Illustration by Jim Newcombe
Today is the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare's death. (It may also be his birthday, but that remains a matter of tradition rather than confirmed fact.) The multi-talented poet and essayist
Jim Newcombe has kindly contributed this piece on the Bard.
THE STARR-Y POINTING PYRAMID
on the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare's death
The marriage of sound and sense,
always in crucial harmony in great poetry, seems to find effortless articulation
in Shakespeare, who produced so many times what other poets pursue with
butterfly nets all their lives. I have
spent much time over the years wondering how so much indelible music and meaning
can be enclosed within his “rough music”, often within the collocation of a few
syllables. The impression one has of his
lines is not usually that they have been dwelt upon with meticulous
deliberation, but rather that they are made “in the quick forge and
working-house of thought.” Perhaps it is
this proximity to living speech, of workaday locutions shot through with the
light of wise insight and lively expression, that in part gives his work its
endurance.
Homer, Dante and Goethe are
reckoned to be the only authors of comparable stature. One of the things which makes Shakespeare the
genius loci of our language, and what
sets him apart from those giants, is an unparalleled gift for metaphor, or what
he – the term “metaphor” not having been created in his day – would beautifully
evoke as “a sea-change / Into something rich and strange.” This might be said to be the beating heart of
any definition of poetry: protean material that transfigures into something weirdly
iridescent or luminous.
Yet the work of Shakespeare has
not been irrefutably lauded throughout time.
Both Tolstoy and George Bernard Shaw voiced their objections to
him. When Wordsworth, writing of the
sonnet form, wrote “with this key / Shakespeare unlocked his heart” Robert
Browning wrote in response: “If so, the less Shakespeare he.” Some of the plays have been bowdlerized: John Dryden, for instance, reworked King Lear, the play which Samuel
Johnson, Shakespeare’s greatest critic (and arguably the world’s), could not
bring himself to watch for its harrowing finale.
Shakespeare’s friendly rival Ben
Jonson, who gently mocked Shakespeare’s “little Latin and less Greek,” wished
Shakespeare had curbed his exuberance:
“I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honour to
Shakespeare, that in his writing, whatsoever he penned, he never blotted out a
line. My answer hath been, ‘Would he had blotted a thousand’… He was, indeed,
honest, and of an open and free nature; had an excellent fancy, brave notions,
and gentle expressions, wherein he flowed with that facility that sometime it
was necessary he should be stopped … His wit was in his own power; would the
rule of it had been so too.” Shakespeare’s
ebullience and fecundity would have seemed excessive to the measured restraint of
the classicist Jonson.
Yet Shakespeare is a sun that
shines above the other English peaks of Milton, Wordsworth and Blake. When in Paradise
Lost Milton writes of being “imparadised within each other’s arms” the verb
is a coinage of Shakespearean genius, more powerfully suggestive than saying
“in the paradise of…” Milton’s work often
smells of the lamp and of the archaic majesty of the Ivory Tower: it can be starchy,
glacial, monumental, remote, whereas Shakespeare’s is blood-warm, sprightly,
inclusive and expansive in its dance, expressing knowledge not just of the
court but of the inn and the marketplace, indeed of the whole soiled rabble of humanity
itself, like no other writer. He knows
how language works and he is powerfully susceptible, in a super-sensitive way,
to the network of duplicitous meanings arising from the taproots of
etymology. He is also aware, long before
the age of critical theory, of what writers should be wary of in language: “taffeta
phrases, silken terms precise, three-piled hyperboles, spruce affectation, figures
pedantical.”
The work of Shakespeare at its
best stands rock-sure, foot-firm, and embodies the Socratic trinity of truth,
beauty and goodness. The goodness here is
not moral in a didactic sense; there is no moral imperative proffered from the
corpus; rather the goodness is one of a fulsome honest portrayal of our complex
humanity. When mere advice comes it is
nevertheless wise, even in the mouth of Polonius; but such ethical equations as
do arise come implicitly from the circumstances of characters coming into moral
collision and the veracity of their actions and wills being tested, as in Measure for Measure, where the virtuous Isabella,
who is soon to enter a nunnery, is blackmailed by the strict Lord Angelo to
have sex with him in order to save the life of her brother, who is to be
executed for having impregnated his lover prior to marriage:
ISABELLA:
…were I under the terms of death,
The impression of keen whips I'ld
wear as rubies,
And strip myself to death, as to
a bed
That longing have been sick for,
ere I'ld yield
My body up to shame.
ANGELO:
Then must your brother die.
ISABELLA:
And 'twere the cheaper way:
Better it were a brother died at
once,
Than that a sister, by redeeming
him,
Should die for ever.
Like many others, I didn’t
immediately warm to our studies of Shakespeare while at school. It wasn’t until I read Hamlet that I felt my innermost psychology had been X-rayed and laid
bare. I have seen various productions of
the play, including as a groundling in The Globe and at The Minack Theatre in
Porthcurno near Land’s End, “swilled with the wild and wasteful ocean”. I still, however, have never seen, nor ever
expect to see, the Hamlet in my head
which so impressed me as a nihilistic nineteen-year-old with its titanic
articulation. I still, when prompted and
made amenable in my cups, regale people with passages from it, since I believe,
as the ancients did, that poetry should be learnt by heart and chanted or sung
aloud.
In Hamlet as elsewhere Shakespeare seems to be transfixed by adultery
and incest. When he writes “O most
wicked speed, to post / With such dexterity to incestuous sheets,” the line,
rammed with plosives, almost has to be spat out, his disgust snaking into a sibilance
and hissance of fricatives before rounding on the powerful compression of a
transferred epithet. Here words
themselves almost become incestuous and lascivious, and as so often in
Shakespeare it is as if language is viewing itself in a mirror. There is in him, as perhaps in all of us, a
moral dilemma or crux between reason and animal physicality: “Die for adultery? No. The wren goes to’t,
and the small gilded fly does lecher in my sight. Let copulation thrive …”
One thing I have noticed time and
again, though which, given the volume of academic study devoted to Shakespeare,
must have been commented on before, is his liking for a kind of ring-shaped
figure of speech to suggest avaricious craving or augmenting bounty: “A man may
fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed
of that worm;” “an autumn ‘twas / That grew the more by reaping;” “The cloyed
will, – / That satiate yet unsatisfied desire, that tub / Both filled and
running;” “Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by.” It is this figure of speech, this serpentine circularity
of metaphor, which we find in the description of Cleopatra:
Age cannot wither her, nor
custom stale
Her infinite variety: other women
cloy
The appetites they feed: but she
makes hungry
Where most she satisfies;
and in Juliet:
My bounty is as boundless as the
sea,
My love as deep; the more I give
to thee
The more I have, for both are
infinite.
It is as if the whole world of
nature, politics and the carnal appetite of mankind were a burgeoning richness
that is fulfilled by its own generosity or else a monstrous orgy of surfeit which
needs constant feeding and finds only momentary and spasmodic appeasement, if
at all, in the flux and continuation of its addictions. The figure of speech resembles the serpent
with the tale in its mouth or the gullet of Erysichthon. In the end it is expressive of the frantic
deadlock between Eros and Thanatos, endlessly devouring and regenerating:
“being full of your ne'er-cloying sweetness / To bitter sauces did I frame my
feeding.”
Images of abundancy and repletion
seem consonant with the author’s own seminal prodigiousness:
...those that feed grow
full, as blossoming time
That from the seedness the bare
fallow brings
To teeming foison, even so her
plenteous womb
Expresseth his full tilth and
husbandry.
Where is the presence of Eros in
Wordsworth? It seems peculiarly
absent. It is powerfully present in the
bawdy poetry of John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, indeed with such
ribaldry that it is a wonder the Victorians didn’t bury his poetry
altogether.
There are passages of sexual
revulsion and jealousy in Cymbeline,
in A Winter’s Tale and King Lear. Tempting though it might be to descend into
unscholarly speculation about his attitude to his wife living in Stratford
while he made his living in London, if we are to ascribe autobiography to
passages in the plays then this would by extension make him culpable of murder
and regicide and so much besides. How
autobiographical are the sonnets? Sonnet
129 nails within its frantic rhythms possibly the best and wisest expression of
desire expressed in poetry, which is conceivably the culmination of his
dwelling bitterly on the sexual triad alluded to in sonnets 133, 134 and 144,
where the dark mistress, it would seem, has slept with the ambiguous and
sexually ambivalent young man, “the master-mistress of my passion.”
It is tempting to wonder whether
the self-loathing expressed in the sonnets, the fixation with promiscuity, is
what finds tortured expression in Othello,
unpleasant in its dramatic greatness:
Villain, be sure thou prove my
love a whore,
Be sure of it; give me the ocular
proof;
Or, by the worth of mine eternal
soul,
Thou hadst been better have been
born a dog
Than answer my wak'd wrath.
Tantalising, yes, but in the end
futile to give weight or credence to such speculations, though I cannot altogether
agree with those who believe that Shakespeare’s greatness merely came of his
having to produce plays regularly for his livelihood, for surely genius
transcends the workshop and the hireling.
Dramatis personæ no doubt afforded
him considerable licence, for it is one thing to put the words “I dare
damnation” into the mouth of a character, quite another to speak them of
yourself. In terms of autobiography or
even authorship, it is enough to know that it was the man from Stratford who
wrote the plays: we know this not only because there are country puns in the
plays and names for flora and fauna which are distinct to his geographic origin
but because there isn’t a shred of sensible evidence to suggest that somebody
else penned them. He not only wrote
plays but acted in them: we know he played the ghost of Hamlet’s father (this
is perhaps telling, as is the fact that Shakespeare’s only son, who was to die
aged eleven, was named Hamnet). Also Ben
Jonson would certainly have had something to say about it if Shakespeare was
anyone other than he claimed to be. The
anti-Stratfordian conspiracies are built on quicksand. Of autobiography it has been remarked that if
ever we detect the real man within the plays then it is surely within these
tender lines:
Grief fills the room up of my
absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and
down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats
his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious
parts,
Stuffs out his vacant garments
with his form…
I don’t know what writers can
usefully learn from Shakespeare: he is so vast, so varied, his tracks melt when
we try to map his whereabouts. Again
Samuel Johnson says it best: “The irregular combinations of fanciful invention
may delight a-while, by that novelty of which the common satiety of life sends
us all in quest; but the pleasures of sudden wonder are soon exhausted, and the
mind can only repose on the stability of truth.”
In this short essay I have
attempted to concentrate on a very small corner of a very vast field. I would like finally to express gratitude to
the two men, Heminge and Condell, who first collected the plays into the First
Folio, rescuing them from the Elizabethan disdain for plays as reading material
and therefore saving them from oblivion, for the English language became
planetary in the wake of the publication of the plays. I like Heminge and Condell all the more that
their enterprise was “without ambition either of self-profit or fame, only to
keep the memory of so worthy a friend and fellow alive as was our Shakespeare.”
Nobody in the English tongue has
before or since quite matched him. That our greatest playwright should also be
our greatest poet is an extraordinary phenomenon; that a species could evolve
to produce the work of Shakespeare at all is awe-inspiring. He is, for my money, the authorial mirror in
which humanity’s innermost being is even now most accurately and fully reflected. I salute him on his 400th anniversary for making a rich world richer still.
Jim Newcombe
London, April 2016
