“Midsummer Nights’ Affaires:” Shakespeare in the Work of Eloisa James

In this thesis, I will be exploring one “particularity” in the work of Eloisa James: her appropriations of Shakespeare; either through quotations uttered by the characters, or plotlines drawn from Shakespeare’s plays which are threaded throughout the books. By considering James’s novels with full awareness of her agency and “artistry,” I shall challenge the notion of the unimportance of the romance author, and contribute to the growing body of scholarship that views romance novels as individual literary works worthy of detailed study on their own merits. James is an excellent candidate for this close study due to her positionality as both a scholar and a published novelist. James’s academic career lends authority and authenticity to her use of Shakespeare, and her deep knowledge means that the intellectual caliber of the appropriations which take place within her novels is high. (12-13)

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I draw upon James’s academic work as Mary Bly in order to contextualize the Shakespeare present within her novels, as well as interrogating how references to her career as a professor in paratextual spaces, such as Author’s Notes or James’s website, affect how the Shakespeare within her novels is perceived. (14)

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I am able to situate James’s novels within the context of Shakespeare appropriations in the romance genre at large, while also performing the author-specific analysis I described above: examining how James’s career as a scholar and professor impacts the way that Shakespeare is used within her novels. I am also able to identify Eloisa James-specific trends, such as how often Shakespeare appeared in her work in different phases of her career, and how the meaning of particular plays has shifted as they are referenced in novels written years apart. (16)

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Few of James’s novels strictly follow particular plotlines from Shakespeare’s plays; instead, the stories are substantially changed in order to highlight the difference between Shakespeare’s work and the female-centric, optimistic outlook of popular romance novels. (16)

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In Chapter One, I shall begin by tracing the development of James’s particular style of Shakespeare appropriation across the first five years of her career in order to understand how Shakespeare became a central part of her authorial reputation. I shall then build on that context to explore James’s negotiation, as both a scholar and a public figure, between the highbrow reputation of Shakespeare and the lowbrow reputation of popular romance, while also investigating how those categorizations developed. Finally, I shall draw these threads together in order to examine how the Eloisa James persona, with its professorial undertones, has been constructed in the text and paratext of James’s novels in order to frame her work as not only an entertaining, but an edifying experience.

In Chapter Two, I shall examine two usages of Shakespeare which are consistent throughout James’s work. First, I will define a practice which I term “Shakespeare-signalling:” the method by which James alerts her readers to the presence of Shakespeare within a dialogue, scene, or novel overall. James’s framing of her own appropriations, whether she is accurately presenting a play’s plot, or having a character misinterpret it, plays a vital role in establishing the appropriation’s meaning. Then, I shall turn to how James uses Shakespeare in order to establish characterization. As both Osborne and Whyte note, protagonists in popular romance fiction, including James’s, tend to quote and enjoy Shakespeare. A mutual appreciation and witty banter regarding his works signals a couple’s compatibility. However, I identify four James heroines who, as their stories begin, either misunderstand or actively dislike Shakespeare, only to develop an understanding and love of his work as they fall in love with the hero and learn more about themselves. Neither Osborne nor Whyte discuss this trope, meaning it is possibly unique to James, marking a new method of using Shakespeare to establish characterization.

In Chapters Three, Four, Five, and Six, I analyze the appropriations of four plays: Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, The Taming of the Shrew, and A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, which are particularly common in James’s work. I identify the novels in which the play is appropriated, and how the meaning or most important element of that play changes across different novels. In the Romeo and Juliet chapter, I demonstrate how Juliet becomes a figure of romantic and sexual agency, and how James bridges the gap between tragedy and romance with a happy ending. The Taming of the Shrew and Midsummer Night’s Dream chapters dovetail with each other, as James reaches the limits of The Taming of the Shrew as an acceptable model for the hero and heroine, and frames A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a more romantic alternative, despite that play’s own darker undertones. Regarding Twelfth Night, I explore how James’s cross-dressing heroines operate in the overwhelmingly heterosexual and cisgender genre of popular romance fiction. (17-18)

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This notion of Shakespeare as a “literary touch” which adds “a touch of class” to a genre that usually has none -- in this case, romance novels -- continues to be reflected throughout James’s work, and through the way that her use of Shakespeare is discussed by the media. It is not approached as doing significant intellectual work, but rather as James trying to elevate her and her novels’ status by drawing on Shakespeare’s cultural capital. The presence of this quotation in her very first book demonstrates James’s wry awareness of the implications of her own technique. (21)

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By deconstructing [...] negative perceptions of genre as a fully reproducible formula, and by invoking Shakespeare, it may appear as if Bly is challenging the status of romance as a lowbrow form. However, her position is more complicated. Although she is adamant that use of genre does not disqualify books from originality, or, as it appears from the example of Shakespeare, literariness, in a talk in 2012, she carefully maintains a distinction between genre fiction and literature. (37)

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James felt she should, or was expected, to include a character of color, yet wanted to avoid discussing colonialism in any serious way, and constructed a backstory which would make it easy to separate Parth from his Indian heritage. Therefore, while this scene in Four Nights with the Duke in which Mia crosses out words was intended to add a new, conscientious facet to Eloisa James’s authorial brand, instead, it is revealing of the general superficiality in James’s approach to race in her work. (57)

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