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Full-Text Articles in Dramatic Literature, Criticism and Theory
Dickens And Shakespeare’S Household Words, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner
Dickens And Shakespeare’S Household Words, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner
Faculty Publications
Though Dickens' Shakespearean qualities have often been noted, less attention has been paid to the way that Dickens constructed the terms of his comparison to Shakespeare, scripting the response he received from critics from the nineteenth century to the present and shaping Shakespeare's reception as well. Focusing on The Pickwick Papers and David Copperfield in the context of their Victorian reception, this essay shows how Dickens used Shakespearean quotation to market his characters' quotability, turning them into household words and popularizing Shakespeare's sayings in turn, even as he challenged the universality of quotable phrases.
Dickens's Hamlet Burlesque, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner
Dickens's Hamlet Burlesque, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner
Faculty Publications
Daniel Pollack-Pelzner considers what an interlude in Great Expectations involving a spectacularly bad production of Hamlet can do for Hamlet. Specifically, Pollack-Pelzner looks at what Dickens's rendering of Mr. Wopsle's travesty reveals about Hamlet's openness to an audience's derisive laughter. Wopsle’s production may be a travesty, but Dickens’s narrative of that production is a burlesque, with Hamlet as much its target as Wopsle.