Marginalia Maxxing, Early Modern Style

People have been adding marginalia to books since ancient times. Most of the handwritten notes in the Folger’s early modern books are predictable and anonymous, consisting of sporadic underlinings, emphasis marks, or single words. They look a bit like the abandoned scribblings of a college undergraduate on a required reading assignment. The cryptic marks must have meant something to someone at a specific moment, but they have long outlived their relevance.

Every now and then, however, we encounter a book whose annotations overwhelm the printed text, crowding into every blank space they can. These sorts of books beckon us into an early modern reader’s flow state: hunched over a book with quill pen in hand, surrounded by other books scattered on the candle-lit table and floor, an inkwell and a notebook within easy reach. As they devour the printed words, they take copious notes in the margins, see patterns, make connections, ruminate passages, consult other books, process ideas, turn these ideas into new ideas, and transfer the best examples to a blank book for additional organization and transformation.

Erasmus (and Seneca before him) compared this type of active reader to a bee who gathers and digests nectar (ideas worth noting) from a range of flowers (books), compartmentalizing it into honeycombs (sorting the ideas under relevant headings in a blank “commonplace” book), in order to create a unique blend of healthy and sweet honey (original, witty, beautiful, and/or moralizing ideas and writings inspired by one’s reading and marginalia).

As the honeybees of summer gather the remaining nectar from our flower gardens, here are examples of marginalia from some of my favorite reader-bees gone wild.

Gabriel Harvey

Gabriel Harvey (1545–1631) earned the nickname “Pedantius” because of his over-the-top annotating habits. You can find out more about him and his marginalia at Archaeology of Reading. He used the margins of this book of Italian mottoes and jests to outline his strategies for self-improvement, to cross-reference other readings, and to comment on a wide variety of themes. He wrote in multiple languages and used a system of symbols to classify his notes into categories such as kingship, astronomy, theology, and eloquence. He believed in reading books over and over again, separately and alongside other books, making new observations and connections each time. His notes in this book (one of seven books owned by him at the Folger) are added over a period of at least 25 years. In the margins of several pages (leaves 57r, 97v, 36r) he offers explanations for why he has transformed it into a sprawling repository of notes:

Make most of such Examples, as may serve for Mines of Invention; Mirrours of Elocution, & fountains of pleasant devises

It is not bookes, that makes the skillful man, but the knowledg of bookes: & the memorie of knowledg: & the practis of memorie, both in Words, & in deeds

Enjoy the soverain repetition of your most excellent notes

The Dictionary Annotator

This is a copiously annotated 1572 Latin/English/French dictionary and phrasebook edited by John Higgins. The annotator has added dozens of new words and definitions to each page, filling the margins and cramming definitions in between lines and columns. The entries have been added over time, using different inks and pens and scripts. Maybe it was someone who wanted to expand their vocabulary, using the dictionary as a repository for new turns of phrase. Maybe it was John Higgins himself, expanding his dictionary in preparation for a new edition. Whoever it was, they had an ear for all kinds of inventive phrases, such as “click clack” for an annoyingly talkative person, and “crocodile tears” (fake tears) which the annotator equates with a benevolent killer, or “benevolus trucidator” (he might have been reading Erasmus’s Adages). The annotator had serious stamina, maintaining the same density of description for nearly 600 pages.

Our marginal maxxer even adds a marginal note to the phrase “margent of a booke” which does double duty as a new addition to the dictionary and as an explanation for his interactive reading. In his note, he defines the phrase “margent note or mark” as “signifeng somewhat to be Amended” (leaf 2D3 verso – leaf 2D4 recto). While Gabriel Harvey was trying to improve himself through his marginalia, Dictonary Annotator was trying to improve the book itself.

In the margins of the opening shown above, for the letter R, the annotator adds multiple definitions relating to the concept of reading. I like the idea of a voracious reader and annotator getting to the section “Re” and thinking, Oh boy, I have a lot to say in general, but especially when it comes to the nuances of reading!

Reading, no sweater musick no Better phisick then in Reading no sounder counsel then in Reading.

Reade one thing often not manie things at Random

Reade diligentlie

Reade mannie good things & follow but a fewe

Marginalia in the Folios

Not every reader buzzes around a book like a bee in a garden looking for nectar to transform into honey. The marginalia in our Shakespeare Folios tends to focus on the correction of printing errors and the provision of further information such as character lists and scene locations. But there are plenty of exceptions!

The Third Folio was published in 1663 and then reissued in 1664 with seven additional plays “never before Printed in Folio.” Scholars now think only one of these—Pericles—is by Shakespeare. As you can see by the scrawl on this title page, not everyone was happy with the newly added plays. An unidentified annotator explodes in anger: “A most detestable & most wretched Edition … you dare not aver these 7 plays as wrote by Shakespear. I think them all poor. I mean put in competition with the other Plays.”

In the first sentence of John Heminge’s and Henry Condell’s prefatory “To the great Variety of Readers,” Shakespeare’s former colleagues mention the range of potential readers of the First Folio: “From the most able, to him that can but spell.” A girl named Margaret By was one of those readers “that can but spell.” She used this copy of the First Folio to practice her penmanship rather than engage directly with the plays. She acknowledges her inexperience using a quill pen in this awkwardly written and unfinished version of a well-known rhyme. In modernized spelling, it reads: “Margaret By is my name and / with my pen I write this same / and if my pen had been better / I should . . . ” She neglected to write the last four words: “have mended every letter.” We don’t know if By could read Shakespeare. But the presence of this book in her household suggests that she would have been at least familiar with his plays.

Like Margaret By, Elizabeth Okell (1717–1770) took advantage of the blank spaces and margins in the First Folio to write her name and draw some pictures. On the page above, which lists the actors in Shakespeare’s company, she practices drawing houses. Two of the exterior views have smoking chimneys, and a third one is topped with Louvre-ish pyramids. The interior view shows two elaborate chairs by a table, with pictures hung on the wall. On other pages she includes a similar interior view and two stick figures and signs her name and date, “Elizabeth Okell her Book 1729.” The First Folio was already 106 years old when it came into her 12-year-old hands. Are these the set designs of the earliest recorded female set designer, or a picture of her family house in Spratton, Northamptonshire?