Produced by Al Haines
[Frontispiece: TITLE-PAGE OF THE FIRST FOLIO, 1628 The first collected edition of Shakespeare's Plays (From the copy in the New York Public Library)]
AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE
BY
H. N. MacCRACKEN, PH.D. F. E. PIERCE, PH.D.
AND
W. H. DURHAM, PH.D.
OF THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN
THE SHEFFIELD SCIENTIFIC SCHOOL OF
YALE UNIVERSITY
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1925
_All rights reserved_
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
COPYRIGHT, 1910,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1910. Reprinted April, December, 1911; September, 1912; July, 1913; July, 1914; December, 1915; November, 1916; May, 1918; July, 1919; November, 1920; September, 1921; June, 1923; January, 1925.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
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PREFACE
The advances made in Shakespearean scholarship within the last half-dozen years seem to justify the writing of another manual for school and college use. The studies of Wallace in the life-records, of Lounsbury in the history of editions, of Pollard and Greg in early quartos, of Lee upon the First Folio, of Albright and others upon the Elizabethan Theater, as well as valuable monographs on individual plays have all appeared since the last Shakespeare manual was prepared. This little volume aims to present what may be necessary for the majority of classes, as a background upon which may be begun the study and reading of the plays. Critical comment on individual plays has been added, in the hope that it may stimulate interest in other plays than those assigned for study.
Chapters I, VIII, IX, X, and XIII are the work of Professor MacCracken; chapters V, VI, VII, XII, and XIV are by Professor Pierce; and chapters II, III, IV, and XI are by Dr. Durham. The authors have, however, united in the criticism and the revision of every chapter.
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CONTENTS
CHAPTER I PAGE
AN OUTLINE OF SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
CHAPTER II
ENGLISH DRAMA BEFORE SHAKESPEARE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
Table of contents (by pages)
- 1: An Introduction to Shakespeare by W. H. Durham
- 2: Chapter iiithe elizabethan theater
- 3: The record of baptism of April 26
- 4: Of that year two farmers of Shottery
- 5: The reference to Shakescene and the Tygers heart
- 6: Which fill the Shakespeare Allusion Book
- 7: 7 13 Shakespeare and the Mountjoys
- 8: Was one seventh of the Blackfriars
- 9: In 1616 Shakespeare's health failed
- 10: But written shortly before Greene's death in 1592
- 11: The empty sepulcher was solemnly visited
- 12: The surviving fragments of lost cycles
- 13: Is that called The Summoning of Everyman
- 14: Gorboduc has all these qualities except the brilliance
- 15: Few Elizabethan playwrights conformed to its rules
- 16: The English masque was an entertainment
- 17: The most important was the innyard
- 18: And reerected it on the Bankside
- 19: Reproduced from The Shakespearean Stage
- 20: When we say that Elizabethan stagings were 'symbolic
- 21: The first of these theaters was the Blackfriars
- 22: When studied in the light of Elizabethan stage conditions
- 23: Next to Burbage the most famous Elizabethan actor
- 24: Had revolutionized the map of the heavens
- 25: Outside them were several important suburbs
- 26: Betwixt him Shakespeare and Ben Jonson
- 27: At the aristocratic Blackfriars
- 28: In which the first and third lines rime
- 29: How Sextus Tarquin ravished Lucrece
- 30: The second sequence contains numbers 127 154
- 31: SONNET CXLIV Two loves I have of comfort and despair
- 32: Such are Shakespeare's nondramatic writings
- 33: All of these rime schemes alike were intended
- 34: So that the date of printing on the flyleaf of the quarto
- 35: Or Barksted could not have copied from it
- 36: He must have written his comedy sometime after 1609
- 37: The number of feminine endings
- 38: 1593 1594 Midsummer Night's Dream
- 39: With masculine and feminine endings
- 40: And utters it again when God doth please
- 41: Romeo and Juliet is full of beautiful poetry
- 42: You need only compare Richard with Macbeth
- 43: Shakespeare never surpassed Hamlet
- 44: But Jessica is Shylock's child
- 45: He had by this time mastered the technique of comedy
- 46: Caesar and Hamlet are great plays
- 47: And it continues to about 1608
- 48: Shakespeare did not waste his time in inventing stories
- 49: Are totally wanting in Holinshed
- 50: The greatest of these collections was the Decameron
- 51: Which it is believed Shakespeare used
- 52: Which began about 1480 and lasted up to 1557
- 53: Later quartos in 1602 and 1619
- 54: Printed and published by John Danter in 1597
- 55: Aspley owned the rights to Much Ado About Nothing
- 56: And of other Elizabethan writers
- 57: While the Folio has one hundred lines not in the quartos
- 58: In 1726 Lewis Theobald published Shakespeare Restored
- 59: Shakespeare Folios and Quartos
- 60: Aside from Romeo and Juliet in the unknown first draft
- 61: Called Joan la Pucelle the maiden
- 62: 1598 then first ascribed to Shakespeare
- 63: The character of Faulconbridge
- 64: The blackamoor lover of Tamora
- 65: Developed by such real artists as Kyd
- 66: The death of Mercutio from the old play
- 67: The twin at Ephesus is arrested instead of his brother
- 68: From the Amphitruo of Plautus
- 69: Lysander and Hermia plan flight
- 70: We may separate the histories from the comedies
- 71: Glendower and Mortimer were kept away
- 72: Oldcastle was a historical personage quite unlike Falstaff
- 73: And 1619 in the latter with the false date of 1608
- 74: Really their wives Portia and Nerissa in disguise
- 75: That Shakespeare wrote the Induction
- 76: Is that the man called Falstaff is not Falstaff at all
- 77: Called Benedicke and Betteris
- 78: Including Jaques and Touchstone
- 79: If Viola is more appealing than Rosalind
- 80: Troilus and Cressida must have been written before 1603
- 81: The more lovely and admirable Helena is
- 82: Whetstone in turn borrowed his material
- 83: Hence we can put the date between 1599 1601
- 84: Several other quartos followed
- 85: Othello feels the same helplessness
- 86: The date of King Lear lies between 1603 and 1606
- 87: Macbeth is an unprincipled but imaginative man
- 88: Cleopatra proves still Antony's evil genius
- 89: And shows great courage at the siege of Corioli
- 90: Yet Apemantus is contemptible beside him
- 91: This was the romantic tragi comedy
- 92: But they bear the unconscious Thaisa safely to land
- 93: They rid her of the troublesome Cloten
- 94: Some later hand probably made up the vision of Posthumus V
- 95: Greene made the jealous Pandosto king in Bohemia
- 96: There are two speeches of Prospero
- 97: The earliest print of the play was the First Folio
- 98: The Baconian arguments fall into four groups
- 99: Is wholly unlike the prose of Shakespeare
- 100: An Introduction to Shakespeare by W. H. Durham
- 101: Heptameron of Civil Discourses
- 102: Patterne of Painful Adventures
- 103: Printed in the United States of America