This
paper presents and analyses the contrasting modes of reception of Shakespeare's
writing by two of his literary admirers who, although late Victorian in many
ways, did not identify completely with British values of the time because of
their geographical and subtly ideological distance from London. The Anglo-Irish
Yeats absorbed the influence of Shakespeare into his own creative ‘working
house of thought’, transmuting the half echoes into his characteristic poetic
idiom and world view. Professor Rupin Desai has dealt thoroughly with the way
Yeats quotes and uses Shakespeare in his poetry, in his magisterial study
published by Northwestern University Press, and my task is the more modest one
of observing the creative adaptation at close hand in Yeats's play Purgatory. Meanwhile, observing from a
greater distance but in some ways a more adulatory stance, Kipling was more
interested in biographical speculation about where Shakespeare's own creativity
welled from. We can see the fruits of Kipling's thoughts on the matter in
various works including “Proofs of Holy Writ”, his accounts of The Tempest, and other sources. The
destination of the paper is an appreciation of the vastly different and often
discrepant ways in which Shakespeare has been appropriated by later creative
writers who achieved eminence in their own rights.
Prof. Robert. S. White is Program Leader of the Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, University of Western Australia, Australia. He may be contacted at bob.white@uwa.edu.au.