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Commonplacing and Originality: Reading Francis Meres

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Article

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Authors

Scott-Warren, Jason  ORCID logo  https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1395-9117

Abstract

Francis Meres (1565-1647) is remembered chiefly for the survey of 'English poetry' that he offers in Palladis Tamia (1598), which includes a number of laudatory comments on Shakespeare. Since the 1930s, scholars have known that this seemingly original critical intervention is a tissue of unacknowledged quotations, stitched together from the works of others. As well as identifying the main source for the Palladis for the first time, this article uses evidence from a number of books that Meres owned and annotated, and draws on the epitaph that he wrote for his wife, to ask what reading might have meant to an author who was incapable of speaking with his own tongue.

Description

Keywords

English literature, 1500-1599, Meres, Francis(1565-1647), prose, <i>Palladis Tamia, Wits Treasury</i>(1598), canon, literary borrowing, originality, Dadré, Jean, <i>Loci Communes Similium et Dissimilium</i>, French literature, Latin language literature

Journal Title

The Review of English Studies

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

0034-6551
1471-6968

Volume Title

Publisher

Oxford University Press (OUP)