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Upstarts and Much Ado
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Starting from a discussion of imitation and parody in Cervantes’ Don Quixote, this chapter moves through Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote to her compilation of sources, Shakespear Illustrated (1753–4). Objections to Shakespeare’s derivativeness, of the kind advanced by Lennox, go back to Robert Greene’s pamphlet Greenes Groatsworth of Witte (1592), where the dramatist is denounced as an ‘vpstart Crow, beautified with our feathers’. To reconstruct the methods of Elizabethan playmaking is to find that the recycling of plays, poems, and prose romances on stage was standard. Competitiveness among players and playwrights led to accusations of plagiarism. What gives an edge to the accusation that Shakespeare is a crow in borrowed plumage is the notion of him as an upstart. Drawing on texts about acting, fashion in hair and dress, and the fashioning of plays, discussion moves from the Groatsworth to Much Ado as a comedy about upstarts that turns on borrowed attire.
Title: Upstarts and Much Ado
Description:
Starting from a discussion of imitation and parody in Cervantes’ Don Quixote, this chapter moves through Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote to her compilation of sources, Shakespear Illustrated (1753–4).
Objections to Shakespeare’s derivativeness, of the kind advanced by Lennox, go back to Robert Greene’s pamphlet Greenes Groatsworth of Witte (1592), where the dramatist is denounced as an ‘vpstart Crow, beautified with our feathers’.
To reconstruct the methods of Elizabethan playmaking is to find that the recycling of plays, poems, and prose romances on stage was standard.
Competitiveness among players and playwrights led to accusations of plagiarism.
What gives an edge to the accusation that Shakespeare is a crow in borrowed plumage is the notion of him as an upstart.
Drawing on texts about acting, fashion in hair and dress, and the fashioning of plays, discussion moves from the Groatsworth to Much Ado as a comedy about upstarts that turns on borrowed attire.