Victorian Shakespeare, Volume 2 Other Books by the Editors
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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.