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.