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Page 54

Thus, Lucinda usurps Orsino’s hyperbolic claim. Unlike Orsino, who announces himself the pattern of love in his passion for Olivia only to change the object of his affection entirely at the end of Twelfth Night, Lucinda, who has patiently awaited a reunion beyond the grave with her husband Jerome, becomes the one who has truly loved, helping several heroines achieve the heightened romantic union Orsino only describes.

In The Lady Who Hated Shakespeare (1986), Mr. Renwick’s quotations are less extensive, yet his Shakespearean references isolate him more thoroughly. For example, Renwick responds, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks” (Carroll 1986:16; Hamlet 3.2.210) to his daughter’s tale that an unknown man (our hero Miles) has insulted her (by quoting a Shakespearean compliment), dropped her in the stream (she ordered him to put her down), and kissed her. Cordelia has indeed overreacted to the compliment; the lady hates Shakespeare because he seems to have alienated her father’s love. Having moved them to Stratford-on-Avon and devoted himself to his passion for Shakespeare apparently in response to his wife’s death, Renwick reads Shakespeare’s plays to her every evening, obsessively but not eloquently:

She loved her Papa dearly, but his reading voice lacked all expression. He recited the lines in such a dreary monotone that even the impassioned love scenes between the Queen of the Nile and her Roman swain sounded like the grimmest of Sunday sermons.

(42)

Shakespeare, however, is also used to mark Renwick’s emergence from emotional isolation: he quotes Lear when Cordelia nearly dies while playing Desdemona in the local amateur Othello. She is predictably disgusted: “She had nearly been killed… And Papa. He had not said a word except…except Shakespeare!” (172). She scarcely relents after the hero scolds her:

“Think of how your father reads Shakespeare, so expressionless. Yet the way he spoke those lines from Lear tonight! Good God, Delia, he showed his love for you in the only way he knew how.”

(177)

Shakespeare’s language shifts from being an obstacle between father and daughter to being the expression of his love when she is genuinely endangered. Moreover, Renwick has invited the

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