Matthew Steggle

I mean, it’s there in black and white on the internet, but I still have some doubts…

YouTube video by David Stoker In the Company of Mrs Shakespeare

Thanks to Aberystwyth Bibliographical Group for hosting me for a zoom talk the other week on Mrs Shakespeare and binding waste! They also recorded the talk, which was kind: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9PK...

Did not know that! Will check it out! Also, fun trivia - it features in an episode of Peep Show where Mark is watching a performance of it.

I’m sorry to hear that. The Satanic Epic is one of my favourite Milton books.

Bowers’s in works of Thomas Dekker, with commentary in a separate volume by Cyrus Hoy. Great choice of play!

a handsome book cover: The Routledge Companion to Digital Humanities in Practice ; blue at top and bottom and with ethereal black and white and rainbow edged dots evoking information transfer (shaped like a long fish's tail, perhaps). Edited by Constance Crompton, Laura Estill, Richard J. Lane, and Ray Siemens

Out now!

The Routledge Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Constance Crompton, @raysiemens.bsky.social , Richard J. Lane, and myself

And better yet? It's #openaccess!
www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-edi...

Order hard copies here: www.routledge.com/The-Companio...

Thanks to all contributors! 🎉

Congratulations on the D Phil!

Thank you so much for sharing this!!

Yes, I think so too - lots of early allusions and imitations.

Number 27 made me laugh. It may not have made a novel but it is now a highly successful piece of microfiction.

For older Brits, that it devalues their own old degrees, for sure. Also that grades do create a social hierarchy, but the wrong one - their constant complaint is that degree results don’t just reproduce a level results (in which posher kids have always had an edge) and are hence meaningless.

Yes indeed! And it’s a mysterious one! The title looks like it should be “gettable” - someone someday is going to work out exactly what it was about - but no-one has yet. lostplays.folger.edu/Spanish_Maze...

Chapter 6 is a bit iffy, but the rest of this collection is really very good.

Go, and return an old Franciscan frier?

Special mention for Matt Woodcock’s book on Fairy in The Faerie Queene, with its sublime subtitle, Renaissance Elf-Fashioning.

Wow! That work sounds amazing! Will check out the paper you mention.

Not a scooby! But there’s a book in the BL that’s of interest to me that presents the same problem. Is there a non-invasive way of getting at these if one were really minded? Can one x-ray them or similar?

Fabulous new discoveries from @kscheil.bsky.social!

Thomas Nashe's Almond for a Parrat (1590), corrected by the author | Folger Shakespeare Library Folger Shakespeare Library is the world's largest Shakespeare collection, the ultimate resource for exploring Shakespeare and his world. Shakespeare belongs to you. His world is vast. Come explore. Jo...

Just seen this - a find with all sorts of elegant implications for Nashe. Bravo, Joseph Black. Lovely to see TN, who projects an air of brilliant improv, rechecking sources and writing corrections in his neatest handwriting.

www.folger.edu/blogs/collat...

A plethora of new ODNB entries on early modern women stationers! Entries from Heidi Craig, Andrea Silva, Kirk Melnikoff, @mgyarn.bsky.social, Andreas P. Bassett, @tarallyons.bsky.social and @georginaemw.bsky.social, me, and of course from @valeriewayne.bsky.social who cooked up the whole cluster.

Who Is Mrs. Shakspaire? What Is She? | Charles Nicholl On a summer’s day in 1978, Frederick Charles Morgan was at work as usual in the ancient library of Hereford Cathedral. He was a hundred years old but

www.nybooks.com/online/2025/...

With customary precision and elegance (how does he make it look so bloody easy?) Charles Nicholl writes about Mrs Shakspaire for the New York Review of Books.

But I love even more the image of him in a frock coat, sat on the sideines at the Royal Toxophilite Society, turning the pages of this book while arrows hiss and thwack into the targets.

I love that this thing, after thirty years, can suddenly take you somewhere completely unexpected, to the worlds of Charles Dickens and Buffalo Bill. It’s great that you can read some of Zouch Troughton’s writing and hear some of his voice.

What’s more – this obit explains precisely why Haines gave him the book that’s now on my shelf.

Fred T. Follett, ed., The Archer’s Register for 1889-1890 (London: Horace Cox, 1890), 78.

The key is another obituary from 1889, this one from The Archer’s Register:

But then – double plot twist – the obituary is wrong. Gosse says he didn’t know Zouch at all, only his work, but has seen a death notice for him. Actually the notice was for Zouch’s grandfather, also called Zouch. I am more relieved by this than I should be.

The academy

But then after some hours of getting to know my new friend Zouch, I found an obituary, written by Edmund Gosse, which indicated that he had actually been dead for ten years at the point this inscription was written. www.google.co.uk/books/editio...

He collected Renaissance art; he was even, briefly, a correspondent of Dickens (!) dickensletters.com/letters/rich....

Source: https://archive.org/details/BP_TRHM_0004; see also https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Nina_Sforza/sh0OAAAAQAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22richard+zouch+troughton%22&pg=PP5&printsec=frontcover; also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viola_Katherine_Clemmons

Google will quickly tell you a lot about a Zouch Troughton. He wrote a blank-verse tragedy, Nina Sforza (1841), acted by Helena Faucit (!), well regarded in print and on stage, and staged in 1893 by Buffalo Bill (!) as a vehicle for his girlfriend (It bombed that time).

A. R. Haines’s name is a bit too common – suggestions welcome. But who on earth is Zouch Troughton? And why did Haines think he would be interested in Roger Ascham’s treatise about archery?