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Journal Article
Lauren Groff’s Unlettered Zed
2025
Overview
In 2020, as she worked on her novel The Vaster Wilds, Lauren Groff was reading through all of Shakespeare’s plays. The Vaster Wilds is set in the late winter of 1610, during the “starving time” of the Jamestown colony, and her reading project was helping her to catch an ear for the language of the time––as an exercise, Groff reportedly wrote a version of the novel in blank verse. While The Vaster Wilds taps into the textures and rhythms of Shakespearean language, it tends to avoid citation or quotation, except in one part of the text: the names given to the servant girl whose escape from the Jamestown colony into the wilderness makes up the action of the novel. Through these appropriations of Shakespeare, the novel plays out an ambivalence about the relationship between words, writing, and power, working through multiple possibilities for how to evade or overcome the dominating force of names.
Publisher
Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation
Subject
