Hardy’s Intertextual Use of English Drama in The Return of the Native

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.Notes1. See, for example, Daniel: “Classics, ancient and modern, are echoed throughout a novel with ‘aspirations to classically tragic status’.”2. See, for example, the following works: Weber; Gwynn; Taylor, “Hardy’s Copy of Hamlet,” and “Hardy and Hamlet:” Anderson.3. I.e., The Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare, ed. Singer, now in the Dorset County Museum. See Taylor 87.4. Hardy, The Return of the Native 357. Subsequent references to this edition are given parenthetically in the text.5. See Barrineau 439.6. Martin, coming up with three possibilities―suicide, accidental drowning, and Hardy’s deliberate irresolution―argues for the third non-committal view (625).7. Concerning Hardy’s allusive technique, for example, Marsden says that “The sources … are ultimately unimportant because they have been absorbed and often transformed by the creative personality of the poet” (232).8. Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse, or Mrs Siddons as the Tragic Muse is a portrait finished in 1784 by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Bullen says that “from an early age he possessed a keen interest in all kinds of painting, ancient and modern,” and suggests that he first had occasion to see the work of Reynolds at the International Exhibition held in London in 1862 (213–214).9. Eggenschwiler sees the greatness of Eustacia as mock heroic. If so, the fact that when an adaptation of Eustacia’s last soliloquy was staged in 1920, “the threatening intensities of Hardy’s major main plots” failed to be conveyed to the audience does not seem to be a simple matter of the actress’s capability. See Wilson 114.10. Hardy’s library in Dorset County Museum (Dorchester, Dorset, UK.) includes The Dramatic Works of John Webster, 4 vols. (1857), and Volume II contains The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi, which has notes and comments written by Hardy’s hand.11. Anderson noted three instances of the “[p]ossible influence” of The Duchess of Malfi (498), but does not mention the passage I cited and discussed.12. See also Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, 219, footnote.13. Daniel argues that the value of courtly Renaissance romance, to whose world Eustacia belongs, was destroyed by the Miltonic ethical view, and in the Victorian era supported by “the middle-class heroism of work, perseverance, faith, and the low wisdom of surviving in a world of paradise lost” (262).14. According to Florence Hardy, The Later Years of Thomas Hardy, 1892–1928, Hardy refers to Clym as “the nicest of all my heroes, and not a bit like me” (151).15. One of a succession of diary entries (15–21 October 1888), cited in Hardy, The Life 224.16. Taylor, “Hardy and Hamlet” 46, has pointed out that Hardy used this line in Two on a Tower (1882).