Peter Quince's Ballad: Shakespeare, Psychoanalysis, History | Catherine Belsey, University of Wales, College of Cardiff
Catherine Belsey, University of Wales, College of Cardiff
In The Rose and the Ring, Thackeray's fairytale of 1854, the sadly unprepossessing, plump Prince Bulbo falls in love with Betsinda, and in this romantic condition Bulbo at once becomes—citational. "I never saw", he says, "a young gazelle to glad me with its dark blue eye that had eyes like thine. Thou nymph of beauty, take, take this young heart. A truer never did itself sustain within a soldier's waistcoat."1 The amorous prince here misquotes not only Shakespeare's Othello (V.2.260-61)2 but also the Irish poet Thomas Moore, whose gazelle had already provided considerable entertainment thirteen years earlier in The Old Curiosity Shop. Dickens's text in turn shows the verbose and villainous Dick Swiveller also misquoting Moore in the process of indicating his own unrequited passion for the perfidious Sophy Wackles:
"It has always been the...
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