Shakespeare and Victorian Women

The first full-length study of Shakespeare's influence on Victorian women writers, actresses and readers.

Gail Marshall (Author)

9780521515238, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 19 March 2009

224 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.6 cm, 0.5 kg

Review of the hardback: 'This book represents a fresh study of the impact Shakespeare had on the lives and work of Victorian women.' Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen

Much has been written on the cultural significance of Shakespeare, his influence on particular periods, and his appropriation and subsequent transformation. However, no book until now has specifically addressed the nature of the relationship between Shakespeare and Victorian women. In this book, Gail Marshall gives an account of the actresses who played an essential part in redeeming Shakespeare for the Victorian stage, the writers who embraced him as part of the texture of their own writing as well as their personal lives, and those women readers who, educated to be alert to the female voices of Shakespeare, often went on to re-read Shakespeare for their own ends. Dr Marshall argues that women form a fundamental part of the narrative of how the Victorian Shakespeare was made, and that translation, rather than terms such as appropriation or adaptation, is the most appropriate metaphor for understanding the symbiosis between Shakespeare and Victorian women.

Introduction
1. Shakespeare and Victorian girls' education
2. Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Shakespeare: translating the language of intimacy
3. 'She had made him, as it were, the air she lived in': Shakespeare, Helen Faucit and Fanny Kemble
4. George Eliot and Shakespeare: defamiliarising 'second nature'
5. Socialism, nationalism and Stratford: Shakespeare and the New Woman at the fin de siècle
6. Shakespeare and the actress in the 1890s.

Subject Areas: Shakespeare studies & criticism [DSGS], Literary studies: general [DSB], Literature & literary studies [D]