Talking Books Update (70.2)

Talking Book Update 70.2

This update begins with former guest Lukas Erne then will look at two issues of Shakespeare Survey, The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Screen, and ends with a cry for help.

Bel-Vedére or The Garden of The Muses: An Early Modern Printed Commonplace Book

Erne and Davani Singh have edited a new edition of Bel-Vedére or The Garden of The Muses. The subtitle An Early Modern Printed Commonplace Book is added to this 2020 Cambridge University Press edition, winner of the Choice Outstanding Academic Title award in 2021. This edition is based on the 1600 first printing of Bel–Vedére, though there was a second edition in 1610 that added two lines of verse, made some corrections, introduced new errors, and presented four commentary poems, all included somewhere in this new edition. The original was probably compiled by Anthony Munday at the behest of and using material supplied by John Boenham, who enlisted different authors to edit a series of similar commonplace books for publication. This new edition is a bit of a hybrid; among a brace of trivial matters, it keeps the spelling and punctuation of the 1600 but silently modernizes the long S, expands typographical contractions, and regularizes fonts.

There were source studies for the quotations before, notably by Charles Crawford in 1911, but Erne and Singh redo that work by identifying 102 single authors and 7 collaborations. Add the 926 lines Erne and Singh were…