The Praise of Shakespeare: An English Anthology

The Praise of Shakespeare: An English Anthology

I believe this volume serves a useful purpose. It is the fruit of a suggestion which I made to its compiler, Mr. Hughes, in the following circumstances. At the beginning of last year I engaged in controversy in the Times newspaper with certain persons who laboured under the delusion that the evidence of Shakespeares authorship of those plays and poems, which for three centuries have been published as his, was inconclusive. In defiance of the fact that the acknowledged work of Bacon, the prose writer and philosopher, proves him to be incapable of writing verse of genuine merit, some of my opponents held Bacon and no other to be responsible for those manifestations of supreme poetic genius which are associated with Shakespeares name. Other sceptics, of less raw judgment, hesitated to commit themselves to this extravagance,they confined themselves to the slightly more plausible contention that the facts recorded of Shakespeare by contemporaries were scanty, and that his career was clothed in a mystery, which justified wild attempts at a solution. The whole of the sceptical argument ignored alike the results of recent Shakespearean research and the elementary truths of Elizabethan literary history. But confirmed sceptics are not easily convinced [vi]of defects of knowledge. With especial emphasis did even the most enlightened among those who declared their doubt in print, persist in affirming that Shakespeare was unnoticed by his contemporaries, and that his achievements failed to win reputation in his lifetime or in the generations succeeding his death. It was that allegation, to a greater degree than any other, which seemed to encourage the inference that the received tradition of the Shakespearean authorship of the plays needed revision. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 57863
Author: Lee, Sidney
Release Date: Sep 7, 2018
Format: eBook
Language: English