Shakespeare among others

[nineweaving]

Martin Wiggins has studied every play, masque, or interlude performed or published in the British Isles or by British writers, from the first secular dramas to the closing of the theaters.  (What the Reformation gave, it took away.)  All of it.  The whole corpus.  He's cataloged it all in his magisterial British Drama 1533-1642, "an enumerative,

Comments

[aerodrome1]

The project is just brilliant.

[nineweaving]

Truly.

Nine

[desperance]

This is awesome. But your link to it is tagged "1633-1642", which didn't seem long enough even at first glance.

[nineweaving]

Oops! That's 1533, as noted two lines down. I've fixed it. Thanks.

I wish I could afford the set, but at $160 a volume, no way. Supposedly, it will be all online in a few years, with fabulous searching and sorting capabilities-but I should think that a subscription would cost as much as access to the OED. Sigh.

Nine

[nineweaving]

Hugh Craig, in his chapter on "The Three Parts of Henry VIin Shakespeare, Computers, and the Mystery of Authorship lists some Marlovian marker words:

gold arms realm pride slain sword golden overthrow death base damned foe field yield cruel stay conquering hell countries words terror

Mr. Earbrass, he was not.

Nine

[nineweaving]

With the excellent Dana F. Sutton, Wiggins is also the curator of the The Philological Museum, a stellar collection of English Neo-Latin text, transcribed and translated, with excellent commentary.

Here, for example is how King James was saluted at the north gate of Oxford in 1605, by three sibyls, as if come from the wood

[kalimac]

Fascinating, though I wonder how it handles the lost plays, some of which flit between existence and not. Love's Labour's Won, for instance, is theorized by some to be an alternative title for some existing Shakespeare play (several would fit the title), while the ur-Hamlet is pretty much hypothetical.

Thrilled to see the clips from Two Noble Kinsmen on the BBC page. I'm going to be seeing that production next month. When I saw that the RSC was putting this on during my UK trip, I leapt at the chance.

[nineweaving]

Since most of the plays that Wiggins catalogues are lost, he's pretty good at marshaling whatever evidence exists. For Love's Labours Won (1109), he has Francis Meres (1598)*, and the tantalizing stocklist of an Exeter bookseller in 1603. Wiggins is not of the school that believes this to have been an alternate title for Much Ado About Nothing.

The ur-Hamlet is 814.

Ooh! Lucky you, seeing Two Noble Kinsmen!

Nine

*"As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for comedy and tragedy among the Latins, so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage; for comedy, witness his Gentlemen of Verona, his Errors, his Love Labours Lost, his Love Labours Won, his Midsummer's Night Dream, & his Merchant of Venice; for tragedy, his Richard the 2, Richard the 3, Henry the 4, King John, Titus Andronicus, and his Romeo and Juliet."

[kalimac]

It looks to me from these examples that the entries for the lost plays will be mostly useful for readers already well familiar with what's going on. For instance, the name ur-Hamlet never appears in that entry, even though that's what everybody calls it; and he doesn't even mention the possibility that Love's Labour's Won is an alternate title for an extant play, even to refute it.

However, glancing at some of the entries for extant plays, I find reading his genre classifications and plot summaries to be a delightful experience, almost as fun as reading Bleiler's equivalently-complete Guide to Supernatural Fiction.

[nineweaving]

...readers already well familiar with what's going on

They're his intended audience. But he's made all of this so fascinating that he's attracting non-specialists. Maybe the online version will be friendlier to us?

...the name ur-Hamlet never appears in that entry, even though that's what everybody calls it

Not the Elizabethans. Wiggins is being punctiliously non-anachronistic: he reports only the titles that were used.

he doesn't even mention the possibility that Love's Labour's Won is an alternate title for an extant play, even to refute it.

That he might have addressed, I think. He might have said that Much Ado is post-Meres, in his opinion (consensus is 1598-9), or that the existence of this very different title on the shelves in 1603, when both a 1600 Quarto and the Folio have Much adoe about Nothing argues against the alternative. Or something.

Wiggins really is a pleasure to read--no small accomplishment in gigantic work of reference

Nine