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Page 58 Someone stood over her. She tried to peek through the tiniest slit in her eyelids, but shadow concealed his face. Then he spoke Hamlet’s line in familiar, beloved tones. “What, the fair Ophelia!” Emotions—amazement, jubilation, exultation—burst forth inside her. She sat up on the bier and reached out. ‘‘Dada!” …Rosie looked toward the row of chairs and half rose in thankfulness, then realized—the play! But no one seemed to care. The audience was crying, laughing, and clapping, involved in the story unfolding before their eyes and forgetting the fiction that had earlier absorbed them. All sense of tragedy had vanished, and nothing would restore it now. (Dodd 1994:362; paraphrasing Hamlet 3.1.91) Dodd’s disrupted Hamlet explicitly acknowledges how romances use Shakespeare’s tragedies. This novel transforms Hamlet. The lost birthright, mourning paternal loss, and fears of sexual betrayal are recycled through the female Rosencrantz who, typically for romance, resolves these conflicts by marrying the man whom her resurrection has deprived of land and fortune. Just as important, the tragic plot is abandoned freely—even by “Uncle Will.” Deanna James’s Acts of Passion (1992b) follows a strikingly similar pattern. Miranda Drummond, appalled that her mother plans to marry the man she thinks murdered her father, stows away with “Sons of Thespis, Royal Shakespearean Company by Appointment to Her Majesty Queen Victoria.” When she becomes the lead actress, her roles extend throughout the Shakespearean canon, but Hamlet remains the central play. At one point Miranda claims to be Hamlet and in fact elicits her stepfather’s public confession by restaging with actor-ghosts the battlefield slaughter that he arranged in order to widow and woo her mother. Like Dodd, James includes Shakespearean quotations as chapter headings. She explains the strategy and openly claims Shakespearean structure in her Afterword: By now you have perceived that Acts of Passion is constructed like a play by William Shakespeare. In further homage to the master writer of all time, I have begun each chapter with a quotation to foreshadow what will follow. I hope the sources have piqued your interest. If so they have served their purpose well. I further thought to allow you the fun of seeing how well you remembered your Shakespeare. Have you tested yourself thus far? (James 1992b:477) |
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