External links
| General | |
|---|---|
| National libraries | |
| Other | |
Maurice Morgann (1725-1802) was a colonial administrator and Shakespearean literary scholar. He is best known for An Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff.
Morgann was born in Blaenbylan, Pembrokeshire, but little is known about his family or education, partly because at his request his executors destroyed all his personal papers after his death. [1] He was established in London by 1756 when he was appointed to the sinecure post of Deputy Weigher and Teller at the Royal Mint. [1] In 1757 he produced his first published work, An Inquiry Regarding the Nature and End of a National Militia. This pamphlet promoted Pitt's militia bill and reflected Tory opposition to a standing army and increased taxation. [1]
From 1762, Morgann served as personal secretary and political adviser to the Earl of Shelburne, who served as President of the Board of Trade the following year. [1] When Shelburne returned to office as Secretary of State for the South in July 1766, Morgann became one of his four under-secretaries and was given another sinecure, the post of secretary of the Province of New Jersey in November. [1] In 1767, he was appointed special envoy of the Privy Council to Canada and visited Quebec in 1768. [2]
Morgann argued for the toleration of Catholicism in the Canadian province and thus contributed to the formulation of the Quebec Act of 1774. He was also opposed to the slave trade, believing it would bring "terror and destruction" in America. These views were expressed in his Plan for the Abolition of Slavery in the West Indies (1772). [3]
In 1782 Morgann embarked to New York with the aim of reuniting the colonies and Great Britain. Congress refused to receive him and it is possible that Morgann's report of the situation in America convinced Shelburne, now Prime Minister, to conclude the treaty with the American Commissioners in Paris which recognized the independence of the former colonies. [4]
Morgann returned to England in 1783 and he retired from active duty under Shelburne in 1786. In 1795 he published his Considerations on the Present Internal and External Condition of France. This work called for an alliance between the United States and Britain to meet the threat of French radicalism which Morgann considered to be a dangerous form of anarchy. His analysis met with the approval of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. [5]
He died unmarried in March 1802.
An Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff was published in 1777. It belonged to a genre of criticism, well-established at the time, that defended a Shakespeare character against charges of immorality. [6] In this character study, Morgann contradicted Dr Johnson's view of Falstaff as a drunken coward unworthy of admiration. Morgann argued that it was Shakespeare's intention to gain sympathy from the audience for Falstaff at the expense of Prince Hal. Falstaff was in reality a good-natured man of true courage and a coward only in appearance. When he is robbed at Gads Hill, for example, Falstaff does not flee "until he had been deserted by his companions, and had even afterwards exchanged blows with his assailants". [7]
Morgann summarises the complexity of Falstaff: "he is a character made up by Shakespeare wholly of incongruities; - a man at once young and old, enterprising and fat, a dupe and a wit, harmless and wicked, weak in principle and resolute by constitution, cowardly in appearance and brave in reality; a knave without malice, a lyar without deceit; and a knight, a gentleman and a soldier, without either dignity, decency or honour". [8]
According to Boswell, Johnson derided the premise of Morgann's Essay: "Why, Sir, we shall have the man come forth again; and as he has proved Falstaff to be no coward, he may prove Iago to be a very good character". [9] The work proved, however, to influence greatly the literary criticism of Henry IV, Part I and it inspired the literary approaches of Edward Dowden and A. C. Bradley in particular. [10] Edward Elgar's interpretation of the character for his symphonic poem, Falstaff (1913), also owed much to Morgann's character study. [11]
| General | |
|---|---|
| National libraries | |
| Other | |
Sir John Falstaff is a fictional character who appears in three plays by William Shakespeare and is eulogised in a fourth. His significance as a fully developed character is primarily formed in the plays Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2, where he is a companion to Prince Hal, the future King Henry V of England. A notable eulogy for Falstaff is presented in Act II, Scene III of Henry V, where Falstaff does not appear as a character on stage, as enacted by Mistress Quickly in terms that some scholars have ascribed to Plato's description of the death of Socrates after drinking hemlock. By comparison, Falstaff is presented as the buffoonish suitor of two married women in The Merry Wives of Windsor.
Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree was an English actor and theatre manager.
Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch was a Cornish writer who published using the pseudonym Q. Although a prolific novelist, he is remembered mainly for the monumental publication The Oxford Book Of English Verse 1250–1900 and for his literary criticism. He influenced many who never met him, including American writer Helene Hanff, author of 84, Charing Cross Road and its sequel, Q's Legacy. His Oxford Book of English Verse was a favourite of John Mortimer's fictional character Horace Rumpole.
The Merry Wives of Windsor or Sir John Falstaff and the Merry Wives of Windsor is a comedy by William Shakespeare first published in 1602, though believed to have been written in or before 1597. The Windsor of the play's title is a reference to the town of Windsor, also the location of Windsor Castle, in Berkshire, England. Though nominally set in the reign of Henry IV or early in the reign of Henry V, the play makes no pretence to exist outside contemporary Elizabethan era English middle class life. It features the character Sir John Falstaff, the fat knight who had previously been featured in Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2. It has been adapted for the opera at least ten times. The play is one of Shakespeare's lesser-regarded works among literary critics. Tradition has it that The Merry Wives of Windsor was written at the request of Queen Elizabeth I. After watching Henry IV Part I, she asked Shakespeare to write a play showing Falstaff in love.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1777.
Sir John Oldcastle is an Elizabethan play about John Oldcastle, a controversial 14th-/15th-century rebel and Lollard who was seen by some of Shakespeare's contemporaries as a proto-Protestant martyr.
Sir Thomas More is an Elizabethan play and a dramatic biography based on particular events in the life of the Catholic martyr Thomas More, who rose to become the Lord Chancellor of England during the reign of Henry VIII. The play is considered to be written by Anthony Munday and Henry Chettle and revised by several writers. The manuscript is particularly notable for a three-page handwritten revision now widely attributed to William Shakespeare.
Andrew Cecil Bradley, was an English literary scholar, best remembered for his work on Shakespeare.
Sir Andrew Jonathan Bate, CBE, FBA, FRSL, is a British academic, biographer, critic, broadcaster, novelist and scholar. He specialises in Shakespeare, Romanticism and Ecocriticism. He is Foundation Professor of Environmental Humanities in a joint appointment of the College of Liberal Arts, the School of Sustainability and the Global Futures Laboratory at Arizona State University, as well as a Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College in the University of Oxford, where he holds the title of Professor of English Literature. From 2017 to 2019 he was Gresham Professor of Rhetoric in the City of London. Until September 2019 he was Provost of Worcester College, Oxford. He was knighted in 2015 for services to literary scholarship and higher education.
In Shakespearean scholarship, Henriad refers to a group of William Shakespeare's history plays. It is sometimes used to refer to a group of four plays, but some sources and scholars use the term to refer to eight plays. In the 19th century, Algernon Charles Swinburne used the term to refer to three plays, but that use is not current.
Falstaff – Symphonic Study in C minor, Op. 68, is an orchestral work by the English composer Edward Elgar. Though not so designated by the composer, it is a symphonic poem in the tradition of Franz Liszt and Richard Strauss. It portrays Sir John Falstaff, the "fat knight" of William Shakespeare's Henry IV Parts 1 and 2.
A crux is a textual passage that is corrupted to the point that it is difficult or impossible to interpret and resolve. Cruxes are studied in palaeography, textual criticism, bibliography, and literary scholarship. A crux is more serious or extensive than a simple slip of the pen or typographical error. The word comes from Latin crux, Latin for "cross", used metaphorically as a difficulty that torments one. Cruxes occur in a wide range of pre-modern texts, printed and manuscript.
Shakespeare's influence extends from theater and literatures to present-day movies, Western philosophy, and the English language itself. William Shakespeare is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the history of the English language, and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He transformed European theatre by expanding expectations about what could be accomplished through innovation in characterization, plot, language and genre. Shakespeare's writings have also impacted many notable novelists and poets over the years, including Herman Melville, Charles Dickens, and Maya Angelou, and continue to influence new authors even today. Shakespeare is the most quoted writer in the history of the English-speaking world after the various writers of the Bible; many of his quotations and neologisms have passed into everyday usage in English and other languages. According to Guinness Book of World Records Shakespeare remains the world’s best-selling playwright, with sales of his plays and poetry believed to have achieved in excess of four billion copies in the almost 400 years since his death. He is also the third most translated author in history.
"On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth" is an essay in Shakespearean criticism by the English author Thomas De Quincey, first published in the October 1823 edition of The London Magazine. Though brief, less than 2,000 words in length, it has been called "De Quincey's finest single critical piece" and "one of the most penetrating critical footnotes in our literature". Commentators who are dismissive of De Quincey's literary criticism in general make an exception for his essay on Macbeth.
Characters of Shakespear's Plays is an 1817 book of criticism of Shakespeare's plays, written by early nineteenth century English essayist and literary critic William Hazlitt. Composed in reaction to the neoclassical approach to Shakespeare's plays typified by Samuel Johnson, it was among the first English-language studies of Shakespeare's plays to follow the manner of German critic August Wilhelm Schlegel, and, with the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, paved the way for the increased appreciation of Shakespeare's genius that was characteristic of later nineteenth-century criticism. It was also the first book to cover all of Shakespeare's plays, intended as a guide for the general reader.
Anne Barton was a renowned American-English scholar and Shakespearean critic.
Robert Shallow is a fictional character who appears in Shakespeare's plays Henry IV, Part 2 and The Merry Wives of Windsor. He is a wealthy landowner and Justice of the Peace in Gloucestershire, who at the time of The Merry Wives of Windsor is said to be over 80.
Falstaff's Wedding is a play by William Kenrick. It is a sequel to Shakespeare's plays Henry IV, Part 2 and The Merry Wives of Windsor. Most of the characters are carried over from the two Shakespeare plays. The play was first staged in 1766, but was not a success. It was infrequently revived thereafter.
Corporal Nym is a fictional character who appears in two Shakespeare plays, The Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry V. He later appears in spin-off works by other writers. Nym is a soldier and criminal follower of Sir John Falstaff and a friend and rival of Ancient Pistol.
Eric Rasmussen is an American scholar, academic and author. He is Regents Teaching Professor and Foundation Professor of English at the University of Nevada.
