Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Professional Players in the Guild Hall, Stratford-upon-Avon, 1568–1597
- Reconstructing The Rose: Development of the Playhouse Building between 1587 and 1592
- The Rose and its Stages
- Philip Henslowe and the Elizabethan Court
- From Revels to Revelation: Shakespeare and the Mask
- Bride-ing the Shrew: Costumes that Matter
- ‘When Men and Women are Alone’: Framing the Taming in India
- The Crown and the Pillow: Royal Properties in Henry IV
- Humanity at Stake: Man and Animal in Shakespeare’s Theatre
- Popular Shakespeare in Japan
- ‘Philosophy in a Gorilla Suit’: Do Shakespearians Perform or Just Perform-a-tive?
- Sudokothellophobia: Writing Hypertextually, Performatively
- Living Monuments: The Spatial Politics of Shakespeare’s Rome on the Contemporary Stage
- ‘In Windsor Forest and at the Boar’s Head’: The ‘Falstaff Plays’ and English Music in the Early Twentieth Century
- Michael Bogdanov in Conversation
- The Mouse and the Urn: Re-Visions of Shakespeare from Voltaire to Ducis
- ‘I covet your skull’: Death and Desire in Hamlet
- Martin Droeshout Redivivus: Reassessing the Folio Engraving of Shakespeare
- Canonizing Shakespeare: The Passionate Pilgrim, England’s Helicon and the Question of Authenticity
- Rereading Shakespeare: The Example of Richard Brathwait
- Shakespeare Performances in England, 2006: January 2006
- Professional Shakespeare Productions in the British Isles January–December 2005
- he Year's Contributions to Shakespearian Study 1 Critical Studies
- 2 Shakespeare in Performance
- 3 Editions and Textual Studies
- Index
The Mouse and the Urn: Re-Visions of Shakespeare from Voltaire to Ducis
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2007
- Frontmatter
- Professional Players in the Guild Hall, Stratford-upon-Avon, 1568–1597
- Reconstructing The Rose: Development of the Playhouse Building between 1587 and 1592
- The Rose and its Stages
- Philip Henslowe and the Elizabethan Court
- From Revels to Revelation: Shakespeare and the Mask
- Bride-ing the Shrew: Costumes that Matter
- ‘When Men and Women are Alone’: Framing the Taming in India
- The Crown and the Pillow: Royal Properties in Henry IV
- Humanity at Stake: Man and Animal in Shakespeare’s Theatre
- Popular Shakespeare in Japan
- ‘Philosophy in a Gorilla Suit’: Do Shakespearians Perform or Just Perform-a-tive?
- Sudokothellophobia: Writing Hypertextually, Performatively
- Living Monuments: The Spatial Politics of Shakespeare’s Rome on the Contemporary Stage
- ‘In Windsor Forest and at the Boar’s Head’: The ‘Falstaff Plays’ and English Music in the Early Twentieth Century
- Michael Bogdanov in Conversation
- The Mouse and the Urn: Re-Visions of Shakespeare from Voltaire to Ducis
- ‘I covet your skull’: Death and Desire in Hamlet
- Martin Droeshout Redivivus: Reassessing the Folio Engraving of Shakespeare
- Canonizing Shakespeare: The Passionate Pilgrim, England’s Helicon and the Question of Authenticity
- Rereading Shakespeare: The Example of Richard Brathwait
- Shakespeare Performances in England, 2006: January 2006
- Professional Shakespeare Productions in the British Isles January–December 2005
- he Year's Contributions to Shakespearian Study 1 Critical Studies
- 2 Shakespeare in Performance
- 3 Editions and Textual Studies
- Index
Summary
We cannot surely but sympathize with the horrors of a wretch about to murder his master, his friend, his benefactor . . . Yet this sentiment is weakened by the name of an instrument used by butchers and cooks in the meanest employments; we do not immediately conceive that a crime of any importance is to be committed with a knife; or who does not, at last, from the long habit of connecting a knife with sordid offices, feel aversion rather than terror?
Dr Johnson’s impatience with Shakespeare’s style is well known and this is but one of his numerous remonstrances against it, taken from a 1751 article in The Rambler. The present subject of his indignation (which probably caused him to confuse husband and wife) was the speech in which Lady Macbeth calls upon the night to hide her black thoughts and deed:
Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,
To cry ’Hold, hold!‚
(Macbeth 1.5.49–53)The critic’s reprobation of Shakespeare’s incongruous choice of words does not stop at knife: while dun is described as ‘an epithet now seldom heard but in the stable’, the blanket of the dark is singled out as a generic mistake:
Who, without some relaxation of his gravity, can hear of the avengers of guilt peeping through a blanket? I can scarce check my risibility when the expression forces itself upon my mind.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Shakespeare Survey , pp. 214 - 222Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007