Emerson, Melville, James, Berryman: Great Shakespeareans Volume VIII 9781472554901, 9780826419408, 9781441159793

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Emerson, Melville, James, Berryman Great Shakespeareans Volume VIII

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Great Shakespeareans Each volume in the series provides a critical account and analysis of those figures who have had the greatest influence on the interpretation, understanding and cultural reception of Shakespeare, both nationally and around the world. General Series Editors: Peter Holland, University of Notre Dame, USA Adrian Poole, Trinity College Cambridge, UK Editorial Advisory Board: David Bevington (University of Chicago, USA), Michael Cordner (University of York, UK), Michael Dobson (Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, UK), Dominique Goy-Blanquet (University of Picardy, France), Barbara Hodgdon (University of Michigan, USA), Andreas Höfele (University of Munich, Germany), Tetsuo Kishi (Kyoto University, Japan), Russ McDonald (Goldsmith’s College, University of London, UK), Ruth Morse (University of Paris 7, Denis Diderot, France), Michael Neill (University of Auckland, New Zealand), Stephen Orgel (Stanford University, USA), Carol Rutter (University of Warwick, UK), Ann Thompson (King’s College, University of London, UK) and Paul Yachnin (McGill University, Canada). Great Shakespeareans: Set I Volume I: Dryden, Pope, Johnson, Malone, edited by Claude Rawson Volume II: Garrick, Kemble, Siddons, Kean, edited by Peter Holland Volume III: Voltaire, Goethe, Schlegel, Coleridge, edited by Roger Paulin Volume IV: Lamb, Hazlitt, Keats, edited by Adrian Poole Great Shakespeareans: Set II Volume V: Scott, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, edited by Adrian Poole Volume VI: Macready, Booth, Irving, Terry, edited by Richard Schoch Volume VII: Jameson, Cowden Clarke, Kemble, Cushman, edited by Gail Marshall Volume VIII: James, Melville, Emerson, Berryman, edited by Peter Rawlings Volume IX: Bradley, Greg, Folger, edited by Cary DiPietro Great Shakespeareans: Set III Volume X: Marx and Freud, edited by Peter Holland and Adrian Poole Volume XI: Berlioz, Verdi, Wagner, Britten, edited by Daniel Albright Volume XII: Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Auden, Beckett, edited by Adrian Poole Volume XIII: Empson, Wilson Knight, Barber, Kott, edited by Hugh Grady Great Shakespeareans: Set IV Volume XIV: Hugo, Pasternak, Brecht, Césaire, edited by Ruth Morse Volume XV: Poel, Granville Barker, Guthrie, Wanamaker, edited by Cary Mazer Volume XVI: Gielgud, Olivier, Ashcroft, Dench, edited by Russell Jackson Volume XVII: Welles, Kozintsev, Kurosawa, Zefirelli, Mark Thornton Burnett, Marguerite H. Rippy, Courtney Lehmann and Ramona Wray Volume XVIII: Hall, Brook, Ninagawa, Lepage, edited by Peter Holland

Emerson, Melville, James, Berryman Great Shakespeareans Volume VIII

Edited by Peter Rawlings

Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc LON DON • N E W DE L H I • N E W YOR K • SY DN EY

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Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Imprint previously known as Arden Shakespeare 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA www.bloomsbury.com

BLOOMSBURY, THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in hardback 2011, first paperback edition published 2015 © Peter Rawlings and contributors 2011 Peter Rawlings and contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-0-8264-1940-8 PB: 978-1-4725-7949-2 ePDF: 978-1-4411-5979-3 ePUB: 978-1-4411-2107-3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Printed and bound in Great Britain

Contents

Series Editors’ Preface Peter Holland and Adrian Poole

vii

Notes on Contributors

ix

Introduction The ‘strained and aching wonder’ of American Shakespeare Peter Rawlings

1

Chapter 1 Ralph Waldo Emerson David Greenham

11

Chapter 2 Herman Melville Alex Calder

51

Chapter 3 Henry James Peter Rawlings

95

Chapter 4 John Berryman John Roe

133

Notes

181

Select Bibliography

212

Index

217

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Series Editors’ Preface

What is a ‘Great Shakespearean’? Who are the ‘Great Shakespeareans’? This series is designed to explore those figures who have had the greatest influence on the interpretation, understanding and reception of Shakespeare, both nationally and internationally. Charting the effect of Shakespeare on cultures local, national and international is a never-ending task, as we continually modulate and understand differently the ways in which each culture is formed and altered. Great Shakespeareans uses as its focus individuals whose own cultural impact has been and continues to be powerful. One of its aims is to widen the sense of who constitute the most important figures in our understanding of Shakespeare’s afterlives. The list is therefore not restricted to, say, actors and scholars, as if the performance of and commentary on Shakespeare’s works were the only means by which his impact is remade or extended. There are actors aplenty (like Garrick, Irving and Olivier) and scholars too (Bradley, Greg and Empson) but our list deliberately includes as many novelists (Dickens, Melville, Joyce), poets (Keats, Eliot, Berryman), playwrights (Brecht, Beckett, Césaire) and composers (Berlioz, Verdi and Britten), as well as thinkers whose work seems impossible without Shakespeare and whose influence on our world has been profound, like Marx and Freud. Deciding who to include has been less difficult than deciding who to exclude. We have a long list of individuals for whom we would wish to have found a place but whose inclusion would have meant someone else’s exclusion. We took long and hard looks at the volumes as they were shaped by our own and our volume editors’ perceptions. We have numerous regrets over some outstanding figures who ended up just outside this project. There will, no doubt, be argument on this score. Some may find our choices too Anglophone, insufficiently global. Others may complain of the lack of contemporary scholars and critics. But this is not a project designed to establish a new canon, nor are our volumes intended to be encyclopedic in scope. The series is not titled ‘The Greatest Shakespeareans’ nor is it

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Series Editors’ Preface

‘Some Great Shakespeareans’, but it will, we hope, be seen as negotiating and occupying a space midway along the spectrum of inclusivity and arbitrariness. Our contributors have been asked to describe the double impact of Shakespeare on their particular figure and of their figure on the understanding, interpretation and appreciation of Shakespeare, as well as providing a sketch of their subject’s intellectual and professional biography and an account of the wider context within which her/his work might be understood. This ‘context’ will vary widely from case to case and, at times, a single ‘Great Shakespearean’ is asked to stand as a way of grasping a large domain. In the case of Britten, for example, he is the window through which other composers and works in the English musical tradition like Vaughan Williams, Walton and Tippett have a place. So, too, Dryden has been the means for considering the beginnings of critical analysis of the plays as well as of the ways in which Shakespeare’s plays influenced Dryden’s own practice. To enable our contributors to achieve what we have asked of them, we have taken the unusual step of enabling them to write at length. Our volumes do not contain brief entries of the kind that a Shakespeare Encyclopedia would include nor the standard article length of academic journals and Shakespeare Companions. With no more than four Great Shakespeareans per volume – and as few as two in the case of volume 10 – our contributors have space to present their figures more substantially and, we trust, more engagingly. Each volume has a brief introduction by the volume editor and a section of further reading. We hope the volumes will appeal to those who already know the accomplishment of a particular Great Shakespearean and to those trying to find a way into seeing how Shakespeare has affected a particular poet as well as how that poet has changed forever our appreciation of Shakespeare. Above all, we hope Great Shakespeareans will help our readers to think afresh about what Shakespeare has meant to our cultures, and about how and why, in such differing ways across the globe and across the last four centuries and more, they have changed what his writing has meant. Peter Holland and Adrian Poole

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Notes on Contributors

Alex Calder is a member of the English Department, University of Auckland, where he teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature from New Zealand and the United States. His research currently focuses on the literary and cultural history of settlement and on the works of Herman Melville. His book, The Settler’s Plot: How Stories Take Place in New Zealand is forthcoming (2011). David Greenham is a senior lecturer in English and American literature at the University of the West of England. His major research interest is in Emerson’s creative appropriation of European romantic thought. His monograph Emerson’s Transatlantic Romanticism is forthcoming (2011). David Greenham has published widely on English and American writers as diverse as Emerson, Philip Roth, William Faulkner and Jane Austen and his The Resurrection of the Body: The Work of Norman O. Brown was published in 2006. Peter Rawlings is Professor of English and American Literature and Head of the Department of English, Writing and Drama at the University of the West of England. He has published widely on Henry James, American theories of fiction in the nineteenth century, and the American reception of Shakespeare. His books include Americans on Shakespeare, Americans on Fiction, 1776–1914 (3 volumes), Henry James and the Abuse of the Past, Three American Theorists of the Novel: Henry James, Lionel Trilling, and Wayne C. Booth, and Henry James Studies. Forthcoming is Henry James, Consciousness and the Evolution of the Novel. John Roe is Professor of English and Related Literature at the University of York. He is the author of Shakespeare and Machiavelli and is the editor

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Notes on Contributors

of The Poems of Shakespeare in The New Cambridge Shakespeare series. With Michele Stanco he has edited Inspiration and Technique: Ancient to Modern Views on Beauty and Art. He has also written articles and book chapters on John Berryman. While spending most of his career at the University of York, he has been a visiting professor in Germany, Japan and the United States.

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Introduction

The ‘strained and aching wonder’ of American Shakespeare Peter Rawlings

In his ‘Introduction’ to The Tempest (1907), Henry James offers a Shakespeare whose very imponderability has been boundlessly attractive to an America on the make; and as he begins to drift in the waters of the Bermudas, James invites his readers, in effect, to reflect on the complex imbrications of Shakespeare, New World foundation myths and subsequent American appropriations of the bard:1 The man himself, in the Plays, we directly touch, to my consciousness, positively nowhere: we are dealing too perpetually with the artist, the monster and magician of a thousand masks, not one of which we feel him drop long enough to gratify with the breath of the interval that strained attention in us which would be yet, so quickened, ready to become deeper still. . . . The man everywhere, in Shakespeare’s work, is so effectually locked up and imprisoned in the artist that we but hover at the base of thick walls for a sense of him; while in addition, the artist is so steeped in the abysmal objectivity of his characters and situations that the great billows of the medium itself play with him, to our vision, very much as, over a ship’s side, in certain waters, we catch, through transparent tides, the flash of strange sea-creatures.2 If ‘Shakespeare shook hands with Nature and the circumstances of the time’, Frank M. Bristol argued in 1898, ‘then he must have been familiar with and profoundly interested in the uppermost theme at that time agitating the public mind, and his literary work must have been somewhat coloured by the prevailing “new world” ideas.’3 Even more emphatically, and writing as America entered the First World War, Charles Mill Gayley insisted that [t]he discovery of America had much to do with the revival of English learning and literature, and aroused the Anglo-Saxon mind to that

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creative activity which produced her immortal drama . . . Columbus, Cabot, Drake, Raleigh, and America, made possible Shakespeare.4 Many American historians have located Shakespeare, and especially The Tempest and its perceived context, in the foundations of America. Shakespeare, it has persistently been argued, arose within the same milieu of liberty, adventure and regeneration as did Columbus, the Puritans and the original American settlers. Charles Wallace extravagantly announced that ‘the whole history of Europe, as immediately preparing the way for us through English colonization, is but early American history’; America is ‘young’, but ‘so, too, in the same sense, is Shakespeare young, very young. Both were born together, twinned at a single birth, children of the same ideal.’5 Writing as America entered the First World War in 1917, Gayley declared that the thoughts and even the words of the liberal master [Shakespeare] . . . passed into the minds of our Revolutionary Fathers and into the Declaration of Independence; and that the principles common to Shakespeare . . . are the principles of liberty which America enjoys today.6 In the nineteenth century and before, a prevalent view was that only Americans had remained true to the radical spirit of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England; hence, they were the rightful possessors of a Shakespeare who had previously been the common heritage of both the English and the Americans. Typical of this approach is James Fenimore Cooper’s nicely ambiguous assertion that Shakespeare was ‘the great author of America’ and that Americans had ‘just as good a right’ as Englishmen to claim Shakespeare as their countryman.7 It was not simply that ‘Shakespeare’ was able, as Lawrence W. Levine has argued, to ‘connect’ with ‘underlying beliefs’ in America, but that whatever the word ‘Shakespeare’ could be made to include was available for interpretative appropriation and acquisition on an industrial scale only possible in the new promised land.8 For Gayley: The thoughts and even the words of the liberal master [Shakespeare] . . . passed into the minds of our Revolutionary Fathers and into the Declaration of Independence; and . . . the principles common to Shakespeare . . . are the principles of liberty which America enjoys today.9 ‘Before February 1849’, Alex Calder reminds us, the Shakespeare familiar to a good many Americans consisted of a ‘set of plots, characters, speeches

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and sayings’ (12), and it is this peculiarly American Shakespeare that Ashley Thorndike encapsulated in 1927: Shakespeare has been a symbol of unity, a moving force, almost a directing deity. He was worshipped in the libraries and theatres of the Eastern cities in much the same way that he was being worshipped in England, but in the West the travelling elocutionist, the lecturer, the company of actors on a Mississippi show-boat became his emissaries and evangels. The frontier would not leave him to Europe and the East; no other writer was so quickly assimilated in the wilderness.10 Where there was a concern, in the early nineteenth century and beyond, about America’s cultural and literary bondage to the Old World, it tended to take on specifically Shakespearean dimensions. Emerson’s, for instance, was not just an anxiety over what he perceived as being an American dependence on ‘the sere remains of foreign harvests’; more specifically, he characterized ‘the enemy of genius’, ‘overinfluence’, in terms of the extent to which ‘the English dramatic poets have Shakespearized now for two hundred years.’11 Orestes Brownson protested, in 1838, that ‘English Literature, so long as it boasts a Shakespeare and a Milton, cannot suffer in comparison with the literature of any other nation’, but that in its ‘tyrannical sway’ it ‘cramps our national genius’. ‘We cannot become independent and original’, he went on, ‘till we have in some degree weakened its empire’.12 That weakening was to take the form of testamentary contestation, conquest, occupation and possession. From the 1760s, when revolutionary ballads often attacked the aristocratic enemy by provocatively parodying Shakespeare, through to the later nineteenth century, by which time American libraries had started to acquire a substantial proportion of available Shakespeare manuscripts, American writers, educationalists and businessmen succeeded in developing a variety of strategies for dealing with the Shakespeare problem. To begin with, what Harold Bloom has termed ‘the curse of an increased belatedness’ and the ‘burden of anteriority’, required an overcoming of what many perceived as being destructive incongruities between Shakespeare’s historical and ideological location and the democratic and popular parameters of America.13 The Romantic evaluation of Shakespeare as not so much a great playwright but a sublime poet took root in America but was seen by Whitman, for one, as an attempt to reinscribe an anti-democratic ideology, and old world-views, in a land of freedom and liberty. Fundamentally, Whitman’s position on Shakespeare was one of radical ambivalence rather than hostility.14 Fully conceded is the playwright’s ‘superb and inimitable’

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art, but harried over is his unavailability for the purposes of a ‘modern and scientific and democratic’ America.15 Similarly, George Wilkes was preoccupied with his sense of the ‘singular anomaly . . . of a genius . . . who was born in comparative humbleness’ and yet never betrayed ‘one emotion for . . . the down-trodden classes’.16 Melville anticipated that American writing, and that of Hawthorne in particular, would eventually excel but, however unwittingly, he left Shakespeare powerfully entrenched as the supreme criterion of such excellence: ‘Believe me . . . that men not very much inferior to Shakespeare are this day being born on the banks of the Ohio.’17 However casuistical the process, Brownson’s belief that Shakespeare was hardly ‘the literature for young republicans’ was countered by others who bought into a Shakespeare who was ‘universal’ not least because they were able to conflate such an attribute with notions of democracy. For George Bancroft: If with us the arts are destined to be awakened into a brilliant career, the inspiration must spring from the triumph of democracy. . . . Who are by way of eminence are the poets of all mankind? Surely Homer and Shakespeare. . . . Shakespeare wrote for an audience wholly composed of the common people.18 A number of transcendentalist thinkers extorted Shakespeare from his cultural specificity by expropriating Ben Jonson’s assertion that he was ‘not of an age, but for all time’. Emerson deployed this stratagem to extricate himself from otherwise rejecting Shakespeare as a pernicious influence and sign of American dependence. Capitalizing on the derivative nature of Shakespeare’s texts, Emerson concluded that ‘it is now no longer possible to say who wrote them first.’ He abjured the empirical scurryings of the ‘Shakespeare Society’ in its attempt to recover what he called ‘scraps of information’ that could not possibly ‘shed . . . light upon that infinite invention which is the concealed magnet of his [Shakespeare’s] attraction for us.’ Conveniently, given what he thought of as America’s repellent situation in the shadow of its English cultural past, Emerson regarded poetry, and Shakespeare as its supreme exemplar, as springing ‘like the rainbow daughter of Wonder, from the invisible, to abolish the past, and refuse all history’. Projected here is not so much a universal, or timeless poet, but one who simply carries no historical baggage. It was in this sense that Emerson regarded Shakespeare as the writer of ‘airs for all our modern

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music’ and as the ‘father of the man in America’.19 Initiated here was the long business of issuing immigration papers to Shakespeare. The four American writers under scrutiny in this volume – Emerson, Melville, James and Berryman – are not merely constituent parts of specifically American fabrications of Shakespeare, they also transmit, transpose and modulate in their own work versions of Shakespeare that continue to reverberate beyond purely local habitations. For David Greenham – as he concentrates on the lectures of the 1830s, when Emerson was ‘determining the central role that language and literature would have in the Transcendentalist ideal of the poet’ – ‘Emerson’s thinking about Shakespeare is an expanding series of circles’ (49). Shakespeare’s influence on Emerson is less important, and ponderable, than the complex ways in which Emerson designs a Shakespeare fit for his own use. The tradition of celebrating Shakespeare’s insouciance, of focusing on his spontaneity and defiance of neoclassical rules, for Greenham, is rejected by Emerson as too limiting a view of the Shakespeare corpus. He opts rather for an emphasis on the power of imagination everywhere evident in a Shakespeare whose texts, nevertheless, Emerson is often rather squeamish about tackling in detail. Unfettered, the imagination has its own penalties, however, in an excessive freedom which must, therefore, be harboured by a ‘Falstaffian common sense’ whose penalty, as the gyrations continue apace, is unconfined sensualism. Imposed on this sensualism is ‘the intuitive power of reason’, but ‘that in turn is limited because it is accessed only through the symbolic creations of the imagination’ (49). Emerson goes on to assert ‘the romantic ideas of genius and organic form, the self-given law, which ultimately elevates Shakespeare’s creativity to that of the divine author’. ‘Shakespeare’s uniqueness’, Greenham argues, ‘rescues him at every turn from the limits Emerson tries to impose on him’ within the context of ‘dynamic’ tensions ‘between sense and soul, body and intellect’ (12). Shakespeare breaks Emerson’s thoughts and as Emerson reshapes it time and again he himself grows. Thinking about Shakespeare provided Emerson with his theories of creativity, of language, of poetry of beauty and with at least one model for the representative man. That is why Emerson has unbounded admiration for Shakespeare even when he, in all optimism, is searching for his American successor. (50) For Emerson, as for Henry James in highly disparate ways, ‘Shakespeare is always, at the last, beyond his readers’ (12).

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Melville encountered Shakespeare, Calder tells us, comparatively late in life, when he purchased in 1849 ‘a handsome set of seven volumes in blue leather’ of the ‘Complete Works’ (52). Calder suggests that Melville’s reactions to reading The Tempest in particular reveals an incipient interest in ‘the places where Shakespeare held something back, where what might have been said is conveyed indirectly through hesitation, implication, backlighting’ as Melville, reading as an American, already begins ‘to wonder about the difference that makes’ (53). It is in his essay ‘Hawthorne and His Mosses’, that after striking the familiar note of the need for American literary independence, Melville’s real preoccupation emerges: ‘an energizing sense of proximity to genius’ (62). In his account of Moby-Dick Calder addresses its long-recognized, yet complex and disputed affinities with Shakespeare. As with Hamlet (although this is not a connection Calder makes), the now ‘commonly accepted compositional map of Moby-Dick’ is that Melville ‘had written two distinct versions’ of the work ‘between February 1850 and August 1851’, a hypothesis grounded in Charles Olson’s 1933 analysis of the marginalia in Melville’s Shakespeare library (69). ‘The few written comments illustrate’ Melville’s ‘feel for subtext and irony’ but there are also ‘upwards of 450 non-substantive circling, tickings, underlinings and sidelinings of particular phrases and passages scattered through the 7 volumes’. But only the scorings of Measure for Measure ‘reveals a distinct shape to Melville’s response’, the ‘[m]ajor speeches involving death and the theme of appearance and reality’ being ‘consistently marked’. It is, in part, the linking of ‘truth-telling’ and the deceptions of appearance which is at the centre of F. O. Matthiessen’s celebrated account of Moby-Dick’s Shakespearean texture. Ultimately, Calder is sceptical about reductive formulations of a two- or even three-version compositional scenario for Moby-Dick if such theories imply that Melville (against the theory of Coleridge and the practice of Shakespeare) was aiming for a ‘tightly organized and aesthetically integrated text’ (73). In this context: If Olson is the ancestor of those who have celebrated two and three book theories of Moby-Dick’s composition, Matthiessen is the forerunner of whose who favour a more organic view of the composition of the novel and a less deterministic understanding of Shakespeare’s pervasive influence. (74) Calder eschews the often futile pursuit of the ‘allusions and verbal echoes’ as ‘tiresome’ and ‘their deliberate deployment forms the least significant

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part of what Melville took from Shakespeare’s language.’ Relevant is Matthiessen’s observation that ‘kaleidoscopic variations of Shakespeare’s patterns’ are found ‘almost on every page’ of Moby-Dick (75). For Calder Shakespeare, along with Elizabethan drama generally, along with Milton and the Bible, and amidst the tangled junctions of a thousand strings of influence, helped Melville towards a language weighted for modern prose tragedy. But allusions and verbal echoes are only the half of it. (76) Ultimately, ‘Melville uses the robes of Shakespearean drama to remember and focus the tragedy that had always been there in the underside of his nation’s story’ (83). To move from Moby-Dick to Pierre is to experience a visceral contrast but also to experience even more intensely ‘the strain’ in Melville, Calder argues, ‘between writing as he pleased and catering to the public’ (84). In this context, and ‘[a]s with Moby-Dick’, there are passages of the most extraordinary power in ‘the midst of writing that can seem overdone, indulgent or torpid’ (85). ‘In Pierre, Melville takes’ ‘Hamlet and Americanizes it with a twist’. But Hamlet ‘is the shell Melville borrows for a novel whose best precedent in Shakespeare is Troilus and Cressida’. From Pierre, Calder turns to Melville’s later The Confidence-Man – with its careful and extensive interweaving of Shakespeare – before concluding, as he again draws in ‘Hawthorne and His Mosses’ that Melville found an enabling precedent for his own art in Shakespeare’s blackness, in the ‘infinite obscure of his background’ against which those ‘occasional flashings-forth of the intuitive Truth’, those ‘short, quick probing at the very axis of reality’ would radiate like dark light from a ‘hidden sun’. (94) If Shakespeare allusion-hunting in Melville is fraught with tiresome difficulties, Rawlings on Henry James similarly concludes that such speculations are ultimately unprofitable. Shakespeare, Rawlings argues, constituted for James not least in terms of overwhelming and suggestive senses of absence, mystery, silence and all things enigmatic and imponderable – is to an almost unfathomable extent the allusive medium of his criticism, fiction, drama and immense epistolary corpus. (96) After surveying aspects of James’s lifelong and often highly oblique encounters with Shakespeare, Rawlings goes on to consider the suffusions

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of Shakespeare in the prefaces to James’s New York edition (1907–1909) of his novels and tales before concentrating on two short stories, both published in 1903, ‘The Birthplace’ and ‘The Papers’. On the evidence of the New York prefaces, if ‘consciousness’ and its representation are the epicentres of James’s theory and practice as a novelist, then ‘Shakespeare’ in all his impenetrable guises is the paradigm for James’s fiction. Rawlings contends that ‘James’s commitment to the centrality of consciousness and to the novel as an organic form . . . owed much to the Romantic, and especially German and Coleridgean, emphasis on Shakespeare as an opponent of classicism and an avatar of later attacks on the sterility of art bound by rigid laws imposed from without’ (104). Similarly, James’s ‘perspectivism’, with deep roots in his early and continuing enthusiasm for Shakespeare, is bound up with an addiction to the dramatic and theatrical. James’s preoccupation, not to mention obsession, with the drama and plays both fuelled and was fuelled by the power Shakespeare exerted over culture and the evaluations of its quality. What can be seen as the pressure of Shakespearean drama on the novel resulted in a preoccupation, certainly for James, not only with the theatre but with impersonal narration and the management of perspective. (106) Rawlings goes on to consider aspects of the largely nineteenth-century American disputation of the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays as a prelude to a detailed examination of James’s ‘The Birthplace’. To an extent, Rawlings takes Louis J. Budd at his word when he argues that the controversy ‘fed on the many uncertainties concerning the plays’.20 For Rawlings, Delia Bacon (whose The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded, published in 1857, is seminal in the dispute) and her scepticism are closely allied with Phineas T. Barnum’s commercial exploitation of those permeable borders between appearance and reality everywhere under scrutiny in the Shakespearean corpus and to which James was no stranger in his fiction. The focus of ‘The Birthplace’ is on an obsessive American interest in Stratford-upon-Avon admirably charted in part by Barbara Hodgdon in her The Shakespeare Trade (1998).21 Following his extensive discussion of ‘The Birthplace’, with its focus on the enigmas, penalties and rewards of bardolatry, Rawlings examines ‘The Papers’, a story published in the same year (1903) as ‘The Birthplace but which has received rather less critical attention and whose Shakespearean

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dimensions might seem small scale at first sight. Rawlings argues that ‘in different ways’, both ‘The Birthplace’ and ‘The Papers’ profit from the ironies involved in high culture’s confrontation with mass cultural appropriations of Shakespeare. In ‘The Papers’, James derives and adopts a plot from As You Like It to offer a critique of a popular press whose processes turn out, however, to have a much in common with the metaphysics and aesthetics of appearance and reality that have fashioned much of his fiction. (125) Four years after the publication of ‘The Birthplace’ and ‘The Papers’, James penned his ‘Introduction’ to The Tempest, his only extensive critical consideration of Shakespeare. In part, its intention is on the ‘morbid and monstrous curiosity’ which is also the subject, however differently, of both ‘The Birthplace’, ‘The Papers’ (and of much of the American way with Shakespeare in general).22 John Roe demonstrates how Shakespeare permeates John Berryman’s imagination in various, often unexpected ways.23 King Lear in particular made a strong impact on Berryman in terms of its depiction of suffering, while Hamlet portrayed family conflicts which had an uncanny bearing on his own. Berryman above all responded to the power of passion that he found in Shakespeare, and he makes it clear in his critical writings that he imagines Shakespeare to have suffered personally some of the experiences he writes about. Roe consequently ponders the relevance of biographical detail to Berryman’s response to certain of Shakespeare’s plots and characters. His chapter concerns itself both with the poetry of Berryman, in so far as it reveals the influence of Shakespeare, and with his scholarship, especially the edition (never completed) of King Lear. Roe begins by arguing that Berryman found his way towards his understanding of Shakespeare partly through the example of Yeats, a poet who was never afraid to express passion directly. In making his own poetic way in the world, Berryman felt he had to throw off the inhibiting influence of T. S. Eliot and the ‘impersonal’ school; Yeats and Shakespeare gave Berryman the confidence to voice his feelings without circumspection or ironic dissemblance. Similarly, when writing about Shakespeare, he acquired the confidence to challenge the objective, ‘unfeeling’ position held by the New Criticism, and its most celebrated advocates, R. P. Blackmur and Cleanth Brooks. At the same time, the desire to edit Shakespeare took a firm hold of Berryman’s imagination, hence the Lear enterprise. Mark Van Doren,

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Berryman’s mentor at Columbia, expressed surprise at Berryman’s earnest commitment to the ‘dry-as-dust’ pursuit of textual annotation, but as Roe shows the attempt to edit King Lear, though it failed in one respect, meant that the play, especially in its language, penetrated Berryman to a very deep level. Roe in his analysis gives examples of the effect on the poetry from Homage to Mistress Bradstreet onwards. In embracing editing, Berryman responded to the New Bibliography, as led by scholars such as W. W. Greg, with whom Berryman conducted an often amusing (on Berryman’s part) correspondence. Roe devotes a section to editing and to the later editorial challenges to the New Bibliography, especially regarding King Lear, assessing its relevance to Berryman. In the second part of his chapter, John Roe turns his attention directly to the ‘Shakespearean’ texts: Berryman’s Sonnets, The Dream Songs and Homage to Mistress Bradstreet. He argues that the Sonnets are the most successfully Shakespearean of sequences written in the twentieth century, and suggests that Berryman produced an original fusion of Petrarch’s blonde Laura and Shakespeare’s unsettling and disturbing ‘dark’ mistress. Both The Dream Songs and Bradstreet, though not addressed to Shakespearean themes, show the pervasiveness of his language with extraordinary and dramatic vividness. Roe concludes that while Berryman ostensibly ‘failed’ in his Shakespearean undertakings, producing neither the edition of King Lear nor the biography he started several times to write, he none the less succeeded wonderfully in accommodating Shakespeare to his own creative processes and achieving a poetic voice that he would have struggled otherwise to find. In often bewildering ways, then, and at the full stretch of their creative and imaginative powers, the four writers considered in this volume indicate the extent of Shakespeare’s hold on a culturally grasping America. ‘One of the interesting things in big persons is that they leave us big questions’ observed Henry James,24 and Emerson, Melville, James and Berryman possessed in highly divergent ways an insatiable appetite for Shakespeare and the big questions. Endlessly alluring for these writers, as James memorably expressed it, was the ‘eternal mystery’ and the ‘strained and aching wonder’ of it all.25

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Chapter 1

Ralph Waldo Emerson David Greenham

Towards the end of his life in 1872, after 50 years of thinking, lecturing and writing about Shakespeare, Ralph Waldo Emerson despaired of criticism: ‘Still it is a wild guess – wide of the mark.’1 This conclusion, though, is not in itself necessarily despairing. The idea that Shakespeare is always, at the last, beyond his reader, drawing a further circle around the last critical position, is crucial to Emerson’s appropriation of Shakespeare as an exemplar of ‘the poet’: the man in advance of his time, who is yet entirely of his time. For Emerson, Shakespeare is a timely untimely contradiction: emerging from a particular material moment, yet disclosing a timeless spiritual universality. In this chapter I shall demonstrate how Emerson’s own intellectual trajectory is an attempt to come to terms with this perceived contradiction, which emerges from Emerson’s own suspension between Puritanism and romanticism. In particular I shall focus on the germinal lectures that Emerson gave on Shakespeare in the middle years of the 1830s, when he was determining the central role that language and literature would have in the Transcendentalist ideal of the poet. I shall also consider Emerson’s mature essays that build upon this work, in particular ‘The Poet’ (1844) and ‘Shakespeare, or the Poet’ (1850).

From Puritanism to Romanticism Though aware of Shakespeare for his entire reading life,2 Emerson’s reading of the plays did not begin in earnest until the last years of his teens. According to William Wynkoop, ‘John Hill, a college classmate, claimed – wildly – that Emerson knew Shakespeare almost by heart in his freshman year. But Rusk believes that “significant first-hand acquaintance” did not

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begin much earlier than 1822, the year after his graduation.’3 From his earliest recorded comments Emerson’s position was ambivalent. Though his perspective would become overwhelmingly romantic, in terms I shall explain below, it also contained a residual element of New England Puritanism: its suspicion of the body and the material world.4 As such the 17-year-old Emerson found Shakespeare’s works ‘sustained on the sensual’, thus to be ‘regret[ted] and abhor[red]’.5 His distaste for the ‘sensual’, that Shakespeare’s works appeal to the senses rather that to the mind, corresponds to a familiar hierarchy.6 It is also an early and significant marker of the dynamic tension between sense and soul, body and intellect, which persists in Emerson’s Shakespeare criticism. By his early twenties Emerson has adopted a wholly different perspective. Now Shakespeare’s mind is ‘majestic’ and his ‘taste the most exquisite that God ever informed amongst men’.7 For the rest of his life Emerson is full of praise for ‘the Bard’. As he confides to his journal in 1834, he is ‘undeniably an original and unapproached bard – the first of men’.8 In 1835 he writes ‘In Shakespear I actually shade my eyes as I read for the splendour of the thoughts.’9 In 1836 the bard is ‘beyond all poets’,10 in 1838 he is ‘immeasurable’,11 and in 1839 Shakespeare is a ‘beautiful, unapproachable, whole’.12 In 1845 ‘Shakespeare is as much out of the category of eminent authors, as he is out of the crowd. He is inconceivably wise . . . unique’.13 In 1872 he is ‘unapproachable’ and a ‘fixed star’14 and, as we have seen, Shakespeare remains, to his advantage, the despair of Emerson’s criticism. This is to cite only a few of the compliments which strew Emerson’s writings, in lectures, essays and journal entries. Despite this clear reverence, Emerson’s lifelong struggle is to wrest Shakespeare from the merely sensual and to find in him the operations of divine spirit. To achieve this Emerson was compelled to rethink the relationship between the senses, the natural world and spirit. It is on these terms he engages with the preromantic conception of Shakespeare as ‘of nature’, a position most widely associated with the Puritan poet John Milton. The Shakespeare of Milton’s ‘L’Allegro’ (1631–1632) can be construed as a naïve poet whose achievement rests on native wildness. Along with the romantics, and influenced by them, Emerson challenges the Miltonic idea – which held strong through the Enlightenment – that Shakespeare, as ‘Fancy’s child, / Warbles his native wood-notes wild.’15 It is with unavoidable reference to Milton – whose works Emerson knew as well as he knew Shakespeare’s, and who as a poet he held second only to Shakespeare16 – that Emerson calls two of his long poems ‘Woodnotes’

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(1841). In the first of these, ‘Woodnotes I’, the protagonist is an observer of nature: Knowledge this man prizes best Seems fantastic to the rest: Pondering shadows, colors, clouds, Grass-buds and caterpillar shrouds [. . .] Why Nature loves the number five, And why the star-form she repeats: Lover of all things alive, Wonderer at all he meets, Wonderer chiefly at himself, Who can tell him what he is?17 The unnamed protagonist, ‘the poet’18 is a naturalist, a quasi-scientist, interested in nature’s variety and its quantifiable and repeated order. He is first of all drawn to nature as an end in itself, going into the woods with neither ‘hook nor line’, nor ‘gun nor scythe’.19 But the poem more importantly suggests that one end of nature is the poet himself. The poet goes into nature in the effort to find himself. This immediately implies a reflexive posture for the poet, rather than that of a naïve warbler. Even though Emerson’s wood-wandering poet is definitely attached to the American landscape (‘In unploughed Maine, he sought the lumberer’s gang’),20 nevertheless, there is a suppressed opening to ‘Woodnotes I’ which makes its reference to Shakespeare explicit beyond the title: For this present, hard Is the fortune of the bard Born out of time; All his accomplishment From nature’s utmost treasure spent Booteth not him.21 Here the reference is to ‘the bard’, who, born out of time, is unable to make the treasure of nature tell: it ‘Booteth not him’ (a consciously Elizabethan anachronism). What the poet can reveal of nature has no audience. The poem then continues with the journey into the woodland, which figures a passage away from philistine incomprehension of Emerson’s contemporary

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moment and back into a time where the bard can be one with what made him a poet: the ability to observe minute nature in its order and variety. As such the poet is not merely of nature, piping its woodnotes, but is a naturalist, writing woodnotes. Emerson’s poet is inspired by nature, rather than ‘natural’ – or ‘native’ and ‘wild’ – as was Milton’s Shakespeare. As such the poem marks the consequences of a shift in thinking of the poet as a part of nature to someone who records and understands nature and is thus able to report it accurately and, perhaps because of empirical or quasiscientific knowledge, but as likely because of intuitive insight, predict its ways (he’s a ‘a forest seer’ and a ‘Foreteller of the vernal ides’).22 The poet is nature reflecting on itself, not mere nature, and, as Shakespeare is the exemplar of the Transcendentalist ideal Emerson is outlining, this revision determines his version of the bard. One corollary of this is that Emerson’s Shakespeare is an educated man, not a rural naïf. Indeed, in a very important and agenda setting early lecture on Shakespeare delivered in 1835 Emerson writes: It needs then in order to any just understanding of this shining genius that we dismiss from the mind at once all the tavern stories that circulate, as if he were an untutored boy who without books or discipline or reflection wrote he know not what, and see in him what he was, a Catholic or Universal mind of very great cultivation and one who by books, by discourse, and by thought formed his own opinions, who wrote with intention and who knew that his record was true and in every line he penned has left his silent appeal to the most cultivated mind.23 For Emerson, Shakespeare must have had access to the best thought of his age and his plays were written accordingly. In challenging the dominant preromantic vision of Shakespeare as a naïve ‘natural genius’, Emerson is in tune with the romantic reinvention of Shakespeare begun in the eighteenth century.24 As A. W. Schlegel puts it: ‘To me he appears a profound artist, and not a blind and wildly luxuriant genius. I consider, generally speaking, all that has been said on the subject a mere fable, a blind and extravagant error.’25 Coleridge makes similar points in the Biographia Literaria: ‘Shakespeare, no mere child of nature; no automaton of genius; no passive vehicle of inspiration possessed by the spirit, not possessing it; first studied patiently, meditated deeply, understood minutely, till knowledge become habitual and intuitive wedded itself to his habitual feelings.’26 Emerson accepts this element of the complex

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romantic rethinking of Shakespeare, and in ‘Woodnotes I’ the poet is a scholar and a thinker, a reflective rather than a passive part of nature. In the second of the poems referencing Milton’s words, ‘Woodnotes II’, Emerson personifies a pine tree, and here nature speaks through the poet, using a voice at times unmistakably Shakespearean in its imagery if not in its mastery of cadence: The rushing metamorphosis Dissolving all that fixture is, Melts things that be to things that seem, And solid nature to a dream.27 In this poem nature is merely apparent, pointing always elsewhere, to the unseen world. The poet is simply the person who can articulate this relationship and allow nature its voice. This is also a familiar romantic trope, available to Emerson in such poems as Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’. Just as the idea that ‘the countless leaves on the pine are strings / Tuned to the lay the wood god sings’,28 would be available from Coleridge’s ‘Aeolian Harp’. Thus in the ‘Woodnotes’, nature and the poet’s relationship with it are rethought in two ways: first the poet is the accurate observer of the natural world, secondly he is the conduit to what is beyond nature narrowly conceived, namely spirit. Neither perspective allows for the poet to be ‘mere’ nature. Emerson’s belated Puritan distrust of nature as merely sensual has become a romantic celebration of nature as a route to the divine – if not the divine itself – and Shakespeare is the implied poet par excellence. Another important aspect of the poet, and a romantic theme that echoes through Emerson’s writings, is an ambivalent resentment towards Shakespeare’s individual biography. As Emerson writes in the 1835 lecture on Shakespeare, ‘It is exceedingly difficult to extract an autobiography from his works, so impartial and devoid of all favourite moods and topics are his works.’29 Coleridge, in his Table Talk, published the year before, responded similarly: ‘Shakespeare’s poetry is characterless; that is, it does not reflect the individual Shakespeare.’30 This theme, though, was already well established in Emerson’s thinking. In 1827 he wrote ‘Shakespeare alludes to himself nowhere in his drama.’31 This is a position that would certainly have been available from his reading of Hazlitt,32 who wrote in 1814 that Shakespeare ‘seemed scarcely to have an individual existence of his own, but to borrow that of others at will, and to pass successively through “every variety of untried being,” – and to be now Hamlet, now Othello, now

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Lear, now Falstaff, now Ariel’,33 and then in 1818 that ‘He was just like any other man, but that he was like all other men. He was the least of an egoist that it was possible to be. He was nothing in himself; but he was all that others were, or that they could become.’34 Emerson also notes that Shakespeare ‘has no discoverable egotism’.35 This selfless protean quality in Shakespeare could be used in two ways. It could make him unique and untouchable, or it could make him universal, that is but a particular example of what all men could be. While we have already seen that Emerson holds the first view, this does not prevent him from appropriating the more radically democratic vision as adduced by Hazlitt. Both perspectives are involved in the following journal entry: It is the very essence of Poetry to spring like the rainbow daughter of Wonder from the invisible: to abolish the Past, & refuse all history. . . . What can any biography biographize the wonderful world into which the Midsummer Night’s dream [sic] admit me? Did Shakespeare confide to any Notary or Parish recorder, sacristan or surrogate in Stratford upon Avon, the genesis of that delicate creation? The forest of Arden, the air of Scone Castle, the moonlight of Portia’s villa; where is the third cousin or grandnephew, the prompter’s book or private letter that has heard one word of those transcendent secrets? Shakespeare is the only biographer of Shakespeare. And ah, what can Shakespeare tell in any way but to the Shakespeare in us?36 This passage from an 1845 journal entry, which would go on to be revised for the 1850 essay ‘Shakespeare, or the Poet’ in Representative Men,37 in summing up Emerson’s views on Shakespeare and biography also asks an important question: can biography tell us anything about literary creation? Emerson’s answer is, here, firmly in the negative. Shakespeare’s ‘transcendent’ secrets remain secrets. Yet, despite what he implies elsewhere (Emerson not being averse to contradiction: ‘a foolish consistency is the Hobgoblin of little minds’),38 this does not mean that Shakespeare is entirely absent from his works (indeed, we have already seen the importance of his education). On the contrary, as Shakespeare’s works were the only necessary monument for Jonson and Milton, for Emerson they are Shakespeare’s biography – his autobiography: ‘Shakespeare is the only biographer of Shakespeare.’ So, while biography can tell us nothing about literary creation, literary creation can tell us everything about biography. Thus he continues in the essay ‘Shakespeare, or the Poet’, ‘So far from Shakespeare’s being the least known, he is the one person, in all modern

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history, known to us.’39 Emerson goes on to argue that Shakespeare has delved into every aspect of ‘morals, of manners, of economy, or philosophy, of religion, or taste, of the conduct of life’.40 Such inquiries and the knowledge contained therein tell us all we need to know about Shakespeare. Though – and this is the crux of Emerson’s perspective on Shakespeare – unlike a simple biography, this is not easily available. Rather Shakespeare can only tell it to ‘the Shakespeare in us.’ This is where we can see the influence of Hazlitt. For Hazlitt, Shakespeare is what others were or could become; for Emerson, Shakespeare is what we all are in our best moments, ‘our most apprehensive and sympathetic hour’,41 where apprehensive means an ability to apprehend. As such he is universal: Shakespeare comes to stand in for – to represent – all people. Thus, ‘To analyze the powers of such an individual is to analyze the powers of the human mind.’42 Shakespeare stands for our very best intellectual potentialities. For Emerson, Shakespeare’s selflessness, his dispersion into his characters, makes him the consummate ‘representative man’; more so because this dispersion makes him available to those who engage with Shakespeare’s language. In addition to the Puritan and the romantic influences on Emerson there is another contemporary factor, the late eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury hermeneutic line of German biblical criticism which had argued that the Bible had multiple authors.43 This comes to Emerson through rationalist Unitarianism, the religious milieu in which Emerson was raised, itself informed by the higher German criticism, which questioned the divine authorship of the Bible, suggesting that it had multiple human authors writing in different times. Thus, Emerson takes an analogous position with respect to Shakespeare, ‘His best works are of doubted authenticity & what his, and what his novelist’s, & what the players’, seems yet disputed.’44 Shakespeare’s originality, on these terms needs to be rethought. It is not straightforwardly inspired, rather ‘The greatest genius is the most indebted man.’45 One key to genius, to originality – there are others which I shall investigate below – is ‘in being altogether receptive; in letting the world do all, and suffering the spirit of the world to pass unobstructed through the mind.’46 Emerson recognizes and celebrates Shakespeare’s deep indebtedness to his age: the fact that he borrowed the stories for his plays, that he drew upon the language of the common people, and that the energies of his age – its coarse blood – flowed into his work. As he puts it in a journal entry of 1845: Shakespear evidently thought the mass of old plays or of stage plays corpus vile [worthless body], in which any experiment might be freely tried. Had the prestige which hedges about a modern tragedy or other worthless

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literary work existed, nothing could have been done. The coarse but warm blood of living England circulated in the play as in street ballads, & gave body to his airy and majestic fancy. For the poet peremptorily needs a basis which we cannot supply; a tough chaos-deep soil, or main, or continent, on which his art may work, as the sculptor a block of stone, and the basis of the popular mind supplies: otherwise all his flowers & elegances are transcendental and mere nuisance.47 Shakespeare’s receptivity to his time, to its ‘tough chaos-deep soil’, is what, for Emerson, gives value to his poetry. Without this receptivity it is ‘transcendental and mere nuisance’, disconnected from experience. Being timely, then, is crucial as it supplies the weight to a work. As it is this appears to contradict what Emerson had said earlier, namely that ‘It is the very essence of Poetry to spring like the rainbow daughter of Wonder from the invisible: to abolish the Past, & refuse all history’ and that Shakespeare’s ‘transcendent secrets’ are undiscoverable. The point, though, is that nothing can explain the way that materials given in time are transformed into timeless art. Nothing about Shakespeare’s powers will be yielded up by an investigation into the corpus vile. Nevertheless, Emerson apparently paradoxically argues, it is timeliness that allows for timelessness. As he writes in 1839: ‘Those books which are for all time, are written indifferently at any time. [. . .] And yet literature, this magical man provoking talisman, is in some sort a creature of time. It is begotten by Time on the Soul. Always the oracular soul is the source of thought but always the occasion is administered by the low antagonisms of circumstance.’48 If you can speak for your time you can, in Ben Jonson’s famous words, be ‘for all time’. The perfect evocation of a material moment is immortal: matter is transformed into spirit, sense into the sublime. Thus in 1834 Emerson writes ‘The remarkable sentences of Lear, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, might as naturally have been composed in 1834 as in 1600’;49 and again in 1843, ‘Shakespeare’s speeches in Lear are in the very dialect of 1843.’50 The circumstance that for Emerson Shakespeare was sensual and sublime, that he spoke of nature, and nature spoke through him, that he was implicated in his moment, but still for all time, that he was exemplary and yet representative, conspires to create his enigmatic approach to England’s greatest poet and the consummate figure of English Literature.

Shakespeare and the Unfixing of Language The attempt to account for Shakespeare is instrumental to Emerson’s own thought and practice. It was through trying to understand Shakespeare’s

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written legacy that Emerson’s views on literature, language and the mind were in large part formed. As he writes in ‘Shakespeare, or, the Poet’: ‘literature, philosophy and thought are Shakespearized’.51 In a lecture titled ‘English Literature: Introductory’, first delivered in November 1835 as a prelude to the Shakespeare lectures given that December, Emerson writes: ‘Literature, in its largest sense, is, the books that are written. It is the recorded thinking of man. It contains the utterance of man upon all knowables.’52 Emerson presents literature in general as a record of thinking and the relationship between literature and thinking is important. Thinking, as Emerson defines it in another lecture delivered later that year, has a very particular shape. A man thinks. He not only thinks, but he lives on thoughts; he is the prisoner of thoughts; his ideas, which in words he rejects, tyrannize over him and dictate or modify every word of his mouth, every act of his hand. There are no walls like the invisible ones of an idea. Against these no purpose can prosper or so much as be formed. Rebellion against the thought which rules me is absurdity. For I cannot separate between me and it.53 In Europe, at about the same time, this structure was coming to be referred to as ‘ideology’: a system of thoughts which have a power over the subject that they create.54 Emerson, though radical in interesting ways, cannot easily be defined as a proto-socialist and it appears, at least, that he welcomes this tyranny of ideas; ideas which, though born in Enlightenment Europe were seen by many Americans of Emerson’s class as their birthright, or as matters of common sense: ‘God, order, freedom, justice, love, time, space, self, matter.’55 These ideas, he continues, are necessarily stable points, and ‘It will be admitted that a man cannot take these in his hand and amuse himself with them as counters’ for ‘compared with their fixity and stability, his being is a dream and a shade’.56 American individuals, then, are built up from these ideas, the bedrock of their identity.57 As the editors of Emerson’s early lectures note, ‘idea’ is a term that he is borrowing from Coleridge58 for whom, in The Statesman’s Manual (1816), ‘every principle is actualised by an idea; and every idea is living, productive, partaketh of infinity, and (as Bacon has sublimely observed) containeth an endless power of semination.’59 Though Emerson’s take on ‘idea’ is differently nuanced, for Coleridge ideas are the lived – that is practical and productive – growths from fundamental principles which, as he goes on to assert, are available directly through intuition and which are revealed in the

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Bible. The Bible, though, is not the only literary source of principles and the ideas they disseminate. There is, for Coleridge, at least one profane yet principled author. Let it not then be condemned as unseasonable or out of place, if I remind you that in the intuitive knowledge of this truth, and with his wonted fidelity to nature, our own great poet has placed the greater number of his profoundest maxims and general truths, both political and moral, not in the mouths of men at ease, but of men under the influence of passion, when the mighty thoughts overmaster and become the tyrants of the mind that has brought them forth. In his Lear, Othello, Macbeth, Hamlet, principles of deepest insight and widest interest fly off like sparks from the glowing iron under the loud anvil.60 In this passage Coleridge outlines several specific issues that resurface in Emerson’s view of Shakespeare. First, he observes that Shakespeare is the exemplar of literary fidelity to nature. Secondly, Coleridge implies that the non-sacred, and the literary in particular, can have revelatory power. Thirdly, he asserts a relationship between intuition and the tyranny of thought. Indeed, it is as if the characters in Shakespeare’s plays have taken over the playwright’s mind, emerging, along with their ideas, directly from nature. What will become apparent is that there is a fine balance between a benign nature as an authority in which the romantic, more specifically pantheistic,61 side of Coleridge (and Emerson) can have faith and his reducing Shakespeare back to a ‘warbling’ Miltonic force of nature. In his development of Coleridge’s philosophy Emerson will inherit this very problem. For him it will always be the case that Shakespeare is an exemplary individual of unique talents and yet also a representative of universal potential. This paradox is, perhaps, irremediable. For the present I shall focus on what makes Shakespeare unique: his mastery of language. In Emerson’s early lectures on literature and Shakespeare language emerges along with a raft of other practical pursuits in man’s ‘efforts to create outside of him a state of things conformed to his inward thoughts’.62 These outward creations are visible ‘ideas’, and Emerson ‘Observe[s] how every belief and every error – each a thought in some man’s mind – clothes itself with societies, houses, cities, language, ceremonies, newspapers.’63 Language, then, is in this case one manifestation of thought or idea, just as houses or newspapers are other more obviously practical manifestations of inner states. However, in language, as we have seen, we are not necessarily free: ‘The very language we speak, thinks for us, by the subtle distinctions which

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already are marked for us by its words.’64 We are, as it were, born into certain circulating ideas, which may be good for us, like order and justice, but which may also be counter-productive and cause an overreliance on tradition or on error. There are, as Emerson wrote, ‘no walls like the invisible ones of an idea’. But, despite his claim that ‘Rebellion against the thought which rules me is absurdity’, new thoughts – and corrective thoughts – are also possible. These are the fresh revelations of ‘spiritual’ principle that the luminaries of literature, Bacon, Milton, Chaucer and most of all Shakespeare, have made available. Against the imposition of tradition the circle of thought is always expanding, transforming and in flux, finding new ways to move from the visible (matter) to the invisible (spirit). As such, there is a decisive break between at least two ways that language may be used. There are those who merely mouth the conventional figures of thought and those who are able to unfix ideas and make them flow. The faculty for effecting this unfixing is called by Emerson, in a romantic mood, the imagination. All reflexion goes to teach us the strictly emblematic character of the material world. Especially is it the office of the poet to perceive and use these analogies. He converts the solid globe, the land, the sea, the sun, the animals into symbols of thought; he makes the outward creation subordinate and merely a convenient alphabet to express thoughts and emotions. This act or vision of the mind is called Imagination. It is that active state of the mind in which it forces things to obey the laws of thought; takes up all present objects in a despotic manner into its own image and likeness and makes the thought which occupies it the center of the world.65 The poet, then, is the person who is aware that nature and language are completely implicated in each other and can turn this kinship to his will, turning one into the other in order to ‘express thoughts and emotions’. Indeed, this could be taken further: it is the turning of nature into language that allows thoughts and emotions to be at all. The imagination is the faculty which allows for this, making emblematic nature subordinate to the poet’s will. It is an active and tyrannical faculty which overcomes, and here is where the excitement and the danger lays, the fixed and stable ideas which, according to Emerson, provide our identity, in the name of the same ‘laws of thought’. The poet, Emerson contends, like the philosopher, is the one who is able to stand outside of the conventions of language that tie us to ways of thinking and, instead, ‘takes [his] stand in the absolute’.66 This is

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a large claim and it is central to Emerson’s later celebration of poets as ‘liberating Gods’.67 From this ‘absolute’ perspective the poet is intuitively able ‘To break the chains of custom, to see every thing as it absolutely exists, and so to clothe every thing ordinary and even sordid with beauty.’68 For ‘Custom is the defacer of beauty, and the concealer of truth. Custom presents every thing as immovably fixed. But the first effort of thought is to lift things free from their feet and make all objects appear fluent.’69 Emerson is evoking the romantic exhortation of Coleridge and Shelley, to see everything anew, to remove ‘the film of familiarity’,70 and gain the potential to create the world over, to begin again, as if on a new continent. The poet who has perfected this fluency to the highest degree is Shakespeare. Emerson writes, using similar language to his definition of imagination, that Shakspeare possesses the power of subordinating nature for the purposes of expression beyond all poets. His imperial muse tosses the creation like a bauble from hand to hand to embody any capricious shade of thought that is uppermost in his mind. Open any page grave or gay and you shall find the despotism of the imagination summoning the elements at will to illustrate his momentary thought.71 What Shakespeare does more successfully than any other poet, Emerson argues, is use creation, the material universe, to express thought, or spirit. His imaginative faculty is able to control nature’s potential for providing apt metaphor to register even the most transitory of thoughts or emotions. This phrase ‘despotism of the imagination’ recalls Coleridge’s ‘tyrants of the mind’ – it is as though Shakespeare’s thought is dictatorial, an absolute monarch over the realm of metaphor. Emerson’s examples are given through generous quotations from the plays and sonnets. Though he is not long on criticism, he enjoyed reading Shakespeare’s words aloud and quoted him at length in his lectures, assuming that his audience would make the necessary connections. It is in this spirit that Emerson cites the following example from The Merchant of Venice: How like a yonker and a prodigal The scarfed bark puts from her native bay Hugged and embraced by the strumpet wind How like a prodigal doth she return With overlabored ribs and weathered sides Lean rent and beggared by the strumpet wind.72 (II.vi.14–19)

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Though Emerson indicates nothing about the meaning of the passage – indeed he rarely interprets Shakespeare – the quotation is clearly meant to illustrate the poet’s ability to use imagery to express thought, to use the material to make visible the spiritual: here the passage from innocence to experience and corruption, from youth to age, closely tied into the nautical metaphors which begin the play and underlie its mercantile theme. Emerson’s ambivalence towards the sensual is curiously present in his choice of quotation. That Emerson is alluding to sexual corruption – the strumpet wind – but not saying so is perhaps confirmed by his next example from Measure for Measure: Not she tempts me not, but tis I Who lying by the violet in the sun Do as the carrion does not as the flower Corrupt with virtuous season.73 (II.ii.167–70; the passage is slightly misquoted) The imagery of this passage, yielding both fruitfulness and decay, is a material embodiment of Angelo’s conflicted spiritual state – and perhaps Isabella’s too. Also the balance of corruption and virtue seems to mark Emerson’s own concerns with Shakespeare’s sensuality. Earlier in the same lecture Emerson makes specific reference to the seasons, saying: ‘The motion of the earth round its axis and round the sun makes the day and the year. These are certain amounts of brute light and heat. But is there no intent of analogy between man’s life and the seasons? And do the seasons gain no grandeur or pathos from that analogy?’74 Again the material allows the spiritual to come forth; in turn the material is elevated by the comparison. On the one hand, it evidences Emerson’s homocentric conception that the world gains its grandeur because humans celebrate it. On the other hand, Emerson shows through his theory, again following Coleridge’s hints in The Statesman’s Manual, that the sensual in Shakespeare reveals the spiritual and is raised up thereby. This is an idea that took form in a journal entry, attributed to July 1834, ‘What is there divine in a load of bricks? What is there of the divine in a privy? Much. All’,75 and which is picked up in the later essay ‘The Poet’, with reference to symbolism. [T]here is no fact of nature that does not carry the whole sense of nature; and the distinctions which we make in events, and in affairs, of low and high, honest and base, disappear when nature is used as a symbol. Thought makes everything fit for use. The vocabulary of an omniscient

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man would include words and images excluded from polite conversation. What would be obscene, to the obscene, becomes illustrious, spoken in a new connection of thought. The piety of the Hebrew prophets purges their grossness. The circumcision is an example of the power of poetry to raise the low and offensive. Small and mean things serve as well as great symbols.76 Though Emerson makes it clear that to the obscene the obscene remains obscene, to those who can properly apprehend, which all have the potential to do, the obscene is sublimated to the symbolic. In the lecture Emerson briefly illustrates this by focusing on the single word ‘unkennel’ in Hamlet: ‘[W]here Hamlet says of the king his uncle, “If his occulted guilt / Do not itself unkennel in one speech,” [III.ii.85–6] which immediately compares his evil thoughts to dogs and unclean beasts.’77 The word ‘unkennel’ Emerson contends, reveals through the capacity of symbolism the spiritual nature of Claudius. This is the work of the imagination freeing matter from its merely sensual or material denotations and connotations and allowing a new spiritual meaning to emerge through the symbol. This connection between matter and spirit is the work of literature and it is through trying to understand Shakespeare above all that Emerson comes to his conclusions.

Reason and the Tyrannical Imagination Emerson’s theory of language, worked out in part in order to understand Shakespeare, contends that the imagination enables spirit to be represented through matter, potentially revolutionizing tradition. Shakespeare is the exemplar who ‘represents’ best what all men have in part: ‘He possessed above all men the essential gift of the Poet, namely, the Imaginative Power, and [. . .] this is a power which all men possess in greater or less degree.’78 By virtue of possessing something in the highest degree which is common to all Shakespeare becomes a model for grasping, through the analysis of extremes, the imagination as a liberative aspect of universal man. The following passage from Emerson’s first lecture on Shakespeare incorporates phrases directly from his general introductory lecture to the series given the previous month and cited above but with a crucial addition which will find its way into Emerson’s 1836 manifesto of transcendentalism, Nature. Now the office of the Poet is to perceive and use these analogies. He converts the solid globe, the land, the sea, the air, the sun, the animal into

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symbols of thought. He makes the outward creation subordinate and merely a convenient alphabet to express thoughts and emotions. And this act or vision of the mind is called Imagination. It is the use which the Reason makes of the material world for purposes of expression. It is not therefore a separate part or member but is the act of the total mind. It is that active state of the mind in which it forces things to obey the laws of thought, takes up all present objects in a despotic manner into its own image and likeness, and makes the thought which occupies it the centre of the world.79 In this revision the imagination, that ‘despotic’ faculty, has been subordinated to reason. Reason, for Emerson in 1835, again borrowing from Coleridge, is the faculty which enables a direct insight into the truth of things. It is not the rational faculty, which, after Coleridge, he calls the ‘understanding’.80 Reason is an intuitive disclosure of the moral order of the universe. Emerson has introduced reason at this point to quell a potential problem that repeatedly occurs in his analysis of Shakespeare: the threat of the sensual. For despite language’s conversion of matter into spirit, and its elevation thereby, the constant threat of the sensual in the language of Shakespeare – as though the material origins of his language may yet weigh it down – makes Emerson keen to show that the poet has more direct spiritual and intellectual insights which guide his metaphorical or symbolic use of the material world. He argues that ‘questions are ever starting up in [Shakespeare’s] mind as in that of one of the most resolute sceptics concerning life and death and man and nature. What is this conscious being? Has the world a real existence, or do we dwell only in a picture gallery which the sovereign Mind paints on time and space?’81 But Emerson is also eager to prove that Shakespeare is more than what he calls a sceptic, and to show that he has insight into the afterlife, or at least the sense that this world is not all. To this end he cites the following extracts: ‘We are such stuff / As dreams are made on and our life / Is rounded with a sleep’ and ‘Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage / And then is heard no more’ and ‘All that live must die / Passing through nature to Eternity’.82 But it is hard to draw any unambiguous moral from these quotations. Life ending with ‘sleep’ or in being ‘heard no more’ is hardly a comfort, even if the idea that life is a shadow – with the connotation that it is a mere act – suggests that its substance lies elsewhere in some undefined ‘Eternity’. Nevertheless, and it is beginning to sound like he protests too much, Emerson wants to be able to tell his auditors that the poet’s words lead to something that he can define as virtue. He makes every

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effort to locate examples, but perhaps the only one he finds is from Measure for Measure. Man proud man Drest in a little brief authority Most ignorant of that of what he’s most assured His glassy essence83 (II.ii.117–20) Though different glosses are possible, if taken to derive from transparent glass (rather than, say, mirror), ‘glassy’ is an apt word for linking together in one image the airy transparency of the spirit (the invisible) and the impenetrable solidity of matter (the visible). As Emerson will write in ‘The Poet’, ‘the poet turns the world to glass, and shows us things in their right series and procession.’84 From the mouth of Isabella ‘glassy essence’ also suggests something beyond the wordly, something moral, albeit coldly so. But this is scant fare on which to extend Emerson’s larger theory about literature and equate the spiritual with the moral rather than the sensual. As such, the imagination’s workings, as revealed by Shakespeare, remain dangerous. But it is plain that however gorgeous and elevated this power of creation or of subjecting nature to the thought of man yet it has this vice that it leaves us without any measure or standard for comparing thought with thought. Each passing thought or emotion filling the whole sky of the poet’s mind and bringing a new world of images to embody and adorn it, he is no way differenced from the man of diseased mind.85 Emerson’s fear that the creative imagination is without measure – as, of course, Shakespeare’s appears to be – perhaps takes its hint from Coleridge who in The Friend wrote (with reference to Hamlet) that ‘in undue preponderance, and when the prerogative of the mind is stretched into despotism, the discourse may degenerate into the grotesque or the fantastical.’86 There is a potential in the imagination for excess and Emerson’s vocabulary echoes Coleridge’s own fears of ‘despotism’. In his first Shakespeare lecture Emerson makes every effort to defend Shakespeare against these charges of tyranny, degeneration, grotesquery and disease. Imagination alone, untempered by other elements, would indeed be a disease. As he writes, ‘In many men of fine powers the imagination has been morbid from its own excess.’87 As such in the early Shakespeare lectures

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Emerson contends that there are two other elements that must be in balance in the poet: reason and common sense. Of reason Emerson says the following: ‘There is a state of repose, and integrity to the mind, in which all objects are thrown back in their due proportion. This vision of all being we call Reason. We speak of it generally as the mind’s Eye. It is the Reason which affirms the laws of moral nature and thereby raises us to a region above the intellect.’88 Here the imagination is reason’s servant, reason being that power ‘above’ rational intellect or the understanding. Reason makes creative power conform to ‘the laws of moral nature’. His use of Hamlet’s phrase ‘mind’s Eye’ is perhaps telling, it is the inward examination of the self – one rare trait that links Emerson’s Puritan past to the Danish prince – which restrains the imagination: ‘the special check to the excess of imagination is the appetite which leads man to introvert his eye, to explore the grounds of his own being, to compare his own faculties.’89 If man looks inward, then, he will find ‘nature’ staring back out at him or at least he will find the same laws that made nature are making him. And, as Emerson points out, ‘Shakspeare added to this towering Imagination this self-recovering, self collecting force.’90 Reason, the reflecting power, and imagination, the creative, are in balance in the perfect poet, and the potentially diseased tyrannical imagination is contained by the moral force of nature and determined by its laws. However, Emerson again finds it hard to locate his argument in Shakespeare’s works. To this end Emerson cites Shakespeare’s own wry awareness of the problem of the imagination, which occurs in Theseus’s speech towards the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream: ‘The lunatic the lover and the poet / Are of imagination all compact’ (V.i.7).91 Theseus’s point, that lovers, poets and madmen are each ‘compacted’ (composed) of imagination is indeed apt, and the connection threatens the relationship between reason and imagination for which Emerson argues. Moreover, the previous lines, ‘Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, / Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend / More than cool reason ever comprehends’ (V.i.4–6), are not cited by Emerson, even though they name his own concerns. Theseus’s ‘more than cool reason ever comprehends’ suggests that the poetic imagination’s implied sensual ‘heat’ surpasses ‘cool’ reason. It is perhaps in an attempt to contain this threat that he suppresses those lines. Finding himself in such an awkward position Emerson adds to reason and imagination the element of common sense.92 By themselves the faculties of imagination and reason would create ‘mere contemplators and visionaries with Pyrrho, Plato, Plotinus, Kant’.93 And like Plotinus, who Emerson notes was disgusted by his own body, these contemplators,

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however great in their own way, have no attachment to the world, and as such are ignored by what they themselves ignore. As Coleridge’s Hamlet they are unable to act, trapped in the reflection of their mind’s eye. They lack practical power, or common sense. It is necessary, then, to return from the airy world of spirit to the firm world of matter, from Ariel to Falstaff. This material world is the natural discipline which God has fastened upon the human spirit. Some men perceive more clearly than others the relations of the outward or apparent world and act agreeably to them. The name we give this perception is Common Sense. And we are wont to think a conformity of the spirit to this condition of its being so important, as to express it by the word humanity, which we contrast with the divine aspirations of the soul.94 Here Emerson celebrates the earthiness of Shakespeare’s dramas, their humanity. Once again we see that Emerson has overcome – however briefly – his first fears regarding the poet’s sensuality. Indeed he stresses that the poet needs to be in touch with the outward or apparent world, that is, the world revealed to the senses not yet worked on by the spirit. On the one hand, of course, it is in this world that the poet will find the ‘material’ which lends itself, by way of symbolism, to spiritual revelation. But on the other he celebrates his own discovery of Shakespeare directly in his most famous, and bawdy, comic creation: ‘See him unbutton himself in unrestrained glee in the jokes and taunts of Falstaff. He is the very impersonation of fun and animal comfort taking his ease in his inn. The man is portrayed with such unmixed delight that we feel that he must be painting himself.’95 What Emerson finds in Shakespeare, drawing on this theory that literary creation reveals biography, is the perfect balance of imagination, reason and common sense: ‘Shakspear united in himself all these faculties as no man had joined them, he was a poet, a philosopher, and a man’;96 as such, once again, Shakespeare is representative.

Tragedy, Genius and Organic Form Even this new found balance between imagination, reason and common sense remains a precarious one which Emerson struggles to maintain. That the poet can use the material world to express thoughts or ideas remains central to his ideas of poetry, but Emerson is ever concerned by the freedom accorded to the individual by the imagination and, moreover, whether it is

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entirely ‘moral’ – though Emerson is never entirely clear what he means by that term. This stems partly from his potentially slippery rethinking of the imagination which attempts to subordinate it to reason. This is problematic because according to Emerson reason uses the imagination to express and as such in symbolic language. Thus, if reason is principally accessed by the imagination, and language is thrall to its despotism, how can we be sure that what is taken for reason – that is, moral truth – is not just the creation of the imagination? His example is telling: ‘Lear thinks that no evil can come to any man but through daughters.’97 In what way are Lear’s tyrannical and pathetic imprecations against his daughters any insight into the truth of things, into reason, into the moral order of the universe? This is not to say Lear does not have such insights that are recognizable on any terms. Indeed, Coleridge suggested above, with reference to principle, that Lear’s madness led him directly to the truth when tradition has been toppled and man ‘bare, forked animal’ (III.iv.106) is revealed. But it appears that Emerson has exemplified the imagination (as Coleridge does) at its most dangerous, where it is closest to a world unfixed. This is the world of tragedy. In a lecture delivered in 1839 titled ‘Tragedy’, near the beginning of which Emerson writes, ‘He has seen but half the Universe who never has been shown the House of Pain’,98 he offers several different explanations for tragedy. In terms of tragic drama chaos is a key element: [L]et any disorder take place in society, any revolution of custom, of law, of opinion, and instantly his whole type of permanence is rudely shaken. In the disorder of society universal disorder seems to him to take place, chaos is come again, and this despair takes at first the form of rage and hatred against the act or actor which has broken the seeming peace of nature. But the fact is he was already a driving wreck before the wind arose which merely revealed to him his vagabond state.99 Emerson’s is a familiar determination of the tragic arc: an old order which was a disorder which never knew itself as such (a ‘vagabond state’), is followed by visible disorder (the ‘revolution of custom’), to be completed by a new order: the establishment of Athens or England on fresh terms. The tragedy of the nation is, though, reduced – or universalized – through a particular individual, say, King Lear, for whom the chaos of the state, indeed of nature as a whole, is personalized as the revolt of his daughters. The allusion to Act III of Othello in the unmarked quotation ‘chaos is come again’ (III.iii.92) also suggests that particularization of tragedy where

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universal affairs are focused by the dramatist through an individual. Such a focus is an act of the imagination, under the sway of reason, in that the universal is revealed by the particular and that particular is a symbol. Thus, the disorder or chaos that ensues from Lear’s action is not merely to do with the state, nor is it merely personal, it is a symbolic disorder, or a disorder of language, where Lear’s ravings, his despotic imagination controlling all and sending it to the abyss, reveal reason by upsetting the fixed ideas of tradition. There is an insight of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s on Shakespeare that is useful in this regard: I do not believe that Shakespeare can be set alongside any other poet. Was he perhaps a creator of language rather than a poet? [. . .] His pieces give me the impression of enormous sketches . . . as though they had been dashed off by someone who can permit himself anything so to speak. And I understand how someone can admire that and call it supreme art, but I don’t like it.100 At this point we need to recall Emerson’s idea that we are always in danger of being held captive by an inherited language – and its ideas – which will not allow for individual expression. This constriction is held in tension with the threat that language may become unfixed. What Wittgenstein dislikes is analogous. For him Shakespeare is creating language, which gives him too much licence. Stanley Cavell suggests that Shakespeare reveals too much about language’s creativity, its refusal to be at home in what Wittgenstein would call language games, which Cavell, following Austin would call ‘ordinary language’. Cavell suggests that this offers the further insight ‘that what Wittgenstein senses in Shakespeare’s language is the continuous threat of chaos clinging to his creation’ (49). Creation and chaos are allied in Shakespeare’s freedom with language. Shakespeare has, in Emerson’s terms, rekindled the long past original fire of linguistic expression. As Emerson writes in ‘The Poet’: ‘For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry.’101 Lost to the vast majority of people, who, caught in tradition, can only mouth inherited words, turning over Emerson’s fossils, Shakespeare’s genius has the power of fresh expression, as the first speaker. Shakespeare has the rare power to free language from custom and to make it flow.102 According to Emerson, ‘This power of expression, or of transferring the inmost truth of things into music

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and verse, makes him the type of the poet and has added a new problem to metaphysics.’103 This ‘metaphysical’ problem is the one Emerson is striving always to articulate: the metamorphosis of matter into spirit utilizing the alembic of language. This metamorphosis is a service that the poet does for the people when he becomes the ‘Thinker, or man of letters’:104 To break the chains of custom, to see every thing as it absolutely exists, and so to clothe every thing ordinary and even sordid with beauty is the aim of the Thinker. All men are capable of this act. The very utterance of his thoughts to men, proves the poet’s faith, that, all men can receive them; that all men are poets, though in a less degree.105 Again Emerson notes that what someone like Shakespeare can do is something which all men have the potential to be able to do, even if it is only to receive and not to create. But, ‘Most men are so much under the despotism of the senses that though they can see the truth or beauty that is pointed out they do not discover it themselves.’106 What Emerson wants is a move from the despotism of the senses to the despotism of the imagination under the sway of reason, from matter to spirit, from the fixed to the fluent. Freeing spirit from the threat of the sensual is his ongoing metaphysical problem. Solving this problem, both reason and imagination having failed, is the task of genius, and Shakespeare, again, is the exemplar. Shakespeare’s genius is not as for eighteenth-century critics like Samuel Johnson a mimetic force, that ‘mirrour of life’,107 equally it is not the ‘natural’ genius of the seventeenth-century Milton, who saw Shakespeare warbling his woodnotes wild. That genius for Emerson is not merely mimetic, that is, not to be judged by its accuracy to nature, becomes clear in his lecture ‘Genius’ first delivered in January 1839. Truth is the subject of Genius: not truth of facts, of figures, dates, measures, – which is a poor, low, sensual truth, – but Ideal truth, or, the just suggestion of the thought which caused the thing. Therein is the inspiration: there the dart that rankles goads him with noble desire to express this beauty to men. That is what art aims ever to say – the truth of thought, and not a copy of fact.108 Though apparently paradoxical, this idea of truth as something to stand against facts is a familiar Emersonian starting-point. The key phrase here is ‘the thought which caused the thing’ – genius is not a passive response to

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an outer world, it is the creation of that world, and, moreover, where the poet and God become attuned as creators. Mimesis, conceived of here as straightforward copying, delivers only ‘sensual’ truth, the truth of facts. It should be noted, though, that Shakespeare also provides this, as Emerson writes later in ‘Shakespeare, or The Poet’, ‘Things were mirrored in his poetry without loss or blur: he could paint the fine with precision.’109 But this is not ultimate. In his first lecture on Shakespeare, Emerson notes that the poet must have ‘that active state of the mind in which it forces things to obey the laws of thought’, to make matter conform to spirit, and that ‘The difference between an imaginative and unimaginative mind is this, that one conforms things to its thoughts and the other conforms its thoughts to things.’110 To the imaginative mind the world conforms to thought, to ideas. But the pride of Milton’s Satan, whose ‘mind is its own place’111 is evoked. How can Emerson be sure that these principles are moral, that the imagination accords with reason, that, as he argues, there is ‘perfect analogy [. . .] between virtue and genius’?112 Emerson is sure because of his conviction that Shakespeare’s ideas and nature – the principal moral force – draw upon the same laws: the fancy creations of this obscure poet have come to be esteemed Ideas, and speculated upon and analyzed in the belief that nothing accidental or capricious went into their composition. Whether Hamlet was truly insane, what was the real character of Othello, and the fate of Ophelia are questions which wise men have not thought it unworthy to debate as if Hamlet and Ophelia were historical personages; such is our confidence that a truly great genius will never write capriciously but is always obeying with fidelity the law of thought.113 According to Emerson, then, Shakespeare’s characters rise above mere mimetic representation, which Emerson would deem sensual; they are not just copies or models, rather they have become ‘ideas’ themselves, in the strict Coleridgean sense. Coleridge also argued that Shakespeare’s characters emerged from a source which itself tyrannized over the playwright. As such they are as worthy of discussion as real people, who have themselves emerged from spiritual principle as active ideas. They are entitled to this treatment because, Emerson argues, Shakespeare’s genius adheres to the same laws when creating character that nature does when creating people. ‘That is the prerogative of a masterpiece, – the kindred emotion which it awakens with that awakened by works of nature. That apprises us how deep in thought its origin, how near to God it was.

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The identity of their origin at the fountain head, we augur with a thrill of joy.’114 Genius, then, is creative in the same way – if not in the same degree – as the divine. And that is because they obey the same laws. As we shall see, it is not Satanic because its apparent freedom rests on a deeper and invisible law. That genius is law bound, yet self-generating, is an idea that itself emerges in the late eighteenth century, and Emerson would certainly have come across it in Coleridge, who would have appropriated it from Kant and the German romantics.115 Coleridge writes, in his notes for a lecture on Shakespeare, ‘As it must not, so genius cannot, be lawless; for it is even this that constitutes its genius – the power of acting creatively under laws of its own origination.’116 Even here there is the now familiar potential for paradox: Shakespeare acts lawfully but only according to laws that Shakespeare has created himself. Genius gives itself its own laws. Moreover, if genius, like nature, is self-generated, then Emerson will need to determine what distinguishes it from nature and keeps Shakespeare from merely ‘warbling his woodnotes wild.’ Again, as with the imagination, in the first instance Emerson needs to prove to his own satisfaction that genius is not merely dancing to its own mistaken tune, and he will repeat the same argument: that genius is analogous to the moral law. In an early journal entry from 1823 Emerson noted that ‘Shakespeare is an outlaw from all systems’117 and in another entry attributed to 1825, he confirms this opinion. I have heard Shakespeare’s blow winds & crack your cheeks, &c. & the rest, accused of false taste and bombast. I do not find this fault. And tho’ I might not allow it in another, even in his mad king, yet I am not offended by this passage in Lear. For as the Romans were idolatrous of Cato’s virtue that when he had drunk wine they would rather believe that intemperance were virtue than that Cato was guilty of vice, so I am afraid to circumscribe within rhetorical rules, the circuits of such a towering & majestic mind, and a taste the most exquisite that God ever informed amongst men.118 Emerson’s earliest interpretations of Shakespeare observe that he is not bound by the conventions of classical dramatic form – ‘rhetorical rules’ – and that for some (Voltaire is the locus classicus here, and the target of Coleridge’s criticism)119 Shakespeare appears vulgar. But for Emerson, Shakespeare is above reproach, and over the years of thinking about Shakespeare, he like the Romans who accepted the behaviour of Cato,

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will come to believe that Shakespeare’s genius sets its own laws. But this leads Emerson directly into the second problem, namely reducing Shakespeare to nature, because the laws of genius are the laws of nature. To explain this he utilized the romantic theory of organic form. Emerson alights on organic form as yet another growth and transformation of his own attempt to understand Shakespeare’s achievement. Shakespeare we cannot account for. No history, no ‘life and times’, solves the insoluble problem. I cannot slope things to him so as to make him less steep and precipitous; so as to make him one of many [. . .] Shakespeare, as Coleridge says, is as unlike his contemporaries as he is unlike us. His style is his own. And so is genius ever total, and not mechanically composable. It stands there, a beautiful and unapproachable whole, like a pine tree or a strawberry, alive, perfect, yet inimitable, nor can we find were to lay the first stone, which given, we could build the arch.120 Shakespeare, then, becomes nature, a ‘strawberry’ or ‘pine tree’ (recalling ‘Woodnotes II’) itself unaccountable, uniquely inimitable, organic, ‘not mechanically composable’. The opposition between the organic and the mechanical implied here is a response to one of the most famous romantic conceptions of art, arguably begun by August Wilhelm Schlegel, and popularized in English by Coleridge, both of whom were themselves responding to the unaccountable in Shakespeare. According to Schlegel, writing around 1810, Form is mechanical when, through external force, it is imparted to any material merely as an accidental addition without reference to its quality; as for example, when we give a particular shape to a soft mass that it may retain the same after its induration. Organical form, again, is innate; it unfolds itself from within, and acquires its determination contemporaneously with the perfect development of the germ.121 To this Coleridge adds: Nature, the prime genial artist, inexhaustible in diverse powers, is equally inexhaustible in forms; – each exterior is the physiognomy of the being within, – its true image reflected and thrown from the concave mirror; – and even such is the appropriate excellence of her chosen poet, of our own Shakespeare, – himself a nature humanized, a genial understanding

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directing self-consciously a power and an implicit wisdom deeper even than our consciousness.122 Shakespeare’s form, then, is not applied from the outside, say through the imposition of the Aristotelian unities, rather it emerges ‘innately’, unfolding from an inner seed, or germ. That is, Shakespeare’s form is self-derived, a form that obeys the same laws (‘implicit wisdom’) as nature. As Johann Gottfried Herder had written in 1773, ‘Shakespeare is the greatest master, simply because he is only and always the servant of nature.’123 The ‘mastery’ of Shakespeare emerges not just from obeying nature, but from obeying the same laws that nature – that God – must obey.124 This, I think, goes some way to explaining an obscure point in Emerson’s essay ‘Self-Reliance’: ‘Who has more obedience than I, masters me, though he should not raise a finger.’125 Obeying nature gives mastery, and this is genius. It is also ‘self-reliance’, that is, the achievement of the self equating with nature. Importantly this must not be seen as a return to Milton’s ‘natural’ Shakespeare. The difference is subtle but important. As Coleridge notes Shakespeare is ‘self-conscious’. The composition of organic form is a reflective not a passive act. To obey does not mean to surrender. It is a self-conscious act. The genius, then, knows what he or she is doing and is conscious of his or her creative processes. This is evident in Emerson’s lecture ‘Genius’, where he writes, ‘To believe your own thought, – that is genius. [. . .] What self-reliance is shown in every poetic description!’126 Belief in your own thought is a reflective act and as such the genius relies on his or her self not directly on nature. Shakespeare, then, is a rare example of a self-reliant man. The man who relies elsewhere than the self, say on custom or tradition or even nature, ‘is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose’.127 Yet, like a mountain or a pine tree, or even a humble strawberry, Shakespeare is ‘a beautiful and unapproachable whole’, moreover, as Emerson’s deliberate metaphors suggest, he is an organic whole.

Shakespeare and the Halfness of Humanity In the essay ‘The Poet’ (1844) a line from Emerson’s 1839 lecture ‘Genius’ that runs ‘The man of genius apprises us not of his wealth but of the commonwealth’ is revised and instead of the word ‘genius’ Emerson uses the words ‘poet’,128 suggesting the interchangeableness of these terms to

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Emerson’s mind. Genius and poetry, then, are equated in Emerson’s thought and Shakespeare is the model for both. The union of poetry and genius emerges as early as another lecture from 1839 also called ‘The Poet’. Here he writes of the poet that ‘he is not free, but freedom; he is not tasteful, but he is taste: he is not the beneficiary but the benefactor of the world, and is the representative of man, in virtue of being the largest power to give and to receive.’129 If genius is free only insofar as it obeys nature’s laws then here Emerson suggests the same for the poet. It is that openness to nature’s laws, to reception, which Emerson sees in Shakespeare’s unobstructed imagination, that makes him the representative of mankind. But it is important that the poet receives nature’s laws for in order to receive something you cannot be it and as such it is a conscious and reflective creativity differing only in extent and not in kind to the divine. As such the genius as the poet figures is ‘the complete man’,130 the Transcendentalist ideal. It is remarkable then that by the time of the publication of the essay on Shakespeare in Representative Men in 1850, Shakespeare ‘share[s] the halfness and imperfection of humanity’.131 Though Emerson is pleased to note in his journal in 1847 that ‘Shakespeare sweats like a haymaker – all pores’,132 it is only in the two ‘Shakespeare’ lectures of 1836 that he publicly registers his faith, albeit sustained by constantly shifting speculative positions, in Shakespeare’s morality, and is happy to announce that the poet’s ‘soul reaches through the three kingdoms of man’s life, the moral, the intellectual, and the physical being; because, taking his stand in that empyrean centre out of which the Divinity speaks’.133 By 1839, we find that ‘Shakespeare, the first literary genius of the world, [is] the highest in whom the moral is not the predominating element.’134 It is no longer enough for morality, imagination and the common sense to be in balance, the moral must be uppermost, and even the title ‘first literary genius of the world’ is compromised. Between 1836 and 1839 something changes in Emerson’s public conception of the purpose of literature. In 1836 ‘the aim and effort of literature in the largest sense [is] nothing less than to give voice to the whole of spiritual nature as events and ages unfold it, to record in words the whole life of the world.’135 According to Emerson literature does this when genius reveals the relationship between matter and spirit in imaginative language which overturns custom and tradition, celebrating organic metamorphosis. However, in 1839 ‘The very highest class of books are those which express the moral element, the next, works of imagination, and the next, works of sciences – all dealing in realities: what ought to be, what really is, and what appears. These, in proportion to the truth and beauty they involve, remain: the rest perish.’136 Here morality of itself,

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what ought to be, becomes the principal factor; imagination, only able to represent ‘what is’, formerly its equal, is relegated to second; fact, ‘what appears’ – as revealed by science – remains of a lower standing. Common sense is not mentioned. As such Emerson’s adulation of Shakespeare is now tempered by a new found piety. There is little doubt that Emerson’s encounter with the high-minded poet Jones Very contributed a large part to this shift in emphasis. Jones Very, born in Salem in 1813, and known to Nathaniel Hawthorne, was a son of sailors who became a classical linguist, poet and critic, before temporary insanity drew off his energies. He stayed in the Emerson household for several days during the fall of 1838, and Emerson very much admired his individuality and his refusal to be cowed, which Emerson would have taken for nascent self-reliance. During the same year Very composed, he might say ‘received’, an essay on Shakespeare. In the copy he sent to Emerson he included a covering letter which began ‘I am glad to be able to transmit to you what has been told to me of Shakespeare. . . . You hear not mine own words but the teachings of the Holy Spirit.’137 It is clear from the essay that Very’s position was similar to that of Emerson; not just because he was influenced by him, but also because his points appear to emerge from the same sources, especially Coleridge and Hazlitt. Thus Shakespeare was ‘transformed into the object he saw’,138 a point of Hazlitt’s also taken up by Emerson; and the ‘universal appears to be coincident with the particular’,139 a point Coleridge makes in The Friend.140 He also sees Shakespeare as a ‘natural’ genius, utilizing organic metaphors which strongly recall Emerson’s in his lectures, and in the monograph Nature. In a passage considering the creative mind of the writer Very writes: The main action of all such minds must evidently be almost as independent of the will as is the life in a plant or a tree; and, as they are but different results of the same great vital energy of nature, we cannot but feel that the works of genius are as much a growth as are the productions of the material world. Such minds act as if all else but the sense of their existence was an accident; and, under the influence of this transforming power, all is plastic; marble becomes flexible and shapes itself into life; words partake as it were of motion, form and speech; and matter, like the atoms on a magnetic plate, feels instinct with order and design. The stream of life, – which in other men, obstructed and at last as stationary as the object that surround it, seems scarcely to deserve the name, – in them rolls ever onward its rich and life-giving waters as if unconscious of the beautiful banks it has overflowed with fertility.141

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Very, like Emerson, sees Shakespeare’s genius in terms of growth; as though it is a part of nature. As a material natural production Shakespeare’s ‘transforming power’ shapes the world under its own ‘influence’ and words become living things: ‘motion, form and speech’. Also, like Emerson’s ideal ‘poet’, ‘the person without impediment’,142 for Very Shakespeare is freer than other men and unobstructed in his creative powers. But in Very’s hands Shakespeare’s creative power is quite different from what it was in Emerson’s. The material world, Very writes, ‘feels instinct with order and design’. This may suggest that Shakespeare’s powers of creation are, as Emerson argues, connate with the divine. But the key words in the passage from Very are ‘will’ and ‘unconscious’. According to Very, Shakespeare’s will is like that of a plant or tree, that is, passive. Also his inundatory force is ‘as if unconscious’. For Very, Shakespeare does not work up his creations using the same laws as God, rather he is merely one of God’s creations, unfolding organically, yes, but as a plant would, as the ‘work of God’.143 As such, for Very, Shakespeare is an innocent; he marks a high point from which we have fallen but as an innocent Shakespeare is necessarily free of virtue. He does not will his creations, he is not conscious of his power, it is not organized in the service of God. Shakespeare was gifted with the power of the poet; a power which, though he may have employed for the purposes intended, does not seem to have been accompanied by that sense of responsibility which would have lent them their full and perfect effect. His creations are natural, but they are unconsciously so. He could but give them his own life, which was one of impulse and not of principle. Man’s brightest dignity is conscious nature; and virtue deprived of this is robbed of her nobility; and without it vice is but a pardonable weakness. Shakespeare is not to be esteemed so much a man as a natural phenomenon. We cannot say of him that he conformed to God’s will; but that the Divine Will in its ordinary operations moved his mind as it does the material world.144 Shakespeare is a natural phenomenon: unconscious, impulsive and irresponsible. Very returns to the thought world suggested by Milton, leaving that of the romantics. The result of this is that Shakespeare lacks virtue; he is shaped by Divine will, but does not have the ability to perceive his proper relationship to God and to Christianity in particular, thus ‘He that is least in the kingdom of heaven, is greater than he.’145 For, unlike Emerson in his early lectures where the references to Shakespeare’s religion are

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deliberately vague, in order, perhaps, to protect him, Very is sharply critical of any poet who fails to engage explicitly with Christianity. In conclusion, then, Very argues, though the world has seen its greatest poet hitherto, namely Shakespeare, it yet awaits the poet ‘deeply affected by truths of Christianity, and the consequent perfection which his creations must exhibit’.146 Emerson will take hold of one aspect of Very’s critique while rejecting another. Emerson will reject Very’s claim that Shakespeare does not partake of ‘conscious nature’. For Emerson, Shakespeare is always a reflective and selfconscious artist; he uses the same power that creates nature rather than being merely natural as Very contends. However, the influence of Very’s account of the moral imperative of literature appears in Emerson’s own work the following year, 1839. In part this is because Very’s influence works on Emerson’s early awareness that ‘Literature resembles religion in many respects and their fortunes have been commonly related.’147 In 1839 Emerson, as many others in the nineteenth century,148 was increasingly aware that this was an inverse relationship: as religion declined literature was fast becoming the significant moral force. It is important to note, though, that Emerson’s claims for moral literature have a different, and distinctly less Christian, animus than Very’s. Though for Emerson the moral has become uppermost, that morality remains spiritual, an ability to transcend the material world of facts through symbolism. He does not hold to any particular organization of symbols such as that offered by Christianity. Shakespeare’s perceived failure to meet this exacting moral standard is played out in its most public way in Emerson’s later essay ‘Shakespeare, or The Poet’, in Representative Men. Here, though Shakespeare is still garlanded beyond praise, he is also strangely limited, and limited in terms that closely resemble Very’s. Shakespeare . . . saw the splendor of meaning that plays over the visible world; knew that a tree had another use than for apples, and corn another than for meal, and the ball of the earth, than for tillage and roads: that these things bore a second and finer harvest to the mind, being emblems of its thoughts, and conveying in all their natural history a certain mute commentary on human life. Shakespeare employed them as colors to compose his picture. He rested in their beauty; and never took the step which seemed inevitable to such genius, namely to explore the virtue which resides in these symbols and imparts this power: – what is that which they themselves say?149

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It is no longer enough for the spiritual harvest of the material world to be merely intellectual, or even beautiful, it must be virtuous, that is, moral. In 1834 Emerson had asked ‘What is there divine in a load of bricks? What is there of the divine in a privy? Much. All.’ Now it is as if Shakespeare has only managed to use metaphor to provide insight into the human mind, into character, but not into the divine. As such the moral law is no longer revealed by Shakespeare’s works. Rather, it is as if the imagination, unhinged from the insight of genius – which is now religious – has become merely a plaything. Moreover, at the end of the essay in which Emerson expends much energy refuting the possibility of any biographical grasp of Shakespeare,150 it is to his life that Emerson turns to further his critique. He was master of the revels to mankind. [. . .] Other admirable men have led lives in some sort of keeping with their thought; but this man, in wide contrast. Had he been less, had he reached only the common measure of great authors, of Bacon, Milton, Tasso, Cervantes, we might leave the fact in the twilight of human fate: but that this man of men, he who gave to the science of mind a new and larger subject than had ever existed, and planted the standard of humanity some furlongs further forward into Chaos, – that he should not be wise for himself; it must even go into the world’s history that the best poet led an obscure and profane life, using his genius for the public amusement.151 Even Emerson’s derogation of Shakespeare still glows with praise. Shakespeare has ‘planted the standard of humanity some furlongs further forward into Chaos’, perhaps indicating his grasp of the human condition within tragedy; and he has given ‘the science of mind a new and larger subject than had ever existed’ – namely, the full complexity of man’s relationship with language. Nevertheless, the imputation of the passage is clear: Shakespeare’s life, which was his works (‘Shakespeare is the only biographer of Shakespeare’) is now an impediment, because his obscurity and profanity, formerly among Shakespeare’s strengths, now suggest a lack of wisdom, a lack which constrains him to be merely a master of revels. His genius no longer reveals the workings of the divine, but is only for public amusement. He is no longer the genius or poet, the complete man, or if he is it is only because all men, poets and geniuses not exempted, suffer ‘halfness’: And now, how stands the account of man with this bard and benefactor, when, in solitude, shutting our ears to the reverberations of his fame, we

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seek to strike the balance? Solitude has austere lessons; it can teach us to spare both heroes and poets; and it weighs Shakespeare also, and finds him to share the halfness and imperfection of humanity.152 By solitude Emerson means to read outside of reputation, ignoring tradition. As such solitude delivers a different account of Shakespeare than that garnered by fame. Of course it is necessary for the solitary self-reliant man to despair of heroes – Emerson cannot rely on Shakespeare’s words or his repute. Thus during the 1840s Emerson portrays himself as someone who has become weary of heroes and poets. In ‘Experience’ (1844) he writes ‘Once I took such delight in Montaigne, that I thought I should not need any other book; before that, in Shakspeare; then in Plutarch; then in Plotinus; at one time in Bacon; afterwards in Goethe; even in Bettine; but now I turn the pages of either of them languidly, whilst I still cherish their genius.’153 Genius, though yet cherished, has itself changed in the years following Very’s stay. In the early lecture ‘Genius’ delivered in 1839, Emerson wrote of genius that: It evinces its realism or worship of truth by this that it pauses never but gives new matter with every word. And it utters things for the things. There is no halfness about genius. It utters things for their own worthiness because they must be said: and what it saith therefore always justifies the saying. But here is the reason why Genius is taxed with loving falsehood, playing with moonshine, and building air castles; namely, because its sight is piercing and pauses not like other men’s at the surface of the fact, but looks through it for the causal thought.154 Even though this rearticulates Emerson’s constant ambivalence regarding the authority of the mind to create, be it through the imagination or through genius, recognizing that genius is ‘taxed’ with excess, he still observes the wholeness of genius and crucially that it really sees through to the cause, to the divine laws. However, by 1841 he writes: ‘Genius may be dangerous. What would happen to us who live on the surface, if this fellow in some new transmigration should have acquired the power to do what he now delights to say? He must be watched. Who shall set limits to the soul?’155 Genius then, like the imagination, is unstable. On the one hand this again marks Emerson’s fear that Shakespeare is, as Theseus implies, a madman and a poet, playing with language, turning the stable ideas that make up man into unprincipled poetry: unfixing humanity. But on the other hand, and like

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Very, Emerson’s aim is not to denigrate Shakespeare, but to leave space open for what is to come: the American Poet.

Shakespeare and the American Poet to Come ‘Why’, Emerson asks, ‘is it that [Shakespeare] is his own silent eulogy to all thoughtful men and almost to all men? Why is it that our power to apprehend and love him has become a sort of gauge of our degree of culture and his mind a measure of the human mind?’156 The answer to Emerson’s first question is, at least in part, that Shakespeare is the representative of what is possible for all men, and certainly all thinking men.157 Emerson’s second question implies that Shakespeare is a marker of the intellectual depth of a nation, and in particular, the still young American nation:158 if this new country is to be seen as cultured it must celebrate Shakespeare – but it must also reject him on two counts: first that he fails to represent American values,159 secondly that the true ‘great’ poet by which all will be measured is still to come and must indeed come from America itself. Despite this American aspiration, as we have seen Emerson developed his understanding of Shakespeare in a thoroughly European intellectual context. In particular the ideas inspired and maintained by the romantics, for whom, as Jonathan Bate has pointed out, ‘Shakespeare was the stick with which the Sturm und Drang beat off French cultural hegemony and initiated the romantic revolution.’160 Emerson noted the same cultural consequence: ‘[Shakespeare] is the father of German literature: it was with the introduction of Shakespeare into German, by Lessing, and the translation of his works by Wieland and Schlegel, that the rapid burst of German literature was most intimately connected.’161 Bate’s point, though, is a little more complicated. It was the celebration of Shakespeare’s nonclassical dramatic structure that freed the Germans from the stifling rule bound forms drawn from the French (recalling that the young Emerson was ‘afraid to circumscribe [Shakespeare] within rhetorical rules’).162 Furthermore, in a European context, there is an anti-Napoleonic twist. Both the Germans and the English could claim that ‘They may have Napoleon, but we have Shakespeare.’163 Shakespeare became a striking cultural counterforce in the romantic period. It is arguable that Friedrich Schlegel’s comment that ‘The French Revolution, Fichte’s philosophy and Goethe’s Meister are the great tendencies of the age’164 should have included Shakespeare. Schlegel does write, suggestively, that ‘Shakespeare’s

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universality is like the centre of romantic art.’165 As such he can be disassociated from the Renaissance and his cultural legacy is straightforward: ‘he wrote the text of modern life; the text of manners: he drew the man of England and Europe; the father of the man in America’;166 as such American culture is the offspring of its European sires. Moreover, what romanticism had achieved in Europe under the influence, acknowledged or otherwise, of Shakespeare could equally well be done in America. Where Lessing, Goethe, De Stäel, A. W. Schlegel and Coleridge had brought out Shakespeare’s qualities in Europe, ‘[p]resumably’, as Michael Bristol puts it, ‘Emerson considers himself in the same mediating relationship to American culture in the nineteenth century.’167 Shakespeare, then, through the unfixing of language, which Emerson demonstrates throughout his writings on the bard, is a way for him to inaugurate an American national literature. What Shakespeare had done for select European romantics, namely, given the impetus to a new literature and a new culture which had liberated the North from the classicism of the South, he could also do for America, emancipating it from its bondage to Europe. There are two elements to this literary revolution, one involving the ahistorical, formal and linguistic qualities of Shakespeare and the other his necessary relationship to the ‘chaos-deep soil’ of his time. In the first instance, as Peter Rawlings has put it: ‘A disembodied, ahistoricized Shakespeare – the Shakespeare of the Germans and of Emerson, perhaps – is a Shakespeare packed for export, malleable, adaptable, and easily integrated into whatever the vibrant dominant ideology happens to be.’168 Because Emerson was, in part, able to separate Shakespeare from his context in favour of the romantic interpretations of his imagination, his genius and his ability to unfix, each of which Emerson would consider universal, he is timeless. Nevertheless, Emerson has also always stressed Shakespeare’s deep connection to his cultural context. Indeed, it is the imaginative expression of his precise material moment that makes Shakespeare timeless. It is because of the need to emulate this contact with the ‘chaos-deep soil’ that founds a culture that Emerson wants Shakespeare’s influence to be received in those places which are most American and least tainted by the standards of Europe. It is, then, a matter of getting literature out there to the people at large: ‘The only mechanical means of importance which we have not, is cheap editions in good type but on cheapest paper of the best authors: Bacon, Milton, Shakspeare, Taylor. I should be glad to see cargoes of these books sailing up the Missouri and Red river and the bales unloaded by the half-Indian hunter of the west prairie.’169 It is to the open lands of the West, not to the

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seminaries of New England, that Emerson would send Shakespeare and the best English writers, for these lands are the romantic future. As Emerson writes in an 1839 lecture titled ‘Literature’: Our own country, I may remark, shares largely in whatever is new and aspiring in thought. Our young men travel in foreign countries and read at home with hungry eyes foreign books. Wishful eyes are cast at Germany which ten or twenty years ago was wont to yield this fruit of new thought to the nations. But here is Germany or nowhere. The spirit they seek is as native here as there. Nay, I doubt not, at this moment, is more deeply active in this country, than in that.170 America, then, is also home to the spirit that produces new ideas, new thoughts: there is no need to travel to find the romantic. As he writes in ‘The American Scholar’: ‘That, which had been negligently trodden under foot by those who were harnessing and provisioning themselves for long journeys into far countries, is suddenly found to be richer than all foreign parts.’171 And that which inspired Germany and romanticism more widely in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, its landscape and its political moment, just as much as its reading, is native to America; what is needed yet is a native Shakespeare. The quality that makes Shakespeare adequate to the task of national expression is twofold. First, the ability to represent things anew through the power of the imagination; this is something Emerson understands to be shared by all but which is yet to appear in America. Secondly, Shakespeare’s direct addressing, and transforming, of his time. The poet to come must in turn directly address American lived experience. As Emerson writes: ‘We do not with sufficient plainness, or sufficient profoundness, address ourselves to life, nor dare we chaunt our own times and social circumstances’172 and ‘America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.’173 What Emerson wants is a poet to emancipate Americans from their ties to Europe and from their inability to engage with their own promise on their own terms rather than those inherited from the originating continent. The poet will do this by using the universal creative powers of the imagination rooted in a particular American context. In words that will become familiar clichés to scholars of American literature Emerson, in a later essay called ‘Poetry and Imagination’, affirms the poet’s originary power: ‘To the poet the world is virgin soil. . . . He is a true re-commencer, or Adam in the garden again.’174 Yet, though there was at least one such poet in England, Shakespeare, and

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one in Greece, Homer, there is no such poet in America: ‘We have yet had no genius in America, with tyrannous eye, which knew the value of our incomparable materials.’175 Thus America is not yet free, for it is poetry which liberates the mind, which for Emerson is the best part of the man, from the fixity of tradition. Certain words that Emerson frequently associates with imagination and poetry, such as the afore-mentioned ‘tyranny’, along with ‘despotism’, and ‘imperial’, rub up uncomfortably against the freedom inaugurated by the poet. This seems to point to a potential ambivalence if, as Emerson states, Shakespeare is to become ‘a sort of gauge of our degree of culture’. This is something that Rawlings has alerted us to: ‘For some, Shakespeare’s location in the feudal past and the aristocratic values his plays were seen as advocating represented a threat to the republic.’176 However, though Shakespeare’s relationship with democracy would come to be a problem for some writers, as Rawlings observes, especially Orestes Brownson, Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman, certainly not all Americans saw it that way. George Bancroft, writing in 1830, recognized that the heights of classical Greek art were contemporary with its version of democracy, and that Shakespeare was a writer for the people of the people: In Athens, where the arts were carried to perfection it was done when ‘the fierce democracie’177 was in the ascendant; the temple of Minerva and the works of Phidias were invented and perfected to please the common people [. . .] Shakspeare wrote for an audience, wholly composed of the common people.178 Bancroft’s aim is contained in the title of his essay: ‘On the Progress of Civilization, or Reasons Why the Natural Association of Men and Letters is with the Democracy’. He sees significance in Shakespeare’s audience rather than his themes or characters. Emerson’s conception of Shakespeare’s relationship with the public – the demos – is rather different. It has two strands; the first can be seen in a late short essay called ‘Art and Criticism’. There is, in every nation, a style which never becomes obsolete, a certain mode of phraseology so consonant and congenial to the analogy and principles of its respective language as to remain settled and unaltered. This style is probably to be sought in the common intercourse of life, among those who speak only to be understood, without ambition of elegance. The polite are always catching modish innovations, and the learned depart from established forms of speech, in hope of finding or

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making better; those who wish for distinction forsake the vulgar, when the vulgar is right; but there is a conversation above grossness and below refinement where prosperity resides, and where Shakspeare seems to have gathered his comic dialogue.179 Language, stripped of its airs, its academicism, its fashions and its grossness beneath vulgarity has a permanence which gives it its national character. This is language spoken plainly, which certainly does not mean unpicturesquely, for what Emerson most admires about plain speech is its honest use of metaphor. In an early lecture Emerson noted the value of the colourful speech ‘drawn from observation of natural processes . . . which gives that piquancy to the conversation of a strong natured farmer or backwoodsman which all men relish’.180 This is the manner of speech which a generation later in ‘Art and Criticism’ he associates with Shakespeare’s comic characters, particularly Falstaff, the type of ‘common sense’; but presently in the same essay he goes further, the playwright does not merely delight in his comic characters, but ‘in the conduct of the play, and the speech of the heroes, he keeps the level tone which is the tone of high and low alike, and most widely understood.’181 What Emerson is celebrating here is Shakespeare’s use of demotic language, and by the time he came to write these lines he could claim that ‘Whitman is our American master, but has not got out of the Fire-Club and gained the entree of the sitting-rooms.’182 The authority of language, then, must come up from below, and the exemplar is Shakespeare: ‘There is no such master of low style as he, and therefore none can securely soar so high.’183 This, at least, is one way of construing democracy. A second way in which Shakespeare and democracy is engaged with in Emerson’s thought is in terms of representativity. For Emerson, the poet ‘stands among partial men for the complete man, and apprises us not of his wealth, but of the commonwealth’.184 On these terms the poet’s role is to show what all can be; he has no individuality but represents that which is shared by all, though recognized only by the very few: it needs a Shakespeare to read a Shakespeare ‘in the best manner’.185 As such, Shakespeare’s uniqueness, and the scarceness of his readers – in the best manner – suggests an exclusivity which is incompatible with democracy, and certainly, though he heartfeelingly respects and cherishes the common and the vulgar, Emerson is only democratic insofar as it could exist in its most ideal form: where, as he put it, ‘Jove nods to Jove from behind each of us.’186 Shakespeare is representative of that which Americans are, as yet,

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not; just as democracy on Emerson’s terms remains remote. Shakespeare is also necessary to Emerson in that he represents, that is, stands in for, the ideal American poet who – as the ideal American – is yet to come. As such Shakespeare is a symbol of an ideal; something which, if Shakespeare cannot fully represent it, is not available. Emerson needs Shakespeare to ground an aspiration. And, just as Shakespeare’s language does not come from above, but is aligned with the vulgar, so Shakespeare’s potential to liberate and transform is not exclusive but merely representative of the fullest human potential. In that sense Emerson allies Shakespeare with the breadth of the American people, to stand alongside them, not above them. Other contemporaries of Emerson were less sanguine. Orestes Brownson, for example, complains in 1838 that Americans are ‘literary vassals’ of England, adding that English literature is ‘not exactly the literature for young republicans’ because ‘England is the most aristocratic country in the world.’ As such ‘It is deficient in true reverence for man as man, wholly unconscious of the fact that man is everywhere equal to man.’187 The study of English literature – even Shakespeare and Milton – can only lead to emulation and thus the rejection of proper republican values. Brownson advocates a turn to continental Europe, especially to France and Germany for an antidote. Henry David Thoreau, in an essay from 1836, though unpublished in his lifetime, titled ‘Advantages and Disadvantages of Foreign Influences on American Literature’, makes similar points. Thoreau contends that the literature of New England is ‘yet receiving those impressions from the parent literature of the mother Country, which are to mould its character’188 and has still to assert itself in a mature fashion, and indeed is in danger of not doing so insofar as it relies on the literature of England. The underlying issue here, that America has yet to satisfactorily produce a worthy literary artwork, is, of course, equally, and arguably most forcefully, voiced by Emerson. This is why, at the end of the essay on Shakespeare in Representative Men, he will feel the need to reject Shakespeare in order to leave open a space for the American poet to come. It is, however, Walt Whitman, often seen as the best candidate to have fulfilled Emerson’s hopes of American poetry, who most successfully illustrates nineteenth-century American ambivalence towards Shakespeare. In Democratic Vistas, 1871, he reiterates the lament of Brownson and Thoreau: What has fill’d, and fills to-day our intellect, our fancy, furnishing the standards therein, is yet foreign. The great poems, Shakespere included,

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are poisonous to the idea of pride and dignity of the common people, the life-blood of democracy. The models of our literature, as we get it from other lands, ultramarine, have had their birth in courts, and bask’d and grown in castle sunshine; all smell of princes’ favors.189 Whitman sees in English literature the toxins of aristocracy and feudalism which will work their way into American letters through influence, poisoning the ‘life-blood of democracy’. In the nineteenth century the heirs of Shakespeare are, Whitman contends in 1882, Walter Scott and Tennyson, whose romances translate medieval structures across the ‘ultramarine’ – the Atlantic – ‘exhal[ing] the principle of caste which we Americans have come on earth to destroy.’190 And, like Emerson, indeed in terms redolent of Emerson, Whitman calls for the American poet to come, asking rhetorically ‘How long it takes to make this American world see that it is, in itself, the final authority and reliance!’191 It appears that over 30 years after Thoreau, Brownson and Emerson have called for an American poet who will have unambiguously emerged from the American scene Whitman is still waiting, albeit optimistically: ‘Meanwhile, democracy waits the coming of its bards in silence and in twilight-but ‘tis the twilight of the dawn.’192 What is intriguing, however, is that Whitman feels that Shakespeare will have a significant role to play. This is in part because of the omnivorousness of Whitman’s America: ‘All serves our New World progress, even the bafflers, headwinds, cross-tides. Through many perturbations and squalls, and much backing and filling, the ship, upon the whole, makes unmistakably for her destination. Shakespere has served, and serves, may-be, the best of any.’193 Shakespeare, then, is a headwind to be tacked into, and thus his strengths are turned against him. As such the bard, though hostile to democracy and American poetry, is a significant aspect of America’s progress towards its destiny. Indeed, a few years later Whitman was to claim that the ‘exploring student’ may discover within Shakespeare’s history plays ‘the scientific (Baconian?) inauguration of modern Democracy’.194 He even claims that Shakespeare may have been ‘more or less conscious’195 that by revealing the innermost processes of the medieval world in the histories he was playing a part in its downfall. This said, and unlike Emerson, Whitman sees the ‘comedies as altogether non-acceptable to America and Democracy’.196 Whitman’s ambivalence towards Shakespeare is almost archetypal of the American response. On the one hand Shakespeare ‘stands entirely for the mighty aesthetic sceptres of the past, not for the spiritual and democratic, the sceptres of the future’ and on the other Whitman has ‘to put on record [his] reverence and eulogy for

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those never-to-be-excell’d poetic bequests, and their indescribable preciousness as heirlooms of America’.197 What is interesting here is that Whitman wants Shakespeare to belong to America – to be an heirloom – but also to consign him to the past. It is as though Shakespeare is necessary to an American culture that needs somehow to be free of him. Whitman even acknowledges that ‘If I had not stood before those poems with uncover’d head, fully aware of their colossal grandeur and beauty of form and spirit, I could not have written “Leaves of Grass.” ’198 Whitman’s position on Shakespeare, though, emerged late in his career – from the 1870s onwards – when, increasingly under the influence of social Darwinism and late nineteenth-century ‘progressive’ evolutionary thought, he finds it all too easy to locate Shakespeare on the path of America’s evolution. Thus Whitman is able to celebrate his unmatched beauty and to consign him to another age and long extinct social scene. Emerson, Whitman and Very all need to delineate Shakespeare’s limits in order to create a space for the poet to come. Shakespeare, they concur, may be the greatest poet yet to have been, but he is not equal to the task of representing America: not its people, not its landscape, not its politics, not its religion and not its possibilities. As such they hold out a hope that an American equal to Shakespeare will arrive and with it American poetry, American humanity, will have established itself on its own terms. For Emerson, Shakespeare has a vital role to play in this establishment. He is the exemplar that can unfix America from its traditions, traditions inherited along with Shakespeare from Europe. Shakespeare rises above this paradox because he is his own law; he is not of tradition, though he has become it. Indeed, what Emerson is calling for is for someone to register that his continent is new, not merely an outpost of Europe. Shakespeare’s role in Emerson’s America is to teach it to see itself anew, to align it with its natural and spiritual possibilities and to inspire a literature, fluent and unfixed, that will be free of models, but representative of a new world. Shakespeare can do this because he is, as Emerson’s struggles to understand him demonstrate, beyond categorization. Emerson’s thinking about Shakespeare is an expanding series of circles. He begins by rejecting Shakespeare as a mere natural, instead seeing in him the creative power of the romantic imagination, but that is too free. He allies it with Falstaffian common sense, but that is too sensual. He imposes upon it the intuitive power of reason, but that in turn is limited because it is accessed only through the symbolic creations of the imagination. He asserts the romantic ideas of genius and organic form, the self-given law, which ultimately elevates Shakespeare creativity to that of the divine author. Shakespeare’s

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uniqueness rescues him at every turn from the limits Emerson tries to impose upon him. Shakespeare breaks Emerson’s thoughts and as Emerson reshapes it time and again he himself grows. Thinking about Shakespeare provided Emerson with his theories of creativity, of language, of poetry, of beauty and with at least one model for the representative man. That is why Emerson has unbounded admiration for Shakespeare even when he, in all optimism, is searching for his American successor.

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Chapter 2

Herman Melville Alex Calder

‘This Shakespeare is a queer man’. At times seeming irresponsible, he does not always seem reliable. There appears to be a certain what shall I call it? – hidden sun, say, about him, at once enlightening and mystifying. Melville, The Confidence-Man

‘This Glorious Edition’ When Herman and Lizzie Melville set out for Boston early in 1849, she was expecting their first baby and he was awaiting delivery of a recently completed third novel. Malcolm arrived happily on 16 February but the author had no sooner cradled his new book when, in April, reviewer after reviewer proclaimed the misbegotten deficiencies of Mardi – a work of youthful ambition that had seemed nearing completion almost a year ago, but had somehow swollen into a 200,000 word paddle through the atolls of an oceanic philosophical romance. Melville’s career would stall over perceptions set by the reception of that book but, for the moment, for those few months in Boston in the bosom of his wife’s family, he flickered in the eye of celebrity as a charming new author in good standing with the smartest literary set in New York. Nothing strenuous was planned for the coming spring and summer: there would be time for a review or two, time to enjoy the new baby and time at last for some concerted reading. The former sailor was famous for his stories of romping with Polynesian beauties and eating with cannibals, but the Othello of these Pacific adventures had yet to discover Shakespeare. ‘Dolt and ass that I am’, he told his cousin, ‘I have lived more than 29 years, & until a few days ago, never made close acquaintance with the divine William.’1 Copies of the

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Plays were commonly available as cheap and inferior single titles or in closely printed editions of the Complete Works; neither format invited a serious reader. But on entering one of Boston’s fine bookshops in February of 1849, Melville’s eye was drawn to a handsome set of seven volumes in blue leather, each featuring the nautical motif of anchor and dolphin in gold leaf on the spine. A collector might have recognized the Aldine device – the imprint of a Venetian publisher of the Renaissance – in which a sea-creature twists round the shaft and flukes of an anchor like a worm on a hook; Melville was its fish.2 On 24 February, the happy purchaser informed Evert Duyckinck: I have been passing my time very pleasantly here. But chiefly in lounging on a sofa (a la the poet Grey) & reading Shakespeare. It is an edition in great glorious type every letter whereof is a soldier, & the top of every ‘t’ like a musket barrel. . . . I am mad to think how minute a cause has prevented me hitherto from reading Shakespeare. But until now, every copy that was come-atable to me, happened to be in a vile small print unendurable to my eyes which are as tender as young sparrows. But chancing to fall in with this glorious edition, I now exult over it, page after page.3 In that mood, Melville rather breathlessly linked Shakespeare with ‘sermons on the mount’ and with archangels, and then went on to suppose that if the Messiah should ever come again, he should do so ‘in Shakespeare’s person’.4 Duyckinck, a sensible man of letters in possession of a good library, must have pooh-poohed his cousin’s enthusiasm, for Melville’s next letter, written on 3 March, speaks again of the revelatory qualities of Shakespeare. The letter begins with a report on another celebrated author Melville had at that point only dipped into, and whom he had recently heard lecture: Ralph Waldo Emerson. Something not only in defence of the transcendental philosopher, and not only in response to his cousin’s stiff attitudes, prompted him to say: I love all men who dive. Any fish can swim near the surface, but it takes a great whale to go downstairs five miles or more; & if he don’t attain the bottom, why, all the lead in Galena can’t fashion the plummet that will. I’m not talking of Mr Emerson now – but of the whole corps of thoughtdivers, that have been diving & coming up again with blood-shot eyes since the world began.5

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The first play of the first volume of the glorious new edition – The Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare, published by the Boston firm of Hilliard, Gray & Company in 1837 – is The Tempest. The play seems to have been freshly read that February, for a memorable line to do with plunging divers – ‘my son i’ the ooze is bedded, and / I’ll seek him deeper than e’er plummet sounded’ (III.iii.100–1) – may have triggered Melville’s selection of ‘plummet’ when writing to Duyckinck a few days later. To say so is like grasping after a diver’s airy trace of bubbles; one clutches at nothings, but their streaming suggests that the exaltation and awe felt in reading Shakespeare is at the bottom of Melville’s ‘thought-diver’ image. His stated response breaks surface a few sentences later. To one of your habits of thought, I confess that in my last, I seemed, but only seemed irreverent. And do not think my boy, that because I, impulsively broke forth in jubilations over Shakespeare, that, therefore, I am of the number of the snobs who burn their tuns of rancid fat at his shrine. No, I would stand far off & alone, & burn some pure Palm oil, the product of some overtopping trunk. – I would to God Shakespeare had lived later, & promenaded in Broadway. Not that I might have had the pleasure of leaving my card for him at the Astor, or made merry with him over a bowl of the fine Duyckinck punch; but that the muzzle which all men wore on their souls in the Elizabethan day, might not have intercepted Shakespeare’s full articulations. For I hold it a verity, that even Shakespeare, was not a frank man to the uttermost. And, indeed, who in this intolerant universe is, or can be? But the Declaration of Independence makes a difference.6 Melville, already, is sensing the places where Shakespeare held something back, where what might have been said is conveyed indirectly, through hesitation, implication, backlighting; he is also reading as an American and beginning to wonder about the difference that makes. The following year, he would develop these inklings into a major essay, ‘Hawthorne and His Mosses’, and also – or so one argument goes – would reconfigure the lively documentary novel about whaling he had been writing into a major work on the most ambitious terms then available to him: as a grand and searching tragedy written in a new kind of American prose – the prose Shakespeare himself might have written had he lived later and promenaded on Broadway.7 But that part of our story must wait, for in one sense no one was more on Broadway in nineteenth-century America than Shakespeare,

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and it is against that theatrical and popular tradition that Melville’s own force as a reader, interpreter and channeller must be measured.

New York’s Shakespeare Wars Before February 1849, the Shakespeare Melville knew was the Shakespeare everyone knows and half knows: a set of plots, characters, speeches and sayings that, if not always recollectable, is not so very far from the tip of one’s tongue – knowledge a quiz compiler regards as fair game. In Melville’s day, familiarity with Shakespeare had one line of support in the schools – most pupils memorized speeches from manuals of elocution – and another on the popular stage. As a teenager, Melville liked to startle the girls with his rendition of a favourite passage. His elder sister gives us the story in a letter describing a production of Macbeth she attended in Boston in 1843: ‘The witch scenes were admirably got up, and when, dancing about the cauldron of “hell-broth”, one of the horrid creatures, puts in some terrible contribution; and enjoins it “to make the gruel thick & slab”, I could not help thinking of poor Herman’ – note the prescient use of this epithet – ‘who made it a favourite quotation, and talked about “pilot’s thumb, wrecked as homeward he did come”, “eye of newt, toe of frog” &c’.8 Walt Whitman, his exact contemporary, recalled youthfully ‘spouting’ the opening soliloquy of Richard III ‘on the Broadway stagecoaches, in the awful din of the street’ and attracting no special notice – ‘one single voice added, thrown in, joyously mingled in the amazing chorus’.9 Mark Twain tells of a Mississippi pilot who loved to recite by the hour while on watch, stopping mid-flow to correct a course or offer ‘explosive interlardings’ regarding Twain’s poor helmsmanship.10 Abraham Lincoln claimed never to have read a novel in his life – he once started, but could not finish, Ivanhoe – but he too was a mighty reciter of Shakespeare, impressing aides with impromptu renditions of Richard III, Macbeth, Henry V – and from Hamlet, his particular favourite passage: the guilty soliloquy of Claudius after the murder.11 If there is something apt and foresightful in Lincoln’s association of Shakespeare with political care and ambition, or in the way Whitman links Shakespeare with a joyous democratic chorus and Twain with the comic potential of the ‘interlarded’ soliloquy, I am less sure what to make of the fact that an eminent military fancier of Shakespeare, General Ulysses S. Grant, acted the part of Desdemona in a regimental performance during the war with Mexico in 1845.12 But Shakespeare, as Lawrence Levine has so amply demonstrated, was a constant reference

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in mid-nineteenth-century America: his elevated speech patterns were woven into the political and editorial discourse of the country, his plots and characters magnetized the nation’s moral compass, yet the Americans of Melville’s youth displayed no particular accomplishment in their familiarity with Shakespeare’s dramatic world. For a time, at least, he was part of ‘a shared public culture’.13 Levine argues that the nature of the bard’s relationship to the American people began to be transformed decisively from the late nineteenth century: [H]e was no longer their familiar, no longer part of their culture, no longer at home in their theatres or on the movie and television screens that had become part of the twentieth century equivalents of the stage. If Shakespeare had been an integral part of mainstream culture in the nineteenth century, by the twentieth, he had become part of ‘polite’ culture. . . . He had become the possession of the educated portions of society who disseminated his plays for the enlightenment of the average folk who were to swallow him not for their entertainment but for their education, as a respite from – not a normal part of – their usual cultural diet.14 In the 1850s, Melville would lose whatever familiarity he had enjoyed with the American public, yet by the mid to late twentieth century, no other American writer would more closely fit Levine’s description of Shakespeare as a heroically canonized figure, whose story of Ahab and the whale is known a little by almost everyone, and frequently dispersed in edifying lumps throughout the high schools and colleges of the United States. The graphed curves of these two processes – a rise and fall in the popular reception of Shakespeare and a fall and rise in the elite reception of Melville – would seldom intersect, but they are produced by and illuminate a broadly similar set of relations. On 7 May 1849, the eminent English actor, William Charles Macready, was booked to play the title role in a performance of Macbeth at the Astor Place Opera House. He walked on stage to an organized chorus of hisses and catcalls from partisans of a rival Shakespearean actor, the American Edwin Forrest. Macready stood his ground in a dignified pose, waiting for the audience to settle. Quiet never came and the three witches were consulted in dumb-show. Rotten eggs were soon thrown, coins whizzed through the air, and when the rowdiest section began heaving chairs from the top gallery ‘so as to peril life’, the curtain went down.15 Macready

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cancelled his season and prepared to leave New York. Two days later, the following letter appeared in the New York Herald. To W. C. Macready, Esq. Dear Sir:– The undersigned, having heard that the outrage at the Astor Place Opera House, on Monday Evening, is likely to have the effect of preventing you from continuing your performances, and from concluding your intended farewell on the American Stage, take this public method of requesting you to re-consider your decision, and of assuring you that the good sense and respect for law and order, prevailing in this community, will sustain you on the subsequent nights of your performance.16 Among the rank and file of 47 signatories – below Washington Irving and Evert Duyckinck – is the name Herman Melville. Macready relented. His backers insisted on a police presence at the next evening’s performance, and there were uneasy discussions at City Hall as to how the inevitable protests might be handled. On 10 May, a group calling themselves the ‘American Committee’ put up handbills around the city, protesting that the rights of ‘all Americans who shall dare to express their opinions this night, at the ARISTOCRATIC Opera House’ were about to be sacrificed to the cliquey preferences of a bunch of rich, anglophile boobies. In banner capitals, the posters urged: ‘Workingmen! Freemen! Stand By Your Lawful Rights!’17 That night a crowd of upwards of 10,000 blue-collar workers gathered outside the ‘kid-glove’ Opera House – just ‘three short blocks’ from Melville’s residence at 103 Fourth Avenue.18 The National Guard had been mobilized in support of the police, and were soon deployed in rows facing the stone-throwing horde. They fired above the heads of the protestors; a voice called out with false assurance, ‘They have only blank cartridges’, and an answering barrage of bricks and paving stones rained down once more on the soldiers. The next volley was fired directly into the crowd – those hit seemed to be play-acting – and then a second round smacked into the disbelieving throng. Twenty-two were killed and thirtyeight more had been shot.19 New York’s ‘Shakespeare Wars’ originated in a public spat between two rival actors, but its improbable escalation into the violence of May 1849 was fanned by class divisions and nationalist sympathies as profound as those that had shaken the capitals of Europe a year earlier. Edwin Forrest came from poverty to become the wealthiest actor in America: having played blackface as a young man and after honing his craft on the Western circuit,

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he emerged from the heartland to take New York by storm in the role of Othello in 1826. Forrest was 5 foot 10, bluff-chested, muscular; on stage, especially in large theatres like The Park and The Bowery, he astounded the house with the rafter-shaking force of his heroic and tragic scenes. Playbills draped him in American flags, and when this natural born phenomenon acted, an audience could sense the nation in triumph. In 1846, at the height of his local fame, he took his American Shakespeare to the English stage. Forrest’s Macbeth was coolly received; behind the critical disdain and the curtailed tour he believed he could discern the dead hand of his English rival, William Macready. At Edinburgh he had the opportunity of attending the latter’s performance in Hamlet – and when Macready embroidered a scene with a foppish bit of hanky waving, Forrest stood up in his box and hissed. The interruption was widely reported: to the British, his behaviour was deplorable and ill-bred – typically American – but his public at home loved him all the more. The very evening Macready was opening in Macbeth for the cognoscenti at the Astor Place Opera House, Forrest was thumbing his nose at his rival by performing the same role in the same play to a full house of ordinary folks on Broadway. His ‘Is this a dagger’ and ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow’ speeches were relished as always, but the line, ‘What rhubarb, senna or what purgative drug will drive these English hence?’ brought the house down. ‘The entire audience’, a fellow actor recalled, ‘rose and cheered for many minutes’.20 In autopsies on the tragedy of 10 May, commentators pointed their fingers at the ‘silly committee’ who supported the English import.21 Their inflammatory petition, one reporter argued, ‘changed the nature of the contest’: Macready was a subordinate personage, and he was to be put down less on his own account, than to spite his aristocratic supporters. The question became not only a national, but a social one. It was the rich against the poor – the aristocracy against the people; and this hatred of wealth and privilege is increasing over the world, and ready to burst out whenever there is the slightest occasion. The rich and well-bred are too apt to despise the poor and ignorant, and they must not think it strange if they are hated in return.22 By any predictable measure, Herman Melville ought to have been on the other side. His first two novels, Typee and Omoo, were narrated from the forecastle – and he had been most irritated to find those books disbelieved in England on the grounds that a working American sailor could not

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possibly write like a gentleman. Those books, along with the ‘humorous’ political satire of Mardi, are notable for their anti-racist, anti-missionary, anti-imperialist, pro-native, pro-working class sentiments, and while his own family’s social trajectory had been downwardly mobile, one does not find its younger generation hankering for the unearned incomes and superior manners of upper-crust New York. Indeed, his late brother Gansevoort had been a Tammany Hall Democrat – the political epicentre of anti-Macready feeling. Melville’s subsequent solidarity with defenders of privilege in the anglophile camp may well seem an aberration in a writing career robustly centred on democratic and egalitarian values. But, as Dennis Berthold has shown, the micropolitics of the Astor Place riots involved more finely calibrated affiliations. ‘The nativist Democrats who hated Macready’, he points out, ‘also hated blacks, abolitionists and foreigners’ – after wrecking Macready’s first performance, Captain Rynders and his bullyboys capped their evening by breaking up a meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society.23 Many died-in-the-wool Democrats who were uneasy about slavery and the expansionist war with Mexico were apt to find sections of the Whig Party more congenial. Macready’s strongest supporters were members of the Whig elite such as the diarists Philip Hone and George Templeton Strong, who both left records of the riots. The former dismissed Forrest as ‘a vulgar, arrogant loafer, with a pack of kindred rowdies at his heels’; the latter, observing the dispersal of the ‘mob’ the day after the riots, supposed the ‘unwashed’ would not relish being ‘treated with a little artillery practice’.24 Melville was – in Dennis Berthold’s phrase – ‘only one handshake away’ from Hone, Strong and the Whig inner circle, but he did socialize along its perimeter, with the doctors, lawyers and literary types who met at Duyckinck’s to discuss – over ‘a bowl of fine punch’ – the merits of fine acting and fine editions purchasable at the Astor Place bookstore.25 They were not cringing anglophiles. Duyckinck had earlier regarded Edwin Forrest – a manly articulator of national identity who commissioned and performed home-grown drama – as the theatrical exemplar of the ‘Young America’ movement, and had hosted a supportive dinner for the patriot on his return from England and the unpleasantness over the Edinburgh hiss. Yet only a year later, Duyckinck was dismissive of Forrest’s portrayal of Lear: the tragedian ‘tramps and stammers and is convulsed like an ox in the shambles’, he complained in his diary. ‘If a bull could act he would act like Forrest.’26 Recent histories of the Astor Place riots echo Duyckinck’s opinion of Forrest while trying not to endorse them. Berthold shows how Duyckinck’s farmyard metaphor ‘frames his aesthetic judgment in terms of class

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distinctions’ – but he shares the aesthetic judgement nonetheless. ‘The modulated performances of Macready’, he writes, ‘increasingly revealed the shabby histrionics of Forrest’: his Duyckinck may be conscious of class, but he prefers Macready as any sensible person would.27 Lawrence Levine’s well-known study of ‘William Shakespeare in America’ latches on to the Astor Place riots as a key moment in the emergence of a division between ‘the lowbrow’ and ‘the highbrow’, between serious art and mere entertainment. As this is a study in the sociology of taste, Levine is careful not to dismiss Forrest’s acting style simply because it is popular, but he is inclined nonetheless to tacitly accept the grounds upon which judgements about Macready’s contrasting style were made. When he describes the Englishman’s acting style as ‘cerebral’, for example, he implicitly supposes an appropriately brainy and discerning audience – an assumption he would warn us against if we were to suppose escapist entertainment requires a vacuous audience. But a cultural boundary is evidently under construction at the time of the Astor Place riots. On one hand, we have the Opera House with its high ticket prices and its dress code, with its silence during performances; on the other, the Bowery Theatre with its carnival atmosphere and ‘show-bizz’ values. In Levine’s history, the ‘lowbrow’ but popular Shakespeare of Forrest loses authority to the ‘highbrow’ but good-for-you Shakespeare of Macready. It is indeed a significant moment in the emergence of cultural hierarchy in nineteenth-century America, but to describe the transition as lowbrow to highbrow flatters the likes of the Astor Place Opera House crowd. A more accurate word for the combination of social, financial and cultural clout commanded by that section of the community is middlebrow. Lovers of the arts, worshippers of Shakespeare – ‘snobs who burn their rancid tubs of fat at his shrine’ Melville had called them, vowing to ‘stand far off & alone’. Accounts of the Forrest-Macready feud oppose acting that is cerebral, subtle and cosmopolitan to acting that is local, obvious and histrionic. But how, given that we are concerned with a writer whose characters are always acting, and whose greatest writing seems to have all the problems of staginess, might we describe the soliloquies of Ahab or Pierre? Would the model be Forrest or Macready? Let us consider for a moment how another commentator, the Englishman George Henry Lewes, saw Macready in a context unconnected with Forrest and the associated inflections of class and nation. Lewes is trying to explain why, in his view, Macready ‘always fell short when representing the great Shakespearean hero’.28 On the plus side, he had a big voice and could declaim like Forrest with ‘tones that thrilled and tones that stirred the ears’.29 But Macready was interested in

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psychological realism rather than spectacular effects. ‘His declamation was mannered and musical’, Lewes observed, ‘yet his intelligence always made him follow the winding meanings through the involutions of the verse, and never allowed you to feel, as you feel in the declamation of Charles Kean and many other actors, that he was speaking words which he did not thoroughly understand.’30 Forrest, by all accounts, was an actor given to declaiming words ‘he did not thoroughly understand’ – but perhaps this was because he was speaking what Ishmael calls ‘a bold and nervous lofty language’ (73): a language which lifts into soliloquy much as recitativo lifts into aria in one of the new Italian operas at the Astor. Macready, in Lewes’s judgement, was always too much of a realist, bringing the sublimity of the great Shakespearean characters down to an implausibly domestic scale. He was irritable where he should have been passionate, querulous where he should have been terrible. In Macbeth, for example, . . . nothing could have been less heroic than his presentation of the great criminal. He was fretful and impatient under the provocations of his wife, he was ignoble under the terrors of remorse; he stole into the sleeping chamber of Duncan like a man going to purloin a purse, not like a warrior going to snatch a crown.31 Macready, one feels, would have made a great Willy Loman. What George Henry Lewes finds wanting is the soapy grandeur of a tragedian like Forrest. When Duyckinck compared the acting of Edwin Forrest to an ox, I suspect he was making a provincial assertion of taste. Macready may well have been the more accomplished, as well as a different kind of actor from Forrest, but in the ‘Shakespeare Wars’ of 1849, we see Duyckinck and the Astor Place circle maximizing those minimal differences into a hard social boundary that separates everything that is crude, low and popular from opposites they themselves embody. Denis Berthold argues that the Astor Place riots are a turning point in Melville’s career: part of a maturing stance that moves from solidarity with anti-authoritarian struggle to ironic and disillusioned detachment, and as a step towards creating more subtle and ambiguous narratives that ‘challenged simplistic notions of democracy’.32 I see other things started here too: problems to do with histrionics and melodrama, and problems to do with defining what is different about American art. While the latter are often described in terms of national cultural identity, the Astor Place riots show how the familiar ‘rise and progress’ account must be qualified

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by factors relating to class and to race. Yet those local and particular differences – which take a more ominous shape in the decade leading to the Civil War – are bound to be suggestive for anyone who comes from the kind of place New York was in the antebellum era: a small city trying to be a big city in a new world that is old to its indigenous inhabitants. As Melville’s response to Shakespeare deepens in the published work to follow, we shall see that it illuminates a weave of contradictory demands common to most settler cultures: how to live in the now and value the past, how to cherish old world attachments and jettison them, how to have high culture in a small province.33

‘Hawthorne and His Mosses’ On 5 August 1850, Herman Melville met Nathaniel Hawthorne for the first time on a holiday ramble up Monument Mountain in the company of a party of literary types from Boston and New York, including Evert Duyckinck and the physician, Oliver Wendell Holmes. On reaching the summit, Melville clambered out onto the peak of a rock while Holmes was affected by nausea at the dizzying heights below them and discovered a restorative bottle of champagne in his bag. The mountain had been immortalized in American verse by William Cullen Bryant, and the party drank a toast to the poet and the success of American letters. That evening, the sociable Holmes mischievously ‘drew the whole company out by laying down various propositions’ regarding ‘the superiority of Englishmen’ over Americans like themselves.34 Duyckinck recalled Melville rising to the occasion with ‘vigorous’ arguments while James Field, recent publisher of The Scarlet Letter, remembered it was Hawthorne who ‘rayed out in a sparkling and unwonted manner’ that evening, ‘stoutly taking part in favour of the American’.35 Holmes was a slight figure, neither tall like Hawthorne nor athletic like Melville, and perhaps humorously offered himself as an instance of degeneration in the former colonies; he might have admitted as much of his own writing, too: a far cry from Shakespeare, the inevitable point of comparison, to his ‘Breakfast Table’ journalism or ‘The Last Leaf’ – a sentimental poem about the declining years of Herman Melville’s grandfather, one of the ‘Indians’ at the Boston Tea Party. In any event, the evening ended with Holmes wryly conceding that ‘in less than twenty years it would be a common thing to grow in these United States men sixteen and seventeen feet high; and intellectual in proportion.’36

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On the morning of 11 August, Melville sat down to write ‘Hawthorne and His Mosses’.37 One can imagine how the conversation about the state of American letters the week before provided a first part of that essay’s impetus: when Melville writes, ‘Let us away with this Bostonian leaven of literary flunkeyism towards England’, it is as if he has been polishing his retorts to Holmes.38 But the least original parts of this paean to home-grown originality are the paragraph-long perorations where Melville echoes the stump speeches of ‘Young America’: Let America then prize and cherish her writers; yea, let her glorify them. They are not so many in number, as to exhaust her good-will. And while she has good kith and kin of her own, to take to her bosom, let her not lavish her embraces upon the household of an alien. . . . Let America first praise mediocrity even, in her own children, before she praises . . . the best excellence in the children of any other land. (247) These sentences belong to a common or garden variety of literary declarations of independence; that they are not the note Melville wants to sustain is signalled by a welcome change of tone: ‘I was much pleased with a hot-headed Carolina cousin of mine, who once said, – “If there were no other American to stand by, in Literature, – why, then, I would stand by Pop Emmons and his ‘Fredoniad’, and till a better epic came along, swear it was not very far behind the Iliad” ’ (247). Like a good public speaker, Melville disarms a rejoinder by embracing the charge of provincialism in a comically exaggerated form. But the question of America’s coming literary greatness is only a debater’s topic so far as Melville is concerned. He can address what he wants to say under that heading, but what most drives ‘Hawthorne and His Mosses’ is an energizing sense of proximity to genius. Since the Monument Mountain picnic, less than a week earlier, he had been immersed in the only copy of Hawthorne’s writings available to him: an edition of Mosses from an Old Manse which his aunt had presented to him on 18 July, not long into the family’s summer holiday at the Pittsfield farm. In ‘The Old Manse’, a preface to the collection, ‘the author makes the reader acquainted with his abode’ through a charming tour of the garden, house and environs in which the stories were conceived and written.39 It is rather like one of Coleridge’s ‘Conversation Poems’: just a walk from the Old Manse to the Concord River and back, but a journey

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in thought ranges much further, offering, without straining to do so, a subtle and unpretentious meditation on the American writer’s imaginative connection to place and to history. ‘Hawthorne and His Mosses’ is Melville’s answering call. The writing room of his manse is ‘a papered chamber in a fine old farmhouse’ (239), and he takes us outdoors to a scene of reading – ‘new mown clover, the hillside breeze blowing over me through the wide barn door, and soothed by the hum of the bees in the meadows around’ (239) – conjuring up the influence of these actual and imaginary surroundings in a bosom to bosom echo of Hawthorne’s romantic topography. Melville would also have admired Hawthorne’s easy way with philosophical allegories – a fanciful mode he had attempted with only mixed success in Mardi. And the essay also tells us how very excited Mr Melville was to meet Mr Hawthorne: ‘A man of a deep and noble nature has seized me in this seclusion’, he writes in the first paragraph, ‘His wild, witch voice rings through me’ (239). And later: I feel that this Hawthorne has dropped germinous seeds into my soul. He expands and deepens down, the more I contemplate him; and further, and further, shoots his strong New-England roots into the hot soil of my Southern soul. (250) The essay is ostensibly written by ‘A Virginian spending July in Vermont’ (239) – an apt enough pseudonym for someone so roused out of his home state. The combination of meeting Hawthorne in person and having been bowled over by several of his books in succession – the ‘Mosses’ review briefly mentions Twice-Told Tales and The Scarlet Letter – opened a number of doors for Melville as a writer and as a reader. There were lessons about appearance and reality, surface and depth, about the great art of ‘thought diving’ and the ordinary abode of genius, but each of these discoveries required another point of triangulation in order to hit home. Reading Shakespeare helped him gauge the extraordinary nature of Hawthorne; reading Hawthorne helped him domesticate the genius of Shakespeare. All settler literatures, so far as I know, have had a renaissance. As with F. O. Mathiessen’s classic study, The American Renaissance, the most influential literary histories of Australia, Canada and New Zealand are constructed around a tipping point separating writing characterized by slightness and local colour (like Washington Irving) and by writers leaning too heavily

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on English models (like James Fennimore Cooper) from the decisive appearance of a generation who found a more original or newly native answer to the problems of writing a national literature. Melville’s ‘Mosses’ essay also announces and enacts a renaissance in American letters, but it is such a blast of enthusiasm the implications of Melville’s reading of Shakespeare are easily lost in the fanfare. I find it helpful to consider the essay in the light of an adjacent formulation of similar problems. For the poet and anthologist, Allen Curnow – a member of New Zealand’s ‘renaissance’ generation – the disjunction between derivative pioneer versification and authentic local writing involved a complex problem of realism. Aware of false starts and false notes, he was inclined like Melville to judge writers as ‘tellers of the truth’ – a phrase not notable for its critical precision, and always apt to sound oracular with Melville, who writes: ‘For in this world of lies, Truth is forced to fly like a scared white doe in the woodlands; and only by cunning glimpses will she reveal herself, as in Shakespeare and other masters of the great Art of Telling the Truth, – even though it be covertly, and by snatches’ (244). Compare the following observation of Curnow’s regarding the failings of stock colonial poetry: ‘The shock of so distant a migration and the recoil of imagination from realities, were to be transmitted through two, three, even four New Zealand generations before poets appeared who could express what it meant to be, or to have become, a New Zealander’ (20).40 A phrase like ‘the imagination’s recoil from realities’ proposes a surface and depth model in which reality, the underlying truth of a situation, is veiled or cushioned by conventional responses whose business it is to maintain psychic comfort and social stability. Only by ‘cunning glimpses’ will tough antipodean truths and sacred white does reveal themselves. There are many instances and analyses of a similar model in Melville. Most readers of Hawthorne, Melville concedes, will deem him ‘a pleasant writer, with a pleasant style, – a sequestered harmless man, from whom any deep and weighty thing would hardly be anticipated: – a man who means no meanings’ (242). But those readers are like Captain Delano in the story of ‘Benito Cereno’: Babo, a negro slave, holds a barber’s razor and basin at his Spanish captain’s throat; Don Benito trembles nervously, but obtrusions of reality fail to threaten the satisfaction with which Captain Delano contemplates the love of a loyal manservant for his master on board the mutinous slave ship. The reader who sees the ‘Indian-summer sunlight on the hither side of Hawthorne’s soul’ likewise only gets half the picture: ‘the other side – like the dark half of the physical sphere – is shrouded in a blackness, ten times black’ (243).

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Having pinpointed that darkness, that reality beneath comfortable appearances, Melville now brings Shakespeare into his discussion. This blackness it is that furnishes the infinite obscure of his background, – that back-ground, against which Shakespeare plays his grandest conceits, the things that have made for Shakespeare his loftiest, but most circumscribed renown, as the profoundest of thinkers . . . ‘Off with his head! so much for Buckingham!’ this sort of rant, interlined by another hand, brings down the house, – those mistaken souls, who dream of Shakespeare as a mere man of Richard-the-Third humps, and Macbeth daggers. But it is those deep faraway things in him; those occasional flashings-forth of the intuitive Truth in him; those short, quick probings at the very axis of reality; – these are the things that make Shakespeare, Shakespeare. Through the mouths of the dark characters of Hamlet, Timon, Lear, and Iago, he craftily says, or sometimes insinuates the things, which we feel to be so terrifically true, that it were all but madness for any good man, in his own proper character, to utter, or even hint of them. Tormented into desperation, Lear the frantic King tears off the mask, and speaks the sane madness of vital truth. (244) Lear’s ‘vital truth’ derives its force from a drama of masking and unmasking. There is an art to the revelation of depths, but the emphasis in the above passage is just as much on the necessity of indirection and the power of backlighting and ambience to develop these ‘flashings-forth’ of an ‘intuitive Truth’. Melville can sometimes sound as if those truths are wafted in from some higher plane: ‘the names of all fine authors are fictitious ones’, he writes, ‘simply standing, as they do, for the mystical, ever-eluding Spirit of all Beauty, which ubiquitously possesses men of genius’ (239). Coleridge often said as much, but Melville is about to invert the qualities associated with that Romantic’s perception of aesthetic unity: what possesses the souls of Hawthorne and Shakespeare is not ‘the one Life within us and abroad’, not ‘rhythm in all thought and joyance everywhere’,41 – but a darkness that ‘pervades’ those writers ‘through and through’ (243). There is a sudden shift down from the ‘Spirit of all Beauty’, but what Melville calls darkness still has an organic form. His subject, he explains, is not Hawthorne but ‘Hawthorne in his writings’ (249): an author’s name is one metonym for the unity diffused throughout a work of art, darkness is another, and the way he writes about both authors and darkness anticipates the concept of tone as elucidated in new critical readings of lyric poetry. The tone of a poem is conveyed rather than directly

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stated; it is easily lost in translation or paraphrase; it is more like a chord than a single note; it is an attitude discoverable through details of wording yet also pervading and animating the whole: ‘a lurking something’, says Melville, ‘that would take several pages to properly define’ (249). The several pages of ‘Hawthorne and His Mosses’ bring out those ‘lurking somethings’ through extended amplifications of tone which often rely on spatial, seasonal or meteorological contrasts: ‘the thump of a great apple, in the stillest afternoon, falling without a breath of wind from the sheer necessity of ripeness’ (241) against ‘apples left to wither on the tree’ (242); the ‘bright gildings’ that ‘fringe, and play upon the edges of thunderclouds’ (243). By way of an example, Melville picks out, with astonished admiration, a sentence of Hawthorne’s describing an old apple dealer whose ‘subdued and nerveless boyhood prefigured his abortive prime, which, likewise, contained within itself the prophecy and image of his lean and torpid age’ (242). Not far from this sentence is a notion as commonplace as ‘the child is the father of the man’, but Hawthorne has crowded so much more in, using one prolepsis to contain another, as if cracking a husk to show the wrinkled grain and desiccated germ, and with this radical economy of means, suggesting the nip and blight of a life hurried towards a pinched old age. Melville says ‘touches as these . . . furnish clews, whereby we enter a little way into the intricate, profound heart where they originated’ and goes on to paint a miniature landscape showing how ‘Hawthorne’s melancholy rests like an Indian Summer, which though bathing a whole country in one softness, still reveals the distinctive hue of every towering hill, and each far-winding vale’ (242). If we were to take the one sentence of Hawthorne’s as a touchstone, it would demonstrate that whatever Melville means by literary ‘truth’, it is likely to loom, likely to be profound, and likely to suggest a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. If Melville largely takes his aesthetics from Coleridge, he owes a general debt to Carlyle’s lectures On Heroes and a specific one to Charles Lamb’s essay on ‘The Tragedies of Shakespeare’.42 Lamb had argued that Shakespeare’s plays can only be cheapened and coarsened by theatrical performance – ‘there is so much in them, which comes not under the province of acting, with which eye, and tone, and gesture, have nothing to do’.43 That had not been the position of either the friends of William Macready or the partisans of Edwin Forrest. After the Astor Place riots of May 1849, and after rapidly competing two further novels, Redburn and White-Jacket, Melville travelled to England to meet his prospective publishers. On 19 November, he saw Macready in Othello at the Haymarket

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but was unimpressed: ‘Macready painted hideously. Didn’t like him very much upon the whole – bad voice, it seemed’. He pronounced Iago ‘very good’, Desdemona ‘very pretty’ and Rodrigo ‘horrible’, but seems to have enjoyed the farce that followed the main feature rather more.44 In the preceding two weeks he had seen and enjoyed West End performances of The Housekeeper, Methinks I See My Father, The Beauty and the Beast, A Practical Man, The Debutante, The Sons of Mars, The Clandestine Marriage, She Would and She Would Not, and had also visited a penny theatre for an experience of working class audience participation he found ‘very comical’ but made his companion ‘afraid’.45 Like Charles Lamb, Melville was finding that while he loved the theatre, the theatre was not the place for Shakespeare. In ‘Hawthorne and Mosses’, Melville claims ‘much of the blind, unbridled admiration that has been heaped upon Shakespeare, has been lavished upon the least part of him’ (244). He has, like Charles Lamb, the limits of all theatrical representation in mind, not just ‘the popularizing noise and show of broad farce, and blood-besmeared tragedy’ (245). The contrast Melville proposes is not Macready versus Forrest, but ‘read[ing] . . . deeply’ versus ‘the tricky stage’ (245). And that is why it is important for him to distance himself from the two versions of bardolatry associated with both the Forrest and Macready camps. The Astor Place anglophiles get shortest shrift: [T]his absolute and unconditional adoration of Shakespeare has grown to be a part of our Anglo Saxon superstitions. The Thirty Nine articles are now Forty. Intolerance has come to exist in this matter. You must believe in Shakespeare’s unapproachability, or quit the country. But what sort of a belief is this for an American, a man who is bound to carry republican progressiveness into Literature, as well as into Life? Believe me, my friends, that Shakespeares are this day being born on the banks of the Ohio. (245) And Homers have sprouted in the Carolina cottons. What differentiates Melville’s boosterism from most chest-thumping expressions of literary nationalism is his hunch that any locally born Shakespeare is bound to appear in a modern and inconspicuous form. ‘The great mistake seems to be’, he continues, ‘that even with those Americans who look forward to the coming of a great literary genius among us, they somehow fancy he will come in the costume of Queen Elizabeth’s day, – be a writer of dramas founded upon old English history, or the tales of Boccaccio. Whereas, great geniuses are parts of the times; they themselves are the times; and possess

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a correspondent coloring’ (246). Shakespeare sets the pattern – ‘In his own lifetime, Shakespeare was not Shakespeare, but only Master William Shakespeare of the shrewd, thriving, business firm of Condell, Shakespeare & Co., proprietors of the Globe Theatre in London’ (246) – and Hawthorne follows it. Melville is playing John the Baptist to his friend, but the Shiloh whose coming this essay also announces is himself. Not that he expects to come in triumph: ‘Failure’, he writes, ‘is the true test of greatness’ – adding, ‘there is no hope for us in these smooth pleasing writers that know their powers’ (248). ‘Hawthorne and His Mosses’ was written at a point when Melville, in the midst of his sixth book, knew he had not found his limit and was sensing an upswing in his own powers. Before Hawthorne and Shakespeare came together for him in this essay, he had every reason to expect that his work in progress, a novel drawing on his whaling experiences much as White-Jacket drew on his cruise as a rating in the US Navy, would be completed shortly. Moby-Dick would take another 15 months and, as all the world knows, would become a masterpiece in the dark terms adumbrated in ‘Hawthorne and His Mosses’. But something unusual happens in that speedily written essay too. Shakespeare arrives in the review on an opportune riff stimulated by the excitement of having encountered Hawthorne. The outrageousness of joining a pleasantseeming American writer to the bard is addressed by picking up the threads of an ever-running debate between those who believe Shakespeare most comes alive in performance and those who find there is always more to him on the page, that he has no true home in drama. And this debate is joined to another conundrum of the age: on what terms can Shakespeare come to America? Might a performance at the Bowery knock the spots off those at Drury Lane? Is an American writer destined to reach and overtake his mark? Affirm either, and one’s little pond provincialism shows even in the staking of a comparison, while the cultivated alternative always risks assuming that real culture happens elsewhere and in terms far removed from the unpropitious local scene. But as Shakespeare exits the Hawthorne essay to strains of ‘America the beautiful’, Melville will take the documentary novel on a course that finds a ‘correspondent colouring’ for Elizabethan tragedy on the decks and in the cabins of a whaling ship, transplanting the ‘unapproachability’ of Shakespeare to the ordinariness of an American page.

Moby-Dick Tracing the compositional history of Moby-Dick is like charting the voyage of the Pequod: there are seamarks, but we have no captain’s log, no daily

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observations of latitude, no rate of knots. In the novel, the Atlantic is criss-crossed in a paragraph while a discursive mist conceals the Pequod’s progress for chapters at a time. Mapping the voyage may seem as simple as joining the dots from Nantucket to the Crozzets, from the Straits of Sunda to the wide Pacific, but the line made covers untold leagues of ocean with only the inference of a wake. Although several hands are responsible for what is still a commonly accepted compositional map of Moby-Dick, it was Charles Olson who, in 1933, tracked down Melville’s Shakespeare library and, linking what he found in the marginalia to the essay on ‘Hawthorne’, first advanced the theory that Melville had written two distinct versions of Moby-Dick between February 1850 and August 1851.46 ‘The first book’, he surmises, ‘did not contain Ahab. It may not, except incidentally, have contained Moby-Dick’.47 With ‘Hawthorne and His Mosses’, writes Olson: Melville is charged again. Moby-Dick is already shadowed in his excitement over genius, and America as a subject for genius. You can feel Ahab in the making. Ahab of ‘the globular brain and ponderous heart’, so much does Melville concern himself with the distinction between the head and the heart in Hawthorne and Shakespeare. You can see the prose stepping off. . . . Above all, in the ferment, Shakespeare the cause.48 Melville’s marginalia preserve the Pequod-like course of a great reader’s encounter with Shakespeare.49 The few written comments illustrate his feel for subtext and irony. In King Lear, when Regan sneers at Gloucester, ‘Ingrateful Fox!’ Melville observes, ‘Here’s a touch Shakespearean – Regan talks of ingratitude’. He puts an X beside the passage in which Edmund accepts Edgar’s challenge to a duel and notes, ‘The infernal nature often has a valour denied to innocence.’ In The Tempest, he sidelines Miranda’s ‘brave new world’ speech, and, circling Prospero’s retort, ‘‘Tis new to thee’, comments: ‘Consider the character of the persons concerning whom Miranda says this – then Prospero’s quiet words in comment – how terrible! In “Timon” itself there is nothing quite like it.’50 There are upwards of 450 non-substantive circlings, tickings, underlinings and sidelinings of particular phrases and passages scattered through the 7 volumes. Antony and Cleopatra and Lear are most heavily scored; Richard III – the most commonly staged work of the nineteenth century – is unmarked.51 Together, they make a fascinating Rorschach blot, but only one play, Measure for Measure, is scored in a way that reveals a distinct shape to Melville’s response. Major speeches involving death and the theme of appearance and reality

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are consistently marked – much as if gilded in yellow highlighter by a student today. Elsewhere, the markings often suggest a reader approving of sentiments or delighting in a particular phrasing – a ‘spleeny Lutheran’ (King Henry VIII) is underlined with two ticks – but apart from noting that he pays attention to fools and clowns, the most salient generalization one can make of the markings in the Shakespeare volumes is that they are so diversely prompted as to make inferences based on them tendentious. Charles Olson cites two scored passages – ‘That truth should be silent I had almost forgot’ (Antony and Cleopatra); ‘Truth’s a dog must to kennel’ (King Lear) – to demonstrate that ‘when Shakespeare muzzles truth speakers, Melville is quick to mark the line or incident’; Olson’s guileful use of the word ‘quick’ obscures the fact that Melville made no such mark on the many other occasions when he might have done so.52 F. O. Matthiessen, also keen to link truth-telling in the ‘Mosses’ to recurrent markings in the marginalia, contends that Melville followed Shakespeare’s treatment of deceiving appearances ‘through play after play’, citing examples from All’s Well, Othello, King Lear, Timon and Measure for Measure.53 Again, the pattern is by no means so definite: Melville occasionally reaches for his pencil and emphasizes such passages; more often he does not. That passages marked in this way caught the particular attention of an engaged and attentive reader is almost as much as can be said, so it is perhaps more germane to note that marginalia in other works in his library evidence a remarkably sure and retentive memory for Shakespeare’s language. In his matching edition of Milton, to give just one example, next to the description in Paradise Lost of animals ‘on the grass / couch’d, and now fill’d with pasture gazing sat’ (vol. 4, 350–1), Melville writes: ‘Full of the pasture’ in ‘As-YouLike’.54 It took a finely tuned ear to notice that. Since the Shakespeare marginalia are undated, scholars cannot be sure which of his checkmarks belong to the ‘Mosses’/Moby-Dick period and which represent the scattered responses of a lifetime. Charles Olson announced a crucial exception: It is beautifully right to find what I take to be rough notes for Moby-Dick in the Shakespeare set itself. They are written in Melville’s hand, in pencil, upon the last fly-leaf of the last volume, the one containing Lear, Othello and Hamlet. I transcribe them as they stand: ‘Ego non baptizo te in nominee Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti – sed in nominee Diabloi. – madness is undefinable – It & right reason extremes of one, – not the (black art) Goetic but Theurgic magic – seeks converse with the Intelligence, Power, the Angel.’55

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Ahab uses that satanic formula as he ‘baptizes’ the harpoon he has forged out of razors and tempered with blood; and on 29 June 1851, Melville told Hawthorne that this black baptism is the ‘secret motto’ of the book. Finding much the same material in the endnotes, in an Ahab chapter, and in a dated letter written as the novel was being completed, brought to light the back-story of how Moby-Dick came to be written. Ahab and Shakespeare, Olson deduced, must have arrived relatively late and together, after August 1850, after the novel was ‘mostly complete’, to complicate, delay and enrich Ishmael’s original whaling book. But those notes on black magic were not written by Melville: Geoffrey Sanborn has discovered Melville copied them almost word for word from an old article about ‘Superstition and Knowledge’ in the Quarterly Review (23 July 1823).56 Nor are they directly linked to the composition of MobyDick: Sanborn’s detective work indicates Melville probably came across the article in 1849, before the novel was begun, though he concedes the evidence is not compelling enough to scuttle modified forms of the ‘two Moby-Dicks’ theory. But he adds an important caution: ‘we should continue to question the application of compositional theories that categorize textual incongruities as vestiges of an Ur-Moby-Dick, inviting us to read anomalous aspects of Melville’s narrative in relation to an imaginary Ur-text rather than the unwieldy finished book.’57 Suppose we redraw the compositional map with that caution in mind, without second guessing the contents of an Ur-Moby-Dick, and without supposing, with Olson, that Shakespeare is to Melville as steroids are to a weightlifter, a powerful additive whose ingestion enabled the author to heft Moby-Dick as the single masterstroke of a hampered career.58 Melville returned to New York from London and Europe on 1 February 1850. He expected to be away longer. Nothing about his activities abroad hints at Moby-Dick; no whaling books were purchased at the time, but he ordered one important source from England only a few months later.59 The germ of the novel probably comes from those weeks in which he renewed his acquaintance with the sea, mulling over on the homeward voyage the literary possibilities afforded by the world of whaling, an untapped resource from his years of adventure in the Pacific.60 On 1 May 1850, he gave a progress report to his fellow novelist of the sea, Richard Henry Dana, Jr, who had been encouraging him to write about whaling. About the ‘whaling voyage’ – I am half way in the work, am very glad that your suggestion so jumps with mine. It will be a strange sort of book, tho’, I fear; blubber is blubber you know; tho’ you may get oil out of it, the

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poetry runs as hard as sap from a frozen maple tree; – & to cook the thing up, one must needs throw in a little fancy, which from the nature of the thing must be ungainly as the gambols of the whales themselves. Yet I mean to give the truth of the thing, spite of this.61 By the end of June, he had written enough to offer his English publisher rights to ‘a romance of adventure founded upon certain wild legends in the Southern Sperm Whale fisheries’, and estimated he would be through by November.62 In August, at the time of the Monument Mountain picnic, Duyckinck informed his brother that Melville’s new novel was ‘mostly done’, and described the manuscript as ‘a romantic, fanciful, & literal & most enjoyable presentment of the Whale Fishery – something quite new’.63 At this point, there is insufficient evidence to suppose Melville’s draft is a documentary novel merely: words like ‘romantic’, ‘strange’, ‘wild’, ‘fanciful’, ‘ungainly’ and ‘new’ describe the novel we read today. But it is apparent that the novel was evolving – opening out, intensifying, spreading – as it was being written. Reports of half done and mostly done in the pre-August letters give way to accounts of writerly absorption through the winter of 1850–1851; by early May, in a long and eloquent letter to Hawthorne, he feels he is almost there, frustrated on the one hand by exigencies – ‘The calm, the coolness, the silent grass-growing mood in which a man ought always to compose . . . can seldom be mine’ – and on the other by exhaustion and pride:64 From my twenty-fifth year I date my life. Three weeks have scarcely passed, at any time between then and now, that I have not unfolded within myself. But I feel that I am now come to the inmost leaf of the bulb, and that shortly the flower must fall to the mould.65 In the May letter to Hawthorne, ‘The Whale’ is ‘in his flurry’.66 In another in late June, Melville looks back at having juggled house renovations with the addition of ‘some shanties of chapters and essays’ to his manuscript; at that point, 29 June 1851, with the typesetting half complete, he offers Hawthorne ‘a fin of the Whale by way of a specimen mouthful’ but ruefully admits ‘The tail is not yet cooked.’67 He knew what the ending would be, perhaps had a good draft, but it would take a final effort of revision and expansion into the three-chapter climax of the chase before the book could be declared done.

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Signs of an improvised and exploratory method of composition are everywhere apparent in Moby-Dick. There are contradictions and vestiges of earlier ideas: the character of Bulkington is introduced in terms that suggest he will become a major character, but no further development transpires; in one inspired moment, Melville decided to give the Pequod a jawbone tiller – yet other chapters refer to the spokes of a conventional ship’s wheel. Details like these have fuelled various elaborations of the two and three Moby-Dick theory, but they assume that a tightly organized and aesthetically integrated text is the standard aimed for.68 Melville wasn’t writing that way, and neither, he knew from his Coleridge, was Shakespeare. In the reception of the plays, as with Moby-Dick, we find critics exercised as to whether ‘the splendor of the parts compensates . . . for the barbarous shapelessness and irregularity of the whole’; but, as Coleridge pointed out, there is an alternative way to conceive the formal unity of a work of art.69 Sonnets have a predetermined form, but ‘organic form’, the poet argued, ‘shapes, as it develops, itself from within’ – the unity of a work is not so much given as discovered; it unfolds with the process of composition.70 Chapter 63, ‘The Crotch’, begins: ‘Out of the trunk, the branches grow; out of them the twigs. So in productive subjects, grow the chapters’ (289). The ship and cetology chapters are the book’s chief growing point, its zone of maximum potential expansion, where the writing becomes speculative and encyclopaedic, where chapters begin as offshoots – ‘this seems as good a place as any to set down’ (146) – develop riffs, and work up to a ‘terminal flourish’.71 The organic method, trusting to process and discovery, is also highly tolerant of inconsistency and fragmentation. Walter Bezanson terms it the ‘Unfinished Tower’ thesis, according to which, as the chapter on ‘Cetology’ affirms, ‘any human thing supposed to be complete, must for that very reason infallibly be necessarily faulty’ (136).72 ‘God keep me from ever completing anything’, says Ishmael. ‘This whole book is but a draught – nay, but the draught of a draught’ (145). In Bezanson’s words: ‘Process is all. Incompletion becomes an aesthetic principle, is perhaps inevitable, may itself signal the towering worth of the intention.’73 Yet, more than any other feature in Moby-Dick, it is the incorporation of Shakespeare that semaphores the ‘towering worth’ of those intentions. Might there not – contra ‘Hawthorne and His Mosses’ – be a dash of un-American bardolatry in referencing Shakespeare so visibly? One might argue that the great chapters of Ishmaelian speculation – ‘The Whiteness of the Whale’, ‘A Bower in the Arsicades’ – are the places where Melville’s writing most approaches Shakespeare, and that Ahab’s performance as

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Lear-on-the-quarterdeck, by contrast, is derivative and fustian, an Edwin Forrest pock-pocking across the stage on an ivory peg.74 Before considering the possibility that Shakespeare’s influence is not wholly benign, it is only proper to lift the curtain on a second early account of the ShakespeareMelville connection. Olson’s findings of the 1930s had been shared with his teacher, F. O. Matthiessen, whose American Renaissance (1941) includes a majestic study detailing how ‘Melville meditated more creatively on Shakespeare’s meaning than any other American has done’.75 There is a rift between the two pioneers: Matthiessen in 1941 reckons Olson’s findings are more specific than the evidence warrants; Olson in Call Me Ishmael digs in more deeply. If Olson is the ancestor of those who have elaborated two and three book theories of Moby-Dick’s composition, Matthiessen is the forerunner of those who favour a more organic view of the composition of the novel and a less deterministic understanding of Shakespeare’s pervasive influence.76 ‘The drama’s done’, says Ishmael in his ‘Epilogue’. ‘Why then here does any one step forth?’ (573). The plot gives us one reason – ‘everyone dies except Ish and the fish’ – but a chapter heading like ‘Enter Ahab; to Him Stubb’ gives us another: this whaling novel often references the conventions and cadences of Elizabethan tragedy.77 Chapter 37, ‘Sunset’, also begins with a stage direction: ‘The cabin; by the stern windows; Ahab sitting alone, and gazing out’. What follows, says Matthiessen, ‘may only be called a Shakespearean soliloquy’, illustrating the point as follows:78 I leave a white and turbid wake; Pale waters, paler cheeks, where’er I sail. The envious billows sidelong swell to whelm My track; let them; but first I pass. (167) Explicit stage directions are found in 13 chapters (29, 36–40, 108, 119–22, 127, 129), sometimes introducing passages written as dialogue or soliloquy, sometimes in combination with standard novelistic techniques. A few sections are written purely as if for the theatre – ‘Midnight, Forecastle’ is a song and dance number for chorus line – yet many highly dramatic chapters suggestive of Shakespeare, such as ‘The Quadrant’ or ‘The Sphynx’, make no overt use of stage business at all.79 So while Melville borrows techniques from the theatre, he does so variably, making it hard to define borders between his normative and more dramatically inflected writing. Some readers, trained on the doctrine of the single narrator, suppose the stage directions are a form of quotation mark; for them, the voice of Ishmael

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ventriloquizes Ahab or Starbuck in soliloquy. Others suppose Ishmael ‘disappears’ in any non-narrated passage, and suppose the implied author unifies diversely voiced sections of text. It might be more apt to regard Moby-Dick as a polyphonic rather than a univocal score. A church organ has stops that say clarinet, trumpet, bells, and so forth; if we suppose Moby-Dick has an organ stop named Shakespeare, it is occasionally used alone and forte, but is more often combined with other timbres and woven into the texture of the piece. Allusions and verbal echoes from Shakespeare’s plays also contribute much to the texture of the novel. They make for tiresome reading if gathered in too long a list, and their deliberate deployment forms the least significant part of what Melville took from Shakespeare’s language.80 A few examples should nonetheless be given. In his cetological researches, Ishmael has encountered Pudding-headed, Quog, and other suspect names for uncertain species, but omits them from his inventory as ‘mere sounds, full of Leviathanism, but signifying nothing’ (145). When the whale took off Ahab’s leg with a single sweep of his sickle jaw, ‘No turbaned Turk, no hired Venetian or Malay, could have smote him with more seeming malice’ (184). The Turk and the Venetian are remembered from Othello’s last speech (‘Where a malignant and a turban’d Turk / Beat a Venetian and traduced the State’); the Malay came from Thomas de Quincey’s opium dreams.81 On the Japan Ground, in gorgeous weather, Ishmael gazes into the ocean: ‘these are the times of dreamy quietude, when beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean’s skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it’ (491). Matthiessen suggests the ‘tiger heart’ is remembered not from its original source in Henry VI – ‘O tiger’s heart wrapp’d in a woman’s hide’ – but from Robert Greene’s mocking reference to ‘an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tyger’s hart wrapped in a Player’s hyde supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you’ – a line marked in the ‘Life of Shakespeare’ prefaced to his edition.82 Matthiessen is perhaps only slightly exaggerating in his claim that ‘kaleidoscopic variations of Shakespeare’s patterns’ are found ‘almost on every page’ of Moby-Dick.83 Often the verbal kaleidoscope combines fragments possibly shaken from his reading with phrases of his own invention that do sound authentically Shakespearean. Ishmael conjures the spirit of tragedy in these partly familiar terms: But Ahab, my captain, still moves before me in all his Nantucket grimness and shagginess; and in this episode touching Emperors and Kings, I must

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not conceal that I have only to do with a poor old whale-hunter like him; and, therefore, all outward majestical trappings and housings are denied me. Oh, Ahab! what shall be grand in thee, it must needs be plucked at from the skies, and dived for in the deep, and featured in the unbodied air! (148) The verb ‘dive’ appears often in Melville, and when found in proximity with ‘pluck’, we may suppose an echo of Hotspur’s By heaven methinks it were an easy leap, To pluck bright honour from the pale-fac’d moon, Or dive into the bottom of the deep, Where fathom-line could never touch the ground, And pluck up bright honour by the locks.84 Matthiessen points out that while Melville is probably dependent on the prior expression, the verbs are so perfectly adapted to his usage, they ‘become his possession as well as Shakespeare’s’.85 The phrase ‘featured in the unbodied air’ also sounds as if it had been remotely triggered by some passage of Shakespeare, yet the words ‘featured’ and ‘unbodied’ each appear on one occasion only in the plays – and, Matthiessen tells us, Melville is indebted to neither ‘for his fresh combination’.86 What makes ‘featured in the unbodied air’ sound Shakespearean is the way the underlying speech rhythms require iambic stress in combination with the final noun, prompting the coinage of ‘unbodied air’ – using a trick with prefixes and opposites that both writers employ. Melville, in need of synonyms for whiteness, smoothness and blankness, would find them in dozens of coinages ranging from ‘unspeckled’ and ‘unsignifying’ through to ‘uncontinented’ and ‘unensanguined’. Melville had Shakespeare’s liking for a neologism and a comparable facility for freshening his vocabulary with verbs and nouns used as adjectives: ‘with igniting velocity’, ‘amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being’, ‘the last gasp of my earthquake life’. Shakespeare, along with Elizabethan drama generally, along with Milton and the Bible, and amidst the tangled junctions of a thousand strings of influence, helped Melville towards a language weighted for modern prose tragedy. But allusions and verbal echoes are only the half of it. If I had to choose just one example to illustrate the synaptic leaps involved in the formation of ‘a bold and nervous lofty language’ (73), I would begin with

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this passage from Antony and Cleopatra, marked with a sideline in Melville’s edition. Enobarbus is about to die: Throw my heart Against the flint and hardness of my fault, Which, being dried with grief, will break to powder, And finish all foul thoughts. (IV.ix.15–18) And here Ishmael explains what the white whale means to Ahab. All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it. (184) Enobarbus is so disgusted with himself, he could take his heart and throw it at a wall and watch it break to powder; raging Ahab sends his ‘hot heart’s shell’ to explode against the white wall of all that’s massed against him. Might one image have prompted the other? Not as a hook requires an eye or a plant its seed, yet both passages construct images in an almost identical fashion: they take the inner organ of feeling, and hurl it forth, vehemently. A heart metaphor can be made vivid by being literalized, and states like disgust or rage, which have the pent-up quality of an unvented impulse, are always likely to be imagined in terms of objects susceptible to motion: Donne’s ‘batter my heart three person’d God’ and Hank Williams’s ‘melt your cold cold heart’ suggest the ubiquity of the pattern. Melville’s conception may owe nothing to Shakespeare’s, but there is a qualitative resemblance nonetheless: both passages are remarkable for their power in rendering the intangibles of thought and emotion as vividly pictured dramatic action. All that the white whale means to Ahab is rammed, instance by instance, into the barrel of that concluding sentence. The final image of the heart as a bursting mortar shell, together with the angle and momentum of its phrasing, show Melville writing after Shakespeare rather than writing in his shadow. It is an example of what Matthiessen aptly terms, ‘the matching of the forces’.87

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The prophecies of Fedallah inevitably recall those of the witches in Macbeth, while Ahab’s relationship to Pip is obviously based on scenes between Lear and his Fool. As with the linguistic texture of the novel, these overt parallels are less telling than the many subtler relations of incident and characterization to less explicit Shakespearean precedents, and to Melville’s general inclination to compose scene by scene, varying the number of players and shaping the rise and fall of dramatic energy. Fedallah has a number of predictions that Ahab reads as pledges of survival: the captain must see two hearses on the ocean; only the hemp of a hangman’s noose can kill him; Fedallah himself will go before him, piloting the way. In theatrical parlance, the chapter relating the prophecy is an ‘Ooh’ scene, and the pleasure of it has more to do with the venturing of a bet about outcomes than any uncanny quality. The dark characters in Shakespeare that Melville so much admired – Edmund, Iago – tell the audience exactly what they plan to do. They make a bet whose essential terms are those of a pantomime villain’s ‘Oh yes I will’ to an audience’s ‘Oh no you won’t’. Many of Ahab’s greatest speeches draw on this histrionic quality. In ‘The Quarter-Deck’ Ahab divulges his hidden purpose to the crew: ‘This is what ye have shipped for men! to chase that white whale . . . till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out’ (163). The bet made by the divulging of his purpose is then doubled by a daring statement of hubris: He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me. . . . Who’s over me? The action of the chapter then builds to a scene without dialogue, in which Ahab, grasping the mates’ crossed lances as if they were swords to swear by, and staring intently from face to face, gives a sudden twitch to the irons ‘as though, by some nameless, interior volition, he would fain have shocked into them the same fiery emotion accumulated within the Leyden jar of his own magnetic life’ (165).88 And from that silence, the scene erupts to the crew’s toasting, from the yard glass of a harpoon stock, ‘Death to Moby-Dick! God hunt us all, if we do not hunt Moby-Dick to death!’ (166). The dramatic raising of the stakes through this scene and throughout the novel – with more ‘stage business’ involving corposants, crossed compasses, a broken log line, a trampled sextant and a sunk lifebuoy, as well as the doomsaying hints of Elijah and Gabriel – owe much to a Shakespeare of

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omens, prophecies and destructive vaunts, to a Shakespeare as played in the Bowery rather more than Astor Place. They also owe something to Hawthorne. The more dramatic the scene, the more the novel lifts from modes appropriate to shipdeck realism or Ishmael’s essay-like dissections to the specially heightened reality of ‘romance’ – that ontologically mixed zone where, says Hawthorne, like a familiar room changed by moonlight through gauzy curtains, ‘the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other.’89 Ahab is an old whaling captain elevated through diction and dramatic action to a figure from romance. Peleg assures Ishmael that, ‘stricken, blasted, if he be, Ahab has his humanities!’ (79). Those humanities, those potentially filled-in psychological interiors, are only named, not inquired into. There is a sweet wife and child for whom Ahab has feelings, but for the most part, Melville writes Ahab only in ways that propel and modulate the kinetic force of this character. An exception is the episodes involving Ahab and Pip, the cabin boy, a relationship inspired by Melville’s admiration for the part the Fool and Edgar play in bringing Lear to ‘the sane madness of vital truth’.90 Pip begins as a conventional zany, the tambourinethumping jester of the crew, but loses his wits when, after falling from a rushing whaleboat, he is left to bob like a ‘head of cloves’ (414) in a soul-crushing immensity of ocean. ‘He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom; and therefore his shipmates called him mad’ (414); but Pip is his Captain’s wise fool: ‘unknown worlds . . . empty into’ the boy from whom Ahab draws ‘most wondrous philosophies’ (529). Like Lear on the heath, Ahab finds sympathy with those most reduced by suffering. ‘Hands off that holiness’, he tells a crew-member, and is soon calling upon the ‘frozen heavens’: Look down here. Ye did beget this luckless child, and have abandoned him, ye creative libertines. Here, boy; Ahab’s cabin shall be Pip’s home henceforth, while Ahab lives. Thou touchest my inmost centre, boy; thou art tied to me by cords woven by my heart-strings . . . [S]ee the omniscient gods oblivious of suffering man; and man, though idiotic, and knowing not what he does, yet full of the sweet things of love and gratitude. Come! I feel prouder leading thee by thy black hand, than though I grasped an Emperor’s! (522) For Charles Olson, these Lear-like scenes and exchanges show how closely Melville contoured the novel to Shakespearean tragedy. Ahab is introduced early in the novel as a man ‘of greatly superior natural force with a globular

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brain and a ponderous heart’ (73); as a ‘mighty pageant creature, formed for noble tragedies’ (73) but possessed of a ‘half-wilful over-ruling morbidness at the bottom of his nature’ (74). Besides these intimations of a flaw, Melville is evidently familiar with Coleridge’s observation that ‘one of Shakespeare’s modes of creating characters is to conceive any one intellectual or moral faculty in morbid excess, and then to place himself . . . thus mutilated or diseased, under given circumstances.’91 But a sense of injury, morbidly dwelt upon and pumped up to cosmic levels of grief and rage – to proud Ahab’s ‘NO! in thunder’ – needs to be complemented, argues Olson, by a breach in the essential solipsism of such a character.92 ‘What Pip wrought in Ahab throws over the end of Moby-Dick a veil of grief’, he writes, ‘relaxes the tensions of its hate, and permits a sympathy for the stricken man that Ahab’s insistent diabolism up to the storm would not have evoked’; as a result, ‘The end of this fire-forked tragedy is enriched by a pity in the very jaws of terror.’93 Moby-Dick, in Olson’s Ahab-centred account, seems to check a classroom list of points about Aristotle and Shakespeare: great man; fatal flaw; pity and terror; catharsis. But the novel has alternative interpretative centres in Ishmael and the Whale, and also draws on alternative conceptions of Shakespearean tragedy. Matthiessen suggests Moby-Dick reworks Elizabethan revenge tragedy as a form of drama concerned with ‘titanic uncontrollable forces which seem to dwarf man altogether’.94 John Bryant, by contrast, regards the novel as a ‘duel between two idioms – Ahab’s relentless Shakespearizing and Ishmael’s lyrical poeticizing’ – and finds a special significance in the fact that ‘it is Ishmael’s voice – “Homeric yet homely, more biblical than Shakespearean” – that survives.’95 Weighing Ishmael’s qualities against Ahab’s is likely to form part of any standard reading of the novel, but Bryant – in refreshing contrast to almost every other commentator – sees Ahab and Shakespeare together as propulsive agents that must be jettisoned by the novel’s end. Melville, he argues, ‘uses Shakespeare to purge himself of Shakespeare, as a blow for both his own artistic freedom and America’s cultural independence’.96 One part of Bryant’s evidence is all the cod Shakespeare in Moby-Dick: the famed ‘nervous lofty’ language ‘flops as often as it soars’, and many scenes, he suggests, are ‘dramaturgid’ rather than ‘dramatic’.97 Ahab, to confine myself to a single example, in the midst of his final scene with Pip, cries ‘Oh! spite of a million villains, this makes me a bigot in the fadeless fidelity of man! – and a black! and crazy! – but methinks like cures like applies to him too; he grows so sane again’ (534). There is nothing so very wrong in the concluding half of the sentence, but the opening apostrophe and

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‘a bigot in the fadeless fidelity of man’ seem inadvertently blustering – as if declaimed by the kind of actor Lewes described as ‘speaking words he did not properly understand’. Bryant argues that lapses like these are deliberate and strategic – not signs of haste, of overreaching, or of a tolerance for roughness, but part of a design calculated to reveal the Edwin Forrest in Captain Ahab and the empty demagoguery at the heart of American political culture. Ahab’s theatricality, he concludes, ‘is the false ring of liberty’s bell, signifying a society out of joint’.98 Yet bad writing is likely to break out anywhere in Melville; it is a feature of Ishmael’s undramatic discourse as well as Ahab’s staginess, and seems inextricably and powerfully mixed with everything that strikes us as extraordinary in his prose. I have explored some of the aesthetic problems posed by Melville’s bad writing elsewhere,99 but it strikes me that both Shakespeare and Melville permit and perhaps require an overegged element in their writing that is neither deliberate nor negligent, and whose presence may owe something to speed and fluency, something to a facility for mimicry and an aliveness to connotative range, but also to ambition and a liking for indirection and complexity. The off-notes, one might say, are to a great writer as blubber is to a whale: they promote isolation from an audience and open up range, supplying the psychic insulation the writer needs to express him- or herself more freely. That may be why Melville in the ‘Mosses’ essay admires Shakespeare ‘not so much for what he did do, as for what he did not do, or refrained from doing’ (244). At one point, he contrasts Shakespeare and Hawthorne with the standard successful American writer of his day – someone like Washington Irving, perhaps – who is ‘graceful’, who is ‘very popular and amiable’, who avoids ‘all topics but smooth ones’ (247): And if it be said, that continual success is a proof that a man wisely knows his powers, – it is only to be added, that, in that case, he knows them to be small. Let us believe it, then, once for all, that there is no hope for us in these smooth pleasing writers that know their powers. (248) While I doubt that Ahab is deliberately turned into a ham actor, I am sure John Bryant is right to insist that ‘drama is politics’ in Melville’s novel, as it was on the antebellum American stage. The politics of Ahab’s scenes with Pip seem to me to point to a curious fracture in the novel – one that Mark Twain, years later, also confronted. Pip is black; Ahab is white. While they are hardly alone on a raft, any Lear-like softening of Ahab’s heart towards his young servant would represent a cultural simplification as attractive and

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as false as a happy-ever-after ending to Jim and Huck’s story would have been. Twain could only complete the novel with the jarring return of Tom Sawyer – and with his own shift to a kind of bad writing in the long delayed ending to Huckleberry Finn. Melville could not help but recognize that King Lear offered a pattern for the development of Ahab: one that would find wisdom in madness, redemption in suffering. He could go there only so far, and maybe to go there at all was to miss his way: in Ahab and Pip’s final cabin scene, for instance, the bathos of a manly handshake – Ahab’s ‘Thy hand! – Met!’ (535) – seems misjudged. Pip rather than Ahab is central figure here, and his last soliloquy, alone in the spotlight – ‘Monsieur’s, have ye seen one Pip? – a little negro lad, five feet high, hang-dog look, and cowardly! Jumped from a whaleboat once; – seen him?’ (535) – does not require the motivation of Ahab’s companionable gesture. Melville handles the necessary temptation of Ahab with more assurance in ‘The Symphony’, where he first allows Starbuck to talk so movingly of home, of the wife and child waiting for their return, and then takes the opportunity to describe the psychological effort underpinning Ahab’s resolve, not by developing the character, but by affirming his essential sameness all the more forcefully. As Starbuck warmly urges, Ahab’s ‘glance was averted; like a blighted fruit tree he shook, and cast his last, cindered apple to the soil’ (545). And then another of his monologues is directed outwards, upwards: What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare? Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? (545) There are characters in Shakespeare’s tragedies who, like Ahab, embrace their fate, but they do not bring with them the problem Melville must always have faced in the composition of Moby-Dick: how to conceive a tragic figure of the stature of Lear, Hamlet or Othello, while forgoing all the opportunities available to a character who is capable of change? The answer was to enlarge Ahab precisely to the degree that he cannot change, to imagine his crazed fixity of purpose at a maximum degree and on a continental scale: Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled

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hearts of mountains, under torrents’ beds, unerringly I rush! Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s an angle to the iron way! (168) Whaling, said Olson, is ‘FRONTIER plus INDUSTRY’.100 Ahab is a human locomotive; his ship carries the name of an exterminated Indian tribe; its crew are a frontier mix of native, black, immigrant and old settler types; the low level employees are a manipulable mob, but they also represent the fraternal possibilities of democracy. The whole novel is conceived in a critical relation to Manifest Destiny, to the ‘removal’ of Indians and the mechanized conquest of nature, to the tolerance of slavery, to all the contradictions of a savage democracy. In the ‘Mosses’ essay, Melville posited the coming American Shakespeare as an expression of the nation’s destiny, but he also spoke of truth-telling, of unmasking, of the power of blackness. In Moby-Dick, white becomes the darkest colour of all. Melville uses the robes of Shakespearean drama to remember and focus the tragedy that had always been there in the underside of his nation’s story.

Pierre ‘Don’t you buy it, don’t you read it’, Melville admonished his friend Sarah Morewood in September 1851: Moby-Dick, he teased, is ‘by no means the sort of book for you’.101 Sarah had just sent him a couple of rousing historical romances along with two small bottles of cologne – perhaps to revive a woozy male reader. The right volume for her, Melville hinted in reply, would need to be confected of ‘fine feminine . . . silk’ but his unsuitable latest was ‘woven of ships’ cables & hausers’: A Polar wind blows through it, & birds of prey hover over it. Warn all gentle fastidious people from so much as peeping into the book.102 Would there were some charm against anticipating the tenor of reviews. While notices were better than dismissive, every gentle and fastidious reader was informed that the charms of the Polynesian travelogues were not to be found in the pages of Moby-Dick, that the lessons of Mardi had not been heeded. The nub of the problem, in the words of one critic, was a ‘constant leaning towards wild and aimless extravagance’ which had, ‘in a melancholy degree, overflown, and, so to speak, drowned . . . the very possibility of human interest in . . . Herman Melville’s works.’103 American sales of the

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novel would bring in $556, less than a third of the income he derived from Omoo.104 His next book was to be written for the lady reader. Early in 1852, he was promising Sophia Hawthorne ‘a rural bowl of milk’ rather than another work washed in sea spray; by April, he was dangling a ‘new book possessing unquestionable novelty’ before his English publisher.105 Pierre: Or the Ambiguities was ‘very much more calculated for popularity’ than anything he had yet written, he explained, ‘being a regular romance, with a mysterious plot to it, & stirring passions at work, representing a new and elevated aspect of American life’.106 That may have been the novel Melville started to write, but as he had told Hawthorne the previous year: What I feel most moved to write, that is banned, – it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches.107 Nowhere in Melville’s work is the strain between writing as he pleased and catering to the public as palpable as in Pierre. Much of the book is written in Melville’s grand thought-diving mode, but much of it looks as if he was pandering to a taste for mysterious plots and heaving passions, and despising the necessity. For a large proportion of readers, the result is not so much a botch as a symptom requiring diagnosis. One early review was headlined, ‘HERMAN MELVILLE CRAZY’; the critic, V. S. Pritchett, believed the book was composed ‘on one of those waves of hysterical exhaustion that are among the calamities of authorship’, while John Updike felt the book ‘runs a constant fever’, and thought the characters had been ‘jerked to and fro by some unexplained rage of the author’s’.108 If there were a hospital for sick books, Pierre would definitely be in it. But the novel’s pulse-takers have mistaken its tone, and a new phase in Melville’s response to Shakespeare may explain why. Pierre is the American story of a young prince who loves his mother a little too much. No ghosts walk the manorial battlements of Saddle Meadows, but when a beautiful young woman with long ebon hair turns out to be his illegitimate half-sister, our hero, Pierre Glendinning, as if internalizing an injunction from his dead father, resolves to put something rotten in the family to rights. He will feign emotional distance from his fiancée – the pale, loyal, mother-like Lucy Tartan – and enter into a pretend marriage with his mysterious sister, Isabel. The two elope to the city, where Pierre seeks his fortune as an author. Strange to relate, everything goes horribly wrong. Pierre’s mother dies of the poison stab of betrayal, and when the

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author of ‘The Tropical Summer: A Sonnet’ and ‘The Weather: A Thought’ (247) ‘immaturely attempts a mature work’ (282), his volcanic efforts bring only poverty, humiliation and despair. The saintly Lucy comes to live with the disgraced couple, but is in turn tracked to the metropolis by her brother and Pierre’s cousin Glen. After Pierre kills Glen in a fit of fury, he is thrown into a cell deep in the ‘Tombs’ of New York where he is soon joined by his dark and fair angels. Lucy dies of shock upon learning that Pierre and Isabel are brother and sister, whereupon the star-crossed siblings take poison and die, just like Romeo and Juliet, in each other’s arms. As with Moby-Dick, readers will find passages of the most extraordinary power in the midst of writing that can seem overdone, indulgent or torpid. Enriching that not uncommon mixture for Melville are passages like the following: As the door of the breakfast-room closed upon Pierre, Mrs. Glendinning rose, her fork unconsciously retained in her hand. Presently, as she paced the room in deep, rapid thought, she became conscious of something strange in her grasp, and without looking at it, to mark what it was, impulsively flung it from her. A dashing noise was heard, and then a quivering. She turned; and hanging by the side of Pierre’s portrait, she saw her own smiling picture pierced through, and the fork, whose silver tines had caught in the painted bosom, vibratingly rankled in the wound. She advanced swiftly to the picture, and stood intrepidly before it. ‘Yes, thou art stabbed! but the wrong hand stabbed thee; this should have been thy silver blow’, turning to Pierre’s portrait face. ‘Pierre, Pierre, thou hast stabbed me with a poisoned point.’ (130–1) No other kitchen implement would do. It has to be a fork, and it has to lodge ‘vibratingly’ to suggest the kind of sound a comic strip artist would render onomatopoeically. Yet for all the humour, portraits and the injuries they sustain, along with statues and figures made of or inscribed in stone (in French: pierre), combine in a closely pursued line of speculation concerning representation and what can be known of the self. To plumb those depths turns out to be like a geologist whose probes find that our central core ‘consists of nothing but surface stratified on surface’ (285); or else to be like an archaeologist opening an Egyptian tomb: ‘By vast pains we mine into the pyramid; by horrible gropings we come to the central room; with joy we espy the sarcophagus; but we lift the lid – and no body is there! – appallingly vacant as vast is the soul of a man!’ (285).

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The pattern is by no means consistent, but when characters in Pierre speak, they tend to sound like Mrs Glendinning addressing her wounded portrait, delivering antique and grotesquely worded speeches in a histrionic manner, as if the lines they had been given had been purloined from a badly written play. The narrator will tend to mock the sentiments in some way (the way is often dry and circuitous) or spring towards passages of analysis and speculation. A deliberate staginess and sly humour are hand in glove with the scepticism. In the second scene of Act II in Hamlet, the Prince exchanges words with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Melville scored lines 246 through 268, double-sidelining Hamlet’s speech, ‘there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so’; in the margin he wrote, ‘Here is forcibly shown the great Montaignism of Hamlet.’ These comments have a direct bearing on a central section of Pierre. Not far from the Glendinning estate, Pierre as a boy often climbed a large elongated balancing rock. Its shape, relative to the ground, would be that of the head of a sperm whale to its jaw. Soon after Isabel reveals her identity to him, into that narrow aperture, with the chest-crushing weight only inches from his skin, crawls Pierre to contemplate life, the universe and lost certainties. (The stone, which Pierre thinks of as the Terror Stone, is also known as the Memnon stone.) He begins to soliloquize in the opulent manner just described: ‘If the miseries of the undisclosable things in me, shall ever unhorse me from my manhood’s seat; . . . if Life is to prove a burden I can not bear without ignominious cringings; if indeed our actions are all foreordained, and we are Russian serfs to Fate’ (134) – and so forth. A cheerfully chirping bird alights on the tip of the immovable balancing stone – a mocking touch before the narrator changes up a gear to deliver a passage of genuinely fine writing prompted by the name of Memnon. For Memnon was that dewey, royal boy, son of Aurora, and born King of Egypt who, with enthusiastic rashness flinging himself on another’s account into a rightful quarrel, fought hand to hand with his overmatch, and met his boyish and most dolorous death beneath the walls of Troy. His wailing subjects built a monument in Egypt to commemorate his untimely fate. Touched by the breath of the bereaved Aurora, every sunrise that statue gave forth a mournful broken sound, as of a harpstring suddenly sundered, being too harshly wound. Herein lies an unsummed world of grief. For in this plaintive fable we find embodied the Hamletism of the antique world; the Hamletism

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of three thousand years ago: ‘The flower of virtue cropped by a too rare mischance’. And the English Tragedy is but Egyptian Memnon, Montaignized and modernized; for being but a mortal man Shakspeare had his fathers too. Now as the Memnon Statue survives down to this present day, so does that nobly-striving but ever shipwrecked character in some royal youths (for both Memnon and Hamlet were the sons of kings), of which that statue is the melancholy type. But Memnon’s sculptured woes did once melodiously resound; now all is mute . . . in a bantering, barren, and prosaic, heartless age, Aurora’s music-moan is lost among our drifting sands, which whelm alike the monument and the dirge. (135–6) As Homer to Shakespeare, so Shakespeare to Melville. In Pierre, Melville takes a ‘montaignized and modernized’ Hamlet and Americanizes it with a twist. Hamlet is a prince; Pierre is only preppy. Hamlet is indecisive; Pierre, who has studied the lesson of the play, acts on his impulses and is lost. The melancholic prince has a sceptical cast of mind; Pierre is credulous. Cushioned by privilege, he at first believes anything is possible, then disillusion turns him into a sophomore relativist, avowing the same lack of truth everywhere. Words like vacant and empty recur in the novel. Hamlet is the shell Melville borrows for a novel whose best precedent in Shakespeare is Troilus and Cressida – the heroic story of Troy hollowed out and retold in an earlier ‘bantering, barren, and prosaic, heartless age’. The stylistic difficulties of Shakespeare’s problem play – some speeches are spoken in earnest while others are high-flown pastiche, the tonal variation between short and often violently contrasting scenes, the way characters go both with and against type, the liking for preposterous vocabulary – are similar to the difficulties that have slowed the reception of Pierre, with its oscillation between sentimental, gothic, discursive and comic modes, with its disconcerting mix of soap-boxy psychodrama and philosophical acumen. The beefcake element in Troilus and Cressida is suggestive too: the novel’s most illuminating critic, James Creech, argues that the ostensible scandal of sibling incest is double-coded.109 A young man deserts his fiancée for his half-sister; with an extra turn on the dial of the safe, the substitution of Isabel for a homosexual lover clicks neatly into place. This is not a new line on the old problem of what is ‘wrong’ with the author, but a way of responding to the queerness of Melville’s style. Pierre is written in a manner that seems far removed from the progressive and confident aspirations of ‘Young America’ – or rather, it is ‘Young America’, curdled. In his complex

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disaffiliations, Melville, in a still provincial Manhattan, seems the precursor of a coming school of New York writers and artists, of whom Susan Sontag would write: ‘Camp taste doesn’t propose that it is in bad taste to be serious; it doesn’t sneer at someone who succeeds in being seriously dramatic. What it does is to find the success in certain passionate failures.’110

‘Shakespeare’s Core’ After the unmitigated failure of Pierre, Melville turned first towards magazine fiction and, once the idea of writing for an income was abandoned, towards poetry. A late masterpiece, Billy Budd, Sailor, was found among his papers after his death in 1891. The works of Shakespeare continue to be a source of allusions, parallels and references in most of these later works, but – with the notable exception of The Confidence-Man – they are not closely interwoven with Melville’s purposes or style. In Billy Budd, for example, John Claggart, the master of arms who maliciously accuses the young sailor of mutiny – yet ‘who might have loved Billy but for fate and ban’ – is patterned after Iago, while in ‘The Encantadas’ (1854), Melville’s account of the Galapagos Islands, the degenerate Creole settler Oberlus is explicitly modelled on Caliban.111 Several later works refer to Timon of Athens – not a play that is widely esteemed, but one Melville ranked highly; in ‘Hawthorne and His Mosses’, Timon is mentioned in the same breath as Lear and Othello as one of Shakespeare’s dark truth-tellers. It is characteristic of Pierre that Timon’s grand themes of betrayal and disaffection are treated as if they were a psychological malaise to which tender young authors are susceptible: after receiving hollow expressions of literary esteem, ‘an incipient Timonism . . . slide[s] into Pierre’ (252). Misanthropy also slides, and with a keener exploration of the possibilities of sardonic treatment, into the story of ‘Bartleby, The Scrivener’ (1853) – the ‘incurably forlorn’ copyist who responds to his employer’s requests with the passive-aggressive mantra: ‘I would prefer not to.’112 The benign lawyer who narrates the story is a variant of Alcibiades visiting Timon in his cave – ‘I am thy friend and pity thee, dear Timon’ (IV.iii.98) – but his do-gooding intentions are rebuffed by Bartleby’s politer version of Timon’s ‘Prithee, beat thy drum and get thee gone’ (IV.iii.97), ‘I had rather be alone’ (IV.iii.99), ‘Timon cares not’ (V.ii.56). When the narrator finds he can neither benefit not budge his inert employee, he soon finds there are limits to these tugs upon his heart-strings, and must ruefully weigh his perception of naked vulnerable humanity against the insubstantiality of all social ties.

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A note to Battle-Pieces (1866), a volume of poems on the Civil War, invites readers to consider poems such as ‘Lee in the Capitol’, which imagines the defeated general speaking before the Reconstruction Committee of Congress, in the light of similar liberties taken by Shakespeare in his history plays.113 Another poem, ‘The Coming Storm’, concerns a landscape painting of that description owned by the Shakespearean actor Edwin Booth that Melville saw exhibited in New York in April 1865. Booth – a Union sympathizer – was in the midst of a hundred night season of Hamlet in New York that same April when the astonishing news came that his younger brother, John Wilkes Booth, had assassinated Abraham Lincoln. ALL feeling hearts must feel for him Who felt this picture. Presage dim – Dim inklings from the shadowy sphere Fixed him and fascinated here. A demon-cloud like the mountain one Burst on a spirit as mild As this urned lake, the home of shades, But Shakespeare’s pensive child Never the lines had lightly scanned, Steeped in fable, steeped in fate; The Hamlet in his heart was ‘ware, Such hearts can antedate. No utter surprise can come to him Who reaches Shakespeare’s core; That which we seek and shun is there – Man’s final lore.114 The poem is about sympathy, but I am not sure it is consoling to know that an actor familiar with Shakespeare must be prepared for darkness. Among the ironies gathering like storm-clouds behind this poem, John Wilkes Booth had a year earlier taken part with his brother in a much publicized charity performance of Julius Caesar. The proceeds went towards the statue of Shakespeare in Central Park.115 Plays and players are a concern of ‘The Two Temples’, an unpublished story rejected for its anti-religious sentiments.116 It is a ‘diptych’ story – a model Melville liked to use in a magazine, as it draws economically on the

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possibilities of two sharply contrasting scenes. In the first, the narrator wishes to attend church service in one of New York’s finest cathedrals, but as he is improperly dressed, a mean-faced beadle bars him from a seat in the pews. He spots a ‘no-entry’ door leading to the bell tower, and slyly gains admittance to a high window overlooking the prosperous congregation, and hears a forceful sermon on the text: ‘Ye are the salt of the earth’ (307). On skipping down the stairs, the narrator finds, to his horror, that the door has been locked, and he must abjectly ring the bells to summon the outraged assistance of the beadle. The second scene takes place in London’s West End. The narrator, who has promptly been dismissed his post as a doctor accompanying a wealthy young female invalid on her overseas tour, is once again without cash. The warmth of a theatre invites him in and, while loitering in the lobby, he is not only offered a free pass, but also, as he takes his seat in the ‘gods’, a free mug of beer. The main feature is Richelieu, and playing the cardinal is William Macready, who – in the perfection of his acting and in the fervour of the audience’s response – infallibly reminds the narrator of the performance of Christianity in New York. It may seem a story of facile reversals – the art of religion, the religion of art – but there is a promising twist: the narrator plays the part of a confidence man.

Conning Shakespeare All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players, Who have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts. As You Like It (II.vii.139–42) In The Confidence-Man, these ‘familiar lines’ close a duel between two dissimulating confidence tricksters, each of whom is disconcerted to discover the other has been playing him for a sucker.117 As one leaves in a huff – or the appearance of a huff – the other is ‘at a loss determine where exactly the fictitious character had been dropped, and the real one, if any, resumed’ (223). It is the phrase ‘if any’ that prompts the other to recall this ‘theatrum mundi’ passage from Shakespeare, and to imply it must be understood not metaphorically but literally. In ‘The Two Temples’, there is nothing peculiarly American in the suggestion that a new world church and an old world theatre might resemble each other – that everyone acts a part. The Confidence-Man, by contrast, takes

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place one April Fool’s Day on a Mississippi steamboat named the Fidèle – after Imogen’s alias in Cymbeline. Among those on board are: Fine ladies in slippers, and moccasined squaws; Northern speculators and Eastern philosophers; English, Irish, German, Scotch, Danes; Santa Fe traders in striped blankets, and Broadway bucks in cravats of cloth of gold; fine-looking Kentucky boatmen, and Japanese-looking Mississippi cotton-planters; Quakers in full drab, and United States soldiers in full regimentals; slaves, black, mulatto, quadroon; modish young Spanish Creoles, and old-fashioned French Jews; Mormons and Papists; . . . hardshell Baptists and clay-eaters; grinning negroes, and Sioux chiefs solemn as high-priests. (9) And the Mississippi, as varied as themselves, ‘pours them along, helterskelter, in one cosmopolitan and confident tide’ (9). It is a frontier setting: the characters are all on the move and strangers to each other; no one’s past can possibly count for much, so there are unparalleled opportunities for self-fashioning in a new world which is busily converting the traditions of the old into costumes. Melville began to get this quintessentially American topic in range with ‘The Two Temples’, but the more acute and unsettling comparison would not be acting and religion, but theatre and the market. The entire action of the novel is a series of confidence pitches, and the stories told by these ‘man-charmers’(237) are designed to manipulate the credulous and the mistrustful alike. Character is commensurately reduced: no character, and especially not its central character, Frank Goodman, the cosmopolitan, has any depth or interiority. His identity literally changes – he might be a Negro cripple, he might be a representative of the Philosophical Intelligence Office or the Black Rapids Coal Company – but in every appearance he is all salesman, all front, looking ‘animatedly about him with a sort of gratulatory affinity and longing, expressive of the very soul of sociability’ (68), or rousing a passenger from his reveries with ‘a cordial slap on the shoulder, accompanied by a spicy volume of tobaccosmoke, out of which came a voice, sweet as a seraph’s:–“A penny for your thoughts my fine fellow” ’ (130). As that phrase promises, entering into an exchange with the Confidence-Man is bound to cost something to someone, yet no one can ultimately resist the investment of trust. ‘Confidence is the indispensable basis of all sorts of business transactions’, the trickster explains to a mark he is fleecing; ‘Without it, commerce between man and man, as between country and country, would, like a watch, wind down and

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stop’ (128). As Jean-Christophe Agnew has observed, Melville exactly fits plot and character to ‘the transactional or “performance” principles of commercial capitalism’ and, in the sinister dance of the confidence men around their victims, shows how ‘every character, every relation, and every form of discourse eventually succumbs to the moral and epistemological ambiguities of a permanent theatre and a placeless market.’118 A conman often succeeds by nudging his mark into expressing a good opinion of human nature, then acting on it with a request for a loan or donation. How might literature – and Shakespeare in particular – augment the circulation of confidence in humankind? One answer from this novel is that Shakespeare does so through the good repute of his name; the plays are frequently quoted and misquoted – the un-Timonlike cosmopolitan announces, ‘I am Philanthropus, and love mankind’ (231) – and his more gullible victims, on the whole, are ‘not disposed to question the justice of Shakespeare’s thought’ (59). A second answer is that Shakespeare is shamefully destructive of trust. Two wily Confidence-Men, Frank Goodman and Charlie Noble, each encouraging the other to fill his glass and drink, each seeking the opening of an advantage, ponder what to make of Polonius’s advice to Laertes. The lines, ‘The friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel’ (170) would almost merit approval, if it were nor for the insidious qualification of ‘adoption tried’. Implications like that are unsettling, agrees the other, inviting his opponent to spell out ‘how Shakespeare meant the words he put in Polonius’s mouth’ (171) – but the exploitable reply he is seeking (a friend would need an opportunity to prove himself a friend) is evaded through an exchange of equivocations over the difficulty of gauging Shakespeare’s intentions. It is thought, by some, suggests Charlie, that Shakespeare means to open people’s eyes – cue mock incredulity – or to corrupt morals, a possibility an innocent soul could not begin to fathom. At which point Frank Goodman tells his companion: ‘Of course you reject so crude an hypothesis; and yet, to confess, in reading Shakespeare in my closet, struck by some passage, I have laid down the volume, and said: “This Shakespeare is a queer man”. At times seeming irresponsible, he does not always seem reliable. There appears to be a certain what shall I call it? – hidden sun, say, about him, at once enlightening and mystifying. Now, I should be afraid to say what I have sometimes thought that hidden sun might be.’ ‘Do you think it was the true light?’ with clandestine geniality again filling the other’s glass.

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‘I would prefer to decline answering a categorical question there. Shakespeare has got to be a kind of deity. Prudent minds, having certain latent thoughts concerning him, will reserve them in a condition of lasting probation.’ (171–2) Like characters in a photographic negative, the two confidence men are in fact affirming the findings of ‘Hawthorne and His Mosses’: Shakespeare’s meanings are dark and by no means reassuring, and the bard’s status as an ‘unapproachable’ deity is inversely proportional to the degree to which he is not closely read. Any coming American Shakespeare, Melville argued in that essay, will not be recognized by a public eager for something that already looks old, that wears the imprint of cultural heritage on its covers; instead, ‘great geniuses are parts of the times; they themselves are the times; and possess a correspondent coloring’ (246). Not Autolycus then, the Shakespearean rogue whose humour, says the Confidence-Man, ‘oils his mischievousness’ (172) and sows distrust, but his modern avatar, the disseminator of confidence, the increaser of geniality, who might be described – though hardly identified – as ‘A man neither tall nor stout, neither short nor gaunt, but with a body fitted, as by measure, to the service of his mind . . . one less favoured perhaps in his features than his clothes’ (139). William Cream the barber, tricked into giving the Confidence-Man a free shave, considers him ‘Quite an Original’ (237). The phrase sparks the last of three metafictional speculations on what the theatrical presentation of self in a market economy might mean for art. Chapters 14 and 33 dispose of the expectations of realism – consistency of character, fidelity to life – and chapter 44 returns to Shakespeare and problems of originality. What is popularly meant by originality of character in literature is, Melville suggests, merely oddness, quirkiness, novelty. Truly original characters – he mentions Hamlet, Don Quixote, Milton’s Satan – are rare, and what is important about them is not what is manifested under a spotlight; rather, ‘the original character, essentially such, is like a revolving Drummond light, raying away from itself all round it – everything is lit by it, everything starts up to it (mark how it is with Hamlet), so that, in certain minds, there follows upon the adequate conception of such a character, an effect, in its way, akin to that which in Genesis attends upon the beginning of things’ (239). Let there be light? The effect he has in mind is only akin to that. Melville invented at least two original characters: Ahab, who says to the fire, ‘thou leapest out of darkness; but I am darkness leaping out of light’ (507), and the Confidence-Man, whose masquerade ends with an ominous ‘Increase in Seriousness’ as he extinguishes the cabin lamp, and leads a gulled old man,

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vainly clutching a money-belt and a life preserver (it is really a potty) in each trusting hand, into the vault of darkness (251). These characters, these endings, take a correspondent colouring from the uncertainties of Melville’s own time and place, from a raw and rudderless nation drifting towards war, but he also found an enabling precedent for his own art in Shakespeare’s blackness, in the ‘infinite obscure of his background’ against which those ‘occasional flashings-forth of the intuitive Truth’, those ‘short, quick probings at the very axis of reality’ would radiate like dark light from a ‘hidden sun’.

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Chapter 3

Henry James Peter Rawlings

Prologue ‘At twelve’ James ‘received a copy of Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare’ and he recounts in his autobiographical A Small Boy and Others the ‘almost unbearable intensity’ of seeing his first Shakespeare play, A Comedy of Errors, an intensity which in complex and shifting ways was never to weaken.1 On the occasion of his second Shakespearean night, he rallied especially to Dogberry in a ‘rapt vision of Much Ado, which may have been preceded by the dazzled apprehension of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Broadway’ where he was initiated into ‘the charm above all, so seen, of the play within the play’.2 In her invaluable, but often rather literal-minded The Book World of Henry James: Appropriating the Classics (1987), Adeline R. Tintner identifies many of the strands of Henry James’s lifelong encounters with Shakespeare. Shakespeare figures prominently in James’s early correspondence with Thomas Sergeant Perry where he is described as ‘the greatest of poets’;3 and it is clear from this correspondence that the young Henry James steeped himself in Shakespeare: It is very pleasant up here but rather lonely, the only other inhabitants being Shakespeare, Goethe and Charles Lamb. There are no women. Thackeray was up for a few days but was turned out for calling me a snob because I walked arm-in-arm with Shakespeare.4 ‘[I]f Shakespeare is the greatest of poets’, Henry wrote William in 1869, ‘Tintoretto is assuredly the greatest of painters. He belongs to the same family & produces very much the same effect.’5 In 1872, James visited ‘Shakespeare country in Warwickshire’ and later suggested (improbably enough) to his brother William that his first child should be named Shakespeare.6

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In James’s later years, Tintner argues, ‘the number of Shakespeare associations and activities multiply, as we see from the diaries’.7 ‘The Victorians’, argues Adrian Poole, ‘had Shakespeare in their blood’. For Dickens alone, ‘[n]o single metaphor’ could adequately convey, the ‘range and complexity’ of his indebtedness to the bard. ‘Think for example of borrowing, stealing, appropriating, inheriting, assimilating; of being influential, inspired, dependent, indebted, haunted, possessed; of homage, mimicry, travesty, echo, allusion and intertextuality.’8 Henry James’s relation to Shakespeare is less excessive than that of Dickens, on this account, but it suffuses his fiction and criticism. If the idiom of Dickens’s debt to Shakespeare is theatrical, broadly speaking, then James’s is dramatic. Few critics have captured the force of this contrast more than Edmund Wilson: ‘One would be in a position to appreciate James better if one compared him with the dramatists of the seventeenth century’ and ‘even Shakespeare’: These poets are not, like Dickens and Hardy, writers of melodrama – either humorous or pessimistic, nor secretaries of society like Balzac, nor prophets like Tolstoy: they are occupied simply with the presentation of conflicts of moral character, which they do not concern themselves about softening or averting.9 The memorable terms in which Melville expressed his awe of Shakespeare takes us nearer to James than to Dickens: But it is those deep far-away things in him; those occasional flashingsforth of the intuitive Truth in him; those short, quick probings at the very axis of reality; – these are the things that make Shakespeare, Shakespeare. Through the mouths of the dark characters of Hamlet, Timon, Lear, and Iago, he craftily says, or sometimes insinuates the things, which we feel to be so terrifically true, that it were all but madness for any good man, in his own proper character, to utter, or even hint of them.10 ‘Shakespeare’ – constituted for James not least in terms of overwhelming and suggestive senses of absence, mystery, silence and all things enigmatic and imponderable – is to an almost unfathomable extent the allusive medium of his criticism, fiction, drama and immense epistolary corpus. As Kellett argues, ‘[i]n one sense all, or practically all, our writing is quotation’ (14) and that in a literary domain where there are ‘no boundaries and tariff-walls’ (92), ‘every book has many authors’.11 Hence the practical and

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methodological difficulties of distinguishing between allusion and suffusion, say, are immense. These problems and delights are compounded and intensified in the Shakespearean domain not least because so many words and lines from the plays have simply become proverbial given that for countless writers, ‘Shakespeare functions heavily in English intertextuality’.12 My preoccupation here can be, then, hardly at all with the almost indeterminable number of direct, oblique, intended or unintended allusions to Shakespeare in James. Tintner, for one, exhibits many of the delights and pitfalls of hunting for allusions to and uses of Shakespeare in James’s fiction. Tintner’s broad argument is that James moved from an earlier period in which Shakespearean plots, characters and motifs are sometimes crudely, and usually conspicuously, appropriated to a later in which Shakespeare figures much more obliquely. The ‘more mature networkings of the Shakespearean matter’ show a freer, more subtle, and more generalized attitude toward the source. But in the earliest attempts to do his Shakespearean thing there is frequently a one-to-one compressed correspondence between the language and figures of Shakespeare’s work and that of his own.13 Principally, James’s more extensive and frequently oblique adaptations, redactions and incorporations of Shakespeare’s plots and characters are to be found in these and other short stories rather than in the novels. Hamlet is cast as the illegitimate son of Claudius and Gertrude in ‘Master Eustace’ with its climax in Eustace’s bungled suicide, and the Shylock of ‘Guest’s Confession’, where Saratoga replaces Venice, is not a Jewish outsider but a member of a family enmeshed in strife over the misappropriation of bonds.14 Ridicule rather than veneration (notwithstanding Tintner) hovers in James’s destructive imitations of Hamlet’s soliloquies in ‘Master Eustace’. Dramatized here is wilful petulance rather than soul-searching metaphysics as the ridicule modulates into the ridiculous at James’s expense, perhaps: She has blighted my life – she has blasted my rights. She has insulted me – dishonoured me. Am I a man to treat in that fashion? Am I a man to be made light of? Brought up as a flower and trampled as a weed! Bound in cotton and steeped in vitriol.15 ‘The story is not my own’ the narrator announces in ‘Master Eustace’ as James signals both what was to be a continuing proclivity for borrowed

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material and a concomitant emphasis on character and characterization at the expense of plot.16 For Kenneth Graham, the mid- to later-Victorian preoccupation with character and plot took its cue from ‘an ancient-debating point in the theory of drama and the epic’ and was intensified by the increasing interest in ‘human motives and psychology’.17 The literary pervasiveness of all things Shakespearean in the nineteenth century is also critically important. An emphasis on plot came to be regarded in the critical quarter that James occupied at least as antique and unreal. James’s constant incorporation of retailed anecdotes and plots is both a genuflection in the direction of Shakespeare and a relegation, however disingenuous at times, of the general significance or importance of the mechanics of plots and plotting. When addressing what he regarded as this ‘old-fashioned distinction between the novel of character and the novel of incident’, between the ‘novel and the romance’, Henry James argued in ‘The Art of Fiction’ for the interdependence of ‘character’ and ‘incident’; indeed, given that the ‘terms may be transposed’, the assertion is of some kind of seamless unity.18 Wallace Martin has suggested that in ‘The Art of Fiction’ ‘function and characters cannot be separated because they are always in a reciprocal relationship, one determining the other’.19 James might have wanted to argue for this kind of reciprocity, but character emerges as dominant nevertheless: character is the ‘determination of incident’ whereas incident is only the ‘illustration of character’. Character is presupposed as that which determines those incidents which, in turn, only ‘illustrate’, or cast light on that character. For James, the novel ‘as a living thing’, and ‘organism’, could only thrive if there was this hierarchy of interdependent parts.20 James celebrated in Ivan Turgenev what he saw as novels and stories organized around and generated by character rather than plot. ‘Character, character expressed and exposed, is in all these things what we inveterately find’, he wrote. Yet that appositional ‘character expressed and exposed’ undermines the primacy of ‘character’, and implies that notions of individual choice, freedom and control are highly tenuous.21 At one pole, the simplest account of Turgenev ‘is to say that the mere play of character constitutes in every case his sufficient drama’; at the other, ‘it is of his essence that he sets in the general flood of life, steeped in its relations and contacts, struggling or submerged, a hurried particle in the stream. At the discursive level, character is all; but in ‘essence’ such characters struggle in, and are submerged by, the ‘general flood of life’.22 Tintner sees ‘Eugene Pickering’, published (1874) three years after ‘Master Eustace’, as a ‘burlesque’ of two plays,23 Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra, James combining ‘two dramas of young and mature passion’.24

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If ‘Eugene Pickering’ is less Shakespearean than Tintner would have it, ‘Guest’s Confession’ (1872) is rather more in that it emulates to a degree Shakespeare’s incorporation of the past, or tales of it at least, as a searing commentary on the present.25 This tale is, in every sense, Shakespeare ‘brought down to date’:26 [S]he might have been fancied a strayed shepherdess from some rococo Arcadia, which had melted into tradition during some profane excursion of her own, so that she found herself saddled in our prosy modern world with this absurdly perpetual prime.27 The ‘all that glisters is not gold’ (II.vii.66) of The Merchant of Venice28 is literalized in this story as the casket’s contents are traduced into the dollar-yielding commodity of a silver mine, courtly conventions degenerating into the business of staking ‘claims’.29 As he pursues Mrs Guest in an anti-pastoral environment akin to that of T. S. Eliot’s sawdust-ridden ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’,30 Crawford’s mining for silver takes on arachnid, predatory and menacingly erotic dimensions as not only The Merchant of Venice but also The Tempest is invoked: ‘the flies buzz with the air of ecstatically suspended resolve proper to a man who has sunk a shaft deep into the very stuff that dreams are made of.’31 ‘The Middle Years’ (1893), which Tintner allies with James’s 1907 ‘Introduction to The Tempest’, explores the predicament of a dying writer at 50 as James indirectly, it could be argued, models the character of Doctor Hugh, the Countess, and Miss Vernham on Ariel, Sycorax and Caliban.32 Tintner is as confident in the Shakespearean source of the play as she is occasionally as vague in substantiation: The location, the isolation on an island, the magic of art, the relation of the characters in the tale comparable to Prospero, Caliban, and Ariel, and certain related phrases seem to give away the source. Above all, the mood is that of the play and the relinquishing of the magic of art near the sea.33 Two stories published in 1902, which are considered extensively below, mark James’s continuing rather than resurgent interest in both direct and much less direct engagements with Shakespeare. Oddly in this context, Tintner observes that ‘[t]he association between Hyacinth and Hamlet’ in The Princess Casamassima ‘leads us to believe that Hamlet’s influence has now weakened’ but that ‘James’s interest in Shakespeare was almost entirely

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technical by this stage’.34 ‘The Birthplace’, a later (1903) much more intense and complex story, capitalizes not simply on speculations about the authenticity of the Stratford-upon-Avon birthplace but on why and whether the question matters.35 The gender trouble at the core of Shakespeare’s romantic comedies figures prominently in ‘The Papers’, a story which at first sight appears only distantly connected with As You Like It. Both of these stories are considered extensively below.36 Engagements with, as distinct from sporadic and unsystematic allusions to, Shakespeare in James’s novels are often more oblique and less sustained than in the tales. Shakespeare suffuses The Tragic Muse (1890) with its rather heavy-handed treatment of the public and private perils of the actress Miriam Rooth whose ‘on-stage success as the unwavering Juliet’, for John P. McCombe, ‘is thrown into relief by an off-stage romantic life that finds the actress entertaining the suits of a would-be painter, a diplomat, and her business manager’.37 In The Outcry, first a play (1909) and then a novel (1911), James seems to ally the plot (for Tintner, at least) with that of King Lear once a ‘basic similarity between father and daughter’ (Cordelia, I guess) is allowed. Tintner argues, again at a stretch and rather insubstantially, that [o]nce the basic similarity between the father and the daughter in Lear and The Outcry and the translation of the tragedy into a comedy are accepted, then certain devices which James employs can be seen as originating in the Elizabethan play.38 Had the novel ever been finished, firmer ground might have been available for Tintner’s concluding that The Ivory Tower (published posthumously in 1917) resembles Hamlet as the ‘hero’ faces the ‘obligations and consequences of his tainted inheritance’.39 Graham (‘Gray’) Fielder has returned from Europe to Newport, Rhode Island to see his dying uncle from whom Fielder subsequently inherits a fortune. As the novel breaks off, the financially inept Gray entrusts the management of this fortune to the evidently unscrupulous Horton Vint. As it is, the reader can only ponder the significance of an early direct reference to Hamlet: No one was dying now, all that was ended, or would be after the funeral, and the nephew himself was surely to be supposed alive, in face of great sequels, including preparations for those obsequies, with an intensity beyond all former experience. This in fact Horton had all the air of recognising under proof as soon as Gray advanced upon him with both

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hands out; he couldn’t not have taken in the highly quickened state of the young black-clad figure so presented, even though soon and unmistakably invited to note that his own visit and his own presence had much to do with the quickening. Gray was in complete mourning, which had the effect of making his face show pale, as compared with old aspects of it remembered by his friend – who was, it may be mentioned, afterwards to describe him to Cissy Foy as looking, in the conditions, these including the air of the big bedimmed palace room, for all the world like a sort of ‘happy Hamlet’.40 Earlier and more directly and extensively, James followed his domestication of the play-within-the play in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in his dramatic cameo Pyramus and Thisbe (1869), in which two amorously inclined neighbours communicate through an apartment wall, with its more sustained deployment (drawing both on A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Hamlet) in The Princess Casamassima (1886).41 In A Small Boy and Others, James recollects his encounter with Daniel Maclise’s painting The Play Scene in Hamlet (1842): ‘I could never have enough’ of what he then saw as ‘[t]he finest composition in the world’.42 Ever mistrustful of his reader’s capabilities, James is anxious that the point of his meta-theatrical incorporation is not overlooked: So pleasant was it to be enthroned with fine ladies in a dusky, spacious receptacle which framed the bright picture of the stage and made one’s own situation seem a play within the play.43 There are more significant Shakespearean deployments in the domain of illusion, reality and the illusion of reality in What Maisie Knew (1897), perhaps the most metaphysical of James’s novels. At Folkestone, as the novel takes on apocalyptic dimensions, Maisie begins to grasp the extent of her egregious misunderstanding of the relationship between her mother and a Captain now ‘the biggest cad in all London’ (187): There rose in her a fear, a pain, a vision ominous, precocious, of what it might mean for her mother’s fate to have forfeited such a loyalty as that. There was literally an instant in which Maisie fully saw – saw madness and desolation, saw ruin and darkness and death. ‘I’ve thought of him often since, and I hoped it was with him – with him –’ Here, in her emotion, it failed her, the breath of her filial hope. (What Maisie Knew 187)44

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Maisie first encounters the Captain in a Kensington Gardens likened to the ‘Forest of Arden’; and there, as part of a romance in which Sir Claude has adopted for Maisie and himself the roles from As You Like It of ‘banished duke’ and the ‘artless country wrench’,45 Maisie struggles to extract the Captain’s protestations of ‘loyalty’ towards her mother: ‘Of course I love her, damn it, you know!’46 What Maisie experiences at Folkestone is the foundering of a construction about the past. Hers is the momentary confrontation of a failure to make valid connections in Kensington Gardens: a failure which, in a quixotic way, exposes the fictive and uncovers the literal and threatens her with the atomization of that fiction of which she is a product. But there is enough of the literary about that ‘literally’ (‘there was literally an instant’) to suggest that making fictions has as much to do with what is conventionally taken as being reality as it has with the unreal. Maisie is an artist-manquée exploring in the wake of Hamlet the artifices by which a coherent appearance of an essentially chaotic and meaningless reality is synthesized. Hans Vaihinger, for one, offers a perspective on the complex processes in play. The fiction of this novel is more than an analogue of the principles on which the world of appearances is ordered, for ‘it must be remembered that the object of the world of ideas as a whole is not the portrayal of reality . . . but rather to provide us with an instrument for finding our way more easily in this world.47 The journey from Kensington Gardens to Folkestone is towards the ‘madness and desolation . . . ruin and darkness and death’), the ocular and experiential tragedy of King Lear, as a powerful correlative of Maisie’s dysfunctional, obscene, family. By the time Maisie reaches Boulogne at the end of the novel she understands, as Vaihinger has it, that ‘appearance and illusion are the necessary presuppositions of art as well as of life’.48 ‘All the world’s a stage’ (As You Like It II.vii.139) not only for Vaihinger, Jacques, Maisie and Shakespeare, but for a James absorbed by the almost infinite ramifications of the Theatrum Mundi tradition.49

Shakespeare, the New York Edition Prefaces, and the Dramatic Imperative Not character, simply, or its representation, but consciousness and its perils are at the core of James’s theory and practice as a novelist; and these are very much the terms, everywhere apparent in the New York edition

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prefaces, in which James evaluated and deployed Shakespeare in his constant battle against the debasement, on account of its referential imperatives, of the novel as art. ‘Shakespearean characters’, he wrote in 1876, ‘are characters that are born of the overflow of observations – characters that make the drama seem multitudinous, like life’.50 Hamlet, quintessential in this respect, can be seen as not only dramatizing, or representing consciousness but constructing its very possibility; and here, Tintner’s emphasis on the singular importance of character for James is unassailable: ‘to the mature James of the prefaces Hamlet is the most conscious character in all of literature’ (18).51 Hamlet ‘has yet a mind still more than he has a costume’ for characters are interesting only in proportion as they feel their respective situations; since the consciousness, on their part, of the complication exhibited forms for us their link of connexion with it.52 Alluding to The Princess Casamassima in his preface to The Tragic Muse, James luxuriates in ‘the prodigious consciousness of Hamlet’ – the ‘most capacious and most crowded, the moral presence the most asserted, in the whole range of fiction’53 – to the extent of fearing its powers. ‘The novel’, James held, is ‘the great extension, great beyond all others, of experience and consciousness’.54 Its purpose is not simply to represent consciousness and experience but to offer the reader an ‘extension’ of her own life. For James, the appetite for experience is insatiable and the novel gives the reader a ‘knowledge’ of it ‘abundant yet vicarious’.55 ‘I never see’ – James further remarks, bonding plot and character through the ‘moved’ and ‘moving’ modulation – ‘the leading interest of any human hazard but in a consciousness (on the part of the moved and moving creature) subject to fine intensification and wide enlargement’.56 The ‘great thing to say’ of novels, James argued, ‘is surely that at any given moment they offer us another world, another consciousness, an experience’.57 The drama of consciousness which shapes and suffuses the entire James corpus frequently casts Shakespeare as one of its principal actors and this is especially so in the prefaces to the New York edition of James’s novels and tales.58 James’s commitment to the centrality of consciousness and to the novel as an organic form whose success should be judged by the extent to which it could be seen, organically, as developing, evolving or growing from within, owed much to the Romantic, and especially German and Coleridgean,

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emphasis on Shakespeare as an opponent of classicism and an avatar of later attacks on the sterility of art bound by rigid laws imposed from without.59 A. W. Schlegel and Coleridge, in the second decade or so of the nineteenth century, are among the critics principally responsible for the extension of the binary opposition between the mechanical and the organic into the aesthetic domain. Shakespeare was frequently cast in this context as the ally of spontaneity, freedom and creative, particularly in Coleridge’s lectures. Drawing on A. W. Schlegel, Coleridge argued that ‘[t]he form is mechanic, when on any given material we impress a predetermined form, not necessarily arising out of the properties of the material; – as when to a mass of wet clay we give whatever shape we wish it to retain when hardened. The organic form, on the other hand is innate; it shapes, as it developes from within, and the fullness of its development is one and the same with the perfection of its outward form.’60 In a similar vein, James asserts that ‘[t]here are bad novels and good novels’, but ‘that is the only distinction in which I see any meaning’. He argues that ‘[a] novel is in its broadest definition a personal, a direct impression of life.’61 There are ‘certain traditions on the subject’ of the novel which ‘applied a priori, have already had much to answer for’: the good health of an art which undertakes so immediately to reproduce life must demand that it be perfectly free. It lives upon exercise, and the very meaning of exercise is freedom. The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting. That general responsibility rests upon it, but it is the only one I can think of. The ways in which it is at liberty to accomplish this result (of interesting us) strike me as innumerable and such as can only suffer from being marked out, or fenced in, by prescription. They are as various as the temperament of man, and they are successful in proportion as they reveal a particular mind, different from others. A novel is in its broadest definition a personal impression of life; that, to begin with, constitutes its value, which is greater or less according to the intensity of the impression. But there will be no intensity at all, and therefore no value, unless there is freedom to feel and say. The tracing of a line to be followed, of a tone to be taken, of a form to be filled out, is a limitation of that freedom and a suppression of the very thing that we are most curious about. The form, it seems to me, is to be appreciated after the fact; then the author’s choice has been made, his standard has been indicated; then we can follow lines and directions and compare tones.62

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In ‘The Art of Fiction’ the genre of the novel is identified at its best as character-oriented and vital, and as analogous therefore to the residually organic structure of all forms of life: I cannot imagine composition existing in a series of blocks . . . a novel is a living thing, all one and continuous, like any other organism, and in proportion as it lives will it be found, I think, that in each of the parts there is something of each of the other parts.63 James’s perspectivism is not only part of a commitment to drama and the dramatic in fiction but to the intensely Shakespearean texture of the Romantic conception of literary art.64 James’s own engagements with the theatre, as distinct from the drama, may have been inspired in part by an addiction to Shakespeare but their framework is very much that of the French well-made play.65 ‘It was the poet Gray’, James wrote in an 1872 essay ‘The Parisian Stage’, ‘who said that his idea of heaven was to lie all day on a sofa and read novels. He, poor man, spoke while Clarissa Harlowe was still the fashion, and a novel was synonymous with eternity.’ He went on: ‘An acted play is a novel intensified; it realizes what the novel suggests, and, by paying a liberal tribute to the senses, anticipates your possible complaint that your entertainment is of the meagre sort styled “intellectual” ’.66 Pyramus and Thisbe was James’s first published dramatic composition (1869); this was followed by ‘Still Waters’ (1871) and ‘A Change of Heart’ (1872). All three make liberal use of asides and soliloquies. A dramatization of Daisy Miller was published in 1882 but was rejected by the Madison Square Theatre ostensibly because the language was ‘too literary’.67 James dramatized The American (1878) while writing The Tragic Muse (1890, and it ran for 69 performances in the provinces and in London, Tenants, first known as Mrs. Vibert was written between November and December 1890, and by the end of 1892, The Album, The Reprobate and The Disengaged were completed.68 The initial scenario of Guy Domville was sketched in May 1893 and finished in the summer. Also surviving from this year are notes for a dramatization of the short story ‘The Chaperon’ (1891). A scenario for a play to be titled The Promise survives from 1894 and this formed the basis for The Outcry, a novel published in 1911 five years before James’s death. It was during 1894 that James also conceived, as a play, the embryo of what was later to become The Wings of the Dove (1902). Summersoft, a one-act play, was written in 1895 and then used as the material for a short story, ‘Covering End’, which was published with The Turn of the Screw in Two Magics (1898). Summersoft and

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‘Covering End’ were transposed into a three-act play, The High Bid in 1907. A year later, in 1908, The Saloon (a dramatization of the 1892 tale ‘Owen Wingrave’) together with The Other House appeared to be followed a year later by The Outcry (published as a novel in 1911).69 Thus, every conceivable permutation of prose fiction and drama is here. James dramatized two of his novels to begin with (leaving aside the early sketches of the 1860s and 1870s and then wrote four comedies before the unsuccessful production of Guy Domville. A one-act play became a short story and then a three-act play. A novel, published twelve years later, was written from a scenario for a play. Finally, there is another play from a short story, and a play which then became a novel. James’s preoccupation, not to mention obsession, with the drama and plays both fuelled and was fuelled by the power Shakespeare exerted over culture and the evaluations of its quality. What can be seen as the pressure of Shakespearean drama on the novel resulted in a preoccupation, certainly for James, not only with the theatre but also with impersonal narration and the management of perspective. In keeping with this, Lessing (1769) had identified the task of poetry as the raising of its ‘arbitrary signs to natural signs’. The ‘highest kind of poetry’, he argued, is ‘dramatic’ because it transforms the arbitrary signs completely into natural signs’.70 Perspective and point of view are commensurable given that one of the original denotations of ‘perspective’ is any optical instrument (such as a spyglass or telescope) ‘for looking through or viewing objects’ (OED). Originally, ‘perspective’ was used for the lens, as well as for the optical devices associated with lenses.71 In 1604, Johannes Kepler took the word ‘focus’ from Latin to denote the ‘burning point of a lens or mirror’.72 In Latin, focus refers to the hearth, or the fireplace, as the central point (in houses, of course, with holes in the roof rather than flues and chimneys) around which people gather. James’s novels often metaphorize the restricted perspectives vaunted in some of the prefaces in ways that draw on this derivation of ‘focus’ as the word moves along a line whose coordinates are the concrete and the abstract, or the literal and the figurative. Perspectives often function in James as destructive burning points in ways that offer a pragmatic critique of the will, or the residues of Romantic egotism, thereby retrieving the concrete meaning of ‘focus’ and combining it with its abstract, epistemological, reaches. Characters, in James, are frequently constituted mainly by their own limited consciousnesses into those storm centres, or origins of ‘coordinates’ which, for William James, we all embody.73 In his The Education of Henry Adams, Adams describes ‘the pleasure’ in reading James of ‘seeing the lights of his burning glass

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turned on alternate sides of the same figure’ in a way that suggests that he was more than alert to the etymologies and resonances of words like focus and perspective.74 Strether’s point of view in Henry James’s The Ambassadors, for example, is akin to the deceptive, single-angle, paintings known as anamorphoses, or perspectives, in the Renaissance (the most famous of which is Holbein’s The Ambassadors). The OED defines an anamorphosis as ‘a distorted projection or drawing of anything, so made that when viewed from a particular point . . . it appears regular or properly proportioned’. This is the application of ‘perspective’ in Richard II which, I would argue, James alludes to in the Kensington Gardens scene in What Maisie Knew where Maisie, through the mist of her tears, has an inevitably partial view of the situation: ‘It was, doubtless, another consequence of the thick mist through which she saw him that in reply to her question the Captain gave her such a queer blurred look.’75 Each substance of a grief hath twenty shadows, Which shows like grief itself, but it is not so; For sorrow’s eye, glazed with blinding tears, Divides one thing entire to many objects, Like perspectives, which rightly gaz’d upon Show nothing but confusion – ey’d awry Distinguish form . . . (Richard II II.ii.14–20)76 James’s prefaces to the New York edition of his novels and tales everywhere demonstrates, then, the inseparability of his preoccupation with Shakespeare from the stuff of which his fiction is made on. It is the specifically American context of James’s engagement with Shakespeare, however, to which I now want to turn.

Henry James, Delia Bacon and the Baconians Delia Bacon’s The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded, published in 1857 with a preface by Nathaniel Hawthorne, was at the centre of nineteenth-century attempts to contest the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays.77 Delia Bacon saw irreconcilable disparities between Shakespeare’s life, and the very fact that so little was known about it, and the power and originality of the plays. ‘In essence’, argues Budd: [T]he Baconian theory was an illogical extension of the worship of Shakespeare as a moral philosopher. It was made possible by the dearth

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of knowledge about Shakespeare’s life and by the misty claims of popular biographies. It further fed on the many uncertainties concerning the plays’ texts.78 James dismissed Delia Bacon’s hypothesis, more or less, yet he shared a fascination for the conundrum she helped to construct. To Violet Hunt he wrote: Also came the Shakespeare-book back with your accompanying letter – for which also thanks. . . . You rebound lightly, I judge, from any pressure exerted on you by the author – but I don’t rebound: I am ‘a sort’ of haunted by the conviction that the divine William is the biggest and most successful fraud ever practised on a patient world. The more I turn him round and round the more he so affects me. But that is all – I am not pretending to treat the question or to carry it any further. It bristles with difficulties, and I can only express my general sense by saying that I find it almost as impossible to conceive that Bacon wrote the plays as to conceive that the man from Stratford, as we know the man from Stratford, did.79 What connects James with Shakespeare at one level is ‘fraud’, a necessary activity when attempting to retrieve a past otherwise useless. Deception and art are happy conspirators in this anti-Stratfordian context, and the creative and self-creative processes of ‘Shakespeare’ seem to depend on a real or imagined obscurity both congenial and troublesome to James. By the end of the eighteenth century, Shakespeare had become the ‘quintessential “English” author’80 in a ‘paradoxical’ manoeuvre whereby ‘modernity generates tradition’ (Kramnick 1). Such a canon provides (in ways akin to the strategies of James’ autobiographical writings) a ‘retrospective pattern that becomes a “usable past” and a simultaneous order’, playing a ‘part in campaigns of cultural nationalism’.81 Aspects of Shakespeare’s nineteenth-century American reception are fundamental to an understanding of the theories of history and biography underpinning Delia Bacon’s The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded and James’s engagement with problems of bio-critical fact and fiction in his short story ‘The Birthplace’ and elsewhere. Delia Bacon’s The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded – or rather, a hearsay acquaintance with the vague drift of its argument – created a storm in England that continued to rage until Henry James’s ‘The Birthplace’ in 1903 and beyond.82 Baconianism from across the Atlantic was dramatized,

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especially by ‘the hack-critics of the minor periodical press in London’ as a specifically American assault on a monumentally English Shakespeare.83 The flaws in Bacon’s argument, and the primitive nature of its logic, are exasperating. Consternating is the coalescence of what appear to be a detailed knowledge of the material examined yet a repudiation of any kind of historical method or sense. In her 1856 article, ‘William Shakespeare and His Plays’, which abounds in feral rhetoric, ill-considered ridicule and invective, Bacon is always struggling for control as she drifts from time to time into seeing herself as one of Shakespeare’s contemporaries.84 As Schoenbaum has it: ‘great tides of rhetoric – incantatory, brilliant, inchoate – swirl over the seaweed and scattered pebbles of thought.’85 This article in particular, however, is significant for all kinds of accidental reasons. It tests to the point of destruction the universalist terms on which Shakespeare continued to be evaluated; and it reveals the degree to which a scientific historical methodology would not accommodate without substantial modification the Shakespeare of transcendent genius offered by German idealism. Bacon seems aware of the extent to which the projection of a wondrous Shakespeare universal and on the threshold of the divine, could be deployed for a variety of cultural purposes, not least that of deferring destructive investigations. The impression produced by these plays, Bacon suggests, has been so ‘profound and extraordinary’ as ‘to give to all the circumstances of their attributed origin a blaze of notoriety’, thus covering, beforehand, the whole ground of attack. The wonderful origin of these works was, from the first, the predominant point in the impression they made – the prominent marvels, around which all the new wonders, that the later criticism evolved, still continued to arrange themselves.86 A Shakespeare disembodied and detached from history not only can be integrated into otherwise alien (American) national cultural formations, but also retrieved, perpetuated and protected, rather than displaced and erased, by an endlessly circulating discourse of the eternally ethereal and impalpable. The continuing mystery on which Shakespeare thrives, Delia Bacon and Henry James might have agreed, although reacting quite differently to the consequences, is a function of impenetrability and a corresponding return on sustained investments in protecting what can be known from the forensic gaze. Shakespeare’s critics may see the playwright as Protean, but for Bacon he is a veritable Proteus, or even

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a composite Ariel and Prospero, who can extend himself infinitely to avoid her grasp: And are not the obscurities that involve his life, so impenetrably, in fact, the true Shakespearean element? In the boundless sea of negations which surrounds that play-house centre, surely he can unroll himself to any length, or gather himself into any shape or attitude, which the criticism in hand may call for?87 By the 1850s, an expanding American cultural, embryonic mass-cultural and academic industry had a large and growing stake in Shakespearean wonders past, present and in prospect.88 This group is given a collective voice by Delia Bacon as it rises to his defence and strives to preserve the spectral inscrutability of a Shakespeare whose continuing significance depends on his remaining untouched. Acknowledged by implication is the risk of a counter-productive dissolution which would necessarily involve Delia Bacon’s own work should the Shakespeare myth succumb to the empirical forces of a modern, scientific age: Is it wonderful? And is not that what we like in it? Would you make a man of him? With this miraculous inspiration of his, would you ask anything else of him? Do you not see that you touch the Shakespearean essence, with a question as to motives, and possibilities? Would he be Shakespeare still, if he should permit you to hamper him with conditions? What is the meaning of that word, then? And will you not leave him to us? Shall we have no Shakespeare? Have we not scholars enough, and wits enough, and men, of every other kind of genius, enough – but have we many Shakespeares? – that you should wish to run this one through with your questions, this one, great, glorious, infinite impossibility, that has had us in its arms, all our lives from the beginning. If you dissolve him do you not dissolve us with him? If you take him to pieces, do you not undo us also?89 Delia Bacon was in danger of pursuing the logic of her argument to the point of destroying the wonder and interest generated by Shakespeare. Shakespeare, if he was to be of use in a rational age committed to scientific standards of evidence, had to be brought down from his transcendental heights; but Bacon seems to recognize, even in the act of welcoming it, that this descent would be a murderous experience under the auspices of the empirical school. Implicit, though, is the extent to which her ‘running

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through’, might have redeeming features: sacrificial penetration, or disputes about the credibility of such penetrations, inflating the value of any afterlife.90 Increasingly available was a form of secularization preserving more than a semblance of profitable mystery, however much an affair of nudges and winks: the American production of a Shakespeare tradition, not least on the site of Stratford-upon-Avon.91 The unintended consequences of Delia Bacon’s assault on Shakespeare are highly pertinent to ‘The Birthplace’, James’s most conspicuous entanglement in the thickets of Shakespeare.

‘The Birthplace’ When the house traditionally92 regarded as Shakespeare’s birthplace came up for auction on 16 September 1847 there were reports that it was about to be shipped across the Atlantic. A flurry of letters to The Times (of London) expressed in overtly chauvinistic terms fears for the future of what was nominated by the auctioneers as the ‘most unique relic amongst England’s treasures’ and ‘the most honoured monument of the greatest genius that ever lived’.93 This house, wrote one correspondent, belongs to the greatest intellectual glory not only of our nation, but of our race. And this, Sir, is the house which is to be brought to the hammer! to be sold by some prattling auctioneer, to whoever chooses to speculate in these universal associations! – perhaps to be plundered for the curiosity shops, or even transported to the United States.94 The dread was that some dire, peripatetic fate awaited it: [O]ne or two enthusiastic Jonathans have already arrived from America, determined to see what dollars can do in taking it away. The timbers, it is said, are all sound, and it would be no very difficult matter to set it on wheels and make an exhibition of it. We hope and trust that no such desecration awaits it.95 According to Fox, it was ‘the rumour that a plan was on foot to remove the Birthplace to America’ that ‘seems to have produced immediate action’: Committees were set up in London and Stratford to raise funds to purchase the property. An appeal for contributions was circulated widely

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and special dramatic performances and concerts were staged in London and the provinces to assist the cause.96 In the event, on the day of the auction, the house was purchased from public subscriptions by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust on behalf of the British nation.97 Phineas T. Barnum, the American showman and entrepreneur of the spectacular and unbelievable, writes in his The Life of P. T. Barnum that he had ‘the refusal of the house in which Shakespeare was born, designing to remove it in sections’ to his ‘museum in New York’: [B]ut the project leaked out, British pride was touched, and several English gentlemen interfered and purchased the premises for a Shakesperian Association. Had they slept a few days longer, I should have made a rare speculation, for I was subsequently assured that the British people, rather than suffer that house to be removed to America, would have bought me off with twenty thousand pounds.98 In his Following the Equator: A Journey around the World, Mark Twain claims to have heard a more extravagant version of this event from a ‘Second Class Passenger’ he came across on his travels, Barnum’s designs on the house being turned into an improbable stratagem for purchasing Jumbo the Elephant from London Zoo.99 Arranged thereby, for Twain the enthusiastic anti-Stratfordian, was a debunking of Shakespeare by aligning the glories of his remains with elephants and circuses.100 Charles Jamrach (1815–1855), the animal dealer and ‘naturalist’, was engaged by Barnum as an agent in the scheme, but was told that ‘Jumbo couldn’t be had; the Zoo wouldn’t part with that elephant’: [A]ll England would be outraged at the idea; Jumbo was an English institution; he was part of the national glory; one might as well think of buying the Nelson monument. Barnum spoke up with vivacity and said: ‘It’s a first-rate idea. I’ll buy the monument’.101 Nelson’s monument not being for sale, Barnum seized eagerly on newspaper accounts of the ruin into which Shakespeare’s birthplace had fallen: I’ll buy Shakespeare’s house. I’ll set it up in my museum in New York and put a glass case around it and make a sacred thing of it; and you’ll see all

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America flock there to worship; yes, and pilgrims from the whole earth; and I’ll make them take their hats off, too. ‘In America’, Twain has him continue, with all puns on ‘value’ doubtless intended, ‘we know how to value anything that Shakespeare’s truth has made holy’. ‘England rose in her indignation’ at the scheme, and Barnum, having purchased the house in Twain’s account, ‘was glad to relinquish his prize and offer apologies’. ‘However, he stood out for compromise; he claimed a concession – England must let him have Jumbo. And England consented, but not cheerfully.’102 In ‘clarifying’ his fellow-passenger’s account, Twain mischievously adds, as he embellishes Barnum’s own recollections, and with the whole Shakespeare mythology in his sights, that ‘it shows how, by help of time, a story can grow’. Mr. Barnum told me the story himself, years ago. He said that the permission to buy Jumbo was not a concession; the purchase was made and the animal was delivered before the public knew anything about it. One of the significant reverberations of this story, however tall, for James’s ‘The Birthplace’, is in Twain’s drawing out the irony that Americans, here in the unlikely shape of Barnum, were the true custodians of Shakespeare’s Birthplace: ‘He handed the house back, but took only the sum which it had cost him – but on the condition that an endowment sufficient for the future safeguarding and maintenance of the sacred relic should be raised. This condition was fulfilled.’103 In A Small Boy and Others, James intersperses his recollections of visiting ‘Barnum’s great American Museum by the City Hall’ in New York, with its ‘dusty halls of humbug, amid bottled mermaids’, and ‘bearded ladies’, with accounts of early and frequent visits to the theatre to see Shakespeare’s plays. He recollects an ‘old ricketty bill-board in Fifth Avenue’, the ‘main source of its spell’ being the ‘rich appeal of Mr. Barnum’, and partly traces his obsession with the theatre and the ‘scenic’ to early sightings of the ‘Barnum announcements’: ‘These announcements must have been in their way marvels of attractive composition, the placard bristling from top to toe with its analytic synopsis of scenery and incidents.’104 However incredible – or rather, precisely because of the incredibility of its details when it comes to the business of actual acquisition and exchange – Barnum’s vaunting of the purchase, and Mark Twain’s later account of it, allows a conjectural elucidation of Delia Bacon’s Shakespeare project and an interpretative

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entry into James’s ‘The Birthplace’ and its anti-Stratfordian associations. More than tangentially, Barnum can be connected with Delia Bacon and what had become a peculiarly American interrogation of the ramifying conflicts between wonder and cynicism, and a reverence for tradition and the contemporary spirit of profitable amusement. Barnum’s exhibitions frequently challenged the spectator to test the limits of what could be observed and believed, offering examples at the threshold of the real and the fantastic, of the credible and incredible. As Neal Harris has argued, Barnum arranged his ‘hoaxes and exhibits to encourage debate about which processes were real’.105 He ‘accepted . . . that perfection and absolute conviction in exhibits made them less valuable. Spectators required some hint of a problem, some suggestion of difficulty’ (89).106 The Baconians, and the anti-Stratfordians in general, can be seen as a part of the means by which Shakespeare, especially on the site of Stratford-upon-Avon, was popularized as an exhibit of a Barnum-like variety: doubt, a destructive element in Delia Bacon, filled the coffers with American dollars at the Birthplace.107 Significantly, Shakespeare is identified with Barnum at one point in Bacon’s ‘William Shakespeare and His Plays’ as ‘New Place’ at Stratford-upon-Avon is displaced by Barnum’s ‘stately’ home in Connecticut, the implication being that Shakespeare’s claims to authorship are tantamount to a hoax worthy of the celebrated American showman himself. Reciprocities between the two surface in terms of a common dependence on rewarding deceptions; Shakespeare and Barnum alike being responsible for a lucrative trade in ‘literary conveniences’: If the prince of showmen in our day, in that stately oriental retreat of his, in Connecticut, rivaling even the New Place at Stratford in literary conveniences, should begin now to conceive of something of this sort, as his crowning speculation, and should determine to undertake its execution in person, who would dare to question his ability?108 After its 1847 purchase, Shakespeare’s birthplace could be displayed on an industrial scale. But such a site, as Barnum had discovered in related arenas, could only prosper if hostilities between tradition and the verifiable facts, and between credulousness and unbelief, could be contained and utilized. In Henry James’s ‘The Birthplace’, transcendental maunderings on Shakespeare, Delia Bacon’s tortured ramblings on authorship and the discourse of exhibitionism (presided over by Barnum) converge and collide.

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Ignored or unknown, apparently, to the critics of Henry James’s ‘The Birthplace’ is the immediate context of the tale.109 In keeping with the ‘boundless sea of negations’ Delia Bacon regarded as defining Shakespeare,110 the ‘Him, him, HIM!’ (‘The Birthplace’ 445) of ‘The Birthplace’ is never identified.111 The reader may infer that as this is the nominal ‘Birthplace’ of the ‘supreme poet, the Mecca of the Englishspeaking race’,112 Shakespeare must be at the absent centre of the tale, especially given the mischievous allusions to his plays throughout; but in withholding the name, James intensifies the impalpability he dramatizes.113 Similarly, ‘Shakespeare’ is all but absent from James’s 1877 account of his visit to Warwickshire. James twice announces that he has ‘no intention of talking about the celebrated curiosities in which this region abounds’; and on the second occasion, the belated appearance of ‘Shakespeare’ is practically elided by ponderous negatives and suspended by an evasive subjunctive: ‘It was, however, no part of my design in these remarks to pause before so thickly besieged a shrine as this; and if I were to allude to Stratford it would not be in connection with the fact that Shakespeare planted there, to grow for ever, the torment of his unguessed riddle.’114 When at the churchyard in what is described as ‘the heart of England’, James focuses not on Shakespeare’s tomb (which goes unnoticed), but on a ‘poor little girl, who seemed deformed’.115 If ‘the American tourist usually comes straight to this corner of England – chiefly for the purpose of paying his respects to the Birthplace of Shakespeare’, James swiftly departs for Warwick where he can linger over some ‘old hospitallers’ housed in an ‘odd little theatrical-looking refuge for superannuated warriors’.116 Maurice Gedge and his wife Isabel are troubled relentlessly by the boundary between fact and fancy and the pecuniary consequences of straddling it ineffectually. Struck at the beginning of the tale is a note that continues to sound: Gedge ‘had tried several things, he had tried many, but the final appearance was of their having tried him not less’, and now he is ‘in charge of the grey town-library of Blackport-on-Dwindle, all granite, fog and female fiction’ (442). At the height of his crisis over whether to capitulate to the demand from his Barnum-like employers not to ‘give away the Show’, the ‘Biggest on Earth’ (478), his wife recoils in horror from ‘the night of early winter on the other side of the pane’ and the possibility of their being evicted into ‘the small flat town, intrinsically dull’ (479) with its ‘stupid little street’ (472). This is a bleakly industrial, utilitarian terrain, from which Gedge is protected by a ‘short moreen curtain artfully chosen by Isabel’ (478). At one level, fiction and the necessary consolations of a world of illusion are gendered powerfully feminine, whereas Gedge’s view of the

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Birthplace and its relics as no more than ‘extraneous, preposterous stuffing’ (457) is impotently masculine. As always in James, however, the geometry is more intricate than this scheme suggests. The prospect as Isabel Gedge views it – ‘we shall live as in a fairy tale’ – is of the ‘vaguest’ (443). Much more important for Mrs Gedge than what she and her husband know, or what can be known, is the keeping up of appearances in a performance for the benefit of the Birthplace visitors of what she thinks they are; and this liberates them, she believes, from the demeaning requirements of truth. Isabel thinks she can discriminate between the real and the vulgar at the social level, but is unwilling, or unable, to pay the cost of extending her analysis to the domain of the Birthplace itself: We’ve no social position, but we don’t mind that we haven’t, do we? a bit; which is because we know the difference between realities and shams. We hold to reality, and that gives us common sense, which the vulgar have less than anything. (444) By ‘holding to reality’, Mrs Gedge disqualifies herself as an artist, at least in James’s world. As the narrator has it in ‘The Real Thing’ (1892): ‘I liked things that appeared; then one was sure. Whether they were or not was a subordinate and almost always a profitless question.’117 The Monarchs, in that tale, are the real things, but they cannot ‘appear’ and are useless, therefore, for the purposes of representation; as in ‘The Birthplace’, the myth of the real is valuable only as a pretext for the appearance of fiction.118 Gedge, by contrast with his wife, is at first naïvely oppressed by ‘discoveries’ and ‘facts’, and he makes a move whose facetious tone suggests that he will be protected from the failure and misery experienced by characters elsewhere in James who settle seriously on a similar trajectory: ‘ “Ah”, he said as if it were a question of honour, “we must know everything” ’ (446). From the perspective of the initially stifling role that awaits him, Gedge’s early preparations are singularly inappropriate: he absorbs himself in the plays with his wife, and ‘they declaimed, they almost performed, their beneficent author’ (447). This deepens his sense of how little he can offer to visitors who care only for the ‘empty shell’ of the Birthplace (457): ‘It’s absurd’, he didn’t hesitate to say, ‘to talk of our not “knowing”. So far as we don’t it’s because we’re donkeys. He’s in the thing, over His ears, and the more we get into it the more we’re with Him. I seem to myself at any rate’, he declared, ‘to see Him in it as if He were painted on the wall’. (447)

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James conjures up A Midsummer Night’s Dream here with Gedge as Bottomthe-ass.119 But if Gedge is asinine, he is also the means by which the necessary dependence of reality on illusion explored in that play is recuperated by the end of the tale. The story moves through four distinct phases. First, there is a reluctant acquiescence by Gedge in his task; he veils his beliefs from the public at large, but bleeds ‘under his coat’ as he overhears his wife’s voluminous fictions. Gedge is an Antonio for whom there is no Portia to plead for mercy as the usurious Shylock-like hoards daily carve from him their ‘pound of flesh’ (465); but Antonio, rather than Shylock, of course, is the merchant of Venice, and Gedge is not without his own appreciable interest in the Birthplace by the end of the tale. From the ‘first evening, after closing-hour, when the last blank pilgrim had gone’, Gedge has daily undergone a transposition into the releasing solitude of ‘the mere spell, the mystic presence’ (448). His uneasy compromise of searching in the dark, as the spectre of Hamlet’s ghost, for the author’s spirit and trading by day with his dubious remains encodes a form of schizophrenia familiar to James. Gedge was on his way to become120 two quite different persons, the public and the private, and yet that it would somehow have to be managed that these persons should live together. He was splitting into halves. . . . One of the halves . . . was the keeper, the showman, the priest of the idol; the other piece was the poor unsuccessful honest man he had always been. (460) Everywhere in James, and not least in this story, there is ‘the roar of the market and the silence of the tomb’ (James, ‘Dumas the Younger’ 291), together with disturbing yet productive realizations that in reality, these sites are intercalated.121 In the second phase, Gedge is unable to sustain his precarious double life after the first of two visits – and the ‘young man’ had also visited Stratford ‘four years ago’ (468) – from a New York couple. They arrive when Gedge’s divided self is at its most vulnerable: at the ‘fall of the day’ but ‘before the hour of closing’ (465). In this liminal zone between the public and the private, Gedge is lured by his sense of their Emersonian ‘transcendent freedom’ (467) and independence into revealing indiscretions they admire about the stupendous incredibility of it all. ‘There has been a great deal said’ about the house, but ‘ “[m]uch of it, in such places as this”, he heard himself adding, “is of course said very irresponsibly”. Such places as this! – he winced at the words as soon as he had uttered them’ (468). Henceforth, in phase three – given that this is a Barnum-like show to an exquisite fault and

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that, as he later says, ‘the look of it . . . is what I give’ (491) – he carries on with his duties but ‘looked so perpetually as if something had disagreed with him’ (475) that word reaches the menacing Grant-Jackson. The secretary of the Birthplace Committee arrives like the ghost of Hamlet’s father at the same testing twilight time, now the ‘horrid hour’ (491), as the New York Hayes couple to threaten Gedge with the ‘sack’ (479) unless he can put a better face on things. Gedge is mesmerizingly eloquent in the fourth and final phase, for ‘they wouldn’t let you off with silence’ (465), and the longer the yarns he spins, the greater the number of tickets sold. He seems, at this point, to have become a writer, gendered feminine by his garrulity and popularity, of those very novels he lent out so industriously in Blackport-on-Dwindle (442). Gedge discovers, however, like Hamlet, that there is more than one way to secure revenge if ‘the rest is silence’,122 and that such a state is not necessarily at odds with incontinent utterances of a kind.123 The Gedges lack a social position, but ‘you’re a gentleman’ she reassures Maurice as she urges him, in effect, to ‘screw’ his ‘courage to the sticking place’.124 If Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are brought to mind here, then Isabel, as one who ‘should have died hereafter’,125 is excluded from an understanding of, certainly from a sympathy for, the strategy by which Gedge is ultimately able to exploit the Birthplace by undermining it, James himself being the main beneficiary of these tactics. When Grant-Jackson forces Gedge to surrender, he delivers ‘only two words’ (478): in effect, ‘remember me’.126 The injunction ‘remember me’ silently appropriates from Hamlet, for the actual words are not uttered, strategies of dissemblance and masking, of indirection and irony, which are essential to an understanding of the New York couple’s second trip to the Birthplace. Critical distance in this tale, as elsewhere in James, takes the form of complex ironies which recruit knowing readers into a community and establish a hieratic communion from which women, frequently, and indiscriminating readers in general are excluded. James has Gedge organize a compromise: he tells tales to satisfy popular demand but seeks his consolations in forms of irony signalled to the cognoscenti. Mr Hayes, rather than his wife, is an observer of Gedge’s developing artistry. Understatement and scrupulousness are replaced by forms of irony-transmitting excessiveness in self-protective, subtly disclaiming, presentations. The public at large ‘wanted . . . to feel that everything was ‘just as it was’ (461), but what this amounts to is a refusal to permit Gedge to depart from the received script: ‘they show me. It’s all in their little books’ (471). Captured here is part of the dynamic of Barnum’s hoaxes whereby unstable disparities between what was, is, or could be, act

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to stimulate curiosity, but always within a narrative framework that to remain infinitely enigmatic must not be dispelled. The vulgarity exploited by Barnum, and James in this story, has its sophistications. If the ‘American imagination’, at least in the manifestation of it under scrutiny in Barnum and ‘The Birthplace’, ‘demands the real thing and, to obtain it, must fabricate the absolute fake’, there is also the question of a patronization of the past which is ‘always . . . in a spirit of gluttony and bricolage’.127 As part of their induction, the Gedges receive ‘various little guides, handbooks, travellers’ tributes, literary memorials, and other catch-penny publications’, but these are for the moment ‘swallowed up in the interesting episode’ of their ‘induction or initiation’ (448) by Miss Putchin, ‘one of the ladies who had for so many years borne the brunt’ (449). Vulgarity and irony, within a context of gender, come into immediate collision. ‘And are They always, as one might say’, asks Miss Putchin, ‘stupid?’ ‘Stupid!’ She stared, looking as if no one could be such a thing in such a connection. No one had ever been anything but neat and cheerful and fluent, except to be attentive and unobjectionable and, so far as was possible, American. ‘What I mean is’, he explained, ‘is there any perceptible proportion that take an interest in Him?’ His wife stepped on his toe; she deprecated irony. (451) Miss Putchin’s resort is always to ‘the facts’ and the ‘one way’ of dealing with them. Gedge repeated it, after this conversation, at odd moments, several times over to his wife. ‘There can only be one way, one way’, he continued to remark – though indeed much as if it were a joke; till she asked him how many more he supposed she wanted. (453) Whereas Mrs Gedge deprecates irony, which is much the same thing in this context as being unwilling to understand how indispensable it is to Gedge’s duplicities, it operates as a rarefied lingua franca for Mr Hayes – rather than his wife, again – and a Gedge who deploys it as a more or less secret mode for negotiating the two ‘halves’ into which he has split. By the time of the Hayes’s second visit, the mere showman has become a consummate performer whose art depends in self-corrosive ways on the material he scorns. What distinguishes the American couple, in a tale where so much is revealed in the dying embers of the day, is the late hour of their visit: desiring

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to escape ‘the crowd’, they ‘almost’ treat it ‘as personal and private’ (466). Detecting ‘a pleasant irony . . . in the air – he who had not yet felt free to taste his own’ (468), ‘Gedge had suddenly, thrillingly, let himself go’ (467). Released from the show, he takes them up ‘without words, without the usual showman’s song’, and from this silence Mr Hayes guesses the ‘travail of his spirit’ and catches ‘the gleam of his inner commentary’ (468). The real ‘interest’, in all its immensity, of the Birthplace, Gedge voicing positions held by James in his introduction to The Tempest, is ‘the fact of the abysmally little that, in proportion, we know’: ‘He escapes us like a thief at night, carrying off – well, carrying off everything’ (469). Hayes’s wife reaches for an American solution: ‘Why not say, beautifully . . . that, like the wind, He’s everywhere?’ ‘What’s the use’ she asks, ‘if you say it wasn’t in this room He was born?’ It is Mr Hayes who defines ‘use’ in terms other than crude gain and implies an alternative for Gedge to torrential inanities on the one hand, and a taciturnity, on the other that invokes the threatening spectre of Grant-Jackson: ‘ “What’s the use of what?” her husband asked. “The use, you mean, of our coming here? Why, the place is charming in itself. And it’s also interesting”, he added to Gedge, “to know how you get on” ’. (470) An ‘increase of communion’ between the two not unrelated to the exchange of a sovereign, has resulted in a shift in attention from Shakespeare to Gedge himself, and to the potential for art and artfulness in the presence of an ‘historic void’ (472).128 Crucially, Mr Hayes now descries in Gedge’s performance ‘an intention beyond a joke’ (483), although the ambiguity of the expression allows James to undercut the endorsement. Gedge, like James, supremely, and unlike Mrs Hayes, thrives when surveying ‘all there wasn’t to be seen’ (472). ‘[T]he “play’s the thing”. Let the author alone’, asserts Mr Hayes (472).129 For most of the story, Gedge is a Hamlet-manqué deliberating over whether ‘to be, or not to be’.130 What the Hayes couple provide, like the visiting players in Hamlet, is a play-within-the-play that offers transforming encounters and reflections. ‘The play’s the thing’, in the sense of a superior form of playfulness Gedge is released into deploying; but the ‘play’s the thing’, also, ‘wherein’ the ‘conscience of the King’ is caught; and ‘caught’, in all its senses, is James when it comes to his way with truth and the past for the purposes of his art. That James has filled the void with his own fiction, mastering a Shakespeare he puts to profitable use, up-staging Barnum and dwarfing Gedge in the process, emerges on the second visit of the New Yorkers. Shakespeare’s Birthplace becomes Gedge’s cradle as an artist but, above all, the site of a story, James’s ‘The Birthplace’, displaces both. ‘The evening was now a mild April-end’, – the traditional date of birth for Shakespeare, of course,

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is 23 April – ‘and this was the second spring’ as ‘history’ repeats ‘itself’ (480). The morose silence and fractured ruminations of the first visit have given away on the second to an eloquent fiction whose distance from Mrs Gedge’s ‘feminine’ incontinence and its proximity to James’s art is in its irony: Across that threshold He habitually passed; through those low windows, in child-hood, He peered out into the world that He was to make so much happier by the gift to it of His genius; over the boards of this floor – that is over some of them, for we mustn’t be carried away! – his little feet often pattered. (482) The chasm has widened between Gedge and his wife in ways that implicate women and women’s fiction in the tawdry coarseness of it all:131 ‘The morality of women was special – he was getting lights on that. Isabel’s conception of her office was to cherish and enrich the legend’ (462). Although from the New York of Barnum’s most successful exhibitions and hoaxes, the Hayes couple are connected by the narrator, in a ‘heavenly mingle’132 of vulgar spectacle and aesthetic discrimination again subjected to irony by James, to those supreme arbiters of taste, the Bostonians: ‘Mr. and Mrs. Hayes were from New York, but it was like singing, as he had heard one of his Americans once say about something, to a Bostonian audience’ (485). It is less, in this tale, that Shakespeare is that measure of American culture feared by early republicans, more that America has become his custodian as the developers of just the right mixture of interrogation and awe necessary for his modern-day accommodation. What the Hayes participate in is a form of branding: with corporate and incorporating resonances abounding, they are entered in the ‘public register’ as ‘Mr. and Mrs. B. D. Hayes, New York’: ‘one of those American labels that were just like every other American label and that were, precisely, the most remarkable thing about people reduced to achieving an identity in such other ways’ (481). For Gedge, Mr and Mrs Hayes seek to occupy a space beyond their label, and it is in this way that they assist in the identification of the Henley Street house as a commodity fit for aesthetic use. If the story begins with pathological doubleness, it ends with a productive, if not a creative, duplicity: ‘They could be Mr. and Mrs. B. D. Hayes and yet they could be, with all presumptions missing – well, what these callers were’ (481). ‘The Birthplace’ exploits the Birthplace by subjecting it to the main constituents of its value: irony and scepticism. Thereby, as in his introduction to The Tempest, James holds himself aloof from processes he is nevertheless unable to resist.

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Gedge’s roots are in a tradition of American writing about Shakespeare whose main characteristics are unstable irony of a comic variety and that knowing suspension of disbelief on which Barnum was to capitalize. That Irving established the paradigm within which Americans were to visit Stratford-upon-Avon is evident from Barnum.133 When visiting Stratford, Barnum ‘called for a guide-book’, and the waiter fetched what he said was ‘the best description extant of the birth and burial-place of Shakspeare’: I was not a little proud to find this volume to be no other than the ‘SketchBook’ of our illustrious countryman, Washington Irving; and in glancing over his humorous description of the place, I discovered that he had stopped at the same hotel where we were then awaiting breakfast.134 More specifically, Miss Putchin and the Gedges have models in both Irving and Hawthorne,135 and in the kind of exchange (recorded in Barnum’s Life) where Barnum, the expert in such affairs, proposes with some irony to the ‘old porter’ at Warwick Castle: ‘I suppose’, I continued, ‘that you have told these marvellous stories so often, that you almost believe them yourself’. ‘Almost!’ replied the porter, with a grin of satisfaction that showed he was ‘up to snuff’, and had really earned two shillings.136 Irving was shown around the Birthplace by a ‘garrulous old lady’ who was peculiarly assiduous in exhibiting the relics with which this, like all other celebrated shrines, abounds. . . . There was an ample supply also of Shakespeare’s mulberry tree, which seems to have as extraordinary powers of self-multiplication as the wood of the true cross; of which there is enough extant to build a ship of the line.137 The curator’s rival is the sexton, who envies her more frequent visitors, and peddles doubts about the authenticity of the Henley Street house. Irving’s curators, like Maurice Gedge in his final manifestation, are strengthened rather than weakened by the doubtfulness of it all: I am always of easy faith in such matters, and am ever willing to be deceived, where the deceit is pleasant, and costs nothing. I am therefore a ready believer in relics, legends, and local anecdotes of goblins and great

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men; and would advise all travellers who travel for their gratification to be the same. What is it to us whether these stories be true or false, so long as we can persuade ourselves into the belief of them, and enjoy all the charm of the reality?138 Irving embraces Shakespeare and his traditions and tacitly repudiates counter-productive scruples. Shakespeare occupies, as in ‘The Birthplace’, a position beyond ascertainable and verifiable facts and, in the end, beyond the reach of fiction. Mr Hayes and Gedge, under the tutelage of irony and previous constructions of the curator’s role, are part of a process whereby the enigma of Shakespeare is sustained. James and Irving, then, share a scepticism about the facts of Shakespeare, and in ‘The Birthplace’ James explores, in the tradition of Irving and Barnum, with Delia Bacon as an unlikely mediator, how such scepticism can be put to use within the context of an American commodification of the bard. But James’s contempt for facts and his deep suspicion of all forms of utterance and representation make Gedge’s compromise, constantly undermined by ironies beyond him, ultimately seem tenuous and unconvincing.139 Gedge is confined to the emptiness of interminable stories, whereas James reserves eloquent silence, from time to time, for himself.140 What James called the ‘paraphernalia of concealment – the drama of alarm and exposure’, together with doubleness, duplicity and the uses of obscurity, is also at the centre of ‘The Papers’.141

‘The Papers’ The tale involves complex deployments of Shakespeare the partial key to which is in the ‘Introduction’ to The Tempest.142 The focus of ‘The Papers’ is on the ‘museum’ of ‘publicity’, ‘the prize object, the high rare specimen’ of which is ‘Sir A. B. C. Beadel-Muffet K.C.B., M.P’. Like Shakespeare, Beadel-Muffet specializes in becoming a subject of ‘fallacious report, one half of his chronicle’ appearing ‘to consist of’ an ‘official contradiction of the other half’.143 He is consummately adept at recruiting Barnum’s strategies for constructing celebrity by arousing public curiosity. The story demonstrates the extent to which if ‘fame’ arose in the past from public actions for the ‘good of the state’, by the early 1900s ‘the conditions of modern celebrity’ had made it a goal in itself;144 or as Bennett, writing in 1901, expressed it: ‘not only is art a factor in life; it is a factor in all

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lives. . . . Everyone is an artist, more or less.’145 In Beadel-Muffet’s ‘artful . . . imitation of the voice of fame’, James satirizes decadent appropriations of a once classical ideal: The fame was all voice . . . the items that made the sum were individually of the last vulgarity, but the accumulation was a triumph . . . of industry and vigilance. It was after all not true that a man had done nothing who for ten years had so fed, so dyked and directed and distributed the fitful sources of publicity.146 As the story progresses, the fledgling journalists Maud and Bight move along a trajectory the unstable and indefinite elements of which are connected in shifting and complex ways. They begin by attempting to report facts invented, distorted or shaped for the purposes of a press at least as much involved in constituting them as the agents involved, but fact and fiction tend to merge in a story that becomes increasingly reflexive and metafictional. Bight seizes on Maud’s reference to ‘facts’ after BeadelMuffet’s death is reported: ‘Do you call them facts?’ the young man asked. ‘I mean the Astounding Disclosures’. (628) In this process, who knows what, what it is that can be known, and even whether there is anything to be known, mesmerize Maud in particular and increasingly, in self-protective ways, perhaps, Bight. Peter Conn’s belief that ‘The Papers’ images James’s ‘direct dissent from the consciousness of the new century’ is much too simplistic in that it ignores the extent and energy of his dealings with it.147 James and BeadelMuffet have a grasp of the value, in As You Like It, of being ‘news-crammed’ (I.ii.95), Rosamond’s fears for which are countered by Celia’s much more pragmatic ‘all the better; we shall be more marketable’ (I.ii.97). These cross-currents are typified by a Maud who is attracted by and yet recoils from Bight’s journalistic mastery: ‘there was something in her mind that it still charmed – his mastery of the horrid art’ (616). The couple renounce journalism for fiction, of a kind, in the end; the material of their art has been gathered, however, in a Fleet Street which also generates James’s story, notwithstanding his ostensible condemnation of all that it represents. From Henrietta Stackpole in The Portrait of a Lady, through the character of Matthias Pardon in The Bostonians, where ‘all things, with him, referred themselves to print, and print meant simply infinite reporting . . . abusive

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when necessary, or even when not’,148 to the narrator in ‘Flickerbridge’ (1902), who attacks the ‘age of prodigious machinery, all organised to a single end’ of ‘publicity – a publicity as ferocious as the appetite of a cannibal’,149 James’s apparent position on the evils of the press is only putatively emphatic and unambiguous. George Flack, as Delia Dosson supposes early in The Reverberator, is ‘connected . . . with literature’,150 and that connection is as advantageous to James, ultimately, as Francie Dosson’s ‘tell-tale character’.151 As an American reporter for the yellow press, Flack ‘was not a particular person, but a sample or memento – reminding one of certain “goods” for which there is a steady popular demand’ (14). But the hinge on which James’s novel turns is the ‘newspaper’ containing the ‘two horrible columns of vulgar lies and scandal’ (135) about a Probert family subjected to considerable irony. Gaston Probert’s ‘genius’ is for ‘the worship of privacy and good manners’, and ‘a hatred of all the new familiarities and profanations’ (194); for Charles Waterlow, however, he has the ‘communicative despair’ of a ‘foreigner’ (192). Gaston is ‘effusive and appealing and ridiculous and graceful – natural, above all, and egotistical’, but lacks ‘moral independence’: It was this weakness that excited Waterlow’s secret scorn: family feeling was all very well, but to see it erected into a superstition affected him very much in the same way as the image of a blackamoor upon his knees before a fetish. (193) In different ways, ‘The Birthplace’ and ‘The Papers’ profit from the ironies involved in high culture’s confrontation with mass-cultural appropriations of Shakespeare. In ‘The Papers’, James derives and adopts a plot from As You Like It to offer a critique of a popular press whose processes turn out, however, to have much in common with the metaphysics and aesthetics of appearance and reality that have fashioned much of his fiction. Thomas Strychacz maintains that ‘publicity’ in the story ‘assumes the character of an autotelic force, functioning beyond the control of individual agents’ (141), yet Beadel-Muffet’s adroit manoeuvre, with its specious manipulation not just of presence and absence, but of life and death, leaves Maud and Bight musing over his ruling, ‘immortal, the night’ (636). His retreat has much the same structure and effect as James’s sense of Shakespeare’s abandoning London for Stratford after writing The Tempest:152 ‘Well’, the young man said, ‘he has disappeared. There you are. I mean personally. He’s not to be found. But nothing could make more, you see, for ubiquity’ (581); and ‘Beadel shows so tremendously what

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a catastrophe does for the right person. His absence, you may say, doubles, quintuples, his presence’ (604). Relevant to an assessment of Maud, the tale’s ending, and a conflict between journalism and fiction more nominal than real in the story, is James’s disquiet over the threat embodied by women to men, and a commitment to what he generally believed should be the masculine preserves of writing and culture. Maud is unsuccessful as a journalist partly because she has too much ‘imagination’ (552), but the story blocks her rite of passage to fiction and artistry. Bight earlier interjects, on Mortimer Marshall’s unsuccessful assaults on the citadel of the press, which is actually a consequence of Maud’s inability or unwillingness to make an omelette ‘without even the breakage’ of an ‘egg or two’ (576): ‘Oh well . . . if he can’t manage to smash a pane of glass somewhere – !’ (565). The ‘practical point’ of the pen Maud lacks has extensive, if uncertain, phallic reaches in this tale: That word of Bight’s about smashing a window-pane had lingered with her; it had made her afterwards wonder . . . if there weren’t some brittle surface in range of her own elbow. She had to fall back on the consciousness of how her elbow, in spite of her type, lacked practical point. (566) There is a contact here with James’s essay ‘The Future of the Novel’. The starkly expressed fear, as James ambiguously remarks that ‘there are too many reasons why newspapers must live’,153 is of ‘the revolution taking place in the position and outlook of women’: [W]e may very well yet see the female elbow itself, kept in increasing activity by the play of the pen, smash with final resonance the window all this time most superstitiously closed . . . when women do obtain a free hand they will not repay their long debt to the precautionary attitude of men by unlimited consideration for the natural delicacy of the latter.154 James has returned to a problem posited in The Bostonians by Basil Ransom, a Civil War veteran of the South: ‘the whole generation is womanized; the masculine tone’, ‘a very queer and partly very base mixture’, is passing out of the world; it’s a feminine, a nervous, hysterical, chattering, canting age . . . which, if we don’t soon look out, will usher in the reign of mediocrity.155

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Ransom, or aspects of his characterization at least, can easily be identified with the Henry James who remarks in his notebooks on the possibility of a ‘big comprehensive subject’ in the ‘decadences and vulgarities’ of the age, the ‘feminizations – the materializations and abdications and intrusions, and Americanizations, the lost sense, the brutalized manner – the publicity, the newspapers, the general revolution, the failure of fastidiousness’.156 For G. M. Young, firmly anchored in a turn-of-the-nineteenth-century discourse of degeneration to which James was far from immune, verbal incontinence, the press, and failures of masculinity are inseparable; it is their interdependence, however, as much as their fusion, that preoccupies James in ‘The Papers’: fundamentally, what failed in the late Victorian age, and its flash Edwardian epilogue, was the Victorian public, once so alert, so masculine, and so responsible . . . the English mind sank towards that easily excited, easily satisfied, state of barbarism and childhood which press and politics for their own ends fostered, and on which in turn they fed.157 In The Bostonians, Verena Tarrant’s outpourings on the rights of women are silenced by Ransom’s abducting her with a view to marriage. As Olive Chancellor has earlier foreboded, ‘there are gentlemen in plenty who would be glad to stop your mouth by kissing you!’158 The allusion is to Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing, where a similarly vociferous Beatrice eventually loses her struggle against matrimonial confinement, and where the heroine of the play, Hero (gendered masculine by name) is celebrated for her almost entirely wordless state. Hero’s suitor endorses ‘silence’ as the ‘perfectest heralt of joy’,159 whereas Beatrice’s injunction – mobilizing the alternatives for women surveyed and rejected in The Bostonians and ‘The Papers’, both of which explicitly or by implication regender the utterance – is to ‘speak, cousin, or (if you cannot) stop his mouth with a kiss, and let not him speak neither’.160 In Much Ado about Nothing and The Bostonians, marriage becomes the enabling subterfuge by which men impose silence on women. A scheme of this kind is eventually adopted in ‘The Papers’; it is radically rewritten, however, given the acrobatic cross-genderings and queer circuits of desire in the tale. What frames the scheme is the degree to which Maud is a great threat to Beadel-Muffet, Bight and James, for as an imaginative woman (eventually) with powers of detection who can write, she is on the threshold of discovering and revealing what produced the fiction in the first place: ‘She had moments, before shop-windows, into which she looked without seeing, when all the unuttered came over her’ (595). Journalists are defined, for

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Bight, by their not having the ‘gift . . . of not seeing’ (549), so Maud’s blindness before the very panes of glass she will never get to smash (which would initiate her into the guild of authors), here mobilizes a quite different sense of redemption – ‘I want to save them’ (571) – than the conventional one initially in play. Now, ‘she was laying up treasure in time – as against the privations of the future’ (593). She makes two discoveries that take her close to James’s own ‘treasure-house of details’.161 The first is that unless the past is complicated and obscure, then the ‘proportion and relation’ of the present and the ‘treacherous’ future on which fiction depends for its generation will be absent;162 secondly, she understands that it is not real obscurity that produces fiction, but the use to which the past (including Shakespeare, of course) is put and the obscurity thereby constructed: ‘Only I feel how little’, Maud tells Bight towards the end of the story, ‘about what has been, all the while, behind – you tell me’. ‘Nothing explains’, she says, as the powerful ambiguity of the phrase becomes apparent: nothing has been explained, and there is nothing, really, hence the need for an obscurity that compels life-enabling illusions and fictions. ‘Explains what?’ asks Bight: ‘Why, his act’. He gave a sigh of impatience. ‘Isn’t the explanation what I offered a moment ago to give you?’ It came, in effect, back to her. ‘For use?’ ‘For use’. (619) There are similarities here between Beadel-Muffet’s ‘act’ and Gedge’s: whatever is, or is not, behind Gedge’s manic odes, for the Hayeses they have a charm and interest of their own, and a speculative anteriority whose justification is in its utility-value.163 Maud ‘believed’ Bight ‘knew more than he said, though he had sworn as to what he didn’t’ (590), and ‘it was his silence that completed the perfection of these things’ (624). It is Maud, as the two renounce the press in favour of the ‘littery’ (636), who can provide for Bight the protections of marriage in the atmosphere of danger in which he is enveloped; but not unambiguously so: Bight, now ‘helpless and passive . . . let her do with him as she liked’, and she draws ‘his hand into her arm as if he were an invalid or as if she were a snare’ (611–12). Marriage is allied with fiction and the hidden, whereas the press is an affair of pursuit and possible discovery. Bight achieves a certain mastery over the world from which he isolates himself, but his final position is also one of puzzled superiority, whereas Maud mixes failure with a refusal to compromise when success, in the form of a sensational interview with Mrs Chorner she could publish, is within reach. Maud is described at the outset as ‘a suburban

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young woman in a sailor hat’ (542), ‘a shocker, in short, in petticoats’ (543) and a ‘young bachelor’ (544); and she later declares ‘I ain’t a woman . . . I wish I were (562). Bight’s gender also comes under scrutiny: he is ‘not so fiercely or so freshly a male as to distance Maud in the show’ (544), and ‘he was so passive that it almost made him graceful’ (545). James weaves into the fabric of ‘The Papers’ complex threads from Shakespeare’s As You Like It, and these include the gender turbulence of its cross-dressing and the same-sex desires thereby cloaked.164 As in Shakespeare, same-sex desire is to be sublimated in a marriage predicated on gender confusion. Bight’s initial proposal to Maud, which is suspended over the entire story, takes place in Richmond Park, London’s ‘Forest of Arden’, and it is there that James explicitly resorts, as he did in What Maisie Knew, to the intricate codes of As You Like It: He turned a little, to rest on his elbow, and, cycling suburban young man as he was, he might have been, outstretched under his tree, melancholy Jacques looking off into a forest glade, even as sailor-hatted Maud, in – for elegance – a new cotton blouse and a long-limbed angular attitude, might have prosefully suggested the mannish Rosalind. (572) Maud’s female garb is queried by a ‘prosefully’ and ‘mannish’ that cast it more as a disguise than a guise as Bight is softened by ‘young’ and ‘melancholy’. Accentuated in the description of Maud, with her ‘long-limbed angular attitude’, are her phallic contours. The central intertextual question, however, is surely that of why James, in rewriting the plot, substitutes Jacques, the only principal character to avoid one of the four marriages with which As You Like It ends, for Orlando. This substitution is far from capricious; it is reinforced by other adoptions, gratuitous if not pursued, of his character traits: [W]ith the life we lead and the age we live in, there’s always something the matter with me – there can’t help being: some rage, some disgust, some fresh amazement against which one hasn’t, for all one’s experience, been proof. (597) That ‘age we live in’ reaches back to Jacques soliloquy on the ‘seven ages of man’: All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts.165

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If ‘exits and entrances’ is given its bawdy extensions, these lines not only relate to the malleability of self-produced personalities and celebrities in an age of publicity, but also to the vagaries of selfhood in a world of unstable sexual boundaries and desires. Also aggregated are fiction, journalism, the production of personal identity, acting and all forms of sexual activity as areas of performance. Jacques escapes from the productions of heterosexual marriage in the forest to the ‘religious life’ recently adopted by the Duke in place of his ‘pompous court’;166 and contrary to the conventional associations of marriage, this suggests retreat and celibacy for a Bightas-Jacques who withdraws from his pursuit of Beadel-Muffet. ‘Melancholia’ can be interpreted as Shakespeare’s code for unrequited, unrealizable, homoerotic desire, as with Antonio and his ‘[i]n sooth, I know not why I am so sad’.167 The overlaying of Jacques identity on Bight heightens his predicament in a heterosexual society and appears to challenge the logic of the prospective marriage with which the story ends.

Epilogue In his introduction to The Tempest, James has become a Howard Bight figure perpetuating the very mystery under investigation; and in the allusion to Macbeth – that ‘sound and fury’168 – a collaboration with the press in all its rapaciousness is implied: ‘There are moments, I admit, in this age of sound and fury, of connections, in every sense, too maddeningly multiplied, when we are willing to let it pass as a mystery.’169 Instructively, it is because ‘the man everywhere, in Shakespeare’s work’ is ‘so effectually locked up and imprisoned in the artist’ that James finds himself hovering ‘at the base of thick walls for a sense of him’,170 exercising his ‘morbid and monstrous curiosity’.171 This curiosity results in part from James’s failure to find Shakespeare in the plays and not, as Vivien Jones has argued, because he detects there ‘the complete formal transformation of private experience in the work of art’.172 James’s ‘imagination’ and sharply honed reading skills reject the ‘primitive simplicity’ of Halliwell-Phillips’ facts.173 ‘The number of the mustered facts’ is, in any case, irrelevant: what matters is ‘the kind of fact that each may strike us as being’.174 Such relics of the past, as in ‘The Birthplace’, are incommensurable with Shakespeare the alluring and yet bedevilling ‘monster and magician of a thousand masks’ who is both a Caliban suspicious of the curse of language and the imperatives of representation, exposure and publicity, and a Prospero who concocts the empowering dissimulations of art.175 In a formula tirelessly

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applied in ‘The Birthplace’: ‘None ever appealed so sharply to some light of knowledge, and nothing could render our actual knowledge more contemptible.’176 The Tempest shows ‘us the artist consciously tasting of the first and rarest of his gifts, that of imaged creative Expression’, and this leaves James suspended between ‘human curiosity’ and ‘aesthetic passion’; for where there are signs of expression, curiosity about the author’s life is aroused; and if a text can no longer be detached from an expressive voice, or personality, the act of writing becomes more an affair of exposure, or possible discovery, than one of self-erasing and fiction-generating obscurity.177 Delia Bacon saw her task as one of dispelling through empirical investigation ‘this great myth of the modern ages’;178 but James in his introduction to The Tempest is much more perplexed about the issue in an essay that demonstrates by its own, sometimes incoherent, critical practice both the frustration and intensified curiosity that results from the resistance of art to artful penetration. James understands the mechanism whereby Shakespeare’s ‘career’ has been taken as a ‘transcendent “adventure” . . . of the mind of man’, and he nervously welcomes the power of the enigma thereby produced.179 But his hopes for the ‘Criticism of the future’, with his own forms of obscurity in play, are fearfully expressed: ‘The figured tapestry, the long arras that hides him, is always there, with its immensity of surface and its proportionate underside. May it not then be but a question, for the fulness of time, of the finer weapon, the sharper point, the stronger arm, the more extended lunge?’180 ‘One of the interesting things in big persons is that they leave us big questions’ observed James,181 and his appetite for information about the bard was insatiable; he found the lure of the ‘eternal mystery’, the ‘strained and aching wonder’ of it all, however, an even more irresistible feast.182 It was on his return to Concord and the site of the first shots fired in the America Civil War that James reflected with poetic intensity on the enigmatic incongruity between what remains of Shakespeare and, by implication, his long, complex, and often inscrutable incrementation. Beyond even such broodings as these, and to another purpose, moreover, the communicated spell falls, in its degree, into that pathetic oddity of the small aspect, and the rude and the lowly, the reduced and humiliated above all, that sits on so many nooks and corners, objects and appurtenances, old contemporary things – contemporary with the doings of our race; simplifying our antecedents, our annals, to within an inch of their life, making us ask, in presence of the rude relics even of greatness, mean

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retreats and receptacles, constructionally so poor, from what barbarians or from what pigmies we have sprung. There are certain rough black mementos of the early monarchy, in England and Scotland, there are glimpses of the original humble homes of other greatness as well, that strike in perfection this grim little note; which has the interest of our being free to take it, for curiosity, for luxury of thought, as that of the real or that of the romantic, and with which, again, the deep Concord rusticity, momentary medium of our national drama, essentially consorts. We remember the small hard facts of the Shakespeare house at Stratford; we remember the rude closet, in Edinburgh Castle, in which James VI of Scotland was born, or the other little black hole, at Holyrood, in which Mary Stuart ‘sat’ and in which Rizzio was murdered.183 But whatever the disparities between the relics and the myth, or what was and is, it is the ‘heavenly mingle’ of Weimar and Concord, of Shakespeare and American history, on which James dwells as he reflects on the past and the force of its representation and contemplates a pantheon which houses Thoreau, Emerson and Shakespeare: I hung over Concord River then as long as I could, and recalled how Thoreau, Hawthorne, Emerson himself, have expressed with due sympathy the sense of this full, slow, sleepy, meadowy flood, which sets its pace and takes its twists like some large obese benevolent person, scarce so frankly unsociable as to pass you at all. It had watched the Fight, it even now confesses, without a quickening of its current, and it draws along the woods and the orchards and the fields with the purr of a mild domesticated cat who rubs against the family and the furniture. Not to be recorded, at best, however, I think, never to emerge from the state of the inexpressible, in respect to the spot, by the bridge, where one most lingers, is the sharpest suggestion of the whole scene – the power diffused in it which makes it, after all these years, or perhaps indeed by reason of their number, so irresistibly touching.184 Ultimately, James ‘was much more struck with the way these particular places of visitation resist their pressure of reference than with their affecting us as below their fortune. Intrinsically they are as naught – deeply depressing, in fact, to any impulse to reconstitute’.185

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Chapter 4

John Berryman John Roe

How deeply Shakespeare himself was fascinated by the music of words can probably be inferred from the speeches of Pistol. What Pistol says is largely meaningless, but if one considers his lines singly they are magnificent rhetorical verse. Evidently, pieces of resounding nonsense (‘Let floods o’erswell, and fiends for food howl on’, etc.) were constantly appearing in Shakespeare’s mind of their own accord, and a half-lunatic character had to be invented to use them up.1 Shakespeare’s greatest significance for John Berryman as a poet was to let him feel that he could go right to the edge and stay at the edge. Berryman responded from the beginning to the passionate music of Shakespeare’s language, though he spent a good deal of time in his early poems trying to maintain a balance, wear a ‘modernist mask’, as he later confessed, rather than deliberately courting the threat of disorder. But he had some distance to travel before this became clear to him. It was only later, when he had the confidence to speak in a voice that could be variously infantile, demotic, elliptical, mischievous, and often near to insanity that Shakespeare’s contribution to his art fully revealed itself. Throughout his life Berryman simultaneously tried to respond as a critic to Shakespeare: it is no accident that his greatest scholarly ambition with regard to Shakespeare was to produce an edition of King Lear. Yet despite working tirelessly on the project from about 1944 to 1949, at the very moment when his own poetry was truly beginning to spark, he was unable to complete it. Similarly, he tried on no fewer than five occasions to write a critical biography of Shakespeare but was never able to do it.2 Berryman was steeped in Shakespeare: Lear in particular entered into his very being, and a great deal of what I have to say will inevitably come back to this play.

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Although Berryman on Lear is inevitably of its time, it may still be argued that subsequent developments in editorial theory, particularly challenges to the New Bibliography method of W. W. Greg and others, whom Berryman followed, do not seriously undermine his position.3 Berryman read as an imaginative writer himself and of course he treated Shakespeare as such, which is why it mattered to him that any editor should have a critic’s sensitivity to language. (The word ‘critic’ is Berryman’s but he could just as well have used ‘poet’.) Berryman’s main contribution to editorial studies, if he had managed to achieve print, would have been in terms of the readings he proposed and his defence of one word over another. However, he never completed the task, and so was unable to make an impact on the tradition of editing the play. What matters is the evidence of an interaction between Berryman and Shakespeare at a deep level, emerging in the poetry Berryman composed, particularly in the so-called Lear years (c.1944–1949). This more than Berryman’s comments as a critic will be my theme.4 In an interview with the Paris Review in 1970 (published in the Winter 1972 edition, following Berryman’s suicide in January that year), Berryman disclaimed that Shakespeare had had any influence on his poetic style or manner. Peter Stitt, the interviewer, immediately responded by quoting one of the most famous of The Dream Songs, belonging to a sequence that speaks of the death of Berryman’s old friend, the poet Delmore Schwartz: Henry’s mind grew blacker the more he thought, He looked onto the world like the act of an aged whore. Delmore, Delmore. He flung to pieces and they hit the floor. (‘Dream Song’ 147) Berryman readily acknowledged that there is something Shakespearean about these lines: ‘That sounds like Troilus and Cressida, doesn’t it? One of my favourite plays. Not to praise it, though, only in description.’ As well as expressing outrage at Schwartz’s fate, the lines suggest a violent response to an instance of sexual degradation, as befits the jealous Troilus in the play. This has bearing on his own collection of sonnets (see below, p. 143). In his critical writings (evidently intended as part of the biographical study) Berryman merely limits himself to reproducing fully Troilus’s famous, desperate defence of Cressida: ‘this is, and is not, Cressid’, and he does so in the context of referring to Troilus and Cressida as a prelude to Othello: ‘the utterance of a man on the rack, tortured by co-existent possibilities’

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(Berryman’s Shakespeare, 124). Unfortunately in the interview he doesn’t enlarge on the Troilus comparison, but he adds: I was half hysterical writing that song. It just burst onto the page. It took only as long to compose as it takes to write down.5 This immediately raises a question which recurs frequently in discussions of Berryman: whether the poetry, especially of The Dream Songs, has the measure of deliberation in composition, distance from actuality of experience, that much poetic theory, not only that associated with Modernism (with which Berryman had a complicated relationship), demands.6 Shakespeare famously has Touchstone in As You Like It declare that ‘the truest poetry is the most feigning’. In this Touchstone is only following a leading Renaissance theoretician, Sir Philip Sidney, who affirmed that ‘a feigned example hath as much force to teach as a true example’, clearly preferring the former.7 Sidney makes the point forcefully with an example from painting, distinguishing between the ‘meaner sort of painters’, who only paint from life, and the ‘more excellent, who having no law but wit’ (invention) conceive in the abstract of a subject which, paradoxically, has the greater power to stir emotion: as the constant though lamenting look of Lucretia . . . when she punished in herself another’s fault; wherein he painteth not Lucretia whom he never saw, but painteth the outward beauty of such a virtue.8 Sidney emphasizes virtue because he has to – The Apology for Poetry was written to prove a point to the moralists who condemned the art as improper – but he also confronts the reader with the curious truth that artistic detachment (unfeeling) can create the most powerful of effects, stronger than simply dissolving in tears and giving voice, as Berryman claims to have done (‘I was half hysterical’). Berryman is knowingly pitting himself against more recent theorists such as James Joyce and his famous dictum, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, about the artist as a god ‘paring his finger nails’,9 a high modernist position which owes much to Sidney, though Sidney himself would never risk such irony of expression. Neither is another high modernist, T. S. Eliot, to whom Berryman always had a mixed – not to say, confused – response, ever far-away. He confesses, in the Paris Review interview, that he ‘refused to meet [Eliot] on three occasions in England’. Eliot, of course, declined to publish five poems

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which Berryman sent to The Criterion in 1936, which can hardly have helped matters. Berryman further says that he had to ‘fight shy’ of Eliot (he mentions the refusal to meet Eliot in the intensely autobiographical collection, Love & Fame, in the poem ‘Monkhood’). He goes on: ‘There was a certain amount of hostility in it too.’ What he seems to mean here is that stylistically Eliot was too threatening: ‘I only began to appreciate Eliot much later, after I was secure in my own style’, and he adds: ‘I now rate him very high. I think he was one of the greatest poets who ever lived.’ At the same time, perhaps surprisingly, Berryman tells Stitt that when he wrote Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (the poem which somewhat belatedly made Berryman’s name; it was published in book form in 1956, when Berryman was 42), his model was none other than Eliot’s The Waste Land, but adds immediately, and quite correctly, that it is in effect ‘as unlike The Waste Land as it is possible for me to be’.10 On the other hand, Berryman is similarly like and yet quite unlike the numerous influences that various critics have claimed for him. The agreement with Stitt’s observation that the Delmore Schwartz ‘Dream Song’ reads like Shakespeare is only part of the story. Disentangling the voices which make up The Dream Songs especially is notoriously difficult. Berryman, in both his life and art, found himself doing homage to and yet reacting against another poet/person, sometimes in the same breath. He would also pit one strong influence against another: hostility to Eliot went hand in hand with devotion to Yeats.11 If he studiously avoided Eliot, he made absolutely sure to meet Yeats, and tells Stitt in humorous detail (which still has reverential overtones) about having tea with Yeats at his club: ‘I gave him a Craven “A”, and then lit it for him, and I thought, Immortality is mine!’ In fact, Berryman is simply quoting from his own poem: Took Henry tea down at the Athenaeum with Yeats and offered the master a fag, the which he took, accepting too a light to Henry’s lasting honour.12 The song then – and in a way that is peculiarly characteristic of Berryman – tempers the sense of privilege by referring to Yeats’s last desperate feelings about sex, and includes an accusation of importuning, portrayed (courtesy of Shakespeare) in terms of Falstaffian humiliation: The last of the girls had gone half in despair on. He starved & flung him on ‘em. Fat then, free,

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he make a lukewarm wooer. All this hell of flesh – not so bulk’, after all – keeps him from edge. (‘Dream Song’ 215) This echoes Prince Henry’s words to the apparently dead Falstaff on the field at Shrewsbury: What? Old acquaintance? Could not all this flesh Keep in a little life? Poor Jack, farewell! (1 Henry IV V. iv. 102–3) While Berryman is happy to confess to his hero-worship of Yeats, another part of him bridled at the power Yeats held over him (a different kind of admission occurs in ‘Dream Song’ 312), so that a wish to taunt Yeats – or at least Yeats’s memory – by pointing up his sexual failings mingles with his affection for him (not unlike Hal’s humiliating treatment of Fat Jack). In another interview, Berryman speaks positively of the overwhelming influence on him, in the 1930s, of ‘Yeats, whom I didn’t so much wish to resemble as to be’.13 Not only did Berryman see Yeats as an antidote to the crushing influence of Eliot and Pound (while of course inevitably becoming too dominant in turn), but it is also most likely that Yeats’s presentation of Shakespeare would have carried a special appeal to Berryman’s imagination. In the mid- to late 1930s it was all Shakespeare for Berryman: he had been fired by Mark Van Doren’s brilliant classes at Columbia, and said later that as early as 1937 he began to think of editing King Lear – a project which had the most mixed of fortunes. This was the year in which he met Yeats, while at Cambridge studying under the famed George (‘Dadie’) Rylands, who directed West End productions of Shakespeare, including Hamlet with Gielgud, and while Berryman was preparing for the Oldham Shakespeare Prize (he was to win it, beating Arnold Kettle, later to be a distinguished Marxist critic, into second place). In 1938, only a year before he died, Yeats published his extraordinary late volume, with the simple title New Poems (it is tempting to think that the Nobel committee would have considered awarding him the prize a second time had he lived), a collection which included ‘Lapis Lazuli’: All perform their tragic play, There struts Hamlet, there is Lear, That’s Ophelia, that Cordelia; Yet they, should the last scene be there,

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The great stage curtain about to drop, If worthy their prominent part in the play, Do not break up their lines to weep. They know that Hamlet and Lear are gay; Gaiety transfiguring all that dread. (ll. 9–17) Unfortunately we have no record of Berryman’s comment on this poem, but the line, ‘[g]aiety transfiguring all that dread’ could stand readily as a description of what Berryman achieves in so many of The Dream Songs. The power Yeats had over Berryman’s imagination was almost bound to express itself in one or more of Berryman’s vivid dreams. Adam Kirsch draws attention to a dream Berryman recorded in February 1937, about a month before he actually met Yeats: I shut my eyes and an image rose before them, not clear but strong: I saw that it was the figure of Yeats, white-haired and tall, struggling laboriously to lift something dark which was on his right side. . . . I saw that it was a great piece of coal, irregular, black. He raised it high above his head, hair flying with a set expression, brilliant eyes dashed it to the ground at his feet, a polished ground that might have been a floor: the pieces rolled away silver.14 The vision of Yeats Berryman conjures up in his dream resembles Lear in his madness, as imagined by Shakespeare (‘thunderbolts / singe my white head’ and ‘a head / So old and white as this’ (III.ii.5–6, 22–3; my italics); that is, Yeats mutates into Lear in Berryman’s vision of him. Kirsch interprets the dream very plausibly as Berryman’s understanding of Yeats’s transformation of weakness in life into perfection in art, what Yeats refers to with satisfaction in The Trembling of the Veil as ‘those verses where I have found something hard and cold’ (Kirsch, The Wounded Surgeon, 104). Yet we have just seen something like those shattered, flying bits of coal in the ‘Dream Song’ that remembers Delmore Schwartz: ‘Henry’s mind grew blacker’ and ‘I flung to pieces and they hit the floor’. It may well be that years later this early but deeply ingrained image of Yeats-Lear fused with Berryman’s vision of himself and Schwartz to renew itself in a modified shape. In each case elements of life are being transmuted into art, but in the poem passion seems even stronger than it does in the dream. Berryman, in the Paris Review interview, makes another revealing remark concerning his meeting with Yeats: He said, ‘I never revise now . . . but in the interests of a more passionate syntax’. Now that struck me as a very good remark. I have no idea what it

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meant, and still don’t know, but the longer I think about it, the better I like it.15 It is surely the word ‘passionate’ that compels Berryman’s imagination. Despite the phrase ‘something hard and cold’, passion animates Yeats’s poetic language throughout, and in the later poems (from The Tower onwards perhaps) he writes like a character straight from Shakespearean drama, a Lear no less, with the effect of eliding the distinction between the artist and his creation. The collocation ‘passionate syntax’ brings together opposites: parts of speech, cold, neutral, mechanically impersonal, come alive under the pressure of feeling. Artistic indifference, beloved of Modernism and New Criticism alike, becomes as a concept harder to sustain in the face of Yeats’s dictum, which forces art and feeling into a much more intimate relationship. So when Eliot, pursuing the theory of impersonality in poetic composition, insists that ‘the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates’, we can be sure that Berryman, following Yeats’s example, would have little sympathy for such a view. Eliot’s famous ‘catalyst’ (applied to the artist who controls, revises, deliberates, separating himself from emotion in the process) becomes for Berryman much less easy to distinguish from the voice that, in the work, issues under the compulsion of suffering.16 The ‘I’ that speaks in a Yeats poem combines confidence with defiance, especially (a favourite theme of Berryman’s) when confronting unavoidable destruction: Arise and bid me strike a match And strike another till time catch; Should the conflagration climb, Run till all the sages know. We the great gazebo built, They convicted us of guilt; Bid me strike a match and blow. (‘In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz’) This may not in the event be all that far from what Eliot proposes, but it does not have the feeling of indifference to the artist’s own emotions, which Eliot seems to recommend: ‘[i]t is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting’ (Eliot, Selected Essays, 20). It is hard to separate what Yeats felt for the two women who gave him the subject of his poem from the poem itself. And it is even harder to square Eliot’s

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view with Berryman’s professed feelings, as he wrote the Delmore Schwartz ‘Dream Song’. It is also the case that while Eliot’s argument may hold true in a general sense, and may indeed hold true for Shakespeare’s tragic drama, the example of Yeats would seem to argue against it. For Berryman, as for a number of poets uneasy with Modernism,17 Yeats seemed closer to the true poetic spirit. We might recall that Sidney, in Astrophil & Stella, seems dissatisfied with the ‘feigning’ theory of poetic inspiration, and has his protagonist proclaim at the outset: ‘look in thy heart, and write’ (1.14). Like many other poets, Berryman fell under Yeats’s spell, only to seek an eventual escape from it. Section VII of The Dream Songs begins with the visit to Dublin and with Berryman’s reflections on his later fight against Yeats’s influence.18 He used Yeats, however, to free himself from the ‘crippling’ influence of Eliot and Pound, and he did so, I would claim, partly by aligning Yeats with Shakespeare in his imagination. What Yeats, responding to Shakespeare’s great orators, insists on in poetry is rhetorical, declamatory power, something which Modernism with its frequent insistence on irony tends to shy away from (in this respect New Criticism proves a child of Modernism). Exemplary Modernist texts either draw attention to art by emphasizing its difficulty rather than its spontaneity or often have a highly fastidious narrator, given to irony and self-deprecation.19 All of this is at some remove from Berryman’s virtual cri de coeur with which the Paris Review interview comes to an end: But what I was going on to say is that I do strongly feel that among the greatest pieces of luck for high achievement is ordeal. Certain great artists can make out without it, Titian and others, but mostly you need ordeal. My idea is this: the artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he’s in business. Beethoven’s deafness, Goya’s deafness, Milton’s blindness, that kind of thing. And I think that what happens in my poetic work in the future will probably largely depend not on my sitting calmly on my ass as I think, ‘Hmm, hmm, a long poem again? Hmm’, but on being knocked in the face, and thrown flat, and given cancer, and all kinds of other things short of senile dementia. At that point, I’m out, but short of that, I don’t know. I hope to be nearly crucified.20 Yeats enjoys bringing things to fever pitch, as he does in the lines quoted from ‘Lapis Lazuli’. If we consider Yeats’s use of the piece of precious stone that has inspired him, we appreciate a nice tension between its hardness

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and the passion expressed by the various characters whose story (as in the examples from Shakespeare) or whose presence (as in the case of the Chinamen carved in the stone) he evokes. All of them show that they know what it is to experience the extremes of suffering. Lear and Hamlet have already ‘perform[ed] their tragic play’; the poem ends by drawing attention to the Chinamen: There, on the mountain and the sky, On all the tragic scene they stare. One asks for mournful melodies: Accomplished fingers begin to play. Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes, Their ancient, glittering eyes are gay. (ll. 51–6) One may assume that the Chinamen, as befits their Buddhist character, have already undergone the experiences that beset Shakespeare’s tragic heroes, and that their ‘ancient, glittering eyes’ equip them with a power of seeing that tragedy might struggle to match. The question of the relationship of art to feeling is not an easy one to resolve, and we may have to settle more for degrees of emphasis than an out and out choice of interpretation. Whatever the truth of the argument regarding ‘impersonality’, Yeats by his musical, rhythmic incantations makes us feel that passion and nothing else has prompted him to write his poem. Berryman’s response to Shakespeare is repeatedly of this order; the ‘whitehaired’ image recurs again, this time in relation to Lear in a poem sent to his mother in a letter (27 October 1936), and as a preface to which he says: ‘great, incredibly great plays can be written, and I’m positive – I must be positive for I hope so greatly, so intolerably – that I can write them . . . I’ve been reading Lear over and over in a kind of frenzy.’ Then comes the poem, in three quatrain stanzas, of which I quote the first: What absolute horizon calls them there? I saw the white-haired men go one by one Up a great stair: the whiteness of the sun Showed crimson blood pounding beneath the hair. This is very evidently Yeatsian, and written as Yeats himself was entering his last great phase. But that it is Lear that Berryman has in mind as he

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composes becomes clear in words later in the letter, when he quotes – or rather, misquotes – directly from the play: – Flowers, flowers and we’ll wear out In a walled prison, packs and sects of great ones that ebb and flow by the moon.21 Lear does not speak of flowers in this or any line in the play. Berryman may be thinking of the scene in Act IV, Scene v where he encounters Edgar and Gloucester. According to the Folio he is simply ‘mad’; however, Capell in the eighteenth century gave the following stage direction: ‘Enter Lear, fantastically dressed with wild flowers’, and a long theatrical and editorial tradition has followed suit.22 The letter to his mother, like so many of Berryman’s comments on Shakespeare, shows him identifying with the state of mind of Shakespeare, and that state is almost unvaryingly one in which creativity is inseparable from frenzy: discipline for the artist lies not in disinterested impersonality but in the endurance of extremities of feeling which ordinary men cannot achieve.23 In an essay, Berryman speaks of Shakespeare’s being moved to intercede on behalf of Desdemona who, though no less virtuous than Ophelia or Cordelia, ‘had disgraced herself in the fact of her unnatural marriage’. It is interesting that Berryman should take this line, despite the Senate’s acceptance of the validity of the marriage. Words such as ‘unnatural marriage’ seem to have a personal ring. He then remarks, with evident feeling, ‘We are speaking of psychological necessity – obsession – in the poet.’24 You could not get a more forceful rejection of the theory of impersonality than this. Berryman concludes the letter to his mother: The strict majesty of a ritual, if one can endure it – men, save some fools, were not made for art – it breaks them and breaks them – but I must be willing, for I’ve no choice. (Kelly, 65) Certainly, what Berryman found in Shakespeare, and what Yeats by his method and examples reinforced for him, was the unashamed readiness to express feeling in all its naked directness. Not only that but for Berryman, as his comments on Othello show, the poet’s passion about his subject cannot be separated from the fictive passion expressed by his characters.

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Shakespeare and Personal Biography Berryman, as is well known, had unassailable personal reasons for believing that art should spring directly from emotion, with minimal interference. We may say this now, of course, following The Dream Songs, Berryman’s Sonnets, and late volumes such as Love & Fame, and after the biographies and memoirs (three so far),25 as well as the publication of various letters (particularly those written to his mother). In his reflections composed at different periods of the 1950s (intended to be part of his critical biography of Shakespeare) Berryman tends more and more to the persuasion that a poet’s art is inseparable from the life. He opens his essay ‘The Crisis’ (which is mainly on Hamlet) with the sentence: ‘It seems likely that Shakespeare in middle life underwent at least two nervous crises that shook his work to its heart.’26 In the preface to another work he never completed, to be called ‘A Shakespeare Handbook’, he attacks in particular a high-minded essay by the Shakespearean guru C. J. Sisson, ‘The Mythical Sorrows of Shakespeare’ (published as a British Academy lecture in 1934), which argues that Shakespeare was ‘a man who felt nothing’.27 In his essay, ‘Marlowe’s Damnations’, Berryman unabashedly speaks of the need to reflect on ‘connexions, now illuminating, now mysterious, between the artist’s life and his work . . . denied only by very young persons or writers whose work perhaps really does bear no relation to their lives, tant pis pour eux’.28 The last four words are a virtual self-declaration. What makes Berryman’s case especially poignant, as shows up pointedly in The Dream Songs, is the death of his father, by gunshot wounds, when Berryman was a boy of only 12. The circumstances of this death seem to have grown murkier as time has elapsed. There was another man involved, John Berryman, who had displaced Berryman’s father, John Allyn Smith, in the mother’s affections and was later to marry her. Smith is officially recorded as having shot himself on a beach in Florida in 1926 (‘[he] shot his heart out in a Florida dawn’, ‘Dream Song’ 384) but the case is more complicated than that. Smith was understandably miserable because he was losing his wife to another man, but that might just as easily have resulted in his turning the gun (he was apparently quite handy with firearms) on his wife and her lover. The newspaper report mentioned the coroner’s observation that there were none of the expected powder burns on the deceased’s shirt, which in turn – though nobody went so far as to say this – would suggest that the wound was not self-inflicted.29 More recently Robert Giroux was ready to assert that ‘Jill’ Berryman or her lover Berryman killed Smith.30 The triangle begins to resemble the

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situation at the court of Elsinore with Berryman, Jr (he had taken his stepfather’s name) in the role of an agonized ‘Hamlet’. Several of The Dream Songs accept the official view of the death, as put forward constantly by ‘Gertrude’. ‘Dream Song’ 384 summons Henry to a final reckoning with his father, and he imagines himself standing above the grave hurling insults and even committing violence on the man who by his death had betrayed him. Yet it is also clear from the correspondence that right to the end of his own life (he died on 5 January 1972) that Berryman was in an agony of unknowing about the circumstances of his father’s demise. This emerges particularly in correspondence with his mother around Thanksgiving, 1970. Berryman writes from hospital, where he was undergoing treatment for alcoholism, asking for precise details, especially concerning his own reaction at the time. His request elicits a long letter of self-justification from his mother (sent on Thanksgiving Eve). Berryman does not raise doubts about the suicide but his mother clearly feels the need to explain everything she had done, as if to clear herself from suspicion. As might be expected, in his reply Berryman apologizes profusely that he ‘laid such a burden on [her]’.31 In the section ‘The Tragic Substance’ (in Berryman’s Shakespeare) the issue of guilt comes up almost subconsciously in Berryman, in a way which he himself would find revealing in a character in the play, especially given his insistence on the importance of reading psychologically (a word occurring frequently in his criticism): [Hamlet] even accuses his mother . . . of his father’s murder – of which she cannot possibly, as he knows very well, have been guilty – and Shakespeare takes the accusation so lightly that he does not have Gertrude explain or explicitly repudiate it, and Hamlet never recurs to it. (Haffenden, Berryman’s Shakespeare, 127; my italics) It is extraordinary that a reader of Shakespeare as subtle and imaginative as Berryman should so crassly (apparently) misread this significant moment. There is nothing light about the accusation as made by Hamlet (or as Shakespeare conceives of it), and Gertrude indeed is moved to declare at one point in the scene: O Hamlet, speak no more! Thou turn’st my eyes into my very soul, And there I see such black and grained spots As will not leave their tinct. (III.iv.88–91)

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Although quite willing to implicate Desdemona, albeit sympathetically, in guilt (see above), Berryman seems prepared to go to any length to absolve Gertrude of transgression. Surely Berryman is thinking of his personal situation and trying hard to refute his suspicions about his own mother by dismissing those of Hamlet so abruptly. It hardly needs saying that, in a drama that so carefully balances suggestion and innuendo on the one hand with fullness of exposition on the other, here if ever is the place for implicit accusation and deferred or disguised confession. Not that the play is saying Gertrude definitely is guilty; merely that it asks (insistently) whether or how much. Hamlet’s decision not to persist directly with his cross-examination (he continues it in other ways) might mean, perfectly understandably, that he does not wish to know the ultimate truth – any more than Berryman wishes to know. The play makes all these readings possible. ‘Hamlet’ continues to have bad dreams and sows his doubts elsewhere in his poetry: and God has many other surprises, like when the man you fear most in the world marries your mother and chilling other, men from far tribes armed in the dark, the dikehole, the sudden gash of an old friend’s betrayal,32 words out that leave one pale . . . I have a story to tell you which is the worst story to tell that ever once I heard. (‘Dream Song’ 168) For readers who have no interest in the biography, these lines stand sufficiently alone as examples of universal nightmares, where every fear or anxiety is possible. However, if we read biographically, the points of resemblance between the situation regarding the play and the situation that may have bearing on the poet’s private life are obvious. Interestingly, Berryman seems to take on the identity of Old Hamlet (John Allyn Smith) in the line beginning the second stanza (‘I could a tale unfold . . .’, Hamlet I.v.15), but then The Dream Songs make a point of continually shifting person and perspective, either in the switch of pronouns, or number, or in the back-and-forth change of tenses, all of which occurs most graphically in the following example: ‘Women is better . . . / . . . Some hang heavy on the sauce, / . . . one hides in the land. / Henry was not his favourite’ (‘Dream Song’ 15).

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In another interview (given in 1965), Berryman makes a special point about shifting pronouns. Talking about an early endeavour, ‘The Ball Poem’ (published in The Dispossessed in 1948) Berryman felt he had made a discovery – ‘that a commitment of identity can be “reserved”, so to speak, with an ambiguous pronoun. The poet himself is both left out and put in; the boy does and does not become him and we are confronted with a process which is at once a process of life and a process of art.’ This effectively refutes the notion of the separability of art and life, and it shows how the poem paved the way for the invention of the Henry figure of The Dream Songs. Berryman then says: ‘a pronoun may seem a small matter, but she matters, he matters, it matters, they matter. Without this invention (if it is one – Rimbaud’s “Je est un autre” may have pointed my way, I have no idea now) I could not have written either of the two long poems that constitute the bulk of my work so far.’33 As a poet, Berryman has a dramatic sense of character, which his remark on pronoun ambiguity makes evident. Shakespeare’s quicksilver change of emphasis, his hero’s constant unsettling of an audience even within the play (Polonius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Ophelia) finds its correspondence in Berryman’s manoeuvres of one person against, in, or through another in The Dream Songs. Berryman is at one and the same time Lear, paying the price for ‘huffiness’, exposed or ‘pried / open for all the world to see’ and Hamlet (‘unappeasable Henry sulked’, ‘Dream Song’ 1), evasive, operating a near private language. The prospect of a comprehensively annotated edition of The Dream Songs (along the lines of, for example, the Collected Poems of Robert Lowell) still seems far-away. Dramatic incident, sometimes planned but more often unplanned, was typical of Berryman, as Eileen Simpson, Berryman’s second wife, makes clear in retailing incidents which bring the life and the art together.34 Berryman, along with fellow poet-critics such as Randall Jarrell, took a Freudian line on the interpretation of texts. The Ernest Jones Oedipal Hamlet was a view that Berryman subscribed to quite naturally.35 His own family circumstances made it imperative that he should somehow seek for a solution to what had happened to him as a result of his father’s death. Unfortunately, one early (and permanent) solution was alcohol. Berryman was already drinking hard as an undergraduate at Columbia, and he was, as is well documented, institutionalized several times in desperate hopes of curing himself.36 The Freudian analytical solution only partly helped, as the father’s actual death complicated the notion of fantasy killing. On whom then should the blame rest? Does ‘Hamlet’ now collude

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with ‘Gertrude’ in the death of ‘Old Hamlet’, or does he turn his murderous attention to ‘Claudius’, the second father? Simpson in her memoir recalls a dramatic moment of interaction between son and mother at Princeton in 1951, while he was giving the Alfred Hodder lectures on Shakespeare, which were attracting growing audiences by virtue of Berryman’s imagination and charisma. He clearly brought an actor’s energy to the podium, though as in any thoroughgoing performance it had the effect of draining him emotionally each time.37 Simpson recalls how one day, in the course of the Hamlet lectures, Berryman’s mother arrived apparently deliberately late, ‘scene-stealing’, causing her son almost to lose control through rage at her antics. The lecture was of course strongly psychoanalytical in method: ‘Did his mother’, Simpson reflects, ‘feel that there was a message for her in the interpretation of the relationship between Hamlet and Gertrude as oedipal?’38 One way Berryman seems to have reconciled the various alternatives his family situation compelled upon him was to mingle dream with reality, and he reached such a state of emotional disturbance and confusion that the two were sometimes indistinguishable to him. Invariably this affected his interpretation of Shakespeare. On Macbeth, Berryman spoke conventionally enough about double nature, whereby a character though acting basely can elicit sympathy from the audience: ‘His strangeness then and his suffering, and also the fact that he is not profiting from his crimes, help to explain the fact that he does not alienate us’ (Berryman, Freedom, 62). Simpson comments: John, who sometime spoke as if his nature were all baseness, and was more and more troubled by what he saw as the demonic component in his make-up, had, unlike [Macbeth], not murdered anyone; yet he so often dreamed he had that he came to believe the dream was reality (I have committed a murder), the reality a dream (I am innocent). (Poets in Their Youth, 208) Two memorable moments in the poetry derive from such dramas. The first occurs in Bradstreet, when the poet speaks in a mood of confession to ‘Anne’ about the women he thinks he may have murdered: I trundle the bodies, on the iron bars, over that fire backwards & forth; they burn; bits fall. I wonder if I killed them. Women serve my turn. (34.1–4)

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The lines have overtones of death camps such as Auschwitz and the mass incineration of bodies, which in turn invoke images of hellfire. The second occurs at the end of one of the most brilliantly inventive and harrowing of all The Dream Songs: But never did Henry, as he thought he did, end anyone and hacks her body up and hide the pieces where they may be found. He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody’s missing. Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up. Nobody is ever missing. (‘Dream Song’ 29.13–18) This is a statement of innocence made by someone racked with inexplicable guilt. Has he or has he not committed the atrocities he describes? What we have discussed above also recurs here: the switch of pronouns (‘her’/‘them’), in addition to which we have changes of verb tense: ‘did . . . / end’/‘hacks’. Such alternation mirrors the feeling of indeterminacy, regarding both the question of personal guilt and the Shakespearean example of duality of character. Macbeth simultaneously both repels us and elicits sympathy. Shakespearean example embeds itself in Berryman’s conscience in a very deep sense, so much so that it is impossible for him to distinguish between a character such as Hamlet or Macbeth and his own character. This means that had Berryman completed the biographical study, it would most likely have struck readers as being highly subjective. What happened in fact was that Shakespeare entered Berryman’s poetry through Berryman’s intense study of his works or, conversely, Berryman was able to re-enter his own poetic practice with the aid of Shakespeare. Whichever way one looks at it, the effect was to produce a more vivid, intensely lived poetry, more easily given to dwelling in ambivalence, than he would otherwise have achieved. Berryman’s Hamlet-like temperament made him find fools whom he would not suffer gladly, especially in the academic world where he always had an uneasy footing. Success came early and easily at one level (victory in the Oldham Prize) but he never really established himself in an academic post until quite late in life, and then more on the strength of his poetic achievements than on his scholarly writings. Although we are treating him here as a Shakespearean, his work on Shakespeare unfortunately came to very little as far as publication is concerned. As I have already said, his projected edition of King Lear, on which he worked long, obsessively, and indefatigably (as the notes on the play preserved in the University of

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Minnesota papers attest) never reached the stage of publication. Nor did the projected critical biography get beyond typescript stage. As John Haffenden observes, ‘it is greatly to be regretted that Berryman never found the occasion to finish his edition of King Lear – or to publish portions of his introduction in the form of articles’ (Berryman’s Shakespeare, xxxiii–xxxiv). He was dashed in 1949 by the appearance of G. I. Duthie’s edition, on which he immediately poured scorn. He writes: ‘I am grossly disappointed. The truth is that I suffer from a respect for textual technicians which is excessive . . . as I looked at [Duthie’s] text last night . . . my respect faded. . . . My impression is that he had no right to edit Lear at all’ (Berryman’s Shakespeare, 251). Admittedly Berryman was justifying himself to members of the Rockefeller Foundation Committee who had given him a grant to work on his own edition. There is something self-protective about this declaration; he must have felt that he had wasted the committee’s money. If, however, we can distinguish between the personal and professional crisis that Duthie’s undoubted accomplishment had created for Berryman and the latter’s sense of what it required to be a true Shakespearean editor (i.e. not boringly technical but reading with sensibility), then we might appreciate the unmitigated passion that he felt the task required. Impatience may be born of personal frustration but it also finds its cause in the lack of imagination and creative complacency that is seen everywhere around. Of course the two cannot be easily separated. Berryman offended often and sulkily enough to deserve blame, but it is also true that when an ideal carries absolute conviction it will leave those in its possession no other option than to accuse without mercy. This, after all, is how Hamlet treated Polonius. For Berryman, the ‘textual technician’ Duthie was just such an unimaginative pedant. For Berryman as an editor of Shakespeare the most important requirement was to possess a poet’s gift for reading the work of a fellow imaginative writer. A mere mechanic for whom one word was as good as another, simply because it made sense, would not do. It is of course not necessarily the case that life with its raw emotions will get into poetry directly, with minimal transformation – and if it does it is difficult to recognize that this has happened. A poet can have the most disturbed private life (witness Eliot himself) while exercising a calm control in his art. Berryman’s statements, especially in the interview in the Paris Review, make it clear that emotion should come through as powerfully as possible, without too much deliberation. For this reason he loved Whitman, though he did not write like him as much as he sometimes claimed to do.39 Berryman sang his song of himself, but it is neither cheerful nor confident,

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as Whitman’s is, though it carries a measure of his defiance, defiance indeed of those he loved and admired. For example, Yeats, on more than one occasion comes under attack. An instance is Berryman’s late ‘manifesto’ in favour of exile in the poem ‘Roots’. He remembers Yeats (and refers probably to the occasion he mentions in the Paris Review interview) saying ‘with some pretentiousness, I felt, even then’, that he always had to ‘go back / to Ireland, where my roots are’. Eschewing such portentous selfregard, Berryman opts for the stripped-down, wanderer’s approach – we might indeed see it as the Lear approach: ‘Wherever I am, young Sir, my wits about me, / memory blazing, I’ll cope & make do’ (Henry’s Fate, 58). It would notwithstanding take Berryman some time to show what he felt to be his true hand. To resume the theme of impersonality, Berryman as a student was in thrall to the New Critical principles of a mentor he much admired, R. P. Blackmur. The early poems show Berryman wearing the mask of impersonality which he was later to discard, and along with it the friendship of Blackmur. He wrote in a philosophy course: ‘when a writer has given us satisfactory work – Lear, say, or Moll Flanders or Ode on a Grecian Urn – we need nothing outside the work.’ Attention to the life is ‘vulgar curiosity’ (Mariani, Dream Songs, 54). It is interesting to note the view he gives here of Shakespeare. Berryman’s style as it evolved in The Dream Songs and beyond became the antithesis of high-minded critical theory such as Blackmur’s. As he became more interested in the life of Shakespeare in relation to the work, so he became more relaxed about, indeed was positively to advocate, the direct and unmitigated expression of emotion in art. Reviewing Cleanth Brooks’s supreme statement of the New Critical position, The Well-Wrought Urn, Berryman is now stern in his disagreement with such an approach and, almost predictably, appeals to King Lear: Every man is entitled to insensitivities; but when, in one of his rare forays into the judicial, the critic writes of ‘More happy love! more happy, happy love!’ ‘I am not sure that this stanza can altogether be defended . . . There is a tendency to linger over the scene sentimentally: the repetition of the word happy is perhaps symptomatic of what is occurring’, one wonders what he thinks of another line hitherto much and miserably admired: ‘Never, never, never, never, never.’ He writes, in fact, ‘The method of art can, I believe, never be direct – is always indirect.’ I wonder.40 One thing is clear, and that is that through Shakespeare, Berryman became more and more confident at expressing feeling directly, often

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invoking a particular recent incident, a spell in hospital following breaking an arm, a drunken blackout, a newspaper interview, or argument with a wife or friend, and at composing a poem without disguising circumstances. He speaks, that is, the way Shakespeare’s highly wrought tragic figures speak, but he does so often and of course deliberately to comic effect. Imagine, accordingly, a Lear who rages feverishly, but whose passion begets a smile: The high ones die, die. They die. You look up and who’s there? – Easy, easy, Mr Bones. I is on your side. I smell your grief. (‘Dream Song’ 36) King Lear has such a character as the ‘Bones’ interlocutor, and that is the Fool. In so far as the play manages comedy, and indeed comedy at Lear’s expense, then the Fool provides it, telling the king what he does not wish to hear, yet expressing concern for his sovereign’s well-being: ‘Prithee, nuncle, be content. This is a naughty night to swim in’ (III.iv.110). The ‘Bones’ speaker does something similar to this, reminding Henry of his obligations on the one hand, while offering advice and comfort on the other. ‘– Now there you exaggerate, Sah. We hafta die. / That is our “pointed task. Love & die” ’ (‘Dream Song’ 36). The switch from high to low in the dialogue in Lear, especially in the exchanges between the king and the fool, are reproduced in sections of the ‘Bones’ conversations in The Dream Songs. In each case the ‘high’ character does not appear to wish to heed what the ‘low’ character is saying to him. None the less, as Berryman’s remarks on the exchange of persons and pronouns indicate, things are not easily separable: ‘Je es un autre’ (Berryman, Freedom, 327).

Shakespearean Tragedy: Art and Life Berryman’s passion for Shakespeare and other authors finds expression in another of his letters to his mother: ‘Pride & Prejudice is definitely one of the best . . . I’ve been reading much Whitman . . . and some Shakespeare, the Sonnets & occasional stuff. Jeez, he could write, dat guy!!’ (Kelly, We Dream of Honour, 37). Later he wrote a letter in which, as we might expect, he brought Yeats and Shakespeare together. On Yeats, he declares, ‘as with Shakespeare, the more you know (an emotional term, too) the greater the difficulties, the central ambiguities’. He then moves from Yeats to Shakespeare and specifically to King Lear, ‘marvel[ling] at the language

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of even a “filling” scene, like 2 Act IV’ (Goneril, Albany, Oswald and Messenger). He goes on: ‘[n]early all pitch and accent is in Shakespeare somewhere, the body of language not revealing but creating passion’ (my italics). He illustrates this remark not from Lear but from Hamlet: This bodiless creation ecstasy Is very [cunning] in. (III.iv.138; Kelly, We Dream of Honour, 98)41 Berryman, however, as we have observed, made his name only posthumously as a Shakespearean. A single essay was published in his lifetime, and his editing and biographical ventures, though apparently (especially the King Lear edition) agonizingly close to completion, never saw print. Why did this play, which as is very clear both from the University of Minnesota Berryman papers as well as from John Haffenden’s Berryman’s Shakespeare, so obsess Berryman? The answer is probably twofold: (1) the story and content spoke to Berryman in a particular way, just as did that of Hamlet, (2) Lear exercised a particular fascination as the cause célèbre of the New Bibliography, represented by editors such as A. W. Pollard, W. W. Greg (with whom Berryman conducted an amusing correspondence), E. K. Chambers and R. W. McKerrow (see n. 3). Controversy was later to be reinvigorated with the publication of The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare’s Two Version of King Lear by Taylor and Warren in 1983 (see below). Of course this was after Berryman’s time; however, the continuing arguments over the play’s form, in its conflicting Folio and Quarto versions, show not only how live an issue it has always been but also suggest that had Berryman lived, and of course been strong enough, he might well have returned to the forum of debate. A good sense of Berryman’s approach to Lear comes in the section of the proposed biographical study, which Haffenden prints under the title, ‘The Tragic Substance’. This being Berryman, there cannot be Lear without the issues of Hamlet: I have tried to account for the appearance of the tragic temper in Shakespeare’s work by seeing it as a product of certain forces: the strain of representing – at enormous length in Hamlet – mysterious and frightening truths about human life probably not verbally understood by the dramatist, the simultaneous excitation and despair of imagining a life for his dead son which unfortunately had to embody these truths, and the dishevelling experience of the loss of his father, which happened also to bring into play in his own life the truths.42

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The biographical assumption, which in one respect is a throwback to the critical interpretation of Edward Dowden, carries special force in the case of Berryman. A writer whose own father has died violently will have to work hard not to see things a certain way and, with a particular critical tradition supporting him, Berryman would naturally be inclined to find the personal in the work. Incidentally, the phrase ‘not verbally understood’ is curious, especially as applied to a writer who more than any other had every verbal resource at his fingertips, as well as being able to summon up a few more for the occasion. Berryman in his compendious and exhaustive compilation of lists of words used in Lear shows his enthusiasm for Shakespeare’s use of coinages, neologisms and nonce-words.43 The claim may be no more than any lecturer aiming to catch his audience’s attention might make; Berryman was nothing if not dramatic on the podium. Eileen Simpson records how he would end his performances dripping with perspiration, and how those in the front rows witnessed his emotional intensity with awe (Simpson, Poets in Their Youth, 210). However, he was delivering these lectures at a time when he was in his own poetry attempting to find words to express the mysterious and the frightening, and he is most instructive in one of his interviews (Berryman, Freedom, 328–31) about how he was attempting to break into a new language, to say the unsayable, which he found eventually in Homage to Mistress Bradstreet. As Berryman progressed towards The Dream Songs, the example of Shakespeare, first in Hamlet, and then especially in the ‘crazy’ moments in Lear, gave him the confidence to break the mould, which is to say, experiment with pronoun usage, career dizzily around words, and mix high and low like never before.44 Passion, as we have already seen, is above all what strikes Berryman in his reading of Shakespeare: inspiration goaded into operation by an instance of pain. The execution of the work is seen as physically and emotionally exhausting, as if some kind of cathartic release is undergone in the act of composition. Of Macbeth Berryman says, ‘What this effort cost Shakespeare we will never know’ (Haffenden, Berryman’s Shakespeare, 136). Similarly, in the interview about Bradstreet, he says that he foolishly underestimated the length his own poem would be, and the emotional distance he would have to travel: My stupidity is traceable partly to an astuteness that made me as afraid as the next man of the ferocious commitment involved in a long poem and partly to the fact that although I had my form and subject, I did not have my theme yet. This emerged under the triple impetus of events I won’t

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identify, I got the poem off the ground and nearly died following it. (Berryman, Freedom, 328) One of those events is of course the love affair he had with the woman known originally as ‘Lise’ (now identified as Chris, surname still unknown), whose poetic identity was published, a couple of years following this interview (conducted in 1965), in the collection Berryman’s Sonnets (1967).45 In his account of the genesis of Lear (which Haffenden prints as ‘The Conceiving of King Lear’) Berryman brings together passion and speed of composition, in a way which recalls his remarks on his own composition of the ‘Dream Song’ sequence he wrote commemorating Delmore Schwartz. Berryman lays claim, original claim as he was to express it, to the discovery that Camden’s Remaines provided Shakespeare with his inspiration for King Lear. The account given by Camden of the reply of the youngest daughter of Ina, king of West-Saxons, mirrors Cordelia’s reply to Lear very closely. From our perspective, more significant than the validity of Berryman’s findings – though he was apparently ‘bitter’ about lack of recognition (Haffenden, Berryman’s Shakespeare, 220) – was his way of imagining Shakespeare’s response to the story in Camden: I take it that there is something here to be accounted for, and confess that I do not know what will account for it except what I now suggest – that the reply of Ina’s youngest daughter was like a sword in Shakespeare’s heart, and that during the ensuing minutes, or hours, he conceived his entire tragedy, except possibly for the Fool . . . in what state of mind and passion we can hardly imagine, but very, very busy, perhaps as busy as any man has been. (224; my italics) Berryman is as good as identifying the process of composition as undergone by Shakespeare with his own white hot composing of the Delmore Schwartz ‘Dream Song’. The intensity of feeling discharged in the course of the play’s enactment corresponds for Berryman to the compulsion under which Shakespeare wrote, and the speed with which he wrote. One of the things that may have made the play an obsession for Berryman, then, was a sense that Shakespeare composed as he himself did – or, more accurately, was to do. Shakespeare in Lear was suggesting to him how poetry ought to be composed, even if Berryman on first falling in love with the play was still writing to New Critical order (both by his own admission and as many of the poems in The Dispossessed indicate). The theme of extreme passion in the work, and the extremes brought on by experiencing it, including responding to it as an editor, recurs in

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‘The Tragic Substance’ in relation to Othello. He quotes Johnson on the murder of Desdemona: The scene in which his [Iago’s] work is finally done, the last, drew from Dr. Johnson an unusual confession when he was editing Shakespeare. ‘I am glad’, he wrote, ‘that I have ended my revisal of this dreadful scene. It is not to be endured. (Haffenden, Berryman’s Shakespeare, 128) Each time the act of composition, in which the editor (as here) may claim in some sense to participate, is so close to the act of experiencing the play as reader or spectator as to be virtually inseparable. Berryman ends the section with a discussion of Macbeth, inevitably underlining the recurrent theme of psychologically significant patricide: ‘The alteration of nature, together with the dramatization again of the Oedipal desire, the murder of the king-father, go far to explain the mysteriousness that Macbeth shares only with Hamlet among this poet’s works.’ He then compares the character of Macbeth to that of Iago in terms of their conception, and stresses the difference between intellect (Iago) and feeling (Macbeth), in a way that may privately be touching on his struggle to free himself from the constricting theory of impersonal composition. Emotion, not just in the character but also in the process of writing, sounds the concluding note: Macbeth himself is warm, whilst Iago was cold: where he was all brain, Macbeth is all passion. What this effort cost Shakespeare we will not know – he made no comparable effort again . . . until his masterpiece of white magic, at the end, The Tempest. (136) Shakespeare responds, that is, to something that directly affects him in his life, for in Berryman’s view each spark of imagination must be set off by some personal, emotional incident. The ‘sword in Shakespeare’s heart’ that resulted from the reading of Camden and issued as King Lear, is for Berryman clearly related to Shakespeare’s family situation at the time, when he was ‘the father of two supremely unmarried daughters’ (Haffenden, Berryman’s Shakespeare, 224–5). Life and art continue to be identifiable and intertwined in Berryman’s criticism of Shakespeare.

Lear, Editing, and The Dream Songs It may puzzle admirers of Berryman’s poetry that he should have regarded himself as a textual critic, especially given his own emphasis on emotional

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composition. Neither the Lear edition nor the attempt at a critical biography came to anything in the end.46 Mark Van Doren, his old and much loved mentor at Columbia (and a poet himself) expressed his scepticism over the book on Shakespeare, even as he loyally supported his bid (successful in the event) for a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: I didn’t tell them what I’ll tell you, namely that you will never finish the Sh book. There will always be metal more attractive: poems, novels, a memoir, a collection of pensées – God knows what else. You have this illusion that you are a scholar, but you know damn well you are nothing of the sort, any more than I am. Scholarship is for those with shovels, whereas you’re a man of the pen, the wind, the flying horse, the shining angel, the glittering fiend – anything but the manure where scholars have buried the masterpieces of the world. Berryman’s response is lengthy but not offended (after all, Van Doren’s strictures are highly flattering). One part of his letter concerns us particularly: he prides himself (with due irony) on his scholarly industry: fantastic hysterical labour, accumulation, proliferation . . . Mark, I am it, Dr Dryasdust in person. The man I identify with is Housman, pedantic & remorseless (though with a lyric style far superior to mine). (Haffenden, Life, 402–3) As the copious and detailed notes for the Lear edition prove, Berryman is in some sense right to assert himself as a scholar, but Van Doren is essentially closer to the mark: the Shakespeare enterprise was to prove forlorn. However, as Theodore Leinwand has recently argued, it paid off elsewhere, that is, in Berryman’s own poetry. It is telling that Berryman should have saluted Housman as a poet as well as a scholar; he calls him a ‘bifurcated personality’. In this respect Berryman looks in Housman for something that is himself, as we have just seen him do in his assessment of Shakespeare’s poetic practice. Leinwand shows how Berryman transcribed his own frequently disturbed and terrifying dreams, almost in the form of poems, and then annotated them, as often as not using quotations from Shakespeare in the margin. That is, he reversed the process of editing Shakespeare and applied Shakespeare to his own dream-recorded crises.47 Leinwand also reproduces pages of Berryman’s lists of Lear Q and F variants. Berryman’s accumulation of words from Lear reflect his

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obsession with verbal inventiveness, both conscious and unconscious, such that working on the play, while not bearing fruit in itself, did produce something in Berryman’s poetry that he might otherwise have failed to realize. The Dream Songs consequently represent King Lear at two removes.

The Text of Lear How far we should reproduce here what Berryman says in detail about the text of the play, especially his thoughts on Q Lear, is debatable. First, we have John Haffenden’s faithful and meticulous reproduction of Berryman’s proposal, notes and conjectures, all conveniently collected in Berryman’s Shakespeare, where readers can consult them for themselves. Secondly, as Berryman never brought out an edition, in one important sense he failed to contribute to editorial thinking on the play. Thirdly, he was without benefit of the more recent developments in editorial theory and surmise, especially the revision theory (see below). We could accordingly pass over this aspect of Berryman as a Shakespearean and go straight to the poetry. On the other hand, it might be useful to pause first, especially since the editing of Shakespeare came at such an important creative phase of Berryman’s life. It is also illuminating to observe Berryman interacting, as he did with great assurance, with the leading scholars of the day. Berryman sets out his own New Bibliographical position on Lear in the following paragraph: The quarto is a memorial-theatrical version of the play, taken by a reporter and based on acting; the copy was extremely illegible, and the condition of its line division and pointing is very dubious; it was treated by the compositor (and press reader . . .) as few books have been treated. At some time between 1608 and 1623 a copy of it was extensively corrected by a playhouse scribe to bring it into agreement with the prompt book at the Globe, and was then used by Jaggard as copy for the folio.48 This position is one essentially held by W. W. Greg, and it owes much to the theory of shorthand reporting. Both Greg and E. K. Chambers preferred this theory to that of the ‘pirated’ memorial reconstruction by a single actor, which was proposed to account for the ‘bad’ quarto versions of various plays, especially Hamlet. Q Lear was too long and for all its imperfections too good a text to stand comparison with the ‘bad’ quartos. No single person could remember all that. Whatever one may think of the

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theory, the text requires a huge amount of reconstruction (though Berryman clearly didn’t mind this task – on the contrary, he seems to warm to it). It is rather like a Platonic two-removes-from-the-ideal: the reporter listened to the actors but couldn’t always tell what they were saying; not only that but he couldn’t write very clearly. The upshot was that the compositors had often to guess wildly at what they saw, and then they guessed exceptionally badly. Berryman declares himself sceptical of F, and then goes on to affirm: ‘I repeat that the present study is interested in Q and in F only in so far as they are witnesses to a lost original’ (Haffenden, Berryman’s Shakespeare, 193; my italics). If one embraces the memorial theory (in this version), then one is truly committed to the notion of a Platonic ideal text, a missing archetype that exists even if it is beyond recovery. However, Berryman was dealt a double blow in 1949 by G. I. Duthie (whom Berryman correctly saw as his rival editor for Lear). Not only did Duthie publish his own edition, he also brought out a little book unassumingly called Elizabethan Shorthand and the First Quarto of King Lear, in which he effectively destroyed the pretence that Q could have been reported by a single stenographer. If a sole actor could not have remembered an entire play the length of Lear, neither could a reporter have been quick enough, no matter how fast his shorthand, and no matter which system he was using, to keep up with the actors in such detail. The more recent revisionist theory, propagated most famously in the volume edited by Gary Taylor and Michael Warren, repudiates the idea of reconstructing a lost original altogether.49 There is no point in attempting to establish finally what Shakespeare originally intended, not because of the hopelessly corrupt state of the Q text, but because Shakespeare changed his mind about what he wrote. This particular revision theory substantially puts Shakespeare in charge of both Q and F texts, and allows little space for collaboration (although certain subscribers to the theory inevitably have their doubts). Apart from obvious cases of corruption resulting from compositor error or the mistakes of ‘reportage’, the differences between Q and F occur because Shakespeare chose to make them. According to this theory, henceforth editors must deal with not one but two texts, each with its own kind of validity.50 The revisionist theory has in turn been strongly challenged. In a trenchant review of the Taylor-Warren volume, Richard Knowles considers the arguments to be full of special pleading, often assuming what is yet to be proved, and adds that of course ‘F changes are generally found to be improvements over the Q original’.51 In contrast, where Berryman finds F superior to Q, it means simply that in that particular case, F is nearer to the ‘lost original’.

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It is hard to determine whether the revisionist idea would have found favour with Berryman: he would hardly entertain the idea that Shakespeare first wrote an inferior version of a speech or phrase, and then modified it. Berryman tends to regard F readings as ‘sophistication’, that is, inventive attempts at recovering the sense. As we have seen, Berryman is very keen to ascribe such efforts to the actors’ memory; he sets great store by the players reconstructing the text – and helping to get it wrong. A famous revisionist case is the ‘mock trial’ in Act III, Scene vi, which F cuts drastically, omitting Lear’s imaginary arraignment of his wicked daughters. If we accept the revisionist theory, F’s omission reflects not the reducing of a scene for playhouse expediency (all the plays were cut in performance, as they are today) but for artistic improvement. Gary Taylor argues for cuts in the scene on the grounds that they remove ‘the fuzziness of detail’ and give ‘a perceptible, emotionally and intellectually satisfying structure’, one that Shakespeare, having had second thoughts, is responsible for (Taylor and Warren, Division of the Kingdoms, 99–101). Against this it needs to be recognized that, even now, directors tend to approve of the full ‘trial’ scene, and if they have to shorten the text, they do so in other places. Taylor admits: ‘this is my own interpretation of the tone of the lines; others might read them differently’ (100). A good deal hangs by that acknowledgment. None the less, it shows that Taylor, whether correct or not in his conjecture (and that we shall never know), does at least read imaginatively. Had he lived, Berryman may well have warmed to editorial developments that interpreted the ‘tone of the lines’, though we can be almost certain that he would still have failed to produce his cherished text. Although Berryman on Lear lacks the benefit of subsequent developments in editorial theory, these do not seriously affect one’s interest in the position he adopted. Indeed, after absorbing the challenge of the revisionist or ‘disintegrationist’ theory, scholarship shows some return to the singletext position that Berryman favoured.52 Berryman’s main contribution, if he had ever got his edition into print, would have been in terms of the readings he proposed and his defence, often very vigorous as his notes show, of one word over another. Berryman read as a poet and of course he treated Shakespeare as a poet, which is why it mattered so much to him that any editor should have a literary critic’s sensitivity to language.53 This would be very different from reading impressionistically, as Berryman’s castigation of Leo Kirschbaum, who produced a study called The True Text of King Lear in 1945, demonstrates (Haffenden, Berryman’s Shakespeare, xxiv). His edition would have proceeded along the lines of those of Greg, and he would not have been so very far from Duthie, whom he purported to

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despise, though Berryman’s choice of readings would have certainly differed markedly from his, and would have reflected the poet’s imagination over that of the ‘textual technician’. John Haffenden judges that ‘a good part of his . . . commentary [as it stands] has a lasting validity, illuminating and invigorating our understanding of a vexed text’ (Haffenden, Berryman’s Shakespeare, xxxiv). One can assent to this to some degree, but one also has to observe unfortunately that Berryman can expatiate at unnecessary length, as on the word ‘cuckoo’ (I.iv.215), truly earning his own ‘Dr Dryasdust’ soubriquet. About the famous taunt of Cordelia by Lear, ‘this little-seeming substance’ (I.i.198), he says: ‘the passage has caused so much trouble that it can hardly be called successful, but Shakespeare often writes thus’ (UMN),54 which shows Berryman dropping oddly into an eighteenth-century editorial mode. But who can edit Lear? The most recent editions, with all the benefit of the collective expertise that is now available, produce readings and justifications that invariably cause eyebrows to be raised. Berryman chose an impossible play on which to cut his teeth. By the time Duthie published his edition in 1949, Berryman had produced ‘a mostly completed text with apparatus and partial commentary’, though the commentary required further shaping.55 His sudden cessation of work had to be a tacit admission that Duthie (whatever his inadequacies) had more or less covered the ground. In addition, Duthie’s demolition of the shorthand theory of reporting would certainly have left Berryman feeling somewhat disorientated. Also, in fairness to Duthie, one should note the acknowledgement of a member of the revisionist school: ‘[e]ven now, Duthie’s edition remains the only thorough, editorially explicit commentary on the variants between Q and F Lear, and the most conscientious defence of the conflationist position.’56 Notwithstanding, Berryman devotes much of his attention to words, and that is what should engage us as we contemplate his attempted edition of Lear. As good a place as any for this may be his sprightly (on Berryman’s part, at least) correspondence with Greg in the 1940s, when Berryman had ambitions for his own edition of the play. The tone adopted by Berryman may remind the reader of Helene Hanff’s wonderfully funny letters to her stiff English bookseller correspondent in 84 Charing Cross Road. On the whole the correspondence takes the form of a dialogue between a Berryman eager to impress the master and a Greg who listens patiently and receptively. He advises Berryman both to set out his arguments more clearly (Berryman sent Greg a draft introduction for the projected Lear edition) and to treat the shorthand reporting hypothesis more sceptically.

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Berryman is a little bit dashed in his response (Haffenden, Berryman’s Shakespeare, 245–8), and one gains the impression that, while as a scholar Berryman stuck to the task like a terrier, he lost heart rather readily in the face of opposition. Part of the exasperation and anger he expresses at other editors’ work (though not that of Greg) may be interpreted as projected self-dissatisfaction or self-doubt. However, he scores a coup with Greg over the staging of Lear. Greg indeed wrote to Berryman enclosing a note he published in the Review of English Studies, in which he recognizes that ‘Mr John Berryman of Princeton, N.J., who is at work on a critical edition of King Lear, has convinced me that some at least of the views on the staging of the play that I put forward in R. E. S. in July 1940 need modifying’ (239–40).57 In the course of his correspondence with Greg, mainly during 1946, Berryman sends Mark Van Doren the following whimsical note, which reveals the extent of his editorial obsessiveness: I collated 24 copies of the First Folio in Washington last week and am only just able to see my hand in front of my face, ha ha. You know Folger had 79 copies & begged the Bodleian to sell him its – if only until his death! when he’d will it back. A strange passion. I wonder whether he misses them where he is.58 Concern about the afterlife, which becomes a theme in The Dream Songs, and indeed in Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, shows up curiously here, as does The Dream Songs’ recurrent, rhetorically comic use of a word like ‘ha’, with its echoes of a manically jesting Lear (‘Ha! Goneril with a white beard?’, F 4.6). Indeed, both the concern and the expression come together in the lines from ‘Dream Song’ 384, where he visits his father’s grave: ‘and ax the casket open ha to see / just how he’s taking it, which he sought so hard’. In his marginal notes to his copy of the Q facsimile, Berryman writes the word ‘Ha’, which in F (but not in Q) occurs before the sentence ‘Here’s three ons are sophisticated’ (UMN). This is just one example of how the annotations embedded themselves in Berryman’s poetic habits. Similarly, his characteristic use of the ampersand (not noticeable in his earlier, pre-1945 poems) may very likely derive from his observation of the compositor’s frequent need to insert corrections where printing space has been reduced, as in ‘& hasten your returne’ (Q I.iv.297).59 But what of the many proposed emendations, of which the correspondence with Greg throws up only a tiny number? Berryman, like Greg, is taxed by one of the major cruxes of the play, the conflict of ‘parti-eyed’ (Q)

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and ‘poorly led’ (F), which occurs in the lines spoken by Edgar on encountering his father at the opening of Act IV, Scene i: Who’s here? My father parti, eyd? World, world, o world! (Q facs. l. 9) But who comes here? My father poorly led? World, world, O world. (F 9–10) Berryman proposes ‘bloody-eyed’ and tries this out not only on Greg but on Van Doren; he goes into impressive detail, in the course of which he tries to win his bibliographical spurs by demonstrating the different possible errors that might have occurred between Q and F (Haffenden, Berryman’s Shakespeare, 228–9). Neither of his correspondents seems convinced. He then later in the correspondence switches readings altogether, and comes up with the quite unprecedented ‘pearly eyed’, which he proposes to Greg. After the textual preliminaries, Berryman’s imagination takes flight: Moreover the reading has singular imaginative interest. It enriches the destruction of sight imagery (dart your blinding flames into her scornful eyes – the web and the pin – squenes the eyes – I’ll pluck ye out – turn our imprest lances in our eyes – see thy cruel nails Pluck out his poor old eyes) which embodies a chief moral theme and supplies the context of Gloucester’s actual blinding. Then the weeping & pearls nexus is so frequent that it may suggest Gloucester’s weeping. And considering the quibble in Two Gentlemen, it does not need a Blunden to imagine that Shakespeare remembered in the last Act, when describing this scene, his language in it, and with a meaning of his own hovering under Edgar’s, wrote of ‘his bleeding rings, their precious stones new lost.’ I wonder. What do you think? What Greg thinks is as follows: I think pearly-ey’d is quite promising. I don’t think it necessary to bring in the egg & flax – the first might give a pearly look but hardly the second. It might mean simply “blind”. And I like the way you connect it up with the imagery and the ‘precious stones.’ Good luck! (246–7)

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Greg is characteristically terse and cautious as against Berryman’s quick-fire imaginative riff. This exchange alone places a distance between the poet Berryman, with his eager, restless capacity for connections, and Berryman the scholar. Whatever he may have wished to think of himself, perhaps in slightly chagrined response to Van Doren’s cajoling remonstration, the poet in him held sway. Van Doren was right. Pegasus was the emblem of Berryman’s creativity. However, Berryman is also right in his insistence on looking at words with the intense scrutiny that he gave them. It may not be individual words as such that impinged on his consciousness and showed up in the poetry. Commentators have made a number of attempts at tracing verbal influence, and the statistical count so far is not high. Yet the words in themselves repeatedly bear evidence of the editorial intensity of Berryman’s reading, whereby the need to opt for a single version competes with multiple possibilities. As Theodore Leinwand puts it: The poet-editor met the poet-playwright via intense work on variants and emendations conducted on note pages brimful with Shakespeare’s reconfigured words. While Edgar and Gloucester may prefigure Henry in Dream Song 120 (‘I totter to the lip of the cliff’), it is Shakespeare’s ‘enormous sounds’ – which downward & up bring real stuff like ‘Loss, deaths, terror’ – which Berryman amplifies in the mixatape that is the complete Dream Songs.60 Echoes penetrate to such depth that it is not easy to pick them out word for word, which is one reason why Berryman himself expressed doubt over them in the Paris Review interview, and why critics and scholars have been hard put to detect Shakespearean quotation as such.61 A line from the opening ‘Dream Song’ should help clarify what I mean; consider the end of the poem: ‘Hard on the land wears the strong sea / and empty grows every bed’. The lines bring the final stanza, which emphasizes loss and separation, and a longing for a time of acutely remembered happiness: ‘Once in a sycamore I was glad / all at the top, and I sang.’ For many readers this will recall Christ’s calling of Zacchaeus down from the tree in Luke 19, while Berryman introduces private symbols: the ‘sycamore’ appears in his sonnets (nos 19 and 98) as a trysting place with his illicit love ‘Lise’. If, however, we take the overall theme of ‘Dream Song’ 1, then we can see an analogue with Lear. In this particular case, it is not so much the king as Edgar who provides a source for the line I have in mind. Consider, for example, Poor Tom’s words, which occur in the speech beginning,

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‘A Servingman, proud in heart and mind . . .’ which culminates in: ‘still through the hathorn blowes the cold wind, hay no on ny, Dolphin my boy, my boy, caese let him trot by’ (Q facs. III.iv.87 and 100–2). The line in question is (I modernize): ‘Still through the hawthorn blows the cold wind’. Put the two ‘echoing’ lines together: Hard on the land wears the strong sea Still through the hawthorn blows the cold wind, and the similarity of syntactic and rhythmic patterning is uncanny. The line from the play is prose, yet it has the prosodic properties of Berryman’s verse line. There is the dactylic opening foot, followed by the noun, then the mid-line verb, definite article and the final spondaic foot. In each case we have an identical adverb-prepositional phrase-verb-subject inversion, distinctive enough in Shakespeare, but very distinctive in a modern poet. The only difference in sound pattern lies in the prepositionalobject noun (a monosyllable in Berryman, disyllabic in Lear); otherwise the two lines make an identical statement, right down to the elements and activities they describe. And yet, apart from the two examples of the definite article, no two words are the same. However, there is more. This is not the first use of the line by Edgar; he has already pronounced it moments before in the scene: Away, the fowle fiend followes me, thorough the sharpe hathorn blowes the cold wind, goe to thy cold bed and warme thee. (46) Berryman ends ‘Dream Song’ 1 with, ‘and empty grows every bed’, which further reinforces the ‘debt’ to Lear, if that is what we may call it. What I think has happened is that Berryman has absorbed the play at such a profound level that it emerges in his own poetry thoroughly transformed, combining with other allusions, and yet not at all unrecognizable, as this example shows.62 As Kenneth Gross observes, ‘[t]he poet does not mean us to catch any direct play of allusion or reflection on a past text, as Eliot or Auden might’.63 Gross gives a telling and convincing list of lines and expressions (from The Dream Songs) that are Lear-derived and yet not precisely locatable: A tiger by a torrent in rain, wind, narrows fiend’s eyes for grief. (32)

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but I will clear that block, I’ll set you on fire along with our babies to save them up the high & ruined stairs, my growing daughters. I am insane, I think, they say & act so. (131) (Gross, 128–9) Gross connects these lines both to Edgar, in the storm scene, and to Lear at the highest point of madness (Gross, 128). Because we cannot rely on exact reproductions of words and phrases to establish ‘borrowing’, then we will always have difficulty finding our way around the poetry in the usual fashion. Not even a sensitive computer programme will do the trick. However, as all the above examples show, Shakespeare is certainly present in Berryman. What Berryman has done is something similar to what Petrarch claimed to be doing with his ancient predecessors, absorbing them into his very marrow, so that it became difficult to distinguish their voice from his own.64 Let me conclude this part of my discussion by returning once more to the question of Berryman’s editing. While an editor must finally make his choice, the poet can go on finding differences and variations; in Berryman’s case, these variants sum up or represent the need he feels to take a firm hold, while experiencing a deeply unsettling experience of disintegration. Take, as an example of this, the first ‘Dream Song’ that follows in the sequence after 77 Dream Songs: Darkened his eye, his wild smile disappeared, inapprehensible his studies grew, nourished he less & less his subject body with good food & rest, something bizarre about Henry, slowly sheared off, unlike you & you. (ll. 1–6) The figure of the king on the heath, entering a form of madness and suffering disconnectedness from all around him, even those sympathetic to his plight, can easily be discerned here. Yet it isn’t only a version of Lear that these lines can be said to summon up; Poor Tom may be glimpsed, as we have seen, and Hamlet is present in them too. The alienating change of mood, the tell-tale allusion to ‘studies’, the emphasis on personal neglect,

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all recall Elsinore as much as the heath in Lear. The repeated syntactical inversion calls forth an archaic language characteristic of Elizabethan dramatic models, which prey on his mind in more ways than one. The two tragedies that particularly haunted Berryman seem to fuse together in this opening stanza, even though echoes and associations remain approximate rather than direct, and are caught by intimation rather than cultivated deliberately. the impact of 77 Dream Songs, which on the one hand gave Berryman with the dread of what was further anticipated.65 There were of course many different pressures on Berryman, but ‘Op. posth. No. 1’ makes it clear that

into the know-how of the American bard embarrassed Henry heard himself a-being, and the younger Stephen Crane of a powerful memory, of pain, these stood the ancestors, relaxed & hard,

That collocation, American ‘bard’, might be revealing: beyond the immediate compatriot ancestry stands Shakespeare himself, ‘relaxed and hard’, working on whom, whether editorially or in an attempt to produce a biography, brought Berryman close to disintegration. Trying to edit Lear pushed Berryman more than once to the edge of despair; but despair is of editing.66 Shakespeare daunts Berryman and yet bolsters and supports him. Nobody else, not even Yeats, is strong and capacious enough to go with him into the darkest places. What, in the midst of all the strain and frustration, Shakespeare’s text gave Berryman was the realization (even as he fought against it) that a body of work (King Lear, supremely) need not be reducible to complete intelligibility at all points, but could exist in a shifting, elusive and indeterminate state. This is certainly how Bradstreet and Berryman’s Sonnets, and ultimately in The Dream Songs. The Dream Songs may have illuminated in Shakespeare something that Berryman would not have been able to perceive merely by following the New Bibliographical method of editing. Shakespeare, as Berryman comes to see him, runs with different possibilities simultaneously, unable to let any of them go, and unwilling to resolve them

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according to the ordinary manner of punning and wordplay. He is straining at times to say more than language can say; temperamentally Berryman was perfectly placed to understand what was going on in Shakespeare’s most harrowing tragedy. Following what Berryman discovers in the play, that is to say, discovers in his own poetry, as if it were itself an edition of King Lear, it might be claimed that everything did in fact come from Shakespeare, not sequentially, as some revisionist theory argues, but all in an irreducible flurry. Had Berryman finished his edition, it is likely that, far from getting back ‘to what the author wrote’, he would have moved further away from the texts as they now stand, inspired by newer and more imaginative readings. The clue is partly in the operations he is seen to be conducting in the many examples available; it is also there in the remark he made in the margins of the old Arden edition of King Lear by W. J. Craig. Craig writes, with what he doubtless thought of as becoming circumspection, ‘I have very seldom ventured to introduce new readings’; to which Berryman retorts, ‘Why did you “edit” the play then?’ (Leinwand, 384). Similarly, in his letter to the Rockefeller Foundation, which he wrote criticizing Duthie’s edition, he cries despairingly, upon citing instances of inert conjecturing: ‘edit, Duthie, edit!’ (Haffenden, Berryman’s Shakespeare, 252). All the more frustrating then that he could not finish the job himself. However, what Berryman does for Shakespeare studies is to establish again that sense of passion, life interacting with art, of which most twentieth-century criticism, ironically influenced by a poet, T. S. Eliot, had deprived it.

Berryman’s Sonnets As Berryman says, he started Bradstreet in 1948, ‘wrote the first stanza and the first three lines of the second stanza, and then . . . stuck’ (‘Art of Poetry’, 20). Berryman had also the previous year had a passionate affair with a young married woman (this was during the period of his own marriage to Eileen Simpson), referred to as ‘Lise’ in the poems (see above, p. 154).67 Her real name was Chris, though more than this has not come to light. He wrote 111 sonnets to her during the summer of the affair, but hid them away and did not publish them until 1967, a full 20 years later. He added 4 new ones, written in 1966, when he decided to publish the whole collection, and at the last moment a further 2 (but these were too late to be included). These love sonnets, clearly based on PetrarchanShakespearean models, are the only such sequence of any merit written in

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English by a twentieth-century author. The last poet to manage a comparable achievement is George Meredith, with his brooding, claustrophobic Modern Love (1862), which also speaks of adulterous passion. All the time Berryman kept coming back to King Lear, desperately trying to bring the play towards an acceptably edited form. He had begun it around 1944, interrupted it with other projects, including his critical biography of Stephen Crane, which was commissioned in 1945 and completed in 1950. (This was a task which, as Eileen Simpson testified, all but exhausted Berryman.) The correspondence with Greg throughout 1946 shows how much thought and energy the play’s cruxes were consuming. On 17 February 1949 comes the letter (to the Rockefeller Foundation) responding to Duthie’s edition: Berryman is clearly in despair, putting on a brave, indignant face, while at the same time admitting, ‘I can’t at all just now put my head back into Shakespeare – I am dead still from the Crane and writing an opera’ (Haffenden, Berryman’s Shakespeare, 251). In the middle of all these separate yet inseparable activities, the sonnets and Bradstreet function on a special axis, the long, narrative poem deriving from the circumstances and experiences described in the sonnets. In both cases we have a young married woman succumbing, or preparing to succumb to an affair with the poet. The major difference is that in Bradstreet the passion felt between them has to overcome a lapse in time of three centuries (she died just 300 years before Berryman in 1672). Each poem, then deals with the guilt occasioned by adultery, but in Bradstreet such feelings are compounded by a deeper sense of her inadequacy as a wife even before the poet arrives on the scene. The early years of her marriage were childless, and the poem represents her as feeling this keenly, as if it were a divine judgement: The winters close, Springs open, no child stirs under my withering heart, O seasoned heart God grudged his aid. (17.1–3) Berryman’s marriage to Eileen was childless, though ‘Lise’ had a young son. Various elements, then, overlap. The sonnets have a clear Shakespearean parallel, and one that Berryman was very conscious of. Their publishing history resembles that of the 1609 Quarto, down to the intentionally parallel titles, Berryman’s Sonnets/ Shakespeares Sonnets. For this and other reasons, I have chosen to keep to the terms of the 1967 publication, rather than adopting those of Charles

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Thornbury’s edition, the title of which, Sonnets to Chris, sacrifices the deliberate Shakespearean echo.68 Berryman’s Sonnets was suggested by the publisher Robert Giroux and Berryman clearly approved it. Thornbury argues that the 1947 typescript represents Berryman’s ‘final intentions of 1947’, and therefore should be preferred, ‘regardless of his intentions of 1966’ (Thornbury, 304). This is questionable, given that Berryman himself authorized what he published in 1967. The main and really only significant changes from 1947 to 1967 concern the names. ‘Chris’ became ‘Lise’, and Berryman’s wife ‘Eileen’ became ‘Esther’; there is in addition a group of street or place-names. However, adopting the 1947 text creates a further problem and that is that Berryman added several sonnets, written in 1966, to the published version (placing them at the end of the sequence). Two other sonnets were then sent from Ireland, too late to be included in the galleys. Thornbury chose to include the later sonnets, which in itself would not much matter, except that two of them address Lise as indeed ‘Lise’ (113, 117), that is, no change of name being necessary as they were freshly written. Thornbury felt obliged to leave this ‘Lise’ as she was rather than going through the motions (absurd as this would have been) of changing her ‘back’ to ‘Chris’. But this only produces another anomaly: while the reader has all along been used to dealing with ‘Chris’, suddenly and without explanation ‘Lise’ appears. We do not of course know how Shakespeare stood in relation to the title of his sonnets, nor what his connection might have been with the tantalizingly indeterminate dedication page. However, Berryman’s delay in publishing, along with awkward biographical circumstances affecting the decision to put them into print, affords a parallel with the fate of Shakespeare’s 1609 Quarto, the authorization of which is generally held in question.69 Judging from his comments on Shakespeare’s sonnets, Berryman would seem to incline to the view that they appeared without their author’s approval: ‘they strike one as proceeding from a man more or less without a pose – roughly naked; not to speak of the humiliating privacy of some of their subject matter, which is quite different from the matter of all the other Elizabethan sonneteers’ (Haffenden, Berryman’s Shakespeare, 285–6) This last point encourages us to ask, in turn, whether Berryman’s sonnets to Lise might, especially in their latter stages, throw some light on Shakespeare’s relationship with his female lover. The sonnets themselves are more Petrarchan than Shakespearean in form. Berryman observes the Italian octave-sestet rhyming scheme,

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avoiding the final Shakespearean couplet and opting instead for variants on the sestet CDECDE pattern. In terms of their content, however, the poems have a strongly Shakespearean element. Leaving aside the feelings the poet has for the young man in Shakespeare’s sonnets, there is no doubt about the physicality of the relationship with the woman, or of its adulterous nature. Think of the famous pun on ‘lying’ in 138 and the harsh, angry accusation that she has betrayed her husband (‘In act thy bed-vow broke’, Sonnet 152). Shakespeare does not celebrate sex with his mistress; positive, energetic expression fuses almost immediately with thoughts of guilt, so as to leave no space for enjoyment (e.g. 129, ‘Th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame’). In contrast, Berryman balances guilt with pleasure sufficiently to allow the latter some real scope, using the Petrarchan form to achieve an effect of erotic fulfilment that never properly occurs in either Petrarch or Shakespeare. This impression fades in the latter part of the sequence where Berryman strikes a darker note; in the early sonnets, however, he gives the feeling of stealing joy from within the very framework of transgression: Drowned all sound else, I come driven to learn Fearful and happy, deafening rumours of The complete conversations of the angels, now As nude upon some warm lawn softly turn Toward me the silences of your breasts . . . My vow! One knee unnerves the voyeur sky enough. (Sonnet 2.9–14) The image of the ‘voyeur sky’ brilliantly and easily mingles pagan and Christian in its nearly oxymoronic phrasing: the distant, judging heaven is drawn into complicity by what it observes. Interestingly, Berryman seems to have expressed a certain hesitation over the immoral content of Shakespeare’s sonnets. In essay-notes he mentions the theme of infidelity, and says about Shakespeare’s Sonnet 135 (‘Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy will’) that it ‘is among the most indecent formal poems in English’. Berryman assumes, in the same context, the literal existence of ‘the poet’s mistress (known, absurdly, as the Dark Lady)’; and then speculates about the sonnets, ‘whether they were shown to her must be doubtful’; after all, ‘one calls her the bay where all men ride’ (Haffenden, Berryman’s Shakespeare, 286–7). By now it is surely impossible that we shall ever know what the dark woman (assuming, of course, with Berryman, that she was not a fiction) thought of her portrayal by Shakespeare. In Berryman’s Sonnets it is as if the Dark Lady

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lives again in ‘Lise’. However, when her opportunity to give her own account came, she was not reluctant to speak out. In an interview with Haffenden, she said: What finally tore it was the beginning awareness that it was not myself John was now involved with, but some spectral ME that he was daily re-inventing; that I’d become a vehicle for his energies and problems and inventions. She then refers to one of the most powerful and disturbing of Berryman’s Sonnets 110: My guess is that while I was away the writing took over, and the resentments multiplied, and the spectral ME . . . moved into the room and threw my clothes out the window. I don’t find the SS lover-murderer any easier to believe in than the incomparable blonde goddess.70 The sonnet in question begins: ‘Ring us up when you want to see us . . .’ – ‘Sure’, Said Moses to the SS woman, smiling hopeless Moses. – Put her whip and file Away and walked away, strip-murderer, A svelte Lise, whistling . . . Knowing, it’s all your (Alas) initiation: you I can’t: while We are relationless, ‘us’? – Hail, chat: cant, heil! – Hypocrite-perfect! Hoping I endure. (110.1–8) Although he nowhere pronounces it in this sonnet, the word ‘hell’ hovers almost audibly. The poet all but utters it in the bold, barely civilized, chiastic taunt: ‘Hail, chat: cant, heil!’ ‘Hell’ is the word that occurs several times in the later phase of Shakespeare’s sonnets. He reproaches his lover in the couplet to 147: ‘For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright, / Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.’ Sin and hell are for Shakespeare necessary terms for the pain he is experiencing. Penance is inevitable after such transgression: ‘Only my plague thus far I count my gain, / That she that makes me sin awards me pain’ (141.13–14). For Berryman’s generation hell had just achieved its greatest renewal in the form of the Nazi death camps, and the sonnets were written only two years after accounts of the full horrors of Auschwitz and Belsen began to emerge. Irma Grese, a likely

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inspiration for the image of the ‘whip’ and ‘strip-murderer’ was hanged for war crimes in December 1945. If sex needed no darkening in Berryman’s mind, it none the less conveniently, and more to the point graphically, acquired it through such recent accounts. The metaphysics of guilt, which in Shakespeare’s time were readily available from any pulpit, strengthened suddenly and unexpectedly, for poets like Berryman, in the 1940s, in the aftermath of war. Of course the accusations will bear no serious scrutiny, and ‘Lise’ is right to object that they are projections from within Berryman, and not founded on any behaviour of her own. On the other hand, the poetry knows this only too well, or it wouldn’t be so outrageously funny. It depends on hyperbole, a rhetorical device well known to the Elizabethans, and often used as deliberately irrationally as Berryman is using it in this sonnet. Here, as later in The Dream Songs, Berryman is experimenting among other things with bad taste, being offensive in order to try and reverse and contain the affliction that he is suffering. Good poetry always manages to master the emotions that inspire it, but sometimes the process runs the ambition very close. In his theatre Shakespeare has no difficulty in making us know that Desdemona is innocent and Othello misguided. Does he manage to do so in the sonnet which shares an accusation with the play? When in the sonnets he writes, ‘anchored in the bay where all men ride’ about his mistress, all that he, the speaker, achieves is an unhappy awareness that he is capable of suffering interminably for someone who does not seem to him to merit it. Nobody speaks up for the sonnet mistress, who never receives the vindication that is granted to an in-death-triumphant Desdemona. For that reason the sonnets go on posing awkward questions, on the nature of life and art, which do not occur with respect to the plays. Yet everything one might want to ask Shakespeare and his dark mistress, Berryman and his mistress of the moment readily provide. All the time he was conducting the affair and writing the sonnets, Berryman kept a journal, which reveals his emotions to be in a riot, his social and civil behaviour barely under control. He was simultaneously undergoing analysis and experiencing and recording the dreams that were to haunt him throughout the rest of his life.71 One could not ask for more ‘evidence’ of emotion, and what it reveals is an insuperable subjectivity: the human capacity to feel aggrieved over and beyond any offence that others may commit. One might similarly argue that Shakespeare’s sonnets show no more than this. Lise is the Petrarchan lady whom we see turning inexorably and tragically into the dark tormentor. ‘Lise’ in the interview was unimpressed by either

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version of her. Yet Shakespeare’s and Berryman’s sonnets concentrate on the suffering subject, not on establishing a fair balance between concerned parties. From this perspective, the wildest, least substantiated accusations are still, in a peculiar sense, ‘true’, as they are in Lear. What helps Berryman contain the emotion that finds such raw expression is his understanding of the form in which he is working. Several sonnets make a direct allusion to Petrarch, two of them (15 and 25) being versions of ‘Passa la nave mia’ (Canzoniere 189, translated by Sir Thomas Wyatt as ‘My galy charged with forgetfulnes’). A third (75) makes a direct comparison between Petrarch vis-à-vis Laura and Berryman vis-à-vis Lise: He never touched her. Swirl our crimes and crimes. Gold-haired (too), dark-eyed, ignorant of rimes Was she? Virtuous? The old brume seldom clears. – Two guilty and crepe-yellow months Lise! be our bright surviving actual scene. (75.11–14) (Line 14, which looks like two lines, is in effect a doubled or extended single line.) Even though he accuses her of being unfeeling on occasion (‘dolce mia guerrera’, Canzoniere 21), Petrarch remains relatively subdued when treating of Laura’s guilt, for the reason that the suffering she inflicts stems from her insistence on chastity (a privilege the sonnet convention accords her). Torment is ironically contingent on impeccable moral behaviour. This is certainly not the case in the ‘strip-murderer’ sonnet that we have been looking at, and which intensifies the idea of torment to the ultimate degree. Beyond this the convention cannot go. However, Berryman has got this far via Shakespeare, who had earlier transformed the chaste convention by opening it up to the morally dark and reprehensible (adultery). Berryman’s Sonnets reflect the Petrarchan sonnet as rewritten by Shakespeare, and this in turn reveals his deep immersion in Shakespeare in the Petrarchan sense of imitation.

Homage to Mistress Bradstreet Although Homage to Mistress Bradstreet appears bent on recreating the circumstances of a seventeenth-century woman poet (‘our first poet, though not a good one’, as Berryman remarked), its genesis lay much closer to

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home: the connection with Berryman’s Sonnets has been subsequently recognized.72 The interlude of passion with the young married ‘Lise’ is revisited in the relationship the poet forms with ‘Anne’, in which they bizarrely – given the gap of three centuries – find themselves to be on the brink of a love affair. In Sonnet 42 occur the words: ‘I want to take you for my lover’, spoken by ‘Lise’ and these same words recur in Bradstreet, now spoken by Anne: ‘I want to take you for my lover’ (Sonnet 32). In each case the word ‘want’ is italicized, and each time the poet responds ‘Do’. The quasi-historical circumstances of Bradstreet, its careful, diary-like recreation of the domestic experiences of the real Anne, carefully disguise the personal nature of the poem and the fact that it is struggling with the poet’s own adultery, just like its immediate predecessor, the Sonnets. The difference from the Sonnets is that ‘Anne’ seems not quite to succumb (the poem hovers uncertainly over the outcome), whereas ‘Lise’ does. In Bradstreet the sense of guilt dominates, even before the seduction, stifling further action, whereas in the Sonnets infidelity occurs several times, and the obsession remains strong to the end. In the title the accent should fall on ‘Mistress’. It is as if in Bradstreet Berryman has chosen for his lover an irreproachable woman, who none the less can still be ‘tempted’ (the word is Berryman’s), but who is beyond the tormenting behaviour he attributes to ‘Lise’. To that extent the later poem may be said to mark a kind of advance on, or liberation from, the terms of reproachfulness that characterize the Sonnets. Berryman may have also taken inspiration for the temporal-spatial configuration of the narrative poem from what he imagines in the Sonnets. In Sonnet 114, for example, he writes: You come blonde visiting through the black air knocking on my hinged lawn-level window. (ll. 1–2) Earlier Shakespeare has entered the picture, just prior to her declaration of ‘want’ in Sonnet 42: Marble nor monuments whereof then we spoke We speak of more . . . . . . none hopes now with one smart stroke Or whittling years to crack away the hasp Across the tickling future; all our grasp Cannot beyond the butt secure its smoke.

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A Renaissance fashion, not to be recalled. We dinch ‘eternal numbers’ and go out. (40.1–9)73 Anne Bradstreet in Berryman’s representation of her is the muse-lover who has survived the passage of time and actively participates in his imagination, still listening to his demands. As she comes forward into the present, so he goes back into the past to meet her. The construction, though ingenious, is not as unbelievable as it first appears, for it merely varies a familiar idea of eternal desire. Although the opening of Berryman’s Sonnet 40 rejects the argument of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 55, Homage to Mistress Bradstreet none the less gives it a novel vindication. Shakespeare’s concluding sestet is: ‘Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room Even in the eyes of all posterity That wear this world out to the ending doom. So, till the judgment that yourself arise, You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes. (9–14) This is what Berryman has done for Anne, the proof being that Anne Bradstreet’s name is better known as the muse of John Berryman than as a poet in her own right.74 The difference with conventional immortalization of the beloved is that whereas Laura, Stella, and the young man and dark woman of Shakespeare’s sonnets all knew their poet in their lifetime, Anne has had to wait for her poet in posterity. Doubtless the real Anne Bradstreet would have had some reservations about all this, especially if she had known that she was to grow in prominence more by another poet’s intercession than through her own merit. Such irony, however, seems to be consistent with Berryman’s intentions, as he takes particular delight in changing aspects of the story as recorded, especially his undermining of her and her family’s steadfast Puritan conscience. He records, for example, his mischievous delight in making her father curse in his delirium: Father is not himself. He keeps his bed, and threw a saffron scum Thursday. God-forsaken words escaped him raving. (43.1–3)75 There is also something teasing, if that is the word, about the necessary insubstantiality of their love – two spectres attempting to commune with

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and touch one another (‘I must pretend to leave you. Only you draw off / a benevolent phantom’, Sonnet 56.1–2). Where else, beyond the sonnets, might Berryman enlist Shakespeare in the enterprise? Inevitably, this takes us beneath the surface. John Haffenden observes that a good deal of Lear is present, if we could only find it. He himself suggests that ‘pestle’ and ‘mortar’ (Bradstreet 37.7–8) may derive from Lear (II.ii.70–1, Q facs.); while more specifically, Anne’s ‘Eat my sore breath, Black Angel. Let me die’ (47.5) carries a distinct echo of Edgar’s ‘Croke not blacke Angell, I have no foode for thee’ (Q facs. III.vi.34).76 We might in addition hear Berryman’s Sonnet 114.1 (‘You come blonde visiting through the black air’ – see above, pp. 114–15), given the close proximity of the Sonnets and the long poem. Although probably ignorant at the time of the existence of the sonnets to ‘Lise’, Eileen Simpson was only too painfully aware of the relevance of ‘Anne’’s initial inability to conceive to her and Berryman’s own situation, which was doubly complicated by the poet’s uneasiness over having children: ‘he had gone so far as to leave Lorca’s Yerma out for me, with a note, “Read!” ’77 Yerma’s husband had refused to give her a child with the consequence that she murdered him. This lends extra confirmation, if such there need be, to the view that Berryman was working out his own crisis in Bradstreet rather than attempting an historical poem. As for crisis, a key moment occurs when Anne is finally able to give birth after what threateningly looks like indefinite sterility: Below my waist he has me in Hell’s vise. Stalling. He let go. Come back: brace me somewhere. No. No. Yes! everything down hardens I press with horrible joy down my back cracks like a wrist shame I am voiding oh behind it is too late hide me forever I work thrust I must free now I all muscles & bones concentrate what is living from dying? (19.2–8 – 20.1–3) Here childbirth is bound up with sin and agony: ‘Hell’s vice’, for example. Horror and pleasure similarly involve one another: ‘I press with horrible joy down’; ‘shame’ is an unavoidable part of the experience. Berryman was so concerned to render the experience of childbirth as exactly as possible that

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he grilled a friend on her experience, taking minute notes (Haffenden 1980, 23.4). In Lear the idea of childbirth occurs in the form of a curse: Hark, Nature, hear: Dear goddess, Suspend thy purpose, if thou didst intend To make this creature fruitful. Into her womb convey sterility, Dry up in her the organs of increase, And from her derogate body never spring A babe to honour her. (Q I.iv.241–8)78 Later, in his rage against women in general, Lear speaks of what lies beneath the female waist: But to the girdle do the gods inherit; There’s the sulphury pit, burning, scalding, Stench, consummation. (Q IV.vi.120–3) The speech begins of course with the famous mock exhortation to adultery: I pardon that man’s life. What was thy cause? Adultery? Thus shalt not die for adultery. No, y Does lecher in my sight. Let copulation thrive. (103–8) An avowal of hellishness in the female genitals together with a powerful injunction against fertility combine in Lear’s language to give Berryman a Bradstreet. Even the ‘simpering dame / whose face between her forks presageth snow, / That minces virtue’ (IV.vi.112–14) may summon a thought of the virtuous Anne Bradstreet (‘I am a sobersides; I know’, Sonnet 32.4), whom Berryman thought rather mischievously that it would be nice to try to seduce.79 The details do not correspond point for point, but in Bradstreet so much is intensely compounded, including Berryman’s uncertainty about having children, and the guiltiness that

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inspires (along with the guilt of adultery), that one would not expect the resemblances to be more than approximate. They are, I would argue, vivid none the less. ‘But to the girdle’ and ‘Below my waist’, with the reference to Hell which follows in either case, suggest a strong parallel. Whereas Lear issues curses (the ‘raving’ father in Bradstreet, perhaps), Bradstreet manages to celebrate parturition, if in peculiar terms: Monster you are killing me Be sure I’ll have you later Women do endure I can can no longer And it passes the wretched trap whelming and I am me Drencht & powerful, I did it with my body! (20.5–8 – 21.1) This is as much about the achievement of composition as it is about actual Simpson records, Berryman said to her: ‘I’m exhausted . . . I’ve been going through the couvade. The little monster nearly killed me.’80 The poet has superimposed himself on the act of creativity, according to the timehonoured formula which Elizabethan poets such as Philip Sidney invoked (‘great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes’, Astrophil and Stella 1.12): One proud tug greens Heaven. Marvellous, unforbidding Majesty.

The ‘monster’ has turned angelic. Homage to Mistress Bradstreet was indeed a gestation poem in more than one sense: Berryman, as we have seen, was for several years. Once he had achieved this, however, he was fully launched and two fertile decades followed. All the while an intense but furtive, one sonnets, which he wrote at an amazing pace (six on a single day according to Paul Mariani)81 but which he dared not publish. As I have tried to suggest, Berryman’s Sonnets might have some pointers for the circumstances behind Shakespeare’s Sonnets. There is of course no word from Shakespeare’s mistress, who unlike ‘Lise’ has never broken her silence. In the mid- to late 1940s, Berryman was working intensely on Lear, heaping up examples of words that lay ready to enter his own poetry

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at unplanned moments. Theodore Leinwand and Kenneth Gross both give instances of how this was to occur in The Dream Songs. The editing of King Lear was an imaginative activity that took place alongside the composition of the sonnets and helped effect the genesis of Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, while involving itself directly in that poem’s themes. It is natural that the play should have declared its presence first of all in these poems.

Conclusion John Berryman occupies a unique position as a great Shakespearean. Whereas other poets and authors in this series operate at some distance from Shakespeare, either giving their views on his work in the form of essays or, sometimes, producing their response in the form of creative pieces, Berryman internalized Shakespeare like nobody else. He did this in two different but related ways. The first of these is the Lear edition, for which he read the texts over and over again, until they were almost literally in his blood (think of his ‘couvade’ image for the production of Bradstreet). He was embattled in the attempt to bring out an edition of his own, embattled with rivals like Duthie and Kirschbaum, and even embattled, though with all due modesty, with a scholar for whom he had the greatest admiration, W. W. Greg. In order to achieve what he could, he had to climb over the bodies of those who stood in his way, even when – and especially when – he owed them his accomplishments. In so doing, Berryman was only acting out his version of the oedipal conflict, which he took without embarrassment from Freud. Greg in Shakespeare scholarship occupied the same status as Yeats in poetry. Shakespeare was the sacred ground for which Berryman competed. The second way was that of raw emotion. Berryman’s personal circumstances bear an uncanny resemblance to those of Hamlet, as he was not slow to see for himself. Once he had freed himself from the grip of New Criticism, he was able to write more and more directly, and passionately, about his feelings and circumstances. Of course he did not do so in complete nakedness: he wore first the mask of Anne Bradstreet’s ‘historical’ lover, and then that of Henry in The Dream Songs. But from within the disguises the language of his poetry becomes more and more unmitigated. In order to combat the influence of Eliot he went, by his own admission, to Yeats; but he also went, more deeply, to Shakespeare. Again, Shakespeare is the sacred ground; he never subjects Shakespeare, as he does Yeats sometimes, to ridicule. What Berryman finds in Shakespeare, hardly surprisingly, is a man

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tortured and suffering, like himself. Hence the preoccupation, above all, with King Lear. In the critical essays, as we have observed, Berryman speaks of Shakespeare’s wounded heart. He speaks also of not one but two crises in Shakespeare’s life, which is another way of speaking of his own continuing crisis. At the end of the Paris Review interview, he says ‘I hope to be nearly crucified’ (see above, p. 163). For Berryman, it is abundantly clear, creativity and suffering are intimately connected and inseparable. For this reason Berryman fixes on – one might say can never escape from – Shakespeare’s greatest sufferer, Lear. But this was a captivity fundamental to his own creative energies. Berryman’s approach to Shakespeare is not fashionable in critical circles, though some directors, not to say audiences, would have no difficulty with it.82 As a poet of original and compelling imagination, he perhaps lends greater credence to a position that has been dismissed as inappropriately romantic. Whether one can say that he illuminates Shakespeare as much as, or more than, other writers, is not easy. His immersion in Shakespeare almost certainly made Berryman a more powerful poetic voice than he would have been otherwise. In return, he encourages us to feel the direct emotional power of Shakespeare without fearing that it is sentimental to do so.

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Notes

Introduction 1

2

3

4

5

6 7

8

9 10

11

12

13

14

15

See Kim C. Sturgess, Shakespeare and the American Nation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Henry James, ‘Introduction’ to The Tempest, Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers. Literary Criticism. Vol. 1 (Library of America. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1984), 1209. Frank M. Bristol, Shakespeare and America (Chicago: Wm. C. Hollister & Bro., 1898), 7. Charles Mill Gayley, Shakespeare and the Founders of Liberty in America (New York: Macmillan, 1917), vi. Charles William Wallace, The Newly-Discovered Shakespeare Documents (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1905), 1. Gayley, Shakespeare and the Founders of Liberty in America, 40. James Fenimore Cooper, Notions of the Americans: Picked Up by a Travelling Bachelor, 2 vols (London: Henry Colburn, 1828), vol. 2, 100, 113. Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass. and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1988), 42. Gayley, Shakespeare and the Founders of Liberty in America, 42. Quoted in Americans on Shakespeare, 1776–1914, ed. Peter Rawlings (Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate, 1999), 23. Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘The American Scholar’, English Traits, Representative Men and Other Essays (London: J. N. Dent and Co., 1908), 309–10. Orestes A. Brownson, ‘Ripley’s Specimens’, The Transcendentalists: An Anthology, ed. Perry Miller (Cambridge, Mass. and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1950), 189–90. Harold Bloom, Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976), 5; and Kabbalah and Criticism, A Continuum Book (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), 89. For two contemporary assessments of Whitman’s views, see Jonathan Trumbull, ‘Walt Whitman’s View of Shakespeare’, Poet-lore, 2 (1890), 368–71, and his ‘The Whitman-Shakespeare Question’, Poet-lore, 3 (1891), 626–9. Walt Whitman, ‘A Thought on Shakespeare (1886)’, Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Selected Prose and Letters, ed. Emory Holloway (London: Nonesuch Press, 1921), 824.

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182 16

17

18

19

20

21

22 23

24 25

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George Wilkes, Shakespeare from an American Point of View; Including an Inquiry as to His Religious Faith, and His Knowledge of the Law: With the Baconian Theory Considered (London: Sampson, Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, 1877), 11. Herman Melville, ‘Hawthorne and His Mosses’, Americans on Shakespeare, 1776– 1914, ed. Peter Rawlings, 165. Ben Jonson, ‘To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author Mr. William Shakespeare: and What He Hath Left Us’, The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd edn, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1967), 98. R. W. Emerson, ‘Shakespeare; or, The Poet’, in Representative Men (1844); reprinted in English Traits, Representative Men and Other Essays (London: J. M. Dent and Co., 1908), 246, 252–3, 255. In this light, Sacvan Bercovitch’s comment that Emerson merely considered ‘Shakespeare . . . as part of an outmoded “feudal school” ’ seems much too crude’; The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1975), 167. Louis J. Budd, ‘The Baconians: Madness through Method’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 54 (1955), 359. Barbara Hodgdon, The Shakespeare Trade: Performances and Appropriations (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 1998). Henry James, ‘Introduction’ to The Tempest, Essays on Literature, 1205–20. I am grateful to John Roe for offering a succinct summary of his own argument. Henry James, ‘London Notes’, Essays on Literature, 1412. Henry James, ‘Introduction’ to The Tempest, 1215, 1205.

Chapter 1 1

2

3

4

5 6

7 8 9 10

Joel Porte, ed., Emerson in His Journals (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 566. The editors of the Early Lectures observe that Emerson’s father’s library contained an edition of Shakespeare sold at his death in 1811, when Emerson was just 8 years old. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 3 vols, ed. Stephen E. Whicher et al. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959–1972), vol. 1, 287. William M. Wynkoop, Three Children of the Universe: Emerson’s View of Shakespeare, Bacon, and Milton (The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1966), 42. For a useful introduction to New England Puritanism see Larzer Ziff, Puritanism in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), in particular chapters 1–4. Robert P. Falk, ‘Emerson and Shakespeare’, PMLA 56 (1941), 539. This would already have been becoming a cliché in early nineteenth-century America. But even so the Puritan suspicion of the body was culturally significant in New England and would be taken up, somewhat satirically, by Hawthorne, most notably in The Scarlet Letter (1850), but also in numerous short stories. Porte, Emerson in His Journals, 566. Porte, Emerson in His Journals, 127. Porte, Emerson in His Journals, 145. Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 1, 292.

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16 17

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25 26

27 28 29 30 31 32

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Porte, Emerson in His Journals, 207 Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 3, 80. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Collected Works, ed. Robert E. Spiller et al., 6 vols (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971– ), 121. Porte, Emerson in His Journals, 566. John Milton, ‘L’Allegro’, Poetical Works, ed. Douglas Bush (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 91. See the lecture ‘John Milton’ in Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 1, 144–63. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Complete Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Wm. H. Wise & Co., 1929), 848. Emerson, Complete Writings, 848. Emerson, Complete Writings, 848. Emerson, Complete Writings, 849. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Early Poems of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York, Boston: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co., 1899), 57. In the most widely available versions the poem begins at line 7: ‘When the pine tosses its cones / To the song of its waterfall tones, / He speeds to the woodland walks, / To birds and trees he talks. / Cæsar of his leafy Rome, / There the poet is at home (Emerson, Complete Writings, 848). Emerson, Complete Writings, 848. Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 1, 304. For more on the complexities of this see Jonathan Bate’s ‘Introduction’, Jonathan Bate, ed., The Romantics on Shakespeare (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), and Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), chapters 1 and 2. Bate, Romantics on Shakespeare, 93–4. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria in Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Oxford Authors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 325. Perhaps confirming Jonathan Bate’s view that ‘The rise of romanticism and the growth of Shakespeare idolatry are parallel phenomena’ (Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination, 6). Emerson, Complete Writings, 851. Emerson, Complete Writings, 850. Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 1, 297. Bate, Romantics on Shakespeare, 161. Porte, Emerson in His Journals, 66 In their introduction to the 1835 lecture Emerson’s editors, Spiller and Whicher, note that Emerson had read, over the course of his production and revision of his ideas on Shakespeare, Herder, Goethe, Heine, Hazlitt, Mme. de Staël and Coleridge (Early Lectures, vol. 1, 287). The allusion in the quote is to Addison’s Cato V.i.2. Bate, Romantics on Shakespeare, 164, 181. Emerson, Collected Works, vol. 4, 121. Porte, Emerson in His Journals, 348. See Emerson, Collected Works, vol. 4, 119. Emerson, Collected Works, vol. 2, 33. Emerson, Collected Works, vol. 4, 120.

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58 59

60 61

62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70

71 72

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Emerson, Collected Works, vol. 4, 120. Emerson, Collected Works, vol. 4, 119. Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 1, 289 For the reach of the Higher Criticism in New England see Barbara Packer, The Transcendentalists (Athens, Georgia University Press, 2007), 44–5, 54 and Robert D. Richardson, Emerson: The Mind of Fire (Berkeley: University of California Press), 49–51. Porte, Emerson in His Journals, 127. Emerson, Collected Works, vol. 4, 109. Emerson, Collected Works, vol. 4, 110. Porte, Emerson in His Journals, 344; cf. Emerson, Collected Works, vol. 4, 111. Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 3, 203. Porte, Emerson in His Journals, 126. Porte, Emerson in His Journals, 307. Emerson, Collected Works, vol. 4, 117. Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 1, 218 Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 1, 218 The works of Marx are most obviously at stake here, for example, his preface to ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’ (1859) and The German Ideology (1845–1846). Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976), and Preface to ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’ in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology: A Students Edition, ed. C. J. Arthur (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1974), 124–51. Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 1, 218. Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 1, 218, 219. Just how Shakespeare’s renaissance ideas square with Emerson’s post-revolutionary American ideas will be the subject of the last part of this chapter. Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 1, 219. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Statesman’s Manual (London: Gale and Fenner, 1816), 28; cf. John H. Muirhead, Coleridge as Philosopher (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1930), 99, 102. Coleridge, Statesman’s Manual, 18. It should be noted that Coleridge’s The Statesman’s Manual contains a rejection of his youthful pantheism. See in particular Appendix B, xiii–xxx. Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 1, 219. Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 1, 219. Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 1, 230–1. Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 1, 224. Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 1, 226. Emerson, Collected Works, vol. 3, 18. Rawlings, Americans on Shakespeare, 228. Rawlings, Americans on Shakespeare, 226. Coleridge, Coleridge: The Oxford Authors, 314; Percy Byshe Shelly, The Defence of Poetry (Indianapolis: Bobs Merrill, 1845), 90. Coleridge, Oxford, 293; cf. Nature, Emerson, Collected Works, vol. 1, 31. Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 1, 292.

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80

81 82

83 84 85 86

87 88 89 90 91 92

93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100

101 102

103 104 105

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Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 1, 292. Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 1, 289. Porte, Emerson in His Journals, 126. Emerson, Collected Works, vol. 3, 10–11. Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 1, 293. Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 1, 289. Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 1, 292; cf. Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 1, 224, Emerson, Collected Works, vol. 1, 31–2; emphasis added. For a more substantial analysis of Emerson’s use of Coleridge’s concept of ‘reason’ see my Emerson’s Transatlantic Romanticism (London: Palgrave, forthcoming), especially chapter 2. Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 1, 298. Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 1, 298–9; The Tempest IV.i.156–8, Macbeth V.v.23–27, Hamlet I.ii.72–3. Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 1, 298. Emerson, Collected Works, vol. 3, 12. Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 1, 296. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Friend, vol. 1, ed. Barbara E. Rooke (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), 455. Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 1, 296 Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 1, 296–7. Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 1, 297. Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 1, 297. Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 1, 296. Emerson’s conception of ‘common sense’ here is clearly influenced by the Scottish ‘Common Sense’ philosophy of Thomas Reid and others. See, for example, Reid’s Inquiry (1764) in Thomas Reid, Inquiry and Essays, ed. Ronald E. Beanblossom and Keith Lehrer (Indiana: Hackett, 1983), 1–125. In brief Reid’s common sense position is that the world we know through the senses is the world as it is, sidestepping the interposition of ‘ideas’ between reality and its interpretation which, for Reid, is a representational fallacy that begins with Descartes. Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 1, 299. Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 1, 300. Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 1, 302. Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 1, 302. Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 1, 292. Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 3, 103. Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 3, 113. Stanley Cavell, Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 48. Emerson, Collected Works, vol. 3, 13. Cf. Michael Bristol, Shakespeare’s America, America’s Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1990), 126–7. Emerson, Collected Works, vol. 4, 121. Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 1, 226. Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 1, 228.

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116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124

125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137

138 139 140 141 142 143 144

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Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 1, 228. Bate, Romantics on Shakespeare, 8. Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 3, 73. Emerson, Collected Works, vol. 4, 122. Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 1, 291. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Barbara Lewalski (London: Blackwell, 2007), 19. Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 3, 76. Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 1, 307. Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 3, 76. See Gian N. G. Orsini, Coleridge and German Idealism: A Study in the History of Philosophy (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), 160–4. Bate, Romantics on Shakespeare, 128. Porte, Emerson in His Journals, 27. Porte, Emerson in His Journals, 56. Bate, Romantics on Shakespeare, 128. Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 3, 80. Porte, Emerson in His Journals, 4–5. Porte, Emerson in His Journals, 128–9. Bate, Romantics on Shakespeare, 44. Cf. ‘These august geniuses were men who had just views of their vocation as Teachers. They did not sing to the tune of the times; they were not decorous sayers of smooth things to lull the ear of society; they did not treat the great spiritual nature and aims which make man a man with silence or civil and distant respect, but they made themselves obedient to the spirit that was in them and preferred its whisper to the applause of their contemporaries’ (Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 1, 231–2). Emerson, Collected Works, vol. 2, 40. Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 3, 77. Emerson, Collected Works, vol. 2, 38. Emerson, Collected Works, vol. 3, 4. Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 3, 356. Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 3, 356; Emerson, Collected Works, vol. 3, 4. Emerson, Collected Works, vol. 4, 124. Porte, Emerson in His Journals, 372. Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 1, 303. Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 3, 205. Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 1, 226; Emerson’s emphasis. Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 3, 202. Very cited in Carlos Baker, Emerson among the Eccentrics (London: Penguin, 1997), 123. Peter Rawlings, ed., Americans on Shakespeare (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 88. Rawlings, Americans on Shakespeare, 84. Bate, Romantics on Shakespeare, 160. Rawlings, Americans on Shakespeare, 79; Very’s emphasis. Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 1, 356; cf. Emerson, Collected Works, vol. 3, 5. Rawlings, Americans on Shakespeare, 78. Rawlings, Americans on Shakespeare, 96.

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Notes 145 146 147 148

149 150

151 152 153 154

155 156 157

158

159

160 161 162 163 164

165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173

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Rawlings, Americans on Shakespeare, 96. Rawlings, Americans on Shakespeare, 97. Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 1, 211. See Chris Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism, 1848–1932 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 18–58; and Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 20–6. Emerson, Collected Works, vol. 4, 125. See Peter Rawlings, Henry James and the Abuse of the Past (London: Palgrave, 2005), 73–4. Rawlings, Americans on Shakespeare, 125–6. Rawlings, Americans on Shakespeare, 123–4. Emerson, Collected Works, vol. 3, 33. Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 3, 71; this lecture also has Shakespeare as an example of genius. Rawlings, Americans on Shakespeare, 354. Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 1, 303. For more on this distinction see Emerson’s ‘The American Scholar’, in Emerson, Collected Works, vol. 1, 52–70. Cf. Bristol, Shakespeare’s America, 123; Kim C. Sturgess, Shakespeare and the American Nation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), see 173–5 for an account of Emerson’s thoughts on Delia Bacon. See Rawlings, Henry James, 71–5 and Adrian Poole, Shakespeare and the Victorians (London: Thompson Learning, 2004), 214–7. Bate, English Romantics, 9. Emerson, Collected Works, vol. 4, 117. Porte, Emerson in His Journals, 56. Bate, Romantics on Shakespeare, 11. Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 46. Schlegel, Fragments, 52. Emerson, Collected Works, vol. 4, 120. Bristol, Shakespeare’s America, 125. Rawlings, Americans on Shakespeare, 12. Rawlings, Americans on Shakespeare, 215. Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 3, 227. Emerson, Collected Works, vol. 1, 67. Emerson, Collected Works, vol. 3, 21. Emerson, Collected Works, vol. 3, 22. Consider also these lines from ‘The American Scholar’: ‘What would we really know the meaning of? The meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the boat; the glance of the eye; the form and the gait of the body; – show me the ultimate reason of these matters; show me the sublime presence of the highest spiritual cause lurking, as always it does lurk, in these suburbs and extremities of nature; let me see every trifle bristling with the polarity that ranges it instantly on an eternal law; and the shop, the plough, and the ledger, referred to the like cause by which light undulates and poets sing; – and the world lies no longer a dull miscellany and lumber-room, but has form and order; there is no trifle; there is

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178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198

Notes

no puzzle; but one design unites and animates the farthest pinnacle and the lowest trench.’ Emerson, Collected Works, vol. 1, 67–8. Emerson, Complete Writings, 736. Emerson, Collected Works, vol. 3, 22. Rawlings, Shakespeare in America, 3. From Fitz-Greene Halleck’s poem, ‘Connecticut’. Thomas R. Lounsbury, ed., Yale Book of American Verse (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1912). Web. Bartleby.com. Rawlings, Shakespeare in America, 70. Emerson, Complete Writings, 1334. Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 1, 222. Emerson, Complete Writings, 1337. Emerson, Complete Writings, 1334. Emerson, Complete Writings, 1337. Emerson, Collected Works, vol. 3, 4. Emerson, Early Lectures, vol. 1, 214. Porte, Emerson in His Journals, 207. Rawlings, Americans on Shakespeare, 72. Rawlings, Americans on Shakespeare, 67–8. Rawlings, Americans on Shakespeare, 282. Rawlings, Americans on Shakespeare, 318. Rawlings, Americans on Shakespeare, 283. Rawlings, Americans on Shakespeare, 331. Rawlings, Americans on Shakespeare, 330–1. Rawlings, Americans on Shakespeare, 359. Rawlings, Americans on Shakespeare, 359. Rawlings, Americans on Shakespeare, 361. Rawlings, Americans on Shakespeare, 361, 373. Rawlings, Americans on Shakespeare, 373.

Chapter 2 1

2

Herman Melville to Evert A. Duyckinck, 24 February 1849. In Herman Melville, Correspondence, ed. Lynn Horth (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and Newberry Library, 1993), 119. Melville describes the Aldus device and its history in chapter 55 of Moby-Dick, ‘Monstrous Pictures of Whales’: ‘As for the book-binder’s whale winding like a vine-stalk round the stock of a descending anchor – as stamped and gilded on the backs and title pages of many books both old and new – that is a very picturesque but purely fabulous creature, imitated, I take it, from the like figures on antique vases. Though universally denominated a dolphin, I nevertheless call this book-binder’s fish an attempt at a whale; because it was so intended when the device was first introduced.’ Moby-Dick, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and Newberry Library, 1988), 261. All page references to Moby-Dick are from this edition and are included in the body of my text.

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Notes 3 4 5 6 7

8

9

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Melville, Correspondence, 119. Melville, Correspondence, 119. Melville, Correspondence, 121. Melville, Correspondence, 122. Charles Olson takes this line in Call Me Ishmael – Olson’s book and its influence are discussed later in this chapter. Helen Melville to Augusta Melville, 27 November 1843. Cited in Hershel Parker, Herman Melville: A Biography Volume 1, 1819–1851 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 107. Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden July 16, 1888 – October 31, 1888 (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1961), 246. Mark Twain, 1601, and Is Shakespeare Dead? ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 7. Don E. Fehrenbacher and Virginia Fehrenbacher, eds, Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 81–2. For the Whitman, Twain, Lincoln and Grant anecdotes, I am indebted to Lawrence Levine’s important study of Shakespeare in nineteenth-century American life: Highbrow Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 37. Twain’s frontier ‘interlardings’ also appear in chapter 21 of Huckleberry Finn, where the duke instructs his fellow actor in the recitation of the lines: ‘To be or not to be; that is the bare bodkin / That makes calamity of so long life; For who would fardels bear, till Birnam Wood doth come to Dunsinane.’ Levine, Highbrow Lowbrow, 30. Levine, Highbrow Lowbrow, 31. Details of the riot are taken from a contemporary pamphlet including eyewitness reports published by H. M. Ranney, Account of the Terrific and Fatal Riot at the New York Astor Place Opera House, on the Night of May 10th, 1849; with the Quarrels of Forrest and Macready, Including All the Causes Which Led to That Awful Tragedy! (New York, 1849). New York Herald, 9 May 1849, 4. Cited in Dennis Berthold, ‘Class Acts: The Astor Place Riots and Melville’s “The Two Temples” ’, American Literature 71.3 (1999), 429–61. Berthold’s is the most thorough examination of Melville’s response to the Macready-Forrest controversy, and I am indebted both to his research and to his linking of the riots with Melville’s later story, ‘The Two Temples’, which I return to below. Cited in Berthold, ‘Class Acts’, 430. Berthold, ‘Class Acts’, 437. Ranney, Account of the Terrific and Fatal Riot, 23, 25. Reported numbers of casualties varied at the time; I take the figures from Berthold, ‘Class Acts’, 430. Cited in Levine, Highbrow Lowbrow, 63. New York Herald (publishers of the petition), cited in Berthold, ‘Class Acts’, 437. Ranney, Account of the Terrific and Fatal Riot, 19. Berthold, ‘Class Acts’, 434. Philip Hone, The Diary of Philip Hone, 1828–1851, vol. 2 (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1889), 360; Alan Nevins and Milton Thomas, eds, The Diary of George Templeton Strong, vol. 1 (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 353.

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29 30 31 32 33

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40

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Berthold, ‘Class Acts’, 436. Cited in Berthold, ‘Class Acts’, 434. Berthold, ‘Class Acts’, 434. George Henry Lewes, On Actors and the Art of Acting (London: Smith, Elder, 1875), 33. Lewes, On Actors, 33. Lewes, On Actors, 33–4. Lewes, On Actors, 34–5. Berthold, ‘Class Acts’, 431. The phrase ‘high culture in a small province’ is the title of an essay by Wystan Curnow. See Wystan Curnow, ed., Essays on New Zealand Literature (Auckland: Heinemann, 1973), 155–71. Evert Duyckinck to his Wife, 6 August 1950. Cited in Jay Leyda, The Melville Log: A Documentary Life of Herman Melville, 2 vols (New York: Gordian Press, 1969), 384. Evert Duyckinck to his Wife, 6 August 1950; James T. Fields, Yesterdays with Authors (1878); cited (with several other recollections) in Leyda, The Melville Log, 383–5. Cornelius Mathews, cited in Leyda, The Melville Log, 384–5. This date is generally accepted, but an ambiguously worded letter from Sophia Hawthorne opens a possibility that Melville wrote the bulk of the essay between 18 July and the meeting with Hawthorne. For a full discussion, see the Historical Note and Editorial Notes in the Northwestern-Newberry edition (see note 38 below), 471–5, 654–62. The essay was published in two instalments in Duyckinck’s magazine, The Literary World, on 17 August and 24 August. Sophia and Nathaniel Hawthorne became aware of the author’s identity several weeks later, after their friendship with Melville had already blossomed. ‘Hawthorne and His Mosses’, in The Piazza Tales and Prose Pieces, ed. Harrison Hayford, Alma MacDougall and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and Newberry Library, 1987), 248. All subsequent page references to ‘Hawthorne and His Mosses’ are from this edition and are included in the body of my text. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Tales and Sketches (New York: Library of America, 1996), 1123. Allen Curnow, Introduction to The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse (Auckland: Blackwell & Janet Paul, 1966), 20. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘The Eolian Harp’, Selected Prose and Poetry of Coleridge, ed. Donald A. Stauffer (New York: Random House, 1951), 57. Melville mentions Lamb’s Specimens of English Poets in the essay (253); Morton M. Sealts, Jr suggests Melville’s comments on Richard III indicate a familiarity with Lamb’s essay ‘On the Tragedies of Shakespeare’; Sealts finds Carlyle’s ‘The Hero as Poet’ ‘even more relevant’ and notes that Melville had purchased a copy of On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic ‘before going to Pittsfield’. Melville’s Reading (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988), 62–3. Charles Lamb, ‘On the Tragedies of Shakspeare, Considered with Reference to Their Fitness for Stage Representation’, The Works of Charles Lamb, 2 vols (London: C. and J. Ollier, 1818), vol. 2, 6–7.

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Notes 44

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Herman Melville, Journals, ed. Howard Horsford and Lynn Horth (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and Newberry Library, 1989), 22. List extracted from Melville’s 1849 Journal from 5 to 19 November 1849 as cited in Leyda, The Melville Log, 327–34. Where Melville gives no play title, Leyda has endeavoured to supply one. Olson initially published his findings as the essay ‘Lear and Moby-Dick’, Twice a Year 1 (1938): 165–89, which has been reprinted in Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker, eds, Critical Essays on Moby-Dick (New York: G. K. Hall, 1992), 265–84. Olson subsequently revised and expanded his essay in the central sections of Call Me Ishmael (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1947). A full (but now dated) account of the novel’s compositional history, building on Olson’s findings as well as internal and external evidence, is given in the ‘Historical Note’ to Moby-Dick, 581–763. Olson, Call Me Ishmael, 35. Olson, Call Me Ishmael, 38–9. At the time of writing, Melville’s edition of Shakespeare – including all marginalia – is being digitized by the Houghton Library with a view to internet publication. All pages with marks and annotations were reproduced as typewritten copies in the 1950s by Walker Cowan, then printed in a reduced facsimile in his Melville’s Marginalia, 2 vols (New York: Garland Publishing, 1987), vol. 2, 353–484. The limitations of the printing technology (italics and underlining look the same) and the manner of reproduction make this an unreliable and misleading source. More helpful is Julian Merkels’s book length study, Melville and the Politics of Identity: From King Lear to Moby-Dick (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993) which includes an appendix with loosely themed groupings suggested by the 491 markings and annotations made throughout the 7 volumes. Among Melville’s few written annotations, one finds the following response to an unnecessary editorial explanation: ‘Peace, peace, thou ass of a commentator’. Merkels notes that Richard III was ‘by far the most frequently performed Shakespearean play on the American stage during Melville’s lifetime’, Melville and the Politics of Identity, 152. See also Levine, Highbrow Lowbrow, 14, 16–19. Olson, Call Me Ishmael, 42. F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941), 433. See the editorial appendix, ‘Melville’s Marginalia on Poetry and Poetics’, prepared by Dennis Berthold, in Herman Melville, Published Poems, ed. Robert C. Ryan et al. (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and Newberry Library, 2009), 880. Melville also makes comments related to Shakespeare in his editions of Beaumont and Fletcher, Spenser, and La Bruyère. Olson, Call Me Ishmael, 52. Geoffrey Sanborn, ‘The Name of the Devil: Melville’s Other “Extracts” for Moby-Dick’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 47.2 (1992), 212–35. Sanborn, ‘The Name of the Devil’, 227. Olson writes: ‘He only rode his own space once – Moby-Dick’, Call Me Ishmael, 13. The book, Thomas Beale’s The Natural History of the Sperm Whale, reached Melville on 10 July 1850. See Sealts, Melville’s Reading, 68–71.

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Commentators often write as if the whaling experience were the one gap from those years: the Marquesan and Tahiti sojourns produce Typee and Omoo; an earlier voyage to Liverpool gives us Redburn and the navy cruise yields WhiteJacket. But Moby-Dick only completes the set if we discount his sojourn in Hawaii. Melville, Correspondence, 162. Herman Melville to Richard Bentley, 27 June 1850, Correspondence, 163. Leyda, The Melville Log, 385. Melville, Correspondence, 190–4. The letter’s date appears as ‘1 June?’ but Hershel Parker has subsequently found evidence to date it early May 1851. See Hershel Parker, Herman Melville: A Biography Volume 1 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 841–2. Melville, Correspondence, 193. Melville, Correspondence, 192. Melville, Correspondence, 195–6. This is also the letter in which Melville discloses the ‘secret motto’ of his book. Studies by George Stewart, James Barbour and Harrison Hayford are reprised in the Historical Note to the Northwestern-Newberry edition cited above. I don’t wish to suggest that these studies are uninformative: they may even x-ray aspects of the novel’s compositional history, but they do not demonstrate the necessity to draw a sharp division between an early and mature state of the text. A simpler account of the through composition of a large and evolving book (with complications due to the need to typeset the book before it was fully completed) is in keeping with the evidence ascribed for two-book theories. Coleridge, ‘Shakespeare’s Judgment Equal to His Genius’, Selected Prose and Poetry, 431. Coleridge, ‘Shakespeare’s Judgment’, 432. Moby-Dick, 146. Warner Berthoff notes that many of Melville’s chapters ‘rise to a distinct terminal flourish’. In Warner Berthoff, The Example of Melville (New York: W. W. Norton, 1962), 176. Walter E. Bezanson, ‘Moby-Dick: Document, Drama, Dream’, A Companion to Melville Studies, ed. John Byrant (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986), 188. Bezanson, ‘Moby-Dick’, 193. Warner Berthoff, one Melville’s most sympathetic and insightful critics, complains: an ‘excessive susceptibility to literary influence nearly brings Moby-Dick aground, among the pseudo-Shakespearean rhythms and rhetoric of some of Ahab’s speeches’, The Example of Melville, 29. Matthiessen, American Renaissance, 424. I contrast Olson and Matthiessen, but John Bryant includes Matthiessen with Olson and Leon Howard as one of the ‘submerged bardolaters’ in the ‘two MobyDicks’ camp in his essay ‘Moby-Dick as Revolution’, The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Robert Levine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 71. He has good reason insofar as Matthiessen uses words like ‘hypnotized’ and ‘subconsciously impelled to emulation’ in describing the nature of Shakespeare’s influence on Melville (Bryant, ‘Moby-Dick as Revolution’, 69). But I would argue that Matthiessen, despite many locutions of that sort, in practice describes the response of writer to writer in terms that are more active than passive, more strategic than reactive, more open to complexities than

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single factor analysis. See, for example, Matthiessen’s comments comparing Melville with other nineteenth-century writers who adopted a Shakespearean manner (American Renaissance, 424) and the long footnote (American Renaissance, 457–8) acknowledging Olson, but protesting at his formulaic and reductive propensity to find keys to Melville in Shakespeare. My own reservations about the ‘two Moby-Dicks’ theory are indebted to Bryant, and I also share his sense that Shakespeare is a problem as well as a blessing for Melville, though I shall describe those problems differently. Bryant, it might be added, is co-editor with Haskell Springer of the superb Longman critical edition of Moby-Dick (New York: Longman, 2007) which, unlike the standard Northwestern-Newberry edition, does not combine the complexly related American and British first editions in a manner that seeks to render the author’s final intentions, but reproduces a ‘fluid text’ with an apparatus tracking revisions and alterations. ‘Everybody dies except Ish and the fish’ – the last words of a 60-second performance of Moby-Dick I once heard. Matthiessen, American Renaissance, 415, 426. Matthiessen links Ahab’s destruction of his quadrant to the scene in Richard II where the King smashes a mirror to the ground (American Renaissance, 449); ‘The Sphynx’, containing Ahab’s address to the beheaded whale, improvises on an old standard: Hamlet’s address to the skull. For a thorough compilation of allusions and echoes, see Raymond Long, ‘The Hidden Sun: A Study of the Influence of Shakespeare on the Creative Imagination of Herman Melville’, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, UCLA, 1965. Melville was delighted to ‘at last’ find a copy of Confessions of an English Opium Eater in a London bookshop on 22 December 1849; ‘A wonderful thing, that book’, Journals, 46. Matthiessen, American Renaissance, 420. Matthiessen, American Renaissance, 424–5. King Henry IV, Part 1, I.iii.199–203. Melville spotted the use of these lines in the Prologue to Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle, noting ‘A hint at Shakespeare in Hotspur’. Appendix to Published Poems, 885. Matthiessen, American Renaissance, 429. Matthiessen, American Renaissance, 428–9. ‘Featured’ occurs in Much Ado about Nothing (‘How wise, how young, how rarely featured’) III.i.60; ‘unbodied’ in Troilus and Cressida (‘And that unbodied figure of the thought’) I.iii.16. The phrase is used as a subheading in Matthiessen, American Renaissance, 431–45. Marcellus and Horatio swear on Hamlet’s sword at the end of Act I; the off-stage voice of Hamlet’s father in that scene is a possible source, suggests Matthiessen, for Fedallah’s ‘spectral laugh from the hold’. See American Renaissance, 432. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter and Selected Tales, ed. Thomas E. Connelly (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), 66. Melville, ‘Hawthorne and His Mosses’, 244. Coleridge, ‘Hamlet 1813’, Selected Poetry and Prose, 451. The connection between Ahab and Coleridge’s ‘Lecture on Hamlet’ was first noted by Leon Howard, ‘Melville’s Struggle with the Angel’, Modern Language Quarterly 1.2 (1940), 202.

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The phrase ‘NO! in thunder’ does not come from the novel but from Melville’s letter to Hawthorne, of April 1851, written in response to the latter’s The House of the Seven Gables. In this important letter, Melville speaks to Hawthorne’s sense of tragedy in a manner that resonates with the role of Ahab in Moby-Dick. See Melville, Correspondence, 186. Olson, Call me Ishmael, 62–3. Matthiessen, American Renaissance, 481. For a development of Matthiessen’s existential reading of the novel, see Robert Milner, Exiled Royalties: Melville and the Life We Imagine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 52–4. Bryant, ‘Moby-Dick as Revolution’, 70. Bryant, ‘Moby-Dick as Revolution’, 80. Bryant, ‘Moby-Dick as Revolution’, 82 Bryant, ‘Moby-Dick as Revolution’, 85. See my essay, ‘Blubber: Melville’s Bad Writing’, forthcoming in Melville’s Aesthetics, ed. Samuel Otter and Geffrey Sanborn. Olson, Call Me Ishmael, 23. Letter to Sarah Huyler Moorewood, [12 or 19] September 1851, Melville, Correspondence, 206. Melville, Correspondence, 206. From an unsigned review, London Morning Chronicle, 20 December 1851. In Watson G. Branch, Melville: The Critical Heritage (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), 286. G. Thomas Tanselle, ‘The Sales of Melville’s Books’, Harvard Library Bulletin 17 (April 1969), 195–219. Letter to Sophia Hawthorne, 8 January 1852, Melville, Correspondence, 219; Letter to Richard Bentley, 16 April 1852, Melville, Correspondence, 226. Letter to Richard Bentley, 16 April 1852, Melville, Correspondence, 226. Letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, [April] 1851, Melville, Correspondence, 191. Headline appeared in New York Day Book, 7 September 1852; the review is reprinted in Higgins and Parker, eds, Contemporary Reviews, 436. Pritchard’s comment is cited by Berthoff, The Example, 14; John Updike, ‘Melville’s Withdrawal’, The New Yorker (10 May 1982), 124. (Cited in Delbanco, Herman Melville, 180.) James Creech, Closet Writing/Gay Reading: The Case of Melville’s Pierre (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). From ‘Notes on Camp’; this passage is used as an epigraph to part two of Creech’s study, ‘Pierre; or The Ambiguities: A Camp Reading’, Closet Writing, 91. Andrew Delbanco has also commented on Pierre as ‘a nineteenth century preview of the camp sensibility that became pervasive more than a hundred years later’ – linking Pierre’s effusions on the beauties of nature to ‘Tiny Tim doing his eyeballing rendition of “Tiptoe through the Tulips” ’, Herman Melville, 199. Herman Melville, Billy Budd Sailor, ed. Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 88; Oberlus’s story is the ninth sketch of ‘The Encantadas’, Melville, The Piazza Tales, 162–70. Melville, The Piazza Tales, 13–45. Herman Melville, Published Poems, ed. Robert C. Ryan, Harrison Hayford, Alma Reising and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and Newberry Library, 2009), 180.

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Melville, Published Poems, 106. Gene Smith, American Gothic: The story of America’s Legendary Theatrical Family, Junius, Edwin, and John Wilkes Booth (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 105. It is included The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, cited above. Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and Newberry Library, 1984), 224. All page references to The Confidence-Man are from this edition and are included in the body of my text. Jean-Christophe Agnew, World’s Apart: The Market and Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 196.

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Henry James, A Small Boy and Others, in Henry James: Autobiography, ed. Frederick W. Dupee (London: W. H. Allen, 1956), 60. ‘Lamb’s Tales’, James recollects, ‘was given to me as (of all things in the world) a reward’ (170). James, A Small Boy and Others, 62, 63. Adeline R. Tintner, The Book World of Henry James: Appropriating the Classics (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1987), 2. Henry James, Letter to Thomas Sergeant Perry, 25 March 1864, 96, The Complete Letters of Henry James, 1855–1872, 2 vols, ed. Pierre A. Walker and Greg W. Zacharias (Lincoln and London: Nebraska University Press, 2006), vol. 1, 95–9. Letter to William James, 25/26 September 1869, The Complete Letters of Henry James, vol. 1, 114. Tintner, The Book World of Henry James, 2. Tintner, The Book World of Henry James, 2. ‘In 1911 he met A. C. Bradley’ and ‘heard Bradley give a lecture on Coriolanus. . . . On October 1, 1912, he saw Granville Barker’s Winter’s Tale’ and ‘even as late as 1913 he attended George Brande’s lectures on Shakespeare’ (3). The contents of the Lamb House library attest to James’s lifelong preoccupation with Shakespeare. Of particular note are J. W. Halliwell-Phillips’s Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare (1885), Francis Anne Kemble’s Notes of Some Shakespeare Plays (1848), Jean Jules Jusserand’s The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare (1890), Sidney Lee’s Life of Shakespeare (1898), George Wyndham’s edition of The Poems of William Shakespeare (1899), C. H. Hereford’s Works of Shakespeare (1902), and Judge Honour Webb’s The Mystery of William Shakespeare (1902). Tintner concludes, not unreasonably, that Webb’s book led in part ‘to his writing of “The Birthplace” ’ (2–3). For a fuller account of James and his library, see Leon Edel and Adeline R. Tintner, The Library of Henry James (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1987). Adrian Poole, Shakespeare and the Victorians (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2004), 2. Edmund Wilson, The Portable Edmund Wilson, ed. Lewis Dabney (London: Penguin, 1983), 128–9. Herman Melville, ‘Hawthorne and His Mosses’, Americans on Shakespeare, 1776– 1914, ed. Peter Rawlings (Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate, 1999), 163–8.

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E. E. Kellett, Literary Quotation and Allusion (Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons, 1933), 65. ‘It’s not controversial’, as Karl Miller has it in Authors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989) ‘to assert that literature haunts itself’ (viii). See Michael Wheeler, The Art of Allusion in Victorian Fiction (London: Macmillan Press, 1979) for a systematic discussion of allusions. Particularly useful are the distinctions between an ‘adopted’ and ‘adoptive’ text, ‘quotation’, ‘marked quotation’, ‘unmarked quotation’, ‘reference’, and ‘allusion’ (as a ‘general term for quotations and reference’) (2, 3, 13). Herman Meyer’s The Poetics of Quotation in the European Novel, trans. Theodore and Yetta Ziolkowski (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), Ziva Ben-Porat’s ‘The Poetics of Literary Allusion’, PTL: A Journal for Descriptive Poetics and Theory of Literature, 1 (1976), 105–28, and John Hollander’s The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After (Berkeley and London: California University Press, 1981) offer further theories, histories, and systematizations of the theory and practice of allusion. Tintner, The Book World of Henry James, 4. Henry James, “Master Eustace,” Complete Stories (Library of America. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1996–1999), 5 vols, vol. 1, 641–68. ‘Guest’s Confession’, Complete Stories, vol. 1, 669–729. James, ‘Master Eustace’, 662. James, ‘Master Eustace’, 661. Kenneth Graham, English Criticism of the Novel, 1865–1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 97. Henry James, ‘The Art of Fiction’, Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers. Literary Criticism. Vol. 1 (Library of America. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1984), 65. Wallace Martin, Recent Theories of Narrative (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 116. James, ‘The Art of Fiction’, 54. Contrast Tzvetan Todorov: ‘If the two are indissolubly linked, one is more important than the other nonetheless – character, that is, characterization, that is, psychology.’ The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977), 66. Henry James, ‘Ivan Turgenieff’, The Library of the World’s Best Literature Ancient and Modern, ed. Charles Dudley Warner, vol. 24 (New York: Peate, 1896–1897), 15061. Henry James, ‘Eugene Pickering’, Complete Stories, vol. 1, 36–81. Tintner, The Book World of Henry James, 24. The allusions, by any definition, are scanty and the plot similarities, whatever allowances might be made for oblique transpositions, slight. The narrator observes that ‘Eugene was treated like a prince’ (42) and there is a single reference to ‘Cleopatra’ (54). Horatio and Hamlet, loosely entangled with Cleopatra and Antony and Cleopatra, emerge in one sentence which attempts to draw together the strings of a plot whose melodramatic mediocrity might have astounded Shakespeare: ‘the result of it was to prove that there were many more things in the composition of a woman who . . . has lodged her imagination in the place of her heart, than were dreamt of in my philosophy’ (68).

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Henry James, ‘Edmond Rostand’, Henry James: Essays on Art and Drama, ed. Peter Rawlings (Brookfield, Vt.: Scolar Press, 1996), 524. James, ‘Guest’s Confession’, 695. This and all subsequent Shakespeare quotations are from The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd edn, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). James, ‘Guest’s Confession’, 697. T. S. Eliot, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1969). James, ‘Guest’s Confession’, 697. James habitually misquoted ‘We are such stuff / As dreams are made on’ (The Tempest IV.i.156–7). As in T. S Eliot’s The Waste Land, The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1969), the critique can be seen as having a reciprocal dynamic in which both cultures come under adverse review. Henry James, ‘Introduction’ to The Tempest, Essays on Literature, 1205–20 and ‘The Middle Years’, Complete Tales of Henry James, vol. 4, 335–55. Tintner, The Book World of Henry James, 44. Tintner, The Book World of Henry James, 12. Henry James, ‘The Birthplace’, Complete Stories, vol. 5, 441–95. Henry James, ‘The Papers’, Complete Stories, vol. 5, 542–638. John P. McCombe, ‘Henry James, Shakespeare’s Biography, and the Question of National Identity in “The Birthplace” and “The Introduction to The Tempest”, Henry James Review 31 (2010), 169. Tintner, The Book World of Henry James, 36–7. Tintner, The Book World of Henry James, 13. Henry James, The Ivory Tower, The Novels and Tales of Henry James, New York edition, vol. 25 (Fairfield: Augustus M. Kelley, 1976), 191. Tintner’s fixation on the play-within-the-play in Hamlet diverts her from the equally potent connection with A Midsummer Night’s Dream. James, A Small Boy and Others, 178. James, A Small Boy and Others, 11. Tintner, conversely, trusts too much in James’s readers: ‘[I]it is the reader alone who is prepared to receive all the signals. . . . His consciousness justifies the subtle and skilful extension of the device found earlier in Hamlet. It is to his consciousness that James aims the presentation of the play-within-the-play box’. Tintner, The Book World of Henry James, 12. ‘O, that way madness lies’ is uttered by Lear (III.Iv.21) when he finds himself, Maisie-like, unhoused and disconnected. For Maisie, her encounter with the Captain in Kensington Gardens resembles the chaos-delivering potential James saw in all scenes construed as of supreme importance: ‘Don’t play any play for the sake of one “great scene” ’, he wrote to the actress Elizabeth Robins, ‘that way madness lies, and destruction, and death’. Henry James, Letter to Elizabeth Robins, 25 June 1891, Theatre and Friendship: Some Henry James Letters, with a Commentary by Elizabeth Robins (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1932), 39. Henry James, What Maisie Knew (London and New York: Macmillan, 1897), 115. James, What Maisie Knew, 128.

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Hans Vaihinger, The Philosophy of ‘As if’: A System for the Theoretical and Religious Fictions of Mankind. 1911, trans. C. K. Ogden, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 1935), 15. Vaihinger, The Philosophy of ‘As if’, 343. For one account of the concept and history of Theatrum Mundi, see Christian. Henry James, ‘Daniel Deronda: A Conversation’, Essays on Literature, 978. Cf. James on Walter Scott: ‘Before him no prose-writer has exhibited so vast and rich an imagination: it had not, indeed, been supposed that in prose the imaginative faculty was capable of such extended use. Since Shakespeare, no writer had created so immense a gallery of portraits, nor, on the whole, had any portraits been so lifelike’ (‘Nassau W. Senior’, French Writers, Other European Writers, The Prefaces to the New York Edition, Literary Criticism, vol. 2, Library of America. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1984), 00–00. In a similar vein, James argued that ‘Shakespeare’s characters stand out in the open air of the universe, while Balzac’s are enclosed in a peculiar artificial atmosphere’; nevertheless, ‘it is very true that Balzac may, like Shakespeare, be treated as a final authority upon human nature’ (‘Honoré de Balzac’, French Writers, 67–8). But tellingly, James opposes ‘the image of life’ to lyricism and the poetic in his 1905 essay on Balzac: ‘the Poet is most the Poet when he is preponderately lyrical. . . . The lyrical instinct and tradition are immense in Shakespeare; which is why, great storyteller, great dramatist and painter, great lover in short, of the image of life though he was, we need not press the case of his example.’ It is the absence of the lyrical that makes Thackeray and Dickens ‘so essentially novelists’ case’ (‘Honoré de Balzac’, French Writers, 121–2). John Lee, in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the Controversies of Self (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), in considering whether Hamlet has a ‘self-constituting sense of self’ (1), argues that any ‘sense of self’ is neither ‘essentialist’ nor ‘transhistorical’ but ‘rhetorical in nature’ (2). James, Prefaces to the New York edition, French Writers, 1088–9. James, Prefaces, 1113. James, Prefaces, 1061. James, ‘The Future of the Novel’, Essays on Literature, 103. James, Prefaces, 1092. James, ‘London Notes’, Essays on Literature, 1400. For the most comprehensive discussion of James and the New York edition, see David McWhirter, Henry James’s New York Edition: The Construction of Authorship (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995). Written only three years after A. C. Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy (London: Macmillan, 1904), James’s Shakespearean legitimation of the supremacy of character and its perils is very much in Bradley’s wake. For some of the context, see René Wellek’s Concepts of Criticism, ed. Stephen G. Nichols (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1963), 225–7. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Coleridge’s Lectures and Notes on Shakespere and Other English Poets, ed. T. Ashe (London: Bell, 1904), 229. Cf. A. W. Schlegel: ‘Form is mechanical when, through external influence, it is communicated to any material merely as an accidental addition without reference to its quality; as, for example, when we give a particular shape to a soft mass that it may retain the

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same after its induration. Organical form, again, is innate; it unfolds itself from within, and acquires its determination along with the complete development of the germ’; August Wilhelm von Schlegel, A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, trans. John Black. 2 vols (London: Baldwin, Cradock and Joy, 1815), vol. 2, 94–5. James, ‘The Art of Fiction’, 55. James, ‘The Art of Fiction’, 49–50. James, ‘The Art of Fiction’, 54. For one consideration of James, drama and point of view, see Peter Rawlings, ‘Narratives of Theory and Theories of Narrative: Point of View and Centres of Consciousness’, Henry James Studies. Palgrave Advances, ed. Peter Rawlings (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 35–58. See Peter Rawlings, ‘Introduction: Henry James and the Kodak Factor’, Henry James: Essays on Art and Drama, ed. Peter Rawlings, 1–12. Henry James, ‘The Parisian Stage’, Henry James: Essays on Art and Drama, ed. Peter Rawlings, 35–43. For a discussion of this issue and James and the theatre in general, see Leon Edel’s ‘The Dramatic Years’ in The Complete Plays of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1949), 19–69. James’s dramatic output is collected in The Complete Plays of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel. For full details of all these plays, see The Complete Plays of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel. Quoted in René Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism, 1750–1950. 5 vols (London: Cape, 1986), vol. 1, 164–5. I am drawing here on Claudio Guillén, ‘On the Concept and Metaphor of Perspective’, Literature as System: Essays towards the Theory of Literary History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 283–374. See OED on ‘perspective’ and Kepler. William James, A Pluralistic Universe. Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the Present Situation in Philosophy. Writings, 1902–1910 (Library of America. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1987), 803n. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams. Novels, Mont Saint Michel, The Education (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1983), 869. James, What Maisie Knew, 128. I am drawing on Guillén here. Delia Bacon, The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded (London: Groombridge and Sons, 1857). Delia Bacon was born in 1811 and died in 1859 within two years of the publication of her The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded. After running private schools and failing to achieve renown as a public lecturer in Boston and New York, she turned her energies towards unearthing the mystery of Shakespeare, having convinced herself that he was not the author of the plays bearing his name. Subsidized in the enterprise by the New York banker and philanthropist, Charles Butler, Bacon was able to sail for Liverpool on 13 May 1853; Samuel Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 387. After spending ten months in St Albans in the proximity of Bacon’s tomb and failing to persuade the beadle to open the sepulchre or to get permission

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for such a sacrilege from Bacon’s descendent, Lord Verulam, she eventually moved on to Stratford. She laid siege to Shakespeare’s gravestone believing that a will and other relics were hidden there. These attempts, and Bacon’s obsession in general, ended in madness and death. In London, Bacon attempted to secure Nathaniel Hawthorne’s support. For Hawthorne’s account of this episode, see ‘Recollections of a Gifted Woman’, Americans on Shakespeare, 1776–1914, ed. Peter Rawlings, 215–36. Louis J. Budd, ‘The Baconians: Madness through Method’, South Atlantic Quarterly 54 (1955), 359. Budd further suggests that ‘although a corollary movement arose in Great Britain, wide agreement assigns to Americans the dubious honor of publicizing the belief that Francis Bacon really wrote the Shakespeare plays’ in a fashion whose main impetus was ‘from 1860 to 1900’. He believes that ‘Delia Bacon was surprised in 1856 when an Englishman, William Henry Smith’ simultaneously ‘advanced the idea’ that Francis Bacon had written the plays (359), and that neither Smith nor Bacon seem to have been aware of an earlier voyage into these waters in the American Joseph C. Hart’s The Romance of Yachting (1848) (360). William Henry Smith’s Was Lord Bacon the Author of Shakespeare’s Plays? A Letter to Lord Ellesmere appeared in 1856 (London: Skeffington, 1856). Budd’s is a simplified charting of the issues. Delia Bacon, a ‘groupist’ rather than preoccupied simply with Bacon, was concerned more with depriving Shakespeare of his authorship, than with the question of specific attribution. Questions about Shakespeare’s authorship arose in the early eighteenth century in Captain Goulding’s Essay against Too Much Reading (London: Moore, 1728) and surfaced again in Herbert Lawrence’s The Life and Adventures of Common Sense: An Historical Allegory (London: Montagu Lawrence, 1769). The next intervention seems to have been James Wilmot’s in 1785: he could find no evidence attesting to Shakespeare’s authorship and fearing the consequences of such a revelation, burned his notes; see Samuel Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 397–9. James Wilmot first came to attention in an article by Allardyce Nicoll, ‘The First Baconian’, Times Literary Supplement, 25 February, 128. Anti-Stratfordians proliferated as the nineteenth century wore on, as did the number of writers surveyed as alternatives to Shakespeare. James Greenstreet, in a series of articles in The Genealogist, nominated William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby. Thomas William White, taking a ‘groupist’ approach, attempted to prove that the plays were written collectively by Christopher Marlowe, Robert Greene, George Peele, Thomas Nashe, Thomas Lodge, Francis Bacon and others; Our English Homer; or, Shakespeare Historically Considered (London: Sampson Low, 1892). Wilbur Gleason Zeigler, by contrast, recruited Marlowe as the sole playwright in his rather sensationalized It was Marlowe: A Story of the Secret of Three Centuries (Chicago: Donohue, 1895). The main rival to the Bacon Society (founded in 1886) is the Shakespeare Oxford Society. It was established in 1957 (stemming from the Shakespeare Fellowship of the 1930s) to propose Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, as the real bard. This branch of the argument grew out of Thomas Looney’s ‘Shakespeare’ Identified in Edward de Vere, the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford (London: Palmer, 1920).

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Henry James, Letter to Violet Hunt, 26 August 1903, Henry James: Letters, ed. Leon Edel, 4 vols (Cambridge, Mass. and London, England: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 1974–1984), vol. 4, 432. Jan Gorak, The Making of the Modern Canon: Genesis and Crisis of a Literary Idea. Vision, Division, and Revision (London: Athlone, 1991), 63. Gorak, The Making of the Modern Canon, 87–8. See Budd, ‘The Baconian’, 359–68. Nathaniel Hawthorne, ‘Recollections of a Gifted Woman’, Americans on Shakespeare, ed. Peter Rawlings, 233. Delia Bacon, ‘William Shakespeare and His Plays’, Americans on Shakespeare, ed. Peter Rawlings, 169–99. Schoenbaum , Shakespeare’s Lives, 389. Bacon, ‘William Shakespeare and His Plays’, 172. Bacon, ‘William Shakespeare and His Plays’, 175. See Robert Falk, ‘Shakespeare in America: A Survey to 1900’, Shakespeare Survey 18 (1965), 102–18; James G. McManaway, ‘Shakespeare in the United States’, PMLA 79 (1964), 513–18; Ashley Thorndike, ‘Shakespeare in America’, Americans on Shakespeare, ed. Peter Rawlings, 512–26; Michael Bristol, Shakespeare’s America, America’s Shakespeare (New York: Routledge, 1990); Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1988). Bacon, ‘William Shakespeare and His Plays’, 175–6. ‘But one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side, and forthwith came there out blood and water’ (John 19.34). On James and ‘a burgeoning mass culture’ in the later nineteenth century, see Thomas Strychacz, Modernism, Mass Culture, and Professionalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 6. James Halliwell (later Halliwell-Phillips), one of the most eminent and prolific nineteenth-century Shakespearean antiquarians and biographers, was a persistent advocate of the authenticity of Shakespeare’s birthplace, although there were many sceptics. He believed that the tradition is ‘as well authenticated as any of the kind, referring to so remote a period, can be expected to be, – there is certainly not the shadow of a known fact that is inconsistent with’ its ‘truth; – and it will be a pity if the pilgrim, without an adequate reason, is unable to direct his steps towards the venerated room in Henley Street without entertaining a suspicion that he may become the victim of an inglorious deception’; New Evidences in Confirmation of the Traditional Recognition of Shakespeare’s Birth-Room, A.D. 1769 – A.D. 1777 (Brighton: Private Circulation, 1888), 5–6. Predictably, given their vigorously partisan perspective (The Bacon Society), Francis E. C. Habgood and R. L. Eagle insist that The Birthplace ‘has no claim whatever to this honour, except a very doubtful traditional one’ (1), and that ‘no part’ of the house ‘as occupied in 1575 survives’ (7); The Stratford Birthplace: Reprinted from ‘Baconia’ (London: The Bacon Society, 1940). The American Shakespeare scholar Richard Grant White was equally dubious: ‘In 1847 the Shakespeare house passed into the hands of the association under whose care it has been renovated; but unfortunately, like some of the Shakespeare poetry, not restored

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to a close resemblance to its first condition; though that was perhaps impossible. Whether it was in this house that John Shakespeare and his wife, with their only previous child, staid out the plague, which visited Stratford in 1564, or whether they fled to some unfinished place, we do now know’ (‘Memoirs’, The Works of William Shakespeare, ed. Richard Grant White, 12 vols, Boston: Little Brown, 1865, vol. 1, i–cxiii). According to Levi Fox, ‘there is documentary proof that John Shakespeare, William’s father, was living in Henley Street as early as 1552, and records survive which prove that the premises were occupied and owned by him. Tradition assigns the western portion of the building as the poet’s birthplace’ (Shakespeare’s Birthplace: A History and Description, Norwich: Jarrold, 1963, 2). Fox, Shakespeare’s Birthplace, 6. Letter to the Editor, The Times (London), 10 April 1847, 7. Letter to the Editor, The Times (London), 10 April 1847, 7. Fox, Shakespeare’s Birthplace, 5. In 1866, the property was conveyed to the Corporation of Stratford-upon-Avon. The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Act formally incorporated the Trustees and Guardian of the Henley Street house in 1891. See Ivor Brown and George Fearon, The Shakespeares and the Birthplace. Stratford-on-Avon: Fox, 1939. P. T. Barnum, The Life of P. T. Barnum, Written by Himself, Phineas T. Barnum (Urbana and Chicago: Illinois University Press, 2000), 344. Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey around the World, Americans on Shakespeare, ed. Peter Rawlings, 403. See Mark Twain’s Is Shakespere Dead? From My Autobiography (New York: Harper, 1909). Twain, Following the Equator, 403. Twain, Following the Equator, 405–6. Twain, Following the Equator, 405. James, A Small Boy and Others, 38, 90, 56, 91, 89, 90. Neil Harris, Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981), 82. Jean-Christophe Agnew endorses this point, noting that ‘Barnum had built his success less upon the credulity of his public than upon its suspicion’; ‘The Consuming Vision of Henry James’, The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1980, ed. Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears (New York: Pantheon, 1983), 80. See Barbara Hodgdon, The Shakespeare Trade: Performances and Appropriations (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 1998) on the commodification of Shakespeare in Stratford-upon-Avon. Bacon, ‘William Shakespeare and His Plays’, 187–8. The major essays on ‘The Birthplace’ – which, generally, ignore this context – are William McMurray, ‘Reality in Henry James’s “The Birthplace” ’, Explicator 35 (1976), 10–11; Henry McDonald, ‘Nietzsche Contra Derrida: Two Views of Henry James’s “The Birthplace” ’, Henry James Review 11 (1990), 133–48; Tony Tanner, ‘The Birthplace’, Henry James: The Shorter Fiction: Reassessments, ed. N. H. Reeve (London: Macmillan, 1997), 77–94; Yoshio Nakamura, ‘The Significance of Fiction in Henry James’s “The Birthplace” ’, Studies in English Literature, English Literary Society of Japan, 66 (1989), 255–69; Laurem

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T. Cowdery, The Nouvelle of Henry James in Theory and Practice (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1986); James V. Holleran, ‘An Analysis of “The Birthplace” ’, Papers on Language and Literature 2 (1966), 76–80; George Arms, ‘James’s “The Birthplace”: Over a Pulpit-Edge’, Tennessee Studies in Literature 8 (1963), 61–9; and Morton L. Ross, ‘James’s “The Birthplace”: A Double Turn of the Narrative Screw’, Studies in Short Fiction 3 (1965), 321–8. Bacon, The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded, 175. Tanner (‘The Birthplace’) is especially acute on this aspect of the tale. James, ‘The Birthplace’, 443. Further references to ‘The Birthplace’ will be given parenthetically. James does not withhold the name in the notebook entry, however: ‘the other day at Welcombe . . . Lady T. spoke of the case of the couple who had formerly (before the present incumbents) been for a couple of years – or a few – the people in charge of the Shakespeare house – The Birthplace – which struck me as possibly a little donnée; The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 195. Henry James, ‘In Warwickshire’, Collected Travel Writings: Great Britain and America: English Hours, The American Scene, Other Travels (Library of America. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1993), 166, 175. James, ‘In Warwickshire’, 168. James, ‘In Warwickshire’, 174. Henry James, ‘The Real Thing’, Complete Tales, vol. 4, 38–9. For a discussion of these issues, see Peter Rawlings, ‘A Kodak Refraction of Henry James’s “The Real Thing” ’, Journal of American Studies 32 (1998), 447–63. I think Tanner, in arguing that the allusions to Shakespeare should not be seen ‘as doing heavy intertextual duty’ (‘The Birthplace’ 81) misses the power and skill with which James deploys the plays in his tale, especially The Merchant of Venice. Despite the apparent oddness, ‘become’ is what James wrote here and not ‘becoming’. Henry James, ‘Dumas the Younger’, Notes on Novelists (London: Dent, 1914), 291. Marcia Jacobson has explored James’s complex relation to the ‘mass market’ (Henry James and the Mass Market. Alabama: Alabama University Press, 1983, 14). Anne T. Margolis observes that James ‘was an artist who repeatedly called for the overthrow of the most cherished conventions of Anglo-American fiction’, yet, ‘at the same time, he was a writer who evinced a chronic obsession with the idea of popular success on a grand scale’ (Henry James and the Problem of Audience: An International Act. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1985, xiii). Hamlet V.ii.358. A number of critics have been curiously censorious about what they see as Gedge’s ‘lies’. One of the most simplistic approaches is James V. Holleran’s in ‘An Analysis of “The Birthplace” ’. See also Osborn Andreas, Henry James and the Expanding Horizon: A Study of the Meaning and Basic Themes of James’s Fiction (Seattle: Washington University Press, 1948): Gedge ‘becomes completely fraudulent as a commentator and guide, only then does he please his masters’ (137–8). A similar line is pursued in Morton L. Ross, ‘James’s “The Birthplace” ’. Other critics defend Gedge, allying him with James’s belief in the ‘futility of

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Fact’; see Nakamura, ‘The Significance of Fiction in Henry James’s “The Birthplace” ’ and Mildred E. Hartstock, ‘The Conceivable Child: James and the Poet’, Studies in Short Fiction 8 (1971), 569–74. Macbeth I.vii.60. Macbeth V.v.17. ‘Adieu, adieu, adieu! remember me; Hamlet I.v.91. Umberto Eco, Faith in Fakes: Travels in Hyperreality, trans. William Weaver (London: Minerva, 1995), 8, 31. William T. Stafford is right, I think, when he says that ‘the Hayeses somehow appear to be more interested in the increasingly tense relation of Gedge to Shakespeare than they are in Shakespeare himself’; ‘James Examines Shakespeare: Notes on the Nature of Genius’, 127. Hamlet II.ii.604–5: ‘the play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King.’ Hamlet III.i.55. In arguing that Mrs Gedge’s ‘position subsumes the whole question of poet and critic’, affirming ‘values more central to the human condition than those of aesthetic or literary history’, I believe that William T. Stafford radically misunderstands not only this story, but James as a whole: nothing was more ‘central’ to him than questions of art and the aesthetic; Books Speaking to Books: A Contextual Approach to American Fiction (Chapel Hill, NC: North Carolina University Press, 1981), 117–18. ‘O well-divided disposition . . . O heavenly mingle!’ Antony and Cleopatra I.v.53–9. Barnum, The Life of P. T. Barnum. Barnum, The Life of P. T. Barnum, 275. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s account of his visit to Stratford-upon-Avon is in ‘Recollections of a Gifted Woman’: ‘thence I was ushered up stairs to the room in which Shakspere is supposed to have been born; though, if you peep too curiously into the matter, you may find the shadow of an ugly doubt about this, as well as most other points of his mysterious life’ (220). Hawthorne purchased a ‘good many’ of the ‘various prints, views of houses and scenes connected with Shakspere’s memory’ and concluded ‘this respectable lady perhaps realizes a handsome profit’ from such articles (221). Barnum, The Life of P. T. Barnum, 277. Washington Irving, ‘Stratford-on-Avon’, Americans on Shakespeare, ed. Peter Rawlings, 42–57. Irving, ‘Stratford-on-Avon’, 44. Krishna Balder Vaid, in Technique in the Tales of Henry James (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964), has argued that ‘[t]he tale can be taken as the depiction of the process by which Morris Gedge flowers into a superb ironic artist’ (170); but I want to emphasize the distance, ultimately, between James and his protagonist. John McCombe’s reading of the play as registering ‘an abhorrence of American consumerism’ is simplistic (however intuitive); ‘Henry James, Shakespeare’s Biography, and the Question of National Identity in “The Birthplace” and “The Introduction to The Tempest” ’, 170.

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Henry James, ‘The Present Literary Situation in France’, Essays on Literature, 120. Henry James, ‘Introduction’ to The Tempest, Essays on Literature, 1205–20. Robert L. Gale offers a useful plot summary of ‘The Papers’: ‘Howard Bight, a competent reporter, and Maud Blandy, who is less able in that line of work, talk together about normally publicity-mad Sir A. B. C. Beadel-Muffet, K.C.B., M.P., whom Howard says he has driven into disappearance and perhaps even suicide. It seems that Beadel-Muffet’s fiancée Mrs. Chorner professes to loathe publicity and has been distressed by seeing his name frequently in the tabloids. Meanwhile Maud’s friend Mortimer Marshall, an inept playwright, desires publicity. So, to josh him, Howard suggests that he produce some news concerning Beadel-Muffet, who a little later is announced as a suicide in Frankfurt. Howard is aghast and Maud remorseful. Yet Howard continues to twit Mortimer, with whom Maud rather sympathizes. Suddenly it is announced that Beadel-Muffet is very much alive: the suicide rumour merely created by publicity. Having valuable notes from an interview with Mrs. Chorner, tactful Maud is happy that she did not write them up for publication, because it might hurt the woman’s chances with Beadel-Muffet. Howard promised to produce Beadel-Muffet after his disappearance and before his reported suicide; Maud promised to marry Howard if he could do so. But the man’s return baffles clever Howard, who now determines to quit journalism, to the delight of Maud, who has been further disillusioned by Mrs. Chorner’s suppressed but now obvious desire for publicity herself’; Robert L. Gale, Plots and Characters in the Fiction of Henry James (Boston: MIT Press, 1972), 39. Henry James, ‘The Papers’, Complete Stories, vol. 5, 546. Where there is no ambiguity, page references to ‘The Papers’ will appear parenthetically in the text. Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 488. E. A. Bennett, Fame and Fiction: An Enquiry into Certain Popularities (London: Grant Richards, 1901), 3. James, ‘The Papers’, 547. Peter Conn, The Divided Mind: Ideology and Imagination in America, 1898–1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 22. Allan Burns (although his focus is on the American journalists) takes a similarly one-sided view; and in restricting James to protecting the ‘private sphere’, he overlooks its radical dependence on the ‘public’ side of the binary; ‘Henry James’s Journalists as Synecdoche for the American Scene’, Henry James Review 16 (1995), 1. Much more usefully, Richard Salmon, Henry James and the Culture of Publicity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), suggests that the tale ‘recognizes its own immanence in the object of its critique’; but he otherwise fails to see the erotic charge of ‘The Papers’ and its anchorage of the tale in James’s pervasive aesthetics of obscurity (148). Henry James, The Bostonians (London: Penguin, 1966), 107. Henry James, ‘Flickerbridge’, Complete Stories, vol. 4, 439. Henry James, The Reverberator (New York: Grove, 1979), 13. James, The Reverberator, 148. For a discussion of possible correspondences between Shakespeare’s retreat to Stratford-upon-Avon, The Tempest, and James’s ‘The Lesson of the Master’,

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see Philip Horne, Henry James and Revision: The New York Edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 312–14. Horne is good at spotting allusions in James to Shakespeare, although any interpretative yield is often ignored. Henry James, ‘The Future of the Novel’, Essays on Literature, 104. James, ‘The Future of the Novel’, 109. James, The Bostonians, 290. James, Complete Notebooks, 120. G. M. Young, Portrait of an Age: Victorian England. 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), 187. James, The Bostonians, 119. Much Ado about Nothing II.i.306. Much Ado about Nothing II.i.310–11. Henry James, Review of Middlemarch, Essays on Literature, 958. Henry James, Hawthorne, Essays on Literature, 427–8. James, ‘The Birthplace’, 470. Tintner has no interest in the erotic reaches of the tale’s relation to As You Like It, confining herself to commenting on the ‘challenge’ of ‘transposing’ one of Shakespeare’s ‘most enchanting . . . fantasies’ on to the ‘world of London journalism’ (The Book World of Henry James, 34). As You Like It II.vii.140–3. As You Like It V.iv.180–1. The Merchant of Venice I.i.1. ‘It is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury / Signifying nothing’ (Macbeth V.v.26–8). James, ‘Introduction’ to The Tempest, 1215. See Neil Chilton, ‘Conceptions of a Beautiful Crisis: Henry James’s Reading of The Tempest’, Henry James Review 26 (2005), 218–28 and John P. McCombe, ‘Henry James, Shakespeare’s Biography, and the Question of National Identity in “The Birthplace” and “The Introduction to The Tempest” ’, Henry James Review 31 (2010), 169–87. Chilton sees the ‘Introduction’, in part, as a displacement of James’s own exhausted preoccupations as a writer in the light of his work on the extensive revisions for the New York edition: ‘In suggesting that for Shakespeare the process of creation was not without its torments and anxieties, James draws on the insights into the relationship between life and the artist afforded him by the experience of rereading, revising, and prefacing a substantial selection of his creative output’ (226). James, ‘Introduction’ to The Tempest, 1209. James, ‘Introduction’ to The Tempest, 1216. I am unconvinced by Nina Schwartz attempts to interpret the ‘ “torture” Shakespeare’s reader suffers at the writer’s hands . . . as a manifestation of the Oedipal drama’; ‘The Master Lesson: James Reading Shakespeare’, Henry James Review 12 (1991), 74. A little overdramatically perhaps, Lauren Cowdery captures some of the feverish atmosphere of James’s piece on The Tempest: ‘But it is exactly as a hunt for big-game that this essay ranks with “The Beast in the Jungle” and “The Jolly Corner” for risk, excitement and the complexity of the relation between the stalker and stalked’; ‘Henry James and the “Transcendent Adventure”: The Search for the Self in the Introduction to The Tempest’, Henry James Review 3 1982), 145.

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Vivien Jones, James the Critic (London: Macmillan, 1984), 199. I also think that Laurence B. Holland misreads the introduction by suggesting that for James ‘instead of being obliterated the dramatist is in effect enclosed and diffused, still present, in his art’; The Expense of Vision: Essays on the Craft of Henry James (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 180. James, ‘Introduction’ to The Tempest, 1216. James Orchard Halliwell-Phillips, The Life of William Shakespeare. Including Many Particulars Respecting the Poet and His Family Never Before Published (London: n.p. 1848). James, ‘Introduction’ to The Tempest, 1208. James, ‘Introduction’ to The Tempest, 1209. James, ‘Introduction’ to The Tempest, 1215. James, ‘Introduction’ to The Tempest, 1207, 1209. Bacon, ‘William Shakespeare and His Plays’, 169. James, ‘Introduction’ to The Tempest, 1219. James, ‘Introduction’ to The Tempest, 1219. James, ‘London Notes’: Essays on Literature , 1412. James, ‘Introduction’ to The Tempest, 1215, 1205. Henry James, The American Scene, Collected Travel Writings: Great Britain and America: English Hours, The American Scene, Other Travels (Library of America. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1993), 569. Henry James, The American Scene, 570. Henry James, The American Scene, 571.

Chapter 4 1

2

3

I am very happy to acknowledge the help and guidance of the following colleagues: Neil Corcoran, John Haffenden and Ted Leinwand. I wish also to thank Kate Donahoe for allowing me access to the John Berryman Papers and Ann Mulfort and Cecily Marcus, and their staff at the University of Minnesota Libraries Archives and Special Collections, for their promptness and kindness in supplying me with materials and answering queries. ‘Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool’, in George Orwell: Essays, ed. Bernard Crick (London: Penguin, 1994), 413–14. Berryman’s Shakespeare: Essay, Letters, and Other Writings by John Berryman, ed. John Haffenden (London: Tauris Parke, 2001), lxi. Berryman refers admiringly to Greg in his own, ‘Project: An Edition of King Lear’ (Haffenden, Berryman’s Shakespeare, 173). Greg’s famous essay, The Variants in the First Quarto of ‘King Lear’: A Bibliographical and Critical Inquiry, supplement to the Bibliographical Society’s transactions, no. 15, Oxford: Bibliographical the text, including the circumstances of its printing. Other earlier scholars, who can be described as working along similar bibliographical lines, include A. W. Pollard (The Foundations of Shakespeare’s Text, 1923), R. B. McKerrow (Prolegomena for the Oxford Shakespeare, 1939), E. K. Chambers (‘The Disintegration of Shakespeare’, Shakespearean Gleanings, 1942), and Madeleine Doran (The Text of ‘King Lear’, 1931).

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Only two Shakespeare pieces were published in Berryman’s lifetime. See John Berryman, The Freedom of the Poet (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1976), 387. (This posthumous collection of essays was arranged by Berryman’s publisher, Robert Giroux.) ‘ “The Art of Poetry”, no. 16: John Berryman’, Paris Review (Winter 1972), 6–7. Berryman himself can easily be regarded as a late modernist, given the nature of Bradstreet and The Dream Songs. Where he parts company with Eliot is in his dislike of Eliot’s insistence on the impersonality of the poet in essays such as ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’. See the discussion below. Sir Philip Sidney: An Apology for Poetry (or The Defence of Poesie), ed. Geoffrey Shepherd; revised and expanded for this third edition by R. W. Maslen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 93. Shepherd, Sidney: Apology for Poetry, 87. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), ed. Jeri Johnson (London: Penguin, 2000), 181. ‘The Art of Poetry, no. 16’, 16. The argument about strength of influence is from Harold Bloom: ‘Poetic history . . . is held to be indistinguishable from poetic influence, since strong poets make that history by misreading one another, so as to clear imaginative space for themselves’ (The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, New York: Oxford University Press, 1973, 5). The memory, clearly a powerful and important one for Berryman, surfaces elsewhere in his poems, namely, Berryman’s Sonnets no. 5, Love & Fame (‘Recovery’ and ‘Anyway’), and Henry’s Fate (‘Roots’). Berryman, Freedom of the Poet, 323. Adam Kirsch, The Wounded Surgeon: Confession and Transformation in Six American Poets (London: Norton, 2005), 103. ‘The Art of Poetry, no. 16’, 13. It is in his famous essay, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, that Eliot speaks of the ‘transforming catalyst’ and ‘escape from personality’. See T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 3rd enlarged edn, 1951), 18–21. In the 1930s, for example, Auden and Spender returned to traditional lyric metres, partly in reaction to the ‘free verse’ of Modernism. See John Roe, ‘Huffy Henry and Crazy Jane: The Dream Songs in Ireland’, Symbiosis 3.1 (April 1999), 26–40. Two key examples are Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, each of which has a ‘heroic’ speaker troubled by self-doubt, which issues in ironic expression. The voice that rhetorically ‘declaims’ in Prufrock constantly undercuts itself. ‘The Art of Poetry, no. 16’, 33. Richard J. Kelly, ed., We Dream of Honour: John Berryman’s Letters to His Mother (London: Norton, 1988), 64. Marvin Rosenberg, The Masks of King Lear (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 267–8. The identification of creativity with frenzy might recall Plato in the Ion; but Berryman does not invoke Plato, and the latter’s emphasis on the poet’s mind

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26 27

28 29 30

31 32 33

34

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37 38

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40 41

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in a trance-like state ignores the element of personal suffering which was so important to Berryman. Haffenden, Berryman’s Shakespeare, 125. Eileen Simpson, Poets in Their Youth: A Memoir (London: Faber and Faber, 1982); John Haffenden, The Life of John Berryman (London: ARK Paperbacks, 1983); and Paul Mariani, Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2nd edn, 1996). Haffenden, Berryman’s Shakespeare, 100. Theodore Leinwand, ‘Berryman’s Shakespeare/Shakespeare’s Berryman’, The Hopkins Review 2.3 (2009), 379. Berryman, Freedom, 3. Haffenden, Life, 26–8. Robert Giroux, ‘Henry’s Understanding’, The Yale Review 84.2 (April 1996), 102. Mrs Berryman, like her son, underwent changes of name. She was Martha Smith calling her Jill Angel. Jill is what she remained. Kelly, We Dream of Honour, 376–80. The friend is Milt Halliday. For details see Mariani, Dream Song, 105–6. He adds: ‘If I were making a grandiose claim, I might pretend to know more about the administration of pronouns than any other living poet writing in English or American (Berryman, Freedom, 326–7). She gives a very readable and informative account of life with Berryman in Poets in Their Youth. See Ernest Jones, Hamlet and Oedipus (New York: W. W. Norton, 1949). In his lecture ‘The Crisis’, Berryman writes, ‘The psychoanalytic explanation of the play suggests itself as the most comprehensible and reasonable that has been offered’ (Haffenden, Berryman’s Shakespeare, 115). Recovery (1973) graphically illustrates the process. Simpson, Poets in Their Youth, 210. Simpson, Poets in Their Youth, 209. Curiously the rivalry is reminiscent of the scene in Chekhov’s The Seagull, where Anna Arkadina and her son Konstantin Trepliov quote Hamlet to each other, and in which the mother, somewhat upstagingly, interrupts the recital of her son’s play. ‘I like or love Whitman unreservedly; he operates with great power and beauty over a very wide range’ (Berryman, Freedom, 227). Review in The Nation, 28 June 1947, 775. Kelly transcribes the word as ‘coming’ but it is clear from Berryman’s hand that he correctly wrote ‘cunning’. Haffenden, Berryman’s Shakespeare, 120. Theodore Leinwand helpfully reproduces several sheets which show lists of words Berryman compiled from Lear and other Shakespearean plays, as well as typed accounts of his dreams with handwritten annotations (Leinwand, ‘Berryman’s Shakespeare/Shakespeare’s Berryman’, 398–403). See above, p. 156. See n. 33.

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210 45 46

47 48 49

50 51

52

53

54 55 56

57

58 59

60 61

62

63

Notes

John Berryman, Berryman’s Sonnets (New York: Faber, Strauss and Giroux, 1967). Leinwand gives an amusing (were it not so painful) summary of the different titles Berryman chose for the Shakespeare study each time he resumed it (‘Berryman’s Shakespeare/Shakespeare’s Berryman’, 380). Leinwand, ‘Berryman’s Shakespeare/Shakespeare’s Berryman’, 389. Haffenden, Berryman’s Shakespeare, 193. Gary Taylor and Michael Warren, eds, The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare’s Two Versions of King Lear (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983). See Taylor, Division of the Kingdoms (passim). Richard Knowles, ‘The Case for Two Lears’, Shakespeare Quarterly 36.1 (1985), 116. See, for example, René Weis, ed., King Lear: A Parallel Text Edition, 2nd edn (London: Longman, 2010), ‘The Integral King Lear: Its War and Variants of Convergence’, 36–72. Berryman affirms his ‘preference of [sic] metrical readings, which . . . one follows on the ground that the author is a poet and his scribes and printers are not; a corollary of this canon, seldom mentioned, is that his editor should be a poet also, if possible not a bad one, and at any rate not one who, like Pope, imposes upon his author an alien metric’ (Haffenden, Berryman’s Shakespeare, 381, n. 15; my italics). University of Minnesota Papers. Leinwand, ‘Berryman’s Shakespeare/Shakespeare’s Berryman’, 381. Randall McLeod, ‘Gon. No More, the Text is Foolish’, in Taylor and Warren, Division of the Kingdoms, 154. In his letter to the Rockefeller Foundation (17 February 1949; Haffenden, Berryman’s Shakespeare, 251–3) Berryman expresses dismay at Duthie’s misreadings and misinterpretations, and cites examples that suggest that his own textual commentary might have made a difference. Berryman responds, somewhat puckishly, ‘I almost wasn’t to be “of Princeton, N. J.” by the time the note will appear – Allen Tate wanted me to edit one of our major quarterlies, The Sewanee Review, which he has left, and it would have meant moving to Tennessee’ (Haffenden, Berryman’s Shakespeare, 243–4). Berryman seems to be ruefully reflecting on himself as the peripatetic aspiring scholar, forced to be ready to put a girdle round about the world, as compared with the grave Oberon-like dignitary, ensconced in his Sussex pastures. Haffenden, Berryman’s Shakespeare, 242. See Jay Halio, ed., The First Quarto of King Lear (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 15. Leinwand, ‘Berryman’s Shakespeare/Shakespeare’s Berryman’, 388–9. John Haffenden makes a couple of interesting suggestions, which I cite below. Neil Corcoran has revealed (privately) that while researching for his book, Shakespeare and the Modern Poet, he found Shakespeare difficult to trace directly in Berryman’s poetry. Later, in ‘Dream Song’ 68, Berryman links ‘empty . . . bed’ to the title of a jazz-blues song by Bessie Smith. Kenneth Gross, ‘Poets Reading Shakespeare’, Raritan: A Quarterly Review 28.3 (Winter 2009), 130.

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Notes 64

65

66

67 68

69

70 71 72 73

211

See ‘To Boccaccio’, in Morris Bishop, trans., Letters from Petrarch (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1966), 183. Richard Wilbur has mentioned the pressure of performance on Berryman. ‘Stanley [Kunitz] said: “As soon as you publish a book of poems in this country, you are in the poetry prison.” I think John felt himself to be in the poetry prison, and that may have been contributory to his death.’ See ‘ “The Art of Poetry”, no. 72: Richard Wilbur’, Paris Review 72 (Winter 1977), 16. ‘Lear’s renovation is going on rapidly & ruins me altogether for anything else. I am willing, however to be destroyed in this cause’ (Letter to Mark Van Doren, 3 October 1944; Haffenden, Berryman’s Shakespeare, 226). Haffenden gives a detailed account of the episode (Haffenden, Life, 167–95). See Charles Thornbury, ed., John Berryman: Collected Poems 1937–1971, London: ‘Faber and Faber, 1990. Compared with the fulsome dedications to Southampton of Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, both carrying Shakespeare’s name, the dedication page of the Sonnets (‘To Mr W. H.’) is positively bare, and suggests surreptitious dealing on the part of the publisher ‘T & T’. It seems unlikely that Shakespeare approved the publication. However, see Katherine Duncan-Jones, ‘Was the 1609 Shakes-peares Sonnets Really Unauthorized?’, Review of English Studies 34 (1983), 157–71. Haffenden, Life, 195. See ‘Art and Adultery, 1947’, in Haffenden, Life, 167–95. For example, see J. M. Linebarger, John Berryman (Boston: Twayne, 1974), 73–4. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 55 begins: Not marble nor the gilded monuments Of princes shall outlive this pow’rful rhyme.

74

75

76 77 78

79 80 81 82

Or such was the case until recently. Now Anne Bradstreet enjoys particular prominence in anthologies of female writing. ‘One night, hugging myself, I decided that her fierce dogmatic old father was going to die blaspheming, in delirium’ (Berryman, Freedom, 329). Haffenden, Berryman’s Shakespeare, xxxiv and 361, n. 61. Simpson, Poets in Their Youth, 224. Jay L. Halio, ed., The First Quarto of King Lear (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). ‘I decided to tempt her’ (‘Art of Poetry, no. 16’, 21). Simpson, Poets in Their Youth, 226. Mariani, Dream Song, 191. As I have argued above, Berryman is passionate rather than impersonal, and where he takes a psychoanalytical approach it tends to be typically Freudian, whereas later critics interested in the psychoanalytical have adopted a more Foucauldian or Lacanian outlook.

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Select Bibliography

Ralph Waldo Emerson Baker, Carlos. Emerson among the Eccentrics. London: Penguin, 1997. Baldick, Chris. The Social Mission of English Criticism, 1848–1932. Oxford: Clarendon, 1987. Bate, Jonathan, ed. The Romantics on Shakespeare. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992. —. Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination. Oxford: Clarendon, 1989. Bristol, Michael. Shakespeare’s America, America’s Shakespeare. London: Routledge, 1990. Cavell, Stanley. Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Friend, vol. 1, ed. Barbara E. Rooke. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969. —. Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Oxford Authors. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. —. The Statesman’s Manual. London: Gale and Fenner, 1816. Falk, Robert P. ‘Emerson and Shakespeare’. PMLA 56 (1941), 532–43. Lounsbury, Thomas R., ed. Yale Book of American Verse. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1912; Bartleby.com, 1999. www.bartleby.com/102/ [accessed 10 June 2010]. Muirhead, John H. Coleridge as Philosopher. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1930. Orsini, Gian N. G. Coleridge and German Idealism: A Study in the History of Philosophy. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969. Packer, Barbara. The Transcendentalists. Athens: Georgia University Press, 2007. Porte, Joel, ed. Emerson in His Journals. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982. Richardson, Robert D. Emerson: The Mind on Fire. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Schlegel, Friedrich. Philosophical Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. Sturgess, Kim C. Shakespeare and the American Nation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Wynkoop, William M. Three Children of the Universe: Emerson’s View of Shakespeare, Bacon, and Milton. The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1966. Ziff, Larzer. Puritanism in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973.

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Herman Melville Agnew, Jean-Christophe. World’s Apart: The Market and Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Berthoff, Warner. The Example of Melville. New York: W. W. Norton, 1962. Berthold, Dennis. ‘Class Acts: The Astor Place Riots and Melville’s “The Two Temples” ’. American Literature 71.3 (1999), 429–61. Byrant, John, ed. A Companion to Melville Studies. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986. Creech, James. Closet Writing/Gay Reading: The Case of Melville’s Pierre. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Delbanco, Andrew. Melville: His World and Work. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005. Higgins, Brian, and Hershel Parker, eds. Critical Essays on Moby-Dick. New York: G. K. Hall, 1992. Levine, Lawrence W. Highbrow Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988. Levine, Robert, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Leyda, Jay. The Melville Log: A Documentary Life of Herman Melville, 2 vols. New York: Gordian Press, 1969. Lyons, Paul. ‘Melville and His Precursors: Styles as Metastyle and Allusion’. American Literature 62 (1990), 445–63. Matthiessen, F. O. American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. New York: Oxford University Press, 1941. Melville, Herman. The Confidence-Man, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker and G. Thomas Tanselle. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and Newberry Library, 1984. —. Correspondence, ed. Lynn Horth. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and Newberry Library, 1993. —. ‘Hawthorne and His Mosses’. The Piazza Tales and Prose Pieces, ed. Harrison Hayford, Alma MacDougall, G. Thomas Tanselle. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and Newberry Library, 1987. —. Journals, ed. Howard Horsford and Lynn Horth. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and Newberry Library, 1989. —. Moby-Dick, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker and G. Thomas Tanselle. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and Newberry Library, 1988. —. Moby-Dick, ed. John Bryant and Haskell Springer. New York: Longman, 2007. —. Pierre, ed. Harrison Hayford et al. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and Newberry Library, 1971. Merkels, Julian. Melville and the Politics of Identity: From King Lear to Moby-Dick. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Olson, Charles. Call Me Ishmael. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1947. Parker, Hershel. Herman Melville: A Biography Volume 1, 1819–1851. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.

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Sanborn, Geoffrey. ‘The Name of the Devil: Melville’s Other “Extracts” for MobyDick’. Nineteenth-Century Literature 47.2 (1992), 212–35. Smith, Gene. American Gothic: The Story of America’s Legendary Theatrical Family, Junius, Edwin, and John Wilkes Booth. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992. Twain, Mark. 1601, and Is Shakespeare Dead? ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Henry James Agnew, Jean-Christophe. ‘The Consuming Vision of Henry James’. The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1980, ed. Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears. New York: Pantheon, 1983. 67–100. Bacon, Delia. The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded. London: Groombridge and Sons, 1857. Brown, Ivor, and George Fearon. The Shakespeares and the Birthplace. Stratfordon-Avon: Fox, 1939. Hodgdon, Barbara. The Shakespeare Trade: Performances and Appropriations. New Cultural Studies. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 1998. Kramnick, Jonathan Brody. Making the English Canon: Print-Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700–1770. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Margolis, Anne T. Henry James and the Problem of Audience: An International Act. Studies in Modern Literature. No. 49. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1985. Poole, Adrian. Shakespeare and the Victorians. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2004. Rawlings, Peter, ed. Americans on Shakespeare, 1776–1914. Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate, 1999. 169–99. —. ‘Narratives of Theory and Theories of Narrative: Point of View and Centres of Consciousness’. Henry James Studies. Palgrave Advances, ed. Peter Rawlings. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 35–58. Schoenbaum, Samuel. Shakespeare’s Lives. 2nd edn. Oxford: Clarendon, 1991. Strychacz, Thomas. Modernism, Mass Culture, and Professionalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Tanner, Tony. ‘The Birthplace’. Henry James: The Shorter Fiction: Reassessments, ed. N. H. Reeve. London, Macmillan, 1997. 77–94. Tintner, Adeline R. The Book World of Henry James: Appropriating the Classics. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1987. Wheeler, Michael. The Art of Allusion in Victorian Fiction. London: Macmillan Press, 1979.

John Berryman Coleman, Philip, and Philip McGowan, eds. After Thirty Falls: New Essays on John Berryman. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007. Corcoran, Neil. Shakespeare and the Modern Poet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

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Giroux, Robert. ‘Henry’s Understanding’. Yale Review 84 (April 1996), 96–103. Greg, W. W. The Editorial Problem in Shakespeare: A Survey of the Foundations of the Text. 2nd edn. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951. Gross, Kenneth. ‘Poets Reading Shakespeare’. Raritan: A Quarterly Review 28 (Winter 2009), 105–31. Haffenden, John. Berryman’s Shakespeare: Essays, Letters, and Other Writings by John Berryman. Edited with an introduction by John Haffenden. London: Tauris Parke, 2001. —. John Berryman: A Critical Commentary, London: Macmillan, 1980. —. The Life of John Berryman. London: ARK Paperbacks, 1983. Kelly, Richard J., ed. We Dream of Honour: John Berryman’s Letters to His Mother. London: Norton, 1988. Kirsch, Adam. The Wounded Surgeon: Confession and Transformation in Six American Poets. London: Norton, 2005. Knowles, Richard. ‘The Case for Two Lears’. Shakespeare Quarterly 36 (1985), 115–20. Leinwand, Theodore. ‘Berryman’s Shakespeare/Shakespeare’s/Berryman’. Hopkins Review 2 (2009), 379. Linebarger, J. M. John Berryman. Boston: Twayne, 1974. Mariani, Paul. Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman. 2nd edn. Amherst: Massachusetts University Press, 1996. Simpson, Eileen. Poets in Their Youth: A Memoir. London: Faber and Faber, 1982. Taylor, Gary, and Michael Warren, eds. The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare’s Two Versions of King Lear. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983. Travisano, Thomas. Midcentury Quartet: Bishop, Lowell, Jarrell, Berryman, and the Making of a Postmodern Aesthetic. Charlottesville: Virginia University Press, 1999. Weis, René, ed. King Lear: A Parallel Text. 2nd edn. London: Longman, 2010. Weiser, David K. ‘Berryman’s Sonnets: In and Out of the Tradition’. American Literature 55 (October 1983), 388–404.

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Index

Adams, Henry, Education of Henry Adams, The 106–7 Agnew, Jean-Christophe 92 Albany 152 allusion 75–83, 96–7 see also Ben-Porat, Ziva; Hollander, John; Kellett, E. E.; Meyer, Herman; Miller, Karl; Wheeler, Michael All’s Well That Ends Well 70 American Renaissance, The 6, 7, 63–4, 70, 74, 75, 76, 77, 80 see also Matthiessen, F. O.; New Zealand renaissance anamorphosis 106–7 see also perspective Angelo 23 Antonio 117, 130 Antony and Cleopatra 69, 70, 77, 98 Ariel 16, 28, 99, 110 Aristotle 35, 80 As You Like It 9, 70, 100, 102, 124, 125, 129, 135 Astor Place riots 55–61 see also Forrest, Edwin; Macready, William Charles; Shakespeare wars Auden, W. H. 164 Austen, Jane, Pride and Prejudice 151 Austin, J. L. 30 Autolycus 93 Bacon, Delia 8, 107–11, 114, 115, 123, 131 see also Baconians

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Bacon, Francis, Baron Verulam of Verulam, Viscount St Albans 19, 21, 43, 48 Baconians 107–11, 114, 115, 123, 131 see also Bacon, Delia Balzac, Honoré de 96 Bancroft, George 4, 45–6 Barnum, Phineas T. 8, 112–14, 115, 117, 118–19, 120, 121, 122, 123 Shakespeare’s birthplace and 111–15 see also Twain, Mark Bate, Jonathan 42 Beatrice 127 Beauty and the Beast The 67 Beethoven, Ludwig van 140 Ben-Porat, Ziva 196n see also allusion; Hollander, John; Kellett, E. E.; Meyer, Herman; Miller, Karl; Wheeler, Michael Bennett, E. A. 123–4 Berryman, Eileen (Eileen Simpson) 146, 153, 167, 168, 169, 176, 178 Berryman, Jill 143–4 see also Jones, Ernest Berryman, Jill (Martha Shaver Little Smith) 143, 147 see also Oedipal complex Berryman, John 5, 9–10, 133–80 Eliot, T. S. and 135–6, 137, 139–40, 149, 164, 167 Jones, Ernest 146 King Lear, edition of 133–4, 148–9, 152, 155–67, 168, 179

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218

Index

Berryman, John (Cont’d) New Bibliography and 134 see also Greg, W. W. Oedipal complex and 143–8 Shakespeare’s Sonnets and 168–73 works of ‘Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz, In’ 139 77 Dream Songs 165, 166 ‘Art of Poetry’ 167 ‘Ball Poem, The’ 146 Berryman’s Shakespeare 134–5 Berryman’s Sonnets 10, 143, 154, 166, 168–73, 174–5 ‘Crisis, The’ 143 ‘Dispossessed, The’ 146, 154 Dream Songs, The 10, 134, 135, 136–7, 138, 140, 143, 144–5, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 153, 154, 157, 161, 163, 164–6, 172, 179 Freedom of the Poet, The 153–4 Henry’s Fate 150 Homage to Mistress Bradstreet 10, 136, 147, 153, 161, 166, 167, 168, 173–9 Love & Fame 136, 143 ‘Marlowe’s Damnations’ 143 ‘Monkhood’ 136 ‘Roots’ 150 Sonnets to Chris 169 ‘Tragic Substance, The’ 144, 152, 155 see also Berryman, Jill; Haffenden, John ; Kelly, John Yeats, W. B. and 136–42, 150, 151, 166, 179 Berthold, Dennis 58–9, 60 Bettina von Arnim (Countess of Arnim) 41 Bezanson, Walter 73 biography Shakespeare and 15–18 Birthplace (Shakespeare’s) 111–23 see also James, Henry; Twain, Mark Blackmur, R. P. 9, 150 Bloom, Harold 3 Boccacio, Giovanni 67 Booth, Edwin 89

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Booth, John Wilkes 89 Bradstreet, Anne 175, 177, 179 Bristol, Frank M. 1 Bristol, Michael 43 Brooks, Cleanth 9 Well Wrought Urn, The 150 Brownson, Orestes A. 3, 4, 45, 47, 48 Bryant, John 80–1 Bryant, William Culen 61 Budd, Louis J. 8, 107–8 Cabot, John 2 Caliban 88, 99, 130 Camden, William 154, 155 Carlyle, Thomas, ‘Heroes, On’ 66 Cato, Marcus Porcius 33–4 Cavell, Stanley 30 Celia 124 Chambers, E. K. 152, 157 see also Greg, W. W.; McKerrow, R. W.; Pollard, A. W. Chaucer, Geoffrey 21 Clandestine Marriage, The 67 Claudius 24, 54, 97, 147 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 6, 8, 14, 15, 19–20, 22, 25, 28, 29, 32–3, 34–5, 37, 43, 62, 73, 103–4 Melville, Herman and 65–6 organic form and 34–5 works of ‘Aeolian Harp’ 15 Biographia Literaria 14 Friend, The 26, 37 Statesman’s Manual, The 19–20, 23 Table Talk 15 see also James, Henry Columbus, Christopher 2 Comedy of Errors, A 95 Conn, Peter 124 Cooper, James Fenimore 2, 64 Cordelia 100, 137, 142, 154, 160 Craig, W. J. 167 Crane, Stephen 166, 168 Creech, James 87 Cressida 134 Curnow, Allen 64 Cymbeline 91

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Index Dana, Jr., Richard Henry 71–2 De Quincey, Thomas 75 Debutante, The 67 Defoe, Daniel, Moll Flanders 150 Desdemona 54, 67, 142, 145, 155, 172 Dickens, Charles 96 Dogberry 95 Don Quixote (character) 93 Donne, John 77 Dowden, Edward 153 Drake, Sir Francis 2 Duke (Measure for Measure) 130 Duncan 60 Duthie, G. I. 149, 158, 159, 160, 167, 179 Elizabethan Shorthand and the First Quarto of King Lear 158 Duyckinck, Evert 53, 56, 58–9, 60, 61, 72 Edgar 69, 79, 142, 162, 163, 164, 165 Edmund 69, 78 Eliot, T. S. 9, 99, 135–6, 137, 139–40, 149, 164, 167 see also Berryman, John Elizabeth I, Queen 67 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 3, 4–5, 10, 11–50, 35–6, 52, 117, 132 America and 42–50 common sense 28 democracy 44–50 ‘genius’ 17–18, 31–3, 35, 41 Germans and 17 Hazlett and 15, 17 imagination 24–8 language 20–3, 30–1 morality 29, 36–7 see also Berryman, Gill sensualism 12–14 works of ‘American Scholar, The’ 44 ‘Art and Criticism’ 45–6 Collected Works 12, 16, 17, 19, 22, 25, 26, 30–1, 32 Complete Writings 12, 13, 14 Early Lectures 12, 14, 17, 18, 19, 20–2, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32, 33, 34, 36–7, 38, 39, 42, 180

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‘English Literature: Introductory’ 19 ‘Experience’ 41 ‘Genius’ (essay) 35–8, 41–2 ‘John Milton’ 12 ‘Literature’ 44 Nature 24–5, 37 ‘Poet, The’ (1839) 36 ‘Poet, The’ (1844) 11, 23–4, 26, 30, 35–6, 39–41 ‘Poetry and Imagination’ 44–5 Representative Men 16, 36, 39, 47 ‘Self-Reliance’ 35 ‘Shakespeare, or The Poet’ 11, 16–17, 19, 32, 35–6, 39 ‘Tragedy’ 29 ‘Woodnotes I’ 12–15 ‘Woodnotes II’ 12–15, 34 Emmons, Richard, Fredoniad; or, Independence Preserved, The 62 Enobarbus 77 Falk, Robert P. 11 Falstaff 5, 16, 28, 46, 136 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 42 Field, James 61 Fool (King Lear) 78, 79, 151, 154 Forrest, Edwin 55, 56–60, 57, 66, 67, 74, 81 see also Astor Place riots and; Macready, William Charles Fox, Levi 111–12 Freud, Sigmund 146, 179 Gayley, Charles Mill 1, 2 Gertrude 97, 147, 144–5 Ghost (Hamlet) 117, 118, 147 Gielgud, John 137 Giroux, Robert 143, 169 Gloucester 69, 142, 162, 163 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 41, 43, 95 Wilhelm Meister 42 Goneril 152, 161 Goya (Francisco José de Goya Y Lucientes) 140 Graham, Kenneth 98

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Index

Grant, Ulysses Simpson 54 Gray, Thomas 52 Greene, Robert 75 Greg, W. W. 10, 134, 152, 157, 159, 161, 161–3, 168 see also Chambers, E. K.; McKerrow, R. W.; Greg, W. W.; New Bibliography; Pollard, A. W. Grese, Irma 171–2 Gross, Kenneth 164–5, 179 Guildenstern 86, 146 Haffenden, John, Berryman’s Shakespeare 135, 144, 149, 152, 153, 154–5, 156, 157–9, 160, 161, 162, 167, 168, 169, 170 Hal (Prince Henry) 137 Halliwell-Phillips, James Orchard 130 Hamlet (character) 18, 26, 27, 28, 65, 70, 82, 86, 87, 93, 96, 97, 99, 102, 103, 120, 137, 138, 141, 144–9, 152, 165, 179 Hamlet (play) 6, 7, 9, 15, 18, 24, 25, 27, 54, 57, 70, 86, 87, 89, 99, 100, 101, 103, 118, 120, 137, 143, 144–5, 152, 153, 155 see also Melville, Herman Hanff, Helene, 84 Charing Cross Road 160 Hardy, Thomas 96 Harris, Neil 114 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 4, 6, 7, 37, 71, 72, 79, 84, 107–8, 122, 132 ‘Hawthorne and His Mosses’ 6, 7, 53, 61–8 Hawthorne, Sophia 84 Hazlitt, William 37 Emerson and 15–17 Herder, Johann Gottfried 35 Hero 127 Hill, John 11 Hodder, Alfred 147 Hodgdon, Barbara 8 Holbein, Hans, Ambassadors, The 107 see also anamorphosis

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Hollander, John 196n see also allusion; Ben-Porat, Ziva; Kellett, E. E.; Meyer, Herman; Miller, Karl; Wheeler, Michael Holmes, Oliver Wendell works of Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, The 61 Last Leaf, The 61 Homer 4, 45, 62, 67, 87 Hone, Phillip 58 Hotspur 76 Housekeeper, The 67 Housman, A. E. 156 Iago 65, 67, 78, 88, 96, 155 Ideology 19–20 Imogen 91 Irving, Washington 56, 63 Shakespeare’s birthplace and 122–3 Isabella 23, 26 Jacques 102, 129, 130 James VI, King of Scotland 132 James, Henry 1, 5, 7–9, 10, 95–132 Birthplace (Shakespeare’s) 111–23 character and 98 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor and 103–4 see also Coleridge, Samuel Taylor consciousness, representation of 102–4 see also Shakespeare, William organic form and 104–5 Shakespearean allusions and 96–7 theatre and 105–6 Turgenev, Ivan and 98 Victorian Shakespeare and 96, 98 works of Album, The 105 Ambassadors, The 107 American Scene, The 131–2 American, The 105 ‘Art of Fiction, The’ 98, 104–5 ‘Birthplace, The’ 8–9, 100, 108, 111–23, 128, 130, 131, Bostonians, The 124–7 ‘Change of Heart, A’ 105 ‘Chaperon, The’ 105

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Index ‘Covering End’ 105, 106 Daisy Miller 105 Disengaged 105 ‘Dumas the Younger’ 117 ‘Eugene Pickering’ 98–9 ‘Future of the Novel, The’ 126 ‘Guest’s Confession’ 97, 99 Guy Domville 105, 106 High Bid, The 106 ‘Introduction to The Tempest’ 1, 9, 99, 120, 123, 130–1 Ivory Tower, The 100–1 ‘Master Eustace’ 97–8 ‘Middle Years, The’ 99 Mrs. Viberts 105 Other House, The 106 Outcry, The 100, 105, 106 ‘Owen Wingrave’ 106 ‘Papers, The’ 8–9, 100, 123–30 ‘Parisian Stage, The 105 Portrait of a Lady, The 124 Prefaces, The New York Edition 8, 102–5 Princess Casamassima, The 99, 101, 103 Promise, The 105 Pyramus and Thisbe 101, 105 ‘Real Thing, The’ 116 Reprobate, The 105 Reverberator, The 125 Saloon, The 106 Small Boy and Others, A 95, 101, 113 ‘Still Waters’ 105 Summersoft 105 Tenants 105 Tragic Muse, The 100, 103, 105 Turn of the Screw, The 105 Two Magics 105 ‘Warwickshire, In’ 115 What Maisie Knew 101–2, 107, 129, Wings of the Dove, The 105 women’s rights and 126–7 James, William 95 Jamrach, Charles 112 Jarrell, Randall 146 John the Baptist 68 Johnson, Samuel 31, 155

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221

Jones, Ernest 146 see also Oedipal complex; Berryman, Jill; Berryman, John Jones, Vivien 130 Jonson, Ben 4, 16, 18 Joyce, James, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A 135 Juliet 85, 100 Julius Caesar 89 Kant, Immanuel 27, 33 Kean, Charles 60 Keats, John, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ 150 Kellett, E. E. 96 see also allusion; Ben-Porat, Ziva; Hollander, John; Meyer, Herman; Miller, Karl; Wheeler, Michael Kelly, John, We Dream of Honour: John Berryman’s Letters to His Mother 142, 144, 151–2 see also Oedipal complex, Berryman, Jill; Berryman, John Kepler, Johann 106 Kettle, Arnold 137 1 King Henry IV 137 King Henry V 54 King Henry VI 75 King Henry VIII 70 King Lear 9, 10, 16, 18, 29, 69, 70, 82, 100, 133–4, 137, 141–2, 148–9, 150, 151–2, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158–62, 163–5, 166, 167, 168, 173, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180 King Richard II 107 King Richard III 54, 69 Kirsch, Adam 138 Kirschbaum, Leo 179 True Text of King Lear, The 159 Knowles, Richard 158 Kramnick, Jonathan Brody 108 Lady Macbeth 118 Laertes 92 Lamb, Charles 66, 67, 95 see also Melville, Herman

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Index

Lear 18, 29–30, 58, 65, 70, 74, 78, 79, 81, 82, 88, 96, 137, 138, 141–2, 150, 151, 154, 159, 160, 165, 176, 180 Leinwand, Theodore 156, 163, 167, 179 Lessing, Gothold Ephraim 42, 43, 106 Levine, Lawrence W. 2, 54–5, 59 Lewes, George Henry 59–60, 60, 81 Lincoln, Abraham 54, 89 Lowell, Robert, Collected Poems 146 Lytton, Edward Bulwar Lytton, Baron, Richelieu 90 Macbeth 18, 65, 118, 130, 148, 155 Maclise, Daniel, Play Scene in Hamlet, The 101 Macready, William Charles 55–6, 57, 58, 59–60, 66, 67, 90 see also Astor Place riots; Forrest, Edwin; Shakespeare wars Mariani, Paul 150, 178 Martin, Wallace 98 Mary, Queen of Scots 132 Matthiessen, F. O. 6, 7, 63, 70, 74, 75, 76, 77, 80 see also American Renaissance, The Macbeth 18, 20, 54, 55, 57, 60, 78, 147, 153, 155 Measure for Measure 6, 23, 26, 69, 70 McCombe, John P. 100 McKerrow, R. W. 152 see also Chambers, E. K.; Greg, W. W.; McKerrow, R. W.; Greg, W. W.; New Bibliography; Pollard, A. W. Melville, Gansevoort 58 Melville, Herman 4, 5, 6–7, 10, 51–94 Coleridge and 65–6 Duyckink, Evert and 53, 56, 58–9, 60, 61, 72 Hamlet, Americanization of 87 Lamb, Charles and 66 Polynesian beauties and 51 Shakespearian allusions and 75–83 Ur-Moby-Dick 71 works of ‘Bartleby, The Scrivener’ 88

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Battle-Pieces 89 ‘Benito Cereno’ 64 Billy Budd, Sailor 88 Confidence-Man, The 7, 88, 90–2 ‘Encantadas, The’ 88 ‘Hawthorne and His Mosses’ 6, 7, 61–8, 69, 70, 73, 83, 88, 93, 94, 96 Mardi 51, 58, 83 Moby-Dick 6–7, 55, 59, 60, 68–83, 70, 85, 93 Omoo 57, 84 Pierre 7, 59, 83–8 Redburn 66 ‘Two Temples, The’ 89–90, 91 Typee 57 White-Jacket 66, 68 Melville, Malcolm 51 Melville, Lizzie 51 Memnon 86, 87 Merchant of Venice, The 22, 99 Meredith, George, ‘Modern Love’ 168 Messenger (King Lear) 152 Meyer, Herman 196n see also allusion; Ben-Porat, Ziva; Hollander, John; Kellett, E. E.; Miller, Karl; Wheeler, Michael Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 27, 95, 101, 117 Miller, Arthur, Death of a Salesman 60 Milton, John 3, 7, 12, 14–15, 16, 20, 21, 31, 32, 35, 38, 43, 47, 70, 76, 93, 140 Miller, Karl 196n see also allusion; Ben-Porat, Ziva; Hollander, John; Kellett, E. E.; Meyer, Herman; Wheeler, Michael Miranda 69 Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de 41, 86, 87 Morewood, Sarah 83 Much Ado About Nothing 95, 127 Napoleon (Napoleon I, Napoleon Bonaparte) 42 New Bibliography 134 see also Chambers, E. K.; Greg, W. W.; McKerrow, R. W.; Pollard, A. W.

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Index New Zealand renaissance 63–5 see also American Renaissance Oedipal complex 143–8 see also Berryman, Jill; Berryman, John Olson, Charles 6, 69, 70, 71, 74, 79–80, 83 Ophelia 137, 142, 146 Organic form 33–5, 104–5 Oswald 152 Othello (character) 18, 57, 70, 82, 88, 172 Othello 15, 18, 29–30, 66, 70, 134, 142, 155 Pegasus 163 Perry, Thomas Sergeant 95 perspective 106–7 see also anamorphosis Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca) 10, 165, 167, 169, 170, 172, 173 Phidias 45 Plato 27 Plotinus 27, 41 Plutarch 41 Pollard, A. W. 152 see also Chambers, E. K.; Greg, W. W.; McKerrow, R. W.; New Bibliography; Pollard, A. W. Polonius 92, 146, 149 Poole, Adrian 96 Poor Tom 163, 165 Porte, Joel, Emerson in His Journals 1, 12, 15, 16, 17–18, 23, 24, 33, 34–5, 36 Portia 117 Pound, Ezra 137, 140 Practical Man, A 67 Pritchett, V. S. 84 Prospero 69, 99, 110, 130 Proteus 109 Pyrrho 27 Raleigh, Sir Walter 2 Rawlings, Peter 43, 45 Regan 69 Richardson, Samuel, Clarissa 105

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Rimbaud, Arthur 146 Rizzio, David 132 Rodrigo 67 Romeo 85 Romeo and Juliet 98 Rosamond 124 Rosencrantz 86, 146 Rylands, George 137 Rynders, Captain Isaiah 58 Sanborne, Geoffrey 71 Satan 33, 93 Schlegel, August Wilhelm von 14, 34, 42–3, 104 Schwartz, Delmore 134, 136, 138, 140, 154 Scott, Sir Walter 48, 54 Shakespeare wars 55–61 see also Astor Place riots; Forrest, Edwin; Macready, William Charles; Shakespeare, William America and 42–50, 55–61, 107–11, 114, 115, 123, 131 Astor Place riots and 55–61 see also Forrest, Edwin; Macready, William Charles; Shakespeare wars allusions and 75–83, 96–7 anamorphosis and 106–7 Baconians and 107–11, 114, 115, 123, 131 biography 15–18 birthplace 111–15 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor and 103–4 consciousness and 102–4 see also James, Henry democracy and 44–50 see also Levine, Lawrence W. editing and 133–4, 148–9, 152, 155–67, 168, 179 education 14–15 Elizabethan drama and 76 genius and 32–42 Germans and 17–18 imagination and 24–8 language and 20–4

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Shakespeare, William (Cont’d) mass culture and 110–11 morality 36–7 organic form and 33–35, 104–5 sensualism and 12–14 Victorians and 96, 98 works of Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare, The (1837) 6, 52, 53 Sonnets 168–73 see also titles of individual plays and names of dramatic characters; Oedipal complex She Would and She Would Not 67 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 22 Shylock 97, 117 Sidney, Philip 178 Apology for Poetry, The 135 Astrophil & Stella 140, 178 Simpson, Eileen 146, 147, 167, 168, 176, 178 Poets in Their Youth 147, 153 Sisson, C. J. 143 Smith, John Allyn 143–5 Smith, Martha Shaver Little (Jill Berryman) 143, 147 Sons of Mars, The 67 Sontag, Susan 88 Stäel, Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Madame de (Baronness of StäelHolstein) 43 Stitt, Peter 134, 136 Strong, George Templeton 58 Strychacz, Thomas 125 Stuart (Stewart), Mary, Queen of Scots 132 Sycorax 99 Taylor, Gary and Michael Warren (eds), Division of the Kingdoms, The 152, 158, 159 Taylor, Jeremy 43 Tennyson, Alfred, 1st Baron Tennyson 48

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Tempest, The 1, 2, 6, 9, 25, 53, 69, 99, 121, 125, 131, 155 Thackeray, William Makepeace 95 Theseus 27, 41 Thoreau, Henry David 45, 47, 48, 132 ‘Advantages and Disadvantages of Foreign Influences on American Literature’ 47 Thornbury, Charles 168–9 Thorndike, Ashley 3 Times, The (London) 111–12 Timon 65, 69, 88, 92, 96 Timon of Athens 70, 88 Tintner, Adeline, R., Book World of Henry James, The 95–100, 103 Tintoretto 95 Titian (Tiziano Vecellio) 140 Tolstoy, Leo 96 Touchstone 135 Troilus 134, 135 Troilus and Cressida 7, 87, 134 Turgenev, Ivan 98 see also James, Henry Twain, Mark (Samuel Clemens) 54 Huckleberry Finn 81–2 Shakespeare’s Birthplace and 112–13 Two Gentlemen of Verona 162 Updike, John 84 Vaihinger, Hans 102 Van Doren, Mark 9–10, 137, 156, 161, 162, 163 Very, Jones 37–9, 42, 49 Voltaire, François Marie Arouet de 33 Wallace, Charles 2 Wheeler, Michael 196n see also allusion; Ben-Porat, Ziva; Hollander, John; Kellett, E. E.; Meyer, Herman; Miller, Karl Whitman, Walt 3–4, 45, 46, 47, 54, 149–51

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Index Whitman, Walt works of Democratic Vistas 47–9 Leaves of Grass 49 Wieland, Christoph Martin 42 Wilkes, George 4 Williams, Hank 77 Wilson, Edmund 96 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 30 Wordsworth, William, ‘Tintern Abbey’ 15 Wyatt, Thomas 173 Wynkoop, William 11

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Yeats, W. B. 9, 136–42, 150, 151, 166, 179 works of ‘Lapis Lazuli’ 137–41 ‘Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz, In’ 139 New Poems 137 Tower, The 139 Trembling of the Veil, The 138 see also Berryman, John Young, G. M. 127 Zacchaeus (Bible) 163

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