Notes on Shakespeare's Workmanship Author:Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1917 Original Publisher: H. Holt and Company Description: Published also under title: Shakespeare's workmanship. Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition ... more »of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER IV A MIDSUMMER-NIGHT'S DREAM Shakespeare's and Dickens's use of pet devices -- Women in male disguise -- Shipwrecks -- Influence of Lyly and I'l. tutus -- Advance from stagocraft to characterisation -- The stigmata of a court play -- The value of inquiring Hoto was the thing done) -- The import of the fairies and the clowns -- An ideal setting for the play. (1) Dk. Jowett, famous Master of Balliol -- But in the manner of Sterne I must break off, here at the outset, to recall that figure, so familiar to me in youth, as every morning he crossed the quad beneath my bedroom window in a contiguous college for an early trot around its garden; a noticeable figure, too -- small, rotund, fresh of face as a cherub, yet with its darting gait and in its swallow-tailed coat curiously suggestive of a belated Puck surprised by dawn and hurrying to hang a pearl in every cowslip's ear. -- Dr. Jowett used to maintain that after Shakespeare the next creative genius in our literature was Charles Dickens. As everybody knows, Dickens left an unfinished novel behind him; and a number of ingenious writers from time to time have essayed to finish the story of Edwin Drood, constructing the whole from the fragment -- yet not from the fragment only, since in the process they are forced into examining the plots of other novels ofhis; so into recognising that his invention had certain trends -- certain favourite stage-tricks, artifices, cliches -- which it took almost predicably; and so to argue, from how he con...« less