Scholars outside Germany have, with good reason, tended to avoid a direct confrontation with the first twenty-one years of Handel's life. First, there are few primary sources relating to his upbringing and education, and the secondary material from the eighteenth century is fraught with obvious inaccuracies and misunderstandings. Furthermore, whatever can be gleaned from the most influential accounts – most notably Mainwaring's of 1760 – might seem, on first sight, irrelevant to a composer whose talents and international exposure seem to stretch well beyond the confines of Halle and Hamburg.

Two of Handel's earliest English biographers, Mainwaring and Hawkins, both try to portray the composer as an isolated genius, who – in Hawkins's view – learned to play the clavichord with virtually no previous experience of music. Even the most significant German biographer, Chrysander (who otherwise fills in many of the spaces in previous accounts of the German years), tends to underplay the achievement of Handel's teacher, Zachow, in order to emphasise the composer's innate talent. More recent writers have, fortunately, redressed the balance, showing quite clearly that Handel did not miraculously spring fully formed into cosmopolitan musical life. Nevertheless, surprisingly few have observed the sheer variety of musical institutions and patronage that Handel experienced before he left Germany, something which undoubtedly contributed to his uncanny ability to handle both court support and public financing during his active career in England.

While in our own time Handel's choruses (particularly those in Messiah) are perhaps his best known vocal music, throughout much of his career it was his arias that generated the most public enthusiasm. Partially owing to the relative neglect of the works in which arias are the most prominent element (the operas and cantatas) in the two centuries following Handel's death, and partially owing to rapidly changing tastes in the genres to which those works belong (both then and now), our appreciation of Handel's aria composition has suffered. Arias are the most important structural element in all of Handel's vocal works, however, and consequently they occupied more of his creative energy than any other form. As a result, Handel's arias provide us with a clear picture of his compositional development and also with insights into his aesthetic aims throughout his career.

Certainly part of our neglect of Handel's arias is the result of the fact that the vast majority of them are in da capo form, a form most commonly associated with opera seria. Until quite recently, opera seria as a genre has been relentlessly criticised by both contemporary commentators and modern scholars alike; moreover, quite often the focus of the criticism has been the da capo aria itself. Essentially an expanded ternary form, the grand da capo aria (or five-part da capo, the type most commonly found in Handel's arias) takes the form A1 A2 B (B) A1 A2, in which A1 is the first stanza of text, A2 is a repetition of the first stanza, and B is the second stanza of text.

Demography, economy and social class

It is estimated that, at the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth, Italy, inhabited by about 12 million people, had an urban population fluctuating between 14 and 19 per cent of the total. This was a higher percentage than in Germany (8–11 per cent) and compared well with the English figure (13–16 per cent). Nevertheless, the future Anglican bishop and parliamentarian Gilbert Burnet, who in 1685 traversed a large part of the Italian peninsula from Milan to Naples, was astonished ‘how there should be so much poverty in so rich a country, which is all over full of beggars’. The most populous Italian city was Naples, with about 250,000 inhabitants (half as many as London but equal to Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Leipzig put together); some distance behind came Milan, Venice, Rome and Palermo, with populations of between 100,000 and 140,000 (thus of the same order of magnitude as Vienna, with just over 100,000 people), while Genoa, Bologna and Florence, each mustering between 60,000 and 80,000 inhabitants, had stagnant population figures or had even slightly regressed in the previous hundred years.

Italy suffered a dramatic social and economic decline in the seventeenth century, as a result of the reduction in importance of the Mediterranean area following the rise of the great maritime empires and the powerful centralised monarchies north of the Alps. The production of woollen cloth fell in Milan from 15,000 pieces per annum to little more than 3,000 – a tendency followed by other centres in Lombardy such as Como, Monza and Cremona, as well as by Florence.

The history of modern literary theory begins in Germany with Johann Christoph Gottsched's Versuch einer Critischen Dichtkunst (An Essay in Critical Poetics, 1730), a poetics that is novel in spite of itself. Introduced by a translation and commentary on Horace's De Arte Poetica, the first, general part of the poetics contains doctrines still indebted to the neoclassical tradition. But Gottsched's views on the theory of genres, the concept of taste, and on the role of the critic all point towards an imminent break with this tradition. The time between 1730 and 1751, when the fourth edition of the Critische Dichtkunst appeared and when Lessing made his debut as a literary critic, was a time of transformation, during which literary discourse was still dominated by the old concepts while new approaches were not yet strong enough to transform the old into something explicitly new. René Wellek, from a twentieth-century perspective, proposes as a meaningful starting-point for the history of modern literary theory the middle of the eighteenth century. This perspective is still generally accepted, but it requires some qualification in the case of Germany, where change was slow in coming. Not until the end of the eighteenth century was the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, which Perrault had started in France in 1687, finally decided in favour of the Moderns.

The fact that German theory lived so long under the spell of antiquity and neo-classicism had much to do with the miserable state of literary life in Germany. As late as 1795 Goethe complained about the backwardness of Germany's literary conditions which did not allow a national author to emerge.

Criticism of Gothic fiction in English dates from 1765, when the first reviews of Horace Walpole's pioneering Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, were published. The medieval revival, which gave Walpole the impetus to write his pseudo-medieval novel, cannot be so precisely dated. A new reverence, however, towards medieval literature was displayed in Richard Hurd's impressionistic Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762), and in the revised edition of Thomas Warton's Observations on the Fairy Queen, published in the same year. While this essay is concerned primarily with the work of later eighteenth-century English critics writing on medieval literature, on contemporary forgers of the medieval such as Macpherson and Chatterton, and on Gothic fiction and drama, a brief account of the attitudes toward medieval literature prevalent between the Restoration and the 1760s will provide a necessary background for subsequent developments.

In the preface to his translation of Rapin's Réflexions sur la poëtique d'Aristote (1674), Thomas Rymer devotes a paragraph to the Middle Ages, which he describes as ‘the Age of Tales, Ballads, and Roundelays’, and as such finds unworthy of critical consideration. Rymer also passes over Chaucer, ‘in whose time our Language … was not capable of any Heroick Character’ (Critical Works, p. 5). In A Short View of Tragedy (1693), Rymer was more explicit. For those who wrote before Chaucer, he still had only scorn; they ‘made an heavy pudder, and are always miserably put to't for a word to clink’. Even though Chaucer himself is given credit for mingling Provençal, French and Latin vocabulary with English, ‘our language retain'd something of the churl; something of the Stiff and Gothish did stick upon it, till long after Chaucer’ (Critical Works, pp. 126–7).

From the very beginning of his career, Arthur Miller has engaged with the critical enterprise, but perhaps even more interestingly he has himself been a relentless and passionate critic, in all of his plays, of the human social and psychological condition, and has consistently ascribed a high value to that critical engagement. In fact, Miller's is a remarkably diverse yet tautly consistent group of major works that have made him, without doubt, the major American dramatic writer of his time, perhaps of the twentieth century. And yet, perhaps not surprisingly, given the nature of the expectations of American theatre audiences, Miller's critical reception, particularly in his native America, has been mixed, at times downright hostile; Miller has irked critics from the beginning of his career and continues to do so, and it is precisely this irksomeness, along with his relentless will to excavate his own and the general human psyche and to place his discoveries into hypotheses about the human experience that draw broad (and often very critical) conclusions, that make his plays so compelling and powerful. “Great drama,” he declares, “is great questions or it is nothing but technique.”

The hundred years of classical scholarship which elapsed between the careers of Richard Bentley (1662–1742.) and Friedrich August Wolf (1759–1824) may not have been as rich in individuals of passionate genius as the first centuries of Renaissance humanism (though, as we shall see, they too were enlivened by their own cranks and lunatics), nor as productive of enduring accomplishments as the well-organized national philological industries of the nineteenth century (though not a few of the editions and reference works published then are indispensable even today). But by working out the implications of some of the insights scattered throughout humanist scholarship, the classical philologists of the eighteenth century finally made it possible to overcome humanism; and by gathering and systematically organizing a vast amount of material and by putting on a firm basis for the first time the ancillary disciplines which were to study it, they laid a secure foundation for the scholars of the next century (who were all too often eager to deny how much there was to learn from them).

The most significant contribution of eighteenth-century classical scholarship to the history of literary criticism is to be found in the ‘internal’ development of a new set of literary critical methods and concepts within classical scholarship itself rather than in the ‘external’ relations between the academic study of Greek and Latin texts and contemporary discussions of literary-critical and theoretical issues. For the most part, in this period those ‘external’ relations were, at best, distant and vague. On the one hand, most eighteenth-century literary critics professed to share with their readers not only a cultivated familiarity with the classic texts but also a gentlemanly disdain for the dusty pedantry of the professors who studied them – Swift's and Pope's attacks on Bentley in such texts as The Battle of the Books and The Dunciad are two drastic but not unrepresentative examples – and it was only gradually, and especially in the last decades of the century, that some of the professors' insights and terms sifted into the critics' more popular discourse.

‘Among the ancients’, wrote Robert Eden Scott, the first Professor of Moral Philosophy in King's College, Aberdeen, ‘Criticism was chiefly cultivated as an art, and consisted rather in practical rules than in scientific investigation: it is to the Moderns, and those too of a very late date, that we owe a philosophical investigation of that science of Rhetoric, and an analysis of those faculties of the mind, upon which peculiar effects are produced, by literary composition, in its various kinds.’ ‘Philosophical investigation’ was the occupation of Scottish academics, ministers and lawyers in the heyday of the Enlightenment. It was rooted in the Scottish system of higher education, and it flowered in the concern for professional status, communal interests and national identity which evolved from the religious, political and cultural events of the recent past.

A strong sense of changing times, embodied in the Act of Union in 1707, of the superior refinement and politeness of metropolitian society, and of the need for efficiency in communication and consensus not only between countries but among regions (forcing to the periphery the issue of the large Gaelic-speaking population), determined the priorities of inquirers pursuing those ‘inner formative forces’ which for Cassirer distinguished the mind of the Enlightenment. Forces such as feeling, sympathy and taste, inherent in the writings of Shaftesbury and his popularizer Addison and grafted on to the stock of humanist speculation congenial to the religious temper of Scotland were expanded by Francis Hutcheson in the Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (17Z5). These found their way into the critical principles of Smith, Hume and their contemporaries.

Biography begins during the eighteenth century to develop a substantial body of critical assumptions and terminology, though a fully elaborated account of its form and subject-matter does not emerge until the nineteenth century. When the term ‘biographer‘ first entered the English language, it was applied interchangeably to an historian or to a writer of individual lives. While the Oxford English Dictionary lists the first use of the word as John Dryden's in the 1683 introduction to his edition of Plutarch, ‘biography’ was earlier employed in the modern sense in the lives of Thomas Fuller (1661) and Oliver Cromwell (1663), where it meant the history of a particular individual. Dryden, following Francis Bacon's earlier categorization, divides history into three types – annals or chronicles, general history or narrative, and biographia. Dryden imagined biography as a more circumscribed and less dignified (but more pleasurable) branch of history because it limited its treatment to aspects directly relevant to an individual man's fortune.

The formulation of biographical and autobiographical theory at first appears primarily in casual remarks occasioned by prefaces and reviews rather than in discrete essays. In addition, occasional critical comments are interspersed in criminal accounts, anecdotes, scandalous memoirs, fictional biographies, newspapers, and legal documents that incorporate biographical approaches and techniques. Biography in its earliest manifestations also frequently commingled with other genres of individuation such as novels, diaries and letters. The memoir, for example, with its daily record of public affairs, often interweaved fiction and history with biography and autobiography. Georges May's argument that the genealogies of English and French life-histories were different is convincing when he writes, ‘British biography developed earlier and more fully than French biography… because it evolved more directly from historiography, whereas in France, it emerged primarily (and slowly) from memoir writing and fiction’ (p. 156).

When the Wooster Group, one of the more controversial of the experimental theatrical troupes active during the 1970s and 1980s, incorporated segments of The Crucible (1953) into their performance piece entitled LSD (. . . Just the High Points . . .) (1984), Arthur Miller's threat of legal action eventually forced the project to be withdrawn from the stage. Even though the excerpts included from Miller's work were reduced first from forty-five minutes to twenty-five minutes and then later to ten minutes - and that recited virtually in gibberish - the dramatist objected on the grounds that such a treatment might be regarded as a parody, which violated his initial intention, rather than an homage, and so might somehow preclude a serious New York revival of his play. Not only does Miller's action provide a fascinating case study in the ongoing debate over who “owns” or maintains interpretive authority over the written text when it becomes a performance text - the author or the director - it also evidences what might seem a peculiar paradox. As David Savran notes, “By insisting on his own interpretation, Miller has, ironically, aligned himself with the very forces that The Crucible condemns, those authorities who exercise their power arrogantly and arbitrarily to ensure their own continued political and cultural dominion.”

Since his first Broadway success, commercial filmmakers have shown great interest in the works, especially the plays, of Arthur Miller. An impressive number of cinematic versions, intended for both theatrical and televisual release, have been produced. As I write this piece, a second film of The Crucible, for which the playwright himself wrote the screenplay, is in production, indicating the lasting appeal, especially of his early plays, to filmmakers. Such enthusiasm is neither surprising nor exceptional. Driven by a need for quality material with proven popularity, the cinema is eager to produce screen versions of the writings of successful authors, a group of which Miller is one of the most distinguished current members. The resulting films pose a difficult, if interesting problem for the critic. On the one hand, they belong indirectly to the oeuvre of the original author; they are versions of his works and thus merit attention in a book such as the present one.

Winner of the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for best play of 1947, All My Sons is the work that launched Arthur Miller's long and distinguished career in the theatre. While few would argue that it is Miller's best or most important play, no one would dispute the fact that All My Sons deserves a special place in the playwright's canon because it constitutes his first major theatrical achievement, displays his extraordinary skill in handling dramatic form, and presages even better things yet to come from one of America's greatest dramatists. The critical and commercial success of All My Sons marks a major turning point in Miller's career, for it came at a time when the young writer was struggling to establish his identity as a literary artist. Having won several awards for playwriting while he was enrolled in undergraduate school at the University of Michigan, Miller continued to develop the texts of stage plays even while supporting himself by working at odd jobs and successfully writing radio plays for the Columbia Workshop (CBS) and the Cavalcade of America (NBC) between the years 1938 and 1943.

It has become almost a cliché among historians of our century to say that, although once dismissed by the likes of Macaulay as a trivial spat confined to literary folk (a mere Battle of the Books), the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns (as it was named by Hippolyte Rigault in his Histoire de la Querelle of 1859) was in fact a watershed - that in the Moderns' rejection of the authority of the Ancients, their texts, and the rules drawn from them, we can locate the birthplace not only of eighteenth-century criticism but of modern thought. In 1920 J. B. Bury (following the lead of French scholars) identified the seventeenth-century Quarrel, especially the works of Fontenelle, as the site where ‘the first clear assertions of a doctrine of progress in knowledge were provoked’, making possible the full-scale theories of human progress of the Abbé de Saint-Pierre, Turgot, and Condorcet, which Bury found characteristic of the period. In parallel with Bury, Richard Foster Jones began an inquiry into the background of the English Battle of the Books, which resulted in his thesis that with their rejection of the Ancients' doctrines of authority, imitation, and degeneration, the Moderns - preeminently Bacon and his puritan followers - produced the activity we know as modern experimental science; in the process, Jones sought to establish both that the Quarrel was not solely a ‘literary’ matter, and that its origins were not in the France of Descartes and Fontenelle but in England.

It is a truism that no book was more copiously studied and written about in the late seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth century than the Bible. The connections between biblical scholarship and literary criticism in the period are multiple and complex, the more so in that many debates about central literary theoretical questions took place within the numerous spheres of biblical discussion, rather than in works of secular literary criticism. This was inevitably the case; at the Restoration secular literary criticism in England was from some points of view in its infancy. There had been no full and systematic theory of poetry since the late sixteenth century, no extended critical analysis or scholarly edition of any English classic. The idea of a secular literary history would begin to take shape only in the eighteenth century.

I shall discuss in this essay, chiefly but not exclusively with reference to the work of British writers, two key themes: the development of appreciation and analysis of the Bible as a literary work, and of its poetic, aesthetic, and rhetorical qualities; and, at least as important to the history of literary criticism, the debates of biblical scholars about the textual and hermeneutic issues raised by the Holy Scriptures. The two themes are not unrelated.

With the possible exception of historians of the sublime, scholars rarely compare the contemporaneous contributions of Shaftesbury and Addison to eighteenth-century criticism and aesthetics. Despite considerable overlap between the political and literary circles in which they worked and travelled, there appears to be no direct biographical connection. There are major differences of focus, tone, subject-matter, and intellectual temperament in their work. Shaftesbury, whose three-volume collection of essays, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, was published in 1711, seems to address himself to fellow gentlemen virtuosi; while Addison, whose writing appears largely in The Tatler and The Spectator, addresses the audience 'in Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-Tables, and in Coffee-Houses' Yet the critical enterprises of Shaftesbury and Addison and their efforts to define a role for the critic have much in common, especially in so far as each is concerned with ‘the public taste’.

Shaftesbury, perhaps most ostentatiously, played critic to himself in the Miscellaneous Reflections he published on his own treatises in the Characteristicks. He creates a commentator to act as ‘critic and interpreter to this new writer’ (II, p. 161); but, describing his goals in his essay, Soliloquy, or Advice to an Author, Shaftesbury writes of himself: ‘His pretence has been to advise authors and polish styles, but his aim has been to correct manners and regular lives. He has affected soliloquy, as pretending only to censure himself, but he has taken occasion to bring others into his company’ (II, p. 2, 72). This aim is consistent with Addison's critical and journalistic enterprise.

The 1970s was a decade of nearly devastating turmoil for the United States from which in many ways it is still recovering. The American incursion into Cambodia leading to the bloody protests at Kent State University, the withdrawal from Vietnam after years of divisive protest at home, South Vietnam's eventual collapse, Watergate, and the resignation of a president under disgrace all shook the very foundation of a United States that was anything but united. Miller created three works for the stage in the seventies that confronted and expanded upon the cultural divisiveness so prevalent then and still present today. The Creation of the World and Other Business and The American Clock each offered reflections on the issue of authenticating existence by assuming individual and collective responsibility for our various internal failures. These two plays, written in the early seventies, work well with the hard-hitting and existentially disturbing play, The Archbishop's Ceiling (written in 1977 but only to receive its final, revised form in 1984), which confronts the questionable effects of our attempts to exercise that authenticity in a world that has lost moral control of its own destiny.