Folger Collections
The Role of Pants in Pants Roles
Emily Trask as Viola In Folger Theatre’s Twelfth Night. Photo: Scott Suchman. Pants. Slacks. Breeches. Knickers. Overalls. Pantaloons. Pedal Pushers. Trousers. Jeans. Bloomers. Jodhpurs. Khakis. Drawers. Call them what you will, in our production of What You Will – of…
Proof prints, part one
Last time I posted on The Collation (Two disciplines separated by a common language, 30 April 2013), I went off on a bit of a rant about vocabulary barriers between printed pictures and printed words. Guess what? There’s more! That…
Ten copies of the “bad” 1640 Sonnets in good and bad shape
The Folger Shakespeare Library has ten copies of the second edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets (STC 22344). All ten copies of STC 22344 in a row Engraved portrait (fol. p1v) and the first title page (fol. *1r) from copy 1 The…
Looking like a book
Last month I wrote about a book—nay, a leaf of a book—and the secret histories it reveals about how it was made, from the growth of the tree that became the woodblock to the valleys and hills that formed during…
Learning to write the alphabet
Learning to write the alphabet is one of the first stages of writing literacy. For early modern English children, this meant first learning to read the letters of the alphabet (printed in black letter) from a hornbook. Hornbook. Folger Shakespeare Library…
Pen facsimiles of early print
As the commenters on last week’s crocodile guessed, the mystery image showed writing masquerading as print or, to use the more formal term, a pen facsimile (click on any of the images in the post to enlarge them): pen facsimile…
Two disciplines separated by a common language
I should have seen it coming when the Art History professor and the English professor started talking with each other about “print culture” (names omitted to protect reputations). It soon became clear that one had been talking about the circulation…
Mors comoedia. A comedy a hundred years old brought to life again in 1726
Sheer chance is an important factor in research. Some sixteen years ago I was surveying a sammelband held at Antwerp University Library that contained 257 programs documenting theater performances in Jesuit schools in Flanders. For the results of this research,…
Louis Butelli: Lights, Camera, Action!
Cover art for “Silent Shakespeare.” Hello once again from your pal Louis Butelli! We have completed our first full week of rehearsals for Robert Richmond’s production of Twelfth Night, beginning April 30 at the Folger Theatre. We’ve got a really…
First Folios online
Editor’s Note, March 30, 2016: Sarah now is maintaining an up-to-date list of digitized First Folios on her personal site. When you’ve finished reading this post, please head over there to check out the current list. I imagine that you’re…
Interleaving history: an illustrated Book of Common Prayer
A guest post by Whitney Anne Trettien In Henry Fielding’s novel Tom Jones, Partridge and his friends go to see a play. As they watch a man light the upper candles of the playhouse, the predictably inane Partridge cries out,…
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…