Following the Great Magician

The term 'Great Shakespeareans', according to the series editors (p. vii), includes all influential cultural figures who have been significantly shaped by Shakespeare and who, in their turn, have helped shape the later reception of his works: actors, editors, creative writers, critics. This volume's focus is the nineteenth-century novel, with four substantial essays on Scott, Dickens, Eliot, and Hardy.

Nicola J. Watson's exemplary essay on Sir Walter Scott pays equal attention to Shakespeare's influence on Scott and Scott's influence on Shakespeare. She argues that the Waverley novels helped create 'a new historical sensibility' (p. 10), which had a defining influence on the way in which Shakespeare's plays were perceived and performed. The nineteenth-century taste for a historically authentic Shakespeare was partly driven by the huge popularity of Scott's own minutely realised depictions of Britain's past.

Although he is now a comparatively neglected writer, the iconic status of Scott in his own lifetime led him to be inscribed - and to inscribe himself - as Shakespeare's heir. Watson demonstrates how two paintings of Scott, one of him visiting Shakespeare's tomb, another showing him at work in his study with a bust of Shakespeare on the mantelpiece, contrive to imply a special bond between the two writers. Scott himself encouraged this association, even when apparently repudiating such a bold claim. In a whimsical dialogue between himself, the anonymous 'Author', and 'Dryasdust', an imaginary interlocutor, he appears to recoil in horror from the presumptuous possibility that he might view himself as a kind of second Shakespeare:

Author. May the saints forfend I should be guilty of such unfounded vanity! I only show what has been done when there were giants in the land. We pigmies of the present day, may at least, however, do something; and it is as well to keep a pattern before our eyes, though that pattern be inimitable.

(p. 20)

But he has also of course ensured that the idea has been firmly implanted in the reader's mind.

Watson convincingly suggests that the fact the Waverley novels were first published anonymously created an aura of mystique around the idea of their 'Author' which mirrored the perceived mysteries surrounding the authorship of Shakespeare's plays: 'Scott successfully engineered for himself a sort of ersatz negative capability whereby he became almost as mysterious and omnipresent as the Bard himself ' (p. 21). This idea that an author might seek to mould himself on an earlier predecessor, or at least be perceived as a revered writer's heir by his enthusiastic readers, is of course also relevant to the construction of Shakespeare's own identity in his lifetime - in 1598 Francis Meres described him as a reincarnated Ovid. The repetition of the trope of heirship, as much as the precise identification of one's forerunner, seals the later writer's claim to illustrious descent.

Noting the ways in which such patterns repeat themselves raises another question which might be asked of all four novelists under discussion: how far do their own allusive procedures themselves mirror those of Shakespeare? Clearly they all allude to Shakespeare, but do they also allude to his own patterns of allusivity, his own tensely productive relationships with his source material? The motto from The Winter's Tale which introduces chapter 22 of Guy Mannering is an interesting starting point for such an investigation. Watson explains that the quotation, a snatch of song from Autolycus, can be seen as a kind of clue, prompting the reader to question its function, in particular its relationship with the character of Vanbeest Brown. Is he himself a tricky Autolycus - or a disguised prince, like Florizel? The allusion does not itself give us the answers, but it helps his readers think what questions they might be asking of the text at this juncture. We can find examples in Shakespeare's plays of equally teasing allusions or quotations. To invoke an oft-cited instance, Prospero's speech beginning 'ye elves of...