Early Criticism

From Charlotte Lennox , Shakespear Illustrated: Or the Novels and histories, on which the Plays of Shakespear are Founded ... (1753), 3 vols (London: Millar 1753), Vol. I, pp. 243–50 Charlotte Lennox, née Ramsay (1730/31?-1804), was a prolific writer, translator and critic, who famously argued that some of Shakespeare’s sources were better structured than his plays and that his characters and plot lines often lacked credibility. Lennox’s critical views on Shakespeare were affected by eighteenth-century literary and moral standards, which privileged the neo-classical rules of probability and decorum over invention. The following extract also shows that the neo-classical tenet, according to which Art should imitate Nature, reflects aesthetic as well as political assumptions which may no longer seem ‘natural’ to us. Lennox, for example, deems ‘the Passion of Olivia [...] for the disguised Lady’ and ‘the Violence of [Antonio]’s Friendship for Sebastian’ as ‘unnatural’, and therefore ‘highly improbable’, ‘unaccountably extravagant’, and ultimately ‘ridiculous’. Lennox’s views on Twelfth Night can, therefore, help us understand not only how notions of what seems ‘natural’ or ‘unnatural’ have changed, but also how Nature is often invoked to legitimise sets of values, which, far from being ‘natural’ are, in fact, the product of a specific historical and cultural context.