Jan 6, 2010

The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare | Wordsworth, William

Wordsworth, William (1770–1850),
English poet. No less than his verse drama The Borderers (1796–7), Wordsworth's great autobiographical poem The Prelude (1805/1850) resonates with echoes of Hamlet, Macbeth, and Othello, here associated both with Wordsworth's childhood guilts and with his adult anxieties about the ambition, usurpation, and regicide enacted by the French Revolution. In ‘Scorn not the sonnet’ (1827) Wordsworth influentially cited the Sonnets as themselves autobiographical, claiming that ‘with this key | Shakespeare unlocked his heart’.

Nicola Watson