ABSTRACT
Longman’s choice of a theater expert for his prefaces has significant implications when it comes to Elizabeth Inchbald treatment of William Shakespeare plays in particular. Shakespeare’s plays were understood and classified very differently at the beginning of the nineteenth century than they had been during the eighteenth century, starting with the nature of the playtext itself. Lewis Theobald also borrowed the garden metaphor from Hamlet, calling Shakespeare’s plays an “unweeded Garden grown to Seed.”Inchbald’s comments on Measure for Measure also underscore the fact that she well understood another technical aspect of Shakespeare’s work: they are adaptations. Marvin Carlson and Francesca Saggini have argued that Inchbald moves between eighteenth-century and Romantic aesthetics, and certainly Inchbald balances different views of human nature—and therefore of Shakespeare’s plays. In fact, Inchbald’s analyses of Shakespeare’s characters often point out that Shakespeare deliberately guards against the tendency to view people in extraordinary circumstances as unusual beings.
