Critical Responses
Critics have generally not been kind to Montagu's work, calling it "tedious," "worthless," and "unintelligible." (Even Montagu's contemporary Sir John Suckling, a fellow follower of the Queen, ridiculed it; in one of Suckling's poems, Apollo asks Montagu if he understands his own work.) Alfred Harbage, in his seminal study Cavalier Drama, considered Montagu's masque typical of most of what is wrong with Cavalier drama. (Critics of Harbage have noted that he blamed Montagu for the faults in plays that were written and performed prior to The Shepherd's Paradise.) Despite its faults, Montagu's work did inspire a brief re-invigoration of the pastoral form in later Caroline drama.
Read more about this topic: The Shepherd's Paradise
Famous quotes containing the words critical and/or responses:
“An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“Apathy is one of the characteristic responses of any living organism when it is subjected to stimuli too intense or too complicated to cope with. The cure for apathy is comprehension.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)