Emending and Remembering

Chaucer was an early modern author. This statement is an acknowledgement of Chaucer's presence in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Nowhere was this presence more visible than in the string of large folio editions of Chaucer's collected works. Chaucer's language may have been increasingly distant and difficult to understand, but, unlike his fellow Middle English poets, his works remained accessible and visible in print. So when Spenser lauded, and self-consciously claimed, the mantle of Chaucer, he was not only accessing the authority of the past -- of a domestic heritage of English "literature" -- but was also capitalizing on the authority of a contemporary.

Necessary Quotation Marks

"Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations."

--Orson Welles (attributed, but possibly apocryphal -- more on this below)

In my last post, I wrote about the texts of Shakespeare's early narrative poems, Venus and Adonis (1593) and Lucrece (1594) -- the first works by the poet to appear in print. What I didn't mention -- and what has been on my mind this week, as I read the proofs for an article on this very subject -- was that both poems were first printed by a native of Shakespeare's hometown, Stratford-upon-Avon: Richard Field (a printer who is, suffice it to say, near and dear to me). We have several books printed by Field here at Iowa, and here I'd like to take a closer look at one book in particular -- or, rather, a single feature of early modern printing: inverted commas; aka, commonplace markers; aka, early modern quotation marks.