WorkWilliam Shakespeare
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (c. 1600–01; First Folio 1623)
William Shakespeare (1564–1616) · c. 1600; First Folio 1623
AnalyzedQuotedReadMentioned
Documented 1830–1849
Additional passages preserved in the Memoirs (1852)
Letters • Books • Manuscripts
Selected engagements, in chronological order.
Reprints, Memoirs passages, and repeat notes within a single manuscript are shown but never counted twice. Evidence for this work is selective, not exhaustive. Methodology →
Passages where the evidence goes beyond allusion to indicate that Fuller had this work in hand — an explicit statement of reading, sustained excerpting or translation, or a specific reading episode recorded by those who knew her.
“L. Have you been reading the play of late? A. Yes; hearing Macready, one or two points struck me that have not before, and I was inclined to try for my thousandth harvest from a new study of it.”
Papers on Literature and Art · hearing Macready; my thousandth harvest from a new study of it
First-person dialogue explicitly states 'Have you been reading the play of late?... I was inclined to try for my thousandth harvest from a new study of it,' a direct reading statement.
“I can appear "a ministering angel on such occasions”
Fuller, Margaret. The Letters of Margaret Fuller. Edited by Robert N. Hudspeth. Vol. VI. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988.
Inferred Fuller quotes "a ministering angel," a phrase that most likely echoes Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 1, though the expression was widely used in nineteenth-century literature.
“He brought me Retsch's Illust. of Hamlet spoiled in copying I presume for they were the weakest burlesque—and one could not trace any talent in the designs either.”
Fuller, Margaret. The Letters of Margaret Fuller. Edited by Robert N. Hudspeth. Vol. I. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983.
Inferred Retzsch's illustrations are specifically of Shakespeare's Hamlet, and Fuller's critical evaluation of them as "weakest burlesque" implies familiarity with the play itself as a standard of comparison.
“How flat, stale, and unprofitable are the Morisons &c near these really living beings!”
Fuller, Margaret. The Letters of Margaret Fuller. Edited by Robert N. Hudspeth. Vol. I. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983.
Inferred Fuller adapts a line from Hamlet (1.2.133–34), applying Hamlet's "How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable / Seem to me all the uses of this world" to dismiss a dull group of acquaintances. The quotation is woven closely into her prose without explicit attribution.
The quotation is woven closely into her prose without explicit attribution.
“One often thinks of Hamlet as the true representative of idealism in its excess.”
Fuller, Margaret. The Letters of Margaret Fuller. Edited by Robert N. Hudspeth. Vol. II. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984.
Inferred Fuller names Hamlet as "the true representative of idealism in its excess," characterizing him through his paralyzed will and "deep-searching tendency and desire for poetic perfection." She contrasts this Shakespearean idealist with Julius Caesar and Coriolanus, using the character as a philosophical archetype for the paralysis of reflection.
“A girl, such as I was, with a head full of Hamlet, and Rousseau, and the ballads of chivalry, is not inclined to idealize lawyers and members of Congress and father's friends”
Fuller, Margaret. The Letters of Margaret Fuller. Edited by Robert N. Hudspeth. Vol. III. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986.
“pangs of despised love”
Fuller, Margaret. "On Beethoven." Houghton Library, Harvard University.
“you have ...”
Fuller, Margaret. Life Without and Life Within; or, Reviews, Narratives, Essays, and Poems. Edited by Arthur B. Fuller. Boston: Brown, Taggard and Chase, 1860. · p104
Inferred Fuller alludes to Shakespeare's Hamlet, invoking "the ghost of the royal Dane" and "his son" in a comparison with pedantic Dante scholarship. She also references "Dame Quickly," a character from Shakespeare's Henry IV, Henry V, and The Merry Wives of Windsor.
“Frailty, thy name is Woman.”
Fuller, Margaret. Woman in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Greeley & McElrath, 1845.
“Have you been reading the play of late? — Yes; hearing Macready, one or two points struck me... Macready gave its just emphasis to the climax...”
“the introduction on the stage of the ghost in Hamlet (in his night-gown) as the old play book direction was.”
Also reprinted in Art, Literature, and the Drama. Counted once, at its first appearance.
Inferred Fuller alludes to the ghost of Hamlet's father in the stage direction; uniquely identifies Hamlet.
Fuller, Margaret. Papers on Literature and Art. New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1846.
“So ridiculous, too, this mortal coil,—such small things!”
Fuller, Margaret. The Letters of Margaret Fuller. Edited by Robert N. Hudspeth. Vol. IV. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987.
Inferred Fuller uses the phrase "this mortal coil," Shakespeare's coinage from Hamlet's "To be, or not to be" soliloquy (Act 3, Scene 1): "When we have shuffled off this mortal coil." She omits "shuffled off" and deploys the phrase with wry self-deprecation, calling financial and practical worries "this mortal coil" and then deflating with "such small things!"
“all others must ever after seem flat and unprofitable”
Fuller, Margaret. The Letters of Margaret Fuller. Edited by Robert N. Hudspeth. Vol. V. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988.
Inferred Fuller's phrase "flat and unprofitable" is a verbatim echo of Hamlet's famous soliloquy (Act 1, scene 2), in which he laments that all the uses of the world seem "weary, stale, flat and unprofitable." She adapts the quotation to praise—Rome's life was so exquisite that everything else must thereafter seem flat by contrast, deliberately inverting Hamlet's despair.
“if all that stuff published as my miscellanies is forever to be unprofitable as well as flat and stale”
Fuller, Margaret. The Letters of Margaret Fuller. Edited by Robert N. Hudspeth. Vol. V. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988.
Inferred Hudspeth identified explicitly confirm this allusion, which Fuller applies self-deprecatingly to her own collected essays.
“he, who could understand the Roman, yet expressed in Hamlet a deeper thought.”
“I greatly enjoyed his readings in Hamlet, and have reviewed in connexion what Goethe and Coleridge have said.”
Inferred This entry is identified by editors as concerning Shakespeare's seminal tragedy.
“Thou wouldst forgive me, master, that I have not been true to my eventual destiny, and therefore have suffered on every side 'the pangs of despised love.”
Inferred Here, Margaret Fuller directly quotes the evocative phrase "the pangs of despised love" from Shakespeare's Hamlet.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, William Henry Channing, and James Freeman Clarke, eds. Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli. 2 vols. Boston: Phillips, Sampson and Company, 1852.