Unvalued: The Life and Afterlife of Milton's Shakespeare

Claire M. L. Bourne will be at the Parkway Central Library on Wednesday, October 28, for a talk titled Unvalued: The Life and Afterlife of Milton's Shakespeare. It's part of the Rare Book Department's programming, and the whole thing centers on one specific book: the library's Shakespeare First Folio, which they've authenticated as the copy once owned and annotated by John Milton, the poet behind Paradise Lost.

Bourne, an associate professor of English at Pennsylvania State University, will walk through the reasons for that attribution and what Milton's handwritten notes reveal about how Shakespeare influenced him. She'll also tell the unlikely story of how the book ended up here in Philadelphia in the first place. It's the kind of talk that works whether you're a lifelong Milton reader or just someone who likes the idea of a 17th-century poet scribbling in the margins of a first edition.

Bourne is a specialist in early modern literature, book history, and textual editing. She wrote Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press) and has helped authenticate two books once belonging to Milton, so she's coming to this with a fair amount of expertise on exactly the kind of thing she'll be discussing. The talk is hosted by the Rare Book Department, which stewards a collection covering 6,000 years of human history—from cuneiform tablets to contemporary works—and has offered a free daily tour every morning since its official founding in 1949.

The talk is at 3 PM in the Elkins Room in the Rare Book Department on the third floor of the Parkway Central Library, 1901 Vine Street. It's a free program and no registration is necessary.