Special Research Project: Electronic Edition of GorboducStatus Report: (May 2002)The purpose of this project is to construct an electronic edition of the play Gorboduc, or Ferrex and Porrex, written by Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville, and published in 1565, 1570 and 1590. The electronic edition will be compiled in TEI-compliant XML, and it is hoped will receive ackowledgement from the Modern Language Association of America Committee on Scholarly Editions as a properly edited text of scholarly and critical value.The project began in April 2001, with the production of copy texts, photographed (using an Olympus Camedia C3040 digital camera) from facsimile editions where possible, supplemented by photocopies from microfilm sources. These texts were transcribed into copy texts for each of the three sixteenth-century editions. (All transcriptions were made in Simple Text in order to facilitate later markup.) At the same time a full census of the primary texts, their locations, and a full secondary bibliography were compiled. The libraries holding copies of the primary texts are in Britain, the U. S. A., and France. In September, libraries in Britain (the British Library, the National Art Library, and the Bodleian Library) were visited, and where possible a full manual collation was made of the library copies against the copy text transcribed from other copies. Subsequently, two assistants began the process of re-transcribing the copy texts, which has allowed a full mechanical collation, using dedicated software, to be performed. This process has been very successful in achieving a final text to be made with a high degree of accuracy. The finally collated text has since been marked up, using a tag set from the TEI (Text Encoding for Interchange), the leading group developing the use of XML in humanities computing. Eventually, the whole project, including three original spelling texts, a modernized text, critical and textual notes, an introduction, and a full bibliography of primary and secondary works, will be produced in XML, and published on the internet.Two publications relating to the project have been completed:Anthony Martin, "The End of History: Thomas Norton's 'V Periodes' and the Pattern of English Protestant Historiography," in John Foxe and His World edited by Christopher Highley and John King (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001)Anthony Martin, "Elizabethan Textual Communities: The Editions and Contexts of Gorboduc", forthcoming.

The British History in Renaissance Literature The first stage of this research involved a wide and thorough reading of the historical backgroundof the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Three areas in particular emerged as entailing detailedconsideration. First, the whold question of nationalism, whethdr British or English, as it arose inthe period; second, the expansion of the early modern, absolutist, Tudor state, in both geographic andsocial areas; thirdly, the legitimacy and foundation of the Stuart dynasty, with special reference ofits attempts to establish a unified Britied British state in the first decade of the seventeenth century.In looking at these areas I read large number of modern historians and also considered at great lengthhow such questions were variously approached in the works of contemporary antiquarians, historians andlegal theorists, such as Leland, Lambarde, Camden, Coke, and Cotton. The second stage was thus to examine the entire development of early historiography and archaeology(as it applied to historical consciousness) in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Besides theauthors mentioned above, I studied the historical writings of such scholars as Holinshed, Verstegen,Speed, and Selden. In particular, however, and of crucial importance to my study, was an examinationof William Camden's Britannia, especially as it moved through successive editions in Latin, andsubsequently in English. The third stage of my research was to read all the fictional or literary treatments of early Britishhistory in the Tudor and Stuart periods. This in volved close reading of such works as Sackville andNorton's Gorboduc, The Mirror for Magistrates, Spenser's Faerie Queene, a number of minorElizabethan plays, Shakespears's King Lear and Cymbeline, Drayton's Polyolbion,and a number of Milton's works. A particular theme which emerged from this consideration of the literaturewas that over the period there was an increasing tendency to transmute history into romance. Some preliminary results of this reseach were contained in a paper "The Romans in Britain:Shakespears's Cymbeline and Fletcher's Bonduca," which I presented at the annual conferenceof the Shakespeare Society (Japan), in Hiroshima in October 1995. This paper had a positive reactionand generated considerable discussuin in the session at which it was presented. At present I am involvedin rewriting the paper with a view to publication. I envisage producing at lesat a further two papersfor publication from the results of the research within the next academic year.