A Babble of Ancestral Voices : Shakespeare, Cervantes and Theobald

Genius, all over the world, stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round. Herman Melville PLATES Shakespeare opposite p. Cervantes opposite p. "The History of the Slave" Illustration .... opposite p. "Cardenio" Illustration opposite p. "The Unfortunate Knight of the Rock".... opposite p. "The Distressed Poet" (1736) opposite p. "The Distressed Poet" (1740) opposite p. INTRODUCTORY In recent years there has been a renewed effort to expand the Shakespeare canon. It has long been impermissible to suggest that Shakespeare authored neither Titus Andronicus nor the Henry VI plays, and the critically minded have been dispelling the legend through most of this century that Shakespeare bid farewell to his art in The Tempest. Instead, one finds arguments for Shakespeare's authorship of Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen cropping up with increasing regularity. Running through recent works of attribution with weed-like regularity has been the suggestion that another late possibility of the canon, a work entitled Cardenio (1613) may exist in altered form in Lewis Theobald's The Double Falsehood (1727). Indeed it may, or just as likely but not nearly so pleasing to the expansionist-minded, it may not. Trends about the dimensions of Shakespeare's work begin to take shape in the late Sixteenth Century. To his contemporaries, most assuredly including unscrupulous stationers, he was London's most popular playwright, and his name appears on the title page of more than one play which everyone knows he never wrote. In the pioneer days, material gain would seem to have played an inordinately large part in the motives of the attributionists.

This monograph represents an expansion and deepening of previous works by Ole J. Benedictow - the author of highly esteemed monographs and articles on the history of plague epidemics and historical demography. In the form of a collection of articles, the author presents an in-depth monographic study on the history of plague epidemics in Scandinavian countries and on controversies of the microbiological and epidemiological fundamentals of plague epidemics.

Acknowledgements Introductory 1. Writing and Floundering On, or, Prefatory Material 2. Theobald’s Early Interest in the Elizabethans 3. Theobald as Shakespearian Editor 4. Tweedledum and Tweedledee 5. Don Quixote in Eighteenth Century England, or The Madness of Cardenio 6. The Rifling of Beauty’s Stores 7. A Postscript on Motivation Appendix: A Note on the Plates Bibliography Index