Literature review

This section serves as a review of existing scholarly literature and texts that I intend to put to use in the discussion for this study. The literature that shows the relation between Shakespeare’s heroines and the Victorians is very comprehensive. To sort out the differences, this section is divided into three categories. The first category will be

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the pieces of literature written by Victorian writers and critics themselves. With these works of literature, I want to explore how the Victorians analyzed these heroines in relation to their society. Next, I move on to the works written by contemporary scholars about their studies related to Shakespeare and the Victorians. From these two selections, I will focus on the comparison between how the issue was seen through the Victorians’

eyes and how it is analyzed in the modern days. The last category will be the studies regarding the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The Pre-Raphaelites had drawn numbers of paintings that were inspired by Shakespeare’s heroines and many of them had become iconic paintings that symbolize the image of the character. Thus, the study of the Pre-Raphaelites is mandatory in this research due to its importance on how their works had represented, symbolized, and influenced the viewpoints of the Victorians and contemporary scholars on the heroines. The selection of texts related to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood is narrowed down mainly to their works subjecting Shakespeare's heroines.

1.) Victorian writings

In 1807, Charles and Mary Lamb published their Tales from Shakespeare, written mainly for young readers of Shakespeare. Although published thirty years before the Victorian era, Tales from Shakespeare greatly influenced the Victorians and became a common book to appear in every Victorian home. The book is a narrative adaptation that contains twenty plays of Shakespeare with Mary responsible for comedies and Charles's work with the tragedies. They believed that some parts of the plays were too difficult for young readers to understand. Thus, they wrote the plays in different adaptations by censoring parts in order to protect the children's purity and understanding. The Lambs aimed at encouraging readers to value the moral of the stories when facing obstacles in life. The Tales from Shakespeare became an influential

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text in the education of Victorian women. Later, researchers and investigators have tended to treat Lamb's work as an origin for Shakespeare’s adaptations for children.¹⁹ It has become a symbolic book of Shakespeare in children’s literature.

One of the first works dedicated to the study of Shakespeare’s women was Anna Jameson’s Shakespeare’s Heroines (1832) (originally published under the title Characteristics of Women: Moral, Poetical, and Historical). Jameson’s discussion focused on her selection of twenty-five heroines from twenty-one Shakespearean plays.

She divided these notable heroines into four different groups: characters of intellect, characters of passion and imagination, characters of the affections and, historical characters. Jameson’s Shakespeare’s Heroines was a popular success that influenced both the literary and education fields. She discussed the heroines individually and offered her generation a different perspective of women's role and the ‘woman question.’

Jameson writes in her book, “his characters combine history and real life; they are complete individuals, whose hearts and souls are laid open before us: all may behold, and all judge for themselves.”²⁰ Her introduction is written in the form of a dialogue between herself, ‘Alda,’ and a male admirer of Shakespeare, ‘Medon.’ Within the conversation, the author justifies her purpose of the study by answering the questions and doubts asked by Medon. In response to Medon's assumption on her aim was to make women the better and superior sex,²¹ Alda answers:

It appears to me that the condition of women in society, as at present constituted, is false in itself, and injurious to them, that the education of women, as at present conducted, is founded in mistaken principles, and tends to increase fearfully the sum of misery and

19 Kathryn Prince, “Illustration, Text, and Performance in Early Shakespeare for Children,” Borrows and Lenders, 1.

20 Anna Jameson, Shakespeare’s Heroines: Characteristics of Women-Moral, Poetical, and Historical.

London: G. Bell, 1913, 48.

21 Ibid., 48.

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error in both sexes but I do not choose presumptuously to fling these opinions in the face of the world, in the form of essays on morality and treaties on education. I have rather chosen to illustrate certain positions by examples, and leave my readers to deduce the moral themselves, and draw their own inferences.²²

She explains that her purpose was to set the stories of the heroines as a warning for the young readers. For instance, young readers of Shakespeare should be prevented from imitating Juliet’s act of love.²³ In result, Jameson's exploration of Shakespeare's women has greatly influenced the Victorians and the later generations on their symbolism and representations.

Influenced by Jameson’s work, Mary Cowden Clarke, published her The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines between 1850 and 1852. As a notable Shakespearian scholar and one of the first woman write about Shakespeare professionally, she publishes essays of imaginative prequel of the girlhood stories for fifteen heroines of Shakespeare. In her book, she includes heroines such as Portia, Lady Macbeth, Juliet, Desdemona, Ophelia, and ten more. The essays title Portia: the heiress of Belmont, Juliet: the white dove of Verona and, Ophelia: the rose of Elsinore. Her selection was down to the best-known heroines that often appeared in other texts and theatrical performances as a perfect example of womanhood for young Victorians.²⁴ The essays were written in the style of fiction for young women to read and relate. According to Anne Russell, her reimagined stories of the heroines work as an "implicit explanations of apparently improper behaviors or attitudes."²⁵ Clarke’s The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines imposed new visions of Shakespeare’s heroines away from the original imagination;

22 Ibid., 49-50.

23 Ibid., 60.

24 Gail Marshall, Shakespeare in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, 109.

25 Russell, "‘History and Real Life’: Anna Jameson," 36.

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instead, she placed them with the Victorian values of womanhood and created a nineteenth-century version of the heroines.²⁶

The relation of Shakespeare’s women and the Victorian women has come into a greater interest and discussion among the Victorian critics. John Ruskin, one of the greatest Victorians, famously or rather provocatively said in his “Of Queen’s Garden”

(1865) that “Shakespeare has no heroes; he has only heroines.”²⁷ The essay discussed the concern on the image of the ideal woman by being passive and set in the private spheres. He writes that there are no real heroes in the perfect plays. When these men failed to become the true heroes of their stories, the presence of the perfect women will always be seen in the plays. As he writes, “the catastrophe of every play is caused always by the folly or fault of a man; the redemption, if there be any, is by the wisdom and virtue of a woman.”²⁸ He asserts that Shakespeare’s women are represented as faithful and wise individuals that serve as counselors for the men.²⁹ Out of all the heroes and heroines of Shakespeare, he points out the exception of Henry V and Ophelia.

He menitons that Henry V is the only hero in his plays and Ophelia is the only weak woman that has failed to become the heroine. Goneril, Regan and Lady Macbeth were also named as the only wicked ones in the plays. He used the heroines as the examples of ideal woman and “validated his own idealized view of women.”³⁰

Algernon Charles Swinburne published his A Study of Shakespeare in 1880. He brought up his discussion with the directions of politics, religion and, sexuality. He divides the plays into three categories: Lyric and Fantastic, Comic and Historic, and Tragic and Romantic. In his study, he analyzes the roles of the female characters in

26 Marshall, Shakespeare in the Nineteenth Century, 110.

27 John Ruskin, “Of Queen’s Garden,” Sesame and Lilies, Ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, (London: Allen, 1905) Vol. 18: 114.

28 Ibid., 115.

29 Ibid., 110.

30 Marshall, Shakespeare in the Nineteenth Century, 223.

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relation to the men in their life. He writes that Othello and Hamlet both serve as their own entities while, “Constance is the jewel of King John, and Katherine is the crowning blossom of Henry VIII.”³¹ With Cleopatra, he comments her as the ‘perfect and everlasting woman’ that Shakespeare has presented her in the ideal femininity of the perfect mother, wife, daughter, mistress and, maiden.³² His criticisms were discussed both in public and private manners. With his personal ideas, we see the struggle of his views of gender and sexual identities.³³ Disagreeing some Shakespearean critics like Thomas Carlyle, Swinburne shapes and discusses his version of the Victorian Shakespeare.

2.) Contemporary writings about the Victorians

In order to understand Victorian women’s status and the society’s belief on the ideology of womanhood, Joan N. Burstyn’s Victorian Education and the Ideal of Womanhood (1980) is a helpful guide to study this background information. The book includes the analysis of the women’s status in education and connects it to their role in politics and religion. In her study, Burstyn explains Victorians ideology of the separate spheres through the shift of women's role in education from the mid to the late nineteenth century. The author provides her study with an argument that even though women were able to gain more rights in higher education, it was the unattainable ideal of womanhood that led to the change. In this discussion, Shakespeare’s play becomes an essential text required in women’s education and is also a factor that symbolizes the change of women’s education.

One of the seminal studies used for the present work is Shakespeare and the

31 Algernon Charles Swinburne, A Study of Shakespeare (London: Chatto & Windus, 1880), 70.

32 Swinburne, A Study of Shakespeare, 191.

33 Robert Sawyer, Victorian Appropriations of Shakespeare, 49.

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Victorian Women written by Gail Marshall in 2009. The author gives an analysis of how women took a fundamental role in the study of Victorian Shakespeare. Besides from analyzing the texts, Marshall also brings the attention to the Victorian actresses who played an influential role in the plays and writers who embrace Shakespeare in their writings and life. She focuses on the relationship between Shakespeare and the Victorian women, through the change of women’s role in education and the female voices they found within the characters. Referring to the issue, Marshall states:

Shakespeare’s women were relevant and audible precisely because they were not timeless, because they were read as the products of another time and political context which could envisage and articulate a potential for women beyond the vision of the nineteenth century.³⁴

She makes the attempt to emphasize the importance of Shakespeare in the Victorian society, especially towards the women.

Stuart Sillars’s Shakespeare and the Victorian (2013) is another work contributing to the analysis of Shakespeare and the Victorian culture. This work shows precise analyses on the Victorian reception of Shakespeare. The author uses a collection of poetry, novels, and, performance reviews to further examine his arguments on how the plays and the male roles became an essential and central role in Victorian life. Through this book, we can obtain the information of Shakespeare in visual art, theatrical performances and, other novels and poems referencing the influences from the plays.

Other than the above publications, Mary Balestraci’s Ph.D. dissertation on Victorian Voices: Gender Ideology and Shakespeare’ Female Characters published in

34 Marshall, Shakespeare and the Victorian Women, 44.

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2012, provides the background knowledge of how the Victorian ideologies of femininity are related to Shakespeare’s women. She focuses more on the woman question and Victorians’ perceptions of femininity as passive, gentle, selfless and, naïve.

She discusses the criticisms made during the nineteenth century about the three types of heroines: “the tragic innocents, the defiant daughters and dutiful wives and, the wise and witty women.”³⁵ In detail, she selected and discussed on nine symbolic female characters from Shakespeare’s plays that fit into one of the three categories: Ophelia, Desdemona and Cordelia for the tragic innocents; Juliet, Katherine, and Lady Macbeth for daughter and wives; Portia, Beatrice, and Rosalind for with wise women.³⁶ In her dissertation, she combines the criticisms made towards the Victorian society’s gender expectations and the limited agency, and mentioned how these selected heroines were used as a role model for women to follow.

3.) Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood studies

One of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB), William Holman Hunt published his memoirskj in 1905-1906 entitled Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. In his two-volume memoir, he illustrates and discusses the in-depth meanings and the search of naturalism in the works by John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, himself and, other associate artists. As one of the members who had never departed from the original ideology of the brotherhood, he writes, "Art is generally regarded as a light and irresponsible pursuit, entailing of its misuse no penalty to the artist or to the nation of which he is a citizen.” This is a notable statement of Hunt and within this book, he discusses his belief and criticism he faced while pursuing his

35 Mary Balestraci, Victorian voices: Gender ideology and Shakespeare's female characters. Diss.

Northeastern University, 2012, 3.

36 Ibid., 3.

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artistic goals. In these memoirs, he indicates his pursuit of art and ideals that he shared with his fellow companions. He writes in a narrative style of how the movement started and how they arrived at the naming of the brotherhood. Through this memoir, we can obtain a comprehensive understanding from one of the founder's perspectives on how he saw and believed in the art movement.

As a representative scholar of Pre-Raphaelite arts, British writer Jan Marsh issued a series of books on her studies related to the PRBs. She published her study on the Pre-Raphaelite Women: Images of Femininity in Pre-Pre-Raphaelite Art in 1987. In this study, she offers a profound analysis of the paintings of Pre-Raphaelite women. She analyzes the linkage between the women portrayed in the paintings and the womanhood ideals in the Victorian age. These images of women reflected and shaped the aspects of how women should act. The Pre-Raphaelite’s women divides into four main categories: the desirable, the chaste, the dutiful and, as the witch.³⁷ Consequently, in her book, we can acknowledge the different types and evolution of women in the Pre-Raphaelite paintings.

Tim Barringer’s Reading the Pre-Raphaelites (1998) provides a detailed description of the works by the Pre-Raphaelites from various perspectives. This text is a helpful guide to the general study of PRB’s paintings. The author draws a collection of significant works by the RPBs and discusses the background information, symbolism and, the relationship between their paintings and their life. Barringer’s study of the Pre-Raphaelite paintings is divided into five different categories. He introduces their works from the beginning of their rebellion and formation to the later times when many shifts from being botanic realistic to painting portraits and profiles. On the basis of such information, we can have a fundamental understanding of the Pre-Raphaelites and the

37 Jan Marsh. Pre-Raphaelite Women: Images of Femininity in Pre-Raphaelite Art. (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987), 9.

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artworks.

Building on these literary and scholarly pieces, I aim to bring up a study using the information provided and produce an analysis of Shakespeare’s women as presented by the Victorians.