Shakespeare's The Tempest

Lately, I've been re-reading The Tempest in a book of four Shakespeare plays.*  Recently, I read Act III, Scene I and noticed some significance in the structure of Ferdinand's reply when Miranda asks him if he loves her:

O heaven, O earth, bear witness to this sound,

And crown what I profess with kind event,

If I speak true! if hollowly, invert

What best is boded me to mischief!  I,

Beyond all limit of what else i' the world,

Do love, prize, honor you.

Part of his response features a chiasm (apodosis | protasis || protasis | apodosis):

Bear witness to this sound, and crown what I profess with kind event,

If I speak true!

If hollowly,

Invert what best is boded me to mischief!

This structure highlights the opposite nature of "true" and "hollowly" and, in a way, even matches Ferdinand's "invert."

---

*Four Comedies (A Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, and The Tempest), published by Washington Square Press, Inc., 1948.  I have a copy of the 26th printing from January 1965, which I got from my grandfather's basement many years ago.

Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream

I recently finished reading Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream in The Norton Introduction to Literature (fifth edition).  I noticed a detail in Act II, Scene 2 that may be significant.  After Puck applies love-in-idleness to Lysander's eyes, Helena notices him and says, "Lysander, if you live, good sir, awake," and Lysander replies, "And run through fire I will for thy sweet sake" (II.ii.102-103).  This section of the play is written in verse, so it's not unusual that Lysander's line rhymes with Helena's, but I think it may be significant that the resulting couplet is formed by two characters.  Helena is the first living thing that Lysander sees when he wakes up, and because of the love-in-idleness, he becomes enamored with her.  That his first line after waking rhymes with hers indicates his desire to be with her.  He complements her poetically in the same way that he wants to complement her romantically.

I feel I must admit, though, that earlier in this scene, a line of Demetrius's dialogue rhymes with a line of Helena's.  She says, "O wilt thou darkling leave me?  Do not so," and he replies, "Stay, on thy peril!  I alone will go" (II.ii.86-87).  Because Demetrius is not at all interested in Helena, however, this instance of rhyming dialogue between two characters doesn't carry this extra meaning.

Seeming/Being in Hamlet

When I read Hamlet last month, I started finding some instances that involve the dichotomy of seeming and being that Hamlet mentions early in the play:

Seems, madam?  Nay, it is.  I know not "seems."
'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,
Nor customary suits of solemn black,
Nor windy suspiration of forced breathe,
No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,
Nor the dejected havior of the visage,
Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief,
That can denote me truly.  These indeed seem,
For they are actions that a man might play;
But I have that within which passeth show -
These but the trappings and the suits of woe (I.ii.81-91)

Shortly after I started reading Hamlet, I also started Macbeth, and one of the essays in my edition (David Scott Kastan's "Words, Words, Words: Understanding Shakespeare's Language," which I think appears in all the Barnes & Noble editions of Shakespeare's plays) mentions this seeming/being dichotomy with regard to Claudius' announcement of his marriage to Gertrude:

Sometimes it is not the network of imagery but the very syntax that speaks, as when Claudius announces his marriage to Hamlet's mother:

Therefore our sometime sister, now our Queen,
Th' imperial jointress to this warlike state,
Have we--as 'twere with a defeated joy,
With an auspicious and a dropping eye,
With mirth in funeral and with dole in marriage,
In equal scale weighing delight and dole--
Taken to wife. (Hamlet, 1.2.8-14)

All he really wants to say here is that he has married Gertrude, his former sister-in-law: "Therefore our sometime sister... Have we... Taken to wife."  But the straightforward sentence gets interrupted and complicated, revealing his own discomfort with the announcement.  ...  The very unnaturalness of the sentence is what alerts us that we are meant to understand more than the simple relation of fact.

While reading Hamlet, I found an-other instance of this - where the syntax of the sentence reveals more meaning than the words themselves.  When Ophelia enters in Act II, Scene 1, she tells Polonius that she has been "so affrighted."  When asked the cause, she explains that

Lord Hamlet, with his doublet all unbraced,
No hat upon his head, his stockings fouled,
Ungart'red, and down-gyved to his ankle;
Pale as his shirt, his knees knocking each other,
And with a look so piteous in purport
As if he had been loosed out of hell
To speak of horrors--he comes before me.  (II.i.87-93)

Ophelia does the same thing that Claudius does in the previous act.  While Hamlet's appearance could very well contribute to Ophelia's fright of him, the only action in those seven lines is that "Lord Hamlet... comes before [her]."  Again, the syntax illustrates more than just the words, and here, it indicates the seeming/being dichotomy that's so important in the play.  Ophelia is putting more emphasis on what Hamlet looks like than on what he does.  More emphasis on how he seems (by means of his appearance) than on what he is (indicated by his action).  Interestingly, Hamlet himself points out this speaking syntax when he tells one of the actors to "Suit the action to the word, the word to the action" (III.ii.17-18).

Before the play (the play within the play) starts, Hamlet shares his plan (observing Claudius' reaction to the play, which Hamlet has re-written to resemble Claudius' murdering King Hamlet) with Horatio, explaining that he will "rivet [his eyes] to [Claudius'] face, / And after [they] will both [their] judgments join / In censure of his seeming" (III.ii.86-88).  In light of the seeming/being distinction, the word choice here seems important, but I don't quite know the whole implication.  Part of it seems to be that characters base their actions (their being) on others' appearances (their seeming).  Hamlet exhibits this with his watching Claudius' reaction just as Ophelia demonstrates this in her explanation of her fear at Hamlet's appearance.  Still, I feel there's more to this that I'm not grasping.

Claudius is attentive to the seeming/being thing too.  In Act IV, he questions Laertes' grief over Polonius death, wondering if it's genuine or not:  "Laertes, was your father dear to you? /  Or are you like the painting of a sorrow, / A face without a heart?" (IV.vii.120-122).

While it's not directly related to seeming or being (although "without [judgement] we are pictures of mere beasts" may relate), I found Claudius' lines in Act IV, Scene 5 really interesting.  Ophelia, mentally unstable after her father's death, has just left the scene.

O, this is the poison of deep grief; it springs
All from her father's death.  O Gertrude, Gertrude,
When sorrows come, they come not single spies,
But in battalions!  First, her father slain;
Next, your son gone, and he most violent author
Of his own just remove; the people muddied,
Thick and unwholesome in their thoughts and whispers
For good Polonius' death, and we have done but greenly
In hugger-mugger to inter him; poor Ophelia
Divided from herself and her fair judgment,
Without the which we are pictures of mere beasts;
Last, and as much containing as all these,
Her brother is in secret come from France;
Feeds on his wonder, keeps himself in clouds,
And wants not buzzers to infect his ear
With pestilent speeches of his father's death,
Wherein necessity, of matter beggared,
Will nothing stick our person to arraign
In ear and ear.  O my dear Gertrude, this,
Like to a murd'ring piece, in many places
Gives me superfluous death.  (IV.v.77-97)

Claudius is doing two different things here, and I can't quite believe either.  First, he's sympathizing for Ophelia and her unstable mental state because her father is dead, and yet Hamlet is in the same position without any of Claudius' good will.  Maybe Claudius views King Hamlet's death and its effect on Hamlet differently than he does Polonius' death and its effect on Ophelia because he had a hand in King Hamlet's death.  Still, it's almost literally incredible that he can't see how similar the situations are.

Second, he seems to be making puns about how he killed King Hamlet.  In Act I, Scene 5, the Ghost of King Hamlet explains that Claudius poured poison in his ear while he was sleeping in the orchard, which is how he died (I.v.66-82).  And here in Act IV, Claudius mentions "poison," a "father's death," "want[ing] not buzzers to infect his ear / With petilen[ce]," "In ear and ear," and "murd'ring."  He doesn't connect King Hamlet's death's effect on Hamlet with Polonius' death's effect on Ophelia, yet he seems to be remembering King Hamlet's death at the same time.

Hamlet in Brave New World

I recently re-read Brave New World.  At the same time, I was also re-reading Hamlet (and I still am), so I discovered some connections between the two, specifically in how Huxley uses the original context of the Hamlet quotes to add some more depth to his characters.

This post contains spoilers for both Hamlet and Brave New World.

In Chapter 8 in the midst of John's history in the reservation, he acquires The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, which - in a way - give him the language to express his thoughts.  At the same time, it's explained how he hates Popé, one of the Indians on the reservation with whom his mother Linda spends a lot of time.  It's kind of hard to tell whether Shakespeare helps John in articulating his hate for Popé, or whether John starts hating Popé because of what he reads in Shakespeare and how similar it is to his own situation.  In any case, his hating Popé is accompanied with two Shakespeare quotes:

Nay, but to live
In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed,
Stew'd in corruption, honeying and making love
Over the nasty sty

And, when John's thoughts turn to murdering Popé:

When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage
Or in the incestuous pleasure of his bed

Both of these are from Hamlet.  The first ("Nay, but to live...") is in Act III, Scene IV (lines 103-106), when Hamlet talks to Gertrude about her marrying Claudius so soon after King Hamlet's death, and the second ("When he is drunk asleep...) is at the very end of Act III, Scene III (lines 92-93), when Hamlet resists killing Claudius because Claudius is praying (and Hamlet thinks that killing him in the midst of prayer will send him to Heaven, which Hamlet wants to avoid), so he thinks of better opportunities to kill him.

The characters in Brave New World sort of match up to the rôles in Hamlet.  John is Hamlet.  His mother Linda is Gertrude.  Popé is Claudius.  But the rôle of King Hamlet could be fulfilled by either Thomas (the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning), who is John's biological father, or - more broadly - the "civilized" society of England itself.  (I think the broader application is more useful.)  In both works, the son tries to kill his mother's new partner, and because Hamlet does this at the behest of the Ghost of King Hamlet, the parallels suggest that, in trying to kill Popé, John aligns himself with his father figure - England, including its "civilized" values of conformity and possibly even its caste system.  In the reservation, John and Linda stick out, and through John's attempts to complete the Indians' rituals, it's obvious that he's trying to fit in.  Before he sees England firsthand, he thinks it will provide him with that sense of belonging.

The parallels beyond that get sort of confusing, and they might even break down after that scene.  Like Hamlet, John dies at the end, but where Hamlet is (at least relatively) successful in avenging his father by killing Claudius, John turns away from his father figure - the society that bred him.  He doesn't have the strength to reform - or even resist - the "civilized" England and hangs himself.  At the end of the book, when he's discovered dead, his feet "turned towards the right: north, north-east, east, south-east, south-south-west; then paused, and, after a few seconds, turned as unhurriedly back towards the left.  South-south-west, south, south-east, east...."  This is similar to Hamlet's "I am but mad north-north-west.  When the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw" (II.ii.388-389), but I'm not sure of the depth of the resemblance.  I don't think I can make a very strong case for the southerly direction that John's feet point for most of the description and their connection with Hamlet's ability to "know a hawk from a handsaw" (i.e. that John was the only sane person in a land of crazy people), but at the very least, John's feet's directions - combined with that Hamlet quote - illustrate the conflict within him - whether he would adopt the ways of "civilization" or renounce them.  It could also represent the split nature of his being - his parents were from the "civilized" society yet he was raised as a "savage" in the reservation.

I think there's also a lot to be said between the two works about what's natural and what's artificial.  The conditioning in Brave New World seems to have some precedent with the differentiation of "seems" and "is" in Hamlet, but I'd have to re-read both again in order to pay attention to those specific points.  Additionally, in the same way that John can be cast as Hamlet, I think he bears some resemblance to Miranda from The Tempest (beyond just their shared excitement about a "brave new world"), but I think it's been two years since I last read The Tempest, so in order to support that claim I'd have to reacquaint myself with that too.  Reading Brave New World this time, I was paying attention mostly to the characters' connections to Hamlet.

"Who Steals My Purse Steals Trash"

I've been re-reading Jack London's The Sea Wolf lately.  The last time I read this, which was also the first time I read this, was about six years ago, as a junior in high school.  (I actually wrote a paper about it, too.)  Last night, I read Chapter XXIV.  In it, there's this conversation between Maud Brewster (the writer who's been rescued/captured by the seal-hunting Ghost) and the captain, Wolf Larsen:

"Why, what can be worse than cutting our throats?" she asked, with pretty naïve surprise. 

"Cutting our purses," he answered.   "Man is so made these days that his capacity for living is determined by the money he possesses."

"'Who steals my purse steals trash,'" she quoted. 

"Who steals my purse steals my right to live," was the reply, "old saws to the contrary.  For he steals my bread and meat and bed, and in doing so imperils my life.  There are not enough soup-kitchens and bread-lines to go around, you know, and when men have nothing in their purses they usually die, and die miserably - unless they are able to fill their purses pretty speedily."

It took me a few minutes, but I finally placed "Who steals my purse steals trash."  It's from Shakespeare's Othello.  (I'm not sure I would have recognized it had I not read Othello just last month.)

At first, I thought that was it.   The writer quotes Shakespeare; I realize it's Shakespeare; woohoo!  But then I got thinking about the context in which this line appears in both works.  In Othello, the purse isn't really the thing that's being talked about.  It functions more as a metaphor:

Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,
Is the immediate jewel of their souls.
Who steals my purse steals trash.  'Tis something, nothing:
'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands.
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him
And makes me poor indeed (III.iii.159-165) 

As it's brought up in The Sea Wolf, Maud Brewster seems to be arguing for higher things, saying that a purse is merely transitory.  She, like the novel's protagonist Humphrey van Weyden, argues instead for "the immediate jewel of [the] soul."  That's one of the main themes of the novel - van Weyden and Larsen's disagreement about what it is to live.  Van Weyden argues for more esoteric things, and Larsen argues that life is just about surviving for the longest.

Here, Larsen's brutish nature is again illustrated because, regardless of whether you recognize the context of the Shakespeare quote (and the distinction it makes between short-lived things like money and the ongoing life of a reputation), he continues the conversation focused on the black-and-white, have-or-have-not that's central to prolonging life.  I'm not even sure if he recognizes that "Who steals my purse steals trash" is a Shakespeare quote.  If he does, he argues for the purse over reputation or any other higher causes, purposes, or morals.  If he doesn't, he's still just focused on surviving.  He's brutish either way.

But what's more interesting is Maud Brewster's use of this quote in such a normal conversation.  This might be contradictory to my earlier point of how Brewster brings up this choice of purse or reputation, but if she's using this quote simply to describe the sort of economic decisions that occur in seal hunting, it also seems to suggest that she's starting to be affected by Wolf Larsen's brutishness.  She's beginning to focus more on the immediate things rather than the higher level of morals and philosophy, so she uses the quote just because they've been talking about money rather than trying to bring up this discussion of purse-or-reputation to Larsen.  I'm not sure if that's happening to her, but that is what has happened to van Weyden.  When he first came aboard the Ghost, he held himself to those standards, but as the time went by, he started to become more brute-like too.

At the end of the chapter, Larsen does discuss "the worthwhileness of reason" with Brewster and van Weyden in that language of trade:

"You are a blessed, bankrupt pair of fools.  You have no facts in your pocketbook." 

"Yet we spend as freely as you," was Maud Brewster's contribution. 

"More freely, because it costs you nothing." 

"And because we draw upon eternity," she retorted. 

"Whether you do or think you do, it's the same thing.  You spend what you haven't got, and in return you get greater value from spending what you haven't got than I get from spending what I have got, and what I have sweated to get." 

"Why don't you change the basis of your coinage, then?" she queried teasingly. 

He looked at her quickly, half-hopefully, and then said, all regretfully: "Too late.  I'd like to, perhaps, but I can't.  My pocketbook is stuffed with the old coinage, and it's a stubborn thing.  I can never bring myself to recognize anything else as valid."

They're discussing intellectual delight versus emotional delight, which is similar to Shakespeare's purse-or-reputation, but they're still doing it while focused on the physical nature of the purse.  Brewster and van Weyden are arguing for intellectual delight (including the reputation of a name), but they're doing so by using a metaphor of a form of emotional delight - the money in the purse and what it can buy.  This change in diction illustrates that the brutish nature of life on the Ghost has changed them, even if they do hold to their original views.

Recursive and Allusive Fathers and Sons

I finally started re-reading Hamlet this week.  I've been meaning to get to it for a couple of months since Hamlet plays a big rôle in a chapter of Ulysses, which I just had a class on.  I had a notion of reading both The Odyssey and Hamlet so that it would be easier to understand what was going on in Ulysses (allusion-wise), but I made it through only The Odyssey.  So now since school's over, I decided to re-read Hamlet.  The last time I read the whole thing (which was also the first time I read the whole thing) was the summer in between my sophomore and junior years of high school, which was about five years ago.  (I was supposed to have read the whole thing in my introductory English class during my freshman year of university, but I got the act and scene numbers mixed up and didn't read as much as I should have, and I never felt bad enough to go back and finish it.)

Before I actually got to start the play, I read all of the introductory material in the front of the book.  That's where I learned that Hamnet Shakespeare - Shakespeare's son whose death in some way inspired Hamlet - was born on 2 February.  Things clicked to-gether in my brain, and I actually had to stop reading because I got so excited about this.

James Joyce's birthday is 2 February.  Supposedly, so is Stephen Dedalus' - one of the main characters in Ulysses.  But what was really interesting about learning this was the whole author/book and father/son relationship combining.

In the Hamlet-centric chapter of Ulysses, Mr Best makes a pun about Hamlet and Shakespeare in French.  Hamlet is "un pièce du Shakespeare."  The play is a piece of Shakespeare in the same way that Hamnet is a piece of Shakespeare.  This involves the ideas of consubstantiality between father and son and metempsychosis (the transmigration of souls) that are central to Ulysses.  (And which I wrote my final paper about.)  Different father/son relationships are constituted by a variety of means:

• Leopold Bloom and Rudy (actual father and son) - like Hamnet, Rudy died
• Simon Dedalus and Stephen (actual father and son) - a big deal is made of their eyes' being the same, which is one of the main examples of father/son consubstantiality
• Bloom and Stephen - Bloom sort of adopts Stephen as a replacement son for Rudy; they are also described in the same way by a cabman; and Ulysses incorporates their rôles as Odysseus (Bloom) and Telemachus (Stephen) - a relationship which also resembles King Hamlet and Prince Hamlet in terms of heredity and royalty
• Paddy Dignam and Paddy Dignam (actual father and son) - this also plays with the Hamlet paradigm as both father and son have the same name and the elder of the pair dies shortly before the main action

In the paper I wrote for my class, I had intended to tie all of this father/son, consubstantiality, and metempsychosis stuff back to literature itself, but it got confusing and I never attempted it.  But from the relationship among Shakespeare, Hamnet, and Hamlet, one can see that literature acts as either a substitute or a continuation of father/son relationships.  This same type of idea is presented in The Divine Comedy, which Ulysses has many allusions to.  Virgil the poet acts as a guide to Dante.  Depending on how one looks at it, Dante could be guided by an actual person - a mentor - or he could be guided by literature itself.  Ulysses has that same idea:  people and literature can play similar rôles.

But learning that Joyce's birthday was the same as Hamnet's takes this all a step further.  Shakespeare's creation of Hamlet to - in a way - replace Hamnet is mirrored by Joyce's creation of Ulysses.  Shakespeare creates his progeny in literature because his real son has died, and then Joyce - who shares Hamnet's birthday - writes about father/son relationships and their replacement in literature.

This is the type of recursive and allusive paradigm that makes Ulysses both great fun to read and really frustrating.