Daddy’s Girls: Shakespearian Daughters and Eighteenth-Century Ideology

Summary

In eighteenth-century England, Shakespeare’s works were the literary emblem of the British character, denoting liberty, courage and a specifically British genius. Shakespeare’s status as the English national poet reiterated this national character; as the playwright and actor Samuel Foote explained, such is the ‘Taste and Genius of the free-born luxuriant Inhabitants of this Isle’ that they ‘will not more bear a Yoke in Poetry than Religion’. Within the context of eighteenth-century literary theory, Shakespeare represented the embodiment of English liberty, resisting the neoclassical shackles of rules and decorum. He thus stood in contrast to the French who, critics claimed, were as unwilling ‘to be freed from a Sovereign Authority in the Empire of Wit and Letters as in their civil Government’. With the ‘Empire of Wit’ standing in for ‘civil Government’, Shakespeare’s works – if presented properly – themselves encode a national ideology of liberty and truth where literary form represents national and political character.