Shakespeare and the Modern Poet

SHAKESPEARE AND THE MODERN POET

Shakespeare is a major influence on poets writing in English, but the dynamics of that influence in the twentieth century have never been as closely analysed as they are in this important study. More than an account of the ways in which Shakespeare is figured in both the poetry and the critical prose of modern poets, this book presents a provocative new view of poetic interrelationship. Focusing on W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, Neil Corcoran uncovers the relationships – combative as well as sympathetic – between these poets themselves as they are intertwined in their engagements with Shakespeare. Corcoran offers many enlightening close readings, fully alert to contemporary theoretical debates. This original study beautifully displays the nature of poetic influence – both of Shakespeare on the twentieth century, and among modern poets as they respond to Shakespeare. n e i l c o r c o r a n is King Alfred Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool. His previous publications include Elizabeth Bowen: The Enforced Return (Clarendon Press, 2004) and, as editor, The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century English Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2007).

SHAKESPEARE AND THE MODERN POET NEIL CORCORAN

cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 8ru, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521199827 © Neil Corcoran 2010 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2010 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Corcoran, Neil. Shakespeare and the modern poet / Neil Corcoran. p. cm. isbn 978-0-521-19982-7 (hardback) 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616 – Criticism and interpretation. 2. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616 – Influence. 3. Poetry, Modern – 19th century – History and criticism. 4. Poetry, Modern – 20th century – History and criticism. I. Title. PR2970.C67 2010 821'.909–dc22 2010000327 isbn 978-0-521-19982-7 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

Acknowledgements

page vi 1

Introduction part i

25

yeats’s shakespeare

1 Setting a sail for shipwreck: Yeats’s Shakespeare criticism

27

2 Myself must I remake: Shakespeare in Yeats’s poetry

41

part ii

61

eliot’s shakespeare

3 That man’s scope: Eliot’s Shakespeare criticism

63

4 This man’s gift: Shakespeare in Eliot’s poetry

90

part iii

121

auden’s shakespeare

5 A plenum of experience: Auden’s Shakespeare criticism

123

6

147

The reality of the mirror: Shakespeare in Auden’s poetry

part iv

ted hughes’s shakespeare

7 A language of the common bond

181 183

8 The Shakespearean moment

200

9 Survivor of cease: Shakespeare and Sylvia Plath in Ted Hughes’s poems

223

Index

242 v

Acknowledgements

Friends and colleagues have very generously read and commented on sections of this book and some have helped it along in other ways. I am extremely grateful for the advice and encouragement I received. I want to thank Patrick Crotty, Michael Davies, Paul Driver, Warwick Gould, David Hopkins, John Kerrigan, Willy Maley, Andrew Murphy, Bernard O’Donoghue, Stephen Procter, Neil Rhodes, Neil Roberts, Stan Smith, Sue Vice and Marina Warner. I am also very grateful to the School of English in the University of Liverpool for a semester of research leave and to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for a research leave award. Long may it continue to support individual research in the Arts and Humanities. The Department of English in the University of Bristol invited me to lecture at a conference on Shakespeare and Modern Poetry in 2007. Comments afterwards were extremely helpful; and I am especially grateful to John Lyon for raising the name of Patrick Cruttwell and for very kindly giving me a copy of The Shakespearean Moment.

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Introduction

influence The most influential modern critic to study poetic interrelationships is Harold Bloom in his book The Anxiety of Influence (1973) and several of its successors. Bloom’s theories of influence were developed while he was writing about one of the central figures in what follows here, W. B. Yeats. They were also almost certainly in part indebted to Richard Ellmann, a dedicatee of The Anxiety of Influence, who, in Eminent Domain (1967), a study of six modern writers including two given attention in what follows, Yeats and Auden, tacitly developed a well-known tenet of another, T. S. Eliot (that ‘Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal’) into this: That writers flow into each other like waves, gently rather than tidally, is one of those decorous myths we impose upon a high-handed, even brutal procedure. The behaviour, while not invariably marked by bad temper, is less polite. Writers move upon other writers not as genial successors but as violent expropriators, knocking down established boundaries to seize by the force of youth, or of age, what they require. They do not borrow, they override.1

Rewritten with energetic conviction and terminological brio, this is essentially the view of The Anxiety of Influence too, in which poetic interrelationships are read as a species of neo-Freudian, Oedipal melancholy, a version of the ‘family romance’. Poetry, as a consequence, is ‘misunderstanding, misinterpretation, misalliance’.2 The first edition of Bloom’s book pays very little attention to Shakespeare and regards literary history from Homer to Shakespeare as a form of prelapsarian ‘generous’ influence: anxiety is a post-Enlightenment phenomenon. For the second edition published in 1997, however, Bloom writes a 1 2

Richard Ellmann, Eminent Domain: Yeats among Wilde, Joyce, Pound, Eliot, and Auden (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 3. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 95.

1

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Shakespeare and the Modern Poet

preface in which he explains that in the first he had deliberately hidden the Shakespearean origin of its key term, ‘misprision’, which derives from sonnet 87, ‘Farewell, thou art too dear for my possessing’. The relevant lines in the sonnet are ‘So thy great gift, upon misprision growing, / Comes home again, on better judgement making’. Used by Bloom as ‘an allegory of any writer’s … relation to tradition’, the word therefore puts Shakespeare at the origin of influential anxiety; and the new preface introduces a further memorable category to Bloom’s impressive arsenal by denominating ‘the anguish of contamination’.3 Bloom’s sole example is the relationship between Shakespeare and Marlowe, about which he has arresting things to say. He now plays down the Freudianism of the original theory and, in describing the way Shakespeare took a very long time to overcome Marlowe, he in effect – if not in theory – reinscribes in the relationship between writers a form of psychological agency which any Oedipal theory must, necessarily, consign to the realm of the unconscious. The theory of the anxiety of influence has saved literary criticism from indulging any sentimentality about writerly interaction; and it makes a great deal of sense in relation to particular poets and poems. But, as the preface to Bloom’s second edition, now openly under the sway of Shakespeare, seems almost on the verge of admitting, it does not tell the whole story. Neither does the now conventional use of the word ‘intertextuality’ to define the relationship between writers and between texts. In Julia Kristeva, who first, in her readings of Bakhtin, gave the term currency, intertextuality has to do not with human agency, with intersubjectivity, but with the ‘transposition of one (or several) sign-system(s) into another’.4 So unhappy did Kristeva become, in fact, with its more casual usage that she began to employ instead the term ‘transposition’. Not soon enough, however, to prevent the word’s common and persistent (mis)use in contemporary literary criticism. Although it is far too late to sabotage that now, the takeover has meant that the word ‘allusion’ has come, in some circles, to seem a bit tame, outmoded and even reactionary. Although I make use of the term ‘intertextuality’ in what follows, to signal a larger and more diffused relationship between texts than ‘allusion’ is liable to suggest, I retain the latter term too in this book, notably in relation to Eliot, and I am interested in its reformulation in the work of Walter Benjamin and, after him, Marjorie Garber. I also believe, pace Harold 3 4

The Anxiety of Influence (2nd edn, 1997), p. xi. Julia Kristeva, ‘Revolution in Poetic Language’ (1974), repr. Toril Moi (ed.), The Kristeva Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 89–136, p. 111.

Introduction

3

Bloom, that relationships between writers and texts can be – indeed, cry out to be – viewed as species of things other than melancholy; and that this is often the case too when poets writing in English take cognisance of that poet who must seem in all sorts of ways the most anxiety-inducing of all, William Shakespeare. Belatedness is certainly sometimes an affliction: and in what follows I describe circumstances in which some form of suffering obtains. But to be an heir can also be a consolation. Corroboration may happen as well as competition. Similarly, the term ‘appropriation’ is often used to figure the relationship, which suggests that the earlier writer is being laid claim to as a kind of property; but negotiation and even collaboration – that admittedly two-edged sword of a word – sometimes obtain too. The relationship between modern poets and Shakespeare can be provoking or sterilising; it can involve the sharing of humane inquiry or represent the fundamental foreclosure of opportunity; it can give rise to awed obeisance or irreverently disfiguring travesty; it can be parabolic, or it can be selfprojecting. And many other things. The fascination lies precisely in the many things it can be, and in the many things it makes possible, among them some of the greatest poems of our modernity and some of the most arresting literary-critical prose. In the relationships I describe in this book poets encountering Shakespeare are also profoundly encountering themselves and, occasionally, one another; and in this process too Shakespeare becomes in many ways the first modern. the first modern There is one sense in which poets are manifestly responsible for making Shakespeare the first modern: the fact that he figures crucially in the literary criticism of the poet William Empson, which was influenced by the poet Robert Graves. In his preface to the second edition of Seven Types of Ambiguity, originally published in 1930, Empson says that Graves was ‘the inventor of the method of analysis I was using here’.5 He is thinking of A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927) by Graves and Laura Riding, which includes a chapter entitled ‘William Shakespeare and e.e. cummings: A Study in Original Punctuation and Spelling’. The originality of cummings’s typography, which looked very ‘modern’ indeed in 1927, now seems an element of his occasionally attractive but often cloying faux-naiveté. Riding and Graves compare it to the original Q 1609 version of sonnet 129, 5

William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930; 2nd edn, 1947; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973), p. 14.

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Shakespeare and the Modern Poet

‘Th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame’, and an edited version by Arthur Quiller-Couch. Unpicking the poem, they say that ‘All of these alternate meanings acting on each other, and even other possible interpretations of words and phrases, make as it were a furiously dynamic crossword puzzle which can be read in many directions at once, none of the senses being incompatible with any others.’6 Riding and Graves in fact carefully discriminate between difficulties of understanding in Shakespeare and in cummings, saying that ‘Shakespeare is more difficult than Mr cummings in thought, though his poems have a familiar look on the page: Mr cummings expresses with an accuracy peculiar to him what is common to everyone, Shakespeare expresses in the conventional form of the time, with greater accuracy, what is peculiar to himself.’7 Nevertheless, their comparison ignores one salient difference: the fact that cummings was self-consciously deviating from conventional norms whereas Shakespeare had none to deviate from. It is plain, then, that in this survey of ‘modernist’ poetry the comparison is made polemically. A method of reading appropriate to a modern(ist) poet is also appropriate to Shakespeare. Therefore what may initially look bizarre and appear unfathomable in modernist poems will come, with closer scrutiny, to seem justified as the method necessary to the fusion of ‘alternate meanings’. Modernist difficulty is sanctioned by Shakespearean practice; and Shakespeare becomes the first modern(ist). That a Shakespearean sonnet may be read as a furiously dynamic crossword puzzle clearly registered strongly with Empson; and Shakespeare is also a central figure in Seven Types of Ambiguity. He is an exemplar of all seven types, and the book’s first, now classic close reading is of sonnet 73, ‘That time of year thou mayst in me behold’. Shakespeare figures centrally again in this book’s successors, Some Versions of Pastoral (1935) and The Structure of Complex Words (1951). Empson’s ingenious, provocative demonstrations of the way ‘ambiguity’ operates in literary texts formed the basis of that ‘New Criticism’ which became a staple form of academic writing about literature until at least the 1960s. So in this way too Shakespeare was in at the beginning. Empson’s own intricately allusive poetry, which owes many debts to the poetry of the English seventeenth century, is occasionally allusive to Shakespeare, most notably in the opening lines of ‘To an Old Lady’. 6 7

Laura Riding and Robert Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, ed. Charles Mundye and Patrick McGuinness (1927; Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2002), p. 38. Ibid., p. 31.

Introduction

5

Here Empson picks up Edgar’s famous words in King Lear: ‘Ripeness is all; her in her cooling planet / Revere; do not presume to think her wasted.’ This allusion has weighty reverence in this poem of filial feeling and its caution against what we would now call ‘ageist’ presumption. What allusion, in fact, could be more weighty with reverence for a parent in age, more subdued to pietas? But Empson’s poetry nowhere engages with Shakespeare more fully than in the way of passing allusion, and neither does that of Robert Graves. What Empson says of Shakespeare in his criticism, on the other hand, is of such interest and memorability that I find myself often citing it in what follows, and sometimes too as humane counterbalance to insensitivity, or excess, elsewhere. shakespeare in the first world war Many modern poets, and poems, however, do figure Shakespeare in extended and intricate ways. English poetry of the First World War is complicatedly concerned with Shakespeare. In Edward Thomas Shakespeare in wartime provides emblems for the poet as solitary traveller. In the first of two poems called ‘Home’, a poem strung between ambivalent longings for the first place and the last, between nostalgia and melancholia, stoical irresolution is ghosted by allusions to Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy so fleeting as to seem themselves almost vagrant, finding no adequate home in this poem of emotional destitution. A similar vagrancy inheres in ‘The Owl’, in both the lonely persona of the traveller and in an allusion to the song ‘When icicles hang by the wall’ in Love’s Labour’s Lost. Unlike Shakespeare’s, Thomas’s wartime owl, with its ‘most melancholy cry’, sings ‘No merry note’: so that in its cry the poet hears it ‘Speaking for all who lay under the stars, / Soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice’. By taking their part, by speaking in their stead, the owl, inherited from Shakespeare but transmuted to present purpose, obviates the need for the poet to do likewise more directly. This owl, Shakespearean and not Shakespearean, becomes the means by which Edward Thomas both gives weight to, and avoids being weighed down by, the expectation that poets in wartime should speak for others, should take on representative status. ‘Lob’, a lengthy poem in rhyming couplets written in April 1915, matches its poet-persona ‘travelling / In search of something chance would never bring’ with a figure conjured from the past by the poem itself, one briefly encountered, recalled, and never found again, who may be the same one described years later by ‘a squire’s son’, a man whose ‘home was where he was free’ and who is ‘English as this gate, these flowers, this mire’. This

6

Shakespeare and the Modern Poet

figure is named multifariously during the poem: he is ‘my ancient’, ‘Lob-lieby-the-fire’, ‘Lob’, ‘tall Tom’, ‘Hob’ and ‘our Jack’. ‘Jack’ is also Falstaff’s name; and, as ‘tall Tom’, this figure has encountered Shakespeare himself: This is tall Tom that bore The logs in, and with Shakespeare in the hall Once talked, when icicles hung by the wall. As Herne the Hunter he has known hard times.

This Shakespearean evocation combines another allusion to the Love’s Labour’s Lost song with one to the figure identified by Mistress Page in The Merry Wives of Windsor, where the legend of Herne the Hunter becomes her means of taunting Falstaff. The poem makes other allusions to Shakespeare too. In a poem much given to naming, notably of English places themselves, Lob is the namer of birds and of flowers, one of which is love-in-idleness, the magically transformative flower used by Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As ‘tall Tom’, and as one who knows ‘thirteen hundred names for a fool’, he may remind us also of Edgar in King Lear transformed into the mad ‘poor Tom’; and the very name ‘Lob’ figures in A Midsummer Night’s Dream too when the fairy addresses Puck as ‘thou lob of spirits’. Towards the end of the poem, the squire’s son himself metamorphoses into yet another representation of the poem’s ‘ancient’, uttering a lengthy list of further names for the figure. These include Jack Cade, the leader of the Kent peasants’ revolt of 1450 which Shakespeare dramatises in one of the most memorable episodes of Henry VI. That iteration of names also makes the figure of English folklore, legend, myth, politics and literature absolutely contemporary in 1915 as ‘One of the lords of No Man’s Land, good Lob’; and this passage of ‘Lob’ has something of the defiant assertiveness of traditional identification which also inheres in the passage known as Dai’s Boast in David Jones’s In Parenthesis, where the tradition is a Welsh one. If Edward Thomas in ‘Lob’ appears to be co-opting Shakespeare to the service of an idea, and an ideal, of ‘ancient’ Englishness, the fact that his representative figure fetches up finally in the trenches strongly suggests that the idea itself may not lord it over No Man’s Land for long. The original Lob figure at the beginning of the poem tells the poet about ‘barrows’ opened sixty years earlier by archaeologists: ‘They thought as there was something to find there, / But couldn’t find it, by digging, anywhere.’ The loving conjuration of an ‘it’ in ‘Lob’, partly by means of highly charged Shakespearean allusion, makes the poet himself an archaeologist of the ancient Wiltshire ground, retrieving an enduring spirit from

Introduction

7

its depths. However, as the squire’s son ‘disappear[s] / In hazel and thorn tangled with old-man’s-beard’ at the poem’s conclusion, the ideal seems to be disappearing too, an irrecoverably aporetic ‘it’ conjured again only for poet and readers to receive ‘one glimpse of his back’. For all its passion of naming, ‘Lob’ is actually discovering what Thomas’s poem ‘The Word’ calls ‘an empty thingless name’, and the footpath identified and opened at the poem’s origin becomes, in fact, impassable: a literal ‘aporia’, a shut-off path. Shakespeare also talks to the lords of No Man’s Land in In Parenthesis. This long ‘writing’ – Jones’s word for its imbrications of prose and verse – was first published in 1937. It is therefore a work long meditated by a combatant private soldier, one of the ‘jacks’. Set in an early phase of the war, December 1915 to July 1916, it is a poem which holds itself in a kind of tense apposition with Henry V. In one of its sometimes lengthy footnotes Jones tells us that ‘Trench life brought that work pretty constantly to the mind’; and his preface says that ‘No one … could see infantry in tin-hats, with ground-sheets over their shoulders, with sharpened pine-stakes in their hands, and not recall “… or we may cram / Within this wooden O …”.’ Part 2 of the poem’s seven parts is called ‘Chambers Go Off, Corporals Stay’, after a stage direction at the end of act 3 scene 1 of the play and a petition which Nym makes to Bardolph at the opening of the following scene: ‘Pray thee, corporal, stay. The knocks are too hot; and for mine own part, I have not a case of lives.’8 In the poem itself the allusions are not at all, as we might anticipate, intended as ironic contrast between past and present, between some form of military heroism then and some form of contemporary military compulsion or stoical endurance now. In fact, In Parenthesis is set in the early phase of the war because Jones, controversially, sees continuities rather than discrepancies in traditions of war: he is fully aware that any later phase would not be amenable to such treatment. Henry V, however, is not a play only about military heroism. It is a play about military terror too; and this is what the title of Part 2 of Jones’s poem points to: ‘corporals stay’ because they are too frightened to go. The allusions made by In Parenthesis to Henry V ignore the hero himself – problematically king and patriot – and focus instead on the common soldier. In particular, several references are made to Fluellen’s catchphrase, ‘the disciplines of the war’. Fluellen, the comic Welshman of Shakespeare’s text, appropriately shadows the soldiers of Jones’s because, 8

All quotations from Shakespeare in this book which are not derived from the texts I am writing about are taken from The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd edn, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997).

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Shakespeare and the Modern Poet

‘mostly Londoners with an admixture of Welshmen’, as the preface tells us, they are members of a battalion of the Royal Welch [sic] Fusiliers. In Jones, however, the phrase which is comically inclined in the play comes to take on an aura of dignified endurance in the face of a shared threat – as when the men first move into position under fire in Part 3: With his first traversing each newly scrutinised his neighbour; this voice of his Jubjub gains each David his Jonathan; his ordeal runs like acid to explore your fine feelings; his near presence at break against, at beat on, their convenient hierarchy. Lance-Corporal Lewis sings where he walks, yet in a low voice, because of the Disciplines of the Wars. He sings of the hills about Jerusalem, and of David of the White Stone.

When Lewis is killed in Part 7 an elegiac passage imagines a tutelary spirit called ‘The Queen of the Woods’ blessing the dead in ways appropriate to their origins. The rite for Lewis, the Welshman, joins together Welsh myth and Henry V: She carries to Aneirin-in-the-nullah a rowan sprig, for the glory of Guenedota. You couldn’t hear what she said to him, because she was careful for the Disciplines of the Wars.

Fluellen’s comic catch-phrase is in these instances literally elevated by being raised into upper case as a significant element of ritual benediction. In In Parenthesis, therefore, it is as though Fluellen and what he represents are being repositioned from the periphery to the centre of the Shakespearean text. In an outstanding essay on the poem John Barnard, reading this as the transformation of Fluellen into a figure of order, shows how these allusions thereby also transform the play’s balance between the serious and the comic. In an argument too complex to rehearse here, Barnard persuasively reasons that this points towards failures in the structure of Henry V, to do with both the absence of Falstaff and the strain involved in writing a national epic. He believes that this may intimate something which can also be unearthed from inconsistencies in the Folio version of the play’s text: that we may sense the ‘shadowy outline of another Henry V which would have been of the same heroi-comical mode as I-II Henry IV ’.9 If this is so, then it seems to me that in In Parenthesis we have a remarkable instance of a modern poetic figuration of Shakespeare in which one of his best-known plays is newly scrutinised, and the moral implications of its thematic and structural patterns reorganised, in the light of catastrophic twentieth-century military 9

John Barnard, ‘The Murder of Falstaff, David Jones, and the “Disciplines of War”’, in René Wellek and Alvaro Ribeiro (eds.), Evidence in Literary Scholarship (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 25.

Introduction

9

experience. This produces a critical, even deconstructive reading which is not a ‘misreading’ in the Bloomian sense but a provocatively insightful counter-reading which then becomes newly and differentiatingly generative, producing the responsively creative thing which is In Parenthesis itself.

shakespeare in america Shakespeare takes many shapes in modern American poetry, including his treatment in a vast, bizarre ‘critical’ work by the Objectivist poet Louis Zukofsky and an engagingly experimental long poem by H. D., the erstwhile Imagist poet Zukofsky’s Bottom: On Shakespeare (1963), which he wrote between 1947 and 1960, is the product of a lifelong obsession with Shakespeare, whose work he first saw performed in Yiddish. It is a vast book, accompanied in a second volume by an operatic setting of Pericles by Zukofsky’s wife, Celia. Parts of the book are redistributed in the text of Zukofsky’s huge poem almost lifelong in its composition, ‘A’. Much taken up with music and philosophy, Bottom: On Shakespeare is in part an eccentric anthology and is remote indeed from any orthodox critical study of Shakespeare. Its decision to lay out a poetics and a theory of knowledge under the aegis of an engagement with Shakespeare must be read, however, as a spectacular act of cross-cultural and cross-historical poetic homage. H. D.’s By Avon River (1949) ought to have survived better than it has. Like In Parenthesis, the text combines verse and prose, but in separate sections. A long, three-part poem called ‘Good Friend’ (after the warning on Shakespeare’s gravestone) is followed by a relatively short prose piece called ‘The Guest’. The poem has a lapidary quality reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, to which it may be indebted. It parallels a memory of H. D.’s visit to Stratford on Shakespeare Day, 23 April, in 1945 with an inquiry into the circumstances and fate of Claribel, Alonso’s daughter from whose wedding the shipwrecked victims of The Tempest have been returning. This is in turn paralleled with the journey of the ship the Sea-Adventure to the Bahamas, an account of which is one of Shakespeare’s sources for the play. H. D.’s poem celebrates Shakespeare, certainly, but also engages in a kind of proto-deconstructive intervention in which the character Claribel and various possibilities occluded in Shakespeare are further probed and investigated; and this is a matter of almost obsessive vocational urgency: Read through again, Dramatis Personae; She is not there at all, but Claribel,

10

Shakespeare and the Modern Poet Claribel, the birds shrill, Claribel, Claribel echoes from the rainbow-shell I stooped just now to gather from the sand.

Invisible, voiceless, ‘a mere marriage token’, Claribel, the silenced woman, is brought to a kind of visibility and audibility in H. D.’s configuration of various circumstances and identities for her. Claribel imagines herself being created out of ‘a shadow / On his page’; hers is posited as the voice calling Shakespeare just before his death, even though Ariel’s might have seemed the more obvious one to do so; and she may have been a nurse to the wounded in wartime Venice. So that this poem, written at the end of the war, is very much a woman’s wartime poem too. This Venetian transformation of Claribel into ‘Clare-the-fair, / Claribel, not a Poor Clare’ – into an active agent of benevolence, that is, rather than a conventual nun retired into another kind of silence – is an unpredictable conclusion to H. D.’s poem and not an entirely successful one. By Avon River suddenly lapses from the intensity of its Shakespearean concentration into what must be a matter of more private psychological and emotional moment. Nevertheless, By Avon River is a notable contribution to modern poetic reinventions of Shakespeare. It engages in the activity of what ‘The Guest’, which is, essentially, a reverie on various Elizabethan and Jacobean writers, calls ‘Remembering Shakespeare always, but remembering him differently’. This combination of mnemonic deference and difference might well act as a motto for more recent feminist readings of Shakespeare. American ‘confessionalism’ absorbs Shakespeare too. John Berryman spent a great deal of his life on the study of Shakespeare and, although the only Shakespeare criticism he published during the course of it was the essay ‘Shakespeare at Thirty’, which conceives a Shakespeare ‘highlone in thought’, he wrote a great deal more, some of which was eventually collected by John Haffenden as the large volume Berryman’s Shakespeare in 1999. Berryman also projected but never completed an edition of King Lear, on which he worked extensively for many years; and he envisaged other Shakespeare studies too, including a critical biography. Almost everything we now have of Berryman on Shakespeare is of interest, but an observation in an essay on Robert Lowell is exceptionally so in attempting, self-interestedly, to make Shakespeare an honorary confessional poet. ‘One thing critics not themselves writers of poetry forget,’ says Berryman, with that slightly autocratic panache not uncommon in him, ‘is that poetry is composed by actual human beings, and tracts of it are very

Introduction

11

closely about them. When Shakespeare wrote, “Two loves I have,” reader, he was not kidding.’10 Sonnet 144, ‘Two loves I have, of comfort and despair’, is one of the ‘dark lady’ sonnets and is among the most striking in the entire sequence, not least in its obscenities. Berryman’s comment is forceful and unforgettable, and embedded in it is a strong reaction against T. S. Eliot’s theories of poetic impersonality which he had once espoused but had come to regard as a preventative against, rather than an enablement of, his own poetry. Italics in critical prose, however, can be almost menacingly pre-emptive. Here, they simply ignore the extensive debate about how far the sonnets may be read as autobiographical at all; and, more insidiously perhaps, they imply that genuine poetry must always be forcefully truth-telling. This may contain a truth, although certainly not the whole truth, about the kind of poetry Berryman was himself trying to write, but it is a profound untruth about many kinds of English poetry and poetics. The truest poetry is also the most feigning, in that richly provocative observation of Touchstone’s in As You Like It, which draws on a debate in Sidney’s Defence of Poetry and out of which W. H. Auden makes a superb poem which I discuss in my chapter on his poetry. As a view of poetry Berryman’s remark also contains its dangers: and we may be inclined to read some ‘confessional’ poetry – although not, in my view, Berrryman’s own – as in fact hurtfully preemptive of the poet’s own experience and feelings, or, more damagingly, of other people’s. Shakespeare resists being made honorarily confessional in this way. For all we know, when he wrote ‘Two loves I have’, reader, he was actually kidding; even if ‘kidding’ hardly approaches the fraught urgency of this sonnet and the demand it makes of the reader. Given his vast interest and knowledge, it is remarkable how little imprint of Shakespeare there is on Berryman’s own poetry. He says so himself, bemusedly, in an interview in 1972: ‘[Delmore] Schwartz once asked me why it was that all my Shakespearean study had never showed up anywhere in my poetry, and I couldn’t answer the question … I seem to have been sort of untouched by Shakespeare, although I have had him in my mind since I was twenty years old.’11 So when Shakespeare does show up occasionally in the Dream Songs it is truly striking. Song 48 has a ‘bitter Henry, full of the death of love, / Cawdor-uneasy, disambitious, mourning / The whole implausible necessary thing’. Henry reading himself as a Macbeth rendered ‘disambitious’ is Berryman hitting on a 10 11

John Berryman, The Freedom of the Poet (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), p. 316. ‘The Art of Poetry, no. 16’, The Paris Review, 53 (1972), p. 6.

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Shakespeare and the Modern Poet

nonce word for what Macbeth could never be, since ambition is the very thing that makes him what he is. Berryman’s other coinage, ‘Cawdoruneasy’, itself almost Shakespearean in its compound, works, precisely, to compound the evaporation of identity involved in the death of love, which is made to seem by the allusion terrifyingly disarming. Hamlet is present at the origin of the long catalogue of pain and rebuke that is song 168: ‘and God has many other surprises, like / when the man you fear most in the world marries your mother / and chilling other’. The Hamlet problem and catastrophe, which may have been Berryman’s own too, initiate a series in this song which leaves Henry, for once, speechless in his abjection, capable only of abandoning his theme and turning to the following song, and perhaps delaying, in this, his confrontation with the truly terrifying thing, just as Hamlet procrastinates in his revenge. The rhyming of ‘mother’ and ‘other’ suggests that all consequent ills are contained in the figure of the alien mother and intimates therefore a kind of genetic seriality. To which an ‘antic disposition’ may be a not incomprehensible response: and what adjective better fits Henry’s disposition in many of the Dream Songs? Further than this, however, Shakespeare is undoubtedly a profound influence on Berryman’s later poetic style, on his distinctive idiolect with its electric instabilities, edgy approximations and accommodations of diction, register and tone, its headlong verbal opportunism. To demonstrate this in any less impressionistic way, however, would be beyond my competence. John Haffenden says in his introduction to Berryman’s Shakespeare that ‘even if we did not get Berryman’s edition of King Lear, we have gained his first masterpiece, Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, which took inspiration directly from Lear – though critics of Berryman have not yet evaluated to the full the degree to which his poem is fired by Shakespeare’.12 They have not done so, I suspect, because trying to control this fire might mean getting badly burned. The influence of Shakespeare, and perhaps particularly of Lear’s speeches in his madness, on Berryman’s language and style is profound but subterranean, hardly to be unearthed by any of the recognisable forms of literary-critical analysis. Robert Lowell’s career as a ‘confessional’ poet has been read in some of its aspects as a kind of competition with Berryman. This is not very accurate or interesting; but it is interesting that Lowell does not make much use of Shakespeare in his verse. However, ‘Caligula’ in For the Union Dead (1964) 12

John Berryman, Berryman’s Shakespeare, ed. John Haffenden (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), p. xxxiv.

Introduction

13

makes reference to Twelfth Night. It does so in that way Lowell’s allusions sometimes have of turning what initially seem almost wildly unlikely connections suddenly into startled appropriateness by reconfiguring the dynamic of the source text. ‘Caligula’ takes part of its point from the fact that Lowell’s nickname, Cal, was drawn from Caligula (although also, it seems, from Caliban). ‘Tell me what I saw / To make me like you’, the poem opens, in a first-person address and with a punning on the verb ‘like’ which suggests a double kind of collusiveness between poet and historical addressee. The poem then evokes the hideousness of Caligula’s body as an implicit image for the hideousness of the body politic under his rule. It does so in what is itself a hideous inversion or perversion of the Renaissance rhetorical trope of the blazon. In Twelfth Night Olivia parodies and pillories this masculine poetic conceit, by which the female body is anatomised and itemised, when in act 1 scene 5 she tells the cross-dressed Viola that her – Olivia’s – beauty shall be ‘inventoried’: ‘as, item, two lips, indifferent red; item, two grey eyes, with lids to them; item, one neck, one chin, and so forth’. Lowell’s poem partly feminises Caligula, imagining him rouged, in a way appropriate to the subject of a blazon. The allusion to Twelfth Night homes in, horribly, on the neck, in a couplet whose identical rhyme sticks exclamatorily in its own gullet, as Lowell remembers and yokes together both Olivia’s neck and Caligula’s most famous remark. Caligula soothes himself to sleep by itemising parts of his body, and Lowell writes, out of a reconfiguring perversion of energies latent in Shakespearean comedy, a poetry of repulsion and disgust: Item: your body hairy, badly made, head hairless, smoother than your marble head; Item: eyes hollow, hollow temples, red cheeks rough with rouge, legs spindly, hands that leave a clammy snail’s trail on your soggy sleeve … a hand no hand will hold … nose thin, thin neck – you wish the Romans had a single neck!

Lowell later adapted this poem into one of the blank-verse ‘sonnets’ of History, a volume in which another, entitled ‘Bosworth Field’, imagines that later Caligula figure Richard III defiant not only in the face of death but of the foreknowledge of his posthumous literary representation, perhaps with an implicit suggestion that this is a construction of Tudor propaganda, as some historians have thought. Lowell’s metre, which sometimes deteriorates almost to prose in the sequence, here realises a richly expressive

14

Shakespeare and the Modern Poet

possibility when the innocuous definite article in the penultimate line is made to carry a heavily and meaningfully trochaic weight: What does he care for Thomas More and Shakespeare pointing fingers at his polio’d body; for the moment he is king; he is the king saying: it’s better to have lived, than live.

And, also in History, ‘Coleridge and Richard II’ ruminates on Coleridge ruminating on Shakespeare’s king. Lowell recognises Coleridge’s ‘kinship’ with Richard in ‘the constant overflow of imagination / proportioned to his dwindling will to act’, but also the fact that he is not ‘flatter-blinded’ by this. So little so, indeed, that any potential narcissism in Coleridge is diverted from ‘the jungle of dead kings’ to his preoccupation with slavery and ‘negroes in 1800 London’. Lowell displays an awareness here of the way the political moment, in this case the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution, puts its pressure on Coleridge’s Shakespeare criticism. There is presumably self-recognition or even self-justification in this, since the sequence History (developed from sequences called Notebook 1967–8 and then just Notebook) forms, as its title suggests, a stubborn refusal to separate or sieve out the aesthetic from the political. The last line of ‘Coleridge and Richard II’ also proposes an exemplary quality in Coleridge: he is ‘the one poet who blamed his failure on himself’. If failure is to be risked in the huge enterprise represented by Lowell’s History, which is made out of dedicated, even obsessive, rewriting as well as writing, then Lowell, taking on the risk, may here be recognising himself in Coleridge as Coleridge recognised himself in Shakespeare’s Richard. Of other modern American poetic engagements with Shakespeare, one of the most notable is Anthony Hecht’s sequence ‘A Love for Four Voices’ in The Transparent Man (1980). The poem ingeniously reinvents Hermia, Helena, Lysander and Demetrius from A Midummer Night’s Dream as a string quartet written in homage to Haydn. The quartet’s four movements offer variations on the play’s themes of love, sex, narcissism, mutability, metamorphosis and poetry itself. The performance is elaborately formal, even baroquely so; which is appropriate in a tribute to Haydn, inheritor of the musical baroque. As such, the poem enters into a kind of competition, or at least conversation, with the formal variations, the Shakespearean reinvention and the movement between ornate and contemporaryidiomatic registers, of Auden’s ‘The Sea and the Mirror’. It even includes a passage of prose, albeit one much shorter and simpler than Auden’s ‘Caliban to the Audience’.

Introduction

15

‘A Love for Four Voices’ is therefore a Shakespearean recension of a Shakespearean recension, almost a Russian doll of intricately allusive playfulness. Its headiness is perhaps given permission by the fact that it is also an imitation, in language, of the formal procedures of music. The closing lines of Hermia’s (the first violin’s) final address to the audience celebrate ‘the world / Here where we fall transposingly in love’; and the adverb is multiply punning. Shakespeare’s Hermia herself is transposed into Hecht/ Haydn’s violin; music is transposed into language; A Midsummer Night’s Dream and ‘The Sea and the Mirror’ are transposed into ‘A Love for Four Voices’; and all of these things are transposed, in the musical sense, by this new poem: they are shifted into a new key. This is poetry as delighted repossession and self-possession: but it is also poetry as, very much, belated subsequence. shakespeare and the warsaw pact Robert Lowell’s Imitations (1961) includes a version of a poem called ‘Hamlet’ by Boris Pasternak. This is one of several outstanding poems making use of Shakespeare, and notably of Hamlet itself, published by poets of post-revolutionary Russia and poets from the countries of the Warsaw Pact after the Second World War. These poems are, characteristically, intensely alert to political resonances in Shakespeare. Appearing in prominent English translations from the 1960s on (and notably in the Penguin Modern European Poets series, whose general editor was A. Alvarez), some of these poems became influential on succeeding generations of poets writing in English. Pasternak’s ‘Hamlet’ was written in 1946 and published as the first of the poems to appear as the work of its hero in Doctor Zhivago in 1958. Lowell translates it as ‘Hamlet in Russia, A Soliloquy’. His jagged, elliptical, exclamatory version, all tension and nervous energy, audaciously joins Pasternak’s original to parts of two other Pasternak poems: the ‘Hamlet’ poem forms the Lowell poem’s final four verses, with a separated final line. Pasternak conceives of an actor playing Hamlet suffering from stage fright and crosses this with what might be thought that instance of divine stage fright which is Christ’s prayer in the garden of Gethsemane that the cup might pass from him. Encoded in this double figuration is the plight of the poet himself in Stalinist Russia: the man with stage fright who, in Russian stadia at hugely popular readings, can command a vast audience but who, as a consequence, takes on onerous, undesired obligations and becomes answerable.

16

Shakespeare and the Modern Poet

The strong sense of fatality in Pasternak’s poem, and the solitude of its Hamlet figure, which Lowell makes more prominent by adding the word ‘soliloquy’ to the original title, are intensified by its resonant, stoical, separated final line. A proverbial Russian saying, and so drawing on a traditionally sanctioned common language not exclusively the poet’s own, the line may also represent the lonely, fated poet’s attempt at a kind of assuagement of his crossed condition by the Russian language itself. In Lowell’s translation it reads, ‘To live a life is not to cross a field.’ His version of Pasternak’s ‘Hamlet’ may be read as a kind of testimonial meditation on Pasternak’s predicament. By means of the acknowledgement of a shared cultural inspiration in Shakespeare, Lowell’s poem also evinces from this famous American poet willing to assume public political positions in the United States a form of solidarity with one who found such things much more problematic in Soviet Russia. This is the point, I think, of Lowell’s retitling the poem ‘Hamlet in Russia’. This ‘soliloquy’ of a modern Hamlet makes possible a kind of piercing colloquy between poets on opposing sides during the cold war. Several East European poems published in the early 1960s, in the agonised wake of the Soviet repression of the 1956 Hungarian Rising, configure a Hamlet appropriate to the time and place; and, unpredictably, they sometimes do so by refiguring poems by T. S. Eliot. The Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert’s ‘Elegy of Fortinbras’, published in his volume Study of the Object (1961), takes up where Shakespeare leaves off, and Herbert’s Fortinbras has a forbiddingly steely resolve in his consciousness of the inheritance: ‘The rest is not silence but belongs to me.’13 Patient, competent, assured and ruthless (‘one has to take the city by the neck and shake it a bit’), this military and political administrator addresses the dead Hamlet ‘man to man’. His tone – sorrowful, concerned, sympathetic – makes him not unlikeable. He is even enviously captivated by something in the prince: witness in particular the intimate, surreal tenderness with which he perceives Hamlet’s hands – which he ‘could never think of without smiling’ – as lying ‘like fallen nests’. As a consequence, this is an unexpectedly genuine elegy, even a kind of love poem, and is entirely characteristic generically in its combination of mournfully melancholic lament and sharp self-interest. Prominently taken up, nevertheless, with Hamlet’s many incapacities, it ends in a resigned insistence on the eternally unbridgeable difference and distance between prince and political opportunist: 13

I am using the translation by Czeslaw Milosz, now available in Zbigniew Herbert, The Collected Poems 1956–1998 (New York: Ecco, 2007).

Introduction

17

It is not for us to greet each other or bid farewell we live on archipelagos and that water these words what can they do what can they do prince

Fortinbras’s unpunctuated, repeated concluding question here has both hopelessness and regret in its cadence. ‘Elegy of Fortinbras’ gives voice, therefore, to a form of bleak self-knowledge and self-acceptance. The state, as Fortinbras understands its needs, requires of him a dutiful dedication of which, he knows, Hamlet would have been incapable; but he also knows that ‘what I shall leave will not be worth a tragedy’. Zbigniew Herbert’s figuration, in Warsaw Pact Poland, of Fortinbras as the representative of political power elegising Hamlet, prince and poet, and acknowledging his own inferiority but then, nevertheless, willingly and stoically getting on with the job, has shelving ironies within it. Out of its Shakespearean occasion this truly haunting poem makes a parable which ramifies in many directions still, but is also notably attuned to the political moment of its composition and the choices demanded of intellectuals, including poets, then. Not least among its ironies, as a post-war Polish poem, is the fact that its concluding lines appear to echo the cadences, the marine imagery and the absence of orthodox punctuation of the opening lines of T. S. Eliot’s Shakespeareanly derived ‘Marina’: ‘What seas what shores what grey rocks and what islands / What water lapping the bow . . . ’. Czeslaw Milosz’s English translation very closely follows the rhythmic and structural patterns of the original;14 and Eliot, we know from Herbert’s ‘To Ryszard Krynicki – A Letter’, is one of the few poets whose reputations will, in his opinion, survive their century. Eliot is therefore, we must assume, one of the few whom Herbert regards as equal to modernity. The way Herbert makes Shakespeare of present use, then, by availing himself of Eliot transforming Shakespeare in ‘Marina’, may be read as emblematic of the larger usefulness of poetry itself and its unpredictably effective trajectories. Hamlet appears several times in the work of the Czech poet Miroslav Holub. In ‘Polonius’, published in Primer, which also appeared in 1961, Claudius’s courtier, always biddable, becomes implicitly the servant of a Stalinist regime, virtually protoplasmic in his pliability and opportunistic subservience: He slinks up the stairs, oozes from the ceiling, floats through the door ready to give evidence, 14

I am grateful for this information to my friend Professor Jerzy Jarniewicz.

18

Shakespeare and the Modern Poet prove what is proven, stab with a needle or pin on an order.15

Ominously, however, this Polonius is also a poet: so we might read him as a truly terrifying combination of Herbert’s Hamlet and Fortinbras. He would represent, then, the warping of imagination and creative intelligence by political demand. Holub’s ‘Polonius’ is a poem which harmonises desolately with Auden’s ‘“The Truest Poetry Is the Most Feigning”’ in which the possibility that a love poem may be contorted into a political eulogy under extreme necessity is seriously canvassed. ‘Polonius’ has an optimistic fortitude, nevertheless, as it projects the demise of its protoplasmic eponym: … when the spore-creating mould of memory covers him over, when he falls arse-first to the stars, the whole continent will be lighter, earth’s axis straighten up and in night’s thunderous arena a bird will chirp in gratitude.

‘Prince Hamlet’s Milk Tooth’, which appeared in The So-Called Heart (1963), is less patient of straightforward explication, which is one signal of its less optimistic, more desolately baffled inclination. A surreal fantasy which makes prominent and indubitable allusion to Eliot, in this case to The Waste Land, the poem conceives of Hamlet’s loss of his tooth as the inception of cumulative social and cultural disaster; and the minatory mood is intensified by two prominent, edgily unsustained refrains or repetends: ‘there won’t be any more’ and ‘we’re on our way, Hamlet’. Both suggest what seems an almost oxymoronically – and therefore insanely – exultant despair as the only response possible to intolerable personal and political circumstance. No optimism whatever is projected by this implicit crossing of Claudius’s Denmark with Warsaw Pact Czechoslovakia. All that can be managed is a form of oppositional thinking in secret places, ‘just in a small way, / the way moss grows’. The poem does include a defiant address to Hamlet himself (‘one fine day / we’ll damn well prove our salt, / Hamlet’) before it culminates in what appears to be a truly devastated final repetition of the refrain, ‘There won’t be any more’. Rarely can repeated refrain, with its 15

I am using the translations by several hands in Miroslav Holub, Poems Before and After: Collected English Translations (1990; expanded edn, Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2006).

Introduction

19

burden of loss, have sounded so bleak. Nevertheless, it is striking that for both Herbert and Holub – and in the same year, 1961 – Hamlet is reinvented as the possibility, however remote, of an alternative to political pragmatism and necessity, an alternative to the totalitarian. The frailty of the conception, however, is inherent in the genres used: elegy is burdened with melancholy, and surreal fantasy with the velleity of wish-fulfilment. The Polish poet Tadeusz Różewicz has a poem called ‘Conversation with the Prince’, published in the volume of that title in 1960, which offers in its use of the figure of Polonius a potentially even greater affront than Holub’s. Set at a time in which, its opening lines say, ‘Fangs have pierced the earth’, making ‘our well-behaved intentions / tremble’, the poem’s ‘conversation’ alludes directly not only to Shakespeare but also to Eliot – primarily, but not only, to ‘Mr Prufrock’ in his ‘Hamletic mood’. As the poem weaves in and out of allusions to these works of high culture, its first person singular takes on the servile accents of Polonius and, scandalously, finally identifies itself as that of ‘a contemporary poet / the year is 1958’. This is an even more radical identification of Polonius with the poet than Holub’s in ‘Polonius’, and one that seems to call into question the very art which its mode of allusion would appear to acknowledge and even defer to. Różewicz’s speaker anticipates the Prince’s contempt for what such a ‘contemporary poet’ might be: indifferent he talks to the indifferent blinded he signals to the sightless he laughs and barks in his sleep woken up he weeps … he’s a voice without an echo16

And the poem’s ‘conversation’ ends with a self-recognition and selfidentification which are also the measure of an ashamed self-contempt: ‘you detect the windbag / behind the arras’. Admirers of Herbert’s astringently ironic, disabused and desolate but still standing humanism tend to find Różewicz too merely negative in his extremism.17 Conceiving of poetry as a voice without an echo is certainly to place under radically sceptical scrutiny the question of any ‘use’ it might 16 17

I am using the translations by Adam Czerniawski in Różewicz’s They Came to See a Poet (London: Anvil Press Poetry, 1991). See, for instance, Stanislaw Barańczak, A Fugitive from Utopia: The Poetry of Zbigniew Herbert (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1987).

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Shakespeare and the Modern Poet

have. Such critiques might well seem reinforced by a further poem of Różewicz’s which makes use of Shakespeare, ‘Nothing in Prospero’s Cloak’, from an again eponymous volume published in 1962. Here Caliban ‘waits’ for whatever revelation Prospero might offer, but Prospero’s ‘magic robes’ disclose nothing as ‘nothing from loudspeakers / speaks to nothing / about nothing’, where those loudspeakers presumably blare the public pronouncements and warnings of a totalitarian regime. The poem’s conclusion seems to bring King Lear into the reckoning in a way that completely overwhelms The Tempest: nothing begets nothing nothing brings up nothing nothing awaits nothing nothing threatens nothing condemns nothing pardons

The negativity of this brings ‘Nothing in Prospero’s Cloak’ close to being something other than a poem altogether – a post-poem; an ex-poem; an anti-poem? And it is a manifest influence on the formal disintegrations in the English poems of Ted Hughes’s Crow (1970). In its destructiveness, however, ‘Nothing in Prospero’s Cloak’ has the energy of outrage too, as it commits its sacrilege on what, at the time of the poem’s publication, was usually considered Shakespeare’s play of ‘redemption’. The poem’s disintegrations seem won through to, or lost through to, by the hardest experience, and its integrity and memorability prevent it from being merely nihilistic. If this is the writing degree zero to which Shakespeare is brought in modern poetry in English translation, then there is sufficient in him to suggest that this is not an entirely inappropriate place. Eliot, for instance, appreciates Wyndham Lewis’s portrait of ‘a ferocious Shakespeare, a furious Samson’.18 ‘Nothing in Prospero’s Cloak’ is the poem of all these Warsaw Pact poems most in tune with the recognitions made by the Polish critic Jan Kott’s hugely influential Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1965), which reads Shakespeare, as it were, by the searchlights of a police state.

shakespeare and john shade I want to touch on one final figuration of Shakespeare. This occurs in a poem which exists only in a novel; a poem, therefore, which is the fiction 18

T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1932; 3rd enlarged edn, 1951), p. 126.

Introduction

21

of a poem. The Russian novelist-in-exile Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962) presents itself as the scholar Charles Kinbote’s critical edition, with extensive commentary, of a long poem by John Shade called ‘Pale Fire: A Poem in Four Cantos’. Nabokov, unlike the post-war poets of the countries of the Warsaw Pact, is profoundly unappreciative of T. S. Eliot; and the poem he has Shade write echoes Eliot with depreciatory intent. An excellent Nabokov critic, Brian Boyd, believes that what we have here is an argument with Eliot’s view of Shakespeare in The Waste Land. Nabokov opposes what he understands as Eliot’s ‘pointed sterility’ in the pastiche of Antony and Cleopatra in ‘A Game of Chess’ with his own sense of Shakespeare’s ‘stupendous fecundity’.19 In my view, Eliot finds far more than ‘sterility’ in Shakespeare. However, that a novelist of the stature of Nabokov should find in a poet of the stature of Eliot an attitude to Shakespeare such as to require the writing of a fictional poem and a fictional critical edition of his own, which together constitute a remarkable modern novel, seems a form of interest, obligation, argument, acknowledgement and, yes, repudiation which may well be allowed to shadow what follows in this book. Pale Fire, a novel of shadows and ghosts and shades, is the only one of Nabokov’s to take its title from another writer. It derives from Timon of Athens: The sun’s a thief, and with his great attraction Robs the vast sea; the moon’s an arrant thief, And her pale fire she snatches from the sun; The sea’s a thief, whose liquid surge resolves The moon into salt tears …

(4.3.436–40)

Nabokov, Brian Boyd says, steals from Shakespeare here to express ‘not Timon’s contempt for universal thievery but his own vision of an unfathomable creative generosity behind our origins and ends’.20 Shakespeare himself, though, knew a great deal about thievery, since almost all his plays are rewritings of one kind or another; and it would not do to sentimentalise his generosity, or Nabokov’s own. What follows in this book is sometimes an account of thievery, of a kind: but, in the relationship between Shakespeare and modern poets, vision always remains a possibility too. 19 20

Brian Boyd, Nabokov’s ‘Pale Fire’: The Magic of Artistic Discovery (Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 245. Ibid., p. 246.

22

Shakespeare and the Modern Poet shakespeare and the modern poet

These are all fascinating cases and deserve further study; and there are others, including, prominently, D. H. Lawrence and Thom Gunn. I take note of Lawrence’s ‘When I Read Shakespeare’, with its negative view of Shakespearean character, in my chapter on W. H. Auden’s criticism below, because Auden does. But there is also ‘The Ship of Death’, published posthumously in 1932, in which Hamlet’s question about whether a man might ‘his quietus make with a bare bodkin’ is repeated across the poem’s third and fourth parts in a way which, when answered in the negative, generates the rest. It is probable too that the repetitions of the phrase ‘we are dying, we are dying’ across the poem’s sixth and seventh sections are caught up from Antony’s ‘We are dying, Egypt, dying’ in Antony and Cleopatra. The whole of ‘The Ship of Death’ might be regarded, then, as a form of Shakespearean regeneration, as Lawrence meditates a response to his own mortality out of a response to Shakespearean tragedy. Gunn’s early work is deeply indebted to Shakespeare, not least in the way it approaches sexuality. The epigraph to My Sad Captains (1961), whose title derives from Antony and Cleopatra, is taken from Troilus and Cressida and intimates oppositions and contraries often addressed in Gunn’s early books. In addition, as Clive Wilmer has demonstrated in an illuminatingly sympathetic piece of literary detective work, Gunn had the best possible reason to play extensively, as Shakespeare himself does in the Sonnets, on the word, and the name, ‘will’. For reasons which Wilmer identifies with delicacy, Gunn had changed his name: the one on his birth certificate is William Guinneach Gunn.21 Other poets too – notably Geoffrey Hill – would need to be adduced if anything like the whole story of the relationship proposed by my title were to be told. In what follows in this book, however, I focus on four outstanding modern poets: W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden and Ted Hughes. ‘Every creator is also a critic,’ says Eliot, that most manifestly allusive of poets, whose creative writing seems itself the most exacting and most deeply absorptive form of critical reading, and whose criticism accompanies and implicitly, sometimes explicitly, accounts for his creative procedures.22 However, while every creator is also a critic, not all creators are what Eliot calls ‘conscious’ critics; and, of those who are, not all are so at any substantial length. In this book I am interested in poets’ prose as well as 21 22

Clive Wilmer, ‘The Self You Choose’, Times Literary Supplement, 25 April 2008, pp. 13–15. Selected Essays, p. 152.

Introduction

23

their poetry, and my rationale for writing about these four poets at length is that they have all written extensively about Shakespeare and usually brilliantly and thought-provokingly. Shakespeare is, for each of them, a figure of central, consuming, protean and permanent critical as well as poetic concern. I am also interested in the ways in which Shakespeare may be contrastively figured in the critical and creative work of poets, in their prose and their poetry; and, again, these poets provide ample scope for such a study. They are also poets in whose poems – and in whose most notable poems – Shakespeare is figured variously and extensively. Finally, these poets relate to one another through their relation to Shakespeare: and this relation supplies a constant and developing subtext to the text of the critical narrative I have written here. It is itself, in my view, a narrative of great interest. All four poets were also playwrights, Hughes rather less well known as such than the others but in fact writing for the theatre intermittently from the 1960s on. Although I do not take much cognisance of their plays, I do think it matters that in this regard too they were creatively as well as critically preoccupied with Shakespeare; and I occasionally have things to say about what they say about Shakespeare which have relevance to their drama as well as to their poetry.

part i

Yeats’s Shakespeare

chapter 1

Setting a sail for shipwreck: Yeats’s Shakespeare criticism

shakespeare in ireland ‘The best way of marking an end to Victorian Shakespeare,’ says Adrian Poole, marking an end to his own excellent study of the topic, ‘is to look towards Dublin.’1 There, at the turn of the century, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, George Bernard Shaw and W. B. Yeats were all writing, or about to write, Shakespeare into their own work both critically and creatively; and, in varying degrees, controversially and even subversively. This greatest of English writers was being defined and focused in alternative ways for the new century by increasingly self-confident writers from across the Irish Sea. Yeats wrote only one full-length critical essay on Shakespeare, the slyly revisionist ‘At Stratford-on-Avon’, first published in two parts in the London journal The Speaker in 1901 and subsequently collected in Ideas of Good and Evil in 1903.2 But numerous other scattered observations of sometimes striking originality and insight attest to a passionate lifelong engagement. Yeats’s creative work has, throughout, its Shakespearean traces, and it culminates in a vision of ‘tragic joy’ directly indebted to Shakespeare, even if also drawing on Nietzsche, and realised in poems occasionally allusive to him, among them some of the greatest Yeats wrote. When Yeats prepared a ‘general introduction’ for his work towards the end of his life, in 1937, he said of the Irish that ‘no people hate as we do in whom [the] past is always alive’, and feared that a certain timorousness – he calls it ‘effeminacy’ – may have prevented his giving this ‘adequate expression’: Then I remind myself that though mine is the first English marriage I know of in the direct line, all my family names are English, and that I owe my soul to 1 2

Adrian Poole, Shakespeare and the Victorians (London: Thomson Learning, 2004), p. 231. And now available in W. B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions (London: The Macmillan Press, 1961), pp. 96–110.

27

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Shakespeare and the Modern Poet

Shakespeare, to Spenser and to Blake, perhaps to William Morris, and to the English language in which I think, speak, and write, that everything I love has come to me through English; my hatred tortures me with love, my love with hate.3

This self-torturing, pointed by the way the word ‘English’ squirms four times through a single, syntactically unorthodox sentence, mirrors the selftorturing of Ireland itself in the preceding decades, which witnessed a war of independence against England followed by a civil war. Yeats, for all his selfdoubt, had supremely expressed both in some of his major poems of the period, in which he discovers definitive images for a country maimed by ‘great hatred, little room’. Yeats’s giving Shakespeare prominence in his anguished inheritance of a violently self-divided tradition makes Shakespeare’s deeply problematic place in the Irish literary and cultural imagination almost epigrammatically memorable. This has distracted attention from the recuperative activity which he actually performs on Shakespeare when, aged only twenty-five in 1901, he writes ‘At Stratford-on-Avon’. When ‘A General Introduction for my Work’ wryly and almost shame-facedly confesses that ‘everything I love has come to me through English’, he must be thinking partly of the Irish mythological and folk materials which he used in his work but could not read in the original: they ‘come’ to him ‘through’ the English translations of Douglas Hyde, Lady Gregory and others. The Stratford essay, however, may be read as combatively appropriating Shakespeare in an act of repayment for the injury inflicted. Writing of Yeats’s drama, and the almost opportunistic use he makes of Shakespeare as a model for the creation of an Irish national theatre, Philip Edwards says that Yeats makes Shakespeare virtually ‘an honorary Celt’; and the perception may be inflected with a more general applicability too.4 Yeats wrote to Lady Gregory and Violet Hunt in 1901, only two years after he had co-founded the Irish Literary Theatre, making it clear how excited he was about his forthcoming trip to Stratford for the Spring festival which had been held there annually by Frank Benson’s company. The visit would provide the opportunity for an essay on Shakespeare which he had been meditating for a while. In Stratford, the essay tells us, he spent his days reading Shakespeare criticism in the library of the Shakespeare Institute and saw the Histories done ‘in their right order’ at night. He was also excited by Stratford itself, its secluded (and quasi-Catholic) medievalism contrasting favourably with what he considered the vapid theatre world of metropolitan 3 4

Ibid., p. 519. See Nationalist Theatres: Shakespeare and Yeats (Liverpool University Press, 1976), p. 16.

Setting a sail for shipwreck

29

London with its ‘evil prestige’, that London ‘where’, he had already written scathingly in 1900, ‘all the intellectual traditions gather to die’.5 In fact, the plays themselves as they stay in his ‘mind’s eye’ – which is, although he does not say so, a phrase from Hamlet – so suffuse his imagination that the actual Stratford dims before him, and ‘I have felt as I have sometimes felt on grey days on the Galway shore, when a faint mist has hung over the grey sea and the grey stones, as if the world might suddenly vanish and leave nothing behind, not even a little dust under one’s feet.’ This dreamlike state, conveyed by those almost narcotic repetitions of the adjective, is virtually an abstraction of the actual Stratfordupon-Avon and of Shakespeare’s own work into the ‘grey’ world of the Celtic Twilight, particularly since the passage crosses its evocation of Galway with a faint echo of Prospero’s ‘Our revels now are ended’ speech in act 4 of The Tempest, with its summoning of a world melting into air in a dissolution which ‘leave[s] not a rack behind’. Yeats’s medieval Stratford is manifestly much closer in its imaginative and, as it were, spiritual topography to Galway, or at least to the Galway of Yeats’s folkloric mythologising, than it is to modern metropolitan London; which does not, however, prevent his shrewd appreciation elsewhere in the essay of the touristic opportunism of the Stratford burghers. Although dutiful in the library, Yeats is also unhappy there, telling Lady Gregory that ‘The more I read the worse does the Shakespeare criticism become. And Dowden is about the climax of it. I[t] came out of the middle class movement & I feal [sic] it my legitimate enemy.’6 Edward Dowden, professor of English at Trinity College Dublin and author of the widely read and very influential Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (1875), is cited in the essay too; and the opportunity for which Yeats has been waiting, and which he seizes in ‘At Stratford-on-Avon’, is the occasion for an attack on Dowden’s view of Shakespeare and the proposal of his own radical alternative. An essay which begins in an almost sentimentally nostalgic view of a medievalising Stratford sharpens abruptly, as a consequence, into polemic; and Yeats’s Shakespeare is moulded in the image of his contemporary romantically nationalist cultural politics. Yeats castigates Dowden’s criticism as a kind in which characters such as Coriolanus, Hamlet, Timon and Richard II are reproved for their behaviour, so that the plays become exercises in self-correction for audiences and 5 6

Essays and Introductions, p. 171. The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), vol. III, p. 61.

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readers. If we suspect that Yeats is unjust to Dowden, the suspicion will not survive a reading of his Shakspere, where Shakespeare is indeed characterised solely as a means towards the formation of character. ‘That by his study of history Shakspere should have built up his moral nature, and have fortified himself for the conduct of life was … to Shakspere the chief outcome of his toil,’ Dowden writes in his chapter on the Histories.7 Against this strenuous moralising Yeats insists that ‘a man’s business may at times be revelation, and not reformation’. Dowden’s kind of criticism is for Yeats the ‘Accusation of Sin’, the capitalisation strongly suggesting that he derives the concept as a literary-critical one from the opening of Blake’s ‘The Everlasting Gospel’. On the contrary, Yeats says, great literature has always been written in the spirit of the ‘Forgiveness of Sin’. Considering literature a species of charity, Yeats is here evolving one of the most sympathetic formulations in a body of critical and polemical work which contains notably, sometimes offensively, unsympathetic ones too. His critique takes on a specifically nationalist colouring when he says that Dowden’s views have been formed by an abject admiration for English mores and the desire to promote them in an Ireland in which ‘everything has failed’; and he scores a palpable hit when, with a glint of malice, he observes that the mode of Accusation would have stymied not only the creation of great art but the English imperial project itself, which demands ‘wildness and imagination and eccentricity’. No doubt it is the Hazlitt-like intimacy of Yeats’s own knowledge of the collusion between poetry and power, a knowledge frequently apparent in his work of the next thirty years, which here suddenly startles a venomous hauteur into vivid life: The Accusation of Sin produced its necessary fruit, hatred of all that was abundant, extravagant, exuberant, of all that sets a sail for shipwreck, and flattery of the commonplace emotions and conventional ideals of the mob, the chief Paymaster of accusation.8

an irish richard In his chapter on the Histories Dowden regards Richard II as a boyishly weak king, the possessor of an ‘entirely unformed’ will, ‘an amateur in living’; and Henry V is identified as the indubitable hero of the cycle.9 In his 7

8

Edward Dowden, Shakspere: His Mind and Art (2nd edn, London: Henry S. King and Son, 1876), p. 163. Terence Brown, in Ireland’s Literature: Selected Essays (Mullingar: Lilliput, 1988), makes some corrective judgements but broadly finds Yeats’s view accurate. Essays and Introductions, p. 105. 9 Shakespere: His Mind and Art, p. 194.

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Stratford essay Yeats, with Dowden implicitly in mind, makes Richard, if not heroic exactly, nevertheless central to his whole conception of the cycle. Shakespeare, he believes, admires a Richard who – ‘vessel of porcelain’ to Henry’s ‘vessel of clay’ – possesses a strain of ‘lyrical fantasy’ opposed to Henry’s ‘resounding rhetoric’. This is virtually the opposition which also informs one of Yeats’s best-known subsequent aesthetic formulations: that out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric, out of the quarrel with ourselves poetry. Out of Yeats’s own quarrel with both Henry and Dowden he makes a Richard according to his own need and desire; even if, necessarily, by means of a highly selective editorial process. When he finds his most appreciative image for Richard’s lyricism it is a responsively brilliant one which reverberates for readers of Yeats’s own poetry. It is a lyricism, Yeats says, ‘which rose out of Richard’s mind like the jet of a fountain to fall again where it had risen’. An aesthetic of abundance and extravagance is figured here exactly as it is years later in the opening stanza of ‘Ancestral Houses’, the first poem in the sequence ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’ in The Tower (1928): Surely among a rich man’s flowering lawns, Amid the rustle of his planted hills, Life overflows without ambitious pains; And rains down life until the basin spills, And mounts more dizzy high the more it rains As though to choose whatever shape it wills And never stoop to a mechanical Or servile shape, at others’ beck and call.10

The image persists in these lines as an emblem for Yeats’s elegiac commitment to a political order very different from that of his early romantic nationalism, the one represented by those Anglo-Irish ‘big houses’ evoked by the poem’s title. Even when it takes on aspects of the arrogant or the haughty, as it certainly does in ‘Ancestral Houses’, however, the image of the self-delightingly self-renewing fountain emblematises for Yeats, as an imaginative constant, the principle of extravagance to which his own art is permanently committed, for all his changes of style, material, address and political belief. Yeats tellingly associates this with the Celtic in ‘The Celtic Element in Literature’, written in 1902 and collected along with ‘At Stratford-on-Avon’ in Ideas of Good and Evil. There he approvingly quotes the extravagantly 10

All quotations from Yeats’s poems are from The Poems, ed. Daniel Albright (1990; Dent: Everyman’s Library, 1992).

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pleonastic Samuel Palmer (not otherwise, of course, known as a ‘Celt’): ‘excess is the vivifying spirit of the finest art, and we must always seek to make excess more abundantly excessive’.11 This essay nominally quarrels with Matthew Arnold’s view of the ‘Celtic’ in On the Study of Celtic Literature (1866), insisting that what Arnold calls the ‘Celtic’ is in fact better considered as a more generally diffused persistence of the folkloric in literature. Yeats does so at least in part, presumably, because he well understands the recuperative design of Arnold’s appreciativeness, which is developed from racial stereotypes which would keep the Celt, even when admired, firmly in his place. Nevertheless, Yeats is in fact deeply indebted to Arnold in his view of what constitutes the ‘Celtic element’. Notably, Arnold defines it as ‘expansive, adventurous and gay’ in a way harmonising completely with Yeats’s views in this essay and also illuminating about his sense of the excessive in ‘At Stratford-on-Avon’; and the word ‘gay’ itself assumes high significance in Yeats’s later poetry and theory, in ways I discuss below. The Yeatsian Richard II set over against the Yeatsian Henry V might equally well be comprehended by Arnold’s valuing of the ‘Celtic genius, with its chafing against the despotism of fact, its perpetual straining after mere emotion’ and what he judges to be ‘just the opposite’, ‘the AngloSaxon temperament’.12 In effect, the Arnold whom Yeats officially denies but by whom he is in fact profoundly influenced gives Yeats national(ist) sanction, in his definition of the ‘Celtic’, for both the central opposition of ‘At Stratford-on-Avon’ and the libertarian view of art which he opposes to the moralism of Dowden. When Yeats says in his letter to Lady Gregory that Dowden’s criticism ‘came out of the middle class movement’, what he means by the phrase at that stage of his life is the bourgeois unionism of Trinity College, which he regarded as imperialist, utilitarian and materialistic. In the ‘Ireland after Parnell’ section of his Autobiographies he makes Dowden the representative of this tradition when he says that he ‘turned Shakespeare into a British Benthamite’.13 Henry V is therefore, in Yeats’s view, the appropriate hero of such criticism. ‘British’ in the phrase ‘British Benthamite’ also quivers with the knowledge that Dowden was, inevitably, hostile to the whole idea of the Irish Literary Revival. In ‘At Stratford-on-Avon’ Yeats discovers, in effect, an alternative Arnoldian Celtic, or Irish, Richard II; which has its 11 12 13

Essays and Introductions, p. 184. Matthew Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature (1866; Port Washington: Kennikat Press, 1970), pp. 86, 91. W. B. Yeats, Autobiographies (1955; London: Macmillan, 1980), p. 235.

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potentially undermining ironies, since in Shakespeare it is Richard’s absence in Ireland attempting to subdue a rebellion – he was the last English king for three centuries to go there – that gives Bolingbroke his opportunity. This is something that the Yeatsian editorial process simply ignores. To say, nevertheless, that for Yeats Henry V is an Irish unionist and Richard II a romantic Irish nationalist would be to caricature an opposition which Yeats’s essay finesses and complicates: but it would not be an inherent injustice to what may be extracted from the essay as its intrinsic ideological opposition. This form of subversive critique has led recent postcolonial criticism to treat Yeats’s reading of the play as precursory of Third World ‘transvaluations’ of Shakespeare. Jahan Ramazani says that Yeats’s valorising of the deposed Richard over against the ‘martial valour’ of Henry V is an anticipation of the frequent recuperation of Caliban at the expense of Prospero in African and Caribbean writing (in Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire, for instance);14 and Declan Kiberd observes that when Yeats finds ‘the triumph of failure’ in Richard – this is Kiberd’s phrase, however, not Yeats’s – he is valuing the ‘very paradox which informed the thinking of the 1916 rebels’. As a consequence, Kiberd claims, ‘it would not be completely fanciful to list Shakespeare among the revolutionary weapons available to the insurgents’.15 Not completely fanciful, maybe, even if still pretty fanciful. That such a line can be maintained at all, however, draws attention to something that does genuinely inhere in Yeats’s revisionism: its early, energetically pursued project of cultural decolonisation. In addition, the literary nature of the insurgency of 1916 should never be underestimated. It was Yeats himself who asked, of himself, with genuine anxiety, in the very late poem ‘Man and the Echo’, thinking of Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), ‘Did that play of mine send out / Certain men the English shot?’. The question is, in my view, asked with good reason, despite its sceptical treatment in another, more recent, Irish poem, Paul Muldoon’s ‘7 Middagh St’. Muldoon’s ‘Wystan’ in that poem quotes Yeats and then offers his brusquely impudent and insidiously memorable dismissal, as Muldoon quibbles on the antithetical senses of the word ‘certain’: ‘Did that play of mine send out certain men (certain men?)

14 15

Jahan Ramazani, The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English (University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 40. Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995), pp. 269–70.

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Shakespeare and the Modern Poet the English shot …?’ the answer is: ‘Certainly not.’16

fathers and sons In attacking Dowden Yeats was also attacking an old friend of his father’s: Autobiographies makes the connection plain and describes Yeats’s own break with Dowden. J. B. Yeats’s biographer, William M. Murphy, has shown that Yeats’s views of Shakespeare are indebted to his father’s, even though, to Murphy’s evident chagrin, this goes unacknowledged by Yeats.17 Some of these (which were probably influenced by Pater’s essay ‘Shakespeare’s English Kings’) can be read in J. B. Yeats’s remarkably affectionate letters to his son, wonderful letters which T. S. Eliot rightly and possibly enviously celebrated as written with ‘dignity and ease and reserve’.18 These seem to me, however, to demonstrate that, although the son’s views may have been suggested by the father’s, they are not at all moulded by them.19 J. B. Yeats and Dowden had in fact fallen out over Shakespeare; which is hardly surprising since, as we have seen in the case of Yeats’s son, views about Shakespeare are views about many other things too. Murphy suggests that in this breach J. B. Yeats was Richard to Dowden’s Bolingbroke – who was, of course, the father of Henry V.20 Even though a letter of W. B. Yeats to Lady Gregory in 1901 claims that his father was delighted with his Stratford essay, there are indications that J. B. Yeats was taken aback by his son’s extreme discourtesy to an old family friend.21 So it is possible to regard the W. B. Yeats of the Stratford essay as negotiating an attitude to Shakespeare, that ultimate father figure for any ambitious male poet writing in the English language, by way of two other authoritative or paternal figures: Dowden, the major literary critic of turnof-the-century Dublin, and his actual father, some of whose views he 16

17 18 19 20

Muldoon’s Auden might have been less certain himself had he read Stephen Gwynn’s memory of the first performance of the play, with Maud Gonne as Cathleen: ‘Nobody else has played the part as it was played by her, and nobody else could. I came away wondering if such things should be written unless the writer were prepared to see men go out and act on them – as undoubtedly she was, who played the “Shan Van Vocht”. We have seen the men go out and act on them …’ Experiences of a Literary Man (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1926), p. 205. ‘Man and the Echo’ may well have been a consequence of Yeats’s brooding on this reflection. William M. Murphy, Prodigal Father: The Life of J. B. Yeats (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1978), p. 122. ‘The Letters of J. B. Yeats’, The Egoist (July 1917), pp. 89–90. Eliot is reviewing Ezra Pound’s Cuala Press selection. See J. B. Yeats, Letters to His Son W. B. Yeats and Others 1869–1922, ed. Joseph Hone (London: Faber and Faber, 1944). Prodigal Father, p. 97. 21 Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, vol. III, p. 74.

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silently makes his own while also building on them and expressing them in a kind of language of which J. B. Yeats would himself have been quite incapable, for all the stylistic virtuosity on display in his own letters. That paternities of different kinds, both overt and covert, should be so much at issue in Yeats’s Stratford essay on the virtues of Richard II makes it appropriate that when he asks ‘pardon’ of his ‘old fathers’ in the introductory poem to Responsibilities (1914) he should figure his ‘boyish’ self claiming that ‘Only the wasteful virtues earn the sun’, the kinds of virtues which the essay associates with Richard. In ‘At Stratford-on-Avon’, then, under the sign of Shakespeare and at the turn of the century, Yeats is defining an antiVictorian modernity and an anti-unionist political identity for himself which is registered all the more sharply by his loathing of the appurtenances of that commercial modernity represented in the essay by ‘London’ as opposed to ‘Stratford’, a debased modernity which is also, even if in this essay silently, an inevitable product for Yeats of the fact that London is the imperial capital, the repressive political ‘father’. That Yeats includes his father’s views in his account of the character even while occluding their source also strongly suggests that he is making a considerable autobiographical investment in the figure of Richard II. This is confirmed by his calling Richard ‘that unripened Hamlet’ because in Autobiographies he tells us of his ten- or twelve-year-old self that ‘Hamlet was an image of heroic self-possession for the poses of youth and childhood to copy, a combatant of the battle within myself’; and in fact Hamlet is the play of Shakespeare’s to which Yeats is more casually allusive than he is to any other, in his poetry as well as his prose.22 This makes it unsurprising that when he next writes about Richard, in 1904, he says that ‘he has made us know of something in our own minds we had never known of had he never been imagined’.23 At the turn of the century, in other words, Yeats was defining Richard II as a revelation of the young poet to himself, and a poetic realisation – a realisation in ‘lyrical fantasy’ – of how that self might be imaginatively constituted or brought to birth. Which would make him one of the mechanisms by which Yeats eventually constructed his theory of mask and anti-self, that theory so crucially enabling for his later work, and for his myth of the objective and subjective man, the ‘dialogue of self and soul’. That in the essay his mind is already stirring with the origins of such things is clear from the way in which, towards its conclusion, Yeats 22 23

Autobiographies, p. 47. ‘Samhain (1904): First Principles’, in Explorations, selected by Mrs W. B. Yeats (1962; New York: Macmillan, 1989), p. 145.

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fairly conventionally reads a fundamental opposition of character as a Shakespearean constant but then, quite unconventionally, makes this the crucial attribute of Shakespearean ‘myth’, which he defines as an intensely provocative and ramifying abstract of the antithesis of Richard and Henry: I have often had the fancy that there is some one myth for every man, which, if we but knew it, would make us understand all he did and thought. Shakespeare’s myth, it may be, describes a wise man who was blind from very wisdom, and an empty man who thrust him from his place, and saw all that could be seen from very emptiness.24

Yeats’s key example, in addition to Richard and Henry, is that of Hamlet and Fortinbras, although, greatly to our misfortune, he does not pursue this analogous case here or elsewhere in his critical writing. The concept of the opposition itself, however, and the verve with which Yeats traces it in relation to Richard and Henry, may well have supplied a model for W. H. Auden’s fundamental opposition between Falstaff and Hal which similarly accretes complex moral, emotional and political resonances in both the prose and the poetry. The idea that Shakespeare’s multifarious work may be interpreted according to a single identifiable myth may also have impelled Auden’s conception of the single tragic, and Christian, myth at work in the plays: that of ‘the unrepentant thief’.25 If Auden uses and adapts Yeats’s insights, however, he does so silently; whereas Ted Hughes is open about modelling his own mythical Shakespeare along lines suggested by Yeats when he uses the opening sentence of the passage I quote above as one of the epigraphs to Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being (1992) and pursues its implications in a kind of devotedly relentless boar hunt. In such ways W. B. Yeats’s Richard II, product of the critical imagination of an Irish writer who perceives himself as tortured by the English language and its traditions, persists as image and opportunity for succeeding English poet-critics.

renaissance and modern In keeping with his concept of a Shakespearean mythology, Yeats also observes in the Stratford essay that the six history plays he has seen there constitute ‘but one play’ and have in them ‘something almost mythological’. As a consequence, he believes that this period of English history would 24 25

Essays and Introductions, p. 107. W. H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand (1963; London: Faber and Faber, 1975), p. 75.

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have made a fitting and adequate subject for the English literary imagination if the Renaissance had not made the Greek myths a viable alternative: English literature, because it would have grown out of itself, might have had the simplicity and unity of Greek literature, for I can never get out of my head that no man, even though he be Shakespeare, can write perfectly when his web is woven of threads that have been spun in many lands.26

This is better read not as a bizarre reservation about Shakespeare, whose extravagantly combinatory eclecticism has so frequently been considered the essential impulsion to, and the entire ground of, his creativity, but as a prompt that Yeats is giving himself about the kind of Antaeus-like rootedness in the mythology of Ireland which sustains an immense amount of his own work. The reservation, however, induces him to end the essay with a lament for ‘the sinking down of popular imagination, the dying out of traditional fantasy’, and Yeats actually calls this disappearance ‘the great famine’, using a metaphor almost scandalous from any kind of Irishman in 1901, barely half a century after the literal famine in Ireland which had killed vast numbers of people and driven vast numbers more to emigration. For Yeats, however, the metaphor’s potential scandal exactly defines the nature and extent of the cultural depredation; and Shakespeare appears at the moment of termination and new orientation: Shakespeare wrote at a time when solitary great men were gathering to themselves the fire that had once flowed hither and thither among all men, when individualism in work and thought and emotion was breaking up the old rhythms of life, when the common people, sustained no longer by the myths of Christianity and of still older faiths, were sinking into the earth.27

Yeats is in effect producing here an early sketch for his theory of a ‘Unity of Being’. That putative phase in his eccentric and, by the time he writes A Vision, occult historiography is the period in which human personality achieved its supreme expression. It occurred, Yeats believes, around 1450; but it disappears from European cultural and emotional life at around the time of Shakespeare. Shakespeare, then, stands at the cusp or, as Yeats will subsequently conceive it, the intersecting point of meeting gyres. On the one hand, in his essay on Edmund Spenser of 1902, Shakespeare is a member of ‘the old nation’ engaged in combat with the new Puritanism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and he sounds there remarkably like an Elizabethan-Jacobean William Butler Yeats, ‘with his delight in great persons, with his indifference to the State, with his scorn of the crowd, with 26

Essays and Introductions, p. 109.

27

Ibid., p. 110.

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his feudal passion’.28 But on the other, he is associated with the new European rootlessness and restlessness: in ‘Discoveries’ (1906) Yeats says that he has ‘come to think of even Shakespeare’s journeys to Rome or to Verona as the outflowing of an unrest, a dissatisfaction with natural interests, an unstable equilibrium of the whole European mind’.29 One of the deepest interests of the plays for Yeats is, consequently, that they focus and articulate the moment of disintegration and unwelcome new individualistic integration. Logically, this ought to make for an ambivalence about Shakespeare on Yeats’s part, and he knows this but simply cannot manage it. A passage of his Autobiographies both charmingly and disarmingly tells us that William Morris – in this, clearly right on message – cared for no poet later than Chaucer, but ‘though I preferred Shakespeare to Chaucer I begrudged my own preference’.30 In divulging so much without having to, Yeats is exemplifying that sometimes almost skinless honesty which always impresses in him: but there must be an element of guilty selfevasion in this. For you cannot really begrudge in yourself a preference of this kind. An aesthetic preference with regard to such hugely significant figures has to be more an absolute than a relative; involving, as it must, so much, almost everything. The discordance between feeling and theory, however, does not prevent Yeats’s finding, in another passage in Autobiographies, characteristically apocalyptic imagery for this momentous historical phase: What afterwards showed for rifts and cracks were there already, but imperious impulse held all together. Then the scattering came, the seeding of the poppy, bursting of pea-pod, and for a time personality seemed but the stronger for it. Shakespeare’s people make all things serve their passion, and that passion is for the moment the whole energy of their being – birds, beasts, men, women, landscape, society, are but symbols and metaphors, nothing is studied in itself, the mind is a dark well, no surface, depth only.31

As is sometimes the case with Yeats’s more esoteric prose, the kind that develops from his systematisations of history, culture and human nature, the expression of personalised theory – which is effectively here his gloss on a well-known passage of Burckhardt – is also evocative of the actual textures of the work being invoked. The violence of the natural imagery found for the bursting out of passionate energy itself has a Shakespearean inflection; and the word ‘passion’, which Yeats constantly uses when writing about Shakespeare, is a word frequently recurrent in Shakespeare, notably in 28

Ibid., p. 365.

29

Ibid., pp. 296–7.

30

Autobiographies, p. 191.

31

Ibid., pp. 291–2.

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Hamlet. Yeats’s prose in this passage, as it syntactically disintegrates into what is virtually a series of notes, mimes the pressure and ferocity of his response and, doing so, stays profoundly in tune with the harmonics of Shakespeare’s own tragic writing. And, not for the only time in Yeats’s critical prose, we discover him approaching closely to something registered more aphoristically perhaps but no more intensively by Eliot: here, the concept of the ‘objective correlative’, which is also defined – ‘this complete adequacy of the external to the emotion’ – in relation to a Shakespearean tragedy, even if one in which it is found lacking.32 When Yeats formulates his phasal system of history and personality in A Vision he puts Shakespeare in Phase 20, in a way appropriate to the moment when a new world explodes out of an old one. This is the phase of ‘The Concrete Man’, ‘a phase of the breaking up and sub-division of the being’, and Shakespeare figures in it along with Balzac and Napoleon, even though this in fact puts him out of phase with his own age, which Yeats sets in Phase 16.33 The figuratively explosive ‘seeding of the poppy’ here becomes that self-division necessary to, and productive of, the dramatic imagination. In Yeats’s phasal system, then, Shakespeare’s myriad-mindedness is accounted for, as are many other things, by the activity of the moon: the man of Phase 20 ‘no longer seeks to unify what is broken through conviction, by imposing those very convictions upon himself and others, but by projecting a dramatisation or many dramatisations. He can create, just in that degree in which he can see these dramatisations as separate from himself, and yet as an epitome of his whole nature.’34 Hence Yeats intuits a Shakespeare who may well have been, or at least have seemed, ‘faint and passionless’ but who, ‘through Mask and Image, reflected in a multiplying mirror … created the most passionate art that exists. He was the greatest of modern poets …; and if we knew all we would find that success came to him … as something hostile and unforeseen.’35 The greatest of ‘modern’ poets: by which Yeats means post-classical poets. Nevertheless, the word in this context also suggests that in A Vision Yeats is cannily establishing Shakespeare as a precursor of his own modern, 32

33

34

T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1928; London: Methuen and Co., 7th edn, 1950), p. 101. For the various analogues, both nineteenth- and early twentieth-century, for Eliot’s concept, however, see the brilliant discussion in Louis Menand’s Discovering Modernism: T. S. Eliot and His Context (1987; 2nd edn, New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), which makes it clear that originality was exactly what it did not possess. Reviewing the case in a very useful book, Rupin W. Desai strikingly says that ‘Whether he could convincingly locate Shakespeare … or not seems to have become for Yeats the test for the validity of his interpretation of history’. See Yeats’s Shakespeare (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1971), p. 69. W. B. Yeats, A Vision (1925; 2nd edn, 1937, London: Macmillan, 1974), p. 151. 35 Ibid., p. 153.

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or modernist, experiments in self-revelation and self-concealment. His poems too sometimes deal in mirror images and tend to mirror one another through succeeding volumes. He too is devoted to the creation of ‘passionate art’; an art that may even be compensation for the shaming knowledge of having been thought ‘faint and passionless’, at least in youth. When Shakespeare enters A Vision, then, the moon behaves, accommodatingly, exactly according to Yeats’s own attitudes and instincts, offering him those models of personality he requires for the creation of his own elaborately selfdramatising and self-projecting poetic masks. The Yeats who discovers Shakespeare reflecting himself in ‘a multiplying mirror’ is the poet, in ‘The Tower’, of ‘a superhuman mirror-resembling dream’; in whom, in ‘Coole and Ballylee, 1931’, ‘all the rant’s a mirror of my mood’; and, in ‘The Statues’, of the knowledge that ‘mirror on mirror imaged is all the show’. Conceiving Shakespeare as a modern poet of mask, image and mirror, A Vision is to be caught, as it can be caught elsewhere too, in the act of confessing the fictiveness of its lunar historiography. Clearly, at least in this respect, Yeats’s phases are what he concessively says they sometimes are at the end of his introduction to this strangest of all his books: ‘stylistic arrangements of experience comparable to the cubes in the drawing of Wyndham Lewis and to the ovoids in the sculpture of Brancusi’. By being assimilated to what is therefore an authoritatively self-aware project of the modernist imagination, Yeats’s Shakespeare, ‘the greatest of modern poets’, becomes also one of the crucial means by which this poet learns ‘to hold in a single thought reality and justice’.36 Expressing this, Yeats also supplies a poignant observation about what unaccommodated ‘reality’ or ‘experience’ might feel like for a great poet, as he envisages a Shakespeare almost haplessly finding his own success ‘hostile and unforeseen’. We have to think this an imaginative self-projection too, since Yeats’s phrasing – ‘if we knew all we would find’ – delicately but almost vertiginously implies insider knowledge. All of which casts an extremely harsh light back over, and almost certainly remembers, the Benthamite Shakespearean criticism derived from Dowden which, ‘At Stratford-on-Avon’ says, manifests ‘a vulgar worship … of success’. It is also quite extraordinary, even as poets’ relationships with Shakespeare go, to find Yeats identifying with Shakespeare in his vulnerability rather than his mastery; except, of course, that intimate knowledge of this vulnerability must demand knowledge of a certain mastery too. 36

Ibid., p. 25.

chapter 2

Myself must I remake: Shakespeare in Yeats’s poetry

crazy jane and juliet That Yeats associates Shakespeare with his own kind of modernity has its paradoxes, given the one poem of his in which the word ‘Shakespearean’ figures, ‘Three Movements’, in The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933): Shakespearean fish swam the sea, far away from land; Romantic fish swam in nets coming to the hand; What are all those fish that lie gasping on the sand?

The Shakespearean poetic as independent, elusive and self-assured; the Romantic as approachable and worth inheriting; and, implicitly, the modern as an image of desuetude and approaching death, and phrased not as statement but interrogative anxiety: Yeats here offers his characteristically highminded or high-handed attitude to what he elsewhere calls ‘the filthy modern tide’, in the form of a dismissively judgemental parable. In some aspects of his own modernity, however, the Shakespearean fish swim much closer to the Yeatsian land; and they do so prominently in relation to sexuality. When, in the essay on Spenser, Yeats situates Shakespeare as still a member of ‘the old nation’, he is thinking primarily of his adaptations of the materials of English folklore in such things as his songs and the riddling speeches of his fools, with their baffling vocabularies and vagaries. Yeats’s own attraction to song and refrain has its Shakespearean sanction. Helen Vendler, for instance, in one of several thought-provoking remarks about Yeats’s formal responses to Shakespeare, thinks that the ‘impetus’ for the ‘new kind of sequence-structure’ apparent in ‘The Three Bushes’ may derive from Shakespeare’s use of songs in his plays.1 The figure of the fool recurs in both Yeats’s plays and his poems and, in the latter, even in some relatively unlikely places. Vendler finds, in what she calls ‘the first-person 1

Helen Vendler, Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form (Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 133.

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apocalyptic self-obliteration’ of ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’, the presence of ‘a Shakespearean song recalling King Lear’. The lines she quotes do recall Lear in their weather, their evocation of universal suffering, and their hinting at madness, but the song must be Amiens’s ‘Blow, blow, thou winter wind’ in As You Like It: O but we dreamed to mend Whatever mischief seemed To afflict mankind, but now That winds of winter blow Learn that we were crack-pated when we dreamed.2

Amiens is an exiled duke, not a fool, but the presence of Lear here, and the compound ‘crack-pated’ – a nonce-word, presumably, for ‘crack-brained’ – certainly evoke the figure of the fool. And this figure also assumes weight when Yeats’s later style self-destructively breaks down the formal perfections of his earlier work in what we might regard as another kind of ‘selfobliteration’. In the sequence whose title proposes that all its poems are, or might become, songs, Words for Music Perhaps (1932), Yeats has several representations of the fool: Tom the Lunatic; the ‘wild old wicked man’; and, most notably, Crazy Jane, a figure by means of which Yeats ventriloquises some of his exacerbations in the voice of a mad woman. That Shakespeare is present to Yeats’s imagination in his construction of Crazy Jane is apparent from the way the poem ‘Crazy Jane Reproved’ secretes an allusion to Cymbeline and ‘Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop’ advertises one to Macbeth. Similarly, Tom the Lunatic may derive his name from Edgar in King Lear when he takes on the disguise of insanity and becomes ‘poor Tom’; and Helen Vendler finds Lear in the imagery as well as the song-like trimeter of ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’. We may also find in ‘Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop’ a reflection of the sexual disgust in Lear, as well as in other Shakespeare plays, in a way suggesting how usefully counter-cultural a force Yeats found Shakespeare at this point of his writing life, when both Irish circumstance and his own politics had changed out of all recognition or prediction since 1901. The shorthand way of putting this would be to say that the ‘middle class movement’ which Yeats then considered his ‘legitimate enemy’ was still his enemy thirty years later: but whereas then it was composed exclusively of Protestant unionists, now it comprised exclusively the recently empowered but already firmly established nationalists of the effectively Catholic State. 2

Ibid., p. 72.

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Elizabeth Butler Cullingford has written about the Crazy Jane poems as Yeats’s response to the introduction of the Publications Bill in 1928 – his last year as an Irish senator – in what was to prove a successful attempt to seal the Irish cultural frontiers, an attempt enthusiastically prosecuted by the Catholic Church. Cullingford reads the Crazy Jane poems as a weapon wielded against the monologic identity of Irish Church and State: hence, of course, the fact that the figure addressed in this poem is a bishop.3 Persuasive as Cullingford is – and Yeats consistently opposed all forms of censorship – there is anarchistic outrage in the poems, I think, something incommensurate, which suggests that if they originate in anti-Catholic aggression they culminate in something much less demonstrably specifiable. And this is to do in part with their Shakespearean indebtednesses. Crazy Jane is ferocious like a sexually demented female Othello or Leontes or, most of all, like a female Lear in the storm, before she is a critic of particular abuses of authority, and in the first poem in the sequence she demands to be brought to ‘the blasted oak’ at midnight so that she can utter imprecations. Which is what she actually does in ‘Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop’ when she tells us how she responds to his catechetical instructions to ‘Live in a heavenly mansion, / Not in some foul sty’, and does so in Yeats’s variation on the weird sisters’ imprecatory trochaic tetrameters in Macbeth, which the lines also quote: ‘Fair and foul are near of kin, And fair needs foul,’ I cried. ‘My friends are gone, but that’s a truth Nor grave nor bed denied, Learned in bodily lowliness And in the heart’s pride. ‘A woman can be proud and stiff When on love intent; But Love has pitched his mansion in The place of excrement; For nothing can be sole or whole That has not been rent.’

Although Macbeth is the play actually alluded to here, Lear is also subliminally present in the poem: the abandoned king in the storm, humbled in his understanding of a shared humanity, sheltering in the foul sty of his ‘hovel’ along with an Edgar transformed into a mad ‘Poor Tom’, a banished, 3

See Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, Gender and History in Yeats’s Love Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 227–44.

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disguised Kent, and the Fool. Crazy Jane’s ‘Fair needs foul’ might in one sense be considered the knowledge that Lear learns, but it is also almost an acceptance of, even a revelling in, that sexual disgust which he hideously voices in his ‘Down from the waist they are centaurs, / Though women all above’ speech, a view of the female usually thought to imply his madness. Yeats quotes from the weird sisters’ spell in this poem, and so does Macbeth himself in the play’s third scene when he says ‘So foul and fair a day I have not seen’, so that they appear to occupy his consciousness in malignly sympathetic magic. Crazy Jane’s transfer of the leitmotif of Macbeth to a specifically sexual context, however, which proposes an identity between innocence and experience, grace and sin, appears to license in Yeats a form of linguistic adventurousness of a kind he virtually never engages in: the pun. That slippery trickery of language, with its inversion of social hierarchies, the unruly linguistic device which Johnson thought the ‘fatal Cleopatra’ for which Shakespeare ‘lost the world and was content to lose it’, possesses or devours the poem’s final stanza and its ‘moral’.4 The lasciviousness which teases the words ‘stiff’, ‘pitched’, ‘sole’ and ‘whole’ is, in Yeats, an uncustomary playing with the inextricability of the foul and the fair which inheres in language itself. It seems virtually written in ‘selfobliterating’ contradistinction to the atmospheres and moods of some of those Yeatsian poems – poignant, chastised, desolate, admiring, Homeric – in which the woman figures as muse. It is as though Shakespeare is giving Yeats a kind of permission here which, if it allows him to manifest an attitude to Irish Catholic censorship, also supplies him with the desire and ability to register the shocking contiguity, or even coincidence, of the places of love and excrement. But this is an ultimate ethical knowledge too. That ‘nothing can be sole or whole / That has not been rent’, that human individuation and integrity derive from a wounding, is known here to Crazy Jane under its sexual aspect, just as it is known to Lear in its ethical dimension when he says, ‘I have ta’en too little care of this.’ That Yeats finds sanction in Shakespearean usage for modes of experience and apperception which his work hardly otherwise admits is also apparent in that poem of his which most obviously derives from a play of Shakespeare’s, ‘Parting’, the seventh poem in the sequence A Woman Young and Old, of 1929, which eventually appeared in The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933) along with the Crazy Jane poems. Daniel Albright calls this in many ways baffling sequence ‘a kind of experimental theatre’ which dramatises various moods in a woman’s life; and ‘Parting’ is, he says, a 4

Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. H. R. Woudhuysen (London: Penguin Books, 1989), p. 132.

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‘Shakespearean love-duet’.5 Written as the dialogue of an anonymous ‘He’ and ‘She’, the poem runs a descant on Romeo and Juliet’s dialogue at the beginning of act 3 scene 5 of the play, after their night of love. She initially tempts him to stay longer, trying to persuade him that the bird he hears is ‘the nightingale, and not the lark’, but he understandably fears being discovered and killed. Yeats’s poem-duet is compact and intense and counterpoints Shakespeare’s dialogue with brief exchanges of its own. One of those which ‘She’ utters counterpoints Shakespeare with a wonderfully Yeatsian accompaniment, ‘The murderous stealth of day’, a phrase recalling such other striking usages of the adjective as ‘the murderous innocence of the sea’ in ‘A Prayer for my Daughter’. Shakespeare’s supplying Yeats with the opportunity for such a resonantly charged phrase of his own suggests an element of competition in the engagement; and this form of ‘counterpointing’ can hardly be characterised as either allusion or version in the usual ways. It offers a strikingly original contribution to the scope of modern poetic interventions in Shakespeare, more noteworthy than its brevity and its place as part of a sequence might suggest. The creative impulse here is not only competitive, however, since in ‘Parting’ Yeats reveals himself almost tremblingly alert to the yearning tenderness of the youthful sexual love which Shakespeare so empathetically dramatises. This makes a strong contrast with W. H. Auden’s inability to sympathise with it or with the plight of the play’s lovers, a deficiency which I discuss in my chapter on his Shakespeare criticism. In fact, Yeats is in one way even more appreciative of the irresistible force of the attraction than Shakespeare. Whereas in Romeo and Juliet Juliet soon comes to admit that the bird is indeed the lark, and encourages Romeo to leave – which he does – in Yeats, despite his title ‘Parting’, no parting in fact occurs. The poem ends: she. That light is from the moon. he. That bird … she. Let him sing on, I offer to love’s play My dark declivities.

In effect, ‘She’ is here annulling the aubade, dangerously careless of whether the bird is nightingale or lark and entirely willing to pit the possible death of the lover against the urgency of sexual invitation and demand. Yeats here senses in Juliet something comparable to what Eliot recognises when he says 5

Yeats, The Poems, p. 744.

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of the balcony scene that ‘one feels that it is Juliet’s voice that has the leading part’; and indeed when Eliot senses a ‘musical pattern’ in the scene – ‘as surprising in its kind as that in the early work of Beethoven’ – he may be recognising exactly the quality which prompted Yeats’s interest in counterpointing the passage.6 Yeats’s ‘She’ takes the sexual as well as the musical lead with, yet again, a superbly memorable phrase, extending a further invitation which recalls the last line of ‘Solomon and the Witch’, which is also the woman’s invitation: ‘O! Solomon! Let us try again.’ ‘Parting’ illustrates how, under the Shakespearean influence, or nudged into Shakespearean competitiveness, Yeats finds a further way to speak in the mask of a woman, although now by substituting for the partly polemical obscenities of Crazy Jane a pleasurable erotics, even if one shadowed by mortality. Unembittered by the emotions of abandonment and desolation in some of the Maud Gonne poems or by the violent physical aggression of such a problematical poem as ‘Leda and the Swan’, ‘I offer to love’s play / My dark declivities’ is Yeats finding in Shakespeare a greatly desired dramatic, and self-dramatising, opportunity of his own.

reverie In these variously inventive ways Yeats’s lyrics take Shakespeare’s plays into themselves, and Yeats makes Shakespeare a function of his own creative imagination and intelligence. The play which he had made such a significant function of his critical intelligence in the Stratford essay also has an afterlife in his creative work. Returning to Ireland after Stratford, he wrote On Baile’s Strand, the first of five Cuchulain plays which he worked on sporadically throughout his life. The figure of Cuchulain similarly persists in his poetry from his appearance ‘battling with the bitter tide’ in ‘To the Rose upon the Rood of Time’ in 1893 to his uncanny presence among the posthumous shades of ‘Cuchulain Comforted’ in the Last Poems of 1939; and he appears together with Hamlet in the hugely complex late poem ‘The Statues’. Various critics have found in the opposition of Cuchulain and Conchobar a reflection of that between Richard and Bolingbroke or between Richard and Henry V in the Stratford essay; and it has even been proposed that the five Cuchulain plays together constitute ‘a kind of Shakespearean five-act tragedy’.7 But the principal creative impact of 6 7

T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber and Faber, 1957), p. 88. Ruth Nevo, ‘Yeats, Shakespeare and Ireland’, in Vincent Newey and Ann Thompson (eds.), Literature and Nationalism (Liverpool University Press, 1991), pp. 182–97.

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Richard II on Yeats may well be suggested in a letter he wrote to Dorothy Wellesley in 1937. There, describing a production he did not much admire, he says that ‘The modern actor can speak to another actor, but he is incapable of reverie.’ Then, almost in a textual reverie of his own, he asks – of himself, it seems, as well as his correspondent – ‘Did Shakespeare in Richard II discover poetic reverie?’8 In an outstanding essay on the relationship between Shakespeare and Yeats’s drama, Peter Ure unravels the Yeatsian thinking that ‘piles up’ behind this gnomic question, deciding that Yeats’s conception has its origin in Richard’s famous soliloquy in act 3 scene 2, ‘Of comfort no man speak’, and specifically in the lines: For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground And tell sad stories of the death of kings: How some have been depos’d, some slain in war, Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed, Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping kill’d. All murthered …

Yeats might have argued, Ure says, that ‘the strong, incantatory rhythms … depersonalise Richard as he moves towards the vast generalisation supported by tradition; this ever expanding tragic rhythm rubs out the marks of individuality; the face becomes a lamenting, stylised Byzantine or Japanese mask; we commune with the falling king in an experience shaped by sorrow at our common mortality’. What Yeats was looking for, and found, in Richard II, Ure suggests, is ‘the impersonal reverie which belongs to a more powerful and more generalised life than that of the individual’.9 This insight in turn illuminates a great deal that piles up behind Yeats’s own later poems and poetic, and in a way once more adumbrated by Ure when he says that some of those poems may be thought ‘the equivalents of the poetic reveries of Richard II or Timon …. Their speaker is very often a great dramatic persona, whose name is usually but not always the same as the poet’s.’10 This is an excellent way of beginning to understand why Yeats thought of some of his poems as ‘soliloquies’; why they are so much more dramatic than his plays; and why consecutive lines in them may appear ‘Shakespearean’ in timbre without seeming at all like pastiche11 – lines such as these, for instance: 8 9 10 11

W. B. Yeats, The Letters, ed. Allan Wade (London: Hart-Davis, 1954), p. 899. ‘W. B. Yeats and the Shakespearean Moment’, in Yeats and Anglo-Irish Literature: Critical Essays by Peter Ure, ed. C. J. Rawson (Liverpool University Press, 1974), pp. 217–18. Ibid., p. 219. For ‘soliloquies’, see Autobiographies, pp. 359, 532, and ‘A General Introduction for my Work’ in Essays and Introductions, p. 521.

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Shakespeare and the Modern Poet What shall I do with this absurdity – O heart, O troubled heart – this caricature, Decrepit age that has been tied to me As to a dog’s tail?

and these, identified as ‘almost Shakespearean in tone’ by Louis MacNeice:12 Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare Rides upon sleep, a drunken soldiery Can leave the mother, murdered at her door, To crawl in her own blood and go scot-free …

The former, the opening lines of ‘The Tower’, spoken apparently in Yeats’s ‘own’ voice, appear almost to evoke a more level-headed but equally disenchanted Lear, even if ‘caricature’ is a modern conception. They seem Shakespearean too in their parenthetically vocative self-communing, their impatiently urgent elision (should it not properly be ‘As a tin can to a dog’s tail’?), and the repeated ‘O’ (not ‘Oh’) which recalls such moments in Shakespeare as the Fool’s telling Lear that he has become ‘an O without a figure’ and Hamlet’s dying cry, ‘O O O O’. The latter lines from ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’, with the close proximity they offer the words ‘nightmare’, ‘sleep’, ‘drunken’, ‘mother’ and ‘murdered’, and with their evocation of a natural world become monstrous, have Macbeth just below their perturbed surface, and that play becomes almost visible in this poem’s final section, where the ‘violence of horses’ recalls those of Duncan which are said, in the play’s second act, to eat one another. If Yeats is discovering here a fitting Shakespearean analogue for the violent catastrophe of the Irish war of independence, these lines are also Shakespearean in the casually extempore but convincingly terrifying compound neologism ‘dragonridden’ and in the impulsive approximation of the metaphor. Yeats may have had Fuseli’s painting ‘The Nightmare’ in mind here, with its wildly staring horse: but, in language, how does a nightmare ‘ride upon sleep’, exactly? It cannot, unless Yeats is once more, quite uncharacteristically, punning here: it is the ‘mare’ of ‘nightmare’ that rides. tragic joy ‘I can hear the dance music in “Absent thee from felicity awhile”.’ (Explorations) 12

Louis MacNeice, The Poetry of W. B. Yeats (1941; London: Faber and Faber, 1967), p. 136.

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As a consequence of such compelling intertextualities, which propose a developing process of attunement, it is hardly surprising that Yeats introduces explicit references to Shakespearean characters in some of his most notable late poems. Appearing in his final volumes, New Poems in 1938 and Last Poems the following year, these are also taken up with the ultimate reality of personal death: so that Yeats’s final confrontation with Shakespeare is also, we might say, his final confrontation. Both volumes vary almost wildly in emotion and tone from poem to poem and even within certain poems or poem–sequences, from excruciation to something almost approaching resignation; and these are variations appropriate to the definitive paradox or oxymoron – Jahan Ramazani calls it, with analytical precision, an ‘affective antinomy’ – of that ‘tragic joy’ which is Yeats’s crucial concept of death, one given almost aphoristic expression in ‘Lapis Lazuli’.13 At the end of Love’s Labour’s Lost Rosalind requires her would-be lover Berowne to spend a penitential year testing whether what she regards as his self-indulgent wittiness can survive its reception by the ‘speechless sick’ and the ‘pained impotent’, among whom it will find either its justification or its necessary correction. ‘To move wild laughter in the throat of death?’ Berowne asks, taken aback: ‘It cannot be, it is impossible: / Mirth cannot move a soul in agony.’ But mirth can be, or must be, for Yeats, part of the reaction to the knowledge of death itself. The concept of tragic joy, developed early in Yeats’s life, originates in a further revulsion from the moralising of Dowden. What Yeats finds in Shakespearean tragic character is not moral example but, as he finds in Richard II, an idea of extravagance. He makes this clear in an almost enraptured passage of ‘First Principles’ in Samhain (1904). The Shakespearean character, he says, may ‘commit murder like Macbeth, or fly the battle for his sweetheart as did Antony, or betray his country like Coriolanus, and yet we will rejoice in every happiness that comes to him and sorrow at his death as if it were our own … We are caught up into another code, we are in the presence of a higher court.’14 If Macbeth, Antony and Coriolanus are beyond morality, the door is opened to the view that tragic heroes ‘seek for a life growing always more scornful of everything that is not itself and passing into its own fullness, perfectly it may be – and from this is tragic joy and the perfectness of tragedy – when the world itself has slipped away in death’.15 13 14 15

Jahan Ramazani, Yeats and the Poetry of Death: Elegy, Self-Elegy, and the Sublime (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 97. W. B. Yeats, Explorations, selected by Mrs W. B. Yeats (1962; New York: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 154, 155. Ibid., p. 170.

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Over thirty years later its creator names the concept again in the poem ‘The Gyres’ when he is close to death: ‘Hector is dead and there’s a light in Troy; / We that look on but laugh in tragic joy.’ Here the context is Homer rather than Shakespeare; but over the years Yeats’s most memorable prose explications do occur in a Shakespearean context. In ‘Poetry and Tradition’ (1908) both of its terms are weighed equally, with something of the defiant nonchalance which can inhere in the poems too: ‘Shakespeare’s persons, when the last darkness has gathered about them, speak out of an ecstasy that is one-half the self-surrender of sorrow, and one-half the last playing and mockery of the victorious sword before the defeated world.’16 Death is figured here as paradoxically both passive and active, an inevitable giving up of consciousness while also, in the same motion of ‘ecstasy’, a derisive flourish in which the human ‘person’ becomes both player and swordsman in a final gesture. It is as though the mask has now become the face. This remarkable sentence is therefore electrifyingly charged with the etymology of the word ‘ecstasy’: a being outside oneself which is also a state of rapture or exaltation. Years later, in ‘A General Introduction for my Work’ (1937), Yeats uses the word again: The heroes of Shakespeare convey to us through their looks, or through the metaphorical passions of their speech, the sudden enlargement of their vision, their ecstasy at the approach of death: ‘She should have died hereafter,’ ‘Of many thousand kisses, the poor last,’ ‘Absent thee from felicity a while’. They have become God or Mother Goddess, the pelican, ‘My baby at my breast,’ but all must be cold; no actress has ever sobbed when she played Cleopatra, even the shallow brain of a producer has never thought of such a thing.17

In truth, it is hard to match the fervent commentary to all of the quoted texts here: Macbeth’s line after receiving news of his wife’s death, which happens offstage, is famously ambiguous in its terseness and, being his, can hardly be considered to represent her ecstasy; and visionary ecstasy in the face of death seems much more appropriate to Cleopatra than it does to Lady Macbeth. Even so, Yeats’s insistence that ‘all must be cold’ is compellingly inward with these Shakespearean moments, and even encourages us to use the word ‘nonchalant’ of those poems of his which draw upon them, since ‘nonchalant’ is, etymologically, ‘not to be warm’. The temperature drops even further later on in this extraordinary passage when Yeats wonderfully figures the visionary and mythological enlargement 16

Essays and Introductions, p. 254.

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Ibid., pp. 522–3.

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of such moments as those in which ‘imagination must dance, must be carried beyond feeling into the aboriginal ice’. What we witness here is not so much Yeats ‘transvaluating’ Shakespeare now as making Shakespeare a facet of his own ultimate and absolute necessity. In this respect, this passage could almost be read as a prose gloss on ‘Lapis Lazuli’; and Yeats’s figuring of Shakespeare in this magnificent but perturbing poem may, as a consequence, be read more accurately as demand than competition, or perhaps, more accurately still, as what Wallace Stevens in ‘Sunday Morning’ calls ‘requital to desire’. The poem, as a consequence, represents a passing from Shakespeare to Yeats in which Yeats passes creatively into his own fullness. ‘Lapis Lazuli’ originates in exacerbated urgency and culminates in projected calm. The two moods gather about the poem’s two uses of Yeats’s personal pronoun: the ‘I’ which is its opening word –‘I have heard hysterical women say …’ – and the ‘I’ which closes line 49 while opening into an enjambment: ‘and I / Delight to imagine them seated there’. What the ‘I’ hears the hysterical women say is a disdain for the capacity of the arts to provide interpretation or solace at a time of apocalyptic European upheaval; and this poem, written in July 1936 and published in 1938, is crucially written to the historical moment of its composition. What the second ‘I’ delights in is the imaginative bringing to life of a scene incised on the work of art after which the poem is named and which it celebrates; and that work and the imaginative conjuration for which it provides the opportunity do indeed appear to offer interpretation and solace. The movement from the first to the second of these pronouns is virtually a diagram, then, of what Yeats famously said constitutes poetry rather than rhetoric: the argument with oneself. But this movement is evoked more intensely, and more memorably, by the poem’s four uses of the word ‘gay’. At the opening the hysterical women are ‘sick of … / poets that are always gay’; in the second strophe, in which Shakespeare is crucially included in the poem and its projection, ‘Hamlet and Lear are gay’; in the third, in a resounding Yeatsian aphorism, ‘All things fall and are built again / And those that build them again are gay’; and in the fourth and final one the ‘Chinamen’ of the scene represented on the piece of lapis lazuli are evoked as possessing both great age and great joy: ‘Their eyes, mid many wrinkles, their eyes, / Their ancient, glittering eyes are gay’ – where the insistent repetition of the word ‘eyes’ (three times in thirteen words) seems almost a kind of linguistic recreation of the tremulous flashing of light that glittering is. The lines, like the eyes, are intensely alive in their own lustre.

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If this is a final calm, however, the second, Shakespearean strophe of the poem troubles its readers with the potential for scandal which inheres in the concept of tragic gaiety. This is undoubtedly in part because the notion is a clear violation of generic decorum. Like Berowne, we may well stand aghast at the notion of moving wild laughter in the throat of death when we discover it in a poem, since poems involving death – elegies, usually – are, to put it no more strongly, not much given to mirth. But we may also be scandalised by what might seem evasion in the idea, feeling that it simply refuses to take stock of the worst. That ‘Hamlet and Lear are gay’ possesses a strong note of affront which stops only just short of the confrontational. At the poem’s opening what the ‘hysterical women’ fear is registered in a language both contemporary and locally specific when they envisage the coming onslaught as ‘Aeroplane and Zeppelin … / Pitch[ing] like King Billy bomb-balls in / Until the town lie beaten flat’. ‘Zeppelin’ and probably even ‘aeroplane’ too, seem, in their mechanised modernity, alien to the diction of Yeats’s poems, even his late poems; and the King Billy bomb-balls are imported from a sectarian Ulster ballad which carries a charge very different from that carried by most folk refrains and ballad types in Yeats. Both terms wilfully do violence to Yeats’s characteristic verbal texture: they are not merely modern terms, they are destructive verbal weapons. The Boyne ‘bomb-balls’ remind us too that in the 1930s the violence of European conflict included continuing low-level guerilla warfare in Ireland. Daniel Albright thinks that these lines have an ‘odd jocularity’ and reads them as ‘the poet’s desire to be gay despite all of war’s horrors’.18 Maybe: but they seem to me, rather, Yeats’s evocation, in a version of free indirect speech, of what the women would say they feared. This is the language, contemporary and a bit dishevelled, even vulgar (‘Pitch … in’), such as ‘I have heard that’ the women ‘say’. The poem needs this kind of language because Yeats wants to oppose to its demotic fearfulness the very different language of his Shakespearean strophe, which tries, in the stately ceremony of its tetrameters, to find a dignity appropriate to tragic gaiety, a kind quite distinct from what the hysterical women might find inappropriate or redundant in their ‘poets that are always gay’, where the word censoriously carries something of its depreciatory connotations of airiness and selfindulgence. Yeats’s use of the word ‘hysterical’ for the women – which makes an opposition of gender strongly and probably prejudicially inherent in the poem – has itself a Shakespearean reverberation. In ‘Parnell’s Funeral’, 18

Yeats, The Poems, p. 774, n. 7.

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amid imagery drawn from ‘a painted stage’, Yeats says of Parnell that ‘popular rage, / Hysterica passio dragged this quarry down’; and the phrase figures again in ‘A Bronze Head’, a poem about a representation of Maud Gonne, and also in the prose piece ‘Rosa Alchemica’. It is taken from King Lear where, in act 2 scene 4, Lear feels almost suffocated when the Fool taunts him about his daughters: ‘O how this mother swells up toward my heart! / Hysterica passio, down, thou climbing sorrow, / Thy element’s below.’ Lear fears, that is, that going mad will feminise him, as the womb (the ‘hystera’) of Galenic medicine wanders about his body to produce ‘hysterical’ behaviour.19 This is one of only two uses of the word ‘hysterical’ in Yeats’s entire oeuvre. The other is ‘Griffith staring in hysterical pride’ in ‘The Municipal Gallery Revisited’, which demonstrates that Yeats does not use it only in relation to women. Together with his peculiar use of the word ‘effeminacy’ as self-critique in his ‘General Introduction’, which I cited in my last chapter, this suggests that there is an element of self-displacement in the apparent gender condescension of the phrase ‘hysterical women’. This would make it very much Yeats’s own terror at the prospect of aerial bombardment which is scripted into ‘Lapis Lazuli’ too. In ‘Parnell’s Funeral’ the quotation from King Lear is submerged in theatrical reference, and the stanza including it ends with a sense of those who colluded in Parnell’s fate as an audience newly stepping away from theatrical scenery into reality: ‘None shared our guilt; nor did we play a part / Upon a painted stage when we devoured his heart.’ There is a comparable but reverse move in ‘Lapis Lazuli’, from hysterical fear to a sense of reality as itself a theatre. It is of course a Shakespearean one, even if one in which the actors do not realise that they are playing their parts: All perform their tragic play, There struts Hamlet, there is Lear, That’s Ophelia, that Cordelia; Yet they, should the last scene be there, 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. All men have aimed at, found and lost; Black out; Heaven blazing into the head: 19

For the womb in Galenic medicine see Bruce R. Smith, Shakespeare and Masculinity (Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 12–19.

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Shakespeare and the Modern Poet Tragedy wrought to its uttermost. Though Hamlet rambles and Lear rages, And all the drop scenes drop at once Upon a hundred thousand stages, It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce.

These lines begin by picking up Jaques’s ‘All the world’s a stage’ in As You Like It but directing it back – self-referentially, as it were – to Shakespeare himself, in his tragedies. The hysterical dread of death is transfigured by gaiety only in what is an ultimate form of acting, the perfect playing of a part. Which is why tragic death is itself figured in theatrical terms: that darkening of the stage which constitutes a ‘black out’, and the final scene of a play, known as the ‘drop-scene’. The fact that joy at such a moment is an ultimate performance is also conveyed formally by the rhyming of the ultimately significant word ‘gay’ with ‘play’. And indeed the oxymoron or ‘affective antinomy’ that is ‘tragic gaiety’ is itself imaged oxymoronically by the line ‘Black out; Heaven blazing into the head’, where darkness becomes light and where Heaven is represented as conflagration in a way usually reserved for its opposite, at least in Christian eschatology: Hell. Although the lines are not in the least homiletic, they still contain a powerful ethic, since to behave as tragic gaiety would have them do is for these originally unwitting performers to become Shakespearean tragic heroes, ‘worthy their prominent part in the play’. Given that Shakespeare, represented by two of the greatest of his tragic characters, is included in ‘Lapis Lazuli’ and that he is so crucial to Yeats’s evolution of the concept of tragic gaiety, it may seem surprising that he is subdued or displaced by the title of this poem and by the way it turns, after the Shakespearean strophe, towards the object named by that title. This moves the poem decisively from Shakespearean theatre to the plastic arts, since ‘Lapis Lazuli’ is an ekphrastic poem, a poem about a work of art. ‘Callimachus / Who handled marble as if it were bronze’ is prominent in the intervening strophe which evokes the rise and violent termination of ‘Old civilisations put to the sword’; and then the anonymous work of art figured on the piece of lapis appears quite unpredictably, as if from nowhere, in a short fourth strophe: Two Chinamen, behind them a third, Are carved in Lapis Lazuli, Over them flies a long-legged bird A symbol of longevity; The third, doubtless a serving-man, Carries a musical instrument.

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The lapis as Yeats describes it inherits elements from the poem’s earlier strophes while also diverting them in a new direction. The ageing motif matches the hysterical women’s fear at the imminence of death, and the musical instrument harmonises with the ‘fiddle-bow’ representative of the art of music at the poem’s opening. That bow may stand for the arts of palette and poetry evoked there too. But the scene itself, which Yeats elaborates extensively in his final strophe, diverts the Western European, Shakespearean locale of the second strophe into an ‘oriental’ one in tune with some of Yeats’s other poetry of Orient and East. When Yeats reinvents the image in his own contemplation of it in his final strophe, he has the Chinamen staring, from the timelessness of permanent form, on ‘all the tragic scene’, by which we must understand the tragic scene, or scenes, of the earlier part of the poem, so that ‘scene’ still carries its theatrical, Shakespearean connotation. The ancient, glittering eyes look back at Hamlet rambling and Lear raging; and their gaiety, even as it is signalled by their ‘mournful melodies’, becomes something more comprehensive than the gaiety of Hamlet and Lear. That Shakespearean strophe of intense activity – performing, strutting, transfiguring, blazing, rambling and raging – makes it appear that gaiety is being wrested from tragedy by sheer, almost muscular force of will. Now the agitation of that verse is replaced by the stillness and quietude of the final one, with its past participles of muted acceptance, ‘seated’ and ‘Accomplished’. And what this tranquillity also includes in its perfection is the radical imperfection of time’s attritions, since the stone’s discoloration and accidental abrasions have now become, for this poet-contemplator, this ‘I’, elements of its aesthetic perfection, have been included in the ‘scene’. One influential model of ekphrastic poetry presents it as competitive: writing, which feigns an appearance of being appreciatively inclined towards the work of art in which it originates, in fact engages in a struggle to replace it.20 ‘Lapis Lazuli’ might well represent Yeats’s competitive appropriation of the image he finds on the ancient Chinese carving, his turning of it to account by making it an emblem of his own theory of tragic art in relation to mortality. But the poem’s conclusion also represents a form of competition between Yeats and Shakespeare. Yeats, while openly and generously acknowledging in his prose a theoretical indebtedness, accommodates Shakespeare in this poem but then replaces him with a scene, and 20

See, for instance, James Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (University of Chicago Press, 1993).

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with poetic lines, literally of his own linguistic and formal making. It is of course Yeats, not Shakespeare himself, who tells us, with immense mnemonic persuasiveness, that Hamlet and Lear are gay; and then it is Yeats who tells us, of the Chinamen retrieved from his piece of lapis, and again with haunting mnemonic intensity, that their ancient, glittering eyes are gay. It would be an exaggeration to say that this final use of the word ‘gay’ is as different from its implications in the line ‘Hamlet and Lear are gay’ as both differ from the implications of airiness carried by the word on its first appearance: but nevertheless there is a new inflection in the word, which is now not only Yeats’s reading of Shakespeare but Yeats’s reading of Shakespeare in a differentiating context entirely of his own making. Like ‘Parting’, ‘Lapis Lazuli’ finds its opportunity by counterpointing a Shakespearean text. But the poem is also what Yeats, by the power of his own writing, does with his necessity, as his own ‘accomplished fingers’ make the ‘tragic scene’ available to art in the same gesture in which he makes it humanly – that is to say, personally – supportable. In this sense, what we take from ‘Lapis Lazuli’ is something more complicated than what Richard Ellmann defines as a ‘message of affirmation’.21 Harold Bloom is understandably sceptical about the nature of this affirmation, drawing attention to the reasons for Yeats’s refusal to Wilfred Owen of a place in his Oxford Book: not simply that ‘passive suffering is not a theme for poetry’ but that – in the next sentence of Yeats’s introduction – ‘In all the great tragedies, tragedy is a joy to the man who dies.’22 Its depreciation of Owen puts the concept of tragic joy under sceptical ethical scrutiny for Bloom, as well it might, and its operation in ‘Lapis Lazuli’ makes the poem’s ‘rhetorical and spiritual authority’ deeply suspect. There is though in ‘Lapis Lazuli’ a conflict between theory and feeling, as there is – we have seen – when he writes about Shakespeare and Chaucer in Autobiographies. That ‘Hamlet and Lear are gay’ is what a line of the poem tells us: but it is not what the poem itself says. Better to regard it, I think, not as affirmation but as a work of art designed to serve its terminal occasions, operating under their stress and duress. ‘Serve’ in the sense in which Yeats means it of Shakespeare when he says in A Vision, once more using the words ‘joy’ and ‘play’, that ‘Shakespeare showed, through a style full of joy, a melancholy vision sought from afar; a style at play; a mind that served’.23 21 22 23

Richard Ellmann, The Identity of Yeats (London: Faber and Faber, 1964), p. 187. Harold Bloom, Yeats (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 438. W. B. Yeats, A Vision (1925; London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1937), p. 166.

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It is conceivable too that Yeats is also, at this ultimate point in his writing life, making Hamlet and Lear ‘honorary Celts’ just as he had made Richard II, since he would have found in Arnold’s On the Study of Celtic Literature an appealing etymology for the always difficult and today in one respect almost impossible word ‘gay’. Arnold, as we have seen, defines the ‘Celtic element’ as ‘expansive, adventurous and gay’ and then offers an etymology that could hardly have failed to impress itself deeply on the young Yeats who had to get everything he loved ‘through English’: ‘Our word gay, it is said, is itself Celtic. It is not from gaudium, but from the Celtic gair, to laugh.’24 This etymology is entirely spurious: ‘gay’ is from ‘gaudium’. But it may nevertheless also have served for Yeats. frenzy If rhetorical and spiritual authority appear to be claimed by some of Yeats’s poems, however, he is himself the first to undermine them – by the expedient of writing another poem. ‘An Acre of Grass’, also collected in New Poems in 1938, complements ‘Lapis Lazuli’ in its Shakespearean reference, but its confrontation with death is now more specifically personal. A poem of statement and prayer, it is extraordinarily lucid in texture, especially in the context of some of Yeats’s elaborately difficult and occasionally virtually unravellable late poems. In its setting and properties – the ‘acre of grass’ of Yeats’s garden and the midnight quiet of his recently acquired house in Rathfarnham, on the outskirts of Dublin – it may appear to offer almost a kind of late pastoral. But this is a pastoral radically distressed by the reality of old age, the consciousness of being ‘at life’s end’, and the necessity of seeking what will serve or suffice when not even ‘the mill of the mind / Consuming its rag and bone, / Can make the truth known’ – where the image is a forecast of the last line of ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’ in which ‘the foul rag and bone shop of the heart’ represents that desolation of reality in which alone any final acts of imagination can originate. In this context Yeats’s trimeter prayer, which constitutes the poem’s final two stanzas, offers a far more exacerbated, altogether less tranquil mood than that evoked at the end of ‘Lapis Lazuli’: Grant me an old man’s frenzy. Myself must I remake Till I am Timon and Lear Or that William Blake 24

On the Study of Celtic Literature, p. 84.

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Shakespeare and the Modern Poet Who beat upon the wall Till Truth obeyed his call; A mind Michael Angelo knew That can pierce the clouds Or inspired by frenzy Shake the dead in their shrouds; Forgotten else by mankind An old man’s eagle mind.

The word ‘frenzy’, repeated, offers something very different from joy, even tragic joy. In this poem by a poet reaching the end of his life the word may also recall Theseus’ lines on ‘the poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling’ in the last act of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. That the desire for delirium or derangement is phrased as prayer adds greatly to the extreme emotion of the lines, in which anger and embitterment combine with a kind of smarting selfassurance; and Lear’s emotion here is clearly quite distinct from the gaiety he shares with Hamlet in ‘Lapis Lazuli’. Now associated with the genius close to madness of Blake and the almost supernatural genius of Michelangelo, this Lear is accompanied more appropriately by Timon than by Hamlet. The ‘sweet prince’ who understands that ‘the readiness is all’ and whose passing is projected by Fortinbras as a consolatory procession of ‘flights of angels’ singing him to ‘his rest’ has a sweeter passage by far than Timon who, aggravated to misanthropic fury, conceives of an isolated tomb ‘upon the beachèd verge of the salt flood’. This is a flight more apt to ‘An old man’s eagle mind’. ‘Eagle’ as adjectival is a Shakespearean use of one part of speech for another; and the eagle mind of age must involve vision over great distance – in Theseus’ speech the poet’s eye ‘doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven’ – and the ability to mark, pounce and devour. That Yeats projects such a scarified remaking of himself in old age argues the instability of his concept of ‘tragic joy’ in his last two books. Like every position maintained in his work, it too is susceptible to modification or even reversal by subsequent poems, as this self writes itself into new plenitudes and new erasures of being in an act of what comes to seem almost heroic self-definition. There is a paradoxical sense in this that Yeats is doing almost in reverse what Dowden recommended that his readers do with Shakespearean characters: take them as moral examples. For Yeats, the exemplary is to be found, perversely, where Dowden would find the cautionary: and, nothing if not contrary, Yeats is also, in this, risking shipwreck as he sets sail. It would be wrong to say that Timon’s misanthropy is the final point reached by Yeats as he contemplates death, because there is no final point, unless it is ‘where all the ladders start’ in ‘The Circus Animals’

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Desertion’; which is, as I have said, a point of origin as well as conclusion. Nevertheless, the curtly dismissive epitaph which Yeats writes for himself in ‘Under Ben Bulben’, that poem of deep and in many ways affronting perturbation – which was once, but is no longer, considered the final poem of his Collected Poems – contains an unmistakable echo of Timon’s epitaph for himself as it is reported to us at the end of the play: ‘Here lie I Timon, who, alive, all living men did hate; / Pass by and curse thy fill, but pass and stay not here thy gait’: Cast a cold eye On life, on death. Horseman, pass by!

part ii

Eliot’s Shakespeare

chapter 3

That man’s scope: Eliot’s Shakespeare criticism

poetry workshop ‘He has always been a student, and read extensively in English literature, especially Shakespeare. He has read practically all of Shakespeare, whom he admires, and retains much in memory.’1 Thus the testimony of Eliot’s parents when recommending him, at the age of seventeen, to the Head Master of Milton Academy. Eliot’s poetry and literary criticism, over the course of his subsequent life, amply justify their claim and make it clear that he spent a lifetime continuing to read and admire. Some of his most notable, controversial and historically persistent critical formulations occur during discussions of Shakespeare. Judgements on particular plays and characters have had a similarly lengthy critical history; and historians of the relationship between Shakespeare and literary modernism have judged that whole schools of Shakespearean literary criticism and theory have been instigated by or deeply indebted to Eliot. Richard Halpern, for instance, says that Eliot ‘established the basic protocols for twentiethcentury Shakespeare criticism’, protocols variously adapted by such critics as G. Wilson Knight, L. C. Knights, Northrop Frye and Cleanth Brooks. He also thinks that Eliot’s brief article ‘The Beating of a Drum’, published in 1923 and not reprinted, originates a primitivist discourse in the disciplinary language of anthropology whose influence on Shakespeare studies may be traced as far as the New Historicism of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, a critical kind not in other ways notably indebted to Eliot.2 Nevertheless, another literary historian, Hugh Grady, justifiably says that Eliot’s influence ‘had little to do with his published remarks on Shakespeare’ and that his greatest influence on subsequent Shakespeare criticism derives 1 2

Valerie Eliot (ed.), The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Vol. I: 1898–1922 (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), p. 6. Richard Halpern, Shakespeare Among the Moderns (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997), p. 16.

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‘from the margins of his own essays’.3 The fact is that Eliot’s entire critical oeuvre contains only two full-length essays on Shakespeare: ‘Hamlet and His Problems’ (1919), which Eliot reprinted in his first critical book, The Sacred Wood, in 1920, and which became simply ‘Hamlet’ in the Selected Essays in 1932, and ‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’ (1927). In Edinburgh in 1937 he gave two lectures on Shakespeare which he later modified into a single lecture delivered in Germany. This was published in the journal Der Monat as ‘Shakespeares Verkunst’ (‘Shakespeare’s Versification’) in 1950: but Eliot never published it in English. He registers his dissatisfaction with these lectures, which he now entitles The Development of Shakespeare’s Verse, in the preface to On Poetry and Poets (1957), where he says that, although he wishes he could have included them, he finds them ‘badly written, and in need of thorough revision – a task to be deferred to some indefinite future’: a future which never in fact arrived.4 This is all the more unfortunate since in the lectures, he says, ‘what I was trying to say still seems to me worth saying’. It is peculiarly of a piece with the almost fugitive nature of Eliot’s work on Shakespeare that what might have amounted to a major statement should remain unpublished and, in effect, unfinished.5 However, Eliot also tells us in this preface that he is publishing, as part of the essay ‘Poetry and Drama’, one of the lecture’s ‘best passages’, an analysis of the opening scene of Hamlet; and he also appends to that essay a note on the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet. While both are significant additions to Eliot’s Shakespeare criticism, they also therefore occur as isolated moments in an essay not on a specifically Shakespearean topic. Eliot is a remarkable critic of Shakespeare, but his Shakespeare criticism is sporadic. To take a purchase on it you must create an anthology of dispersed episodes. As Eliot ages he reviews his critical career and offers reasons for the relative paucity of his Shakespeare output. In ‘To Criticize the Critic’ (1961) he says that the earlier essays he likes most are those on Shakespeare’s contemporaries, not those on Shakespeare himself. ‘My own theorizing has been epiphenomenal of my tastes,’ he says;6 and Shakespeare’s contemporaries were manifestly what he elsewhere calls ‘the 3 4 5

6

Hugh Grady, The Modernist Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 148. T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber and Faber, 1957), p. 12. The MSS may be consulted in the Houghton Library of Harvard University. They are also extensively paraphrased and excerpted in Sudhakar Marathe’s T. S. Eliot’s Shakespearean Criticism: A Perfect Form of Development (Delhi: BR Publishing Corporation, 1989) and Charles Warren’s T. S. Eliot on Shakespeare (Ann Arbor and London: UMI Research Press, 1987). T. S. Eliot, To Criticize the Critic and Other Writings (1965; London: Faber and Faber, 1978), p. 20.

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influences which first introduce one to oneself’. In drawing a distinction between the ‘fecundating’ influence on a young poet which relatively unknown work might supply and the potentially ‘sterilising’ form of imitation which Shakespeare is almost bound to provoke, ‘To Criticize the Critic’ suggests how cannily deliberate in his choices the younger Eliot was. As a critic, therefore, it is with the work of writers other than Shakespeare that he first established an identity; and numerous commentators on his poetry have demonstrated its network of allusions to the lesser Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists and to the Metaphysical poets. Much attention has also been paid to the deep affinity in Eliot’s earlier poetry of both feeling and world view with those of Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy. Indeed, the usual way nowadays of understanding what Richard Halpern calls the ‘historical allegory’ of Eliot’s theory of a seventeenth-century ‘dissociation of sensibility’ is as a back-formation from his negative sense of the characteristics of his own modernity.8 ‘To Criticize the Critic’ also underwrites Eliot’s frequently expressed view that the truly necessary criticism will be written by a ‘practitioner’ of the art itself. In its status as adjunct to his own creative work Eliot’s criticism is, he says in ‘The Frontiers of Criticism’ (1956), ‘a by-product of my private poetryworkshop’.9 This is given emphasis by the fact that The Sacred Wood shares its title with a phrase in the poem ‘Ode’, published in Eliot’s volume Ara Vos Prec in the same year, 1920, but subsequently suppressed; and that both The Sacred Wood and The Waste Land draw their epigraphs from Petronius’ Satyricon. As ‘by-product’, however, this criticism may be at odds with the poetry which produces it as easily as it may be in tune with it: Eliot’s poetry by no means always practises what his criticism preaches. It can also be consigned by its producer to historical obsolescence: ‘To Criticize the Critic’ tells us that both the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ and the ‘objective correlative’ are already well on their way to being read only in their ‘historical context’.10 Although this apparent retraction has sometimes been read as disingenuous, there can be no doubting Eliot’s straightforwardness when, in his collection of essays Elizabethan Dramatists (1963), he prints neither the Hamlet essay nor ‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’, telling us in his preface that he finds them callow and even impudent. This is because, he thinks, it is appropriate for a younger man to write about minor writers but not about Shakespeare: ‘for the understanding of Shakespeare, a lifetime is not too long; 7 9 10

8 Ibid., p. 126. Shakespeare Among the Moderns, p. 16. T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber and Faber, 1957), p. 106. To Criticize the Critic, p. 19.

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and of Shakespeare, the development of one’s opinions may be the measure of one’s development in wisdom.’11 This rather begs the question of why he did not write more extensively about Shakespeare as he matured, or, indeed, why he did not offer us a fuller account of his own development in Shakespearean wisdom. Eliot may even be regarded here, towards the end of his life, as sounding a note of repining, particularly since as early as his 1932 essay on John Ford he speaks, harshly, of ‘the incommensurability of writers like Ford … with Shakespeare. It is not merely that they fail where he succeeds; it is that they had no conception of what he was trying to do; they speak another and cruder language.’12 As readers of Eliot’s criticism, we will certainly ourselves regret that he never pursued at any further length his judgement in his 1931 essay on Thomas Heywood that ‘The ethics of most of the greater Elizabethan dramatists is only intelligible as leading up to, or deriving from, that of Shakespeare: it has significance … only in the light of Shakespeare’s fuller revelation.’13 This sense of Shakespeare’s exceptionalism, if pursued at length, could only have produced work itself exceptional from this exceptional poet and critic. There is a further sense in which Eliot’s Shakespeare criticism, like his poetry in several senses, is fragmentary. In the preface to his Clark lectures (1926) – which remained unpublished in his lifetime – he tells us that they were intended as the first stage of a book to be called The School of Donne, which was to have been, in turn, the first volume of a trilogy along with Elizabethan Drama and The Tribe of Ben. Together these would have constituted ‘a criticism of the English Renaissance’.14 Presumably in these books Shakespeare would have been given more sustained treatment. Eliot projected The Disintegration of the Intellect as the general title of this trilogy: and it may be that what is perceived as disintegration is inherently unconducive to a proposed critical integration. It is striking that Eliot’s use of the word ‘Renaissance’ here is unique among his references to the English sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which did indeed appear to him far more a disintegration than a rebirth. In any case, it is clear that Eliot had mistaken himself in this projected enterprise. He is, pre-eminently, a critic at home in the essay and the review; and even some of his longer essays, such as ‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’ itself, show signs of structural instability. 11 12 14

T. S. Eliot, Elizabethan Dramatists (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), p. 6. Ibid., p. 123. 13 Ibid., p. 104. T. S. Eliot, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry, ed. Ronald Schuchard (London: Faber and Faber, 1993), p. 41.

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If Eliot’s decisions about his critical practice prevent our access to a systematic ‘development’ of his views on Shakespeare, however, we do have many notes towards the definition of such a thing in a rich, stimulating and provocative dispersal of individual readings and aperçus. During the course of his criticism Eliot conveys a strong sense of Shakespeare’s value as a potential model and stimulus: but he also understands Shakespeare’s nature as the foreclosing of opportunity. In his never treating Shakespeare at greater length as a critic Eliot may well have been aware that he was, of necessity, protecting himself as a poet.

towards anthropology Eliot is the one poet in this study whose criticism has had a far-reaching impact on the academic study of Shakespeare. Together with William Empson, he is the poet-critic without whom modern modes of Shakespeare criticism would have been unthinkable. That Eliot is self-consciously a reviser of opinion and taste is apparent from the way he engages with the work of other Shakespeare critics, both past and present, about which he is deeply knowledgeable and to which he is often spontaneously referential. When, in 1934, he writes a survey essay on Shakespeare criticism from Dryden to Coleridge for a collection edited by Harley Granville-Barker (whose work on Shakespeare in his Prefaces Eliot commends), he defines Coleridge as ‘perhaps the greatest single figure in Shakespeare criticism down to the present day’.15 In fact, however, he frequently finds Coleridge lacking, in a way coincident with his permanent argument with romanticism. In this very essay he takes issue with Coleridge’s definition of Shakespeare’s ‘philosophic mind’. This is an inaccurate way of thinking about thought in Shakespeare, Eliot thinks, and responsible for a great deal of redundant critical activity in which a ‘philosophy’ in Shakespeare is laboriously unearthed and explicated. For Eliot Shakespeare’s ‘philosophy’ is a chimera: ‘thought’ in his work is a thing drawn opportunistically from elsewhere. The Hamlet essay also takes Coleridge to task, along with Goethe, for writing a criticism of self-identification. Goethe ‘made of Hamlet a Werther’, and Coleridge ‘made of Hamlet a Coleridge’.16 We are to understand that such self-identifications seem to Eliot appropriatively self-dramatising; and, in relation to Othello and elsewhere, he is almost 15 16

‘Shakespearean Criticism I. From Dryden to Coleridge’, in Harley Granville-Barker and G. B. Harrison (eds.), A Companion to Shakespeare Studies (Cambridge University Press, 1934), p. 299. T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1932; 3rd enlarged edn, 1951), p. 141.

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preternaturally alert to self-dramatisation, even – perhaps particularly – at the most fraught moments of consciousness. This is one of the clear motives of his earlier poetry too and one of the reasons why ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ is to be read as a critique of late nineteenth-century romanticism, a reading I pursue in my next chapter. Eliot prefers eighteenth-century neoclassicism, and in a series of radio talks on Dryden in 1931 he suggests that we should historicise Dryden’s occasional censuring of Shakespeare so that it becomes correctively comprehensible to a contemporary.17 Neoclassicism here becomes a way of revealing the present to itself in its dubious evasions and tendentious certainties. Similarly, when he discovers in Samuel Johnson what appears an inexplicable error of judgement – Johnson, he thinks, opposes the admirable spontaneity of the comedies, which he favours, to what he regards as the laboriousness of the tragedies – this produces a memorable passage in the 1934 conspectus. Eliot is pursuing a theme he had announced in his Charles Eliot Norton lecture at Harvard, ‘Apology for the Countess of Pembroke’, the previous year, in which he discusses the way ‘comic relief’ in the histories is ‘taken up into a higher unity of feeling’ and offers this as his very tentative ‘theory about Shakespeare’: that of a ‘Unity of Sentiment’ of the kind which Philip Sidney demands in his Apology for Poetry.18 Now, responding to Johnson, Eliot breaks through the almost parodically dutiful academic-speak of this essay to pursue an objection into unpredictable territory. The passage is suddenly – and disquietedly – the product of this poet’s own workshop; and the new charge of interest strains its syntax. Johnson’s sense of the alternation between tragic and comic in the histories is actually, Eliot thinks, ‘something much more than an alternation; he perceives that something quite different and new is produced’: Johnson, by his simple integrity, in being wrong has happened upon some truth much deeper than he knew. For to those who have experienced the full horror of life, tragedy is still inadequate. Sophocles felt more of it than he could express, when he wrote Oedipus the King; Shakespeare, when he wrote Hamlet; and Shakespeare had the advantage of being able to employ his grave-diggers. In the end, horror and laughter may be one – only when horror and laughter have become as horrible and laughable as they may be; and – whatever the conscious intention of 17 18

See ‘John Dryden – III. Dryden the Critic, Defender of Sanity’, Listener, 5, 120 (29 April 1931), pp. 724–5. T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the Relation of Criticism to Poetry in England (London: Faber and Faber, 1933), pp. 42, 43. In this same lecture Eliot, in a judgement of his own at least as bizarre as Johnson’s, deems the histories ‘plays of a transient and unsatisfactory type’ (p. 43).

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authors – you may laugh or shudder over Oedipus or Hamlet or King Lear – or both at once: then only do you perceive that the aim of the comic and the tragic dramatist is the same: they are equally serious … The distinction between the tragic and the comic is an account of the way in which we try to live; when we get below it, as in King Lear, we have an account of the way in which we do live.19

This has the authoritative surprise, panache and self-involvement of Eliot’s criticism at its best. Initially suspecting that we will ‘boggle over’ Johnson’s observation, Eliot then probes it until it releases an unexpected meaning; and this has at least as much to do with Eliot’s own view of ‘the way in which we do live’ as it has with anything Johnson may actually be thought to be discovering in Shakespeare. The passage is congruent, for instance, with Eliot’s ringingly famous declaration in his essay on Matthew Arnold (1933) that ‘the essential advantage for a poet is not, to have a beautiful world with which to deal: it is to be able to see beneath both beauty and ugliness; to see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory’.20 There is something very deep in Eliot’s constitution as both critic and poet that insists on the collapsing of traditional binaries – generic, aesthetic and ethical: and it is close to the heart of his own highly individual talent.21 In this passage Eliot is also offering a further elaboration, although in quite different discursive terms, of the view of drama expounded in ‘The Beating of a Drum’. There, discussing the Fool in Elizabethan drama, he recommends to literary critics the study of anthropology and offers an anthropological reading of the Fool in Lear. The Fool is, he proposes, ‘a possessed; a very cunning and very intuitive person; he has more than a suggestion of the shaman or medicine man’.22 As such, he must be accounted a ‘comic’ character; and Eliot proposes comparable kinds of comedy in some perhaps unlikely places: in Caliban, in the weird sisters as well as the Porter in Macbeth, and in Antony in the drunken scene on Pompey’s galley in Antony and Cleopatra. Eliot traces the prototype of this ‘true Fool’ to the Doctor figure in the mummers’ play of St George and the Dragon; and he displays here as elsewhere an attachment to the anthropological theory of the development of tragedy and comedy out of a common form. Both comic and tragic are present, he believes, ‘in all savage or

19 21

22

‘From Dryden to Coleridge’, pp. 295–6. 20 The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, p. 106. Ironically, Eliot is actually close here to Johnson’s account of Shakespeare’s ‘mingled drama’. His view of Johnson probably derives from a misunderstanding of his dialectical criticism and the sense of the word ‘skill’ in the statement in his Preface that Shakespeare’s ‘tragedy seems to be skill, his comedy to be instinct’. T. S. Eliot, ‘The Beating of a Drum’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 6 October 1923, p. 11.

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primitive art’; and ‘comedy and tragedy are late, and perhaps impermanent intellectual abstractions’.23 The ‘rhythm’ of that primitivity, Eliot says, has been lost to modern Shakespeare production and interpretation; and, unlike some Shakespeare critics, he shows a marked and consistent interest in Shakespearean production – notably, in the 1920s, in the experimental theatre of the Phoenix Society. Such a rhythm may still be found, however, in such contemporaries as Charlie Chaplin, the juggler Enrico Rastelli and the dancer Massine (Eliot often refers excitedly to the Ballets Russes in his earlier critical writing). While the terms ‘primitive’ and ‘savage’ are now culturally and anthropologically outmoded and ideologically suspect, the conclusion of this essay, finding the origin of drama in ritual, resonates in various ways for all readers of Eliot when it uncovers a Shakespeare inheriting the neediness, desire and reasoning consequent on ‘primitive’ impulse, a Shakespeare beating a drum: primitive man acted in a certain way and then found a reason for it. An unoccupied person, finding a drum, may be seized with a desire to beat it; but unless he is an imbecile he will be unable to continue beating it, and thereby satisfying a need (rather than a ‘desire’), without finding a reason for so doing. The reason may be the long continued drought. The next generation or the next civilization will find a more plausible reason for beating a drum. Shakespeare and Racine – or rather the developments which led up to them – each found his own reason. The reasons may be divided into tragedy and comedy. We still have similar reasons, but we have lost the drum.24

Writing this in 1923, Eliot clearly has in mind his own experiments in poetic drama which resulted first in ‘Sweeney Agonistes’ (subtitled ‘Fragments of an Aristophanic Melodrama’), published in 1926, which attempts to reintroduce the rhythm of the primitive drum into modern verse. Indeed, when he wrote to Arnold Bennett in 1924 about his dramatic experiment, he was projecting a rhythmic prose ‘perhaps with certain things in it accentuated by drum-beats’.25 Consistently with his instancing of Chaplin in the article, Eliot proposes in ‘The Possibility of a Poetic Drama’, collected in The Sacred Wood in 1920, that contemporary verse dramatists take cognisance of the possibilities of ‘the music-hall comedian’;26 to whom Eliot pays his own homage in the essay on Marie Lloyd which he wrote in the same year as ‘The Beating of a Drum’ and which he 23 25 26

Ibid. 24 Ibid. The Journals of Arnold Bennett 1921–1928, ed. Newman Flower (London: Cassell and Co., 1933), p. 52 (entry for 10 September 1924). T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1920; London: Methuen, 1960), p. 70.

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subsequently made a point of including in his Selected Essays, where it is exceptionally an essay on a non-literary figure. In these collocations of anthropology and contemporary popular-cultural forms and in their underwriting in his own poetic and dramatic practice Eliot is preparing the ground for the more ‘primitive’ energies let loose in some later twentiethcentury Shakespeare productions; and he is also enthusiastically initiating the turn to various forms of anthropological Shakespeare criticism.

character and rhetoric There are manifest affinities between this strain in Eliot’s criticism and the critical work on Shakespeare of two of his contemporaries, Wyndham Lewis and G. Wilson Knight. In Lewis’s The Lion and the Fox he writes of how ‘the comic servant of the commedia dell’ arte harlequin, and every famous comic incarnation, down to Chaplin’s Charlie, have at the root of their function a considerable identity with that of the greatest tragic poet’, although this is offered as an almost parenthetical suggestion rather than an exercise in precise demonstration.27 Similarly, one of the best known of Knight’s essays in The Wheel of Fire is entitled ‘King Lear and the Comedy of the Grotesque’, in which he attempts to demonstrate that ‘Though its impact usually appears vastly different from that of tragedy, yet there is a humour that treads the brink of tears, and tragedy which needs but an infinitesimal shift of perspective to disclose the varied riches of comedy.’28 It is difficult to specify mutual critical influences between Eliot and Lewis on the one hand and Eliot and Knight on the other. Eliot encouraged Lewis’s anthropological interests and what we might now consider ‘crossover’ forms of literary criticism by giving him relevant books for review in The Criterion; and he tells us in his introduction to The Wheel of Fire that he read Knight’s essays in manuscript. In a memoir Knight, while taking care to note the significant differences between Eliot and himself, says that Eliot was responsible for recommending and even physically delivering the book to its original publisher.29 Hugh Grady, in fact, regards Eliot as a ‘co-creator’ with Knight,30 whose criticism was profoundly influenced by Eliot’s poetry; and Eliot as poet is, in turn, indebted in some respects in ‘Coriolan’ and 27 28 29 30

Wyndham Lewis, The Lion and the Fox (1927; London: Methuen, 1951), p. 132. G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire (1930; revised and enlarged edn, London: Methuen, 1949), p. 160. G. Wilson Knight, ‘T. S. Eliot: Some Literary Impressions’, in T. S. Eliot: The Man and His Work, ed. Allen Tate (1966; London: Chatto and Windus, 1967), p. 246. The Modernist Shakespeare, p. 90.

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‘Marina’ to Knight’s readings of Coriolanus and Pericles – even if, in my view, as I indicate in my next chapter, not at all as indebted as Knight himself and some other commentators too would have it. It is clear, however, that Eliot’s allegiances among contemporary Shakespeare critics were eclectic; and we might best understand them as framed by judgements on two of his most notable immediate precursors. He decisively favours A. C. Swinburne over A. C. Bradley, resoundingly approving the former for ‘his almost unerring gift for selection’ while caustically dismissing the latter’s Four Plays of Shakespeare as ‘a needless luxury’.31 Eliot’s blunt hostility to Bradley contrasts strongly with William Empson’s high approbation in The Structure of Complex Words: it was not necessary to dismiss Bradley to be an innovatively modern Shakespeare critic.32 Eliot is himself outstandingly gifted with the capacity for memorably telling selection. He disarmingly shows that he knows this when, in ‘To Criticize the Critic’, he offers a further reason for having written about the lesser Elizabethans and Jacobeans rather than Shakespeare: that quotation from them, since it was likely to be a novelty for most of his readers, did more critical work than would have been possible by familiar quotation from Shakespeare. If Eliot is, at least to this extent, signalling a certain methodological affinity with Swinburne in his favouring a text-based responsiveness, he is also giving evidence of a decisive turn against Bradleyan ‘character’ criticism. The favouring of Swinburne over Bradley is therefore the impulse to that form of close linguistic attentiveness which eventually resulted in the ‘New Criticism’ on which Eliot was deeply influential. Even so, Eliot does intermittently have penetrating things to say about Shakespearean character: about Hamlet in the ‘Hamlet’ essay, about Othello’s self-dramatisation, and more significantly when he elaborates the latter, in ‘“Rhetoric” and Poetic Drama’, as a theory of the way Shakespeare’s finest rhetoric occurs in situations ‘where a character in the play sees himself in a dramatic light’.33 In addition to Othello’s final speech (where Eliot thinks he is ‘cheering himself up’), he instances part of Coriolanus’s penultimate short speech, ‘If you have writ your annals true …’, Timon’s last speech, ‘Come not to me again’, and, more surprisingly, 31

32 33

The Sacred Wood, p. 135; ‘London Letter’, Dial, 73, 1 (July 1922), p. 95. Eliot’s disparagement of Bradley is all the more forcefully negative for its occurring in the context of celebrating his brother F. H. Bradley’s Appearance and Reality as ‘a fine work of art’. Empson does find Bradley ‘a bit unctuous’ but still admires his ‘magnificent analysis’ of Othello. See The Structure of Complex Words (1951; 3rd edn, London: Chatto and Windus, 1977), pp. 136, 229. Selected Essays, p. 39.

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Enobarbus’s speech about Cleopatra on the Cydnus in which, Eliot says, Enobarbus sees Cleopatra ‘in this dramatic light’. This is surprising since, of necessity, it cannot be clear whether the dramatisation here is Enobarbus’s, and signals the full extent of his awed fascination, or Cleopatra’s own, to which he is responsive: and the ‘rhetoric’ is of course Enobarbus’s. Eliot’s point, however, is that at such moments rhetoric becomes revelatory, giving us ‘a new clue to the character, in noting the angle from which he views himself’.34 The fact that three of his examples are taken from speeches by characters at the point of death addressing others, with their posthumous reputations at least partly in mind, suggests that Eliot’s sense of rhetorical selfdramatisation has affinities with Yeats’s ‘tragic joy’. The conceptions may be regarded as potentially fruitful complementarities: Eliot reading the tendency as almost entirely negative, Yeats turning it towards affirmation with a virtually Nietzschean panache. Yeats includes his Shakespearean conception in his own poetry, as we have seen; and the fact that Eliot in some ways peculiarly adduces Enobarbus’s magnificently opulent speech in this way is a measure of that fascination with Antony and Cleopatra which also produces references to it in ‘Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar’ and the pastiche of the Enobarbus passage in The Waste Land, where a self-dramatisation now become narcissistically decadent may be what Eliot’s modernist rhetoric of allusion both reveals and puts under judgement. In ‘Ben Jonson’ (1919) Eliot compares Shakespearean and Jonsonian characterisation, probing the manner in which the personality of an author undergoes ‘transfusion’ into dramatic character in ‘complex and devious’ ways. The extra dimension possessed by Shakespeare’s characters does not mean that Jonson’s do not also spring from an emotional source: but Shakespeare’s represent ‘a more complex tissue of feelings and desires, as well as a more supple, a more susceptible temperament’.35 Shakespeare’s supple susceptibility is defined in this essay primarily in relation to Falstaff; but it continues to impress Eliot over the course of his life and is probably the prompt to his conception of the ‘third voice’ of poetry in ‘The Three Voices of Poetry’ in 1953. Here Eliot regards the individuality of lyric as the ‘first’ voice, and dramatic characterisation, in which author and character say the same thing but may mean something slightly different by it, as the second: and Shakespeare is in command of both voices. The third voice is an ‘impersonal’ one possible only to ‘the supreme poetic dramatists’. This is the 34

The Sacred Wood, pp. 81, 82.

35

Selected Essays, pp. 157–8.

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voice that utters such things as ‘Ripeness is all’ and ‘Simply the thing I am shall make me live’: For the work of a great poetic dramatist, like Shakespeare, constitutes a world. Each character speaks for himself, but no other poet could have found those words for him to speak. If you seek for Shakespeare, you will find him only in the characters he created; for the one thing in common between the characters is that no one but Shakespeare could have created any of them. The world of a great poetic dramatist is a world in which the creator is everywhere present, and everywhere hidden.36

There is an element of tautology in this, but it is a tautology of the sublime, as Eliot stands almost aghast in admiration of Shakespeare’s aphoristic wisdom. Appropriate to both the wisdom and the admiration is his figure for the creator of such dramatic character; for the idea of the creator as ‘everywhere present and everywhere hidden’ draws on the figuration of God in Christian mystical theology. The passage also raises to a new power of comprehensiveness and intensity the word ‘impersonal’ in Eliot’s criticism. Used to apply to the ‘third voice’, it represents the astonishing resourcefulness with which a whole world may be conjured from a dramatic word by a sufficiently supple susceptibility.

disintegrations and integrations Despite this celebration of what Shakespearean characterisation makes possible, however, Eliot takes from those contemporary Shakespeare critics who most interested him – J. M. Robertson, the ‘disintegrator’, as well as Wyndham Lewis and Wilson Knight – inspiration for a kind of writing about Shakespeare which is not character based. Eliot’s Hamlet essay originated as a review of a book on the play by Robertson, and his view of it as an ‘artistic failure’ is in part a consequence of his agreeing with Robertson’s account of its composition by accretion.37 Many years later, in ‘To Criticize the Critic’, he berates himself for coat-trailing in this essay, confessing that his depreciation of the play was driven by the desire to redirect attention to later, then much less popular, plays such as Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra.38 Neither the initial judgement nor the subsequent part-retraction, however, can entirely distract attention from that 36 37

38

On Poetry and Poets, p. 102. Eliot is also polemically supportive of Robertson in a letter to the Nation and Athenaeum on 18 December 1926 (p. 418) and in an article entitled ‘The Problems of the Shakespeare Sonnets’ in the same journal on 12 February 1927 (pp. 664, 666), a review of Robertson’s book of the same title. To Criticize the Critic, pp. 19–20.

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element in the essay which appears to manifest a degree of self-involvement and self-recognition. Judging that the play, like the Sonnets, is ‘full of some stuff that the writer could not drag to light, contemplate, or manipulate into art’, Eliot reads Hamlet’s levity as a form of ‘emotional relief’ and transfers this – much too quickly and by suspect sleight of hand, some commentators have felt – to Shakespeare himself, reading it as a function of the author’s necessitousness too: In the character Hamlet it is the buffoonery of an emotion which can find no outlet in action; in the dramatist it is the buffoonery of an emotion which he cannot express in art. The intense feeling, ecstatic or terrible, without an object or exceeding its object, is something which every person of sensibility has known; it is doubtless a subject of study for pathologists. It often occurs in adolescence: the ordinary person puts these feelings to sleep, or trims down his feelings to fit the business world; the artist keeps them alive by his ability to intensify the world to his emotions.39

The transfer of need, in relation to a play whose main subject matter Eliot identifies as the effect of a mother’s guilt upon her son, seems to extend beyond Hamlet and Shakespeare to Eliot himself. At this point the quasiscientific rigour of the early criticism appears to open up into an abyss of unspecified personal emotion. The awkward lack of lucidity in the clause ‘to intensify the world to his emotions’ indicates the stress involved in this painful form of obliquity. In this essay, whose fame far exceeds its quality, Eliot appears to make Shakespeare a function of his own personal and artistic desire or demand; the criticism secretes a psychology coterminous with the obliquity of the early poetry and its preoccupation with the ‘buried life’. It is an irony, in the light of what Eliot says about Coleridge’s and Goethe’s Hamlets, that here at least Eliot appears to make of Hamlet an Eliot; and in a study of modern recensions of the play Martin Scofield reads it as the work of Shakespeare’s closest in its emotions to Eliot’s own in his poems.40 If Hamlet was undoubtedly an artistic failure for Eliot, it was in all sorts of ways undoubtedly an artistic influence too. In ‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’, wittily contrasting various recent interpretations of Shakespeare, Eliot characterises Wyndham Lewis’s The Lion and the Fox, first published in the same year, as offering a ‘ferocious Shakespeare, a furious Samson’.41 This is in fact almost a timid description 39 40 41

Selected Essays, p. 146. See Martin Scofield, The Ghosts of Hamlet: The Play and Modern Writers (Cambridge University Press, 1980). Selected Essays, p. 126.

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of the Shakespeare on offer in Lewis’s book. Purportedly a study of the hero in Shakespeare, it is entitled after what Lewis calls a ‘famous apologuic figure of Machiavelli’s’; it is propelled by an account of Machiavelli and his European influence; and it contains chapters entitled ‘Shakespeare as Executioner’ and ‘Shakespeare’s Nihilism’.42 Although Lewis says that Shakespeare is ‘much more a bolshevick [sic] … than a figure of conservative romance’,43 The Lion and the Fox has been read by some as proto-fascist. Eliot praises the book in several places and reviewed a reprint in 1937, denying the charge of fascism.44 Although critical of several aspects of Lewis’s view of the Shakespearean hero, he believes that the book ‘says the best things that have been said about certain plays’ and ‘contains the most revelatory criticism of Timon, Troilus, and Coriolanus that I have read’.45 Coriolanus is a figure of both manifest and latent significance throughout Eliot’s career. While Eliot and Lewis share an anthropological discourse on Shakespeare in the 1920s, Eliot’s reading of Lewis is of more immediate significance to his poetry than to his criticism, and notably to ‘Coriolan’, and I shall return to the topic in my next chapter. Turning decisively from Robertson’s ‘disintegrationist’ view of Shakespeare, in a way that follows his own spiritual or religious development, Eliot becomes interested, in the later 1920s, in Wilson Knight’s readings of reiterated imagery and symbol, in which the metaphysical predominates over the ethical and texts are read ‘spatially’ as well as temporally. Eliot derives from, or at least finds confirmed in, Knight’s then revolutionary theories a view of Shakespearean ‘pattern’ consisting of ‘important and very serious recurrences of mood and theme’. What excites Eliot in Knight is therefore essentially his modernist readings of Shakespeare; and I shall pursue the influence or affinity in relation to Eliot’s poems in my next chapter. Eliot was also, however, interested in the metaphysical, occasionally occult, dimension of Knight’s work and is most indebted to his readings of the last plays in the essays eventually collected as The Imperial Theme (1931). The image of Shakespeare produced by Knight becomes for Eliot what he defines in his 1930 introduction to The Wheel of Fire: that of a master of language capable of both satisfying a public and remaining ‘steadfast in … integrity of exploration’.46 This projects an 42

43 44 46

The Lion and the Fox, p. 83. ‘Apologuic’ is Lewis’s coinage from the noun ‘apologue’, meaning a moral fable, especially one in which the speakers are taken from the animal world. The combination of lion and fox is recommended by Machiavelli as the one most appropriate for the prince. Ibid., p. 14. ‘The Lion and the Fox’, Twentieth Century Verse, 6/7 (Nov./Dec. 1937), unpaginated. 45 Ibid. Eliot, Introduction to The Wheel of Fire, p. xviii.

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exemplary image of an ageing Shakespeare congruent with the recommendation in ‘East Coker’ that ‘Old men ought to be explorers’, and congruent also with the protean experimentalism of Eliot’s own writing.

one poem Recurrent pattern in Shakespeare’s work is also confirmation for Eliot of something he maintains frequently: its unity. Probably the central statement on this occurs in his essay on John Ford in 1932, where he defines a ‘continuous development from first to last’: a development in which the choice both of theme and of dramatic and verse technique in each play seems to be determined increasingly by Shakespeare’s state of feeling, by the particular stage of his emotional maturity at the time. What is ‘the whole man’ is not simply his greatest or maturest achievement, but the whole pattern formed by the sequence of plays; so that we may say confidently that the full meaning of any one of his plays is not in itself alone, but in that play in the order in which it was written, in its relation to all of Shakespeare’s other plays, earlier and later; we must know all of Shakespeare’s work in order to know anything of it. No other dramatist of the time approaches anywhere near to this perfection of pattern, of pattern superficial and profound; but the measure in which dramatists and poets approximate to this unity in a lifetime’s work is one of the measures of major poetry and drama.47

Eliot’s critical procedures sometimes involve, as here, the counselling of his readers in ideals of perfect reading. However, the penultimate sentence of this passage is hyperbolic and pedagogically forbidding: surely we will know something of Shakespeare’s work without knowing all of it? Yet the persistence with which he repeats the point elsewhere suggests that it is for him a fundamental belief. When, later in the same essay, he writes that ‘The whole of Shakespeare’s work is one poem; and it is the poetry of it in this sense, not the poetry of isolated lines and passages or the poetry of the single figures he created, that matters most’, he is articulating a profoundly symbolist conception of Shakespeare.48 Doing so, he is also proposing a critical programme taken up by others, notably Ted Hughes, whose conception of Shakespeare may well have originated in this essay as well as in a key observation by Yeats, although it could hardly be more at odds with contemporary academic ways of conceiving of the Shakespeare ‘text’. Eliot often registers simple astonishment at both Shakespeare’s hugely absorptive capacity and his exfoliating progression. This is clear when he reviews a book by Middleton Murry in 1936: 47

Elizabethan Dramatists, pp. 120–1.

48

Ibid., p. 132.

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I do not think that Shakespeare quite fits into either the class of people who mature quickly or the class of those who mature late. Shakespeare arrived in a very short number of years at a maturity which seems complete: no one has ever gone further in a short time. We cannot explain that away by saying that he started ripe: the early works are there to disprove it. But unlike most of us, he wasted no time; and everything he wrote he turned to account for his further development.49

This says something fascinatingly different from what is usually said about poetic development, which is most often understood as the absorption and transformation of external influence, experiential or stylistic, or both. This passage would be much more conventional if Eliot had written ‘read’ instead of ‘wrote’ in his final sentence. Instead, he is arrestingly intimating a Shakespeare who is influenced by himself: his own work becomes the material necessary for absorption before the new advance can be made. Eliot was interested in and wrote elsewhere too about the importance of poets’ borrowings from themselves.50 Self-borrowing and self-absorption (perhaps in both senses of the word) are the basis of Eliot’s absolutely meaning it when he says that we cannot understand any single play of Shakespeare’s without understanding all of them, and why in the essay ‘Goethe as the Sage’ (1955) he goes so far as to impose a reverse chronological and developmental obligation on Shakespeare’s readers when he insists that ‘the unity of Shakespeare’s work is such that you not only cannot understand the later plays unless you know the early plays: you cannot understand the early plays without knowing the later ones’.51 In all of these respects Eliot is figuring Shakespeare in ways analogous to his own development. Ezra Pound said of Eliot, in amazement, that ‘he has actually trained himself and modernized himself on his own’.52 So Eliot too is a poet who ‘arrived in a very short number of years [at] maturity’; in his case, that of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. He is also a poet who turns everything he writes to account for his further development, and in some of the most literal ways: by deploying in new structures material written long prior to their discovery, as he does in The Waste Land, ‘The Hollow Men’ and Ash-Wednesday; and by turning the five-part structure discovered for The Waste Land into the deliberated and repeated five-part 49 50

51 52

‘Mr. Murry’s Shakespeare’, Criterion, 15, 61 (July 1936), pp. 708–10. See the gobbets assembled by Christopher Ricks in Appendix D, section iii, of his edition of Eliot’s Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909–1917 (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), pp. 391–4. These were all written between 1919 and 1928. On Poetry and Poets, p. 214. Ezra Pound to Harriet Monroe, 30 September 1914, in Ezra Pound, Letters, ed. D. D. Paige (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), p. 40.

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structure of each of the Four Quartets. At least one significant study views Eliot as deliberately attempting, by transforming earlier material in his later work, ‘to unify the whole body of his poetry and plays quite as he saw Shakespeare’s and Dante’s work unified and marked by a single “developing personality”’.53 However, even if this, or something like it, is so, any such effort must also have fuelled the anxiety responsible for the overall shape of Eliot’s oeuvre, both in its experimental radicalism and in its comparative exiguousness: the fear of repetition or self-imitation. Eliot absorbs a lesson from Shakespeare, then, in the same engagement in which he registers an astonishment at him, so that the engagement becomes creative as well as critical, a further turning of something to account. Even so, it is the astonishment which prevails in the criticism: as when, outstandingly, Eliot tells us at the end of his Norton lectures that ‘some of the poetry to which I am most devoted … is poetry which I am not sure I understand yet: for instance, Shakespeare’s’.54

versification In considering Shakespeare’s development, Eliot’s primary object of critical attention is, as the title he eventually gave his 1937 lectures has it, ‘the development of Shakespeare’s versification’. Eliot’s published criticism tells, intermittently, the story of what Shakespeare managed in his experiments with what was when he adopted it what ‘The Possibility of a Poetic Drama’, collected in The Sacred Wood in 1920, calls ‘a crude form’. ‘To create a form is not merely to invent a shape, a rhyme or rhythm,’ Eliot says here: ‘It is also the realization of the whole appropriate content of this rhyme or rhythm.’ Form is not merely a pattern that can be described, but ‘a precise way of thinking and feeling’.55 Examining the development of versification in Shakespeare, Eliot frequently analyses the relationship between form and feeling and the way a rhyme or rhythm realises – in the sense both of apperceiving and making actual – an appropriate content. In ‘Seneca in Elizabethan Translation’ (1927) he illustrates Shakespeare’s inheritance of a blank-verse cadence from both Marlowe and Seneca, showing in particular, and with effective delicacy, how Clarence’s dream in Richard III absorbs the magnificence of Senecan rhetoric. Defining some of the further transformations of blank verse consequent upon this 53 54

Elisabeth Schneider, T. S. Eliot: The Pattern in the Carpet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), p. 5. The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, p. 151. 55 The Sacred Wood, p. 63.

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absorption, Eliot indicates how his interest in versification is also an interest in far more than versification. ‘Few things that can happen to a nation,’ he says, ‘are more important than the invention of a new form of verse.’56 The premium placed on versification here, the sense that the microcosm of poetry matters greatly in the macrocosm of the nation, is matched in an ‘introductory essay’ to a limited edition of Samuel Johnson’s London and The Vanity of Human Wishes in 1930. History, or at least literary history, virtually forecasts itself for Eliot in the versification of Shakespeare and his contemporaries when he suggests that a major part of their effort with blank verse was to adapt a medium originally ‘almost intractably poetic, so that it would carry the burdens and exhibit the subtleties of prose; and they accomplished this before prose itself was highly developed’.57 This is possibly itself a back-formation from the modernist insistence that poetry should be at least as well written as prose: so that here, as elsewhere in Eliot’s discussions of Shakespearean versification, there is an implicit argument with the poetry of romanticism and its after-effects, and an implicit contemporary self-interest and self-reference. In ‘The Music of Poetry’ (1942), which cites Wilson Knight when it defines the Shakespearean play as ‘a very complex musical structure’, Eliot understands Shakespeare’s development as a form of binary, saying that he ‘carried out, in one short lifetime, the task of two poets’ in two separate periods: During the first, he was slowly adapting his form to colloquial speech: so that by the time he wrote Antony and Cleopatra he had devised a medium in which everything that any dramatic character might have to say, whether high or low, ‘poetical’ or ‘prosaic’, could be said with naturalness and beauty. Having got to this point, he began to elaborate. The first period – of the poet who began with Venus and Adonis, but who had already, in Love’s Labour’s Lost, begun to see what he had to do – is from artificiality to simplicity, from stiffness to suppleness. The later plays move from simplicity towards elaboration. The late Shakespeare is occupied with the other task of the poet – that of experimenting to see how elaborate, how complicated, the music could be made without losing touch with colloquial speech altogether, and without his characters ceasing to be human beings.58

This is a wonderfully distinctive kind of analytic and descriptive criticism whose justice has simply to be admitted. It is also a kind which inscribes into its Shakespearean binary subsequent English literary history since, for Eliot, the direction of simplicity was taken by Wordsworth, that of elaboration by 56 57 58

Elizabethan Dramatists, p. 53. Samuel Johnson, ‘London: A Poem’ and ‘The Vanity of Human Wishes’, with an introductory essay by T. S. Eliot (London: Frederick Etchells and Hugh Macdonald, 1930), p. 13. On Poetry and Poets, pp. 35–6.

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Milton, with all that followed on from those elections in terms of the diction and versification of English poetry. One of Eliot’s charges in his first essay on Milton is that he writes a language never actually spoken by men: and he is consistently approving of the fact that Shakespeare’s language never strays too far from the norms of spoken English. We shall see Ted Hughes’s linguistic theorising in relation to Shakespeare developing partly from a misreading of Eliot here. Hughes believes Eliot to have read Shakespeare’s simplification and elaboration not as chronologically distinct phases of development, but as a simultaneous process of creative activity; and he then defines a Shakespeare who manages to accomplish exactly this. The self-interest of Eliot’s Shakespeare criticism becomes explicit when he writes as a ‘practitioner’ of poetic drama. In ‘Poetry and Drama’ (1951) he discusses the opening scene of Hamlet – in a way that perhaps now tacitly revises his earlier opinion of the play – finding it an example of a maturity in which Shakespeare is outstandingly ‘simplified and sure’. Defining a form of verse which is, in itself, an intensification of drama, he says that ‘No poet has begun to master dramatic verse until he can write lines which, like these in Hamlet, are transparent. You are consciously attending, not to the poetry, but to the meaning of the poetry.’59 Eliot’s italics make clear his admiration for, and suggest his desire to emulate, the achievement; and he goes on to discuss his own verse drama in this Shakespearean context. The ideal is for dramatic verse to be not transparent only to ‘meaning’ but to colloquiality; Eliot concludes with his brilliant note on the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet in which he discovers Shakespeare, even early in his career, capable of a poetry which, while staying in touch with ordinary speech, also composes ‘a musical pattern … as surprising in its kind as that in the early work of Beethoven’.60 Analysing the pattern, Eliot brings together the absorption of a critical method partly derived from Wilson Knight together with his own practitioner’s intimate knowledge of the movement and structure possible to dramatic verse. The resulting tribute to Shakespeare is necessarily also the register of personal incapacity: In this scene, Shakespeare achieves a perfection of verse which, being perfection, neither he nor anyone else could excel – for this particular purpose. The stiffness, the artificiality, the poetic decoration of his earlier verse has finally given place to a simplification to [sic] the language of natural speech, and this language of conversation again raised to great poetry, and to great poetry which is essentially dramatic: for the scene has a structure of which each line is an essential part.61

59

On Poetry and Poets, p. 75.

60

Ibid., p. 87.

61

Ibid., p. 88.

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By this stage in his own development Shakespeare has become a usable tool in Eliot’s poetry workshop. And not only in relation to his verse drama, since his observations on the ‘transparency’ of poetry may also gloss the line in ‘East Coker’, ‘The poetry does not matter’; and his reference to Beethoven reminds us that the composer had also been much on Eliot’s mind during the composition of Four Quartets, which has its own ‘musical pattern’. Even so, Eliot is also fully aware here and elsewhere of how awkward a presence Shakespeare may be for any poetic dramatist who comes after him. In the second of his Milton essays, in 1947, he says that ‘Anyone who tries to write poetic drama, even today, should know that half of his energy must be exhausted in the effort to escape from the constricting toils of Shakespeare: the moment his attention is relaxed, or his mind fatigued, he will lapse into bad Shakespearean verse.’62 For Eliot the practitioner, the complex negotiation with Shakespeare must be a matter of perpetual poetic vigilance.

dante ‘Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them; there is no third,’ Eliot says in ‘Dante’ (1929).63 At several important points in his criticism he brings Shakespeare into relation with Dante, that Dante who is variously influential on his own poetry and significant to his whole sense of poetic possibility, and on whom he wrote the early essay which concludes The Sacred Wood, the major essay of 1929 given a section to itself in the Selected Essays, and a more personal adjunct to it, ‘What Dante Means To Me’, in 1950. In the 1928 preface to The Sacred Wood Eliot states a preference with absolute certainty, saying that he prefers the poetry of Dante to that of Shakespeare because ‘it seems to me to illustrate a saner attitude towards the mystery of life’.64 A couple of years later, in his introduction to The Wheel of Fire, he again maintains a preference for Dante’s poetry, now because it has, unlike Shakespeare’s, ‘a clear philosophical pattern’: but he is less absolute here, saying that ‘this is not a judgement of superiority or even a statement that I enjoy it more as poetry’. He even thinks now that Shakespeare’s poetic, as opposed to his philosophical, ‘pattern’ is ‘more complex’ than Dante’s.65 The 1929 ‘Dante’ essay understands them as ‘complementary’: ‘Shakespeare understands a greater extent and variety of human life than 62 65

Ibid., p. 150. 63 Selected Essays, p. 265. 64 The Sacred Wood, p. x. Introduction to The Wheel of Fire, pp. xvi, xix.

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Dante; but … Dante understands deeper degrees of degradation and higher degrees of exaltation. And a further wisdom is reached when we see clearly that this indicates the equality of the two men.’66 ‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’ distinguishes them in relation to ‘thought’. Although Dante benefits from having had a coherent philosophical system, Shakespeare can make ‘equally great poetry’ from an inferior philosophy.67 The point in Eliot’s so frequently drawing Dante and Shakespeare together seems not comparison so much as the manifestation of the permanence and immediacy of each to his consciousness as critic and poet. It is as though together they provide a form of gauge, a sometimes antagonistic and sometimes complementary mode of literary, intellectual, ethical and, in the end, spiritual judgement. In ‘Ben Jonson’ (1919) an essential similarity between them is opposed to Jonson’s deliberate ‘poetry of the surface’: Shakespeare, and smaller men also, are in the end more difficult, but they offer something at the start to encourage the student or to satisfy those who want nothing more; they are suggestive, evocative, a phrase, a voice; they offer poetry in detail as well as design. So does Dante offer something, a phrase everywhere … even to readers who have no Italian; and Dante and Shakespeare have poetry of design as well as of detail.68

‘ . . . suggestive, evocative, a phrase, a voice’: the glissade from the two adjectives to the two nouns is a beautiful evocation of the way a poem may initially affect a reader; or, indeed, of the way something in language read or heard may be an invitation to the creation of a new poem. The cadence is close to John Berryman’s, evoking something comparable, in his Dream Song 29: ‘Starts again always in Henry’s ears / the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime’; and it is, I suppose, conceivable that Berryman picked up the cadence from Eliot’s essay, which would make his lines a very neat exemplification of their own point, that the originating ‘little cough’ of a poem might start again ‘always’ and anywhere. The passage from ‘Ben Jonson’ indicates something of the way in which Eliot’s own auditory imagination – as he refers to it elsewhere – is intimately responsive to the poetry of detail in both Shakespeare and Dante. Even so, to compare them as poets of design indicates a certain effortfulness, a register of desire rather than a demonstration of actual affinity, since, although there undoubtedly is design in Shakespeare, in Dante it is so much more clearly manifest – structurally, theologically, and even as a matter of verse form. 66

Selected Essays, p. 252.

67

Ibid., p. 137.

68

Ibid., p. 148.

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Eliot’s oppositions between them seem more obviously just and more critically fruitful. In the earlier ‘Dante’ essay in The Sacred Wood, for instance, he contrasts their methods of presenting emotion. Almost certainly under the influence of Wyndham Lewis, Eliot finds Shakespeare analytic to the point of destructiveness, possessing a mind that was ‘one of the most critical that has ever existed’, whereas Dante, in the constant interrelationship between emotions effected by the Commedia, offers ‘the most ordered presentation of emotions that has ever been made’.69 Italics in Eliot can seem a lapse in adequately sensitive interchange with the reader. He does not seem hortatory or querulous or over-insistent, exactly, but there is still something pre-emptive about italicisation in critical prose. The italicised emphasis which sets a ‘critical ’ Shakespeare against an ‘ordered ’ Dante, however, seems very close to the heart of his deepest perception of both poets. Yet, as far as emotions themselves go, he says in ‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’, ‘there is not much to choose between Shakespeare and Dante’. This is a view which produces in this essay a resonant passage which, in the apparent empathy of both its intensity and its scrupulous qualifications, seems self-definitive too: Dante’s railings, his personal spleen – sometimes thinly disguised under Old Testament prophetic denunciations – his nostalgia, his bitter regrets for past happiness – or for what seems happiness when it is past – and his brave attempts to fabricate something permanent and holy out of his personal and animal feelings – as in the Vita Nuova – can all be matched out of Shakespeare. Shakespeare, too, was occupied with the struggle – which alone constitutes life for a poet – to transmute his personal and private agonies into something rich and strange, something universal and impersonal. The rage of Dante against Florence, or Pistoia, or what not, the deep surge of Shakespeare’s general cynicism and disillusionment, are merely gigantic attempts to metamorphose private failings and disappointments. The great poet, in writing himself, writes his time.70

Once again, this makes poetic ‘impersonality’ seem far less coolly and neutrally prescriptive than it does in the essay which contains its most famous expression, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919). Indeed, this passage may be regarded as a more deeply meditated and even humbled elaboration of what the earlier essay implies when it ends its second section, provokingly, with the sentence, ‘But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.’71 The humility derives from Eliot’s contemplation of the ‘tradition’ of Dante and Shakespeare to which his own individual talent 69

The Sacred Wood, p. 168.

70

Selected Essays, p. 137.

71

Ibid., p. 21.

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self-consciously attaches itself. The humility is prompted by the knowledge subsequently expressed in ‘What Dante Means to Me’ that ‘Later poets must find something else to do, and be content if the things left to do are lesser things.’72 In several respects The Waste Land seems tacitly present in this passage too: not only because that poem, in its own metamorphoses, employs, as this critical passage does, a phrase which haunts Eliot, from Ariel’s song about metamorphosis in The Tempest, ‘Full Fathom Five’, in which things are made ‘rich and strange’ when they suffer a sea-change, but also because that is pre-eminently a poem in which a great poet, writing himself, writes his time. The 1929 ‘Dante’ essay also includes one of Eliot’s finest passages of close reading when he compares the simile in canto xv of the Inferno, in which a crowd in Hell peer at Dante and Virgil ‘come vecchio sartor fa nella cruna’ (‘like an old tailor peering at the eye of his needle’), to Caesar’s image for the dead Cleopatra (‘she looks like sleep, / As she would catch another Antony / In her strong toil of grace’), lines which, unsurprisingly, so deeply impressed themselves on Eliot that he also makes reference to them several other times in his criticism. Eliot’s comparison seems, almost despite itself, to incline more admiringly towards Shakespeare than towards Dante: The image of Shakespeare’s is much more complicated than Dante’s, and more complicated than it looks. It has the grammatical form of a kind of simile (the ‘as if’ form), but of course ‘catch in her toil’ is a metaphor. But whereas the simile of Dante is merely to make you see more clearly how the people looked, and is explanatory, the figure of Shakespeare is expansive rather than intensive; its purpose is to add to what you see (either on the stage or in your imagination) a reminder of that fascination of Cleopatra which shaped her history and that of the world, and of that fascination being so strong that it prevails even in death. It is more elusive, and it is less possible to convey without close knowledge of the English language. Between men who could make such inventions as these there can be no question of greater or less. But as the whole poem of Dante is, if you like, one vast metaphor, there is hardly any place for metaphor in the detail of it.73

This awards the palm to both poets, telling us that there is no competition. Yet to be expansive rather than intensive is what Shakespeare manages in and with the English language, realising its own particular genius, and this is of course the (usual) language of Eliot’s own poetry. In his earlier years as a poet Eliot was, by his own admission, steering clear of Shakespeare selfprotectively, and turning to Dante partly because in the poetry of another language there could be little danger of overwhelming influence. Here, 72

To Criticize the Critic, p. 133.

73

Selected Essays, p. 244.

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however, he is tacitly acknowledging the ways in which Shakespeare might become a ‘fecundating’ influence too. Dante’s simile, magnificent as it is, serves ‘merely [my italics] to make you see more clearly’; Shakespeare’s metaphorical elusiveness, which Eliot finely locates and defines here, is in fact closer to the imagistic and symbolic suggestiveness of his own poetry. In ‘What Dante Means to Me’ Eliot once more makes the comparison, now in an astonishing metaphor: ‘Dante seems to me to have a place in Italian literature – which, in this respect, only Shakespeare has in ours; that is, they give body to the soul of the language, conforming themselves, the one more and the other less consciously, to what they divined to be its possibilities.’74 The almost rapturous metaphor of giving body to the soul of a language takes an additional lustre from Eliot’s long engagement in his own poetry with the relationship between body and soul – from the youthful ‘First Debate between the Body and Soul’, through ‘La Figlia Che Piange’ (‘As the soul leaves the body torn and bruised’) to the second section of ‘Little Gidding’, where body and soul ‘begin to fall asunder’. Eliot’s high approbation, phrased in a trope significant to his own work too, suggests that he is also locating himself here as a diviner of possibilities in the English language. He does so in a way both more and less conscious, in a poetry capable of both metatextual commentary and symbolist dream. Conforming himself to the divination of possibilities, Eliot, like Shakespeare and Dante, is acceding to the only demand of conformity which the language makes of its greatest poets. three moments Eliot has, throughout his critical writing on Shakespeare, extremely memorable things to say. Some, however, stay more powerfully in the mind than others: three moments, for me. In ‘“Rhetoric” and Poetic Drama’ he says about Romeo and Juliet that Shakespeare ‘shows his lovers melting into incoherent unconsciousness of their isolated selves, shows the human soul in the process of forgetting itself’.75 This is itself melting with admiration and uncharacteristically warm in its own melting together of the erotic and the spiritual, particularly since in one of his ‘Poems Written in Early Youth’, ‘Nocturne’, Eliot had engaged in an ironic Laforguean exercise on the play and its hero, a ‘grand sérieux’. Eliot now seems suddenly vulnerable, even envious; and what he says recalls those lines aching with loss in ‘The Hollow Men’, ‘Lips that would kiss / Form prayers to broken stone’, which may be 74

To Criticize the Critic, p. 133.

75

The Sacred Wood, p. 83.

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read as a memory of Juliet’s line in the sonnet duet which does culminate in a kiss in act 1 scene 5 when she responds to Romeo’s insinuating query about whether saints have lips: ‘Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.’ Eliot’s observation is a long way from what we shall see is Auden’s entirely unsympathetic attitude to the play’s emotions, and on its way to the explicitly sexualised reading by Ted Hughes, who says of the lovers that it is ‘almost as if they were too young to have personal lives, still egoless, as if they had nothing yet to transcend. As if they died, like an image of the sexual act, in a biological, rather than a transcendental, exaltation.’76 Hughes may be implicitly inheriting from, and commenting on, Eliot here: but Eliot is arguably the more radical when he offers not an opposition between the biological and the transcendent but a virtual combination of them, suggesting in the young lovers a somatic, psychological and spiritual melding – as if the body thought. The second of Eliot’s three radio talks on Dryden compares ‘parallel passages’ from Antony and Cleopatra and All for Love, discussing ‘the nature of the dramatic in poetic drama, as distinguished from the poetic in poetic drama’. The passages concern the moment in the final scene of the play when the soldiers enter after Cleopatra’s death. In Shakespeare one of them asks Charmian, ‘Is this well done?’, to which she replies, ‘It is well done, and fitting for a princess, / Descended of so many royal kings. / Ah, soldier!’ Dryden’s Charmion [sic] says, ‘Yes, ’tis well done, and like a Queen, the last / Of her great race. I follow her.’ Eliot comments: Now, if you take these two passages by themselves, you cannot say that the two lines of Dryden are either less poetic than Shakespeare’s, or less dramatic; a great actress could make just as much, I believe, of those of Dryden as of those of Shakespeare. But consider Shakespeare’s remarkable addition to the original text of North, the two plain words, ah, soldier. You cannot say that there is anything peculiarly poetic about these two words, and if you isolate the dramatic from the poetic you cannot say that there is anything peculiarly dramatic either, because there is nothing in them for the actress to express in action; she can at best enunciate them clearly. I could not myself put into words the difference I feel between the passage if these two words ah, soldier were omitted and with them. But I know there is a difference, and that only Shakespeare could have made it.77

I am by no means the first to have noticed this passage. Christopher Ricks says of it that ‘If in some game I had to instance one paragraph from Eliot to 76 77

Ted Hughes, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being (London: Faber and Faber, 1992; revised paperback edn, 1993), p. 318. ‘John Dryden – II. Dryden the Dramatist’, Listener, 5, 119 (22 April 1931), p. 681.

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show that he was a great critic, I should choose this, from a radio talk which he never himself reprinted’; and in a lengthy reading of it he draws out the implications of ‘ah, soldier’ in a way that most effectively demonstrates that if Eliot cannot put into words the difference the words make, Ricks can.78 His words on Eliot’s, and on the significance of Shakespeare’s ‘not definitely and unmistakably indicating the posture proper to the cry, the expression on the face of the word’, are typically acute and sparkling.79 Terence Hawkes, however, in the course of making the lines an element in a theory of the significance of the paralinguistic in a ‘play-text’, regards Eliot as indulging in ‘mock bewilderment’.80 Denis Donoghue understands Eliot’s refusal to say anything further as a characteristically symbolist response to the uncanny: Eliot, he says, ‘doesn’t interpret the two words, say what their purport is or why the effect of them is uncanny. He contemplates them as if they were a symbol, and leaves off.’81 Ricks’s elaboration of what Eliot notices is brilliant but seems in the end less powerful than Eliot’s own refusal to elaborate, even to some extent defusing the mystery of its resonant reticence. Although I am willing to believe Eliot capable of mock bewilderment, I do not think he is engaging in any mockery here: the tone of the passage seems to me entirely sincere, not disingenuous, particularly since Eliot is making the comparison in a talk devoted to revealing the genuine qualities inhering in the work of Dryden, whom he considers greatly under-appreciated. And to consider Eliot as a symbolist remarker of an uncanny moment makes him seem more driven by programme than I find him; and in any case I am not sure that ‘uncanny’ accurately defines the effect Eliot isolates here. What seems most notable in the passage is that Eliot is discovering a moment in Shakespeare before which the power and persuasiveness of his own critical writing actually wants to remain dumb. And, I think, for two reasons. First, because this is a moment at which Shakespeare, in the most minute detail of his work and not only in its larger pattern, is supremely a poetic dramatist for this poet who himself wants to be a poetic dramatist; and also because it is one of those moments which are a further cause of ‘the terror and awe with which he inspires us’, or even of what Eliot defines in his

78 79 80 81

Christopher Ricks, T. S. Eliot and Prejudice (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), p. 160. Ibid., p. 161. Terence Hawkes, That Shakespeherian Rag: Essays on a Critical Process (London and New York: Methuen, 1986), p. 85. Denis Donoghue, Words Alone: The Poet T. S. Eliot (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 64.

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essay on Andrew Marvell in 1921 as his ‘terrifying clairvoyance’.82 This is criticism rooted in genuine humility, with the fullness of its high intelligence and its exceptional capacity for observation utterly trained on the object of its inquiry and not on self-display. It has the critical knowledge of its own puniness in the face of what Shakespeare manages, but it is deeply insightful knowledge none the less: ‘But I know there is a difference, and that only Shakespeare could have made it.’ Terence Hawkes, for all that he thinks Eliot disingenuous here, also finds him ‘ineluctably respondent’ to Shakespeare’s two words. In saying nothing at all, and saying that he does not know what to say, Eliot finds a perfect way of expressing ineluctable responsiveness; and I am ineluctably responsive to Eliot’s response. In an article called ‘The Poetic Drama’ published in 1920 Eliot conceives a Shakespeare consistent with this kind of critique. With almost heroic selfassurance, and despite his routine engagement as actor, writer and businessman in his own theatre, this Shakespeare nevertheless casts himself clear, in his essential being, from the trammels of all attachment: In the middle of a rowdy seventeenth-century playhouse pit the thought of Shakespeare, the feeling and the shuddering personal experience of Shakespeare moved solitary and unsoiled; solitary and free as the thought of Spinoza in his study or Montaigne in his tower.83

This image of Shakespeare – lonely, oblivious, convulsed – finds a fit phrase for itself in a poem Eliot wrote over ten years later when, in the Shakespearean ‘Coriolan’, the hero is perceived ‘at the still point of the turning world’. 82

Selected Essays, p. 297.

83

T. S. Eliot, ‘The Poetic Drama’, Athenaeum, 14 May 1920, p. 635.

chapter 4

This man’s gift: Shakespeare in Eliot’s poetry

allusion Discussing the way the lines ‘A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many’ in The Waste Land transform lines from Dante’s Inferno, Christopher Ricks says that ‘a great allusion is a metaphor, created not only out of pertinent likeness but out of pertinent unlikeness’.1 Marjorie Garber pushes a comparable perception further in the direction of the uncanny in a study of Shakespeare. What she says about quotation generally is itself so pertinent to Eliot’s allusions to Shakespeare as to require lengthy quotation: the use of quotation is itself always already doubled, already belated, since it cites a voice or an opinion that gains force from being somehow absent, authority from the fact of being set apart. Used always ‘in quotation’, as there and not there, true and not true, the real thing and yet a copy, the quotation occupies the space of a memorial reconstruction in the present plane of discourse. Notice that we put ‘in quotation’ in quotation marks … Quotation … is a use of history, since in a quotation tradition and authority are simultaneously instated and put in question. In the same way, a quotation is a ghost: a revenant taken out of context, making an unexpected, often disconcerting appearance – the return of the expressed. Thus Walter Benjamin, perhaps the most assiduous modern collector of quotations, writes that ‘Quotations in my works are like robbers by the roadside who make an armed attack and relieve an idler of his convictions’. Surveying a world suffering the loss of both authority and tradition, he argued that the function of quotations was ‘not the strength to preserve but to cleanse, to tear out of context, to destroy’. The quotation by its very presence offers a critique of the context into which it is summoned. It stands as a qualification of the circumstances for which it is apparently so suited as to be cited in the first place. A quotation is always ‘in quotation’, always inappropriate for its proper place.2 1 2

Christopher Ricks, T. S. Eliot and Prejudice (1988; London: Faber and Faber, 1994), p. 138. Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality (New York and London: Routledge, 1987), p. 52.

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Benjamin’s metaphor of robbery is remarkably close to Eliot’s insistence, in his 1920 essay on Massinger, that ‘Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.’3 Although this appears to view the process as more benign than Benjamin does, Eliot’s final concessive qualification suggests some anxiety about any absolute justice in the formulation. For surely ‘bad poets’ will make ‘at least something different’ with what they take too, even if the difference is defacement; and Eliot – a very ‘good’ poet indeed – is capable of his own defacements. The metaphor of theft resists benignity; and Eliot’s formulation involves the art of allusion in motives other than, or additional to, the tributary. Allusion willingly runs the risk of defacement: and the willingness is a measure of ambition at least as much as a register of admiration. The opening of Ash-Wednesday (1930) raises the issue intensively: Because I do not hope to turn again Because I do not hope Because I do not hope to turn Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope I no longer strive to strive towards such things (Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?) Why should I mourn The vanished power of the usual reign?4

The allusions here include one to Shakespeare’s sonnet 29, ‘When in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes’, whose seventh line reads, ‘Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope’. Eliot is therefore adapting Shakespeare, not citing him directly; and adapting, furthermore, a line from an exceptionally well-known source. There is a playful element in this, of a kind recalling the etymology of the word ‘allusion’ (alludere, OED tells us, is ‘to play with, joke or jest at, dally with, touch lightly upon a subject’); and the opening of this passage, which is also allusive, may mime another kind of playfulness as it catches itself up, hesitates, repeats itself with a difference, in a kind of stately linguistic dance. Eliot is playing there with his version of the opening line – ‘Perch’io non spero di tornar gia mai’ – of Cavalcanti’s ‘Ballata, written in exile at Speranza’. A version of an original not in English, the opening lines of Ash-Wednesday 3 4

T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1920; 2nd edn, 1928; London: Faber and Faber, 1997), pp. 105–6. All quotations from Eliot’s poetry are taken from The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1969) unless otherwise indicated.

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cannot have the same referential weight as the poem’s immediately subsequent allusion to Shakespeare. Taken out of the context even of its own language, the Cavalcanti line, or part-line, is, in Garber’s term, a ‘revenant’ trying to find a place for itself, through the hesitation and repetition of those lines, in the English language itself. Only after introducing this element of distant allusion does Eliot risk the Shakespearean one with its far more prominent citational authority. The allusion to Shakespeare is therefore a form of both subsequence and displacement, and in fact Eliot’s rhyming of ‘hope’ and ‘scope’ repeats Shakespeare’s in the fifth and seventh lines of this sonnet, suggesting that it, as well as Cavalcanti, was Eliot’s originating impulse. Sonnet 29 opens as a poem of abjection. The word ‘hope’ figures because the poet wishes himself ‘like to one more rich in hope’: so the word in fact evokes hopelessness, which is identified with a set of envies throughout the first two quatrains, including the one Eliot adapts, envy of the ‘art’ and ‘scope’ of others. As the sonnet turns into its third quatrain, however, the state of ‘disgrace’ and self-loathing is alleviated by thoughts of the beloved, in emotionally and rhythmically elevating lines – ‘my state, / (Like to the lark at break of day arising / From sullen earth), sings hymns at heaven’s gate’ – and disgrace is finally dissipated in the grace of a concluding couplet, in which ‘thy sweet love’ brings to the poet such ‘wealth’ that not even kings are any longer the object of envy. Nevertheless, the abjection is powerfully evoked, notably in the line Eliot takes, since this has to do with ‘art’ itself, and Ash-Wednesday is sometimes self-reflexively preoccupied with the art and scope of poetry. Of ‘art’ and ‘scope’ one commentator says, ‘Impossible to gloss precisely, but art involves “skill, craft, learning, literary achievement” while scope includes “range of accomplishment, plentiful opportunities, mental stamina”.’5 Eliot retains ‘scope’, the rhyme word, but, by altering ‘art’ to ‘gift’, slightly obscures what poets might feel in relation to Shakespeare: envy of his ‘skill, craft, learning, literary achievement’. But the idea of envy – ‘Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope’ – persists in Eliot’s own new poem. Replacing ‘art’ with ‘gift’ also makes an activity passive, turning worked-at accomplishment into gratuitous bestowal. In Ash-Wednesday, a Lenten poem of confession, supplication and metanoia – a poem of ‘turning’ – this is also to replace the idea of ‘literary achievement’ with something close to the theological concept of divine grace: one of OED’s definitions of ‘gift’ is ‘a faculty, power, or quality miraculously bestowed, e.g. upon the apostles and other early Christians’. And sonnet 29 in fact possesses a 5

‘The Sonnets’ and ‘A Lover’s Complaint’, ed. John Kerrigan (London: Penguin, 1986; 1995), p. 211, n. 7.

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diction and imagery at least congruent with the discourse of Christian prayer and redemption: (dis)grace; (deaf) heaven; hope; hymns at heaven’s gate. One commentator has even suggested that ‘the Christian distinction between material and spiritual well-being functions as a hyperbolic metaphor throughout’ and that in the lines about the lark at break of day ‘the beloved’s love functions as the love of the deity does in Christian theology’.6 Eliot, then, finds the occasion of Ash-Wednesday in Shakespeare, and his inclusion of the Shakespearean line is an acknowledgement of the debt, one reinforced by the way Shakespeare is summoned again in the poem’s next strophe, where ‘The infirm glory of the positive hour’ plays allusively with Shakespeare’s glorious line in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, ‘The uncertain glory of an April day’. Risking the introduction of the idea of envying Shakespeare by including in his own poem Shakespeare’s poem of envy, Eliot deflects the risk by turning the idea of artistic ambition and achievement towards the theological concept of gratuitous donation, even if the idea of the ‘turn’, expressed by means of an allusion, cannot but itself summon the idea of the ‘return’ that is literary allusion (‘the return of the expressed’) and remind us that Eliot conceived of Ash-Wednesday as itself a return – not to Cavalcanti but to Dante – calling the poem ‘a sketchy application of the Vita Nuova to modern life’.7 But the incision made in Shakespeare’s line, which seems so small, signals a large art and scope of Eliot’s own. It appears that he can accept the gift of the line only by himself setting the terms under which he is willing to receive it. This is not rapacious, but it is not entirely benign either; and in Eliot’s way with Shakespeare there is usually at least the ghost of something memorably characterised in relation to John Donne in ‘Whispers of Immortality’. Donne’s ability ‘To seize and clutch and penetrate’ is also sometimes Eliot’s way with the words of others, including Shakespeare. Although this poetic eagle may regard himself as agèd he is still capable of sudden swoop and retrieval. Eliot’s modifications of Shakespeare reveal some of the ways in which ‘a quotation is always “in quotation”, always inappropriate for its proper place’. hamlet No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; Am an attendant lord, one that will do 6 7

Shakespeare’s Sonnets, edited with analytic commentary by Stephen Booth (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 180. Cited in B. C. Southam, A Student’s Guide to the Selected Poems of T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 6th edn, 1994), p. 221.

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Shakespeare and the Modern Poet To swell a progress, start a scene or two, Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool, Deferential, glad to be of use, Politic, cautious, and meticulous; Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse; At times, indeed, almost ridiculous – Almost, at times, the Fool.

But why should we – or he himself, if that’s who he’s talking to – ever think that Prufrock is, or is meant to be, Prince Hamlet? Why should we presume? Because, some commentators say, his demurral asserts once more, at the beginning of the poem’s final section, and with Shakespearean emphasis, Prufrock’s timidity and self-doubt; and this Hamlet derives from Laforgue’s ironic treatment of the hero as well as from Shakespeare. Prufrock would then be recognising himself as bit player, not hero, in something of the way in which, in his first Laforguean exercise, the sonnet ‘Nocturne’, Eliot’s narrator condescendingly refigures Romeo as a ‘grand sérieux’ and conventional Pierrot and rewrites the play’s plot as a sentimentally clichéd romance. Not regarding himself as hero, even of his own narrative, and reading himself as programmed to play a minor role are precisely the things that make him, in an adjective which has currency beyond the poem’s frame, ‘Prufrockian’. And the unillusioned acceptance of selflimitation is formally dramatised by the abjuration of Shakespearean blank verse, that tragic form in Hamlet, in favour of rhyming couplets, the signature of the mock heroic reaching back to the comedy of Chaucer, whose Clerk of Oxford is put down in The Canterbury Tales, as Prufrock puts himself down, by the phrase ‘full of high sentence’. But Hamlet is himself one who cannot bring himself to act, faced by his own ‘overwhelming question’ or questions: his doubt about Claudius’s guilt and the Ghost’s benignity, and the ontological ‘question’, ‘To be or not to be’. By putting an antic disposition on, Hamlet himself becomes ‘the Fool’, even if only opportunistically. For all that Prufrock’s lines conjure the figure of the ‘attendant lord’, they conjure Prince Hamlet too, inviting comparison as well as contrast. Arguably, Prufrock also possesses a self-knowledge which others who have meditated self-dramatisingly on the Prince lack – as Eliot thinks, as we have seen, both Goethe and Coleridge lack. So Prufrock’s demurral may wittily encode a critique of the failures of a narcissistic romanticism: and allusion, as often in Eliot, thereby becomes the means of ironic distancing from a romanticism rejected but still found compelling. Self-dramatisation is also, for Eliot, one of the besetting failures to which Shakespeare is exceptionally alert. In ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’,

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then, Eliot aligns his modern instance of febrile self-consciousness with Shakespeare’s, in a mode of complexly allusive and evaluative irony, tracing a modernity of interiorisation across the two figures. In this subtlety of allusive reinvention, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ far outstrips the more primary irony of the allusion to Hamlet in The Waste Land. At the end of ‘A Game of Chess’, the parting of the cockney contemporaries merges into Ophelia’s final line before her suicide: Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight. Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight. Good night, ladies, good night sweet ladies, good night, good night.

This has undeniable, even exquisite pathos, as Eliot makes a melancholy poetry out of basic means. However, this is exclusively a pathos of discrepancy. As such, its condescension, in this monologue in which vulgarity is imitated in pastiche, is itself a little vulgar. It cares about effect more than is consistent with true regard for Ophelia’s plight, such as William Empson, for instance, displays when he feels for ‘this poor Ophelia, in the exhaustion of her wreckage’.8 The ‘Prufrock’ allusion is far more deeply interwoven with the predicament explored and with the literary history of that predicament. In this sense it has a formally ironic resonance too. The literary history of self-consciousness (and self-dramatisation) prominently includes nineteenth-century dramatic monologue, of which Robert Langbaum says that it is ‘largely modelled on the Shakespearean soliloquy; for in the Shakespearean soliloquy as they read it, nineteenth-century poets thought they had found the form by which they could objectify and dramatize their essentially subjective and lyrical impulse’.9 ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ transforms the form of the dramatic monologue, rewriting it as interior monologue: so that its knowing conjuration of Hamlet, the selfconscious Shakespearean soliloquist par excellence, acts as both acknowledgement and ambitious deviation. The consequence of this was to gift to modern poetry in English one of its most influential structures. The ‘Prufrock’ lines on Hamlet may therefore be considered an illustration in Eliot’s own work of his opaque observation in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ that tradition ‘cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour’.10 Tradition, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ 8 9 10

William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930; 2nd edn, 1947; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973), p. 249. Robert Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition (1957; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974), p. 155. Selected Essays, p. 14.

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tells us, exists only to the extent that it is usably transformed; exists, in fact, only in its transformations. So Prufrock is actually Prince Hamlet, and is meant to be. ‘A quotation is a ghost: a revenant taken out of context, making an unexpected, often disconcerting appearance – the return of the expressed.’ ‘Little Gidding’ includes, in its second section, an encounter with a ghost: ‘some dead master / … a familiar compound ghost / Both intimate and unidentifiable’. Set in the hallucinatory aftermath of a London wartime air raid, this passage stages an encounter which draws on canto xv of the Inferno, the meeting with Dante’s old teacher, Brunetto Latini. Eliot takes some specific details from Dante, and the form he invents for this passage, with its alternation of masculine and feminine endings, is a sustained attempt to find an equivalent in English poetry for some of the effects of Dantean terza rima. Just as Shakespeare frequently accompanies Dante in Eliot’s criticism, he forms part of this passage’s projection too. The phrase ‘familiar compound ghost’ remembers the ‘affable familiar ghost’ of sonnet 86, ‘Was it the proud full sail of his great verse …?’ The best known of the Sonnets on the rival poet, it is preoccupied with literary derivativeness or allusiveness and with the communication with either dead writers, by means of their books, or with supernatural spirits – depending on how we interpret ‘spirits’, ‘compeers by night’ and the phrase ‘affable familiar ghost’ itself. The sonnet therefore sits well with the conversations with the dead of the Commedia. It shadows this passage of ‘Little Gidding’, which is a communication concerning the art of poetry, intensely allusive in form, from a dead to a living writer. As in Shakespeare’s sonnet too, the relationship between poets, always potentially riven with rivalry, itself becomes part of the texture of the exchange. Hamlet is also present in the passage. Eliot’s ghost ‘faded on the blowing of the horn’, and the Ghost in Hamlet ‘faded on the crowing of the cock’. The poet in ‘Little Gidding’ pleads with the ghost – ‘Therefore speak: / I may not comprehend, may not remember’ – in a way that picks up reiterations in Hamlet. ‘Speak, speak, I charge thee speak!’ says Horatio on the Ghost’s first appearance; and again, twice, ‘Speak to me,’ and ‘O speak,’ and ‘Speak of it, stay and speak!’ When Hamlet encounters the ghost he says, ‘Thou com’st in such a questionable shape / That I will speak to thee’ and ‘It will not speak’; then, following it, he says, ‘Speak, I’ll go no further’ and finally, ‘Speak, I am bound to hear.’ The plea in Eliot, as in Shakespeare, makes it plain that the connection between living and dead

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must be established by means of language itself. Eliot’s word ‘remember’ similarly derives from the play, where the Ghost’s parting direction to Hamlet is ‘Remember me’, which Hamlet then picks up twice as a query, ‘Remember thee?’, and then with an insistence that he will indeed remember. Martin Scofield sees this passage as Eliot’s ‘profound creative response’ to Hamlet, which may be exaggerating the significance of a single one of its sources: but there is no doubting that Hamlet is integral to its generation.11 The Hamlet allusion is accompanied in the passage by an echo of the play which Eliot’s Hamlet essay says deserves more attention and to which he pays the attention of allusion in ‘Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar’ and of pastiche in The Waste Land. In Antony and Cleopatra, Antony’s contemptuous lines about Octavius – that ‘at Philippi [he] kept / His sword e’en like a dancer’ – are turned to altogether different effect in the ghost’s final lines, where restorative purgatorial fire is figured, in a way recalling outrageous seventeenth-century conceit, as the invitation to a dance: From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.

This fire is Dantean, the one that, in the Purgatorio, refines its sufferers into salvation, and specifically that of canto xxvi in which Arnaut Daniel hides in the canto’s last line, ‘Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina’. This line is quoted, in the original, towards the end of The Waste Land: so Eliot is citing the ghost of an earlier writerly self here too. In the Brunetto Latini canto, on the other hand, the fire is infernal, not purgatorial. In her study of the poem’s manuscripts Helen Gardner says that Eliot retained the Hamlet allusion against an objection by John Hayward and offers an interpretation of his insistence: the allusion ‘might be said to have propriety, enforcing the purgatorial meaning of an encounter that at the beginning appears infernal’.12 I think it truer to say that Shakespeare and Dante are, from its inception, bound inextricably together in Eliot’s rich imagining of this encounter. The mise-en-scène of the Inferno, where Brunetto must endure eternal flames from which he cannot shield himself, 11 12

Martin Scofield, The Ghosts of Hamlet: The Play and Modern Writers (Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 57. Helen Gardner, The Composition of ‘Four Quartets’ (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1978), p. 31.

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yields to the only temporary purgatorial fires in which the Ghost in Hamlet must remain ‘Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature / Are burnt and purg’d away’ (1.5.12–13). Eliot’s ghost is genuinely ‘compound’ and not to be singly identified: one commentator finds as many as fifteen poetic figures allusively present in the passage.13 Swift and Mallarmé are prominent; but, as the image of the dancer in the ghost’s final lines suggests, the recently deceased W. B. Yeats, in whom the dance is a powerful symbol, is the most telling presence. Helen Gardner quotes from a letter of Eliot’s to Hayward during the passage’s protracted composition saying that ‘the visionary figure has now become somewhat more definite and will no doubt be identified by some readers with Yeats though I do not mean anything so precise as that’, explaining, understandably, that he did not want to situate Yeats in Hell or to impute to him the vice which took Brunetto there (sodomy).14 Although Eliot clearly does not mean anything so precise as that in the final version of the passage, he does mean something imprecisely that; and both the imprecision and what he does mean are of great interest. The drafts of the poem make it clear how necessary Yeats was to the construction of this ‘visionary figure’. Eliot was deeply ambivalent about Yeats. He had often criticised him for a redemptive view of art which he did not himself at all share; and in After Strange Gods (1934) he discovers in the young Irish Protestant Yeats ‘the doctrine of Arnold, that Poetry can replace Religion, and also the tendency to fabricate an individual religion’. Yeats’s search for what Eliot regards as a factitious tradition results in ‘a somewhat artificially induced poeticality’.15 By this stage, however, Eliot also greatly admires the way Yeats has ‘outgrown’ his earlier work and self; and he cites ‘Vacillation’ to demonstrate that Yeats ‘has arrived at greatness against the greatest odds’.16 Here he confirms the view of his Norton lectures in 1932–3 that, ‘by a great triumph of development’, Yeats was in the course of writing ‘some of the most beautiful poetry in the language, some of the clearest, simplest, most direct’.17 In the early 1930s, then, the way Yeats had managed a mode of triumphant self-revision as he aged was much on Eliot’s mind. 13 14 15 16 17

See Sebastian D. G. Knowles, A Purgatorial Flame: Seven British Writers in the Second World War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), pp. 223–31. The Composition of ‘Four Quartets’, pp. 64–5. T. S. Eliot, After Strange Gods: The Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia 1933 (London: Faber and Faber, 1934), p. 44. Ibid., p. 47. T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the Relation of Criticism to Poetry in England (1933; London: Faber and Faber, 1964), p. 140.

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Eliot was never much on Yeats’s mind. This is obvious from the one occasion when he was compelled to voice an opinion: his introduction to the Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936), where he displays an almost complete failure of understanding. He regards Eliot as a ‘satirist’ without imagination whose rhythms have ‘much monotony of accent’ and compares him, in his ‘grey middle-tint’, to Manet, who leaves Yeats longing for Rousseau and Courbet.18 Only once does he find Eliot speaking ‘in the great manner’; and he quotes the final two stanzas of ‘Sweeney Among the Nightingales’. As others have pointed out, these are the only conceivable lines of Eliot’s which Yeats could be imagined writing himself. Despite the qualification, Yeats on Eliot in 1936 is little short of insulting; and his strictures culminate in a reference to Eliot’s religion (just as Eliot’s on Yeats in After Strange Gods are initiated by identifying him as ‘an Irish Protestant’). Friends of his, Yeats says, have attributed the greater ‘rhythmical animation’ of Eliot’s poems after The Waste Land to ‘an emotional enrichment from religion’: but Eliot’s religion, Yeats thinks, ‘lacks all strong emotion; a New England Protestant by descent, there is little self-surrender in his personal relation to God and the soul’.19 Eliot, trying to live and write himself into an identity as an Anglo-Catholic in England, must have found this extremely difficult to take from an ‘Irish Protestant’ who had attempted to fabricate an ‘individual ’ religion; where the italics are both scornful and antiseptic. Yeats on Eliot in 1936 therefore makes it striking that Eliot includes his Yeats figure in ‘Little Gidding’ just a few years later. We may therefore regard the inclusion as a radical instance of what ‘East Coker’ advertises as ‘the only wisdom we can hope to acquire’: ‘the wisdom of humility’. Humility is by no means his only mode of relation to the predecessors Eliot includes in his poems: but, given the difficulties involved, it is the relation here. While he was writing this passage, Eliot delivered the first Annual Yeats Lecture in Dublin in 1940.20 He praises Yeats’s ‘exceptional honesty and courage’ in facing old age, regarding these as the qualities which provoke the ‘extraordinary development’ in the poetry. He opposes this capacity to the depredations and self-delusions possible with age for a well-established poet: ‘insincere mimicry’; ‘a hollow and wasted virtuosity’; ‘becoming dignified’. 18

19 20

Given this, I cannot agree with Roy Foster that Yeats’s comments on Eliot ‘were usually favourable’, although it is interesting to learn that social relations between the poets were amicable enough. See Roy Foster, W. B Yeats: A Life II: The Arch-Poet 1915–1939 (Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 457. W. B.Yeats, Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1865–1935 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), xxi, xxii. This was subsequently published in the journal Purpose and collected in On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber and Faber, 1957).

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As an example of Yeats’s ‘honesty’ Eliot quotes from ‘The Spur’, with its powerful expression of lust in age, and asks, ‘To what honest man, old enough, can these sentiments be entirely alien?’ He also admires Yeats’s last play, Purgatory, which, like ‘The Spur’, ‘is not very pleasant’: I wish he had not given it this title, because I cannot accept a purgatory in which there is no hint, or at least no emphasis upon Purgation. But, apart from the extraordinary theatrical skill with which he has put so much action within the compass of a very short scene of but little movement, the play gives a masterly exposition of the emotions of an old man.21

And Eliot is clearly self-referential when he says that ‘only those who have toiled with language know the labour and constancy required to free oneself from [early] influences’. Self-referentially too, this echoes a cadence in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’: ‘only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things’.22 In ‘Little Gidding’ Eliot brings together, in relation to his Yeatsian figure, the reality of ageing, the concern with language, and the purgatorial scene and penitential impulse. He does so under the aegis of both Dante and Shakespeare in a passage self-conscious about what allusion is and what it makes possible: taking a ‘double part’; crying and hearing another’s voice cry; ‘Knowing myself yet being someone other’. In this double state Yeats, the Irish Protestant, and Eliot’s own persona in the passage – representative, therefore, of someone once a ‘New England Protestant’ – are brought to a strange meeting in that most unlikely place or spiritual condition, Purgatory: ‘unlikely’ because it is the Catholic place or state – the scene of Dante’s Purgatorio and the location from which the ghost of Hamlet’s father may have briefly escaped – which it had been essential to Protestantism to extirpate.23 In ‘Little Gidding’ there is an ‘emphasis upon Purgation’, notably when the ghost names the last of the ‘gifts reserved for age’: …the rending pain of re-enactment Of all that you have done, and been; the shame Of motives late revealed, and the awareness Of things ill done and done to others’ harm Which once you took for exercise of virtue.

The lines from ‘Vacillation’ quoted in After Strange Gods ghost this passage: 21 23

On Poetry and Poets, p. 258. 22 Ibid., p. 261; Selected Essays, p. 21. For the full theological context, see Stephen Greenblatt’s fascinating Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001).

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Things said or done long years ago, Or things I did not do or say But thought that I might say or do, Weigh me down, and not a day But something is recalled, My conscience or my vanity appalled.

Using the lines to celebrate Yeats’s self-conquest, Eliot nevertheless mildly deprecates their tone of ‘regret, sometimes of resignation’;24 and his own lines in ‘Little Gidding’ are the prelude to the restorative fire of the Christian purgatory, where alone redemption from the knowledge of ‘things ill done’ can be effected. Eliot’s lines have been read as though they were his self-admonishment, even perhaps for the ‘shame’ of anti-Semitism, but they have been chastised as well as admired. Anthony Julius compares them with ‘Vacillation’. ‘Little Gidding’, he says: refuses to acknowledge any responsibility to those the poet has injured and thereby seeks to avoid just that tone of ‘regret’ Eliot so disliked in Yeats’s poem. ‘Vacillation’ looks back to a landscape filled with those wounded by the poet; ‘Little Gidding’ looks forward to the poet’s purgation in the ‘refining fire’. It anticipates a redemption that leaves the poet’s injured without justice.25

This misrepresents Eliot’s view of ‘Vacillation’ in After Strange Gods. He does not ‘so dislike it’; he mildly deprecates its regret, as I have said, before celebrating it as an index of Yeats’s arrival at greatness. For Eliot as a Christian, regret is a phase, not a terminus. But a necessary phase: and these lines of ‘Little Gidding’ do include regret – for what else would ‘the rending pain of re-enactment’ involve? – just as they include, and name, ‘shame’ and the appalled misunderstanding of one’s own motivation. These are, precisely, the things requiring ‘Purgation’. But the ghost’s concern is, above all, with language and its issue. In this poem of ageing and of what must follow upon ageing there is the unillusioned certainty that ‘next year’s words await another voice’. And in this sense this passage of ‘Little Gidding’ is also about allusion; about, as it were, proleptic allusion. Having itself absorbed Dante, Shakespeare, Yeats and all the rest, it leaves a pregnant emptiness waiting to be filled, where someone else must ‘move in measure’. Not like a dancer, but as a poet moves in the measure of verse. 24 25

After Strange Gods, p. 46. Anthony Julius, T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form (1995; London: Thames and Hudson, revised edn, 2003), p. 202.

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In disparaging Hamlet in his essay of 1919 Eliot directs attention towards the play which he regards, along with Antony and Cleopatra, as ‘Shakespeare’s most assured artistic success’. As opposed to Hamlet, he says, it is ‘intelligible, self-complete, in the sunlight’.26 The judgement, still an extraordinary one, was notably so at the time, when Coriolanus was not much regarded. Eliot offers a kind of recantation fourteen years later in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, where he says, with what seems disingenuous consternation, that ‘my words were even interpreted as meaning that Coriolanus is a greater play than Hamlet’.27 If he did not mean that, he had an odd way of putting it: and the evidence of his poetry is that he ranks Coriolanus very highly indeed as an element of his own creative energy. The first of the four poems in the sequence ‘Mandarins’, written in 1910, has various Shakespearean resonances and references, including Coriolanus, as Christopher Ricks demonstrates.28 In its conception of a hero with ‘fixed regardless eyes’ and crowds ‘Keen to appropriate’ him, it also seems the seed that developed into ‘Triumphal March’ twenty years later. This became the first of two poems published together under the title ‘Coriolan’ in 1936. Ricks also discovers in the phrase ‘Broken and scarred’ in ‘Interlude: in a Bar’ (1911) an echo of Coriolanus 4.5.10.106–9, the astonishing speech in which Aufidius greets the banished hero: ‘Let me twine / Mine arms about that body, where against / My grained ash an hundred times hath broke, / And scarr’d the moon with splinters.’29 The concluding lines of Eliot’s poem are ‘Broken and scarred / Like dirty broken finger nails / Tapping the bar’: and Ricks duly asks us to compare ‘The broken fingernails of dirty hands’ in The Waste Land. Surprisingly, he does not also mention the explicit figuring of Coriolanus himself in that poem where, in ‘What the Thunder Said’, the evocation of imprisonment prompted by the word ‘Dayadhvam’ permits a brief possibility of escape: ‘Only at nightfall, aetherial rumours / Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus.’ With Eliot’s earlier echoes of Aufidius’s speech in mind, we might well think that he is finding for Coriolanus a word suggested by Shakespeare but not used by Shakespeare of his own hero. Aufidius’s spear has ‘broke / And scarred’ Coriolanus’s body; but Eliot’s Coriolanus is more ultimately ‘broken’, 26 28 29

Selected Essays, p. 144. 27 The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, p. 44. T. S. Eliot, Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909–1917, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), pp. 127–30. Ibid., p. 198.

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a word with emotional and ethical as well as physical connotations which also vividly conjures Coriolanus’s final state in Shakespeare as a crushed and mutilated victim, literally under Aufidius’s profaning foot. Eliot uses the epithet again, with comparable implications, in ‘Little Gidding’, of Charles I – ‘If you came at night like a broken king’ – which permits us to find a faint Shakespearean resonance there too. Coriolanus also forms part of the imaginative conception of the poem ‘Ode’, published in England in Ara Vos Prec in 1920. It was cut from the American edition (entitled simply Poems) and Eliot never permitted its republication.30 It consists of three vignettes under an alliterating sequence of adjectives, ‘Tired’, ‘Tortured’ and ‘Tortuous’; the second appears to evoke a catastrophic wedding night failure which leaves ‘blood upon the bed’. It has often been thought that this subject matter is what led Eliot to suppress the poem; and a letter to his brother makes it clear that he did not want his mother to read it.31 Its epigraph is taken from the play: ‘To you particularly, and to all the Volscians / Great hurt and mischief’. This makes what appears to be a contemptuous vocative address out of what, in the original, is Coriolanus’s statement to Aufidius in the same scene in which the ‘broken / And scarred’ phrase occurs, when he asks for sanctuary: My name is Caius Martius, who hath done To thee particularly, and to all the Volsces, Great hurt and mischief; thereto witness may My surname, Coriolanus.

Eliot’s epigraph in effect modifies the syntax of the original and also modifies it emotionally, making contempt out of what is, especially for Coriolanus, relative cajolement, even if only in the interests of ensuring his revenge on Rome. ‘Ode’ is a poem of breathtaking difficulty, and not the least of its cruces is the way we might attach its epigraph to it. In this, it resembles the also Shakespearean epigraph – from Measure for Measure – to ‘Gerontion’; and there is an element of sheer mischief in Eliot’s epigraphs throughout his work which may beguile as well as irritate. With ‘Ode’, however, the difficulty with the epigraph is a difficulty with the poem’s other allusions 30

31

It was, however, published at the head of the article by H. A. Mason to which I refer below. It is included in Appendix C of Inventions of the March Hare, p. 383, in ‘the text … as it first stood in the loose leaves’. This version does not have the Coriolanus epigraph. Valerie Eliot (ed.), The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Vol. I: 1898–1922 (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), p. 363. That Eliot should have been willing to discuss the poem, and the matter, with his brother, if not his mother, seems to me worthy of more note than it appears to have received.

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too, which include an adaptation of a line from Macbeth and, arguably, a reference to Julius Caesar. H. A. Mason has traced this pattern of allusion through Laforgue, Seneca and Whitman to reveal an Eliot ‘recognizing the difficulty of distinguishing what was real in his nature from what was put on, in a form of hypocrisy, the actor’s mask’.32 In this sense, although Mason does not say so, the epigraph may be alerting us to the extent to which Eliot makes Coriolanus an element of his own imaginative selfconception. It is an irony that Eliot was influenced in deciding to suppress the poem by thoughts of his mother’s reaction since the First Citizen says, early in the play, of Coriolanus’s most recent heroic exploit, that ‘he did it to please his mother, and to be partly proud’ (1.1.38–9). The play’s plot, and Coriolanus’s psychology, turn on his relationship with the extraordinarily strong-minded Volumnia, and Coriolanus is often thought to suffer a form of infantilism. The ferocious intertextual complexity of Mason’s argument almost matches the ferocious complexity of the poem’s own allusive procedures. But the insights gained by its efforts seem disconcertingly banal. In his own account of the point of the epigraph, for instance, Mason says only that Coriolanus is a man ‘humiliated by women’, and that being humiliated by women is part of the theme of ‘Ode’.33 But Coriolanus is not ‘humiliated’ by women. He is in a peculiar kind of thrall to his mother, it is true; and this appears ultimately to direct actions which, he knows, will also prove fatal to him. This is not, however, humiliation: and in my view Eliot was attracted to the figure of Coriolanus, as anyone might be, as a profoundly disturbing instance of the radical twining together of public action and private motive, and as a man attempting to be ‘author of himself’ but in fact everywhere constrained by having been ‘authored’ by another. Eliot’s fascination with the figure may have its roots in his own psychology and in his relationship with his mother: but the specificity of the epigraph hardly points in that direction, even if its general invocation of Coriolanus does. But it hardly points in any other direction much either: with the consequence that ‘Ode’ is a test case of the limits of Eliot’s earlier allusive method. The allusions become impacted, and the poem also suffers from ‘syntactic strangulation’, as Mason calls it – with horrible appropriateness since he takes its theme to be ‘Lustmord’, ‘the murder of a bride, a wife, or a female lover’.34 ‘Ode’, therefore, is exactly not what Eliot calls Coriolanus: ‘intelligible, self-complete, in the sunlight’. On the contrary, it exhibits 32 33

H. A. Mason, ‘Eliot’s Ode – A Neglected Poem?’, Cambridge Quarterly, 19, 4 (1990), p. 308. Ibid., p. 312. 34 Ibid., pp. 328, 312.

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what, with far less justification, he thinks Hamlet does: it is ‘full of some stuff that the writer could not drag to light, contemplate, or manipulate into art’.35 He allowed ‘Ode’ only its brief moment in the sunlight before consigning it to embargoed invisibility: and it could be that, as well as fearing his mother’s reaction, this most vigilantly self-critical of poets also realised its failure. The allusions of ‘Ode’ suggest forcefully that Eliot’s earlier allusive method is a peculiarly precarious one. ‘Few poets,’ Louis Menand says, ‘can have mistrusted their own feelings as thoroughly as Eliot seems to have mistrusted his in the poetry he wrote before his religious conversion, and … the strategy of putting feelings he suspected of being factitious in the literary quotation marks of imitation and allusion was one of the methods he discovered for neutralizing that mistrust.’36 ‘Ode’ displays the obverse of this: that putting feelings he suspects, or knows, to be genuine in the quotation marks of imitation and allusion may, if these feelings are disintegrative to the point of terror, neutralise not the mistrust but the efficacy of the poetry itself. The allusions have no opportunity, in Marjorie Garber’s terms, to offer a critique of the context into which they are summoned; and we are thrown back, extremely disconcertingly, into something unaccommodated and unappeasable in the poet himself. Unlike ‘Ode’, The Waste Land knows all this when, at its close, it mimes disintegration with superbly confident aplomb, with an allusive insouciance and panache in which Coriolanus is at once both broken and revived. Although Coriolanus appears again, jauntily enough, in ‘A Cooking Egg’, where he is envisaged in Heaven with ‘other heroes of that kidney’, his major appearance in Eliot’s work is in the sceptical double vision represented by the two poems of ‘Coriolan’, ‘Triumphal March’ and ‘Difficulties of a Statesman’. The former was published as a Faber Ariel pamphlet poem in 1931 and the latter in the Winter 1931/2 issue of the Parisian journal Commerce. They appeared together under the title ‘Coriolan’ only in the Collected Poems of 1936, in its ‘Unfinished Poems’ section. This is a category whose familiarity for readers of Eliot should not dull us to its oddity: no other authorial Collected Poems known to me has anything comparable. Eliot clearly wants ‘Coriolan’ to be known as ‘unfinished’; since, if it had not been declared so, how many readers would have realised that it was? There is irony in the fact that ‘Coriolan’, being ‘unfinished’, can hardly be said to be 35 36

Selected Essays, p. 144. Louis Menand, Discovering Modernism: T. S. Eliot and His Context (1987; 2nd edn, New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 16–17.

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‘intelligible, self-complete, in the sunlight’ either. What Eliot admires in the play appears obdurately impossible for his own creative encounters with it. In one of his excellently provocative books on Shakespeare, in which familiar texts seem suddenly very strange indeed, Terence Hawkes discusses the impact of Coriolanus on Eliot. His detective work finds in ‘Coriolan’, as it does also in ‘Ode’, which carries in manuscript the titular subscript ‘on Independence Day, July 4th 1918’, the presence of Anglo-American anxieties. Eliot and his wife Vivien had attended the triumphal drive through London of President Woodrow Wilson in December 1918. Eliot’s disgust at English rhetoric about America at the time of the First World War, and his view of Wilson’s failures at the Treaty of Versailles which succeeded it, are, Hawkes thinks, coded into ‘Ode’; and Wilson’s drive may have been ‘crystallized’ into the march of ‘Triumphal March’, whose title, in this context, would take on even more of a ‘savage irony’ than it already has.37 Of their nature, such things cannot be proven; but the idea of Eliot’s enduring the complex fate of being an American in England does suggest a further intensity in his fascination with Coriolanus. What Eliot regards as Wilson’s mistaken appearance in Europe may have resonated with his own anxieties: and Coriolanus’s forced entry into a citadel and involuntary intimacy with despised allies may have seemed an analogue for Wilson’s political and Eliot’s cultural exploits. Sustained by a Coriolanus-like arrogance, Eliot became, Hawkes thinks, author of himself by rewriting British literary traditions ‘in order to place himself as their latest successor’.38 And, although Hawkes does not say so, Coriolanus’s perhaps best-known lines, ‘Would you have me / False to my nature? Rather say, I play / The man I am’ (3.2.14–16), seem entirely apposite to this element in Eliot: and one can imagine their having a special aura for him. This arresting if only speculative context, with its acerbic, even exacerbated self-recognition, gives a particular edge to the ‘Coriolan’ poems, which figure both the arrogance and the anxiety of the hero and operate through a form of jolting discontinuity, including that of poetic register. Even so, it is worth taking account of other contexts which the poem itself makes plain influenced Eliot’s conception of the figure of the leader. His translation of St John Perse’s Anabase, published in 1930, shares a few phrases with ‘Triumphal March’, and includes the figure of a ‘Leader of a people of dreams’ who enables the foundation of a city.39 ‘Coriolan’ cites, 37 38 39

Terence Hawkes, Meaning by Shakespeare (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 109. Ibid., p. 112. See Anabasis: A Poem by St.-Jean Perse, translated and with a preface by T. S. Eliot (1930; New York and London: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1949), p. 47.

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in French, a phrase from L’Avenir de l’Intelligence by Charles Maurras, leader of the camelots du roi, whose pre-First World War marches the poem might also be recalling. Maurras’ ultra-right-wing thinking was influential on Eliot in a way that has been deplored, and he was tried as a collaborator after the war: but if ‘Coriolan’ displays an interest in the rise of fascism in the 1920s it also offers a critique of it. In this, the poem allies itself with the interest taken in Coriolanus by such figures of the political Left as Bertolt Brecht and Orson Welles. In ‘Triumphal March’ the crowd waits for the conquering hero in eager anticipation, but the poem’s representative admiring voice is tonally disrupted by allusion. Husserl’s ‘The natural wakeful life of our Ego is a perceiving’ seems flatly useless as any index of feeling; and the listing of weapons and military equipment, which is in fact an itemisation of the munitions surrendered or destroyed by the Germans after the Treaty of Versailles taken almost verbatim from Erich Ludendorff’s The Coming War (1931), is preposterously specific and lets us know that it knows this when it mixes the specificity – of, for example, ‘102,000 machine guns’ – with sudden uncertainty: ‘I cannot tell how many projectiles, mines and fuses’. The preposterousness and uncertainty may also be read as this poem’s attitude to the treaty itself. Similarly, the temple sacrifice which this voice describes is tonally disrupted by the memory of ‘young Cyril’ saying ‘crumpets’ when the bell rings at a church service (mistaking it for the bell of the crumpet seller). The rhyming of ‘crumpets’ and ‘trumpets’ enacts the bathos of the poem’s discontinuities, and the name ‘Cyril’ itself has bathetic affinity with ‘Coriolan’, since they share three consecutive consonants and a vowel. And the presence of the boy Cyril may remember that Aufidius insultingly calls Coriolanus ‘boy’ at the end of the play. Coriolanus recoils in disgust, and the insult points up his subjection to his mother. Eliot’s rhyming of Cyril with Coriolanus like this is probably influenced by Wyndham Lewis’s The Lion and the Fox. Coriolanus, Lewis says, is ‘the child of Volumnia, not of Shakespeare, and one that never became anything but a schoolboy, crazed with notions of privilege and social distinction, incapable of thinking … but also congealed into a kind of machine of unintelligent pride’.40 Lewis’s book was originally published in 1927, but, as I said in my previous chapter, in a 1937 review of a reprint Eliot calls it ‘the

40

Wyndham Lewis, The Lion and the Fox: The Role of the Hero in the Plays of Shakespeare (1927; London: Methuen and Co., 1951), p. 238.

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most revelatory criticism’ of Coriolanus ‘that I have read’.41 He continues, in a way suggesting that he has ‘Coriolan’ in mind, that ‘the modern “dictator”, a Hitler or Mussolini, must be thought of … as a highly paid leading actor, whose business is to divert his people individually, from the spectacle of their own littleness as well as from more useful business’.42 Such a diversion is precisely the topic of ‘Triumphal March’. The disruptive comedy of discrepancy which is ‘Triumphal March’, in which no purchase can be taken on a tone before it slips into another, seems almost a way of distracting attention from the actual depiction of the hero: There he is now, look: There is no interrogation in his eyes Or in the hands, quiet over the horse’s neck, And the eyes, watchful, waiting, perceiving, indifferent. O hidden under the dove’s wing, hidden in the turtle’s breast, Under the palmtree at noon, under the running water At the still point of the turning world. O hidden.

Its context may ironise these lines, but the lines themselves appear not at all ironic: so that ‘indifferent’ seems affirmative, an element of the hero’s necessary impassivity. The imagery of the dove, and possibly of the eyes too, is derived from Coriolanus itself, where, in the final act, Coriolanus asks Virgilia, who has come to beg his mercy on Rome, ‘What is that curtsy worth? or those doves’ eyes / Which can make gods forsworn?’; and in almost his last words he says he wants it known to posterity that, ‘like an eagle in a dove-cote, I / Flutter’d your Volscians in Corioles’. Eliot’s lines may suggest, then, that there is something valuably female ‘hidden’ in the male will to power of the Coriolan figure: and the phrase which epitomises this value, ‘At the still point of the turning world’, is repeated in ‘Burnt Norton’, the first of the Four Quartets, where it is the point without which ‘There would be no dance, and there is only the dance’. Yet any such value in ‘Triumphal March’ is itself disrupted by ‘Difficulties of a Statesman’. Here the bathos is more acute, as the opening capitalised allusion to Isaiah – ‘CRY what shall I cry?’ – collapses immediately into mundane catalogues of honorary orders and committees and the information that Cyril – now swollen in his maturity into ‘Arthur Edward Cyril Parker’ – has become a ‘telephone operator / At a salary of one pound ten a week’. The bathos provides the context for this corrective view of the hero, as the poem’s voice appears to modulate into that of the Coriolan 41 42

T. S. Eliot, ‘The Lion and the Fox’, Twentieth Century Verse, 6/7 (Nov./Dec. 1937), unpaginated. Ibid.

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figure himself when what he comes to cry is ‘Mother mother’ and again, desperately, ‘O mother’, ‘Mother’ and ‘O mother’ once more. All derive from Coriolanus itself where, in its final act, the hero capitulates: ‘O mother, mother! / What have you done?’ and again ‘O my mother, mother!’ and finally ‘O mother!’. Eliot’s removal of the exclamatory punctuation makes the utterance and its repetition more blankly disconsolate, draining exclamatory energy into weary resignation. What is ‘hidden’ now in the centre of the heroic is not a valuable ‘still point’ but an exhausted trammelling in routine and a piercing desire for maternal contact. This is figured firstly in an imagery which, picking up that of the dove in ‘Triumphal March’, is articulated in a double aposiopesis which seems a kind of neurotic stammer: O hidden under the … Hidden under the … Where the dove’s foot rested and locked for a moment, A still moment, repose of noon, set under the upper branches of noon’s widest tree

The stammer is prelude to the beseeching of the mother. This is more the signature of hopelessness than expectation, since the plea is so haltingly unidiomatic as to seem almost a slightly skewed translation from another language: Mother May we not be some time, almost now, together

What is hidden in the depths of this Coriolan is a desire for maternal love of a kind he appears never to have had; and in Coriolanus Volumnia represents an overpowering maternal presence which can hardly be classified as love. Reading anxieties and neuroses out of ‘Coriolan’, we may also be discovering a reason for its unfinished state. Aposiopesis may not be only a rhetorical device in a poem which refuses to continue, one which, like the dove’s foot, has ‘locked’, and for more than a moment, but which its author nevertheless preserved in a collected volume. ‘Coriolan’, like Sweeney Agonistes, may be unfinished because it handles material that remained unfinished business for Eliot himself, material that this poet could not manipulate any further into art. Wilson Knight thought his work on Coriolanus influenced ‘Coriolan’. ‘My reading of Coriolanus as a dramatised balance of warrior values and love, rising to a powerful climax at love’s victory,’ he says, ‘is reflected in … the repeated Shakespearean reminiscence of “Mother” and “O mother” in … “Difficulties of a Statesman”.’43 Terence Hawkes thinks that Eliot’s 43

Allen Tate (ed.), T. S. Eliot: The Man and his Work (London: Chatto and Windus, 1967), p. 248. Eliot knew Knight’s work on Coriolanus before its appearance in The Imperial Theme in 1931.

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eventual acquiescence in Knight’s ‘spatial’ reading of Shakespeare leads him to abandon the ‘disintegrative, historical and thus essentially temporal mode of analysis’ which he had once admired in J. M. Robertson, and turns him instead towards Knight’s ‘unifying a-historical … “vision”’.44 This has truth with regard to Eliot’s criticism, although it is overstated. In ‘Coriolan’, however, although Eliot’s imagery probably owes something to Knight, he in fact departs decisively from him. Knight grossly sentimentalises the play, notably when he says of its conclusion that it is ‘aglow with heating love’.45 Heat comes from somewhere here, but not from Shakespeare: and this ‘vision’ of the play entangles Knight in serious difficulties when it compels him to read Coriolanus’s death, risibly, as a form of sacrificial purification. There is no unifying ‘vision’, and certainly no vision of ‘love’, in Eliot’s ‘Coriolan’. Indeed, the poems which constitute it, with their lurches of tone, style, perspective and address, and their barely concealed emotional desolation or even derangement, resulting from what appears to be a failure of maternal love, may almost be regarded as critiquing any such thing. The poem engages with disintegrative emotions; and, unfinishable, it disintegrates itself. It is one of Eliot’s most compelling performances after The Waste Land and insufficiently regarded or attended to.

the tempest and the merchant of venice Among the fragments shored against ruin in The Waste Land are several fragments of Shakespeare. Antony and Cleopatra, King Lear, Hamlet and Coriolanus are all sounded in the poem’s echo chamber. The play most crucial to it, however, is The Tempest, and one moment of it in particular: when, in act 1 scene 2, Ferdinand, believing his father to have been drowned, hears the invisible Ariel singing ‘Full fathom five thy father lies’. ‘The ditty,’ he says, ‘does remember my drown’d father.’ The Waste Land revisits this moment as a kind of repeated undersong of its own, even to the point of implying, among so much radical disjunction and discontinuity, the presence of a ghostly, skeletal or attenuated narrative. ‘The Burial of the Dead’ introduces the motif when Madame Sosostris produces the tarot card of ‘the drowned Phoenician sailor’. The punctuation here, as often in Eliot, is unorthodox. What Madame Sosostris ‘said’ is 44 45

Meaning by Shakespeare, p. 95. G. Wilson Knight, The Imperial Theme: Further Investigations of Shakespeare’s Tragedies Including the Roman Plays (1931; London: Methuen and Co., 1968), p. 198.

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punctuated with a comma, after which a parenthesis immediately opens, and what Madame Sosostris ‘said’ then continues after the parenthesis. What the parenthesis says is, ‘(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)’. It is unclear therefore whether Madame Sosostris or some intrusive voice from elsewhere is saying this, or whether the poem itself, as it were, is saying it. Whoever is saying it, it is not placed within quotation marks; and in any case the quotation, from ‘Full fathom five’, extends only as far as the word ‘eyes’: ‘Look!’, with its hortatory punctuation, is an intrusion from elsewhere. The introduction of The Tempest appears to generate considerable textual excitement. This is appropriate, since the poem cannot leave the allusion alone. It reappears in the next section, ‘A Game of Chess’, which also alludes to Antony and Cleopatra and King Lear. In response to anxiously repetitive questioning, the voice of the poem responds to the final question, ‘Do you remember / Nothing?’, with ‘I remember / Those are pearls that were his eyes.’ The Waste Land, then, offers a kind of meta-critical assessment of its own flurry of Shakespearean references when it syncopates a ragtime rhythm out of the repeated orthographic representation of the characteristic Shakespearean tragic howl or groan, ‘O’, and a popular song published in 1912, ‘That Shakespearean Rag’.46 Here, in a kind of allusive doubleness, Eliot cites popular culture citing high culture; and the syncopation necessitates a syllabic addition to the adjective ‘Shakespearean’, a jazzily modernistic irreverence: O O O O that Shakespeherian rag It’s so elegant So intelligent

‘Not the strength to preserve but to cleanse, to tear out of context, to destroy,’ says Benjamin of quotation: and although we might – too casually – think that in Eliot tradition is usually instated rather than questioned by allusion, this moment seems a defacement with jaunty ragtime of the mournfully melancholy assuagement of Ariel’s song and of Hamlet’s last utterance. The moment is reconstituted twice in ‘The Fire Sermon’. The figure ‘fishing in the dull canal / On a winter evening round behind the gashouse’ is discovered ‘Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck / And on the king my father’s death before him’, in a savage discontinuity of register jolting 46

The song’s sheet music and lyrics are supplied in Lawrence Rainey (ed.), The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), pp. 95–9.

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even for this poem of jolting discontinuities. The fisherman here becomes Ferdinand who, after hearing the first of Ariel’s songs, ‘Come unto these yellow sands’, says: Sitting on a bank, Weeping again the King my father’s wrack, This music crept by me upon the waters, Allaying both their fury and my passion With its sweet air.

(1.3.390–4)

And the line ‘This music crept by me upon the waters’, now set in quotation marks, introduces the subsequent passage in ‘The Fire Sermon’ on the Thames and its ‘fishmen’. These allusions to the same moment in The Tempest and its preoccupation with death by drowning are reinforced elsewhere by Madame Sosostris’s explicit warning to ‘Fear death by water’, and by the brief fourth section actually called ‘Death by Water’ where the drowned Phoenician sailor, now identified as Phlebas, is figured in an imagery of deathly metamorphosis remotely echoing that of Ariel’s song (Eliot: ‘A current under sea / Picked his bones in whispers’; Shakespeare: ‘Of his bones are coral made’). Valerie Eliot’s facsimile and transcript of the poem’s drafts indicates that Ezra Pound struck out the line ‘(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)’ without comment.47 Eliot obviously considered it integral and ignored the recommendation. But the facsimile also includes the first draft and a fair copy of a short poem called ‘Dirge’ which Pound marks with two questionmarks, doubly underlined, and the word ‘doubtful’.48 This also makes use of one of Ariel’s songs, now in parodied form, and an imagery of metamorphosis in death: Full fathom five your Bleistein lies Under the flatfish and the squids. Graves’ Disease in a dead jew’s eyes! When the crabs have eat the lids. Lower than the wharf rats dive Though he suffer a sea-change Still expensive rich and strange

In the poem’s second verse the hideously specific metamorphosis proceeds: his nose becomes lace; his toes lose their skin; his lips ‘unfold’ from his gold teeth. 47 48

T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound, ed. Valerie Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1971), p. 7. Ibid., p. 121. We cannot know whether Pound meant the word ethically or aesthetically, or both.

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The prominently repeated motif taken from The Tempest thereby entangles The Waste Land with two of the poems which weigh most heavily when charges of anti-Semitism are brought against Eliot: ‘Dirge’ itself and ‘Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar’. In fact, the presence of the ‘dead jew’s eyes’ in ‘Dirge’ recalls Shylock’s speech of ironically exemplary self-justification in act 3 of The Merchant of Venice, ‘Hath not a Jew eyes?’ In his arresting book Shakespeare is Shylock, Kenneth Gross says that ‘it is hard to find in modern poetry, fiction, or drama a truly canonical reimagining of Shakespeare’s Shylock’, the kind of reinvention of other Shakespearean characters to be found in Pirandello’s use of Hamlet in his Henry IV, or Beckett’s use of both Hamlet and Lear in Endgame. ‘When it comes to the invention of a new literary character,’ Gross says, ‘the face of Shylock, unless it appears as a grotesque relic or revenant – as in the early poetry of T. S. Eliot – is something that must either be exorcised or go more deeply in disguise.’49 In ‘Dirge’ we find such a grotesque relic or revenant, as we do in ‘Bleistein’; and this is so even after we acknowledge that Eliot, with Pound’s prompting, did not publish the poem as part of The Waste Land, or anywhere, and that in such a multivocal poem it need not have been read as expressing his own attitudes even if he had. The poem seems, however, not discontinuous with attitudes expressed elsewhere by Eliot; and we have to wonder why he should write a passage of such virulence in the first place. It is hard to envisage any context in which ‘Dirge’ might be made to seem not anti-Semitic. The congested epigraph to ‘Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar’, which rams a series of literary and artistic references to Venice forcibly up against one another, includes Othello’s climactic curse when he is persuaded of Desdemona’s adultery, ‘Goats and monkeys!’ (4.1.265). The poem itself, which Christopher Ricks justly calls ‘compulsively allusive’,50 is compulsively allusive to Shakespeare: to The Phoenix and the Turtle, to Antony and Cleopatra (twice), to Othello. But the crucial Shakespearean reference is now, as it is not in ‘Dirge’, explicitly to The Merchant of Venice. As in ‘Dirge’, however, the reference is initiated by a Jewish eye, and the passage places a Jew a long way ‘under’ and ‘underneath’ other things: A lustreless protrusive eye Stares from the protozoic slime At a perspective of Canaletto. The smoky candle end of time 49 50

Kenneth Gross, Shylock Is Shakespeare (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 9. Christopher Ricks, T. S. Eliot and Prejudice (1988; London: Faber and Faber, 1994), p. 34.

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The poem’s Shakespearean references, including the specific if oddly phrased one here to Shylock’s self-justifying speech in the first act of The Merchant of Venice itself (‘Signior Antonio, many a time and oft / In the Rialto you have you rated me / About my moneys and my usances’), frame what appears a satirical attitude to the cultural, social, sexual and financial decadence of modernity, compared to evocations of past strengths. But, as in The Waste Land – notably in the pastiche in ‘A Game of Chess’ of Enobarbus’s speech about Cleopatra on the Nile in Antony and Cleopatra, which is both sumptuous and sterile, an essence of the synthetic – such allusions have a tendency to operate in both directions, critiquing our too easy compliance in the more affirmative values we might casually read out of, say, Antony and Cleopatra itself or Canaletto’s perspectives. That Eliot was well aware of such an ambivalent two-way flow at the heart of apparently judgemental allusion is clear from his admiration, in his Edinburgh lectures, for the savage humour of Antony and Cleopatra which creates, he thinks, ‘a fusion of sordidness and magnificence … into one and the same thing’.51 That so much of the ‘sordidness’ of ‘Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar’ should attach to the figure of the Jew ‘underneath the lot’ and that the allusion to Shylock appears to suggest the permanently deleterious presence of the Jew in Venice are elements of judgement almost unattached to the other comparisons and contrasts which the poem makes. ‘Underneath’, Antony Julius points out, in the sense of being the most worthless, but also of being the most significant, as in ‘what’s at the bottom of all this?’.52 These lines therefore seem prejudicially anti-Semitic. The argument about this poem, and others of Eliot’s, has been extensively pursued in Julius’s book, and in responses to it.53 An excellent précis of the various cases made is available in Denis Donoghue’s Words Alone.54 51 52 53

54

Cited in Ronald Schuchard, Eliot’s Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 117. T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form, p. 133. In addition to Julius the major documents in the case are: Christopher Ricks, T. S. Eliot and Prejudice (London: Faber and Faber, 1988); the journal Modernism/Modernity, 10, 1 (January 2003), which prints Ronald Schuchard’s essay ‘Burbank with a Baedeker, Eliot with a Cigar: American Intellectuals, Anti-Semitism, and the Idea of Culture’, responses by various critics, and a reply by Schuchard; and ‘Appendix 1’ in Craig Raine, T. S. Eliot (Oxford University Press, 2006), which is a spirited but unpersuasive defence of Eliot. Denis Donoghue, Words Alone: The Poet T. S. Eliot (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 99–103.

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(Donoghue has his own position, which has itself been rebuked by Anthony Julius.) The problem in ‘Burbank’ is sometimes taken to be who we regard as doing the perceiving. If Bleistein is being perceived through the eyes of Burbank, then the queasily disgusted feeling is Burbank’s, not the poet’s, and the attitude becomes defensible within the judgemental context in which it exists. But this problem, as the acres of commentary on the poem attest, admits of no easy solution. My own view is that, like ‘Dirge’, ‘Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar’ cannot be acquitted of the charge. There is simply insufficient evidence that perception is the persona’s; and, given the sensitivity of this material and the propensity to misunderstanding within it, Eliot would have been capable of greater clarity about that, had he seen the necessity of it. This being so, Eliot’s Shakespeare is inextricably involved in his antiSemitism. Christopher Ricks’s altogether appropriate metaphor for the method of ‘Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar’ makes a point unforgettably, and with justice: ‘It is the only one of Eliot’s collected poems,’ he says, ‘penned with the ink of the cuttle-fish; it uses its energies of ink (its own, and those of the coinciding previous writers) at once to announce and conceal its whereabouts.’55 Shakespeare is the most significant of those ‘coinciding previous writers’; and The Merchant of Venice, a play Eliot never discusses as a critic and so one never ‘announced’ in his work, may nevertheless be considered a deeply informing, if usually concealed, presence within his poetry of the 1920s.

pericles In a review of Valerie Eliot’s edition of the poem’s drafts, William Empson does not dispute the anti-Semitism of ‘Dirge’ and says that ‘The rejected passages of Jew-baiting are still deeply involved in the final poetry’ of The Waste Land itself.56 He also thinks, ingeniously but persuasively decoding Eliot’s use of The Tempest, that anti-Semitism is a coded representation of difficulties with his Unitarian father. If a conflicted filiality is allusively written into The Waste Land by means of one of Shakespeare’s late plays, another supplies the source for a poem in which the childless T. S. Eliot writes paternity as a kind of visionary projection in which, although conflict is still potential, delighted mutual recognition is actual. ‘Marina’ (1930) 55 56

T. S. Eliot and Prejudice, p. 35. William Empson, Using Biography (London: Chatto and Windus/The Hogarth Press, 1984), p. 196. The review first appeared in Essays in Criticism in 1972.

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remains one of the strangest even of T. S. Eliot’s poems which, despite all the commentaries and interpretations, go on being very strange, and strangely provoking, indeed; and it is also one of the most beautiful. Eliot greatly admired Pericles at a time when this was not the norm. Ben Jonson initiated a persistent view shortly after its first staging when he called it ‘some mouldy tale’; and even current opinion tends to find the first nine scenes extremely problematic, and to doubt Shakespeare’s authorship of them. In his Edinburgh lecture Eliot describes it, on the contrary, as ‘a very great play’ and says that in it Shakespeare has ‘seen through the dramatic action of men into a spiritual action which transcends it’. He also speaks of its moving onto ‘another plane’ in which ‘a hidden and mysterious pattern of reality appears as if from a palimpsest’: it is a play in which Shakespeare discovers a way of ‘expressing more than what the characters know or know they feel’.57 This reading is at least in harmony with, and probably influenced by, Wilson Knight’s work on the last plays. In his introduction to The Wheel of Fire in the same year in which he wrote the poem, Eliot says that he had read some of Knight’s ‘papers’ while reading the late plays ‘for the first time in my life as a separate group’.58 In an essay contributed to a memorial volume in 1967, Knight identifies these ‘papers’ as almost certainly his book Thaisa, which Eliot considered for publication by Faber and Faber. Eliot dedicated a presentation copy of ‘Marina’ to Knight on its publication as a Faber Ariel pamphlet poem in 1930 ‘with, I hope, some appropriateness’; and Knight says in this essay, rather self-aggrandisingly, that ‘as a poet’ Eliot ‘had seen so exactly what I was doing that he had composed in “Marina” a perfect poetical commentary on those Shakespearean meanings which I had unveiled’.59 Thaisa went unpublished, but Knight did publish an essay based on it, ‘Myth and Miracle’, in 1929, which eventually formed the opening chapter of The Crown of Life: Essays in Interpretation of Shakespeare’s Plays, published by Oxford University Press on Eliot’s strong recommendation in 1947. This book had enormous impact on Shakespeare criticism and interpretation for a long time after the war when many others were also, like Eliot, responding positively to its theological, metaphysical and visionary view of the last plays, to Knight’s ‘discovery’, as he puts it in an addendum in 57 58 59

Charles Warren, T. S. Eliot on Shakespeare (Ann Arbor and London: UMI Research Press, 1987), pp. 99, 100. T. S. Eliot, ‘Introduction’ to G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire (1930; revised and enlarged edn, London: Methuen, 1949), p. xviii. T. S. Eliot: The Man and His Work, p. 247.

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1965, ‘that Shakespeare’s autonomous poetry corroborates the death-conquest announced by Christianity’.60 This understanding of the last plays is unfashionable now, although Knight’s work can still impress in its rapt attentiveness, its analytical as well as synthesising powers, and its hugely comprehensive knowledge of the Shakespeare canon. But the theological understanding of Pericles clearly underwrites ‘Marina’, with the poem’s prominent use of those words crucial to Christian theology, ‘grace’ and ‘hope’. Both words occur in the play itself; and Eliot’s poem is, in part, a tissue or patchwork of words recurrent in Pericles: seas; shores; daughter; wind; breath; pulse. In addition, Eliot’s lines ‘By this grace dissolved in place’ and ‘This form, this face, this life’ echo Gower’s opening speech, which rhymes ‘face’ and ‘grace’, and a speech by Simonides in act 2 which rhymes ‘place’ with ‘grace’. The poem’s interrogative syntax also rhymes with the question-and-answer mode of the play’s great recognition scene between father and daughter, act 5 scene 1, which seems to me, as it does to many who write about the play, the most moving of all such scenes in late Shakespeare. Given all this, it is striking that one word the poem does not use is the word ‘Marina’ itself, which does resound repetitively throughout this scene, from identification (‘My name is Marina’) through disbelief (‘How, a king’s daughter? / And called Marina?’) to wondering acceptance and confirmation (‘thank the holy gods as loud / As thunder threatens us. This is Marina’). This points up the peculiarity of Eliot’s title, which is exactly not the way a dramatic monologue, even of the Eliotic kind, is usually entitled: after its speaker, like ‘Ulysses’, say, and ‘Andrea del Sarto’ and ‘Gerontion’. In ‘Marina’, Marina has become an echo, a name detached from all referents, floating free from specificity so that it can the more intensely represent an ache and a yearning. The poem presents a paternal consciousness acknowledging an impossible thing, the return to life of a beloved daughter, and it names her, as his entire consciousness is suffused with the sense of her presence, only in her relationship to him: ‘O my daughter’, in wondering gratitude; and, at last, in simple, affirmative recognition, ‘my daughter’. The tone could hardly be more at variance with that in which ‘Mother’ and O mother’ are uttered in ‘Coriolan’. In a rhapsodic piece written around 1931, William Empson even makes this a matter of identification, understandably: ‘He is himself his daughter 60

G. Wilson Knight, The Crown of Life: Essays in Interpretation of Shakespeare’s Final Plays (1947; London: Methuen, 1965), p. 31.

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because he can conceive her sufficiently to father her: because he can imagine and promulgate a state of mind in which he cannot himself find equilibrium.’61 In these respects ‘Marina’ meets Pericles and even aspires to its sublimity: but its epigraph intrudes quite another form of recognition, in a way that makes Eliot the poet continuous with Eliot the critic who, three years before the publication of ‘Marina’, had published both ‘Seneca in Elizabethan Translation’ and ‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’. Taken from Hercules Furens, the epigraph gives us Hercules’s questions – which translate as ‘What place is this? What region, what quarter of the world?’ – as he awakes from exhausted sleep after murdering his wife and children, an act occasioned by the madness engendered in him by the jealous Juno. Hard upon this awakening comes his appalled recognition of what he has done and his urge to kill himself, which he is only with great difficulty dissuaded from by his father. Eliot said of the epigraph that it proposes a ‘crisscross between Pericles finding alive, and Hercules finding dead – the two extremes of the recognition scene’62 – but what it does more immediately is to initiate the interrogative syntax and the cadence of the poem itself: ‘Quis hic locus, quae / regio, quae mundi plaga?’; ‘What seas what shores what grey rocks and what islands …’, which is the unpunctuated rhythmic motion, the coming and going, of the sea itself, water lapping the bow. The interrogatives of Hercules Furens interconnect, then, with those of the recognition scene in Pericles to supply the syntax and cadence of the opening of ‘Marina’; and that syntax and cadence return at the poem’s close. As a consequence, ‘Marina’ is almost buoyantly tentative, a poem of seeking and inquiring, and not at all what Wilson Knight makes it seem when he calls it ‘a perfect poetical commentary’ on the meanings he has found in the play. ‘Marina’ is not commentary but pure poetic discovery. It does not know what is already known but is itself the revelation of knowledge and the tracing of the progress by which knowledge is revealed. As such, it mediates Pericles into an entrancingly new life of its own. Eliot’s epigraph is actually far too obscure to do anything of the work for the reader which he says it will. In ‘Seneca in Elizabethan Translation’ he himself calls Seneca ‘a Latin poet whose reputation would deter any reader but the most curious’.63 The source is so obscure in fact that it is hard not to 61 62 63

William Empson, ‘Marina’, in Argufying: Essays on Literature and Culture, ed. John Haffenden (1987; London: The Hogarth Press, 1988), p. 357. Quoted in B. C. Southam, A Student’s Guide to the Selected Poems of T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 6th edn, 1994), pp. 246–7. T. S. Eliot, Elizabethan Dramatists (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), p. 11.

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find a certain disingenuousness here. Even if what the epigraph is meant to point to in the poem is primarily the second strophe with its four instances of human animality ‘meaning / Death’, these could actually be derived perfectly satisfactorily from Pericles itself since, prior to its culminating recognitions, the play’s action involves exactly what may be read out of these instances: avarice; pride; sloth; lust. Eliot needed the provocation of Hercules Furens, however, as well as that of Pericles itself, in order to make ‘Marina’, and he needed it to be known that he needed it. The ‘crisscross’ of Pericles with Hercules Furens, which continues to seem a bizarre one, was necessary to Eliot in at least two ways. Firstly, it gave him a kind of permission to inhabit the persona or consciousness of Shakespeare’s hero, if that is what the first person singular of ‘Marina’ is, exactly, which he might otherwise have denied himself, since there is in Eliot a very deep poetic insecurity. This makes for a large part of the timbre of his work, and is a quality always appealing in him. His own inhabitation of the Pericles persona is, like the rhythms of his poem itself, tentative, utterly lacking the undaunted self-confidence of, say, Browning’s inhabitation of Caliban or Auden’s of Prospero. And second, Hercules Furens is a play in which the masculine heroic code of Greek and Roman tragedy reaches a nadir when Hercules kills his sons. Pericles is a play in which, as in Shakespeare’s other last works, the masculine code of tragedy is turned, with immense difficulty, towards the comic: and that turn is represented by the female and by the younger generation; by, that is to say, the daughter. Pericles in the recognition scene says to Marina, ‘Yet thou dost look / Like Patience gazing on kings’ graves, and smiling / Extremity out of act’ (5.1.137–9). In their radical interpenetration of suffering and joy, Shakespeare’s final plays also smile out of act the extremity of a long Western European history of the tragic. And so it is Hercules Furens as well as Pericles that puts its pressure on Eliot’s image for the entrancement of creativity, its combination of control and release: Bowsprit cracked with ice and paint cracked with heat. I made this, I have forgotten And remember. The rigging weak and the canvas rotten Between one June and another September. Made this unknowing, half conscious, unknown, my own.

In these lines Eliot transposes the meanings and energies of Pericles into the aesthetics of modernism, making the Shakespearean hero his ‘own’ too. In

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this, his poem harmonises with the ‘spatial’ modernism of Wilson Knight’s criticism, itself influenced by Eliot’s criticism and poetry, which discovers in the play ‘Shakespeare’s total poetry on the brink of self-knowledge’.64 The difficult making of the ship probably remembers The Tempest rather than Pericles, when the amazed Boatswain announces that our ship – Which, but three glasses since, we gave out split – Is tight and yare, and bravely rigg’d as when We first put out to sea.

(5.1.222–5)

The making of the ship in ‘Marina’ symbolises the making of a life, a faith, a child, a poem; and ‘Marina’ is Eliot’s supreme symbolist poem, naming and miming the process of its own generation. It is also his most unconstrained. Ending where it begins, its emblematic marine setting draws on that same New England imagery which momentarily represents unconstraint elsewhere in Eliot too: towards the end of The Waste Land (‘The boat responded / Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar …’), in the sixth section of Ash-Wednesday, where ‘the lost sea voices’ figure the human desire which must be renounced in a new dispensation, and in ‘The Dry Salvages’. Relocating himself in Pericles, Eliot, resigning his speech for that unspoken, finds a voice ‘that gains force from being somehow absent’, and earns the right to its exalted expectation: ‘The awakened, lips parted, the hope, the new ships’. 64

The Crown of Life, p. 73.

part iii

Auden’s Shakespeare

chapter 5

A plenum of experience: Auden’s Shakespeare criticism

essays and lectures Until 2000 Auden’s major writings on Shakespeare appeared in The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (1963) and in an introduction to the Signet Classics edition of the Sonnets (1964), which he collected in a second volume of essays, Forewords and Afterwords (1973). The essays in the section ‘The Shakespearian City’ in The Dyer’s Hand deal primarily with Henry IV Parts I and II, The Merchant of Venice and Othello; ‘Balaam and His Ass’, on masters and servants, contains a substantial discussion of The Tempest; and a final sequence of essays, ‘Homage to Igor Stravinsky’, concludes with ‘Music in Shakespeare’ which considers several plays and pays attention to the songs in Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It and Twelfth Night. The title ‘The Shakespearian City’ presumably intends the whole order of civilisation and behaviour comprehended by the epithet ‘Shakespearian’, taking point from its tacit allusion to Augustine’s The City of God, Augustine being a frequent source of reference in Auden’s later criticism. Most of the Shakespeare material in The Dyer’s Hand had its origin in Auden’s lectures as Oxford Professor of Poetry from 1956 to 1961. This is apparent in the title ‘The Shakespearian City’ itself since, although Auden nowhere explicitly uses or explains it in the essays, he had entitled two of the lectures ‘The fallen city’ and ‘The alienated city’.1 Similarly, despite the fact that the title suggests that ‘The Dyer’s Hand’ is the title of one of its essays – it is not – the title itself goes unexplained. It is, however, glossed by a review with the same title of a book on Shakespeare by Mark van Doren which Auden published in 1939. Auden defines Shakespeare there, in a rather specialised sense of the word, as ‘the purest poet who ever lived: that is to say, he explored life through a single medium, that of language’. 1

See B. C. Bloomfield and Edward Mendelson (eds.), W. H. Auden: A Bibliography 1924–1969, 2nd edn (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1972).

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He confines himself exclusively to the poetic and shows no interest in philosophy or science – unlike Auden himself – and is figured in a metaphor drawn from sonnet 111: ‘The dyer’s hand,’ Auden says, ‘was completely immersed in what it worked in.’2 The relevant lines of the sonnet are: Thence comes it that my name receives a brand, And almost thence my nature is subdu’d To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand.

The dyer’s hand is coloured by the dye into which he dips cloth, just as Shakespeare is coloured by the medium, language, in which he works; and one editor persuasively says that the sonnet’s metaphor distantly suggests ‘the poet’s hand, writing, steeping language in rhetorical “colours”’.3 The ‘brand’ is the mark put on a criminal, Shakespeare representing himself as forced by financial necessity to engage in the suspect work of an Elizabethan actor: there is shame, even self-loathing in this sonnet, which John Berryman accurately describes as ‘excruciated’.4 So Auden may imply selfcriticism in his title: he subdues himself in these pieces to the work of the paid critic, who must comply with word limits; and he may also insinuate the unorthodoxy of some of what his volume contains. In 2000, however, Arthur Kirsch published Auden’s Lectures on Shakespeare. This reconstructs Auden’s lectures at the New School for Social Research in Greenwich Village, New York City, between October 1946 and May 1947, in which he worked chronologically through almost every text in the canon. Reconstruction is required because there are no manuscripts. Auden was, however, blessed with attentive listeners, notably the student who would become his friend and secretary, Alan Ansen; and the lectures are assembled from Ansen’s notes and, to a much lesser extent, those of two other students. Kirsch also uses Auden’s copy of G. L. Kittredge’s edition of the Complete Works which includes numerous indications of passages for discussion and some marginal annotation; and, infrequently, he employs notes by Howard Griffin, although he finds these not entirely reliable. More questionably, Kirsch occasionally amplifies the

2 3 4

W. H. Auden, Prose, Volume II: 1939–1948, ed. Edward Mendelson (Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 30. ‘The Sonnets’ and ‘A Lover’s Complaint’, ed. John Kerrigan (1986; London: Penguin Books, 1999), p. 324, n. 7. John Berryman, ‘Shakespeare at Thirty’, in The Freedom of the Poet (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), p. 36.

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text with quotations from Auden’s published prose in order, he says, to ‘clarify and enrich’.5 Although unorthodox as scholarly procedure, this is not without precedent: there are Coleridge’s Shakespeare lectures, for instance, and Wittgenstein’s talks on aesthetics; but it does raise some difficulties. Thomas Blackburn has compared some of Ansen’s original notes with Kirsch’s edition, and there is no reason to dispute his judgement: A substantial part of Kirsch’s work consists simply of making fragments into sentences, providing reasonable transitions between sentences, and supplying the full text of quotations read or cited by Auden. Other parts of the editing, however, involve interpretive conjectures that make us aware that reconstruction here really amounts to the construction of a text whose original cannot be recovered.

The result, Blackburn says shrewdly, is that ‘Kirsch’s expansion of Ansen’s notes makes reasonable sense, but we cannot be sure that it is the sense that Auden intended in the lecture.’6 This is an anxiety for anyone writing about Auden’s Shakespeare who intends to use the lectures interpretatively, particularly since they are also tonally so distinct from the essays. They can be repetitive; they contain rather dull plot summary; and they are sometimes whimsical in a way that may have charmed in the theatre but can grate on the page. At the same time, they also crackle with jokes, autobiography and contemporary reference, situating Shakespeare at the centre of all sorts of instance and example; and they have an ex tempore immediacy, even to the extent of containing the odd factual error. In addition, in the foreword to The Dyer’s Hand Auden says that, when revising for publication in book form, he often ‘reduced’ his material ‘because, as a reader, I prefer a critic’s notebooks to his treatises’.7 Although a distinction between published essay and lecture is to be maintained, Auden seems to give us permission here to regard essays and lectures as related movements of mind continuous with the reinvention of Shakespeare in his poems.

5

6 7

W. H. Auden, Lectures on Shakespeare, reconstructed and edited by Arthur Kirsch (Princeton University Press, 2000), Introduction, p. xii. I do not usually identify specific page numbers for my citations of the lectures themselves, since these are easily traceable to the individual lectures from which they derive. Where they are not, I cite as LS within my text. Thomas Blackburn, review of Lectures on Shakespeare, Shakespeare Quarterly, 54, 1 (Spring 2003), pp. 111–14. W. H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand (1963; London: Faber and Faber, 1975), p. xii. Subsequent citations are identified as DH within my text.

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Reading Auden on Shakespeare, it sometimes seems as though we are reading Auden on life itself, and on the life of the mind, so widely referential, ethically alert and socially contextualised are his ruminations and speculations. Occasionally in the lectures, the Shakespearean text can even seem merely the occasion for observations which may well have found their opportunity elsewhere, and on matters as various as farce, boredom, deception, noise, honour, fatness and the theology of money: an almost carnivalesque play among the concepts. On such occasions we may regret not having more of Auden’s opinion of the play itself while still being grateful to have whatever opinions he chooses to deliver himself of, so accommodating and well-accommodated are his intellect and his moral appetite. In addition, opinion in Auden’s prose on Shakespeare, which sometimes tightens into aphorism, is only rarely opinionated, saving itself from instructiveness by exactly the right degree of humane misgiving. To read Auden on Shakespeare is to join in a continued conversation of exceptional liveliness, brilliance, wit, quirkiness and occasional audacity. It is also to overhear Auden’s own conversations with numerous other writers who figure almost as a colour of his own intelligence in his spontaneously allusive critical writing. He refers only sparingly to contemporary critics – Empson, Wilson Knight, Eliot, George Rylands, Wyndham Lewis – but he does occasionally reveal an indebtedness to them. His account of Hamlet has absorbed Eliot, for instance, and in his final lecture he strikingly approves of Lewis’s conception, in a superbly grim passage of The Lion and the Fox, of a Shakespeare who possesses the impassibility of the public executioner. This is to define, in the harshest possible way, something about Shakespeare as ethical judge and disposer which Auden is unwilling to put so extremely himself but which, nevertheless, inheres fundamentally in his critical conception of Shakespeare. He is notably silent on some famous past Shakespeare criticism, even where it might have underwritten his own. His controversial account of Falstaff and Hal, for instance, has a shadowy forebear in Bradley’s essay ‘The Rejection of Falstaff’, and his view of Iago in ‘The Joker in the Pack’ may have been prompted by Bradley’s Nietzschean view of him, but Auden never mentions Bradley. Given the prominence of the relationship between Falstaff and Hal in Auden’s criticism, it is also odd that he never adduces Hazlitt’s view that Falstaff is ‘the better man of the two’, particularly since he was the first to say so in print. Similarly, Auden’s manifest delight in what I shall call generic instability might have discovered, but does not, its

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historical sanction in Johnson’s arguing in his Preface in favour of what he calls ‘mingled drama’. Auden is clearly, perhaps almost to the point of impudence, uninterested in placing himself in a continuity of literarycritical opinion. Instead, he far more frequently cites, quotes and alludes to a vast range of authorities as readily philosophical, theological, sociological, psychoanalytical and musical as literary. Epigraphs to the essays are drawn from Wittgenstein, Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt and Cardinal Newman; and lectures return as readily to such figures as Kierkegaard, Augustine, Freud, Buber and Nietzsche as they do to the literary figures to whom he gives most allegiance, a group which prominently includes Kipling, Lawrence, Housman, Woolf and Rimbaud. This eclecticism is vibrantly independent-minded, catching Shakespeare up into a network of polymathically unpredictable ramification while also generously paying tribute to the figures who shape Auden’s own intellect. In this criticism Shakespeare becomes the name for one of the crucial forms taken by Auden’s thinking. In an intensification of this kind of reference, many essays and lectures culminate in quotation with minimal, or even no, comment. These virtually stand-alone quotes may critique as well as confirm what Auden has said, and some are virtually riposte to it. Almost the opposite of customary peroration, they act as oblique, sometimes even riddling, invitations to further speculation and they form such a notable feature of Auden’s Shakespeare criticism, and are so peculiar as a critical mode, that it is worth detailing the more arresting ones. The lecture on Henry VI ends with D. H. Lawrence’s enthusiastically insubordinate poem ‘When I Read Shakespeare’, with its marvelling that ‘such trivial people’ can speak ‘such lovely language’, a sentiment to which Auden gives half-hearted assent, although no assiduous reader could think the word ‘trivial’ applicable to his own perceptions of Shakespearean character. Eliot’s ‘Coriolan’ is quoted at the end of the lecture on Julius Caesar – not that on Coriolanus, perversely enough – as, in some inexplicit way, complementary to Kierkegaard on ‘the pagan’s aesthetic definition of spirit’, which is also quoted at length. The conclusion of Woolf’s Between the Acts is quoted at the end of the lecture on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with the implication that the novel has an almost Shakespearean extensiveness in its conception of wartime England. Rimbaud’s prose poem ‘Génie’ is quoted at the end of the lecture on Much Ado About Nothing, where it is proposed as a complement to Don Pedro’s speech, after his visit to Hero’s tomb, about what Auden calls the contrast between ‘kindness and the possibilities of malice and tragedy, between the gentle day and the wolves of prey’.

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Arthur Kirsch, citing Alan Ansen, tells us that the ‘genius’ of Rimbaud’s poem was ‘applied by WHA (implicitly) to Christ’ – unsurprisingly, given the oxymoronically apocalyptic tenderness of Rimbaud’s invocation of this ‘génie’ (LS, p. 376). So Auden’s placing of this poem here is a prefiguring of the kind of Christian analogising which more famously informs his reading of Henry IV and Henry V in The Dyer’s Hand. Finally – an instance of Shakespeare commenting on Shakespeare in Auden’s prose – Palamon’s long prayer to Venus in The Two Noble Kinsmen, which Auden thinks may have been the last thing Shakespeare wrote, ends both the lecture and the essay on the Sonnets. Auden here discovers in one of the least known plays in the corpus a brilliantly apt instance of Shakespeare’s intense disgust at what he calls ‘masculine sexual vanity’, which ramifyingly complements his views on the Sonnets themselves.8 Such citations, the apparently spontaneous overflow of Auden’s vast reading and exceptional memory, seem deferential and tributary; and there is self-effacing modesty in his Shakespeare criticism, for all its intellectual range and occasional aphoristic decidedness. The modesty is complemented, though, by the serenity of his Shakespearean engagements, the sense they convey that no anxiety inheres in this encounter. Their exercises in citation even aid their serenity by proposing a continuum of endeavour, a permanence of humane inquiry and accomplishment, in which Shakespeare too must take his place. As, also, must Auden, since no one would presume to engage in such a conversation unless he considered himself worthy of admission to it. Auden’s referential criticism is therefore both modest in its high approbations and also extremely self-assured in its operation. Citation, in the same act in which it declares deference, bolsters self-confidence, protecting this critic against too overwhelming a sense of Shakespeare’s exceptionalism. Auden’s Shakespeare criticism is a remarkable demonstration of a poet’s prose as perpetually self-defining dialogue.

contemporaneities Auden’s dialogue with the past in relation to Shakespeare is complemented by the contemporaneity of some of his references. His criticism engages with the moment of its own composition and he is also willing to speak autobiographically. The institution in which his lectures were delivered, the New School for Social Research in Greenwich Village, had been founded in 8

W. H. Auden, Forewords and Afterwords, selected by Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber, 1973; 1979), p. 106.

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1933 as the second phase of the original, radical New School established in the 1920s under the name the University in Exile. It provided refuge and employment for European artists and intellectuals dismissed from teaching and government positions under Hitler and Mussolini. In 1946, when Auden began his Shakespeare lectures, this was a very recent history; and he was himself living in New York as an entirely voluntary but controversial exile. In the 1940s he was beginning to perceive himself as a poet of deliberate deracination and to include the perception in his work, eventually becoming, Nicholas Jenkins has said, ‘the first great poet of that most symptomatic of all social groups in the modern world: those who will not or cannot go home’.9 Auden occasionally makes the origins of his host institution explicit, when the lectures take account of wartime and post-war conditions. The lecture on Romeo and Juliet acknowledges that some members of his audience will find their experience tallying with that of refugees from the Gestapo portrayed in contemporary movies. Richard III’s opening monologue is ‘not unlike Adolf Hitler’s speech to his General Staff on 23 August 1939, in its utter lack of self-deception’. In fact Auden means 22 August, when Hitler said that it did not matter whether his explanation for the invasion of Poland (which happened a week later) sounded convincing or not because ‘The stronger is always right.’ The perception becomes an essential element in Auden’s persuasive understanding of Richard’s motivation. The same lecture includes a discussion of racism which makes a sensitively difficult distinction between contemporary anti-Semites and ‘anti-Negroes’. The lecture on Henry IV and Henry V calls Falstaff ‘a displaced person, a country boy who leaves his playmates and comes to the city’: ‘Many people in Greenwich Village,’ Auden says, ‘don’t know how to live in the city.’ This tacitly addresses some members of his audience in particular and, knowing that they too are literally displaced persons, implicitly hopes that Falstaff may be of use, or of help. Falstaff as a displaced person may be regarded as a forerunner of the subversive Falstaff who figures in The Dyer’s Hand; and by 1947, when he published The Age of Anxiety, Auden had generalised his perception so far as to have its prologue propose that the condition is intrinsic to contemporary experience or even to modernity itself: in wartime, he says, ‘everybody is reduced to the anxious status of a shady character or a displaced person’.10 9 10

Nicholas Jenkins, ‘Historical as Munich’, Times Literary Supplement, 9 February 2007, p. 13. W. H. Auden, Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber, 1976; revised edn, 2007), p. 447.

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The lecture on Julius Caesar reads Cassius as General Patten, and that on Measure for Measure perceives Angelo as ‘an enemy agent’. In a discussion of the crowd in the lecture on Coriolanus Auden recalls his recent experience in post-war Germany, where he had worked for the US Strategic Bombing Service. He argues that the denials of collaboration by German civilians which he encountered then were not to be regarded as deceit because ‘Events had robbed them of their memory.’ Further, he says admonitorily that ‘We should not imagine such conduct is restricted to Germans. Most of us, if we are not careful, are members of the crowd.’ To an audience in which there must have been anti-German feeling, this is brave. On such occasions Auden discovers in Shakespeare a means of addressing his own moment and allowing the experiences of his own life to set the terms of his inquiry. This is an engaged criticism, prickly with a sense of relevance and contingency, almost a version of what recent critical terminology calls ‘presentism’.11 In the essays there are far fewer contemporary references, but one calls a great deal of attention to itself. In ‘The Joker in the Pack’, the essay on Othello, Iago, is ingeniously but persuasively presented throughout as a practical joker and is finally read, parabolically, as a figure for ‘the autonomous pursuit of scientific knowledge through experiment which we all … take for granted as natural and right’. Auden, however, clearly believes that we are under no obligation to do so. Taking up Iago’s parting shot, ‘What you know, you know’ – his refusal, that is, to offer any motivation whatever for his actions to the Othello whom, by this stage in the play, he has turned into what Auden calls ‘a thing, incapable of knowing anything’ – the essay ends by moralising a crucial contemporary question: To apply a categorical imperative to knowing, so that, instead of asking, ‘What can I know?’ we ask, ‘What, at this moment, am I meant to know?’ – to entertain the possibility that the only knowledge which can be true for us is the knowledge we can live up to – that seems to all of us crazy and almost immoral. But, in that case, who are we to say to Iago – ‘No, you mustn’t.’ (DH, pp. 271–2)

The question still resonates in the worlds of contemporary technology, ecology and genetics. In Auden it is implicitly inflected with a Christian attitude to the human will and its collusion with evil: but its terms are formulated for him by Shakespearean character and psychology.

11

See, for instance, Terence Hawkes, Shakespeare in the Present (London and New York: Routledge, 2002).

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psychologies The way ‘The Joker in the Pack’ progresses from a close consideration of motive to parabolically moralising speculation with theological resonance is paradigmatic of Auden’s critical method with Shakespeare. The concept of parable is infrequently adduced explicitly in individual lectures and essays, but it is in ‘The Globe’, the introductory essay to ‘The Shakespearian City’, specifically in relation to tragedy, where the context strongly recalls Yeats’s concept of the ‘one myth’ in ‘At Stratford-on-Avon’: All Shakespeare’s tragedies might be called variations on the same tragic myth, the only one which Christianity possesses, the story of the unrepentant thief, and anyone of us is in danger of re-enacting it in his own way. The audience at a tragedy of Shakespeare’s, therefore, has to be both a spectator and a participant, for it is both a feigned history and a parable. (DH, pp. 75–6)

This is crucial in Auden; and the word ‘participant’, at least in the context of the one tragic myth of Christianity, has high sanction, since one is said to ‘participate’ in a ritual or a liturgical act but not, normally, in secular theatre, at least as a spectator. For Auden the secular tragedy of Shakespeare, in its parabolic dimension, incarnates a form of theodicy: despite his ease with the Shakespearean texts, they finally possess for him a virtually eschatological gravity. Nevertheless, Auden’s primary method with Shakespeare is character study of what now seems a rather old-fashioned Bradleyan kind, even if this is a Bradley enabled by, if also sceptical about, Freud; and Auden’s readings in psychology and motivation form a large part of the interest of his work on Shakespeare. His examinations of character in individual plays are phases in the development of a typology and taxonomy of human nature, and in his final lecture he defines this as an interest in ‘Christian psychology’ whose principles are that: All men are equal not in respect of their gifts but in that everyone has a will capable of choice. Man is a tempted being, living with what he does and suffers in time, the medium in which he realizes his potential character. The indeterminacy of time means that events never happen once and for all. The good may fall, the bad repent, and suffering can be, not a simple retribution but a triumph.

The tragic heroes are treated as sinners, and the comedies are regarded as movements towards a redeemed community, what Arthur Kirsch’s introduction calls ‘representations of the fulfilment of Eros in Christian Agape’.12 12

Lectures on Shakespeare, p. xiv.

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Christian terminology is consequently often at least within earshot, and Kierkegaard’s distinction between the aesthetic, ethical and theological is at the root of much of Auden’s thinking, sometimes explicitly. Many of Auden’s admonitions and aphorisms are grounded in this ‘psychology’, even though the specificity of its religious definition hardly precludes general applicability: ‘Many promising reconciliations have been wrecked because both sides were ready to forgive, but neither side was ready to be forgiven’; ‘You find out who you are when you are in love’; ‘The better you know someone, the better you can torture him: man and wife become each other’s devils’; and ‘Time will tell you nothing – you must decide your life’, which appears remarkably to combine a repeat line from Auden’s villanelle ‘If I Could Tell You’ (‘Time will say nothing but I told you so’) with the magisterial concluding line of Rilke’s ‘Archaic Torso’, ‘You must change your life’ (LS, pp. 32, 47, 56, 111). It chances – although it is not just chance, and the chance is not the result of my selectivity – that these observations all have immediate relevance to the circumstances of Auden’s own life, and also to the long poem which forms his major encounter with Shakespeare, ‘The Sea and the Mirror’ (1944), which I treat in my next chapter. Auden’s ‘Christian psychology’ begins and ends very close to home. The consequence of its predominantly psychological motive is that Auden’s Shakespeare criticism supplies a rich treasury of provocative ethical readings. In the lectures the judgements are rapid, absolute and unrelenting. In Falstaff and Hal, ‘eternal antitypes’, we have ‘the relation between honesty and acting’, and Hal has ‘no self’. The society of Twelfth Night ‘is beginning to smell gamey’. Achilles and Patroclus are ‘like grubby little boys from a Steig cartoon, except that they know what they’re doing and people get killed’, and Patroclus is ‘a 52nd street queen’.13 Isabella’s ‘very excess of feeling about [her] vocation means that she is not qualified for it’. Desdemona is ‘more aware than is agreeable of the honour she has done Othello by becoming his wife’; and, noting her apparent interest in Ludovico shortly before her death, Auden thinks she is on the verge of maturing from a ‘young schoolgirl’ into a woman beginning ‘to realize the meaning of adultery as a circumstance of life, not just of books’. In time, he says, ‘she might well have been unfaithful’. Lear’s nature is ‘that of a child, and socially he becomes a father-son to Cordelia’. Antony and Cleopatra ‘have behind them a lifetime of experience, and their worldly success makes them as unfree as children, public life taking the place of parents’. 13

William Steig was, Kirsch tells us, an ‘extremely sardonic cartoonist for the New Yorker’. Lectures on Shakespeare, p. 381.

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Coriolanus ‘requires a relation where he is the only child – with the people as well as with his mother’. Iachimo’s problem is ‘not a defective love for his neighbours but a lack of a definite relation even to himself’. Almost the last thing Hamlet says – ‘Had I but time (as this fell sergeant, Death, / Is strict in his arrest) – O I could tell you – / But let it be’ – ‘has the same kind of vanity as a suicide note’. Continuous with that, a striking passage of The Enchafèd Flood, Auden’s study of ‘the romantic iconography of the sea’ published in 1951, figures Hamlet as ‘the first hero of the romantic type’: ‘The result is that, instead of just avenging his father and getting it over with, he secretly cherishes the situation and cannot bear to end it, for who will he be then?’14 Auden’s brusqueness here, regarding Hamlet’s delay as the product of romantic egotism in which all sense of self is submerged in narcissistic role-playing, is consistent with the profound anti-romanticism of the latter part of his career. In 1943 he had even taught a seminar called ‘Romanticism from Rousseau to Hitler’.15 Reading Hamlet as Shakespeare’s nailing of romanticism without having had to endure its ill effects, Auden is also defining something in Shakespeare which is of high significance in relation to those poems of his own which figure or include Shakespeare in some way, as we shall see. Given Auden’s generally high level of psychological penetration, it is striking that, in relation to one type of character, he can be wrong-headed, even cruel. He lacks all inwardness with, or empathy for, the young woman as daughter and lover. Arthur Kirsch says that to believe that Desdemona might eventually prove an adulteress is to endorse Iago’s view of her; and this is surely so, even if we find Auden properly alert to the complications of her frank admiration for Ludovico. Romeo and Juliet are ‘idolators of each other, which is what leads to their suicides’; which is coarse in its insensitivity and inattentive to the play’s tragedy of circumstance. Cordelia is ‘a bore’, since even Shakespeare is unable to dramatise ‘absolute love and goodness … destroyed by the powers of this world’ (DH, p. 201), which is proven for Auden by how few lines she speaks. But this is crassly to underestimate the loud voice of Cordelia’s silence, present even when absent, and the source throughout of significant judgement. Ophelia is ‘a silly, repressed girl and is obscene and embarrassing when she loses her mind over her father’s death’. This is heartless. ‘Repressed’ is an unthinking gibe, 14 15

W. H. Auden, The Enchafèd Flood or The Romantic Iconography of the Sea (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), p. 97. See Edward Mendelson, Later Auden (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), p. 239.

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since it fails to take account of the conditions of her existence or her intelligence; and it is unclear why her insanity is an embarrassment, although it certainly manifests itself in obscenity. Brusquely dismissive anti-romanticism can, as ever, sound not unlike public-school priggishness. Although Auden endows Miranda in ‘The Sea and the Mirror’ with a ravishingly beautiful villanelle, his Prospero in that poem still finds her ‘a silly lovesick little goose’. There is an incapacity of humane recognition in these judgements which provokes a tone quite inappropriate to the textual moments they purport to define. It would be ungenerous to label them straightforwardly misogynistic, given what we know from the biographies about Auden’s attitudes to and relationships with women, although Randall Jarrell thinks that ‘a contempt for women sometimes breaks out in little half-sublimated forms’ in the earlier poetry.16 Still, we may wonder whether there is some repression in Auden himself which makes him so signally fail to respond to, or even appear to be threatened by, youthful female desire and suffering. Could it be that the W. H. Auden who reads himself into the fat, ageing Falstaff in The Dyer’s Hand and finds erotic desire in Falstaff’s relationship with Hal fears a comparable vulnerability in himself and steels himself against it by ridicule or derision? Like Proust writing boys as women in À La Recherche du Temps Perdu, Auden may be talking about boys when he talks about girls, since it was with boys that he had his own emotional and sexual encounters, and with boys that he experienced the infatuation, jealousy, guilt and betrayal – including, in the case of Chester Kallman, the betrayal that he thought ageing represents – which often flow in the wake of such encounters. Behind Auden’s sometimes outrageous contempt for young female characters may lie not so much misogyny as a response – cross-dressed, as it were – to the boys he used and cast off during his early life as a serial and predatory employer of sexual partners. Girls in Shakespeare are always cross-dressed anyway, since in Shakespeare’s theatre girls were played by boys, that necessity which the cross-dressing of the comedies toys with in such provocative ways. The possibility that this is the ultimate derivation of Auden’s feeling about some of Shakespeare’s heroines indicates how very deeply his own emotions are interpenetrated by those of Shakespeare’s characters. Living into them in his prose, he also writes modes of his own being as man and artist through them in ‘The Sea and the Mirror’ and his other Shakespearean poems. 16

Randall Jarrell, The Third Book of Criticism (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), p. 128.

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Despite Auden’s misjudgements, his Shakespeare criticism is remarkable for its breadth of insight and acuity. Discussing the ‘worldliness’ – his italicisation – of Antony and Cleopatra, he says that the play presents ‘a plenum of experience’: Shakespeare ‘needs this comprehensiveness to show the temptation of the world, the real world in all its kingdoms, all its glories’. In this allusion to the Lord’s Prayer Shakespeare is being given Christian blessing for his plenitude; but Auden’s own readings in the amplitude of Shakespearean character testify to his enduring sense of a worldly Shakespearean comprehensiveness. instabilities Nevertheless, Auden’s Shakespeare criticism also displays a more destabilised, indeterminate sense of identity than a ‘Christian psychology’ would find entirely orthodox. There is a cataloguing of the ways in which characters dissolve into one another. An exhaustive account of this would be tedious, it is such a marked feature of individual lectures and essays; and Auden is always prone to catalogue and classification, displaying what seems almost an obsessive taxonomic interest. But a few salient examples. Some are conventional: Richard II is a forerunner of Hamlet, the Duke in Measure for Measure of Prospero, and so on. But numerous others are much less so, and Auden frequently supplies a whole chain of character mobility and metamorphosis. Brutus becomes Hamlet; Jaques is linked to Shylock, Hamlet and Caliban; Hamlet derives from a number of ‘proto-Hamlets’, one of whom is Falstaff (both are ‘actor[s] living in a world of words’); Iago is present in Boyet, Friar Laurence, Puck, Oberon and Hal; Miranda is Juliet, Cordelia and Marina; and, in addition to being like the Duke, ‘Prospero is like Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream … and as a puppet master, he is Hamlet transformed.’ There is a sense in which, despite the peculiarity of some of these similitudes, they are doing little more than typological criticism always does. However, they also have a genuinely subversive element, proposing a slippage of identity and an insecurity of selfhood, an ontological instability, in Shakespearean character which inscribes at its very origin the kind of anxiety Auden discovers in Berowne and Rosaline in Love’s Labour’s Lost when he says that ‘the malice of their wit covers a desperate anxiety about themselves’. For Auden Shakespeare’s characters are constantly asking who they are, who they ought to be, and who they might become. This has an impact on the composition of ‘The Sea and the Mirror’ too: a letter to Christopher Isherwood associates Stephano in The Tempest with Falstaff,

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Ferdinand with Henry V and the young man of the Sonnets, and Gonzalo with Polonius; and the association of Antonio with both Iago and Richard III has significance for Auden’s representation of Antonio in his own monologue in the poem and in his verse codas to those of the other characters.17 This sense of instability in character is accompanied in Auden by a strong sense of generic instability too. Unlike all his contemporaries, Auden believes, Shakespeare was a beneficiary of the ‘improvised character’ of Elizabethan drama: most others, not having Shakespeare’s powers of characterisation, were disabled by it (LS, p. 310). In particular, his inheritance of the chronicle play compelled Shakespeare to derive his art from materials and characters already given. ‘He has to take whatever history offers,’ Auden writes in ‘The Globe’ (DH, p. 174); and in his concluding New York lecture he says that ‘The tightness of history enforces an understanding of the relation of any one thing to everything else in the world’; hence ‘characters have mixed motives, and there can be no narrow theory of aesthetic propriety that separates the tragic from the comic’. This is Auden coming from a different angle to the perception of the vitality of the Shakespearean interrelationship between tragic and comic which Eliot, as we have seen, also found so significant. In this context, it becomes clear why Antony and Cleopatra was Auden’s favourite Shakespeare play. He favours its presentation of mature love over Shakespeare’s many representations of young romantic love and has inspired things to say about this, which I discuss below. But he must also have found in it ample testimony to the virtues of breaching ‘aesthetic propriety’. The play is ‘mixed’ in several senses: in terms of gender, since Rome is unmanned by Egypt and there are reported acts of cross-dressing between hero and heroine; and in terms of genre, since these instabilities of gender are carried over into what is nominally a tragedy from the comedies: comedy intrudes even at the very moment of tragedy when the clown makes bawdy jokes just before Cleopatra speaks of death and immortality in some of Shakespeare’s most sublime poetry. In terms of both character and genre, then, Antony and Cleopatra might be said to find itself perfectly limned in Antony’s figuring of his own disintegration as a cloud shape which ‘The rack dislimns, and makes … indistinct / As water is in water.’ As such, it may also figure this whole tendency in Shakespeare, which reaches ultimate formal realisation in the mixed genres of the last plays where the character 17

The letter is cited in Arthur Kirsch’s edition of the poem (Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. xxiv–xxv.

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types and plots of some of the tragedies are inflected towards comic resolution. So, profoundly affected by generic instability, Auden, when he rewrites a Shakespeare play, takes up the last one of all, the romance or tragicomedy of The Tempest, and, in ‘The Sea and the Mirror’, rewrites Caliban, outsider and would-be rapist, in a lengthy monologue pastiching one of the most sophisticated prose styles ever written, that of the later Henry James.

radical readings Auden’s sense of these indeterminacies propels in The Dyer’s Hand three of his most radical readings: his view of the relationship between Antonio and Shylock in ‘Brothers and Others’; his comparison of Hal to Iago in ‘The Prince’s Dog’, which is congruent with his account of Iago in ‘The Joker in the Pack’; and the figuring of Falstaff as Christ in that same essay. In ‘Brothers and Others’ Auden differentiates between the world of the history plays, in which the scandal of civil war is that it is fought between those who conceive of themselves as brothers, and the new world of international trade in The Merchant of Venice in which such feudal relationships have disintegrated to the point where ‘customers are brothers, trade rivals are others’; and this involves a radical alteration in ‘the social conception of time’. In this context the apparently attractive fairy-tale world of Belmont, with its alternative time scheme, is actually questionable: its inhabitants, who appear charming, are in fact ‘frivolous members of a leisure class, whose carefree life is parasitic upon the labours of others, including usurers’. Nevertheless, the usurer Shylock is excluded from Belmont because, as Shakespeare, varying his source, emphasises by making him absurdly ignorant of the law of forfeit, in Venice ‘A Jew is not regarded, even in law, as a brother.’ But Antonio is also excluded from Belmont, selfexcluded from the norms of heterosexual interrelationship because ‘his emotional life, though his conduct may be chaste, is concentrated upon a member of his own sex’. Reminding us of the ancient connection between usury and sodomy, given major expression in canto xi of Dante’s Inferno, Auden, in one of the finest and most original passages of his Shakespeare criticism, makes a peculiar, remarkable ethical comparison between merchant and Jew. In a proto-deconstructive move, he reads out of one of the most radical oppositions in Shakespeare an essential similarity, a shared outsider status. If not displaced persons, both Antonio and Shylock are unplaced and unaccommodated persons, resident aliens:

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Recalling that the inscription on the leaden casket ran, ‘Who chooseth me, must give and hazard all he hath,’ it occurs to us that we have seen two characters do this. Shylock, however unintentionally, did, in fact, hazard all for the sake of destroying the enemy he hated, and Antonio, however unthinkingly he signed the bond, hazarded all to secure the happiness of the friend he loved. Yet it is precisely these two who cannot enter Belmont. Belmont would like to believe that men and women are either good or bad by nature, but Shylock and Antonio remind us that this is an illusion: in the real world, no hatred is totally without justification, no love totally innocent. (DH, p. 235)

Auden had knowledge, of course, of a contemporary European real world in which institutions had existed which, unlike Belmont, were keen to welcome both homosexual and Jew, if not for long. Compacting a perception of similitude into paradox, Auden reads Iago, in his lecture on Othello, as ‘an inverted saint, a saint manqué’, since in both saint and villain ‘ethics and aesthetics become almost the same thing’. There is, Auden says, ‘a similar detachment and similar freedom in both with respect to human relations, an absence of the usual scruples and motivations that govern or trouble most living’. ‘The Joker in the Pack’ does not repeat this perception but, in a comparably striking way, reads Iago as ‘devoid of ordinary worldly common sense’, persuasively arguing that his treatment of Roderigo proves as much. Now, however, Auden, taking his cue from Emilia’s belief that Iago acts solely ‘to please his fantasy’, reads him as ‘a portrait of a practical joker of a peculiarly appalling kind’. Practical jokes are ‘a demonstration that the distinction between seriousness and play is not a law of nature but a social convention which can be broken, and that a man does not always require a serious motive for deceiving another’. Auden does not make the link directly, but this must prompt his comparison of Iago to Hal in ‘The Prince’s Dog’, since Hal’s treatment of Falstaff is a practical joke too, the practising of a deception which we know about as early as the end of the first scene in which he appears. In his soliloquy at the end of act 1 scene 2 of Henry IV Part I (‘I know you all and will a while uphold / The unyok’d humor of your idleness’) we learn that his ‘loose behaviour’ is politic and will be cast off before long. Auden is extremely negative about Hal throughout ‘The Prince’s Dog’, but the comparison with Iago still comes as a shock: ‘To the outward eye, however different their subjective intentions, both Harry of Monmouth and Iago deceive and destroy’; and he acutely notices a resemblance between Hal’s first soliloquy and Iago’s speech to Roderigo in which he reveals how his ‘outward action’ conflicts with ‘The native act and figure of my heart’, the speech which concludes, ‘I am not what I am.’ This Hal resembling Iago

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reappears in the second of Prospero’s songs in ‘The Sea and the Mirror’ where, once an ‘Heir Apparent’ who prefers ‘low dives to formal feasts’, he ends up ‘our sound committee man / With murder in his heart’. Falstaff, on the other hand, Auden says, ‘is perfectly willing to tell the world, “I am that I am, a drunken old failure”’. That honesty is the root of Auden’s wild reading. He thinks Falstaff hardly belongs in the play but should appear instead in opera buffa, its ‘world of play and mock action governed not by will or desire, but by innocent wish, a world where no one can suffer because everything he says and does is only a pretence’. Auden is to a degree unsentimental about Falstaff, recognising the ‘false notes’ in his behaviour to Hotspur and with Coleville: but he is still deeply sympathetic. He discusses his ‘absolute devotion’ to Hal, comparing his speech in act 2 scene 2, ‘I am bewitched with the rogue’s company’, to the love declared in sonnet 124, ‘If my dear love were but the child of state’. This is a weighty comparison: John Kerrigan excellently says that ‘love’ in this sonnet is ‘lived and inward, its monumental status resting on groundedness’.18 Commensurate with this, Hal is for Auden the son Falstaff never had and Falstaff, astonishingly, is the folktale mermaid falling in love with a mortal prince: ‘the price she pays for her infatuation is the loss of her immortality without the compensation of temporal happiness’. And so Auden moves towards the most generous, or outrageous, account of Falstaff ever offered by a Shakespeare critic: Seeking for an explanation of why Falstaff affects us as he does, I find myself compelled to see Henry IV as possessing, in addition to its overt meaning, a parabolic significance. Overtly, Falstaff is a Lord of Misrule; parabolically, he is a comic symbol for the supernatural order of Charity as contrasted with the temporal order of Justice symbolized by Henry of Monmouth. (DH, p. 198)

And the end of the essay implicitly elaborates the parable even further when it calls the Christian God ‘a God who creates a world which he continues to love although it refuses to love him in return’. When this God appears in that world as Christ he is condemned by religious and temporal authorities as ‘a Lord of Misrule, as a Bad Companion for mankind’ (DH, pp. 207–8). In a review of The Dyer’s Hand in which he regards Auden as ‘increasingly hampered’ by a form of Christianity which, although relatively benign, still involves the ‘duty to save God’s face’, William Empson is aghast at this Falstaff: ‘To stretch one’s mind all round Falstaff is hard, and to defend him 18

William Shakespeare, ‘The Sonnets’ and ‘A Lover’s Complaint’, ed. John Kerrigan (London: Penguin, 1986; 1999), p. 346.

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against legalism is at least to take the right side; but Auden regards the old brute as a saint.’19 And in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human Harold Bloom says that, although he admires Auden’s Shakespeare criticism, he is baffled by this Falstaff: ‘Sir John is neither Christ nor Satan, nor an imitation of either.’20 But Auden is careful in his use of the word ‘parabolic’, which neither Empson nor Bloom reads carefully enough. He explicitly links his reading of the play to those gospel parables in which ‘actions which are ethically immoral are made to stand as a sign for that which transcends ethics’, parables such as that of the unjust steward. He also includes, as one of the ‘interludes’ in ‘The Shakespearian City’ which comment obliquely on the Shakespearean essays, an account of Nathanael West as a parabolic writer; and he carefully tells us in his foreword to the book that ‘the order of the chapters … is deliberate, and I would like them to be read in sequence’ (DH, p. xii). Parable does not propose ‘imitation’. What Auden actually performs in this reading is a form of virtuosic and subversive allegorising or analogising, a knowing making of his text double.

self-projections The passionate enthusiasm for Falstaff also reads very much as Auden’s own ‘absolute devotion’ to him and his thwarted devotion to the spurning Prince Hal. As such, it must be read as self-projection and has an autobiographical as well as a theological motive. Self-involvement inheres in its intensities; and theological parable seems predicated on personal predicament. In fact, Auden includes an extraordinary, vulnerable moment of autobiography in this essay. Discussing Falstaff’s fatness and drinking he says, completely disarmingly, ‘If my own weight and experience give me any authority, I would say that fatness in the male is the physical expression of a psychological wish to withdraw from sexual competition and, by combining mother and child in his own person, to become emotionally self-sufficient’ (DH, p. 196). To take the full measure of this, which seems unconcerned about laying itself open to ridicule and almost preternaturally willing to divulge a potentially shaming privacy, we should imagine anything like it occurring in the work of other major poetcritics: T. S. Eliot, say, or Seamus Heaney. It is a knowing breach of 19

20

William Empson, ‘The Just Man Made Innocent’ (1963), in Argufying: Essays on Literature and Culture, edited and introduced by John Haffenden (1987; London: The Hogarth Press, 1988), pp. 378–81. Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (London: Fourth Estate, 1999), p. 280.

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decorum and, notably, of the masculine literary-critical norms of its period. Auden’s Shakespeare criticism, then, includes elements of selfidentification whose focus is sometimes sexual. It is not explicitly so in ‘The Prince’s Dog’, but Auden still reflects there on the absolute devotion of an older for a younger man, comparing it to the love in the Sonnets, many of which turn on a similar age difference. We know from the biographies that Auden’s troubled, long-standing relationship with Chester Kallman lies behind the piercing quality of these observations;21 and this distress becomes most acute, Edward Mendelson says, in the introductory essay on the Sonnets.22 This offers one of Auden’s many rebukes to biographical criticism, even to the extent of claiming, preposterously, that genuine writers would rather publish anonymously. However, the biographical is a kind which Auden is always himself liable to practise in his criticism, even if a bit shamefacedly when he catches himself at it; which makes it a profound irony that his reading of the Sonnets should carry such autobiographical freight. Auden disdains both the presumably heterosexual ‘sound and sensible citizen’ who, unable to credit what he is reading, tries to neutralise it somehow, and the parti-pris homosexual reader who too eagerly welcomes Shakespeare into the ‘Homintern’ (a word, on the analogy of ‘Comintern’, intended to suggest an international homosexual conspiracy).23 The primary experience of the sequence is, Auden claims, mystical, having to do with what he calls the ‘Vision of Eros’. In Forewords and Afterwords this essay is accompanied by that on ‘The Protestant Mystics’ which discusses other forms of secular mysticism, and elsewhere in the volume Auden writes about what he calls ‘natural mystical experiences’ in Plato’s Symposium, Dante’s La Vita Nuova and some of Wordsworth’s poems. Auden is highly specific in his definition of the Vision of Eros: the erotic is its ‘medium’ rather than its ‘cause’; it cannot be mutual; and it is classdependent. Despite this characteristic Audenesque taxonomy, the essay is manifestly distressed and includes observations which appear to well out of personal experience: ‘Any passionate relationship can go through and 21

22 23

See especially Dorothy J. Farnan’s Auden in Love (London: Faber and Faber, 1984) and Thekla Clark’s Wystan and Chester: A Personal Memoir of W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman (London: Faber and Faber, 1995). Edward Mendelson, Later Auden (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), pp. 466–8. Cyril Connolly, among others, claimed to have invented the word. Auden gets it into print in the Partisan Review in 1950 in ‘A Playboy of the Western World: St Oscar, the Homintern Martyr’, reprinted in W. H. Auden, Prose, Vol. III: 1949–1955, ed. Edward Mendelson (Princeton University Press, 2008), pp. 184–8.

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survive painful crises, and become all the stronger for it,’ for instance, and its cautionary, hurt rider, ‘But forgiveness and reconciliation do not obliterate memory of the past.’ These, and the comparison of the young man to Bassanio, with whom Antonio is apparently besotted, gradually sharpen into a definitive interpretative statement: The story of the sonnets seems to me to be the story of an agonized struggle by Shakespeare to preserve the glory of the vision he had been granted in a relationship, lasting at least three years, with a person who seemed intent by his actions upon covering the vision with dirt.24

The slippage into idiomatic vernacular is a disruption of the written with the hurt exigency of speech: it has a sudden, quivering bitterness of recrimination. And that ‘three years’ has something of the reproachful precision of Sylvia Plath’s temporal specificity in ‘Daddy’ – ‘seven years if you want to know’. Edward Mendelson says that the Sonnets essay was probably written early in 1964, ‘the first winter of Kallman’s defection’: that is, after he had decided to spend his summers with Auden in Austria but his winters in Athens alone. As a veiled response to personal pain, Auden’s reading of the Sonnets forms a peculiar kind of self-revelation. Literary criticism becomes the vehicle for disguised autobiographical confession even as the vulgarity and redundancy of biographical criticism is condemned, and by a poet who disdained the whole idea of poetry as a vehicle for confession. As we shall see, something not dissimilar happens in Auden’s Shakespearean poems, outstandingly in ‘The Sea and the Mirror’. Keats famously said that ‘Shakespeare led a life of Allegory; his works are the comments on it’;25 in the essay on the Sonnets Auden allegorises Shakespeare’s work as a way of speaking about himself. The activity becomes virtually a mode of survival when Auden’s self-confirming speculation on the Vision of Eros – ‘Perhaps poets are more likely to experience it than others, or become poets because they have’ – shades into empathetic, even fervent, if still inexplicit, selfidentification: Did Shakespeare later feel that the anguish at the end was not too great a price to pay for the glory of the initial vision? I hope so and believe so. Anyway, poets are tough and can profit from the most dreadful experiences.26 24 25 26

Forewords and Afterwords, p. 103. Letters of John Keats: A New Selection edited by Robert Gittings (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 218 (a letter of 1819 to George and Georgiana Keats). Forewords and Afterwords, p. 106.

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Auden has been criticised, even as hypocritical or cowardly, for his refusal of the word ‘homosexual’ to the love of the Sonnets; and, as we shall see, Ted Hughes is one of those who rebuke him.27 The problem has been complicated by the publication of the lecture on the Sonnets in which Auden assumes that various poems imply sexual infidelity, ‘which wouldn’t make sense if there hadn’t been a prior sex relationship between Shakespeare and the young man’. He is clearly capable, therefore, of identifying this love as homosexual when he chooses to; and he chooses to in public in 1946. I think he abstains from doing so in his introduction because he is genuinely ambivalent on the issue and because he means it when he categorises the love between poet and young man as mystical, however difficult the even well-intended reader may find such a concept. That he himself experienced some form of what he considered ‘mystical’ experience – a vision of ‘agape’, however, not of eros – is clear from his poem ‘Out on the lawn I lie in bed’ and his comments on it.28 In this introduction Auden needs to clear a space free of the specific issue of sexuality where this far more difficult thing can be articulated. But the whole matter of interpretation and record, of knowing and saying, in this, for Auden, always sensitive area is cast into relief, if not exactly clarified, by ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ in 1936, long before the introduction to the Sonnets. Responding to putative charges against him, Auden reaches, in his rhyme royal, for sonnet 121: ‘No, I am that I am, and those that level At my abuses reckon up their own. I may be straight though they, themselves, are bevel.’ So Shakespeare said, but Shakespeare must have known. I daren’t say that except when I’m alone, Must hear in silence till I turn my toes up, ‘It’s such a pity Wystan never grows up.’

Here Auden has Shakespeare saying something and knowing something slightly different; and the Shakespearean adduction is itself a way of steadying his resolve to take on those critics (F. R. Leavis, perhaps) who accused him of ‘immaturity’ as – this stanza implies – a coded way of deploring his homosexuality. 27

28

The reception of Auden’s introduction is comprehensively considered by James Fenton in ‘Auden’s Shakespeare’, New York Review of Books, 47, 5 (23 March 2000), and Auden’s reputation is convincingly defended there. The comments are quoted in John Fuller, W. H. Auden: A Commentary (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 149.

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Perhaps Auden appears serenely unafraid of Shakespeare because there is a real sense in which, for him, Shakespeare, c’est moi; and not at all selfdramatisingly so. Quite the contrary, since what they share is the humiliating abjection of sexual suffering, that thing which must be both hidden and revealed in the act of writing, the arena of requisite if dubious transformation: as Auden knows, and knows that Shakespeare knows, in ‘The Globe’, where he writes that: What a man does is irrevocable for good or ill; what he makes, he can always modify or even destroy. In all great drama, I believe, we can feel the tension of the ambivalent attitude, torn between reverence and contempt, of the maker towards the doer. (DH, p. 181)

And for ‘drama’ there we may also read ‘poetry’. Like Yeats, Auden identifies with Shakespeare not in his mastery but in his vulnerability.

ars poetica In its speculation on the way the Vision of Eros might prompt people into poetry, the Sonnets essay is consistent with the constant tendency of Auden’s Shakespeare criticism to ruminate on the nature of writing and of art more generally. His is very much the criticism of a practitioner, and a quiet ars poetica may be read out of it. This offers maxims such as ‘You must be in love with your art, not with yourself’ and ‘Every poet has to struggle against “poetry”.’ It illuminates some of the minutiae of language and rhetoric: the direct plainness of the monosyllables of Julius Caesar; the way Hal’s later style ‘becomes fat, like Falstaff’s stomach’; the development of the caesura in Hamlet; the characterisation of the ‘violent prose’ of Troilus and Cressida and of those alternative places in the play where ‘words are vehicles of detachment, a means to ataraxia’; the recommendation to apprentice poets of those ‘bridge passages, little points’ in the late plays as an education in writing. Such local insights are complemented by readings in which matters of style and rhetoric supply the basis for more general interpretation. Auden is outstanding on Antony and Cleopatra in which, he says, words are used to create feelings about which the characters are in doubt: ‘Antony and Cleopatra are saying “I want to live forever”. Their poetry, like fine cooking, is a technique to keep up the excitement of living.’ And their ‘flaw’ is not particular in the way it is in other tragic heroes but ‘common to all of us all the time’: it is ‘worldliness – the love of pleasure, success, art, ourselves, and conversely, the fear of boredom, failure, being ridiculous, being on the

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wrong side, dying’. The comparison of poetry to fine cooking is homely, even banal, but appropriately so. It captures, with aplomb, the way the play’s rhetoric is in fact frequently at odds with the banality or bathos of character and action, and it remembers that Antony and Cleopatra is in fact full of fine Egyptian cooking, and that living forever is what both hero and heroine think they will achieve by suicide. The last plays, which Auden reads in the light of Aldous Huxley’s characterisation of ‘late works’, display ‘enormous interest in particular kinds of artistic problems lovingly worked out for themselves, regardless of the interest of the whole work’. This is an insight which establishes Shakespeare as a risk-taking experimentalist to the end, as Auden surely eventually came to see himself too and as Eliot also saw Shakespeare. In fact, the taking of risks distinguishes a great poet, in Auden’s view; whereas surrendering to language is the mark of a minor poet (and, extraordinarily, Yeats is classified as minor on these grounds in the lecture).29 In the essay on Troilus and Cressida he says that ‘Shakespeare is always prepared to risk failure’; and in a long passage in the lecture on the three plays, The Taming of the Shrew, King John and Richard II, he makes it the sign of ‘a major poet’ that he risk failure and constantly seek ‘a new rhetoric’. It was crucially enabling for Shakespeare, Auden thinks, that financial exigency forced him from the composition of lyric into the theatre: Shakespeare had to study action, which was a bore. So he had to find the rhetoric to make action interesting to him, and he thereby developed a rhetoric that enabled men of action such as Faulconbridge to transcend action and become interesting. Or, taking a particular lyric rhetoric as a given, he had to find a character to suit it, as he did with Richard II.

The interdependence of character and language, the way the one provokes and stimulates the other, is central to Auden’s conception of the linguistic event that is Shakespearean poetry. The sense of developments in an art being produced by exigencies not themselves primarily artistic – Ted Hughes has a similar view of Shakespearean theatre – consorts also with Auden’s views on the relationship between art, ethics and social responsibility to which he returns frequently in his writing on Shakespeare. In his lecture on The Merchant of Venice, his conception of Shylock as the only serious character in a frivolous society provokes a definition of the damage that may be done by the aestheticisation of ethics: 29

Lectures on Shakespeare, p. 68. This is so bizarre that I wonder whether Auden was joking in some way not apparent in the published text; or, indeed, whether his transcribing auditor misheard him.

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A society constructed to be like a beautiful poem – as was imagined by some aesthetically-minded Greek political theorists – would be a nightmare of horror, for given the historical reality of actual men, such a society could only come into being through selective breeding, extermination of the physically and mentally unfit, absolute obedience to its Director, and a large slave class kept out of sight in cellars.

In such speculations, Auden must have had in mind, along with those Greek political theorists, such reactionary social models as those to be read out of Ezra Pound’s Cantos, which he nevertheless admired; and the potential damage to be inflicted by the confusing of the realms of ethics and aesthetics is, as we shall see, brought to the fore in a crucial passage of ‘The Sea and the Mirror’. Accompanying such level-headed democratic refusals to intertwine the social and the aesthetic is an undeceived view of art itself, in which Shakespeare becomes the spokesman for a characteristically laterAudenesque view. In his final lecture Auden decides that it is only in some minor sonnets that Shakespeare insists that his work will outlast time. He must be thinking, in particular, of sonnet 55, ‘Not marble nor the gilded monuments / Of princes shall outlive this pow’rful rhyme’, which few other readers ever consider ‘minor’. The limiting judgement is provoked though by the fact that Auden wants to project a later Shakespeare who comes to believe that ‘art is rather a bore’: He spends his life at it, but he doesn’t think it’s very important … I find Shakespeare particularly appealing in his attitude to his work. There’s something a little irritating in the determination of the very greatest artists, like Dante, Joyce, Milton, to create masterpieces and to think themselves important. To be able to devote one’s life to art without forgetting that art is frivolous is a tremendous achievement of personal character. Shakespeare never takes himself too seriously. When art takes itself too seriously, it tries to do more than it can. For secular art to exist, it’s highly advantageous to artists, whatever their belief, to support religion. When supernatural religion disappears, art becomes either magic that is run by authorities through force or fraud, or falsehood that becomes persecuted by science.

This harmonises exactly with Auden’s later conception of an art of ‘disenchantment’. In fact, in Auden’s Shakespeare essays and lectures, Shakespeare becomes virtually the name for such an art; and it is as such that he figures in some of the art made by W. H. Auden himself, to which I now turn.

chapter 6

The reality of the mirror: Shakespeare in Auden’s poetry

Artists are inclined to suffer not from too much emotion but rather from too little. This business of being a mirror – you begin to question the reality of the mirror itself. Auden, Lectures on Shakespeare

absorption ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’, the first poem Auden wrote in America, in 1939, contains the most famous lines on poetic inheritance by a modern poet in the English language, lines which have been returned to frequently by other poets and critics. On his death, Auden says, the poet ‘became his admirers’: Now he is scattered among a hundred cities And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections, To find his happiness in another kind of wood And be punished under a foreign code of conscience. The words of a dead man Are modified in the guts of the living.1

‘Scattered’ suggests Orphic dismemberment, and the wood is a Dantean importation; but the poet’s subsequent modification is figured here in a peculiar somatic metaphor. John Fuller thinks that it ‘may be intended as a kind of sacramental metaphor of sowing, reaping and digesting bread’, and so it may, with the word ‘sacramental’ implying the doctrine of transubstantiation, when the bread is ‘modified’ into the body of Christ.2 Even so, in its use of the word ‘guts’, with its intense, almost queasy physicality, it emphasises digestion, and what follows on digestion, in a way that may owe 1 2

All quotations from Auden’s poetry are taken from the Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber, 1976; revised edn, 2007). John Fuller, W. H. Auden: A Commentary (Princeton University Press, 1998; 2000), p. 287.

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something to Hamlet’s morose imagining of how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar. While sacramentality is itself the product of the Catholic incarnational tradition to which Auden gave his allegiance, it is still of interest that his metaphor for a poetic tradition should almost indelicately combine the sacramental and the excretory. With a comparable ambivalence, these lines also figure poetic survival as both a mode of slightly suspect approval (‘unfamiliar affections’) and chastising critique (‘punished under a foreign code’). Auden is, I have said, unafraid of Shakespeare in his literary criticism. So he is too in those poems of his which include Shakespeare in some way, which all occur in what is conventionally known as his ‘later’ (post-1930s) work; and this fearlessness is underwritten by the indelicacy of his metaphor for cultural absorption in ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’. Indelicately too, one of the appearances Shakespeare makes in Auden’s shorter poems happens in his Kirchstetten bathroom. In the sequence ‘Thanksgiving for a Habitat’ in About the House (1965), we learn that ‘Shakespeare probably stank’, not having available the sanitary sophistications of twentieth-century Austria. Consistently with this, the three shorter poems of Auden’s in which Shakespeare significantly figures take him in their stride. ‘Under Which Lyre’, subtitled ‘A Reactionary Tract for the Times’ (written in 1946 and published in Nones in 1951), writes the opposition between Hal and Falstaff – which, as we have seen, Auden treats extensively in ‘The Prince’s Dog’ – into a Phi Beta Kappa poem for public reading at Harvard; ‘“The Truest Poetry Is the Most Feigning”’ (written in 1953 and published in The Shield of Achilles in 1955) intricately teases a famous line from As You Like It; and ‘Forty Years On’ (written in 1968 and published in City Without Walls in 1969) figures Auden, in a dramatic monologue, as Autolycus, the thieving rogue of The Winter’s Tale. These poems also offer scepticism – about public life, about poetry itself, and about conventional ways of conceiving mortality – written large in ‘The Sea and the Mirror’, the poem sequence written during the war and published, along with another, ‘For The Time Being’, in the volume of that title which appeared in 1944. This is Auden’s most extensive, compelling and tortured poetic response to Shakespeare, and one of his greatest works. ‘under which lyre’ The title of ‘Under Which Lyre’ alludes to Pistol’s question to Justice Shallow in act 5 scene 3 of Henry IV Part II. Pistol arrives in the Gloucestershire countryside to inform Falstaff about Hal’s accession; so

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that when Shallow says, with characteristic pomposity, that he is ‘under the King, in some authority’, Pistol, with characteristically high-flown menace, responds, ‘Under which king, Besonian?’ This is derisive of the aged Shallow since a Besonian – from the Italian – is a raw recruit. The derision, however, will soon redound upon Falstaff himself because the Hal he expects to welcome him back to London has already become the imperious Henry V who witheringly rejects him when they meet. Auden implicitly takes up the Besonian reference when he ruminates on the undergraduate returnees from the Second World War who make Harvard an almost oxymoronic institution in which ‘Raw veterans already train / As freshman forces’. But, for Auden, another war is now being waged in Harvard itself, ‘just as mean, / And more fanatic’, between two gods, ‘Precocious Hermes’ and ‘Pompous Apollo’, and student intellectuals must choose, as it were, ‘under which king’ they will fight: The sons of Hermes love to play, And only do their best when they Are told they oughtn’t; Apollo’s children never shrink From boring jobs but have to think Their work important.

Or, in the further figuration which takes up the allusion of the title, ‘Falstaff the fool confronts forever / The prig Prince Hal’, which makes Auden’s Shakespeare criticism reverberant in the Apollonian-Hermetic opposition of ‘Under Which Lyre’. Auden’s title also recalls that of an influential essay by F. R Leavis. ‘Under Which King, Bezonian?’, published as an editorial in an early issue of Scrutiny in December 1932, debates the social and political responsibilities of literature, and the whole concept of culture, with a number of leftist intellectuals, including Trotsky.3 Leavis says at one point, miming the principles of the opposition, ‘There is a choice; we must speak or die: Stalin or the King by Divine Right?’ He rejects the ‘algebraic rigour, stern realism and contemptuous practicality’ with which 1930s Marxists presented such choices. Auden contributed to Scrutiny at this time, and Leavis’s framing of his question about ‘choice’ must inform the line which caused him so much trouble in ‘September 1, 1939’, ‘We must love one another or die’. In ‘Under Which Lyre’, Auden also appears to remember this essay, finding its debating of this issue in the 1930s newly relevant to 3

It is reprinted in F. R. Leavis (ed.), A Selection from ‘Scrutiny’ (Cambridge University Press, 1968), pp. 166–74.

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what appeared another moment demanding absolute choice in an America at the beginning of the cold war. Appropriately for a public occasion, ‘Under Which Lyre’ is light in manner, form and tone, even where the witty levity assesses the damage done to these veteran freshmen (‘nerves that steeled themselves to slaughter / Are shot to pieces by the shorter / Poems of Donne’); and Edward Mendelson includes it in an anthology of Auden’s light verse.4 The poem makes elegantly humorous but also combative play with the apparent contemporary victories of Apollo, locating them even in some unusual places – in, for instance, the stakhanovite productivity of those Sartrean existentialists who, although ‘in complete despair, / Yet go on writing’ and do so, hypocritically, ‘In fake Hermetic uniforms’. But ‘Under Which Lyre’ has a fundamental seriousness of purpose too; and in its combination of the playful and the profound it typifies a great deal in later Auden where levity, or even frivolity, often offers a kind of slant access to deep feeling. An element of camp sometimes inheres in this, of the kind that has distressed some critics of Auden since Randall Jarrell’s brilliantly prejudiced attacks in the 1940s.5 But ‘Under Which Lyre’ is an apology for its own aesthetic: its serious attack could hardly have been managed otherwise than by the stealth of its light verse form, with its speedy stanzas of tetrameter complets and single, femininely-rhyming dimeters. Discussing Auden, Joseph Brodsky justly says that ‘in art lightness of touch more often than not comes from the darkness of its very absence’.6 In opposing Hermes to Apollo, Auden employs arcane learning of a kind uncommon in ‘light verse’: he knows from the Hymnus Homericus ad Mercuriam that Hermes is said to have invented the lyre, making his lawkeeping brother Apollo the latecomer and hence the exponent only of ‘official art’.7 So, even while recognising that ‘The earth would soon, did Hermes run it, / Be like the Balkans’ – and presumably knowing therefore that Apollo has his place, although he ought not to be allowed every place he wants – ‘Under Which Lyre’ answers its own title question when its ‘reactionary tract’ concludes with the fiction of a ‘Hermetic Decalogue’ whose commandments oppose forms of bureaucratic managerialism: 4 5

6 7

See W. H. Auden, As I Walked Out One Evening: Songs, Ballads, Lullabies, Limericks and Other Light Verse, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber, 1995). See, in particular, his two long essays on Auden in The Third Book of Criticism (London: Faber and Faber, 1975) and the lectures edited by Stephen Burt, with Hannah Brooks-Motl, Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). Joseph Brodsky, ‘To Please a Shadow’, in Less Than One: Selected Essays (1986; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), p. 373. See Fuller’s Commentary, p. 426–7.

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Thou shalt not do as the dean pleases, Thou shalt not write thy doctor’s thesis On education, Thou shalt not worship projects nor Shalt thou or thine bow down before Administration.

Written to be read aloud in a famous institution of higher education immediately after the war, Auden’s poem here riskily recommends the virtues of prodigality, recklessness and critical disobedience; which would be dangerous sentiments to publicise in many managerialised contemporary educational institutions, where the dean’s smile would undoubtedly freeze into a rictus while the poem was read. In his lecture on Henry IV and Henry V Auden says of Hal that he is ‘the type who becomes a college president, a government head … and one hates their guts’. A living man has been modified in the guts of ‘Under Which Lyre’, since Anthony Hecht tells us that in conversation Auden ‘acknowledged that at least a part of [the poem’s] purpose was to embarrass the “pompous stuffed shirt” who had invited him to write and read a Phi Beta Kappa poem for Harvard’. Although Auden was too discreet to identify him, Hecht’s hunch is confirmed by Alan Ansen’s Table Talk, where it is clear that it was James Bryant Conant, a chemist who was Harvard’s president between 1933 and 1953, and who Auden thought might have been responsible for the final decision to drop the atom bomb: between 1941 and 1946 Conant had been chairman of the National Defense Research Committee. Ansen records that Auden said of him, ‘He is the real Prince Hal and gives the notion of sheer naked power.’8 He may well be included among those satirised in the poem’s fourth stanza: Professors back from secret missions Resume their proper eruditions, Though some regret it; They liked their dictaphones a lot, They met some big wheels and do not Let you forget it.

But whether Conant recognised himself or not, he must indeed, as Auden intended, have found the public reading of this poem discomfiting.9 8 9

Cited in Anthony Hecht, The Hidden Law: The Poetry of W. H. Auden (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 358. In a vivid first-hand account of the actual reading Harry Levin tells us that ‘The setting for which [Auden] had fondly and mistakenly framed it ought to have been an intimate evening meeting, where

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Auden was biting the hand that fed him, of course; which may be a Hermeslike thing to do. It is also what Falstaff does, almost literally, to Shallow when, after enjoying his hospitality, he gulls him out of a large amount of money. Falstaff and Hermes are dangerous to the official and the officious; but their lightness of finger, or of touch, is one of the few ways available to them by which to challenge the truly dangerous solemnities of power. ‘Under Which Lyre’ is written under the sign of Falstaff and Hermes. If there is an element of self-approval in the poem’s eventually posited solidarity – ‘Zeus willing, we, the unpolitical, / Shall beat him yet’ – this is probably necessary for the bravery of its affront. This light-fingered poem does serious business, proposing as it does, and in the space of public educational oratory, a continuity between the warfare that produced the bomb and the ideological warfare of post-war American public, social and professional life. ‘Under Which Lyre’ convinces us that when Auden admires Falstaff, both in his critical writing and in this very poem, he is, to quote John Berryman on sonnet 144, ‘not kidding’;10 even where kidding is what his verse forms appear to be up to.

‘“the truest poetry is the most feigning”’ In act 3 scene 3 of As You Like It, Touchstone, the wittiest of Shakespeare’s clowns, cynically woos Audrey. What he wants is sex, not marriage: but marriage – which he intends shall be short-lived – is his only way of getting sex. Punningly comparing himself, among Audrey’s goats, to ‘the most capricious poet, honest Ovid … among the Goths’, he runs intellectual rings around the rustically simple goatherd: touchstone: When a man’s verses cannot be understood, nor a man’s good wit seconded with the forward child, understanding, it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room. Truly, I would the gods had made thee poetical. audrey: I do not know what ‘poetical’ is. Is it honest in deed and word? Is it a true thing? it might well have formed the appropriate climax to a sequence of after-dinner speeches and frequent toasts. Instead, the epigrams bypassed the superannuated alumni and thudded against the rafters of Saunders Theatre during the cold sobriety of ten o’clock in the morning – an hour which Auden regularly eschewed. The statues flanking the platform looked the other way.’ But perhaps Conant was not quite so bypassed by the epigrams as the alumni (and the statues), since not long afterwards Auden was nominated as professor of poetry at Harvard but was not appointed. See Harry Levin, Memories of the Moderns (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), pp. 150–5. 10 See John Berryman, The Freedom of the Poet (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), p. 316.

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touchstone: No, truly; for the truest poetry is the most feigning, and lovers are given to poetry; and what they swear in poetry may be said as lovers they do feign. audrey: Do you wish then that the gods had made me poetical? touchstone: I do, truly; for thou swear’st to me thou art honest. Now if thou wert a poet, I might have some hope thou didst feign. audrey: Would you not have me honest? touchstone: No, truly, unless thou wert hard-favor’d; for honesty coupled to beauty is to have honey a sauce to sugar.

The ringing of changes on the words ‘honest’, ‘feigning’ and ‘true’ in this exchange and the knowing paradoxicality of Touchstone’s ‘the truest poetry is the most feigning’ make an aphorism out of a Renaissance debate about the nature of poetry most famously expressed in Sidney’s Defence of Poetry. The word ‘feigning’ has already been forcefully sounded in As You Like It in Amiens’s song at the end of act 2 where one of the chorus lines is ‘Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly.’ The poet Christopher Marlowe, translator of Ovid, is probably invoked by the reference to the ‘great reckoning in a little room’, which is usually considered an allusion to the circumstances of his death. And the play later finds room for an indubitable allusion to Marlowe when the pastoral shepherdess Phoebe, fallen in love at first sight with Rosalind disguised as Ganymede, finds her plight well expressed by Hero and Leander and addresses its author to tell him so: ‘Dead Shepherd, now I find thy saw of might, / “Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?”’ (3.5.81–2). How Phoebe, denizen of the Forest of Arden, acquired her knowledge of sophisticated recent literature and pastoral convention is also a question about the relationship between the ‘true’ and the ‘feigning’ in poetry, Shakespeare’s sudden witty deconstruction of the artifice of his own verbal constructions. And As You Like It is a play which frequently features the composition of love poetry – very bad love poetry – notably by Orlando. These forms of reflexivity complicate the relationship between poetry and truth-telling which the lines raise. Touchstone, wanting to seduce Audrey, would have her more poetical since then she might be disingenuous if she claimed in verse that she was honest, and he might have a chance of getting his way. The poetry of love is designed to deceive, with a view to seduction: it is designed to have designs. And Touchstone is so intellectually superior to Audrey that his designs on her, uttered in Shakespeare’s own poetry, are bound to succeed, even though Hymen, at the end of the play, gives the couple to each other with the grim assurance only of their antagonism, telling them that they are ‘sure together / As the winter to foul weather’ (5.4.132–3).

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Auden’s lecture on As You Like It says that Touchstone ‘quite correctly’ tells Audrey that ‘the truest poetry is the most feigning’. ‘Quite’ is itself an appropriately equivocal word in this context (‘perfectly’ correctly, or ‘more or less correctly’?); and the line’s opening up of equivocations in the art of poetry itself makes it appropriate as the title of this poem, the only one of Auden’s to use an allusion as title. Written in strophes of rhyming iambic couplets, it is Popean in its witty spirit and motion – ‘The Rape of the Lock’ is within earshot – and, like ‘Under Which Lyre’, it also appears in Edward Mendelson’s anthology of Auden’s light verse: but it embodies what is, for Auden, not only ‘quite correct’ in Touchstone’s view of poetry, but profoundly the case. So this moment in Shakespeare becomes the scene of significant self-recognition. ‘“The Truest Poetry Is the Most Feigning”’ advises would-be love poets to ‘make a rare old proper hullabaloo’ about their love – ‘Be subtle, various, ornamental, clever’ – even though the ‘Christian answer’ to the question ‘How much do you love me?’ should be ‘così-così’. The poem does not elaborate the Christian ethical issue: it could hardly do so without losing its lightness of touch and tone, since ‘Christian’ is a big word in a poem, and this is one of the very few places in his verse where Auden employs it with ethical rather than merely denotative significance. It points, however, to the injunction of the Gospels not to love the things of this world too much; and this stays in the poem, below its glittering surface, as judgement and measure. In fact, ‘così-così’ probably also remembers As You Like It: in act 5 scene 1 Touchstone encounters the yokel William, who is said to be in love with Audrey, and, while dismissing him, asks him if he is rich. ‘Faith, sir, so so,’ William answers; to which Touchstone responds, ‘So so is good, very good, very excellent good; and yet it is not, it is but so so.’ The poem’s spirited playfulness offers various instances of the ways a real person, even an inadequate one, may be idealised or hyperbolised by poetic rhetoric, culminating in a gorgeously expansive apotheosis in which the loved one becomes ‘Queen of the Night and Empress of the Air’, able ‘To bless the vines and put an end to war’. Auden’s pastiche Petrarchanism works as a kind of reverse of Shakespeare’s own in sonnet 130 (‘My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun’), to expose the fact that ‘From such ingenious fibs are poems born.’ Even so, the poem also knows that true suffering in love – the consequence of abandonment or death – remains obdurately beyond the consolations of poetic fictions:

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No metaphor, remember, can express A real historical unhappiness; Your tears have value if they make us gay: O Happy Grief! is all sad verse can say.

The aphoristic lightness of this does not disguise the fact that it is the fundamental scandal of poetry that grief becomes pleasure when shaped to artistic form and measure, that human emotion becomes its articulate opposite when subjected to the manipulative artifice of aesthetic commodification. The word ‘value’ in this context is a loaded one: true grief does not weigh the price of its tears. ‘“The Truest Poetry Is the Most Feigning”’ does not leave its charge against poetry there, but moves unpredictably into a further denunciation of its potential biddability. Taking a hint from Cavafy’s ‘In a Township of Asia Minor’, Auden imagines his putative love poet writing in a period of political terror. Suspect with the ‘New Regime’, he is advised that he might ‘save [his] skin’ by converting his poem into one celebrating the new leader: Re-sex the pronouns, add a few details, And, lo, a panegyric ode which hails (How is the Censor, bless his heart, to know?) The new pot-bellied Generalissimo.

In a reversal of the political-poem-disguised-as-love-poem found in such subversive conventions as eighteenth-century Irish aisling, the poem here becomes ‘feigning’ in a further sense: its fiction of love becomes a fiction of compromised, self-serving deference, and the poem itself becomes compliant, malleable, usable, venal. Auden’s poem maintains its witty lightness towards its conclusion – with the advice, for instance, that the natural beneficence of the title Goddess of wry-necks and wrens in the original will need to become Great Reticulator of the fens in the made-over version, an inflated portentousness remembering Mussolini’s draining of the Pontine Marshes. Yet, in the midst of such poetic pleasures, this extension of the poem’s concerns reminds us that the title poem of the volume in which it first appeared, ‘The Shield of Achilles’, is one of the great post-war poems of atrocity and witness. Its superb, terrifyingly elaborated Homeric metaphor must, of necessity, also be subject to the caveat that ‘No metaphor … can express / A real historical unhappiness’ – even, perhaps especially, when this is magnified into the suffering of entire nations and peoples (‘they were small / And could not hope for help and no help came’). Even such a poem as ‘The Shield of Achilles’, which has seemed to so many readers to do justice to the unspeakability of its

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occasion, stands, for its author, subject to the knowledge that it may encourage an altogether inappropriate form of self-congratulatory empathy. An aesthetic of anti-pathos is inextricably intertwined with Auden’s understanding of the rhetorical persuasiveness of poetic artifice. Re-sexing the pronouns, Auden’s love-poet-become-political-eulogist also reminds us that the sexing of the pronouns must have been a constant anxiety for Auden himself, writing love poems as a homosexual at a time when the practice was a criminal act (‘Your tears have value if they make us gay’ has to have a knowing double-entendre). His own love poetry therefore had to go in disguise, had to ‘feign’, in this sense too: either by re-sexing the pronouns or by anonymising the object of love in vocative address (‘Lay your sleeping head, my love …’); and the figure of the loved one conjured in this very poem, ‘“The Truest Poetry Is the Most Feigning”’, is ‘The living girl’, not ‘the living boy’ (so that re-sexing its pronouns to make it a political poem would involve, in a slyly Audenesque joke, making female pronouns male). There could hardly be any more radical instruction in the way poetic language can be self-alienating rather than self-including; and the correlative might be those instances proposed in my last chapter of Auden’s reading girls as boys in Shakespeare’s plays. In As You Like It too the pronouns need frequent re-sexing, since Rosalind is disguised as a male youth called Ganymede, which happens (but does not just happen) to be the name of the boy lover of Zeus. This gives an extra edge to Auden’s introduction of the figure of Iago in the penultimate paragraph of ‘“The Truest Poetry Is the Most Feigning”’, where he is imported to criticise the cynicism of the biddable poet: ‘honest Iagos, true to form, will write / Shame! in your margins, Toady! Hypocrite! ’. ‘Honest’ picks up the epithet which Othello frequently uses of his lieutenant until he is disabused: but it must also be glossed by Auden’s essay on the play, ‘The Joker in the Pack’, where – outrageously, to some – he says that Iago is indeed honest. Treating Othello as an analyst treats a patient – ‘except that, of course, his intention is to kill, not to cure’, which must be one of the most notably perverse concessions ever made in a critical essay – Iago has no need to lie: ‘Everything he says is designed to bring to Othello’s consciousness what he has already guessed is there’ (DH, p. 266). So, in ‘“The Truest Poetry Is the Most Feigning”’, these honest Iagos, ‘true to form’, are recognising in poetry a capacity which it actually has but might well prefer not to admit to; in which context the phrase ‘true to form’ takes on the characteristics of a pun (and this very poem tells us that ‘Good poets have a weakness for bad puns’): honest Iagos are explicit in the margins about the feigning truth which poetic forms might contain.

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And so the poem’s final strophe generalises from this in a way bringing it, in the end, tonally closer to the Moral Essays than to The Rape of the Lock: For given Man, by birth, by education, Imago Dei who forgot his station, The self-made creature who himself unmakes, The only creature ever made who fakes, With no more nature in his loving smile Than in his theories of a natural style, What but tall tales, the luck of verbal playing, Can trick his lying nature into saying That love, or truth in any serious sense, Like orthodoxy, is a reticence?

The image of fallen man implicitly reintroduces to the poem the concept of the ‘Christian answer’ with which it began. Complementing that, ‘“The Truest Poetry Is the Most Feigning”’ now finds a saving grace in poetry: its tricksy playfulness itself compels our acknowledgement that not verbal and formal display but their opposite, ‘reticence’, is the medium most appropriate to true feeling. That ‘orthodoxy is reticence’ is a maxim which appears several times in Auden’s prose, where it is associated with the antienthusiastic virtues of Anglicanism.11 ‘The luck of verbal playing’ is a modestly anti-romantic conception of what poetry might be; but, paradoxically, it becomes also, in this poem, the means to perhaps the only truth to which, for Auden, we can ever have genuine access: the truth of our dissembling natures and the necessary consequence of that in the worlds of both ethics and aesthetics. Along the way the poet Auden has made out of the paradox one of his most relishable poetic fictions, by making his own one of William Shakespeare’s. ‘forty years on’ If the truest poetry is the most feigning, then the true poet is a great liar. In The Winter’s Tale Autolycus is a liar, a pedlar and a thief, and also a poet of a kind, since he is a singer, and presumably a writer, of ballads. Auden’s lecture on the play says that the sub-plot is ‘a comic Eden, with a comic serpent, Autolycus’, and maintains that ‘Autolycus even in his deceptions brings pleasure, making people happy to be deceived’. In ‘Forty Years On’ Auden figures himself as Autolycus; and they do of course share the initial vowels of their names. The poem bears a sort of family resemblance to 11

See The Dyer’s Hand, p. 21, and Forewords and Afterwords, pp. 71 and 276.

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‘Under Which Lyre’, since in Greek mythology Hermes was the father of Autolycus; but Auden’s crossing of himself with Autolycus may remember Louis MacNeice’s poem ‘Autolycus’ which he includes in the selection of MacNeice he published in 1964. He may even intend ‘Forty Years On’ as a tribute: he includes an elegiac poem addressed to MacNeice, ‘The Cave of Making’, in the sequence ‘Thanksgiving for a Habitat’ in About the House (1965) which makes it clear that they share an anti-romantic, antiMallarméan conception of poetry: ‘We’re not musicians: to stink of Poetry / is unbecoming, and never / to be dull shows a lack of taste’. MacNeice’s ‘Autolycus’ correlates Autolycus the thief and his author (his ‘maker’), the poet, which may well have influenced Auden’s choice of persona: Watch your pockets when That rogue comes round the corner, he can slit Purse-strings as quickly as his maker’s pen Will try your heartstrings in the name of mirth.

‘Forty Years On’ is unusual in Auden’s oeuvre in being a dramatic monologue, although Autolycus is identified as speaker only in the penultimate line; and this in a poem which opens with an imagery of blast furnaces and generating-stations almost pastiche-‘Audenesque’. The poem seems plotted around a form of reticently disguised self-revelation rather than directed towards dramatic realisation; and if the poles of the traditional dramatic monologue are sympathy and judgement, this one veers so decisively towards the former as virtually to exclude the latter. Autolycus describes a Bohemia forty years after the end of The Winter’s Tale which has mysteriously taken on all the appurtenances of late-1960s contemporaneity. He has prospered even though his ballads are no longer wanted: the present age – and this poem was written in 1968, year of European revolution – ‘calls for Songs of Protest / and wants its bawdry straight / not surreptitious’. Instead of crying his pedlar’s wares, therefore, he acts now as a black marketeer; and the poem’s syllabics break into octosyllabic rhyming couplets as he sings a cajoling song of commercial invitation to his ‘likely clients’: ‘Believe me, I know all the tricks, / There is nothing I can’t fix.’ If this allegorising intends a further critique of poetic venality, it is now deepened by Autolycus’s sense of mortality. Distressed by the glibness of the young and the waning of sexual desire, he reports a dream he has had on three consecutive nights. From high ground he sees black, shaped like a bell-tent, the mouth of a cave by which (I know in my dream) I am to

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make my final exit, its roof so low it will need an awkward duck to make it. ‘Well, will that be so shaming?’ I ask when awake. Why should it be? When has Autolycus ever solemned himself?

This dream of death may take its shape from The Winter’s Tale itself which features a famous Shakespearean dream, that of Antigonus, and includes in its plot the cave of the Oracle. The cave of the poem’s dream, however, is a cave of unmaking. Auden’s Autolycus speaks in his author’s own unique late manner, with its baroque lexicon: ‘oggle’, ‘eloignment’, ‘whelking’, and here ‘solemned’, the past tense of the verb ‘to solemn’. The word does exist as a verb, even if it has long since been obsolete according to OED, whose final example is from 1555. Which may be Auden’s slightly arch joke about the language this contemporary but also early-modern Autolycus might still be able to make available to himself when required – as it would be after a frightening dream of death. More crucially, though, the word is an implicit defence of this poet’s whole later poetic and ethic: not even death itself is to be ‘solemned’ in a poem. The final rhetorical question would almost certainly sound self-approving if uttered in propria persona; which may have been the essential prompt to Auden’s adoption of the Shakespearean mask. This poet, this ‘bohemian’, revisits in age the scenes of his youth, registers the times that are changing in a way which will soon entirely exclude him, acknowledges the activities of larceny and shady dealing of which poets are capable, and still refuses to blench in the face of mortality. In ‘Forty Years On’, taking neither poetry nor himself too seriously, Auden finds in the figure of Autolycus a surprising alter ego: hardly flattering but, in its very self-deprecation, true, for all its feigning, to a recognisable, and admirable, self. So much so, in fact, that the dream’s ‘awkward duck’ into death has something of the self-defining quality – mannerly and with a paradoxical, if still desolating, near-sprightliness – of Keats’s final letter: ‘I always made an awkward bow’, which Auden may almost, just, be remembering, at the very edge of earshot.12 ‘the sea and the mirror’ The end of ‘“The Truest Poetry Is the Most Feigning”’ commends the virtues of reticence. ‘The Sea and the Mirror’ opens with a ‘preface’ in which 12

Robert Gittings (ed.), Letters of John Keats (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 399 (to Charles Brown, 30 November 1820).

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‘the stage manager’ addresses ‘the critics’ with a meditation on matters raised by the play which has just finished, and concludes by insisting on what lies beyond its fictional world: All the rest is silence On the other side of the wall; And the silence ripeness, And the ripeness all.

This long poem therefore opens with a conjuration and commendation of the virtue of silence, but does so by combining two of the most famous moments in the last acts of two tragedies by the author of that play: ‘The rest is silence’, Hamlet’s dying words, and ‘Ripeness is all’, the wisdom inherited from suffering by Edgar in King Lear. W. H. Auden, making a new aphorism out of separate lines in Shakespeare, and doing so in this intensely memorable quatrain, stamps his own mark on the Shakespearean text in the very gesture in which he offers a critique of any claim that poetry, or what the stage manager calls ‘Art’, might make about its ability to transform the actual. The paradoxicality of the combination of this renunciatory inclination with such masterly appropriation lies close to the heart of the conception, generation and effect of this extraordinary poem. Auden’s lecture on The Tempest calls it a ‘mythopoeic’ work: like others such as Don Quixote and texts by Kafka, it acts as an inspiration to writers ‘to go on for themselves’. The lecture also offers a more particular reason for Auden’s interest: he finds it, as many critics of his time did not, deficient in its conception of forgiveness. Antonio and Sebastian remain outside the ‘magic circle’ of Prospero’s reconciliations: although they are ‘spared punishment … they can’t be said to be forgiven because they don’t want to be, and Prospero’s forgiveness of them means only that he does not take revenge upon them’. In ‘Balaam and His Ass’, written ten years after the lecture, he is more disconcerted, saying that the play is ‘disquieting’ because ‘both the repentance of the guilty and the pardon of the injured seem more formal than real’; and Prospero’s forgiveness is ‘more the contemptuous pardon of a man who knows that he has his enemies completely at his mercy than a heartfelt reconciliation’ (DH, p. 129). Its exceptionality in these respects among Shakespeare’s late plays clearly provoked Auden’s imaginative interest; and his own sequence rewrites the characters of The Tempest, as they find themselves (in several senses) at the end of the play, in addresses, monologues, songs and (in Caliban’s case) an extremely lengthy passage of prose. Auden was right and also prophetic about the inexhaustibility of The Tempest as the source of further creative work; and many academic studies

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trace this rich intertextual history. One student of The Tempest observes that its historical reception makes it ‘a work of anticipation, forever poised, like Ariel in the bough, upon the aching pulse of modernity’.14 We might well locate ‘The Sea and the Mirror’ there, even though it does not share a great deal in common with many of its modern rewritings. In ascribing weight and authority to Caliban, however, and in elaborately voicing him, it does parallel those postcolonial texts which redefine the relationship between Prospero and Caliban in terms of the varying relationships of power and subjection in the countries of the Third World, outstandingly Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempête (1969). Auden’s transvaluation of the relationship may well be read as answering needs of his own, both personal and political, comparable to these in their deconstructive intensity if not their specific focus. Auden’s lecture implies that he was himself provoked by a pre-existing literary response to the play, one that certainly takes the pulse of modernity: he ends by quoting the final stanza of Rilke’s ‘Der Geist Ariel’ in J. B. Leishman’s translation. Written ‘after reading Shakespeare’s Tempest’, this address to Prospero identifies Ariel with the impulse which made Prospero throw himself ‘full upon greatness, far from all respect’ – a wild, asocial impulse which is ambivalently both the will to power and the following of personal genius, an ambivalence figured also in the way Ariel is said to have ‘loved [Prospero] and / would yet be going, always both at once’. These richly suggestive lines may well have concluded a more orthodox poem on the subject but Rilke, with characteristically self-surpassing extensiveness, opens it up further in a parenthesis in which he questions himself about what we must assume is a literally abandoned draft: ‘And there I left it?’ The remainder of the parenthesis, which is the remainder of the poem, is what Auden quotes: Now he terrifies me, this man who’s once more duke. – The way he draws the wire into his head, and hangs himself beside the other puppets, and henceforth asks mercy of the play! … What epilogue of achieved mastery! Putting off, standing there with only one’s own strength: ‘which is most faint’.15 13

14 15

See, for instance, Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan, Shakespeare’s Caliban: A Cultural History (Cambridge University Press, 1991), Chantal Zabus, Tempests after Shakespeare (New York and Houndmills: Palgrave, 2002) and Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman (eds.), ‘The Tempest’ and Its Travels (London: Reaktion Books, 2000). Simon Palfrey, Late Shakespeare: A New World of Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 138. Leishman’s phrase ‘achieved mastery’ appears to remember Hopkins’s ‘The Windhover’ – ‘the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!’ – and his translation gains from the allusion.

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Derived from the play itself, when Prospero addresses the ‘elves of hills’ and ‘demi-puppets’ in the fifth act, this marionettish Rilkean image of the mage-artist disencumbering himself of the Ariel powers of imagination and asking mercy of the play itself rather than of its audience – as Prospero does in the epilogue – has excruciation in it, notably in its implication that Prospero may not be just putting himself back in his box but committing suicide. Its abjection, after such ‘achieved mastery’, is indeed terrifying: not least because it is clear that Rilke is figuring Prospero as Shakespeare himself (and, undoubtedly, as Rilke himself too). By so brilliantly expressing both the artist’s control and his renunciatory defencelessness, ‘The Spirit Ariel’ is very close to the spirit of ‘The Sea and the Mirror’, and Auden’s lecture does in fact call Prospero ‘a puppet master’. Rilke’s poem might well have acted as epigraph to Auden’s. But it does not. Although Rilke is alluded to several times, the poem’s actual epigraph is the final verse of Emily Brontë’s ‘Plead for Me’. A prayer to the ‘God of visions’ made at a shrine ‘where / Faith cannot doubt, nor hope despair’, this implicitly opposes the self-dependent romantic imagination to the God of orthodox Christianity. It acts therefore as a kind of counter-epigraph since ‘The Sea and the Mirror’ takes a profoundly anti-romantic view of art. While Auden was writing it, indeed, he was teaching a course at Swarthmore College called ‘Romanticism from Rousseau to Hitler’. The poem’s implicit position (made virtually explicit towards its conclusion) is theologically Christian, deriving from the Kierkegaardian existentialism which Auden adopted on his return to the Church in 1940. In this sense, it cannot be divorced from its accompanying poem in the 1944 volume. ‘For The Time Being’ reads the Christian nativity in the light, or dark, of the contemporary world, and some draft material was transferred, during composition, from this poem to ‘The Sea and the Mirror’. The persistent tradition, originating in the nineteenth century, of reading The Tempest as religious allegory was clearly of interest to Auden and may be one reason why he subtitles his poem ‘A Commentary on Shakespeare’s The Tempest’ and divides it into a preface, three chapters and a postscript. This is the poem as literary criticism. Behind it may stand Pope’s ‘Essay on Criticism’ (Auden employs quasiAugustan personifications); and ahead of it lies Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962), which is the novel as critical commentary on a poem. For one editor of The Tempest, Frank Kermode, ‘The Sea and the Mirror’ provides ‘some brilliant insights into the play’, and so it

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does: but there is a disconcerting discontinuity between the academic formalities of the ‘commentary’ form and the personal and ethical urgency of the materials the poem handles. These are dramatised, following the preface, in Prospero’s farewell speech to Ariel in Chapter I; in the monologues by all the play’s other principal characters in Chapter II; and in Caliban’s lengthy speech to the audience, in a prose pastiched from the style of late Henry James, in Chapter III, which is followed by a brief lyric ‘postscript’ by Ariel, echoed by the prompter. These materials prominently include the war itself; Auden’s fraught relationship with his one-time lover Chester Kallman; and his attitude, after his move to America, to his own earlier work and reputation. The poem never refers explicitly to the war, although an early (verse) version of Caliban’s speech does, when ‘an unidentified plane’ is reported ‘Approaching the city’;17 but the scale of the war’s catastrophe is reflected in several ways. Taking its cue from Prospero’s saying, at the very end of The Tempest, that on his return to Milan his ‘every third thought shall be [his] grave’, ‘The Sea and the Mirror’ is intensely preoccupied with death. This takes a personal edge too from the fact that Auden’s mother had died in 1941: ‘For The Time Being’ is dedicated to her memory. The poem is bookended by death. The preface opens with the circus image of a ‘nonchalant couple’ ‘Waltzing across a tightrope / As if there were no death / Or hope of falling down’; and every stanza of the postscript ends with the isolate, echoing word ‘I’, which the final stanza identifies with ‘What we shall become, / One evaporating sigh’ – the evaporation of the final breaths of both Ariel and Caliban. Between the two, Prospero’s opening address frees Ariel – the spirit of creative imagination or the principle of the possibility of art – ‘So at last I can really believe I shall die. / For under your influence death is inconceivable’; and at the end of his monologue, in a passage which examines the depredations of ageing as unsettlingly as Eliot does in ‘East Coker’ and ‘Little Gidding’, he foresees ‘the time death pounces / His stumping question’. 18 A concluding song invites Ariel, in beautifully lyrical dimeters, to sing ‘Of separation, / Of bodies and death’, with Prospero conceiving of himself as tremblingly taking ‘The silent passage / Into 16 17 18

Introduction, The Tempest, ed. Frank Kermode, Arden Shakespeare (1954; London: Methuen, 1964), p. lxii, n. 1. These lines are made available in the notes to Arthur Kirsch’s edition (Princeton University Press, 2003), which is the source of my quotations in this chapter. In an essay on Eliot and Auden Peter McDonald persuasively proposes that Prospero in ‘The Sea and the Mirror’ transforms a tone picked up from parts of Four Quartets. See ‘One of Us: Eliot, Auden and Four Quartets’ in Serious Poetry: Form and Authority From Yeats to Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), pp. 103–37.

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discomfort’. The whole of Prospero’s monologue is instinct with loss: its tone is that of a man stoically committing himself to the necessity of Ariel’s liberation rather than relishing the prospect of it. It is in fact a kind of aching love song to the departing imagination: ‘O Ariel, Ariel, / How I shall miss you’. If the war stands behind the poem’s constant orientation towards death, it may also shadow Prospero’s admission of culpability for Antonio’s treachery by absenting himself from government to concentrate on his art. John Fuller finds in this ‘a suggestion of the failure of liberal humanism to avert Hitler’.19 It may be that you have to read hard to find this suggestion, but it is conceivable in a poem which, for all its lack of specific reference to the actual circumstances of the time of its composition, pulses throughout with the urgencies and demands of that time and, occasionally, with the apocalypticism of the time’s temper – notably when Alonso instructs Ferdinand in Chapter II: ‘At the end of each successful day /Remember that the fire and the ice / Are never more than one step away / From the temperate city.’ The war manifestly provokes a passage in Caliban’s address to the audience in which he speaks as ‘echo’ to what he conceives as the audience’s own response to Shakespeare, which is why the passage is printed in italics.20 Speaking on behalf of others, therefore, Caliban gives voice to a sense of survivor privilege and guilt: We should not be sitting here now, washed, warm, well-fed, in seats we have paid for, unless there were others who are not here; our liveliness and good humour, such as they are, are those of survivors, conscious that there are others who have not been so fortunate, others who did not succeed in navigating the narrow passage or to whom the natives were not friendly, others whose streets were chosen by the explosion or through whose country the famine turned aside from ours to go, others who failed to repel the invasion of bacteria or to crush the insurrection of their bowels, others who lost their suit against their parents or were ruined by wishes they could not adjust or murdered by resentments they could not control; aware of some who were better and bigger but from whom, only the other day, Fortune withdrew her hand in sudden disgust, now nervously playing chess with drunken sea-captains in sordid cafés on the equator or the Arctic Circle, or lying, only a few blocks away, strapped and screaming on iron beds or dropping to naked pieces in damp graves.

This is, in its context, a passage of startling immediacy, in which the pastiche-James of Caliban’s monologue seems briefly almost to forget itself, 19 20

Fuller, A Commentary, p. 358. Kirsch’s edition is, however, the first to do so. He makes it plain that this was Auden’s original intention, thwarted by his publishers.

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and in which some of the tropes of Auden’s earlier poetry – its psychosomatics, its Nordic topographies, its landscapes of ruin and its menacing population – are transposed to a new key and placed at the service of an engaged empathy of witness and recoil. Auden’s being excused military service because of his sexuality may lie behind this, but the portrayal of the psychology of privileged survival is generalised in a way that makes Caliban a representative figure. This allows him to challenge his nominal addressee – Shakespeare himself – with almost arch condescension: And shouldn’t you too, dear master, reflect – forgive us for mentioning it – that we might very well not have been attending a production of yours this evening, had not some other and maybe – who can tell? – brighter talent married a barmaid or turned religious and shy or gone down in a liner with all his manuscripts, the loss recorded only in the corner of some country newspaper below A Poultry Lover’s Jottings?

This humorous effrontery is close to the heart of the whole conception of ‘The Sea and the Mirror’. Paralleling Auden’s fearlessness in his critical prose on Shakespeare, Caliban’s camp irony knows that even the greatest art is the product of accident, that it is necessarily circumstantial and contingent. I am reminded of the unillusioned conclusion of Jonathan Bate’s The Genius of Shakespeare where he says that in an alternative universe in which the Counter-Reformation had vanquished Protestantism or the Spanish Armada had succeeded in 1588 ‘Lope [de Vega] would … have triumphed over Shakespeare and I would be writing a book called The Genius of Vega’.21 Its composition in time of war imposes on ‘The Sea and the Mirror’ a similar sense of political and historical contingency. If the war is the larger context of suffering for the poem, Auden’s own suffering, in the shape of his relationship with Chester Kallman – which he referred to as ‘l’affaire C’ – also deeply informs it. What matters most is the chronological closeness of the poem’s composition to Auden’s first knowledge of Kallman’s sexual betrayal. Auden had met Kallman, fourteen years his junior, in April 1939, and considered himself in a relationship equivalent to marriage – which he took with total seriousness and commitment – when he learnt of Kallman’s affair in July 1941. They were never lovers again, although they lived intermittently together subsequently: Auden came to consider their relationship more that of parent and child or of elder and younger brother than that of a married couple.

21

Jonathan Bate, The Genius of Shakespeare (London: Picador, 1997), p. 340.

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There are several points at which ‘The Sea and the Mirror’ reflects these circumstances. The verse form of Prospero’s monologue – syllabics imitative of classical elegiacs – is interrupted by three italicised songs. The first asks Ariel to: Inform my hot heart straight away Its treasure loves another, But turn to neutral topics then, Such as the pictures in this room, Religion or the Weather; Pure scholarship in Where and When, How Often and With Whom, Is not for Passion that must play The Jolly Elder Brother.

The jaunty rhythm, alternating iambic tetrameters and trimeters, is a formally evasive irony. There is pain and frustration in the way a still intense desire has to accept that it will never be satisfied again, and in the way a would-be lover must be content with such a humiliating disguise as that of the ‘Jolly Elder Brother’. The second song’s imagery secretes that nexus of emotions, erotic as well as political, involved for Auden in the relationship between the elderly Falstaff and the young Hal (‘Of Heirs Apparent who prefer / Low dives to formal feasts’), which is extensively addressed, as we have seen, in the critical prose. ‘L’affaire C’ is certainly involved here too, and Falstaff himself may well be considered to play the part of the ‘Jolly Elder Brother’ in Henry IV. That this play was prominently present to Auden’s conception of ‘The Sea and the Mirror’ is witnessed not only by this song but by his lecture on The Tempest, where he suddenly, without explanation, divides the characters of the play into those of ‘Hal’s kingdom’ and ‘Falstaff’s kingdom’, observing that ‘If Hal’s kingdom becomes smaller, less glorious, Falstaff’s becomes much uglier’. Finally, Ariel’s postscript address to Caliban offers us an Ariel ‘helplessly in love’ and pleading to be spared ‘a humiliation’. In these moments a still almost nakedly unaccommodated grief and longing are struggling hard indeed to pull around themselves the accommodating cloak of the poet’s fiction-making art. An autobiographical pain is almost disconcertingly obtrusive. But ‘The Sea and the Mirror’ also contains guilty self-recrimination. We learn from the biographies that Auden became acutely conscious of his own manipulativeness, against which Kallman could hardly do other than rebel, and also that he was forced, by his initial reaction to the betrayal, to confront his capacity for physical violence. These things may impel the would-be murdering brother Sebastian’s sestina in Chapter II and inform parts of

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Prospero’s address in Chapter I. The former’s repeated, enclosing endwords (dream, sword, day, alive, proof, crown) suggest a man locked into his knowledge of violence and guilt; but in this contorted, almost perversely obscure poem in which something seems to be trying almost as hard not to be said as to be said, the envoi, in which all end-words occur, appears to propose that a kind of mercy has been recognised in failure, that the sestina’s bitter circle might be broken by the suffering of adversity: In dream all sins are easy, but by day It is defeat gives proof we are alive; The sword we suffer is the guarded crown.

In Prospero’s speech such autobiographical material may brood behind the consciousness of his failure with Caliban, ‘my impervious disgrace’ (a failure which returns from all attempts at repression in Caliban’s speech in Chapter III): We did it, Ariel, between us; you found on me a wish For absolute devotion; result – his wreck That sprawls in the weeds and will not be repaired: My dignity discouraged by a pupil’s curse, I shall go knowing and incompetent into my grave.

To be knowing and incompetent is to have to face the knowledge that not everything can be made available to, and can certainly not be altered by, art; and what Prospero must learn, as he dispenses with the services of Ariel, is a capacity for the kind of silence beyond speech recommended by the poem’s preface, a profound divestment in which he finds that ‘the way of truth’ is ‘a way of silence where affectionate chat / Is but a robbers’ ambush and even good music / In shocking taste’. The knowledge is something, necessarily, that Ariel ‘never told me’: it can be learnt only by the renunciation of imaginative accommodation. We should read in this Auden’s later ‘Ars Poetica’; and in Prospero here we discover this poet’s radical dissatisfaction with his earlier work and reputation. Particularly after the reception of ‘Spain’ and its critique by George Orwell, Auden developed a profound suspicion of the rhetorical powers of an engaged poetry, a resentment about being commandeered for any ideological position, a disdain for acolytes and, it may be, a disgust with poetic success itself, certainly with his own facility at producing one version of it. Auden’s break with England was also therefore his opportunity to fracture the mould in which his earlier poetry was, or appeared to be, set; and ‘The Sea and the Mirror’ is a ‘commentary’ on that fracture as well as on The Tempest.

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The inclination of this poem is away from the confessional: in dramatisation, ventriloquial monologue, formal variety, intertextuality with, and fantasia on, a Shakespearean text which is also a frequently revisited cultural object. However, the quality of its poignancy, which is a large part of its effect and of its poetic effectiveness, has to do with the ways in which a distressed autobiography is partially diverted and partially declared in its forms and processes; and the drafts of the poem, as Arthur Kirsch’s notes make clear, occasionally had a more straightforwardly autobiographical character. When he writes about The Tempest in 1954 Auden is harsh to Prospero in a way few even of his antagonistic critics have been: ‘One must admire Prospero because of his talents and strengths, one cannot possibly like him. He has the coldness of someone who has come to the conclusion that human nature is not worth much, that human relations are, at their best, pretty sorry affairs’ (DH, p. 129). The injustice of this to the character as we find him in Shakespeare strongly suggests an element of jaundiced self-critique. Auden was thirty-seven when he published ‘The Sea and the Mirror’; so, although we cannot be certain of Prospero’s age, this poet would have been prematurely ageing himself had he identified in any straightforward way with his Prospero figure. Nevertheless, what we have in the poem is a figure driven by an awareness of death; suffering and enduring an irremediable calamity in love; chastising himself for the tendency to manipulate and control others; and renouncing a no longer credible, or creditable, view of the purpose and power of poetry. When T. S. Eliot was writing ‘Little Gidding’ he thought that a draft lacked a ‘sharpening of personal poignancy … some acute personal reminiscence (never to be explicated, of course, but to give power from well below the surface)’.22 In ‘The Sea and the Mirror’ W. H. Auden includes no such single ‘reminiscence’, but sharply personal emotions suffuse the whole, giving power both on the poem’s surface and from well below. What we certainly have on the poem’s surface is brilliant performance; and in essence what is performed throughout Chapters II and III is reproach to, and chastisement of, Prospero. The performative element of The Tempest itself, in which metatextual reference to plays and players is frequent, was probably a major source of Auden’s attraction to it. As we have seen, the poem’s preface opens with an imagery of the circus, and the speeches and songs of the characters in Chapter II are almost virtuoso 22

Cited in Helen Gardner, The Composition of ‘Four Quartets’ (London: Faber and Faber, 1978), p. 24.

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vaudeville turns, in exacting forms, in which each character performs what has become most essential to him or her as a consequence of Prospero’s agency. Antonio begins these speeches and then utters a lyrical five-line coda to his own and all the others. These ten codas employ the same rhyme words which almost tell the story of The Tempest in miniature: Prospero / own / know / Antonio / alone – with the tenth adding a sixth line and a rhyming ‘O’. Antonio as coda, an embittered spirit of negativity, stands prominently apart from any more resolved mood or tone in the speeches themselves: so that all are cast under the shadow of an unrelenting opposition to Prospero’s will. This means that Prospero cannot rid himself of his magic in the way he wishes to: his brother’s intransigence is a permanent instruction to him in the incompletion of his own purposes: ‘as long as I choose // To wear my fashion’, Antonio says, ‘whatever you wear / Is a magic robe’. In this chapter the characters of The Tempest are caught in the first moment of aftermath, recognising, and realising that they must accommodate themselves to, what Prospero’s magic has effected in them. So that Auden is ‘completing’ Shakespeare by permitting the play’s characters a degree of autonomy which their original author never allows them. They are both answering back and standing, for the first time, firmly on their own unillusioned feet. Auden’s forms – and this is an aspect of their virtuosity – accommodate themselves wittily and movingly to the recognitions being made by their speakers. Some instances. Antonio, relishing his denial of Prospero, uses terza rima. Its circularity suggests the endlessness of his negativity and, as the form of Dante’s Inferno, it also evokes the hellishness of entrapment. Even so, this is a terza rima which can accommodate allusion to contemporary popular song, allowing Antonio a scathing sarcasm about Prospero’s final magic: ‘given a few / Incomplete objects and a nice warm day, / What a lot a little music can do’. Ferdinand speaks an alexandrine sonnet which fuses the erotic and the religious in a tradition familiar in European poetry but here made very strange to itself. Auden said that it ‘describes fucking in completely abstract words’ and perhaps it does: but this suggests a coarseness which the poem does not possess.23 It wonderfully mimes sexual yearning, as its trembling alexandrines stretch their enjambments towards desired satisfaction and release, in an insinuatingly melting rhythm in which the

23

Cited by Kirsch, p. xxiii.

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loved one is newly invented in a feat of delighted co-creation. It is a hymn to sensual mutuality and reciprocity: Flesh, fair, unique, and you, warm secret that my kiss Follows into meaning Miranda, solitude Where my omissions are, still possible, still good …

Stephano’s poem is an address to his belly, which he considers both bride and daughter: so the materiality of his appetite is envisaged as having an incestuous intensity. Alcoholic girth is, as I have said, a preoccupation of Auden’s in his Shakespearean prose, in relation to Falstaff. Taking on the flesh of a poem, the preoccupation is perfectly rendered as a ballade, whose combination of refrain and envoi invokes François Villon in his great medieval poems of the materiality of the body in sex and death. Auden manages a poignancy comparable to Villon’s too when the repeated refrain attaches itself to Stephano’s desolating knowledge that fatness is sublimation and evasion: ‘A lost thing looks for a lost name.’ Alonso’s monologue is a syllabic invention of Auden’s, in which rhyming twelve-line stanzas have lines of nine syllables, apart from their concluding lines, which have seven. The poem is a letter, to be opened after his death, from Alonso to his ‘Dear Son’ on the nature and obligations of political power (‘Only your darkness can tell you what / A prince’s ornate mirror dare not’), imitating the Renaissance genre of the ‘advice to princes’. The attenuation of the final line, as it recurs, is world-wearily disabused, befitting the suspicion and reserve which Alonso recommends to Ferdinand: Remember when Your climate seems a permanent home For marvellous creatures and great men, What griefs and convulsions startled Rome, Ecbatana, Babylon.

The formal repetitions of Miranda’s concluding villanelle – that most repetitive of forms – enact an ecstatic vision of mutual love: William Empson puts it bluntly when he says that ‘Miranda is panting … [and] what she speaks is a perfect villanelle.’24 But they also enact a horror of what might threaten that love, figured as the ‘Black Man’ and a squawking ‘Witch’ with a ‘venomous body’, the Grimm-like terrors of a child’s nightmare. The poem’s ambiguities are contained too in the repeated 24

Cited in The Complete Poems of William Empson, ed. John Haffenden (London: Penguin Books, 2000), p. 219.

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simile itself, ‘My Dear One is mine as mirrors are lonely.’ This combines the Elizabethan trope of the speaker seeing herself reflected in the eyes of her lover with Miranda’s telling Ferdinand in The Tempest that she knows no woman’s face ‘Save, from my glass, mine own’ (3.1.50). Mirrors may be perceived as lonely until someone looks into them, but what the line actually says is that Miranda possesses Ferdinand as a mirror possesses its loneliness; which must be a tempering of any desired ecstasy. The solipsism is reinforced by Miranda’s very name which – the feminine form of the gerundive of the Latin word for wonder, ‘miror’ – may be read as a kind of pun. The villanelle’s almost childlike nonsense verse, with its glancing allusions to The Wizard of Oz and Alice Through the LookingGlass, circles around such ambiguities, in which this Miranda seems at once mature woman capable of sexual ecstasy and immature child afraid of the dark. Reading the villanelle aloud is to be tempted into a breathless childlike chant, and then to feel guilty about being so tempted: there is a sexual frisson in its disconcerting combination of experience and innocence. When Empson writes about Marina, ‘the delicious heroine’, protesting her innocence in act 4 scene 1 of Pericles, he says that she arouses in him the same ‘electric nausea’ as Esther Summerson in Bleak House: ‘But in these passages by Shakespeare I seem to get a reassuring echo of the poet Auden; a glaring eye, or I delude myself, peeps through the mask.’25 Perhaps it does so in Miranda’s villanelle too: and Auden must have enjoyed hearing from such an impressive source that Shakespeare had at least once echoed him. Miranda’s villanelle also formally brings the terms of the poem’s title together at its close, where it envisages a first world of primal inexperience. This contrasts sharply with the figurings of death in ‘The Sea and the Mirror’ and with Prospero’s evocation of his unhappy childhood in Chapter I, from which he sought escape in his art. Its figure of the dance, which Auden subsequently uses at resoundingly conclusive moments in ‘Horae Canonicae’ and ‘Whitsunday in Kirchstetten’, inherits a central symbolist conception, one also crucial in both Eliot and Yeats. Auden is advertising, in this poem which transforms so much in a literary tradition, an inheritance from the modernism which constitutes a necessary ground of his own poetic being: So, to remember our changing garden, we Are linked as children in a circle dancing: 25

See Essays on Shakespeare, ed. David Pirie (Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 237. The essay, called ‘Hunt the Symbol’, was first published in the Times Literary Supplement in 1964.

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But Miranda’s villanelle does not conclude Chapter II; Antonio’s final coda does that, and does so by increasing its usual five lines to six in an attempt to replace her loving dance with a dance of death: One link is missing, Prospero, My magic is my own; Happy Miranda does not know The figure that Antonio, The Only One, Creation’s O Dances for Death alone.

Antonio’s repeated codas, negative ‘commentaries’ on his texts, as Auden’s poem is a commentary on The Tempest, are a kind of knell, tolling the extinction of all value, and finally sucking everything into the vortex, the mere nothing, of that final O. Making space for itself in its additional line, it attempts to cancel out all those other Os which recur in ‘The Sea and the Mirror’. Beginning in the preface – ‘and O / How the dear little children laugh / When the drums roll and the lovely / Lady is sawn in half’ – these probably remember Shakespeare’s own ‘wooden O’ in Henry V; but Antonio’s may more appositely be likened, in its desolating negativity, to the Fool’s when he tells Lear that he has become ‘an O without a figure’ (1.4.191–2). If, under one aspect, Antonio is, like Loerke in Women in Love, ‘a gnawing little negation gnawing at the roots of life’, he is also, however, the only possibility in ‘The Sea and the Mirror’ of human freedom from appropriative power: since without his rejections and refusals Prospero’s power would be absolute. And absolutism in the worlds of both ethics and aesthetics is decisively rejected in the self-critically clashing and conflicting forms, the endlessly perspectivising ironies, of ‘The Sea and the Mirror’. In his opening monologue Prospero admits responsibility for Antonio’s treason, which is partly to apologise for him; but Caliban remains his ‘impervious disgrace’. In the very long prose monologue addressed to the audience which closes ‘The Sea and the Mirror’ Caliban knows exactly what a disgrace he is; and yet it is he who eventually recommends to his audience grace itself as the necessary alternative, or even corrective, to art. In one of the most commanding literary moves in all of Auden, Caliban, image of gross carnality and would-be rapist of Miranda, often taken as emblematic of the wantonly phallic or the undisciplined energies of the Id,

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privately identified by Auden as ‘The Prick’,26 and (mis)identifying himself at one point of his speech as Cupid, is endowed with the baroquely sophisticated prose style of late Henry James, whom Auden addresses – indeed, prays to – in ‘At the Grave of Henry James’ as ‘Master of nuance and scruple’. Randall Jarrell called this prose ‘rocket-assisted James’, implying that it out-Jameses James in the verve and panache of its periodic and syntactical energies; and, although it understandably caused Auden a great deal of trouble, it manifestly also gave him a great deal of pleasure.27 John Fuller says that it is ‘insistent, amusing and exhausting’; and so it is, all of those things.28 No prose has ever been written – not even James’s own – which demands to be read, and re-read, more slowly; more slowly, even, than most difficult poetry. There is a rich comedy of discrepancy in having Caliban – wounded, wheedling, cajoling, recriminatory, resentful, truculent – speak in a language which pastiches that of a supreme stylist renowned for prefaces analysing artistic creativity, for an introduction to The Tempest which meditates on the difference between the man and the artist, and for a novel, The Wings of the Dove, which is arguably intertextual with the play. Like James, though, Auden’s Caliban is an aesthetician who discusses the nature of art and its relation to reality; and he is also, ultimately, a theologian who proposes the necessity and value of religion above art in the hierarchy of human understanding and interpretation. It is a notably bold stroke for a poet to imitate James so extensively in a long poem which so extensively appropriates Shakespeare. In ‘Caliban to the Audience’ part of the comedy of Caliban’s representation is the extent of his self-knowledge. Speaking of himself in the third person, as though offering detached scientific analysis, he figures himself throughout as the outsider, as whatever it is that cannot be accommodated by art. He is ‘the begged question you [the audience] would speak to him [Shakespeare] about’; and, with respect to the Muse, he is ‘the solitary exception she is not at any hour of the day or night at home to’. He also realises that he is ‘breaking, by refusing to keep in step, the excellent order of the dancing ring’; which is to step outside the image of artistic harmony offered by Miranda at the end of her villanelle, and, in doing so, to go even further than Antonio in his coda to Miranda’s song where, however negative his dance is, he is still dancing.

26 28

In a letter cited by Kirsch, p. xviii. Fuller, A Commentary, p. 363.

27

Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden, p. 131.

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But the real force of Caliban’s challenge has to do with his view of Ariel. The question to Shakespeare is, ‘Is it not possible that, not content with inveigling Caliban into Ariel’s kingdom, you have also let loose Ariel in Caliban’s? … For if the intrusion of the real has disconcerted and incommoded the poetic, that is a mere bagatelle compared to the damage which the poetic would inflict if it ever succeeded in intruding upon the real. We want no Ariel here, breaking down our picket fences in the name of fraternity, seducing our wives in the name of romance, and robbing us of our sacred pecuniary deposits in the name of justice.’ This issue has, as we have seen, its correlative in Auden’s Shakespeare criticism when, in the lecture on The Merchant of Venice, for instance, he says that ‘a society constructed to be like a beautiful poem … would be a nightmare of horror’; but it also, surely, remembers the reception of ‘Spain’, that poem which encourages political activism. For the poet of ‘The Sea and the Mirror’, living in voluntary American exile while Hitlerian fascism dominated the Germany where he had himself lived not long before, and fully realising the consequences for homosexuals as well as for Jews, such rhetorical poetic power and its potential collusiveness with powerful political rhetoric has become deeply suspect. For the poet who writes this Jamesian Caliban, poetry is not itself the place to speak selfapprovingly to the converted, however necessary it is to speak out against Hitler. Caliban’s objection finds its most memorable figuration when he addresses those members of the audience who consider themselves ‘apprentice’ artists. Conceiving of a successful artistic career as a successful relationship with Ariel, Caliban subsequently traces the relationship’s gradual disintegration. His slow unfolding of this is managed with something of the deftness of pace of a Jamesian ghost story; and the final sudden explosion when the artist attempts to rid himself of the now disobedient and utterly unaccommodating Ariel, has great impact. Caliban imagines the artist approaching Ariel (‘Him’), and there is a shocking doppelgänger effect, which is also a characteristically Jamesian effect: Striding up to Him in fury, you glare into His unblinking eyes and stop dead, transfixed with horror at seeing reflected there, not what you had always expected to see, a conqueror smiling at a conqueror, both promising mountains and marvels, but a gibbering fist-clenched creature with which you are all too unfamiliar, for this is the first time indeed that you have met the only subject that you have, who is not a dream amenable to magic but the all too solid flesh you must acknowledge as your own; at last you have come face to face with me, and are appalled to learn how far I am from being, in any sense, your dish, how completely lacking in that poise and calm and all-forgiving because all-understanding good nature which to the critical

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eye is so wonderfully and domestically present on every page of your published inventions.

This passage, with its specific Shakespearean allusions – to The Tempest itself and to Hamlet – acts as a hideously distorted mirror image of the Renaissance conceit, which partly informs Miranda’s villanelle, of having one’s reflection returned by a lover’s eyes. Here, what the artist sees in Ariel’s eyes, in that devastating explosion of cliché, ‘all too unfamiliar’, is himself as Caliban, the nightmare of dishevelment and grotesquerie which cannot ever be disciplined into the ‘inventions’ of art: wholly given over to unfamiliar affections, with a vengeance. What Caliban earlier calls ‘that world of freedom without anxiety’ here savagely cedes to ‘our shambling, slovenly, makeshift world’. There is something of that other great modern doppelgänger tale in this, The Picture of Dorian Gray; and Wilde’s preface to that novel famously figures nineteenth-century aesthetics as Caliban seeing, or not seeing, his face in a glass. Caliban’s fable is variously interpretable: that something inchoate will always resist the discipline of artistic will (‘we have made oblongs and stood them upon squares’, Virginia Woolf’s geometrical figure for this in The Waves, greatly attracts Auden in his critical prose); that the apparent civilities of liberal-bourgeois art (‘poise and calm’) disguise a rampant will to power and the ferocious motivations of envy; that the artist, in his customary aesthetics and apologia, actually understands nothing of the unconscious forces which in fact drive him; that taking pleasure in fiction is to divert attention from actual human suffering; even that the artistic will is, at bottom, no different from a Hitlerian will to power. But whatever the specifics, the passage insists that the scandal of the artist as Caliban’s doppelgänger, and the ethical realisations consequent upon it, are an ultimate undermining of all high claims for the transformative power of art. Subsequently, Caliban recounts what seems an almost parodically sententious railway ‘Journey of Life’. What he himself calls its ‘allegorical’ landscape – of desolate countryside, of quasi-Icelandic ice and snow – shares some of the features of the topographies of Auden’s poetry of the 1920s and 1930s. It is as though Caliban now offers a critique of early Auden, suggesting that these very topographies possess a compelling but spurious glamour; exactly the things renounced in and by this poem itself. For this journey is one of ascesis towards a ‘Nowhere’, ‘that still smashed terminus at which he will, in due course, be deposited, seedy and by himself’; where ‘deposited’ suggests not just descent from the train but the ultimate descent of the body

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into the grave, the final end of the line. This requires us, Caliban says, to be ‘blessed by that Wholly Other Life’ of which the mirror and proscenium arch of art are merely ‘feebly figurative signs’. The place reached at last by ‘The Sea and the Mirror’ is one we cannot create ourselves: ‘it is just here, among the ruins and the bones, that we may rejoice in the perfected Work which is not ours’. It is the place where, euphorically, ‘the working charm is the full bloom of the unbothered state; the sounded note is the restored relation’. Caliban, impervious to disgrace, sues for grace and implicitly proposes that we, his readers, do so too. There is, as many have felt, something voulu about this theological termination, however beautifully expressed; and it will hardly convert the unconverted. But it is a sophisticated literary joke that Auden continues to play here, since the richly poeticised evocation of the Other Life is still Caliban’s. If this is in one sense radical testimony to the incarnationally Catholic Christianity Auden had espoused, in which it is the flesh itself which supplies the means of sacramental transformation, it is also testimony to Auden’s willingness to follow the impulses of his Shakespearean fiction further than any reader of this poem may have initially assumed possible. A strong element of the hyperbolic inheres in the entire conception. Even when his poem recommends the way of ascesis, Auden’s actual poetic manner is one of extravagance. For Auden there is another life much closer to hand – an uncapitalised ‘wholly other life’, maybe – to which he also gives allegiance. In an article in 1944 – the year ‘The Sea and the Mirror’ was published – he talks about the wartime fashion for Henry James’s work, suspecting that ‘the blessed sanctities of art’ are being used as ballast against ‘the unimaginable, unmanageable horrors of life’. This would be fundamentally to misunderstand James, Auden thinks, since he was not an aesthete like Yeats or Mallarmé but, like Pascal, ‘one to whom, however infinitely various its circumstances, the interest itself of human life was always the single dreadful choice it offers, with no “second chance”, of either salvation or damnation’: James certainly did not imagine that intellectual vocations were the only ones. It is possible, I think, that he would share my belief that the vocation to which the majority of mankind is called is also the highest and hardest, and that to be a good husband and father is a larger achievement than becoming the greatest artist or scientist on earth.29

29

W. H. Auden, Prose, Volume II: 1939–1948, ed. Edward Mendelson (Princeton University Press, 2002), pp. 243, 244.

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‘The Sea and the Mirror’ certainly gives us reason to credit Auden’s own belief – prominently gendered though it is – even if we remain uncertain whether to ascribe it to Henry James. But Auden’s poem gives us reason, too, to feel the poignancy of distress behind this perhaps almost sentimentally expressed ‘belief’, since, for its author himself, becoming a good husband was an option made devastatingly unavailable by Kallman’s desertion, and becoming a father, of a kind, was one thrust upon him, and hardly desired. It is difficult to exaggerate what is brought into play, or ‘verbal playing’, when W. H. Auden reads Caliban through Henry James. Despite the vulnerabilities which fuel it, however, and paradoxically so, it may be, ‘The Sea and the Mirror’ is a powerfully appropriative poem. It opens by transforming some exceptionally well-known Shakespearean phrases to its own purposes, and it bends a major Shakespearean text and its characters to its own design under the perhaps disingenuously humble guise of a ‘commentary’. It possibly competes formally with Shakespeare too: not only in that it is a metrical tour-de-force, but that its forms are emphatically not blank verse, even though Auden was more than capable of writing a flexible blank verse, as he does, for instance, in Paid On Both Sides. Critics sometimes say that John Skelton’s Magnificence may have been a model for the formal variety of ‘The Sea and the Mirror’; and the review – of Skelton’s Complete Poems, in 1932 – which gave rise to this speculation actually refers to Shakespeare: I am glad that Mr Henderson [Skelton’s editor] has called attention to the use of different kinds of verse for different characters in Magnificence. As far as I know Skelton is the only English poet who has done this. It is a commonplace that Shakespeare’s characters are all rather like each other at emotional climaxes. Blank verse is a medium suitable to a certain type of character, the heroic: when the emotional tension is relaxed it tends to become flat.30

I am not at all sure that what Auden says is a commonplace is so or that, if it were, it would be any the more true for that. But what the passage certainly registers, long before the actual composition of ‘The Sea and the Mirror’, is a competitive instinct; and in Auden’s poem all of the characters are, as we have seen, at points of ‘emotional climax’ and one of them, Ferdinand, is, in Auden’s own view, at the point of sexual climax. As Shakespeare’s competitor, Auden may even be read as Antonio – unjolly younger brother – to 30

W. H. Auden, Prose and Travel Books in Prose and Verse, Volume I: 1926–1938, ed. Edward Mendelson (Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 10.

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Shakespeare’s Prospero: refusing completion, having the last word, writing the coda, saying O. In addition to Shakespeare, Henry James is appropriated by Auden’s pastiche, since pastiche, much as it manifests appreciation and regard, also displays command, the presumption consequent upon self-assurance. Finally, T. S. Eliot – although in a much more muted way – also comes within Auden’s range. A rumination on ageing, and a tone appropriate to that, are caught up from Four Quartets into Prospero’s monologue. Auden would also have recognised how significant The Tempest is as an element of the allusive network of The Waste Land and have been aware that Eliot had published in 1930 ‘Marina’, one of his ‘Ariel’ poems intertextual with another late Shakespeare play, Pericles. Mark Ford sees ‘The Sea and the Mirror’ as a poem which engages ‘most provocatively and searchingly’ with The Waste Land.31 This probably overstates the case: but it is nevertheless clear what the real competition was when a poet produced a long poem in English in the years after 1922. Auden is also brazenly allusive to yet another Eliot poem, ‘Sweeney Among the Nightingales’, in the song of the Master and Boatswain in Chapter II of ‘The Sea and the Mirror’. In Eliot, ‘The nightingales are singing near / The Convent of the Sacred Heart’; in Auden, more intimately and emotively, and with a commandeering insouciance, ‘The nightingales are sobbing in / The orchards of our mothers.’ This is virtually an instruction to read Eliot into and out of his own poem, and even perhaps to propose Eliot as its mother where Shakespeare is its father. In ‘The Sea and the Mirror’ we have a paradoxical object: a poem extremely conscious of its own power in relation to the tradition which it inherits and newly possesses, and yet dedicated to, and clearly desiring to proselytise on behalf of, a belief in the ultimate powerlessness of poetry. In its author we have a poet devoted to the revelation of his own authoritative competence while engaging the persona of a character, Prospero, who is in the act of ceding all imaginative authority and competence, and of another, Caliban, who disturbs, at the deepest possible level, any complacency about the sources of the desire for such authority and competence. If paradox is a form of poetic playfulness, however, and if the later Auden is dedicated to the notion of poetry as play, ‘The Sea and the Mirror’ conveys nevertheless the strongest possible sense that, for all its authoritativeness, it is making its poetry out of forms of helplessness and haplessness which inevitably inhere in the living of the life that must fetch up in the poem. Which is why the 31

Mark Ford, A Driftwood Altar: Essays and Reviews (London: Waywiser Press, 2005), p. 138.

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commentary on art that this poem is, or claims to be, ends not with Caliban’s insistence on the truly redemptive way of asceticism but with Ariel’s postscript. If not a palinode, exactly, this nevertheless has the cadence of misgiving and the longing for reciprocity, as it offers us a figure of capable imagination still ‘Fascinated by / drab mortality’: Tempt not your sworn comrade, – only As I am can I Love you as you are – For my company be lonely For my health be ill: I will sing if you will cry …I

part iv

Ted Hughes’s Shakespeare

chapter 7

A language of the common bond

unsayable In his brilliantly idiosyncratic essay ‘Myths, Metres, Rhythms’ (1993), Ted Hughes describes a review of his first volume, The Hawk in the Rain (1957), by the poet Roy Fuller. Fuller, who was to be Oxford Professor of Poetry between 1968 and 1973, and a governor of the BBC, was a poet of urbane sophistication and irony of a kind Hughes would almost certainly have associated with the poetry against which he was, in his earliest work, implicitly reacting; a reaction he made explicit in early interviews. Citing the final line of his poem ‘The Horses’ – ‘Hearing the horizons endure’ – Hughes observes, ‘When Roy Fuller reviewed the book, which he did in a serious, considerate sort of way, he seized on that last line and pointed out, confidently, that it was “unsayable”.’1 And that word subsequently echoes reproachfully throughout this essay. For all the serious consideration, the gentlemanly good behaviour, of Fuller’s treatment of the book, Hughes clearly found his confidence a form of condescension; and ‘Myths, Metres, Rhythms’ is a superbly relentless rebuke to the word ‘unsayable’, in which Hughes identifies the English poetic tradition of his own allegiance – the English line behind his own line from ‘The Horses’, as it were – to which Fuller’s ear is almost entirely deaf. In fact, our sense of Hughes’s reaction is complicated by the knowledge that Fuller’s review, although arguably both considerate and condescending, nowhere actually makes this claim about Hughes’s line, although it does quote it as one of the book’s ‘very bad patches’.2 Hughes’s misattribution, however, reinforces my feeling that rarely can resentment at a review have provoked such a magnificently 1 2

Ted Hughes, Winter Pollen: Occasional Prose, ed. William Scammell (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), p. 320. Hereafter cited WP within my text. Roy Fuller, untitled review, London Magazine, 5, 1 (January 1958), p. 61.

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matured response; and Hughes’s essay is edgily personalised with selfjustificatory animus.3 We need to be clear about the contours of Hughes’s rebuke and the definition of his attachment. His tradition of allegiance, which he identifies as the ‘unorthodox’ one, has Hopkins’s notion of ‘sprung rhythm’ at its conceptual origin and historical core, and Hughes locates it elsewhere in Smart, Blake, Coleridge, Scott, Yeats and even, residually, Keats. He figures the tradition as always experimental, approximate and adaptive, as it ‘explores its way through a field of flexing, contrapuntal tensions, between two simultaneous but opposed laws – that is to say, between a law of “natural quantities” set in opposition to the law of a fixed, basic metric pattern’ (WP, p. 336). Being considered unorthodox, it is met everywhere and always with suspicion and hostility by the opposing orthodoxy: Coleridge, for instance, attempting to define and defend the metrics of ‘Christabel’, finds himself confronting ‘the contemptuously dismissive arrogance of a cultural ascendancy that was simply deaf to what he was talking about, as well as opposed to it on principle’ (WP, p. 334). So, we must assume, he becomes a precursor of Hughes in also having to defend himself against ‘unsayability’. Crucial to Hughes’s argument is a lengthy consideration of Thomas Wyatt, and of Tottel’s metrical tidying-up of his work in 1557. Hughes uncovers in Wyatt the persistence of the English alliterative tradition operative in such medieval poems as Piers Plowman and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; and Tottel’s rewritings indicate how, for him, ‘the metrically correct mode is the socially correct or as we might say now the politically correct mode’ (WP, p. 347).4 Tottel revises, Hughes thinks, according to a notion of standard deriving not from the alliterative ‘poetry of the people’ but from the concept of a courtly poetry first vibrantly selfaware in Chaucer. There the ascendancy of a new, Anglo-Norman court is given literary expression in a ‘King’s English’ which ‘did not derive from any corner of Englishness’ (WP, p. 367), and Hughes is abrasive, if also partly admiring, about the politico-cultural strategy which this embodies: If there is a Civil War within English poetry, perhaps it opened here, where Chaucer’s marvellous oeuvre laid down the front line of battle along which the 3

4

He still bristles about the review in letters of the 1980s. See Letters of Ted Hughes, selected and edited by Christopher Reid (London: Faber and Faber, 2007), pp. 432, 454. To Craig Raine, making this explicitly a matter of class, he says that ‘Roy Fuller refuses to surrender his officer’s moustache, even provisionally.’ Hughes published his own translation of a passage from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes (eds.), The School Bag (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), but he translated more than this; and Daniel Weissbort publishes further passages in his edition of Hughes’s Selected Translations (London: Faber and Faber, 2006).

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metrical, disciplined squares of the ‘King’s English’ would ever after … defend it against the resurgent ‘sprung rhythms’ of the tribes. (WP, p. 368)

Sketching the concept of such a self-divided literary and linguistic history as a reaction to something Roy Fuller is wrongly said to have written about a single line of Hughes’s in a review of a first volume may seem excessive, as if personal pique is self-dramatisingly appropriating public culture. But ‘Myths, Metres, Rhythms’ gives the impression of issuing from an entire subterrene of sensitised responsiveness as a consequence of finding its opportunity. And indeed, the final flourish in Hughes’s view of English literary history as permanent contestation is an almost Derridean refusal to locate a single originary impulse: since he understands the old English alliterative metres to have themselves uprooted and displaced ‘the verse forms of the indigenous Celtic peoples’, forms that he regards as those of ‘the enveloping, nurturing Celtic matrix’ (WP, p. 369). Over time that displacement is succeeded by an alliance, as the alliterative and Celtic traditions come into increasing interdependence; and in the extended prose poem which ends his essay Hughes reads the two traditions as compositely forming the bride in a marriage to the male ‘orthodox’ tradition. It is a marriage initially loving, then increasingly troubled, and eventually disastrous: but the prose poem culminates in Hopkins, and in ‘Celtic’ Wales and Ireland, with the wistful possibility of reconciliation; and the passage finds a valedictory, still wounded space for the word ‘unsayable’: The orthodoxy resumed control of the highways so completely that when Hopkins heard: She is not dead: There lives the dearest freshness deep down things and made a new attempt and even followed her, as he thought, through Wales into Ireland (as if his Catholicism itself were a lonely, forlorn, backtracking effort to locate the divorced, unheard-of or thought-to-be-defunct woman of the well-spring), his letters to her were as if written in invisible ink – or, if spelled out even to such a meticulous ear as Bridges’s, unsayable. She could only get to him by candle-light, as a midnight, North-North-West mad nun, her finger to her lips. (WP, pp. 371–2)

This lyrical evocation genders the just persistent and audible unorthodox tradition female and religiously denominates it convert-Catholic in a way congruent with the myths and metaphors of Hughes’s vast study, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being.5 And the figure of the nun, 5

London: Faber and Faber, 1992; revised paperback edn, 1993. Hereafter referred to within my text as ‘the Goddess’ and, in parentheses, as G for the identification of the page numbers of quotations.

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tacitly alluding to the silent figure of Hopkins’s ‘Heaven-Haven’ with its subtitle, ‘A nun takes the veil’, renders the tradition as, in the end, Gothic as well as Catholic, and a Gothic almost reflexly allusive to Shakespeare, to the Hamlet who says that he is only mad ‘nor’-nor’-west’. Shakespeare of course takes his place in Hughes’s allegorical prose poem, and at more than one stage of the disintegration of its figurative marriage (‘he’ in this passage is the orthodox tradition): Then she erupts, love-mad, imperious, dazzling, tempestuous, alarming, while he fights to subdue her, in Marlowe and early Shakespeare. The marriage becomes uncontrollable: his more and more desperate attempts to regain control are simply shattered by her astonished rage, or her vengeful fury, as she overwhelms him, drags him by the hair, storms through the house smashing things at every interruption, remembering every tiniest slight a million times magnified – till he fears for his sanity: middle Shakespeare. While he dozes in second childhood fondness on their daughter, she becomes a Sycorax, joins a coven, sleeps in her coffin to terrify him etc: late Shakespeare. (WP, pp. 369–70)

This metaphor is itself imperious, dazzling, tempestuous and alarming: but behind it, and inhering in Hughes’s linguistic and cultural views in this essay, it is possible to sense something more conventional. Despite his overt anti-academicism and the often-recounted story of the dream-fox which told him to abandon the writing of literary-critical essays, Hughes’s linguistic views are profoundly in tune with those of the Cambridge English school in which he began his own post-secondary education.6 What Lucy McDiarmid in her book Saving Civilisation calls ‘the myth of the seventeenth century’, that myth to which Eliot gave seminal expression when he defined a ‘dissociation of sensibility … from which we have never recovered’, and which was extensively purveyed by F. R. Leavis, seems powerfully active behind Hughes’s thinking.7 Patrick Cruttwell’s once influential and still excellently readable book The Shakespearean Moment (1954), which focuses on the 1590s and the immediately succeeding decades, and on the work of Shakespeare and Donne, extensively argues for just such a dissociation, although without explicitly referring to Eliot or Leavis.8 When we discover the phrase ‘the Shakespearean moment’ being used definitively, although with different inflections, by Hughes in the Goddess, it is hard to 6 7 8

For the story of the dream-fox see, for instance, Letters of Ted Hughes, pp. 422–3 (letter to Keith Sagar of 16 July 1979). Lucy McDiarmid, Saving Civilisation: Yeats, Eliot, and Auden Between the Wars (Cambridge University Press, 1984). Patrick Cruttwell, The Shakespearean Moment and Its Place in the Poetry of the Seventeenth Century (London: Chatto and Windus, 1954).

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believe that he is unaware of Cruttwell, despite his never naming him. And it is notable that, in a letter to the Observer responding to a negative review by Christopher Ricks of the first edition of A Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse, Hughes adverts to a discussion of ‘dissociation of sensibility’ he had with Eliot in which Eliot remarks that his phrase was ‘something of an understatement’.9 It is almost as if Hughes is here projecting a kind of poetic laying-on of hands; and his implicit approval of the concept is one reason for his enormously high regard for Eliot, which may initially seem surprising. However, Eliot had in fact more or less retracted the whole notion in his second Milton essay as early as 1947, as we have seen. The phrase ‘dissociation of sensibility’, he says, ‘retains some validity’: but clearly not much, since he also says that ‘All we can say is, that something like this did happen; that it had something to do with the Civil War; that it would even be unwise to say it was caused by the Civil War, but that it is a consequence of the same causes which brought about the Civil War; that we must seek the causes in Europe, not in England alone; and for what these causes were, we may dig and dig until we get to a depth at which words and concepts fail us.’10 These ratcheting clauses are fatal to the confidence of the original theory, and this prose has the very rhythms of backtracking. Far from ensuring that the theory retains some validity, Eliot appears to wish that he had never promulgated it in the first place. Even if for Hughes the dissociation begins long before it does for Eliot, some of the prejudices inherent in the idea may also be read out of Hughes: specifically, something very like xenophobia in the suspicion of iambic pentameter and of poetry containing non-English (that is, Norman French) elements. In a discussion of ‘The Hawk in the Rain’ Neil Roberts shows, representatively, how the poem in fact values something quite different from the ‘heavily accented Anglo-Saxon diction’ which it would appear to value if it were read only according to the prescriptions of Hughes’s own criticism. The point is well taken, and may even argue for the kind of Hughesian self-division which I shall myself be proposing later in this chapter.11 Nevertheless, in his desire to propagandise on behalf of a trochaic or beat-prosodic tradition (Anglo-Saxon poetry; medieval alliterative verse; the Coleridge of the accentual – as opposed to the accentual-syllabic – poems; Hopkins) in opposition to the corrupt foreign importation of the iambic tradition, Hughes can conscript Shakespeare to the former only by a highly 9 10 11

Letters of Ted Hughes, pp. 327–8 (17 January 1972). T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber and Faber, 1957), p. 153. Neil Roberts, Ted Hughes: A Literary Life (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 27.

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selective consideration of actual Shakespearean practice. Similarly, his views of Tottel’s editorial interventions in Wyatt are indebted to Cambridge English assumptions now much in dispute.

shakespearean dialects If a set of acquired literary and cultural-political assumptions can be uncovered from Hughes’s prose, however, what sustains readerly interest is the verve and brio with which he reinvents them. Reading English poetic tradition, in his marital metaphor, as double from the start, he understands this as the cause not only of cultural and political stress but of an almost apocalyptic antagonism. Within this doubling Shakespeare is accommodated at points of, even so, particular intensity: where there is a battle for control; where subjugation reaches the point of mental instability; and where dotage is distressed by the wiles of witchcraft. It is hard to say this with much tact – Hughes is himself scarcely tactful in his figuration – but the trope of a disintegrating marriage cannot fail to derive a particular intensity from the fact that it is being written across English literary history by a poet whose own disintegrating marriage is a continuingly controversial element of the figuration of one of the seminal volumes of poetry in modern literary history, Sylvia Plath’s Shakespeareanly entitled Ariel, as it is also the coded subtext of numerous poems by Hughes himself, and the explicit material of his final volume, Birthday Letters, where it becomes, in my view, the object of an attempted but failed literary exorcism, and where some of the appurtenances of witchcraft are both material for speculation and source of imagery. Whatever else Hughes’s tactlessness in ‘Myths, Metres, Rhythms’ suggests, it proposes that what is at stake is all-consuming for him. This is in large part because the alliterative tradition which is the bride in this stressful and distressing figuration is intimately connected with Hughes’s deep, and deeply politicised, feelings about English dialect. The ‘innate music of its “sprung rhythm”’, he says, ‘survived and multiplied, underground, like a nationalist army of guerillas, in the regional dialects of common speech’ (WP, p. 368). This is a view given strong autobiographical emphasis in a frequently cited passage of an interview in which Hughes talks about growing up with the ‘very distinctive dialect’ of West Yorkshire: Whatever other speech you grow into … your dialect stays alive in a sort of inner freedom … it’s your childhood self there inside the dialect and that is possibly your real self or the core of it … Without it, I doubt if I would ever have written verse.

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And in the case of the West Yorkshire dialect, of course, it connects you directly and in your most intimate self to Middle English poetry.12

It is unsurprising, then, that when Hughes turns his attention directly to Shakespeare’s language, dialect is prominently there at the beginning of his speculations. Hughes’s fullest discussion of Shakespearean language comes in the lengthy introduction to the second, revised edition of A Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse (1991); and he reproduces some of this in modified form, and adds a little to it, in the Goddess, where he also more intimately relates Shakespearean linguistic development to the development of what he calls the Tragic Equation, what he regards as his discovery of Shakespeare’s all-consuming single preoccupation. But it is in his brief introduction to the first, 1971 edition of A Choice that he states the case which he will then lengthily pursue: In spite of its Elizabethan ruff, Shakespeare’s language is somehow nearer to the vital life of English, still, than anything written down since. One reason for this is that it is a virtuoso development of the poetic instincts of English dialect. Even the famous pincer movement, where he embraces an idea with a latinate word on one wing and an Anglo-Saxon on the other, is an innate trick of fluent dialect. The air of wild, home-made poetry which he manages to diffuse through a phenomenally complicated and intellectualised language, and which makes the work of almost any other poet seem artificial, derives also from another dialect instinct, which is the instinct to misuse latinisms, but in an inspired way. This is really a primitive, unconscious but highly accurate punning.13

This valuing of dialect places Shakespeare firmly within the radius of the unorthodox tradition, and in a way that appears to give more prominence to the bride than to the groom in the marriage that is Shakespeare. ‘The poetic instincts of English dialect’ are those of the almost lost alliterative tradition; and Hughes’s combative sense of it reserves particular opprobrium for what he reads as the tidy editorialising of Shakespeare at the Restoration, an activity comparable to the operations which he believes were performed on Wyatt by Tottel, a belief also currently greatly disputed. Restoration orthodoxies, Hughes thinks, could not comprehend what he wonderfully calls, in the 1991 Choice, Shakespeare’s ‘prodigiously virtuoso pidgin’.14 12 13 14

Ekbert Faas, ‘Ted Hughes and Crow’, London Magazine, January 1971, pp. 5–20. A Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse, selected and with an introduction by Ted Hughes (London: Faber and Faber, 1971), p. 11. A Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse (1991 edn), p. 192.

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When he says in ‘Myths, Metres, Rhythms’ that ‘Shakespeare’s hybridization and cross-breeding, for all its superior vigour, multiple genetic resource and incidental, exotic, half-caste beauty, became [after the Restoration] a barbarous offence against gentility’, Hughes is clearly registering the degree of self-interest involved in his lifelong engagement with Shakespeare (WP, p. 184). For the word ‘gentility’ maps the literary and cultural battles of the mid-twentieth century onto those of the Restoration. It was used prominently by A. Alvarez in the title of the controversially influential introduction to his Penguin anthology The New Poetry in 1962, ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’. Famously, that essay advertises the stirrings of a ‘new seriousness’ in English poetry more responsive to ‘the forces of disintegration which destroy the old standards of civilization’ than the poetry of the Movement with its ‘negative feedback’ against modernism. It prominently associates Hughes with this seriousness and contrasts his poem ‘A Dream of Horses’ with Philip Larkin’s ‘At Grass’, applauding Hughes as more ‘urgent’ if less ‘skilful’. This is not a secure or convincing opposition of categories: but it makes Hughes’s poem Alvarez’s major example of a poetry which combats ‘the disease so often found in English culture: gentility’.15 And, as Paul Muldoon shrewdly – if rather obviously with one eye on another, Irish, encounter of his own – reminds us, Hughes would ‘have seen himself as being in serious contention’ with Larkin as early as 1957, the date of publication of his first book, The Hawk in the Rain.16 Hughes conceives of Shakespeare’s language, drawing on and developing its dialectal resources, as imperiously appropriative, experimental and improvisatory. In this he gives a new inflection to the not otherwise entirely original conception of Shakespeare’s ‘double language’; and he is resolutely materialist and historicist about the exigencies of its origins. The word ‘pidgin’ is, after all, itself a Chinese corruption of the word ‘business’, and pidgin was evolved as a mode of communication between Chinese and Europeans for mercantile purposes. Business is also the occasion of the ‘famous pincer movement’ for Hughes. He believes that Shakespeare developed this mode of bringing Latin and Anglo-Saxon into the same linguistic 15

16

‘The New Poetry or Beyond the Gentility Principle’, in The New Poetry, selected and introduced by A. Alvarez (revised and enlarged edn, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), pp. 21–32. Both Hughes and Alvarez may in fact have been influenced by Patrick Cruttwell’s use of the word in The Shakespearean Moment, particularly since Alvarez had published in 1961 a book entitled The School of Donne. Cruttwell (New York: Random House edn, 1960), p. 27, says that ‘in his raid on the world of politeness and “gentility”’ Shakespeare ‘took over with him … the complex ironies of the professional dramatist’. His book is also consistently derogatory about the English poetry being written in the 1950s. Paul Muldoon, The End of the Poem: Oxford Lectures on Poetry (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), p. 36.

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construction as a response to the requirements of two theatre audiences, on both of which he was dependent. On the one hand, he needed the aristocratic Court, ‘an élite as formidably educated and as exactingly cultured as Englishmen have ever been’; and on the other he was financially dependent on the ‘common populace’, many of whom would have been illiterate.17 In Hughes’s striking conception, then, the politically and financially dependent Shakespeare has to make it his business – literally – to address both audiences at once; and the double dependency provokes the invention of the linguistic form. In all of this Hughes displays a more than usually empathetic understanding of a Shakespeare responding with urgency to the peculiar, novel demands of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre – ‘that tropical forcing house of optimal conditions and maximum demand’ – which may owe something to his own experience of working with Peter Brook, that demanding director of Shakespeare.18 It also fits everything we know about Ted Hughes as, himself, no mean businessman and entrepreneur. Hughes calls the pincer movement ‘famous’, but I am not sure it is. He is referring to one form of what rhetoric calls ‘hendiadys’, and it is odd that Hughes does not actually use the word, since he shows himself adept in many technical vocabularies in the Goddess, and this is by no means the most recherché term in the rhetoric manuals. Literally meaning ‘one through two’, it is defined by Puttenham in The Arte of English Poesie (1589) as ‘Endiadys, or the Figure of Twynnes’, ‘when you will seem to make two of one not thereunto constrained’; and Chris Baldick defines it as a figure of speech in which a single idea is expressed ‘by means of two nouns joined by the conjunction “and”’, citing ‘The flash and outbreak of a fiery mind’ in Hamlet.19 Neil Rhodes sophisticates this when, in a discussion involving Hughes, he writes that ‘it involves the doubling of nouns in a phrase where one of them has an adjectival function’: his examples include, from Hamlet, ‘the expectancy and rose of the fair state’, for ‘rosy expectation’, and ‘the morn and liquid dew of youth’, for ‘liquid dewy morn’.20 And it is in relation to Hamlet that this rhetorical ‘ornament’ has been most thoroughly investigated, since it is the play of Shakespeare’s which employs

17 18 19 20

A Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse (1991 edn), p. 173. Ibid., p. 178. For Hughes’s account of working with Brook in 1971 see ‘Orghast: Talking without Words’ in Winter Pollen, pp. 122–7. Chris Baldick, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (Oxford University Press, 1990; 2nd edn, 2001), p. 111. Neil Rhodes, Shakespeare and the Origins of English (Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 64.

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it most: it has seemed a trope especially appropriate to a play so preoccupied with doublings and divisions of many kinds.21 Despite calling it ‘famous’, Hughes is exceptional as a critic of Shakespeare’s language in paying particular attention to it. In his definition the figure is a locution in which Shakespeare ‘balances two nouns or two adjectives on either side of an “and” and directs their combined and contrasted meanings to qualify a third word – always a noun’. Since, strictly speaking, adjectives would not make for hendiadys, Hughes’s ‘pincer movement’ in fact comprehends rather more than the classical figure.22 In practice, however, his examples are all of nouns, and they are also all of one particular kind. They are those in which the ‘doubling of nouns’ always includes one Latinate and one Anglo-Saxon example. Moving away from the figure of the pincer, and attempting something closer to a technical term, Hughes calls this Shakespeare’s ‘device’. The word has relevant connotations of stratagem or expediency as well as of mechanical or artistic contrivance, although at one point in the Goddess Hughes also plays an elaborate scherzo on the device as a coat of arms, and the word does have etymological connections with heraldry. Hughes’s exploration is initiated by his citation of Eliot’s observation that linguistically Shakespeare is always doing the work of at least two poets, first simplifying then elaborating a language; although Hughes finds the issue more complicated than Eliot implies. In fact, as I have already said in my chapter on Eliot’s criticism, Hughes misunderstands Eliot’s ‘The Music of Poetry’ here, believing him to have read Shakespeare’s linguistic doubleness not as chronologically distinct phases of development but as a simultaneous process of activity. It is a highly creative misreading. The high trust Hughes places in Eliot as a critic of Shakespearean language is underwritten by his appreciative centenary tribute, ‘The Poetic Self’, written in 1988 and first published in 1992, which celebrates Eliot in a way surprising to readers who ally Hughes more with the Protestant-individualist line of English poetry associated primarily with D. H. Lawrence, to whom Eliot is often considered antithetical.23 Indeed, Hughes’s long essay, in a way perhaps equally surprising even to passionate admirers of Eliot, culminates in an association of its discovery of a single myth in Eliot with Shakespeare himself. 21 22 23

See especially George T. Wright’s classic essay ‘Hendiadys and Hamlet’, PMLA 96 (1981), pp. 168–93, and Frank Kermode in Shakespeare’s Language (London: Allen Lane: The Penguin Press, 2000). A Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse (1991 edn), p. 180. See, however, Sandra M. Gilbert’s penetrating collocation of the two in ‘D. H. Lawrence’s place in modern poetry’, in Neil Corcoran (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century English Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 74–86.

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Shakespeare is ‘the only one other poet in the canon of English poetry comparable to him in this respect’, and ‘the same “god” [provides] the hidden psychic drama’ in each.24 For Hughes, therefore, Eliot is Shakespearean through and through, and he is there at the very origin of Hughes’s thinking about Shakespearean language. Hughes writes extensively about the device, sometimes with a kind of entranced attentiveness to close verbal detail, and his readings are occasionally brilliantly intricate in a virtually Empsonian manner, which makes it odd that he nowhere refers to Empson. Suggesting that the device advances self-complicatingly along with the development of the Tragic Equation itself, Hughes proposes that it makes its major move forward with All’s Well That Ends Well in c. 1602–3. There it is galvanised into an explosive hyperactivity which ‘transforms [Shakespeare’s] vocabulary, yoking disparate worlds of reference and opposed metaphysical realms violently together, within the new “language of the common bond”’.25 The metaphor draws on Johnson’s critique of metaphysical poetry, which castigates ideas ‘yoked by violence together’; and this is a little act of revenge, Hughes admiring what Johnson would censure, since his Shakespeare is so resolutely anti-Johnsonian. The ‘language of the common bond’, yoking together by violence what Hughes thinks Johnsonian neoclassicism would separate, simplify and classify, is a Shakespearean invention virtually designed to thwart decorum. The irony is that, in Hughes’s prejudice against Johnson, he misunderstands his criteria for judgement, which are actually derived from Shakespeare; although this is not the place to pursue that argument. The crucial moment in Hughes’s discussion of the whole issue is his lengthy consideration of ten lines of the King’s astonishing elegiac speech on Bertram’s father, who had been his close friend, in act 1 scene 2 of All’s Well, which is one of those sudden, unpredictable Shakespearean explosions of linguistic and emotional excess. It is a passage which also fascinated John Berryman, who calls it ‘this protracted marvel of ungovernable re-creation and mourning, richer I think than Dante’s of Brunetto’; which is rich indeed, and Berryman is not hyperbolic here.26 The device in the passage is ‘On the catastrophe and heel of pastime’; and Hughes’s long, densely 24 25 26

The essay was first published in A Dancer to God: Tributes to T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1992) and is reprinted in Winter Pollen, pp. 268–92. Quotations here are from the latter, p. 292. A Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse (1991 edn), p. 185. Hughes wrongly ascribes the lines to the following scene: his references to the Shakespearean text are not always wholly accurate. For Berryman, see ‘Shakespeare’s Reality’, in Berryman’s Shakespeare: Essays, Letters and Other Writings by John Berryman, ed. John Haffenden (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), pp. 343–51.

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ramifying reading discovers in its pincering of the Latin ‘catastrophe’ and the Anglo-Saxon ‘heel’ ‘a fractal of the whole play’.27 His pages on these lines, as he unravels and exemplifies the ‘magnesium, pulsing glow of a constant metaphorical enthralment, a continuous play of riddle, a constant simultaneity of at least two worlds’ in Shakespeare, are among the most distinguished in his critical output, breathtakingly alive in their ingenious transitions and devoted attentiveness to the ways in which Shakespeare’s language achieves the most intense kinds of self-referentiality; achieves, in fact, almost a form of self-consciousness, since Hughes says that in the lines, ‘The play itself is thinking … defining itself, turning itself this way and that, searching among all possible images for new images of itself, and trying them on.’28 Hughes wins a recognition of the radical nature of Shakespeare’s experimentalism, of his permanent campaign of linguistic eventfulness, at once exhilarating and unnerving, from a close reading which gives the impression of an almost scientifically co-creative endeavour. In the 1991 essay Hughes instances, with regard to this capacity in Shakespeare, the Renaissance Neoplatonist Giordano Bruno’s mnemonic system, and in the Goddess this brief reference is pursued much further, until Hughes discovers in the All’s Well lines a Shakespeare for the first time making accessible to himself ‘his whole inner world of feeling … in the form of the Mythic Equation, which … was simultaneously the double myth of the Reformation and of his own deepest subjectivity’ (G, p. 154). Hence it is in this play that the ‘language of the common bond’, that ‘makeshift’, becomes ‘the sacred language of his hierophany’ (G, p. 155). Invented for business purposes, the device becomes religious ceremony and mystery; and Hughes’s massively synoptic and eclectic reading ultimately uncovers it, in the Goddess, as both a development of Brunonian Neoplatonic hermeticism and a reflection of the discoveries of contemporary brain theory. Such heady doublings are, we shall discover, the very substance of the Goddess. For Hughes, therefore, the doubling that is the Shakespearean device of hendiadys is the linguistic register – the most visible sign in print and the most audible sign in the theatre – of the double myth that sustains the entire oeuvre; and his reading of these lines from All’s Well is at the very heart of his vision of Shakespeare, and crucial to it. What he says about Shakespeare’s language is vivid, alert, engaging and acute of itself as close literary criticism, and a reader unimpressed or dismayed by the language of sacred hierophany can still gain a great deal from it: but for Hughes the language and the myth cannot be separated out. They coincide and are identical in a species of 27

A Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse (1991 edn), p. 192.

28

Ibid., p. 191.

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mutually productive intimacy; they are, as it were, watermarked into each other. So much is this the case that, in a piece of virtually Joycean verbal fantastication, Hughes reads Shakespeare’s very name as a figure of hendiadys: ‘Shakespeare’ is ‘the Shake and spear of will’ (and in the Goddess Hughes admires Stephen Dedalus’s theories of Shakespeare in the Circe episode of Ulysses). Double in the very inscription of his signature, Shakespeare possesses antithetical selves and is himself a dramatic conflict. In the absence of its mythical dimension, Hughes thinks, Shakespeare’s language would have become a version of Neruda’s or St John Perse’s; by which he means, presumably, a free-floating rhapsody, captivating or compelling, but unanchored in anything other than the poet’s subjectivity. Or, alternatively, Shakespearean language might have been like the Joyceanism of Finnegans Wake, which Hughes characterises as the ‘white-out’ of radio interference. Hughes is not negative, exactly, about Perse, Neruda or late Joyce, but his aim in these discriminations is, as everywhere, to account for Shakespeare’s exceptionalism. Setting him among these avatars of international modernism, he offers us Shakespeare as a more resourceful modernist, one whose literary experimentalism enables the writing of the most profound spiritual conflict of his own time in the same linguistic moment in which he writes his own spiritual (and sexual) history. The device is also a mode of translation. The pincer movement clutches both the Latin and the Anglo-Saxon so that Shakespeare’s double language speaks both ‘the full foreign text and the full translation – simultaneously’.29 This sense of the device as an en face doubling has behind it Hughes’s varied interests as translator and encourager of translations of modern Eastern European poetry from the 1960s on; and his view of the urgency with which Shakespeare manages his simultaneous translations is consistent with the urgencies of his own writing about the necessity for English translations of work by poets such as the Serbian Vasko Popa and the Hungarian Janos Pilinszky, and his support for the journal Modern European Poetry in Translation.30 This activity is also one way of combating what the 1971 essay damns, with cumulative adjectival venom, as the direct inheritance of Restoration artifice: ‘the shrunken, atrophied, suppressive-of-everythingunder, bluffing, debonair, frivolous system of vocal team-calls which we inherit as Queen’s English’.31 Or, what he calls even more brutally, and 29 30 31

A Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse (1991 edn), p. 183. Hughes’s introductions to the poetry of both Popa and Pilinszky, originally published in 1969 and 1976, are reprinted in Winter Pollen. A Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse (1971 edn), p. 198.

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hilariously, in an essay on Keith Douglas, ‘the terrible, suffocating, maternal octopus of English poetic tradition’ (WP, p. 213) – where ‘maternal’ signals the Goddess in her malign form too, a paralysing imp of language. Shakespeare as a constant translator, inventively joining new Latinisms and old Englishes, is therefore implicitly the model for an informed and politically alert modernism too: international, open-minded, welcoming, unprejudiced. This is in marked contrast with what I have defined as an element of xenophobia in Hughes’s opposing of a native to an iambic English tradition. For Hughes, it appears, the energies of the ‘native’ mode are much closer to those of the often subversive work of European poets living under oppressive political regimes. The full measure of his oppositional linguistic theories may be taken if we think of him as, at some basic level, finding the native English model ‘foreign’ to the received one. The device is also a form of democratising accommodation. In his acts of ‘translation’ Shakespeare is healing, linguistically, the wounds of English social and political history by forging a ‘language of the common bond’ which will unite, even if only in the invented or imagined space of the theatrical event, Court and commoner. The phrase ‘the common bond’ accretes a powerfully covenantal, quasi-legalistic or even quasi-religious significance as Hughes repeats it throughout his writings on Shakespeare. In this figuration he is in fact dissolving the aggressiveness towards orthodox English which he discovers in Shakespeare’s dialectal resourcefulness into something more open-heartedly generous and inviting; and this may be one reason why he maintains, in the 1971 essay, that ‘Shakespeare’s language is not obsolete so much as futuristic: it enjoys a condition of total and yet immediate expressiveness that we hope sooner or later to get back to, or forward to.’32 This compellingly suggests what may be derived from Shakespeare and how the past may be collapsed into the contemporary as a means of creating that future which is the next, the new poem. Getting back to the future is the actual intertextual time travel of literary history. But it is also a way for the modern poet Ted Hughes to be unafraid of Shakespeare by looking forward to encountering him in the future – the future of the poem, that is, which you make for yourself – rather than being dumbfounded by his formidable presence in the past, which must include his presence in the work of other poets who succeeded him in that past, those poets who are what you have inherited, who are what you know. However, Hughes’s reconciliatory view of the device is problematic, since it is not self-evident that hendiadys must be read as harmonising or 32

A Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse (1971 edn), p. 12.

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unificatory. George T. Wright sees it, on the contrary, as a figure of uncertainty, mockery and disjunction: ‘nothing is compact, normal unions are disassembled’.33 Hughes’s refusal to countenance the undermining or deconstructive instability which others have found in the figure is symptomatic of a strain in his own doubling of Shakespeare. For reading Shakespeare as reconciliatory in this way conflicts, in fact, with reading his dialectal energies as subversive, energies which Hughes earlier envisages, as we have seen, in terms of ‘a nationalist army of guerillas’. The doubling of ‘guerilla’ and political healer is a doubling too far in Hughes’s conception of Shakespeare, one that remains obdurately plural. There simply is no ‘one through two’ possible between these terms. Nor does Hughes’s view of Shakespeare’s drama as the expression of the explosive energies of his own, and his time’s, antitheses and antagonisms very easily consort with his belief, towards the end of the 1991 essay, that Shakespeare gives expression, in an ego-dissolving oeuvre which constitutes ‘a single work’, to ‘a nation of selves’, arresting as that formulation is in its crossing of the political and the subjective. For the conception of a nation proposes commonalty and community, whereas Hughes’s Shakespeare, from the smallest detail to the largest motions of mind and art, is a seething cauldron of individualistic tension, struggle and demand. In Hughes’s double Shakespeare we have a correlative in the poet Ted Hughes. He is the poet of instinctive energies and untamed territories, inheritor of the unorthodoxies of dialectal and alliterative resource, perpetrator of the ‘barbarian’ rather than the sophisticated Ovid; and he is Poet Laureate, and so inevitably poet ‘of the Court’, officer of the Royal Household responsible to the idea of ‘a nation’, producer of odes on royal occasions, and servant of the person who, more than all others, might be expected to speak ‘Queen’s English’. Inscribed in Hughes’s very conception of Shakespeare is an element of self-contradiction which is the inevitable product of attachments to varieties of Englishness which cannot be comprehended by an ideal of national unity. Ted Hughes’s Shakespeare is fractured at his very core. silence Hughes’s writing about Shakespeare’s language itself constantly gives the impression of a certain uncontainability, an energetic surplus. Intensely voluble, Hughes is also sometimes strikingly eloquent. Yet at the very heart and end of this effort there is not writing or speech at all, but silence, and 33

‘Hendiadys and Hamlet’, p. 175.

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not eloquence, but ethics. And specifically there are the Sonnets and the silence of Cordelia. Discussing his work with Peter Brook, in 1971, on the play Orghast, which uses a partly invented form of language, and strikingly telling us that he once abandoned work on a long poem about Gallipoli, Hughes says: ‘A strange quality of truth is that it is reluctant to use words. Like Cordelia, in King Lear. Perhaps the more sure of itself a truth is, the more doubtful it is of the adequacy of words’ (WP, p. 122). In the 1991 essay and in the Goddess, he returns to Cordelia and decides that drama ‘gave [Shakespeare] the language of this silence’ and says that he once considered calling the Goddess ‘The Silence of Cordelia’. Arguably, Hughes underestimates Cordelia here since she is not literally silent. She does not say nothing, she says ‘Nothing’, twice, and explains exactly what she means (that she loves her father according to her bond, no more nor less); and, despite its provokingly peculiar quantification, this is very eloquent indeed in the context in which she says it. Nevertheless, Hughes imagines Shakespeare listening to Lancelot Andrewes’s the ‘word within a word unable to hear a word’ – the Andrewes to whom Eliot was also ascetically but fruitfully attentive – and relates Shakespeare’s linguistic sensitivity in this regard to Wittgenstein (who was, appropriately enough, although Hughes does not say so, one of the Shakespearean doubters or heretics, like Tolstoy). Hughes decides that Shakespeare’s consciousness of the ‘dissembling function of language’ is ‘proportionate to the awe that he felt for the ineffability of the truth’ (G, p. 277). Ineffability is another form of unsayability: and the problem for Shakespeare in the Sonnets, Hughes thinks, in which respect they are quite unlike the plays, is that he has only words to prove the truth of what he says, to prove his love; and it is worth saying how entirely unfazed Hughes is by what he just assumes to be Shakespeare’s homosexuality, even taking Auden to task for his embarrassment at the ‘abject self-prostration’ of the Sonnets (G, p. 59). When Hughes finds in them Shakespeare’s ‘naked self-surrender’ – ‘both a perfect fearlessness and an unflinching, total vulnerability’ – he reaches one of his most impressive, searing generalisations about poetic language: ‘Poetry has a warrant for the office of truth-teller only in so far as its music becomes a form of action.’34 That is to say, since action cannot prove anything in a lyric poem, as it can in a play, the poem must persuade by the authority of cadence and tone; but even so, Shakespeare’s suspicion of his own virtuosity means that he includes forms of ‘dumbness’ as well as volubility in the Sonnets. This 34

A Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse (1991 edn), p. 200.

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happens, Hughes thinks, when we find him reaching for ‘the other language of drama’, for instance, and when he tells us (‘half-joke, whole serious’) what he cannot say (‘My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun’).35 After the immense finessing of language which Hughes so extensively defines in Shakespeare, he fetches up ultimately with awe at his simplicity, the virtue defined by Eliot at the origin of Hughes’s project: or, more specifically, he fetches up with awe at the ‘simple truth miscalled simplicity’ of the Sonnets. When Hughes quotes this phrase he does not say that it occurs in sonnet 66. This is the ‘suicidal’ sonnet – ‘Tir’d with all these, for restful death I cry’ – which has been read as congruent with the ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy in Hamlet and therefore testimony to the way that play embodies the actual emotions of its author. But Hughes is nevertheless clearly discovering a biographical Shakespeare here too; and, calling his suspicion of language ‘the insoluble, Wittgenstein-like dilemma’, he is also discovering modernity in him.36 After expending so much energy and ingenuity making Shakespeare the eloquent avatar of Elizabethan and Jacobean political and sexual conflict, Hughes – by dissolving him finally into a modern Wittgensteinian refusal to speak, by making him newly naked in the reduced means of the contemporary moment – is also making him manageable to the modern poet. Freighted with so much formative English history and psychology, Shakespeare is also finally weightless and unaccommodated. This may be read as a version of the rhetorical strategy by which discourse is disclaimed by discourse, but Hughes inflects it in an urgently modern manner. We may regard it as his version of what we have already seen as Yeats’s and Auden’s self-identification with Shakespeare in his vulnerability rather than his mastery. It is in the abjection of a very modern tone of voice, the tone of Eastern European witness poetry, a tone that would accommodate Samuel Beckett too, that Hughes presumes to make a final statement about Shakespeare, language and truth: ‘His truth to his own nature is like a helplessness to be otherwise.’37 Shakespeare, hero of linguistic resourcefulness, is observed here in a form of destitution. Inventing a Cordelia, he is inventing a self with nothing to say, a self which knows that saying anything at all would be saying too much and speaking an untruth. Pledging allegiance to the authority of this silence after so much linguistic energy and fury of his own, after such plenitude of saying, Hughes too – movingly, to my mind – allies himself, and the effort of his work, with an unsayability quite at variance with the kind of which he believed himself to stand accused by Roy Fuller. 35 37

Ibid., p. 201. 36 Ibid. A Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse (1991 edn), p. 202.

chapter 8

The Shakespearean moment

myths of the goddess When it was published in 1992 Ted Hughes’s Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, the first major study by an English poet laureate of the English national bard, was greeted by many of its academic reviewers with something approaching derision, and it has hardly been better welcomed by most students and critics of Shakespeare since. Entering a world in which the most prominent modes of Shakespeare criticism were new-historicist and cultural-materialist, Hughes’s vast account of Shakespeare’s plays as the syncretic construction of a single unifying myth from a bewildering variety of arcane sources could hardly have seemed anything other than bizarre anachronism. It was read as comparable to the arcana of Yeats’s A Vision, and as the very belated survivor of cultural-anthropological approaches to literature of the kind that had reached their apogee in Robert Graves’s The White Goddess, subtitled ‘a historical grammar of poetic myth’, in 1948 (‘Shakespeare knew and feared her,’ Graves says of his goddess).1 Hughes refers to The White Goddess only once but he develops some of Graves’s methods and shares some of his controversial purposes: notably, pondering the difficulties involved in the treatment of the feminine in poetry by heterosexual male poets, his attempt to defend and rehabilitate non-Protestant traditions of that feminine against forms of Puritanism in the English tradition most forcefully represented by the names of Calvin and Cromwell, the anti-heroes of Graves’s cultural-anthropological tale. Calvin does not figure in the Goddess, although he does elsewhere in the repository of Hughes’s totemic litanies (when the invading Vikings fetch up in ‘the iron arteries of Calvin’, for instance, in ‘The Warriors of the North’

1

Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (1948; amended and enlarged edn, London: Faber and Faber, 1952), p. 426.

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in Wodwo (1967)); but Cromwell does, as a major presence. And in fact, although Hughes draws on the outmoded and suspect Gravesian model, and although his language differs radically from most credible and creditable forms of contemporary literary and cultural criticism, what he derives from the figure of Cromwell is one of many instances in his book of a fundamental crossing between his preoccupations and those of some better regarded forms of contemporary academic critique: preoccupations with gender and the representation of nature in gender terms; with political and religious history as inevitably imbricated in a history of sexuality (and with history as both mythologised and metaphorised in terms of sexuality); and with the putative Catholicism of Shakespeare. An early rehearsal of some of these themes figures in the relished anatomising disgust of the poem ‘Dolly Gumption’s Addendum’ in Recklings (1966), where the development of English history is mythologised as the progress of a ‘maggot’ derived from ‘the head of the dead god king / Cromwell cut from the country body but could not bury or silence’. Since, apart from its first reviews, the book has had little sustained attention, I want to begin by outlining, as simply as I can, what its thesis is. I shall then offer a view of where I think its significance lies. Ted Hughes’s theory of Shakespeare is explicitly developed from his work for A Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse in 1971 which was, as we have seen, reprinted, with a new introduction and a much longer, quite different concluding ‘Note’, twenty years later. Aiming at identifying the most intense passages in the mature plays capable of standing alone, Hughes discovers that ‘whenever Shakespeare wrote at top intensity, at unusual length, in a burst of unusually self-contained completeness, he was almost invariably hammering at the same thing – a particular knot of obsessions’, and that these passages, cast clear of their contexts, demonstrate that ‘the poetry has its taproot in a sexual dilemma of a peculiarly black and ugly sort’.3 The passages Hughes chooses do not seem forced to fit this thesis, and it appears therefore to have real textual basis, even if another anthologist might well have told quite a different tale. Attempting to account for the phenomenon, Hughes develops the concept of Shakespeare’s plays as a single, integrated work secreting a set of complexly orchestrated variations on a single basic formula. Fully intending the slightly derogatory connotation of the word ‘formula’ – which he may 2 3

All references to Hughes’s poems are to the texts as printed in Ted Hughes, Collected Poems, ed. Paul Keegan (London: Faber and Faber, 2003). A Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse (1971 edn), p. 181.

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derive from Eliot’s Hamlet essay where the ‘objective correlative’ is ‘the formula for that particular emotion’ – he thinks that it is necessitated by a prolific dramatist’s practical need to reproduce, over and over again, a dramatic action which will always hold an audience’s interest; and Hughes has a strong sense of Shakespeare as actor, manager, owner and entrepreneur as well as writer. This necessity is the origin of what he variously calls in the Goddess, and always capitalised, Shakespeare’s Equation, his Tragic Equation, and his Mythic Equation: but, originating as pragmatism, it becomes the rationale for Shakespeare’s exceptionalism, both in his time and in the history of literature. It is this dual sense of Shakespeare’s formula, earthed in immediate necessity while also supplying the means of transcendence, that accounts for the rapt intensity of Hughes’s enthusiasm and his manifest self-involvement in the Goddess. He has discovered – at least, to his own satisfaction – in the usual exigencies of the workaday artist, the elusive rationale for the genius of Shakespeare. Hughes believes that ‘some obsessive private experience’ lies at the root of Shakespeare’s evolution and formulation of the Equation. This experience is essentially irrecoverable, although Hughes does rather half-heartedly adduce putative biographical material about Shakespeare’s marriage: but the abjection of the love described in the Sonnets, its ‘strange humility’, is intimately related to it. Indeed, this abjection is the ‘matrix’ of the ‘total, unconditional love’ – a phrase much repeated in the Goddess – to be discovered in what he takes to be the foundational text of the Equation, Venus and Adonis. As I have already said, Hughes takes it for granted that the love of the Sonnets is homosexual. Now he reads Shakespeare as Venus to Southampton’s Adonis. There is irony in the fact that Hughes chastises Auden for his view of the Sonnets. The poet often taken as the paradigm of a certain kind of male heterosexuality rebukes a great homosexual poet for his inability adequately to acknowledge and respect the poetic expression of a certain form of homosexual love. But this acknowledgement is vital for Hughes because it is the prerequisite of the Tragic Equation which ‘can be seen emerging, aching with sap, from the darkness beneath the Sonnets’ (G, p. 181); where ‘aching with sap’ tremblingly suggests both the sexual perturbation from which the Equation arises and the fluidity of its circulation. Locating its emergence in Venus and Adonis, Hughes is much struck, as other readers of the poem have been too, by the fact that Shakespeare varies the myth as he finds it in his source, Ovid’s Metamorphoses: so that, uniquely among retellings of the tale, Shakespeare’s Adonis rejects Venus. Shakespeare is here combining Ovid’s narrative with his tale of Salmacis

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and Hermaphroditus (although Hughes believes that Euripides’s Hippolytus, which traces the appalling consequences of Hippolytus’s rejection of Phaedra’s love, was also influential). Hughes himself translates both Ovidian narratives in the versions of Ovid which he began to undertake as he was completing the Goddess; and we may assume that this is both homage to Shakespeare and a further underwriting of his own Shakespeare. The rejection is crucial for Hughes: his entire theory of Shakespeare’s myth develops from it. For, originating as a characteristic of Shakespeare’s sexual sensibility, this is also, at the moment of the English Reformation, the Puritan, desacralising male rejecting the Catholic goddess of love; and that rejection produces the explosive force of the Boar, which is the enraged animal figuration of the Queen of the Underworld, a kind of rampagingly destructive Persephone figure, the image of the female as ‘other’, who gores Adonis in the thigh and kills him. The Shakespearean tragic hero is born out of the realisation that the same woman is inhabited by both the cherished Queen of Heaven and the lustful Queen of Hell, now become the Boar. The force with which the Boar emerges from the Goddess is the explosion in which Adonis, and then all Shakespeare’s tragic heroes, are destroyed. Subsequently, Adonis is transformed into a flower mournfully transported into the skies in Venus’s bosom; and a concomitant of Hughes’s reading is the discovery of a series of emblematic significances in Shakespeare’s flora. The first part of the Equation, then, is set up in Shakespeare’s first narrative poem, and the next is produced in the second, The Rape of Lucrece, which forms a ‘contrapuntal symmetry’ with it (G, p. 82). Here, in a partly Roman setting – which must have meant Catholicism to Shakespeare, Hughes believes, before it meant imperialism – the Puritan Adonis, now acting out of self-destructive insanity, and possessed by the Boar of lust, turns into the rampaging rapist Tarquin whose violation of the female, in the form of Lucrece, is also that of his own soul. And this is the foundational myth of that Puritanism which destroyed images of the Virgin Mary and rid England of Church festivals and feast days. So: the symmetry of the two poems proposes that the formula secreted in Shakespeare is a myth at once defensive of Catholicism and exacerbatedly intimate with the strained subjectivities of Puritanism. In Venus and Adonis Catholicism is perceived from the Puritan point of view; in The Rape of Lucrece Puritanism is perceived from the Catholic. In his Equation, therefore, Shakespeare becomes ‘a shaman, a prophet, of the ascendant, revolutionary, Puritan will … just as surely as he was a visionary, redemptive shaman of the Catholic defeat’ (G, p. 91). Hughes’s sense of Shakespeare’s inwardness with Catholicism is continuous with a controversial strain in contemporary Shakespeare criticism and

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biography. His most assertive statement of the association comes in the context of a very Gravesian rumination: The inner identification of Shakespeare’s Goddess with the archaic Goddess of the Catholic world … suggests that … he was indeed not merely crypto-Catholic but committed to Catholicism with an instinct that amounted to fanatic heroism … This explains in just what way the sequence of tragic plays, and even his whole oeuvre, can be seen as Shakespeare’s record of the sufferings of the Goddess … and his heroic, lifelong, patient attempt to rescue the Female – in some way or other to salvage the Goddess. (G, p. 90)

Even this does not, of itself, constitute a declaration that Shakespeare was a Catholic – his ‘commitment’ may be to the restoration of the religion under the propitious circumstances rather than to its actual practice – but Hughes is influenced, as other critical accounts have been too, by the Jesuit Peter Milward’s Shakespeare’s Religious Background (1973). The Goddess makes very few acknowledgements but it does acknowledge Milward, who musters as strong a case as he can for Shakespeare’s Catholicism; says that ‘one may interpret the plays as Shakespeare’s personal response to the major problem of his age, which was fundamentally a religious problem’ and that his ‘secular form is itself allegorical, or rather, analogical, of the religious situation of his time’; and also supplies the basis for Hughes’s analogical interpretation of The Rape of Lucrece.4 It is notable that, against the norm, the Goddess was favourably reviewed by the Northern Irish critics Seamus Deane and Tom Paulin: their intimacy with the place in which the Elizabethan sectarian conflict has persisted possibly gave them access to an orientation in Hughes’s perception of Shakespeare opaque to others.5 Similarly, among recent critics and biographers inclined to credit Shakespeare’s Catholicism, Hughes’s project has been more admiringly engaged. Richard Wilson’s Secret Shakespeare (2004) also discovers a politics within the erotics of Venus and Adonis and posits – with what is, to me, extraordinarily far-fetched ingenuity – a recusant Shakespeare whose work is an elaborate drama of self-concealment. Wilson actually thinks Hughes does not go far enough: he ‘overlooked the historic irony that a Protestant Queen had usurped the role of the Virgin Mary, even as her Catholic sons adopted the Counter-Reformation’s puritanical clothes’.6 Stephen Greenblatt, in Will in the World (2004), reading 4 5 6

Peter Milward, Shakespeare’s Religious Background (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1973), pp. 274, 56. See Seamus Deane, ‘The Laureate and the Bard’, Irish Times, 23 May 1992, and Tom Paulin, ‘Protestant Guilt’, London Review of Books, 9 April 1992. Richard Wilson, Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theatre, Religion and Resistance (Manchester University Press, 2004), p. 130.

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the strain between Catholicism and Protestantism in Shakespeare as a form of ‘double consciousness’, admires Hughes’s ‘brilliant pages’ on the poem.7 Hughes’s sense of Shakespeare’s equal and opposite inwardness with Puritanism – and this is, after all, the motivating impulse of the Equation – militates, however, against his co-option into the ranks of those whose view of a Catholic Shakespeare seems to some a very special kind of pleading indeed.8 But if the phrase ‘equal and opposite’ itself suggests the balancing of contraries which is the hallmark of orthodox accounts of the liberal Shakespeare, then the energy, passion and attack of Hughes’s writing throughout the Goddess reveal his own inwardness with a Shakespeare not only exacerbated but virtually eviscerated by the opposed religious recognitions he makes; and ‘eviscerated’ may be the mot juste, since Shakespeare wrote when religious positions placed their adherents at risk of literal evisceration, in that process of hanging, drawing and quartering which could be the consequence of treason. The term ‘Equation’ in the Goddess is much less the neat geometry or algebra it initially seems and is in all sorts of ways a raggedly approximate, even inchoate trope for a literature of extremity. Shakespeare is in the end that figure conjured on the final page of Hughes’s book, the ‘misfit’ whose work, ‘in its elemental otherness and ferocity, suggests an almost pathological alienation from the culture within which his plays triumphed’ (G, p. 504). In this, Hughes’s Shakespeare may derive from certain figurations in Eliot which, in their turn, as we have seen, derive from Wyndham Lewis. Shakespeare’s exceptionalism, then, is the fact that his work secretes a myth which marries his own sexual nature, in the most intimate way, to the historical crisis of his time, that crisis which, in Ted Hughes’s view, is still ongoing in English (and Irish) social, cultural and political history. The outburst of uncontrollable rage against the female which first occurs when Adonis becomes Tarquin is characterised, in the Goddess, as ‘the Shakespearean moment’: as, that is, the point in his text when, again and again, Shakespeare is most completely Shakespeare. Which accounts for the fact that so many of the finest passages in the plays are performances of misogyny. That explosive moment is exactly congruent with the political 7 8

Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (London: Jonathan Cape, 2004), p. 404. For an aggressively sceptical counterblast to Wilson’s thesis see Michael Davies, ‘On This Side Idolatry: The Canonisation of the Catholic Shakespeare’, Cahiers Elisabethains, 58 (2000), pp. 31– 47. To my mind, the most persuasive account of the issue is Patrick Collinson’s ‘William Shakespeare’s Religious Inheritance and Environment’ (1985), reprinted in his Elizabethan Essays (London and Rio Grande: Hambledon Press, 1994), pp. 219–52.

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moment when the opposed forces of the English Reformation were held in a state of suppressed but pulsating arrest by the ‘police state’ of Elizabeth I prior to their eruption in the Civil War and the person of Oliver Cromwell. Beyond this too – although, having made it once, this is a point Hughes does not elaborate – the ‘Shakespearean moment’ may even be read as embodying ‘the inevitable crime of Civilization, or even the inevitable crime of consciousness’ (G, p. 47), the crime of which the Goddess is the investigation.9 Stepping to one side of Hughes’s specialised usage, however, we may regard it as the Shakespearean moment in that more restricted contemporary sense too, the ‘moment’ as epochal, historically definitive, coincident with crisis – as we say, for instance, ‘the moment of Cubism’. For Ted Hughes, it appears, the Shakespearean moment is once and always; and it is also, most certainly, now and England. Understanding that the plays express for Hughes the enduring crisis of English history and the English nation is to be enabled to take the actual force of what might otherwise seem rhetorically hyperbolic: that Shakespeare’s complete works are ‘modern England’s creation story, our sacred book, closer to us than the Bible’ (G, p. 85). In my previous chapter I suggested that Hughes’s use of the phrase ‘the Shakespearean moment’ may be indebted to Patrick Cruttwell’s book of that title first published in 1954. Although Hughes inflects the phrase very differently here, Cruttwell’s thesis has, at the very least, affinities with Hughes’s, even if he is concerned, throughout, as Hughes is not of course, to compare Shakespeare and Donne. Cruttwell’s ‘Shakespearean moment’ is the 1590s and the immediately succeeding decades; his sense of the relationship between the poetry and the historical moment is grounded in an initial reading of the Sonnets (their crisis is Shakespeare’s ‘own microcosmic reproduction of the change and crisis of the time’). The book includes a chapter on ‘Puritanism and the Dramatic Attitude’ in which ‘Anglo-catholicism’ is said to have ‘agreed with’ the ‘mature Shakespearean manner’, whereas Puritanism ‘did not and could not’. Cruttwell asks, apropos Joseph Hall’s contrast between ‘smoothness’ and ‘strong lines’, whether there might always have been at least two Great Traditions in English writing. He defines the feminine figures of the once-Catholic 9

In an essay on William Golding’s The Inheritors Hughes does investigate the crime of consciousness in relation to that novel’s discovery of a potent myth for the estrangement between instinct and intelligence. He says that ‘The Tempest makes the best of it, in terms of the redeeming triumph of civilised human values. A Voyage to the Houyhnhnms reveals the worst of it, in terms of the breakdown of the same.’ See ‘Baboons and Neanderthals: A Rereading of The Inheritors’, in John Carey (ed.), William Golding: The Man and his Books: A Tribute on his 75th Birthday (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), p. 163. Discussing the theories of Eugène Marais on man as a premature ape, Hughes calls this figure ‘a jittery Ariel among the Calibans’ (p. 166).

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Donne’s love poems as ‘a means of retaining, by ways allowable in Protestant England, the emotions which he would otherwise have expressed through worship of the Virgin and feminine saints such as the Magdalen or St. Teresa’. Commenting on lines of Donne’s ‘The Second Anniversarie’, he says that they ‘touch one of the nerve-centres of the seventeenth century’: ‘Without this intense feeling for a nexus, an absolute identity, between the spiritual, the political, and the personal – it could be, as here, the quasiamorous personal – the poetry of the Shakespearean moment would not be what it is.’ And he notes that ‘it is not accidental that the age of the Shakespearean moment was one of comparative settlement between two great upheavals: the Reformation and its consequences before it, the Civil War after it’.10 It is hard to believe that such correspondences between Cruttwell’s book and the Goddess could be mere chance or coincidence, for all that Hughes plays variations on a basic pattern; and any student of Hughes will find Cruttwell of serious interest. phases of the equation Hughes’s elaboration of the stages of the Equation through the phases of Shakespeare’s work from Venus and Adonis to The Tempest – its ‘immature phase’, its ‘evolution’ and its ‘transformation’ – is ingenious and excited; and the elaboration, play by play, is the reason that the Goddess is as long as it is. The book is essentially a series of densely interwoven close readings, knitting detail to detail and analogue to analogue in a form of minute and exact – and exacting – attentiveness, and Hughes occasionally displays anxiety about the demands he makes of his reader. The book is also elaborate in its collocation of world mythologies (Welsh, Irish, Egyptian, Greek and Buddhist), and of Sufism, shamanism, Gnosticism and occult Neoplatonism. At different points Shakespeare is conceived of as a shamanic religious healer and a practitioner of the Cabbala; and part of Hughes’s self-conception seems that of a shamanic mythographer who has received the call in relation to Shakespeare. This esoteric syncretism was the main reason for the book’s negative reception, and there are places where it is overpowering. The pages at the end of the section on King Lear, in particular, are liable to leave the reader punch-drunk, as a riot of speculation on Shakespeare’s knowledge of Welsh, Irish and Egyptian myth, to prove his ‘occult eavesdropping’ in a way that allows Hughes to 10

Patrick Cruttwell, The Shakespearean Moment (1954; New York: Random House edn, 1960), pp. 38, 143, xiii, 64, 80, 107–8, 113.

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read the play as ‘a reactivation of its mythic sources’, obtrudes on what had until then seemed relatively level-headed and even contiguous with more orthodox accounts of the play. The book’s various kinds of accumulation make it exceptionally difficult to offer a paraphrase of its argument. What I attempt here is an outline of the phases of the Equation themselves. In All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure the Equation is first subsumed into the working plot: but it is ‘explosive’ in these plays, not tragic; and, although Hughes has arresting things to say about both, it is clear that the focus of his interest in the Goddess is the plays in which the Equation does become tragic, and then in the way this is resolved in the last plays. The movement towards tragedy occurs in Troilus and Cressida, because here Shakespeare has ‘invested his own vulnerability in Troilus’; and it is impossible not to see a Hughesian self-investment too in the notion that ‘This is the sort of thing that is meant by saying that a writer needs courage’ (G, p. 177). Troilus’s ‘total, unconditional love’ becomes the impetus to tragedy when it meets, or believes it meets, its check in the loved one’s behaviour. That encounter produces the ‘double vision’ in which Troilus perceives the object of his love as a whore; and that perception, in turn, gives rise to Troilus’s homicidal frenzy against her. In Troilus and Cressida the ultimate consequence of that – that the beloved Female must die – is held in check: but this is precisely what follows in the plays of the tragic sequence. And it is a developmental sequence: its myth progresses, in a way demanding even that Othello was planned, if not actually written, before Hamlet. Hughes describes this progression with immense taxonomic complication; key elements of its heuristic capacity include the following. In Othello Iago is the Puritan intelligence turned envious and inquisitorial, and the Goddess is the composite figure of Othello embracing Desdemona. Hamlet’s double vision of his mother makes her inseparable from Ophelia: so his treatment of Ophelia is an inevitable consequence of her association with the demonic goddess of the underworld; and the peculiar pathos attaching to her is the inevitable product of the encounter between Hamlet’s mythic compulsion and sheer human frailty. In Macbeth the strongest element of the Equation is the theme of the Rival Brothers, and the Goddess, in a piece of classificatory ingenuity entirely characteristic of the book, is the Crown itself. The Brothers theme supplies a further element, another dialectical conflict, in Hughes’s conception of the workings of the Equation, where the Brothers are rational and irrational protagonists, often literal usurpers of their own siblings who contend murderously with one another (Claudius in Hamlet, Antonio in The Tempest). Where

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this theme operates, the Boar charges in the form of the villain of the play, the enraged Queen of Hell taking possession of him in order to destroy the tragic hero. In Macbeth the witches, together with Lady Macbeth, are the Queen of Hell, and the female is divided here before the beginning of the play, and not by the hero playing the Adonis role. Macbeth, possessed by an infernalised Lady Macbeth, himself becomes the Boar: and, doing so, becomes the only tragic hero to live the opposed lives of Adonis and the Boar simultaneously. This simultaneity accounts for the exceptionality of this play in the tragic sequence. King Lear manifests a ‘triple Tragic Equation’ in which Lear endures the ‘double vision’ three times – in relation to Cordelia, Goneril and Regan: but the Tarquinian explosion, the ‘Shakespearean moment’, is nevertheless blocked by their power(lessness) and Lear’s own advanced age. Consequently, the tragic explosion is transformed into Lear’s ferociously penitential remorse which, as a component of his madness, may be read as the Boar frustrated; and the flower, which elsewhere has meant lust and appetite, is now also transformed into Lear’s crown of weeds. Hence, in this, the final play of the tragic sequence, the tyrannical oppressor that is Tarquin becomes ‘an infantile, frail, brain-washed idiot savant, the child of his daughter, the transfigured Lear’ (G, p. 261). In the Equation in this play, therefore, Lear is himself the Boar transformed and Cordelia is the transformed Goddess; and the concluding action of the play holds out the possibility of the Goddess forgiving and redeeming the Tarquin figure: so much so that this figure may actually become, Hughes says, that of a sanctified Tarquin; which would presumably be, although Hughes does not press this, a re-Catholicised Puritanism. That possibility, however, is atrophied in King Lear, but it returns to dominate in the last plays. Timon of Athens, Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra also have their place in Hughes’s plotting of Shakespeare’s tragic sequence, as variant forms of the Equation; but King Lear is nevertheless the ‘climax’ of the sequence and the climax of Shakespeare’s tragic vision. The word ‘climax’, when Hughes uses it here, has a prominently sexual connotation too; and he locates the exact moment of climax – another kind of ‘Shakespearean moment’ – in Lear’s great, appalled and appalling speech of sexual disgust in the fourth scene of act 4: ‘Down from the waist they are centaurs, / Though women all above.’ In this speech we are given ‘broken glimpses of the female genitalia as the topography of Hell’ (G, p. 263). It is of high significance that Hughes’s own double vision of a Shakespeare given to tirades of misogyny and thereby capable of acting as a shaman of both Catholic and Puritan world views and mythologies should culminate here in

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fractured, even demented, psycho-sexual distress and revolted physical specificity, and in that capitalised location of metaphysical distress, ‘Hell’ (which, Hughes would know, was also Elizabethan slang for ‘pudendum’, as it is in sonnet 144, for instance). Whatever their credal differences, Elizabethan and Jacobean Catholics and Puritans alike were convinced of the actuality of that last place or state. the last plays Because the last plays, still commonly known as ‘romances’, are themselves so immersed in mythical material and have attracted a great deal of archetypal criticism, Hughes’s readings may appear, as he acknowledges, in certain respects more orthodox than those of the rest of the work. Indeed, it is possible to feel as we reach the final section of the Goddess that the book can be understood as a reading of Shakespeare through the lens of the last plays, and particularly of The Tempest; which would make it a kind of backformation which discovers – or imposes – a developmental pattern in retrospect, plotting origins in the foreknowledge of teleology. To consider ‘tirades of … misogyny’ in Shakespeare, for instance, is very quickly to consider Leontes’s furious speeches in the early part of The Winter’s Tale. Yet any tendency to mythological orthodoxy is met by Hughes’s sense of historical actuality: his reading of the last plays begins by reminding us of the immediacy with which English history presses upon Shakespeare’s Equation: ‘If the plays that dramatize the Tragic Equation are viewed as a suite of diagnostic variations on the result of the divisive religious policy of Henry VIII and his daughter Elizabeth, then the romances adapt equally well to the religious policy of James, which seemed potentially more fluid and even reconciliatory’ (G, p. 330). Although he wavers about how far he wants to press his theory of these plays – Shakespeare may be just ‘giving a rationale to the dance of his materials’ (G, p. 372) – he nevertheless offers now a version of Shakespeare as ‘the magus of a Gnostic, Hermetic ritual’ (G, p. 331). With an immense amount of speculative material derived from Neoplatonic sources, Hughes traces this ritual closely through the four plays. Some of this is very hard going indeed for the uninitiated reader, who must cope with such observations as ‘Florizel, as the Jesus Aion, is an emanation of Polixenes’ (G, p. 354); and it all has more than a hint of that nineteenth-century linking of Shakespeare to Francis Bacon and occult societies such as the Rosicrucians. Shakespeare’s ritual offers, for a select group of knowing initiates, Hughes thinks, and after the tragedies with their repeated stagings of the Reformation crisis, ‘a visionary solution to religious

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conflict’ (G, p. 349); and the last plays are a type of symbolic religious drama and, finally, a theophany. Even so, the solution symbolised in these plays had no living reality in the English history which succeeded their sublime fictions of transcendence: for that was the history of ‘the Gadarene, possessed rush down the hill into the Civil War’ (G, p. 471) and Cromwell. ‘Gadarene’ implicitly proposes that the Civil War was the charge of the Boar too, since the rush from Gadara in Matthew’s gospel is the rush of swine. And, reminding himself that the English Civil War is what is in prospect almost immediately after Shakespeare, Hughes appears almost to begin to doubt himself when, towards the very end of the Goddess, he is possessed again by the venomous Tarquinian speeches of Posthumus and Leontes, and struck anew by how deeply they resist the reconciliatory: Those late speeches are doorways, maybe, into the rapidly darkening real world where the weaponry of the Civil War was being cleaned and primed, and where, for a while, all outcomes would be pitiless, all worst fears would be realized. Shakespeare tries to accommodate what they reveal in his Neoplatonist determination to rescue the human soul, but their flame is acetylene and laser. In spite of his control, jets of it burn raw and frightful holes in the spiritualized fabric of these ‘romances’. (G, p. 487)

That searing image for the romances as self-deconstructive artefacts, virtually undermining themselves by resisting a knowledge so appalling that it can only be suppressed, is itself fittingly constructed from the anachronism of agencies – acetylene and laser – beyond Jacobean knowledge. And this bruised and bruising view of the last plays is strikingly in tune with some contemporary accounts from more academic literary-critical perspectives. Simon Palfrey, for instance, finds them undermining the apparent politics and gender politics of pastoral by a system of analogising in which Shakespeare ‘continually undresses convention, sends it naked or disguised into nativities which … might be at once promising, treacherous, and precarious’.11 Ultimately, for Hughes, the last plays secrete a Shakespeare so opposed to the spirit discovered by orthodox readings as to suggest an alternative ending altogether to the career ‘if fashion, politics and health had gone differently’; an ending not with the plays we actually have but, beyond Antony and Cleopatra, with ‘tragedies, of a kind that can hardly be guessed, waiting to be written’ (G, p. 487). Which sounds, astonishingly, like a yearning derived from a disappointment: as though, 11

Simon Palfrey, Late Shakespeare: A New World of Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997; 1999 edn), p. 176.

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for Ted Hughes, the Shakespeare truest to what is ultimate in himself is always and forever the Shakespeare of the Tragic Equation, not the Gnostic Shakespeare of the Tragic Equation Resolved. However, Hughes’s lengthy reading of The Tempest ends the Goddess primarily by giving a Hughesian inflection to some relatively orthodox forms of interpretation. In this he is actually, without at all adverting to it, engaging in a volte-face in relation to his original conception of the play in the ‘Note’ to the first Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse. There Lucrece as Miranda is married to Adonis as Ferdinand in a way that produces a sudden eruption of Lawrentian exclamations from Hughes: ‘But what a wooden wedding! What proper little Puritan puppets! And what a ghastly expression on Prospero’s cynical face. We know why he wants to drown his book in the sea … it contains the tragedies, with their evidence.’12 The volte-face is necessitated by the theory as it has developed in the intervening period and out of a desire to make it all perfectly cohere: but it suggests too the constant approximation of Hughes’s theorising, its adaptability and even its permissive licence, as subsequent re-readings of the plays cast its basic premises and oppositions into new patterns. Hughes’s theory of Shakespeare is a kaleidoscope, not a lantern. Understanding the play now as ‘a virtuoso Grosse Fuge of the themes of Shakespeare’s tragic myth’ (G, p. 379), this reading also returns the Goddess to its, and to the Equation’s, origins. The play is ‘a summary comment on the entire sequence, returning it, in a fashion, back to its beginnings: as if Venus and Adonis should be rewritten with its conclusion corrected and yet encapsulating everything that had been endured, throughout the dramas, projected from the wrinkles and folds of the harrowed mask of Prospero worn by Adonis’ (G, p. 360). In this reading, which makes much use of the cabbalist myth of Sophia, the Equation itself has been subsumed in Prospero’s exposition, in the second act, of the narrative of his usurpation and exile; and Prospero is the only hero in the whole sequence of plays who does not commit the Tarquinian crime, or undergo the Tarquinian madness. Accounting for the lack of sympathy the audience usually feels for him, nevertheless, Hughes ingeniously explains that, although Prospero appears not to have paid the price for his ‘ceremony of transcendence’, he has in fact paid the price in every mythic work since Venus and Adonis, since he is ‘the surviving rational ego of all the usurpations, all the Shakespearean moments’ (G, p. 463). Prospero also overcomes the Boar – who, in this play, is Caliban, the male representative of the rejected Queen of Hell 12

A Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse (1971 edn), p. 198.

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(Sycorax). And Ferdinand is the newborn Adonis. So the tragic pattern is reversed and redeemed by the helplessness of the Queen, the powerlessness of the Boar, and the reconciliatory marriage of Adonis and Miranda (whom Hughes regards as a Diana figure). Prospero has therefore separated the two halves of the double vision, managing this by Ariel’s ‘flower-magic’: and so the concomitant flower undergoes one final transformation in Hughes’s Shakespearean myth. The consequence of the separation is the reversal staged in the play’s masque of betrothal in act 4. There, Venus – goddess of Love – is deliberately excluded in a masque which prominently includes Isis and Ceres; and her exclusion is made explicit when Iris says, ‘I met her Deity / Cutting the clouds towards Paphos’, but she ‘is returned again’: she intended to be present, therefore, but changed her mind at the last moment. Hughes reads this curious detail, which has exercised many critics, as ‘a carefully modulated recycling, and a carefully positioned reversal’ of the ending of Venus and Adonis (G, p. 446); and there is, in literal fact, a verbal echo between the narrative poem and The Tempest – not that Hughes’s speculations ordinarily demand any such thing. Nevertheless, citing the Ainu proverb also cited as the ‘Epilogue’ to Cave Birds (1978), ‘At the end of the ritual, up comes a goblin’, Hughes notes grimly that ‘The Masque itself produces its own destruction’ (G, p. 446). This is the sudden irruption of Caliban, the Boar now at the point of destroying Prospero. In one of the most imaginative flights even in this book of shamanic flights, Hughes understands the extraordinary radiance of Prospero’s ‘Our revels now are ended’ speech as Shakespearean language become incarnate as ‘the transcendental form of Caliban’ (G, p. 454). As such, the speech is the reversal of the great misogynistic tirades consequent on the irruption of the Boar in the earlier work; and so Ariel, hunting for Caliban, is ‘the active personification of the spirit of the speech’ (G, p. 457). It is fitting in all sorts of ways that it should be language itself, the word made flesh and the word become voice and action, that effects the ultimate reversal and transcendence in Hughes’s conception of the Shakespearean Equation. That is, essentially, Hughes’s conception of The Tempest and of its place in the life of the Equation: but he also devotes a great deal of space in his pages on the play to a topic which might appear, on the face of it, relatively minor and which is contained only very obscurely in the text. The reason for the voyage which ended in the play’s shipwreck was the return to Naples of Alonso and his court after the marriage of his daughter Claribel in North Africa. What Hughes calls, in what may be a rare intentionally comic

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moment in his book, ‘the sensitized antennae of the Equation-seeker’ are alerted, and ‘Inquiry into this can go far’ (G, p. 417). Where it goes for Hughes is into a conception of Dido, Queen of North African Carthage in Virgil’s Aeneid, as a presence in the play, and a reading of Miranda as a kind of resuscitated Dido finding her happiness with a new Aeneas. The Tempest, he believes, may lack an explicit dramatisation, as opposed to a reported narrative, of the Equation because secreted within the text is the ‘unwritten, life-long-pondered tragedy … of Dido and Aeneas’ (G, p. 421); and Shakespeare does, as a strict matter of fact, although Hughes does not say so, refer to Virgil throughout his work, notably in Henry VI, Hamlet and Antony and Cleopatra. Since The Tempest is also ‘a keyboard for playing the Complete Works’ (G, p. 462), this speculation on an intimate correspondence between Shakespeare and Virgil, made very late indeed in Hughes’s book – at, we might say, the last possible moment – is notable. The story of Dido and Aeneas is the tale of a woman who considers herself a wife abandoned by her husband so that he may perform what he regards as his imperial, and masculine, duty. Her response is suicide; and, in one of the most moving moments in the whole Aeneid, the dead Dido rebukingly refuses to acknowledge Aeneas when, in Book VI, he descends to Hades and sees her there. Eliot – who may have had his own reasons for being fascinated by the passage – calls this ‘the most telling snub in all poetry’ and observes that ‘Dido’s behaviour appears almost as a projection of Aeneas’ own conscience’.13 If this is the text secreted into The Tempest, and therefore also into the score for the Complete Works, it is also one congruent with some of the most painful circumstances of Ted Hughes’s own biography: his marriage to, and separation from, Sylvia Plath, and her suicide. It is difficult not to intrude here, and it is difficult to avoid prurience if one does: but Hughes’s discovery of Dido secreted in Shakespeare is the clearest possible signal that we are at liberty to discover Ted Hughes himself in his version of Shakespeare. Hughes’s awe at the Shakespeare he has disclosed from the hiding-places of his power is self-identifying as well as diagnostic; and Shakespeare’s ‘secret’ is in the end apprehensible without recourse to the arcana: The secret of Shakespeare’s unique development lies in this ability (in most departments of life it would be regarded as a debility) to embrace the inchoate, as-ifsupernatural actuality, and be overwhelmed by it, be dismantled and even shattered by it, without closing his eyes, and then to glue himself back together, with a new, greater understanding of the abyss, all within the confines of a drama, and to do this once every seven months, year after year for twenty-four years. (G, p. 479) 13

T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber and Faber, 1957), p. 62.

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a goblin And yet, at the end of the ritual, up comes a goblin; a goblin in the shape of a sow. Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being eschews many scholarly conventions but it does contain occasional footnotes, even if not of the conventional kind. One of them is at least as arresting as anything in the body of the text. Stretching in double columns over two pages (G, pp. 11–12), it looks as though the text has delivered itself of a poem, albeit a prose poem. As we have seen, Hughes discovers the climax of Shakespeare’s tragic vision in Lear’s speech of sexual revulsion – ‘Down from the waist they are centaurs, / Though women all above’ – in which, he says, we are given ‘broken glimpses of the female genitalia as the topography of Hell’. I would not want to claim that this footnote is the climax of Hughes’s tragic vision of Shakespeare; but it might well be the centaur below the text’s waist. It annotates the statement that ‘The Boar is the Goddess of the Underworld’ with a reflection on the hermaphroditic nature of the Boar in mythology. And suddenly something exacerbatedly unappeased in Hughes’s sensibility runs riot, as he figures the sow of mythology – but whose myth is this, exactly? – as ‘a sort of uterus on the loose – upholstered with breasts, not so much many-breasted as a mobile tub entirely made of female sexual parts, a woman-sized multiple udder on trotters … like a Breughelesque nightmare vagina, baggy with over-production’. And so on, across two pages of double columns, as though the very dead pig in one of Hughes’s best-known early poems, ‘View of a Pig’ in Lupercal (1960) – ‘They were going to scald it, / Scald it and scour it like a doorstep’ – has, when feminised as a sow, come bristling and bruising back to vengeful life. There is fascination in this passage, but appalled fascination; and disgust too, but electrifyingly stimulated disgust. This sow running riot in Ted Hughes’s mythical imagination could be read as the primal impulse to the theorising of the Goddess; and, perhaps giving us permission to make this claim, Hughes says that ‘she is inseparable from the lethal factor of the Boar, who carries the same vaginal grin yet is prodigiously virile’; she is ‘everything about female sexuality that is awesome, alien, terrifying and “beyond” the reaches of [man’s] soul’ (G, p. 11). Marina Warner says of this passage that ‘harsh old Crow is startled into cawing again’.14 Its real disturbance is that what startles the caw is the image of the female pig mouth as vagina, that image which secretes – but only just keeps secret – the ancient male fear of the vagina dentata. This sow 14

Marina Warner, ‘Shakespeare and the Goddess (1992)’, in Signs and Wonders: Essays on Literature and Culture (London: Chatto and Windus, 2003), p. 253.

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is the hermaphroditic Boar as phallic mother, who would destroy what she has created and consume what she should nurture. hand-torch and divining-rod ‘I rely on hand-torch and divining-rod through the tunnels of the wild pig,’ Hughes says, disarmingly, of his method in the Goddess (G, p. 34); and the sense of the makeshift and improvisatory in his interpretations, which demand text-by-text close readings liable at any moment to open into sometimes extravagant digression, is reinforced by the book’s lack of all scholarly apparatus. Although Hughes does not share Graves’s self-regarding antiacademicism, footnotes are occasional and usually digressive too; there is no bibliography or index; and Shakespeare critics are cited very sparingly. In addition, Hughes appears almost unable to stop, ending not in peroration or synopsis but in a flurry of possibly rather anxious appendices, as though this is an argument he cannot finish conducting with himself, the register of an obsession. He defines himself at one point as ‘a devout member of Shakespeare’s congregation’ (G, p. 462); and, despite its numerous references to literature and the arts more generally, the Goddess asks to be read as an impassioned act of quasi-religious attention and affirmation rather than an act of literary criticism. Hughes warns us early on, for instance, that ‘I do not profess to be an Occult Neoplatonist, but my own approach … is if anything from that point of view, rather than through literary studies’ (G, p. 34). This earnestness obtains, more or less, throughout the book, and it makes Hughes sometimes unalert to tone. Notably, for instance, he fails entirely to remark the exuberant erotic playfulness of Venus and Adonis, its sheer sexiness; and he is, in general, insufficiently appreciative of the spontaneous or improvisatory in Shakespeare, that quality which Coleridge describes as his sometimes making us feel ‘as if he were unconscious of himself, and of his high destiny’.15 Hughes’s mythical Shakespeare is, virtually by definition, a Shakespeare acutely conscious of himself and of high destiny. But the quasi-religious analogy is only one of several which Hughes supplies in an occasional meta-commentary which can seem both assertive and defensive. The Goddess is, analogously, all of the following: the investigation of a crime; a scientific treatise; an anthropological inquiry; a game played with the reader; a tour guide; and, hilariously – or battily – ‘the serial instructions for the stage-by-stage assembly of what is quite an intricate piece of machinery – a flying-machine, perhaps’ (G, p. 43). Perhaps. In 15

Coleridge on Shakespeare, ed. Terence Hawkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969), p. 240.

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some of these analogues Hughes is indebted to that strain of sometimes affected terminological rigour, probably designed as a rebuke to bellelettrism, in modernist usage: Eliot’s ‘formula’, as we have seen, and even perhaps Ezra Pound’s use of the word ‘equation’ in his account of the genesis of his poem ‘In a Station of the Metro’.16 Most beautifully and suggestively, though, Hughes’s ‘ideal reader’ would regard the book as ‘a sort of musical adaptation, a song’ (G, p. 44), which would make Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being not a piece of prose criticism at all but a kind of operatic libretto, based on an original but modifying it too for varied purpose or audience, a collaborative venture. Even so, the book includes many acts of attentive literary criticism, of which insufficient stock was taken by its reviewers. Notably, there is a fascinating discussion of male love poetry in which Hughes decides that only John Clare, out of a ‘suite’ of English poets, shares with the Shakespeare of the Sonnets a ‘defenceless self-surrender and self-exposure’ (G, p. 59). A weakness which is, oxymoronically, a form of genius, this can be found, however, in continental European poetry with its tradition of ‘the Virgin eroticized’ (G, p. 60) and in the Sufi poets of Islam, notably Rumi, about whom Hughes is illuminatingly knowledgeable. There is an essay on Shakespeare’s ‘extraordinary, playful, manipulative cruelty’ (G, p. 231), which appears to enter into implicit dialogue with Wyndham Lewis, possibly; and, more certainly, with Jan Kott’s Shakespeare Our Contemporary; and, behind it, the writings of Artaud. Deriving from a discussion of Giordano Bruno’s memory theatre but casting itself clear of this paraphernalia too, there is the intimately sensitised responsiveness of Hughes’s analysis of the dramatic nature of Shakespearean thought: ‘the actualization of imagined scenes is, at every point, Shakespeare’s way of thinking: he raises the idea into quasi-physical reality, then lets his feeling respond to it exactly as if it were real’ (G, p. 153). This is a remarkable way of thinking about thinking in Shakespeare and one that would surely have impressed Eliot, who spent a lot of time thinking about Shakespeare thinking. And there is the casually throwaway brilliance and memorability of numerous observations of the kind he makes of the lovers in Romeo and Juliet: that it is ‘almost as if they were too young to have personal lives, still egoless, as if they had nothing yet to transcend. As if they died, like an image of the sexual act, in a biological, rather than a transcendental, exaltation’ (G, p. 318). Implicitly reactivating the Elizabethan sexual connotation of the word ‘die’ (to reach orgasm), this gets almost 16

Ezra Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (1916; London: New Directions, 1970), p. 87.

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desolatingly close to the play’s transfixing erotic pathos and supplies an excellent counter to what we have seen as Auden’s self-revealing failure to appreciate the relationship. For all that the Goddess eschews the academic conventions, its interventions are made with some more traditional kinds of Shakespeare criticism at least within earshot. I have discussed Patrick Cruttwell and the background of Cambridge English, and Graham Bradshaw thinks that the book shows traces of other figures from that school too: F. R. Leavis, A. P. Rossiter, Derek Traversi and L. C. Knights.17 There are also intriguing parallels between the Goddess and Leslie Fiedler’s The Stranger in Shakespeare (1972). Indebted to Northrop Frye’s archetypal criticism, Fiedler also writes a study of Shakespeare ‘at the mythic level’ and, commenting on Shakespeare’s peculiar lack of interest in the Elizabethan myth of the Virgin Queen, which fired both Spenser and Raleigh, he decides that Shakespeare ‘began with an anti-feminist bias; and it is the private mythology bred by that bias which most directly influences his view of the stranger, as well as his over-all theories about the nature of love’.18 Fiedler’s chapter on misogyny in Shakespeare – the woman as ‘stranger’ – is, like Hughes’s theory, anchored in the Sonnets and Venus and Adonis. It similarly dwells on Shakespeare’s incorporation of the Hermaphroditus and Salmacis material into the poem, although the basic structural pattern of misogyny is discovered in the figure of Joan in Henry VI Part I rather than in Venus and Adonis itself. And it turns on an interpretation of ‘the Triple Goddess in darkest form’ and on a view of Shakespeare as compelled by the Roman Catholic faith of his mother while still showing ‘a Protestant, Puritan, Hebraic, finally patriarchal distrust of Mariolatry in all its forms, any attempt to smuggle into Christianity or patriotic piety homage to the Goddess’.19 Like Hughes too, Fiedler makes much of the presence of Dido in The Tempest, and of that play’s ‘Virgilian music’.20 Finally, he also reminds us that Wyndham Lewis calls Shakespeare a ‘shamanized man’ in The Lion and the Fox. I am not necessarily claiming that Hughes read Fiedler between writing the essay appended to A Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse in 1972 and writing Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, although he may have done: but I am saying that Hughes’s book was, in its procedures and purposes, not quite as outré as some of its first reviewers found it. 17 18 19

See Graham Bradshaw, ‘Hughes and Shakespeare: Visions of the Goddess’, in The Achievement of Ted Hughes, ed. Keith Sagar (Manchester University Press, 1983), pp. 52–69. Leslie Fiedler, The Stranger in Shakespeare (1972; Frogmore: Paladin, 1974), p. 17. Ibid., pp. 43, 51. 20 Ibid., p. 168.

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In addition, the Goddess appears, from its very inception, to cede priority to a writer it never actually names. D. H. Lawrence’s pithily pregnant remarks on Hamlet in the chapter entitled ‘The Theatre’ in Twilight in Italy read the contours of Reformation and Civil War out of the play too, and ally the privacy of ‘the soul’ with the fate of the nation: The King, the Emperor is killed in the soul of man, the old order of life is over, the old tree is dead at the root. So said Shakespeare. It was finally enacted in Cromwell.21

Lawrence must also, necessarily, be precursorily present to Hughes’s imagination in his dealings with Shakespeare in various other ways too: with regard to language, dialect and class, and in his considerations of English Puritanism, sexuality and sexual disgust. Whatever Hughes’s reasons for not mentioning him, the enthusiastic mode of the Goddess has its roots in an English Protestant heritage and may find its formal model, and permission, in Lawrence’s non-fictional prose.22 In his almost mesmerised unravelling of what had hitherto been secret in Shakespeare’s mysterium, Hughes appears, then, in a way mirroring the dualisms he discovers in Shakespeare, at once both a Puritan preacher possessed by the word, and a Neoplatonist initiate or devotee giving us access to the rites and the esoterica; or, indeed, himself a shaman who, having made the flight, is returning now with the information and the curative medicines. This is a difficult mode to sustain over more than five hundred pages, and there can be few readers of the Goddess who would not wish it shorter. But its compulsions are also compelling, and the book at its best has the wild creative energy also to be found in Hughes’s poems. In Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being Hughes writes, after Lawrence, and just as wildly as him, a diagnostic and prophetic kind of criticism tracing the historical ‘moment’ at which the social and emotional ills still with us first exploded; and the book is, at least implicitly, a proposal for their cure. If Lawrence remains secreted within the book, however, perhaps accruing an occult potency from his very invisibility, the poet-critics constantly referred to explicitly are Yeats and Eliot, and the poet most frequently referenced is Dante. Yeats provides the book’s main epigraph, in that 21 22

D. H. Lawrence, Twilight in Italy (1916; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1960), p. 79. In the 1972 letter to The Observer complaining about Ricks’s review which I have already cited Hughes claims, scarcely credibly, that he has not read the essays of Lawrence’s which Ricks considers influential on him. Letters of Ted Hughes, p. 327.

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passage from ‘At Stratford-on-Avon’ which I discussed in my chapter on Yeats’s Shakespeare criticism: The Greeks, a certain scholar has told me, considered that myths are the activities of the Daimons, and that the Daimons shape our characters and our lives. I have often had the fancy that there is some one myth for every man, which, if we but knew it, would make us understand all he did and thought.23

This ‘fancy’ of the single, all-explanatory myth is the informing principle of a great deal of Hughes’s writing on other poets, notably on Coleridge, Eliot and Plath. It is also, of course, the impulse to his understanding of the obsessive singularity of mythical structure in Shakespeare. In this sense, Hughes’s reading is self-confessedly partial. He divides the ‘realist’ from the ‘mythical’ Shakespeare and invites us to consider that the plays work on two sometimes almost entirely separable levels; and, pursuing the mythical level in the tragedies and the late plays, he ignores the history plays and skimps the comedies. Hughes is also Yeatsian in his Neoplatonism; and Yeats’s plays, eschewing naturalism in favour of symbol and myth, and sometimes hieratic in their pattern-making and stasis, may seem structures exemplifying the way a mythical-level Shakespeare might appear to the eye of Hughes’s mind. He refers at one point to ‘the hieratic, sacramental instinct of the mythic operation’ (G, p. 36). His letters confirm that Yeats was, from very early on, the signally significant precursor for Hughes; and Hughes’s Shakespeare is prominently a Shakespeare read through Yeats. Yeats is also, the Goddess says, ‘a great literary shaman, like Eliot’ (G, p. 89), who is also pervasive in the book. Hughes compares the obsessive private experience he discovers in Shakespeare to Eliot’s obsession with the image of St Sebastian, and he makes this obsession the basis of ‘The Poetic Self’, his essay on Eliot in Winter Pollen. He employs, usually with a strikingly distinctive personal inflection, some central concepts in Eliot’s criticism. These include the ‘dark embryo’ of poetic creativity; the possibility that poetic work might well occur out of synchrony with the main line of development in an individual talent; as we have seen, the view that Shakespeare does the work of at least two poets, one simplifying and the other complicating the language; and the rationale for the ‘failure’ of Hamlet, its offering ‘emotion in excess of the facts’, which Hughes uses as a way in to all of the tragedies. In the latter case, he visibly slides from the Eliotic perception into his own theory when he says that the tragedies all ‘carry this sense of hidden, unobjectifiable excess, in so far as the characters are motivated and 23

W. B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions (London: The Macmillan Press, 1961), p. 107.

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burdened by the Tragic, Mythic Equation – and by the vast, turbulent historical and psycho-biological implications of that – as well as by the immediate, contingent business of the plot’ (G, p. 236). This is to inflect Eliot’s concept in a way he would hardly himself have appreciated and would never have envisaged. In fact, Hughes is here inflecting Eliot with Yeats. The fastidiously withdrawing critical discrimination about Shakespearean plot is being virtually commandeered by the powerfully symbolic resonances of a hieratic dramaturgy. Hughes’s generalisation about the dual burden of Shakespearean motivation therefore pregnantly suggests how his book on Shakespeare is also his way of accommodating himself to these great modern precursors but also appropriating both to the purposes of his modificatory Shakespearean ‘adaptation’. And it is in this context that the significance of Dante in Hughes’s conception of Shakespeare should be understood: since Dante was supremely important to Eliot, who, as we have seen, frequently holds him in the same sentence as Shakespeare in his critical prose; and highly important to Yeats. For Hughes, however, and even though he shares Eliotic and Yeatsian views of cultural and literary ‘dissociation’, Shakespeare – or at least his own mythical Shakespeare – appears to be actually a Dantean type of poet. Hughes believes, despite the fact that there is no evidence to prove it, that Shakespeare read Dante and was influenced by him; so As You Like It becomes a ritual drama purposefully related to the opening of the Inferno, and Cordelia is symbolically the equivalent of Beatrice. Beyond these local resonances, Hughes perceives the Shakespearean oeuvre on its mythical plane as itself the equivalent of the Commedia. With As You Like It, Shakespeare, aged thirty-five, is said to be ‘nel mezzo del cammin, awake in the depth of the Mother Forest, about to enter … his Divina Commedia’ (G, p. 115–16); at a later stage, we are told that ‘at every phase of the Commedia, Shakespeare’s Tragic Equation, and Theophany, applies’ (G, p. 393), where ‘Commedia’, unitalicised, clearly refers to Shakespeare’s own, and not to Dante’s; and the crowning achievement of The Tempest is figured in markedly Dantean terms: ‘the whole evolution of the tragedy of Divine Love, the long, convulsive history from Aaron onwards, can be seen folded into a single consummate design, like an Elizabethan knot-garden maze, with Venus and Adonis, glistening and pulsating, as the divine clue (or Minotaur), figured, as in a fountain sculpture, at the centre’ (G, p. 335). ‘Folded’ echoes Eliot echoing Dante at the end of the Quartets: ‘When the tongues of flame are in-folded / Into the crowned knot of fire / And the fire and the rose are one’. The images of garden and fountain have strong associations with the Paradiso, and the

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concept of ‘a single consummate design’ is precisely what generations of commentators have admired in the Commedia. Given these, and many other, Dantean traces throughout the Goddess, it is not at all surprising that Hughes draws his vast book to conclusion by quoting the final tercet of the Paradiso, so that Shakespeare’s theophany too ultimately manifests ‘the Love that moves the sun and the other stars’ (G, p. 504). A. C. Bradley thought that Shakespeare’s ‘great things … have no companions in literature except the few greatest things in Dante’, but Hughes pursues the affinities much further.24 The conception of Shakespeare as Dantean has several consequences. Despite Hughes’s telling us in the foreword to the Goddess that the book had its origins in a correspondence in 1978 with the theatre director Donya Feuer about a new kind of Shakespearean production, few accounts of Shakespeare could be less inclined towards the stage, or take less cognisance of it. For Hughes, Shakespeare is a poet rather than a dramatist. The pattern of all his works derives from the Sonnets and the narrative poems; and, giving the latter such attention and priority, Hughes was regarding them more highly than most literary criticism until relatively recently. Nuances of psychology, behaviour, characterisation, gesture, staging and so on are all, for Hughes, elements of the ‘realistic’ Shakespeare, and not the subject of his book, which rather makes nugatory the antagonism of some of its critics on the grounds that he ignores such things. For Ted Hughes, Shakespeare, like Dante, evolves an extraordinarily complex structure from a sustaining single myth; he manifests, out of a vast storehouse of metaphysical arcana, a theophany; he celebrates the idea of poetry as ritual event. Just as Dante is the great poet of medieval Catholic Christianity, of its world view and its metaphysic, Shakespeare is the great poet of the breakdown of that world, that view, and that metaphysic. The ‘Shakespearean moment’ when Adonis becomes Tarquin, when the loving suitor of the Virgin becomes a self-hating Puritan, is the moment of the English Reformation; and Shakespeare’s luxuriously exfoliating myth gives it expression with exactly the kind of ultimate poetic strength and singularity with which Dante gives expression to the religious and cultural dispensation which preceded it. Ted Hughes’s musical adaptation, composed of guilt, yearning, abandonment and damage, joins together the two worlds in a jarring and violent dissonance resolved into harmony only very insecurely by the needy accommodations and fantasies of Shakespeare’s final play. 24

A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (1904; London: Macmillan and Co., 1961), p. 60.

chapter 9

Survivor of cease: Shakespeare and Sylvia Plath in Ted Hughes’s poems

sequence and survival Towards the end of Ted Hughes’s discussion of the tragedies in Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being he makes a remark literally in parenthesis, and it is as though the parenthesis licenses the lapse from the impassioned but analytical tone of mythical speculation which is the dominant mode of that book to something more nakedly private and possibly more selfinvolved: ‘Presumably in these works,’ he says, ‘[Shakespeare] was fighting towards his own salvation and inner survival’ (G, p. 325). It is hard not to hear the poet of the trilogy of long poetic sequences which Ted Hughes published during the 1970s – Crow (1970), Gaudete (1977) and Cave Birds (given small press publication in 1975; revised into its Faber edition in 1978) – behind this observation; and the sequences include, occasionally and fitfully, Shakespearean references.1 ‘The Battle of Osfrontalis’ in Crow, for instance, in which Crow is persecuted by words, culminates in an allusion to Yorick in Hamlet, as Crow wins yet another temporary victory: Words retreated, suddenly afraid Into the skull of a dead jester Taking the whole world with them – But the world did not notice. And Crow yawned – long ago He had picked that skull empty.

This has that weary melancholy, an exhaustedly posthumous but still combatively critical spirit, which is the mood of some poems in the sequence; and its reference to Hamlet enforces the literary nature of the melancholy – paradoxically, it may be, in this sequence so bent on seeming 1

The publication history of Crow is complicated. Paul Keegan tells us in a note to the Collected Poems (p. 1254) that ‘Crow is both a single work and a loose grouping of texts’ published between 1967 and 1973. In what follows I use the poems of this loose grouping as my Crow text.

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‘super-ugly’, in Hughes’s (ugly) formulation. For the poignant moment in the graveyard scene, in which Hamlet contemplates the skull of his childhood jester, is travestied by Crow’s boredom. The skull tenderly memorialised by Hamlet was once for him, as skulls on battlefields – even the battlefield of Osfrontalis – usually are, just food for the crows. Even so, in the act of savagery, the poem-sequence Crow itself takes a tone from that scene, where poignancy collapses into an almost slapstick brutality of behaviour as Hamlet and Laertes fight over Ophelia’s grave. So there is a grim Hughesian joke here too: Crow has long since picked the skull of Hamlet clean, but has drawn manifest nourishment from it. In Gaudete, comparably, there is a sudden, unpredictable Shakespearean allusion. Commander Estridge’s daughter Janet has hanged herself as a consequence of her treatment by the Reverend Nicholas Lumb, the changeling priest protagonist of this almost hypnotically propulsive narrative poem, and Estridge – ‘an incinerator of loss and pain’ – goes to join a gang bent on exacting revenge: ‘He enters the Bridge Inn for the first time in his life, remembering, as he pushes the door, the wren in Macbeth.’ Since there is no other indication that Estridge is literary, it is as though the poem itself remembers the wren in Macbeth. As well it might, since that wren is the one named by Macduff’s wife in her complaint against her husband’s flight just before she and her children are murdered: He loves us not, He wants the natural touch; for the poor wren, The most diminutive of birds, will fight, Her young ones in the nest, against the owl.

(4.2.8–10)

Estridge, the father of a suicide daughter, deciding to do something he has never in his life done before, perceives himself, in his desperation, as the wren. Doing so, he is arguably even feminising himself, since the wren is gendered as female-maternal in Lady Macduff’s speech, and this casts a harsh ornithological shadow back over the hoarse ‘raven himself’ which Lady Macbeth wants to become in the speech in which she cries out to be masculinised (‘unsex me here’) and so rendered capable of murder. So this crucial moment of the poem Gaudete and the action to which it subsequently gives rise, in which modes of masculinity and femininity are continuously presented and inspected, is grounded in Shakespearean source and analogue. This is emphasised by the fact that Estridge’s name figures in both Henry IV Part I and Antony and Cleopatra: in the former, an ‘estridge’ appears to be an ostrich, in the latter a goshawk. This is an Estridge, then, who might well remember the wren in Macbeth.

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These sequences of the 1970s have been variously interpreted, and their mythical means invite interpretative variety. The poems are absorptive, synthetic and fragmentary: Crow is partially dependent on an unpublished story; Gaudete combines narrative and lyric; and Cave Birds is composed of both word and image (the drawings of Leonard Baskin). Yet, along with such specific local allusions, these sequences are also impelled by engagements comparable with those Hughes undertakes in charting Shakespeare’s Tragic Equation. Graham Bradshaw goes so far as to say that the original essay in A Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse is ‘Crow’s critical twin’; and Neil Rhodes observes that this work ‘charts an agonized attempt to rescue the female’: the pattern Hughes sees developing in Shakespeare is ‘effectively that which develops in his own work between Crow in 1970 and Gaudete in 1977’.2 The sequences are variously preoccupied with relations between masculine and feminine, with sexual cruelty and disgust, with disintegration, catastrophe, accusation and guilt, and with the struggle towards a survivor’s new integration; and they witness kinds of exacerbation, perturbation and sudden calm comparable to those Hughes also finds in Shakespeare. In ‘Crow’s Song about England’ there is even a parodically cartoon-like but savage version of ‘the Shakespearean moment’. England, envisaged as feminine, ‘a girl / Who tried to give her mouth’, is brutally abused, changes sex and then brutalises in her turn, and finally changes into ‘a little girl’, also brutalised, then tried and sentenced. The poem’s final line, ‘She did life’, spaced alone, is both her sentence – a life sentence – and the serving of notice that this is, still, the unfinished business of ‘England’. The Crow sequence itself prominently includes a femininity evoked as threat or disaster: in its Oedipal fixation on the unavoidable figure of the mother or ‘mama’ – even after crash-landing a rocket on the moon Crow crawls out ‘Under his mother’s buttocks’ – and in its grotesque mechanics of disembodied genitalia, in which, for instance, ‘woman’s vulva dropped over man’s neck and tightened’ and ‘Words came in the likeness of a wreathed vagina pouring out Handel.’ And, in ‘Fragment of an Ancient Tablet’, each of six couplets offers an ‘Above’ and ‘Below’ of female anatomy in which delight is undermined and supplanted by repulsion – moving from ‘Above – the well-known lips, delicately downed. / Below – beard between 2

Graham Bradshaw, ‘Hughes and Shakespeare: Visions of the Goddess’, in The Achievement of Ted Hughes, ed. Keith Sagar (Manchester University Press, 1983), p. 56; Neil Rhodes, ‘Bridegrooms to the Goddess: Hughes, Heaney and the Elizabethans’, in Shakespeare and Ireland: History, Politics, Culture, ed. Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1997), p. 156.

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thighs’ to ‘Above – the face, shaped like a perfect heart. / Below – the heart’s torn face’. Jacqueline Rose has said of this poem, tartly, that ‘When Lear produces the same set of alternatives, he is generally considered to have gone mad’, as though the sexual disgust and misogyny informing it can be laid squarely at the door of the poet.3 While it is easy to see how the poem might be found offensive, this is to misread the sequence, whose fragmentations and dramatisations prevent any simple identification of the poet’s own emotions, judgements or opinions with those of his poems. This poem’s title, ‘Fragment of an Ancient Tablet’, both signals the fragmentary form itself and judgementally places its emotion as belonging to a past mode of culture and consciousness, the lore of the ‘ancients’, not the moderns. Rose also pays insufficient attention to tone. The final line is not so merely repelled as the other ‘Below’ lines. While ‘The heart’s torn face’ is a repulsive physical evocation of the vulva, it is also, in its metaphor, the register of sympathy for endured experience. But ‘Fragment of an Ancient Tablet’ does, as Rose’s adduction suggests, evoke the excoriation of female sexuality in act 4 scene 4 of King Lear (‘Down from the waist they are centaurs’) and Hughes’s reading of it in the Goddess where, as we have seen, he says that the speech gives us ‘broken glimpses of the female genitalia as the topography of Hell’ (G, p. 263). Rather than reading it, though, as the ravings of a male author who has lost all self-restraint in obsessive sexual revulsion, it is at least possible to read it as a commentary on Lear, an inclusion of precisely such derangement as one of the modes of masculinity undergoing examination in Crow. This poem does, therefore, suggest the presence of Shakespeare as an energising force in the conception of Crow; and so does a notable poem with an odd publishing history. Now known in the Collected Poems as ‘Prospero and Sycorax’ and published there as part of Earth-Numb (1979), this was originally a Crow poem called ‘Crow’s Song of Prospero and Sycorax’, first published, a footnote tells us, as part of the pamphlet Shakespeare’s Poem in 1971, and reprinted in the limited edition of Crow in 1973. Hughes subsequently retained it in his Selected Poems (1982) and New Selected Poems (1995): it clearly remained significant to him throughout his career. Even orphaned of its Crow context, it carries a powerful charge, as it meditates on the way Sycorax, the witch-mother of Caliban usurped by Prospero, possesses posthumous knowledge of Prospero’s state of mind. The poem brings other female characters into play too, both Shakespearean and classical – Ophelia, Jocasta and Cordelia – as it adumbrates, in four plaintively 3

Jacqueline Rose, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (1991; London: Virago Press, 1992), p. 161.

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repetitive quatrains and an isolated closing line, Sycorax’s dark knowledge. What she knows finally is that He is not himself now, And what speaks through him must be discounted – Though it will be the end of them both. She knows, like God, He has found Something Easier to live with – His death, and her death.

This poem remembers Prospero’s melancholy speech towards the end of the play in which he tells us that, on his return to Milan, his ‘every third thought shall be [his] grave’; but it does so in a way suggesting a profound intimacy of collusive knowledge between the usurped female witch and the usurping male mage. Sycorax’s knowledge evacuates Prospero of his power and locates his ultimate self-discovery in a form of abjection and avoidance: and ‘Prospero’ in this poem is another representative of the Tarquin figure in the Goddess. Sycorax discovers in him an entrapment in guilt which he can nevertheless more or less live with – guilt for her death, mitigated only by the thought of the release from guilt which his own death will bring. As originally sung by Crow, this poem therefore brought a further Shakespearean impulse into the sequence and should now shadow its other moments of guilt and self-accusation – in ‘Crow’s Nerve Fails’, for instance: Is he the archive of their accusations? Or their ghostly purpose, their pining vengeance? Or their unforgiven prisoner? He cannot be forgiven.

The Cave Birds sequence originates in exactly such accusation, with its stagings of original violence followed by figurations of legal process: poems are titled after summoner, interrogator, judge, plaintiff, executioner and accused. This is a poetry almost extravagantly unaccommodating in its bleak obliquities, its absorptions of recherché mythical material, its edgy disjunctions and discontinuities apparently representative of a consciousness self-tormented almost past endurance. It would be simplistic to claim that this sequence, and therefore the Hughesian trilogy of the 1970s which it completes, moves from this Tarquin mode into something approaching the reconciliations effected by the late plays in Hughes’s readings of the

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‘Shakespearean Equation’ but there are poems in Cave Birds – outstandingly ‘The knight’, ‘A green mother’ and ‘Bride and groom lie hidden for three days’ (originally also written as a Crow poem) – in which moods of assuagement and forms of new accommodation do seem to obtain. This is notably so when, in the last of these poems, one of Hughes’s finest, the mutuality of the newly married couple named by the title is figured as the generous donation of bodies to each other. A mechanics of assemblage is transformed by a limpidly floating cadence into a resonantly astonished tenderness of devoted transformation and sexual bringing-into-being: So, gasping with joy, with cries of wonderment Like two gods of mud Sprawling in the dirt, but with infinite care They bring each other to perfection.

This mood is ecstatic, but continuous with that initiated by the benignity of the poem ‘Littleblood’ in Crow, and by the songs which act as a long lyric coda to the sexually and physically violent narrative of Gaudete, which are all implicitly or explicitly addressed to a goddess figure. The addressee of ‘Littleblood’, ‘Grown so wise grown so terrible / Sucking death’s mouldy tits’, is instructed, in the final line, to ‘Sit on my finger, sing in my ear, O littleblood’; and Seamus Heaney has read both the titular name and the invocation within the orbit of Shakespearean names in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Henry IV Part II, The Tempest and Macbeth: ‘something as frail as the second coming of pity, that “naked, new-born babe / Striding the blast”, an image which Ted reads (in Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being) as proleptic of “a new kind of agonizing transformation”’ – which Heaney characterises as the shift ‘from the tragic to the transcendental’ (‘I have always tended to read “Littleblood” as an instance of just that kind of transition’).4 Heaney’s Shakespearean adductions are astute, but not only so: they are also deeply in tune with the movements of mind, imagination and transformative poetic energy which Hughes’s 1970s trilogy shares with his prose writing on Shakespeare. The action of Gaudete takes place in the North of England and the poem begins with the disorientation there of its protagonist, the Reverend Nicholas Lumb in his changeling form. His sexual exploits with his female parishioners and their violent consequences – which can be read as a kind of shamanism gone wrong – impel the rest of the narrative. After it 4

Seamus Heaney, ‘Omen and Amen: On “Littleblood”’, in The Epic Poise: A Celebration of Ted Hughes, ed. Nick Gammage (London: Faber and Faber, 1999), pp. 59–61.

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concludes in literal conflagration, an epilogue is set in ‘a straggly sparse village on the West Coast of Ireland, on a morning in May’, in which three young girls tell the local priest about their ‘vision’ of an otter called from a lake by a man who leaves a folder of verse behind. We are to understand that this is the original Nicholas Lumb, returned from the spirit world and transformed into a poet. When the girls describe their experience, the priest, ‘astonished by his own emotion’, is transported into a visionary description of Creation. The epilogue concludes with the priest deciphering the words of the heavily revised manuscript and copying out the verses. Gaudete then itself comes to a close with forty-one of these short, intensely gnomic pieces. This haunting episode effects a reconciliation, in visionary sympathy and then in written transmission, of English Protestant Anglicanism and Celtic (Irish) Catholicism; and this is to return the vanished feminine to the order of Protestant and, for Hughes, masculine Christianity. The month of May is, in popular Irish Catholicism, the month of Mary and so appropriate to the miracle, as these little Catholic girls perceive it, of the calling of the otter from the lake; and the alliterative phrase ‘on a morning in May’ recalls the opening of the medieval vision poem Piers Plowman (‘Bote in a mayes morwnynge on Malverne hulles / Me bifel a ferly, of fairie, me-thoughte’). The verses themselves are prayers to some form of goddess and contain significant female presences: a mother; a woman in labour; ‘God’s daughter’; ‘the woman who wore a split lopsided mask’. The apostrophised or invoked female figure’s actions have huge consequences for the speaker of the poems: ‘She fell into the earth / And I was devoured’; ‘An unearthly woman wading shorewards / With me in your arms // The grey in my hair’. And she appears to combine, mythologically, aspects of various pagan goddesses and iconographical and apocalyptic representations of the Catholic Virgin: ‘She rides the earth / On an ass, on a lion’; ‘She reveals herself, and is veiled’; ‘The saviour / From these veils of wrinkle and shawls of ache // Like the sun / Which is itself cloudless and leafless // Was always here, is always as she was’, which catches and transforms a phrase and a cadence from Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’ in a poem purporting to have been written in the West of Ireland, that very Yeatsian location. This mythologised feminine presence is accompanied in the sequence by several poems more realistically figuring a dead woman, notably the eighteenth which begins: Waving goodbye, from your banked hospital bed, Waving, weeping, smiling, flushed

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The consequence for the speaker, leaving the corpse in the morgue, is to feel ‘Like a pillar over Athens // Defunct // In the glaring metropolis of cameras’. And that word ‘defunct’, its blank dissyllable isolated on a line apart, sucks into itself several intimations of posthumousness in this speaker, who is, of course, in the dramatic mythology of Gaudete, the survivor of a period spent out of the world. This, for instance: And for all rumours of me read obituary. What there truly remains of me Is that very thing – my absence.

In fact, the opening poem of the sequence asks questions on behalf of ‘half a man’ lost in ‘the shorn sleep of aftermath’: How will you correct The veteran of negatives And the survivor of cease?

Everything in the form, mode, structure and generic disposition of Gaudete, as of the other two poem-sequences comprising Hughes’s trilogy of the 1970s, is oriented away from autobiography (even if occasionally it would take a saintly believer in poetic impersonality not to make some connections: the ‘third time’ in the poem I quote above, for instance, and Sylvia Plath’s three suicide attempts). However, the trilogy should be understood as what medieval aesthetics called a ‘psychomachia’, a poem which could be both ‘a conflict of the soul’ and ‘a fight for life’. Ted Hughes’s various engagements with the feminine in these works, and the perturbations, anxieties and guilts with which they deal, constitute a modern psychomachia continuous with the one Hughes reads out of Shakespeare: ‘Presumably in these works he was fighting towards his own salvation and inner survival.’5 The emotional and psychological stability won through to in these sequences – in the benignity of a tiny handful of poems in Crow, in the reconciliatory gestures of mutuality in Cave Birds and in the verse hymns of Gaudete – remain, however, precarious and temporary. They are stages in a process, not stations of arrival. For, as the ‘Finale’ 5

A letter to Seamus Heaney (1 January 1998) offers remarkable confirmation of the single root from which the Shakespeare book and at least some of Hughes’s poems grew. ‘I sometimes wondered if that Shakes [sic] tome wasn’t the poem I should have written – decoded, hugely deflected and dumped on shoulders that could carry it’ (Letters of Ted Hughes, p. 704).

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of Cave Birds tells us, ‘At the end of the ritual // up comes a goblin’; and this, as we have seen, is the Ainu proverb also cited in the Goddess when Hughes says, of the masque in The Tempest, that it ‘produces its own destruction’ (G, p. 446). In Ted Hughes creativity is always liable to prove combustible and may explode in the poet’s hands; as it may, also, in Ted Hughes’s Shakespeare. sylvia plath The orientations of the trilogy are away from the autobiographical but their impulses originate there; and the way in which the numerical adjective ‘third’ reaches out towards a known history pre-existing Gaudete is complemented by a resonant numeral in ‘Crow Improvises’: So in one hand he caught a girl’s laugh – all there was of it, In the other a seven-year honeymoon – all that he remembered – The spark that crashed through coked up his gonads.

The first line catches up a poignantly uncorrupted joie de vivre which the third line savages with, even for the ‘super-ugly’ language of Crow, a joltingly brutal vulgarism: and what separates the two may be glossed, dreadfully, by the very specific venom of the penultimate stanza of Sylvia Plath’s ‘Daddy’: If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two – The vampire who said he was you And drank my blood for a year, Seven years, if you want to know.

That there is a creative tension in Hughes’s work between mythical method and autobiographical impulse is most expansively proven by the volume Birthday Letters, the last he published in his lifetime, a lengthy sequence exclusively about his relationship with Plath, which is closer in technique and procedure to the poetry of self in Robert Lowell than it is to modernist mythopoeia. That Plath was a permanent fixture of Hughes’s consciousness and imagination is unsurprising, but it still comes as a shock to discover him writing poems in this sequence – ‘Wuthering Heights’, ‘The Rabbit Catcher’ and ‘Totem’, among others – which take famous titles from her and almost obsessively revisit their occasions. A great deal has been written about Birthday Letters; but, although the presence of Shakespeare has been observed – by Erica Wagner, for instance – its deep entwining in the

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relationship as Hughes recalls, figures or reinvents it has not been given its due.6 To notice the presence of The Tempest in the sequence is to become more crucially aware both of the singleness of endeavour which sustains Hughes’s prose and poetry and of the centrality of Sylvia Plath to his very conception of the generative energies of Shakespeare’s work. This is dramatised in the prose by the way the introduction to the Goddess makes room for a lengthy digression on Plath. Offering a précis of his superb earlier essay on the drafts of her poem ‘Sheep in Fog’, collected in Winter Pollen, Hughes now suggests how, comparably to Shakespeare, Plath’s ‘mythic personality’ drives the ‘realistic plot’ of the poems, which thereby evince ‘in the most literal sense a life-and-death emergency trying to communicate itself’. ‘Throughout this book,’ he says, ‘I interpret Shakespeare’s successive mature plays in just this way’ (G, pp. 42–3); which appears to give priority, in his thinking about Shakespeare, to his thinking about Plath. The Tempest forms part of the figuration of both ‘St. Botolph’s’, Hughes’s evocation of his first meeting with her, and ‘Freedom of Speech’, his imaginative projection of a sixtieth birthday party for her; and ‘Setebos’ characterises their relationship, and relations with others, in terms of the play’s characters. In ‘St. Botolph’s’ The Tempest figures in a brief allusion when Hughes represents himself as having consulted ‘Prospero’s book’ about the occasion of the meeting, which was a party for a literary magazine in which he had published poems: this book has predicted ‘disastrous expense’, and the phrase is ominously repeated within a few lines. ‘Our Chaucer would have stayed at home with his Dante’ as the result of any such consultation, the poem says, but He would have assured us, shaking his sorrowful head, That day the solar system married us Whether we knew it or not.

The consultation of Prospero’s book is one of many references in the sequence to astrological influences and spiritualist interventions: so many, indeed, as to suggest that Hughes reads the relationship with Plath, at least in retrospect, as itself mythologically plotted or even predestined since, had he reacted in a different way to the book’s prediction, he might well never have met her. This is the force of the astrological assurance which he then imagines Chaucer articulating. Having their first meeting brooded over by Shakespeare, Chaucer and Dante is also to set their own poetic stars very high indeed; and the sequence sometimes possesses an extravagance which 6

See Erica Wagner, Ariel’s Gift (London: Faber and Faber, 2000).

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risks ridicule, even if this is usually mitigated by an intentness of recall or reimagining which subsumes the very possibility. Like Lawrence, Hughes levelly takes risks in order to get some most unusual things said. That he fully realises, even courts, the risk is suggested by ‘Setebos’, in which relations between himself, Plath and Plath’s mother are figured in terms of the characters of The Tempest: Hughes is Ferdinand; Plath is Miranda; and Aurelia Plath is Prospero, ambivalently both benign and malign. It is relevant that in the 1960s Hughes wrote a play called ‘The Calm’ which Sylvia Plath thought ‘the dark opposite to … The Tempest’.7 We cannot know about the play, which seems not to have survived: but the poem is alert to the potentially portentous nature of the analogues and includes a line ambivalently poised between anxiety and insistence, both vulnerably betraying insecurity and urgently wanting to put a truth on record: ‘And it was like that, yes, it was like that’; which seems Hughes’s equivalent of, and surely remembers, Lowell’s apologia in ‘Epilogue’ at the end of Day by Day (1977), ‘Yet why not say what happened?’ ‘Setebos’ is also a poem about portent, since the tale it tells is one in which ‘the script overtook us’. Caliban is imagined returning as the terrifying voice of Plath’s poems ‘Elm’ and ‘Event’, and Sycorax, Caliban’s mother, from whom Prospero has expropriated the island, turns into a figure hounding the poem’s Ferdinand/Hughes figure until, in the final lines, he crawls under a gabardine, as Caliban does in The Tempest, where he hears the cry of pursuing hounds. So the poem finally crosses The Tempest with an evocation of Venus and Adonis, the Ur-poem of the Tragic Equation. Setebos, the deity or demon worshipped by Sycorax, goes unnamed in the poem itself but does, of course, supply its title: so we should read hers as the name of the chaos this marriage collapses into. As such, ‘Setebos’ fulfils the omen of an earlier poem in the sequence, ‘Ouija’. Echoing work by Plath, this again figures Shakespeare, in what is probably the most peculiar way even in Hughes’s work. One of the spirits responding when Plath and Hughes sit at the Ouija board is a poet whose favourite poet is Shakespeare and who writes pastiche Shakespearean lines. This spirit is a joker, the poem says: but his favourite line is Lear’s almost insupportable line about an insupportable thing, ‘Never never never never never’; and ‘Ouija’ ends with Hughes imagining Plath picking up from the Ouija encounter ‘a whisper I could not hear’, ‘some still small voice’ addressing her in secret. The biblical still small voice in the First Book of 7

Cited in Diane Middlebrook, Her Husband: Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), p. 137.

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Kings is a manifestation of the voice of God, but the voice issuing in this poem, foretelling the price of fame, is that of a very menacing god indeed: ‘Fame will come. Fame especially for you. Fame cannot be avoided. And when it comes You will have paid for it with your happiness, Your husband and your life.’

By contrast, ‘Freedom of Speech’, a poem of deep yearning and grief, is a poem of portent become posthumous to itself. Imagining a sixtieth birthday for Plath, it enters into almost uncanny correspondence with her own deeply unsettling poem ‘A Birthday Present’. Hughes’s poem is, literally, a ‘birthday letter’; except that the person addressed could never have had a sixtieth birthday and cannot receive a letter. In Plath’s poem a mysterious veiled object sits between the speaker and an apostrophised ‘you’, and the poem asks anxious, repeated questions about its identity. These waver disconcertingly between the realistic and the surreal; and the element of panic is enforced by a reference to a suicide attempt. As the poem’s address proceeds it more and more co-opts the addressee in a way both menacing and anguished: he (for we assume it is a he) is cajoled, reprimanded, blamed and persuaded, sometimes in imperative injunctions. Finally, apparently in contradistinction to the veiled gift actually proffered, the speaker says, ‘There is this one thing I want today, and only you can give it to me’: and ‘it’ becomes the subject and object of some of the poem’s final evocations, one of which includes the possibility that ‘it’ may be death, and therefore that this birthday may be a deathday too. Among these evocations in the poem’s solemn concluding unrhyming couplets there is this: ‘Let it not come by word of mouth, I should be sixty / By the time the whole of it was delivered, and too numb to use it.’ ‘Freedom of Speech’ opens, ‘At your sixtieth birthday, in the cake’s glow, / Ariel sits on your knuckle’, which has a piercing echo of ‘Littleblood’ (‘Sit on my finger, sing in my ear’); and the poem, apostrophising Plath, imagines a party of friends – ‘Some famous authors, your court of brilliant minds’ – gathered in benign laughter; and the word ‘laughter’ recurs several times in its four brief verses. The laughter also includes that of ‘your Mummy’, ‘your children’ and even ‘your Daddy’, the Otto Plath who has figured in ways inducing no laughter whatever elsewhere in the sequence (and the capitalisation of whose name cannot but recall the poem title ‘Daddy’). None of these is actually present at the party, though, and the Daddy, indeed, ‘Laughs deep in his coffin’. The laughter also includes that of poppies, candles and stars, those radiantly emblematic properties in

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Plath – the poppies of ‘Poppies in October’, for instance, the candles of ‘Nick and the Candlestick’, and the stars of ‘Crossing the Water’: so that ‘Freedom of Speech’ seems a reprise of some of her most unforgettable work. Bracketing this chorus of celebratory acclaim, however, are the opening and closing verses. In the opening one Ariel sits on Plath’s knuckle while she remains solemnly outside the circle of joy; and at the poem’s conclusion former husband and wife collude in a kind of blankly desolate joylessness: And Ariel – What about Ariel? Ariel is happy to be here. Only you and I do not smile.

‘Let it not come by word of mouth’, ‘The Birthday Present’ prays. Hughes’s title, ‘Freedom of Speech’, may respond to that and could be read as his invention for Plath of the birthday present which, in her own poem, she imagines waiting for until she is sixty. ‘Freedom of Speech’ hauntedly, and hauntingly, imagines what might have been and joins it to what has been and what is, and does so under the auspices of Shakespeare’s Ariel. Literally ‘auspices’, since Ariel is conjured as an ominous bird taking grapes from Plath’s lips in a way that seems both erotic and occult: ‘auspice: an observation of birds for the purpose of obtaining omens; a sign or token given by birds’ (OED). ‘Freedom of Speech’ is heavy with omen, but omen exhausted or fulfilled, desolately plunged into the posthumous. So, although Ariel is ‘happy to be here’ at the poem’s conclusion, he is notably not himself joining in the general laughter. Prospero does call Ariel ‘my bird’ (4.1.184), so Hughes has Shakespearean sanction for this figuration; but it is still very striking that he conjures the figure of Ariel, in a poem about Plath, in a way that far more prominently remembers Shakespeare’s than Plath’s own (whose Ariel, in the title poem of her posthumous volume, is, famously, a horse). In this, ‘Freedom of Speech’ is prepared for by ‘Setebos’ which precedes it in the sequence, in which the honeymoon of Hughes and Plath is presided over by Ariel too: Ariel Entertained us night and day. The voices and sounds and sweet airs Were our aura. Ariel was our aura.

In these lines Hughes voices his own sounds and sweet airs as an interweaving with Ariel’s, sounding the sweet assonances of ‘Ariel’, ‘Entertained’,

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‘day’, ‘airs’, ‘aura’, ‘Ariel’ and ‘aura’: a consort of harmony cruelly disrupted by the atonal energies crowding the culmination of this devastated poem. But Ariel is the defining volume which created Plath’s posthumous fame: so it may also be regarded as the birthday present brought by Hughes, its editor, in the poem ‘Freedom of Speech’. A great deal has been said about the problems involved in Hughes’s editing of Plath (‘a so-called neutral activity weighed down by the heaviest of psychosexual, aesthetic and ethical investment’, says Jacqueline Rose, justly); and these give prominence to his controversial editorial decisions about Ariel.8 Although ‘Ariel’ is a poem about a horse-ride and nowhere refers to Shakespeare, it is impossible not to recall Shakespeare’s figure in relation to Plath’s title, particularly if we know that an early title for her first book, The Colossus, was Full Fathom Five, which is one of Ariel’s songs.9 She explains the title, which is also that of a poem in the book, like this in her journal: It relates more richly to my life and imagery than anything else I’ve dreamed up: has the background of The Tempest, the association of the sea, which is a central metaphor for my childhood, my poems and the artist’s subconscious, to the father image – relating to my own father, the buried male muse and god-creator risen to be my mate in Ted, to the sea-father neptune [sic] – and the pearls and coral highlywrought to art: pearls sea-changed from the ubiquitous grit of sorrow and dull routine.10

Birthday Letters relates more explicitly, if not necessarily more richly, to Sylvia Plath’s life and imagery than anything else Ted Hughes dreamed up; and when ‘Freedom of Speech’ returns Ariel from the name of Plath’s horse to the name found in a Shakespeare play which deeply appealed to Plath, we should read into the gesture appeal, apology, anxiety and attempted reparation, together with, certainly, an absolute recognition of the ubiquitous grit of sorrow, even amid the joyous laughter of this birthday party which can exist only in the eternal posthumousness of the poetic imagination. In Hughes’s prose on Plath her truest poetic voice is always called her ‘Ariel voice’; and in the essay ‘Sylvia Plath and Her Journals’ he characterises her greatest poetry as ‘roots only’ – ‘Or as if all 8

9 10

The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, p. 74. Marjorie Perloff’s ‘The Two Ariels: The (Re)making of the Sylvia Plath Canon’ is a key document here; and in 2004 Ariel: The Restored Edition, describing itself as ‘A facsimile of Plath’s manuscript, reinstating her original selection and arrangement’, was published by Faber and Faber, with a foreword by Frieda Hughes. Even so, the title The Colossus itself has a Shakespearean association: with Julius Caesar, in which Cassius says of Caesar that he ‘bestrides the narrow world like a colossus’. The Journals of Sylvia Plath 1950–1962, ed. Karen V. Kukil (London: Faber and Faber, 2000), p. 381.

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poetry were made up of the feats and shows performed by the poetic spirit Ariel. Whereas her poetry is the biology of Ariel, the ontology of Ariel – the story of Ariel’s imprisonment in the pine, before Prospero opened it’ (WP, p. 178). But who permits freedom of speech to whom in this poem? It is Hughes’s poem, so it is his speech that operates freely: but it is Plath who has the commanding presence, even in her solemn silence. In this respect, and in some others, it may be regarded as a riposte to, or apology for, ‘Bad News Good!’, a much earlier, savagely unappeased poem published in 1963, the year of Plath’s death, but never subsequently collected by Hughes himself. It portrays a woman ‘under crow-possession’ who ‘Will pluck out her evil tidings / From your eye’s lightest confession, / Then flap off with the evidence bleeding’. Her ‘bodings’ – the ‘bad news’ of the title, presumably, ‘good’ only in that this is the only news there is – victimise and kill, in what appears a premeditated exercise of malignity; and at the poem’s conclusion the Shakespeare play evoked as analogue is not The Tempest but, with hideous aptness, Othello: What of Iago, idiot, or revenge There is in her, I do not know – Lust to rend and to derange Is the nature of a crow: Messenger innocence of God’s will, Delivering the black of Hell – Till every word that wounds be buried Where it comes closest to kill.

This is a venomous poem, apparently bent on coded revenge, and congruent with detail offered in the biographies of the part played by rumour, gossip, innuendo and Aurelia Plath in the Hughes–Plath marriage. ‘Bad News Good!’ may be read as an alternative Ur-Crow poem: and this would plot Shakespeare even more integrally into Crow, putting Iago, as it were, in at the kill. laureate poems Ariel is the name of a bird in ‘Freedom of Speech’ but is once more the name of a horse in ‘A Unicorn Called Ariel’, the fourth poem in the sequence ‘The Unicorn’, written in 1992 to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the Queen’s accession to the throne. This is one of several complicatedly mythological poems praising the endurance and validity of monarchy

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which Hughes wrote as Poet Laureate. In its composite mythology, as a footnote explains – needs to explain – the Queen is figured as three aspects of a supernatural Pegasus-Unicorn figure, one of which is ‘her horse-like magical vehicle (named Ariel, after Prospero’s magical servant in Shakespeare’s The Tempest)’ which ‘trots off in the earthly likeness of a racehorse’; and in another aspect this supernatural figure becomes ‘a woman, the racehorse’s owner, who likes a bet’.11 It is hard to judge if Hughes intends any humour in these figurations, and in one of his aspects as Poet Laureate it is not difficult to imagine him situating the supernatural at Royal Ascot: Gaudete, which situates it in a Northern English town, would have been useful preparation. Even if levity inheres in the conception, though, it is still strangely disconcerting to witness Hughes naming as Ariel any horse other than Plath’s, even if he does so here, once more, specifically with reference to The Tempest. It is more than tempting to feel that Sylvia Plath, in some weird form of psychological and mythological synapse, has infiltrated Hughes’s conception of the super-historical transcendentalism – for that is what his conception of monarchy amounts to – of this female monarch. Shakespeare, if not Sylvia Plath, figures elsewhere too in Hughes’s laureate poems. This sequence also includes, for instance, a poem called ‘Falstaff’ which illustrates how, for all his monarchical mythologising, Hughes has a beady eye on the problems of the House of Windsor’s public image in the early 1990s, on ‘the tabloid howl that tops the charts’. Falstaff is offered as an alternative to the ‘Court Jesters’ who accept cash for giving stories to the press and becomes, thereby, an image of the best of British: ‘Britain, Falstaff in disguise, / Laughs with the Queen and keeps her wise.’ This laughter is characterised in the accompanying footnote as ‘bound to nobody, free, affectionate, all-accepting, all-forgiving, illuminating, liberating – as the laughter of a Zen master ought to be’.12 Hughes’s reluctance to confront the real damage done to the monarchy by these stories – by, that is, the behaviour of the royal family – is betrayed by this shining-upward-faced idealising of Falstaff, whose Zen laughter would, no doubt, have been music to the ears of those ‘mortal men, mortal men’ of whom he venally makes canon fodder in Henry IV Part II, and who, after all, had to be cast off before Hal could become, not ‘be kept’, wise as Henry V, whatever was lost in transit. The conception of Falstaff as Zen master is even more hyperbolic than Auden’s conception of him as Christ, and without as justified a 11

Collected Poems, p. 1224.

12

Ibid., p. 1222.

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rationale. William Empson would undoubtedly have reminded Hughes, as he reminded Auden, that Falstaff is an ‘old brute’ too.13 Shakespeare is also very much part of the intricately woven texture of the sequences ‘A Birthday Masque’ and ‘An Almost Thornless Crown’. In the latter, as another of Hughes’s fascinatingly peculiar footnotes tells us, the ‘slightly thorny’ crown of the poem is partly ‘in memory of the nettle and weed-flower crown worn by King Lear in Shakespeare’s play, at the moment of his rebirth, the point at which he becomes like an idiot-savant, a grey-bearded infant saint in Cordelia’s arms, a kind of almost risen Christ in the arms of a kind of Mary’.14 Although the imprecision of the repeated ‘a kind of’ and the qualification ‘almost’ suggest insecurity in the conception even in its articulation, this attempts to Christianise some of Hughes’s perceptions in the Goddess in a way possibly acknowledging that the Queen is Head of the Church of England and that therefore the laureateship is a post with Christian associations, even responsibilities.15 However, this in fact seems much more Roman Catholic than even High Anglican in its Marian, pietà imagery, in a way that may return our minds to the concluding poem-hymns of Gaudete. When Hughes subsequently says that the Flower Crown ‘associates the Queen with the King who is not only the hero of the crucial work by our national prophet and seer, but is the only king in British legendary history who was originally a god’, we must fear that the Queen, had she taken the point – and we should not, I suppose, assume that she did not – may well have found the association with Lear (who had very difficult children) less than entirely diplomatic or ‘helpful’, despite its apparent offer of apotheosis. Anyone writing on Ted Hughes and Shakespeare must note the Shakespearean presence in Hughes’s laureate work, but in general these poems – in this respect, if in few others, like numerous poems by other poets laureate – fail to sustain much interest. Although sometimes breathtakingly imaginative in conception (even if we must decipher this from the prose glosses rather than the poems themselves), they are heraldic, ritualised, burnished and deliberated to the point of deep obscurity and are, in the main, something other than poems: ‘masques’, maybe, as one of them is

13

14 15

William Empson, ‘The Just Man Made Innocent’ (1963), in Argufying: Essays on Literature and Culture, edited and introduced by John Haffenden (1987; London: The Hogarth Press, 1988), pp. 378–81. Collected Poems, p. 1217. Neil Roberts writes illuminatingly about Hughes as laureate in Ted Hughes: A Literary Life (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

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actually entitled, after that form which more or less died with Charles I, or prayers to the ancient god of hierarchical monarchy. In all of these respects too they may be compared with those poems in which Hughes more officially, as it were, recognises Shakespeare, in ways paralleling, and effectively glossed by, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. I am thinking of such poems as ‘An Alchemy’, written in 1973 for the Shakespeare Birthday Celebration at the Globe Theatre and published in the Poems for Shakespeare series of pamphlets, which traces a virtual diagram of the Equation in which Shakespeare’s plays and characters (including the memorably phrased ‘Icicle Angelo’) metamorphose into one another; ‘Unfinished Mystery’, published in 1980, in which a similar metamorphic process produces, out of a parade of Shakespearean characters, an ‘Oliver Milton’ and the sense of a still uncompleted English history of Protestant individualism; and ‘A Full House’, also written for Poems for Shakespeare, in 1987, a sequence in which a further versification of the Equation is staged as the conceit of a reading of some of Shakespeare’s works as a set of playing cards. One poem in this sequence, ‘King of Hearts’, was reprinted separately as ‘Shakespeare, drafting his will’, one of the last poems Hughes saw to press. Although to my mind of little intrinsic interest, it does, therefore, offer a final testimony to the way Shakespeare was present to Hughes from first to last – as both ‘omen and amen’, as Seamus Heaney has it in the title of his essay on ‘Littleblood’.

ophelia ‘Ophelia’, one of the poems in River (1983), includes Shakespeare but is at the opposite end of the spectrum from the heraldic. It spots Ophelia tumbling animatedly in the water among trout, leading a submarine afterlife in a way possibly deriving from Gertrude’s amazing description of her death by drowning: ‘Her clothes spread wide, / And mermaid-like awhile they bore her up.’ Although the poem actually uses the word ‘death’, it is wonderfully lively and tender, its anapaests and dactyls evoking fleeting glimpses of Ophelia at beginning and end: Where the pool unfurls its undercloud – There she goes … There she goes Darkfish, finger to her lips, Staringly into the afterworld.

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Finger to her lips – like the mad nun of the ‘Myths, Metres, Rhythms’ essay in Winter Pollen – she is saying nothing and taking her dark knowledge with her, but going with eyes wide open, even if the memorable ‘staringly’ also activates its now obsolete meaning: ‘wildly’ or ‘frantically’. Is it possible that in this tender fantasy or figuration of the suicide Ophelia as a ‘darkfish’ staringly entering the afterworld, Hughes is once more crossing Shakespeare and Sylvia Plath? Finger to its own lips, this poem is not saying: but Ted Hughes’s imagination is itself manifestly possessed by both, and by both simultaneously.16 16

In a letter to Janos Csokits, of 6 August 1967, Hughes interprets his story ‘The Suitor’, written in 1962 and published in Wodwo (1967). Calling it ‘a story of death & the maiden’, he describes it as ‘a prophecy’, and says that ‘the girl is my spirit of light, my Ophelia’ (Letters of Ted Hughes, p. 274).

Index

Albright, Daniel, 44, 52 Alvarez, A. New Poetry, The, 190 Penguin Modern European Poets series, 15 Andrewes, Lancelot, 198 Ansen, Alan, 124, 128 Table Talk, 151 Arendt, Hannah, 127 Arnold, Matthew, 69, 98 On the Study of Celtic Literature, 32, 57 Artaud, Antonin, 217 Auden, W. H., 11, 22, 33, 36, 45, 119, 123–79, 199, 218 About the House ‘Cave of Making, The’, 158 ‘Thanksgiving for a Habitat’, 148 Age of Anxiety, The, 129 ‘Ars Poetica’, 167 ‘At the Grave of Henry James’, 173 ‘Balaam and His Ass’, 123, 160 ‘Brothers and Others’, 137 Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays, The, 123, 125, 128, 129, 134, 137, 139 Enchafèd Flood, The, 133 ‘For The Time Being’, 162, 163 Forewords and Afterwords, 123, 141 ‘Forty Years On’, 148, 157–9 ‘Globe, The’, 131, 136, 144 ‘Horae Canonicae’, 171 ‘If I Could Tell You’, 132 ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’, 147–8 ‘Joker in the Pack, The’, 126, 130, 131, 137, 138, 156 lectures, 127 on Coriolanus, 127, 130 on Henry IV and Henry V, 129, 151 on Henry VI, 127 on Julius Caesar, 127, 130 on Measure for Measure, 130 on Merchant of Venice, The, 145 on Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 127, 135 on Much Ado About Nothing, 127

on Othello, 138 as Oxford Professor of Poetry, 123 on Romeo and Juliet, 129 on Tempest, The, 160 Lectures on Shakespeare, 124, 147 ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, 143 ‘Music in Shakespeare’, 123 ‘Out on the lawn I lie in bed’, 143 Paid On Both Sides, 177 ‘Prince’s Dog, The’, 137, 138–9, 141 ‘Protestant Mystics, The’, 141 ‘Sea and the Mirror, The’, 14, 132, 134, 135, 137, 142, 146, 159–179, 230 ‘September 1, 1939’, 149 ‘Shakespearian City, The’, 123, 140 ‘Shield of Achilles, The’, 155 ‘Spain’, 167 ‘“Truest Poetry Is the Most Feigning, The”’, 18, 154–7, 159 ‘Under Which Lyre’, 148–52, 158 ‘Whitsunday in Kirchstetten’, 171 Augustine, 127 City of God, The, 123 Bacon, Francis, 210 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 2 Baldick, Chris, 191 Ballets Russes, 70 Bate, Jonathan, The Genius of Shakespeare, 165 Beckett, Samuel, 199 Endgame, 113 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 46, 81 Benjamin, Walter, 2, 90, 111 Bennett, Arnold, 70 Benson, Frank, 28 Berryman, John, 10–12, 124, 152, 193 Berryman’s Shakespeare, 10, 12 Dream Song 29, 83 Dream Songs, 11–12 Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, 12 ‘Shakespeare at Thirty’, 10

242

Index Blackburn, Thomas, 125 Blake, William, 28, 58, 184 ‘Everlasting Gospel, The’, 30 Bloom, Harold, 56 Anxiety of Influence, The, 1–3 Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, 140 Boyd, Brian, 21 Bradley, A. C., 72, 131, 222 ‘Rejection of Falstaff, The’, 126 Bradshaw, Graham, 218 Brancusi, Constantine, 40 Brecht, Bertolt, 107 Brodsky, Joseph, 150 Brontë, Emily, ‘Plead for Me’, 162 Brook, Peter, 191, 198 Brooks, Cleanth, 63 Browning, Robert, 119 Bruno, Giordano, 194, 217 Buber, Martin, 127 Burckhardt, Jacob, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, 38 Calvin, John, 200 camelots du roi, 107 Carroll, Lewis, Alice Through the LookingGlass, 171 Cavafy, C. P., ‘In a Township of Asia Minor’, 155 Cavalcanti, Guido, ‘Ballata, written in exile at Speranza’, 91 Cervantes, Don Quixote, 160 Césaire, Aimé, 33 Une Tempête, 161 Chaplin, Charlie, 70, 71 Charles I, 240 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 38, 56, 94, 184, 232 Clare, John, 217 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 14, 67, 75, 94, 184, 187, 216, 220 ‘Christabel’, 184 Shakespeare lectures, 125 Collinson, Patrick, 205 Conant, James Bryant, 151 Courbet, Gustave, 99 Cromwell, Oliver, 200, 206, 211, 219 Cruttwell, Patrick, 206, 218 Shakespearean Moment, The, 186 Cullingford, Elizabeth Butler, 43 cummings, e.e., 3–4 Dante, 79, 82–6, 96, 100, 193, 219, 221–2, 232 Divina Commedia, La, 221 Inferno, 90, 137, 169, 221 Paradiso, 221 Vita Nuova, La, 141 Davies, Michael, 205

243

Deane, Seamus, 204 Derrida, Jacques, 185 Desai, Rupin W., 39 Dickens, Charles, Bleak House, 171 Donne, John, 186, 206 ‘Whispers of Immortality’, 93 Donoghue, Denis, 88 Words Alone, 114 Doolittle, Hilda See H. D. Douglas, Keith, 196 Dowden, Edward, 31, 32, 34, 40, 49, 58 Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art, 29 Dryden, John, 67, 68, 87 Edwards, Philip, 28 Eliot, T. S., 11, 16, 20, 21, 34, 39, 45, 63–120, 126, 136, 140, 145, 171, 186, 187, 192, 199, 202, 205, 217, 219, 220–2 After Strange Gods, 99, 100–1 ‘Apology for the Countess of Pembroke’, 68 Ara Vos Prec, 103 ‘Ode’, 65, 103–6 Ash-Wednesday, 78, 91–3, 120 ‘Beating of a Drum, The’, 63, 69 ‘Ben Jonson’, 73, 83 ‘Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar’, 73, 97, 113–15 ‘Burial of the Dead, The’, 110 ‘Burnt Norton’, 108 Charles Eliot Norton lectures, 79, 98 Clark lectures, 66 Collected Poems (1936), 105 ‘Cooking Egg, A’, 105 ‘Coriolan’, 71, 76, 89, 102–10, 117, 127 ‘Triumphal March’, 105, 106–9 ‘Difficulties of a Statesman’, 105, 108 ‘Dante’, 82, 84, 85 ‘Death by Water’, 112 ‘Dirge’, 112–13, 115 ‘East Coker’, 77, 82, 99, 163 Edinburgh lectures, 114, 116 Elizabethan Dramatists, 65 ‘Figlia Che Piange, La’, 86 ‘First Debate between the Body and Soul’, 86 Four Quartets, 79, 108, 178, 221 ‘Frontiers of Criticism, The’, 65 ‘Game of Chess, A’, 21, 95, 111, 114 ‘Gerontion’, 103, 117 ‘Goethe as the Sage’, 78 ‘Hamlet and His Problems’, 64, 65, 67, 72, 74 ‘Hollow Men, The’, 78, 86 ‘Interlude in a Bar’, 102 ‘Little Gidding’, 86, 98, 99, 100–1, 103, 163, 229

244

Index

Eliot, T. S., (cont.) ‘Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The’, 19, 68, 78, 93–6 ‘Mandarins’, 102 ‘Marina’, 17, 72, 115–20, 178 ‘Music of Poetry, The’, 80–1, 192 ‘Nocturne’, 86, 94 On Poetry and Poets, 64 ‘Poetic Drama, The’, 89 ‘Poetry and Drama’, 64, 82 ‘Possibility of a Poetic Drama, The’, 70, 79 ‘“Rhetoric” and Poetic Drama’, 72, 86 Sacred Wood, The, 64, 65, 82 ‘Seneca in Elizabethan Translation’, 79, 118 ‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’, 64, 65, 66, 75, 83, 118 ‘Shakespeares Verkunst’, 64 ‘Sweeney Agonistes’, 70, 109 ‘Sweeney Among the Nightingales’, 99, 178 ‘Three Voices of Poetry, The’, 73 ‘To Criticize the Critic’, 64, 72, 74–5 ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, 84, 100 Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, The, 102 Waste Land, The, 18, 21, 65, 73, 78, 85, 90, 97, 99, 102, 105, 110–16, 120, 178 ‘What Dante Means To Me’, 82, 85, 86 Wheel of Fire, The (G. Wilson Knight), introduction to, 76, 82, 116 Yeats Lecture, 99 Eliot, Valerie, 112, 115 Eliot, Vivien, 106 Elizabeth I, 204, 206, 210 Elizabeth II, 239 Ellmann, Richard, 56 Eminent Domain, 1 Empson, William, 67, 95, 115, 126, 139, 193, 239 Seven Types of Ambiguity, 3, 4 Some Versions of Pastoral, 4 Structure of Complex Words, The, 4, 72 ‘To an Old Lady’, 4–5 English Civil War, 187, 206, 207, 211, 219 Euripides, Hippolytus, 203 Fanon, Frantz, 33 Fenton, James, 143 Feuer, Donya, 222 Fiedler, Leslie, Stranger in Shakespeare, The, 218 First World War, poetry of the, 5–9 Ford, John, 66 Ford, Mark, 178 Freud, Sigmund, 127, 131 Frye, Northrop, 63, 218

Fuller, John, 147, 164, 173 Fuller, Roy, 183, 185, 199 Fuseli, Henry, ‘Nightmare, The’, 48 Garber, Marjorie, 2, 90, 105 Gardner, Helen, 97 Gilbert, Sandra M., 192 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 67, 75, 94 Golding, William, The Inheritors, 206 Gonne, Maud, 46, 53 Grady, Hugh, 63, 71 Granville-Barker, Harley, 67 Graves, Robert, 5, 204, 216 Survey of Modernist Poetry, A, 3–4 White Goddess, The, 200 Gregory, Lady Augusta, 28, 29, 32, 34 Griffin, Howard, 124 Gross, Kenneth, Shakespeare is Shylock, 113 Gunn, Thom, 22 My Sad Captains, 22 Gwynn, Stephen, Experiences of a Literary Man, 34 Hall, Joseph, 206 Halpern, Richard, 63, 65 Hawkes, Terence, 88, 106, 109 Haydn, Franz Joseph, 14 Hayward, John, 97 Hazlitt, William, 30, 126 H. D., 9 By Avon River, 9–10 Heaney, Seamus, 140, 228, 230 ‘Omen and Amen: On “Littleblood” ’, 240 Hecht, Anthony, 151 Transparent Man, The ‘A Love for Four Voices’, 14–15 Henry VIII, 210 Herbert, Zbigniew, 19 Study of the Object, ‘Elegy of Fortinbras’, 17 ‘To Ryszard Krynicki – A Letter’, 17 Heywood, Thomas, 66 Hill, Geoffrey, 22 Hitler, Adolf, 108, 129, 133, 164 Holub, Miroslav Primer, ‘Polonius’, 18, 19 So-Called Heart, The, ‘Prince Hamlet’s Milk Tooth’, 18–19 Homer, 155 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 184, 185, 187 ‘Heaven-Haven’, 186 Housman, A. E., 127 Hughes, Ted, 77, 81, 87, 143, 145, 183–241 ‘Alchemy, An’, 240 ‘Almost Thornless Crown, An’, 239

Index ‘Bad News Good!’, 237 Birthday Letters, 188, 231–7 ‘Birthday Masque, A’, 239 Calm, The, 233 Cave Birds, 223, 227, 230 ‘Bride and groom lie hidden for three days’, 228 ‘Epilogue’, 213 ‘Finale’, 230 ‘Green mother, A’, 228 ‘Knight, The’, 228 Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse, A, 187, 189, 201, 212, 218 Collected Poems, 226 Crow, 20, 223–8, 230 ‘Dream of Horses, A’, 190 Earth-Numb, 226 ‘Freedom of Speech’, 234–5 ‘Full House, A’, 240 Gaudete, 223–5, 228–31, 238, 239 Hawk in the Rain, The, 183, 190 ‘Hawk in the Rain, The’, 187 ‘Horses, The’, 183 ‘King of Hearts’, 240 Lupercal, ‘View of a Pig’, 215 ‘Myths, Metres, Rhythms’, 183, 185, 188, 190, 241 New Selected Poems, 226 Orghast, 198 ‘Ouija’, 233 Poems for Shakespeare, 240 ‘Poetic Self, The’, 192, 220 ‘Prospero and Sycorax’, 226–7 Recklings, ‘Dolly Gumption’s Addendum’, 201 River, ‘Ophelia’, 240 Selected Poems, 226 Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, 36, 185, 186, 189, 191, 192, 194, 198, 200–22, 223, 228, 231, 239, 240 ‘Unfinished Mystery’, 240 ‘Unicorn Called Ariel, A’, 237 Winter Pollen, 241 Wodwo, ‘Warriors of the North, The’, 201 Hunt, Violet, 28 Husserl, Edmund, 107 Huxley, Aldous, 145 Hyde, Douglas, 28 Irish Literary Theatre, 28 Isherwood, Christopher, 135 James I, 210 James, Henry, 137, 164, 173, 176, 177, 178 Wings of the Dove, The, 173 Jarrell, Randall, 134, 173

245

Jenkins, Nicholas, 129 Johnson, Samuel, 44, 68–9, 80, 127, 193 Jones, David, In Parenthesis, 6–9 Jonson, Ben, 73, 83, 116 Joyce, James, 27 Finnegans Wake, 195 Ulysses, 195 Julius, Anthony, 101, 115 Kafka, Franz, 160 Kallman, Chester, 134, 141, 142, 163, 165, 166, 177 Keats, John, 142, 159, 184 Keegan, Paul, 223 Kermode, Frank, 162 Kerrigan, John, 139 Kiberd, Declan, 33 Kierkegaard, Søren, 127, 132 Kipling, Rudyard, 127 Kirsch, Arthur, 124, 127, 131, 133, 168 Kittredge, G. L., 124 Knight, G. Wilson, 63, 71–2, 74, 76, 80, 81, 109, 116–17, 118, 120, 126 Crown of Life, The, 116 Imperial Theme, The, 76 Thaisa, 116 Knights, L. C., 63, 218 Kott, Jan, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, 20, 217 Kristeva, Julia, 2 Laforgue, Jules, 94, 104 Langbaum, Robert, 95 Langland, William, Piers Plowman, 184 Larkin, Philip, ‘At Grass’, 190 Lawrence, D. H., 127, 192, 219, 233 ‘The Ship of Death’, 22 ‘When I Read Shakespeare’, 22, 127 Women in Love, 172 Leavis, F. R., 143, 186, 218 Leishman, J. B., 161 Levin, Harry, 151 Lewis, Wyndham, 20, 40, 71–2, 74, 84, 205, 217 Lion and the Fox, The, 75, 107, 126, 218 Lloyd, Marie, 70 Lowell, Robert, 10, 12–14, 231 Day by Day, ‘Epilogue’, 233 For the Union Dead, ‘Caligula’, 13 History ‘Bosworth Field’, 13 ‘Coleridge and Richard II’, 14 Imitations, ‘Hamlet in Russia, A Soliloquy’, 15–16 Ludendorff, Erich, Coming War, The, 107 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 76 MacNeice, Louis, 48 ‘Autolycus’, 158

246 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 98, 176 Manet, Édouard, 99 Marlowe, Christopher, 79, 186 Hero and Leander, 153 Marvell, Andrew, 89 Mason, H. A., 103, 104–5 Massine, Léonide, 70 Maurras, Charles, L’Avenir de l’Intelligence, 107 McDiarmid, Lucy, Saving Civilisation, 186 McDonald, Peter, 163 Menand, Louis, Discovering Modernism: T. S. Eliot and His Context, 39, 105 Mendelson, Edward, 142, 150, 154 Michelangelo, 58 Milosz, Czeslaw, 17 Milton, John, 80, 187 Milward, Peter, Shakespeare’s Religious Background, 204 Modern Poetry in Translation, 195 Morris, William, 28, 38 Movement, The, 190 Muldoon, Paul, 190 ‘7 Middagh St’, 33 Murphy, William M., 34 Murry, Middleton, 77 Mussolini, Benito, 108, 155 Nabokov, Vladimir, Pale Fire, 20–1, 162 Neruda, Pablo, 195 New Criticism, 4, 72 New Historicism, 63 New School for Social Research in Greenwich Village, 128 Newman, Cardinal John Henry, 127 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 27, 73, 126 Orwell, George, 167 Ovid, 153, 197 Metamorphoses, 202 Owen, Wilfred, 56 Palfrey, Simon, 211 Palmer, Samuel, 32 Pascal, Blaise, 176 Pasternak, Boris Doctor Zhivago, 15 ‘Hamlet’, 15–16 Pater, Walter, ‘Shakespeare’s English Kings’, 34 Paulin, Tom, 204 Perloff, Marjorie, 236 Perse, St John, 195 Anabase, 106 Petronius, Satyricon, 65 Phoenix Society, 70 Piers Plowman, 229

Index Pilinszky, Janos, 195 Pirandello, Luigi, Henry IV, 113 Plath, Sylvia, 214, 220, 223–41 Ariel, 188, 236 Colossus, The, 236 ‘Daddy’, 142, 231, 234 Plato, Symposium, 141 Poole, Adrian, 27 Popa, Vasko, 195 Pope, Alexander ‘Essay on Criticism, An’, 162 ‘Rape of the Lock, The’, 154, 157 Pound, Ezra, 78, 112, 113 Cantos, 146 ‘In a Station of the Metro’, 217 Proust, Marcel, À La Recherche du Temps Perdu, 134 Puttenham, George, Arte of English Poesie, The, 191 Quiller-Couch, Arthur, 4 Racine, Jean, 70 Raine, Craig, 114 Raleigh, Walter, 218 Ramazani, Jahan, 33, 49 Rastelli, Enrico, 70 Rhodes, Neil, 191 Ricks, Christopher, 78, 87, 90, 102, 113, 115, 187 T. S. Eliot and Prejudice, 114 Riding, Laura, Survey of Modernist Poetry, A, 3–4 Rilke, Rainer Maria ‘Archaic Torso’, 132 ‘Der Geist Ariel’, 161–2 Rimbaud, Arthur, 127 ‘Génie’, 127 Roberts, Neil, 187 Robertson, J. M., 74, 76, 110 Rose, Jacqueline, 226, 236 Rossiter, A. P., 218 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 133 Rousseau, Théodore, 99 Różewicz, Tadeusz, 19–20 ‘Conversation with the Prince’, 19 ‘Nothing in Prospero’s Cloak’, 20 Rumi, 217 Rylands, George, 126 Schuchard, Ronald, 114 Schwartz, Delmore, 11 Scofield, Martin, 75, 97 Scott, Sir Walter, 184 Seneca, 79, 104 Hercules Furens, 118–19

Index Shakespeare, William All’s Well That Ends Well, 193–5, 208 Antony and Cleopatra, 21–2, 44, 49, 50, 69, 73, 74, 80, 85, 87, 97, 102, 110, 111, 113–14, 132, 135, 136, 144, 209, 211, 214, 224 As You Like It, 11, 42, 54, 123, 152–4, 156, 221 Coriolanus, 49, 72, 74, 76, 102–10, 127, 130, 132, 209 Cymbeline, 42 Hamlet, 5, 15–19, 22, 29, 36, 38, 48, 55, 58, 64, 68, 72, 74–5, 81, 101, 102, 105, 110, 111, 113, 126, 133, 135, 144, 148, 175, 186, 191, 199, 202, 208, 214, 219, 220, 223, 240 Henry IV, 123, 128, 129, 139, 151, 166 Part I, 224 Part II, 148, 228, 238 Henry V, 7–9, 30, 32–3, 46, 128, 129, 136, 151, 172 Henry VI, 6, 127, 214, 218 Julius Caesar, 104, 127, 130, 135, 144 King John, 145 King Lear, 5, 12, 42, 43, 48, 53, 55, 58, 69, 110, 111, 113, 132, 133, 160, 172, 198, 207, 209–10, 215, 226, 239 Love’s Labour’s Lost, 5, 49, 80, 135 Macbeth, 42, 43, 44, 48, 49, 50, 69, 104, 208, 224, 228 Measure for Measure, 103, 130, 135, 208 Merchant of Venice, The, 113–15, 123, 135, 137–8, 145, 174 Merry Wives of Windsor, The, 6 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A, 6, 14, 58, 127, 135, 228 Much Ado About Nothing, 123, 127 Othello, 43, 67, 72, 113, 123, 130, 132, 133, 135, 137, 138, 156, 208, 237 Pericles, 72, 115–20, 171, 178 Rape of Lucrece, The, 203–4 Richard II, 30–1, 32–3, 35, 46, 49, 135, 145 Richard III, 79, 129, 136 Romeo and Juliet, 45–6, 64, 81, 86, 129, 133, 135, 217 Sonnets, 22, 75, 128, 136, 141–4, 198, 202, 206, 217, 218, 222 sonnet 29, ‘When in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes’, 91–3 sonnet 55, ‘Not marble nor the gilded monuments / Of princes shall outlive this pow’rful rhyme’, 146 sonnet 66, ‘Tir’d with all these, for restful death I cry’, 199 sonnet 73, ‘That time of year thou mayst in me behold’, 4 sonnet 86, ‘Was it the proud full sail of his great verse …?’, 96

247

sonnet 111, ‘O, for my sake do you with Fortune chide’, 124 sonnet 121, ‘No, I am that I am, and those that level’, 143 sonnet 124, ‘If my dear love were but the child of state’, 139 sonnet 129, ‘The’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame’, 4 sonnet 144, ‘Two loves I have, of comfort and despair’, 11 Taming of the Shrew, The, 145 Tempest, The, 9, 13, 29, 33, 69, 85, 110–13, 115, 119, 120, 123, 135, 137, 160–79, 207, 208, 210, 212, 213–14, 218, 221, 226, 228, 231, 232–3, 236, 237, 238 Timon of Athens, 21, 47, 58, 72, 76, 209 Troilus and Cressida, 22, 76, 144, 145, 208 Twelfth Night, 13, 123, 132 Two Gentlemen of Verona, The, 93 Two Noble Kinsmen, The, 128 Venus and Adonis, 80, 202–5, 207, 212–13, 216, 218, 221, 233 Winter’s Tale, The, 43, 157, 158, 210 Shaw, George Bernard, 27 Sidney, Philip, 68 Defence of Poetry, 11, 153 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 184 Skelton, John, Magnificence, 177 Smart, Christopher, 184 Sophocles, 68 Spenser, Edmund, 28, 37, 41, 218 Stevens, Wallace, ‘Sunday Morning’, 51 Swift, Jonathan, 98 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 72 ‘That Shakespearean Rag’, 111 Thomas, Edward, 5–7 ‘Home’, 5 ‘Lob’, 5–7 ‘The Owl’, 5 Tottel, Richard, 184, 188, 189 Traversi, Derek, 218 Treaty of Versailles, 106, 107 Ure, Peter, 47 van Doren, Mark, 123 Vega, Lope de, 165 Vendler, Helen, 41, 42 Villon, François, 170 Virgil, 85 Aeneid, 214

248

Index

Wagner, Erica, 231 Warner, Marina, 215 Warsaw Pact, 17, 18, 21 Weil, Simone, 127 Welles, Orson, 107 Wellesley, Dorothy, 47 West, Nathaniel, 140 Whitman, Walt, 104 Wilde, Oscar, 27 Picture of Dorian Gray, The, 175 Wilmer, Clive, 22 Wilson, Richard, Secret Shakespeare, 204 Wilson, Woodrow, 106 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 125, 127, 198, 199 Wizard of Oz, The, 171 Woolf, Virginia, 127 Between the Acts, 127 Orlando, 9 Waves, The, 175 Wordsworth, William, 80, 141 Wright, George T., 197 Wyatt, Thomas, 184, 188, 189 Yeats, J. B., 35 Yeats, W. B., 27–59, 73, 101, 144, 171, 176, 184, 199, 220–1, 229 ‘Acre of Grass, An’, 57 ‘Ancestral Houses’, 31 ‘At Stratford-on-Avon’, 27, 28, 31, 34, 40, 46, 131, 219 Autobiographies, 32, 34, 38, 56 ‘Bronze Head, A’, 53 Cathleen ni Houlihan, 33 ‘Celtic Element in Literature, The’, 31–2 ‘Circus Animals’ Desertion, The’, 57, 58 Collected Poems, 59 ‘Coole and Ballylee, 1931’, 40 Crazy Jane poems, 42–5 ‘Crazy Jane Reproved’, 42 ‘Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop’, 42, 43 ‘Cuchulain Comforted’, 46

‘Discoveries’, 38 Explorations, 48 ‘General Introduction for my Work, A’, 28, 50, 53 ‘Gyres, The’, 50 Ideas of Good and Evil, 27, 31 ‘Lapis Lazuli’, 49, 51–7 Last Poems, 49 ‘Leda and the Swan’, 46 ‘Man and the Echo’, 33 ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’, 31 ‘Municipal Gallery Revisited, The’, 53 New Poems, 49 ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’, 42, 48 On Baile’s Strand, 46 Oxford Book of Modern Verse, The (Introduction), 99 ‘Parnell’s Funeral’, 52, 53 ‘Parting’, 44–6, 56 ‘Poetry and Tradition’, 50 ‘Prayer for my Daughter, A’, 45 Purgatory, 100 Responsibilities, 35 ‘Rosa Alchemica’, 53 Samhain, 49 ‘Solomon and the Witch’, 46 ‘Spur, The’, 100 ‘Statues, The’, 40, 46 ‘Three Bushes, The’, 41 ‘To the Rose upon the Rood of Time’, 46 ‘Tower, The’, 40, 48 ‘Under Ben Bulben’, 59 ‘Vacillation’, 98 Vision, A, 37, 39–40, 56, 200 Winding Stair and Other Poems, The, 44 ‘Three Movements’, 41 Woman Young and Old, A, 44 Words for Music Perhaps, 42 Zukofsky, Louis Bottom: On Shakespeare, 9