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Introduction: on Writing the History of Early English Criticism 1 NOTES Introduction: On Writing the History of Early English Criticism 1. See George Saintsbury, “From the Renaissance to the Decline of Eighteenth Century Orthodoxy,” Vol. 2 of A History of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1900–04). 2. Introduction to The Later Eighteenth Century, Vol. 1 of René Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism: 1750–1950 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1955). 3. Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism: From The Spectator to Post-Structuralism (London: Verso, 1984). Other notable overviews include: J. W. H. Atkins, English Literary Criticism: 17 th and 18th Centuries (London: Methuen, 1951); George Watson, The Literary Critics: A Study of English Descriptive Criticism, rev. ed. (London: Hogarth Press, 1986); and James Engell, Forming the Critical Mind: Dryden to Coleridge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). Perhaps the most comprehensive survey is The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: The Eighteenth Century, ed. H. B. Nisbet and Claude Rawson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); but, because of its scope—it covers both English and Continental criti- cism from 1670 to 1800—its chapters on individual genres and topics are nec- essarily brief. The only recent, book-length work that problematizes our understanding of the criticism of this period is Philip Smallwood’s Reconstructing Criticism: Pope’s Essay on Criticism and the Logic of Definition (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2003). See also Paul Trolander and Zeynep Tenger, “Criticism Against Itself: Subverting Critical Authority in Late-Seventeenth- Century England,” Philological Quarterly 75 (1996): 311–38, and “ ‘Impartial Critick’ or ‘Muse’s Handmaid’: The Politics of Critical Practice in the Early Eighteenth Century,” Essays in Literature 21 (1994): 26–42. 4. Richard Burt, Licensed by Authority: Ben Jonson and the Discourses of Censorship (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993); Richard Dutton, Ben Jonson: Authority: Criticism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996); Robert D. Hume, Dryden’s Criticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1970); Edward Pechter, Dryden’s Classical Theory of Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975); Michael Werth Gelber, The Just and the Lively: The Literary Criticism of John Dryden (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999). 184 NOTES 5. The Critical Works of Thomas Rymer, ed. and intro. Curt A. Zimansky (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1956); The Critical Works of John Dennis, ed. Edward Niles Hooker, 2 vols. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1939, 1943). 6. Samuel Johnson’s “Preface to Dryden” first appeared in Vol. 3 of Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, to the Works of the English Poets (1779). 7. Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905) 1:410. 8. The Works of John Dryden, ed. Edward Niles Hooker, H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., et al., 20 vols. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1956–2002) 9:4. Unless otherwise indicated, all references to Dryden’s works are from this edition, and will hereafter be cited paren- thetically in the text by volume and page number. 9. Gelber begins his book-length study of Dryden’s criticism by announcing, “John Dryden is the father of English literary criticism,” The Just and the Lively 1. Dryden’s paternalistic role in the early history of English criticism is also central to Marcie Frank’s thesis in Gender, Theatre, and the Origins of Criticism: From Dryden to Manley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), where she examines the influence of Dryden’s criticism on Aphra Behn, Catharine Trotter, and Delarivier Manley. 10. Critical Works of Thomas Rymer 136. All references to Rymer are from this edition, and will hereafter be cited parenthetically in the text. 11. Letter to the Earl of Dorset (late summer or early autumn, 1677), The Letters of John Dryden, ed. Charles E. Ward (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1942) 13–14. According to Zimansky, Tragedies of the Last Age “was licensed July 17, 1677, and advertised in the Term Catalogues for Michaelmas of that year. .so the title page was consider- ably postdated” (193). 12. Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Critical Essays, ed. and intro. George Watson, 2 vols. (London: Dent, 1962) 1:211. Similarly, in The Literary Critics, Watson accuses Dryden of engaging in “some disagreeable boot-licking of Rymer” (51). 13. R. S. Crane, “On Writing the History of Criticism in England, 1650–1800,” in The Idea of the Humanities, 2 vols. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1967) 2:162. 14. Pat Rogers, Grub Street: Studies in a Subculture (London: Methuen, 1972). A distilled version of this book appeared as Hacks and Dunces: Pope, Swift and Grub Street (London: Methuen, 1980). 15. For a similar critique, see Brean S. Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writing in England, 1670–1740: “Hackney for Bread” (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997) 2–3. 16. See Burt, chapter 1: “Branding the Body, Burning the Book,” particularly pp. 30–5; Douglas Lane Patey, “The institution of criticism in the eigh- teenth century,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: The Eighteenth Century, 3–31; and Smallwood, Reconstructing Criticism. 17. Peter Uwe Hohendahl, “Literary Criticism and the Public Sphere,” in The Institution of Criticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982) 52. NOTES 185 18. See Matthew J. Kinservik, “Theatrical Regulation during the Restoration Period,” in A Companion to Restoration Drama, ed. Susan J. Owen (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001) 36–52. 19. On this topic, see Kinservik, “Censorship and Generic Change: The Case of Satire on the Early Eighteenth-Century London Stage,” Philological Quarterly 78 (1999): 259–82. 20. On the impact of the Collier controversy on the London theater world—or lack thereof—see Hume, “Jeremy Collier and the Future of the London Theater in 1698,” Studies in Philology 96 (1999): 480–511. 21. This genre is identified early on by the author of A Description of the Academy of the Athenian Virtuosi (1673), who dismisses it as an illegitimate form of criticism: “the Burlesque way of writing is the most hopeful to abuse a good Author, since the fantastick dress tickles the Reader, and makes him laugh whether he will or no” (34). 22. For an excellent survey of pre-1660 English criticism, see English Renaissance Literary Criticism, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001). 23. Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). Chapter 1 The Author as Critic: Prefatory Criticism from Jonson to Dryden 1. See, for example, William K. Wimsatt, Jr. and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957) and Engell, Forming the Critical Mind: Dryden to Coleridge. In a refreshing change of pace, the editors of The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: The Eighteenth Century deliberately avoid devoting “separate chapters to academic or institutional aspects of critical activity, or to the careers of individual critics” (xviii). 2. In particular, see Dutton, Ben Jonson: Authority: Criticism. 3. For example, Gelber concludes his study of Dryden’s criticism by claiming, “No other [English critic] demonstrates so well the interconnections between sound criticism and great literature; and the demonstration by him is all the more impressive since he was simultaneously both poet and critic” (255). 4. Indeed, Jonson’s achievements here have earned him the title of “father”: according to Richard C. Newton, “Of this Ben Jonson, the (re-)inventor of the book, the first English classical author, virtually all subsequent English authors can claim at least some degree of paternity,” “Jonson and the (Re-)Invention of the Book,” in Classic and Cavalier: Essays on Jonson and the Sons of Ben, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982) 46. 5. This is most clearly evident in Ben Jonson’s Literary Criticism, ed. James D. Redwine, Jr. (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), where Jonson’s critical writing is taken out of context and treated as a cohesive critical project. 186 NOTES 6. See Vickers’s anthology, English Renaissance Literary Criticism, and David Klein, The Elizabethan Dramatists as Critics (New York: Philosophical Library, 1963). 7. J. W. Saunders, “The Stigma of Print: A Note on the Social Bases of Tudor Poetry,” Essays in Criticism 1 (1951): 139–64. 8. Kevin Dunn, Pretexts of Authority: The Rhetoric of Authorship in the Renaissance Preface (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994) 6. 9. How exactly play publication—pirated or otherwise—affected play performance and acting companies is the subject of much debate. Peter W. M. Blayney argues that play publication was not profitable enough to warrant pirating, “The Publication of Playbooks,” in A New History of Early English Drama, ed. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997) 383–422. Dutton notes that there are very few recorded instances of a theater company “stealing” the property of another, probably because of the risk of running afoul of the Master of the Revels, “The Birth of the Author,” in Texts and Cultural Change in Early Modern England, ed. Cedric C. Brown and Arthur F. Marotti (London: Macmillan, 1997) 153–78. But Paulina Kewes argues that there is still evidence suggest- ing that the companies “saw publication as inimical to their commercial interests,” Authorship and Appropriation: Writing for the Stage in England, 1660–1710 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998) 20–3. 10. See Gerald Eades Bentley, The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare’s Time, 1590–1642 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971) 275–9. 11. Because my argument focuses on typography, the (often unusual) placement of extraliterary material, and changes that occur between different editions of the same play, I have, unless otherwise indicated, cited the original quarto or folio editions even when a modern edition exists.
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