Literary Imagination Advance Access originally published online on March 18, 2009
Literary Imagination 2009 11(2):127-135; doi:10.1093/litimag/imp010
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. All rights reserved. For permissions please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
"They Hate Us Youth": Byron's Falstaff
*Rutgers University. E-mail: ronlevao@rci.rutgers.edu
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Byron's pleasure in contraries—and in being contrary—is nowhere more evident than in his treatment of Shakespeare. The iconic writer is not "without the grossest faults," he assures James Hogg in March 1814:
Shakespeare's name, you may depend on it, stands absurdly too high and will go down. He had no invention as to stories, none whatever. He took all his plots from old novels, and threw their stories into a dramatic shape, at as little expense of thought as you or I could turn his plays back again into prose tales.1
The notorious letter concedes the occasional "flashes of genius," but is as dismissive of Shakespeare's language as it is of his dramatic construction—the best speeches of the histories are "all but verbatim out of the old affairs"—and heartily endorses the "improvements" visited on the plays by adapters.
As his contemporaries knew, however, Shakespeare's language and plays were constantly in