Editors and Actors: Hanmer
After going through Theobald’s hundreds of footnotes, Hanmer’s relatively unannotated text came – I must admit – as a bit of a relief. This doesn’t mean that there isn’t a lot to study here, but rather...
View ArticleEditors and Actors: Warburton
I’ve emerged from reading the (roughly) 2 395 footnotes Warburton affixes to his edition of Shakespeare’s plays, and once more have a few observations about how this editor uses the idea of that actor....
View ArticleEditors and Actors: Johnson
Of all the editors I am reading for my first chapter, Samuel Johnson both excites and terrifies me the most. There’s just something so distinctive about his way of writing: the preface to his edition,...
View ArticleEditors and Actors: Steevens
George Steevens’s edition of twenty plays of Shakespeare, being all those works published during the playwright’s lifetime, has a clear, and wonderfully scholarly, aim: disgusted at the variously...
View ArticleEditors and Actors: Blair/Reid
In order to look at this Scottish edition of Shakespeare, edited by Hugh Blair and John Reid, I had to take my first trip to the British Library. Even in this collection, the only version available was...
View ArticleEditors and Actors: Capell
Working on this edition nearly broke me. That’s an exaggeration, but not much of one. Starting out, things looked to be plain sailing, with a brief introduction and a relatively unadorned text to the...
View ArticlePromptbooks and Publication
As is no doubt evident from my last few posts, I’ve been looking into Francis Gentleman and his work on John Bell’s 1774 edition of Shakespeare quite a lot. I’m now writing my ideas up, and – as ever...
View ArticleThe Abstract and (not so) Brief Chronicles of Lichtenberg
It’s been a rather painful process, but I have finally read Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s Briefe aus England in their original German. Although the lack of available translations forced my hand, I’m...
View ArticleCurating Letourneur
This is a bibliographical post. In the following table, I’m going to list the rough contents of all twenty volumes of Pierre Letourneur’s translation of Shakespeare into French. I am also going to...
View ArticleTheobald’s Baobab Theatre
Almost a decade ago now, I spent two months of my summer holidays teaching English in Madagascar as a volunteer for The Dodwell Trust. I worked in the capital Antananarivo, in the cattle town of...
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