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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Shakespeare and the Modern Poet

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