11-14-2019, 12:43 AM
(This post was last modified: 11-14-2019, 12:47 AM by RiverNotch.)
It is finished!
....or is it? If the point of what I shall soon be uploading here -- hopefully tomorrow -- were just the notes, I would consider the product finished, but aside from finding a more consistent copy of more of Boydell's plates, I also find that some of the editorial choices here made -- expanding words like "th'offertory" to "the offertory", for example, thus ruining the meter -- as well as some obvious mistakes to be inexcusable. I want both Johnson's commentary and Shakespeare's text to be equally intelligible, even if there are better editions of the latter out there.
Hence, consider what shall soon be posted as a proof of concept, or perhaps a first draft, although what shall follow is a slight reversion, since I have no copy of the 1778 edition, and I refuse to turn to Malone's rather bloated 1790 version. The proper version shall be Johnson's first, which I hope is as clean as when I first considered it: I must admit it's the copy I've actually worked with before starting on this project.
Oh, an additional consideration: throughout the process of working on this first draft, I have found it hard, in many places, to insert an illustration without ruining a passage, whether of commentary or of speech, since scene breaks -- the most natural place to insert them -- so rarely happen at the end of pages, and the illustrations themselves lose much of their value (as they would not, were they simply printed out) too far divorced from their scenes. The new version might not have the pictures inserted -- instead, I might deliver them through a separate folder.
....or is it? If the point of what I shall soon be uploading here -- hopefully tomorrow -- were just the notes, I would consider the product finished, but aside from finding a more consistent copy of more of Boydell's plates, I also find that some of the editorial choices here made -- expanding words like "th'offertory" to "the offertory", for example, thus ruining the meter -- as well as some obvious mistakes to be inexcusable. I want both Johnson's commentary and Shakespeare's text to be equally intelligible, even if there are better editions of the latter out there.
Hence, consider what shall soon be posted as a proof of concept, or perhaps a first draft, although what shall follow is a slight reversion, since I have no copy of the 1778 edition, and I refuse to turn to Malone's rather bloated 1790 version. The proper version shall be Johnson's first, which I hope is as clean as when I first considered it: I must admit it's the copy I've actually worked with before starting on this project.
Oh, an additional consideration: throughout the process of working on this first draft, I have found it hard, in many places, to insert an illustration without ruining a passage, whether of commentary or of speech, since scene breaks -- the most natural place to insert them -- so rarely happen at the end of pages, and the illustrations themselves lose much of their value (as they would not, were they simply printed out) too far divorced from their scenes. The new version might not have the pictures inserted -- instead, I might deliver them through a separate folder.