Notes Introduction 1. Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. Published According to the True Originall Copies (London: Isaac Iaggard and Ed. Blount, 1623), A5r. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid., A5r–A5v. 7. E. K. Chambers emends “deere” to “cleere,” and, as G. Blakemore Evans notes, the Hol- gate MS, fol. 110 (Pierpont Morgan Library), and Additional MS. 30982 at the British Library read “deere.” See Chambers, William Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon, 1930), 2:224; Evans, “Early Critical Comment on the Plays and Poems,” in The Riverside Shake- speare, 2nd ed., ed. G. Blakemore Evans, with J. J. M. Tobin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 1971. 8. Evans, “Early Critical Comment,” 1971–72. 9. Ibid., 1973. 10. Ibid. 11. Mr. William Shakespeares, A5v. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 16. A good example of an accomplished scholar writing a general book for what he calls “a non-professional audience” is Frank Kermode, Shakespeare’s Language (2000; repr., Lon- don: Penguin, 2001), vii. 17. Gilbert Murray, The Classical Tradition in Modern Poetry (1927; repr., New York: Vintage Books, 1957), vii. On Ben Jonson, see Anne Barton, Ben Jonson, Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 18. Rather than go into this topic, I refer to my other discussions of Shakespeare’s relation to irony and Romanticism in a number of works, including Theater and World: The Prob- lematics of Shakespeare’s History (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992), esp. 9–11, 228–31. 19. William Lambard, in John Nichols, Progresses and Processions of Queen Elizabeth (1823), quoted in The Shakespeare Allusion-Book, ed. and rev. J. Munro (1909; repr., Freeport, NY: Books for Library Press, 1970), 100. 20. Walter Kaufman, From Shakespeare to Existentialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 3. 212 NOTES, PP. 1–13 21. The Platonic Socrates, particularly in the tenth book of Republic, shows skepticism over the role of Homer in Greek education and would prefer that poetry serve philosophical and political ends. This is an attempt to displace poetry with philosophy. Still, Plato is also uncomfortable with the rhetoricians, comparing these professionals with someone devoted to education without financial interests—Socrates, poetry, philosophy, and rheto- ric are not—as his student, Aristotle, recognized—easy to separate. To persuade is, for Aristotle, the end of the rhetoric: “Persuasion is clearly a sort of demonstration, since we are most fully persuaded when we consider a thing to have been demonstrated.” Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. W. Rhys Roberts (1924; repr., New York: Dover, 2004), 1355a. Aristotle does not portray the study and practice of rhetoric, which originated in the Greek colony in Sicily and was exported back to Athens, as something insincere and manipulative. No cheap lawyer jokes for him. Instead, Aristotle says that rhetoric is of use “because things that are true and things that are just have a natural tendency to prevail over their oppo- sites, so that if the decisions of judges are not what they ought to be, the defeat must be due to the speakers themselves, and they must be blamed accordingly.” Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1355a. See Plato, The Republic of Plato, trans. Francis MacDonald Cornford (1941; repr., Oxford: Clarendon, 1945), Book X, 595 A-608 B. Poetry, according to Aristotle, sprang from imitation and harmony and rhythm. He considers these aspects to be two elements deep in human nature. Poetry, for Aristotle, comes down to a relation between the char- acter of the author and the choice of genre. On Aristotle, see Jonathan Hart, “The Author Writes Back (and Speaks Up),” Primerjalna književnost 31, no. 2 (2008): 15–37. 22. Clifford Geertz, Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics (2000; repr., Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 3. For my own recent discussions of culture, poetics, interpretation, recognition and other topics, see Interpreting Cultures: Literature, Religion, and the Human Sciences (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 23. See Aristotle, Poetics, chapter 9. 24. In a well-known passage, Philip Sidney gives us a view of the historian as lost in a slowly vanishing archive: “The Historian, scarcely giueth leysure to the Moralist, to say so much, but that he loden with old Mouse-eaten records, authorising himselfe (for the most part) vpon other histories, whose greatest authorities, are built vpon the notable foundation of Heare-say, hauing much a-doe to accord differing VVriters, and to pick trueth out of partiality, better acquainted with a thousande yeeres a goe, then with the present age.” See An apologie for poetrie. VVritten by the right noble, vertuous, and learned, Sir Phillip Sidney, Knight, At London: Printed [by James Roberts] for Henry Olney, and are to be sold at his shop in Paules Church-yard, at the signe of the George, neere to Cheap-gate, Anno. 1595. In the opening paragraphs of “Preface to Shakespeare,” Samuel Johnson also says famously, “Shakespeare is above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirrour of manners and of life. His persons act and speak by the influence of those general passions and principles by which all minds are agitated, and whole system of life is continued in motion. In the writings of other poets a character is too often an individual; in those of Shakespeare it is commonly a species.” See Mr. Johnson’s Preface to His Edition of Shakespear’s Plays (London: J. and R. Tonson, H. Woodfall, J. Rivington, R. Baldwin, L. Hawes, Clark and Collins, T. Longman, W. John- ston, T. Caslon, C. Corbet, T. Lownds, and the Executors on B. Dodd, 1765), A4v–A5r. In Jerusalem, William Blake takes a contrary view to Johnson’s: “He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars. / General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite & flatterer: / For Art & Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars, / And not in generalizing Demonstrations of the Rational Power.” See William Blake, “Jeru- salem,” in The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, rev. ed., ed. David V. Erdman and Harold Bloom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 205. NOTES, PP. 1–13 213 25. For a discussion of the London of Shakespeare and its material culture at the turn of the seventeenth century, see Material London, ca. 1600, ed. Lena Cowen Orwin (Philadel- phia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). In this volume, on the theatres in London, see Andrew Gurr, “The Authority of the Globe and the Fortune,” 251–67. 26. Ben Jonson, The Workes of Beniamin Ionson (London: Will Stansby, 1616). 27. See Rosalind Miles, Ben Jonson: His Life and Work (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), 166–69. See also David Riggs, Ben Jonson: A Life (Cambridge MA: Harvard Uni- versity Press, 1989); Sarah Van Den Berg, “True Relation: the Life and Career of Ben Jon- son,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ben Jonson, ed. Richard Harp and Stanley Stewart (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1–13; and, in the same volume, Leah Marcus, “Jonson and the Court,” 30–42. My thanks to Jane Wong for discussing Jonson as laureate. 28. For records on Shakespeare’s life, see, for example, E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare, 2:1–18. See also Samuel Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975); William Shakespeare: Records and Images (New York: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 1981). 29. Mark Harrison, Disease and the Modern World: 1500 to the Modern World (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), 27–29. See also F. P. Wilson, The Plague in Shakespeare’s London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1927); William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977); Clare Gittings, Death, Burial and the Individual in Early Mod- ern England (London: Croom Helm, 1984); Paul Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985); J. Leeds Barroll, Politics, Plague, and Shakespeare’s Theatre: The Stuart Years (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); F. David Hoeniger, Medicine and Shakespeare in the English Renaissance (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992); Nat Wayne Hardy, “Anatomy of Pestilence: The Satiric Disgust of Plague in Early Modern London (1563–1625)” (PhD thesis, University of Alberta, 2000); Colin Heywood, A History of Childhood (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001). 30. See John Seeley, The Expansion of England (London: Macmillan, 1883). 31. In 1734, Voltaire showed ambivalence toward Shakespeare (he wrote about Shakespeare from about 1733 to 1776): “The English as well as the Spaniards were posses’d of Theatres, at a Time when the French had no more than moving, itinerant Stages. Shakespear boasted a strong, fruitful Genius: He was natural and sublime, but had not so much as a single Spark of good Taste, or knew one Rule of the Drama.” See “Shakespeare’s Montrous Farces . Lettres Philosophiques, 1734,” in Four Centuries of Shakesperian Criticism, ed. J. Frank Kermode (New York: Discus/Avon, 1965), 73. In 1765, Samuel Johnson observed, “When Shakespeare’s plan is understood, most of the criticisms of Rymer and Voltaire vanish away.” See “Samuel Johnson, Edition of Shakespeare 1765,” in William Shake- speare: The Critical Heritage, ed. Brian Vickers (London: Routledge, 1974), 45. Elizabeth Montagu also came to the defense of Shakespeare against Voltaire’s charges of barbarism in “Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare,” in Vickers, William Shakespeare, 169;