Shakespeare and the Culture of Romanticism

Joseph M. Ortiz is Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas at El Paso, USA.

• Contents: Introduction, Joseph M. Ortiz; Part I Rethinking the Romantic Critic: ’Small reverence for station’: Walter Savage Landor’s subversive Shakespeare, David Chandler; Peer reviewed: Elizabeth Inchbald’s Shakespeare criticism, Karen Bloom Gevirtz; ’My God! Madam, there must be only one black figure in this play': Hamlet, Ophelia and the Romantic hero, Karen Britland. Part II Shakespeare and the Making of the Romantic Poet: The state of unfeigned nature: poetic imagination from Shakespeare to Wordsworth, Thomas Festa; ’Mature poets steal’: Charlotte Smith’s appropriations of Shakespeare, Joy Currie; The sublimity of Hamlet in Emily Dickinson’s ’He fumbles at your soul’, Marianne Noble. Part III The Romantic Stage: ’The translucence of eternity in time’: Shakespeare and Coleridge’s Zapolya, Paola Degli Esposti; Contextual hauntings: Shakespearean ghosts on the Gothic stage, Francesca Saggini; Shakespeare reception in France: the case of Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet, Suddhaseel Sen. Part IV Harnessing the Renaissance: Markets, Religion, Politics: Reconstructing the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery, Ann R. Hawkins; Pericles and the spiritual wisdom of Joanna Baillie’s sacred dramas The Martyr and The Bride, Marjean D. Purinton and Marliss C. Desens; A written warning: Lady Caroline Lamb, noblesse oblige, and the works of John Ford, Leigh Wetherall-Dickson; Bibliography; Index.

Joseph M. Ortiz accomplishes for Shakespearean reception what the New Historicists did for Shakespearean studies in the 1980s. He presents a critical investigation that moves beyond the works of the dominant male writers of the period, and attends to broader contexts of cultural response among theater directors and performers, women critics and poets. At a point in reception studies when one might complacently assume that the important players have all been identified and adequately reviewed, Ortiz has assembled a collection of essays that from start to finish develop new and revisionary approaches to the Romantic reception of Shakespeare.'Frederick Burwick, University of California, Los Angeles, USA