DCI Shakespeare

Another occasional #LitCritForTeachers post.


Shakespearean Allusion in Crime Fiction: DCI Shakespeare by Lisa Hopkins, 2016 (Palgrave Macmillan)

Hopkins tells us:

‘Shakespeare is a pervasive presence in detective fiction’ (1)

She notes there are three main ways in which this can happen - 

• quotation
• merely touching on a detail
• called on as a detailed guide to human character

Shakespearean allusion in crime writing is a way of borrowing Shakespeare's status to assert that the detective novel (etc) is a literary form in its own right. 

‘Shakespearean allusion serves a variety of purposes. First and most obviously, Shakespeare is an unimpeachable source of cultural capital, but at the same time one perceived as popular enough to be free of any connotations of elitism or inaccessibility.’ (8)

Referring to details that you recognise also helps to balance out the fact that the text is trying to deceive you, the reader: 

‘Shakespearean allusion also has consequences for the reader and for the status of the text itself: it interpellates the reader and establishes the literary status of the text. G.K. Chesterton notes in ‘The Ideal Detective Story’ that ‘The detective story differs from every other story in this: the reader is only happy if he feels a fool,’ and yet feeling a fool is also a potentially unnerving and unsatisfying state. It can however be counteracted if one does not feel quite such a fool because one can at least recognise Shakespeare’ (10)

Hopkins also notes of crime writing that: 

‘It is a commonplace of the genre that a fine line divides the detective from the criminal’ (17)

which is a particularly useful thought when considering Hamlet as part of Elements of Crime Writing.

Hopkins notes the massive number of Shakespearean quotations and allusions in both the work of Dorothy L. Sayers and Ngaio Marsh, among others. One of the functions Shakespeare fulfils in these works is to demonstrate the status of the detective - to make him one of the 'good guys', because he is educated. She makes the argument that this is necessary because of the need to position readers on the same side as the detective: 

‘Detective fiction needs to position readers in this way for two main reasons. In the first place, it is generally nervous about the legitimacy of its own enterprise, because it can by no means be taken for granted that detection itself is a legitimate enterprise. Alongside a rather vaguely felt conviction that it is a citizen’s duty to help the police typically sits an often more powerful view hat doing so will almost certainly entail things that are literally, inherently and in absolute terms deplorable: reading other people’s correspondence, eavesdropping on conversations and generally prying into a sphere radically and inalienably constituted as private.' (11)

 ‘The only thing that can justify violation of this ethos of privacy being sacrosanct is if the policeman too is an insider, and allowing to quote Shakespeare is a foolproof way of constituting him as one; this is particularly marked in the case of Ngaio Marsh’s Alleyn, both the most intrinsically inquisitive and also the most sustainedly Shakespearean of detectives’ (11)

She refers to Golden Age detective fiction here, and it would be interesting to see if the same attitudes can be found in modern crime fiction.

Hopkins also notes that there are three plays which are more commonly alluded to in crime fiction than others: unsurprisingly Hamlet and Macbeth are two of the three. The final one is oddly, Midsummer Night's Dream: 

‘On the surface the least likely of plays to be connected to crime, Dream proves to have a surprising affinity with the genre because it speaks to so many of its key concerns: drug-taking, land ownership, violence against women, and the question of artisanship versus mass production, with attendant implications for the literary status of crime fiction itself.’ (184)

Finally, there's a link here to an open access article on Shakespearean allusion in the crime novels of Georgette Heyer: https://www.nature.com/articles/palcomms201652