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Rather than submitting to her lover’s belief in her sexual treachery, as Desdemona seems to do, Isabella had fought back by falsely claiming that she had taken lovers and by fleeing her unreasonably jealous lover. Whereas Desdemona lies about who killed her (“Nobody, I myself” [Othello 5.2.133]) in order to protect her husband, Isabella lies to exploit Jack’s/Othello’s greatest fear—that she has betrayed him. She saves herself by fight and flight. Moreover, their ‘‘performance” of Othello allows Jack his fantasy of the submissive, betraying woman only to reflect his own excessive jealousy back at him. His recognition that his jealousy, like Othello’s, was groundless is crucially mediated through the “amateur” Shakespearean performance.

The Lady Who Hated Shakespeare even foregrounds the nineteenth-century prunings of Shakespeare in its amateur staging of Othello, which is radically revised by a character (presented as officious and troublesome) who objects to husbands strangling their wives. When Delia steps in as Desdemona, she inadvertently restores the radically bowdlerized text to the fuller version she recalls from her father’s endless reading. Even as she apparently opposes revision of the play, however, Delia gets caught in the murderous plot to strangle the young woman whom she understudies. Carroll’s use of Othello, like Balogh’s, acknowledges the romantic obstacle in that play—jealousy and male aggression—but revises it. When Delia takes the role of Desdemona, she is endangered not because of undeserved sexual jealousy, but because of the mistaken fears of a valet disguised as a nobleman who thinks that she, rather than the original actress, is blackmailing him. In effect, anxiety about preserving class position displaces anxieties about female sexuality.

The most elaborate appropriation and reinterpretation I have discovered so far, Michelle Martin’s reworking of Much Ado About Nothing in The Hampshire Hoyden (1993), not only stages Shakespeare as the common language shared by hero and heroine, but also invokes the slandered maiden tale as an eminently suitable narrative for romance. This novel strategically uses Shakespearean allusions against one another in several contexts.

First Kate Glyn and Theo Blake quote Shakespeare to each other frequently. Although Theo initially identifies himself with Hamlet because he deeply mourns his brother, Kate provokes him out of his melancholy with Shakespeare. Her resistance to matrimony and his melancholy emerge and merge in frequent quotation wars:

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