DOCSLIB.ORG

Coversheet for Thesis in Sussex Research Online

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Coversheet for Thesis in Sussex Research Online View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Sussex Research Online A University of Sussex DPhil thesis Available online via Sussex Research Online: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/ This thesis is protected by copyright which belongs to the author. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Please visit Sussex Research Online for more information and further details Domestic Relations in Shakespeare Amy Kenny Submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy University of Sussex November 2011 2 I hereby declare that this thesis has not been previously submitted to this or any other University for a degree. Amy Kenny 3 Table of Contents Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................... 4 Textual Note .............................................................................................................................. 4 Summary ................................................................................................................................... 5 Introduction: Early Modern Family .......................................................................................... 6 Chapter 1: Marriage ................................................................................................................. 29 Chapter 2: Children ................................................................................................................. 91 Chapter 3: Adolescence ......................................................................................................... 148 Chapter 4: Early Modern Siblings ......................................................................................... 180 Chapter 5: Nuclear Families .................................................................................................. 206 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................. 261 Bibliography .......................................................................................................................... 266 Primary Sources ......................................................................................................... 266 Secondary Sources ..................................................................................................... 280 4 Acknowledgements Many people have been instrumental in the writing of this thesis. First, my gratitude is owed to my ever-encouraging supervisor, Professor Andrew Hadfield, who provided constructive, erudite criticism every step of the way and was always a joy to work with. I have been grateful to research and teach at Shakespeare’s Globe while working on this thesis, for which I am indebted to Dr. Farah Karim-Cooper for the opportunity and her personal mentoring along the way. My colleagues there, namely Dr. Jordan Landes, Dr. Ruth Frendo, Madeline Knights, Alexandra Massey, Sarah Dustagheer and Casey Caldwell (via Blackfriars), have all been supportive and engaging with even the smallest of concerns. For their suggestions and ideas in reading sections of this thesis at various stages, I am thankful to Professor Tom Healy, Dr Angus Vine, Dr. Jordan Landes, Paul Hamilton, Erin Weinberg and Denise Thompson. It is fitting that in a piece on the family my own has played such a large role in encouraging me. I owe everything to my parents, who first believed in me and continue to everyday; and to my family: Liss, Dave, Drew and Brooke, who have all been cheering for me throughout this entire process as ever before. But most of all, my appreciation is owed to my Andrew, my husband, not only for sitting through countless productions and lectures on Shakespeare (admittedly many of them from me), but for his never-ending enthusiasm and interest in my work. Textual Note Unless stated otherwise, all Shakespearean quotations are from The Riverside Shakespeare , G. Blakemore Evans, ed. 2 nd edn (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997) and are included in the text. 5 Summary This thesis investigates how the size, structure and function of the family presented in Shakespeare’s plays relates to an early modern understanding of the importance and function of the family. By examining domestic manuals, pamphlets, treatises and diaries from the early modern period, I establish what was considered normative domestic behaviour at the time and analyse Shakespeare's plays through these contemporary attitudes, specifically their treatment of privacy, household structure and medical beliefs surrounding reproduction and gynaecology. This thesis seeks to focus on the way in which people’s positions in the family change over time, from infancy to adulthood, and how these relationships are represented in Shakespeare’s plays. Beginning with marriage, where the family is first formed; I examine Othello and Macbeth , and show how the marriages in these plays, while tragic, are cherished and valued. Succession was integral to the legacy and sustainability of a family, which is the topic of the next chapter, in which I explore the notions of how children are conceived and raised in Richard III and The Winter’s Tale . The transition from childhood into adulthood was fraught with change in both housing and legal circumstances, and this struggle in adolescence is clearly depicted in Romeo and Juliet , which comprises the third chapter. Aside from the familial relationships of husband and wife and parent and child, the most influential relationships were those of siblings, which I investigate in a number of plays in the fourth chapter. Finally, I focus on the traditional and complicated nuclear families in The Merry Wives of Windsor , Hamlet and Coriolanus , and analyse how the family is highlighted and valued in each of these plays. The thesis concludes that throughout Shakespeare’s work, the family is privileged over war, nobility and absolute patriarchal control, emphasising that it is vital to understanding and analysing Shakespeare’s plays. 6 Introduction: Early Modern Family Early modern drama is rooted in the everyday lives of early modern people. Shakespeare repeatedly alters his source materials in order to stage these everyday, domestic issues that everyone in his audience could relate to and understand. Since theatre companies were never sure how long these plays would run or how successful they would be, the connection to the everyday household was a way of keeping the audience interested and invested. In early modern England, social hierarchy ensured that various classes were rigidly separated, yet one thing that all people had in common, from aristocracy to beggars, was family. The family was constructed as necessary to the public commonwealth, a microcosm on which the structure of government and social hierarchy rested. Robert Cleaver began his popular domestic manual by stating that ‘a household is as it were a little commonwealth, by the good government whereof, God’s glory may be advances, the commonwealth which standeth for several families, benefited and all that live in that family may receive much comfort and commodity.’ 1 Thus, family was not merely a shared bloodline or household, but the means by which people could implement social and religious ideals, maintain their reputation in the community and garner respect and business from their neighbours. Consequently, the significance of family in the early modern period far outweighs its role in society today. While much recent scholarship has focused on the political aspects of Shakespeare’s canon, not as much work has examined the day to day issues that appear in all of his plays. This thesis will investigate how the size, structure and function of the family presented in Shakespeare’s plays correlates to the importance and organisation of the family during the early modern period. Since the household functioned as both a model for the hierarchy of the government and a method of regulating disruptive behaviour in 1Robert Cleaver, A Godly Form of Household Government (London: Thomas Creede for Thomas Man, 1598), 1. 7 the community, many contemporary manuals, treatises and diaries establish what was considered normative domestic behaviour at the time. By evaluating Shakespeare's plays through these contemporary attitudes, specifically their treatment of privacy, household structure and medical beliefs surrounding reproduction and gynaecology, this thesis aims to gain a better understanding of the characterisation and purpose of the families in his plays. Although volumes have been written on relationships in Shakespeare’s plays, much of this work has focused on absent mothers or over-bearing fathers. Seminal works such as Janet Adelman’s Suffocating Mothers and Carol Thomas Neely’s Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare’s Plays have led these discussions. Adelman’s work psychologised the role of the mother in Shakespeare’s plays as a source of tragedy, arguing that even where mothers are absent, the negative associations with the maternal body manifest themselves in the plays. Her pre-Oedipal reading of the mother accounts for the constructs of masculinity in Shakespeare’s plays,
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Introduction
    introduction Romance is a twilight zone in studies of late sixteenth-century literary genres in England. Half-way between the nostalgia of medieval chivalry and the enterprising spirit of early modern exploration, piracy and com- merce as preludes to a future empire, it is both very old-fashioned and innovatively modern. Appearing in narrative as well as in dramatic forms, romance lays simultaneous claims to history and imagination, which were not necessarily in opposition in the period, and caters for a readership of servants and citizens while equally fi nding its way into Spenserian epic, Sidneyan pastoral or even late Shakespearian tragicomedy and Miltonian poetry. The three plays grouped in this volume are early modern attempts at conquering that twilight zone in a context of expanding contacts with Muslim lands around the Mediterranean. romance and conquest in early modern england ‘The structural core of all fi ction’ for Northrop Frye, who sees it as a means to translate mythical archetypes into human experience, 1 romance is also ‘a notoriously slippery category’, as Barbara Fuchs warns. 2 The basic defi nition with which Helen Cooper starts her authoritative study of the genre is a primarily narrative fi ction in the vernacular which appears from the twelfth century onward, characterised by exotic settings, distant in time and/or place, concerned with love and/or chivalry, and involving high-ranking individuals engaged in some ideal quest. It may include such recurrent patterns as encounters with the supernatural, obscured identities or miraculous conversions. 3 Patricia Parker’s earlier deconstructionist approach complicates this defi nition by insisting on the proliferating digressions which form the structure of romance and defer its closure and collective coherence.
    [Show full text]
  • The First Quarto of King Henry V Edited by Andrew Gurr Excerpt More Information
    Cambridge University Press 0521623367 - The First Quarto of King Henry V Edited by Andrew Gurr Excerpt More information 1 Introduction INTRODUCTION The significance of the quarto text of Henry V The character of the text of Henry V printed in the First Folio of 1623 (f) is not seriously in doubt. As the NCS edition and others argue, it was set from an authorial manuscript that had not been through the developmental process of emendation for performance. The version printed in 1600 (q), however, tells a different story. It contains several features that show radical corrections made to the f text either in the course of preparing the play for performance or during its first run on stage. It cuts the total number of lines by a half, eliminating entire scenes and transposing others, and shortens or cuts all the longer speeches. The speed with which it came to the press only a year after its first staging is a mark both of its proximity to the text performed by the company that owned it and of its authority as an official version. Between 1598 and 1600 ten plays owned by Shakespeare’s company came into print, seven of them Shakespeare’s own. With the sole exception of the Henry V quarto, and Jonson’s Every Man Out of his Humour, which Jonson gave to the press himself, all of them were at least three years old. In the speed of its delivery to the press, q Henry V is unique even among the so-called ‘bad’ quartos. What its text can tell us about its origins and its intended function is uniquely valuable for an understanding of what Shakespeare’s company did to adapt the play-manuscripts he sold to them for staging.
    [Show full text]
  • Redating Pericles: a Re-Examination of Shakespeare’S
    REDATING PERICLES: A RE-EXAMINATION OF SHAKESPEARE’S PERICLES AS AN ELIZABETHAN PLAY A THESIS IN Theatre Presented to the Faculty of the University of Missouri-Kansas City in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree MASTER OF ARTS by Michelle Elaine Stelting University of Missouri Kansas City December 2015 © 2015 MICHELLE ELAINE STELTING ALL RIGHTS RESERVED REDATING PERICLES: A RE-EXAMINATION OF SHAKESPEARE’S PERICLES AS AN ELIZABETHAN PLAY Michelle Elaine Stelting, Candidate for the Master of Arts Degree University of Missouri-Kansas City, 2015 ABSTRACT Pericles's apparent inferiority to Shakespeare’s mature works raises many questions for scholars. Was Shakespeare collaborating with an inferior playwright or playwrights? Did he allow so many corrupt printed versions of his works after 1604 out of indifference? Re-dating Pericles from the Jacobean to the Elizabethan era answers these questions and reveals previously unexamined connections between topical references in Pericles and events and personalities in the court of Elizabeth I: John Dee, Philip Sidney, Edward de Vere, and many others. The tournament impresas, alchemical symbolism of the story, and its lunar and astronomical imagery suggest Pericles was written long before 1608. Finally, Shakespeare’s focus on father-daughter relationships, and the importance of Marina, the daughter, as the heroine of the story, point to Pericles as written for a young girl. This thesis uses topical references, Shakespeare’s anachronisms, Shakespeare’s sources, stylometry and textual analysis, as well as Henslowe’s diary, the Stationers' Register, and other contemporary documentary evidence to determine whether there may have been versions of Pericles circulating before the accepted date of 1608.
    [Show full text]
  • Det. 1.2.2 Quartos 1594-1609.Pdf
    author registered year of title printer stationer value editions edition Anon. 6 February 1594 to John 1594 The most lamentable Romaine tragedie of Titus Iohn Danter Edward White & "rather good" 1600, 1611 Danter Andronicus as it was plaide by the Right Honourable Thomas Millington the Earle of Darbie, Earle of Pembrooke, and Earle of Sussex their seruants Anon. 2 May 1594 1594 A Pleasant Conceited Historie, Called the Taming of Peter Short Cuthbert Burby bad a Shrew. As it was sundry times acted by the Right honorable the Earle of Pembrook his seruants. Anon. 12 March 1594 to Thomas 1594 The First Part of the Contention Betwixt the Two Thomas Creede Thomas Millington bad 1600 Millington Famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster . [Henry VI Part 2] Anon. 1595 The true tragedie of Richard Duke of York , and P. S. [Peter Short] Thomas Millington bad 1600 the death of good King Henrie the Sixt, with the whole contention betweene the two houses Lancaster and Yorke, as it was sundrie times acted by the Right Honourable the Earle of Pembrooke his seruants [Henry VI Part 3] Anon. 1597 An excellent conceited tragedie of Romeo and Iuliet. Iohn Danter [and bad As it hath been often (with great applause) plaid Edward Allde] publiquely, by the Right Honourable the L. of Hunsdon his seruants Anon. 29 August 1597 to Andrew 1597 The tragedie of King Richard the second. As it hath Valentine Simmes Andrew Wise "rather good" Wise been publikely acted by the Right Honourable the Lorde Chamberlaine his seruants. William Shake-speare [29 Aug 1597] 1598 The tragedie of King Richard the second.
    [Show full text]
  • A Rare Early Quarto of Shakespeare's Richard III William Shakespeare
    A rare early quarto of Shakespeare’s Richard III William Shakespeare, Richard III. London: Mathew Law, 1605. 7 1/4 inches x 5 1/4 inches (184 mm x 133 mm), [92] pages, A–L4 M2. THE | TRAGEDIE | of King Richard | the third. | Conteining his treacherous Plots against his brother | Clarence : the pittifull murther of his innocent Ne- | phewes : his tyrannicall vsurpation : with the | whole course of his detested life, and | most deserued death. | As it hath bin lately Acted by the Right Honourable | the Lord Chamberlaine his seruants. | Newly augmented, | By William Shake-speare. | [Creede’s device] | LONDON, | Printed by Thomas Creede, | and are to be sold by Mathew | Lawe, dwelling in Paules Church-yard, at the Signe | of the Foxe, neare S. Austins gate, 1605. Shakespeare’s quartos, so named because of their format (a single sheet folded twice, creating four leaves or eight pages), are the first printed representations of his plays and, as none of the plays survives in manuscript, of great importance to Shakespeare scholarship. Only twenty-one of Shakespeare’s plays were published in quarto before the closure of the theaters and outbreak of civil war in 1642. These quartos were printed from either Shakespeare’s “foul papers” (a draft with notations and changes that was given in sections to actors for their respective roles); from “fair copies” created from foul papers that presented the entire action of the play; from promptbooks, essentially fair copies annotated and expanded by the author and acting company to clarify stage directions, sound effects, etc.; or from a previously published quarto edition.
    [Show full text]
  • Air Pollution in Early Modern Drama
    AIR POLLUTION IN EARLY MODERN DRAMA DR CHLOE PREEDY KING: How fares our cousin Hamlet? HAMLET: Excellent, i‘ faith! Of the chameleon's dish - I eat the air, promise-crammed. You cannot feed capons so. KING: I have nothing with this answer, Hamlet. These words are not mine. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (Arden Shakespeare, 2006), 3.2.88-93 [Plague] proceedeth from the venemous corruption of the humours and spirits of the body, infected by the attraction of corrupted aire, or infection of evil vapours, which have the property to alter mans bodies, and poyson his spirits after a straunge and dangerous qualitie Thomas Lodge, A Treatise of the Plague (London: [Thomas Creede and Valentine Simmes] for Edward White and N[icholas] L[ing], 1603), B2v This guest of summer, The temple-haunting martlet, does approve By his loved mansionry that the heaven's breath Smells wooingly here; no jutty, frieze, Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird William Shakespeare, Hath made his pendent bed and procreant cradle; Macbeth, ed. Carol Rutter (Penguin Shakespeare, Where they most breed and haunt I have observed 2005), 1.6.3-10 The air is delicate. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
    [Show full text]
  • Introduction
    Cambridge University Press 0521623367 - The First Quarto of King Henry V Edited by Andrew Gurr Excerpt More information 1 Introduction INTRODUCTION The significance of the quarto text of Henry V The character of the text of Henry V printed in the First Folio of 1623 (f) is not seriously in doubt. As the NCS edition and others argue, it was set from an authorial manuscript that had not been through the developmental process of emendation for performance. The version printed in 1600 (q), however, tells a different story. It contains several features that show radical corrections made to the f text either in the course of preparing the play for performance or during its first run on stage. It cuts the total number of lines by a half, eliminating entire scenes and transposing others, and shortens or cuts all the longer speeches. The speed with which it came to the press only a year after its first staging is a mark both of its proximity to the text performed by the company that owned it and of its authority as an official version. Between 1598 and 1600 ten plays owned by Shakespeare’s company came into print, seven of them Shakespeare’s own. With the sole exception of the Henry V quarto, and Jonson’s Every Man Out of his Humour, which Jonson gave to the press himself, all of them were at least three years old. In the speed of its delivery to the press, q Henry V is unique even among the so-called ‘bad’ quartos. What its text can tell us about its origins and its intended function is uniquely valuable for an understanding of what Shakespeare’s company did to adapt the play-manuscripts he sold to them for staging.
    [Show full text]
  • View Fast Facts
    FAST FACTS Author's Works and Themes: Hamlet “Author's Works and Themes: Hamlet.” Gale, 2019, www.gale.com. Writings by William Shakespeare Play Productions • Henry VI, part 1, London, unknown theater (perhaps by a branch of the Queen's Men), circa 1589-1592. • Henry VI, part 2, London, unknown theater (perhaps by a branch of the Queen's Men), circa 1590-1592. • Henry VI, part 3, London, unknown theater (perhaps by a branch of the Queen's Men), circa 1590-1592. • Richard III, London, unknown theater (perhaps by a branch of the Queen's Men), circa 1591-1592. • The Comedy of Errors, London, unknown theater (probably by Lord Strange's Men), circa 1592-1594; London, Gray's Inn, 28 December 1594. • Titus Andronicus, London, Rose or Newington Butts theater, 24 January 1594. • The Taming of the Shrew, London, Newington Butts theater, 11 June 1594. • The Two Gentlemen of Verona, London, Newington Butts theater or the Theatre, 1594. • Love's Labor's Lost, perhaps at the country house of a great lord, such as the Earl of Southampton, circa 1594-1595; London, at Court, Christmas 1597. • Sir Thomas More, probably by Anthony Munday, revised by Thomas Dekker, Henry Chettle, Shakespeare, and possibly Thomas Heywood, evidently never produced, circa 1594-1595. • King John, London, the Theatre, circa 1594-1596. • Richard II, London, the Theatre, circa 1595. • Romeo and Juliet, London, the Theatre, circa 1595-1596. • A Midsummer Night's Dream, London, the Theatre, circa 1595-1596. • The Merchant of Venice, London, the Theatre, circa 1596-1597. • Henry IV, part 1, London, the Theatre, circa 1596-1597.
    [Show full text]
  • Shakespeare's Stationers: Studies in Cultural Biography, Ed
    Marta Straznicky, ed., Shakespeare’s Stationers: Studies in Cultural Bibliography (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). 384pp. ISBN 978 0 8122 4454 0. Tom Rooney Central European University [email protected] In Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication (2004), Zachary Lesser suggests that 21st-century readers should consider how 16th- and 17th-century stationers read the plays they issued, and ‘that thinking of plays as publishers thought of them, as commodities, can change the ways in which we read these plays themselves’ (p. 4). He also argues that ‘the plays of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Beaumont and Fletcher, and their contemporaries will in fact take on new meanings if we pay attention to the people who published them’ (p. 10). Lesser’s method is to examine the plays a particular stationer issued within the context of that stationer’s whole career; as a result he sheds new light on familiar titles such as Othello, The Jew of Malta and The Knight of the Burning Pestle. Such an analysis, he points out, is ‘not merely sociological or historical, but also literary critical’ (p. 17). Lesser is one of nine contributors to Shakespeare’s Stationers: Studies in Cultural Bibliography, a fine new collection of sociological-historical-literary critical essays on some of the printers, publishers and booksellers involved in the publication of Shakespeare’s plays and poems between 1593 and 1640. In her introductory essay editor Marta Straznicky, like Lesser before her, makes the case that many stationers in early modern London need to be understood not only as men working in a trade but as readers of the texts they ushered into print.
    [Show full text]
  • This Dissertation Has Been 64—3183 Microfilmed Exactly As Received
    This dissertation has been 64—3183 microfilmed exactly as received MURPHY, John Leo, 1923- SOME PROBLEMS IN THE ANONYMOUS DRAMA OF THE ELIZABETHAN STAGE. The University of Oklahoma, Ph.D., 1963 Language and Literature, modern University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan THE UNIVERSITÏ OP OKLAHOMA GRADUATE COLLEGE SOME PROBLEMS IN THE ANONYMOUS DRAMA OP THE ELIZABETHAN STAGE A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE PACULTY In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OP PHILOSOPHY BY JOHN l V‘ MURPHY Norman, Oklahoma 1963 SOME PROBLEMS IN THE ANONYMOUS DRAMA OF THE ELIZABETHAN STAGE APPROVED BY DISSERTATION COMMITTEE MAGISTRO ET AMIGO GARISSIMO JOSEPH HANGOGK MARSHBÜRN namque tu solebas meas esse allquid putare nugas 111 I should like above all to acknowledge my many obliga­ tions to Professor Calvin G, Thayer, Department of English, University of Oklahoma, and director of this dissertation. My brother, Donald Murphy, and my mother, Mrs. Leo Murphy, gave help without which I could not have brought this study to a conclusion. Finally, I wish to give special thanks to the following professors for serving as members of my disser­ tation committee: Philip J, Nolan, Chairman, Department of Classics, University of Oklahoma; Alphonse J, Fritz, Department of English, University of Oklahoma; Jack L, Kendall, Department of English, University of Oklahoma, iv TABLE OP CONTENTS Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTION................. 1 II. LOCRINE AND SELIMUS: SOMÉT IMPLICATÏÔJJ3 OP THE BORROWINGS PROM SPENSER AND GREENE.......... 7 III. LOCRINE: CONJECTURES AND ÏRPË5ENCES PROM QUARTO TO M A N U S C R I P T ...... 58 IV. SELIMUS: THE TEXT AND THE " l (5S5Le a t m a n u s c r i p t ...
    [Show full text]
  • Straznicky, Marta, Ed. Shakespeare's Stationers: Studies in Cultural
    comptes rendus 199 Straznicky, Marta, ed. Shakespeare’s Stationers: Studies in Cultural Bibliography. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Pp. viii, 374 + 9 ill. ISBN 978-0-8122-4454-0 (hardcover) $75. Shakespeare’s Stationers speaks to recent and growing interest in the careers and professional concerns of the publishers and printers who made Shakespeare’s plays and poems available in print. Marta Straznicky contributes a helpful introduction in which she outlines the conversations taking place in early modern stationer studies and identifies this book’s particular engagements with that field. This collection has a strong and coherent research focus: it provides detailed investigations into the workings of the trade in the fifty to sixty years around the turn of the seventeenth century and the networks of professional and personal relations within which decisions were made. Alexandra Halasz opens with “The Stationers’ Shakespeare,” in which she argues that stationers cultivated the literary market over the long term to make of the texts to which they had publishing rights “steady rent-producing properties” (17). These marketing strategies extended to Shakespeare’s plays and poems. Pavier’s aborted 1619 venture, in this context, comes to seem an economically smart effort to create a “synergy” among related texts, both to develop existing properties and to expand the readership for them at “a middling price point” (25). When this effort failed—according to Halasz, because the playing companies realized how publishers’ development of “property” might impair their own economic interests—a compromise founded on an authorial canon was reached, in the form of the First Folio.
    [Show full text]
  • “THE TRUE TRAGEDY of RICHARD the THIRD” Another Early History Play by Edward De Vere
    “THE TRUE TRAGEDY OF RICHARD THE THIRD” Another Early History Play by Edward de Vere Ramon Jiménez ❦ HE anonymous history play, The True Tragedy of Richard the Third, printed in 1594, has occasionally been cited as a source for Shakespeare’s Richard III, printed in 1597, also anonymously. True Tragedy was not printed again until 1821, and was not commented on at length until 1900, when G.B. Churchill found sufficient parallels between the two plays to assert that Shakespeare took incidents and language from the anonymous playwright (524). Fifty years later, John Dover Wilson agreed, pointing out additional links between the plays (Shakespeare’s 299-306). In 1960, Geoffrey Bullough (3.222, 238) concurred with Churchill and Wilson, and printed most of True Tragedy at the end of his discussion of Richard III in his Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (3.317-45). On the other hand, most com- mentators, including E.K. Chambers (Elizabethan 4.44) and the editors of the recent Arden and Oxford editions of Richard III, see only scattered minor borrowings by Shakespeare from the old play. Several early critics ascribed the play variously to Lodge, Peele, Kyd, and the author of Locrine (Stage 4.44). Aside from occasional comments about its insignificance, True Tragedy has been largely ignored by scholars for the past forty years. With the exception of a hint from the maverick scholar Eric Sams in 1995 (59), no one has ever claimed the play for Shakespeare, nor has it been included in discussions or collections of Shakespeare apocrypha. However, a review of the published evidence and a further analysis of the two plays streng- then the conclusion that it was a source play for Shakespeare’s Richard III.
    [Show full text]