Shakespeare and Victorian Women (review)

Gail Marshall compresses a spacious subject into a small book: the response of Victorian women to Shakespeare. Her study rests on counterpoints. Female authors alternate with actresses; Shakespeare as Ruskinian bard of self-denying womanhood is countered by a Shakespeare who liberates women from Victorian constraints. Like Shakespeare, Marshall is most compelling in her irresolution. Her book refuses to choose between Shakespeare on the page or on stage, or between a Shakespeare who encases female readers and players in postures of self-denial, and a Shakespeare who gestures toward new selves and new lives.

There is so much material here, and so much of it is fresh, that I wanted more space for self-definition: too much whizzes by unanalyzed. No explanatory bridge distinguishes authors from actresses, nor is there analysis that links them. Marshall’s is the first book I know that brings together Victorian novelists with the performances—and copious writing—of Victorian actresses, but instead of clarifying this wonderful association, she jumbles writers and performers together and leaves us to find coherence.

The two extended chapters on authors (Elizabeth Barrett Browning and George Eliot) seem to me weaker than the others. Marshall is a more assured archival researcher than she is a literary critic; both Barrett Browning and Eliot seem randomly chosen as authors wrestling with Shakespeare or inspired by him. True, their works are sprinkled with quotations from Shakespeare, but so are the works of most literate writers then and now. True, lazy critics called both of them “Shakespeare’s Daughter,” largely because both Barrett Browning and Eliot wrote sonnet sequences with an autobiographical feel. But why not substitute Christina Rossetti for the more formally deferential Barrett Browning? Marshall does quote poems by Rossetti that offer stinging “counter-readings” (48) of Hamlet, As You Like It, and Macbeth, poems that offer a more direct confrontation with Shakespeare than the stately rhetoric of Barrett Browning and Eliot.

Shakespeare himself figures more as a cultural artifact than a writer; Marshall seems not to be steeped in his language. She claims, for instance, that in their early correspondence, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett quoted Shakespeare as a conduit of intimacy. She interprets a particularly obscure reference to Romeo and Juliet: “Under the guise of an exchange about friendship, the two poets seem to be referring to Juliet’s ‘It is an honour that I dream not of’ . . . , words which are applied in the play to the young lovers’ marriage” (70). But Juliet uses these evasive words not to Romeo, but before she meets him, to deflect her parents’ scheme of an arranged match. With Romeo, she is forthright about her dream of marriage. This gaffe about a well-known play suggests that Shakespeare and Victorian Women would be stronger and more cohesive if Marshall knew Shakespeare as well as her canonical writers did.

The book is much better when it surveys less well-known women; in fact, it is fascinating. There is a particularly good chapter on the Victorian cult of Shakespeare’s birthplace at Stratford as it was refracted in the writing of Matilda Blind, Marie Corelli, and Eleanor Marx. Each of these unorthodox women ignored Shakespeare as a monument to high culture on behalf of the sacred preindustrial socialism supposedly exemplified in his Stratford. These relatively marginal women create a worker, not a Bard, in their own utopian images.

Actresses like Helen Faucit, Fanny Kemble, Ellen Terry, Sarah Bernhardt, and Elizabeth Robins play a variety of Shakespeares for Marshall, who is clearly more at home with theatrical memoirs than with literary monuments. These theatrical Shakespeares are refreshingly contradictory. Faucit’s is a priest of female renunciation; Kemble’s is a daemon of artistic power. Terry charmed audiences in bowdlerized productions at Henry Irving’s grand Lyceum while writing sardonic commentary in the margins of her Shakespeare scripts. Robins, the icon of the new, radical fin-de-siècle theater, pleaded with Irving to take her into his traditional Lyceum just as it was...