Print

Print
My expertise is pretty dated at this point, Robin, but yup, seems right to me. A quick corrective, and a couple of opinions. The Restoration as a period  is variously dated, but most commonly ends in 1700. Centlivre, by that dating, is post-Restoration. That dating is partly based on substance and partly on academic territories. Opinions: Otway's comedies are pretty wonderful, and they're more feminist that Behn's. Friendship in Fashion has some nice bits of language, Robin. The three middle acts are an extended cocktail party. His tragedies are strongly influenced by Shakespeare, and he wrote the best blank verse of the period. Davenant and Dryden's Tempest is one of the great guilty pleasures. So is Dryden and Lee's Oedipus, for over-the-top baroque-unto-madness.

-----Original Message-----
From: Robin Hamilton <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Oct 25, 2016 7:53 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Marlowe-speare

I think (and Mark can correct me here if I'm wrong ) that the Big Three at the Restoration were initially (equally split) Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Jonson.  Heavily performed, with the twenty year hiatus continuing in a fashion and for a time even after plays went street-legal again at the Restoration, before a new generation of playwrights learned their craft.  Also, of course, Dead Playwrights didn't have to be payed for their work, a factor even before copyright came into play.  

In the course of time (exactly when, again Mark should be able to pin down better than me) the other two contenders dropped out, leaving Shakespeare as the only pre-Restoration dramatist still to be regularly performed (aside from -- damn, what's the word?  -- ah, drolls, short cut versions of plays put on in booths at fairs, along with, in the two legit theatres, heavy rewrites of full-length plays).  I suspect this had partly to do with the nature of the language used as much as anything else.  Jonson's language is much closer to the actual spoken word of the late sixteenth/early seventeenth century than Shakespeare's (about the B&J duo, I don't know enough to say) and consequently dated quicker -- High Status Speech tends to be more conservative than Low Status Speech.

Anyway, in this reading, Shakespeare is The Last Man Standing (although women, like Aphra Behn and Susan Centilivre were beginning to get into the act as writers around this time -- actresses on stage wasn't the only change that happened around this particular cusp).  Garrick deciding to turn Shakespeare into God was simply a matter, by the 1750s (that date's a guestimate), of picking the obvious candidate for Greatest Dead English Playwright and recognising the inevitable.

Like so much else, when it comes down to it, the Establishment was simply, belatedly, reflecting the Will of the People.  People carried on being happy to pay to see Shakespeare's plays performed long after they'd given up on Jonson, and Dryden could huff and puff as much as he liked, but came down to it, bums on seats was the name of the game.

But I'm about the last person to talk on this issue, since I don't really like much of what was staged, with or without music, post-1660 and pre-1900, with the exception of Wycherley and The Beggar's Opera, so what you're getting here is a view which is both biased and limited as well as very probably wrong.  This is Mark's territory, and he knows a hell of a lot more about it than me, and is more sympathetic to what was happening on the stage.  If it annoys Mark sufficiently to get him to fire off a blistering corrective post, I'll have done my duty.

Robin

On 25 October 2016 at 22:56 Mark Weiss <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

I've mentioned Davenant before, who claimed circa 1660ish to be Shakespeare's bastard, which he certainly wasn't, but the claim conferred status (tho maybe not to his mom). And I'm willing to bet that Shakespeare was the most performed (and deformed) earlier English playwright in the Restoration, with nary a word about Oxford, etc.

-----Original Message-----
From: Robin Hamilton<[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Oct 25, 2016 3:25 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Marlowe-speare

Good question, dave, but I for one haven't got a quick answer.  It's certainly possible to locate the beginning of the ...  Actually, I was about to raise a name when I suddenly thought, maybe earlier.

Then you've got the instantiation of Shakespeare as The Playwright by Garrick, well before the Academy sticks a spoon into the pudding.  And probably the currency of English (as opposed to Latin/Greek) texts in Working Men's Institutions, and then the rise of the place of English in Real Universities, and ideas of the canon, and literature (or "literature") and ...

Not really my scene.  Back to you, me dook.

Do  your own bloody homework!

Robin

On 25 October 2016 at 19:33 David Bircumshaw <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Just an aside here, and a wandering thought, but is there a relationship between the adoption of Shakespeare as a teaching text and the growth of the Authorship Question? The key objections to WS as author seem to be low social status combined with lack of formal education.

On 25 October 2016 at 14:03, Robin Hamilton <[log in to unmask]om> wrote:

Yes (and no) -- unless you're a born-again New Critic, in which case, the strait answer is, "It's a no-no!"

R.

On 25 October 2016 at 13:56 David Lace <[log in to unmask]> wrote:


Does it matter who wrote the bloomin' plays?




--


 


 

<[log in to unmask]>