“Glassy Margents”: Biblical Paratexts, Early Modern Readers, and Shakespeare

Early modern readers engaged with the paratexts of their Bibles. This essay reviews a corpus of eighty-six English vernacular Bibles (printed 1537–1610) in the collection of the Bodleian Library and documents the manuscript marginalia marking the paratexts of these Bibles. These readers’ marks provide fresh material evidence of readers turning to annotations and chapter heads for interpretative guidance and engaging with the Geneva’s running titles, epigraphs, prefaces, and concordances by copying them out, underlining them, and creating their own bespoke versions of these paratexts. This essay—by looking at each main printed paratext in turn (frontispiece, prefaces, running titles, chapter heads, navigational tables, indices, concordances, and marginal annotations)—details how early modern readers shaped their reading experience through annotating the apparatus of their Bibles. Alongside this, it gathers internal evidence from Shakespeare’s writing for his own engagement with the literary thematics of the “margent.” The new archival evidence for the careful contemporary searching of the Geneva’s “glassy margents” clarifies and nuances the possibilities of Shakespeare’s own marginal metaphors. The new evidence for the importance of Genevan paratexts to early modern readers draws attention to the ways the figurative margents of Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and Lucrece likewise explicate and edify. This exploration of the responses of early modern readers to biblical paratexts provides important context for understanding of Shakespeare’s own marginal poetics. [B.G.]