Raymond Macdonald Alden - Shakespeare

Routledge Revivals

This fascinating title, first published in 1922, presents a detailed overview of the life and works of Shakespeare. Alden first considers Shakespeares Elizabethan context, alongside exploring the Classical and Italian foundations, political theories, concepts and theatrical trends that influenced his works. Next, a comprehensive biography provides insight into Shakespeares probable education, relationships and contemporaries. The final sections are devoted to the genres into which Shakespeares works have been categorised, with full analyses of and backgrounds to the poems, histories, comedies and tragedies. An important study, this title will be of particular value to students in need of a comprehensive overview of Shakespeares life and works, as well as the more general inquisitive reader.

Raymond Macdonald Alden

First published in 1922
by George Allen & Unwin, Ltd

This edition first published in 2013 by Routledge
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Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

1922 R. M. Alden

The right of R. M. Alden to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

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The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent.

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The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and welcomes correspondence from those they have been unable to contact.

A Library of Congress record exists under LC control number: 22007766

ISBN 13: 978-0-415-72115-8 (hbk)
ISBN 13: 978-1-315-86315-3 (ebk)

SHAKESPEARE

The critic will, indeed, require, as the spirit and substance of a work, something true in human nature itself, and independent of all circumstances; but in the mode of applying it he will estimate genius and judgment according to the felicity with which the imperishable soul of intellect shall have adapted itself to the age, the place, and the existing manners.Coleridge.

BY

RAYMOND MACDONALD ALDEN

LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN, LTD.
RUSKIN HOUSE, 40 MUSEUM STREET, W. C. I.

COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY DUFFIELD & CO. FIRST PUBLISHED IN GREAT BRITAIN IN 1922

Printed in the United States of America.

Shakespeares setting in Elizabethan England. The significance of the Renaissance in his literary environment. Classical and Italian influences. The new interest in poetry, and in art prose. The neo-platonic doctrines of love. Ideas of villainy. The Reformation in England; its relation to the Renaissance. The Elizabethan Londoners; the brilliancy and zest of their mental atmosphere. The blend of feudalism and nationalism; democratic influences. The blend of refinement and barbarism. Moral standards. Political theories. Superstitions. Elizabethan psychology. The popular stage; the early theatres and their dramatists. Types and ideals of Elizabethan drama. The characteristic blend of story and poetry.

Fact and fiction in Shakespeare biography. Birth, probable education, and marriage. Traditions of the migration to London. Shakespeares reading. His early acquaintance with the theatre. The Greene and Chettle pamphlets. His dbut as poet: Venus and Adonis and Lucrece. Shakespeare as actor. The Lord Chamberlains company. Established position and prosperity; the coat-of-arms; real estate. Meress tribute. The Globe Theatre; Shakespeares income. The Passionate Pilgrim and the sonnets on the friend and the dark lady. Theatrical controversies and difficulties. Shakespeare in London and at Stratford. His friendships, known and guessed. His last years, death, and burial. Contemporary opinion of him, as poet and man. The publication of his poems and plays; quartos and folio. The Shakespeare canon. The order of composition; the assumed four periods.

Relation of Shakespeares early poems to Ovid and the Italian Renaissance. Venus and Adonis; decorative sensualism. The Rape of Lucrece; greater earnestness. Style and imagery of the poems. The Passionate Pilgrim, The Phoenix and the Turtle, A Lovers Complaint. The Sonnets of 1609; uncertainty as to date and circumstances of composition. The Renaissance conceit. Conventional and personal elements in sonnets of the Petrarchan school. The question of continuity in Shakespeares. Influence of Sidney and of Daniel. Metrical form of the Shakespeare sonnets. The more trivial and conventional, and the more serious and individual, themes and conceits. Sonnets on beauty, love, time, poetry, absence, death, estrangement; the triangle sonnets. Varying estimates of the Sonnets. Their maturity, in contrast with the narrative poems.

The vogue of national drama in Shakespeares period. Characteristics of the type; frequently primitive, nave, undramatic. Marlowes development of it. The group of plays on the reign of Henry the Sixth: the lost play on the wars in France, The Contention, and The True Tragedy. Relation of Shakespeares Henry the Sixth to these. Richard the Third; its Marlovian character. Primitive elements of the tragedy of villainy; Shakespeares development of the hero. The Life and Death of King John; a rewriting of an older play. Slight Shakespearean elements. The series on the house of Lancaster. Richard the Second: a chronicle-play becoming a tragedy of character. Primitive conventional elements mingled with Shakespearean characterization. Henry the Fourth; new problems in the dramatization of incident and personality. The comic elements; origin and development of Falstaff. The changes in these elements in the Second Part; difficulties raised by the rejection scene. Henry the Fifth; a still different type of chronicle-history; its epic or pageant-like structure. The use of the prologue or chorus. Evolution of the comic elements surviving from the preceding plays. Brilliancy and yet inadequacy of the characterization of the King. Reversion to chronicle-history in the late patchwork play of Henry the Eighth..

Condition of English comedy at the opening of Shakespeares career: the popular and classical traditions. Types of comedy in general: farcical and high. Divergent moods: satiric and romantic. Shakespeares experimentation in all these; his final emphasis on the comedy of romance. Loves Labors Lost of uncertain origin and history. Satire of contemporary affectations. Slight elements of characterization. The Comedy of Errors based on a farce by Plautus; Shakespeares contribution of certain more serious elements. Two Gentlemen of Verona the herald of his romantic comedy. Influence of Greene on this type. Shakespeares daring use of improbabilities. The