Preliminary thoughts on the display

If we structure the display around a chronological publication history of Shakespeare, here's one way we could organize it:

Shelf 1 - Earliest texts and first generation of editors / Age of Pope
1600 Midsummer Night's Dream quarto
1632 Second Folio
[1709 Nicholas Rowe - EEBO - skip?]
1725 Pope - SC Archives
1733 Theobald - attacked Pope
[1747 Warburton - SC Archives - skip?]

Shelf 2 - Second generation of editors / Age of Johnson
1765 Johnson - best known for his preface
1768 Capell - first editor to base his text on quartos and folios
1773 Steevens - worked with Johnson, extremely quarrelsome

Shelf 3 - Third generation of editors / Romantic Age
1793 Reed - first variorum
1818 Bowdler - SC Archives
1821 Boswell - third variorum

I'm least certain about that first shelf - my instinct is that it's important to show an example of an early quarto and folio, just so people know what the editors were drawing from. It might leave us a little squeezed for space, though. Thoughts?

Shakespeare adaptations

If we stick to adaptations pre-1800, these books look like they'll provide plenty of background information:

Branam, George. Eighteenth-Century Adaptations of Shakespearean Tragedy.
In addition to a very practical complete index listing all the adaptations, Branam gives a good overview of general changes made by adaptations (such as elevating diction or reducing imagery). He divides 18th-century adaptations into three chronological groups.

Dobson, Michael. The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Authorship 1660-1769.
Dobson makes several broad arguments about thematic alterations in the Restoration revisions, focusing on de-emphasizing monarchy and emphasizing domesticity and family, among others. This has a lot of useful treatments of specific revisions, including The Enchanted Isle.

Marsden, Jean. The Re-imagined Text: Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Eighteenth-Century Literary Theory.
Marsden is not in our library, but most of this very useful book is excerpted on Google Books. It deals with simplifications and thematic changes in the adaptations, with an emphasis on how Shakespearean criticism drove the changes.

Fischlin, Daniel. Adaptations of Shakespeare.
This is actually an anthology, but it provides concise and helpful overviews before each of the twelve adaptations printed.

Shakespeare's Lawsuits

This nytimes article details the various people who have weighed in on the identity of whoever wrote Shakespeare's plays--have you, for instance, ever heard of the Supreme Court case Earl of Oxford vs. William Shakespeare?

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9405E7DF1F3DF933A25751C0A9649C8B63&scp=3&sq=shakespeare&st=cse

Incredible.

Restoration Literary Criticism

Below are two links to 1660s literary criticism by John Dryden and Thomas Shadwell. We've talked a bit about Dryden already, but Shadwell is probably new to you. A Restoration playwright and critic, he likely had a hand in revising Dryden and Davenant's revision of Shakespeare's The Tempest, adding songs to make the play even more musical. (The version you skimmed for class two weeks ago is the pre-Shadwell text.)

The text linked to here is the preface to Shadwell's The Sullen Lovers (1668). Dryden's Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1667) is structured as a lengthy conversation between friends. As they discuss the merits of English drama and of the previous generation's playwrights (mainly Jonson, Shakespeare, and Fletcher), they also reveal some of the same preoccupations with the French and with Frenchness that we mentioned last week.

Skim through both as time permits. Be sure, though, to read Dryden's discussion of Epicoene, which he refers to throughout as The Silent Woman . Shadwell's preface, available through Google Books, is included in Restoration Literature: An Anthology, ed. Paul Hammond (NY: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 196-200.

The gentleman pictured above is John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, whom we'll be discussing in class on Thursday. Painted by Sir Peter Lely, c. 1677, Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Misogyny Galore

Reading the Restoration Tempest, I've found that the co-editors of Shakespeare's piece not only deigned to add several characters/love interests, but also added a great deal of misogyny to the play's lines.

For instance:
"like most of her frail Sex,
She's false, but has not learned the art to hide it;
Nature has done her part, she loves variety:
Why did I think that any Woman could
Be innocent, because she's young? no, no,
Their Nurses teach them Change, when with two Nipples
They divide their liking."

This is Ferdinand on Miranda, Act 4, Scene 1, starting at about line 80.

It's also interesting to read this play and see what the co-editors' ideas of what a man who had never seen a woman, versus the woman(en) who had never seen a man, would be like. Hippolito's youth seems to make him naively overeager to claim women for himself, so much so that he makes a rival for Miranda in Ferdinand...

Woe, that I am King!*

Miranda brought the importance of bloodlines and class structure in The Tempest today in class, and I thought it was interesting that, going off the conversations of Prospero's power over others in the play, part of his ability to match Miranda and Ferdinand together is based on the absence of the king. There's something like a power vacuum because Prospero removes power from those who would normally be in power, and Shakespeare has Ferdinand often lamenting over the "death" of his father, the king, while emphasizing that his father is the king.

*just paraphrasing. :)

The Reuengers Tragaedie: a side note

In my quest for a copy for the Revenger's Tragedy, I managed to find only the oldest copy owned by the Amherst College library system deep down in the lowest floor of the library. It was published in 1878 and has stiff, yellowed pages that were apparently last perused in the 70s.

Reading it is more entertaining than even Middleton might have anticipated, because I have to sound out all the words in order to understand what they're saying. For instance:

"Within the spend-thrift veynes of a drye Duke, A parcht and juicelesse luxur. O God! One that has scarce bloud inough to liue upon--and hee to ryot it like a sonne and heyre?"

Oh, the boon to the English-speaking world that is standardized English!