Victorian Shakespeare Volume 2: Literature and Culture

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

PASCALE AEBISCHER Lecturer in Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature, University of Leicester, UK PHILIP DAVIS Professor in the English Department, University of Liverpool, UK CHRISTOPHER DECKER Assistant Professor of English, Boston University, USA ROBERT DOUGLAS-FAIRHURST Fellow and Tutor in English, Magdalen College, University of Oxford, UK JOHN GLAVIN Professor of English, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA DIANA E. HENDERSON Associate Professor of Literature, M.I.T PHILIP HORNE Professor of English, University College London, UK JULIET JOHN Senior Lecturer in English, University of Liverpool, UK DANIEL KARLIN Professor of English, University College London, UK FRANCIS O'GORMAN Lecturer in Victorian Literature, University of Leeds, UK CLARE PETTITT Fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge, UK SASHA ROBERTS Lecturer in English, University of Kent, UK ANN THOMPSON Professor of English Language and Literature, King's College, London, UK.