Hamlet's soliloquy: An eighteenth-century genre

Romantic writers had a habit of routine Shakespeare quotation, using phrases from his plays with very little recognizable reference to their original context in poems, novels, essays and diaries. Since then, many of these phrases have undergone lexicalization, turning from authored and traceable quotations (however casual) into anonymous idioms that are part of the phrase stock of English. “Shakespeare, an Eighteenth-Century Genre” reads parodies of the “to be or not to be” soliloquy as representing an analogous process. In these rewritings, which carry the word “parody” or “soliloquy” more often in their titles than “Hamlet” or “Shakespeare”, the original context and topic of the passage is only rarely referred to. A large body of “parodies” or “imitations” dating from 1744 to the early1800s represents neither homage to nor attack on an already absent original. Instead, topical allusions, literary cross-references and mutual borrowings overlay and distance the original, which becomes a generic template rather than an intertextual point of reference. The material suggests that such generic Shakespeare reception ‘ in absentia ’ started rather earlier than has been assumed, flowering when a climate of bardolatry would suggest consciously significant reference / reverence to be the dominant mode.