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Page 59

Since the quotations from less popular plays such as Pericles, Cymbeline, and King John surely escape most readers, this transformation of romance into memory quiz seems destined to put her public down. Her claims to Shakespearean structure, as well as the unexpected test on the “master writer of all time,” insist on the novel’s artistry; Miranda’s enactment of a Hamlet-like revenge revises the plot utterly in terms of female revenge and action.

These actress-novels also rework Shakespeare’s female characters. Mary Balogh’s Christmas Belle (1994) takes up Othello in recounting actress Isabella Gellée’s pursuit of love and respectability. Long after fleeing London’s theatrical scene and her lover’s unflattering assumptions about its actresses, she returns to England, widowed with two children and famous as an extremely talented actress, only to end up starring in an amateur theatrical hosted, inevitably, by the grandparents of the lover whom she fled. During their early reacquaintance, the amateur Christmas production, which Isabella has agreed to direct and which includes most of the house party, seems focused on Portia from Merchant of Venice and Kate from Taming in the excerpts that she plans to perform. Soon, however, the emphasis settles decidedly on Othello, as Balogh reveals that Jack Frazier, the hero, drove Isabella away with his extreme jealousy. Jack naturally plays the Moor opposite Isabella’s Desdemona, provoking the audience to weep “for the world beyond innocence, where love did not always bring happiness, where there could be so many misunderstandings and tragedies because people would not talk openly with each other—even with those they loved” (Balogh 1994:205).

The novel’s narrative of early jealous insecurity and accusations of adultery echoes Othello, but the lovers, older and wiser, get another chance largely because Isabella cannot embrace Desdemona’s submission:

She could not understand Desdemona. Although she had played the part several times before, she suddenly felt locked outside the person who was Desdemona. She could not feel with Desdemona’s heart or think with her mind or breathe the air she breathed. She wanted to become angry. She wanted to fight back the way she had fought back nine years ago. She wanted to hurt him as he was hurting her. She had done it once, and she thought she had succeeded well enough.… No, she could not be Desdemona.

(Balogh 1994:143)

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