ABSTRACT

Perhaps the most influential literary historian and critic of his time, George Saintsbury (1845-1933), Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature at Edinburgh, stressed positive personal response by the reader as a major test of literary greatness. Saintsbury implies that this reader would be grounded in realism and thus find Webster the creator of great dramatic flashes, and would have a preference for 'The White Devil1. Extracts from 'A History of Elizabethan Literature1, pp. 274-6, 278-80.