Christina Dodd's The Greatest Lover in All England

In Christina Dodd's The Greatest Lover in All England, Rosencrantz, the girl disguised as a boy-actress, not only knows "Uncle Will" Shakespeare himself but is also present and performing in the first staging of Hamlet. She takes the role of Ophelia which echoes her own history as a young girl doubly orphaned, losing her father to plague and her foster-father to Queen Elizabeth's displeasure. Her performance of Ophelia coincides with her reunion with both foster-father and lover. When the foster father appears onstage over her corpse, his presence transforms the tragedy explicitly into comic union. As she lies on her funeral bier at the end of what we are assured is her best, in fact her only good performance as a boy-actress, Sir Danny, her foster father, unexpectedly shows up on stage:

Someone stood over her. She tried to peek through the tiniest slit in her
eyelids, but shadow concealed his face. Then he spoke Hamlet's line in
familiar, beloved tones. "'What, the fair Ophelia!'"

Emotions--amazement, jubilation, exultation--burst forth in side her. She
sat up on the bier and reached out. "Dada!"

... Rosie looked toward the row of chairs and half rose in thankfulness,
then realized--the play! But no one seemed to care. The audience was
crying, laughing, clapping, involved in the story unfolding before their
eyes and forgetting the fiction that had earlier absorbed them. All sense of
tragedy had vanished, and nothing would restore it now (Dodd 362).

Dodd's disrupted staging of Hamlet acknowledges the romance novel's strategies with Shakespeare's tragedies. This novel explicitly transforms Hamlet in performance as the climax of a whole series of revisions of its narrative. The lost birthright, the mourning for fathers, and the fear of sexual betrayal from Hamlet are recycled through the female Rosencrantz who, typically for romance, resolves these conflicts by marrying the man whom her resurrection has deprived of land and fortune. Just as important the tragic plot and action are abandoned freely--even by "Uncle Will" himself.

Go to Introduction References by Play  Return to Actress Novels