Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

8-1991

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

English

Major Professor

J.M. Armistead

Committee Members

Normal Sanders, Allen Carroll, Patrick Schmitt

Abstract

Though today Thomas Shadwell's popularity, or notoriety, is often due to Dryden's attacks, he was a successful Restoration playwright with a keen sense, as Etherege wrote, of "the follies in fashion." The Lancashire-Witches, And Tegue o Divelly The Irish-Priest (1681/1682) was immediately controversial. An anti-Catholic play riding on the heels of the Popish Plot, it introduced a despicable Irish Catholic priest but also presented Smerk, an Anglican curate lacking moral values and greatly fearing witches, an account of whom is taken from the actual Lancashire witch trials of 1612. When the play was first published, having had much of Smerk's dialogue censored for the stage, Shadwell returned those lines to the page and addressed the political censorship. According to modem bibliographical standards, this new edition is based on Quarto 1 as the copy text, retaining the author's old spellings and rhetorical punctuation. Variations from Q1 through Q4 are listed at the end of the work, along with endnotes on word usage, political and literary allusions, etc. For the first time, Shadwell's own exhaustive notes on witchcraft are translated from the Latin and Greek, with exact sources cited. An introduction addresses the author's life, performance history of the play, the author's sources, a critical analysis, and provides an extensive section on the text itself.

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