! ! ! Much Ado About Pride and Prejudice: Jane Austen’s Appropriation of Shakespeare’s Comedic Structure ! by Victoria R. Jacobs-Moore ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! A Research Problem presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the Department of English and Philosophy University of C!entral Missouri ! ! ! ! 9 May, 2014 Much Ado About Pride and Prejudice: Jane Austen’s Appropriation of Shakespeare’s Comedic Structure ! by Victoria R. Jacobs-Moore May, 2014 ! APPROVED: Faculty Mentor: Dr. Darlene Ciraulo, Ph.D. ! ACCEPTED: Faculty Mentor: Dr. Darlene Ciraulo, Ph.D. ! ! ! ! UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL MISSOURI WARRENSBURG, MISSOURI ! ! ! ! ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my Faculty Mentor, Dr. Darlene Ciraulo, for her helpful guidance in this study and for introducing me to Shakespeare 6 years ago. Her passion for teaching is unequalled and will serve as an inspiration to me always. ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Introduction………………………………………………………………………………… ….1 Miola’s Seven Types of Intertextuality……………………………………………………….. 4 Much Ado About Pride and Prejudice……………………………………………………..….11 Discussion and Conclusion………………………………………………………………..….29 ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! Moore !1 I.Introduction Readers and critics of Jane Austen have noted her appropriation of Shakespeare. According to John Wiltshire, Jane Austen’s “dramatic quality” was most often praised and compared to that of Shakespeare to “indicate her level of achievement” (58). Commenting on Austen’s dramatic quality is part of the critical heritage that accompanies Jane Austen. George Lewes deemed Austen a “Prose Shakespeare” and continued his praise of her by citing her “marvelous dramatic power” unlike other writers of her age (Southam 138). Tennyson also wrote of Austen as “next to Shakespeare” in her “realism and the life-likeness of her characters” (Southam 21). In 1911, A.C. Bradley concluded that Austen’s “surpassing excellence within that comparatively narrow sphere whose limits she never tried to overpass” gave her the same success in her time which Shakespeare had achieved in his (32). However, it is the critical praise of Shakespearean scholar, Richard Simpson, that brought to light a new perspective of Austen’s work. Instead of making her the Shakespeare of her time, Simpson suggested that Austen’s relationship with Shakespeare was what Wiltshire calls “indebtedness or influence," or conventional source study (59). Most of the comparative studies conducted on the subject of Shakespeare and Austen (between their literature, lives, or both) have followed the traditional model of source studies. This critical approach grants agency to the author, in this case Austen, who supposedly maintains total control of her work through conscious design and who places intentional allusions to other authors and works that can be proven through concrete, empirical evidence. The complication that arises from this practice is the exclusion of possible indirect sources, literary traditions, or remote sources that might have affected the author’s work. Moore !2 Within the last 50 years, scholars have made significant strides in the field of intertextuality. This theoretical model, at the most basic level, seeks to discover the relationship between a literary work and the influences that shaped its development. According to Julia Kristeva, “[Mikhail] Bakhtin was one of the first to replace the static hewing out of texts with a model where literary structure does not simply exist, but is generated in relation to another structure” (64). Kristeva coined the term “intertextuality,” based on what she saw as an “intertwining” or “interwoven” network of texts, cultures, and timelines. Since then, a range of critics and theorists, most famously Kristeva and Barthes, have questioned the traditional approaches to literary source study in order to, as Kevin Curran states, “locate less direct forms of influence, borrowings which result from shared ways of thinking within and across cultures rather than from linear textual transmission” (435). This freedom from tradition, however, comes at a price. Being confronted with what Curran calls “a seemingly limitless discursive field, in which just about anything can be taken as an intertext for anything else," critics can conceivably compare all texts to each other without worrying about imprecise lines of filiation, inaccurate historical generalization or impressionistic cultural views (435). Therefore, I would argue the need for a pragmatic solution in the form of intertextual guidelines to inform and assist scholars in their pursuit of indirect intertextual source connections. In this study, I will be using Robert S. Miola’s “Seven Types of Intertextuality”to illustrate Austen’s use of Shakespeare’s comedic structure in the characterization and plot of Pride and Prejudice. Miola’s method is ideal for several reasons, the first being his clear cut organization of three categories and seven types of intertextuality that span from authorial Moore !3 intention, cultural influence, and audience contribution. The second reason is his detachment from what he calls “the highly specialized usage of Kristeva, Barthes, and Derrida, that excludes varieties of conscious and uncurious imitation from consideration” (13). Furthermore, these three theorists, though essential to the foundations of intertextuality as a whole, tend to draw upon linguistic inferences that leave meaning seemingly unattainable and render the practice of comparing texts futile. Miola seeks to move past the “post-structuralist approach” and address what he sees as “the most prevalent intertextual relationship[s]” involving Shakespeare (13). The third reason for evoking Miola’s method is Miola's use of examples from Shakespeare’s predecessors and contemporaries to illustrate his types of intertextuality. I will be looking at how Austen shaped and developed her romantic plot and characterization from Shakespeare’s comedic structure. Pride and Prejudice, though it is Austen’s most famous novel, is often overlooked by researchers who seek to find Shakespearean influences in Austen’s work. Some similarities to Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing are noted occasionally, but no one has taken on the challenge of making Austen’s appropriation of Shakespeare the main focus of an argument. Perhaps this is due to lack of a theoretical medium, like Miola’s method, that frames different forms of intertextual relationships, thus making them easier to identify. Therefore, this study will have two goals. The first goal will be to validate the intertextual approach of Robert S. Miola’s “Seven Types of Intertextuality." The second goal is to contribute to the existing academic discourse surrounding the intertextual relationship of Shakespeare and Austen by comparing the comedic structure of Much Ado About Nothing to the romantic characterization and comic plot pairing of Pride and Prejudice. Moore !4 This study will be divided into three sections. First, I will briefly describe Miola’s intertextual approach, identify the types of intertextuality I intend to use for my argument, and explain why this is the best method. The second section will make up the bulk of the paper and will consist of applying Miola’s “types” to Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing and Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. The third section will consist of further discourse on the results of this application and how Miola’s approach to intertextuality enlightens readers to the connection between Austen’s construction of the eighteenth century romance novel and Shakespeare’s dramatic comedy structure. ! II. “Seven Types of Intertexuality” Miola begins his argument by describing three variables he uses to organize his “types” and “categories” and explains why there are no clear cut divisions as well as some “overlapping” (13). He focuses on “first, the degree to which the trace of an earlier text is tagged by verbal echo; second, the degree to which its effect relies on audience recognition; third, the degree to which the appropriation is eristic” (Miola 13). These variables represent themselves in different categories with varying amounts of influence. Miola views these categories as “a continuum” that ranges from the “closest approximations” to “author-directed imitations," “all the way through to intertextualities that exist in discourses created by the reader” (13). By viewing intertextuality as a continuum, Miola acknowledges the complexity of indirect sources and the varying degrees of influence they have on interpreting a text. This spectrum also frees Miola from the absolutism of traditional forms of source study which require empirical evidence and leave little room for speculation. Moore !5 In what he calls “an attempt to map out some complex territory," Miola constructs three categories made up of seven types of intertextuality. The first category is “comprise[d] [of] specific books or texts mediated directly through the author” through practices such as “revision, translation, quotation, allusion, [and] sources…”(14). The evidence for placing a text/s within the first category are the “parallel” patterns found between two authors either through “verbal iteration or echo” and “imagistic patterns” (14). This category contains four types of intertextual relationships: Revision, Translation, Quotation, and Sources. The first type, Revision, is “marked by evidence of the reviser’s preference and intentionality” for the reworking of a specific text (14). “The process," to which Miola is referring, “occurs under the guiding and explicitly comparative eye of the revising author." Miola’s second type, “Translation," is the rewriting of a text in a new language and carries with it problems of accuracy, grammar, and word choice. This kind of relationship is easy to identify, but language, like currency, does not exchange equally. Miola points out that “to varying extents, all translations exhibit a kind of intertextual impossibility” (17) These two types do not apply to this study, as there is no textual evidence of Austen’s “preference and intentionality” for revising or translating Much Ado About Nothing. Miola’s third type of intertextuality is Quotation, which literally “reproduces the anterior text (whole or part) in a later text” (17). He allows textual allusions here, but is careful to distinguish them as a “reference, not [a] re-enactment”(17). Quotations can be marked by “typographical signals, by a switch in a language” or by actually identifying the “original author of the text” (17). It is important to note the amount, location, and frequency of quotations in a posterior text for the author and reader’s ability to evoke value from various contexts. Miola Moore !6 gives us the example of using quotes from classical literature to “portray the absence of divine order and justice in the corrupt [modern literary] world” (18). Additionally, the posterior author may be trying to foreshadow coming events in the narrative, such as the allusion to Shakespeare in Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. In that novel, antagonist John Willoughby says, “When you leave Barton to form your own establishment, Queen Mab shall receive you,” as he offers his horse to Marianne (64). In Romeo and Juliet, Queen Mab “‘is the hag, when maids lay on their backs, / That presses them’” (1. 4. 92-93). Readers who knew Shakespeare would have a pretty strong hint as to what Willoughby is really proposing” (Chandler 19). The Quotation technique would be useful in establishing Austen’s familiarity with Shakespeare in her other novels, but is of limited use in Pride and Prejudice due to the lack of direct allusions and references to Shakespeare. Therefore, I will not include it in my application. Miola’s fourth type of intertextuality, the last in this category, are “Sources” (19). Instead of looking at direct references to an author, this type of intertextuality seeks to understand the contextual relationship between specific texts. The Sources type looks at intertextual relationships between sources such as Hamlet and Sense and Sensibility, rather than Shakespeare and Sense and Sensibility. Source texts “provide plot, character, idea, language, or style to later texts” (Miola 19). Miola uses the term “reading and remembering” to describe how an author uses a source text, consciously or unconsciously, to shape the formation of the new text (19). For example, we know that Austen was educated in Shakespeare at a young age; therefore, she was “reading and remembering” the work of Shakespeare, to varying degrees, while she was writing her own work. This practice resulted in Shakespeare becoming part of the identity associated with Austen’s novels.