Anne Brontë — Not the Least of Shakespeare's Sisters

Abstract

This essay explores the influence of Shakespeare on Anne Brontë, and follows on from my earlier study in Shakespeare Survey 62 (see below for a full bibliographical reference). It seems clear that Anne read more Shakespeare between her work onAgnes Grey and her writing of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, the particular focus here. I identify two kinds of literary allusion, the 'unambiguous' and the 'submerged', and collate all nineteen references to Shakespeare in Anne's two novels made available through the major critical editions (see Table 1). To these I add nineteen more and present them through reference to Shakespeare's comedies, histories, tragedies and sonnets. I conclude by making the case that Shakespeare was important to Anne in her final lines of poetry, and in Charlotte's own later appropriation of them.