< previous page page_61 next page >

Page 61

Lord Blake’s eyes widened… “And so you will be a barren sister all your life, chanting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon.”

Miss Glyn tsked at Lord Blake. “‘Would it not grieve a woman to be overmastered with a piece of valiant dust? To make an account of her life to a clod of wayward marl?’”

Lord Blake sighed and shook his head. “I really must find a chink in your Shakespearean armor, or I’ll be all out of charity with myself.”

(Martin 1993:58–59; Dream 1.1.72–73; Much Ado 2.1.51–53)

Theo rarely gets the last quoted word. In fact he soon finds that he feels “downright cheerful—morning, noon, and night. He had shed Hamlet’s mantle without remorse to reveal…Puck?’’ (125–26). He registers his own changed perspective with Shakespearean substitution.

The wittiness of their Shakespearean battle so dominates the novel that it is easy to overlook the lovely Georgina, whom Kate is reluctantly chaperoning for the London season and who falls instantly in love with Sir William Atherton, freshly returned from the wars. Their easy mutual affection and prompt, trouble-free courtship seem merely the background to Kate’s and Theo’s more lively interactions until Kate’s former betrothed, who is pursuing Georgina, and Theo’s would-be fiancée, in imitation of Much Ado About Nothing, decide to stage Georgina’s “betrayal” of William before her bedroom window and smash the engagement. While reworking Shakespeare’s slandered maiden tale as a breach of Regency proprieties with wide-ranging social consequences, The Hampshire Hoyden (1993) also revises the alliance between Kate and Theo, who work together to uncover how William was fooled. Rather than being tricked into love, the pair discover that they are more than compatible verbal sparring partners during the highly emotional collapse of their friends’ betrothal. Martin extends the time it takes the two to discover and prove Lord Faulkland’s perfidy in order to develop their alliance.

The Hampshire Hoyden (1993) also plays out the reactions of Hero/ Georgina and the difficulties and horror of Claudio/William’s realization that he has been tricked into ruining his life and that of the woman he loves. As Joan Wolf’s Fool’s Masquerade (1984) extends Twelfth Night by exploring Orsino/Diccon’s recognition that he loves Viola/Valentine, so Martin elaborates both William’s and Georgina’s dilemmas, staging their reunion not as the abrupt substitution at

< previous page page_61 next page >