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Page 51 difficulties of the disguised Valentine’s love for Diccon and, perhaps more significantly, details Diccon’s protracted discovery that he loves her. His evolving awareness of his feelings proves crucial in romance (as it apparently is not in Shakespeare) because the genre depends on the masculine acknowledgment of emotion as much as on active female choice. When pertinent, such epigrams are typically less involved with the actual narratives than in Fool’s Masquerade (1984), in some cases functioning as an authorial grace note. Edith Layton notes that her Shakespearean references may elude her readers but gratify her: I confess, I like to put Shakespeare in many of my books, not just in hopes that association will give me some polish but because the references please me…I thought it would be especially noticeable in…Game of Love, given the quote on the first page, and the main character, “Lion”, aka Arden. But alas! No one ever wrote to tell me they noticed that. (Osborne 1997) Since Layton opens Game of Love (1988) with a quotation from A Midsummer Night’s Dream and characterizes her hero, Arden Lyons, as the beast courting a fairy princess, her expectations seem reasonable. References to Shakespeare clearly signal that these authors are serious writers. Although A.S.Byatt acknowledges, in her essay on Heyer, “how difficult good escape literature is to write’’ (1992: 233), romance novelists themselves are well aware that: Nothing about the romance genre is more reviled by literary critics and, indeed, the public at large, than the conventional diction of romance. Descriptive passages are regularly culled from romance novels and read aloud with great glee and mockery by everybody from college professors to talk show hosts. You would think that we romance novelists…would have the wit to clean up our act. After all, we are talented professionals. (Barlow and Krentz 1992:24) Krentz and Barlow suggest that these much-derided patterns of language are crucial to relating particular fantasies to their audiences. As a result many affirm their position as “talented professional” writers indirectly—some through the allusions to Shakespeare, whom Deanna James characterizes as the greatest writer of all time and credits with the inspiration for the multi-act structure of her Acts of Passion (1992b) and Acts of Love (1992a).1 |
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