Close encounters with Anne Brontë's Shakespeare

Summary

In considering the Shakespeare that Anne Brontë knew, three kinds of close textual encounters emerge. First, the Shakespearian text the Brontë family might have read, and the context in which they read it; second, Anne Brontë's actual copy of Shakespeare's plays and how she might have read them; and third the kinds of Shakespeare allusions which are traceable in her two novels, Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. These close encounters with a reader and her writing will further our understanding of Shakespeare's importance in relation to Anne Brontë's creativity as well as to her life.

Shakespeare's impact on the work of the Brontë sisters is considerable. In Charlotte's novel, Shirley, there is a chapter entitled 'Coriolanus'. Shakespeare is there appropriated as an emotional and political nexus for the relationship between Caroline Helstone and Robert Moore. Shakespeare is appropriated, to a lesser extent, in Jane Eyre and The Professor. In Emily's Wuthering Heights, Shakespeare's influence is much more submerged, just one of the imaginative and influential threads that Emily weaves together.

Although it includes the Life of Sir Walter Scott, the Lord Wharton Bible and Milton's Paradise Lost, no edition of Shakespeare is listed in the inventory of 'Books belonging to or inscribed by members of the Brontë family and held in the Brontë Parsonage Museum'. This should not be too surprising. The inventory is small and the most commonly read books tend not to survive. The Brontës' knowledge of Shakespeare can be safely assumed.

Lynne Reid Banks imagines the reading environment of the Brontës in her 1986 biographical novel, Dark Quartet: The Story of the Brontës:

When he [the Reverend Patrick] saw Branwell in a reverie over some book, written in a more permissive age, Patrick wondered if he was wise in allowing his children access to any volume in his library or that at Ponden Hall, which they frequently visited to borrow books. At first he had felt that they were safe from the grosser allusions in Shakespeare, for instance, by virtue of an inability of their essentially innocent minds to understand. Now he was no longer sure.