Shakespeare and the Victorians by Stuart Sillars (review)

The proliferation of books on Shakespeare and his Victorian afterlife, recently noted by Richard Schoch in this journal (65.1, pp. 74–85), continues with Stuart Sillars’s latest contribution. Best known as the author of important work on Shakespeare and the visual arts, Sillars expands his repertoire here by taking us through the relatively well-worn route of Shakespeare’s influence on other art forms, editions and criticism of Shakespeare, Shakespeare in performance, biographical interest in Shakespeare, and “Shakespeare the Victorian.” His book also includes an interesting and more novel take on “Shakespeare beyond Shakespeare”—that is, the life that plays and characters achieved for themselves beyond Shakespeare’s authorial remit—and a sensitive reading of the specificities of the late Victorian Shakespeare.

Sillars’s challenge here is twofold: to manipulate an extraordinary mass of material into a relatively short text without sacrificing either readability or authority, and to achieve a new approach in an increasingly familiar field. Compared with earlier works, Shakespeare and the Victorians is perhaps more determinedly encyclopedic and thus more explicitly concerned with mapping out possible routes for future scholars. At times slightly bewildering in its weight of references, Sillars’s book resolutely sets out to give the broadest range of material from which readers may gain a panoramic view of the extent and contours of the Victorians’ almost compulsive interest in Shakespeare. Editions are listed with careful accounts of their different editorial policies, illustrations, prices, and readership, offering the modern reader insight into how modern editions of Shakespeare, for example The Cambridge Shakespeare, achieved their distinctive identities.

The major glossaries, concordances, grammars, as well as lesser-known critical works referenced here reveal the indefatigability of the Victorians’ commitment to Shakespeare but also the dogged earnestness with which they sought both to revere and perhaps to control the impact of the earlier writer. The effect of Sillars’s chapter on “Scholarship, Editing, and Criticism” in particular is to leave the reader both agog at the efforts of often amateur scholars and critics and wanting to rescue Shakespeare from their taxonomical approaches. This is, of course, only part of the story, as Sillars demonstrates in accounts of the seamier side of scholars’ attachment to the Bard: forgery (acutely related to the new possibilities for rewriting identity in the anonymous Victorian city) and book mutilation also inform this story.

The chapter on “Performance” gives a detailed account of shifts in production values and practices throughout the Victorian period: “Legislation, education, publishing, antiquarianism, stage design, transport: are all significant elements” (56) in determining and responding to Shakespeare performances, to say nothing of the development of greasepaint in the later part of the century. The work of important actor-managers, and several women managers, is noted in a reasonably familiar story that attempts to map a narrative of progression through the century, culminating in the “extreme naturalism” (63) and proto-respectability of Henry Irving and Herbert Beerbohm Tree. A welcome nod is given to the work of European and American performers and managers on the British stage, though there is little sense of the broader European and American—to say nothing of the worldwide—presence of Shakespeare onstage. That might just be a bridge too far for this work. Sillars does, however, acknowledge the usefulness of theater autobiographies in building up a picture of the theater at this time, singling out the extensive and insightful writings of Ellen Terry and Helena Faucit. Worth noting also is the importance of these two women, like their contemporary Fanny Kemble, coming from well-established theatrical families, for whom Shakespeare offered a vocabulary of emotional as well as professional value and regard.

“Shakespeare, the Novel, and Poetry” offers a reading of the usual subjects when it comes to novelists: Dickens, Eliot, and Hardy, whose references to Shakespeare have long been acknowledged as part of their creative vocabulary. This is a suggestive portion of the book, but one that might have benefited...