William Shakespeare and George Eliot: traditions, influences, allusions

The author of the essay speculates on George Eliot’s attitude to theworks of William Shakespeare during the whole period of her creative writ-ing. It is shown in the essay how much important Shakespeare’s achieve-ments in character making were for George Eliot, how high she thought ofhis ability to merge various and different aspects and fields of human life, ofhis capacity both to amuse and educate people through his personages, plotsand the author’s voice obvious in the artistic world constructed by a writer.Special attention is due to some interchanges, allusions, traditions, analogiesbetween one the most poetical and close to the genre of parable novel ofGeorge Eliot ‘Silas Marner’ and one of the three late dramas of Shakespeare‘The Winter Tale’.