William Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage Volume 1 1623-1692 (The Collected Critical Heritage : William Shakespeare)

392 Pages·1996·1.49 MB·English

by  Brian Vickers

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: THE
CRITICAL HERITAGE
VOLUME 1, 1623–1692
THE CRITICAL HERITAGE SERIES
General Editor: B.C.Southam
The Critical Heritage series collects together a large body of criticism on major
figures in literature. Each volume presents the contemporary responses to a
particular writer, enabling the student to follow the formation of critical attitudes
to the writer’s work and its place within a literary tradition.
The carefully selected sources range from landmark essays in the history of
criticism to fragments of contemporary opinion and little published documentary
material, such as letters and diaries.
Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included in order to
demonstrate fluctuations in reputation following the writer’s death.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
VOLUME 1, 1623–1692
THE CRITICAL HERITAGE
Edited by
BRIAN VICKERS
London and New York
First Published in 1974
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of
thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
Compilation, introduction, notes and index ©1974 Brian Vickers
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording
or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
ISBN 0-203-19783-6 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-19786-0 (Adobe eReader Format)
ISBN 0-415-13404-8 (Print Edition)
FOR
TONY HENDERSON
General Editor’s Preface
The reception given to a writer by his contemporaries and near-contemporaries is
evidence of considerable value to the student of literature. On one side we learn a
great deal about the state of criticism at large and in particular about the
development of critical attitudes towards a single writer; at the same time,
through private comments in letters, journals or marginalia, we gain an insight
upon the tastes and literary thought of individual readers of the period. Evidence
of this kind helps us to understand the writer’s historical situation, the nature of
his immediate reading-public, and his response to these pressures.
The separate volumes in the Critical Heritage Series present a record of this
early criticism. Clearly, for many of the highly productive and lengthily reviewed
nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, there exists an enormous body of
material; and in these cases the volume editors have made a selection of the most
important views, significant for their intrinsic critical worth or for their
representative quality— perhaps even registering incomprehension!
For earlier writers, notably pre-eighteenth century, the materials are much
scarcer and the historical period has been extended, sometimes far beyond the
writer’s lifetime, in order to show the inception and growth of critical views
which were initially slow to appear.
Shakespeare is, in every sense, a special case, and Professor Vickers is
presenting the course of his reception and reputation extensively, over a span of
three centuries, in a sequence of six volumes, each of which will document a
specific period.
In each volume the documents are headed by an Introduction, discussing the
material assembled and relating the early stages of the author’s reception to what
we have come to identify as the critical tradition. The volumes will make
available much material which would otherwise be difficult of access and it is
hoped that the modern reader will be thereby helped towards an informed
understanding of the ways in which literature has been read and judged.
B.C.S.
Contents
PREFACE ix
INTRODUCTION 1
NOTE ON THE TEXT 19
1 BEN JONSON on Shakespeare, 1623, c. 1630 20
2 LEONARD DIGGES, commendatory verses, 1640 24
3 ABRAHAM WRIGHT on Othello and Hamlet, c. 1655 27
4 SAMUEL PEPYS on Shakespeare in the theatre, 1660–9 28
5 SIR WILLIAM D’AVENANT, from his adaptation of Measure 31
for Measure with Much Ado, February 1662
6 MARGARET CAVENDISH on Shakespeare’s wit, 1662 39
7 RICHARD FLECKNOE, from A Short Discourse of the English 42
Stage, 1664
8 SIR WILLIAM D’AVENANT, from his adaptation of Macbeth, 44
November 1664
9 SIR WILLIAM D’AVENANT and JOHN DRYDEN, from their 68
adaptation of The Tempest, November 1667
10 JOHN DRYDEN, from An Essay of Dramatick Poesie, 1668 118
11 JOHN DRYDEN?, prologue to Julius Caesar, 1672 122
12 JOHN DRYDEN on the Jacobean dramatists, 1672 124
13 THOMAS SHADWELL?, from the operatic version of The 133
Tempest adaptation, April 1674
14 JOHN DRYDEN, from All For Love, December 1677 142
15 THOMAS RYMER, from The Tragedies of the Last Age, 1677 161
16 JOHN DRYDEN, Heads of an Answer to Rymer, c. 1677 170
viii
17 THOMAS SHADWELL, from his adaptation of Timon of 176
Athens, January 1678
18 EDWARD RAVENSCROFT, from his adaptation of Titus 205
Andronicus, Autumn 1678
19 JOHN DRYDEN, from his adaptation of Troilus and Cressida, 214
pre-April 1679
20 THOMAS OTWAY, from his adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, 252
September/October 1679
21 NAHUM TATE, from his adaptation of Richard II, December 274
1680
22 NAHUM TATE on Shakespeare’s learning, 1680 292
23 NAHUM TATE, from his adaptation of King Lear, March 1681 295
24 NAHUM TATE, from his adaptation of Coriolanus, January 330
1682
25 THOMAS D’URFEY, from his adaptation of Cymbeline, 347
Spring1682
26 ROBERT COULD, from The Play-House. A Satyr, 1685 353
27 GERARD LANGBAINE, from An Account of the English 356
Dramatick Poets, 1691
28 ELKANAH SETTLE?, from the operatic adaptation of A 362
Midsummer Night’s Dream, May 1692
A SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 377
INDEX 379
Preface
This is the first of six volumes in the Critical Heritage Series to be devoted to
Shakespeare, and it differs from its companions in a number of ways. For one
thing, I print no contemporary allusions in the text proper, since it seems to me
that none of these amount to sustained criticism of any great value. For another,
it would have been a falsification of the total picture to limit the selections to
formal criticism. Having taken stock of the various courses taken by the reaction
to Shakespeare, I decided to include, in addition to regular critical essays, and
poems to or about Shakespeare, items in the following categories: the
adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays, of which over a hundred appeared in the
period 1660–1820; theatre criticism, dealing with performances of both the
original plays and the adaptations; notes and comments from the editions of
Shakespeare. I intend to offer a more detailed account of the progress of
Shakespeare criticism once these volumes have been completed.
For the present volume only the first of these additional categories was
relevant: I have chosen excerpts from all the major adaptations. The demands on
space were strong, and although I would have liked to include several of these in
their entirety I had to settle for selections, as generous as possible. If the reader
has a copy of Shakespeare open he will be able to follow the most important of
the transformations in plot, character and language. The Select Bibliography lists
some detailed studies of these versions.
It only remains for me to thank the libraries which have made this collection
possible: the Folger Library, Washington; the British Museum; the Bodleian;
Cambridge University Library, and King’s College Library. For assistance in
checking the manuscript I am indebted to Mr Albert Freiling and to Mr Wilhelm
Schmid.
B.W.V.