The Fairy Queen: A fresh look at the issues

Abstract

[Some] ha' not the heart to believe anything,\nBut what they see in print\nAye, that's an error\nHas abus'd many; but we shall reform it,\nAs many things beside (we have a hope)\nAre crept among the popular abuses \nThus Ben Jonson on the simple-minded reading public of 1625 and the press is more of a menace than Jonson realized, now that people by the million have votes to cast, money to spend and leisure time to fritter away following their printed instructions. If some topsy-turvy thinking on The Fairy Queen were the worst result of our ready belief in printed things, there would be little enough reason to complain. \nCurrent theories about source relationships, and details of the stage history of The Fairy Queen that are inferable from them, rest upon printed evidence which has been taken at face value—accepted even when Purcell's autograph contradicts it. Allowing the manuscripts greater weight than usual, and with the help of one or two new witnesses, we arrive at a different interpretation.\n...& more

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 6 citations exist upstream.