Beyond the Stacks, by Professor Thomas
Fulton
There are few things that
transport students into the past as effectively as a really
old book. Last week, I took my Renaissance drama class to
the best time-machine on campus: the Special Collections department
of Alexander Library. There, we had a look at the primary
texts we had been studying thus far in class: pages from medieval
plays, first editions of Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists,
and a fascinating series of Bibles.
Thanks largely to the generosity of alums over the past two
centuries, Rutgers has a spectacular collection of Bibles
from the early modern period. In our visit, we were able to
see an edition of the Bible that King James I, in the beginning
of his reign of England, had called "seditious and traitorous":
the Geneva Bible, created by exiles during Mary I's reign
in Calvin's Geneva, and brought back with the accession of
the new Protestant queen, Elizabeth I. We were able to see
for ourselves the reason James had taken such offence: annotations,
elaborately crafted to fit in the margins, a few of which
"alloweth," as James protested, "disobedience
to Kings." Was this Bible (or its annotations) really
such a threat to authority?
Looking back at Shakespeare's Measure for Measure,
a play performed before James himself, we saw a play rife
with allusions not only to this repudiated Bible but also
to its "seditious" marginal notes. Does Shakespeare's
subtle use of biblical allusion criticize James's arrogations
of Divine Right? How does the play comment on the King's condemnation
of England's most popular Bible? Also in the collection, thanks
to the generosity of an alumnus from 1842, we saw the spectacular
product of James's decree: the popular 1611 King James Bible
- a book without any marginal notes to explain that the Bible
is not always sympathetic to the powers that be.
Some important Bibles are still missing from Rutgers' exciting
collection, including the Bible officially sanctioned under
Queen Elizabeth. Several successive editions feature a frontispiece
with the Queen flanked by allegorical figures, such as Mercy
and Justice. Studying these iconographic representations,
which combine political power and religious orthodoxy, can
also help us understand this combination in Shakespearean
drama. To do this, we needed to turn to one of the many electronic
resources that have transformed the nature of archival research:
Early English Books Online. EEBO is an electronic database
of thousands of books published from 1475 to 1700. Students
at Rutgers can use the library's subscription to view scanned
images of whole books from collections all over the world.
We were able to compare multiple frontispieces in a matter
of minutes, looking at the images Shakespeare himself might
have seen.
The scholarly and pedagogical possibilities of electronic
resources grow at an astonishing rate, and I am eager to see
Rutgers continue its dedication to the acquisition of these
invaluable research tools. Using powerful databases for research
is more than just convenient: it allows us to ask, and answer,
important questions about literary and historical texts. For
example, with the right databases, students could search the
history of English Bibles to see if and how a phrase such
as "measure for measure" appears, and then search
through thousands of texts by Shakespeare's contemporaries,
to see how they use the same phrase. If having the chance
to turn the pages of a first edition of Shakespeare produces
one kind of awe, the ability to search through millions of
pages of text, in moments, creates another. Taken together,
they engender both a reverence for the past and an excitement
about the possibilities of the future.
Related Links
Special
Collections and University Archives at Rutgers
EEBO
- Early English Books Online (access is restricted to
Rutgers students, faculty, and staff)
The
Research Guide for English Literatures includes a list
of online resources, many of which are open-access
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