annotators.json

{
  "_comment": [
    "Additional annotators for King Lear, beyond the Melville marks that come from",
    "Melville's Marginalia Online's XML. Neither of these has a structured transcription",
    "database behind it, so each mark was located by hand and is anchored here by the",
    "TEXT of the line it sits against -- never by line number. Line numbers shift when",
    "the Folger text is re-fetched, and an off-by-N on a hand-typed index is silent.",
    "The renderer fuzzy-matches these anchors the same way it matches Melville's."
  ],

  "annotators": [
    {
      "key": "JM",
      "name": "John Milton",
      "color": "#2e4057",
      "blurb": "John Milton owned a First Folio identified in 2019 as his own, on the evidence of its handwriting — the only Shakespeare First Folio known to have belonged to a major English poet. Five marks from its King Lear pages are reproduced here, located directly from the Free Library of Philadelphia's own digitization.",
      "source": "Free Library of Philadelphia's digitization of its 1623 First Folio, archive.org/details/shk00001; identification by Claire M. L. Bourne & Jason Scott-Warren (2019).",
      "marks": [
        {
          "anchor": "Time shall unfold what plighted cunning hides,",
          "type": "enclosure",
          "note": "A hook drawn beside Cordelia's parting warning to her sisters.",
          "citation": "Folio p. 285"
        },
        {
          "anchor": "How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is",
          "type": "score",
          "note": "Marked beside Lear's “sharper than a serpent's tooth” line.",
          "citation": "Folio p. 289"
        },
        {
          "anchor": "Pierce every sense about thee! Old fond eyes,",
          "type": "enclosure",
          "note": "A long wavy bracket around Lear's curse on Goneril — the longest mark found on these pages.",
          "citation": "Folio p. 289"
        },
        {
          "anchor": "LEAR They durst not do 't.",
          "type": "enclosure",
          "note": "Bracketed beside Lear's demand to know who dared put Kent in the stocks.",
          "citation": "Folio p. 293"
        },
        {
          "anchor": "What in the world he is",
          "type": "annotation",
          "note": "The Folio's compositor dropped a word here — Edmund's line printed as “what in the world he … / That names me traitor.” Milton pencilled the missing word back in above the line: “is.” Modern editors, comparing the Quarto centuries later, restored the same word — the reading printed here.",
          "citation": "Folio p. 307"
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "key": "JK",
      "name": "John Keats",
      "color": "#6b5a23",
      "blurb": "John Keats wrote a sonnet facing this play's opening and, months later, dated a single word beside “poor Tom” while nursing his dying brother. Both are reproduced exactly as documented.",
      "source": "Caroline F. E. Spurgeon, Keats's Shakespeare (1928); UVic's Mapping Keats's Progress.",
      "frontispiece": {
        "caption": "Written by Keats, facing this play's opening page — 1818",
        "title": "On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again",
        "lines": [
          "O golden-tongued Romance, with serene lute!",
          "Fair plumed Syren, Queen of far-away!",
          "Leave melodizing on this wintry day,",
          "Shut up thine olden pages, and be mute:",
          "Adieu! for, once again, the fierce dispute,",
          "Betwixt damnation and impassion’d clay",
          "Must I burn through; once more humbly assay",
          "The bitter-sweet of this Shakespearean fruit:",
          "Chief Poet! and ye clouds of Albion,",
          "Begetters of our deep eternal theme,",
          "When through the old oak forest I am gone,",
          "Let me not wander in a barren dream,",
          "But when I am consumed in the fire,",
          "Give me new Phoenix wings to fly at my desire."
        ]
      },
      "marks": [
        {
          "anchor": "Poor Tom!",
          "type": "annotation",
          "note": "Keats circled the words “Poor Tom” here and wrote beside them: “Sunday evening, Oct. 4, 1818.” His younger brother Tom, whom he was nursing through the tuberculosis that would kill him eight weeks later, was the reason. He did not write anything else — just the date, next to the name.",
          "citation": "Spurgeon 1928"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}