I think it is no coincidence that many of the quotations Catherine has memorized are incorrect in some way.

This is something I hope to look into more as we go through the GR, but I also think that the particular selection of Shakepseare quotations is not an accident or a coincidence. I think there is something iherently appealing about those plays to a young girl or to a (would-be)heroine, gothic or otherwise.

Some of the heroines of books mentioned in NA are given to quoting Shakespeare, among them Camilla (of Fanny Burney's novel) and Emily St. Aubert from Udolpho. The Mysteries of Udolpho begins every chapter with a little snippet of verse, and many of these are from Shakespeare, including one from Measure for Measure, where Catherine memorized "The poor beetle..." Measure for Measure has many gothic elements in it, and many parallels to gothic literature such as The Monk (mentioned by John Thorpe a bit later in this week's reading), not to mention a heroine named Isabella!

It is interesting that all three plays from which Catherine 'memorizes' a line (Othello, Twelfth Night, and Measure for Measure) include events that result mainly due to a character deliberately deceiving other characters by pretending to be something that he/she is not, which is rather the opposite of Catherine's character.

Also, it is interesting to note that Belinda Portman, the title character in Belinda (also mentioned in defense of the novel) quotes the same line from Othello in the novel: 'trifles light as air—"

Othello also features a female lead who was attracted to Othello because of the harrowing tales he used to tell her:

Wherein I spake of most disastrous chances,
Of moving accidents by flood and field
Of hair-breadth scapes i' the imminent deadly breach,
Of being taken by the insolent foe
And sold to slavery, of my redemption thence
And portance in my travels' history:
Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle,
Rough quarries, rocks and hills whose heads touch heaven
It was my hint to speak,--such was the process;
And of the Cannibals that each other eat,
The Anthropophagi and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders. This to hear
Would Desdemona seriously incline:
But still the house-affairs would draw her thence:
Which ever as she could with haste dispatch,
She'ld come again, and with a greedy ear
Devour up my discourse:

...
She swore, in faith, twas strange, 'twas passing strange,
'Twas pitiful, 'twas wondrous pitiful:
She wish'd she had not heard it, yet she wish'd
That heaven had made her such a man: she thank'd me,
And bade me, if I had a friend that loved her,
I should but teach him how to tell my story.