The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 8.0312.  Tuesday, 4 March 1997.

[1]     From:   John Drakakis <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
        Date:   Monday, 3 Mar 1997 16:37:42 -0000
        Subj:   RE: SHK 8.0287 Re: Facsimiles

[2]     From:   Tom Simone <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
        Date:   Monday, 3 Mar 1997 11:43:01 -0500
        Subj:   Folio Facsimiles

[3]     From:   John Velz <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
        Date:   Monday, 3 Mar 1997 14:50:12 +0200
        Subj:   Facsimiles


[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From:           John Drakakis <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date:           Monday, 3 Mar 1997 16:37:42 -0000
Subject: 8.0287 Re: Facsimiles
Comment:        RE: SHK 8.0287 Re: Facsimiles

I don't think that the word facsimile is used to describe these
editions.  They are orthographically modernized reprints of the earliest
editions.  They are emphatically NOT diplomatic editions. Long "s" for
example is modernized, and no attempt is made to reproduce the spacing
after punctuation etc.

They are designed to give modern readers a flavour of what reading an
"original" quarto might have been like, along with errors of various
kinds.  I did the Q1 Richard III but a number of the variants between Q1
and F which I would have liked to have seen printed in the notes at the
end of the volume were cut by the publisher for reasons of cost.

I think "Shakespeare Originals" in the plural is about right.

John Drakakis

[2]-------------------------------------------------------------
From:           Tom Simone <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date:           Monday, 3 Mar 1997 11:43:01 -0500
Subject:        Folio Facsimiles

Just a note on what I find to be the most nuanced of all the Folio
facsimiles, the Sydney Lee version of 1906?.  The use of
photolithography from a single copy produced a noble volume with far
superior resolution of the page than in the Norton/Hinman.  Of course,
the Lee facsimile was a limited edition of about 1,000 copies and is
only usually available in libraries, and it does not pretend to the
bibliographic scrutiny of Hinman and his collator.

I was, however, recently surprised by the fine quality of print
impression in a leaf from an original folio.  It retains aura even
post-Benjamin.

Best,
Tom Simone

[3]-------------------------------------------------------------
From:           John Velz <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date:           Monday, 3 Mar 1997 14:50:12 +0200
Subject:        Facsimiles

Louis Marder's detailed account of the problems in the Yale Facsimile of
F1 obviates most of what I sent off to SHAKSPER before I saw Marder's
contribution.  I might add to his information and that of Ken Steele
some tidbits about earlier facsimiles.  Lionel Booth made a type
facsimile (1865) of F1 in honor of the tricentennial of Sh's birth.  It
was a labor of considerable magnitude.  He was so proud of its accuracy
that he offered a large cash reward to anyone who could find an error in
it; no one ever claimed the reward.  Of course no one knew in the middle
of the 19th century what we now know about variants in F1 copies.  I own
a copy of this facs. which I bought for a very low price from the Folger
when they were selling off some extra copies of such books in the late
1960s I believe it was.  Henry Clay Folger bought multiple copies of the
four Shak. folios later in the nineteenth century with the idea that
having multiple copies in one place would someday enable scholars to
learn more about the true text of Shakespeare: an uncanny prophecy of
Hinman's work in the 1950s in the Folger Library vault that led to his
two-volume *The Printing and Proof-Reading of the First Folio of
Shakespeare* (Oxford, 1963).

I once examined 15 readings in *JC* in the facsimile of F2 in the series
of Shakespeare facsimiles that Methuen published early in this century
and found that the plates had been tampered with ("sophisticated") to
make F2 look more like F1.  J. H. P. Pafford had earlier demonstrated
that the F1 facs. in the Methuen series had itself been sophisticated.
(See Velz "The Text of *Julius Caesar* in the Second Folio: Two Notes"
*SQ* 20 [1969]: 95-98; J. H. P. Pafford "The Methuen Facsimile, 1910, of
the First Folio, 1623." *N&Q* n.s. 13 [1966]:126-27).

Neither Yale, nor Methuen, nor any other facsimile is a safe substitute
for the Hinman facsimile from Norton.  Now that Norton is bringing out a
big moneymaker in their textbook version of the Oxford modern spelling
Shakespeare, perhaps they can be induced to serve the scholarly
community as they did when the Hinman facsimile appeared in 1968 and
scholars were offered a deep discount on a special cloth-bound edn. at
the same time that a gift edition was being marketed at several times
the price of the scholars' edition.  Many of us have been grateful to
Norton ever since.  It would be a boon to a new generation of scholars
if Norton were to make a press run for another deeply discounted
edition-again limited to scholars and one-time only.

John Velz

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