THE SEVENTEENTH- and eighteenth-century adaptations of
Shakespearean plays have never received much critical
attention. Except for Dryden All for Love, which owes
so little to Shakespeare that it may almost be regarded as an
independent play, the altered plays have little literary merit.
Shakespearean scholars understandably have regarded the altera-
tions only as mutilations and have treated them with scorn. This
attitude, however understandable, leads to an indulgence of
questionable value. The plays in their altered form can be useful.
Each adapter must have felt that he was improving the original
play, that his version was a more polished and better constructed
piece than Shakespeare's. By the changes he made and the details
he kept he disclosed his literary values. The altered plays thus
provide a kind of laboratory manual of the diction, dramatic
theory, and dramatic practice of the age in which they were
written: they disclose writers surveying the literature of an
earlier time, selecting the parts they especially value, and pre-
serving those parts while removing the marks of a "barbaric"
age.

It is my intention in this study to examine the alterations to
determine, if possible, what the adapters thought they were
doing, to discover their motivations for sacrificing parts of
Shakespeare that we particularly value. I do not wish to docu-
ment atrocities or to exclaim at the presumption and bad taste
of a vitiated age, but to seek comprehension, to understand the
assurance and vitality of the eighteenth-century attitude.

I have chosen to concentrate on the eighteenth century rather
than repeat work that has already been done on the Restoration
adaptations. Readers interested in a more detailed treatment of

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