ABSTRACT
“Jane Williams, Rolling Stone: Reconstructing British Romanticism’s Guitar God(dess)” identifies the rolling stone, a trope for the itinerant guitarist, as a central figure in rock and roll and then explores its genealogy. Nesvet identifies Jane Williams (1798–1884) as one of the most important prototypes for the rolling stone and British Romanticism’s first and most important guitarist. She was gifted a guitar by Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who immortalized this gift with his poem “With a Guitar, to Jane.” Nesvet describes a tradition of associating the guitar (or early versions of it) with itinerants and vagabonds as far back as the early seventeenth century, associating it with “sex, scandal, and rootlessness” even in early modern drama, and then demonstrates how Williams herself fit that role through her non-traditional romantic relationships and her own guitar playing. By Shelley’s time, the Spanish guitar had supplanted the English in English culture, so to elaborate on the nature of the Spanish guitar in Williams’s time Nesvet draws upon the insights gained from her work with luthier Wes R. Schroeder to reconstruct a playable version of Williams’s guitar in the present based upon the original currently held in the Bodleian. Nesvet concludes by explaining Williams’s instrumental role in preserving Shelley’s memory for antiquity, not only by publishing his poem about the guitar posthumously but by commissioning the George Clint drawing of Shelley that, at the time, helped rehabilitate Shelley’s image for his contemporaries after his death.
