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Shakespeare’s Weeds: Tennyson, Elegy and Allusion

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Abstract

Stephen Greenblatt opens Shakespearean Negotiations, his seminal study of the reciprocal pressures which Shakespeare and his contemporaries exercised upon one another, by raising the idea of the literary critic as a type of cultural shaman: ‘I began with the desire to speak with the dead.’ However, critics are not alone in hoping that their writing will allow them to speak with the dead; nor are they alone in being aware that, in Greenblatt’s words, ‘works of art, however intensely marked by the creative intelligence and private obsessions of individuals, are the products of collective negotiation and exchange’.1

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Notes

  1. Biographia Literaria (1817), ed. by James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), I, 48.

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  2. See Aron Y. Stavisky, Shakespeare and the Victorians: Roots ofModern Criticism (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1969), p. 42.

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  3. See Richard W. Schoch’s essay in the companion volume to this, together with his critical study Not Shakespeare: Bardolatry and Burlesque in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

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  4. Cited in Shakespeare and the Victorian Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), ed. by Richard Foulkes, p. 162.

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  5. See Gillian Beer, Darwins Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-century Fiction (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), pp. 30–3.

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  6. Vicesimus Knox, Winter Evenings, or, Lucubrations on Life and Letters, 2 vols (London: Charles Dilly, 1790), cited in Price, p. 73.

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  7. The Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Hardy, ed. by Samuel Hynes, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982–95), II, 395–7.

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  8. J. P. Mahaffy, ‘The Decay of Genius’, in Macmillans Magazine, L (September 1884), 355–62 (p. 356).

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  9. See William Greenslade, Degeneration, Culture and the Novel, 1880–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 25.

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© 2003 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

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Douglas-Fairhurst, R. (2003). Shakespeare’s Weeds: Tennyson, Elegy and Allusion. In: Marshall, G., Poole, A. (eds) Victorian Shakespeare, Volume 2. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230504141_8

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