Shakespeare Weekend!
Continuing our look at The works of Mr. William Shakespear: in ten volumes published in 1728 by Alexander Pope (1688-1744) and Dr. George Sewell (d. 1726) for Jacob Tonson (1655-1736), this weekend we pore over Volume Seven.
This volume contains the tragedies Antony and Cleopatra, Titus Andronicus, The Tragedy of Macbeth, and problem play Trolius and Cressida. All four plays were published in the First Folio, however Trolius and Cressida seems to have been haphazardly squeezed in on unnumbered pages between the histories and tragedies adding to its genre identification problems. In step with Shakespeare’s other problem plays, Trolius and Cressida’s ambiguous tone bounces around creating a montage of possible intents and leaves viewers puzzled about how to relate to the characters.
The Tragedy of Macbeth is contemporarily known as a cursed play and superstitiously often referred to as The Scottish Play. Proposed origins of the curse are rumored in Shakespeare having used real witches’ spells in the text below angering witches who then cursed the play.
Like Rowe’s earlier collection, scene divisions, stage directions, dramatis personae, and full-page engravings by either French artist Louis Du Guernier (1677-1716) or Englishman Paul Fourdrinier (1698-1758) precede each play.
Pope’s editions of Shakespeare were the first attempted to collate all previous publications. He consulted twenty-seven early quartos restoring passages that had been out of print for almost a century while simultaneously removing about 1,560 lines of material that didn’t appeal to him. Some of those lines were degraded to the bottom of the page with his other editorial notes.
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-Jenna, Special Collections Graduate Intern
