VICTORIAN APPROPRIATIONS OF SHAKESPEARE: MACBETH AND THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD
VICTORIAN APPROPRIATIONS OF SHAKESPEARE: MACBETH AND THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD

Summary/Abstract: In his seminal book Victorian Conventions John Reed states that ‘‘in order to read the literature of the Victorian period accurately and rewardingly, it is necessary to acknowledge and recover the forms of stylisation and convention with which Victorian authors and audiences were familiar,” encouraging the potential reader to try and restore the 19th literature to the world view out of which it was written (1975: 3). Though it is never possible to read the past from its own perspective, yet even a mere attempt may lead to thoughtprovoking conclusions. Victorians frequently stylised their scenes and characters on Shakespeare. Considering a large bulk of 19th literature, one may boldly observe that the Victorians were haunted by Shakespeare. According to several researchers of Victorian literature, Shakespeare is woven into Victorian art through echoes, ubiquitous allusions and plot patterns.1 Likewise Dickens appropriated Shakespeare as a treasury of types and moral and aesthetic designs that could fulfil (in the language of typology) his characters and plots and cast his narratives into a larger moral and aesthetic context. ‘‘He brought within the magic circle of his genius, traditions peculiarly adapted for his purpose, and turned familiar things into constellations which should enlighten the world for ages,” thus one of Dickensian characters, Nicholas Nickleby defends Shakespeare’s contemporaneity, viewing him both as the shaper of literary tradition and as the major figure in the tradition Nicholas himself inherits (1978: 727).2

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