“Our inimitable Shakespeare is a Stumbling-block to the whole Tribe of these rigid Criticks”: English and German Women in Eighteenth-Century Debates on Shakespeare
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Abstract
In the preface to the Dutch Lover, performed in 1673, Aphra Behn justifies her profession as dramatist claiming a strong affinity between women and Shakespeare: “We all well know that the immortal Shakespeare’s Plays (who was not guilty of much more of this than often falls to women’s share) have better pleas’d the World than Jonson’s works”1. Drawing from Shakespeare’s presumed ignorance, his “small latine, and less Greek”,2 Behn’s words not only suggest an association between Shakespeare’s lack of knowledge and that of women, but also become emblematic of the significant role that English women would play, from the last decades of the seventeenth century onwards, in the promotion of Shakespeare as a cultural figure that deserved to be more carefully interrogated in England and, as today we well know, abroad. Since then, Shakespeare has continued to be seen as a national but also global emblematic figure. The analysis of his reception, appropriation and criticism has always been helpful in exploring the way in which languages, ideas and models travel through time and space, acquiring new political-cultural meanings, and becoming important elements of exchange ‒ Kulturtransfer‒ between different cultures. Compelling in this respect are the recent