The old English dramatists

Chapter 2: NOTE

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About This Book

A series of lectures surveys prominent Elizabethan and early Stuart playwrights, offering readable criticism and selected readings to illustrate stylistic traits, dramatic methods, and historical contexts. Beginning with a reflection on the stage's origins and the role of interludes, the speaker analyzes individual dramatists—including Marlowe, Webster, Chapman, Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger, and Ford—attending to poetic power, moral ambiguity, plot construction, and performance needs. The essays balance appreciative close readings with biographical and theatrical commentary, emphasizing distinctive voices and the transition from medieval forms to the more literary, city-grown drama of the Renaissance.

NOTE

In the spring of 1887, Mr. Lowell read, at the Lowell Institute in Boston, six lectures on the Old English Dramatists. They had been rapidly written, and in their delivery much was said extemporaneously, suggested by the passages from the plays selected for illustration of the discourse. To many of these passages there was no reference in the manuscript; they were read from the printed book. The lectures were never revised by Mr. Lowell for publication, but they contain such admirable and interesting criticism, and are in themselves such genuine pieces of good literature, that it has seemed to me that they should be given to the public.1

CHARLES ELIOT NORTON.

1 Before their publication in this volume, these Lectures appeared in Harper’s Magazine, in the numbers from June to November, 1892.