By Gail Marshall, Adrian Poole
What did the Victorians think about Shakespeare? The twelve essays amassed right here supply a few solutions, via shut exam of works by means of best nineteenth-century novelists, poets and critics together with Dickens, Trollope, Eliot, Tennyson, Browning and Ruskin. Shakespeare supplied the Victorians with methods of brooding about the authority of the previous, concerning the emergence of a brand new mass tradition, in regards to the family members among inventive and commercial creation, concerning the nature of creativity, approximately racial and sexual distinction, and approximately person and nationwide id.
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Extra resources for Victorian Shakespeare, Volume 2: Literature and Culture
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3. 15 Their ideas, in turn, were generated in great part by their responses to what they saw at the theatre. 16 This was, moreover, the time when other race-based anthropological theories were gaining ascendancy among European intellectuals, elevating Aryans and Normans above ‘darker’ peoples (including Celts and Jews, to name two ‘races’ relevant to Scott’s novels). At the bottom of these racist hierarchies were Negroes. 20 Victorian Shakespeare: Literature and Culture Such associations of blackness with baseness appear in English responses to Ira Aldridge, the one famed black actor to play Othello during the 1820s and ’30s and again (outside London) at mid-century.
1 But though he did frequently stab, the nineteenth-century Othello always stabbed in black face – actually, after Edmund Kean, more in tawny face. So it comes as no surprise that the painting now seems to be a ‘Tarquin and Lucretia’ by Titian. Nevertheless, even allowing for the upraised dagger as clue, we still want to ask: what could both Othello and Othello have come to mean in the nineteenth century if by 1900 the hero might be blanched? We can begin to uncover the answer to that question by looking at G.
The ornamental ‘enterprise’, therefore, comes across finally as a garnish, or better still in that supreme age of spectacle as window-dressing, disguising and indeed mystifying with public performance the quotidian experience of daily life, and drudgery, below a glittering veneer. However, the very theatricality of the ornamental, though politically unpersuasive, may resonate when we turn it back to theatre itself. Think of all those late-Victorian playhouses calling themselves ‘The Empire’. ’4 If theatres called Empire staged imperial fictions, surely Othello offered an unequalled opportunity for producing ornamentalist ‘sameness’, presenting to Victorian audiences a black field-marshal in whom no white paladin should have, would have, or even could have refused to recognise his simulacrum.