Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Shakspere” (1865) and Catholic Self-knitting

Norman White has written in his Literary Biography that, for Gerard Manley Hopkins, “the second half of 1865” was a period in which his “old self was repudiated, but he had not yet knitted together the valuable pieces of his past” . Such difficulties or – making the best of Hopkins’s imminent conversion to Catholicism in 1866 – as-yet-unfulfilled potentialities in self-knitting or self-coalescence find correspondence and representation in “the octave of an unfinished sonnet” on Shakspere , whose autograph manuscript dates back to 13 September 1865. Hopkins’s Shakspere and its idiosyncratic textual, literary and cultural features have been only scantily investigated by the so-called “Hopkins industry”.