3 May 2013
by The Collation
6 Comments

“What manner o’ thing is your crocodile?”: May 2013

Another month, another mystery for your riddling. What might be going on in this image? I’m not asking you to identify the text1 but to look at it and speculate on what we might see and say about it. Click on the image to enlarge it (you’ll need to click twice, once to open it in and again to zoom in on it), leave your comments below, and come back next week when the answer is revealed!

May crocodile

May crocodile

Update 5 May: See the next post, “Pen facsimiles of early print,” for the answer and a discussion of this image!

  1. Revelation 21:1-6 [↩]

30 April 2013
by Erin Blake
8 Comments

Two disciplines separated by a common language

I should have seen it coming when the Art History professor and the English professor started talking with each other about “print culture” (names omitted to protect reputations). It soon became clear that one had been talking about the circulation of printed pictures, the other had been talking about the circulation of printed words, and neither wanted to let on that they hadn’t been talking about both all along. Full disclosure: when I first came to the library world from the art world, I had no idea that familiar picture-printing terms have different and sometimes contradictory meanings in word-printing. This post is for anyone else who didn’t know that they didn’t know this.

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25 April 2013
by Goran Proot
0 comments

Mors comoedia. A comedy a hundred years old brought to life again in 1726

Sheer chance is an important factor in research. Some sixteen years ago I was surveying a sammelband held at Antwerp University Library that contained 257 programs documenting theater performances in Jesuit schools in Flanders.1 And now, just a month ago, one of the many Neo-Latin theater plays in the Folger collections unexpectedly helped me to identify the author of one of the largely anonymous texts. The author in question is the Jesuit dramatist and English recusant William Drury, who taught at the English Jesuit college in Douai. Two of Drury’s Neo-Latin plays were published in one volume in Douai in 1620, together with a poem entitled “De venerabili Eucharistia”: Aluredus sive Alfredus tragicomoedia and Mors comoedia. A third play, Reparatus, sive Depositum, was added to the second edition which also appeared in Douai (1628), and the so-called  ”editio ultima ab ipso auctore recognite” (which suggests that Drury himself corrected this latest edition) was brought to light in Antwerp in 1641. 2 The Folger has a copy of the second and third editions.3

Opening page of the comedy Mors in the 1628 and 1641 editions.

Opening page of the comedy Mors in the 1628 and 1641 editions. (Click this, and all the images in this post, to enlarge)

Let me first give you some background about the tradition of Jesuit school drama. Fairly quickly after the establishment of the first secondary schools for Latin and Greek by the Jesuit order (founded in 1540), the priests began to stage theater plays in Latin which were performed by their students. Soon it became a custom that each class would perform one play each school year. In addition, in Lent and at the end of the school year extra plays were staged. As a result the larger colleges, such as the Flemish ones in Antwerp, Brussels or Ghent, would stage seven regular school dramas which anyone could attend for free. Continue Reading →

  1. For the results of this research, see Goran Proot, Het schooltoneel van de jezuïeten in de Provincia Flandro-Belgica tijdens het ancien régime (1575-1773), Doct. diss. Antwerpen: Universiteit Antwerpen, 2008. [↩]
  2. For a description of the 1641 Antwerp edition, see http://anet.ua.ac.be/record/stcvopac/c:stcv:6602987/E; a digital surrogate of the complete edition is available at http://anet.ua.ac.be/digital/opacua/uapreciosa/o:lvd:776015/N. Two more copies of the 1641 edition are available at Ghent University (Acc.001186 and BL.001490) and available through Google Books (copies 1 and 2). Both Ghent copies have Augustinian provenances: the first copy was acquired by father Ignatius de Dijckere, who in 1645 founded a convent in Bree. The book would later become part of the library of the Augustinian friars in Dendermonde. The second Ghent copy originally belonged to father F[ranciscus?] [van?] Reckendaele and was integrated in the library of the Ghent Augustinians (shelf mark 490/R). With thanks to Ellen Storms (Antwerp University Library) and Régine Dedecker (Ghent University Library). To learn about the foundation of the convent in Bree and the Augustinians in Dendermonde and Ghent, see Jürgen Vanhoutte [et al.], Latijnse scholen in de Zuidelijke Nederlanden (16de-18de eeuw): repertorium en archiefgids Vlaanderen en Brussel. Brussel 2007. [↩]
  3. See shelf mark PA8135 D8 1628 Cage and PA8135 D8 1641 Cage. [↩]

22 April 2013
by Sarah Werner
8 Comments

First Folios online

I imagine that you’re all thinking the same thing I’m thinking in the lead-up to April 23rd, Shakespeare’s birthday/deathday: Where can I find a good online facsimile of the First Folio? And I’m here to tell you the answer: In many places! In fact, by my count, there are at least seven eight nine different copies of the First Folio that are online in at least reasonably high-resolution facsimiles.

But here we must pause a moment, in case there are some of you wondering a) why would one need a high-quality online facsimile of F1 and b) why would one be so excited that there were so many? And I can tell you the answer to this, as well, based on my own experience. Recently I was working on an edition of The Taming of the Shrew and was comparing my text with that of the Folio to make sure I’d caught and listed all the emendations that had been made. That right there is a good reason to want to consult a First Folio: if you are reading (or editing) a play and you want to understand how the edited text you’re working with compares with the early printed texts of the play (especially if you’re working with one of the 18 plays that appeared in print for the first time in the 1623 Folio),1 you might want to look at F1 for yourself to identify those changes. In this case, I was reading through the fourth act of one of the Folger’s digitized First Folios when I came across this:

"ptove Mistresse of my heart"

“ptove Mistresse of my heart” (sig. T3v) (click to enlarge in Luna)

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  1. See Appendix 1 below [↩]

19 April 2013
by Guest Author
5 Comments

Interleaving history: an illustrated Book of Common Prayer

A guest post by Whitney Anne Trettien

In Henry Fielding’s novel Tom Jones, Partridge and his friends go to see a play. As they watch a man light the upper candles of the playhouse, the predictably inane Partridge cries out, “Look, look, madam, the very picture of the man in the end of the common-prayer book before the gunpowder treason service!”

The picture Partridge refers to is most likely this—

Guy Fawkes

Guy Fawkes

—a widely circulated and often reproduced image of Guy Fawkes sneaking toward the House of Lords, matches and lantern in hand. (Click on any of the images in this post to enlarge them in Luna.) It’s easy to read Partridge’s bumbling analogy as a comedic misinterpretation of the seriousness of the Gunpowder Plot—after all, he seems to see no difference between a flame intended to ignite barrels of gunpowder and one used to light candles in a playhouse (!). There’s a second level to his comedy, though, lost to most modern readers: namely, that by the eighteenth century this iconic depiction of Fawkes simply was as common as lit chandeliers. Found interleaved in many (if not most) extant post-1662 copies of the Book of Common Prayer, this image, along with another showing Charles I’s execution and a third celebrating Charles II’s return, iconically punctuated the state services added to the end of the restored Prayer Book.  Continue Reading →

12 April 2013
by Sarah Werner
2 Comments

Secret histories of books

This month’s crocodile mystery was a bit more challenging than recent ones (perhaps not helped by my cryptic “suitable for April” introduction), but Aaron Pratt guessed the gist of it: the image was a detail of a page printed in black, usually referred to as a mourning page. Here is the full context, with the bit we were looking at taken from the middle of the left-hand page:

leaves A3v-A4r of Josua Sylvester's Lachrymae Lacrymarum

leaves A3v-A4r of Josua Sylvester’s Lachrymae Lacrymarum (click to enlarge in Luna)

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8 April 2013
by The Collation
13 Comments

“What manner o’ thing is your crocodile?”: April 2013

Is April the cruellest month? If so, here’s a suitably dark crocodile mystery for you to solve:

your April crocodile

your April crocodile (click to enlarge)

What is this and what might we learn from it? Your speculations are welcome in the comments, and the answer will appear later this week!

UPDATE (10 April): Read the comments below for some thoughts that have been bandied about and some clues on what it might be.

3 April 2013
by Erin Blake
2 Comments

The mysterious “Sem”

World, meet Sem. Sem, meet the World. Looks thrilled, doesn’t he? Well, you’d be a bit jaded, too, if you’d been hanging around the Folger for over 80 years, waiting for someone to finally notice you.

Sympathetic caricature of a bearded man, smoking, holding an oversize artist's pencil

Self portrait of the artist known as “Sem”

It all began February 15, with a reference question from a colleague in London, “I am currently researching two volumes of drawings by an artist using the monogram SEM,” wrote Marcus Risdell, the curator at the Garrick Club. Long story short, Marcus had figured out that this “SEM” couldn’t possibly be the French caricaturist Georges “Sem” Goursat (1863-1934) that all sorts of institutions’ catalogs—including Hamnet here at the Folger—said he was.

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28 March 2013
by Heather Wolfe
17 Comments

Filing, seventeenth-century style

When we think of filing today, we think of digital files and folders, and manilla folders, hanging files, and filing cabinets. But what did filing look like in early modern England? How did people deal with all their receipts and bills and letters when they wanted to keep them? What evidence of filing systems still survives?

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19 March 2013
by Goran Proot
2 Comments

Opening Ornamental Initials

During the last couple of months at the Folger, we have come across a number of exceptional ornamental initials in Flemish imprints, as we are processing these systematically together with two interns.1 These initials can be fascinating to study. For example, look at the beginning of the first book of Lodovico Melzo’s Regole militari [...] sopra il governo e servitio della cavalleria, published in Antwerp by Joachim Trognesius in 1611:2 (Click on any image in this post to enlarge it.)

Beginning of Melzo’s military treaty on the cavalry (sig. A1r)

Beginning of Melzo’s military treaty on the cavalry (sig. A1r)

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  1. Bettie Payne and Amanda Daxon were trained to make physical descriptions of these imprints in October 2012 and they have been making collations of, up to now, about 500 items. My sincere thanks to both of them, for both their invaluable help and joy in carrying out this project together with me. [↩]
  2. See the Short Title Catalogue Flanders, henceforth: STCV 6626406. [↩]