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 ten eleven 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…

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:

socializing

I’ve been thinking about the social ties that connect us to our scholarship. Last week I was at the annual Shakespeare Association of America meeting (or #shakeass13, as it was lovingly hashtagged), a conference that I’ve been going to every single year since (have mercy on me) 1994. ((Ok, I missed one year, in 1995, when it was held in Los Angeles and I was living in London, but I’ve been every other single year always.)) It’s a great conference, in part because it is organized around seminars: the bulk of the work of the meeting happens in seminars in which participants circulate papers in advance; there are also paper panels, with only two or three happening concurrently. The result is a conference with a lot of room for active participation and common conversations. It’s invigorating, and that’s one of the reasons I keep returning. Another reason is that I…