ABSTRACT
Elizabeth Inchbald and Nathaniel Hawthorne developed the Romantic moral romance sub-genre for different reasons, but, as argued in the previous chapter, their results exhibit remarkable similarities. In part, the similarities arise because both authors wrote in opposition to the tradition of the British novel, which they tried to recast into a type of fiction that would more accurately reflect their goals as writers. In Inchbald’s quest for the woman’s niche in British literary history and in Hawthorne’s quest for a uniquely American literature, these Romantic writers eschewed the traditional novel in favour of a form that combined elements of the romance and the novel. But while they resisted imitating writers like Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding, they unhesitatingly borrowed from writers like William Shakespeare. 3 Indeed, Inchbald and Hawthorne held Shakespeare in high regard, perhaps because they respected Shakespeare’s reputation for capturing the truth of human experience in his writing. Moreover, Shakespeare’s last plays, now known as the romances, experimented with alternate definitions of genre and with challenges to established convention in ways that appealed to Romantic writers like Inchbald and Hawthorne. When Inchbald and Hawthorne developed their Romantic moral romance fictions, they borrowed themes and structures from the later Shakespeare plays whose characteristics complemented their own artistic goals – The Tempest, Cymbeline and especially The Winter’s Tale. Inchbald’s and Hawthorne’s adaptations of Shakespeare’s models provide further evidence that the Romantic writers attempted parallel reorientations of contemporary fiction and suggest that the transatlantic development of the Romantic moral romance was not coincidental.
