Read more
The eighteenth century has long been acknowledged as a pivotal period in Shakespeare's reception, transforming a playwright requiring 'improvement' into a national poet whose every word was sacred. Scholars have examined the contribution of performances, adaptations, criticism and editing to this process of transformation, but the crucial role of fiction remains overlooked. Shakespeare and the Eighteenth-Century Novel reveals for the first time the prevalence, and the importance, of fictional characters' direct quotations from Shakespeare. Quoting characters ascribe emotional and moral authority to Shakespeare, redeploy his theatricality, and mock banal uses of his words; by shaping in this way what is considered valuable about Shakespeare, the novel accrues new cultural authority of its own. Shakespeare underwrites, and is underwritten by, the eighteenth-century novel, and this book reveals the lasting implications for both of their reputations.
List of contents
1. Introduction; 2. Quotation culture; 3. Shakespeare's novel authority; 4. Theatrical Shakespeare; 5. Banal Shakespeare; 6. Ann Radcliffe's Gothic epigraphs; 7. Jane Austen and eighteenth-century Shakespeare; 8. Conclusions; Notes; Bibliography; Index.
About the author
Kate Rumbold is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Birmingham. She has published widely on the quotation and reception of Shakespeare, with particular focus on the eighteenth century, and is the co-author, with Kate McLuskie, of Cultural Value in Twenty-First-Century England: The Case of Shakespeare (2014).
Summary
This study shows that Shakespeare is a very significant presence in major novels of the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, from epigraphs to descriptions of performances of his plays, and from allusions in polite conversation to Shakespearean knowledge as a mark of erudition among men and women alike.
