Dickens and Shakespeare

For Dickens Shakespeare was the supreme literary artist, ‘that great master who knew everything’, and he delighted in the fact that so little was known about Shakespeare’s life so that it remains ‘a fine mystery’ to us. This absence of biographical knowledge makes us concentrate on Shakespeare’s plays which Dickens knew intimately, both from his constant theatre-going but also from his lifelong study of them. His own work is deeply influenced by Shakespeare and saturated with Shakespearian references and allusions some of which will be explored in this lecture. Professor Michael Slater, MBE, Emeritus Professor of Victorian Literature, Birkbeck, and Senior Fellow, Institute of English Studies in the School of Advanced Studies, University of London is a former Editor of The Dickensian and a Past President both of the Dickens Fellowship and of the Dickens Society of America. He is the author of a number of studies of Dickens including Dickens and Women (1983) and a major biography Charles Dickens 1812 - 1870. A Life Defined by Writing (2009). He is now working on an edition of Dickens’s uncollected short fiction 1857 – 1868.