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). The article provides paleographic, bibliographic, and other contextual evidence for the attribution and features more than 60 images, including photos of the handwritten interventions in the folio as well as in the other books we know Milton owned and annotated.
You can access a read-only version of the full article here. If you do not have institutional access to the journal but would like a PDF, please get in touch.
Many people have supported this work through the challenges of a global pandemic, not least the librarians and digitization staff at the Free Library, who digitized the entire book so that we could continue our research remotely. Anyone can now view and download cover-to-cover images of the whole book on the Free Library’s Digital Collections website.
We are grateful to everyone who vetted our arguments (both formally and informally); who turned up for virtual talks and asked productive questions; who fielded queries over email about seemingly minute details; and who offered general collegiality and moral support.