A Kind of Power: The Shakespeare-Dickens Analogy (Jayne Lectures for 1974)

78pp.  Blue cloth-covered boards. lettering in gilt front and spine.  8vo.  Cloth is a little faded, rubbed at corners and spine ends.  Stamped ‘Review Copy’ on the front free endpaper, with some pencil annotations else internally neat, clean, bright and tight.  In its original paper dust jacket, shelf worn and lightly marked, bumped with a couple of small nicks on edges.  

Amongst English plays of past centuries, Shakespeare’s plays are among the most performed.  And among the older English novelists, Dickens is the most widely read.  The works of these two towers of English literature appear wildly different that it at first seems impossible ascribe their continuing popularity to common characteristics yet Harbage, an eminent Shakespearean scholar and once professor of English Literature at Harvard, in three chapters, finds cogent similarities that link the two.