ABSTRACT
Like casual quotation, casual Shakespearean verse parody has met with ambivalent criticism. Both quotation and parody repeat familiar elements out of context gain a certain attention from association with that original context and are taken to confirm the original’s prestige by their number. Shakespearean verse parody from the mid-eighteenth century onwards is an intertextual genre of a very particular kind. The Housewife’s Soliloquy: A Shakespearean Parody. The Student’s Soliloquy, In Imitation of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. As in Shakespeare’s own quotation practice, cross-quotation weakens the link to any single source in the soliloquy parodies, making intertextuality more casual. Instead, the poem is called ‘Socrates on Death translated from Plato’s Apology in Shakespeare’s Manner’. Like Shakespeare’s own texts, eighteenth-century parodies of his speeches obscure their primary source by cross-quotation and cross-adaptation. The close affinity of eighteenth-century parodies with casual Shakespeare quotation is evident in parody titles that include additional quotations and in the typographical acknowledgment of ‘uber-quotes’ within adaptations.
