Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of abbreviations
- Acknowledgements
- PROLEGOMENON
- PART I ORIGINS
- PART II FORM AND MATTER
- PART III READERS AND READING
- PART IV ANCIENT AND MODERN
- PART V TEXTS AND TASTES
- 12 Taming the Bard: dramatic readings
- 13 Commonplacing and the modern canon
- PART VI ANATOMISING THE SELF
- ENVOI
- Bibliography
- Index
12 - Taming the Bard: dramatic readings
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 May 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of abbreviations
- Acknowledgements
- PROLEGOMENON
- PART I ORIGINS
- PART II FORM AND MATTER
- PART III READERS AND READING
- PART IV ANCIENT AND MODERN
- PART V TEXTS AND TASTES
- 12 Taming the Bard: dramatic readings
- 13 Commonplacing and the modern canon
- PART VI ANATOMISING THE SELF
- ENVOI
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Our English Poets may, I think, be disposed into four different classes and degrees. In the first class I would place, first, our only three sublime and pathetic poets: Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton.
Joseph Warton, An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope (1756)This, too, is Shakespeare's great excellency; and to this it is principally owing, that his dramatic productions, notwithstanding their many imperfections, have been so long the favourites of the Public. He is more faithful to the true language of Nature, in the midst of passion, than any Writer. He gives us this language unadulterated by art; and more instances of it can be quoted from him than from all other Tragic Poets taken together.
Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783)The literary canon, as it was perceived by the reading public, was a complex and necessarily contested construction. Traditional forms, principally the epigram, still retained many readers' allegiance, reflecting the deep-lying continuities guiding emergent canonicity. Yet modernity, as we have seen, also affected the public's tastes very directly: the closed couplet, for example, came to enjoy particular favour, as did vernacular composition in general. These conflicting influences on readers' preferences need to be recognised, of course, because ultimately it was the responses of ordinary literate men and women – their impulses, their decisions – that determined the fate of printed texts in what was fast becoming a bustling and intensely competitive literary marketplace.
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- Commonplace Books and Reading in Georgian England , pp. 183 - 195Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010