Victorian Appropriations of Shakespeare: George Eliot, A.C. Swinburne, Robert Browning and Charles DickinsonRobert Sawyer
Book Review
Working at the forefront of "appropriation" studies, Robert Sawyer examines the use, or appropriation, of Shakespeare on the part of four eminent Victorians to demonstrate how critics, poets, and novelists engage Shakespeare to shape themselves and the mid 19th-centurycultural climate in which they work. The notion of Shakespearean appropriation itself presents an initial challenge, as the field is still settling into a set of consistent practices and terms. Sawyer clarifies, proposing to examine a series of “seizure(s)” of Shakespeare, on the part of George Eliot, A. C. Swinburne, Robert Browning, and Charles Dickens. Part borrowing and part stealing, these seizures involve the four authors' "use of Shakespeare's works to question their culture's notions of gender, desire, identity, and the family" and "to lend cultural currency to their own works" (16). Sawyer also considers the ways in which each author, particularly Brow-, wrestles with Shakespeare as a poetic predecessor. Supplementing Harold Bloom's anxiety of influence model with more recent work from Gary Taylor, Marianne Novy, Christy Desmet, and others, Sawyer highlights the cultural currency Victorians could confer on themselves and their writing by linking it to Shakespeare's plays and to Shakespeare's towering reputation. Chapter 1 examines George Eliot's complex and layered use of Hamlet as a model for the character Daniel Deronda in her novel of the same name. Tracing Eliot's interest in Shakespeare as a "sympathetic" artistic consciousness through Ludwig Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity, Sawyer argues that Deronda's sensitivity and thoughtfulness constitute an appropriation of both Shakespeare and Hamlet. The melancholy Dane serves as a blueprint for Deronda, whose femininity draws on new readings of the play that emphasize Hamlet's struggle with irresolution and other "feminine" traits. Unlike Hamlet—, however, Deronda "resolves his identity crisis in the long-delayed reunion with his absent mother" (34); thus, the appropriation, Sawyer argues, works in both directions, and Eliot exerts her own influence on Shakespeare: she effectively re-writes Hamlet "from a female point of view" and ushers in not only an era of feminized Hamlets in performance, but also a new vogue of females playing Hamlet on stage (46). Sawyer then moves on to Eliot's relationship with G H. Lewes, demonstrating how Lewes finds in Shakespeare a kind of character model for Eliot herself : Lewes, helping to shape the novelist's literary legacy, "subtly invokes George Eliot as the heir to the Shakespeare/Austen tradition of sympathetic character portrayal” (28). In chapter 2, Sawyer plucks A. C. Swinburne and his A Study of Shakespeare from the wake of T.S. Eliot's demolishing dismissal and rejuvenates him as an important, perhaps even formative, early critic of Shakespeare. While other Victorian critics busied themselves with ridding Shakespeare's fecund garden of its more unsettling weeds—latent homosexuality, latent anti-nationalism—Swinburne reads the bard against the grain to find support of his own subversive sexuality and aesthetic politics. Sawyer is at his best in this chapter, which raises a number of compelling issues in Swinburne's work, from Bakhtin's dialogics to the early rumblings of gender studies, in order to point out how Swinburne's subtle '"double-voice" opens up new critical spaces in Shakespeare. Sawyer also touches on the power of Shakespeare to grant legitimacy and cultural currency to those who can manage to make Shakespeare speak for their own causes. Appropriation here is a matter of genuine political and social force, in an early instance of what has since gathered considerable momentum in the widespread use of Shakespeare to legitimate divergent and often contradictory agendas. Where local or personal appropriations of Shakespeare tend to affect immediate circumstances or particular people (George Eliot and Robert Browning), Swinburne's appropriation, with its subtleties and its dialogic ambiguities, reverberates more widely Moreover, because Swinburne speaks simultaneously to the conservative standard and to the emerging fringe, his critical appropriation, Sawyer notes, does double duty; it holds the attention of the status quo while making space for radical departures into new territory. Chapter 3 considers Robert Browning's use of Shakespeare first as a model poet and later as a peer or even a rival. The chapter traces Browning's career as he moves from an early interest in the "subjective" poetry of Shelley to an unsuccessful foray into playwriting, from which he emerges having acquired a sense of the "objective" mood of drama and a reverence for Shakespeare. With careful readings of ''Childe Roland" and "Caliban Upon Setebos," Sawyer suggests that Browning fashioned himself first as Shakespeare's equal and then as his dramatic predecessor. The chapter's most compelling connection is between Browning and Caliban, whose irreverence toward Prospero is not only justified in the poem, but also outright admirable in a cultural climate that had begun to regard slavery with growing revulsion. With the help of critics and fans, Browning eventually surpasses Shakespeare as a national poet in whom the troublesome ambiguities of Shakespeare's sexuality are replaced with Browning's wholesome and "highly publicized" relationship with Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 13). Chapter 4 examines Charles Dickens's struggle with his private and his public life, suggesting that Dickens's public readings of his work effectively "collapsed the distinction not only between private reading and public performance, but also between his private family, his novelistic family, and his public family-the admiring populace" (137). By reading the Gradgrinds in Hard Times against Poionius, Laertes, and OpheIia in Hamlet, Sawyer uncovers a series of parallels linking "Shakespeare's work, Dickens's art, and the novelist's own family life" (119). The comparisons of Dickens to Polonius are especially adept and revealing. The chapter also addresses the era's concern with drama on the "stage" versus the "page," discussing the Victorians' general distaste for theater and preference for texts, undefiled by the mouths and gestures of actors-a particularly intriguing issue today, given the growing interest in performance as an indispensable component of the study of Shakespeare. Sawyer's tour is a succinct and compelling consideration of four major Victorian writers on its own account, offering non-specialists a crash course on the cultural and intellectual climate of the mid 19th century. In particular, it presents Shakespeareans with a valuable introduction to an important era in Shakespearean criticism and a glimpse of early trends in critical readings of the plays that are of immediate interest today. The account of Swinburne's A Study of Shakespeare reminds us that the homoerotic energies at the heart of I Henry IV are not: the discovery of late 20th-century accounts, and that the flexibility of Shakespeare's plays, their adaptability to utterly contradictory readings, fetches its first head and spring from an era of generally conservative criticism. Victorian Appropriations is also a focused and straightforward exploration of "appropriation" providing a valuable instance of a sustained critical exercise. As the study of Shakespearean appropriation gathers force, Sawyer's book will serve as an important early landmark. Matt Kozusko, Urninus College, South Atlantic Review More About this title To see a full description of this book, search our online database
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