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Shakespeare in Arden: Pragmatic Markers and Parallels
- Edited by Emma Smith, University of Oxford
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- Book:
- Shakespeare Survey 76
- Published online:
- 17 August 2023
- Print publication:
- 07 September 2023, pp 163-179
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Summary
The question of who wrote Arden of Faversham remains open. In 1656, publisher Edward Archer (or an associate) assigned the play to Shakespeare in a ‘Catalogue’ appended to his edition of Massinger, Middleton and Rowley’s The Old Law, or A new way to please you.2 Five years later, bookseller Francis Kirkman re-designed the ‘Catalogue’, but this time left the Arden author’s name blank. In 1770, Faversham antiquary Edward Jacob produced an edition of the play ‘With a Preface; in which some Reasons are offered, in favour of its being the earliest dramatic Work of Shakespear’. In defence of this attribution, Jacob’s ‘Preface’ listed a series of verbal parallels between Arden and Shakespeare’s works.3 A little over a century later, Algernon Charles Swinburne deemed the play ‘no man’s youthful hand but Shakespeare’s’.4 In the later twentieth century, MacDonald P. Jackson proposed that the central scenes of the play (in particular, scene 8) belonged to Shakespeare.
22 - His collaborator George Wilkins
- from Part III - Colleagues and Patrons
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- By Duncan Salkeld, University of Chichester
- Edited by Paul Edmondson, Stanley Wells
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- Book:
- The Shakespeare Circle
- Published online:
- 05 November 2015
- Print publication:
- 22 October 2015, pp 289-296
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George Wilkins is remembered today largely for two reasons – for co-writing Pericles with Shakespeare and for running a tavern or bawdy house. Neither activity has enhanced his reputation. By all accounts, he was an unlikeable figure, a man evidently given to violent outbursts and physical attacks against women. Critics have kept their distance from him and wished that Shakespeare might have done so too. Neither W. W. Greg's edition in collotype facsimile of Pericles, nor his later study of editorial questions in Shakespeare, so much as mentions Wilkins by name (Greg 1940, 1956). G. E. Bentley's The Jacobean and Caroline Stage ignored him as a dramatist altogether (Bentley 1956), as did Derek Traversi's short catalogue of Renaissance drama (Traversi 1980). Biographers of Shakespeare have found his association with Wilkins unfortunate. Park Honan deems Shakespeare ‘not to be blamed’ for this particular association (Honan 1999, p. 329). For Katherine Duncan-Jones, Wilkins was a misogynistic lout, a ‘distinctly second-rate, though by no means talentless writer’ (Duncan-Jones 2001, pp. 205–6). Peter Ackroyd wonders why Shakespeare ‘would condescend to work with a tyro’ (Ackroyd 2006, p. 434), while René Weis silently passes over any and all of Wilkins's literary contributions (Weis 2007). Charles Nicholl, who devotes three useful chapters to Wilkins, nevertheless thinks him ‘a mediocre writer’ (Nicholl 2008, p. 199). What we now know of Wilkins's character fits uncomfortably with what we suppose we know of ‘sweet Shakespeare’, ‘good Will’, or ‘Friendly Shakespeare’, terms used by contemporaries William Covell, John Davies of Hereford and Anthony Scoloker. Wilkins is something of an anomaly, a dreadful man but a writer who ought to be of considerable interest, for Wilkins clearly knew the red-light world of bawds, panders and prostitutes that also lies at the heart of the play they both produced.
Most of what we know about the life of George Wilkins has emerged through prosecutions of him that have survived in the Middlesex County Sessions records (Prior 1972 and 1976). He was an aspiring writer whose extant work seems to have emerged from the two-year period between 1606 and 1608. His father apparently died in the dreadful London plague of summer 1603: sixth in the list of burials for 19 August 1603 in the register of St Leonard's, Shoreditch, is ‘George Wilkins the Poet’ of Holywell Street.
4 - New historicism
- from HISTORY
- Edited by Christa Knellwolf, Australian National University, Canberra, Christopher Norris, University of Wales College of Cardiff
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- Book:
- The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism
- Published online:
- 28 March 2008
- Print publication:
- 30 April 2001, pp 59-70
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Summary
New historicism emerged in the early 1980s as a turn to history in literary studies after the formalisms of New Criticism, structuralism and deconstruction. The label describes, as Stephen Greenblatt has observed in Learning to Curse (1990), ‘less a set of beliefs than the trajectory’ of related materialist, Marxist and feminist critical practices as they seek to interpret literary works amid the complexities of their own historical moment. An American counterpart to British cultural materialism, its influence has been felt mainly in Renaissance studies, and, to a lesser extent, in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century studies of the novel and Romanticism. Its Renaissance practitioners draw upon diverse strands in modern critical theory (especially Foucault and Althusser), upon the work of cultural historians (by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Carlo Ginzburg, Natalie Zemon Davis) and on social anthropology (especially Clifford Geertz), in order to read across the boundaries of literature and history. So far as it is possible to generalise about such a vast and varied field, new historicists seek to identify hitherto unacknowledged contexts of semiotic exchange between literary and cultural history.
Characteristically self-conscious in method, new historicist criticism frequently voices an acute awareness of its own procedural difficulties. A key problem, for example, has to do with what kind of sense may, indeed should, be made of the materials of literature and history. New historicism represents a sustained negotiation of those complex cultural, textual and political forces which intervene between past and present, then and now. Its central problem has thus to do with distanciation. On the one hand, the past must be minimally intelligible for history to bear any meaning at all; on the other hand, intelligibility always remains relative to the conditions in which interpretations are made.