Milton’s notes on Shakespeare appear to have been found | Hacker News Reader

Milton’s notes on Shakespeare appear to have been found

theguardian.com

131 pointspepys45 comments

I put the cam.ac.uk post on this up a couple days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20969349

Thanks! I like your linked article quite a bit more. The photos comparing known-milton handwriting to the folio in question adds a lot.

This is the better link. Omg I love this guys humble style. If I ever think I have made a big discovery in math or physics I am totally going to present it like this: "You know how I am always coming up with bad ideas that turn out to be wrong, well I just had another one. No big deal, silly me I can't help myself [big sigh] This is so embarrassing, but I think gravity and quantum physics could be related by ...

Last paragraph, the discoverer is quoted:

>> This is evidence of how digital technology and the opening up of libraries [could] transform our knowledge of this period.

Indeed! Just bringing many more eyes (and perhaps AIs) to the works can vastly accelerate the growth of knowledge, and they're already doing further research based on this discovery.

Who knows how many more centuries this knowledge might have languished unrecognized, just sitting in the stacks? And how much more like it is still awaiting?

Agreed - and if anyone is interested in this specific sort of work ("meta-textual" analysis of things like marginalia and the material characteristics of a piece of writing) there is a wonderful resource in Rare Book School at the University of Virginia: https://rarebookschool.org. They offer summer classes and a fellowship program, and it isn't just about old books - when I was there I met people working on digital texts, and even things like the preservation and archiving of VHS tapes and other old analog formats.

Nick Wilding's discovery of a forged Galileo manuscript is another fun example of this type of research: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/12/16/a-very-rare-bo...

+1!

I studied under Terry Belanger there as an undergrad and it was one of the most rewarding experiences of my time in university.

If you had asked me 5 minutes prior to reading about this, who was the earlier writer - Milton or Shakespeare? - I would have said Milton. I now know that it's the opposite. Shakespeare preceded Milton.

There's something about Shakespeare's writing that feels closer to modernity though. Milton seems sort of medieval, perhaps because of the religious themes (and the fact that I've only read a small portion of Paradise Lost...).

Multiple people have suggested this here. It seems very strange to me, since Shakespeare is one of the most famous Englishmen of the Elizabethan era, and Milton was politically active 50+ years later during the English Civil War.

People in the US don't even know there was an English Civil War.

A surprising number of English people don't know that there was an English Civil War. When you've got a thousand years of continuous history to pack in, Oliver Cromwell ends up being kind of a footnote.

Maybe if it had occurred before Shakespeare, instead of after, he could have written a cycle of plays about it, and we'd remember it as well as the Wars of the Roses. But as it is, English schoolchildren forget it as soon as class is over... and I suspect the rest of the UK cares even less.

My understanding is that we already had the notes, we just recognized that they're Milton's, is that correct?

Correct.

So why is this so groundbreaking? At most, I'd expect it to be an interesting anecdote.

Because we care about what Milton wrote a lot more than we care about what some random book buyer wrote.

Why? We obviously read the notes and we didn't especially care for them before we found out they were Milton's, so why is that? This implies that we care more about a famous person writing dreck than an anonymous person writing fantastic insights.

The article mentions one allusion Milton made to Shakespeare. It is possible that we can learn more about what ideas Milton was referencing and responding to in Shakespeare. It gives us more insight into him than into Shakespeare.

Ah, that's fair.

If you find someone’s copy of a book that was an important influence on them, then by reading their marginal notes you can learn something about their work or life. We probably won’t learn much new about Shakespeare from reading Milton’s comments, but we can potentially learn a lot about Milton.

Perhaps not in this case, but often marginal notes are incomprehensible without context about what else the writer of the notes was reading, thinking about, or working on. Once you know who wrote the notes you can often understand more of their content and relevance.

That's part of it, I suspect. It's all so subjective, after all. And also, as noted, it aids interpretation of Milton's work.

I see a lot of evidence that these annotations are similar to Milton’s style. But the question is, are they more similar to Milton’s style than to any other random literati of the time? Has this been looked at?

I admit I only skimmed the article but it I didn't see it say that Milton actually physically met Shakespeare, right: this is simply a metaphorical use?

Doesn't detract from the excitement of the article, I just would love to think how the elder might have influenced the younger.

I'd think it would have to be metaphorical, if Wikipedia is correct - Wikipedia says Shakespeare died in 1616 and Milton was born in 1608... so if they did meet, there was no great exchange of ideas there.

Thanks, and blush for not doing my homework myself.

Well, don’t give me too much credit. I had to look it up because I was surprised to learn that Shakespeare and Milton were alive at the same time - but if I had been on a gameshow, I would have guessed that Milton lived and died hundreds of years before _Shakespeare_ was born.

...and of course they're hoarding them instead of just putting up a torrent of high-res scans.

It is a public library and they are already putting it out a display open to the public (instead of keeping it in records in the back.) They are also making available other Milton stuff they have on hand such as a 1st edition of Paradise Lost.

Free Library of Philadelphia's Parkway Central branch 1901 Vine St., Philadelphia, PA 19103 Shakespeare First Folio on Display Monday, Sept. 16, through Saturday, Oct. 19

Source: https://www.phillyvoice.com/free-library-display-shakespeare...

So Shakespeare was real after all!

That take, Anonymous the movie :)

This is about Milton reading and annotating the published collection of Shakespeare's plays, not Milton meeting Shakespeare in person. It doesn't have any bearing on the debate over Shakespeare's identity.

The title is a little misleading.

Milton would have been not yet eight years old when Shakespeare died, to boot, so I'm not sure a physical meeting would have meant much to him.

People would be talking about him/her during that time, so I think their observation would have been very relevant had they made one about the identity.

Very few historians doubt Shakespeare's identity. Wikipedia doesn't even categorize him as "people's whose existence is disputed."

You're right, I shouldn't have even called it a debate.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com