On to Sense and Sensibility

"We have never finished Hamlet, Marianne; our dear Willoughby went away before we could get through it. We will put it by, that when he comes again.... But it may be months, perhaps, before that happens."

Lines like this are so pregnant with meaning you could spend a lifetime on them. Not all the meaning can have been intended by the author. For example, some Shakespeare scholars nowadays argue that Shakespeare himself never finished Hamlet. That he wrote one play and then rewrote it and kept tinkering with it until he retired.

In any case, we have never finished with Hamlet. It comes back again and again. It really came back in Austen's lifetime. (Shakespeare, although always recognized as an exceptional writer, didn't become "Shakespeare" until the Romantic era.) The line above has been called Hamlet's walk on part in Sense and Sensibility. I think it's more than that. Buckle up, I'm going to make an audacious claim. I think that just as Austen ended up using the story elements from a Radcliffe novel to make a different sort of story in Northanger Abbey, in Sense and Sensibility, she takes the story elements of Hamlet and makes something else of them.

Before doing that, I have to explain what I mean by "story elements". I'm going to do that explanation by picking a fight with a guy named Tyler Cowen starting today.