Victorian Shakespeare

Gail Marshall is the author of "Actresses on the Victorian Stage" (1998) and "Victorian Fiction" (2002), and is the editor of "George Eliot" (2003). Adrian Poole's books include "Tragedy: Shakespeare and the Greek Example" (1987), "Henry James " (1991), and (co-edited with Jeremy Maule) "The Oxford Book of Classical Verse in Translation" (1995).

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.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.