>> Just a thot.<<
> Yeah, right, Robin <g>.
>
> Doug
Hey, since my previous post, as of about half-an-hour ago, I've even managed
to work out which edition of Dekker Richard Head was using.
For complicated reasons which I won't go into (and because I don't want to
be Watsoned as to how blindingly obvious it all is -- in retrospect), this
has to be the 1632 edition [or a later reprint] of what was originally
Dekker's _Lanthorne and Candlelight_ (or The Bellman Returns) of 1608.
It's sometimes known for strange reasons as Q6. I thought only
Shakespeareans got caught up in that particular numbers game.
This is, as even I am prepared to admit, relatively trivial. What's less
trivial is that between 1632 and 1969, one of Dekker's five poems in cant
was completely misplaced, and two others transferred to the status of
"Anon".
How this fits into the current Kent&Ken debate ...
A lot of things happening in the period between 1590 and 1620 get swept
aside by a blanket dismissal of "plagiarism". The following are all to a
greater of lesser extent *dismissed as "plagiarists", either of Thomas
Harman or of each other -- Robert Greene, Thomas Dekker, Samuel Rowlandson,
and the anonymous author of _The Groundwork of Coney-Catching_.* The
problem is that each one of the above is doing something different with the
material they appropriate, and it's (for me) the nature of the intervention
which is significant.
For me, much the most interesting interventions are made by Dekker. Greene
would come next, but mostly he makes things up. The rest -- well, sometimes
a cigar is only a cigar, Doctor Freud.
:-p
Robin
*There is also the mysterious way in which a passage originating in Reginald
Scot's _Discovery of Witchcraft_ (1584) works its way through Samuel
Rowlands (or Rid, or Anon), _The Art of Juggling_ (1614) to end with Hocus
Pocus Iunior, _The anatomie of legerdemain: or, the art of jugling (1634).
Scot considers sleight of hand or legerdemain in the context of witches;
Rowlands rips off Scot's material and applies it to gypsies; Hocus Pocus
Junior, in turn ripping off Rowlands, seems to treat it as simple manual
tricks.
R.
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