Emily Dickinson's Shakespeare
"One of the messages that Emily Dickinson wanted to communicate to the world was her great love of William Shakespeare - her letters abound with references to him and his works. This book explores the many implications of her admiration for the Bard." "Paraic Finnerty clarifies the essential role that Shakespeare had in Dickinson's life by locating her allusions to his writings within a nineteenth-century American context and by treating reading as a practice that is shaped, to a large extent, by culture. In the process, he throws new light on Shakespeare's multifaceted presence in Dickinson's world: in education, theater, newspapers, public lectures, reading clubs, and literary periodicals." "Through analysis of letters, journals, diaries, records, periodicals, newspapers, and marginalia, Finnerty juxtaposes Dickinson's engagement with Shakespeare with the responses of her contemporaries. Her Shakespeare emerges as an immoral dramatist and highly moral poet; a highbrow symbol of class and cultivation and a lowbrow popular entertainer; an impetus behind the emerging American theater criticism and an English author threatening American creativity; a writer culturally approved for women and yet one whose authority women often appropriated to critique their culture. Such a context allows the explication of Dickinson's specific references to Shakespeare and further conjecture about how she most likely read him."--Jacket
Print Book, English, ©2006
University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, ©2006
viii, 267 pages ; 24 cm
9781558495173, 1558495177
61254018
Introduction : "Whose pencil
here and there
/ Had notched the place that pleased him
There's nothing wicked in Shakespeare, and if there is I don't want to know it" : advising women readers, Amherst's Shakespeare's Club, and Richard Henry Dana Sr
"I read a few words since I came home
John Talbot's parting with his son, and Margaret's with Suffolk" : reading and performing Shakespeare, Fanny Kemble, and the Astor Place riot
"Shakespeare was never accused of writing Bacon's works" : American Shakespeare criticism, Delia Bacon, James Russell Lowell, and Richard Grant White
"He has had his future who has found Shakespeare" : American nationalism and the English dramatist
"Pity me, however, I have finished Ramona. Would that like Shakespeare, it were just published!" : Shakespeare and women writers
"Shakespeare always and forever" : Dickinson's circulation of the Bard
"Then I settled down to a willingness for all the rest to go but William Shakespeare. Why need we Joseph read anything else but him" : Dickinson reading Antony and Cleopatra
"Heard Othello at museum" : Junius Brutus Booth, Tommaso Salvini, and the performance of race
"Hamlet wavered for all of us" : Dickinson and Shakespearean tragedy
Conclusion : "Touch Shakespeare for me."