[King James I. of Scotland]

First published Edinburgh Saturday Post, 15 September 1827, pp. 150–1. Never reprinted. Ignoring the Scottish nature of its subject, this review goes out of its way to mention Shakespeare, other London dramatists, and London theatres. It is one of a series of critiques in the Saturday Post which clearly show an English and literary perspective. The wit, and the devastating sarcasm, as well as the confident treatment of literary issues, certainly point to De Quincey alone, among all the known critics for the Post. Peterkin, Milligan, and Nelson would be unlikely to use Biblical-sounding language to make fun of a Scottish playwright. Rhetorical devices such as question-and-answer, exclamatory sentences, and direct address to the author under review, are rare for the Post, except in articles that appear to be De Quincey’s. Other signs include ‘contemporaries’, where most of the paper’s writers would have written of ‘cotemporaries’, and the strong emphasis on pleasure, as a basis for literary creativity and evaluation. Probably the most telling sign is the account of Shakespeare’s mind as ‘quick, forgetive, and overflowing’; ‘forgetive’ is an unusual word (meaning: imaginative, creative), whose first recorded appearance is in a speech by Shakespeare’s Falstaff. The English, amoral, and pleasure-loving Falstaff seems a little out-of-place in a newspaper normally devoted to religion, morality, and patriotic pride; but De Quincey seems to invoke him quite often – perhaps in reaction to the attitudes of some of his colleagues. (For allusions to Falstaff and friends in the 1827 Post, see pp. 14, 73, 77, 140, 173, 216n., 272, 326.)