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,
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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.
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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.
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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 ( ... )
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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.
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The ur-Hamlet is 814.
Ooh! Lucky you, seeing Two Noble Kinsmen!
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*"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."
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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.
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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
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