Ann Thompson

Mary Cowden Clarke: Marriage, Gender and the Victorian Woman Critic of Shakespeare

Mary Cowden Clarke was the first woman to make a profession of writing about Shakespeare. Unlike female critics today she did not hold a university post — indeed it was not possible for women to attend universities at all when she was growing up — but she was a freelance writer living by her pen. In so far as she is remembered at all today it is for The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines (1850-52), occasionally cited (usually by people who have not read it) as an example of a naive Victorian novelistic approach to the plays. The Girlhood is however representative of only one strand in Mary’s long and prolific writing career;1 she published voluminously on Shakespeare, both as a solo author and in collaboration with her husband Charles. In the mid-nineteenth century, when Mary Cowden Clarke began writing, Shakespeare scholarship was not yet institutionalised within British universities; how did Mary establish herself among contemporary circles of Shakespeare scholars, particularly as the female member of a literary couple?

Songs of Experience: New Books on Metaphor@@@The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason@@@More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor@@@Metaphoric Worlds: Conceptions of a Romantic Nature@@@The Depictive Image: Metaphor and Literary Experience@@@Shakespeare: Meaning and Metaphor@@@Death Is the Mother of Beauty: Mind, Metaphor, Criticism

In this book, Mark Turner shows that the languages of literature and everyday life are different expressions of the same universal mechanisms of the mind. Drawing on the languages and metaphors of kinship and causation, and on myriad examples in English literature from Chaucer to Wallace Stevens, he argues convincingly that all our thinking with language depends on a restricted range of deep metaphors and inference patterns.Words: english deathAuthor: Turner, Mark Publisher: Cybereditions Corporation Illustration: N Language: ENG Title: Death Is the Mother of Beauty: Mind, Metaphor, Criticism Pages: 00177 (Encrypted PDF) On Sale: 2001-12-24 SKU-13/ISBN: 9781877275135 Category: Literary Criticism : English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh Category: Literary Criticism : Poetry

Hamlet: Looking Before and After: Why So Many Prequels and Sequels?

Why does Hamlet have prequels and sequels? Is it unusual in inviting readers, and more especially writers, to speculate about what might have happened both before and after the events of the play? I’ll begin by citing a few moments in the text that have proved particularly inviting. First, the closet scene: Hamlet, in reply to Gertrude’s calling the murder of Polonius ‘a bloody deed’, says ‘A bloody deed? Almost as bad, good mother, / As kill a king and marry with his brother’, to which she replies ‘As kill a king’, and he says ‘Ay lady it was my word’ (3.4.25–8).2 The tone of Gertrude’s response is not indicated by punctuation, such as a question mark or an exclamation mark, in either of the ‘good’ texts, the Second Quarto and the First Folio, and the topic is not pursued. Interestingly, in the so-called ‘bad’ First Quarto, the Queen asks for an explanation: ‘Hamlet, what mean’st thou by these killing words?’ and goes on to deny the accusation: ‘But, as I have a soul, I swear by heaven, / I never knew of this most horrid murder’. It would seem that whoever compiled this text felt the need for a clarification of this important point, and many others have followed, arguing the case both for and against Gertrude with enthusiasm and ingenuity.3

Shakespeare and National Culture@@@Women Reading Shakespeare, 1660-1900: An Anthology of Criticism

List of figures Quick reference topics Acknowledgements Introduction The texts Bibliography Index

‘Father and Mother is One Flesh’: Hamlet and the Problems of Paternity

Shakespeare’s Hamlet must be one of the world’s best-known stories. It has for example been filmed more often than any other narrative with the single and rather surprising exception of Cinderella.1 Yet people get it wrong. The printer of the 1623 First Folio text apparently made a slip in Hamlet’s apology to Laertes just before the duel in the final scene. In both the 1603 and the 1604 Quarto texts, Hamlet claims that any wrong he has done Laertes (by killing his father, for example, and driving his sister to madness and death) was committed accidentally: ‘I have shot my arrow o’er the house / And hurt my brother, (V.ii. 243–4).2 In the Folio text he says ‘I have shot my arrow o’er the house / And hurt my mother’. Horace Howard Furness in his 1877 Variorum edition of the play quotes Joseph Hunter’s 1845 speculation in support of ‘mother’: ‘The change in the Folio might have been made by Shakespeare after he retired to Stratford, the passage as it originally stood coming too near to an incident which had recently occurred in the family of Greville in that neighbourhood, where one of them had by misadventure killed his brother with an arrow.’3 Furness nevertheless prints ‘brother’ as do all other editors of the play, including those who privilege the Folio as Shakespeare’s own revision of his earlier text; they assume ‘mother’ is simply a misreading and correct it without feeling any need to comment.

Sight Unseen: Problems with ‘Imagery’ in Macbeth

In Shakespeare, Meaning and Metaphor,1 we found ourselves at odds with the way the term ‘imagery’ gets used, especially in pedagogic contexts, in traditional literary studies. We pointed out there that a similar disquiet goes back as far as I.A. Richards,2 and we could have gone back further. (The unjustly neglected Victorian literary theorist E.S. Dallas could write in 1866, ‘A book might be written on the absurdities of criticism which this one subject of imagery has engendered, only it would be a waste of labour on barren sand’3).