Archive for the 'William and Mary' Category

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
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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.

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…