William Shakespeare. Coryat’s Crudities (2 vols)

Abstract

The first Russian translation of Thomas Coryat’s travel over Europe cuts a fantastic figure on the London literary scene at the beginning of the 17th c. The book opens with over one hundred pages occupied by the panegyrics to the traveller from the pen of the customers at the Mermaid tavern, Ben Jonson and John Donne most illustrious among them. The prevalent carnivalesque style adds a mysterious flavour to the book, enhanced in the Russian version where Caryot is presumed to be a literary mask of Shakespeare (his name stands on the titlepage as one of the authors) while Shakespeare, in accordance with one of the anti-Stratfordian heresies, is advanced as the mask of the earl of Rutland. The exaggerated academic style of the Russian edition features as another carnivalesque attribute in this enigmatic case. Coryat’s Crudities, apart from the anti-Stratfordian guess, is an important contribution to Shakespeare studies in Russia vividly presenting Elizabethan wit as a fact of literary everyday life.