Enter Touchstone: Manners of Comedy in James's The Europeans

Probing the body of criticism concerning Henry James’s The Europeans (1878), one encounters a host of proposed literary models for the novel. The alleged field of influence extends across national boundaries as well as literary genres: the American novel (Hawthorne), the English novel (Austen), the French well-made play (Augier, Cherbuliez, Feulliet, et al.). Considering the range of these sources, one might hesitate to pronounce the list incomplete. Nevertheless, more than a century after the first publication of The Europeans, a key model for the text has yet to be acknowledged. What a close reading of the novel reveals is that The Europeans is greatly indebted to Shakespeare’s comedy of 1599, As You Like It.

A logical first step in positing a literary model is establishing the author’s familiarity with that model. Unfortunately, James’s failure to include The Europeans in the New York Edition of his work (and the concomitant failure to provide a critical preface) frustrates the quest to locate the definitive roots of the novel. Because there is no documented evidence of James’s admission of the use of AYLI in The Europeans, one must look beyond the novel itself for potential clues. Other texts in the Jamesian canon do allude to Shakespeare’s play. In The Princess Casamassima (1886), Hyacinth Robinson considers fighting a battle by means of “the retort courteous” (177), which is exactly one of the categories of argumentation (a spectrum extending from the Retort Courteous to the Lie Direct) outlined in 5.4 of AYLI. Similarly, in What Maisie Knew, Sir Claude likens Kensington Garden to the Forest of Arden and places the scene squarely within the framework of AYLI: “‘I’m the banished duke, and you’re—what was the young woman called?—the artless country wench. And there,’ he went on, ‘is the other girl—what’s her name, Rosalind?’” (122). Furthermore, Adeline Tintner cites James’s 1902 short story “The Papers” as a deliberate reworking of Shakespeare’s play, identifying the story (which explicitly compares the two main characters to Jaques and Rosalind) as “an equivalent in modern life and a reversal of the outcome of As You Like It” (29).

These texts testify to James’s awareness of AYLI in the latter half of his career, but what about the time preceding his composition of The Europeans? Here again one must turn to the scholarship of Tintner, whose The Book World of Henry James: Appropriating the Classics details James’s unabashed borrowing from the literary tradition. ¹ Exploring the contents of the family library, Tintner catalogues James’s early exposure to the Shakespearean canon. She notes that at the age of twelve James received a copy of Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare and that as a young man he possessed William Hazlitt’s Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays and the works of Shakespeare edited by William George (2). In arguing for James’s particular exposure to AYLI, Tintner notes the interpretation of the play made by George Sand (of whose plays James was apparently a devotee) in her “Comme il vous plaira, [first] presented at the Comedie Française in 1856” (30). The crucial piece of evidence that James was familiar with AYLI before he wrote The Europeans, however, is found when Tintner considers James’s 1874 story “Eugene Pickering.” Calling attention to the line describing the title character as being “in the very extremity of love,” Tintner recognizes that this line “comes intact from As You Like It IV.i.5” (26).

While Tintner fails to connect The Europeans with AYLI, she does help identify James’s methodology in his overall use of Shakespeare: either an explicit announcement of the Shakespearean link or a more subtle creation of “a support system of converted quotations in order to stress the analogue” (29). In The Europeans James does not make obvious reference to AYLI, but he does employ a series of verbal echoes of Shakespeare’s play. The character Eugenia in the opening chapter of the novel is said to carry “her three-and-thirty years as a light-wristed Hebe might...