Taking note: Fanny Kemble's Shakespeare

The project focuses on marginalia written by nineteenth-century actress Fanny Kemble in her copy of Shakespeare's plays. I am transcribing and encoding these notes, cuts, and other marginalia in her six-volume 1744 Hanmer Shakespeare housed in the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library in order, eventually, to analyze and share the marginalia with other scholars of Kemble and nineteenth-century Shakespeare studies. Another dimension to the research and analysis is that Kemble read from this collection in her popular lecture tours and left indications of cuts, emendations, and word changes in the text; though her acting is discussed more often than her lectures, the public readings reached a larger audience. Studying Kembles unpublished marginalia fills a gap in Fanny Kemble scholarship: Kemble was an educated woman, actress, author, abolitionist, lecturer, and Shakespeare enthusiast who moved in literary circles, and her notes and changes offer a window into Shakespearian reading practices and scholarship during the mid to late nineteenth century. This dissertation explores the intertextual history of her 1744 Hanmer Shakespeare text and the process of encoding her handwritten marginalia into TEI-compatible XML code.