Victorian Shakespeare Volume 2 Literature and Culture [Hardcover]

What did the Victorians think of Shakespeare? The twelve essays gathered here offer some answers, through close examination of works by leading nineteenth-century novelists, poets and critics including Dickens, Trollope, Eliot, Tennyson, Browning and Ruskin. Shakespeare provided the Victorians with ways of thinking about the authority of the past, about the emergence of a new mass culture, about the relations between artistic and industrial production, about the nature of creativity, about racial and sexual difference, and about individual and national identity.Foreword; N.Auerbach Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors References List of Illustrations Introduction; A.Poole Othello Redux?: Scott's Kenilworth and the trickiness of race on the nineteenth-century stage; D.E.Henderson 'To make the situation natural': Othello at Mid-Century J.Glavin Dickens and Hamlet; J.John Shakespeare at the Great Exhibition of 1851; C.Pettitt Implicit and Explicit Reason: George Eliot and Shakespeare; P.Davis 'Where did she get hold of that?' Shakespeare in The Tragic Muse ; P.Horne Shakespeare's Weeds: Tennyson, Elegy and Allusion; R.Douglas-Fairhurst Shakespeare and the Death of Tennyson; C. Decker 'The Names': Robert Browning's 'Shakesperean Show'; D.Karlin Mary Cowden Clarke: Marriage, Gender and the Victorian Woman Critic of Shakespeare; A.Thompson& S.Roberts Shakespeare, the Actress and the Prostitute: Professional Respectability and Private Shame in George Vandenhoff's Leaves from an Actor's Notebook ; P.Aebischer 'The clue of Shakespearian power over me': Ruskin, Shakespeare, and Influence; F.O'Gorman Index

' Victorian Shakespeare is not free from a tendency to make history a refuge from judgement, but it does richly advance our understanding of how Shakespeare made us and how we have made him.' - Times Literary Supplement

PASCALE AEBISCHER Lecturer in Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature, University of Leicester, UK PHILIP DAVIS Professor in the Englisl³$