Abstract
“Shakespeare Say,” Rita Dove’s surefire title, invokes the compulsive, pleasurable habit of quoting our most quotable author. One might even hear in “Shakespeare Say” a humorous suggestion of “Simon Says,” the ritual game of recitation and repetition. Dove’s game, however, turns out to be entirely different. Having prompted our anticipation of Shakespearean allusion, she refuses to fulfill the expectation she has set up. The poem uses no words from Shakespeare whatsoever. Hence Shakespeare is present in name only; the sole allusion is to an author whose role is quite literally nominal.
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Notes
Christopher Ricks, Allusion to the Poets (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002), 1
John Keats, Selected Poems and Letters, ed. Douglas Bush (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959), 279.
Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1973).
Harry Berger, Jr., Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt Against the Italian Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000), 427–29.
Adrienne Rich’s “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision” (1971)—in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence (New York: Norton, 1979), 33–49
Joanne Tompkins uses the term “re-playing” in “Re-Citing Shakespeare in Post-Colonial Drama,” Essays in Theatre/études théâtrales 15, no. 1 (1996): 15–22.
Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body (New York: Random House, 1966), 184
T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems, 1909–1962 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1963).
The latter appears in Derek Walcott’s The Castaway and Other Poems (London: Jonathan Cape, 1965)
Rita Dove, “‘Either I’m Nobody, or I’m a Nation,’” Parnassus: Poetry in Review 14, no. 1 (1987): 49–76
Therese Steffen, Crossing Color: Transcultural Space and Place in Rita Dove’s Poetry, Fiction, and Drama (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001), 172–73
Malin Pereira, Rita Dove’s Cosmopolitanism (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2003), 171–72.
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© 2007 Peter Erickson
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Erickson, P. (2007). Introduction: Allusion as Revision. In: Citing Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-06009-9_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-06009-9_1
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