English 3336 Restoration and Eighteenth Century Drama and Theatre
Prompt # 22
24 October 2012

Reading The Great Favourite, or The Duke of Lerma

The text

The text, photocopied from Anthology #13 (the only one to include it) and scanned, is available on line, here. It's in two forms -- one a double-page spread, the other a single page. Choose the one that's most comfortable to read on your own screen. You can also consult the hard copy in the library, if you're able to get there first; it's on 3-day reserve.

I've included not only Womersley's introduction to the play, but his introduction to the whole anthology, because it is a useful source for contextualizing the play and for seeing how plays are selected in such cases.

A reading diary

As I said in the last prompt,

The main thing to do in reading a text like this as part of exploring a new form is to keep a diary composed mainly of questions and expressions of surprise or interest. On Friday morning you should bring a reading diary to class. One way to keep such a diary is to say you're going to write a comment of some kind at a regular interval -- say, twice a page or every 50 lines or so -- and if nothing's occurred to you by the time you hit your limit, inkshed (simply write off the top of your head) for three or four minutes, and then start a new chunk of reading.
You can do this (as I will) by reading it next to a computer and making my notes on a file there (or you can do it by hand; if you do, make it legible). If you do it on a computer, you can then, if you like, post your completed notes to the Forum that's beneath the page with links to the text. I'll be keeping my diary there, so you can see at least one example of what this sort of thing might look like. The crucial thing is to read, as my colleague Thom Parkhill said once, "suspiciously." Be aware of what puzzles you, what surprises you, what you expect and what you're stumped by, and write it all down.

Work for a couple of hours on this, and bring a copy of your diary, however far you get in the process, to class Friday morning.


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