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  • Weeping for Jane Shore
  • Richard Helgerson (bio)

What’s Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba, That he should weep for her?

—Shakespeare, Hamlet

To those who know Jane Shore, if at all, only as the “Shore’s wife” mentioned a few times in Shakespeare’s Richard III, my title may seem puzzling. Shakespeare’s “Mistress Shore,” as she is also called, is a figure of fun: King Edward’s whore, Lord Hastings’s whore, just about anyone’s whore, to judge from what Richard says about her. Why should we weep for her? To get a preliminary intimation of a very different Jane Shore and a very different affective claim, let me fast-forward from the 1590s, when Shakespeare’s play was first produced, to the 1780s. “We then, indeed, knew all the luxury of grief.” That, according to a contemporary witness, was the experience the great Sarah Siddons offered London theatergoers in the title role of Nicholas Rowe’s Tragedy of Jane Shore. Women sobbed and shrieked, and men, after struggling to suppress their tears, “at length grew proud of indulging” them. Before the intense appeal of Rowe’s play and Mrs. Siddons’s acting, “the nerves of many a [End Page 451] gentle being gave way . . . and fainting fits long and frequently alarmed the decorum of the house.”1 Sobbing, shrieking, and even fainting over a royal concubine? What’s going on here?

The first thing to notice is that we don’t have to wait for the late eighteenth century and its notoriously lachrymose sensibility to find audiences moved by the plight of Mistress Shore. Since its first appearance more than half a century before Shakespeare wrote, her story—the story of a London wife seduced by one king, Edward IV, and harshly punished by another, Richard III—had been calling forth an emotional response that is not easily rivaled in either intensity or persistence.2 Moreover, through the shaping power of its extraordinary emotional appeal, the Jane Shore story was already—centuries before Mrs. Siddons played the part—remaking the generic map of English literature, pushing against the affective limits of old genres and helping to forge new ones, including, most obviously, the kind of domestic tragedy represented by Rowe’s Jane Shore.

This is a big claim, and it is going to get bigger before I’m done. If the whole of our modern, middle-class world does not emerge from the story of Jane Shore—and it surely doesn’t—a fair part of its literary self-representation does. But, even at this point, I have to acknowledge the unlikeliness of such a claim. How could a story that most people, even people who work in the field of early-modern studies, either do not remember at all or remember only as a sneering joke be supposed to have grabbed hold of the literary system and given it a transforming shake? How, for that matter, can such remarkable agency be attributed to any story when stories exist, after all, only in their various tellings—tellings that in this case transformed the story almost beyond recognition? That transformation points to a quite different way of locating agency: not in the story that needed to get told, but rather in the culture that needed, because of its changing social and political configuration, to do the telling—needed, in particular, a story like what it made of this one. Although I sometimes formulate things one way and sometimes another, it seems to me that both the push and the pull are going on all the time. Yes, the story was summoned forth by tensions within the culture that craved a medium through which those tensions could express themselves. At the same time, the story worked to define those tensions and bring them to conscious realization. Even more than most significantly resonant stories, the story of Jane Shore helped to remake the world by which it was made. [End Page 452]

But however we characterize this process, Shakespeare resisted it—a resistance as significant as the affective power it would have denied. Focus, as Shakespeare did, on King Richard to the exclusion of Mistress Shore—she never...

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