Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Shakespeare: Translating the Language of Intimacy

The poet who famously bemoaned her lack of literary grandmothers was not lacking in gratefully acknowledged male forebears, particularly Shakespeare and Homer, whom she describes as the "colossal borderers of the two intellectual departments of the world's age . . . the antique and modern literatures."¹ But her relationship with those figures, as she acknowledges through Aurora Leigh's encounters with earlier poets, has to be carefully managed, the possibility of her dependent and derivative status scrupulously recognized:

My own best poets, am I one with you, That thus I love you,—or but one through love? Does all this smell of thyme about my feet Conclude my visit to your holy hill In personal presence, or but testify The rustling of your vesture through my dreams With influent odours?²

That such encounters are effected through her father's "Books, books, books" (1: 832) underlines the perils of the female poet's seeking to claim a part within a literary history told mainly through its published male poets.

This essay examines diverse dimensions of the relationship between EBB and Shakespeare, assessing her responses to the earlier writer in the light of her fascination with the playwright and poet, and in particular with his depictions of young women. I consider the fascination wrought by the daughters in Shakespeare's plays and the extent to which EBB was herself lauded and constrained by the accolade of being a fit candidate for Shakespeare's daughter. I will examine the strategic manipulations involved in according the accolade "Shakespearean" to a woman writer, the ways in which EBB both recognizes and resists the lure and the straitjacketing of such a term, and how instead she effects a "dialectic of trust" in her reading and writing of Shakespeare.

The phrase is George Steiner's, and alludes to the mode of translation: it is a "dialectic of trust, of reciprocal enhancement [which] is, in essence, both moral and linguistic . . . it is an instrument of relation."³ In these terms, I would argue, we might also most aptly speak of EBB's relationship to Shakespeare. She is not a servile and circumscribed transcriber of his words, but rather one who makes his reputation anew by her attention to, and quotation from, his works. Her quotations from and allusions to Shakespeare, which are most notable and frequent in her correspondence, are acts that can usefully balance and accommodate the recognition of historical difference and contemporary exigency and that emphasize transmission and sympathetic interrelation. The model of translation suspends both authors in a delicate relationship of mutual recognition and co-existence, of cooperation, and potential creativity. It signals the enriching of the source within a new set of resonances, rather than the wresting of power from the original source, and it highlights the intellectual and creative activity which accrues to the translator. From this intimate relationship, EBB achieves a language of intimacy in which to speak to her closest friends and her lover Robert Browning. It is a language which enables her, through role playing, through the license of shared knowledge and almost silent allusion, to find a means of articulation trammelled neither by Victorian conventions nor by expectations, which allows for the exposure of private thoughts in a context which subtly protects and cherishes the speaker.

In Aurora Leigh and her Sonnets from the Portuguese, Shakespeare's presence is perhaps most visible in EBB's poetry. Shakespeare's sonnets linger unavoidably in the mind as one reads EBB's own sonnet sequence, and yet, what precisely is the relationship between the two sequences? Dorothy Mermin argues that Shakespeare's sonnets are one of the many contexts for EBB's poems, which also include the Iliad and Milton's sonnets.⁴ Other recent critics have paused only briefly over the name of Shakespeare in writing of EBB's Sonnets, stressing rather the extent to which, as Angela Leighton points out, she is characteristically concerned with making over a tradition, the better to articulate her female, nineteenth-century consciousness.⁵ The challenges are only too obvious: she not only has to tackle formal issues...