| This dissertation examines the nineteenth-century character criticism written by women addressing Shakespeare's female characters. The character criticism of actresses Helen Faucit, Fanny Kemble, Ellen Terry and authors Madeleine Leigh-Noel Elliott, Anna Jameson, and Mary Cowden Clarke reveals an emotional and textual engagement with Shakespeare's characters that differs from the Romantic and Scientific criticism of their male counterparts such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, Matthew Arnold, Edward Dowden, and Algernon Swinburne. Within the pages of their narratives, the female character critics record their personal, emotional, textual engagement with characters such as Rosalind, Lady Macbeth, and Imogen, and establish a communal and dialogic relationship of loving friendship with them. A narratological analysis illuminates this communion in the narrative by examining each critic's reconstruction and re-imagination of Shakespeare's play, mimetic staging of scenes, and representation of the consciousness of the character. The textual communion is enacted in the critic's narrative in the same way that the actor, such as Terry or Kemble, psychologically unites with her character on stage. In their written works, both nineteenth-century character critics and actresses share this female communion with Shakespeare's characters with other female readers. Rather than viewing such extratextual accounts of Shakespeare's play as the stuff of fantasy or dreams, this dissertation argues that the moments of communion between critic and character provide the female reader the 'extra-textual' space to envision Shakespeare's character and herself differently from the 'ideal' woman of the Victorian age. |
