- Title
- Shakespeare's vocabulary: myth and reality
- Creator
- Craig, Hugh
- Relation
- Shakespeare Quarterly Vol. 62, Issue 1, p. 53-74
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/shq.2011.0002
- Publisher
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2011
- Description
- Sometime in the second decade of the nineteenth century, Samuel Taylor Coleridge noted in his copy of Shakespeare's Dramatic Works that the playwright "can be complimented only by comparison with himself: all other eulogies are either heterogeneous, (ex. gr. in relation to Milton, Spencer, &c) or flat truisms (ex. gr. to prefer him to Racine, Corneille, or even his own immediate Successors, Fletcher, Massinger &c.)." For Coleridge, to compare Shakespeare to anyone else made little sense. Shakespeare scholarship has continued in full spate since Coleridge's time, and a great deal has changed, but studies which put Shakespeare in the context of his peers as a regular member of a collective playwriting enterprise that together created English Renaissance drama are still the exception rather than the rule. It has been more common to regard him, as Coleridge does, as sui generis. Gary Taylor remarked in 1989 that Shakespeare's fame had made it hard to see his works and the works of others clearly. In gravitational terms, "cultural space-time" is bent by the black-hole-like singularity of his reputation. Taylor cites publications by leading Shakespeare scholars of the day that reflect this sense of Shakespeare's exceptionality: Kenneth Muir's Singularity of Shakespeare and Harry Levin's "Primacy of Shakespeare." More recently, while scholars have viewed the drama of Shakespeare's time much more as a collective enterprise and have questioned the importance of individual authorship in general, the effect has been to downplay all authorial difference and thus to pay less attention to the characteristics of one playwright's output against another's. Perhaps the strongest indicator of a new interest in Shakespeare in relation to his peers is a new wave of strictly attributive studies in the past decade.
- Subject
- Shakespeare; vocabulary; English playwrights; English Renaissance drama
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1356376
- Identifier
- uon:31690
- Identifier
- ISSN:0037-3222
- Language
- eng
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