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Page 53 nificance. Not surprisingly, the three Shakespeare-quoters I have mentioned are secondary figures as well as characters who have difficulty expressing their feelings. Paradoxically, these characters also enable romantic union: Shakespearean quotations ultimately both express and distance emotion, making a bridge between the emotionally eloquent female characters and the taciturn males. Although Garwood’s Victoria has only slight influence, Lucinda Benedict and Walter Renwick are simultaneously involved in their quoting and implicated in matchmaking. Lucinda encounters an array of increasingly bemused young ladies in Michaels’ three novels. Either troublesome or in trouble, Miss Tamerlane, Lady Penelope, and Miss Hampshire each discovers true love thanks to a woman who speaks only the words of dead men. Lucinda’s quotations are bricolage, overt acknowledgment that all language has been used and overused, especially the characteristic language of the romance novel. Lucinda demonstrates, however, that “used” language enables romantic union, as she quotes freely from many sources. Indeed, she must quote other writers around the dowager duchess who berates her in the final novel where Lucinda appears as a ghost: “Shakespeare! How dare you quote the great Will to me, you vacantly grinning twit… It’s one thing to come back and haunt me, but to quote Shakespeare to me at the same time? No! It is too much for one old woman to bear!” (Michaels 1992:87) Nonetheless, Michaels clearly envisions Shakespeare as central. Not only does Lucinda describe her position, entrapped between life and afterlife, with Hamlet’s lines (“Clasping her beringed hands theatrically to her lace-draped breast, she exclaimed, ‘Oh God! I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.’ Shakespeare” [63–64; citing Hamlet 2.2. 248–50]), but Michaels also deliberately invokes Shakespeare at the end of the final book: So we have bid a final, fond farewell to Aunt Lucinda, who is off to rejoin her adored Jerome, knowing that she would not wish our regrets, but only quote from the dowager duchess’s beloved bard: “If ever thou shalt love,/In the sweet pangs of it remember me…’’ (184; citing Twelfth Night 2.4.14–15) |
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