Shakespeare’s Critics: Utopic Time in Cavendish, Dickinson and Woolf

In this paper, I follow a thread that ties Shakespeare to three women who have far more in common with each other than seems possible: Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673), Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), and Virginia Woolf (1882-1941). Each woman, in her time, wrote about Shakespeare, whether in admiration, interrogation or criticism. Though separated by time and location, their social, personal, and political circumstances are astoundingly comparable. To contextualize my reading, I explore how their similarities do not end with their engagement with Shakespeare and his texts, and that their works reveal a utopian approach to narrative time in their experimental literary structures and forms. I consider their biographical similarities through the lens of their distinct readings of Shakespeare, and will demonstrate how each informs their individual disruptions of social and literary conventions and defined their individual constructions of literary utopian themes. Central to my argument is how each author collapses time in her effort to speak through/to Shakespeare through their utopian texts. Each woman wrote from the social and political fringes, and during liminal moments when their worlds were changing in similar ways. From their shared historical position between the waning past and the coming future, I will demonstrate how each spoke to/through an increasingly “timeless” Shakespeare as a common anchor and contributed to forging Shakespeare’s shifting iconicity.