When Milton met Shakespeare: poet’s notes on Bard appear to have been found

But I always think I recognise that handwriting, Scott-Warren said. I go and check and normally Im wrong. This time I thought: The case is getting stronger and stronger.

As evidence stacked up, he said he became quite trembly Youre gathering evidence with your heart in your mouth.

The first folio is the first collected edition of Shakespeares plays, published seven years after his death. Without it, 18 plays including Macbeth and The Tempest might have been lost to history. Around 750 first folios were printed, with 233 known to survive. They command huge sums at auction, with one selling for 1.87m three years ago.

Scott-Warren has made a detailed comparison of the annotators handwriting with the Paradise Lost poets. He also believes that the work the annotator did to improve the text of the folio suggesting corrections and supplying additional material such as the prologue to Romeo and Juliet, along with cross-references to other works is similar to work Milton did in other books that survive from his library, including his copy of Boccaccios Life of Dante.

The scholar tentatively suggested in a blogpost that he might have identified John Miltons copy of the Shakespeare First Folio of 1623, admitting that, in this as in other cases, theres usually a lot of wishful thinking, plus copious spinning of the evidence to make it seem plausible, and elision of anything that doesnt seem to fit.

But he soon found that other scholars were agreeing with him. Not only does this hand look like Miltons, but it behaves like Miltons writing elsewhere does, doing exactly the things Milton does when he annotates books, and using exactly the same marks, said Dr Will Poole at New College Oxford. Shakespeare is our most famous writer, and the poet John Milton was his most famous younger contemporary. It was, until a few days ago, simply too much to hope that Miltons own copy of Shakespeare might have survived and yet the evidence here so far is persuasive. This may be one of the most important literary discoveries of modern times.

Everyones been weighing in, every day someone suggests a new similarity, Scott-Warren said. I feel 100% sure, but there are still people out there who remain to be convinced. I guess there is a question of if other people could have very similar handwriting.

As well as numerous textual annotations, the folio also contains a host of line markings, showing the annotators engagement with, particularly, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, The Tempest, Henry IV, As You Like It and King Lear. Scott-Warren believes these can be traced to Miltons own work.

The book is absolutely covered with lines in the margin of passages and when youre reading those thinking the annotator is Milton they become really interesting, he said. Its how they echo with his work, the sense that the volume offers you the opportunity to read Shakespeare through Miltons eyes. Because the lines in the margin dont give you any verbal content, you dont know why hes singled out a passage for attention, but it forces you to think your way into Miltons head and it does really chime with a lot of what goes on in his poetry, so you can see him constructing himself through Shakespeare.

One highlighted section in The Tempest is the song: Come unto these yellow sands, / And then take hands: / Courtsied when you have and kissd / The wild waves whist. The unusual rhyme, of kissd and whist, is echoed in Miltons On the Morning of Christs Nativity: The winds with wonder whist, / Smoothly the waters kist.

We would already have known about that allusion, they are the only two writers who used that rhyme, but you can see him marking it in the text and responding to it, said Scott-Warren. It gives you a sense of his sensitivity and alertness to Shakespeare. Whats quite remarkable as well is that hes singled out for attention lots of the passages that have become incredibly famous he goes through and marks out some of the most celebrated Shakespearean speeches.

It has always been known that Shakespeare was a huge influence on Milton in his poem On Shakespeare, Milton calls him a son of Memory and great heir of fame, writing of how Thou in our wonder and astonishment / Hast built thyself a live-long monument.

But this allows us to see the encounter happening, said Scott-Warren. It shows you the firsthand encounter between two great writers, which you dont often get to see, especially in this period. A lot of that kind of evidence is lost, so thats really exciting.

He is now intending to collaborate with Bourne on a series of articles about the find. Having these annotations might allow us to identify further books that have been annotated by Milton, he said. This is evidence of how digital technology and the opening up of libraries [could] transform our knowledge of this period.