36 research outputs found
Mucedorus: the last ludic playbook, the first stage Arcadia
This article argues that two seemingly contradictory factors contributed to and sustained the success of the anonymous Elizabethan play Mucedorus (c. 1590; pub. 1598). First, that both the initial composition of Mucedorus and its Jacobean revival were driven in part by the popularity of its source, Philip Sidney's Arcadia. Second, the playbook's invitation to amateur playing allowed its romance narrative to be adopted and repurposed by diverse social groups. These two factors combined to create something of a paradox, suggesting that Mucedorus was both open to all yet iconographically connected to an elite author's popular text. This study will argue that Mucedorus pioneered the fashion for âcontinuationsâ or adaptations of the famously unfinished Arcadia, and one element of its success in print was its presentation as an affordable and performable version of Sidney's elite work. The Jacobean revival of Mucedorus by the King's Men is thus evidence of a strategy of engagement with the Arcadia designed to please the new Stuart monarchs. This association with the monarchy in part determined the cultural functions of the Arcadia and Mucedorus through the Interregnum to the close of the seventeenth century
Maria Coswayâs Hours: Cosmopolitan and Classical Visual Culture in Thomas Macklinâs Poets Gallery
Thomas Macklinâs Gallery of Poets opened at the Mitre Tavern in Fleet Street in 1788 with the aim to âdisplay British Geniusâ through âPrints Illustrative of the Most Celebrated British Poetsâ. Early newspaper coverage promised âa monument of the powers of the pencil in England, as the Vatican is at Romeâ. The incongruous juxtaposition between Fleet Street and the Vatican spells out the cosmopolitan ambition of the literary gallery phenomenon through its real and imagined geographies of display. Through the format of the paper gallery of prints, Macklinâs Poets offered the inventions of British Poets as a repository of painting. This chapter examines how the cosmopolitan idiom of the paper gallery is negotiated in the first number of Macklinâs Poets. This essay examines the extent to which this ambition was achieved in the first Number of Macklinâs Poets which carried an engraving of Maria Coswayâs The Hours, originally a painting with an impressively European iconographic heritage. The painting was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1783, and was retroactively associated by Macklin with Thomas Grayâs âOde on the Springâ. The trope of the Hours brought with it a weighty provenance derived from classical marble bas-relief, through the antiquarian pages of Pietro Santi Bartoli and Bernard de Montfaucon to Flaxmanâs designs for Wedgwood plaques and vases. Coswayâs name also imported into Grayâs poem her reputation as a cosmopolitan, cultured woman who had completed the Grand Tour and who moved in elite circles including those of the Prince of Wales in London and the Duke of Orleans, Pierre dâHancarville and Thomas Jefferson in Paris. The iconographies of the painting, the print, and the poem articulate a European cosmopolitan tradition for British Art