Shakespeare and the Culture of Romanticism ed. by Joseph M. Ortiz (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Shakespeare and the Culture of Romanticism ed. by Joseph M. Ortiz Dan Venning SHAKESPEARE AND THE CULTURE OF ROMANTICISM. Edited by Joseph M. Ortiz. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013; pp. 306. In this engaging collection, Joseph Ortiz presents twelve essays that “suggest that … a narrative of Romantic sleep followed by a critical awakening is … a simplification of a more complex situation” (7) in which Romantic responses to Shakespeare were neither monolithic nor wholly filled with Bardolatry. Several of the essays focus on women, demonstrating “the potential of female critics and actresses to unsettle Romantic paradigms” (8). At its [End Page 573] core, the book is an examination of Romantic intertextuality: each essay interrogates how Romantics received Shakespeare’s plays and adapted them within the context of Romantic culture in order to reflect current literary, theatrical, political, or commercial agendas. Both for literary critics and theatre historians, Shakespeare and the Culture of Romanticism will allow scholars to think through a variety of previously unexplored ways that the Romantic period intersected with Shakespearean drama and stage practice. The book is divided into four sections of three essays each. The first, “Rethinking the Romantic Critic,” begins with David Chandler’s examination of the Bardolator Walter Savage Landor, who, in contrast to his fellow Romantics, crafted a fictionalized “festive” Shakespeare, a subversive figure anticipating C. L. Barber’s readings of the comedies as works of an “essentially popular playwright” (25). Landor’s imaginary Shakespeare provides an alternative to “the divinely moral Bard” (30) worshipped by fellow Romantics, and Chandler’s opening essay is the first of many contributions that allow readers to reconsider traditional impressions of the Romantics. Next, in her excellent essay, Karen Bloom Gevirtz argues that Elizabeth Inchbald, herself a playwright, crafted prefaces to Shakespeare’s plays demonstrating a more thorough understanding of his dramaturgy than other Romantic critics who approached the plays primarily as works of literature. Gevirtz also illustrates how Inchbald demonstrated an interest in female readers and audience members, noting that this “set Inchbald apart from almost all of the other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Shakespeare critics” (44), and Gevirtz is thus able to explore a feminist view of Romantic Shakespearean criticism that is often ignored. In her examination of Harriet Smithson’s performance as Ophelia, Karen Britland argues that the Romantic “stage tradition” of Hamlet “tells us something about a culture’s attitude to women and their intellects, as well as about Ophelia’s relationship to Hamlet” (57). Britland demonstrates how Romantic theatre, relying upon a cultural masculinization of the idea of genius, denied women agency and identity onstage in comparison with previous actresses, such as Sarah Siddons. The second section, “Shakespeare and the Making of the Romantic Poet,” is probably of least interest to scholars of theatre and drama. In this section, Thomas Festa, Joy Currie, and Marianne Noble examine through close reading how, William Wordsworth, Charlotte Smith, and Emily Dickinson use allusions and quotations to respond to Shakespeare and place their own poems within the canon of English literature. By contrast, the third section, “The Romantic Stage,” is probably of most interest to theatre scholars, although the first contribution here, Paola Degli Esposti’s essay on Shakespearean allusions in Coleridge’s 1816 drama Zapolya does not refer directly to theatrical practice. Francesca Saggini’s essay “Contextual Hauntings: Shakespearean Ghosts on the Gothic Stage” is the best in the collection. She argues, through analyses of both the literary and theatrical receptions of James Boaden’s gothic play Fontainville Forest, that context matters, as Romantic adaptations “express a cultural negotiation … cross-fertilizing the stage, the page, and the canvas at the same time” (166). Saggini demonstrates how the “contextual framing”—from contemporary novels to stage practice, especially John Philip Kemble’s productions of Macbeth and Hamlet—necessarily influenced both how Boaden crafted his play and audiences were conditioned to receive it. Her essay powerfully demonstrates the reciprocal “haunting” that allows playwriting and playgoing to influence each other. The final section, “Harnessing the Renaissance: Markets, Religion, Politics,” presents fascinating essays that examine drama and various forms of material culture. Ann Hawkins’s bibliographic essay uses annual catalogs of the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery to demonstrate that the gallery, as...