Other Publications

Lukas Erne and Devani Singh, “Newly Discovered Shakespeare Passages in Bel-vedére or The Garden of the Muses (1600)”, Shakespeare 16.1 (2020), 14-22. https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/FSU7MPGV3ITZM2EYPzjJ/full

 

This article identifies thirteen hitherto untraced passages in Bel-vedére that are based on Shakespeare (and of a fourteenth passage whose Shakespearean origins were discovered by the scholar Charles Crawford in the early twentieth century but not published). These passages and their Shakespearean source texts in Romeo and Juliet, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Richard II, Richard III, Venus and Adonis, and The Rape of Lucrece are discussed here and serve to illustrate the range of adaptive strategies used in the compilation of the commonplace book. Three additional passages which have perhaps been adapted from Shakespeare source texts, including one of his sonnets, are also discussed. Discussion of the Shakespearean presence in Bel-vedére is contextualised by a brief account of prior work on the commonplace book and the attempted identification of its origins.

Lukas Erne and Devani Singh, ‘Bel-vedére (1600) and the Dates of Thomas Combe’s Theater of Fine Devices and Dunstan Gale’s Pyramus and Thisbe’, Notes and Queries 66.3 (September 2019), 467-69. https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/gjz106

 

This note derives evidence from Bel-vedére about the dates of The Theater of Fine Deuices, Thomas Combe’s translation of Guillaume de la Perrière’s emblem book, Le Theatre des bons engins, and Dunstan Gale’s Ovidian narrative poem, Pyramus and Thisbe. The earliest dated copies  of Combe’s translation and Gale’s poem are from 1614 and 1617 respectively. The note argues that the presence of passages from the two texts in Bel-vedére makes it likely that editions of them were published in the 1590s.

We are also grateful for the various opportunities we have been offered to talk about our work-in-progress on the edition, and for the helpful feedback we received on those occasions: the Digital Humanities conference organized by Radu Suciu at the University of Geneva in November 2015; the ‘Journée d’études: Les éditions critiques à l’ère numérique’ organized at the University of Geneva by Damien Nelis in March 2016; the Geneva doctoral workshop in April 2018; the Society for Renaissance Studies conference in Sheffield in July 2018; and the Geneva-Exeter Renaissance Exchange in Exeter, hosted by Pascale Aebischer, in November 2018.