Introduction

The first thing that you notice when you move from the study of Shakespeare in his own time to Shakespeare in the eighteenth century is all the noise and hubbub, the huge range of conversation, all the bright lights. It’s like driving out of the desert in the middle of the night and finding yourself rolling down the Strip into the brilliant illumination of Las Vegas, or what it might have felt like for the young Shakespeare riding down from Stratford into the burgeoning metropolis of London. The early modern archive for Shakespeare studies is strikingly bare of direct evidence. The Riverside Shakespeare provides an appendix containing all the early modern “contemporary references,” “contemporary notices of the plays and poems,” and “early critical comment” (1951-75). There are thirty items (and that includes comments from Milton, Dryden, and Cavendish, which were written long after Shakespeare’s death). Brian Vickers’ six-volume compendium, Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, needs less than a single volume for the period before the Restoration and over five volumes for the long eighteenth century, that is, from the Restoration to 1800.