This is the first comprehensive account of the relationship between Shakespeare and his favourite poet, Ovid, examining the full range of Shakespeare's works.

Although it is well known that the Romantics were obsessed with Shakespeare, little attention has been paid to the ways in which he influenced their creative practices and their theories of the imagination. This new work finally presents the fascinating picture of how the Romantics read Shakespeare and responded to the implications of his work for their own poetry. The book provides the first full critical discussion of Shakespeare and Wordsworth, explores the influence of the plays on the poetry of Blake and Coleridge, and offers a fresh account of Shakespeare's powerful presence in the letters and poems of Keats and Byron, and in Shelley's dramas. Taking issue with prevalent deconstructionist theories and Harold Bloom's ideas on "the anxiety of influence," Bate instead carefully illustrates the ways in which initial attempts at blind imitation were transformed into graceful poetic echo and allusion.

The idea of Shakespearean genius and sublimity is usually understood to be a product of the Romantic period, promulgated by poets such as Coleridge and Byron who promoted Shakespeare as the supreme example of literary genius and creative imagination. However, the picture looks very different when viewed from the perspective of the myriad theater directors, actors, poets, political philosophers, gallery owners, and other professionals in the nineteenth century who turned to Shakespeare to advance their own political, artistic, or commercial interests. Often, as in John Kemble’s staging of The Winter’s Tale at Drury Lane or John Boydell’s marketing of paintings in his Shakespeare Gallery, Shakespeare provided a literal platform on which both artists and entrepreneurs could strive to influence cultural tastes and points of view. At other times, Romantic writers found in Shakespeare’s works a set of rhetorical and theatrical tools through which to form their own public personae, both poetic and political. Women writers in particular often adapted Shakespeare to express their own political and social concerns. Taken together, all of these critical and aesthetic responses attest to the remarkable malleability of the Shakespearean corpus in the Romantic period. As the contributors show, Romantic writers of all persuasions”Whig and Tory, male and female, intellectual and commercial”found in Shakespeare a powerful medium through which to claim authority for their particular interests.

This work argues that Rome is relevant to the Romantic period not as the continuation of an earlier neoclassicism, but rather as a concept that is simultaneously transformed and transformative: transformed in the sense that new models of historical thinking produced a changed understandings of historicity itself.

These two criticisms are based on the presumption that only a socially and intellectually elite reader is able to view the author's language in terms of its organic relationship with the text as a whole. The Romantics focused on the interpretive reproduction of Shakespeare through sympathetic identification with his characters."--BOOK JACKET.

Evaluating Emily Dickinson's poetry within the context of Romanticism, Joanne Diehl demonstrates how the poet both manifests and boldly subverts this literary tradition. One of the most important reasons for the poet's divergence from it, Professor Diehl argues, is a powerful sense of herself as a woman, which also creates a feeling of estrangement from the company of major male Romantic precursors. Originally published in 1982. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.