#variorum

[uwmspeccoll]

Shakespeare Weekend

In 1803 Joseph Johnson (1738-1809) published the fifth edition of The Plays of William Shakespeare, in twenty-one volumes, with the corrections and illustrations of various commentators to which are added notes. Originally written by Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) and George Steevens (1736-1800), this fifth edition was edited by Isaac Reed (1742-1807) and became known as the first variorum edition of Shakespeare.  

Reed’s collation of previous variations of Shakespeare proved to be a massive undertaking (twenty-one volumes!) that would be reprinted in 1813 and inspire future variorums like that of James Boswell the Younger in 1821 and the New Variorum Shakespeare Project that began in the 1870s and continues to this day as an official project of the Modern Language Association of America (which, btw, was headquartered here at the UWM libraries for 20 years, and the reason we have such a strong Shakespeare collection). The edition opens with a frontispiece engraving of Shakespeare by British engraver James Neagle (d. 1822) followed by an advertisement by Reed. Reed takes this opportunity to sing Steevens praises, including a eulogy written by William Hayley that reads in part “This tomb may perish, but not so his name who shed new lustre upon Shakespeare’s fame!” 

Volume One continues with various prefaces and essays by the usual Shakespearean scholars and critics of the time, Malone, Pope, Warburton and of course Nicholas Rowe’s Life of Shakespeare. Printed by John Plymsell out of London, our edition features marble endpapers in a Stormont pattern. 

View more Shakespeare Weekend posts. 

-Jenna, Special Collections Graduate Intern

[uwmspeccoll]

Shakespeare Weekend!

This week we continue our look at The works of Mr. William Shakespear: in ten volumes published in 1728 by Alexander Pope (1688-1744) and Dr. George Sewell (d. 1726) for Jacob Tonson (1655-1736). Similar to Rowe’s earlier collection, scene divisions, stage directions, dramatis personae, and full-page engravings by either French artist Louis Du Guernier (1677-1716) or Englishman Paul Fourdrinier (1698-1758) precede each play.  

Pope’s editions of Shakespeare were the first attempted to collate all previous publications. He consulted twenty-seven early quartos restoring passages that had been out of print for almost a century while simultaneously removing about 1,560 lines of material that didn’t appeal to him. Some of those lines were degraded to the bottom of the page with his other editorial notes.  

This process is called a variorum. Pope began a practice of producing Shakespeare variorum editions that continues to this day with the Modern Language Association's New Variorum Shakespeare Project. That project was centered here at the UW-Milwaukee Libraries for 30 years beginning in 1977 under the direction of Dr. Robert K. Turner, with the assistance of Dr. Virginia Haas.

Volume Two’s Comedy of Errors provides several examples of Pope's editorial additions, including using stars to denote scenes he felt were particularly lovely and daggers for those he found rather ugly. Other editorial notes within Volume Two are seen within Much Ado About Nothing where Pope points out additions from earlier editions and provides definitions for daffe and foining.  

A star marking Pope's appreciation for the scene.

Editorial note by Pope.

Inclusion of definitions by Pope.

Volume Two also includes Shakespearean comedies The Merchant of Venice, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and As You Like It. 

View more Shakespeare Weekend posts. 

-Jenna, Special Collections Graduate Intern 

[journeyintowriting]

Word of the Day: Variorum

Variorum (vair-ee-awr-uh m, -ohr-)

Adjective

1. containing different versions of the text by various editors

2. containing many notes and commentaries by a number of scholars or critics

Noun

1. a variorum edition or text

[the-lexicographer]

Word of the Day

Variorum, /ver-ē-ˈȯr-əm/ - Having notes or comments by different critics or editors.

       Source: Funk and Wagnall’s Comprehensive Standard Dictionary, 1939

[asfaltics]

folding, faulting, and brecciation, 2

detail (minus border rule, etc) of Plate xxiv, Jaspilite from Grand Rapids Mine, Negaunee illustrating Charles Richard Van Hise (1857-1918 *) and William Shirley Bayley (1861-1943). The Marquette iron-bearing district of Michigan, with atlas. Including a chapter on the Republic Trough, by Henry Lloyd Smith. Department of the Interior. Monographs of the U.S. Geological Survey. XXVIII. 1897. * The "two emphatic intrusions" found in the monochrome Google scan (of copy at Stanford University) were evidently a tear in the, or loose scrap of, paper. This poor snapshot of an original copy (at Harvard's Cabot Science Library) can only hint at the beauty — uniformly so — of the plates in this volume. The two presentations are incomparable and striking in their respective ways.

Google scans of copies at Cornell* and Purdue* are also available. The Stanford and Cornell scans are at least partly in color (but no color for Plate xxiv); the Purdue scan misses Plate xxiv.  

[fairmatter]

Experience/Experiment; or, Reading the Variorum, Part 3

By Erick Kelemen

“Experience thogh noon auctoritee

Were in this world is right ynogh for me

To speke of wo that is in mariage.”

Actually, it might matter a great deal. Experience can come unbidden. But an experiment requires volition—intention. To call anything an experiment requires that we have a purpose to gather knowledge in taking action. That means that for the Wife of Bath, today, experiment is the more subversive word than experience. Experiment argues the Wife marries each husband in order to learn something—what marriage is, what makes a good husband, whatever. Many students suspect that the Wife is a mercenary. The word experiment would lean that direction, suggesting not only that she has learned from what has passed in her marriages (as experience indicates), but that learning—not love—was the whole point. Oh, the scandal! Experiment makes the Wife’s approach to marriage and the “marriage market” a bit more like a casual shopper than many would like: “Hmm,” says this Wife of Bath, “I think I’ll try this one for a while, to see how it goes.”

Some will object that choosing experiment over experience takes us further away from what Chaucer intended and further away from what Chaucer’s original audiences would have understood. Experiment and experience were new words in English, having first appeared in written documents within Chaucer’s lifetime, and there was significant overlap in their meanings, making any argument quite complicated. In short, I think there is room to disagree.

We can make the case that editors today might do well to print experiment instead of experience. After all, it is the subversive quality that makes the Wife such a hot commodity in literary studies. Her subversiveness is one reason, perhaps the biggest single reason, why the Wife is more likely to be anthologized today than is any other pilgrim. Subversion is conflict, and conflict sells. While modern editors will all likely reject experiment in favor of experience, it cannot be denied that experiment provides our readers, even our most scholarly readers, with precisely what they want from the Wife, with what they already find there.