Victorian Shakespeare: Literature and Culture

What did the Victorians think of Shakespeare? The twelve essays gathered here offer some answers, through close examination of works by leading nineteenth-century novelists, poets and critics including Dickens, Trollope, Eliot, Tennyson, Browning and Ruskin. Shakespeare provided the Victorians with ways of thinking about the authority of the past, about the emergence of a new mass culture, about the relations between artistic and industrial production, about the nature of creativity, about racial and sexual difference, and about individual and national identity.

PASCALE AEBISCHER Lecturer in Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature, University of Leicester, UK PHILIP DAVIS Professor in the English Department, University of Liverpool, UK CHRISTOPHER DECKER Assistant Professor of English, Boston University, USA ROBERT DOUGLAS-FAIRHURST Fellow and Tutor in English, Magdalen College, University of Oxford, UK JOHN GLAVIN Professor of English, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA DIANA E. HENDERSON Associate Professor of Literature, M.I.T PHILIP HORNE Professor of English, University College London, UK JULIET JOHN Senior Lecturer in English, University of Liverpool, UK DANIEL KARLIN Professor of English, University College London, UK FRANCIS O’GORMAN Lecturer in Victorian Literature, University of Leeds, UK CLARE PETTITT Fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge, UK SASHA ROBERTS Lecturer in English, University of Kent, UK ANN THOMPSON Professor of English Language and Literature, King’s College, London, UK.