Description
This is the first edition of the complete works of William Heminge (1602-c.1653), son of Shakespeare's colleague and first co-editor, John Heminge. It contains a biography, critical old-spelling texts of his two surviving plays, The Jewes Tragedy and The Fatal Contract, and the small group of poems assigned to him in contemporary manuscripts. Heminge's tragedies in particular reveal him to be an innovative writer deserving far greater critical attention than he has previously received. He is both the first dramatist in English to see the theatrical potential of Josephus's account of 'the Fall of the Temple', and the first to challenge the conventions of revenge drama by presenting a fully autonomous female avenger on the English stage. The introductions to the plays offer an investigation of Heminge's historical sources and theatrical techniques. His literary and theatrical debts to Shakespeare are investigated, together with the stage history and afterlife of the plays and the provenance of the poems' manuscripts. In the case of The Jewes Tragedy, three early modern analogues ot the narrative of the siege of Jerusalem are discussed along with the contemporary context of Roman dramas and representations of Jews on the English stage. The Fatal Contract depicts the first female revenge protagonist in English drama, and is examined in the tradition of revenge tragedy, with special reference to portrayals of cross-dressed women, Africans, and eunuchs. All copies of the first quartos of the plays available in the United Kingdom have been examined and collated, together with those in the Huntington Library. The transmission of the texts is discussed, with contextual evidence for the dates of the plays. The relationship of the variant text, The Eunuch (1687), to both The Fatal Contract and Elkanah Settle's adaptation, Love and Revenge (1675) is examined. One poem, 'A Contemplation over the Dukes Grave,' has never been previously printed. A case for the attribution to
