Okay. Welcome back, everyone.
And it gives me enormous pleasure, firstly, to be here in a space where we held English Parliament during the Civil War.
That gives me an opportunity to say Hail the King, who in this instance is more aggressive to grant it.
I'm very, very delighted and honoured to be introducing Margaret to her book Shakespeare Verbatim.
Her first book really shaped quite a lot of the Malone studies that we've been talking about today.
And in particular, she created the Good and the Bad Malone or reflected them.
And I think we've been jostling with those two. Malone throughout today.
Her second book, Hamlet Without Hamlet, won many awards.
And not only has she also edited a number of important collections, but she's also in the middle at present of two book projects.
One is five Shakespearean period pieces, and one is Shakespeare Without a Life.
So she's being highly, highly productive in all sorts of different areas, which has typified her work.
So I'm very, very delighted to introduce her and I'm fascinated to hear what lines she will now take on this complicated character.
So, Margaret, it. Well.
Many thanks. First to David Carsten of great regret to us all that is not here.
It was so brilliant to collaborate with Catherine and Alexander on this particular topic.
He was at the heart of it from the beginning.
David is also someone who has sent good things my way and to the way of many, many, many others over his career.
And in this instance, I wasn't so sure.
I was so happy with the invitation, because the last thing in the world I wanted to do was to go back where my career began with him alone.
But the marginal aspect of it intrigued me, since I never worked with Malone's manuscripts before.
I was into my book was entirely based on the printed textual situation.
So this has been a wonderful opportunity for me.
I also have to give a special acknowledgement to the editor of the new John Aubrey Brief Lives, and that is Kate Bennett.
And I am so admiring of this book that I actually lugged it here so that you can see it.
But this is a phenomenal addition. I'm in awe of it.
I'm in awe of the sheer genius of it, but also the extraordinary labour that went into it.
And it's not only that I was very lucky. This came out in March.
Toward the end of March, I knew more or less what I wanted to work on.
But what I ended up doing would have been not only impossible, but unthinkable without this extraordinary resource.
Kate Bennett is here, but I want her to know I would have said that even if she hadn't been.
Okay. This is a sampling of the ciphers Malone used when preparing an edition of John Aubrey's Manuscripts of Brief Lives.
And this was just after the publication of a 1790 edition of Shakespeare.
On the Recto page he described Aubrey's text on the Verso.
He annotated it. The edition was never printed, but if it had been those ciphers,
these ciphers would undoubtedly have been converted to conventional superscript numbers or perhaps letters ordered sequentially.
Why such a scramble of irregular and unsystematic ciphers in preparation for print,
especially in the hand of Malone, the editor largely acclaimed for his rationalisation of the Shakespearean text.
When sitting down to the perusal of any work, either ancient or modern, Malone's attention was drawn to its chronology.
There are overlaps of my paper with Tiffany's.
One of the things that I'm going to have a hard time resisting and going through this paper is making links with papers that have already been given.
It's inevitable. It's been so interesting to hear the papers before me.
So that's a comment that I just read sitting down to the perusal of any work.
Malone's attention was drawn to its chronology. That's James Boswell junior observation in his biographical memoir of the late Edmund Malone as the
younger friend and collaborator who completed the 1821 edition Malone worked on until his death.
Boswell knew Malone's working habits well, and it is the primacy Malone accords to chronology that is the focus of my lecture,
the necessity to found his biographical and editorial work on a dating a dated sequencing.
But I will end as I began by raising the question of why an editor committed to chronology,
to the numerical ordering of events and time should be using glyphs that have no sequential relation whatsoever.
And clearly, I've called this from his manuscript.
There's scattered over a number of pages, but they're ubiquitous.
They're the only kind he uses in the first part.
He has no letters, no numbers whatsoever. Malone's attention to chronology first surfaced when insisting the other Boswell James
Boswell senior in writing The Great Broke Brick groundbreaking work life of Johnson.
According to Peter Morton, Malone was the midwife to that biography,
and Boswell describes how he read the manuscript to Malone and benefited from his remarks.
He corrected Have the proof sheets and he annotated later editions.
But Malone's important contribution, most important contribution might have been before Boswell put pen to paper.
Uncertain how to organise the vast quantity of materials he amassed.
Boswell turned to Malone for advice. And this was Malone's advice.
Make a skeleton with references to the materials in the order of time.
And so he did. Boswell had the distinct advantage of having Johnson's diary for the final 20 years of his life.
But even that was not enough, said Boswell.
I have sometimes been obliged to run half over London in order to fix a date correctly.
The result biography was one that conformed to the chronological series of Johnson's life,
which I said Boswell traced as distinctly as I could year by year.
Johnson's works, as well as the events of his life, were put in the same order, and also with Malone's assistance,
who extracted dates of first publications from notices and periodicals and then listed them in that chronological skeleton.
Malone put his own chronological principle into practice when preparing editions of the Life and writings of both Pope and Dryden.
Here in this library is a folded sheet chronological order of Pope's works, and you open it and you see, oh, I don't know.
I'm sorry about that lighting. Alexander Pope, born at London, May 21st, 1618.
Then the chronological list that is continued on the next pages.
So you see him preparing for his edition that he never got very far with.
But he did begin with a chronology, and I think this must have preceded it.
This must be the bad copy because he's reordering with numbers.
Some of the dating on the sheet.
So Malone's aim was to replace William Burton's 1751 edition, an edition that scrupulously followed Malone's specifications in his will.
None of which concerned the chronological ordering of his works.
Malone does, however, complete, and publish his edition of The Life and Writings of Dryden,
where in the preface he explains that he has deviated from chronological order only when strictly necessary,
extending and tabulating technology of plays furnished by Dryden himself and then taking the next step.
And I think this was before Shakespeare's life received periods.
But Malone's malone gives four periods to Dryden's life, as well as working out the chronology as very often.
Almost always. Malone takes inspiration from the errors of his predecessors.
Johnson, in his life of Dryden, in his lives of eminent poets, had loosely ordered his lives from the time of poets deaths rather than births,
and preferred to give the latest date of a given work rather than the earliest.
In addition, unlike Malone himself, Johnson was says Malone,
generally careless of dates because disinclined to examine ancient registers offices of record and those speakers of literature,
public repositories of manuscripts.
And therefore, says Malone of Johnson, he was under the necessity of trusting much to his own retentive but still fallible memory.
Malone also writes a biography of Joshua Reynolds,
his close friend and the painter of the fine portrait that Yvonne had mischievously
placed at the heading of his lecture with all of Reynolds papers in his possession.
And he was a great friend. He was able to track not only the progress of his life,
but also his steadily rising reputation as reflected in the increasing prices commanded by his paintings.
From 12 guineas, a portrait or a head in 1755 to 20, in 1762, 25 and 1772.
A hefty 50 at his retirement in 1781.
Of course, Malone is celebrated among us anyway,
less for his attention to the life and writings of Johnson, Polk, Dryden and Reynolds than to Shakespeare.
And some of this again emphasises his interest in chronology, as Tiffany did.
I also want to emphasise how novel that particular aspect of his apparatus is.
His first scholarly contribution to Shakespeare studies was an attempt to
ascertain the order in which the plays attributed to Shakespeare were written,
and he revised it. Up until his death in 1812 and left Boswell's the instruction to print the plays in that order.
So it wasn't only that he organised them in that order, he also wanted them reproduced and encountered in that order.
And Boswell does so. But interestingly enough, he won't do it for the history plays because it means putting the kings in the wrong regional order.
So it's this wonderful conflict. What's more important? A story or composition or the kings of England?
Boswell thought the latter. All right. So his in the same way that he focuses on chronology and the.
Of the players, she also began.
And worked on until his death, his life of William Shakespeare proposed in 1790 and unfinished at his death.
Malone introduced both projects as novelties.
The chronology was a new and curious inquiry, and the biography an entirely new life of Shakespeare,
pre Malone and biographical notices of Shakespeare have no dates at all.
All the familiar anecdotes deer stealing stop off, sit Devon on Staten Retirement to Stratford etc. have no dates as Malone was quick to complain.
Nothing is more wanting in the traditional details than dates Fuller and Winstanley, who the latter work so closely in correspondence with the former.
They begin to give all they can do in by way of giving.
The date of Shakespeare's death is one six and they leave the last two digits open and in the early listings of the canon.
So it's not only that the anecdotes are not dated or the biographies are not chronological, but also the earliest listings of the canon.
So long Bain and Gilden give his plays, but arrange them alphabetically.
Thomas Wharton's history of English poetry that wasn't completed until 1781,
claims to be the first written in a chronological series so that he can illustrate the gradual
development of progress of our national poetry from 11th century barbarism to 18th century civility.
But that's what I'm stressing the novelty of using chronology for literary history, not just for Malone, but in general.
Now at last, Aubrey's brief lives chronologically minded about his own activities.
Malone records the date 10th July 1792, when he resolved to transcribe and publish Aubrey at some future time.
And he also inscribed the date when he, in fact, began to do so.
I began on this day to transcribe the manuscript of Lives of Celebrated Men, written by John Aubrey, September 16th, 1792.
We don't know when, if ever, Malone gave up on the edition,
though he seems to have held on to the manuscript quite literally until at least 1797, when a pamphlet was published.
Complaining, and this is an echo of papers heard earlier,
complaining that the keeper of the Ashmolean had granted him the almost unknown indulgence of having the
manuscript removed to his house from the museum for his greater convenience and copying and transcribing,
reserving it for his exclusive use. It was claimed until he finished his own edition.
This would have been quite a long spell, especially as was claimed.
He, if he intended to put Aubrey's lies forth to the world on the same scale as his last edition of Shakespeare.
That's the 1790 edition of Shakespeare.
On the one hand, Aubrey's manuscripts were Shakespeare, editor's dream, a manuscript or manuscripts uncontaminated by printers and editors.
But it was also an editors nightmare.
They consisted the manuscripts of three separate bundles of pages in disparate sizes, from folio to little slips and scraps,
both stitched together and interleaved, mainly written, often scribbled, but also sketched.
There are drawings of our memorial crests, horoscopes, tombs, gardens and coloureds.
Mainly they are not. They seem to be coloured by Aubrey, but there is much of what the manuscripts contain are from other authors,
especially correspondence, collections of letters of autographs, epitaphs and so on.
Marginal scribbling encroaches going every which way in the text proper on most pages.
Sometimes the marginal notes are intended for incorporation into the text, sometimes cross-referencing other works.
Here you also have a great deal of into linear writing deleted lines,
blank spaces intended to be filled in the future by a future reader, by Aubrey himself.
We don't know and notes to also seek out another source, another informant in his project.
The heterogeneity of the whole seems too designed to resist reproduction in uniform print.
Kate Bennett suggests that the manuscripts might better be classified not as a book, but as paper museum.
Before Malone, nine of the lives appeared in a lavishly printed volume called the Oxford Cabinet,
which seems like a nice reflection of what's contained in the manuscripts.
And in fact, the manuscript was housed in a cabinet in the ashmolean before Malone took it home with him,
Aubrey maintained that the fact he had not made a fair copy of the lives meant that the manuscript survived in Paris,
not turbulence in their true colours, he translates, which he said pleases an antiquarian.
Safekeeping is important to him, rather than circulation authored by many put to paper over a protracted period of time,
about 40 years, generically miscellaneous and never finished.
It posed a daunting editorial challenge how to marshal so much disparate and undigested stuff into a printed book.
And hats off to Malone for attempting it.
It's an extraordinary dare to the editor to editorial, imagination and Skills.
Though he never publishes his edition.
Malone does transcribe a total of 130 lives in his mainly steadily uniform script, and he annotated them on the opposite page.
Keying his notes with the ciphers with which I began.
He titles the addition and apparatus for the lives of the most eminent English poets and other celebrated persons.
So poets primarily, but other celebrated persons get cast into the second volume.
That's his ordering and not Aubrey's.
The first part contains the lives of the poets, and the second the lives of prose writers and other celebrated persons.
He began, as we would expect with a chronological line-up for each part of Aubrey's manuscript,
and his transcript of Aubrey is in chronological order.
And one thing you can say for sure about that manuscript is that it is in nothing remotely resembling chronological order.
He introduces a table of contents for each of the two sections, listing the lives in chronological order,
and it is that order in which he transcribed them in his notebooks.
So a rational through line runs through each of the two parts.
The poets. Here's the first one. The first table of contents.
And you can see that the poets range from Chaucer. Well, you'll have to take my word for it.
I'm sorry. We're not in the other room. From Chaucer and Gower to Milton and Waller and all of the others are properly ordered in time.
And then we have the second part of his transcription.
And these are all of the other celebrated persons who were not poets.
And these ranged from Roger Bacon and Erasmus to John Wilkins and Isaac Barrow,
who were contemporaries of all Greeks and members of the Royal Society.
There is a bit of an anomaly, which I do not understand, but I will admit to this continues the table of contents, as you can see by the page numbers.
But these are all 16th century figures and I don't know if he intended to put them in and didn't,
but in any case, they're isolated from the otherwise perfect chronological tables.
You also see his tally there. So he's done 68 poets, 62 others.
And then that 44 for a grand total of 74 refers to another volume of Aubrey that Malan worked on but did not transcribe.
And this was a volume. This is another one of these antagonisms among textualist between Aubrey and Anthony Wood.
But they collaborated very, very thickly for many years, had a great falling out toward the end at its basis.
Is that. Aubry lent wood or gave him a mirror exchanging materials all the time.
His volumes. And there was one that he didn't return. And when he finally returned, 44 pages were missing.
And I think Malone is assuming that they're 45, 44 lives there.
In any case, that's a long explanation, but it refers to matter later, so not irrelevant.
Hmm. We do not know much about the order in which Aubrey had dispositive the manuscript.
And as in the ashmolean in 1693, a century before Malone.
The manuscript was in three parts. All three, it seems, were once stitched up, though also interleaved with loose sheets.
Aubrey, however, explains that one part had been un stitched before being deposited in the ashmolean by his sometime fellow,
an antiquarian and collaborator, Antony Wood. It was stitched up when I sent it to him.
Wood had removed 44 pages as Aubrey charged and Malone repeated at least three times in the course of his transcript.
And this is a quality of Malone's that he is redressing wrong.
He is correcting error. It's a great stimulant to him and a great generator of additional information.
But it so often is announced in the form of making right correcting, and he seems to excel at that.
He also would remove the index for the second volume,
though its survival would not have helped much either about the contents of the volume or the order of the contents,
at least if Aubrey's remaining indices are any indication.
Not all lives in the manuscript are in the indices, and many that are in the indices are not in the manuscript.
Either they were written elsewhere or they're yet to be written either by Aubrey or by somebody else.
Presently in the paper there, presently in the order in which they were bound and Paginated by the Bodleian around 1860.
This is not to say, though, that Aubrey does, though Aubrey does say this,
that his lives have been put in writing tumultuous early as they occurred to my thoughts or as occasionally I had information of them.
There are hints of some organisational principle or principles, I should say, in the making.
There is a cluster of poets that is more or less regular,
although there are also outliers and most of them are noted with Laurel reads in the margin and they're never in chronological order.
So the most famous run is Dryden's Shakespeare, Jonson.
There are also a few genealogical clusters and some ordering principle, and this is just sheer guess on my part.
Or memorial crests are given for most of the subjects of brief lives, but only some of them are coloured.
In the manuscript, the others are just love sketches. But some Aubrey colours in.
And of the ten, at least the ten that I counted that are coloured.
Eight of them are mathematicians.
And one of this many things that Kate Bennett's edition does is stress Aubrey's interest in and mathematicians and in mathematics more generally,
in mathematics being that discipline that reaches out into so many areas in this period of the in the middle of the 17th century in the Royal Society.
All right. Malone, though, has no interest in seeking out such groupings or proto groupings.
Indeed, he overrides Aubrey's most explicit instruction for the ordering of the lives,
noting in the margin of his life of the mathematician John Pell.
And this is an instance of Malone,
I guess it was it was you who said something about how Malone always signals any kind of a any kind of a modification that he's making in the text.
And he does do that here. He says that John Pell, the mathematician, had written excuse me, that in the life of John Pell,
Aubrey had written, I would have the lives of John D, Sir Henry Billingsley.
The two digs, father and son, Mr. Briggs and Dr. Pell be put together, but Malone sticks fast to what for him is a higher rule.
Writing this division I could not comply with, as it would have interfered with the Chrono chronological arrangement I have endeavoured to preserve,
and I think that would preserve is rather interesting because I think he meant observe instead of preserved.
There's no chronological order in the brief lives to preserve.
Impose in this instance would have been more accurate before that order could be imposed.
Malone had to have established the termini of the lives many of Malone's annotations supply or correct Aubrey's dates,
particularly birth dates and death dates. He supplies dates Malone does for Francis Beaumont.
These are dates missing in Aubrey and his accounts.
Mary, Countess of Pembroke, Sir Thomas Overbury, John Sackville, Catherine Phillips and numerous others.
In a few cases, when Aubrey had left a blank or dotted line, Malone inserts the date into the text proper in John's settings entry.
Aubrey writes, He was born. TalkTalk malone fills it in first with 1613, then he crosses it out and inserts in the year 1609.
This date I have supplied from the register of the Parish of Twickenham.
Aubrey had calculated that Suckling was 28 when he died.
This, however, was a mistake. Aubrey had calculated this, however, was a mistake.
And Malone Corexit from the same registry. In the Erasmus entry, Malone lists the birth date out of his manuscript horoscope.
There it is. So he takes it out of the horoscope and puts it into into the page itself.
He was born at Rotterdam and 14 October 27th, 1467, in William Uptrends account, he again corrects Aubrey, who records his age at death at 88 years.
In our days, this is a mistake of computation.
And he does the math and decides that he couldn't have he couldn't have been more than 85 complete and consequently into his 86th year.
Aubrey leaves blank the final digit of John Cleaves on Death Day.
Malone fills it in and also corrects what Aubrey said was the day of his death.
This is a mistake. He didn't die of palsy, but of intermittent fever.
Malone is particularly proud of having ascertained the previously undiscovered date of Aubrey's own death.
Again, a correction since he was supposed to have. Deva is supposed to have died in 1700, but Malone determines otherwise.
She records. I on this day, however, found that he was buried in St Martin's church or churchyard on June seven, 1697.
He also dates the date of his discovery of that fact July 18, 1792.
Now this is rather speculative, and I do dare anyone not dare invite really anyone to disprove what I'm about to say.
In this next paragraph. We are accustomed to seeing birthdates and death dates after a name so accustomed that we tend not to appreciate
the difficulty of establishing those Germany in earlier periods only after Thomas Cromwell's edict of 1538.
And I owe this knowledge to Adam Smith's wonderful book, An Autobiography.
Only after that were parish registers required to record the dates of baptism and burial and not undoable paper until 1558.
Even with access to a registry, a subject may have not died in the same parish in which he was born,
or if they had, the two dates would have been separated by many pages.
Funeral monuments and epitaphs give only the date of the deceased death or burial hic yaka obit and so on.
Or the age or a tortoise at the time of death.
Obviously, I don't even know what it would mean to do the research it would take to establish this that it's hard to determine date of birth,
date of death in this early period. I will say that I did look.
John Weaver's 1000 inscriptions, and there were none on them that had the date of birth and the date of death.
It's the burial and the death that counts, and the birth date is not there.
Even in Malone's time, the biographical abridgement of two endpoints spanned by a dash is something of a novelty.
Now this you won't be able to see very well. But I'll tell you what it is.
This is called a chart of biography, and it was published in England, in London in 1765.
It's a coloured etching on two broadsheets that are about that size, in fact.
The chart consists of. You have to take my word for it.
Although the device's word for it it consists of 2000 lines,
one for each eminent person from 12,000 B.C. to the time of the charts making in A.D. 1765.
So those little lines, brief lives, indeed, of eminent persons in that extraordinary range of time, according to Antony.
Graphed in the timelines on this chart are the first to be printed in England.
This, I would like to emphasise, is not a technical innovation.
Nothing new about etching straight lines, but it's a conceptual one.
An accompanying pamphlet to this chart explains how duration and time can be represented by extension in space.
Malone might have seen this chart, he and the charts divisor Joseph Priestley moved in similar intellectual circles that included Jonson,
Edward Gibbon and especially Edmund Burke. But it doesn't matter if he didn't see it.
He's clearly thinking along the same lines. The lives along the side there are grouped in six different categories.
This is the one that is of most interest to us and to Aubrey are artists and poets.
I shouldn't say to Aubrey because actually Aubrey would be more interested in the classification of mathematicians and physicians.
They're paired together in this chart. And then there's another one, Antiquarians and historians.
There is a bit of overlap between the charts eminent persons in 1765 and Aubrey's, and I'll have examples of those momentarily.
Now on this chart, each line is a little a literal biograph, a graph or drawing of a bios or life,
and each Biograph requires dated termini to be set when you see the dots as you do before dead centre.
Inigo Jones and also Spenser those dots they come before or after the line indicate that the date is not unknown.
Okay. So the time and duration of a lifetime can be determined by aligning.
And you need some rules for this by aligning a bio graphs to endpoints with the dated gradient.
That is at the top of the chart. And what you have at the top of the chart are years, decades and centuries notched in.
So you can tell any given lines span of lifetime with just this chart.
Each of the 2000 lifelines runs parallel to the universal one.
Personal biography follows the course of world history,
advancing chronologically in the same forward direction, from left to right, from earliest to latest.
And this is the beautiful simplicity and economy of the rectilinear.
By the end of the next century, abbreviating a lifetime as a dash between two end points becomes absolutely formulaic.
In the monumental Dictionary of National Biography, published 1882 to 1900.
Every name is followed in the form. We're used to seeing it everywhere by inclusive dates within parentheses.
For easy reference, it arranges the entries alphabetically as in a dictionary, but as the inn keeper of each of its 30,000 individual life,
it at the Intrepid is the linking of the dates by a dash which epitomises the life
that is then narrated in the entry from cradle to grave in chronological order.
Also around the turn of the century,
Clarendon published the first scholarly edition of Beef Lives with the same biographical formula following in parentheses after each subject.
This is the briefest possible representation of a full life, a line between two end points.
It has been the traditional biographer's task to narrative ize the interval, calibrating it with sequential events between births and deaths.
If you have the chronology of the works as well as the chronology of a life,
and those were Malone's twinned imperatives for all of his authors then the two can be coordinated
what an author did at the same time that he wrote the basis of man and his works criticism.
And of course the to the works and the life can be coordinated with events in history and that is the basis of all historicism as well.
Like Malone and Priestley, Aubrey is a date monger.
But for one date in particular, that of a person's nativity or janitor.
He had been collecting nativity or genitalia since 1679, and he completed a manuscript of them,
a collection of genitalia as well attested that I have so luckily made.
No, he didn't make up these horoscopes. They come from authority, authoritative astrologers, and he often names them before falling out with Anthony.
Would he stressed to him their importance? I would have all that is all the subjects, all the eminent persons.
I would have all the eminent persons and activities religiously set down if attainable,
and also their orbits for the sake and improvement of astrology.
As he makes clear in his prefatory letter to the manuscript, his biographical project is impelled by a desire.
Malone could never well could not have shared the promotion of astrology.
For, says Aubrey, it is a science not yet perfect.
To be perfect, it must get a suplex. And that's just a mass supply of two janitors.
To that end, he explains, I have, with much care, collected these ensuing janitors,
which the astrologers may rely on, for I have set them down from their own mouths.
Such a compilation of nativity would be, he says, for the great advancement of astrology and the advancement of astrology is his phrase,
echoing the beckoning ideal by which knowledge advances by the accumulation of data.
The more, the better. In this instance, by collecting horoscopes when possible.
And gathering biographical details to determine the degree of planetary influence on individual lives.
And one of the things that there was so much discussion earlier today about loss
and the antiquarian and editorial impulse to save and preserve and transmit.
But what's so interesting about Aubrey, who is in so many ways as an exemplary antiquarian,
is that there's this great interest in the future in the form of mathematics and science and inventions,
all of this much encouraged by the world society to which he too contributed so many.
Much of his thinking is progressive rather than antiquarian.
The Brief Lives manuscript includes about 20 horoscopes, with one exception.
This is one of the ones he draws but never fills out.
This is the one exception that is actually a printed from taken from a printed form and filled in.
The others are all drawn by Aubrey, we think, and with the information of others.
He, as Kate Bennett suggests, he often drew the horoscope onto the folio page itself and put it either in the centre or flush with one of the margins.
And then he wrote. So the horoscope is physically primary and fundamental to the whole project.
Now no trace of them remains in Malone or indeed in subsequent editions until Kate Bennett's edition.
Who does include them all? No, I think it was Tess who asked the question about omission and is there a principle of omission?
And isn't that an interesting category? What is?
Well, I don't want to say purposefully omitted, but it's not admitted by accident either.
In any case, none of these horoscopes appear.
Malone does, however, take opportunity to ridicule the start of astrology in his life of RD.
Aubrey mentions matter of factly that D showed the eclipse with a dark room and kept it many stills going.
And Malone regrets that Aubrey should mention the vagaries of these supernatural assertions without reputation.
These are the notes on the side of his transcript of his description of John Cleveland as a comely plump man, good curled hair, dark brown pumps,
Malone's jibe, softer, flaccid hair with sudden unfavourable denotation by those idle enough to put any confidence in astrology.
So, too, does Aubrey's description of John Paul's melancholic, sanguine, dark brown hair with an excellent moist curl.
Here is here. Our author is at his old wounds.
Though I haven't shown too many of these manuscripts, that's Thomas Hobbs.
And there's these and this is an interesting one.
This is the only one that Malone does transcribe and he explains why he made well, he doesn't explain that.
He made an exception. He explains why he included it. Mr. Aubrey has inserted here it's not really an insertion, but anyway,
Mr. Aubrey has inserted here the Nativity of Waller in the handwriting of his son in law,
which I insert for the purpose of showing he means he scribes in his own copy.
He copies it for the purpose of showing that a confidence in judicial astrology was not peculiar to the writer of these lives.
Astrology is a quirk of the times rather than Aubrey, however wild or incredulous on the subject of astrology, says Malone.
Aubrey had many celebrated men of the same time to keep him in countenance, who are yet not thought lightly of for their eccentricity.
As poor Aubrey has been. That's one of the most convoluted melodeon sentences I think there is.
But in any case, it's an eccentricity that shouldn't be allowed to discredit Aubrey altogether.
And yet, astrology is foundational to brief lives, nowhere more salient than in the life.
Aubrey writes of himself what he calls remarkable in an astrological respect I'm quoting from his birth,
and he begins by referring to himself in the third person from his birth to late years, labouring under a crowd of ill directions.
Of course, referring to the influence of evil planets and his and his own birth as he continues to narrate his own
life after this birth registers his inability to steer clear of those reigning malign stars at his birth.
And here I'm just calling examples. Born 12 March about sun rising and he has a chart in which the date is actually more exact, is entirely exact.
And he was born very weak and like to die until the age of 12.
Sickness of vomiting, bellyache, pain in the side eyes.
Education at Oxford was cut short by civil wars and his father summoning him home life in the country with none but servants and sticks.
It was the most sad life to me then in my prime of my youth, not to have the benefit of an ingenious conversation and scarce any good books.
Death of his father that left him massively in debt, followed by more debts and lawsuits.
His mother prevented him from seeing the antiquities of Rome and Italy.
His dream as as he says, to my inexpressible grief and ruin.
She hindered his design, which was pro proper triptych.
It was the protracted cause of my ruin.
I meant to check down that particular adjective, but I have a feeling it's astrological.
But I don't know for sure. In any case, these busy.
These are all of the consequences of the particular astrological conjunction under which she was born.
Lawsuits sale of property in as much as mortal could be, he says.
And he regrets, very movingly the loss of monasteries.
And, he says, even the Turks and Lutherans of monasteries.
Why should our reformers be so severe? What a pleasure.
Which would have been to have travelled from monastery to monastery.
So even history is a misfortune for him. A strange fate that he has laboured under.
Never in my life to enjoy one entire month.
Odium or contemplation.
And this relentless misfortune is alleviated here and there by his passion for books, for bacon, for all the now, for Brown and for antiquities.
He says, notwithstanding all these embarrassments, I did piano, piano take notes on antiquity.
And of course, the brief lives. Some of them are gone.
He also celebrates his good friends and he gives the list of them.
Among them is one singular friend, as he calls him, Sir William Perry and I.
I had this manuscript page on display.
And here is Sir William Petty, the mathematician, primarily, although had many interests and he foregrounds, gives primacy to this particular life,
there are many indications that he intended this particular life of Sir William Petty to head the entire collection.
Kate Bett Bennett has written beautifully about how William Petty's auspicious rather than unfortunate birth was borne out by his life,
which is really a stellar success story based on his education, ingenuity, entrepreneurship.
He's a self-made man who fully realised his astrological advantage.
Now Aubrey Accords, petty pride of place in the celebration.
And in addition to that, he gives him his best artistic effort.
This is the most beautiful and detailed of them all.
And he was a good draughtsman, which Malone was not.
He was. Malone also committed the memorial cress, although in one life that he transcribed, he tried to do Dryden's crest rather incompetently.
Okay, so he gives Petty his best artistic effort.
But in Malone's addition.
Which is here. Petit's life loses his pre-eminence among the eminent.
When, without illustration, it takes its dull place in the chronological line-up of his collection.
Okay. So what I'd like to return to is the Biograph and its relation to the horoscope.
So you have the chronological rectilinear and the multifaceted diagram.
And I would like to propose that these are really two different templates for representing human life in its temporality.
I would call the horoscope diagram integrative in contrast to the chronological throughline.
And one the through line is designed to put. No, the horoscope is designed to put an individual life in sync with cosmological phenomena.
And the other the through line is in order to have it parallel a historical time, universal time, uniform and absolute.
Okay. Both the horoscope and also Malone's outlines as chronological outlines were meant to be preliminary.
They were meant to be preliminary for some things to come.
And that's why both can be referred to as an apparatus or in Malone, he calls the materials preliminary to his addition of the garment on.
But there are materials there are there devices for preparing the reader for the reception of what's to come.
And these are very different kinds of vehicles for that receipt.
Here. As in Aubrey, I can only.
Well, Aubrey very often leaves blank spaces in his texts and has a note to himself or others to seek out another source,
another informant, more information. And what this particular talk lacks is an account of almanacs that, as I'm sure many of you know,
are printed more frequently than any other form in the period of Aubrey's life.
Aubrey refers numerous times to the various almanacs that are important to him, Malone mentions.
And it's none of them. They're present in his transcription, but he won't give you any help with them.
So there is a rather full scale elimination of the astrological component in Malone's transcription,
and that's Hobbs and that's well, I kind of wanted to go from Hobbs back to the before I return to where I began.
And maybe some of you have anticipated this. And.
This is what I would like to see in these bizarre cipher ciphers that I've culled from Malone's transcription of Aubrey.
And that is that in the context of his horoscopes and the scattered astrological symbols that are also in Aubrey's manuscripts,
Malone is repurposing astrological ciphers to signal his own footnotes.
The ciphers have been emptied out of their cosmic signification in order to flood points in Malone's own explanatory system.
Astrologically charged symbols are rendered neutral like numbers,
but without their serialising function for pure index a calorie a cosmic scheme gives way to the rationalising demands of the textual apparatus.
That's a very highfalutin construal of what.
These may or may not be about, but at least I think my reading of them has some kind of a logic.
I have looked through Malone's markings, and even today I saw the simple sword that he used quite frequently in Johnson's dictionary.
And I saw the two triangles, which indicates that usually I think that texts are meant to be brought together.
But I have never seen anything. And I shouldn't say that because it sounds like my experience of his manuscripts is extensive.
But I do think that there is something unusual about the way he's annotating Aubrey in the context of
Malone's own antipathy to something that he doesn't understand and feels antagonistic toward in transcribing.
And here I am concluding in transcribing the life of the translator and cartographer John Oglesby,
Malone explains that he has transferred a paragraph and Aubrey from the end of the entry to the middle.
He then justifies the move. Mr. Aubrey put down his information as he could obtain it and did not live to methods his papers.
If only Aubrey had had more time alone assumes had he lived into his seventh or eighth year, rather than only into his 70 seconds,
his brief lives might have been in better order, but had he lived longer,
I would suppose it is more likely that he would have collected more janitors, more and activities.
Malone Transcribing and annotating. Malone Excuse me?
Malone Transcribing and annotating.
Aubrey is to me a stunning example of what can happen inevitably when a modern editor working to make a text accessible,
intelligible and useful loses sight of what might have been key to the author in the past.
In this instance, the relation of the details of individual everyday life to astronomical phenomena.
That's what gets lost. What Shakespeare referred to.
My one mention of Shakespeare. I didn't even point him out to you in the Biograph, but he was there.
Okay. This is what Shakespeare referred to as the cheering and checking of the selfsame sky, always and again, necessarily.
Much slips through the editorial cracks, which is why Aubrey might have preferred that his manuscript not be printed, but kept in a cabinet.
Thank you.