Melvyn New and Anthony W Lee (eds). Notes on Footnotes: Annotating Eighteenth-Century Literature

Abstract

Really, universally, annotations stop nowhere, as Henry James almost said. Or at least, that can be the danger for even the most rigorous scholarly editor: of drowning text in redundant paratext, submerging creativity in otiose commentary, pulverizing Golden-Age verse with Saturnian Lead. There is always more to say, and there is always a case to be made for saying it. Among the dedicatees of Notes on Footnotes is the irrepressible universal scholar Pierre Bayle, ‘who taught us’, Melvyn New and Anthony W. Lee write, ‘that no informative annotation can be too lengthy’. Bayle’s virtuosity as an annotator—his baroque, cornucopian, sometimes magnificently scurrilous footnotes, to say nothing of his wraparound marginal glosses, or his ludic, recursive notes on the notes—made him the hero of Anthony Grafton’s The Footnote: A Curious History (1997). But Bayle’s prolixity also placed him, and more particularly the scholarly editors who annotated in his wake, right in the satirical crosshairs of Pope’s Dunciad Variorum. Pope’s eloquent mise en page enacts his sense of cultural decay and the mediocrity of the modern. A churning groundswell of ironic, bogus, or otherwise wrongheaded annotation pushes the verse it should illuminate to the uppermost lines of the printed page (sometimes no more than a couplet appears), like an action hero gasping for breath as the ship sinks and the waters rise.