A Shakespeare Allusion in Far From The Madding Crowd

Abstract

Although Hardy's indebtedness to Shakespeare has been carefully studied,' some stray allusions doubtless remain to be noted. One such is Hardy's quotation of a line from The Two Gentlemen of Verona (I. iii. 85) in Far from the Madding Crowd (Chapter i8).2 Everdene and Gabriel Oak, her shepherd, are working with the young lambs, when Farmer Boldwood, driven out-of-doors by the fine day and his love for Bathsheba, approaches. Bathsheba looked up . . . and saw the farmer by the gate, where he was overhung by a willow tree in full bloom. Gabriel, to whom her face was as the uncertain glory of an April day [my italics], was ever regardful of its faintest changes, and instantly discerned thereon the mark of some influence from without, in the form of a keenly selfconscious reddening. He turned and beheld Boldwood. Hardy does not put the line in quotation marks, and he may well have employed it unconsciously. It is, in any case, exquisitely appropriate, for it not only conveys Bathsheba's beauty and her changeableness but also reflects Gabriel's anxious situation in his spring of love, a situation similar in its unsettledness and uncertainty to Proteus' in the Two Gentlemen. As only a great writer can, Hardy assimilates Shakespeare and makes him his own.