< previous page page_62 next page >

Page 62

the wedding in Shakespeare’s play but as a slower healing of serious wounds to trust. Even with Kate’s persuasions that “‘Despite everything he was told and thought that he heard and witnessed, Sir William still loved you. He still loved the woman he believed had betrayed him, and he hated himself for it’” (Martin 1993:222), Georgina’s forgiveness is hard-won and, ultimately, classic romance fare.

By the end of the novel, Shakespearean quotation duels yield to competing Shakespearean plots: strategies from Hamlet help resolve a crisis from Much Ado. Rather than wait “till tomorrow…[to] devise…brave punishments” (Much Ado 5.4.121–22) for the slanderers, the two couples use the play-within-a-play from Hamlet. At the Prince’s reception, which everyone including Lady Priscilla and Lord Falkland attend, Kate and Theo enact the conspiracy, provoking Falkland to reveal his guilt; both he and Lady Priscilla experience even worse social ostracism than they imposed on Georgina. Martin’s novel displays vividly how well Shakespearean narrative structure, with some extensions, can suit the generic requirements of romance: he offers both the obstacles to union and potential mechanisms for alliance.

The paradoxical position that Shakespeare occupies in romance derives from the subgenres in which he appears. Critics and writers who analyze the appeal of romance inevitably argue for the psychological and social significance of different subgenres. For example, in “Mass Market Romance: Pornography for Women Is Different,’’ Ann Barr Snitnow suggests that Harlequins are “too pallid to shape consciousness but they feed certain regressive elements in the female experience,” namely the moment of erotic and personal power that (presumably) occurs during courtship (1983:247). As Kathleen Gilles Seidel puts it, “The first function of the setting of a romance novel is to be Other, to transport the reader somewhere else. The setting often provides the reader with the first and clearest signal that fantasy follows” (1992:207). Both historical romance (James, Dodd, Garwood) and the more specialized Regencies (Heyer, Carroll, Balogh, etc.) use historical distance as their reproduction of the exotic or the Other. Shakespeare as a participant signals historical Otherness in Elizabethan historicals like Dodd’s. His plays and their performances offer a context for the Regencies from Heyer to Martin because of the intense revival of Shakespeare’s plays throughout the 1800s. As an indicator of historical difference, Shakespeare proves especially useful since he is both familiar and “Other,” sufficiently

< previous page page_62 next page >