Julian, A Tragedy in Five Acts
Our parallel text edition compares two versions of Mitford’s play, to assist study of revisions from Mitford’s manuscript to performance. Julian represents Mitford’s first success with the London Royal Theatres, and with writing parts specifically designed for the actor-manager William Charles Macready. The play ran for eight performances at Covent Garden Theatre in March 1823, and in the months preceding performance, Mitford’s correspondence indicates that she and Macready engaged in a sometimes tense process of revision to parts. Our edition compares:
- Mitford’s manuscript as submitted to the Lord Chamberlain’s Office on 5 March 1823, transcribed from microfiche image of The Lord Chamberlain’s Plays (The Larpent Plays) of 1743 - January 1824; and
- the second published edition of 1823, derived from a Google Books reproduction digitized in 2006.
Our TEI coding uses apparatus markup to document the differences between the Larpent manuscript and the early print publication, which permits us to visualize the variants in the two texts side by side. We have now thoroughly encoded over a thousand variants between the Larpent manuscript and the 1823 publication, and we are working on documenting the 1854 text as published in Mitford’s collected Dramatic Works. These tools permit us a way to help review our markup and check for errors in spacing, for example, but they are not ideal for editions of the plays since they miss much of our markup, entirely missing the prologue and epilogue, for example, and missing our observations about the condition of the manuscript, or the numbering of the lines. We are working on generating our own styled interface for Mitford’s literary texts, so that these views will simply be available to supplement our native reading views.
