Constructing the Canon of Early Modern Drama
Cambridge University Press, 1/16/2014
EAN 9781107030572, ISBN10: 1107030579
Hardcover, 244 pages, 22.8 x 15.2 x 2.3 cm
Language: English
For one hundred years the drama of Shakespeare's contemporaries has been consistently represented in anthologies, edited texts, and the critical tradition by a familiar group of about two dozen plays running from Kyd's Spanish Tragedy to Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore by way of Dekker, Jonson, Middleton and Webster. How was this canon created, and what ideological and institutional functions does it serve? What preceded it, and is it possible for it to become something else? Jeremy Lopez takes up these questions by tracing a history of anthologies of 'non-Shakespearean' drama from Robert Dodsley's Select Collection of Old Plays (1744) through those recently published by Blackwell, Norton, and Routledge. Containing dozens of short, provocative readings of unfamiliar plays, this book will benefit those who seek a broader sense of the period's dazzling array of forms.
Part I. Early Modern Dramatic Canons
Origins
1. Excluding Shakespeare
2. Trollope's Dilke
3. What is an anthology? (Part 1)
4. Collecting early modern drama, 1744 to the present
5. Ejecta
6. How to use this book
7. Table of contents
8. Autogenesis
The Custom of The Country (Part 1)
9. Endless tragedy
10. Negative canon
Attachments
11. Lamb in the library
12. Dodsley's Hog
13. Blunt instrument
14. Fragments
15. Comedy and tragedy
16. The Mermaid series
17. The Keltie exception
18. The ties that bind
The Custom of The Country (Part 2)
19. Hints of designs
20. What is an anthology? (Part 2)
Paradoxes
21. Introductory
22. Bullen's Nero
23. Collier's Reed's Dodsley
24. Beaumont our contemporary
25. History in disguise
26. The aesthetic under erasure
27. The turn of the corkscrew
28. Return of the repressed
The Custom of The Country (Part 3)
29. The Changeling
30. The greatness of English Renaissance drama
Interlude
reading a bad play
The Fair Maid of Bristow
Part II. Early Modern Dramatic Forms
Bifurcation
31. The Bowers Dekker
32. Fletcher's Shakespeare
33. Early modern dramatic form
34. The Bloody Brother
35. Early modern dramatic forms
36. What is an anthology? (Part 3)
37. Apples and oranges
38. The sleepwalker
Northward Ho (Part 1)
39. The war in The Shoemaker's Holiday
40. The Holaday Chapman
Opposition
41. Laws of canon
42. Rowley's sow
43. Form in collaboration
44. Love's Labors Won
45. 'A sort of dramatic monster'
46. What should an anthology be?
47. The surviving image
48. Other voices
Northward Ho (Part 2)
49. Disappearing act
50. Anon., anon
Inheritance
51. Voluminous Heywood
52. Ford's Webster
53. Labored forms
54. The Triumph of Time
55. Moral Massinger
56. No heir
57. Apocalypse now
58. Bedlam at Ware
Northward Ho (Part 3)
59. Modern times
60. Principles of selection and exclusion
Afterword
List of primary-text editions
Bibliography.