Shakespearean Sensibilities: Women Writers Reading Shakespeare, 1753–1808

Abstract

In 1903 David Nichol Smith published a collection of eighteenth-century essays on Shakespeare in order to demonstrate that ‘there are grounds for reconsidering the common opinion that the century did not give him his due’, and that ‘the eighteenth century knew many things which the nineteenth century has rediscovered for itself’.² The problem was that Romantic Shakespeare criticism had obscured or had appeared thoroughly to trump that of the previous era. In recent years, a great deal of expert attention has been productively paid to reassessing the state of Shakespeare and Shakespeare studies in the period 1750 to 1830. For example, Jonathan Bate has written on eighteenth-century and Romantic appropriations of Shakespeare in poetry and popular culture,³ and at least four books have been published in the last seven years on editing Shakespeare in the eighteenth century.⁴ This is aside from the more general surveys of Bardolatry, of Shakespeare’s many lives, and more theoretical considerations of the meanings of Shakespeare.

To the honour of a profession long held in contempt by the wise — and still contemned by the weak — Shakespeare, the pride of Britain, was a player. For the comfort of the illiterate, he was unlearned; and, to the shame of the vain and petulant author, he was weak and humble.

Elizabeth Inchbald¹