English Drama to 1710 [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION Literature is the texts. Literary history is the contexts. The essays commissioned to form Volume 3 of The Sphere History of Literature in the EngUsh Language are intended to give a modern reader a sense of the many contexts within which literature—in this case, drama—exists. Without an understanding of context it is too easy to misunderstand or misjudge a work of the past. Context, rather than background, because the word context is likely to remind us that we cannot so easily hive off the pure work of art itself from the circumstances and expectations within which it was created and which may often be truly said to form part of its meaning. There is no rule which will tell in advance which of the various possible contexts is going to prove the most illuminating for any particular writer or work. The contributors to this volume have been free to select their own emphases. But the volume necessarily begins with a full account, by Glynne Wick-ham, of that essential context which distinguishes drama from other forms of literature, and which even calls in question to what extent drama should be thought of as a form of literature: the context of stage and staging, of 'Play, Player, Public and Place', from the beginnings of English drama through to the Jacobean playhouse. From this account of the stage and drama, there follows naturally Brian Morris's substantial survey of the whole of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama—a map which is not only striking in itself, but which provides a context for the major dramatists who figure later in the volume. The first of such major dramatists is Christopher Marlowe; here Gamini Salgado sees the essential context as that furnished by the writer's life and times. Shakespeare stands as the core of the volume, just as he is the core not only of dramatic achievement in English but of all literary achievement. Richard Proudfoot charts Shakespeare's career and development, setting down lucidly and compactly the essential known facts. Four further essays then treat the