Between the ‘Triumvirate of wit’ and the Bard: The English Dramatic Canon, 1660–1720

Abstract

Modern literary historians, much exercised by questions of canonicity, have dwelt on the ascendency of the ‘Triumvirate of wit’ in the seventeenth century and of Shakespeare in the eighteenth. Several recent studies have emphasized the construction of the triumvirate through the publication of the Jonson, Shakespeare, and ‘Fletcher’ folios in 1616, 1623, and 1647 respectively.2 Shakespeare is believed to have outflanked the others by the late 1730s, and to have become the nation’s cultural icon by the time of the Stratford Jubilee in 1769.3 This perspective, though not incorrect, is seriously incomplete. It overlooks the hierarchy of esteem that prevailed in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In that period, which had its own concern with canonicity, the pre-eminence of the triumvirate waned and the solitary greatness of Shakespeare was by no means assured. Shakespeare did not simply displace Fletcher and Jonson in the national pantheon. The critical evaluation of drama after the Restoration was, I shall argue, both more complex and more appreciative of contemporary achievement than has hitherto been realized. The new generation of playwrights — Dryden, Otway, Lee, Shadwell, and others — enjoyed a high reputation.