John Lyly

Leah Scragg

This is a photographic facsimile of John Lyly's comedy Gallathea, printed in 1592, taken from the copy in the British Library, with the songs from Lyly's Sixe Court Comedies, printed in 1632, taken from the copy in the Huntington Library, California.

Gallathea, 1592

This volume in the Malone Society Reprints series consists of a photofacsimile of the Huntington Library copy of the first edition of Lyly's Sapho and Phao (1584), together with the songs from the first collected edition of Lyly's plays, published by Edward Blount in 1632. The introduction discusses the relationship between the first edition and that represented by the British Library copy (now known, following the work of David Bevington, to be the second), and traces thebibliographical history of the play from its first publication until Blount's edition of 1632. The volume facilitates the study of the relationship between the three quartos, and in particular the priority of that represented by the Huntington Library copy.

Sapho and Phao, 1584

Five Elizabethan Progress Entertainmen

A Study in Creative Adaptation

The Metamorphosis of Gallathea

A knowledge of the history and evolution of the tales on which Shakespeare drew in the composition of his plays is essential for the understanding of his work. In re-telling a particular story, a Renaissance writer was not simply reshaping the structure of the narrative but participating in a species of debate with earlier writers and the meanings their tales had accrued. The stories upon which Shakespeare's plays are constructed did not descend to him as innocent collections of incidents, but brought with them considerable cultural baggage, substantially lost to the modern spectator but an essential component, for a contemporary audience, of the meaning of the work. Shakespeare's Alternative Tales explores this literary dialogue, focusing on those plays in which the expectations generated by an inherited story are in some way overthrown, setting up a tension for a Renaissance spectator between 'received' and 'alternative' readings of the text. Each chapter opens with a familiar story, supplying a context for the subsequent discussion, and exhibits the way in which the dramatist's reworking of a traditional motif interrogates the assumptions implicit in his source. While offering the twentieth-century reader a fresh perspective from which to view the plays, the approach also supplies an introduction to contemporary readings of the Shakespearean canon. The tales Leah Scragg considers may be seen as 'alternative' in more than one sense: they radically rework conventional situations, while lending themselves to analysis in terms of new critical methodologies. The text will be of interest to both students of Shakespeare and the general reader. In conjunction with the author's companion volume, Shakespeare's Mouldy Tales, it provides an ideal introduction to contemporary developments in source studies.

Leah Scragg

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