GAIL MARSHALL (ed.). Shakespeare in the Nineteenth Century.

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In the last of the 17 essays in this volume, Virginia Mason Vaughan describes the eagerness with which in the late 1880s Americans across the country thronged to see the great Shakespearean actor, Edwin Booth. She concludes: ‘Shakespeare was not simply a preoccupation of the eastern elite—even in the hinterlands people revered the Bard.’ This is a dominant theme of Marshall’s well-marshalled book. Another hinterland that commands attention is represented by the factory girls in the late 1840s who met at five in the morning to read Shakespeare together for an hour before going to work. To change the spatial metaphor, Marshall’s contributors probe all sorts of nooks and crannies at risk of being overlooked in accounts of the nineteenth century that focus on more traditionally iconic texts and their authors. We learn here about the satiric analogies applied to the Prince Regent and Queen Caroline by radical journals like the Black Dwarf, about the writings of Constance O’Brien’s articles in The Monthly Packet in the 1880s about Shakespeare’s women, about performances at the Britannia, Hoxton and the Surrey in the Blackfriars Road, about the illustrative work of Louisa Starr, Elizabeth Forbes and Henrietta Ward—‘too long overshadowed by their more celebrated contemporaries’, Stuart Sillars observes (p. 276). It is a note that resonates through the whole volume.