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Gregory Smith, "Elizabethan Critical Essays"

ELIZABETHAN CRITICAL ESSAYS EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY G. GREGORY SMITH VOLUME I - PREFACE THE purpose of these volumes is to collect the writings of the Elizabethan age which are concerned with Literary Criticism. The term is used in its most comprehensive sense, and permits the inclusion not merely of academic treatises on the nature of poetry or on more special problems of form, but of tracts and prefaces which express contemporary taste. Some of the texts, such as Harveys and Nashs, are reproduced less for their matter than for their manner of approach. The work is therefore an attempt to recover, primarily in the words of the Elizabethans themselves, what then passed for critical opinion in literary circles. I hope the collection will commend itself as being fairly complete the ingenious repeti tion of argument and illustration which runs through out would show at least that we are in possession of the abiding topics. Several of the texts have been reprinted, either individually or as parts of works, during the late century, and notably by Haslewood, Grosart, and Mr. Arber. In these, it may be said, the interest has been exclusively bibliographical and historical a restriction perhaps inevitable in the plan of separate reprints. The advance in the study of Criticism has proved, however, that there are other, and perhaps more important, interests in this material, and that these are best served by treating it as a whole. In no other way can we find the historical perspective of what appears to be a mingle-mangle of ill-con vi Preface sidered, off-hand sayings, or better appreciate the fact that in these we have the true beginnings of English Criticism as a separate literary kind or adequately understand how much of the classical mood expressed in Dryden and his successors is the natural and native outcome of these early speculations. I have endeavoured, in the Introduction, to discuss these general problems, and to show that the texts here reprinted supply evidence for certain conclusions. It has been found convenient to use the epithet 1 Elizabethan in the strictest chronological sense, and to exclude the earlier treatises of Coxe, Wilson, and Sherry, and, with them, Fulwoods book of 1568, which are either entirely rhetorical or merely anthological. By ending with Elizabeth's death-year, we are denied the critical work of Ben Jonson, other than the earlier pieces which appear in the Appendix to Vol. ii, and all the work of Bacon for though the first edition of the Essays appeared in 1597, the important reissues fall well within Jamess reign. Moreover considerations of space apart Jonson J s and Bacons milieu is Jacobean, and their work introduces us to a later stage in the history of criticism. In that work, with Boltons Hypercritica, Stirlings Anacrisis, Draytons Epistle to Reynolds, and others, there is ample material for another volume. Yet we need not concern ourselves overmuch with the chronological division. The defence of the - limits here chosen must be the mutual dependence of the essays between Aschams chapter on Imitation and Daniels Defence. It so happens that the date of the latter falls in or about 1603. Preface vii All the writings in the body of the book are in prose. The contributions in verse, such as Daniels Musophtlus, Halls Satires, or Peeks judgements on contemporaries, are either plainly supplementary or too occasional for the present purpose. These have been incorporated by way of illustration in the Notes...

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