On March 1, 2024, during a research forum at the Phoenix Public Library sponsored by the newly formed Arizona Book History Group, Aaron T. Pratt noticed two distinctive things about the marginal notes in the library’s copy of Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles (1587): an instantly recognizable two-stroke italic ‘e’ and unusually dark ink. The annotations in the Holinshed were reminiscent of handwritten notes in a copy of the Shakespeare First Folio now at the Free Library of Philadelphia—marginalia that Jason Scott-Warren and I have argued were inscribed by the poet and author of Paradise Lost John Milton.
Read morePREMIERE: "Making Shakespeare: The First Folio" on PBS Great Performances
The story of how we came to know that the copy of the Shakespeare First Folio now in the Rare Book Department at the Free Library of Philadelphia was once owned and annotated by John Milton, author of Paradise Lost, is featured in this new documentary to mark the quatercentenary of the First Folio’s publication. Jason Scott-Warren and I discuss the “discovery” from our respective sides of the Atlantic: he in Cambridge, where Milton was a student almost four hundred years ago, and me in Philadelphia, where his copy of Shakespeare now resides.
Read moreOUT NOW! The Case for John Milton as the Reader of the Free Library First Folio
Three and a half years ago, in September 2019, Jason Scott-Warren suggested that the handwriting in a copy of the Shakespeare First Folio in the Rare Book Department at the Free Library of Philadelphia might belong to John Milton. His claim was based on images of the marginalia published with an essay I had written about the 700+ handwritten inscriptions in the book and what they revealed about how one (then-anonymous) early reader engaged with the Shakespearean text. (The essay was published in Early Modern English Marginalia, edited by Katherine Acheson, for which Jason had also written a chapter.) My independent findings about the reader just so happened to match the Milton context well, both in terms of dating and modus operandi.
At long last, our article identifying Milton as the former owner and annotator of the Free Library First Folio—“‘thy unvalued Booke’: John Milton’s Copy of the Shakespeare First Folio”—has been published in Milton Quarterly (vol. 56).
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