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available in common usage that readers will recognize him, sufficiently “historical” that readers can readily take his works as part of the past.

In their “Otherness,” Shakespeare’s plays also, paradoxically, normalize the erotics of several of these novels. When Deanna James’s Miranda, at sixteen, falls in love with “Shreve Catherwood,” her seduction is deeply intertwined with his initial efforts to cast her as Juliet, whose extreme youth masks what amounts to the statutory rape of Miranda. Jack Frazier’s destructive jealousy in Christmas Belle (1994) is both explained and defused by Isabella’s revision of Desdemona. The Hamlet narrative and Ophelia’s madness function as the major plot devices repeatedly, as either the impulse to revenge or intimations of madness separate the lovers. The most patriarchal characters—those who chronically quote Shakespeare —become enablers of the romance. Thus Shakespearean obstacles to union are “Other,” yet familiar, both tied to historical context and appropriable and revisable.

Shakespearean references also serve an essential anglophilia evident in these subgenres. The attention both readers and authors pay to historical detail underscores how the intricacies of the British aristocracy serve fantasies of hierarchies subverted or used to the heroine’s advantage.5 As a result, Shakespeare often signals challenges posed to the male-dominated social order. Isabella Gellée’s revision of Desdemona’s passive submission to patriarchal authority ultimately enables the unthinkable marriage between an actress and a peer of the realm. Heyer’s Venetia explicitly revises Shakespeare when she proposes to Damerel, invoking the very strategies that Twelfth Night’s Viola claims she would adopt to woo Olivia: “I warn you, love, that if you cast me out I shall build a willow cabin at your gates—and very likely die of an inflammation of the lungs, for November is not the month for building willow cabins!’’ (1958:288; 1.5.237–5). Both Rosencrantz from The Greatest Lover in England (1994) and Miranda in Acts of Passion (1992b) usurp the central role of Hamlet and work through loss, madness, mourning, and revenge very differently, replacing the icon of Western male subjectivity with a female perspective and revenge with romantic union as the goal. Revising or using Shakespeare becomes a symptom of the feminine challenge to the patriarchal structures of these genres, overt structures that are therefore more readily recognized, if not defeated.

Because patriarchy remains intact and even the most intrepid heroine comes up against that reality, Shakespearean references acquire

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