ANNE BARTON Anne Barton 1933–2013
ANNE BARTON Anne Barton 1933–2013 IN 1953 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY, then, as now, one of the two leading academic Shakespeare journals in the world, published an article concisely titled ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’.1 The list of contributors identified the author as ‘Miss Bobbyann Roesen, a Senior at Bryn Mawr’, who ‘is the first under- graduate to contribute an essay to Shakespeare Quarterly. She attended the Shakespeare Institute at Stratford-upon-Avon in the summer of 1952 and hopes to pursue graduate studies in Renaissance literature at Oxford or Cambridge.’2 Looking back forty years later, the former Miss Roesen, now Anne Barton, had ‘a few qualms and misgivings’ about reprinting the article in a collection of some of her pieces. As usual, her estimate of her own work was accurate, if too modest: As an essay drawing fresh attention to a play extraordinarily neglected or mis- represented before that date, it does not seem to me negligible. Both its high estimate of the comedy and the particular reading it advances are things in which I still believe. But, however influential it may have been, it is now a period piece, written in a style all too redolent of a youthful passion for Walter Pater.3 Undoubtedly influential and far from negligible, the article not only continues to read well, for all its Paterisms, but also continues to seem an extraordinary accomplishment for an undergraduate. There is, through- out, a remarkable ability to close-read Shakespeare carefully and with sus- tained sensitivity, to see how the language is working on the page and how 1 Bobbyann Roesen, ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 4 (1953), 411–26.
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