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.

Shakespeare and the Eighteenth-Century Novel: Cultures of Quotation from Samuel Richardson to Jane Austen

It is widely recognised that Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son (1907) made a crucial intervention in the transition from traditional Victorian biography to modern life writing. This innovative text became a classic while Gosse’s other literary biographies were quickly forgotten. This article argues that the radical qualities of Father and Son were forged from Gosse’s position of being influenced by, and at the same time resistant to, a network of family memoirs. His father, Philip, constructed an idealised son who listens intently to his lectures about God’s Creation. Likewise, in her evangelical tracts, his mother Emily depicted young Gosse responding obediently to Christian discipline. Even in Gosse’s Life of Philip Henry Gosse (1890), the father’s voice dominates the son’s authorship, despite the latter’s occasional criticisms and veiled allusions. It was in Father and Son that Gosse finally asserted his freedom from those parental discourses that had defined his persona and determined his prospect...

Life Writing by the Gosse Family: Family Portraits in Scientific, Evangelical and Auto/biographical Discourses

Questions of gender, ethnicity and sexuality have all been raised by novelists intent on rewriting Shakespeare from the position of what have been seen as cultural margins. While discussions of such rewritings are ongoing, few concerted efforts have been made to trace a pattern in the treatment of Shakespearean allusion and adaptation at the hands of British and American writers of the literary mainstream. The present essay sets out to investigate the way in which three such writers —Ian McEwan, Graham Swift, and John Updike— employ allusion to/adaptations of Hamlet in their novels and what their respective stances reveal about their understanding of their role as canonical writers.

/pdf/the-drops-which-fell-from-shakespear-s-pen-hamlet-in-40k2jcs8ti.pdf

"The drops which fell from Shakespear's Pen": Hamlet in Contemporary Fiction

In this chapter I will ask if Iris Murdoch’s narratives of suffering and healing might justifiably make us think of Murdoch as a healer of the soul as much as a moralist. I will consider the narratives of Tamar, a young woman hideously tortured by remorse after the abortion of her baby in The Book and the Brotherhood (1987), and of Edward, a young man similarly tormented after causing the death of his best friend by giving him LSD in The Good Apprentice (1985). Both these narratives relate the recovery of their sufferers to the actions of healers (a priest in Tamar’s case, a psychiatrist in Edward’s). I will also consider two further narratives where healing occurs without the agency of another: that of Stuart, the lonely, troubled and misunderstood older brother in The Good Apprentice, and of Moy, a sixteen-year-old girl in The Green Knight (1993), gripped by what a mental health diagnostician might classify as obsessive compulsive disorder, but who defies such a classification when seen through Murdoch’s compassionate eyes. I make no apology for an approach to Murdoch’s fiction which appears in danger of treating it as a series of case studies: in a groundbreaking approach to D.H. Lawrence, Gerald Doherty shows the extent to which Lawrence uses prior sexological discourse in his fiction.1 I contend that discourses from the two greatest depth-psychologists, Freud and Jung, are embedded in Murdoch’s writing, and that her approach to the suffering of her characters would not have taken the form it has without her deep knowledge of Jung.

Stories, Rituals and Healers in Iris Murdoch’s Fiction

Hamlet has haunted the British novel since there were British novels. In Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), Tom, a foundling, and his surrogate father, Mr. Partridge, attend a performance of Hamlet starring David Garrick (→ Ch. 25) that delights, repulses, and confuses them. Partridge criticizes Garrick’s acting as not acting at all — it seems too natural to be artful. But perhaps Garrick’s prince also strikes him as all too familiar. Partridge, after all, is unwittingly acting in a version of Hamlet as he accompanies Tom on a search for his true father through a parade of ghostly pretenders (cf. Brook-Davies 1989).

Hamlet in the British Novel

Fielding's "Tom Jones" - encountering the king Dickens - "Great Expectations" and the ghost of the father Edmund Gosse's "Father and Son" - remembering the mother Iris Murdoch's "The Black Prince" - overthrowing the tyrant and inscribing the feminine.

Douglas Brooks-Davies

Papers

Fielding, Dickens, Gosse, Iris Murdoch and Oedipal Hamlet