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Inscribing Textuality: Milton, Davenant, Authorship, and the Performance of Print by Rachel Willie is a book available to read on EtoBox.

What is Inscribing Textuality: Milton, Davenant, Authorship, and the Performance of Print about?

In The Preface to Gondibert (1650), William Davenant proposes a new literary aesthetic predicated upon philosophical and scientific learning. Like Milton, he was concerned with poetic form, though, unlike Milton, Davenant wrote numerous plays. Milton’s minimal engagement with dramatic form could be construed as representative of him positioning himself in opposition to the aesthetics of drama and the politics of the Restoration stage. This chapter addresses how Davenant’s notions of aesthetics and how Milton’s engagement with the theatricality of ink informed their ideas of drama. By placing these two authors in dialogue with one another, we are presented with a rich cultural poetics that is underpinned by questions of authorship and continued anxieties regarding the moral and didactic space of the stage and of the page.

Author

Rachel Willie

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Published

2021

Language

EN