The Making of the Shrew: Comedy, Adaptation, and the Construction of Shakespeare's Cultural Authority on the Restoration and Eighteenth -Century Stage

338 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2004.John Lacy's Sauny the Scot (1668) engages in dialogue with the poetic satire of the Restoration and calls for the reassertion of male hegemony in marriage in order to criticize Charles II and imagine for the theater a moral authority that counters the king's power to license the stage. Charles Johnson's The Cobler of Preston (1716) uses Shakespeare to attempt to delimit access to, and construct class hierarchies within, both the polite society of the eighteenth century and the literary elite, which it contrasts with writers who were associated with the marketplace. Sir Richard Steele and David Garrick use Shakespeare's play to call for a companionate marriage which seems to offer egalitarian gender relations, but only reinforces male dominion in marriage. Christopher Bullock's The Cobler of Preston (1716), in contrast, burlesques marital relations and depicts the early-eighteenth-century same-sex subculture of the molly house in order to attack the establishment politics of sex, gender, and desire of reformers such as Steele and Garrick. Bullock attributes to Shakespeare an ownership interest in the intellectual property of his source materials, making him an owner of a text that embraces the nonelite literary marketplace. As a result of these efforts, Shakespeare's cultural authority was locally constructed in a number of fragmented ways around the issues of class politics, the politics of sex, gender, and desire, and questions about literary and theatrical authority.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD