The Ghost behind the Masks: The Victorian Poets and Shakespeare

by W. David Shaw

Overview

In The Ghost behind the Masks, W. David Shaw traces Shakespeare’s influence on nine Victorian poets: Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Christina Rossetti, Thomas Hardy, Matthew Arnold, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Algernon Swinburne, Arthur Hugh Clough, and George Meredith. Often, he writes, the transparency of Shakespeare's influence on Victorian poets and the degree of their engagement with Shakespeare exist in inverse ratio. Instead of imitating a play by Shakespeare or merely quoting his lines, a Victorian poet may embrace more elusive elements of rhetoric and style, adapting them to his or her own ends.

Shaw argues that the most Shakespearean attribute of the Victorian poets is not their addiction to any particular trope or figure of speech but their reticence, the classical restraint of their great monologues, and their sudden descent from grandeur to simplicity. He explores such topics as man-made law versus natural right, Stoic fatalism versus self-reliance, and the sanity of lunatics, lovers, and poets versus the madness of commonplace minds.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813935447
Publisher:	University of Virginia Press
Publication date:	06/02/2014
Series:	Victorian Literature and Culture Series
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.50(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

W. David Shaw, Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Toronto and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is the author of numerous books, most recently Secrets of the Oracle: A History of Wisdom from Zeno to Yeats.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

Part I Poetic Beginnings

1 Word and Love Games: Berowne and Ida's Prince 9

2 The Trespass of Intimacy: Artists in Crime 20

Part II Hamlet's Afterlives

3 Toils of Face: Dickens, Hamlet, and Malvolio 47

4 The Angel of Dust: A God in Exile 59

Part IIII Shades of King Lear

5 Thou, Nature, Art My Goddess: The Garden and the Health 83

6 A Choral Mind Trap: Hardy and the Homilists 94

7 Wisdom and Wit: Lear's Fool to Dagonet 108

8 The End of Illusion: Childe Roland and Caliban 123

Part IV Grace and Death

9 A Toil of Grace: Cleopatra and Her Heirs 125

10 Off the Edge: End Games and Elegy 164

11 The Hills Are Shadows: Time the Devourer 193

12 Oracle Meets Wit: The Promised End 220

Notes 253

Selected Bibliography 263

Index 277

Editorial Reviews

Shaw's book builds on the important, much-explored theme of literary connections between and appropriations of Shakespeare's work by Victorian poets.... [T]he inclusion of Hopkins and Clough... proves particularly refreshing. This book is of interest to scholars of the Shakespearean canon and... a helpful addition to the study of Victorian literature.

Vict. Inst. Journal

This book is just what one would expect from a scholar like David Shaw, who has for many decades been one of our most consistently penetrating critics of Victorian poetry: it is learned, illuminating, and frequently profound. The book makes a valuable and truly original contribution to our understanding not only of major Victorian poets but of Shakespeare.

Erik Gray

Shaw's erudite and finely attuned ear discerns the ghostliest of Shakespearean resonances in subtle close readings of seven Victorian poets.

David G. Riede

"This book is just what one would expect from a scholar like David Shaw, who has for many decades been one of our most consistently penetrating critics of Victorian poetry: it is learned, illuminating, and frequently profound. The book makes a valuable and truly original contribution to our understanding not only of major Victorian poets but of Shakespeare. "—Erik Gray, Columbia University, author of Milton and the Victorians

"Shaw's erudite and finely attuned ear discerns the ghostliest of Shakespearean resonances in subtle close readings of seven Victorian poets. "—David G. Riede, Ohio State University

"Shaw's book builds on the important, much-explored theme of literary connections between and appropriations of Shakespeare's work by Victorian poets.... [T]he inclusion of Hopkins and Clough... proves particularly refreshing. This book is of interest to scholars of the Shakespearean canon and... a helpful addition to the study of Victorian literature. "—author of Vict. Inst. Journal

From the Publisher