Upstart Crow Manuscript Style Guide

General Spacing and Punctuation Guidelines

  1. Put two spaces before beginning the next sentence.
  2. Space all initials as follows: J. L. Styan, not J.L. Styan
  3. Set ellipses with space between punctuation as follows . . . ,
  4. Use three dots for ellipses that cut mid-sentence and that end the sentence.
    EX: "Use three dots . . . that end the sentence."
  5. Use four dots for ellipses that end the sentence. There should be no space between the last letter of the sentence and the first dot (which is the period, not part of the ellipsis).
    EX: "Use four dots for ellipses. . . ."
  6. Leave only one space after commas, colons, and semicolons.
  7. Leave no space before or after dashes, hyphens, and apostrophes.
  8. Put act, scene, and line citation in text as follows: act one, scene two, line three (no caps); I. ii. 3
  9. A comma always follows the title of plays in a citation.
    EX: 2HIV, IV. v. 213-14

Quotations

  1. All quotations with slashes should have one space before and one space after the slash. EX: "busy giddy minds / With foreign quarrels"
  2. Use brackets for parentheses in all quotations, including blocked quotation or citation.
  3. Reproduce any quotation marks found in the quoted passage itself.

Grammar

  1. Possessives: Cassius', not Cassius
  2. Plural of dates: 1850s, not 1850's
  3. Do not hyphenate centuries, except where used as a modifier.
    EX: "the sixteenth century," not "the sixteenth-century"; BUT "a sixteenth-century man"
  4. Spell out all percentages.
    EX: sixty percent, not 60%
  5. Put short foreign language quotations in italics.

Citations from Plays

  1. 1. The full citation of history plays has a space between the numbers.
    EX: 3 Henry VI
  2. Use MLA style for abbreviating plays. (See Abbreviations)
  3. Use a comma after abbreviations where there is no period.
    EX: AWW, II. 111. 3-6

Prints and Photos

Cite all figures as follows: Figure 1. Woodcut of the reverse side of Giovanni Cavino's portrait medallion of Marcantonio Passeri, c. 1560, as printed in I. P. Thomasinus, Illustrorum virorum elogia (Padua, 1630).

Citations and Endnotes

Format and Spacing

  1. 1. Publisher(s)
    EX: Princeton Univ. Press
  2. For mulitple citations of text in successive notes, use the author's name, comma, page number.
  3. For reprinted references, cite as follows:
    (1927; rptd. New York: Tudor Publishing, 1955).
  4. For play titles within the italicized title of a book, use quotation marks.
    EX: "Hamlet" and the Art of Discourse
  5. Biblical quotations
    EX: Eph. 4:17-18

Citation of an Article

See, for instance, Tom McAlindon's critique of Stephen Greenblatt's essay "Invisible Bullets" in "Testing the New Historicism: 'Invisible Bullets' Reconsidered," Studies in Philology 92 (1995), 411-38.

Citation of an Article Quoting from a Book with Citation of Specific Page (p. or pp.)

Katharine Eisaman Maus, "Renaissance Studies Today," ELR 25 1995), p. 407, quoting from Debora Kuller Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1990).

Subsequent Citation of a Book or Article or Chapter of a Book

Sinfield, pp. 159, 174-80.

Citation From an Essay or a Chapter in a Book

Stephen Greenblatt, "Remnants of the Sacred in Early Modern England," in Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, eds. Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996), p. 338.

Discursive Note

To clarify my terms, by "theological criticism" I mean analyses that address the specific domain of religious practice and belief in Renaissance English culture, whether the goal is to investigate the content of early modern religious discourse or to provide formalist readings (generally in the New Critical vein) demonstrating texts' aesthetic realizations of mystical experience. I use the term "materialist criticism" to denote a wide range of approaches that include the new historicism, cultural materialism, materialist feminism, and other kinds of historical studies aimed at reconstructing ideological patterns of authority and alienation (in texts and in early modern culture at large) through discourses of race, ethnicity, and sexuality. Importantly, the terms "theological" and "materialist" in this context are not parallel to the terms "sacred" and "secular." Rather, the terms denote different emphases on different kinds of discourses within the same period. Materialist readings emphasize the primacy of people's material circumstances in their day-to-day efforts to construct meaning in their lives--meaning that may include religious meaning. While the cause-and-effect of a materialist criticism may differ from that of a theological criticism, which assumes the primacy of religious ideas in the construction of meaning, the difference does not necessarily make "materialism" synonymous with the "secular."

Discursive Note with Citation from a Book

See Michael D. Bristol, Carnival and Theater: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England (New York: Methuen, 1985). At the beginning of Chapter 3, Bristol details correspondences between festive events and specific dates associated with the Catholic church's liturgical calendar; but because his focus is on the anthropology of carnivalesque ritual, neither the word "Catholic" nor any description of Catholic theology appears in his analysis. Even supporting the logic of Bristol's neo-Marxist methodology, one cannot help but find such an omission remarkable.

Citation of Series of Specific Pages from a Book

Robert Weimann, Authority and Representation in Early Modern Discourse (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1996), pp. 3, 14, 15, 12-13, 17-21, 11.

Brackets within Parentheses in a Citation

Shuger, a self-professed Christian (The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity [Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1994], p. 1), makes no bones about her displeasure with materialist critics' ignorance, mishandling, and denial of the importance of early modern theological discourse. Yet unlike many others who share her opinion, she has gotten her point across by actively engaging with materialist criticism and thereby confronting it from within. An indication of the success of this strategy is the fact that Habits of Thought was published through a series entitled "The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics," edited by Stephen Greenblatt, whose other titles include works by notable materialist critics Leah Marcus, Jonathan Crewe, Alan Sinfield, Greenblatt, and others.

Citating an Edited Collection of Articles

A scan through the indexes of a number of recent works, including Weimann's Authority and Representation in Early Modern Discourse, Montrose's The Purpose of Playing, and the very recent A New History of Early English Drama, ed. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1997), shows a continuing reliance on Geertz and Turner, but particularly on Geertz, by materialist critics. Vincent Pecora offers an extended analysis of the impact of Geertz's work on the new historicism in his essay, "The Limits of Local Knowledge," in The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Vesser (New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 243-76.

Citing an Unpublished Paper

Anthony B. Dawson, "No More Sights: Memory, Spectacle, and Iconoclasm in the Elizabethan Theatre," p. 7, unpublished essay submitted for a seminar entitled "The Reformation" at the 1997 Annual Meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America, Washington, D.C.

Adapted from The Upstart Crow Style Manual by William Wentworth