The Folger’s ‘Pierce Penilesse’

The second guide to digitised copies of Nashe, this time examining the two editions of Nashe’s first big hit, Pierce Penilesse (1592).

While the first guide to Have with you to Saffron Walden identifies some of the visually striking features of that work, today I will make use of the fact that the Folger Library has digitised two different editions of Pierce Penilesse, to illustrate how Nashe and his publishers made changes to the text, over five different editions. These variances between different copies of the same text matter to the Nashe Project, because in each case, the editor will need to decide which choice of words to present in their new edition, and which to relegate to the footnotes, affecting the way that modern readers will be approaching this book.

Exploring “Have with you to Saffron-Walden” online

This is my first guide to the digitised copies of Nashe’s early editions which are available open-access online.

This copy of  Have with you to Saffron-Walden (1596) is held at one of our project’s academic partners, the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C.  Last year I visited the library on a research fellowship, which you can read about here, on the Folger’s blog The Collation. At the bottom of this page, you’ll find a link to Have with you, plus the woodcut of Nashe in The Trimming of Thomas Nashe (1597), and a few pages from John Danter’s edition of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (1597).