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3. Addressing the Problem of a Lyric History: Collecting Shakespeare's Songs/Shakespeare as Song Collector
- University of Pennsylvania Press
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Chapter 3 Addressing the Problem ofa Lyric History: Collecting Shakespeare's Songs/ Shakespeare as Song Collector In Ramsay's Gentle Shepherd, Patie praises Shakespeare, Ben Jonson , Drummond of Hawthornden, and Cowley without discriminating among them. By the 1740s many would have reckoned it an insult to list any other writer, including Jonson, alongside the author who would become "the Bard" during this era. Shakespeare's rising reputation was signaled by the dedication of his bust in Westminster Abbey in 1741, and it is on that monument that John Home, mortified by David Garrick's rejection ofAgis, pencils these lines: Image of Shakespeare! To this place I come To ease my bursting bosom at thy tomb; For neither Greek nor Roman poet fired My fancy first, thee chiefly I admired; And day and night revolving still thy page, I hoped, like thee, to shake the British stage; But cold neglect is now my only mead, And heavy falls it on so proud a head. If powers above now listen to thy lyre, Charm them to grant, indulgent, my desire; Let petrefaction stop this falling tear, And fix my form for ever marble here.1 Few authors in Home's era or since have been so frank in declaring their wish to be enshrined along with Shakespeare. Fewer still use iconoclasm as a vehicle for bardolatry: Wishing to be petrified, put beyond weeping and immortalized , Home defaces Shakespeare's bust in the act of begging for his favor. Yet in many ways Home's lines are representative of Shakespeare's canoniza- 98 Chapter 3 tion in the mid-eighteenth century. First, Home sets Shakespeare's power to inspire "the fancy" above that of classical authors, tacitly taking sides in ongoing critical conflicts over issues such as Shakespeare's violation of the dramatic unities and his mixture of comedy and tragedy. While Hume may praise Douglas for refining Shakespeare's "unhappy barbarism;' Home and an increasing number of others hold that neoclassical rules are trumped by Shakespeare's English creativity. Second, by identifying himself as a reader "revolving still thy page" rather than a theatrical spectator, Home points to the growing tide of editions and essays that canonizes Shakespeare. The intimacy of that reading, rooted in his childhood and still part of his days and nights, draws him closer to Shakespeare and fires his hope that he could move back from the page to the centralizing social power of the stage. Lastly, Home's lines are representative of Shakespeare's canonization in being predicated on his failure to turn this felt intimacy into authorial success and succession, a failure that moves him to pin his hopes on the "charm" of Shakespeare's "lyre." While the Anglocentric slant of the "British stage" played a role in Home's frustration, it was not only Scottish authors who rated their powers well below Shakespeare's. For many, he is the strong precursor who triggers elegiac reflections on the erosion of poetic inspiration, threatening to undermine the possibility of effective lyric in the present. And even if strong poetry could still be written, many authors were uncertain whether a contemporary audience, compromised by the laxities of print culture , could understand it. This is the double problem of what I will call lyric history. One way that mid-eighteenth-century authors attempt to bridge the double gap between themselves and Shakespeare and between themselves and their contemporary audience is by using the resources of lyric and ballad collection. The pages that follow track how this happens in the poems of William Collins (1743-50), in Garrick's adaptations of Shakespeare and his staging of the Jubilee (1755-69), in succeeding editions of Thomas Percy's Reliques ofAncient English Poetry (1765-94), and in Joseph Ritson's sharp interrogation of Reliques and Shakespeare editions in his song collections (1783-95). The fate of Shakespeare's lyrics in the eighteenth century is an understudied topic. In the recently published Shakespeare's Songbook, Ross W. Duffin eschews eighteenth-century sources, primary and critical, and the few recent discussions of lyric in eighteenth-century Shakespearean criticism have tended to import either a pseudo-Romantic idea of lyric as expressive Project MUSE (2024-03-19 12:21 GMT) Problem ofa Lyric History 99 or an Adornian notion of it as "in a negative and critical relation to the public :'2 Yet while the strains of expressivism or alienated critique can be heard in the odes ofCollins and Garrick (not to mention Home's...