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 isfigured in both the poetry and the critical prose of modern poets, this book presents a provoca-tive 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 sympa-thetic–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.
SHAKESPEARE AND THE
MODERN POET
c a m b r i d g e u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo
Cambridge University Press
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridgecb2 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 Corcoran2010
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 published2010
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.
isbn978-0-521-19982-7 (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
isbn978-0-521-19982-7Hardback
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,
Contents
Acknowledgements page vi
Introduction 1
part i yeats’s shakespeare 25
1 Setting a sail for shipwreck: Yeats’s Shakespeare criticism 27
2 Myself must I remake: Shakespeare in Yeats’s poetry 41
part ii eliot’s shakespeare 61
3 That man’s scope: Eliot’s Shakespeare criticism 63
4 This man’s gift: Shakespeare in Eliot’s poetry 90
part iii auden’s shakespeare 121
5 A plenum of experience: Auden’s Shakespeare criticism 123
6 The reality of the mirror: Shakespeare in Auden’s poetry 147
part iv ted hughes’s shakespeare 181
7 A language of the common bond 183
8 The Shakespearean moment 200
9 Survivor of cease: Shakespeare and Sylvia Plath in Ted
Hughes’s poems 223
Index 242
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 in2007. 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 ofThe Shakespearean Moment.
Introduction
i n f l u e n c e
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 centralfigures 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 writersflow 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 essen-tially the view ofThe Anxiety of Influencetoo, in which poetic interrelation-ships are read as a species of neo-Freudian, Oedipal melancholy, a version of the‘family romance’. Poetry, as a consequence, is‘misunderstanding,
mis-interpretation, misalliance’.2
Thefirst 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 phenom-enon. For the second edition published in1997, however, Bloom writes a
1 Richard Ellmann,Eminent Domain: Yeats among Wilde, Joyce, Pound, Eliot, and Auden(New York:
Oxford University Press,1967), p.3.
2
Harold Bloom,The Anxiety of Influence(New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press,1973), p.95.
preface in which he explains that in thefirst 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, whofirst, 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’.4So 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
The Anxiety of Influence(2nd edn,1997), p. xi.
4 Julia Kristeva,‘Revolution in Poetic Language’(1974), repr. Toril Moi (ed.),The Kristeva Reader
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell,1986), pp.89–136, p.111.
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 provok-ing or sterilisprovok-ing; it can involve the sharprovok-ing of humane inquiry or represent the fundamental foreclosure of opportunity; it can give rise to awed obei-sance or irreverently disfiguring travesty; it can be parabolic, or it can be self-projecting. 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 them-selves and, occasionally, one another; and in this process too Shakespeare becomes in many ways thefirst modern.
t h e f i r s t m o d e r n
There is one sense in which poets are manifestly responsible for making Shakespeare thefirst modern: the fact that hefigures 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 in1930, 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
cum-mings’s typography, which looked very‘modern’indeed in1927, now seems
an element of his occasionally attractive but often cloying faux-naiveté. Riding and Graves compare it to the original Q1609version of sonnet129,
5 William Empson,Seven Types of Ambiguity(1930;2nd edn,1947; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973), p.14.
‘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 conven-tional 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
read-ing 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 thefirst modern(ist).
That a Shakespearean sonnet may be read as a furiously dynamic cross-word puzzle clearly registered strongly with Empson; and Shakespeare is also a centralfigure in Seven Types of Ambiguity. He is an exemplar of all seven types, and the book’sfirst, now classic close reading is of sonnet73,
‘That time of year thou mayst in me behold’. Shakespearefigures centrally again in this book’s successors, Some Versions of Pastoral (1935) and The
Structure of Complex Words(1951). Empson’s ingenious, provocative
dem-onstrations 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 the1960s. 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
Laura Riding and Robert Graves,A Survey of Modernist Poetry, ed. Charles Mundye and Patrick McGuinness (1927; Manchester: Carcanet Press,2002), p.38.
7
Ibid., p.31.
Here Empson picks up Edgar’s famous words inKing 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
allu-sion, in fact, could be more weighty with reverence for a parent in age, more subdued topietas? 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 Ifind myself often citing it in what follows, and sometimes too as humane counterbalance to insensitivity, or excess, elsewhere.
s h a k e s p e a r e i n t h e f i r s t w o r l d w a r
Many modern poets, and poems, however, dofigure 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 thefirst of two poems called‘Home’, a poem strung between ambivalent longings for thefirst place and the last, between nostalgia and melancholia, stoical irresolution is ghosted by allusions to Hamlet’s‘To be or not to be’soliloquy sofleeting as to seem themselves almost vagrant,finding no adequate home in this poem of emo-tional 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’inLove’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 April1915, matches
its poet-persona ‘travelling / In search of something chance would never
bring’with afigure 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
figure is named multifariously during the poem: he is‘my ancient’,‘
Lob-lie-by-the-fire’,‘Lob’,‘tall Tom’,‘Hob’and‘our Jack’.‘Jack’is also Falstaff’s
name; and, as‘tall Tom’, thisfigure 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 offlowers, one of which is love-in-idleness, the magically trans-formative 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 inKing Leartransformed into the mad‘poor Tom’;
and the very name‘Lob’figures inA Midsummer Night’s Dreamtoo 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
representa-tion 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 1450which Shakespeare dramatises in one of the most memorable episodes ofHenry VI.
That iteration of names also makes thefigure of English folklore, legend, myth, politics and literature absolutely contemporary in1915as‘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’sIn 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 Lobfigure at the beginning of the poem tells the poet about‘barrows’opened sixty years earlier by archaeologists:‘They thought
as there was something tofind 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 archae-ologist of the ancient Wiltshire ground, retrieving an enduring spirit from
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-offpath. Shakespeare also talks to the lords of No Man’s Land inIn 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, December1915to July1916, 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 3scene 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 Parenthesisis set in the early phase of the war because Jones, controversially, sees continuities rather than discrep-ancies 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 Part2of Jones’s poem points to:‘corporals stay’because they are too
frightened to go. The allusions made byIn ParenthesistoHenry Vignore 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 fromThe Riverside Shakespeare,2nd edn, ed. G. Blakemore Evanset al. (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company,1997).
‘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
menfirst move into position underfire in Part3:
With hisfirst traversing each newly scrutinised his neighbour; this voice of his
Jubjub gains each David his Jonathan; his ordeal runs like acid to explore yourfine
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 Part7an 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 andHenry 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 afigure 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 ofHenry V, to do with both the absence of Falstaffand 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 anotherHenry Vwhich would have been of the same
heroi-comical mode asI-II Henry IV’.9
If this is so, then it seems to me that inIn Parenthesis we have a remarkable instance of a modern poeticfi gu-ration 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.
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 genera-tive, producing the responsively creative thing which isIn Parenthesisitself.
s h a k e s p e a r e i n a m e r i c a
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 erst-while Imagist poet Zukofsky’s Bottom: On Shakespeare (1963), which he
wrote between1947and 1960, is the product of a lifelong obsession with Shakespeare, whose work hefirst 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.’sBy 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 ofThe Tempesthave been return-ing. This is in turn paralleled with the journey of the ship theSea-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 inves-tigated; and this is a matter of almost obsessive vocational urgency:
Read through again,Dramatis Personae; She is not there at all, but Claribel,
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
Riversuddenly lapses from the intensity of its Shakespearean concentra-tion into what must be a matter of more private psychological and emotional moment. Nevertheless,By Avon Riveris 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 in1999. Berryman also projected but never completed an edition ofKing 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 confes-sional 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
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’sDefence of Poetryand 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
pre-emptive 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, hewas
actuallykidding; 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 theDream Songsit is truly striking. Song48has 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 John Berryman,The Freedom of the Poet(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,1976), p.316. 11 ‘
The Art of Poetry, no.16’,The Paris Review,53(1972), p.6.
nonce word for what Macbeth could never be, since ambition is the very thing that makes him what he is. Berryman’s other coinage, ‘
Cawdor-uneasy’, 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. Hamletis 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’. TheHamlet
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 thefigure of the alien mother and intimates therefore a kind of genetic seriality. To which an‘antic disposition’may be a not
incom-prehensible response: and what adjective betterfits Henry’s disposition in
many of theDream 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 dic-tion, register and tone, its headlong verbal opportunism. To demonstrate this in any less impressionistic way, however, would be beyond my com-petence. John Haffenden says in his introduction toBerryman’s Shakespeare that‘even if we did not get Berryman’s edition ofKing Lear, we have gained
hisfirst masterpiece,Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, which took inspiration directly fromLear–though critics of Berryman have not yet evaluated to
the full the degree to which his poem isfired by Shakespeare’.12They have
not done so, I suspect, because trying to control thisfire 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
pro-found 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’inFor the Union Dead(1964)
12
John Berryman,Berryman’s Shakespeare, ed. John Haffenden (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1999), p. xxxiv.
makes reference toTwelfth 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 afirst-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 act1scene5she 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 toTwelfth 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 Caligulafigure 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
deterio-rates almost to prose in the sequence, here realises a richly expressive
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 pointingfingers 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 in1800London’.
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 calledNotebook 1967–8and then justNotebook) 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
exem-plary 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 fromA 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 contemporary-idiomatic 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’.
‘A Love for Four Voices’ is therefore a Shakespearean recension of a
Shakespearean recension, almost a Russian doll of intricately allusive play-fulness. 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 (thefirst 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
Dreamand‘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.
s h a k e s p e a r e a n d t h e w a r s a w p a c t
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, characteri-stically, 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 gen-erations of poets writing in English.
Pasternak’s‘Hamlet’was written in1946and published as thefirst of the poems to appear as the work of its hero in Doctor Zhivagoin1958. 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’sfinal four verses, with a separatedfinal 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 doublefiguration 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.
The strong sense of fatality in Pasternak’s poem, and the solitude of its
Hamletfigure, 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 afield.’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 volumeStudy 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.’13Patient,
compe-tent, 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 per-ceives 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).
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 fi gu-ration, 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.
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
for-titude, 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 inThe 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 toThe 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 devastatedfinal 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).
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 in1960, which offers in its use of thefigure 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, itsfirst person singular takes on the servile accents of Polonius and, scandalously,finally identifies itself as that of‘a contemporary poet / the year is1958’. 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 recognition and
self-identification 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
I am using the translations by Adam Czerniawski in Różewicz’sThey Came to See a Poet(London: Anvil Press Poetry,1991).
17 See, for instance, Stanislaw Barańczak,A Fugitive from Utopia: The Poetry of Zbigniew Herbert
(Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press,1987).
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 in1962. 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
con-clusion seems to bringKing Learinto the reckoning in a way that completely overwhelmsThe 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
disinte-grations 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.
s h a k e s p e a r e a n d j o h n s h a d e
I want to touch on onefinalfiguration of Shakespeare. This occurs in a poem which exists only in a novel; a poem, therefore, which is thefiction
18
T. S. Eliot,Selected Essays(London: Faber and Faber,1932;3rd enlarged edn,1951), p.126.
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
coun-tries 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, Eliotfinds 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, acknowl-edgement 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 palefire 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
unfa-thomable creative generosity behind our origins and ends’.20Shakespeare
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 relation-ship between Shakespeare and modern poets, vision always remains a possibility too.
19
Brian Boyd,Nabokov’s‘Pale Fire’: The Magic of Artistic Discovery(Princeton University Press,1999), p.245.
20
Ibid., p.246.
s h a k e s p e a r e a n d t h e m o d e r n p o e t
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’inAntony 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 toMy Sad Captains(1961), whose title derives fromAntony and Cleopatra, is taken fromTroilus and Cressidaand intimates oppositions and contraries often addressed in Gunn’s early books.
In addition, as Clive Wilmer has demonstrated in an illuminatingly sym-pathetic 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 out-standing 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 accom-panies and implicitly, sometimes explicitly, accounts for his creative proce-dures.22However, 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
Clive Wilmer,‘The Self You Choose’,Times Literary Supplement,25April2008, pp.13–15.
22
Selected Essays, p.152.
