Lisa Hopkins discovers echoes of Shakespeare in Heyer’s work. She finds not only that plays such as Much Ado About Nothing are influential on Heyer’s comedy, but also tragedies such as King Lear through bathos. (11)
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it is not only the comedies on which Heyer draws; she also deploys allusions to tragedies and to the Roman play Antony and Cleopatra to suggest that it is really better to live life a little less in alt than Shakespeare’s suffering heroes do. It is my aim in this chapter to explore what Osborne calls ‘Heyer’s complex, often unmarked, appropriations of Shakespeare’, and to argue that they play an important part in the creation of her preferred brand of urbane, witty comedy. (148)
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Heyer normally has little time for regrets; her characters know that they ought not to dwell on relationships which can never develop. However Antony and Cleopatra is a play which glamorises nostalgia, and when Heyer alludes to it she does allow a more elegiac note to be sounded, even if only briefly. Generally, however, she uses Shakespearean tragedy to mock excessive emotion, while the resilient, cross-dressing heroines of his comedies are models for her own enterprising young women who – like Viola and Rosalind– often ensure not only their own marriages but also those of others. (149)
From the introduction to the volume:
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