This book tells how Dickinsons fascination with Shakespeare informed her life and her poetry. One of the messages that Emily Dickinson wanted to communicate to the world was her great love of William Shakespeare - her letters abound with references to him and his works. This book explores the many implications of her admiration for the Bard.Paraic Finnerty clarifies the essential role that Shakespeare had in Dickinsons life by locating her allusions to his writings within a nineteenth-century American context and by treating reading as a practice that is shaped, to a large extent, by culture. In the process, he throws new light on Shakespeares multifaceted presence in Dickinsons world: in education, theater, newspapers, public lectures, reading clubs, and literary periodicals.Through analysis of letters, journals, diaries, records, periodicals, newspapers, and marginalia, Finnerty juxtaposes Dickinsons engagement with Shakespeare with the responses of her contemporaries. Her Shakespeare emerges as an immoral dramatist and highly moral poet; a highbrow symbol of class and cultivation and a lowbrow popular entertainer; an impetus behind the emerging American theater criticism and an English author threatening American creativity; a writer culturally approved for women and yet one whose authority women often appropriated to critique their culture. Such a context allows the explication of Dickinsons specific references to Shakespeare and further conjecture about how she most likely read him.Finnerty also examines those of Dickinsons responses to Shakespeare that deviated from what might have been expected and approved of by her culture. Imaginatively departing from the commonplace, Dickinson chose to admire three of Shakespeares most powerful and transgressive female characters - Cleopatra, Queen Margaret, and Lady Macbeth - instead of his more worthy and virtuous heroines. More startling, although the poet found resonance for her own life in Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and Macbeth, she chose, in the racially charged atmosphere of nineteenth-century America, to identify with Shakespeares most controversial character, Othello, thereby defying expectations once again.
