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Page 203 century and a half the quoting of Shakespeare was pandemic. It has been convincingly argued that, by 1764, Shakespeare was becoming in many ways a religious cult figure, an object of pilgrimage and of quasi-transcendental authority, his works accorded many of the attributes of sacred scripture (Dávidházi 1998). Certainly, in nineteenth-century Britain and its empire—as Robert Sawyer, Sudipto Chatterjee and Jyotsna G.Singh, and Georgianna Ziegler here demonstrate—appropriations of Shakespeare pervaded the public sphere, from book illustration and gender debate to the rhetoric of poetic self-legitimation and imperial racism. The great Romantic essayist William Hazlitt quoted Shakespeare more than 2,400 times in his published prose (Bate 1984:26); William Blake could label an image “Jocund Day” (from Romeo and Juliet 3.5.9) or “Fiery Pegasus” (from 1 Henry IV 4.1.110) and expect just two words to recall their Shakespearean context (Taylor 1989:107). In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville, visiting America, reported that ‘‘There is hardly a pioneer’s hut which does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare” (Tocqueville 1838–40:2:66), and those volumes were obviously read, not just displayed on log coffee tables. In 1810, a popular burlesque entitled Hamlet Travestie inaugurated the dramatic subgenre of Shakespearian travesties, a genuinely “popular” form of mass entertainment that flourished in England and America for most of the nineteenth century, and presumed an audience intimately acquainted with the plots and the language of the plays (Jacobs and Johnson 1976; Wells 1978). But never-resting time carries a backpack, wherein he puts bards for oblivion. In nineteenth-century America, Shakespeare was increasingly appropriated by “highbrow” culture (Levine 1988); the very popularity and vulgarity of the burlesques to some extent confirmed that division. At the end of the twentieth century, the comedians John Monteith and Suzanne Rand do an improvisation built upon four items suggested by the audience: a place, a person, an object, and a cliché. On the night I saw the show, the audience suggested Chicago, Al Capone, a toilet seat, and “Have a nice day.” Monteith and Rand then improvised upon these details, a scene “as if written by Shakespeare.” The result was screamingly funny, but I did not hear a single quotation from Shakespeare; his style was suggested, instead, by acrobatic contortions of grammar, the occasional “alas,” odd “doth,” and frequent “thee,” incongruous mixtures of orotund polysyllables and street slang, and a singsong approximation of blank verse. So low the star is fallen. |
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