7 - Dramatic experiments

Summary

In the prologue to John Dryden's revised version of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida (1678), Dryden had “Mr. Betterton, representing the ghost of Shakespeare” rise up and intone to the audience, 'Untaught, unpractic'd, in a barbarous age, /I found not, but created first the stage.' Before Shakespeare was the void - an uncouth, dark time with nothing to offer England's first master dramatic poet. There are traces of Dryden's perspective in the titles of this chapter and the one that follows it. While the age of Shakespeare proudly sets forth “Dramatic Achievements,” the pre- Shakespearean era can offer only “Experiments.” To be sure, we have abandoned Dryden's formulation in some ways. No scholar would now contend that Shakespeare took nothing from the drama that preceded him; indeed, a flourishing twentieth-century scholarly industry has devoted itself precisely to demonstrating how Shakespeare's achievement needs to be understood as the culmination of earlier developments in the Tudor theatre. Shakespeare was neither “untaught” nor “unpractic'd” in an earlier English drama, but found much to emulate and adopt.