Browsing by Author "Baker, William"

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    G. H. Lewes Reads Cymbeline: His Annotations in Knight’s Shakspere
    (Oxford University Press, 2021-08-23) Baker, William; Thompson, Andrew
    George Henry Lewes’s (1817–1878) reading of Cymbeline in his extensively annotated copy of Charles Knight’s 12 volume edition of Shakspere, the second edition of which was published between 1842 and 1844 and is now at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C., is of considerable interest.1Cymbeline is among the eleven plays in the First Folio described as ‘Tragedies’, although today it is characterized as a ‘romance’, and was extremely popular on the nineteenth-century stage. For Hazlitt, ‘of all Shakespeare’s women she [Innogen] is perhaps the most tender and the most artless’, and for Anna Jameson, Innogen is ‘the most perfect’.2 Knight’s eighth volume contains the text annotated by Lewes. His marginal observations are representative of his close reading of Shakespeare’s text, revealing amongst other elements, intertextuality, a concern with metrics that Lewes subsequently uses in his ‘Shakspeare and his Editors’, Foreign Quarterly Review, 43 (1845), 21–41, and an awareness of editorial commentary.
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    George Henry Lewes’s Annotations of the Comedies in Charles Knight’s Shakspere (2nd Edition, 1842–1844)
    (Oxford University Press, 2021-08-23) Baker, William; Thompson, Andrew
    George Henry Lewes’s (1817–1878) extensively annotated copy of the twelve-volume The Comedies, Histories, Tragedies, and Poems of William Shakspere, edited by Charles Knight (2nd edition, 1842–1844) and published by Knight, is now at the Folger Library, Washington, DC.1 What follows is a record of selective Lewes annotations on four of the comedies contained in the first three volumes of his copy, with a brief discussion of patterns in his Shakespearian marginalia for this group of plays.2 Lewes’s innumerable marginal linings and underscoring, however, are too numerous to include in their totality in this account. Lewes’s annotations constitute unpublished primary material, are a resource for the study of reading Shakespeare in the 1840’s, the Shakespeare/Knight edition and provide insight into an early Victorian responding to selected Shakespearian Comedies. Unfortunately, space considerations do not allow for description of Lewes’s spacing on Knight’s page, or his ink usage.