In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I describe one of my favorite academic pursuits, a choice example of which has lately made it into the news. Here’s an excerpt.
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To a literary scholar, few things are so exciting as to discover something hitherto unknown about a great writer of the past. A couple of weeks ago, Jason Scott-Warren, a fellow of Cambridge University, hit a double: He announced that the copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio of 1623 owned by the Free Library of Philadelphia contained numerous handwritten annotations that appear to have been made by none other than John Milton, the author of “Paradise Lost.” Other scholars promptly chimed in to agree that Philadelphia’s First Folio looked like the real right thing—a book once owned by Milton himself in whose margins he had scribbled notes, some terse and others discursive, about the printed texts of Shakespeare’s plays. These notes give us, Mr. Scott-Warren said in an interview with the Guardian, “the opportunity to read Shakespeare through Milton’s eyes.”…
Unlikely as it may sound, the study of such annotations is a recognized academic specialty, albeit an arcane one. There’s even a word for them, “marginalia,” coined by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the author of “Kubla Khan” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Coleridge scrawled so compulsively in the margins of the books he read that six fat volumes of his collected works are devoted to his own marginalia, some of which are as memorable as full-length essays. Here, for instance, is what he had to say about a priggish remark made by one of Milton’s biographers: “The man who reads a work meant for immediate effect on one age, with the notions & feelings of another, may be a refined gentleman, but must be a sorry Critic.” Bull’s-eye!…
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Read the whole thing here.