Library Fellow, July -September 2020
Home Institution: Newcastle University
Exploring the Halliwell‐Phillipps collection
My research project focuses on the working books of the nineteenth-century Shakespeare scholar James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps, who bequeathed these items (approximately 100 in number) as part of a large collection of early modern texts and Shakespeariana to Edinburgh University Library; a larger collection of Halliwell-Phillipps’ working books are housed at the Folger Shakespeare Library, but the Edinburgh items have received considerably less attention. The working books are valuable as they give an insight into the research practices and developing ideas of one of the nineteenth century’s most eminent Shakespearean antiquarians; perhaps more significantly, they contain hundreds of clippings from pre-1800 texts (many of them Shakespearean) that have hitherto been unexplored or fully documented. A key outcome of this project will be to identify and wherever possible establish the provenance of the pre-1800 textual fragments contained within Halliwell-Phillipps’ working books.