The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 20.0193 Tuesday, 28 April 2009
[1] From: Peter Holland <
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Date: Monday, 27 Apr 2009 16:41:40 -0400
Subj: Re: SHK 20.0186 William Scott?
[2] From: Stanley Wells <
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Date: Tuesday, 28 Apr 2009 12:46:44 +0100
Subj: RE: SHK 20.0186 William Scott?
[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Peter Holland <
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Date: Monday, 27 Apr 2009 16:41:40 -0400
Subject: 20.0186 William Scott?
Comment: Re: SHK 20.0186 William Scott?
>The recent portrait kerfuffle reminds me to ask about an earlier Stanley
>Wells revelation, the mysteriously cloistered William Scott manuscript
>he wrote up in TLS in 2003, which ms (he shared with us in 2005) was
>since transferred to the BL.
>
>http://www.shaksper.net/archives/2005/1872.html
>
>Has anybody done any work on it? I've searched every so often (Expanded
>Academic ASAP, Google Scholar, etc.) with no results. Can't even find it
>in the BL catalogues. There are a couple of passing mentions in books
>(all quoting from the TLS piece), but that's it as far as I can tell.
>
>Do we know who owned it or anything else about provenance?
>
>Has anyone created a facsimile or transcript? (And/or does anyone have
>influence at the BL to move it up in the scanning queue?)
>
>Has anyone written about it at any greater length than the 2003 TLS piece?
>
>Has it suffered the fate of the Dead Sea Scrolls, or Indiana Jones' lost
>ark?
>
>As Professor Wells said in concluding his article, the work is of
>"multifaceted interest to scholars of the literature and language of the
>period ... It is a major addition to the considerable corpus of
>Elizabethan literary criticism . . . It is to be hoped that his work
>will eventually be made available for detailed study in an annotated
>edition."
>
>*Any* availability for detailed study -- even any discussion -- that
>does not require traveling to the BL would be welcome.
Rumour says that an edition of the manuscript is to be published by
Cambridge University Press in the future.
[2]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Stanley Wells <
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Date: Tuesday, 28 Apr 2009 12:46:44 +0100
Subject: 20.0186 William Scott?
Comment: RE: SHK 20.0186 William Scott?
Here are answers to some of the questions raised by Steve Roth about the
William Scott manuscript.
It has been bought by the British Library, and has taken rather a long
time to go through their accession processes. I am not aware of the
present state of play, but it has certainly been consulted and studied
by one scholar, Dr Gavin Alexander, of Christ's College, Cambridge, who
is the author of _Writing After Sidney: The Literary Response to Sir
Philip Sidney, 1586-1640_ (Oxford: O.U.P., 2006), and editor of
_Sidney's 'The Defence of Poesy' and Selected Renaissance Literary
Criticism_ (Penguin Classics, 2004) - my TLS article appeared just in
time for him to include a brief reference to it in the latter. Since
then he has submitted an admirable proposal for an edition of the work
to Cambridge University Press, and within the last few weeks has been
contracted for this. He has authorized me to say that he hopes it may be
published by late 2011. He regards it as comparable in importance to
Sidney's _Apology_. Considering the youth of William Scott when he wrote
it, it bears witness to the extraordinary excellence of the Elizabethan
educational system, at least in literary studies.
I was not initially allowed to reveal the whereabouts of the manuscript
for security reasons. And now I can say no more than that it is of
impeccable provenance, having descended directly from the heirs of Sir
Henry Lee.
List members interested in the Cobbe portrait of Shakespeare may like to
know that it descended from the same collection as the Cobbe portrait of
the Earl of Southampton, and that the relationship between the Earl and
the poet is discussed in Shakespeare Found, an illustrated collection of
essays with reprints on the narrative poems along with those of the
Sonnets that are clearly addressed to a male, edited by me and published
last week by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and the Cobbe Foundation.
A revised version of my TLS article appeared recently in _Shakespeare's
Book, Essays in Reading, Writing and Reception_, ed. Richard Meek, Jane
Rickard and Richard Wilson (Manchester University Press, 2009). In an
essay in the same volume Richard Wilson comments on Scott's work, but
regrettably confuses Scott's comments on _Richard II_ with what Scott
says about _The Rape of Lucrece_ (pp.. 116-7). Paul Edmondson also makes
critical use of it in his Introduction to the Penguin Shakespeare
edition of _Richard II_.
Stanley Wells
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