The Reader in the Book: A Study of Spaces and Traces by Stephen Orgel (review)

This monograph originates in Stephen Orgel's enduring and well-known passion for marginalia and marks of ownership in early modern books. It successfully mixes methodologies stemming from the sociology of books and book history, using the investigative strategies developed in the field of English literary studies by scholars such as Heidi Brayman Hackel or William H. Sherman. Orgel's book provides the reader with a series of fascinating case studies and a great deal of critically incisive analyses. The six chapters and the coda are written in a lucid and engaging style. Throughout, Orgel asks the right questions and eschews overgeneralizations. The backbone of his argument is that "the history of any particular book does not conclude with its publication" (2), that early readers—far from being desecraters of the author's work—were expected to give books a new lease on life and to fill out the blanks of otherwise unfinished and unstable printed texts (8–9).

Thus, any printed book could be "perfected" by its readers—for example, a 1668 edition of Milton's Paradise Lost, which Orgel examines in his first chapter ("Reading in Action"), containing early handwritten instructions to improve certain lines (28–29). Fittingly, chapter 2 ("Learning Latin") turns to a traditionally rich source of marginalia: the textbooks used by early modern schoolchildren. Orgel begins with a copy of Virgil's Bucolica (Cologne, 1507), which was profusely annotated by the hands of three German schoolboys, probably at different moments in time (30–31). The chapter ends on what Orgel calls "visualizations" (43)—an especially evocative and useful term to describe, among other examples, schoolchildren drawing in and hence playing with their 1541 edition of Terence (43–49).

In "Writing from the Stage" (chapter 3) Orgel examines the earliest and most annotated First Folio (a copy currently held by Meisei University in Japan) and finds that its very thorough reader sometimes produced what scholars today would consider misinterpretations. Yet these "misinterpretations" often underline logics that simply differ from our own. For instance, the inscriber's notes on Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy show how "this seventeenth-century reader marginally constructs an alternative hero who confronts everything that Hamlet is avoiding" (55). Later, Orgel looks at printed editions of Shakespeare annotated for the stage. The subject is not altogether new (see G. Blakemore Evans's editions of some seventeenth-century promptbooks and the work of Tiffany Stern), but again the author provides remarkable insights. He notes, regarding a First Folio marked up for the stage during the first half of the seventeenth century and now kept by the University of Padua, that what is often deleted is paradoxically but revealingly "what we call 'Shakespeare': the complex poetry; the rhetorical grandeur; and, in large measure, the bits that became famous. The essential Shakespeare here is action, not poetry" (74).

The ensuing chapter focuses on a pair of Spenser editions annotated in the seventeenth century by two very different readers—one with strong Puritan inclinations and another who was clearly an admirer of Spenser's work and whose "mode of annotation" is "fairly normative for the period" (109). The chapter forms a lively diptych that underlines the variety of early responses to Spenser and reminds us of the idiosyncratic nature of many annotations in early books. In the conclusion to this chapter, Orgel argues that Spenser's poetry did not appeal as much to eighteenth-century reader-annotators. However, while his view that in the eighteenth century "reading was becoming efficient, margins increasingly unsullied" (113) may be true for Spenser, it is not for other authors, such as Shakespeare, whose margins are filled with eighteenth-century manuscript commentary as well as emendations.

The next chapter is intended as a "Scherzo" (114), which may explain why it is the only chapter in Orgel's book without a conclusion. Its focus is a scurrilous history...