Victorian Shakespeare, Volume 2 Other Books by the Editors

Victorian Shakespeare, Volume 2 Other books by the editors:

GAIL MARSHALL:

ACTRESSES ON THE VICTORIAN STAGE: Feminine Performance and the Galatea Myth VICTORIAN FICTION GEORGE ELIOT (ed.)

ADRIAN POOLE:

GISSING IN CONTEXT TRAGEDY: Shakespeare and the Greek Example SHAKESPEARE: Coriolanus HENRY JAMES THE OXFORD BOOK OF CLASSICAL VERSE IN TRANSLATION (ed. with Jeremy Maule) SHAKESPEARE AND THE VICTORIANS Victorian Shakespeare, Volume 2 Literature and Culture

Edited by

Gail Marshall Senior Lecturer in Victorian Literature School of English University of Leeds Adrian Poole Reader in English and Comparative Literature University of Cambridge

Foreword by Nina Auerbach

Published in association with the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London Editorial matter and selection Q Gail Marshall and Adrian Poole, 2003. All chapters Q Palgrave Macmillan 2003. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2003 978-1-4039-1117-9 Foreword Q Nina Auerbach 2003 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2003 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. MacmillanT is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-51054-2 ISBN 978-0-230-50414-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230504141 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Victorian Shakespeare / edited by Gail Marshall, Adrian Poole. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. Contents: –v. 2. Literature and culture ISBN978- 1-4039-1117-7 (v. 2) 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616–Criticism and interpretation– History–19th century. 2. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616–Appreciation– Great Britain. 3. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616–Stage history–1800- 1950. 4. Criticism–Great Britain–History–19th century. I. Marshall, Gail, 1965- II. Poole, Adrian. PR2969.V47 2003 822.3’3–dc21 2003046950 10987654321 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 Contents

List of Illustrations vii Foreword by Nina Auerbach viii

Acknowledgments xi Notes on the Contributors xii A Note on References xv

Introduction, Adrian Poole 1 1 Othello Redux?: Scott’s Kenilworth and the Trickiness of ‘Race’ on the Nineteenth-century Stage 14 Diana E. Henderson 2 ‘To Make the Situation Natural’: Othello at Mid-Century 30 John Glavin 3 Dickens and Hamlet 46 Juliet John 4 Shakespeare at the Great Exhibition of 1851 61 Clare Pettitt 5 Implicit and Explicit Reason: George Eliot and Shakespeare 84 Philip Davis 6 ‘Where Did She Get Hold of That?’ Shakespeare in Henry James’s The Tragic Muse 100 Philip Horne 7 Shakespeare’s Weeds: Tennyson, Elegy and Allusion 114 Robert Douglas-Fairhurst 8 Shakespeare and the Death of Tennyson 131 Christopher Decker

v vi Contents

9 ‘The Names’: Robert Browning’s ‘Shaksperean Show’ 150 Danny Karlin 10 Mary Cowden Clarke: Marriage, Gender and the Victorian Woman Critic of Shakespeare 170 Ann Thompson and Sasha Roberts 11 Shakespeare, the Actress and the Prostitute: Professional Respectability and Private Shame in George Vandenhoff’s Leaves from an Actor’s Notebook 190 Pascale Aebischer 12 ‘The Clue of Shakespearian Power over Me’: Ruskin, Shakespeare, and Influence 203 Francis O’Gorman

Selected Bibliography 219 Index 224 List of Illustrations

4.1 ‘Unfinished statue of Shakspeare, from the Stratford bust’, by John Bell (Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue of the Great Exhibition, 1851, vol. II, p. 847) 62 4.2 ‘The Shakspeare Shield’, by Leighton (Luke Limner) (Illustrated London News, 6 September 1851, p. 311) 63 4.3 Sculpture of Titania, by J. G. Lough (Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue of the Great Exhibition, 1851, vol. II, pp. 850–1) 64 4.4 Sculpture of Puck, by J. G. Lough (Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue of the Great Exhibition, 1851, vol. II, pp. 850–1) 65 4.5 Sculpture of Ariel, by J. G. Lough (Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue of the Great Exhibition, 1851, vol. II, pp. 850–1) 66 4.6 ‘Puck throned on a Mushroom’, by Mr Pitts (Art Journal Illustrated Catalogue of the Great Exhibition, 1851, p. 259) 69 4.7 Electroplate vase with statues of Newton, Bacon, Shakespeare and Watt, surmounted by Prince Albert (Art Journal Illustrated Catalogue of the Great Exhibition, 1851, p. 195) 71 4.8 ‘Dinner time at the Crystal Palace’ (Punch, 5 July 1851) 78

All illustrations are reproduced by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.

vii Foreword Nina Auerbach

Many of our contemporaries assume that the Victorian Shakespeare was a bully, an Imperialist insignia, an apologist for Anglo-Saxon supremacy, a particularly grandiose nineteenth-century ideal of Britan- nia. To actual Victorians, however, at least for those who were writers, Shakespeare was often a thorn in the Establishment side, as the essays in this stunning collection show. Far from being a triumphant vessel of unilateral Bardolatry, implicitly belittling cultural outsiders, the Victorian Shakespeare spoke in opaque language for the silenced dispos- sessed. The tragic star of this collection is not royal. Kings Macbeth and Lear appear only incidentally, while Prince Hamlet sweeps in largely to be mocked by Dickens in his populist persona. It is Othello who stars in three of the most striking essays, but he is not the luminous black champion we are familiar with from Laurence Fishburne’s 1995 film performance. Victorian Shakespearean productions featured a hero critics now paradoxically call ‘the white Othello’, an aggressively non- black husband who was both a concession to British racial taboos and a reminder of its denied voices. Diana Henderson’s ‘Othello Redux?’ refracts Othello through Walter Scott’s Kenilworth, whereby Othello’s suppressed blackness implicitly evokes the suppressed Scottish nation, recently absorbed by the English crown. In the same vein, John Glavin’s rich ‘To make the situation natural’ transmutes this non-black black man through Trollope’s devi- ous novel, He Knew He Was Right. Trollope and Glavin’s combined wizardry turns Othello’s repressed colour into a conduit for the voices of women who have no power over their stories. In both readings, a troubling hero becomes, not a symbol of imperial homogenisation as we might think, but an emissary for the excluded. Pascale Aebischer’s startling account of George Vandenhoff’s Leaves from an Actor’s Notebook finds in the despised genre of theatrical memoirs an anecdote about Othello that speaks for actors’ tainted lives. Embellishing the legend of a mad actor who begins to live his Othello, a legend Ronald Colman’s Oscar-winning performance in A Double Life (1947) immortalised in American film, Aebischer unravels a memorable parable about performers’ hybrid natures, at once pure and whores, artists and mountebanks, cynosures and outcasts. Othello, who, it

viii Foreword ix might seem, epitomised Victorian exclusions, becomes a vehicle for uncomfortable identities beyond simulated whiteness. Other essays focus similarly on Shakespearean discomfort. Clare Pet- titt shows that even in the 1851 Great Exhibition, that spectacle of British technological supremacy, the welter of Shakespearean artefacts coalesced into an icon more fragile than imperial, whose original genius dissipates in cheap copies. As Francis O’Gorman’s Ruskin grows old, he denounces as fraudulent Shakespeare’s heroic influence on England’s broken manhood. For Juliet John, Hamlet exists only so that democratic Dickens can laugh his outdated Romantic elitism off the stage. In the same aggressively modern spirit, Victorian poets who seemed to celebrate Shakespeare relegated him in their imagery to opacity or the grave. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s Tennyson plants his Shakespearean allusions in weediness, decay, things rank and gross in nature; Danny Karlin reads a particularly convoluted sonnet by Browning in which Shakespeare dissolves into the lost esoterica of Hebraic religion. In all these readings, Bards shun Bardolatry. Their Shakespeare is an out- growth of the lost, the putrid, the arcane. Perhaps, like King Hamlet, he should remain underground. The only wholehearted celebrants in this collection are two woman writers: Mary Cowden Clarke and George Eliot. Ann Thompson and Sasha Roberts’s testimonial to Mary Cowden Clarke shows that through her prolific Shakespeare scholarship, alone and in collaboration with her husband, she became that Victorian rarity, a wife with a voice of her own. In her own time if not in ours, Shakespeare (along with her encouraging husband) lent her the prestige that made her welcome in the men’s club of scholarship. With seeming ease, she slid into an inclusion for which most diligent Victorian women struggled vainly. In a voice almost as shrewd and subtle as its subject’s, Philip Davis’s ‘Implicit and Explicit Reason: George Eliot and Shakespeare’ teases out the Shakespearean echoes, not only in George Eliot’s wise saws, but in her penetration of her characters’ secret, shameful thoughts. For Davis, George Eliot is Shakespearean not in her theatricality, but in her secrecy; through Shakespearean empathy, she constructs the pervading persona of ‘George Eliot’, who lives both within and beyond her characters. Davis’s is not the bombastic Shakespeare of ‘what ho’s’ and trumpet fanfares, but the obscure creeper into unacknowledged places to which, centuries later, he leads a psychological novelist for her penetration. For the most part women were beyond the pale of Victorian emi- nence. It is appropriate for this surprising collection that only women, x Foreword

Mary Cowden Clarke and George Eliot, find unambiguous authorisation in Shakespeare. The subject of this volume is an uncomfortable figure who arouses, not the dread and fear of kings, but the greater dread and fear of unacknowledged voices. Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Warwick Gould, Director of the Institute of English Studies at the School of Advanced Studies, University of London, for the invitation to hold the conference on which the papers gathered in these volumes are based, and both him and his colleagues, especially Joanne Nixon and Michael Baron, for their support in making arrangements for it. We are very grateful to all the contributors who helped to make this conference such a success, and to the British Acad- emy for a grant that supported it. We thank Josie Dixon and Emily Rosser at Palgrave Macmillan for the initial encouragement they gave this project. To our editor Emily Rosser we owe particular thanks for her firm guidance and warm co-operation throughout its development, and to Paula Kennedy for her work in seeing it through to completion.

xi Notes on the Contributors

Pascale Aebischer is a Lecturer in Shakespeare and Renaissance Litera- ture at the University of Leicester. She is the author of Shakespeare’s Violated Bodies: Stage and Screen Performance (forthcoming 2004), and the co-editor of Remaking Shakespeare: Performance across Media, Genres and Cultures (2003) and Personation and Performance: Staging the Early Modern Subject (2003). She has published essays on drama theory, Res- toration comedy and Henry Green.

Philip Davis is a Professor in the English Department at the University of Liverpool. His most recent publications include Sudden Shakespeare (1996) and The Victorians 1830–1880, published in 2002 as one of the first volumes in the new Oxford English Literary History series.

Christopher Decker is Assistant Professor of English at Boston Univer- sity. He was a Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1994 to 1998. He has written on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English poetry, and his critical edition of Edward FitzGerald’s Ruba´iya´t of Omar Khayya´m was published by the University Press of Virginia in 1997.

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst is Fellow and Tutor in English at Magdalen College, Oxford. He is the author of Victorian Afterlives: the Shaping of Influence in Nineteenth-Century Literature (2002), and is currently re- searching a book on Victorian magic.

John Glavin is Professor of English at Georgetown University in Wash- ington, DC, where he also directs the John Carroll Scholars Program. He is the author of After Dickens: Reading, Adaptation and Performance (1999) and editor of the forthcoming Dickens on Screen (2003). He is currently at work on a study of Shakespeare’s ‘Italian’ plays.

Diana Henderson, Associate Professor of Literature at MIT, is the author of Passion Made Public: Elizabethan Lyric, Gender, and Performance (1995), and numerous essays on early modern drama, poetry, and domestic culture. Recent articles include contributions to Shakespeare: the Movie, 2; Shakespeare After Mass Media; Shakespeare and his Contemporaries in Performance; Virginia Woolf: Reading the Renaissance; and several of

xii Notes on the Contributors xiii

Blackwell’s Companion anthologies. She is currently editing Blackwell’s Concise Companion to Shakespeare on Screen and completing her book Uneasy Collaborations: Working with Shakespeare across Time and Media.

Philip Horne is Professor of English at University College London. He has written and published extensively on Henry James, most notably Henry James and Revision (1990), and Henry James: a Life in Letters (1999).

Juliet John is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Liverpool. She is author of Dickens’s Villains: Melodrama, Character, Popular Culture (2001), editor of Cult Criminals: the Newgate Novels (1998) and co-editor (with Alice Jenkins) of Rethinking Victorian Culture (2000) and Rereading Victorian Fiction (2000). She is currently working on a book entitled Dickens and Popular Culture.

Danny Karlin is Professor of English at University College London. He is the author of numerous books and articles about Robert Browning, including The Courtship of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett (1985) and Browning’s Hatreds (1993). He is the editor of the Penguin Book of Victorian Verse (1997).

Gail Marshall is Senior Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of Leeds. She is the author of Actresses on the Victorian Stage: Feminine Performance and the Galatea Myth (1998) and Victorian Fiction (2002), and editor of George Eliot (2003). Her research interests include the novel, women’s writing, and Victorian theatrical culture, and she is currently writing a monograph on the relationships between Shakespeare and Victorian women.

Francis O’Gorman is Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of Leeds. His books include John Ruskin (1999), Late Ruskin: New Contexts (2001), and a collection, edited with Dinah Birch, Ruskin and Gender (2002). Forthcoming books include the Blackwell’s Annotated Anthology of Victorian Poetry (2004) and a study of Ruskin, Venice, and the Idea of Influence.

Clare Pettitt is a Fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge, and author of a monograph on the Great Exhibition of 1851 (forthcoming 2004).

Adrian Poole is Reader in English and Comparative Literature at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Trinity College. His books xiv Notes on the Contributors include Gissing in Context (1975), Tragedy: Shakespeare and the Greek Example (1987), Henry James (1991), and Shakespeare and the Victorians (2003). He has edited novels by Dickens, Stevenson and James, and co- edited (with Jeremy Maule) The Oxford Book of Classical Verse in Transla- tion (1995). He is currently working on a book on ‘Witnessing Tragedy’.

Sasha Roberts is Lecturer in English at the University of Kent. She is the author of Reading Shakespeare’s Poem in Early Modern England (2003), and Writers and their Work: Romeo and Juliet (1998), co-editor with Ann Thompson of Women Reading Shakespeare 1660–1900: an Anthology of Criticism (1997), and has published numerous articles on Shakespeare, the history of reading, and early modern visual culture. She is currently working on a book on The Formation of Literary Taste in Early Modern Manuscript Culture.

Ann Thompson is Professor of English Language and Literature at King’s College London. She is a General Editor of the Arden Shakespeare (third series), for which she is co-editing Hamlet with Neil Taylor (forthcoming 2004). Her publications include Shakespeare’s Chaucer (1978), Shakespeare, Meaning and Metaphor (co-authored with John O. Thomp- son, 1987), an edition of The Taming of the Shrew (1984, second edition 2003) and an anthology of criticism, Women Reading Shakespeare 1660–1900, co-edited with Sasha Roberts (1997). A Note on References

All references to Shakespeare are to The Riverside Shakespeare, general and textual editor, G. Blakemore Evans, with the assistance of J. J. M. Tobin, 2nd edn (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).