LEMDO Classroom: The Golden Age: Annotations

The Golden Age: Annotations

1.1

The 1611 quarto is divided into acts. Gaines was the first scholar to divide the play into scenes. See Textual Introduction for a discussion of scene divisions in this edition.

crares

small boats

Gaines emends to crayers but the one-syllable crares fits the meter better.

The examples in the OED show that both crayer and crare were early modern spellings (OED crayer|crare noun).

Aside

This aside is marked in Q1 after Dianaʼs What can you do?. Collier places it in the margin after To bright Diana and her train Iʼll stand, perhaps suggesting that this line, with its sexual pun on stand, as well as More than the best here can are spoken as asides. Gaines places the aside before Thatʼs more than I can promise and indicates that Well, proceed and subsequent lines are spoken To them (Gaines 2.6.113).

(Thatʼs … proceed.

The compositor has wrongly put parentheses around the part of the line that is spoken to Atlanta. Collier and Gaines recognize the error and correct it in their respective ways.

Jupiter alone his life defended

Jupiter merely defended his own life

his

Saturnʼs

He … force

Jupiter is the subject here

his father

Jupiterʼs father (i.e., Saturn); Jupiter drove his father from Crete

leaving him

ceasing to speak of him (i.e., Saturn)

father, double tyrannous

double tyrannous / To prosecute the virtues of his son is a subordinate clause modifying our unkind father. I have followed Collierʼs punctuation instead of Gainesʼ.

fostʼress

foster parent

jennet

horse

Specifically a small Spanish horse (OED n.1)

riched

enriched

yet

Possibly a compositorial misreading of yt (a common abbreeviation for that) in the manuscript. Both Collier and Gaines retain Q1ʼs yet.

Nay, … lords

This dialogic stage direction indicates that Pluto and Neptune have not taken Arcasʼs hands.

She … strumpet

Gaines marks this line as an aside. One might experiment in performance with this moment of strife between Juno and Jupiter. Jupiter hears Junoʼs denigration of Callisto. Does Juno hear Jupiterʼs resolve woo and win all the beauteous maids on earth? What is happening on stage during this lengthy aside?

It was … star

The quarto sets each of these three half lines on their own compositorial lines. I have tagged the second and third as a shared verse line, because of the isocolon on She was/shall be a.

One might experiment in performance with the rapidity of responses. Does Juno make a speedy rejoinder to Jupiterʼs It was before your time? Does she take a moment to formulate her response?

snaffle in

bridle

snaffle is a transitive verb meaning “to put a bit on a horse”. See OED v1 1.

transhapes

changes of shape, metamorphoses; see OED trans-shape | transhape, where all three examples come from Heywood.

Heywood appears to be the only early modern writer to use transhape as a noun. In addition to OEDʼs examples from The Golden Age, The Silver Age, and Loveʼs Mistress, Heywood uses the term as a noun in Gynaikeion. He also accounts for more than half of the uses of transhape as a verb in the EEBO-TCP corpus up to 1640. Transhape is a more common spelling than trans-shape.

Argos king

king of Argos

mure

wall

novel

piece of news (Gaines).

beldams

an aged woman (OED n.2).

Unlike Gaines, we treat this term as a generic noun rather than a proper name.

Unsensible of

Incapable of being affected by (Gaines).

obdurʼs

obdurate is (i.e., is stubborn)

That fort … fail

Gaines marks these two lines as an aside.

We … behold

Gaines marks this concluding couplet as an aside.

tow

flax.

barricadoed

barricaded

pleasure … All

Collier offers a plausible alternative punctuation of this passage. He puts a question mark after pleasure and treats For thy taste and curious palate as the dependent opening clause of All the chiefest cates / Are […] Fetched to content thee.

durance

forced confinement

record

remember, take to heart (Gaines).

child

give birth to

obdur

obdurate

gem

virginity (metaphoric)

off

Go off, discharge (Gaines).

The Clown, punning on the double meaning of charge (responsibility; munition), continues the verbal play with fire and off.

sooth

to support, or back up, (a person) in a statement or assertion (OED verb 3).

The OED cites this line from The Golden Age as an example of this now-obsolete meaning.

Gaines unnecessarily emends the spelling to “soothe”.

Now, gold,

Jupiter apostrophizes (speaks to) the gold

Gaines marks this speech as an aside.

1 Beldam

Q, Collier, and Gaines all assign both A4 Sc4 Sp30 and A4 Sc4 Sp32 to 1 Beldam. However, one of the two speeches might be assigned to another beldam. The speaker of A4 Sc4 Sp48 orders one of the other beldams to Keep […] the peddler company while she shows the peddlerʼs gift to Danae; the speaker of A4 Sc4 Sp50 orders you that have the best legs to run to Danae. Assigning both speeches to the same speaker may open up comic possibilities, with 1 Beldam feigning lameness and staying behind when she recognizes that the peddler has more presents.

that

that which

Exit 2, 3, and 4 Beldam.

This edition adds an exit for three of the beldams, on the grounds that each beldam is given one jewel and the subsequent original stage direction has Danae looking upon three several jewels. 1 Beldam remains behind.

—Sweet, your ear.

The compositor of Q used italics and an opening parenthesis to signal the aside here.

4.6

This edition adds a scene break here. The Q1 stage direction reads The bed is drawne in, and enter the Clowne new wakʼt. Both Collier and Gaines split this two-part paratactic stage direction into its two component parts and drop the and. Collier does not provide scene divisions; even though Gaines does provide scene divisions, he does not add one here, even though the stage is technically cleared.

Jove … way

I follow Gaines in assigning this line to Arcas, on the grounds that it seems unlikely that Jupiter would invoke Jove (i.e., himself) to ‘guide us in our wayʼ (Gaines 77n).

Trojans

Q1ʼs Troians could equally well be modernized as “Troyans”, a more common early modern name for the inhabitants of Troy, from whom Londoners imagined themselves to be descended.

5.3

Gaines does not begin a new scene here. I do, on the grounds that this scene is one of the rest and regroup scenes so common in early modern battle sequences.

Prosopography

Brett Greatley-Hirsch

Brett Greatley-Hirsch is Professor of Renaissance Literature and Textual Studies at the University of Leeds. He is a coordinating editor of Digital Renaissance Editions, co-editor of the Routledge journal Shakespeare, and a Trustee of the British Shakespeare Association. He is the author (with Hugh Craig) of Style, Computers, and Early Modern Drama: Beyond Authorship (Cambridge, 2017), which brings together his interests in early modern drama, computational stylistics, and literary history. His current projects include editions of Hyde Park for the Oxford Shirley (with Mark Houlahan) and Fair Em for DRE, a history of the editing and publishing of Renaissance drama from the eighteenth century to the present day, and several computational studies of early modern dramatic authorship and genre. For more details, see notwithoutmustard.net.

Cameron Stirling

Cameron Stirling is an English Honours student at the University of Victoria and the holder of a 2024–2025 Jamie Cassels Undergraduate Research Award.

James D. Mardock

James Mardock is Associate Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Associate General Editor for the Internet Shakespeare Editions, and a dramaturge for the Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival and Reno Little Theater. In addition to editing quarto and folio Henry V for the ISE, he has published essays on Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and other Renaissance literature in The Seventeenth Century, Ben Jonson Journal, Borrowers and Lenders, and contributed to the collections Representing the Plague in Early Modern England (Routledge 2010) and Shakespeare Beyond Doubt (Cambridge 2013). His book Our Scene is London (Routledge 2008) examines Jonsonʼs representation of urban space as an element in his strategy of self-definition. With Kathryn McPherson, he edited Stages of Engagement (Duquesne 2013), a collection of essays on drama in post-Reformation England, and he is currently at work on a monograph on Calvinism and metatheatrical awareness in early modern English drama.

Janelle Jenstad

Janelle Jenstad is a Professor of English at the University of Victoria, Director of The Map of Early Modern London, and Director of Linked Early Modern Drama Online. With Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Mark Kaethler, she co-edited Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media: Old Words, New Tools (Routledge). She has edited John Stow’s A Survey of London (1598 text) for MoEML and is currently editing The Merchant of Venice (with Stephen Wittek) and Heywood’s 2 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody for DRE. Her articles have appeared in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Elizabethan Theatre, Early Modern Literary Studies, Shakespeare Bulletin, Renaissance and Reformation, and The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. She contributed chapters to Approaches to Teaching Othello (MLA); Teaching Early Modern Literature from the Archives (MLA); Institutional Culture in Early Modern England (Brill); Shakespeare, Language, and the Stage (Arden); Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate); New Directions in the Geohumanities (Routledge); Early Modern Studies and the Digital Turn (Iter); Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers (Indiana); Making Things and Drawing Boundaries (Minnesota); Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study: Audiences, Authors, and Digital Technologies (Routledge); and Civic Performance: Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern London (Routledge). For more details, see janellejenstad.com.

Sarah Neville

Sarah Neville is an associate professor of English and Theatre, Film and Media Arts at the Ohio State University. She specializes in early modern English literature, bibliography, theories of textuality and Shakespeare in performance, chiefly examining the ways that authority is negotiated in print, digital and live media. She is an assistant editor of the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016-17), for which she edited five plays in both old and modern-spelling editions, as well as an associate coordinating editor of the Digital Renaissance Editions. She regularly publishes on textual theory, digital humanities, pedagogy, and scholarly editing. Neville’s book, Early Modern Herbals and the Book Trade: English Stationers and the Commodification of Botany (Cambridge, 2022), demonstrates the ways that printers and booksellers of herbals enabled the construction of scientific and medical authority in early modern England. A theatre director and film artist who is a great believer in experiential learning, Neville is the founder and creative director of Ohio State’s Lord Denney’s Players, an academic theatre company that enables students to see how technologies of textual transmission have shaped the reception of Shakespeare’s plays.

Thomas Heywood

Orgography

Digital Renaissance Editions (DRE1)

Anthology Leads and Co-Coordinating Editors: Brett Greatley-Hirsch, Janelle Jenstad, James Mardock, and Sarah Neville.

LEMDO Team (LEMD1)

The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors.

University of Victoria (UVIC1)

https://www.uvic.ca/

Metadata

Authority title	The Golden Age: Annotations
Type of text	Annotation
Publisher	This unpublished text is made available by Linked Early Modern Drama Online in the LEMDO Classroom.
Series	Digital Renaissance Editions
Source	Preliminary annotations prepared by Janelle Jenstad
Editorial declaration	Edited according to the DRE Editorial Guidelines. Content follows Canadian spelling conventions.
Edition	Released with LEMDO Classroom 0.2.1
Sponsor(s)	Digital Renaissance Editions Anthology Leads and Co-Coordinating Editors: Brett Greatley-Hirsch, Janelle Jenstad, James Mardock, and Sarah Neville.
Encoding description	Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines
Document status	draft
Funder(s)	Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Jamie Cassels Undergraduate Research Award (UVic)
License/availability	All rights reserved. Intellectual copyright in this edition is held by the editor(s). Editions in the LEMDO Classroom are not yet in their final form and are not ready for publication in any other LEMDO anthology. Reuse and quotation are strictly forbidden except as follows: (1) students are welcome to cite from these editions for their coursework, and (2) directors are welcome to adapt the modern text for performance. Scholars may quote from the edition with the knowledge and consent of LEMDO, but they are advised to wait for the edition to be published in its destination anthology before citing from it; scholars who do want to cite or allude to a Classroom edition should be aware that the Classroom edition will be retired when the full, final edition is published in its host anthology, and are advised to contact the LEMDO Director for advice on citing.