ABSTRACT
While Brontë recommended certain of Shakespeare’s plays to her friend Ellen Nussey, she warned against the comedies, and did not advise watching the plays at all.3 Even the thought of seeing one of the numerous contemporary works based on Jane Eyre filled her with dismay; she urged W.S. Williams, a reader at her publishers, “to forget entirely what you saw” of one such performance.4 Though she admired George Henry Lewes as a writer, she was baffled by his venturing into the rough-andtumble world of the London stage.5 She went against popular opinion and startled fashionable fellow diners at Thackeray’s home with bluntly critical comments about William Charles Macready’s performance in Macbeth and Othello.6 Finally, in letters
from London in 1851, she described having seen the French actress Rachel (Elisa Félix) in two plays. Horrified and fascinated by the performances, Brontë chose strong terms to report on them, even for her: the actress’s “strange soul” had perhaps been sold “I fear-to Beelzebub”; her performance seemed to reveal “a glimpse of hell,” made Brontë “shudder,” and evoked a “fiend” and a “snake.”7
