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When discussing the relationship between Shakespeare and his characters,FangPing shares his understanding of“Shakespearean”:“1.To give each character fleshand blood,a life of his own.2.To let the many people in his plays share his(Shakespeare’s)talent.3.To project the light of his own personality on the charactersin a passionate moment”(Fang Ping,1982:14).It can be said that underShakespeare’s pen,various characters are given vivid lives and distinctly portrayed.InWise Children,these classic figures are borrowed and rewritten by Carter.Forexample,like Othello,the jealous old Ranulph Hazard,who eventually became unableto distinguish Shakespeare’s plays and real life,shot his wife Estella and her lover andkilled himself,causing a Victorian tragedy.In addition,the greedy and mean-spiritedSaskia Hazard and Imogen Hazard are just like Goneril and Regan,two daughters ofKing Lear.The pretty and pure Tiffany immediately reminds readers of Ophelia,another attractive maiden in Shakespeare’s plays.In short,the novel parodies a largenumber of characters from Shakespeare’s plays.

In this chapter,the discussion will revolve around two female characters owed toGrandma Chance,Lady Atalanta,and a male character,Melchior Hazard.The ghostthat appears so many times in Shakespeare’s play Hamlet is transformed into theaffectionate Grandmother Chance who guards the sisters Dora and Nora after herdeath.Lady Atalanta is the unsilenced queen Gertrude,who no longer has any lines,and Melchior Hazard,who spends all his life seeking fame,is merely the clownish King Macbeth.By parodying Shakespeare’s classic characters,Carter places them in amodern context and endows them with very different personalities and fates,deconstructing the underlying masculine discourse behind the classic plays.

1.2 Modification in Shakespeare’s Plots

Shakespeare’s works are a perfect unity of ideological content and artistic form.In his letter to Ferdinand Lassalle,Engels puts forward“Shakespearean vivacity andwealth of action”,and argues that this“is where the future of the drama lies”.“Shakespearean vivacity and wealth of action”,as noted in On Hundred Topics ofMarxist-Leninist Literature,means“the skill of arranging parallel and interlockingplots,of uniting two opposing things”(Editorial Board of On Hundred Topics ofMarxist-Leninist Literature,1982:160).Shakespeare often uses the play within theplay,disguises,traps,jokes and other means to weave the plots,artificially creatingsome bizarre,twisted,complex and varied dramatic plots.The ups and downs inShakespeare’s plays are also effective means of vividly demonstrating thedevelopment of his characters and responding to the conflicts of real life.

In Wise Children,Angela Carter parodies many episodes of Shakespeare’s plays,such as the play within the play,substituted bride,gender inversion,transvestism,triple wedding and so on.For instance,in Shakespeare’s drama Measure for Measure,a couple turned against each other.The man had a new love and arranged a tryst withhis new lover in the garden in the middle of the night.A kind man came up with ascheme to have t本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。