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Troilus and Cressida. Vincent Darracott, who has been supplanted as the earl’s heir by an unknown cousin, speaks most of these lines. That cousin, Hugh Darracott, is unacceptable to both his grandfather and cousin because of his father’s marriage to a weaver’s daughter. This complicated background explains both Vincent’s assumptions about Hugh—that he is an oversized oaf from the merchant class— and the form his hostility takes—taunting references to Hugh as the intellectually challenged, yet heroically proportioned Ajax in Troilus. Vincent’s Shakespearean barbs insult Hugh on two levels, by suggesting that he is as dimwitted as Ajax and by flaunting the superior education that Vincent has presumably received. But instead of foolishly using his strength to resolve the major plot crisis, Hugh so cleverly deceives the excise man who tries to arrest the heroine’s younger brother that her final accolade completely inverts the “Ajax” slurs: “Noble Ajax, you are as strong, as valiant, as wise, no less noble, much more gentle, and altogether more tractable!” (Heyer 1959:314; 2.3.140–42). Even though in Troilus Agamemnon’s words falsely praise Ajax only to provoke Achilles into action, Heyer’s heroine uses the lines approvingly to describe Hugh, whose tractability has made him look easily manipulated to his prejudiced relatives. Heyer’s revision of Shakespeare’s Ajax, valuing rather than deriding him, prefigures other ways in which romances revise Shakespeare, often by inverting his hierarchies—particularly those of gender.

Another strategy of appropriation appears in Venetia (1958), where the lovers-to-be quote Shakespeare during their first meeting. When the rakish Damerel steals a kiss and comments, “And beauty’s self she is” (Heyer 1958:27), his quotation’s unspoken next line (“When all her robes are gone’’) offends proprieties, but so does the sequel to Venetia’s response that he is “a most pestilent complete knave” (28). Her quotation comes from Othello, where Iago claims that Cassio desires Desdemona; the next line reads, “and the woman hath found him already” (2.1. 239–40). Since Iago insists on Desdemona’s intimacy with Cassio, Venetia’s embarrassment is understandable, though Heyer does not explain it: “Venetia, who had suddenly remembered the rest of the quotation, replied, ‘If you don’t know, I certainly shan’t tell. That phrase is apt enough, but the context won’t do’” (1958:28). Heyer does, however, give clues, since Damerel remarks that he had better study his Shakespeare and offers his own more recognizable quotation: “My reputation, Iago, my reputation!” (28; 2.3.246). He quotes Cassio’s lament for the reputation he has lost by becoming drunk at Iago’s instigation, so both charac-

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