Abstract
‘If any one of Shakespeare’s plays was known by an individual during the Victorian era that play was Hamlet. ‘1 Valerie L. Gager’s claim about the popularity of Hamlet is perhaps difficult to substantiate, but there is no doubt that, of all Shakespeare’s plays, Hamlet was the play to which Dickens most often alluded.2 At first sight Dickens’s interest in Hamlet may seem surprising. Dickens, or Mr Popular Sentiment as Trollope infamously called him, was accused of vulgarity and intellectual deficiency from his own day onwards. G. H. Lewes perhaps put the charges most bluntly, maintaining that there was not ‘a single thoughtful remark’ in the whole Dickens canon, and that Dickens ‘never was and never would have been a student’.3 Hamlet, on the other hand, became synonymous with the tortured, alienated intellectual at the play’s centre — a man superbly endowed with intelligent thoughts, but a little short on action. During the nineteenth century, when so many artists and thinkers felt themselves to be, in Isobel Armstrong’s term, ‘secondary’, Hamlet metamorphosed from a flawed Prince to the archetypal hero as artist and thinker.4 Dickens’s fascination with Hamlet, however, was not born of this hero-worship.
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Notes
This essay is indebted to the scholarship of Valerie L. Gager’s Shakespeare and Dickens: the Dynamics of Influence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), which has proved an invaluable source of reference. I would also like to thank Calum Forsyth and Alice Jenkins for helping me to write it. I have used the Clarendon edition of Dickens’s novels where available and the Oxford Illustrated where the Clarendon is unavailable, unless otherwise stated. Given the wide range of editions in which these novels are available, however, I normally cite only chapter numbers (or where appropriate, volume, book, and chapter).
Valerie L. Gager, Shakespeare and Dickens: the Dynamics of Influence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 58.
The Dickens Index by Nicolas Bentley, Michael Slater and Nina Burgis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988) lists more references to Hamlet than to any other Shakespeare play.
‘Dickens in Relation to Criticism’, Fortnightly Review, 11 (Feb. 1872), 141–54 (pp. 151–4).
The Ghosts of Hamlet: the Play and Modern Writers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 3.
Joel Fineman, ‘The Turn of the Shrew’, in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. by Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 157.
Maurice Willson Disher, Blood and Thunder: Mid-Victorian Melodrama and its Origins (London: Muller, 1949), p. 62.
Michael R. Booth, English Melodrama (London: Jenkins, 1965), pp. 44–5.
Gabrielle Hyslop, ‘Researching the Acting of French Melodrama, 1800–1830’, Nineteenth Century Theatre, 15 (1987), 85–114 (p. 85).
Quoted by Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor: a Cyclopaedia of the Condition and Earnings ofThose That Will Work, Those That Cannot Work, and Those That Will Not Work, 3 vols (London: Morning Chronicle, 1851), I, 15.
Charles Lamb, ‘On the Custom of Hissing at the Theatres, with Some Accounts of a Club of Damned Authors’ (1811), in The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. by E. V. Lucas, 6 vols (London: Methuen, 1912), I, 101–7 (p. 105). Hays and Nikolopoulou suggest that Lamb’s opposition had general currency (Melodrama: the Cultural Emergence of a Genre, p. viii).
Coleridge, ‘Critique of [Maturin’s] Bertram’ (repr. from Courier, Aug. and Sept. 1816), in Biographia Literaria, ch. 23, in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. by James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 16 vols, Bollingen Series, XXV (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), VII, 207–33 (p. 221); Hays and Nikolopoulou, introduction to Melodrama: the Cultural Emergence of a Genre, p. viii.
The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. by Madeline House, Graham Storey and Kathleen Tillotson, Pilgrim Edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press), III, 243–4.
John Carey, TheViolentEffigy: a Study ofDickens’ Imagination (London: Faber & Faber, 1973), p. 55.
See Edwin M. Eigner, The Dickens Pantomime (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989).
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John, J. (2003). Dickens and Hamlet. In: Marshall, G., Poole, A. (eds) Victorian Shakespeare, Volume 2. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230504141_4
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