ABSTRACT
Thousands of William Shakespeare quotations from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries can be called ‘routine’ because they are numbingly frequent and unobtrusive. Romantic Routine is, first of all, a period in English letters when the majority of Shakespeare quotations are marked, the years when the solid black line is above 50%. Romantic Routine is the time when the majority of marked quotations are marked for quotation only so that the dashed line is above the dotted line. The mid-1770s watershed in Shakespeare quotation may be partially explained by the defeat of perpetual copyright in 1774, which made a difference between the legal status of older and more recent published works. William Hazlitt’s essays are the best introduction to the characteristic features of Romantic Routine because they offer a large sample of knowledgeable, fluidly elegant quotation. Narrative voices and the sentiments that they express with the help of quotations are fascinatingly complex.
