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C o d a Eccentric Shakespeare The period of theoretical and formal innovation that we now claim as a point of origin for modern literary history appeared to its immediate successors as a dead end. Neither the ministrations of Latin-speaking nursemaids nor the rigors of double translation succeeded in naturalizing classical eloquence in Renaissance England. No English compiler of tropes and figures achieved the authority of an Aristotle, a Cicero, or a Quintilian, nor did rhetoric long maintain its reign as the queen of the liberal arts: as early as 1605, Francis Bacon looked back with disdain at the sixteenth century’s “affectionate study of eloquence”; by the mid-seventeenth century the tide of rhetorical handbooks had receded; and in 1691 John Locke dismissed “all the Art of Rhetoric, besides Order and Clearness, all the artificial and figurative application of Words Eloquence hath invented, are for nothing,” as a “perfect cheat.”1 To a seventeenth-century eye—Ben Jonson’s, for instance—Lyly’s ornate prose, Spenser’s odd diction, and Marlowe’s thundering verse looked like failed experiments , useful only insofar as they marked the outer limits of vernacular decorum. A century later Samuel Johnson would describe the age of Elizabeth I as a period of violent and self-inflicted upheaval, in which “above all others experiments were made upon our language which distorted its combinations, and disturbed its uniformity.”2 Johnson articulates that view in his 1756 “Proposals for Printing . . . the Dramatick Works of Shakespeare,” and if we are now likely to regard the late sixteenth century in a rather different light—as a period in which English received the refinements that ushered it into a graceful and uniform maturity— that perspective has much to do with Shakespeare. Lyly, Spenser, and Marlowe may rapidly assume the status of linguistic outsiders and, to varying degrees, still hover at the margins of literary culture, but Shakespeare is the ultimate insider : “the exemplary author of the English canon,” as Margreta de Grazia puts Coda 165 it.3 And yet, as she points out, for a century and a half after his death—until Edmond Malone’s pioneering 1790 edition of the complete works fashioned for him a legitimating carapace of scholarly respectability—the circumstances of Shakespeare’s renown were decidedly otherwise: both his life and his art were judged wayward by early critics, as his famously extravagant fancy was matched by equally extravagant lapses in judgment.4 Thus Johnson offers his judgment of the Elizabethan period not in order to rescue Shakespeare from it but to place him firmly within it: the reader of Shakespeare’s text, he confesses, is “embarrassed at once with dead and with foreign languages, with obsoleteness and with innovation,” the disorienting stylistic impress of a “desultory and vagrant” wit.5 Embarrassment—in both the eighteenth-century sense of perplexity or difficulty and our own sense of cringing awkwardness—seems indeed to have been a primary effect of reading Shakespeare throughout the seventeenth and much of the eighteenth centuries. For such readers Shakespeare did not transcend the eccentricities of his contemporaries; he epitomized them. Although Jonson’s elegy for Shakespeare in the opening pages of the 1623 Folio hails the playwright as far greater than the “disproportion’d Muses” of Lyly, Spenser, and Marlowe,6 his commonplace book lumps all four writers together in its disparaging account of the stylistic extremity of what he calls “the late age.” In the same pages that record his judgments against Lyly’s unrestrained copia, Spenser’s queer pseudo-archaisms, and Marlowe’s strutting bombast, Jonson laments the judgment of “the multitude,” who “commend Writers, as they doe Fencers or Wrastlers; who if they come robustiously, and put for it, with a deale of violence, are received for the braver-fellows,” and implies that Shakespeare was just such a robustious and violent sort: “His Wit was in his own Power, would Rule of it had been so too.”7 Subsequent critics tended to agree in finding Shakespeare unruly: his genius , as Walter Harte wrote in 1730 with both admiration and dismay, “soar’d beyond the reach of Art”; his plots were deficient (or nonexistent); his style was passionately irregular; and his diction, as Francis Atterbury complained to Alexander Pope, less intelligible than “the hardest part of Chaucer.”8 In 1693 Thomas Rymer notoriously judged Shakespeare so eccentric as to be downright un-English, calling Othello a play whose absurdities and excesses “can only be calculated for the latitude of Gotham...

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