This book discusses Shakespeare’s deployment of French material within genres
whose dominant Italian models and affinities might seem to leave little scope
for French ones. It proposes specific, and unsuspected, points of contact but
also a broad tendency to draw on French intertexts, both dramatic and
non-dramatic, to inflect comic forms in potentially tragic directions. The
resulting tensions within the genre are evident from the earliest comedies to
the latest tragicomedies (or ‘romances’). An introduction establishes the French
inflection of Italian modes and models, beginning with The Taming of the Shrew,
as a compositional paradigm and the basis for an intertextual critical approach.
Next, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is related to three French intertexts
highlighting, respectively, its use of pastoral dramatic convention, its
colouration by the histoire tragique and its parodic dramatisation of the
Pyramus and Thisbe story. The third chapter interrogates the ‘French’ settings
found in the romantic comedies, while the fourth applies French intertexts to
three middle-to-late comedies as experiments in tragicomedy. Finally, the
distinctive form given tragicomedy (or ‘romance’) in Shakespeare’s late
production is set against the evolution of tragicomedy in France and related to
French intertexts that shed new light on the generic synthesis achieved—and the
degree of bricolage employed in achieving it.
avoids the problems frequently encountered in ‘straight’ Marxist criticism: it seems less overtly polemical and more willing to allow the historical evidence its own voice.
STOP and THINK
‘Doing’ new historicism essentially involves the juxtaposition of literary material with contemporary non-literary texts. But how would you attempt to set about doing this yourself, rather than just reading published essays which use this formula?
For instance, if you wished to use the new historicist method for an essay about, say, a Shakespearecomedy where would you look
the sonnet and the iambic pentameter are a counterpart of social stability, decorum, and order.
Marxist criticism: an example
As an example of Marxist criticism we will take chapter five, on Twelfth Night , in Elliot Krieger's A Marxist Study of Shakespeare's Comedies (1979). As it is discussed here, the example mainly shows the first of the five Marxist critical activities just listed. The play centres on the love between the Duke Orsino and the Lady Olivia. His love is extravagantly and persistently expressed, but she at first rejects him, having dedicated
is only averted by the Pages’ decision to dictate a joyful resolution through speech acts generating positive affects. Page says ‘God give thee joy’ (5.5.230) and Mistress Page ‘God give you many, many merry days!’ and they facilitate the ritual of the festive meal to which all have been invited when they leave the stage. While many of Shakespeare's comedies conclude with the suggestion that the generic resolution of the comedy in marriage is a particularly fictitious and fragile imagined social construct, Merry Wives contains no such suggestion, even though both
Rewriting Shakespeare in A Poem upon the Death of O. C.
France, trans. ed. Grimstone (London,
1612), p. 117; L. de Vega, The Pilgrim of Casteele, trans. W. Dutton (London, 1621),
garganigo: marvell’s personal elegy?
p. 31; W. Shakespeare, Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (London, 1623), p. 72;
W. Shakespeare, Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (London, 1632), p. 72; F. Quarles,
‘On the Contingencie of Actions’, in Divine Fancies (London, 1633), p. 2; W. Strode,
The Floating Island: A Tragicomedy, 4.13 (1636; London, 1655), E3r; Gilbert Saulnier
Du Verdier, The Love and Armes of the Greeke Princes, trans. Philip, Earl of
The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet (London:
I. R. for N. L, 1604), sig. F4v; Mr William ShakespearesComedies, Histories, & Tragedies (London: Isaac Jaggard and
Ed. Blount, 1623); The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet (London:
N. L and Iohn Trundell, 1603), sig. E4v.
Bate implausibly argues that
Shakespeare’s shifting sonnets. From Love’s Labour’s Lost to The
W. Shakespeare, Mr.
William ShakespearesComedies, Histories, &
Tragedies: Published According to the True Originall
Copies (London: 1623), sig. A3.
P. Hyland, An
Introduction to Shakespeare’s Poems (New
Producing theatrical classics with a decorative aesthetic
availability of a location dictated the choice of play, as with the 1975
Love’s Labour’s Lost , one of
Shakespeare’s least performed and hardest to follow plays:
‘Well, we wanted to do another Shakespearecomedy. And I
particularly wanted a play that was set in the open air. In this, all
the action takes place in the open air. We recorded it at Glyndebourne.
It looks lovely. All the girls are very, very
I and VI
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 53–5.
46 L. Jardine and A. Stewart, Hostage to Fortune: The Troubled Life of Francis Bacon (London:
Victor Gollancz, 1998), p. 521.
47 LPL, MS 2086, fol. 41r.
48 See Mr. William Shakespeares, Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. Published according to the
True Originall Copies (1623), sig. A3r: ‘we pray you do not envie his Friends, the office
of their care, and paine, to haue collected & publish’d them; and so to haue publish’d
them, as where (before) you were abus’d with diuerse stolne, and surreptitious
Variety of Readers’ stresses the ‘care and paine’ in producing an authoritative and comprehensive text, using imagery similar to that used by early Sidney editors. Thus John Heminge and Henry Condell declare that one of the purposes of their edition is to replace ‘maimed and deformed’ editions and present readers with the author’s brainchildren ‘perfect of their limbes; and […] absolute in their numbers, as he conceiued thē’ (A3 a ). Like the Sidney folio, Mr William ShakespearesComedies, Histories & Tragedies also treats its author as a known entity who requires