This week we will continue our discussion of the First Folios currently on display in the Folger Shakespeare Library exhibition, First Folio! Shakespeare’s American Tour. This post will look at their “sophistication.”
A “sophisticated” or made-up book is a defective book that has been perfected with leaves supplied from other copies, or from a pen or printed facsimile. Missing leaves in a book are the most likely motivation for its sophistication although, other explanations exist.… Continue Reading
The rusty outline we showed in last week’s Crocodile post is, as one of our responders, Giles Bergel, correctly guessed, from a pair of scissors. It appears in Folger First Folio number 58, in Henry IV, part 1 (pp. 50-51). This First Folio is currently in the Folger Great Hall, along with nineteen other First Folios, for the exhibition First Folio!… Continue Reading
Here is another ghostly residue for you to identify, for this month’s Crocodile Mystery:
As always, leave your thoughts and guesses in the comments, and come back next week to find out the answer.… Continue Reading
Manuscripts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are going digital with added features for users! The launch of a beta website for Early Modern Manuscripts Online next month will provide encoded transcriptions to accompany manuscript images and metadata. The number of transcriptions will be limited at first (a few hundred letters), but the EMMO corpus online will grow over time into a broad resource for research on a variety of manuscripts.… Continue Reading
When I retrieved Sh.Misc. 1639 from the shelf, I wasn’t sure what to expect from an item described on the catalog card as “Shakespeare Tercentenary Celebration. Mementoes, tickets, programs…” Many of the components turned out to be fairly common–though no less interesting!—pieces of ephemera such as programs, fundraising letters, performance tickets, and even a train schedule. But one item was a little more exciting.… Continue Reading
I used to hate Hamnet’s one-box “Basic Search”—the landing page you get when you click the “Search” tab at http://hamnet.folger.edu—but two things happened last Thursday to change this. What caused the change of heart? Read on.
First, the Basic Search now defaults to “Keyword Anywhere*” instead of “Name Browse.”
This means that even if you meant to select a different search option, you at least stand a chance of getting something useful if you just type something then hit “Enter” without thinking.… Continue Reading
