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A Literary Link between Thomas Shadwell and Christian Felix Weisse

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Alfred E. Richards
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Extract

Witchcraft in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a subject upon which the dramatists from Marlowe to Shadwell seized with the greatest avidity. There was material of the most pliable sort; it could be moulded into a magnificent tragedy or distorted into the wildest buffoonery. In the sixteenth century it was the darker side of magic which we find in the drama, and though we note as early as 1604 the effort to brighten up Marlowe's tragedy of Doctor Faustus by the introduction of broadly comic scenes taken from the prose tale, yet one can well believe that the theatre audiences from 1590 to 1610 remembered too vividly the cruelties of the witch trials in 1590 to appreciate the buffoonery of Ralph in the comic scenes as deeply as they felt the dark despair of the protagonist Faustus.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 21 , Issue 4 , 1906 , pp. 808 - 830
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1906

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References

page 809 note 1 Cf. Middleton's Blocke Booke (1604), page 13: “he had a head of hayre like one of ray Diuells in Doctor Faustus, when the olde Theater crackt and frighted the Audience.”

page 810 note 1 Copied from the original 1594 text in the Bodleian. Thoms’ reprint of the Wagner Book is inaccurate.

page 810 note 2 Bibliographers mention only one edition: but I found two in the Bodleian.

page 811 note 1 An account of the English Dramatick Poets, etc., by Gerard Langbaine, Oxford, 1691.

page 811 note 2 Biographia Dramatica.

page 811 note 3 Genest: Some Account of the English Stage, etc. Vol. i.

page 813 note 1 A copy of this text is in the library of Mr. Hiram Bingham, Princeton, N. J., and another in the Harvard Library, while the Boston Public Library possesses copies of the 1693 and 1695 texts.

page 819 note 1 It was Shadwell's description of this character which excited a great clamor against the whole play and moved the Master of the Revels to strike out a dozen lines of the dialogue.

page 822 note 1 This instance of the word “facer” is earlier, obviously, than that in the citation given in the New English Dictionary, which is taken from the Squire of Alsatia.

page 824 note 1 Whincop, A Complete List of All the English Dramatic Poets, etc., 1747.

page 825 note 1 The rôle in the Lancashire Witches which brought such a storm against Shadwell, and yet is repeated again in The Devil of a Wife.

page 825 note 2 All the songs contained in the earliest one-act version which I have been able to see (dated 1748) are contained in the original 1731 text except Nos. 3, 4, and 15. I cannot identify these however.

page 825 note 3 Gentleman's Magazine, Aug. 11, 1731.

page 827 note 1 A remark quite suggestive of Lincoln's epigram a century or more later.

page 828 note 1 Genest records a performance of the farce as late as 1828.

page 828 note 2 Christian Felix Weisse und seine Beziehung zur deutschen Literatur des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts, von Dr. J. Minor, Innsbruck, 1880.

page 829 note 1 It appeared in print in 1770 with the title: Le diable à quatre ou la double metamorphose, Opera comique en trois actes. An 1829 reprint shows many alterations from the English original.

page 829 note 2 The earliest text I have seen is that of 1778, although the Leipzig city library possesses a copy of the 1768 edition.

page 830 note 1 The parson's rôle was first omitted, as already mentioned, by Theophilus Cibber.