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Cooper's Indebtedness to Shakespeare

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

W. B. Gates
W. B. Gates*
Affiliation:
Texas Technological College, Lubbock
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Extract

According to James Fenimore Cooper's daughter, Susan, the novelist was “always ready” to read Shakespeare aloud to the family, “entering with unfeigned delight into the spirit of his works, whether comedy or tragedy”; and he carried as his “constant traveling companions” in Europe the volumes of a 32° edition of the plays. Cooper's reading of Shakespeare was evidently not critical but largely for pleasure. In the volumes of the plays in the library at Cooperstown are no significant marginal comments; in the published letters are no important allusions to the dramatist; and of the many references to Shakespeare in the novels, the only notable one of critical nature is that in Jack Tier, where Shakespeare is called “the great poet of our language, and the greatest that ever lived, perhaps, short of the inspired writers of the Old Testament, and old Homer and Dante.”

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 67 , Issue 5 , September 1952 , pp. 716 - 731
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1952

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References

1 Pages and Pictures from the Writings of James Fenimore Cooper (New York, 1861), p. 17, and “A Second Glance Backward,” the Atlantic Monthly, lx (Oct. 1887), 476.

2 I am indebted to Professor James F. Beard, Jr., of Dartmouth College for this information and to Mr. Louis C. Jones, Director of the New York State Historical Association at Cooperstown, for his assistance in regard to these volumes.

3 Correspondence of James Fenimore Cooper, edited by his grandson, James Fenimore Cooper (New Haven, 1922).

4 Page 333. References to the novels are to the Townsend Edition (New York, 1859-61). References to the plays are to the Neilson and Hill Edition (Boston, 1942).

6 In the Introd. to James Fenimore Cooper: Representative Selections (New York, 1936), pp. lxvii-lxviii, Robert E. Spiller has noted that Cooper “quoted from Shakespeare more than from any other author in his chapter headings”; and Edward P. Vandiver, in “James Fenimore Cooper and Shakespeare,” SAB, xv (1940), 110-117, has shown that “more than 1100 lines are quoted from Shakespeare,” chiefly for chapter mottoes, as compared with Scott's quotation of slightly more than six hundred.