A Critical, Old-Spelling Edition of The Birth of Merlin (Q1662)

Abstract

Credited on its first title page to William Shakespeare and William Rowley, The Birth of Merlin continues to provoke speculation about its place in the Shakespeare ‘Apocrypha’. The play is an imaginative re-working of the story of Merlin the Magician and his part in the struggle against the Saxon invasion of Britain. It contains not only scenes of love, war, and court politics, but a devil, a clown, and an unusual number of spectacular stage effects. This edition seeks to provide contexts for the play’s diverse elements (chronicle history, romance, spectacle, and comedy), and considers its relationships with a wide variety of texts from Geoffrey of Monmouth and the English prose Brut to Shakespeare’s Henry VIII. This book, originally published in paperback in 1991 under the ISBN 978-0-947623-34-0, was made Open Access in 2024 as part of the MHRA Revivals programme.