jul

A Post on Paper

By madness 2 Comments
Categories: Bibliography, Paper, Parnassus, Research and Thesis
Tags: , , ,

I promised a post about the production of paper and its usefulness in bibliography. Here is a description, lifted from a draft of my thesis:

Before the advent of machinery in the 1800s, paper was a handmade object created by dipping a mould into a vat of pulp, known as stuff. The mould consists of an outer wooden frame with inner supporting ribs, running vertically along the shorter end of the mould. A fine wire mesh covers the mould, allowing water to drain out when removed from the vat of stuff. The mould has two identifiable sets of wires—wirelines, a fine mesh of thin wires that run horizontally across the length of the mould, and chainlines, thicker wires that tie the supporting ribs to the mould. [Try googling “paper mould” in google image search] When handmade paper is held up to light, the imprints of these wires are easily discernible. For purposes of bibliographic research, since the mould itself is a handmade object—no two are exactly alike—the ribs for each mould will bear a unique spacing pattern. Since this pattern is reflected in the chainline imprint on the paper, it is possible to measure the spaces between the chainlines in order to create a “fingerprint” for each mould. Moreover, because many moulds of the era bore a sewn-on wire design, creating a watermark, the combination of chainline spaces and watermark form a highly accurate description of any given mould. When describing paper, however, researchers must keep in mind Allan Stevenson’s remark: “Watermarks are twins.” The production of paper in the hand-press period was a two-man process involving a set of moulds. The vatman would dip the first mould into the stuff, give the mould a shake to lock the fibers, and pass the mould to the koucher, who would hand a second mould to the vatman. While the vatman was dipping the mould, the koucher would roll the paper off the mould using a sheet of felt, preparing the mould to be used again. In any given day, a paper-making team would be able to produce 2000 sheets of paper, each mould being dipped around 1000 times. Such constant strain on the moulds led to short lives—rarely more than a year; the sewn-on wires for the watermarks lasted six months (from Gaskell’s A New Introduction to Bibliography). Important to the description and identification of paper, then, is the idea that two moulds were in use to form one stock of paper—each sheet of paper has a twin. By looking at multiple copies of a work, it is possible to create a composite model for each mould and to accurately pair one mould with its twin.

Much of my thesis work included traveling to libraries that held copies of Returne in order to count the chainlines in the paper of each copy. The work itself sounds about as dry as its description; however, it proved especially useful in the case of Returne, as it demonstrated a shared paper stock between the first and second editions.

15
Jul

My Textual History, or, How I Became Involved in Research and Started Losing My Hair pt. V

By madness 0 Comments
Categories: Bibliography, Bindings, Collators, Editing, Manuscripts, Paper, Parnassus, Printing, Research, Thesis and William and Mary
Tags: , , ,

I now move on to the main part of my research experience, which has consumed the past three years of my life. Beginning my sophomore year, I began working with a play entitled The Return from Parnassus (I often refer to it in its original form—The Returne from Pernassus, or just Returne). Two other students and I began editing the text in order to make it accessible for an undergraduate audience.* The most recent edition available was published in 1949, edited by J.B. Leishmam. Leishman was an Oxford scholar who, like many editors of the time, chose not to translate any of the Latin that appears in Returne, nor are his notes elucidating to anyone interested in a basic understanding of the text. Leishman already assumed his readers would have not only knowledge of Latin but also a firm grip on the entire Early Modern world. Needless to say, his editorial apparatus, though thorough, does little to help the modern reader.

For this project, I was the textual editor. Returne offers interesting problems for the editor, since three textual witnesses exist: two printed editions—both 1606—and a manuscript. Many major libraries in the UK and the US hold copies of the first and second editions of Returne; the unique manuscript (titled The Progresse to Pernassus) is housed in the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC. The two printed texts are quite similar, only varying in a small degree; the manuscript, however, contains significant changes in wording, scene headings, character names, and title. For this project—which would eventually turn into my thesis—I traveled to said libraries/institutions to examine their copies of the Returne. I also spent considerable time at the Folger, pouring over their manuscript copy.

With my examination of copies, I felt I had finally “arrived.” Here was I, a researcher in the humanities, looking at copies of books that no one else had handled in a long time. In my examination, I was particularly concerned with three things: 1) The paper (a subject of another post) 2) The text (using a collator to compare copies against a standard 3) The markings. Since I was going to be looking at over twenty copies of this play, I wanted to find out how readers and owners of this play had interacted with it as an object. What did they write in their copies? How did they bind their copies? What did they pay for their copies? It became quickly apparent that many owners highly valued their copies—having them bound in fine bindings by the top bookbinders of the era. Others read through the text, meticulously correcting misprints and wrong readings. Still others penciled in provenance information or pasted bookplates onto the inside front covers as a sign of ownership. Such is the nature of the play as object. Scans or other digital facsimiles would not provide this kind of information; each play copy is a unique object—the play copies must be touched, handled, and investigated in person. Thus the note that appeared in a copy of Returne in the Bodleian Library: “Not to be disposed of as a Duplicate”.       

 *An article in Teaching Bibliography, Textual Criticism and Book History has disparaging things to say about students editing obscure texts, but all in all I think our final product served its purpose well.

15
Jul

A Thesis in Search of an Adviser

By madness 0 Comments
Categories: Advising, China, Research, Thesis and William and Mary
Tags: , , ,

All my plans were disrupted by my year abroad in China. I had taken the Junior Honors Seminar in spring 07, with a plan to write my thesis during the 07-08 school year. I had an adviser lined up who was interested in and knowledgeable about my project. But then China came and no thesis got written during the 07-08 school year. This wasn’t a problem, since I planned to write my thesis in summer 08, defend it in the fall, and then graduate in December 08/January 09. A snag: my adviser wouldn’t be at W&M the summer or fall of 08.

So those are the circumstances. I talked with the lovely people at the Charles Center, who suggested I find another adviser—they didn’t want a “rogue thesis” on their hands. After dragging my feet for some time in the hope that the situation would magically resolve itself, I eventually e-mailed another professor in the English department and asked if she would be willing to advise me. I’m waiting to hear back, so I’ll update the blog when I find out.

           Lessons to be learned:

1) Switching advisers is not the end of the world.

2) Your thesis will not magically finish itself; nor will it magically find a new adviser.

12
Jul

My Textual History, or, How I Became Involved in Research and Started Losing My Hair pt. IV

By madness 0 Comments
Categories: Bibliography, Charlottesville, Rare Book School, Research and University of Virginia
Tags: ,

At the end of the week, Terry Belanger approached me and asked me to return to Rare Book School the following week to take a course. He had some money from a fellowship that would pay for my tuition and housing. I said yes, called Coldstone and asked for the time off, and enrolled in The American Book in the Industrial Era. I wasn’t particularly interested in American books, but that’s the class Terry Belanger suggested—and it was taught by Michael Winship, the foremost expert on American printing during the industrial revolution. I needed little persuasion to take his course.

           As part of the fellowship I became a staff member for the week. My duties included helping tear down from the previous week’s classes and setting up for the up-coming week’s classes. I wrote earlier that the purpose of RBS was to handle objects. The ‘problem’ with rare books, of course, is that they are, by definition, rare. Rare book reading rooms allow one person to handle (usually one or very few) book(s) at a time, always under close supervision. Damage to a book is kept at a minimum because access to the book is kept at a minimum. RBS operates on the principle that if you want to learn about something, you’re going to have to handle it. And RBS’s collections reflect this. The RBS collections are a teaching collection, built of old—but not necessarily rare—books. The ‘rare’ books that RBS owns tend to be parts of books or books that are in poor condition. RBS faculty members have free range to select course materials, resulting in each course having a significant amount of material that must be sorted through, arranged, and prepped. So actually setting up a single course can take several hours of labor.

           Being on staff allowed me to see the inner workings of Rare Book School. From the outside, RBS appears to run very smoothly. To create the appearance of smoothness, an amazing amount of work goes on behind the scenes. Every day, RBS receives numerous packages of books that must be accessioned, catalogued, and placed in the collection—RBS has a prodigious ebay habit. Some books that receive heavy use need to be repaired—after seeing the results of one group attempt at fixing bindings, TB commented, “My, aren’t we provincial.” Other books have been in the collection for years (RBS has been around for a quarter of a century) but haven’t made it into the computer system—I spent a week this past June cataloging a (mostly) nineteenth-century binding collection. So there is always plenty of work to be done. When the school is in session, the hours are long but always rewarding.

           During my second week at RBS, TB asked if I would like to be on staff next summer on a more permanent basis. There was no hesitation in my decision. Being offered the chance to work at a place filled with other people who shared my interest in books was a priceless opportunity. I was eager to return the next summer to explore the world of bibliography.        

10
Jul

My Textual History, or, How I Became Involved in Research and Started Losing My Hair pt. III

By madness 0 Comments
Categories: Bibliography, Charlottesville, Printing, Rare Book School, Research and University of Virginia
Tags: , , , ,

After my freshman year I had $1000 at my disposal compliments of Monroe. Having shown an interest in bibliography, Professor Hailey suggested I attend Rare Book School (RBS) at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. I had little idea before I went what I was getting myself into. I was signed up for a class entitled Introduction to Descriptive Bibliography, also known as DesBib. The class ran for a week in the middle of July. In the meantime I had started my first real (i.e. paying) summer job (I had been an unpaid intern at a legal office in previous summers)—working at Coldstone. The pay was shoddy (minimum wage), but I received a free ice cream creation after every shift, so my stomach was happy. I took the week off in July in order to attend RBS.

Unbeknownst to me, and probably to most everyone else, Rare Book School—located in sequestered Charlottesville—is in fact the center of the rare book instruction world. It was the brainchild of Terry Belanger—now a MacArthur fellow—who directs the school’s operation. When I tell people I’m associated with RBS, they have one of several impressions: that I’m a counselor at a summer camp; that I work in a library; that I work in a book shop; that I work in a bindery, etc. etc. etc. All of the above are in some senses partly true, though none accurately describes RBS or my role in it (which I’ll explain in a future post).

Rare Book School runs mostly in the summer (though also in January and October), offering one-week classes in all sorts of topics related to books. You can see their course listings here. During each week-long session, four or five classes are offered. RBS brings in the top experts in the field to teach the courses, and the students tend to be librarians, English/history grad students, book collectors, archivists, or library administrators, though certain classes—Libraries and Donors, for instance—attract accountants, lawyers, and other businesspersons. The whole atmosphere is intensely intellectual and tends to be middle- upper-class (i.e. people interested in rare books either hold advanced degrees to study them or are wealthy enough to own them).

So into this tightly-knit sphere at the center of Rare Book-dom walks in fresh-from-freshman year Chris (me—at nineteen years of age). I quickly discovered I had also signed up for one of the more challenging classes offered at RBS. Introduction to Descriptive Bibliography is an introductory course about how to describe books as physical objects—their structure, their binding, their printing, etc. The class is one of the most hands-on of any RBS course (which is saying a considerable amount since the purpose of RBS is to not just look at but handle stuff). The day is broken up into four periods, two before lunch and two after lunch. One period is lecture—talking about paper, or printing processes, or bindings, etc. Another period is museum—getting to look at and handle a myriad of objects related to the lecture topic du jour. The paper museum features hundreds of objects related to the production of paper, including numerous sheets of paper—watermarked, unwatermarked, hand made, machine made, machine made made to look like hand made etc. The beauty of the museum being that you can look at, in the flesh, as it were, what was talked about that day. Don’t understand the difference between a cut edge and a deckled edge? No problem—there are examples a plenty. The other two periods are broken up into homework and lab. When one leaves the DesBib course, one has (hopefully) learned how to write a collational formula, a standardized way to describe the structure of a book. (The class uses Fredson Bowers’s epic and somewhat frightening Principles of Bibliographic Description for its standard). One learns how to write a collational formula simply by doing, so the homework consists of your going through six books every evening and describing them. A simple formula may look something like this: A-H4 I2 . A complex one may look like: π2 a-c4 A-L12 χ1 M6, 2A-3C12. Getting through six books, especially at the beginning of the week, can take anywhere from four to six hours, depending on your attention to detail. Needless to say, any thoughts of ‘free time’ are out of the question. However, the real joy of the class is the previously mentioned lab session, which consists of going over the homework with a lab instructor. The lab (two or three on one at the most) allows you to ask questions of the instructor and sort out problems you encountered. The lab instructors are patient, attentive—and brilliant.

I managed to get through the week without any major hiccups. Being able to handle books with such freedom and to examine them so closely proved to have an allure all its own. Some of the work was monotonous—counting the pages in a 600 page book to ensure the printer numbered every page correctly, for instance—but tended to be rewarding in the end. The work fit my interest in not only books but also investigation—every book has its own built-in detective story. I ended the week with an excitement about bibliography…and an offer to return.

09
Jul

My Textual History, or, How I Became Involved in Research and Started Losing My Hair pt. II

By madness 3 Comments
Categories: Bibliography, Collators, Hamlet, Jane Austen, Rare Book School, Research, Shakespeare, Swem and William and Mary
Tags: , , , , , ,

I had developed an interest in Jane Austen sometime in middle school—I first read Emma, which remains my least favorite JA novel, though that did not deter me from plunging headlong into Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, and Persuasion (all of which I distinctly enjoyed). During Christmas vacation my freshman year (December 2004/January 2005) I bought a copy of Jane Austen’s Letters, edited by Deidre Le Faye. A bit of background: Jane Austen was a consummate letter writer, especially to her sister Cassandra. Jane Austen died in 1817, leaving her letters to her sister. Cassandra, being private and protective, censored some of the letters and destroyed others. The rest found their way into the possession of Lord Brabourne, (great?)-nephew to Cassandra. [Note: I think all of that information is more or less correct—it’s been three years since I’ve worked on this project.] In 1884, Brabourne edited the letters and had them published. Here’s where it gets interesting—in the intervening years between the Brabourne edition and the Le Faye edition, fourteen of the letters went missing (lost, if I remember correctly, during one of the World Wars). Thus the only surviving witness to these fourteen letters is Brabourne’s 1884 edition, which Le Faye printed in her edition.

This information intrigued me because I had come to learn from Professor Hailey about a device called a collator. A collator is a device that relies on certain optic tricks—smoke and mirrors minus the smoke—to compare two copies of an image. In our day and age we are under the (mistaken) belief that one copy of, say, Kaplan’s Guide to the GRE is just like any other copy of Kaplan’s Guide to the GRE. Though they may be highly similar, they are in fact two distinct and unique objects. This holds especially true for books printed before the advent of machine printing. Two copies of the first folio of Shakespeare may appear to be alike; however, they contain hundreds (if not thousands) of textual variation. One copy might read: “To be or not to be” and another copy might read “To be or no to be” (this is just an example, I have no idea if this is actually the case or not). The point is, however, that the two seemingly “same” copies contain variation between themselves, but you would never know this if you didn’t have a way to look at them. A collator provides this way. For my project I used a collator called Hailey’s Comet, designed by Professor Hailey. Collators come in all shapes and sizes, and some people are abnormally attached to their preferred collator. (The Hinman Collator, for instance, is a beast of a machine developed in the 1940s). Hailey’s Comet is really nothing more than two mirrors attached to cannibalized desk lamp stands. One takes two copies of whatever one is looking at and arranges things such that one eye is looking at a mirror directed toward one copy; the other eye is looking directly at the second copy. The brain, then, is receiving two different sets of images at the same time—one image from the mirrors pointed at Copy A and another image from eye looking at copy B. The brain, in its attempt to process this information, superimposes the images over each other. The result is a 3-D effect of sorts. The usefulness of a collator is that any variations between the two copies will appear to shift or wiggle strangely, making them immediately apparent.

I will digress here to make a small point: bibliography—the study of books as physical objects—is filled with sometimes complicated explanations of processes or objects that are, in fact, quite simple to grasp upon witnessing or seeing said process/object. Such is the collator. The Myth of Print Culture suggests crossing one’s eyes as a suitable method for achieving the same effect.

All of this lengthy explanation is to say that during the spring of my freshman year I bought a copy of Brabourne’s 1884 edition of Letters (using a student research grant from the Charles Center!) and proceeded to collate a copy against roughly twenty other copies in hopes of finding some sort of textual variation. I acquired those twenty other copies through interlibrary loan at Swem—how the ILL department must have loathed me. But the library was accommodating—they even provided me with my own book cart to haul around the twenty copies (each “copy” was two volumes, so there were some forty books involved).

Being somewhat naive about this process, I expected that with every page turn I would come across some previously unidentified variant that would change the way scholars thought about Jane Austen for years to come. I was due for a reality check: bibliography can hardly be described as glamorous. Despite my lack of ground-breaking results (I think I found a few changes in punctuation), the experience was instrumental in my growth as a researcher. Some things must be learned by simply doing them. Working on Letters taught me how to quickly and effectively use a collator (they can be pains), which would prove useful in the years to come. Moreover, my Letters project taught me about the library, research aids, and grant proposals. And it was through collating copies of Letters that I discovered the best summer job I’ve ever had: Rare Book School.

Which will be next post’s topic…

08
Jul

My Textual History, or, How I Became Involved in Research and Started Losing My Hair pt. I

By madness 1 Comment
Categories: Bible, Colonial Williamsburg, Parnassus, Printing, Research and Shakespeare
Tags: , , , , , , , ,

My textual history is a complicated affair. I arrived at William and Mary fresh from high school—ready to face college and do something. I knew fairly early on that I wanted to be an English major, so I began asking my freshman adviser—the estimable Adam Potkay—what English major types actually do. I was very concerned to figure out how people in the humanities go about researching. Sitting in Professor A. Potkay’s office (one must make a distinction, as there is also an M. Potkay—likewise estimable and brilliant), I received some advice: “Martha, Martha, you are worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is needed.” The Potkays teach the ever-popular Literature and the Bible course, so a quotation from Luke’s Gospel in response to a question was not entirely out of the blue. From Professor A. Potkay’s remark, I came to understand that research would always be there—I didn’t need to rush things along unnecessarily. Research would find me in her own sweet time.

           But find me she did. I have always had a love for books—not only reading them but owning them. I enjoy the way a book feels in my hand, I enjoy the way a book smells, I enjoy looking at clean, crisp paper. When I saw the British Library’s unbound copy of Returne from Pernassus (1606), so incredibly well-preserved, I—no joke—cried. Books—the physical object—have a strange effect on me. Creepy, probably, but I could have a worse disorder. All of this is background information to explain how I became involved in my field of study. The second semester freshman year (perhaps it was first semester—I can’t remember now) I took a course with Professor R. Carter Hailey in the English department—Introduction to Shakespeare. While reading through the Sonnets (1609), we came across Sonnet 69, which in the original edition contained an error—in the third line printing “end” for what most everyone agrees should be “due.” I found the printing error fascinating and decided to write a paper about it. (Reading back on it now, it’s a shoddy piece of work. I’m embarrassed of all but a few paragraphs—maybe not even that much—all but a few sentences.) For my research I took a short jaunt down Duke of Gloucester street to the printer’s shop in Colonial Williamsburg. The printer was helpful in explaining certain parts of the printing process to me, and from that moment I was hooked. I checked out A New Introduction to Bibliography by Philip Gaskell from the library and began reading for myself about the history of printing.

           More to follow…