"Alas, poor YORICK"

Quoting Shakespeare in the Mid-Eighteenth-Century Novel

Authors

Kate Rumbold Trinity College, Oxford

Abstract

Shakespeare is so widely quoted in the eighteenth-century novel that the practice seems almost innocuous. Closer examination of his quotation by the novel's characters, however, reveals a tension between this polite convention and its potentially dangerous association with the pretense of the stage. This paper will argue that Shakespeare's multiple availability to the eighteenth-century public — via the stage, adaptations, gentlemanly editions, cheaper texts, and anthologies — renders his quotation an ambiguous act, capable of representing simultaneously a stagy self-dramatization and a benign, readerly admiration. Looking at some of the ways in which novelists such as Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne have their characters variously maximize or minimize the theatricality of their quotations, the paper will show how they creatively exploit Shakespeare's complex status at this historical juncture to create subtle shades of characterization.

Author Biography

Kate Rumbold, Trinity College, Oxford

Kate Rumbold is a doctoral candidate at Trinity College, Oxford. Having gained an undergraduate degree at Trinity and an M. A. at University College, London, she is now completing her D. Phil. thesis on the quotation of Shakespeare in the eighteenth-century novel, under the supervision of Dr. Abigail Williams. Kate has spent time exploring the rare eighteenth-century novel collection of the Houghton Library, Harvard and recently organized the 2006 English Graduate Conference at Oxford. She will shortly take up a post-doctoral research fellowship at the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon.