Scholar finds John Milton's copy of Shakespeare, marked up with corrections and improvements

boing
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Some of those edits are consistent with the standard text.

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HAMLET
How is it with you, lady?

QUEEN
Alas, how is ’t with you,
That you do bend your eye on vacancy
And with th’ incorporal air do hold discourse?
Forth at your eyes your spirits wildly peep,
And, as the sleeping soldiers in th’ alarm,
Your bedded hair, like life in excrements,
Start up and stand an end. O gentle son,

There are three texts of hamlet-- the bad quarto Q1; the good quarto Q2, and the folio.

The folio lacks 230 lines found in the good quarto; and adds 70 lines that are not found in the quartos.
https://www.bl.uk/treasures/shakespeare/hamlet.html

edit:

first quarto:

Ham. How i’st with you Lady?
Queene Nay, how i’st with you
That thus you bend your eyes on vacancie,
And holde discourse with nothing but with ayre?

second quarto:

Hamlet
How is it with you, lady?
Queen
Alas, how is’t with you,
That you do bend your eye on vacancy,
And with th’incorporal air do hold discourse?

first folio

Ham . How is it with you Lady?
Qu . Alas, how is’t with you?
That you bend your eye on vacancie,
And with their corporall ayre do hold discourse.

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The most interesting note from Milton:

I just figured out who wrote Shakespeare’s sonnets and it is astounding – it was his dog all along! I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain.

3 Likes
23

Indeed.

She demonstrates that the annotations are highly unusual in character, having been added by a reader who was very attentive to misprints and metrical errors, and who in two cases–those of Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet–was comparing the Folio text with the text supplied by a Quarto edition of each play (Q5 [1637] in the case of the former, and one of Q3-5 [1611-37] for the latter). In several cases, the reader corrected the Folio from the Quartos, but his emendations were by no means slavish, and were accompanied by other textual changes that seem to have been inspired by his own sense of what was needed in the particular context.

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