Emily Dickinson's Shakespeare (review)

Emily Dickinson alludes to Shakespeare in only a very few poems, such as "Drama's Vitallest Expression is the Common Day" (Fr766). She refers to the bard more frequently in her letters; and her family volume of Shakespeare, edited by Charles Knight, includes marginalia, some of which might have been penciled in by the Amherst poet herself. Beginning with these thin evidentiary threads, Páraic Finnerty has woven an elaborate tapestry, one of the most intensely researched and thought provoking books on Dickinson in recent years. Many scholars have written interestingly about Dickinson and Shakespeare. This book, which generously acknowledges those predecessors, now stands as the best and most comprehensive study of the topic.

Emily Dickinson's Shakespeare is much more than a source study, though it is that in passing. It amounts to a cultural biography of Dickinson—a biography of her shifting yet enduring imagination. It includes a good deal of American cultural history as well: the new nation's love-hate relationship with England and its ambivalent effort to wrest Shakespeare from the parent country's grasp while at the same time trying to meet the parent country's cultural standards. This mixed drama of separation and deference plays itself out in America's ways of appropriating and misappropriating Shakespeare and, microcosmically, in Dickinson's ways of representing and misrepresenting, quoting and misquoting, the writer she, like many of her countrypeople, ranked above all others.

Dickinson's Shakespeare explores the "central and constitutive role" Shakespeare played in Dickinson's life (3). In doing so, it takes into account cultural and social categories such as gender, race, class, sexuality, and nationality. It shows that Dickinson's references to Shakespeare, when read in historical context, are rarely straightforward. Shakespeare was a contradictory figure in nineteenth-century American culture—alternately an improper influence that must be censored and a symbol of upper-class white civility, a force of genius and a force that inhibited genius. As we know, Dickinson herself was a problematic figure in her time. She used Shakespeare ambiguously, "to either validate or undermine traditional attitudes" (206). Revealing either her reticence or her fear of the bard's influence, she rarely cited him in her poetry, though she apparently read and thought about him ceaselessly. He was the volcano situated beneath her still volcano life.

Finnerty spends a good deal of time unraveling the Shakespearean culture that surrounded and penetrated Dickinson's existence: Shakespeare as a text to be studied and venerated in isolation or with friends, as a topic of high-toned lectures and articles as well as low burlesques, as a dramatist Dickinson's circle would be more likely to hear in a public reading than to witness in a theatrical performance, as an author of particular significance for women writers, and as a set of familiar passages and characters widely circulated through newspapers, magazines, almanacs, calendars, conversations, and letters. By accumulating biographical and historical detail, Finnerty is able to show just how deeply and complexly Dickinson was embedded in Shakespeare's discourse, and he in hers. She associated him with her mentor, T. W. Higginson, and with her dearest friend, Susan Dickinson; she was shaped by him and yet often appeared studiously detached from him.

Dickinson especially loved Antony and Cleopatra, not simply as an enactment of her own erotic relations with Sue, but as a locus for working through issues of gender ambiguity, love and unattainability, and female power. She also expressed a highly charged interest in Othello, initially scapegoating the eponymous hero for his blackness and eroticism and later learning to identify herself with him. And finally, her fascination with Romeo and Juliet and particularly Hamlet grew ever stronger in her later years, perhaps because both plays provided arenas in which she could explore her growing preoccupation with death. Despite this lifelong enchantment with Shakespeare, Dickinson did not refer to him at all in letters written between 1853 and 1865. Finnerty attributes her return to Shakespeare in the mid-1860s to the restoration...