Newly Discovered Shakespeare Passages inBel-vedére or The Garden of the Muses(1600)

Abstract

This article is an offshoot of work towards an edition of Bel-vedére or The Garden of the Muses, a printed commonplace book published in 1600. The editors’ comprehensive analysis of the origins of the 4,482 one- or two-line passages has resulted in the discovery of thirteen hitherto untraced passages that are based on Shakespeare (and of a fourteenth passage whose Shakespearean origins were discovered by the scholar Charles Crawford in the early twentieth century but not published). These passages and their Shakespearean source texts in Romeo and Juliet, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Richard II, Richard III, Venus and Adonis, and The Rape of Lucrece are discussed here and serve to illustrate the range of adaptive strategies used in the compilation of the commonplace book. Three additional passages which have perhaps been adapted from Shakespeare source texts, including one of his sonnets, are also discussed. Discussion of the Shakespearean presence in Bel-vedére is contextualised by a brief account of prior work on the commonplace book and the attempted identification of its origins.

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