Lesson 24: Follow-Up

John Milton's working drafts provide an outstanding opportunity to practice your skills not only as a transcriber of difficult, rewritten material, but as a proto-editor. Begin to think about how you might dispose some of the information stored in these deletions in a critical edition of the poem; take a minute to consult a scholarly edition to see if the editor has consulted the manuscript and, if so, what she has done with the deleted material.

The other page from Milton's notebook reproduced in our archive, page 6, is about as textually difficult as they come, and should only be attempted by the brave. It is definitely worth a long look, however -- again for the purpose of reflecting on how you might cope, in a transcription as well as in an edition, with the text and rewritten text that it contains. See this page under item 50 of the 'index of manuscript images', or click on the link below.

• John Milton, notebook ('A maske'; autograph), Trinity College Library, MS R. 3. 4 [p. 6 +]

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