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The Collation

An alter'd case: An annotated copy of The Roaring Girl

[Editor’s note: Victoria Myers was a student in the Fall 2012 Folger Undergraduate Seminar taught by Sarah Werner. As part of that course, Victoria researched the history of a copy of the first printing of The Roaring Girl (STC 17908). She continued her research for her capstone project for her Renaissance Studies major at the University of Maryland. This is a small excerpt from that project, focusing on the discoveries she made about the book’s annotations, a sleuthing process that ultimately revealed who the unknown marginalia writer was. Although this post is longer than the typical post in The Collation, it nicely illustrates Victoria’s research process and the type of contributions to scholarship that undergraduates are capable of making.]

The marks in the book

The reason that I found the Folger Shakespeare Library’s copy of The Roaring Girl especially interesting is because it is completely marked up. Most of these marks are corrections to the text, specifically updates to the spelling. These marks consist mostly of little lines through extra letters (often ‘e’ and ‘s’), but also include things like altering “I” to “aye,” when it is not meant to be a pronoun.

modernizing spelling (fol. 3Br)

modernizing spelling (fol. 3Br)

At first, I thought that this person must have been extremely serious in their dislike of Jacobean spelling, to correct every single word in the book. However, there were other marks that indicated some other reason for this editing. These led me to believe that this person was not editing the text for their own amusement (or out of annoyance), but rather that they were editing it for a new edition of the play. 

  1. Robert Dodsley, Isaac Reed, Octavius Gilchrist, and John P. Collier. A Select Collection of Old Plays.  In Twelve Volumes.  The Second Edition, Corrected and Collated with the Old Copies.  With Notes Critical and Explanatory. (London: J. Nichols, 1780). Digitizations of the entire twelve volumes are available through HathiTrust: http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000559408. Volume 6, which contains The Roaring Girl, can be viewed at http://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015006997541.

Comments

Congratulations to Victoria! Excellent literary sleuthing! It’s inspiring when material from the Folger’s astonishing collection encounters such a diligent scholar.

And to think used books with annotations were once thought undesirable!

Richard M. Waugaman, M.D. — June 13, 2013

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This was amazing work. Many years ago, I did an MA and then a PhD on marginalia. I think that your careful scholarship on this project is a credit to your industry and to the people who were supervising this capstone. I certainly hope that you are going to go on in the field.

Carl James Grindley — June 13, 2013

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Yay Vicki! Great job. I was very honored and pleased to be a reader on this independent study project at the University of Maryland. Wonderful work!

Sabrina Baron — June 13, 2013

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Reed’s extensive library (almost 9000 volumes) was sold at auction over the course of 39 days (Nov. 2-Dec. 16, 1807). The catalogue is titled “Bibliotheca Reediana”; the UCLA copy (annotated with prices realized, totalling more than £4100 according to the annotator’s reckoning) has been digitized (archive.org). Alas, “The Roaring Girle” is not listed (at least not among the quarto plays, where it would be expected). John Nichols has a substantial article on Reed in his “Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century,” v. 2, 664-672 (and 722 on Dodsley in particular). It’s tempting to imagine that other copies of earlier editions of the plays included in his new edition of Dodsley’s collection, with similar editing by Reed, are waiting to be discovered. — This is an excellent piece of detective work, and clearly lays out the evidence; however, it should be noted that this copy was identified as Reed’s copy-text in Paul Mulholland’s edition of the play (Manchester UP, 1987, in the series “The Revel Plays”); see the list of copies collated (pp. 1-2) and note 2, p. 53, which traces the identification of the copy as Reed’s to an article in “The Library” (4th ser., 17 [1937], 395-426, at p. 423) by R. C. Bald, dealing with a copy of “The Lost Lady” in the Library of Congress, similarly marked up, but by Dodsley for the first edition of the collection.

John Lancaster — June 13, 2013

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It’s true that the Reed connection has been noted before, but it’s fantastic to see a detailed analysis of this book— the careful study of the marginalia, and the excellent illustrations, help you understand it in a way those earlier publications didn’t.

John Lavagnino — June 22, 2013

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