Essays in Criticism

Hammond,, Paul

doi: 10.1093/escrit/cgz026pmid: N/A

AFTER LUNCH IN THE SENIOR COMMON ROOM I was standing in the queue for coffee next to John Barnard, when he turned to me and asked whether I would like to edit Dryden for the Longman Annotated English Poets series. Of course, I said yes, little knowing what it was that I was committing myself to. The edition was planned to be in two volumes, and to take five years. It turned out to be in five volumes, and took twenty-five years, even with the collaboration of David Hopkins on volumes three to five. My involvement with the series has lasted even longer, because John Barnard eventually invited me to join him as General Editor. Together we worked on second editions of A. C. Hamilton’s The Faerie Queene and of W. H. Stevenson’s Blake, and on new editions of Marvell from Nigel Smith and of Donne from Robin Robbins, as well as further volumes in the well-established Longman Shelley (begun in 1989) and Browning (begun in 1991), both of which are still in progress. In due course John Barnard retired, and I currently share the role of General Editor with David Hopkins and Michael Rossington. The series itself has migrated from Longman via Pearson to its present comfortable billet with Routledge. It has also changed its character: the original editions were one-volume hardbacks which were just about affordable by students; now we have multi-volume hardback sets for libraries and the wealthier scholars amongst us, alongside substantial selected editions in paperback, as well as paperback editions of complete poems where the oeuvre is sufficiently concise to allow this. Recent additions to the series have been the poems of Shakespeare from Raphael Lyne and Cathy Shrank, volume one of Pope from Paul Baines and Julian Ferraro, more Shelley, and more Browning. There is always, it seems, more Browning. There will be two or three more volumes of Pope, followed by a selected edition; one more volume of Shelley, again followed by a selected; and the next instalment of Browning will be The Ring and the Book. We have also commissioned new titles: a Wyatt, a Ben Jonson, a Samuel Johnson, a Keats, a Coleridge, a multi-volume complete Byron, a multi-volume complete Wordsworth, a Christina Rossetti, and a Yeats. We have still more editions in our sights. Some poets have eluded our best efforts to find suitable editors; some editors have fallen by the wayside; some have been pushed. I have offered this roll-call of editions to indicate that with such a wide range of poets no one textual policy could possibly fit all circumstances, even though when F. W. Bateson established the series in the 1960s he seems to have envisaged that editors would by and large take what he called the textus receptus and annotate that. A few moments’ reflection on Bateson’s choice of that term will indicate how illusory that idea was. The term textus receptus refers originally to the Greek New Testament put together by Erasmus on the basis of seven manuscripts; with modifications this provided the basis for Luther’s German translation and for the Authorized Version in England. But now that we know of some 5,800 extant manuscripts of the Greek New Testament, as well as some 20,000 more in other ancient languages which may be taken into account when establishing the text, it is clear enough that the very concept of a received text is problematic. The considerable work which has been done in recent years on the manuscript circulation of texts in early modern England, pioneered by Peter Beal and Harold Love,1 has demonstrated the fluidity of texts and the importance of understanding the different functions of print and manuscript. Even where there is something approaching a textus receptus – perhaps Herbert’s The Temple might be an example – questions remain about the kind of authority it commands. In fact, virtually all the Longman editions have presented a freshly edited text, and rightly so, since the task of elucidating a poem through annotation cannot really be carried out in isolation from the task of elucidating it through the presentation of the text itself. And that brings me to the question of modernisation. When the first volume of the Longman series, Kenneth Allott’s edition of Matthew Arnold, appeared in 1965, the statement of editorial principles was minimalist: For the great majority of Arnold’s poems the text is based on the textus receptus, that is to say, the text of Poems (1885), which was the last collected edition to have the benefit of the poet’s supervision; for the remainder the textual authority is a variety of printed and MS. sources. The text has been slightly modernized in spelling and punctuation in accordance with editorial policy for the series to which this edition belongs.2 Even for a series whose principal raison d’être is annotation, this seems an unduly laconic protocol. There is no explanation for the decision to prefer Arnold’s last wishes over his first thoughts; no indication of what is meant by ‘slightly modernized in spelling and punctuation’, or why the accidentals of late nineteenth century texts might need such treatment. Nor is the ‘editorial policy’ of the series explained in any way. The second volume of the series, Carey and Fowler’s Milton, appeared in 1968, and I will return to that in a moment. It was only in 1969, in Christopher Ricks’s Tennyson, that the General Editor’s preface by Bateson appeared for the first time, setting out his rationale for the modernisation of the text: Since the reader in any English-speaking country will tend to pronounce an English poet of the past (at any rate to Chaucer) as if he was a contemporary, whatever impedes the reader’s sympathetic identification with the poet that is implicit in that fact – whether of spelling, punctuation or the use of initial capitals – must be regarded as undesirable. A modern pronunciation demands a modern presentation, except occasionally for rhymes (e.g. bind – wind) or obsolete archaisms (eremite, hermit).3 Bateson is quite right to say that modern readers pronounce older poets as if they were contemporaries, and despite the pioneering work of David Crystal and his actor son Ben students rarely hear Shakespeare spoken in anything approximating to the original pronunciation – which doesn’t stop them writing about what we learn of Othello’s character from his use of what they confidently tell me are hard or soft sounds. A whole seminar might be devoted to examining Bateson’s concept of ‘sympathetic identification’, but what strikes me as especially curious in his statement is his claim that the identification with a poet as our contemporary proceeds from speaking the words aloud, and his underlying assumption that this sense of contemporaneity is a wholly desirable approach which should be facilitated by editors. I think exactly the opposite: these poets are not our contemporaries. While part of their value to us may indeed lie in the way that they hold up a mirror to our own concerns, it often lies precisely in their strangeness, in the way that they can say to us, ‘Just stretch your minds to imagine this very different way of thinking and living’; and I suggest that one of the functions of editors is to guard that strangeness – to explain it, yes, but to preserve its singularity, and not to disguise its occasional or systemic remoteness from modern culture. Geoffrey Hill liked to say that public conveniences have to be accessible, but poetry does not. I half-agree with this grumpy bon mot: what we as editors have to make accessible is the strangeness of the territory created by poets of the past. Bateson’s statement of editorial principles appears to have been slightly revised for Roger Lonsdale’s Gray, Collins and Goldsmith, published in the same year as the Tennyson, with the addition of the explanation that ‘conventions of the original printing-house, including those of the author himself’ had been modernised.4 This addition may have been made in response to the particular textual conditions which pertained to Lonsdale’s volume, for the editor devotes two careful pages to explaining exactly what modernising the texts of his three poets has entailed. Lonsdale defends his practice on the grounds that in this period printers rather than authors were generally responsible for the accidentals of a poem, and points out that for editors of eighteenth century poetry capitalisation poses a special challenge, for around 1750 the practice of capitalising virtually every noun was abandoned.5 Goldsmith’s poetry was published after the change, so already appears more modern in that respect; Gray’s spans the change, while Collins’s verse was mostly published before capitals were swept away, and so, says Lonsdale, in the case of Collins ‘modernization has involved extensive decapitalization’ (p. xiv). But, as Lonsdale concedes, this still leaves the editor with the problem of how to handle personifications; and, of course, there is no binary divide between personified nouns and non-personified nouns: there are different degrees to which a poet may suggest personification, attributing being or agency to abstract ideas through the adjectives, verbs, and adverbs associated with them. An editor who strips away most, but not all, of the capitals from an eighteenth century poem creates a starker contrast between these two categories of noun than the original readers would have encountered. The Gray, Collins and Goldsmith has never been revised and is long out of print. Lonsdale apparently became dissatisfied with the textual policy of this edition, for in 1977 he re-edited Gray and Collins for the Oxford Standard Authors series, adhering to the original conventions of spelling and punctuation.6 Let me take up the case of the Carey and Fowler Milton. There was no preface by the General Editor, perhaps because the editors’ practice did not square with what Bateson would announce as the series’ policy the following year. It is distinctly peculiar, for Carey and Fowler modernise spelling but retain punctuation ‘with diplomatic faithfulness’. Their justification is that punctuation ‘is a class of grammatical symbols’; ‘not only does it obey conventions of logic but also others whereby it renders the pauses and junctures and tones of spoken language’; if punctuation is modernised, they say, ‘ambiguities will have to be removed and enhancing suggestions lost’. They acknowledge that the reader may sometimes encounter difficulties in following Milton’s syntax as articulated by this punctuation, ‘but when he overcomes the difficulty it will at least be Milton’s syntax he has understood, and not the editors’’.7 I have some sympathy with this position, though in maintaining that punctuation is a class of grammatical symbols they underestimate the way in which in the early modern period it is frequently, perhaps primarily, a set of rhetorical symbols, an aid to performance. The point at which I have to part company with the editors, however, is when they say that their punctuation preserves Milton’s syntax: what it does is to articulate Milton’s syntax as understood by a seventeenth century compositor. Moreover, we are talking about different compositors in different printing houses over a long period from 1638 to 1674. And when they say that modern punctuation may remove significant ambiguities and introduce distinctions ‘that the poet himself may have taken care to exclude’ they do not explain how they envisage the blind poet exercising such care over his punctuation, though they admit that their adherence to the original punctuation ‘should not be taken to imply that it is necessarily Milton’s punctuation’. But if it is not Milton’s punctuation, how can it display Milton’s syntax to a degree that commands such respect? And how often are there ambiguities which were intended by Milton and created through the punctuation but which would be cleaned away by punctuation supplied by a thoughtful modern editor? It is difficult to see why Carey and Fowler place such evidential value on the punctuation of the early editions while simultaneously maintaining that the spellings of these texts ‘could only reasonably be attributed to amanuenses or compositors, since they were completely at variance with Milton’s own practice’. Which angel stood guard over Milton’s punctuation but not his spellings?8 If there are difficulties with the unmodernised punctuation, there are also problems with Carey and Fowler’s modernised spelling. Take this line, as it appears in their copy-text, the second (1674) edition of Paradise Lost: Through the strict Senteries and Stations thick (II. 412) ‘Senteries’ is clearly three syllables, but in Carey and Fowler’s text it appears as two: Through the strict sentries and stations thick A note explains that ‘sentries’ is a trisyllable, and records the original spelling, but readers have to dig into the commentary to find this explanation, having first been tripped up by an unmetrical line. Spelling, the editors explain, ‘is a vocabulary symbol’ and ‘all that can generally be expected of orthographic signals is that they should enable the reader to make the right vocabulary selection’, and ‘modern spelling is perfectly well able to do this for a seventeenth-century text’. Is this true? The problem, as I see it, is that this theory assumes that the reader is being invited to select a single transhistorical item of vocabulary instead of a word which existed at a particular moment. Their text creates the illusion that Milton’s words are simply our words, but they are not. They come from a world which is strange to us, and their strangeness should be signalled and preserved. I keep returning to that word ‘strange’, because I am sure that the Russian formalists were right when they spoke of ‘defamiliarisation’ as one of the functions or characteristics of literature. That awkward word may belong now in the museum of critical theory, but the idea remains potent. I sometimes try to tell my students that the really difficult words in Shakespeare are not the ones which they have to look up, but the ones which they don’t notice because they are too familiar to register. I have tried to explore the complexities which a poet brings to a word’s semantic field in the appendix on ‘Shakespeare’s Complex Words’ which I included in my original-spelling edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and in respect of Paradise Lost in my more recent book Milton’s Complex Words,9 and I suggest that one of the functions that an original-spelling text can perform is to alert us to strangeness; conversely, one of the hazards of modernisation is that it makes the unfamiliar deceptively familiar. As the Longman series has developed, editors have sometimes moved away from Bateson’s brief. Hamilton’s first edition of The Faerie Queene reproduced photographically J. C. Smith’s Oxford English Texts edition – which I suppose was in this case a kind of textus receptus – because Spenser’s deliberately archaising vocabulary demanded that one keep his original spelling. In the second edition Hamilton printed a freshly edited text contributed by two Japanese collaborators, but it was once again an old-spelling text. The Longman Pope is also in original spelling, because Pope took such pains over the accidentals of his texts that they were evidently important to him as part of the poems’ meaning, though, as we know, he changed his mind radically about his typographical ideas in the course of his career. The Longman Pope follows his initial preferences for spelling, punctuation, capitals, and italics because it prints the words of his texts as they were first published. Now we encourage our editors to develop textual policies which suit their particular poets, rather than seeking to impose a uniformity. Tricky decisions await the editors of some of the titles currently in progress. What do we do about Byron’s notoriously wayward punctuation, which he expected his publisher John Murray to tame? We will try to preserve some of his informality, especially his dashes and double dashes; but what should we do about five consecutive dashes? Do we modernise Wyatt? Yes, and no. Our current thinking in this case is that the Longman edition will print modernised texts of all the poems by or plausibly attributed to Wyatt, but will include as parallel texts a diplomatic transcription of those poems which survive in the Egerton manuscript in his own handwriting or in the hand of an amanuensis whose work he seems to have checked; this scheme of parallel texts should provide readers with resources with which to reflect for themselves on the process of modernisation, and on their own process of reading. There is a special challenge in the case of Wyatt, whose modernising editors face a particular problem which their old-spelling counterparts can decide not to notice. We might call it an aesthetic problem in that it raises the question of how we suppose that Wyatt thought a line of verse should run. How do we scan his lines? Do we think that he aimed to produce regular iambic metres, or did he experiment with a variety of stresses? Rough lines or smooth lines? Or both? Tottel’s Miscellany began the process of modernising him just fifteen years after his death by changing some of his lines into forms closer to the regular iambic patterns expected of well-behaved Tudor verse. The original-spelling editor of Wyatt can leave the lines as he or she found them, but the modernising editor has to made decisions which are not simply textual but also aesthetic: what kind of verse do we suppose Wyatt to have written? The trap which modernising editors of Wyatt probably cannot avoid may be illustrated from the selected edition published in 1986 by H. A. Mason.10 I yield to no one in my admiration for Mason, who was my teacher long ago, and exemplified for me the life of the scholar to which I aspired. But his edition sometimes crosses the boundary between modernising and rewriting the text on the basis of assumptions about how a line ought to scan, while also sometimes leaving us with lines which I find impossible to scan plausibly. (This is odd coming from a man who insisted on quoting Shakespeare unmodernised from the First Folio.11) Take as an example the sonnet beginning ‘Farewell love, and all thy laws for ever’. In the Egerton MS the first line reads: ffarewell Love and all thy lawes for ever12 and in the Devonshire MS, which some editors regard as preserving an early version, while others think it a corrupt version, we find: Nowe fare well love and thye lawes for ever Mason, who says that he is following the Devonshire MS for this poem, prints: Now farewell, Love, and all thy laws for ever! which gives a nicely regular iambic line, though only by silently smuggling in ‘all’ from the Egerton MS. Rebholz’s Penguin edition follows Egerton verbally: Farewell, Love, and all thy laws forever.13 Later in the poem we have this line in the Egerton MS (contractions expanded): In blynde error when I did perseuer which Mason prints as: In blind error whilest I did persever (following Devonshire for ‘whilest’), and Rebholz as: In blind error when I did persevere Surely we need ‘blynde’ to be two syllables: In blýn | de érr | or whén | I díd | perséu | er so that the final word is pronounced ‘perséver’, not ‘persevére’, and the line finishes with a hypermetrical feminine ending, as, indeed, do the first and fourth lines of the first two quatrains: Now farewell, Love, and all thy laws | forév| er!   1    Thy baited hooks shall tangle me no more.    Senec and Plato call me from thy lore To perfect wealth my wit for to | endéa| vour.    4 In blind error whilest I did | persév| er,       5    Thy sharp repulse, that pricketh eye so sore,    Hath taught me to set in trifles no store But scape forth since liberty | islíef| er. (Mason’s text)8 Here we stumble against the aesthetic problem of what sort of line we think Wyatt was aiming to produce (and also the question of how his scribes thought the lines should sound). To what degree was he trying to write smooth iambics? Did Mason and Rebholz really think that Wyatt started line 5 ‘In blínd érr | or’? Or did Rebholz think that ‘error’ was pronounced ‘errór’? Mason rightly sees that the final word is ‘perséver’ not ‘persevére’, but I cannot work out how to scan his line 5 in such a way as to lead up to that pronunciation, and his line has ten syllables instead of the eleven which the pattern of the poem surely requires, unless he expects us to pronounce ‘whilest’ as two syllables. Mason recognises that there is a problem in ‘how to read aloud the words ever, endeavour, persever, liefer. The Tottel editors assumed that the accent in all was on the last syllable. I think Wyatt followed common practice in treating the last two syllables as one with a sound like -effr’.14 I hear the words as providing hypermetrical feminine endings, but Mason is quite right in seeing that the four words need to be scanned in the same way. The slurred or the feminine ending ‘perséver’ is matched in line 8, which rhymes with it: and scape fourth syns libertie is lever (Egerton) which Mason prints as: But scape forth since liberty is liefer. and Rebholz: And scape forth since liberty is lever. But ‘scape’ – which a modern reader of a modernised text assumes to be one syllable – must surely be two syllables, producing an iambic pattern, and so ‘liefer’ is, like ‘perséver’, a feminine ending to an eleven-syllable line: and scá | pe fóurth | syns líb | ertíe | is lév | er At several points in this poem we only have a sporting chance of working out the scansion if we attend to the original spelling and what it tells us. I am not trying to pick holes in the work of these scholars: I could not have done any better myself if I had tried to produce a modernised edition of Wyatt. I am simply trying to illustrate the problem that to modernise Wyatt’s spelling is to create a text which invites the reader to pronounce the words in a way that makes it even more difficult to determine the likely rhythm and metre than it is with an original-spelling edition. Elsewhere, Mason himself says that in any encounter with a poem ‘it is a fellow-interest the reader finds, not a selfish, totally egoistic, interest. We listen to a voice not our own in our dramatic replay of Wyatt’s poem … the reality we both meet and create in reading a poem occurs in a no-man’s land, neither the present nor the past’.15 Quite so: the poem is indeed a mundus alter et idem, but how best to create or facilitate that meeting through our editing? When I began editing Dryden, I somewhat reluctantly accepted what was then the normal policy of the Longman series. Howard Erskine-Hill, who was originally approached as a possible co-editor with me, was firmly of the opinion that the edition should be in original spelling. I don’t know whether that was the reason why he didn’t in the end come on board, though I do regret the loss of his erudition, especially because he confided to me on more than one occasion that he thought Dryden a greater poet than Pope, to whom he devoted much of his own career. In spite of my reservations, I did edit Dryden in modernised spelling, and set out in the preface to the first volume the rationale for doing so, and the case was subsequently made much more fully by David Hopkins in the volume of essays which we edited for the Dryden tercentenary.16 My argument was that in the early modern period compositors, rather than authors, were usually responsible for the accidentals of a text; that in the case at least of Dryden’s Virgil, and probably for other poems, the printer worked from a scribal copy, not the author’s own holograph; and that Dryden himself complained about the poor printing of some of his works. He drew attention to the erroneous punctuation in Annus Mirabilis and in Sylvae, and struggled for nine days to correct proofs of his Virgil, writing to Tonson that ‘the Printer is a beast, and understands nothing I can say to him of correcting the press’.17 After compiling the errata list, Dryden had to tell readers of his translation that ‘There are other Errata both in false pointing, and omissions of words … which the Reader will correct without any trouble. I omit them, because they only lame my English, not destroy my meaning’.18 None of this inspires us with much confidence as to the accuracy of Dryden’s printed texts, particularly in respect of their accidentals, and surely provides the modernising editor with the licence he needs to correct and to clarify. And in editing Dryden I tried particularly to produce a text in which the punctuation helped readers through the often intricate arguments of Dryden’s satires and theological polemics. And yet, while being proud of this work, I am also somewhat suspicious of the very clarity that I was attempting to produce. One of the ideas to which I find myself returning again and again is that expressed in the title of an essay published some twenty years ago on the French language by Henri Meschonnic, ‘Ce que la clarté empêche de voir’: ‘what clarity prevents us from seeing’.19 And what the clarity of a modernised text may prevent us from seeing is the distinctive strangeness of the work. I can date my own preference for original-spelling texts quite precisely to August 1971, when I bought a Scolar Press facsimile of the second quarto of Hamlet from a bookshop in Stratford. The Scolar Press is long gone, and the shop now sells Peter Rabbit memorabilia to Japanese tourists, but that facsimile stays on my shelves. It is an important book for me because it transformed a work which I thought I knew. Having studied the play for A-level, I knew it almost by heart, yet here it was in this strange guise, familiar but remote. Ever since I picked up that facsimile I have been puzzled by the refusal of most Shakespeare scholars to provide original-spelling texts of the plays and poems, because generations of readers have been deprived of the opportunity to think about what they might learn from Shakespeare’s texts in their original printed form. The three leading scholarly series, the Arden, Oxford, and Cambridge Shakespeares, all provide only modernised texts, though an original-spelling version of the Oxford Shakespeare does exist in a bulky and prohibitively expensive tome.20 What really irritates me, however, is the failure of editors to explain and defend their practice of modernisation. All three series tell the reader that the text is modernised; none explains why, or considers what might be obscured or lost in that process. Preparatory to his work on the Oxford Shakespeare, Stanley Wells published an essay on ‘Modernizing Shakespeare’s Spelling’, but he confined himself to discussing ‘how, once modernization has been decided upon, it should be carried out’.21 The only editorial acknowledgement of the problems inherent in modernising Shakespeare that I have found is the short discussion in E. A. J. Honigmann’s Arden edition of Othello in which he does explain what he is doing, says that he modernises reluctantly, and admits that in so doing we lose the ‘Elizabethan flavour and suggestiveness of his language, making Shakespeare our contemporary even though his every word is around four hundred years old’.22 To my mind, the refusal to allow readers to experience Shakespeare in original spelling is analogous to the attitude of those theatre directors who will not attend to Shakespeare’s precisely crafted settings, and insist upon staging his plays in modern dress. (Opera seems even more vulnerable to the triumph of the directorial ego over the artist’s own vision.) Audiences are, they suppose, too unimaginative to understand Othello unless the characters wander round waving machine guns and shouting into their mobile phones. Yet these are the same audiences who obviously have no problem finding Harry Potter or Game of Thrones ‘relatable’: in those cases they readily use their imaginations to enter a world where strange things are made possible. Indeed, is it not the very strangeness that attracts them? It was an anxiety about the simplifications that we generate through modernising that led me to produce my original-spelling edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets in 2012. In that volume I readily admitted that the compositors of the 1609 quarto were not particularly competent (it was customary, even in those days, for a sentence to end with a full stop, for example), but I wanted to show that nuances of meaning could be gleaned by careful attention to spelling and punctuation which, if not always Shakespeare’s own, were at least those produced by his contemporaries and understood by his contemporaries. And here the alert reader will wonder why I advocate following the original punctuation of the Sonnets while criticising Carey and Fowler for keeping the punctuation of Milton’s original editions. Besides seeing no justification for treating punctuation differently from spelling, I am more tentative than they were about the value of this seventeenth century pointing: sometimes it can be downright sloppy, but at other times it can tell us something important. Let me briefly rehearse the case which I made in my edition for not modernising Shakespeare’s sonnets, while acknowledging that modernisation can bring benefits in clarity, albeit at a cost.23 Take the long ‘s’, perhaps a mere typographical variant, but even so one which can possibly carry meaning. Here is the opening of Sonnet 126 in the 1609 quarto: O thou my louely Boy who in thy power, Doest hould times fickle glasse, his ſickle, hower: The link between the fickle glass and the sickle hour is emphasised by the visual link between ‘fickle’ and ‘sickle’ when the long ‘ſ’ is used: ‘fickle … ſickle’. The comma after ‘sickle’ is regularly deleted by modern editors as an instance of the incompetent pointing which disfigued this quarto, but in fact one of the uses of the comma in early modern printing was to emphasise the word which preceded it,24 as we might do by using italics, but the comma does it less blatantly. It’s not an example of a careless piece of pointing by the compositor, whether it originates from Shakespeare’s desk or from the printer’s shop: it’s a careful, expressive piece of punctuation. The comma is saying to us: ‘Pause for a moment and consider the link between “fickle” and “ſickle”; and while you’re about it, stop to reflect on what the poem means by calling this “hour” “sickle”’. In Sonnet 34 we find these opening lines: VVhy didſt thou promiſe ſuch a beautious day, And make me trauaile forth without my cloake, In line 2 ‘trauaile’ in 1609 meant both ‘travel’ and ‘travail’, both journey and labour, as the same spelling was used for both senses of what was then the same word, but in modern usage is regarded as two distinct words. We find the same use of the word in its double senses in Wyatt’s sonnet ‘Whoso list to hunt’, when he says that ‘the vayne travaill hath weried me so sore’ (Egerton MS): ‘travaill’ expresses the painful labour involved in pursuing this deer. Colin Burrow’s Oxford text and Cathy Shrank’s Longman text of Shakespeare (which I commissioned and greatly admire) both print ‘travel’, thus losing the secondary meaning that the poet’s venturing forth is something difficult, perhaps even a risky piece of self-disclosure. Katherine Duncan-Jones’s Arden text prints ‘travail’, but thereby loses the sense of a journey, which is surely the primary meaning here: the poet has gone out on a journey without his protective cloak. We need both senses, but we cannot have both in a modernised text. We can have both in an old-spelling text, but only if we are quasi-Jacobean readers who understand the word’s two meanings; in practice, we can only have both meanings through an editorial note. There are many such places in the Sonnets where the original spelling facilitates a play on the sound or meaning of words which is obscured in a modernised text. Modern spelling can also cause problems for rhymes. Here is the final couplet of Sonnet 34: Ah but those teares are pearle which thy loue ſheeds, And they are ritch, and ranſome all ill deeds. The rhyme words in the couplet are ‘sheeds | … deeds |’, ‘sheeds’ being a normal Renaissance spelling of ‘sheds’. It provides a perfect rhyme. But does the modernising editor preserve the meaning by printing ‘sheds’, thus wrecking the rhyme; or keep the archaic spelling for the sake of the rhyme by printing a weird word which no one will understand? Modernising editions regularly choose to change the spelling and thereby prioritise the meaning over the rhyme – a reasonable choice, if you have to make a choice: Ah, but those tears are pearl which thy love sheds, And they are rich, and ransom all ill deeds. (Arden, Oxford, and Longman) An original-spelling text will keep both meaning and rhyme, but its readers cannot make anything of this couplet without a note explaining ‘sheeds’. Modern spelling may also alter the metre. In Sonnet 138, line 12 reads thus in 1609: And age in loue, loues not t’haue yeares told. We might mark the metrical pattern as follows: And áge | in lóue, | loues nót | t’haue yéa | res tóld. | where ‘yeares’ is disyllabic. But Katherine Duncan-Jones modernises the line thus: And age in love loves not t’ have years told: (Arden) By keeping the elision of ‘to’ into ‘t’’, and modernising the spelling of ‘yeares’ into ‘years’, the line loses one syllable: And áge | in lóve | loves nót | t’ have yéars | [ ] tóld: | One could have modernised the spelling differently, expanding ‘t’’ into ‘to’: And age in love loves not to have years told. (Oxford)25 This is Colin Burrow’s solution, which preserves the right number of syllables, but changes the emphasis which is provided by the stress pattern, which becomes: And áge | in lóve | loves nót | to háve | years tóld: | If we are guided by the metre (and, of course, Shakespeare does not expect slavish adherence to the metre) the emphasis falls now on the insignificant verb ‘have’ instead of the all-important noun ‘years’, which was appropriately stressed in the 1609 text. It is difficult to see how a modernised text could avoid spoiling either the metre or the required emphasis of this line. Moreover, modern editions remove 1609’s comma after ‘love’, though once again the comma functions to emphasise the preceding word: it is precisely when he is in love that the older man does not want to have his age calculated by his lover. The comma also provides a brief pause for the reader before the transition from noun to verb, accentuating the word-play. I would like to conclude by considering briefly the problems posed by one of the poets who has figured from time to time on the wish list for the Longman series without us ever managing to clinch a deal: Rochester.26 For a while Harold Love considered editing him for the series, but eventually produced instead his magisterial Oxford English Texts edition, a format which allowed him much more scope for textual work than the Longman series could have afforded. The textual problems are immense: pirated printed editions; reputable but posthumous and bowdlerised printed editions; authorial manuscripts; scribal manuscripts; anonymous texts of poems actually by Rochester; and poems confidently attributed to him which are in fact spurious. With Rochester there are both textual and aesthetic choices to be made, in that the editor will often be presented with a decision about how rough or how smooth a satire should be, or how decorous or indecorous he thinks a love poem is, given that the manuscript transmission of Rochester’s verse tended sometimes to bowdlerise and sometimes to add sexually explicit material to the originals. I would like to focus on one example of the hazards of both modernised and original-spelling texts. Take this passage from the Satire against Reason and Mankind. For this poem there is no authorial manuscript but a myriad of printed and scribal copies. Then old age and experience, hand in hand, Lead him to death, and make him understand, After a search so painful and so long, That all his life he has been in the wrong. Huddled in dirt the reasoning engine lies, Who was so proud, so witty, and so wise.    Pride drew him in, as cheats their bubbles catch, And made him venture to be made a wretch. His wisdom did his happiness destroy, Aiming to know that world he should enjoy. This is from the edition by Rochester’s great pioneering editor David Vieth in modern American spelling, and with, I think, very sensitive punctuation which deftly articulates the rhetorical structure and emotive force of the lines. But isn’t there a missed opportunity to bring out the allegorical force of some of these abstract nouns? Shouldn’t ‘old age’ and ‘experience’ be capitalised as, hand in hand, they lead the man to Death? By accident ‘Pride’ is necessarily capitalised at the beginning of its line, and that too is surely a personification, imagined here as a con-man drawing his victim into a scam. But do we read ‘Pride’ as a personification when the other abstract nouns don’t seem to be? And what about ‘wisdom’ and ‘happiness’: should they be capitalised, or has the allegory faded by this point in the text? The modernising editor cannot avoid making interpretative decisions here, and I’m not convinced that Vieth made the right ones. Here now is the passage as printed in Harold Love’s edition, which for its substantives reconstructs its text of this poem from a variety of witnesses and then dresses up the result with accidentals from a single manuscript whose substantives are sometimes rejected (a procedure whose justification I fail to understand):27 Then old Age and Experience hand in hand, Lead him to Death, and make him understand, After a search so painful and so long That all his life he has been in the wrong. Hudled in dirt the reasoning Engine lies, Who was so proud, so witty and so wise. Pride drew him in (as Cheats their Bubbles catch) And made him venture to be made a Wretch. His Wisedome did his Happiness destroy, Ayming to know that World he should enjoy. One wonders what the evidential value is of such a synthetic text. The problem of how to represent personifications is present in Love’s text as it is in Vieth’s, albeit in a different form, for here most of the nouns are capitalised, so that the allegory is made visible typographically. More problematic still is the old-spelling text edited by Keith Walker: Then Old Age, and experience, hand in hand, Lead him to death, and make him understand, After a search so painful, and so long, That all his Life he has been in the wrong; Hudled in dirt, the reas’ning Engine lyes, Who was so proud, so witty, and so wise. Pride drew him in, as Cheats, their Bubbles catch, And makes him venture, to be made a Wretch. His wisdom did his happiness destroy, Aiming to know that World he shou’d enjoy. Walker uses as his copy-text the 1680 printed edition of Rochester’s poems, which has no special authority for substantives and none at all for accidentals, and at several points in this passage the accidentals are positively unhelpful: the inconsistent capitalisation marks out ‘Old Age’ but not ‘experience’, and the italicised words seem arbitrarily chosen: in the last line ‘World’ is one of the less significant words in a line whose point is the antithesis between ‘know’ and ‘enjoy’, which the typography does nothing to mark. The last chapter of Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas is called ‘The conclusion: in which nothing is concluded’, and this is the position in which I find myself as well. Clearly there is a need for both modernised and unmodernised texts for different kinds of readership, though I do think that educational opportunities are lost when students have ready access only to modernised editions. Personally, I prefer original-spelling texts because they open the door into a world which is radically different from my own, and whose very difference is part of what fascinates me. But if we present readers with such texts we need to do a lot of work to explain how to interpret (and sometimes how to ignore) the unusual spelling and punctuation. In a world where attentive literacy is fast disappearing even from English literature undergraduates, this may be asking too much. But if we give our students modernised texts, we also have to work hard to explain the ways in which these may misrepresent the original works and the conceptual world which these works both inhabit and create. Who would be an editor? This is a revised text of a paper given to a conference on textual modernisation held under the auspices of the Oxford Centre for Textual and Editorial Theory on 24 April 2019. I am grateful to John Barnard, David Hopkins, and Michael Rossington for their comments on drafts. Footnotes 1 See Peter Beal’s Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450-1700 (https://www.ies.sas.ac.uk/research-projects-archives/catalogue-english-literary-manuscripts-1450–1700-celm), and Harold Love’s Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1993) and English Clandestine Satire 1660-1702 (Oxford, 2004). 2 The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. Kenneth Allott (1965), p. xiii. 3 The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks (1969), p. xv. 4 The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Roger Lonsdale (1969). 5 Michael Rossington points out to me that Crabbe’s poetry also spanned this change in typographical preferences. See further Gavin Edwards’s review of the Oxford edition of Crabbe in Essays in Criticism, 39 (1989), 84-91. 6 Thomas Gray and William Collins, Poetical Works, ed. Roger Lonsdale (Oxford, 1977). 7 The Poems of John Milton, ed. John Carey and Alastair Fowler (1968), pp. x-xi. 8 For a detailed discussion of the significance of the accidentals of Milton’s texts which also considers the textual policy of the Carey and Fowler edition see John Creaser, ‘Editorial Problems in Milton’, Review of English Studies, 34 (1983), 279-303, and 35 (1984), 45-60. 9 Shakespeare’s Sonnets: An Original-Spelling Text, ed. Paul Hammond (Oxford, 2012), pp. 447-83; Paul Hammond, Milton’s Complex Words: Essays on the Conceptual Structure of ‘Paradise Lost’ (Oxford, 2017). 10 H. A. Mason, Sir Thomas Wyatt: A Literary Portrait (Bristol, 1986). 11 H. A. Mason, Shakespeare’s Tragedies of Love (1970), p. x. 12 Quotations from the Egerton and Devonshire MSS are taken from Richard Harrier, The Canon of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s Poetry (Cambridge, Mass., 1975). 13 Sir Thomas Wyatt, The Complete Poems, ed. R. A. Rebholz (Harmondsworth, 1978). 14 Mason, A Literary Portrait, p. 150. 15 H. A. Mason, ‘Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Birds of Fortune’, Cambridge Quarterly, 7 (1977), 281-96. 16 The Poems of John Dryden, ed. Paul Hammond and David Hopkins, 5 vols. (Harlow, 1995-2005), vol. i, pp. xvi-xxi; David Hopkins, ‘Editing, Authenticity, and Translation: Re-presenting Dryden’s Poetry in 2000’, in Paul Hammond and David Hopkins (eds.), John Dryden: Tercentenary Essays (Oxford, 2000), pp. 330-57. I had previously explored the grounds for modernising Dryden’s texts in my article ‘The Autograph Manuscript of Dryden’s Heroique Stanza’s and its Implications for Editors’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 76 (1982), 457-70. 17 The Letters of John Dryden, ed. Charles E. Ward (Durham, NC, 1942), p. 96. 18 The Works of Virgil, translated into English verse by Mr. Dryden (1697), sig. ††v. 19 Henri Meschonnic, ‘Ce que la clarté empêche de voir’, Esprit, 230-1 (1997), 51-63. 20 Oxford University Press has issued two original-spelling editions of Shakespeare: The Complete Works: Original-Spelling Edition, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford, 1986); and The Complete Works: Critical Reference Edition, ed. Gary Taylor et al., 2 vols. (Oxford, 2017). I expressed reservations about the former in my ‘Review Article: The Oxford Shakespeare’, The Seventeenth Century, 3 (1988), 85-107. 21 Stanley Wells, Modernizing Shakespeare’s Spelling, with Gary Taylor, Three Studies in the Text of ‘Henry V’ (Oxford, 1979), p. 3. 22 Othello, ed. E. A. J. Honigmann (Walton-on-Thames, 1997), pp. 361-3. 23 The following discussion is drawn substantially from pp. 94-5 of my edition, with the permission of Oxford University Press. The other editions cited are Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Walton-on-Thames, 1997); The Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Colin Burrow (Oxford, 2002); and The Complete Poems of Shakespeare, ed. Cathy Shrank and Raphael Lyne (2018). 24 Percy Simpson, Shakespearian Punctuation (Oxford, 1911), pp. 26-31. Michael Rossington tells me that this use of the comma for emphasis is also found as late as Shelley’s texts. 25 Cathy Shrank prints the same text, and explains the problem of scansion in a note. 26 I have discussed the problems of editing Rochester in The Making of Restoration Poetry (Cambridge, 2006), ch. 10. The editions cited here are: The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. David M. Vieth (New Haven, 1968); The Poems of John Wilmot Earl of Rochester, ed. Keith Walker (Oxford, 1984); and The Works of John Wilmot Earl of Rochester, ed. Harold Love (Oxford, 1999). 27 Love says that he has selected the source for his accidentals because of the care which its scribe took over punctuation (p. 563). © The Author(s) [2020]. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)

Pierce, Robert, B

doi: 10.1093/escrit/cgz032pmid: N/A

I ONCE TOOK PART IN A PRODUCTION of the Tom Stoppard play Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth. In the first half I played Dogg, headmaster of an English public school that is rehearsing and then performing Hamlet. For the inner, performed, play I was Claudius (dying twice over in increasingly short versions of Shakespeare’s tragedy). Stoppard’s characters speak an invented language (also called Dogg and based on a tongue that Wittgenstein creates in his Philosophical Investigations), except when they are performing the words of Shakespeare’s play, and sometimes even then. This whole first half of Stoppard’s play is a wildly funny intellectual farce, and after the intermission the audience came back prepared to enjoy that same kind of farce when Cahoot’s Macbeth began. The second part begins, however, with the opening witch scene of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, played absolutely straight. The rest of the play is a rich mixture of farce and serious political drama. The most vivid moment from that whole production was the startling transition in everyone’s mood as the witches’ language worked its magic. In a complete reversal of their expectations, the audience and even the actors were swept up into a state of wonder, created by the power of Shakespeare’s theatrical art. Stoppard’s incorporation of the play within a world otherwise attuned to laughter speaks to something in the long reception of Shakespeare’s play: down through the centuries of response to Macbeth, the imaginative impact of the play as a whole and of the witches in particular has proved so unsettling that people have often distanced themselves from it in humour, by means of jokes and cartoons. One of the cleverest New Yorker cartoons shows the witches gathered around their cauldron, one of them looking at a piece of paper and saying, ‘Is that all it says – eye of newt to taste?’ It is not accidental that Macbeth is, of all Shakespeare’s plays, not only among the most parodied but also the most enwrapped in superstition, so that even uttering its name is taboo among theatre people, and stories about bad luck in productions of the play abound. The distinctive quality of Macbeth among the examples of Shakespeare’s endlessly experimental approaches to the genre of tragedy is its splendidly successful use of the supernatural to create an atmosphere of appalled wonder. If one tries to imagine the play without its witches and prophecies and ghosts and aery daggers, without its dark, haunting poetry, without its sense that Hell and the demonic hover nearby to everything that people see and hear, the play becomes something very different: Macbeth shrinks into a not very striking figure, a King John, perhaps even a Don John from Much Ado. But in the actual play audiences can feel that they are seeing something utterly unlike that, experiencing what Helen Gardner calls a ‘tragedy of damnation’, that they are looking into the depths of a man as he struggles with ultimate issues of human existence, and loses that struggle.1 And in a descent into damnation parallel to Macbeth’s, Lady Macbeth’s guilt and fear drag her into a madness that is shown with grotesquely demonic splendour, something both stranger and grander than Ophelia’s madness, for example. Scotland itself becomes no ordinary setting but the violence- and death-haunted place of Ross’s lament:          Alas, poor country, Almost afraid to know itself. It cannot Be called our mother, but our grave. Where nothing, But who knows nothing, is once seen to smile; Where sighs, and groans, and shrieks that rend the air, Are made, not marked; where violent sorrow seems A modern ecstasy. The deadman’s knell Is there scarce asked for who, and good men’s lives Expire before the flowers in their caps, Dying or ere they sicken.           (IV.iii.164-73)2 Even the one piece of comic relief in the play begins abruptly just after the knocking at the gate that so terrifies Macbeth, and its drunken porter imagines himself to be a ‘devil-porter’ at the very gates of Hell.3 Not only is this Scotland a place of death and despair, but it is wrapped in an impenetrable fog of not-seeing and not-knowing. The inhabitants of Scotland, the characters of the play, dwell in a land of phantasmagoric hideousness, where nothing makes sense and people are too numbed with horror to ‘mark’ (notice, tally up) things, not even counting the dead, far less asking what is happening and how. In their horrified wonder the onlookers within the play infect the audience with parallel reactions to the dramatic world spread before their imagination. A number of critics, in particular J. V. Cunningham and T. G. Bishop, have analysed this kind of atmosphere in Shakespeare’s plays under the category of ‘wonder’: Cunningham adds ‘wonder’ to the traditional Aristotelian responses of pity and fear to define the emotions generated by tragedy.4 Though these two critics pursue very different directions in their analysis of wonder in Shakespeare’s drama, both start from its importance in Aristotle’s thinking: he describes wonder as the human feeling that inspires the whole intellectual discipline of philosophy, the questioning of the existence one encounters.5 In their different ways, Cunningham and Bishop emphasise the cognitive role of wonder that interests Aristotle as well, its spur to intellectual seeking; and wonder in Shakespeare certainly helps students of the play to voyage in strange seas of thought alone;6 but my interest here is in its non-cognitive role, how it creates the distinctive imaginative world of Macbeth from the characteristic feelings that constitute everyone’s most immediate experience of the play. The term ‘wonder’ suggests the sublime, with its origins in Longinus and its development by Edmund Burke in his youthful Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.7 Wonder can be seen as the human feeling created in people when they encounter sublimity either in nature or art. Thinking in the terms of eighteenth century faculty psychology, Burke tries to isolate that part of human experience of nature and art that both pleases and disorients those who encounter it. Whereas the beautiful pleases while giving the perceiver a sense of mastery – of seeing what gives pleasure within a frame, as it were – the sublime gives a pleasure that paradoxically goes along with feeling terrified, overwhelmed, lost. Burke discusses different extraordinary parts of human experience that create an overwhelming sense of awe, including such elements as fear, infinitude, darkness and sudden light, and so on. Aristotle’s argument finds the disorientation that is part of wonder as the impetus towards philosophy, towards a mastery that will turn the sublime into the beautiful because the mind comprehends the true as beautiful. But Shakespeare’s tragedies of the great period do not characteristically complete that arc; rather, they enable audiences to arrive only at the position expressed by Edgar’s words at the end of King Lear (if they are Edgar’s, as in the Folio, and not Albany’s, as in the quarto text): The weight of this sad time we must obey, Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say. A resting-place such as Milton proclaims at the end of his tragedy Samson Agonistes, finding ‘calm of mind, all passion spent’, comes at the end of a philosophical journey that Shakespeare does not claim to have finished. So how does a play like Macbeth manage to leave the audience in a sublime fusion of woe and wonder, to vary the title of Cunningham’s study? As often, Shakespeare does not begin his play with his protagonist, but instead introduces the three witches in the scene that Stoppard borrowed to launch Cahoot’s Macbeth. In both Stoppard’s and Shakespeare’s handling, the scene of the witches planning to meet Macbeth is overwhelmingly unexpected, mysterious, and uncanny, as it begins to create a distinctive form of wonder. The movement of Shakespeare’s poetry unsettles and captures: no one is allowed to sink into the familiar rhythms of blank verse or prose, but instead audiences hear those unmistakable and haunting couplets of a free trochaic tetrameter.8 In the chantlike rhythm they create, the first witch asks a puzzling question: When shall we three meet again? In thunder, lightning, or in rain? Why are these three phenomena contrasted by the ‘or’ with each other, not with some opposite that one might expect to hear, like sunshine or a starry night? Not only are the witches creatures of wild, stormy weather, but they are so much at home in their setting as to make a baffling distinction where most would normally see one whole. Like most commentators I am calling them witches, but the dialogue here does not, and indeed in their choral chant at I.iii they name themselves ‘The weïrd sisters’, a term explained in Holinshed, Shakespeare’s source at this point, as ‘the goddesses of destinie’ (note at I.iii.32). What are audiences to make of these uncanny creatures as the play develops – are they witches or fates? Like goddesses of destiny they prophesy the future exactly, and they appear to have supernatural control as well as supernatural knowledge: they entangle Macbeth in his fate by manipulating their prophecies to delude him. But, for all their aura of cosmic power as shapers of destiny, they also behave like the witches or cunning women that early modern audiences knew about and of which they had familiar experience in the towns and villages many of them came from.9 They tell of performing mundane acts such as killing swine and quarrelling with a sailor’s wife. In that way they partake of the ordinary, but they also evoke the uncanny, bringing their magical powers to ordinary life. The uncanny is reinforced when they hear and answer their supernatural and demonic familiars’ summonses at the end of the first scene. And, with so strong a bond with the dark and demonic, they tie Macbeth to themselves, pulling him into their world. Thus they rhyme his name with their dwelling-place, the heath (a rhyme with ‘Macbeth’ in early modern pronunciation). After this first mention by the witches, the heath establishes itself for the play as the place of mysterious, dark encounters – as indeed it has been in anglophone culture ever since, the evocative setting exploited by Emily Brontë, Thomas Hardy, and Arthur Conan Doyle. If Shakespeare creates a phantasmagoric world in the wilderness scenes of King Lear, a place of otherness and the unheimlich,10 he goes even further when he evokes such a setting in Macbeth; and there the strange world spreads out to take over everything, even the castle that is home to the Macbeths, which transforms from the idyllic place that Duncan sees on his arrival to become a setting in which the king is murdered in his bedroom, and where the hideous suspension of time that De Quincey describes so vividly in his essay is ended only by a knocking at the gate that evokes the sounds of Hellgate. This imaginative world over which the witches preside is dominated by visions, dreams, and hallucinations that will not stay within their normal boundaries, as, for instance, the fairies and their magic largely do in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Those fairies leave the forest and come to Theseus’s palace in Athens only at the end of the play, and then to tidy up the palace, honour Theseus, and pronounce a blessing on the wedding celebration. But in Macbeth everything turns dark, strange, and uncanny under the spell of the witches. In their world strange things happen. An unexplained Third Murderer encounters Macbeth’s two agents as they prepare to commit their sordid crime, and the play never solves the riddle of who he is – Macbeth himself? Seyton? someone or something unknown? Audiences do not know why he is there, nor do they grasp what he accomplishes – Banquo’s death? Fleance’s escape? Moments later the bloody ghost of Banquo cannot be kept away from Macbeth’s feast, and Macbeth cannot even resist inviting the ghost’s presence there. He twice voices his insincere request, as though his words and the will behind them were just part of the spell that the witches have cast, with Macbeth only a puppet. The world of Macbeth is characterised by indistinct boundaries through which terrible forces at first seep and then pour in an overwhelming flood. In a setting in which nothing holds its shape or its place in the cosmos, in which everything is undefined in the looming darkness, the witches embody such presiding ambiguity – are they male or female, weak or powerful, prophets or liars, helpers or destroyers? Are they even strictly characters in the play or a kind of demonic chorus? ‘The earth hath bubbles, as the water has, / And these are of them’ (I.iii.79-80): Banquo’s explanation of them is no explanation at all to the ear of reason, but one hears the wonder in his voice. Consider how many modern horror stories involve the sudden release of some uncanny evil: a demon, a vampire, infection with an unknown plague, a blob of protoplasm that devours everything – the sorts of beings and events that can be imaged symbolically by that stock device of melodramatic horror, a black door opening to allow red light to come pouring through. There are two aspects of this in-flooding evil – it tempts those on the ordinary side of the door to ally themselves with it – suggests them, to use the early modern term for ‘tempting’, so that they choose to become one with it – and it overwhelms them – possesses them, as if their capacity to choose were insignificant and the power of metaphysical evil absolute in a deterministic cosmos. In the way it is portrayed in many recent imaginings of such horror, the force of individual will, that inner human place of choosing, is largely omitted. An unconscious woman is caught up in Count Dracula’s arms; Rosemary of Rosemary’s Baby is drugged and helpless to resist impregnation with the Antichrist. But it is the power of Macbeth to include both sides of this image of evil, being tempted and being possessed. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, with a full sense of what they are admitting into themselves, acquiesce in the overwhelming evil that floods in upon them. A. C. Bradley called this play ‘psychologically … perhaps the most remarkable exhibition of the development of a character to be found in Shakespeare’s tragedies’.11 And surely it is true that the audience does witness the process of moral and psychological collapse in Macbeth and Lady Macbeth that Bradley and other critics have described so well. But Bradley wrote from a post-Romantic understanding of human character, one influenced by the realist novel, that is more continuous and organic than Shakespeare’s: in the dramatist’s characters one never quite sees the gradual shaping of an Emma Bovary or a Stephen Dedalus. Instead, in this play one watches the transformation of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth as if by flashes of lightning in the dark of night. Shakespeare is always fascinated with decision as a defining act, both for the deciding character and for the plot. Here the specific choice that produces the tragedy, the centre to the structure of the play, is Macbeth’s decision to kill Duncan. Of that decision a rationalistic critic can ask where it comes from (its motivation), how it is enacted, and what its consequences are. Yet in Macbeth the first two questions are difficult to answer unambiguously. When exactly does Macbeth first think of seizing the crown, and when does he finally determine on the act of killing Duncan? And of course the audience never really sees the murder itself, the enactment of the decision. They see it only in Macbeth’s unhinged recollection, in Macduff’s horrified report of finding the body, and in Lady Macbeth’s chillingly cold, practical commands on how to proceed. Shakespeare in this craft is precursor both of the realistic characterisation to be found later in the novel and Ibsen and of absurdist characterisation, with its discontinuities surrounding a divided or even absent self, the art of Beckett and Ionesco. That doubleness in Shakespeare is what puzzles the more rationalistic critical attempts to make sense of the play, but it is also why Macbeth haunts the modern and postmodern age, endlessly performed and rewritten, as Ionesco does in Macbett and, more distantly, in Exit the King, and as Tom Stoppard does in Cahoot’s Macbeth.12 It is a play full of puzzles and discontinuities: it is curious, for example, that Macbeth should be ignorant of Cawdor’s rebellion; the subsequent merging of identity between Macbeth and Cawdor is a puzzle, as is the strange mixture of heroic and horrific imagery associated with Macbeth’s early victories; and, of course, a big mystery attaches to the question whether the Macbeths have or have had children. In some deep symbolic sense the Macbeths are childless, sterile, in contrast with the fecundity of Macduff and the line of Scottish and English kings; yet audiences suddenly have to widen their sense of Lady Macbeth to incorporate the picture ‘I have given suck’, only to have her turn to her claim that, to honour a vow, she would dash the baby’s brains out (I.vii.53-9). Some of these puzzles may come from cutting the play or other revisions, but either way their effect is to support its dark sublimity by thwarting the desire of the audience to arrive at clarity about the characters.13 So to return to the question: where does the decision to kill Duncan come from? Two external answers offer themselves: Lady Macbeth and the witches; but their overtures to Macbeth apparently speak to something already present in him. Thus he reacts to their words as Banquo does not, and he even echoes them unconsciously in his very first line. The witches (as well as Lady Macbeth) are not simply outside forces that sway Macbeth: they are both external and internal to him, an ambiguity reflected in the terms used for discussing Macbeth over the centuries. What early modern Christian analysts would have called ‘possession’, interpreters in the twenty-first century tend to call obsession, defining the same human condition as it manifests itself in Macbeth in psychological rather than cosmic-theological terms. And part of the wonder of the play is that in their chosen language both ages get at much of what audiences experience. In the witches’ cryptic pronouncements and in his wife’s promptings, Macbeth encounters outside himself much the same impulses as he recognises within himself, in his horrible imaginings. He finds inside himself a dark world that is also a dark world beyond him, a Heart of Darkness, and by submitting to it and so becoming king through the bloody murder of his sovereign and guest, he makes Scotland itself take on that darkness: the inner state of Macbeth and the outer state of Scotland interpenetrate to become a witches’ brew of horrified wonder. The language of the play surges towards the sublime as it helps to create the fiery darkness, as of Milton’s Hell in Paradise Lost, that more and more surrounds Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. In the moment where she steels his mind to commit the murder of Duncan, it is as though he is dragged unwillingly towards her determination to act and her darkly sublime mode of speech. In the scene leading to his departure to kill the king, he desperately tries to reclaim the world where he can be admired for his valour and probity in an image that combines boldness and graceful beauty: He [Duncan] hath honoured me of late, and I have bought Golden opinions from all sorts of people Which would be worn now in their newest gloss, Not cast aside so soon.           (I.vii.1-4) He imagines the admiration that Duncan and the others have given him as a worthy and splendid transaction, an inward exchange for the honour that he has earned. Then the gold of the opinions that he has earned becomes a garment. The image turns on the ‘newest gloss’ of the fabric from the light shining off the gold, as Macbeth echoes the familiar theme of the play of garments that can or cannot be worn.14 Lady Macbeth taunts him into submission in a set of speeches that push the limits of poetic coherence, inviting him into the world of the demonic sublime. Thus she attacks his masculinity, and, when he utters a maxim that neatly defines an ideal of manhood that justifies it as genuinely virtuous (his last real gesture towards solid virtue in an image of graceful beauty – ‘I dare do all that may become a man. / Who dares do more, is none’), she holds herself up as an exemplar of the dark world into which she invites him:       I have given suck, and know How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me: I would, whilst it was smiling in my face, Have plucked the nipple from his boneless gums, And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn As you have done to this.           (I.vii.55-9) From that time on, with a feeble gesture of hesitation – ‘If we should fail?’ – Macbeth is pulled into her poetic mode as he becomes the creature of the deed, one which he compels himself to carry out with all its monstrous consequences. If Macbeth is a tragedy of damnation, as Helen Gardner calls it, it is damnation shown with great psychological insight into the inner workings of damnation. A terrible process of inner decay in Macbeth is fixed in place by a decision to plunge that dagger into the sleeping Duncan. His motivation for his deed is a famous puzzle not least because he is very eloquent on why he should not do it. As a result both E. E. Stoll and Bernard Shaw denied that the portrayal of Macbeth as murderer was psychologically plausible at all, but J. I. M. Stewart shrewdly argued that it is the very horror of the act that creates its fascination for Macbeth.15 In a terrible way Macbeth does not so much act as let the murder happen to him. Audiences see the actual deed only in their imagination, and then in Macduff’s horrified report of his discovery of the king’s body; but the scene is so vivid that it has a spectral reality for them, just as Macbeth clearly sees the aery dagger that has no physical reality. Each has wanted the other to become a murderer, and each obtains what he or she wants. One can say roughly that Macbeth is hardened more and more after the first murder, while Lady Macbeth’s willed hardness before the deed is shattered by her guilty madness, which we see taking her over in the sleepwalking scene. There is a grim accuracy in Malcolm’s restoration-of-order speech at the end as he refers to ‘This dead butcher, and his fiend-like queen’. But, at least for many interpreters, their fate evokes a horrified pity that this closing speech does not fully incorporate. In those two phantasmagorical figures the play imagines a man and a woman opening the black door, and, as the hideous red light floods over them, they take on the nightmarish shape of damned figures like those that readers can see in the flickering, fiery light of Dante’s Inferno. For Cunningham and Bishop, emphasising the cognitive aspect of wonder, the question facing the audience is: Can we understand what the protagonist is seeking and why? And that phrasing, with its emphasis on the cognitive, is surely more or less justified, for Shakespeare and for tragedy generally. But wonder is also a theatrical experience in its own right, having its own aesthetic worth aside from what it may teach the protagonist or the audience as they spur onwards in the Aristotelian quest for philosophical answers. Though there are puzzles in Macbeth, they are not really mysteries that lead to enlightenment for the characters or for the audience. In contrast to our experience of Hamlet, where both the protagonist and his viewers set forth on an intellectual quest for truth in an enigmatic world,16 the puzzles and wonders in Macbeth are above all just parts of the fabric of an engrossing dramatic experience. The mysteries of Macbeth are not so much intellectual challenges, for the characters or for the audience, as they are reminders of how precariously balanced on the edge of a moral and existential precipice the characters and their viewers are. And indeed that may be a cognitive lesson of a negative kind, not to expect too much of the intellectual and artistic power that shapes the world into the beautiful. The introduction of wondrous things into Shakespeare’s tragedies operates in very different ways in the different tragedies. In Hamlet they come with a ghost, bringing a mystery to be solved, a problem in cognition for the intellectual Hamlet and the audience. In King Lear they come with the thunder of the gods, an inscrutable mystery about the cosmos even while that thunder is echoed by the titanic passions in the king’s breast. In Antony and Cleopatra they pervade a strange, alien land where passion seems more real than, larger than, politics and military glory, and even rational thought. But in Macbeth they take over the whole play, with only a partial escape for a moment to the English court of Edward the Confessor; and, in dominating the play, they raise pity and fear and wonder at the inner life of a man whose intellectual and emotional capacities are stunted, whose military prowess withers away after a display that the audience only hears about, but a man whose most striking quality when he appears onstage is a vivid, hallucinatory imagination. That imagination is what allows the audience to see deeply into him and to follow him into an appalling, nightmarish world. They watch him walk up to a precipice and step over it to fall into the vast darkness of primal dreams. There is no pure ‘tragedy of wonder’ in the Shakespeare canon because Shakespeare always resists generic purity, exploring the boundaries of the form in his various tragedies rather than distilling some tragic essence.17 But, in its own distinctively imagined inner world of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth and outer world of a Scotland drenched with the blood of their crimes, there is no more singularly wondrous tragedy than Macbeth. Footnotes 1 Helen Gardner, ‘Milton’s Satan and the Theme of Damnation in Elizabethan Tragedy’, in A Reading of Paradise Lost (Oxford, 1965), Appendix A, pp. 99-120. 2 Quotations are taken from Macbeth, ed. Sandra Clark and Pamela Mason, Arden 3 (2015). 3 Thomas De Quincey, ‘On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth’, in De Quincey’s Writings, vol. ii: Miscellaneous Essays (Boston, 1851), pp. 9-16. 4 Thomas Bishop, Shakespeare and the Theatre of Wonder (Cambridge, 1996); see also Bishop’s article ‘“Come, Let Me Clutch Thee”: Macbeth and the Marvelous Text’, in Peter G. Platt (ed.), Wonders, Marvels, and Monsters in Early Modern Culture (Newark, Del., 1999), pp. 229-50 ; J. V. Cunningham, Woe or Wonder: The Emotional Effect of Shakespearean Tragedy (Denver, Colo., 1951). 5 Bishop, Shakespeare and the Theatre of Wonder, p. 26. 6 As Bishop says, ‘Wonder becomes a kind of high-level “switchpoint” for transactions between emotional and rational responses’ (ibid., p. 4). 7 The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, vol. i (Boston, 1826), pp. 73-216. 8 So unmistakable that it is surely difficult to read the Hecate scenes in the Folio as Shakespearean or as parts of the original creation of the play, whatever the facts about its authorship. 9 See Keith Thomas’s magisterial study, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (1971), along with the many critical studies of the supernatural in Macbeth. 10 See John Gillies, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 1-39, and Robert B. Pierce, ‘Mapping King Lear’, Shakespeare Survey, 62 (2009), 308-16, esp. pp. 311-12. 11 Shakespearean Tragedy: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth (New York, 1955), p. 285. 12 See Ruby Cohn’s thoughtful study of Shakespearean adaptations, Modern Shakespeare Offshoots (Princeton, NJ, 1976). 13 See L. C. Knights, ‘How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?’, in Explorations: Essays in Criticism Mainly in the Literature of the Seventeenth Century (New York, 1964), pp. 15-54. 14 The one striking garment in the wonderful Trevor Nunn production of the play with the cast in black rehearsal clothes, including Ian McKellen and Judi Dench as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, was the golden robe that Macbeth donned as he became king through his murder. The ironic recollection of this image when Macbeth put on the physical embodiment of the robe, which swallowed up his humanity, was striking. 15 Elmer Edgar Stoll, Art and Artifice in Shakespeare: A Study in Dramatic Contrast and Illusion (New York, 1933), pp. 77-89; Shaw on Shakespeare: An Anthology of Bernard Shaw’s Writings on the Plays and Production of Shakespeare, ed. Edwin Wilson (New York, 1961), p. 225; J. I. M. Stewart, Character and Motive in Shakespeare: Some Recent Appraisals Examined (1965), pp. 91-7. 16 See Robert B. Pierce, ‘Hamlet and the Problem of Moral Agency’, in Garry L. Hagberg (ed.), Fictional Characters, Real Problems: The Search for Ethical Content in Literature (Oxford, 2016), pp. 46-55. 17 See Robert B. Pierce, ‘Tragedy and Timon of Athens’, Comparative Drama, 36 (2002), 75-90. © The Author(s) [2020]. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)

Tambling,, Jeremy

doi: 10.1093/escrit/cgz031pmid: N/A

Enter Kent, Gloucester, and Edmund. Kent. I thought the King had more affected the Duke of  Albany than Cornwall. Gloucester. It did always seem so to us: but now, in the  division of the kingdom [kingdoms, Q] it appears not which of the Dukes he values most, for qualities [equalities, Q] are so weighed that curiosity in neither can make choice of either’s moiety. Kent: Is not this your son, my lord?      (King Lear I.i.1-6, F)1 TEXTUAL DIVISIONS BETWEEN the quarto (Q) and the Folio (F) King Lear emphasised by scholars over the past forty years have made the play less easy to interpret singly; more interesting, however, because producing more tentativeness about any overarching reading, knowing this may not be fully supported by both the texts and their variants but may reflect on the critic’s desire for consistency, or for a single comforting, or discomforting, strain within the reading. Any interpretation will find itself disconfirmed by either Q or F at every turn. The necessity of plural readings indicates the play’s multiple strands, for the variants often provide distinctions, not between sense and nonsense, though sometimes they do (and the traffic here is rarely one-way, one version being consistently better than the other), but between differing valid readings, as if, in the intensity of writing, one speech, or emphasis, or moment of speaking is assignable to more than one character with equal rightness or possibility. The divisions between the texts spark plural energies, possibilities of reading, within each.2 That is underscored by one impulse within the play: dividing, so bringing out visibly multiple tendencies, undoing apparent single forces at work. Lear’s irrationality in banishing Cordelia partly exposes something inherently impossible within his ‘darker purpose’ (I.i.35), whose madness and folly accelerate what he calls ‘the mysteries of Hecate and the night’ (I.i.111, F2). Q reads ‘mistress’, and F1 ‘miseries’ for F2’s ‘mysteries’, and Q reads ‘might’ for ‘night’, which gives a hendiadys: ‘the mighty miseries/mysteries, of Hecate’. Hecate may have a mistress above her, but though ‘mysteries’ is usually adopted, F’s ‘miseries’ anticipates the discomforting bare-life conditions of Acts III and IV, and a state of despair.3 Hecate, a divisive force, consorts with the disturbing feminine Nature, who is Edmund’s goddess (I.ii.1), and with ‘false Fortune’ (V.iii.6).4 Gloucester’s credulousness, believing one brother against another, matches Lear’s self-destructiveness and work of division; both actions demand the question: what energies prompt such self-division and self-destruction, and unleash multiple divisive forces? The state of the text makes the question inseparable from how ambiguity in the play ruins all single statements and any desire for single integral being. Irrationality emerges in the play’s opening: Kent’s surprise that Lear no longer ‘affects’ Albany more than Cornwall (a sensible, justifiable choice; further, Albany, married to the eldest daughter, could be expected to take precedence). ‘Division of the kingdom’ is under way, a point intensified by Q’s ‘kingdoms’; division precedes segmentation into three, or two (as in ‘moiety’, and implied in Q’s image of the balances). If the kingdom divides three ways, Lear’s ‘darker purpose’ is not to equalise these: Cordelia is expected to win a third ‘more opulent’ than her sisters. Lear ‘parts’ (i.e. divides) a coronet between two – Albany and Cornwall – after excluding Cordelia, but since the coronet has already been brought in ceremoniously, he seems already committed to the impossible: splitting something inherently single (the coronet and what it symbolises). Such division also implies war (‘future strife’) between those who have received an ambiguous portion, which Lear thinks he has prevented, assuming that ‘prevent’ does not mean ‘to bring on’: i.e. to bring on strife, desiring it (OED v. 2). One coronet is given to two men replacing three women. Two on the basis of the play’s opening, or three on the basis of the daughters? Sexual difference destroys the symmetry of three, or two, or one. Three inheres or splits in a single instant, as in France’s phrase ‘this trice of time’ (I.i.217). The ambiguity of either two and three, as uncanny as in Macbeth,5 appears in Edgar-as-Tom naming plural devils interchangeably with the single ‘foul fiend’; the play divides equally strangely. In The Winter’s Tale, the friendship of Leontes and Polixenes is expected to ‘branch’ (I.i.24 – i.e. multiply and divide); ‘division of the kingdoms’ there begins with the king’s irrationality, making division inhere in unity. If Ophelia, ‘divided from herself and her fair judgment’ (Hamlet IV.v.84-5), defines madness, madness inheres in division. Lear acts ‘upon the gad’, like Gloucester; he makes the King of France to be ‘in choler parted’; and division exfoliates in Gloucester’s ‘I would unstate myself to be in a due resolution’ (I.ii.99-100).6 The unconscious force within ‘unstating’ exceeds the meaning that he would surrender his position, or rank. It includes what happens to him, physically and mentally; it consorts with the implications of disrobing – in image and reality – and with wanting to tear the body apart (I.iv.293-6). Gloucester wants the ‘resolution’ of a single, definite state – and also utter self-division. The first state disallows ambiguities within speech, even in Cordelia loving according to her ‘bond’, a word opposed to ‘division’ but capable of multiple interpretations. Similarly, Marlowe’s Faustus will go forward in the ‘famous art’, as the Evil Angel calls it, wanting ‘the spirits’ to ‘resolve me of all ambiguities, / Perform what desperate enterprise I will’.7 He wants control, and resolution; but also ‘desperate’ action, which has destructive potential. Faustus and Gloucester show self-division in wanting the singleness of ‘resolution’; Faustus shows this too when dominated by a Calvinist God who would not pardon anyway: Away with such vain fancies and despair! Despair in God and trust in Beelzebub. Now go not backward. No, Faustus, be resolute …     (II.i.4-6) Going forward or backward may mean despair; resolution comes from despair, which, theologically, implies alienation from God, inducing suicide.8 It is a sin since it rejects hope in God, and because despair desires resolution and division together (both markers of suicide), it is an essential word for King Lear. Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death (1849) makes despair the state where the self ‘cannot consume himself, cannot get rid of himself, cannot reduce himself to nothing’ – a double condition, for it is also ‘in despair to will to be oneself’. That is, the self despairs of becoming a self, which might heal its self-divisions (its despair); and it cannot be ‘rid of’ itself.9 Kierkegaard calls despair the modern state. That is, people are already, though unconsciously, in despair, but if they become conscious of it, as Goneril speaks of her ‘hateful life’ (IV.ii.87) – a statement not reducible to her idea of marriage to Albany – they will to be rid of themselves (desiring to be unstated); or else, when realising they have failed to become a self, they become assertive, acting out ‘imaginary constructions’, or becoming defiant, even demonic. Despair does not mean giving up on the state of things in the world as bad, rather: ‘despair over the earthly or over something earthly is in reality also despair of the eternal and over oneself insofar as it is despair, for this is indeed the formula for all despair’. Someone moving from unconscious to conscious despair goes from despair in weakness to despair over his weakness; the latter becoming a negative defiance.10 Does Kierkegaard on despair help with King Lear? Perhaps Lear and Gloucester are cases of unconscious despair, shown in their destruction of their own ‘kingdoms’ in the sense meant when Brutus calls ‘the state of man’ a ‘little kingdom’ (Julius Caesar II.i.67, 68). Gloucester, who says he loves Edgar ‘entirely’ (I.ii.66), undoes him, and himself; Edmund exploits multiple roles and sexual allegiances, angrily repeating ‘Why bastard? Wherefore base? … Why brand they us / With base? With baseness, bastardy? Base, base’ (I.ii.6, 9, 10, F; Q: ‘with base, base bastardy’), but his defiance ends with a self-simplifying resolution, agreeing with Edgar’s moralism: ‘the wheel has come full circle, I am here’ (V.iii.172). The first act’s ‘division’ multiplies into ‘likely wars between the two Dukes of Cornwall and Albany’ (II.i.11, 12; Q supplies ‘two’). These ‘wars’ (an uncanny plural) further branch into war with France, while remaining, as in Act III, scene i, ‘division … ’twixt Albany and Cornwall’ (III.i.19, 21). Though the versions of this scene in Q and F are almost impossible to reconcile (neither seems complete without the other), Q’s phrase ‘this scattered kingdom’ should not be jettisoned; its sense of throwing away goes further than saying the kingdom is divided: division, as Gloucester tells Edmund, brings on ‘worse matter than that’ (III.iii.8, 9). Division pluralises: for example, Act II, scene i reveals division between Edgar and Edmund; division between Gloucester and Edgar; division reported between Lear and Goneril; and, implicitly, division between Cornwall and Regan, who has noticed Edmund for the first time (there was no interaction in Act I, scene i). Now, sexuality shows itself as the basis of division. Edmund opportunistically plays along with Regan’s lie about Lear’s knights being riotous: he aligns his brother with them, slandering both (II.i.94-8). Regan’s speech, beginning with replying to Edmund (‘No marvel, then’, II.i.98), ends with her declaring what initiative she is taking. Cornwall must tag along with her, and when he begins some explanation, ‘You know not why we came to visit you?’ (II.i.120), she cuts him out with her own version of events. In Act III, scene vii, deprived of Edmund, whom Cornwall has sent off with Goneril, Regan is more ruthless than Cornwall; her vindication (if that is the right word) of Edmund to Gloucester (III.vii.86-9) having more vigour in it than her enquiries after the dying Cornwall. (If the F reading ‘Exit’ at III.vii.97 stands, she may not give her arm to the dying Cornwall, but just leave, making him stagger out alone.) Goneril, equally viciously, reacts against Regan. The women have rejected their husbands; Cordelia’s sarcasm about why her sisters married at all points this up (I.i.99-104). Division inheres in sisters, and in male responses to women, and in marriage; this informs Gloucester’s casual joking about a ‘fault’ (I.i.15), which, playing on a sexual meaning of ‘fault’, associates with ‘division’.11 Husband/wife division induces in Act IV a sexually competitive women’s division. Behind the ‘affecting’ of Albany and Cornwall stands Lear’s invitation to his daughters to compete in saying how much they love him; the father would deny the daughters’ sexuality in possessing their love and loyalty. Regan plays to that, calling herself an ‘enemy to all other joys / Which the most precious square of sense possesses’ (I.i.73-4), as if her body’s sexuality means nothing to her in the context of the ‘dull, stale, tired bed’ (I.ii.13, F) of marriage; sexuality rips everything apart. The quarto title, The True Chronicle Historie of the life and death of King LEAR and his three Daughters, With the Unfortunate life of Edgar, sone and heire to the Earle of Gloster, and his sullen and assumed humor of TOM of Bedlam, emphasises the asymmetry of three women as potentially uncanny, but the title, Shakespearean or not, marks a bifurcation between what is ‘true’ and what is ‘assumed’, awarding equal place to the historical/chronological and the theatrical. The first associates with ‘resolution’, with having an assured, secure identity, even if this must be usurped, as by Edmund, or Goneril, or Regan (and here Kierkegaard helps: ‘this sense of security and tranquillity can be the despair’).12 The second half of the title, the theatrical and mad, aligns with the desire to divide and end as being ‘desperate’ – here, again, like Goneril (V.iii.159), as if the play combined Kierkegaard’s despair (that we want to be rid of ourselves) with Freud’s sense of the power of the death-drive. This second alignment arises because, against the impulse to be part of a ‘true history’ – as if the self could have and be part of such a thing – appears a counter-desire to ‘assume’, as if knowing the self is on stage, or to be as if mad, perhaps in the context of Bedlam, which was, historically, a theatrical space for the privileged to gawp at the mad. These opposed tendencies show in Edgar, and Edgar-as-Tom. Tom’s ‘humours’ need not be ‘assumed’ and comedic; they may arise from the bleak earth, from his environment, as Portia fears that Brutus will ‘suck up the humours / Of the dank morning’.13 That would align Tom’s ‘humour’ with him as an elemental figure, as evoked in his first speech in the hovel (III.iv.50-61): led by the fiend through fire, flame, ford, whirlpool – compare ‘whirlwinds’ – bog, and quagmire.14 But to these images of nature conjuring up the reality of ‘the extremity of the skies’ (III.iv.100) must be added Tom of Bedlam (II.ii.13-21, IV.vii.102), a familiar London type. Dekker’s vagabonds talk of ‘Tom of Bedlam’s band of madcaps, otherwise called Poor Tom’s flock of wild-geese, whom here thou seest by his black and blue naked arms to be a man beaten to the world, and these wild-geese, or hare-brains, are called abram-men’.15 Edgar-as-Tom becomes ‘natural’, and urban; and, as the latter, a character thought of as staging himself as a spectacle to enforce charity, as well as being associated with the types of madness within Bedlam (St Mary Bethlehem in Bishopsgate).16 Tom of Bedlam was regarded as a fraudulent character-type; and here we must draw in the pervasive, anti-theatrical tendencies marking one of Shakespeare’s sources: Samuel Harsnett’s A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures, to with-draw the harts of her Majesties Subjects from their allegiance and from the truth of Christian Religion professed in England, under the pretence of casting out Devils (1603). Harsnett’s language, down to individual words which are used in surprisingly unpredictable contexts, saturates the play, troubling Shakespeare’s own writing.17 Harsnett claimed spirit possession and its exorcism to be fraudulent, taking a particular case of this at Denham, Buckinghamshire (1585-6), to show his contempt for it. Edgar increases his self-alienation by calling himself ‘Poor Tom’ in the third person, but he is the second to assume that role, for Edmund has already said ‘My cue is villainous melancholy, with a sigh like Tom o’Bedlam’ (I.ii.135-6), unlike the character of Edgar, who comes ‘like the catastrophe of the old comedy’ (I.ii.134).18 That Edgar-as-Tom’s acting tends towards comedy – and so the theatrical – is lightly underscored when the Fool, an earlier figure of comedy, answers Lear’s ‘Couldst thou save nothing? Wouldst thou give them all?’ with a joke: ‘Nay, he reserved a blanket, else we had all been shamed’ (III.iv.63-5). Edmund’s ‘melancholy’, however, may connect with Harsnett’s question: ‘Why men of a melancholick constitution be more subject to fears, fancies, and imagination of devils and witches than other tempers be?’ (Harsnett, p. 304), though of course he appropriates melancholy to himself, not to Edgar, who will be, in some sort, spirit-possessed. Nonetheless, the overlapping indicates how two brothers may also be as one, since both play the Bedlam.19 Behind the pretence of madness may stand genuine melancholia in Edmund, however he acts it, in a Kierkegaardian denial of despair. Edgar, who will indeed become the ‘catastrophe’ in Act V, scene iii, unlike Edmund, is forced into acting:    Poor Turlygod, poor Tom, That’s something yet: Edgar I nothing am.      (II.iii.19-20) ‘Because as Edgar I am nothing, therefore I will no longer be Edgar’, or ‘Nothing of me now is Edgar any longer’.20 Becoming Tom is a strategy, a form of acting. A recent very interesting monograph by Simon Palfrey casts Tom as a disavowed, repressed part of Edgar, a creation who nonetheless speaks of a past, but who ‘owns to more fears, more desires more places, more dread’ than others in the play.21 Edgar represents both contradictory drives already noted within the play: he wills to believe in single identity and preserves that throughout, at whatever cost in terms of sympathy. The victim of several ironic reverses, he never loses his moralism; though, since he throws away his identity, he becomes more unstated than any other character, and a figure of despair. Palfrey admits Tom’s theatricality, calling him ‘the unkillable life of theater’,22 yet is more interested in him as an autonomous creation, an ‘other’ being, more related to elemental life than anything in Edgar, so that for him the relation between the doublet Edgar/Tom is uncanny, the dividing line impossible to specify. Perhaps that overlapping explains why he virtually ignores Stephen Greenblatt’s analysis.23 For Greenblatt, Shakespeare follows Harsnett pronouncing on the theatrical and illusionistic nature of the Catholic exorcism practised on such figures as the servant girl Susan Williams and her sister Fid (Friswood) at Denham.24 Similarly, Edgar practises illusions on Gloucester when leading him to Dover cliff (IV.vi). These illusions may ‘work’ like the theatre which Harsnett’s version of Protestantism derides; but the emptying out of ritual practices such as exorcism by calling them superstition cannot negate the effects of the evil or destructiveness which the play shows working within the self or society.25 Greenblatt stresses the self-fashioned nature of identity; Palfrey, however, stresses Tom as ‘the thing itself’ (III.iv.108), as he quotes that at the beginning of an ‘Interlude’ he entitles ‘Tom Is …?’.26 For Greenblatt, Shakespeare uses and perhaps ironises Harsnett’s scepticism, so that the devils whose existence was flouted by Harsnett return in secular form, as metaphors for the cruelty of state power; Palfrey, however, is barely concerned with Harsnett, and only moderately with the sources of Tom’s speeches. Emphasising an unassimilable reality about Tom (as well as theatrical – so that he repeats the bifurcation commented on in Q’s title), Palfrey’s absence of attention to devils diminishes his account. Yet at the same time, it seems right to find a reading of the Poor Tom scenes where Shakespeare is less ironic, less coolly appropriating Harsnett, than in Greenblatt. It is hard to think that Harsnett’s derision of the idea of the ghost of Caesar appearing to Brutus as described by Plutarch, dismissed by Harsnett as a ‘Heathenish dream’ (Harsnett, p. 306), yet worked by Shakespeare into Julius Caesar, would not have produced in Shakespeare a reaction which showed preference for illusion, madness, and even the devilish; the latter disavowed, but more striking than anything that accounts of Bedlam or of ‘penury’ (Harsnett, p. 222; Lear II.iii.9) could produce. Here despair seems to be the condition where the self cannot keep track of itself, nor of its sources of being. Shakespeare’s Edmund might well have derived his name from the young Edmund Peckham of Denham, a dupe whom Harsnett compares to a comic from Plautus; from William Weston (alias Edmunds, 1549-1615), who was the leading exorcist Harsnett discusses; and from Edmund Campion (1540-81), martyred as a Jesuit, and whose thumb, as a relic, was thrust into the mouth of Friswood Williams during exorcism while she was bound fast in a chair (Harsnett, p. 295) – tortured like Gloucester.27 (Torture, and medical aid, even exorcism, require the patient to sit comfortably.) ‘Edmund’ derives from all three people; but the name implicitly denies him a single-subject position, making him devil, clown, and holy fool (depending on one’s view of Campion). Harsnett lets Shakespeare pour plural energies into the ‘Bastard’ (so Q), making distinctions of being possessed and exorcising the devil impossible to distinguish, and further making Edmund, Edgar, and Edgar/Poor Tom composites, conjoined and separate simultaneously, two, or three, identities, uncannily also occasionally almost one (as Harsnett (p. 269) says of the devil, ‘he played both parts himself’). Edgar derives from a supposed demoniac, Nicholas Marwood, who did lie but a night or two abroad in the fieldes, and beeing but a melancholicke person, was scared with lightning and thunder that happened in the night, and loe, an evident sign that that the man was possessed. The priests must meet about this pittifull creature. Edmunds must come, the holie Chaire must be fetcht out, the holy budget of sacred reliques must be opened, and all the enchaunting mysteries applied about the poore man. (Harsnett, p. 222) In Shakespeare, this intensifies and fractures into incidents involving Lear, Edgar, Edmund, Cornwall, the chair to bind Gloucester, and Gloucester himself. The trivial and ironically comic in Harsnett metamorphose into an unignorable sequence of miseries and torture, applied to a melancholic whose condition may extend to unconscious despair. Edgar tortures himself (II.iii.13-20) as his brother cuts himself (II.i.34-6), but Edgar’s self-harm recalls knives and needles pressed into the skin in exorcism: Friswood Williams speaks of a pin being thrust into her shoulder (Harsnett, pp. 259, 275, 365). The exorciser’s sadism becomes in Shakespeare a self-dividing, self-torturing masochism. The language of those needing exorcism affects Lear, who declares he has the disease of the ‘mother’, ‘Hysterica passio’ (II.iv.52), like Richard Mainy, who, moving in and out of Catholicism, was exorcised at Denham (Harsnett, pp. 24-5, 223, 401-2). Mainy’s sickness, rising from the belly to a giddiness in the head, was interpreted as possession, as he says in a self-serving confession to Bishop Bancroft’s 1602 inquiry into the affairs at Denham.28 Lear, like Mainy, has a double identity – himself, and the devils within. As Regan fears Lear is attended by a ‘desperate train’ (II.iv.304), as though riotous anarchy – including the storm – was the play’s subtext, and fear, Edgar-as-Tom seems despairing, since his words, that the ‘foul fiend’ ‘hath laid knives under his pillow’ (III.iv.53), show that he knows the despair that prompts suicide.29 Despair, making him deny his name and identity, extends into further strangeness and aberrance. Edmund calls him a ‘brother noble’, with ‘foolish honesty’, ‘whose nature is so far from doing harms / That he suspects none’ (I.ii.177-80) – and the plural ‘harms’ seems characteristic of this play’s plurality in counting. Edgar as Edgar-now-Tom finds a newer strange vocabulary, as Ophelia’s madness exceeds Hamlet’s, in his madness; he exceeds Lear’s or Edmund’s wordplay, or the Fool’s punning on ‘nothing’ (as in I.iv.177-90).30 Punning implies a shared language, belonging to a homogeneous world, since it implies that what is said will be understood at different levels. Edgar’s language stands outside that, mixing obscenity with fear of the ‘suffocating mother’, the nightmare – perhaps Hecate or worse – who evokes the incantations of Macbeth’s Weird Sisters, not least in this poem, whose subtext is the ironies in numbering: Swithold footed thrice the wold, He met the nightmare and her nine foal, Bid her alight, and her troth plight, And aroint thee, witch, aroint thee.     (III.iv.117-20; Q: ‘arint’)31  Kent’s ‘How fares your grace’ (III.iv.121) sidesteps the demonic energy within this probable sexual encounter with the nightmare’s miseries, where ‘night’ (single) becomes ‘nine’. Foakes thinks that ‘the saint makes the demon swear to do no harm (her troth plight), and drives her away’; it is hard to know what to say to such cheerfulness.32 There may be a separation between the third and fourth lines, wherein Swithold has come off worse and curses her in this absolute sexual union and division. Edgar-as-Tom defines desperation as devil-driven madness arising from poverty, taking the position of the courtier (‘servingman’, III.iv.83) whose position has been reversed, and is now naked: in the fury of his heart, when the foul fiend rages, eats cowdung for salads, swallows the old rat and the ditch-dog; drinks the green mantle of the standing pool; who is whipped from tithing to tithing, and stocked, punished, and imprisoned, who hath had three suits to his back, six shirts to his body, Horse to ride and weapon to wear But mice and rats and such small deer Have been Tom’s food for seven long year.   (III.iv.127-35) ‘Ditch-dog’ recalls ‘ditch-delivered by a drab’ (Macbeth IV.i.31). ‘Mice’ is followed by evoking Smulkin, a devil who went out of the young servant William Trayford’s right ear as a mouse (Harsnett, p. 312). Harsnett had mocked possession and exorcism: the devilry and sadism marked those influencing the possessed. The oppressiveness of beggary as devil-driven supplements Harsnett. Making Tom’s the voice of the fiend and the voice of the possessed beggar reads against Harsnett, who saw the exorcisms as tritely theatrical while, for example, mocking ‘the nimble Vice’ in old church plays (p. 291), as well as the players themselves. Yet ‘machination’, practised by the Vice-like Edmund and Edgar alike, shows diabolism affecting both.33 Kent ignores Tom; indeed, Edgar at the end notes that Kent, himself disguised, and honourably doing for the king ‘service / Improper for a slave’ (V.iii.219-20, Q), while Edgar was ‘in my worst estate / Shunned my abhorred society’ (V.iii.208-9). Kent keeps certain illusions; disguised, he remains noble, and tries to solder together his split identities of Caius, or Kent, in what he says, too late, to Lear (V.iii.279-85), wanting to be known as a single identity.34 But if only despair permits Edgar’s acting, making him ‘the bedlam’ (III.iv.102, Q), those who would retain the illusions of hope cannot so act, although, to follow Kierkegaard, they may be unconsciously despairing. They cannot reach such bareness and misery as Tom knows in Acts III and IV; that would entail losing a sense of the consolations of hope, embracing despair. Kierkegaard regards despair as essential because it steps away from illusion; however, it is also ‘the worst misfortune and misery – no, it is ruination’.35 King Lear’s ‘life of difference and decay’ (V.iii.286) kills perhaps twelve separate characters and causes unknown deaths in war, but despair is measureless. Edgar (not Edgar-as-Tom) forgets that when speaking of his ‘worst estate’ – though he has said ‘the worst is not / So long as we can say “This is the worst”’ (IV.i.29-30).36 If we can say ‘this is the worst’, despair becomes something observable from the outside: the irony within despair is how its state as alienation from self makes it part of a spectacle, something illusory, to be questioned whether definable as despair or not. The play speaks of ‘comfort’, often in association with Gloucester.37 Equally a theological and spiritual word, ‘comfort’ contrasts with despair, as in Gloucester’s desire for suicide which Edgar twice dubs ‘despair’ (IV.vi.33, V.iii.190), and which his play-acting is intended to cure,38 dismissing the ‘poor unfortunate beggar’ on the cliff verge as a ‘thing’: As I stood here below methought his eyes Were two full moons. He had a thousand noses, Horns whelked and waved like the enraged [Q: enridged]  sea. It was some fiend. Therefore, thou happy father, Think that the clearest gods, who make them honours Of men’s impossibilities, have preserved thee.      (IV.vi.69-74)39 As the ‘spirit’ (III.iv.42), the self lacking a single subjectivity, Edgar continues to multiply identities and positions, giving this imagined figure ‘a thousand noses’. Imagining himself at the bottom of the imagined cliff, he can only see the water as ‘enridged’ from the top; his imagination makes himself ‘here and everywhere’, as Sebastian says he cannot be, as not being a spirit (Twelfth Night V.i.225-6).40 Perhaps Edgar’s sometimes formulaic moralism is his unconscious despair, which ‘finds it too hazardous to be himself’,41 and is therefore self-protective, in contrast to the conscious, which shows in Act III’s mad scenes when he talks freely and acts (‘counterfeiting’, III.vi.59, Q only) with Lear.42 In Act IV, scene vi, unlike Gloucester, he has hardly anything to say to Lear, now ‘mad’ (IV.vi.80 s.d., Q); nor has he in Act V, scene iii. His comfort to his father (‘Bear free and patient thoughts’, IV.6.80) is temporary: Gloucester returns to ‘ill thoughts’ (V.ii.9). Edgar’s play-acting does justice to the Q title’s recognition of that as the play’s subject, according with Lear’s knowledge of life as beginning with acting when ‘preaching’ that ‘when we are born we cry that we are come / To this great stage of fools’ (IV.6.178-9). Edgar play-acts when killing Oswald, and even Edmund, but sees acting as flawed (compared with being in a ‘true chronicle historie’), when adding ‘Never – O fault! – revealed myself’ in describing his actions with Gloucester; he only reveals himself before fighting Edmund:         but his flawed heart, Alack, too weak the conflict to support – ’Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief, Burst smilingly.       (V.iii.195-8) The speech, which combines ‘fault’ (Q: ‘father’) and the implication that Gloucester’s heart was already ‘flawed’, matches the play’s opening (showing Gloucester, father to the other son), and points to a divided state impossible to make other than that.43 Edgar-as-Tom despairs more consciously than Edgar-as-Edgar, both acting and being despairing, perhaps not knowing which. Edgar-as-Tom knows and imagines the suicidal possibilities of looking over the verge (IV.vi.22-4); such knowledge and being should mean he cannot quite return to being Edgar; hence, even after revealing himself to Gloucester, he says ‘my name is lost’ (V.iii.119). Gloucester, tricked into believing he has survived a fall, laments: Is wretchedness yet deprived that benefit To end itself by death? ’Twas yet some comfort When misery could beguile the tyrant’s rage And frustrate his proud will.     (IV.vi.61-4) Since despair, called ‘misery’ here, is the act of suicide, it becomes equivalent to the ‘comfort’ involved in doing that. This ambiguity resembles Sonnet 144, which gives a dramatic situation in which despair is imaged, in masculine thinking, in relation to the sexual, and to women: Two loves I have of comfort and despair, Which like two spirits do suggest me still: The better angel is a man right fair; The worser spirit a woman coloured ill. The Q spelling ‘dispaire’ makes ‘despair’ a split, double force (unlike the negating de prefix before sperare, to hope). These ‘loves’ recall Faustus’s Good Angel and Evil Angel, intertwining that with the thought, in the sonnet as in Lear, of the woman as the worser spirit, as the devil. ‘Worser’ may mean that there cannot be a worst; things can only get worse. But both spirits ‘suggest’, which, meaning ‘tempt’ (OED 2a), including tempt sexually, leads the ‘I’ towards the worse, as if despair must be desired, as indeed it is; the first line shows that he loves despair, whatever its feminine form, as if it is richer than comfort.44 The worser spirit ‘tempts’ (l. 6) not just the ‘I’ but the better spirit. Comfort tends to despair, as the ‘female evil’ tempts the ‘better angel’, ‘wooing his purity with her foul pride’ (l. 8). ‘Fair’ and ‘foul’ change places, both figures being called ‘angels’ in the line ‘I guess one angel in another’s hell’. The woman as ‘foul’ even echoes in Edgar-as-Tom’s otherwise pleonastic ‘the foul fiend’: is the fiend for him feminine?45 ‘Suspect’, ‘guess’, and ‘doubt’, which word keeps its sense of thinking doubly, might be resolvable when the ‘bad angel’ ‘fires my good one out’ (l. 14); but any resolution from that would induce general despair: the good angel losing his identity, being threatened, especially if, as commentators agree, ‘fire’ means venereal disease tainting this ‘angel’. Despair infects all three figures, and ‘if I should despair, I should go mad’ (Sonnet 140.9). Despair, originating from the powerful woman and her sexual effect, does not silence, but evokes the mad speech marking Lear’s woman-obsessed madness in Acts IV and V (IV.vi.109-27).46 As affected by despair, Lear can make no return to sanity. His final reconciliation with Cordelia, in ‘Come, let’s away to prison’, possesses an initial infantilism recalling how he wanted Cordelia’s ‘kind nursery’ (I.i.125); it hides from the play’s otherwise vivid sexuality and violence: We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage. When thou dost ask me blessing I’ll kneel down And ask of thee forgiveness. So we’ll live And pray and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues Talk of court news; and we’ll talk of them too – Who loses, and who wins, who’s in, who’s out, And take upon’s the mystery of things As if we were God’s spies. And we’ll wear out In a walled prison pacts and sects of great ones That ebb and flow by the moon… . Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia, The gods themselves throw incense. Have I caught thee? He that parts us shall bring a brand from heaven, And fire us hence like foxes. Wipe thine eyes; The good years [goodyear, Q] shall devour them, flesh and  fell, Ere they shall make us weep. We’ll see ’em starved first: come.      (V.iii.8-26) The speech evokes different forms of nothing as innocent play-acting (‘as if we were God’s spies’ – but as this is an absent God, there is nothing envisaged), while flowing paratactically from one subject position to another. It remembers the ‘handy-dandy’ (IV.vi.149) changes which courtiers or servingmen undergo – which was the Fool’s theme (II.iv.75) as it was Tom’s. Shaped by lightning-like non-connective movements, glancing at alternative other non-lives and modes of existence, the speech claims insight into ‘the mysteries of things’, as if knowing what belongs to Hecate (recalling I.i.111), making such ‘mysteries’ sexually diabolical. The language contests the power of division by affirming inseparability, and the ending of separate identities, which now seem composites, as in/out, and ebb/flow seem interchangeable forces; it is as if individual identity came from a mad dividing force. Sacrifices to the gods are complemented by the gods cancelling out their right to be sacrificed to, as if they were making their own sacrifices to humans, obliterating superiority and their singleness of identity in another undoing of identities which makes lives, and gods and men, impossible to ‘part’. But, should parting happen, those separated will conjoin like Samson’s foxes (Judges 15: 4-5), their tails bound together with firebrands which cause devastation as the foxes spoil the Philistines’ fields. This language echoes Sonnet 144’s conclusion of the bitter pox-ridden parting of ‘my bad angel fir[ing] my good one out’, anticipating Lear on women’s ‘hell’: being ‘the sulphurous pit, burning, scalding, stench, consumption’ (IV.vi.124-5) (strangely echoed in what is said of Goneril’s knife: ‘it smokes’, V.iii.222).47 It recalls Harsnett: the devil is fired out of his hole, ‘as men smoke a Foxe out of his burrow’, being in sequence with other Harsnett references to dogs, and ‘devils in the likeness of dogges’ (p. 278). Sonnet 144’s spirit of comfort will become despair, having lost everything, being potentially classed amongst the diabolic, or Harsnett’s possessed. Despair, and the devilish force which ‘fires’, will overcome any separating or comforting force with the power of the pox, which may be ‘a brand from heaven’. ‘Wipe thine eyes’ attempts to comfort, but remains part of Lear’s refusal to weep, tears being ‘women’s weapons’ (II.iv.274), part of their sexuality, of which, since the first scene, he has seemed afraid, like Swithin, if we assume that his curses arise from his being ‘fired out’ by the ‘nightmare’. Goneril and Regan (V.iii.7) will be destroyed, not by Pharaoh’s lean kine, but by the fat (‘the good years’, Genesis 41: 17-32). Kenneth Muir follows OED in annotating Q’s ‘goodyear’ as the devil (so Much Ado About Nothing I.iii.1); or the pox: ‘fires out’, and/or is fired out.48 F’s ‘good years’, positive in Genesis, terrify more than the seven lean years – evoked in Tom’s ‘seven long year’ (III.iv.135). The brand, and the good year(s) are indifferently forms of blessing, or cursing: despair-inducing, diabolical. Dog-like devouring, evoked in Edgar’s ‘by treason’s tooth bare-gnawn’ (V.iii.120), intensifying but not negating Harsnett’s ‘hungerbitten’ (p. 292), starves not the prisoners, though Gloucester, dog-like, must ‘smell his way to Dover’ (III.vii.92-30), but the devourers. But as Sonnet 144.14 hardly resolves anything, so what Lear envisages in the firing only evokes more ambiguity, more division. Edmund commissions a captain, whom his instrumental rationalism calls a ‘sword’ (V.iii.33), to hang Cordelia, and ‘to lay the blame upon her own despair / That she fordid herself’ (V.iii.252-3). In one Shakespearean source, John Higgins’s additions to The Mirror for Magistrates, after Leir has been restored to the throne (as also in King Leir) and has died, Cordila is imprisoned by her nephews Morgane and Conidagus, and loses everything, in Boethian fashion. But prison gives no consolation of Philosophy; rather, speaking from beyond the grave, Cordila says ‘A gryzley ghost in darkes I sawe’ (l. 269). Calling herself ‘thy frend Despaire’ (l. 281), as a mirror of herself, Despair stabs her.49 Cordelia, then, was known to Shakespeare as a despairing suicide. As always, Shakespeare, in a criticism of The Mirror for Magistrates akin to that he made of Harsnett, worsens that situation by literalising it, making the allegorical Despair the ‘real’ nihilistic captain, hanging her as if she were a Judas, despair’s ultimate exemplar. The captain – whom Lear kills – reflects: ‘I cannot draw a cart, nor eat dried oats. / If it be man’s work, I’ll do it’ (V.iii.39-40, Q only), showing a Kierkegaardian unconscious despair, where the ‘man’ has no self-knowledge, that is, no awareness of any responsibility attached to being a ‘man’.50 But the figure inducing such despair is Edmund, as a ‘modern’ or secular version of the fiend leaving knives under the pillow. His action in ordering Cordelia’s killing repeats his connivance at violence against his father, Gloucester, while keeping personally absent. Cordelia’s despair – and was there none in her word ‘nothing’ in Act I, scene i? – is transferred to Lear, faced with her death. In both appearances in Act V, scene iii he remains unweeping, cursing. If he revives enough to believe her alive at the end as is perhaps implied in F – ‘Do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips, / Look there, look there!’ (V.iii.308-9), he would have experienced yet further madness and despair on learning she was dead: his last illusions continue his mad self-fashioning of an undone self, where despair engenders illusions of life. Against Edmund’s (and Goneril’s) slander about Cordelia’s despair, Kent tells Lear:    All’s cheerless, dark, and deadly; Your eldest daughters have fordone themselves And desperately are dead.      (V.iii.287-9, F) Goneril’s self-murder and murder are despairing ‘fordoings’, ruinations, outworkings of sexuality as constitutively divisive.51 The ‘true Chronicle Historie’ accounts of Lear and his three daughters promise – from the sources – different types of despair; the play excepts Cordelia but does not allow her to be a survivor. Qualifying the sisters’ deaths with ‘desperately’ as a moral comment on them makes despair a posthumous state, theatrically inscribed in dead bodies. Kent’s despair observes it, as F makes Lear observe Cordelia’s lips moving. Lear’s death (V.iii.304-11) varies considerably between Q and F, even in deciding whether ‘Break heart I prithee break’ (dying by allowing further division) belongs to Lear (Q) or Kent (F), but F shows what Lear’s despair creates; his ending remains, as in ‘Come let’s away to prison’, controlled by illusion. Against ‘Look there’ (F) may be posed Edgar’s comfort: ‘Look up’ (V.iii.111; compare IV.vi.57-9, whose glib comfort was despair, unconscious and conscious, continued in measure here). The Folio Lear, dying in illusion, defeats a Harsnett-like superiority which defines reality and knows what illusion is; it shows rather that reality cannot be disentangled from its illusions; unconscious and conscious despair alike need and work by theatrical illusion. But less so in Q, where Lear ends: ‘Pray you undo this button’ – if this is one at the throat of either Lear or Cordelia it recalls hanging, and its strangling – ‘Thank you sir. O—O, O, O’. This is followed by Edgar’s ‘He faints: my lord, my lord!’ and Lear’s ‘Break, heart, I prithee break’ (V.iii.307-8, 311).52 Together, Q and F prevent a single knowledge of what happens in these lines; of how much illusion and how much comfort prevails. Textual variants match the play’s ambiguity, which gives truth and theatre, but not dividing them up in a way that implies that the theatre gives comfort and truth despair. If comfort turns to despair since illusion cannot be sustained, despair multiplies itself in Lear’s ‘O’ exclamations as the source of energy, however much it is in the sphere of illusion; while in the Folio, despair keeps its potential and momentum, permitting illusion, and repetition, where that implies divided statements, split recurrences of energy which mock the deathly decisiveness of ‘O thou’lt come no more’ (V.iii.306).53 ‘Look there, look there’ (V.iii.210) makes repetition only broken by the silence of death. Footnotes 1 References are to King Lear, ed. R. A. Foakes, Arden Shakespeare (1997). This prints a collated text, the two quartos (1608 and 1619) and the Folio (1623); only its self-consciousness over textual variants puts it over Kenneth Muir’s Arden 1952-85 edition. Debates over these versions’ merits have been well rehearsed: see Steven Urkowitz, Shakespeare’s Revisions of King Lear (Princeton, NJ, 1980), and Gary Taylor and Michael Warren (eds.), The Division of the Kingdom (Oxford, 1983). Neither Q nor F seems a wholly stand-alone text, nor as marking discrete points of completion in writing and revision; hence some form of collation seems inevitable. For discussion of the quarto text see Jay Halio’s edition (Cambridge, 1993) alongside his edition of the Folio (1992). The quarto is edited by Stanley Wells (Oxford, 2000). See also King Lear: A Parallel Text Edition, ed. René Weis, 2nd edn. (2010). 2 Of older approaches to produce a unified reading, S. L. Goldberg, An Essay on King Lear (Cambridge, 1974), with the scholarship it draws on, seems compelling 3 Edgar speaks of ‘our miseries’ (III.vi.100, Q), and see V.iii.179; see also V.iii.47 (‘the old and miserable king’); for ‘misery’ see II.ii.164 and IV.i.79, where Gloucester refers to Edgar’s poverty; IV.v.14, where Regan gives it as Edmund’s reason to kill his father Gloucester; and IV.vi.63, where it is a synonym for ‘despair’. 4 On Nature, see John Danby’s Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature in King Lear (1948). 5 See David L. Krantz, ‘The Sounds of Supernatural Soliciting in Macbeth’, Studies in Philology, 100 (2003), 346-83. 6 Compare Antony and Cleopatra III.xiii.30: Caesar is not likely to ‘unstate’ himself by fighting Antony in a duel. 7 Quotations are from Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, ed. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen, Revels Plays (Manchester, 1993), A-Text, I.i.82. On despair here, taken as Calvinist (Faustus can never hope for salvation), see Arieh Sachs, ‘The Religious Despair of Doctor Faustus’, JEGP, 63 (1964), 625-47; on traditions of despair, see Susan Snyder, ‘The Left Hand of God: Despair in Medieval and Renaissance Tradition’, Studies in the Renaissance, 12 (1965), 18-59. 8 On the relationship of suicide to despair in Tudor/Jacobean England, see Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam; Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 130-8. 9 Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death (1849), ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ, 1983), pp. 14, 19. 10 Ibid., pp. 68, 60-1. 11 John H. Astington, ‘“Fault” in Shakespeare’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 36 (1985), 330-4. 12 Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, p. 24. Cf. Goneril, I.iv.321-4 (F only), and Macbeth III.v.32-3. Macbeth is urged to be ‘resolute’ (IV.i.79). 13 Julius Caesar II.i.263-4. Or Othello III.iv.30-1: ‘I think the sun where he was born / Drew all such humours [here, jealousy] from him’. 14 Q reads ‘whirlipoole’: note other words whose central i makes them like a child’s rhyme, or charm: ‘Pillicock sat on Pillicock hill’ (III.iv.75), Flibbertigibbet, handy-dandy; cf. ‘the whirligig of time’ in Twelfth Night (V.i.375), whose Arden editor (T. W. Craik, 1975) incidentally connects with ‘the wheel has come full circle’ (Lear V.iii.174). Harsnett says that ‘Haberdidance’, the dancing devil, ‘appeared to the patient like a whirlwind, turning round like a flame of fire’: F. W. Brownlow, Shakespeare, Harsnett, and the Devils of Denham (Newark, Del., 1993), p. 312. 15 Thomas Dekker, ‘The Bellman of London’ (1608), in A. V. Judges (ed.), The Elizabethan Underworld, revised edn. (1965), p. 309. Compare Thomas Harman, ‘A Caveat or Warning for Common Cursitors, Vulgarly Called Vagabonds’ (1566), ibid., pp. 83-4, and ‘O Per Se O’ (1612, possibly Dekker), ibid., pp. 371-3. All presuppose an urban setting. See also A. L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560-1640 (1985), pp. 115-19. On madness in King Lear, see Ken Jackson, ‘“I know not / Where I did lodge last night?”: King Lear and the Search for Bethlem (Bedlam) Hospital’, English Literary Renaissance, 30 (2000), 213-40, and Carol Thomas Neely, Distracted Subjects: Madness and Gender in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture (Ithaca, NY, 2004), pp. 59-65. 16 Stanley Wells, ‘Tom O’Bedlam’s Song and King Lear’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 12 (1961), 311-15, gives the evidence provided by the near-contemporary ‘Tom o’ Bedlam’s Song’, with allusions to the ‘foul fiend’, but with a resigned sense of a personal history of rejection which has been lived through, like Feste’s song which concludes Twelfth Night, which may give a sense of the character as familiar. For Feste’s presence in King Lear see the Fool’s partial repeating of his song (III.ii.74-7). 17 Brownlow, Shakespeare, Harsnett, and the Devils of Denham, p. 13. Harsnett’s Declaration is reprinted by Brownlow; references to Harsnett below and in the text are to this reprint. For Harsnett in King Lear see Kenneth Muir, ‘Samuel Harsnett and King Lear’, Review of English Studies, 2 (1951), 11-21; John L. Murphy, Darkness and Devils: Exorcism in King Lear (Athens, Ohio, 1984); M. C. Bradbrook, Shakespeare, the Poet in his World (1978), pp. 188-201; Richard Dutton, ‘Jonson, Shakespeare, and the Exorcists’, Shakespeare Survey, 58 (2005), 15-22; and Gillian Woods, Shakespeare’s Unreformed Fictions (Oxford, 2013), pp. 133-68. On Denham, see D. P. Walker, Unclean Spirits: Possession and Exorcism in France and England in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries (1981), pp. 43-9. 18 Q is less specific: ‘sith [sigh] like them of Bedlam’. On Edgar-as-Tom, see William C. Carroll, ‘“The Base Shall Top th’ Legitimate”: The Bedlam Beggar and the Role of Edgar in King Lear’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 38 (1987), 426-41, and see also the evidence about Bedlam and beggars in his ‘Songs of Madness: The Lyric Afterlife of Shakespeare’s Poor Tom’, Shakespeare Survey, 55 (2002), 82-95. 19 Harsnett imagines an imagining of the devil becoming a ‘bedlamit’ (p. 270). For connections between spirits and melancholy, see Hamlet II.ii.594-9. 20 Paraphrases by Julian Markels, ‘King Lear, Revolution and the New Historicism’, Modern Language Studies, 21 (1991), 11-26: 21, and by Weis in King Lear: A Parallel Text Edition, p. 170. 21 Simon Palfrey, Poor Tom: Living King Lear (Chicago, 2014). Palfrey follows standard criticisms of Edgar’s moralism (pp. 16-17). 22 Ibid., p. 66. 23 Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Shakespeare and the Exorcists’, in Shakespearean Negotiations (Berkeley, Calif., 1985), pp. 94-128, given only in a footnote (Palfrey, Poor Tom, p. 91). 24 Shakespeare virtually alludes to this in Edgar’s citing of devils ‘who since possesses chambermaids and waiting women’ (IV.i.65-6), making reference to Harsnett explicit. Tom’s ‘go to thy cold bed and warm thee’ (III.iv.46-7, Q), which echoes Ophelia’s madness (‘cold ground’ – ‘go to thy death-bed’, IV.v.70, 190), is quoted by Sly, Taming of the Shrew (Induction, i.7-8), along with a reference to The Spanish Tragedy, making it theatrical and associated with vagrancy (compare ‘roguish’ (III.vii.103, Q), ‘rogues forlorn’ (IV.vii.39) – OED ‘rogue’ n. 1). 25 See my Histories of the Devil: Marlowe to Mann, and the Manichees (2017), pp. 104-10. 26 Palfrey, Poor Tom, p. 61. 27 Harsnett describes the virtual torturings of the ‘chair’, where devils were cast out ‘at a clap’ (p. 243; compare Lear I.iv.286), in his chapter 9 (pp. 234-9). When Gloucester’s arms are bound, Shakespeare adopts the word ‘corkie’, which Harsnett applies to old women (Harsnett, p. 221; Lear III.vii.29), so feminising him. 28 Q and F read ‘historica passio’. See Kaara L. Peterson, ‘Historica Passio: Early Modern Medicine, King Lear, and Editorial Practice’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 57 (2006), 1-22, noting that Mainy did not actually suffer from this, nor was it a sickness men could suffer from. When Lear uses it ‘he is already deluded’ (p. 14), aligned with the feminine (p. 15); ‘symbolically feminised, compromised, irrational, and psychically ill’ (p. 21). This agrees with analyses bringing out problematic relationships to woman as mother; see Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest (1992), pp. 103-20. But is Shakespeare’s use of the phrase for Lear so calculated? Rather, Lear’s disease of the mother, which for Adelman is essential, intensifies Harsnett, carrying his language and examples into a more fearful, despairing context. Peter L. Rudnytsky, ‘“The Dark and Vicious Place”: The Dread of the Vagina in King Lear’, Modern Philology, 96 (1999), 291-311, finds the play misogynistic: a point debated here, implicitly. 29 Compare Doctor Faustus V.i.48-53, and perhaps Macbeth’s dagger (II.i.33) – incitements to suicidal despair. 30 Palfrey, Poor Tom, pp. 98-9, notes that Tom does not pun. 31 Compare ‘Aroint thee witch’ and ‘thrice again to make up nine’ (Macbeth I.iii.6, 36). Note ‘the triple Hecate’ (Midsummer Night’s Dream V.i.362). Note the internal rhymes, ending with the double ‘Aroint thee’. Edmund has been out nine years (I.i.23): completing an endurance test? 32 Foakes, note to III.iv.117-20. Foakes follows Muir, who quotes Kittredge seeing these lines as a charm, but the source Kittredge gives, from Thomas Blundervill, does not permit the sense that the figure of the night is routed, though compare Harsnett’s sense that the exorcists could ‘make a woman of a mare’ (p. 282). 33 See Leo Salingar, ‘King Lear, Montaigne and Harsnett’, in Dramatic Form in Shakespeare and the Jacobeans (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 107-39, specifically p. 134 for beggary, and p. 137, quoting I.ii.113 and V.i.47 (F), for ‘machination’, only here in Shakespeare, and coming from Harsnett (p. 197). Halio and Wells note Salingar’s discussion of Cordelia’s word ‘bond’ in his other essay, ‘Romance in King Lear’ (Dramatic Form, pp. 91-106). 34 ‘Caius’ has not been mentioned before, and the name can only increase ambiguity and uncertainty about whom it refers to: compare ‘my poor fool is hanged’ (V.iii.304). 35 Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, p. 15. 36 See James L. Calderwood, ‘Creative Uncreation in King Lear’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 37 (1986), 5-19, relevant too for the play’s ‘nothing’. 37 See III.v.20 and III.vi.2, and III.vii.84 and IV.i.17, all relating to Gloucester. 38 Compare eleven references to ‘comfort’ in Measure for Measure: the Duke will make Isabella ‘heavenly comforts of despair / When it [comforts? despair?] is least expected’ (IV.iii.109-10) – so behaving like Edgar. 39 See Rowland Wymer, Suicide and Despair in Jacobean Drama (Brighton, 1986), pp. 66-72. 40 See Jan Franz von Dijkhuizen, Devil Theatre: Demonic Possession and Exorcism in English Renaissance Drama, 1558-1642 (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 68-87, for Twelfth Night and King Lear. 41 Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, p. 34. 42 Following Q, which includes III.vi.17-55, the ‘trial’ of Goneril and Regan. Palfrey, Poor Tom, p. 71, notes how the Fool, Kent, and Gloucester do not respond to Tom, unlike Lear. 43 Contrast Lear warning that his heart will ‘break into a hundred thousand flaws’ before he will weep (II.iv.281-3): he is then most resolute, believing in himself as a single subject. 44 Compare ‘that sweet way I was in to despair’ (Richard II III.ii.205): Kierkegaard quotes this (The Sickness Unto Death, p. 38). 45 OED ‘fiend’ 2 gives King Lear for the first citation for ‘foul fiend’. 46 G. Blakemore Evans’s edition of the sonnets (Cambridge, 1996), on Sonnet 144.14, compares Sonnet 119.2 (‘limbecks foul as hell within’) and Lear IV.vi.124-9. 47 Goneril is accused of being devil-possessed at IV.ii.60-9 (Q); Sara Williams had ‘all hell in her belly’ (Harsnett, p. 243). 48 Frankie Rubinstein, ‘They Were Not Such Good Years’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 40 (1989), 70-4. 49 ‘Cordila shewes how by despaire when she was in prison she slue herselfe, the year before Christe, 800’: The Mirror for Magustrates, ed. Lily B. Campbell, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1946), ii. 145-60. 50 M. M. Mahood, Bit Parts in Shakespeare (Cambridge, 1992), p. 178, calls him a ‘desperado’. 51 Compare, on Ophelia: ‘the corse they follow, did with desp’rate hand / Fordo its own life’ (Hamlet V.ii.13-14). 52 Q2 (1619) gives Lear ‘O’ five times, not four, and so anticipates the F Hamlet: see Hamlet V.ii.363, F reading. See Maurice Charney, ‘Hamlet’s O-Groans and Textual Criticism’, Renaissance Drama, 9 (1978), 109-19. 53 In this last full speech (V.iii.304-9), Q gives ‘no, no life’ and F adds another ‘no’; Q gives an ‘O’ before F’s ‘thou’lt come no more’ (so anticipating the last series of ‘O’). Q gives ‘Never’ three times, and F five times. Finally, F gives four repetitions of the command ‘look’. Both texts strain towards more and more, but different, repetitions. If F repeats more, compare V.iii.8: ‘No, no’ (Q), ‘No, no, no, no’ (F): does this negate more? © The Author(s) [2020]. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)

Corcoran,, Neil

doi: 10.1093/escrit/cgz030pmid: N/A

IN 1970 THE GLOBE PLAYHOUSE TRUST was formed to campaign for a third Globe Theatre on the South Bank in London; and a replica – or perhaps only what some people fondly believe to be a replica – was eventually opened in 1997. One of its funding tactics was a series of pamphlets called Poems for Shakespeare. The second, in 1973, combines famous Shakespeare-related work with newly commissioned pieces. Seamus Heaney’s is called ‘A Flourish for the Prince of Denmark’. The title is disconcertingly baroque and sounds more like something by, say, John Crowe Ransom or Geoffrey Hill – although it remembers that Hamlet instructs the lavishly verbose Osric to make his report ‘after what flourish your nature will’. It seems a mildly self-directed irony, then, plausible in any poet commissioned to respond creatively to the dauntingly fecund creativity of Shakespeare; and the opening line does read like pastiche Shakespearean pentameter – ‘Ease him towards the strict arrest of bone’. But this soon contracts into something recognisably like the thin free-verse quatrains of both Wintering Out (1973) and North (1975). ‘A Flourish for the Prince of Denmark’ will seem oddly familiar to anyone who knows Heaney’s poetry, including, as it does, the phrase ‘the longship’s swimming tongue’, and culminating: Out of the silence a prow emerges elaborate as language bursting its runes, outrunning shed alphabets and oral harbourings: a northerly migration, a southern breeze, an English landfall.1 The phrase ‘the longship’s swimming tongue’ recurs in the title poem of North, which is itself contained within the word ‘northerly’ in the penultimate line. This ‘flourish’ is recognisably part of the same linguistic, etymological, and archaeological imagination evident in that book and in Wintering Out. The figuration of Hamlet’s language as the prow of a longship emerging from the silence of his death suggests how closely Shakespeare, in his linguistic absorptions and transformations, including the Norse of the Viking invaders, was aligned with some of this poet’s keenest preoccupations at the time of North: with Elizabethan colonisation and plantation and the development of the English language, and of the English language in Ireland, concurrent with that. When Hamlet’s language makes ‘an English landfall’ it’s also finding an Irish harbour, since this English-language poet is Irish and since the English language in Northern Ireland, with its Hiberno-English and Ulster Scots usages, is the language of his own poems, and since his work both recalls and translates from the Irish language. Hence, ‘Traditions’ in Wintering Out reads contemporary Ulster usage as ‘correct Shakespearean’ and contests nationalist myths of identity in a dialogue between Shakespeare’s MacMorris in Henry V and Joyce’s Leopold Bloom in Ulysses. The ‘Flourish’ poem is more deeply mined in North than the excavation of a single phrase. The ‘strict arrest of bone’ anticipates both ‘Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces’ and ‘Bone Dreams’, in which bone becomes the material of artwork and inscription. The image of the emergent prow emerges once more in ‘Viking Dublin’ with a ‘migrant prow / sniffing the Liffey’, which in turn becomes a child’s representation on bone of ‘a longship, a buoyant / migrant line’. In Section IV Heaney’s ‘Flourish’ seems almost to fracture into something more ramifying and more personally inflected as the poet’s ‘I’ enters with a train of archaeological and literary identifications. The ‘line’ with which the child incises the longship becomes the poet’s own ‘longhand’ whose cursive follows ‘a worm of thought’ into the mud, just as Hamlet in the ‘Flourish’ follows ‘the worm of his thought / into the mound’. This cursive has a long heritage while also becoming the imagined vermicular of thinking itself. The metaphor may respond to Hamlet’s observation that ‘Your worm is your only emperor for diet’; and it’s in the scene set among the worms of a graveyard that the hero identifies himself, defiantly, as ‘Hamlet the Dane’. Poetic excavation of several kinds, then, leads to startling self-identification, when this poet now flourishes himself as the prince of Denmark, adapting the reference in the ‘Flourish’ to ‘this handler of beloved skulls’: I am Hamlet the Dane, skull-handler, parablist, smeller of rot in the state, infused with its poisons, pinioned by ghosts and affections, murders and pieties, coming to consciousness by jumping in graves, dithering, blathering. Self-identification with Hamlet is a repeated trope in post-Shakespearean literature. Coleridge reads himself into Hamlet and so does Eliot. Joyce’s Stephen in Ulysses is dressed in mourning like Hamlet, wears ‘a Hamlet hat’, and propounds his biographical theory of the play in the ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ episode. In Section V of ‘Viking Dublin’ Heaney alludes, in the line ‘Old fathers, be with us’, to Stephen’s prayer in the closing pages of the Portrait to the ‘Old father, old artificer’ – Daedalus, that is – aligning Shakespeare and Joyce once more, as he does again in ‘Granite Chip’ in Station Island. Yeats, influenced by Matthew Arnold, makes a different national identification: Ireland is Richard II, England Henry V. But for Yeats Richard II is very much of the same type as Hamlet, one of those heroes whose deeds ‘had no obvious use, were, indeed, no more than the expression of their personalities’.2 The poet’s identification with Hamlet is a crucial component of the mythologising of the ‘I’ in Part I of North. There are so many ways in which Seamus Heaney is not Prince Hamlet nor was meant to be; but here, perhaps underwritten by Joyce, Hamlet becomes of present use: an exemplary profile, the opportunity for a representation of the poet as something other than a suffering lyric self – the inheritor of a tradition and the bearer of a social burden. In the autobiographical Part II of North, therefore, ‘Whatever You Say, Say Nothing’ returns to the Hamlet identification when the speaking voice, analytical now rather than mythological, says of the current state of the North that ‘The times are out of joint’, a version of what Hamlet exclaims after encountering his father’s ghost: ‘The time is out of joint. O cursed spite, / That ever I was born to set it right!’ A great deal of ‘A Flourish for the Prince of Denmark’ spills over into North, then, making Shakespeare prominent in its initiating impulse. This may be an impressive case of the accident of commission promoting the design of art, although the impetus for actually shaping the volume was Heaney’s receipt of the manuscript of Brian Friel’s play Volunteers, which handles comparable archaeological material.3 It too alludes to Hamlet, and its final line is ‘Good night, sweet prince’. In Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney (2008), we learn that by the end of his senior year at school Heaney ‘could have repeated almost every scene [of Hamlet] without looking at the book’; elsewhere he tells us how important T. S. Eliot’s famous essay on the play was to him then. So it’s not surprising that Hamlet should figure in several other Heaney poems too. It’s tacitly present in ‘Casualty’ when the murdered man is addressed as ‘Dawn-sniffing revenant’, recalling the Ghost summoned back at cockcrow; and it’s strikingly there in ‘Sandstone Keepsake’ in Station Island (1984), where the two great post-classical European poets significantly related several times in Eliot’s prose, Shakespeare and Dante, share poetic space. In ‘Envies and Identifications: Dante and the Modern Poet’, first published in 1985, the year after Station Island, Heaney takes stock of Eliot’s Dante. This involves distinguishing two chronologically divergent figures: the one who makes possible the symbolist theatre of ‘bewilderment and somnambulism’ in the ‘Unreal City’ passage of The Waste Land and the ‘official’ Dante of ‘philosophia and religious orthodoxy’ who sets a tone for Four Quartets. Heaney opposes the latter to Osip Mandelstam’s conception of Dante as the poet of organic process and vernacular energy, which he thinks close to Eliot’s representation of Shakespeare as a figure of ‘disruption, unaligned cognition and explorativeness’. This figure becomes ‘suspect’ at the time of Eliot’s conversion, which was also a conversion to a different Dante. This seems to me only one of several Shakespeares you can unearth from Eliot’s sometimes, at least until recently, fugitive pieces, but it permits Heaney to make Mandelstam’s Dante the equivalent of Eliot’s Shakespeare as ‘an exemplar of the purely creative, intimate and experimental act of writing itself’. Hence a perhaps extravagant metaphorical flourish of identification when he says that Mandelstam’s Dante is ‘a voluble Shakespearean figure, a woodcutter singing at his work in the dark wood of the larynx’.4 Heaney’s own Dante and Shakespeare are manifestly also being negotiated here. The ‘envies and identifications’ are those of the poet-critic as well as those of his exemplars, and these negotiations affect, even if only at a distance, this poem in which the two are related. ‘Sandstone Keepsake’ opens with its poet lifting the titular stone from a shingle beach on Inishowen: ‘Across the estuary light after light / came on silently round the perimeter / of the camp’. It ends: Anyhow, there I was with the wet red stone in my hand, staring across at the watch-towers from my free state of image and allusion, swooped on, then dropped by trained binoculars: a silhouette not worth bothering about, out for the evening in scarf and waders and not about to set times wrong or right, stooping along, one of the venerators. The Inishowen peninsula is shared between the Republic and Northern Ireland, and its north-easterly tip nudges Magilligan Point at the narrow outlet of Lough Foyle. In 1971 its former army camp was commissioned as an internment camp for paramilitary suspects. The policy of detention without trial was discontinued only in 1975. Convicted paramilitary prisoners were given ‘Special Category’ status in 1972, in effect making them political prisoners. Its discontinuance in 1976 led to the ‘dirty’ protests and eventually to the hunger strikes of 1980-1 during which ten Republican prisoners died. When the poet walking in the Republic is scrutinised by the agents of the British state in Northern Ireland these political circumstances put their pressure on the figuration – as they do on other poems in the frequently self-defining, self-rebuking, and self-justifying Station Island, published only a few years after the end of the hunger strikes. The Hamlet reference in the poem’s penultimate line therefore strikes a more disabused note than the anguished but defiant ‘I am Hamlet the Dane’ moment in North, and does so as the climax of a reflection on a moment not in Shakespeare but in Dante. ‘Evening frost and the salt water / made my hand smoke, as if I’d plucked the heart / that damned Guy de Montfort to the boiling flood’: Heaney’s allusion is to the canto of the Inferno in which Guy de Montfort flounders in Phlegethon, a stream of boiling blood, his appropriate punishment in the Dantean scheme of contrapasso. He had avenged his father’s murder by killing his cousin Henry of Cornwall in church in 1271 and desecrating his corpse. Henry’s heart was interred in Gloucestershire, where it was indeed ‘venerated’. This inter-necine act of reprisal and revenge, together with its religious and sacrilegious connotations, makes it a not inappropriate emblem for the state of Northern Ireland at the time the poem evokes. Heaney has very carefully sought out his Dantean occasion, because de Montfort is not named in the Inferno and appears only in a single tercet: the information behind the poem must be drawn from a gloss. This signifies, because ‘Sandstone Keepsake’ is an enquiry into the ambivalent virtue or adequacy of poetic emblems or symbols themselves at a time of political adversity. For the poem refuses to profit from the emotions which might be made to attach to the emblem which it has itself resourcefully discovered and transmitted. The allusion is pointedly introduced by a sceptical interrogative – ‘A stone from Phlegethon, / bloodied on the bed of hell’s hot river?’ – which is eventually answered negatively: ‘but not really’. That bathetic diminuendo appears to disparage the emblematic or symbolic mode itself, in which this poet’s expertise has just been demonstrated. It’s as if Yeats were suddenly to lose confidence in his emblem of stone, variously transformed and confidently pursued in ‘Easter 1916’. Heaney embarrasses himself, as it were, by making literature out of the political occasion. The poem’s wilful deviation into bathos invites us to consider what aesthetic could ever adequately accommodate the situation this poet finds himself in: on a strand in the Irish Republic being scrutinised by the ‘trained binoculars’ of the British state which is arguably, in its suspension of habeas corpus, a police state. The poem puns on the word ‘state’ in the phrase ‘free state of image and allusion’. The poet walks in what was once the Irish Free State, established in 1922 after a bloody war of independence. Although the designation lost official currency in 1937, it was colloquially used almost universally in Northern Ireland to refer to the southern polity until the mid-1970s. Manifestly, therefore, this ‘free state’ has an oppositional political edge in a poem involving the unfree state in which prisoners are being held in the state of Northern Ireland, established under the terms of the deal made in 1921. But the ‘free state of image and allusion’ is the state of poetry itself which, however incapable in the face of political predicament, can at least perform an act of honour or regard. Being a venerator is to be not an actor: hence the Hamlet allusion. But in the lines Heaney calls to mind Hamlet accepts, even while bemoaning, his political responsibility, whereas this poet is more wearily or stoically resigned to his own superfluity. Notably, though, the Hamlet allusion operates almost at the opposite end of the referential scale from the Dantean one. You don’t even need to be particularly literary to pick it up. It’s so easily readable as to be itself virtually an element of the poem’s deliberate bathos. It’s almost publicly available from the stock of Shakespearean phrases and sayings, whereas the Dantean one is secret, occluded until we appeal to a gloss or footnote. The allusions therefore – in this poem which draws attention to its own allusive capacity – function in two of the quite different ways that allusion can in poetry. It can speak to an elite and it can reach out to a community. Rejecting the viability of Dante, Heaney embraces the greater communality of Shakespeare, but only to make it clear that, poetically, nothing will suffice. Alluding to both Dante and Shakespeare, Heaney is organising his poem as a form of recognition of the two pre-eminent post-classical European poets and so allying himself with a long tradition of poetic engagement and affiliation. It’s a bold move, a significant gesture, a register of capacity. But literary capacity is exactly what this poem ironises in its bathos; and Heaney’s comment on the simultaneous sensuousness and asceticism of Eliot’s Dantean Ash-Wednesday is relevant: that its ‘very plenitude was meant to render its beauty questionable’.5 ‘Sandstone Keepsake’ could have been a poem of greater amplitude and scope – like, say, ‘Triptych’ in Field Work, in which the disconsolately diagnostic line ‘Our island is full of comfortless noises’ is composed from phrases in The Tempest and King Lear, or ‘Alphabets’ in The Haw Lantern, where the poet represents himself as referential orator – ‘He alludes to Shakespeare, he alludes to Graves’ – and then makes an elaborately augmenting, even altitudinous, emblem out of an original letter O which, in its poetic ascent, becomes the ‘wooden O’ of the Globe theatre in Henry V and the lecture theatre in which this poet now stands, before culminating as the O of the Earth itself seen from an astronaut’s window. But this is not the moment for such a poem or for Shakespeare – or Dante – to be situated at such a height. Heaney is brought low, he loses confidence in his fiction, because no allusive gesture is adequate to, or sustaining in, the contemporary political nightmare, and a poet is negligible under state surveillance. ‘Sandstone Keepsake’ registers both political and aesthetic incapacity but makes out of these a still capable literary construct, a graphic trace of this movement of mind and sensibility and a paradigm of scrupulous behaviour. Hamlet figures significantly in Heaney’s poetry, then, but the Poems for Shakespeare pamphlet reminds us that an engagement with Shakespeare was more thoroughgoing for other major modern English-language poets than it was for Heaney. It opens with Ted Hughes’s ‘An Alchemy’, in which Shake-spearean characters step from theatre into myth, character into archetype, in a way that acts like a diagram of the ‘tragic equation’ Hughes was to promulgate in his immense work Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being (1992). Like Yeats, Eliot, and Auden, Hughes considers Shakespeare extensively in his prose and intensively in his poetry. Significant as Shakespeare is in Heaney’s work, his is not this kind of Shakespeare. He has only one extended Shakespearean essay, a fugitive one on Macbeth which I’ll discuss in a moment. And the only lecture he devoted as Oxford Professor of Poetry to what he calls ‘the headiness of the English Renaissance moment’ is on Marlowe, not Shakespeare, even though the terms in which he discusses Marlowe’s Ovidian erotic epyllion ‘Hero and Leander’ might equally well have been applied to Shakespeare’s generically identical ‘Venus and Adonis’.6 In that essay Heaney works to save a quality of exemplary literariness from the nevertheless willingly acknowledged collusions between Elizabethan literary form and imperial expansion; and a great deal of modern Shakespeare criticism has been devoted to unmasking the occlusions of that collusion. Shakespeare is acknowledged in this lecture when ‘Hero and Leander’ is said implicitly to project the Romantic comedies, and he is tacitly acknowledged when the poem is described as ‘a structure of sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not’, which is Caliban in The Tempest in an ironically eloquent speech in praise of what was once his island. Heaney keeps Caliban tacit, but the essay is aware that the empire that marches along with the pentameter makes Calibans also of the islanders it encounters, prominently of those in Gaelic Ireland, as it extirpates local customs and traditions – and languages. Comparable political inflections can be discovered when Shakespeare appears more overtly elsewhere in Heaney’s prose. ‘Englands of the Mind’, in Preoccupations (1980), canvasses ideas of Englishness and English historical affiliation in three of Heaney’s just-senior English contemporaries, and Shakespeare becomes an index of both identity and differentiation. Ted Hughes’s sensibility, ‘pagan in the original sense’, is read through his title Lupercal (1960) and its origin in Julius Caesar. The ‘sturdy English Romanesque’ of Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns (1971) is said to derive from ‘a deliberate exploitation’ of the linguistic effect in the lines, ‘It would the multitudinous seas incarnadine, / Making the green one red’, that combination of ‘the Latinate and the local’ in Macbeth. And characteristic compound coinages in Philip Larkin such as ‘rain-ceased’ and ‘million-petalled’ are said also to derive from Shakespearean practice. ‘Englands of the Mind’ is entirely complimentary to all three poets. Heaney is that elsewhere in his critical writing too, in the main, although, comparing Larkin’s attitude to death with Yeats’s in The Redress of Poetry, he doesn’t so much govern his tongue as sharpen it – possibly to the disadvantage of his judgement. But ‘Englands of the Mind’ is also authoritative in tone and procedure as it plots these English near-contemporaries into a historical and linguistic narrative or graph. That this should be Shakespearean augments the authoritative nature of the case, as Heaney gathers his poets in their relation to the greatest ‘English’ poet of all and indeed, for some, the cynosure of ‘Englishness’ itself. The Irish poet Seamus Heaney seems to be commandingly placing his English contemporaries, if not exactly putting them in their place. English poets would have been aware in the mid-1970s that a great deal of interest and influence in cisatlantic poetry in English appeared to be shifting towards Ireland – a reorientation confirmed a few years later when Heaney was the exemplary case in a Penguin anthology of ‘British’ poetry edited by Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion, although he famously rejected the adjective in his occasional poem An Open Letter.7 Larkin chose to review the anthology in a way that doesn’t quite stop short of insulting Heaney by ignoring his prominence and calling him ‘a left-footing John Hewitt’.8 This carries not just an evaluative judgement but a sectarian inflection, since ‘left-footing’ is not a benign term when used by a Protestant of a Catholic – as this Protestant, who had lived in Belfast, would certainly have known. It’s hard to believe that Larkin would have appreciated having his kind of ‘Englishness’ characterised discriminatingly by this Irish critic; and, truth to tell, what Heaney says about Larkin in relation to Shakespeare isn’t wholly convincing. Hill also certainly derived his contemporary Romanesque, if that’s what it is, from sources other than Macbeth. Heaney is truly persuasive only about Hughes, and only Hughes might have been flattered by the adduction. Not that any of this signifies in strictly critical terms, because Heaney writes luminously about all three. I don’t know that we need to import the colonial and post-colonial paradigm to deal with this because Heaney’s canny subtlety doesn’t operate according to programme; but still. Heaney’s most extended prose on Shakespeare, however, comes, as I’ve said, in a fugitive uncollected essay, an introduction to Macbeth for what appears to have been, or to have been intended as, a secondary-school edition published by the Dublin educational publishers Folens.9 My copy is undated, but Heaney’s bibliographers say that it was published in a limited edition of 150 copies in 1973.10 Mine looks nothing like a limited edition and everything like a cheap trade paperback; but Folens, which still exists, can tell me nothing whatever about it. Heaney signs his introduction ‘Seamus Heaney, M.A.’ and designates Queen’s University, Belfast as his institution. It’s likely, then, that the piece was written rather earlier than 1973, even if the book was published then, since Heaney resigned from Queen’s in 1972 and I can’t think why he would want to advertise his postgraduate credentials even in the early 1970s. We can safely say, I think, that this is a young man’s essay, and it has the appeal of an enthusiastic teacher’s encomium. It explains various contexts in a way helpful for secondary-school students, but it also develops into a critical essay of interest for students of Seamus Heaney. He challenges Jonson’s classicist complaint that Shakespeare should have blotted more lines than he did with a late Romantic conception of his own: that ‘Shakespeare was more a medium through whom words flowed than a master who subdued them to his will. His imagination, in a single act, fused perception and intention; expression was recognition and discovery at once’. This makes him for Heaney an exponent of what Eliot calls ‘the auditory imagination’. Although that concept has sometimes been found tendentious, Heaney attaches himself to it in the essay ‘Learning from Eliot’ and elsewhere. What he says about Shakespeare here seems very close to the fundamental idea of poetic creativity he consistently espoused as his own, naming it differently over the years: divination; archaeology; excess and redress; ‘the activity of listening’. It’s in this context that the Macbeth essay briefly cites lines from Timon of Athens which recur twice in Preoccupations: in ‘1972’, on the state of Belfast where Heaney was living then, and in ‘The Fire i’ the Flint’, an account of Gerard Manley Hopkins. As far as I’m aware, Heaney was the first critic of note to isolate these lines like this, and certainly the first to pay them the compliment of extensive close scrutiny. He does so because, he claims, this is a speech in which ‘Shakespeare seems to be glossing the abundance and naturalness of his own art briefly and completely’. They occur in the play’s first scene in an exchange between a Painter and a Poet. The Painter overhears the Poet reciting to himself a few undistinguished lines which appear to be some form of tribute to Timon: Painter. You are rapt, sir, in some work, some dedication   To the great lord? Poet. A thing slip’d idly from me.   Our poesy is as a gum which oozes   From whence ’tis nourished: the fire i’ the flint   Shows not till it be struck; our gentle flame   Provokes itself, and, like the current, flies   Each bound it chafes. Heaney’s lengthy, almost entranced close reading focuses on the implications of the word ‘slip’d’, which suggests a conception of poetry almost as a form of ‘somnambulism’ – the word we’ve already seen him using long afterwards in the Dante essay, and a word he uses elsewhere also, to comparable purpose. This allows him to read these lines as containing in utero an aesthetic also to be found in poets otherwise as varied as Keats, the French symbolists, Frost, Eliot, and Stevens, but emphatically not in Hopkins himself and, although less categorically, not in Yeats either. So, following on from the Macbeth essay, Heaney discovers in what he reads as Shakespeare’s poetic self-conception a clear antecedent to and analogue of his own. Which is why he tells us in the ‘1972’ essay that the lines act as a ‘touchstone’ when he’s obliged to consider the role or place of the poet at a time of intense political violence; which is not to betray his conception of the art to public demand or the urgencies of the moment, since this would likely reduce poetry to rhetoric. Heaney therefore allies these lines with the bewilderment of Sonnet 65, ‘How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea, / Whose action is no stronger than a flower?’ Shakespeare’s ‘rage’ is the inexorability of ‘sad mortality’ itself. Implicitly, Heaney adapts the word to the murderous civil chaos on his doorstep; and when he introduces his 9/11 poem ‘Anything Can Happen’ in an essay in 2004 he adapts it once more to the American cataclysm then.11 Comparably, he appears to bend the Timon quotation to his own purpose by ignoring its context. He takes the word ‘slip’d’ to imply initially, before he tracks its ramifications, understatement of the kind ‘artists are prone to when speaking about a finished work in order to protect the work’s mystery and their own’. But it’s more usual to see the Poet indulging in false modesty here, pooh-poohing the Painter’s speciously flattering word ‘rapt’ as a covert strategy of self-regard. Arguably, when he uses the metaphors of poetry as oozing gum and self-provoking flame the Poet proposes poetic creativity as a form of onanism. This may not have greatly perturbed the poet of, say, ‘Personal Helicon’ in Death of a Naturalist, where poetry is the displacement of primary narcissism; and Heaney does of course pick up the sexual implications of the lines. Even so, it’s worth noting that the current Arden editors call the image of the oozing gum ‘grotesque’ even while identifying it as the product of emendations by Pope and Johnson.12 For ‘gum which oozes’ the Folio gives ‘gown which uses’ – that is, ‘wears out’. This is hard to reconcile with ‘From whence ’tis nourished’, so Pope corrected ‘gown’ to ‘gum’, meaning ‘sap’; and ‘ooze’ appears to be Johnson’s modernisation of ‘use’. We must assume that neither Pope nor Johnson found the image ‘grotesque’, although neither’s poetry would be at all comprehended by the Poet’s metaphors. But the fact that the image is the product of an editorial committee, however distinguished, makes the lines only dubiously Shakespeare’s. In the following metaphorical flurry Heaney admires the way ‘the four elements combine and coagulate by sleight of word’ – although he does call this a ‘spawn’, which is not usually a term of high approbation. Others might find the coagulation too rapidly protean, too mixed a metaphorical sequence to be readily comprehensible; and shortly afterwards the Painter has to ask the Poet to explain what he has just verbosely said. In addition, the Poet’s prominent repetition of the first person plural possessive ‘our’ might be read as coterie conceit; and there is a bathetic discrepancy between the specimen he has produced and his extravagant account of its production. Elsewhere, however, he does describe a composition that seems presciently an allegory of the play’s plot itself. He is a problematically ambiguous figure therefore, satirised for his incomprehensibility, venality, and sycophancy yet also on occasion himself a perspicacious satirist. As the object of satire, we might think him an unlikely elected mouthpiece for Shakespeare’s own conception of poetic creativity, but in flattering a patron with a verse he’s doing only what Shakespeare himself occasionally had to do of professional necessity. Glorifying the obligation in a flamboyant metaphorical display was perhaps necessary to get the preposterous job done at all. When Heaney seizes on these lines as an extractable gobbet he shows no interest whatever in these complications of dramatic character and situation, although he is interested in Shakespeare’s dramaturgy in the Macbeth essay, was interested in the theatre more generally, and himself made versions of plays by Sophocles. He ignores such things here because he’s seizing on the poetic moment as both recognition and discovery. He is able to locate in Shakespeare, to his own satisfaction, a creative self-definition he would happily accept as his own. Shakespeare is self-recognition and self-confirmation. It would be too much to say that what Heaney finds in the passage isn’t actually there to be found, but it’s clear that what he finds is what he went looking for. He may be less than properly attentive to Shakespeare’s dramatic purposes but he is critically exhilarating, and the critique, after Eliot and Shakespeare, is of manifest creative use. The Macbeth essay is of interest too, though, because the play figures as largely as Hamlet in Heaney’s poetry. He’s impressed by the thought that its ‘atmosphere of dark and brooding menace’ derives ‘in some way from the Celtic world … of superstitious terror, or violent deeds, of men haunted by spectres of blood and guilt’. The term ‘Celtic’ may seem a little uninspected and the phrase ‘in some way’ is hardly convincingly specific. Even so, Heaney clearly regards Macbeth as ‘the Scottish play’ if not the ‘Celtic’ play – just as superstitiously euphemistic actors do – because he uses Macbeth’s phrase ‘Would they had stay’d’ when the witches disappear in Act I as the title of an elegy in Electric Light for three Scottish poets. In the same volume, ‘The Marching Season’ associates the play with the Northern Irish ‘menace’ of the Lambeg drums of Orange parades. And years earlier one of the ‘Glanmore Sonnets’ in Field Work poisons its pastoral in Irish menace with the rhetorical question, ‘What would I meet, blood-boltered, on the road?’ The unusual adjective is Macbeth’s when Banquo’s ghost ‘smiles upon’ him at the end of the procession of future kings: it means, the OED says, ‘clotted or clogged with blood; esp. having the hair matted with blood’. Heaney meets ‘blood-boltered’ victims of sectarian assassination in several of his finest poems, including ‘Keeping Going’ in The Spirit Level, which also makes use of Macbeth; and I’ll turn to it in a moment. But Macbeth also figures in Heaney’s only poem wholly devoted to a Shakespearean theme, ‘The Real Names’ in Electric Light. Like ‘Keeping Going’ this employs one of his later modes, which might be called the anecdotal-associative, a technique of reticulation netting autobiographical moments together in sequences with some overall analytical or interpretative intent. Dedicated to the playwright Brian Friel, ‘The Real Names’ remembers Shakespearean performances and classroom discussions during Heaney’s schooldays in Derry; a Regent’s Park production of Twelfth Night in his youth; and his own time as a schoolteacher in Belfast. These are radiantly realised recollections which ‘enter … memory like mitigation’, and they are also moments of self-extension as the young poet’s developing sense of the power of language is read as coterminous with his sense of the power of Shakespeare. The poem also ‘rhymes’ other moments from his childhood with moments in the plays, and the fifth section allies the madness of Duncan’s horses and their ‘breach in nature’ with local and national catastrophes then. In this respect, though, the poem seems a little déjà lu, before Heaney finds his truest and deepest late style in Human Chain. The analogues are too deliberately orchestrated or intended, even arch, especially when we are implicitly referred back to the earlier work, with the phrase ‘seeing things’ doing new duty and a moment in The Merchant of Venice, already referenced in the ‘Glanmore Sonnets’, reappearing a little ponderously. To my mind, the use of Shakespeare as analogue is managed more deftly and disturbingly in ‘Keeping Going’. Patrick Crotty points out in an article on the poem that the opening line, ‘The piper coming from far away is you’, responds to a line in the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid’s ‘Lament for the Great Music’.13 Dedicated to Heaney’s brother Hugh, the poem remembers him in childhood jocularly pretending that a whitewash brush is a sporran and an inverted kitchen chair a set of bagpipes, whereas MacDiarmid’s ‘Lament’ is a solemn meditation on the lost art of the MacCrimmons, pipers on the Isle of Skye. The allusion makes the Scottish connection, even if undetectably for most readers; and Macbeth will shortly appear. The poem’s title is multivalent in meaning, as we’ll see. Most obviously, it proposes an appreciation of the brother’s steadfastness, his ‘good stamina’, while through its six sections we witness him in childhood; in his mature life as a farmer; in his endurance of chronic illness; and in his having to cope with sectarian murder in the place where he spends his life. The poem’s six sections are linked associatively by trains of imagery, notably that of the whitewash and the potstick used to stir it. The associative manner and the use, most of the time, of a neutrally conversational language and a loosely approximate pentameter are presumably intended, in this poem of fraternal affection, to represent a form of discourse the poet might share with his much less well educated and presumably unliterary brother in the world outside the poem. The title also recognises therefore the difference between this kind of language and form and what has gone before in this poet. Heaney himself is ‘keeping going’ in an adventurously exploratory poetics of discovery as he moves into a later style. But beyond the evocations of place and event, of the home and what has happened there over many years, ‘Keeping Going’ has an edgily anxious sense of the uncanny – of, exactly, what the Macbeth essay calls ‘a world of superstitious terror, or violent deeds, of men haunted by spectres of blood and guilt’. The home becomes unheimlich. Lime mixed with water not only brings tears to the eyes but is associated with ‘brimstone’, the sulphur of hell. When the women of the household piss at the gable – a necessity occasioned by lack of plumbing, presumably – the dead congregate as they do in the Virgilian underworld of Aeneid VI, part of which Heaney had already translated in Seeing Things and would go on to translate fully. The young children possess a kind of untranslatable ‘knowledge’ connected with ‘hill-fort clay’, as if in touch with some atavistic psychological or emotional insight or distress. In the third section this unhomeliness within the homely culminates when the poet remembers that the cutting down of a thorn tree – that object with many ‘fairy’ associations – coincided with his brother’s breaking an arm. The superstitious connection between the two is conveyed by a shared ‘dread / When a strange bird perched for days on the byre roof’. Then the following section alludes to Macbeth, a play full of birds of ill omen: raven, owl, crow, and what Lennox calls ‘The obscure bird / [that] Clamoured the live-long night’ of Duncan’s murder. This ‘obscure bird’ is close cousin, surely, to the ‘strange bird’ in ‘Keeping Going’. The Macbeth allusion is to Act IV, scene i, the scene in which the word ‘blood-boltered’ occurs, when Macbeth encounters the witches again: That scene, with Macbeth helpless and desperate In his nightmare – when he meets the hags again And sees the apparitions in the pot – I felt at home with that one all right. Hearth, Steam and ululation, the smoky hair Curtaining a cheek. ‘Don’t go near bad boys In that college that you’re bound for. Do you hear me? Do you hear me speaking to you? Don’t forget!’ And then the potstick quickening the gruel, The steam crown swirled, everything intimate And fear-swathed brightening for a moment, Then going dull and fatal and away. Manifestly, Heaney is rhyming his own childhood experience with the play’s action. The witches stirring their gruesome brew are doing so not in a ‘cauldron’, as Shakespeare has it, but in a less impressive ‘pot’, which looks back to the earlier evocation of Hugh stirring whitewash with a potstick; and this complements the other potstick of these lines – which seems, almost without human agency, to quicken the gruel. ‘Quickening’ is an odd word here. ‘To make alive’ is one of the first senses offered by the OED; and, even if it’s intended only to mean ‘stirring’, something of its earlier sense still adheres to it in this context. We think of the quick and the dead and of the witches in Macbeth bringing the dead to life as ghosts and apparitions; and maybe we recall Yeats’s great poem ‘The Cold Heaven’, which goes very deep indeed in Heaney: ‘Ah! When the ghost begins to quicken, / Confusion of the death-bed over …’. The quickening gruel anticipates the hideous transformation of the next section when the victim’s brains are seen as ‘grey matter like gruel flecked with blood’ – and one who was just now quick becomes suddenly and hideously dead. The speaker or speakers of the quoted instructions is (or are) not identified. Patrick Crotty thinks of them as ‘the women in the family home’ who, he says, ‘are, of course, benign, in utter contrast to Shakespeare’s hags’. We can be confident that the lines are spoken by the women of the family home, or one of them, while still finding this too confidently benign a reading. The participial syntax of the passage, however, is not easily interpretable. Curtaining, quickening, brightening, going: this is the grammar of stasis and irresolution, of memory held permanently in mind – no mitigation at all. Macbeth encounters the ‘hags’ and sees the apparitions in their pot, and immediately the poet says he feels ‘at home’ with that and moves, associatively, to the ‘hearth’ of the home he’s been evoking throughout; so those using the ‘potstick’ are inevitably associated with the ‘pot’ of the play, the witches’ cauldron. The smoky hair and the ‘ululation’ hardly distinguish them from, but work to identify them with, the ‘hags’. ‘Ululation’, according to the OED, is ‘a howl or wail, a cry of lamentation’. Heaney’s word, not Shakespeare’s, this must be an almost hysterical regret that the child is leaving home for a world of educational opportunity and advantage. The voice’s threateningly repeated question, imperious exclamation, and derisive refusal to name the ‘college’ appear to warn the child about not presuming to leave this world too successfully. Educational opportunity, which ought to be joyfully welcomed, is regarded only as potential moral danger. When all of this is seen ‘brightening for a moment, / Then going dull and fatal and away’, therefore, the world for the developing child is clarified in the light of Shakespearean literature, which allows him to recognise it, take a differentiating purchase on it, and enter into judgemental relation with it, so releasing himself from its inertial or even nightmarish hold. ‘Fatal’ is a big word in Macbeth, where the play’s hero has his fate written for him by the witches. In Heaney, the word ‘away’ appears to strain against the word ‘fatal’ to suggest a further valency in the poem’s title. The poet’s necessary way is the opposite of his brother’s: he must ‘keep going’ away from the first place so intimately evoked in this very poem. And in fact, in so far as its first line is an arcane literary allusion hardly to be picked up by its addressee, it’s already declaring how far this other son has gone. Comparable journeys from rural obscurity to the public literary arena must be at least one reason for Heaney’s allegiance to central figures celebrated during his own progress: Virgil, Wordsworth, Hughes. Shakespeare might well be such another. This poem wants to be tribute but needs to be apologia. The poem’s commendation of steadfastness, then, comes with a rueful caveat, and the final section reads ambivalently. Hugh Heaney is seen going about his socially useful business, but when he has a (presumably epileptic) ‘turn’ he’s said to be ‘at the end of [his] tether’. The usual meaning of this idiomatic expression – whose literal meaning is to do with an animal straining at its leash – is that one can stand no more of something, that one has had more than enough. And Hugh is imagined ‘wondering, is this all? As it was / In the beginning, is now and shall be?’ The poem’s usual language elevates into the language of the doxology, the Gloria Patri of the Catholic Mass, the praise of God which ends ‘as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end’. This is the poem’s only evocation of Catholicism, which elsewhere in Heaney is read as so influentially dominant in the world of his origins. The adaptation cannot but have an irreligious or impious implication, as the Catholic metaphysic – the celebration of God’s eternal being – becomes an agnostic or atheist ethic, testifying to the paralysing ineluctability of the brother’s routine. In Heaney’s work as a whole the values of the first world, its place and people, its customs, traditions, and rhythms, are celebrated, and warmly so; even too much so, some think. But not always. The relationship with the mother, as we read it in the elegiac sonnet sequence ‘Clearances’, has its pained awkwardness as well as its affection, and this conspicuously turns on the poet’s education. Uneasy herself, the mother heartlessly makes her son uneasy also: With more challenge than pride, she’d tell me, ‘You Know all them things’. So I governed my tongue In front of her, a genuinely well- adjusted adequate betrayal Of what I knew better. We must infer that the educated poet voluntarily but under compunction feels obliged to commit such solecisms as ‘them things’ too: not easily done. In the ninth section of ‘Station Island’ its poet, even while knowing himself compliantly a ‘cairnstone’ incapable of ‘defy[ing] the cairn’, nevertheless records a version of himself voicing an angry hostility: ‘“I hate how quick I was to know my place. / I hate where I was born, hate everything / That made me biddable and unforthcoming”’ – where knowing his place is both understanding his locale and being constrained by its assumptions and prejudices. When his own experience is rhymed with Sweeney’s in the ‘Sweeney Redivivus’ sequence, what one poem calls ‘The First Kingdom’ is distinctly at a slant to notions of origin elsewhere in Heaney: I blew hot and blew cold. They were two-faced and accommodating. And seed, breed and generation still They are holding on, every bit As pious and exacting and demeaned. And perhaps just as tellingly, for all its understatement, there’s reproach in ‘A Sofa in the Forties’, immediately preceding ‘Keeping Going’ in The Spirit Level, which remembers ‘the insufficient toys’ given to the family’s children at Christmas. The adjective registers a permanently resentful disappointment. What Auden calls ‘the nuance of damage’ is certainly present in Heaney’s familial poems; and in ‘Keeping Going’ he writes, almost despite himself, a work of the deepest ambivalence, twining together virtually conflicting attitudes, demands, and recognitions. For which Shakespeare has, in part, supplied the enabling opportunity – indisputably now the Shakespeare of ‘disruption, unaligned cognition and explorativeness’. ‘Unaligned cognition’ is what the form of ‘Keeping Going’ both expresses and offers, bringing cognition into new alignments. It gives Heaney something of the opportunity he commends in Yeats’s theory and practice of the mask: its production of an art ‘which is a kind of trace element of the inner struggle of opposites, a graph of the effort of transcendence’.14 This also seems to me one of those poems which expose a dark residual paganism still operative in Seamus Heaney despite the ingrained Catholicism of his origins. And a ‘strange bird’ appears again in ‘The Blackbird of Glanmore’, the superb final poem in District and Circle (2006). Poignantly remembering once more the brother whose accidental death forms the subject of the early ‘Mid-Term Break’, this recalls a neighbour long after the event saying, ‘“Yon bird on the shed roof, / Up on the ridge for weeks, / I said nothing at the time / But I never liked yon bird”’. We believe in the reality of this bird and of the superstition attaching to it while still recognising that it probably flies into Heaney’s work from Macbeth too:            Light thickens, And the crow makes wing to th’ rooky wood. Good things of day begin to droop and drowse, Whiles night’s black agents to their preys do rouse. Footnotes 1 Poems for Shakespeare 2, ed. and introd. Graham Fawcett (1973), p. 37. 2 See W. B. Yeats, ‘At Stratford-on-Avon’, in Essays and Introductions (1961), pp. 96-110: 102-3. 3 In Spelling It Out: In Honour of Brian Friel on his 80th Birthday (Oldcastle, 2009), Heaney says that he ‘assembled’ North ‘after receiving the manuscript of … Volunteers in October 1974’ (n.p.). 4 See ‘Envies and Identifications: Dante and the Modern Poet’, Irish University Review, 15/1 (Spring 1985), 5-19. This essay is excerpted in Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001 (New York, 2002). 5 ‘Learning from Eliot’, in Finders Keepers, p. 31. 6 See ‘Extending the Alphabet: On Christopher Marlowe’s “Hero and Leander”’, in The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures (1985), pp. 17-37. 7 Published as Field Day Pamphlet Number 2 by Field Day Theatre Company in 1983. Heaney was responding to The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry, ed. Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion (1982). 8 ‘Under a Common Flag’, Observer, 14 Nov. 1982, p. 23. One of Heaney’s endnotes identifies his reference to the review in stanza 10 of An Open Letter. The review is reprinted in Philip Larkin, Further Requirements: Interviews, Broadcasts, Statements and Book Reviews, ed. and introd. Anthony Thwaite (2001), pp. 316-19. 9 Seamus Heaney, ‘Introduction’, Macbeth (Folens, n.d.), pp. 5-22. 10 See Rand Brandes and Michael J. Durkan, Seamus Heaney: A Bibliography (2008), p. 177, item B19. They identify an edition of ‘150 copies for the benefit of our Consultants and Contributors’ and say that ‘A trade edition of this publication was planned but never issued’. 11 Anything Can Happen: A Poem and Essay by Seamus Heaney with Translations in Support of Art for Amnesty (Dublin, 2004), p. 12. 12 Timon of Athens, ed. Anthony B. Dawson and Gretchen E. Minton, Arden Shakespeare (2008), p. 161. 13 Patrick Crotty, ‘“Keeping Going”: Seamus Heaney’, Irish University Review, 39/2, special issue, ‘Poems that Matter: 1950-2000’ (Autumn/Winter 2009), 347-57. 14 ‘Envies and Identifications’, p. 5. © The Author(s) [2020]. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)

Burt,, Stephanie

doi: 10.1093/escrit/cgz029pmid: N/A

ALONG WITH RECHERCHÉ RHYMES, recondite forms, and repurposed clichés, the poetry of Paul Muldoon is full of trivia. Words most readers would not know, place names in Ireland and in New Jersey, facts and more facts, and sometimes a flurry of brand names: L. L. Bean, Coutts and Co., ‘Crested Ten on the rocks’.1 ‘Hartebeest bugle’. ‘Wright’s coal tar’.2 Randall Jarrell quipped that W. H. Auden’s learning made critics exclaim ‘what a queer thing for a poet to know!’, whereas the learning in Eliot and Pound made critics explain, instead, ‘What a queer thing for anybody to know!’3 Muldoon’s work – especially the late work, the work completed after his move to America – could provoke, and has provoked, both responses. Early Muldoon, written mostly in England and Ireland, was often noted for its lacunae, its modes of omission or stopping teasingly short; these omissions provoked deconstructionist readings, psychological interest in what he could not say, what culture will not let us say, and also complaints, most famously from Helen Vendler, who found ‘a big hole in the middle where the feeling should be’.4 The claim was unfair and yet accurate, in a way, since so many of the poems were about feeling alienated, not feeling what other people expect you to feel. (Almost literally so in the case of that marvellous, underrated, angry sonnet ‘The Ox’.) Late Muldoon still circles, leaves gaps, but also leaves blanks filled in, or over-full: almost any book, at least since The Annals of Chile, could have borne the ironic title he gave his 2015 collection One Thousand Things Worth Knowing. Muldoon’s elegy on Seamus Heaney alone (which opens the volume) includes a double handful of words most readers will have to look up: ‘darne’ and ‘flitch’ (OTT, 3), ‘spraint’, ‘dibble’, perhaps ‘catafalque’, and certainly proper nouns like ‘Aedán mac Gabraín’ (OTT, 9, 11).5 There’s also ‘thole’, a word that readers outside Ireland know, if we know it, likely from reading Heaney, who used it several times and wrote about it in his introduction to Beowulf.6 That elegy (‘Cuthbert and the Otters’) is no outlier. Muldoon’s sonnet in memory of Michael Allen compares Allen’s editorial pencil to ‘a graip above a groop’, a three-tined fork for fieldwork above a trench dug for cow dung, in Irish or Yorkshire dialect (OTT, 23). A terse, almost singsong poem about the apocalypse, ‘Noah and Sons’, includes ‘Massey Ferguson’ (a farm implement manufacturer), ‘jorums’ (punchbowls), and ‘comal’ (‘hairy’, used of plant parts, a technical term from botany). Such poems hold together not so much because their words and figures have anything in themselves in common, but thanks to what Michael Robbins calls ‘Muldoon’s … private linguistic associational attraction’.7 That field of association also attracts defunct brand names, several in a row (‘Omo, Daz, Beechams Powders’; OTT, 14), and such odd facts as the body temperature of a healthy live chicken (OTT, 15). The same poems incorporate sentences stating actual trivia, the kind that pops up in a pub quiz: ‘The best baseball bats are turned from hibiscus’; ‘The Cuban ground iguana / is actually quite thin on the ground’ (OTT, 73). The bit about hibiscus may not be true. His 2015 book also returns to Muldoon’s earlier fascination with nonsense and codes: if you liked what he did with CROATOAN, in Madoc, you can now thrill to ‘the word SINIMIAINIAIS / inscribed on a Viking sword’ (OTT, 7). It also corrects itself, or mocks a trivia contest’s promise of certainty: ‘Not that Francis Bacon. That Francis Bacon’. Which is which? The omnivorous, polyglot, volume-ending poem ‘Dirty Data’ compiles such references as ‘Havengore’ (any of several ships), ‘gliomach’ (lobster), and ‘loria segmentata’ (Roman armour), comprehensible (without an Internet search) only to speakers of Irish who happen to know both Roman history and naval lore. Nor is One Thousand Things alone in this: a passage taken almost at random from Maggot yields ‘a yarrow corymb’ and ‘Pistol, Bardolph or Nym’ from Shakespeare’s Henriad.8Moy Sand and Gravel contains a poem about an academic contest, in which a boy can’t escape his rural roots even though ‘dressed to the nines / to take the prize for Geography’ (Maggot, 13), and then a poem whose questions literally comprise a high-school trivia contest, though the title ‘A Collegelands Catechism’ makes clear that Muldoon wants to substitute secular for sacred, trivia for doxology: ‘Which is known as the “Orchard County”? / Which as the “Golden State”?’ (Maggot, 15) Arguably Muldoon’s first fully American book, and the first to address his New Jersey home, Hay (1998), opens with a poem about collecting trivial things, taking into one’s home ‘the dreck / and clutter’ of several cultures and the words that come with them (especially words and phrases from Hebrew and Yiddish, reflecting the heritage of his wife, Jean Hanff Korelitz). ‘The Mud-Room’ (whose title suggests ‘the Muldoon’ as spoken by a small child) also contains unfashionable 1970s LPs, ‘The Pretender, Desperado / The Best of Spirit’, whose titles could be dyspeptic rejections of a poetic vocation; they occur amid ‘box after cardboard box / of all manner of schmaltz and schlock from Abba to Ultravox’, along with a ‘stack of twenty copies of The Annals of Chile ($21 hardback)’.9 What aesthetic effect or emotional goal could these accumulations of trivia serve? Is it the same, does it work in the same way over Muldoon’s career, going back at least to ‘Incantata’, with its collection of bric-a-brac, arguably rendered meaningless by the death of Mary Farl Powers? Does it work in the same way in the clearly divergent genres and media (elegy, multum-in-parvo celebratory lyric, complaint; long printed poem, song, essay) in which Muldoon now works? What makes all these sorts of trivia significant? ‘Significance’, and its Anglo-Saxon analogue ‘meaning’, are what William Empson called ‘complex words’: we can figure out a lot about art and culture by asking about the relations among their parts (as when Clair Wills describes Muldoon’s ‘hesitancy about the idea of poetic significance’).10 Muldoon’s arrays of trivia – as much as they annoy some of his best readers – turn out to serve, in his work, not one function but several. They interact with his earlier work, and with his more recent criticism, especially the Oxford lectures in The End of the Poem. They respond to political demands, and they serve as ways to process grief. They also – in ways critics have not yet seen – give him ways to consider the place of poetry generally in modernity, and ways to participate in the so-called culture wars, the debate over what’s important in academia, and what people with institutional power – like the power he now holds – ought to do. Finally, they help the poems imagine – and depict – certain kinds of community and certain kinds of frustration, kinds we might recognise not so much from other major contemporary poets as from the experience of people with autism. That experience, in turn, can help us see what the emotional life – as well as the technical brilliance – in Muldoon’s late poetry makes possible for its readers, what kind of joys and solaces Muldoon’s arrangements of words and facts entail. Critics since the 1980s have glommed on to moments in Muldoon’s poems when the uncertainty, and the deployment of trivia, look overtly political. Muldoon’s poems on public events characteristically deflect their focus away from whatever made headline news, back to a detail that most or all adults would likely consider unimportant: the rude upside-down stamp and the name ‘Frances Hagan’ in ‘Profumo’ (where Christine Keeler’s name does not appear), or the location to which the rebels of 1916 ‘retreat’:   if we don’t share the sweet taste of victory, at least for now we may find joy in our retreat to the Williams and Woods jam factory in Parnell Street.11 The street name speaks to Irish patriotism, but the jam factory is what Roland Barthes called a reality effect, a detail that establishes verisimilitude just because it means nothing else.12 And while we expect realist novels to bring us cartloads of such details, we do not expect them from lyric poems; indeed, our protocols for reading, and writing, lyric poems often exclude them – unless, that is, they are poems by Paul Muldoon. You can find these effects of distraction, deflection, denial that what is public or famous comes first, in almost any of Muldoon’s poems that speak to Irish political history. With ‘The Unapproved Road’ (the first poem in Moy Sand and Gravel), history dissolves almost immediately into trivia and etymology – the word ‘zarf’, the meaning of the Irish name for Emyvale – as the words’ historical significance turns out to be less important than their sounds: ‘the bourne fades into the boreen’, ‘with – you’ll like this – a total disregard of any frontier’.13 Muldoon is making a polemical point about the importance of the unimportant, about how what matters to you, or you, or you, may not be What Matters to public history – whether, like the nomad in ‘The Unapproved Road’, you wish you could ignore that history, or whether, like the Easter martyrs, you are determined to go down in that history, to be remembered for (as Muldoon put it) ‘something else’. The poet who wrote ‘Something Else’, a poem about how the mind cannot stop finding – or manufacturing – meaningful relations, went on to write ‘At the Lab’, a kind of fantasia on the Blakean notion that the poet can see eternity in a grain of sand: I was at the lab to analyze the spore in a seaweed wreath marking the spot where it came to grief, you the pollen in a sediment core.       (OTT, 37) The tiniest items speak to history, if anything does; to quote another poem, ‘an eye-level fleck of straw in the mud wall / is almost as good as gold’ (OTT, 66). Good for what, for whom? What counts as good, and who decides, and who cares? What counts as significant, and what’s just a trifle? Some of the strongest critical debate over Muldoon’s work has concerned ‘A Trifle’, set in Belfast during the Troubles. Sean O’Brien infamously saw the poem as an anti-British allegory; Tim Kendall saw O’Brien’s reading as tendentious, even ridiculous. For Kendall the quivering dessert instead has moral implications: it is ‘significantly insignificant … Trifles, not politics, make life worth living’.14 John Lyon in turn disagrees: ‘All critics agree that this sonnet is about insignificance’, he writes, but he objects to the way that critics pursue ‘the significance of this insignificance’. For him the poems are snark hunts: like Victorian nonsense poetry, they ‘resist or elude interpretation’, seeking ‘removal from the semantic field’. Lyon notes, disapprovingly, the fuller, more cluttered style Muldoon developed in America, a style with fewer lacunae and more errata, and asks whether ‘Muldoon’s stance towards his readers has altered, moving from his writing against his interpreters in earlier collections to a later Muldoon who writes in and for the academy’.15 Such a claim seems unfair, first because a Muldoon full of holes seems just as fit or unfit for the academy (especially in the late 1980s, the era of late deconstruction, of ‘subversive’ as all-purpose praise) as a Muldoon full of nouns that you have to look up; and second, because the later Muldoon is at least as evasive as the earlier – he’s just flooding the zone, or throwing up chaff, where the Muldoon of Mules might be cleanly speeding away. Still, later Muldoon does moon the academy; but before returning to that effect, I should describe some of the other novel aesthetic and emotional effects that Muldoon gets from his cagey, canny, unpredictable spray of information. Tim Hancock, attacking biographical readings, writes that ‘as a self-acknowledged product’ of academic interpretative systems, ‘Muldoon is unusually conscientious about including all of what he would regard as the necessary information within the text’.16 That’s true if ‘information’ means the life of the poet, or the poet-like character, who seems to speak the poem, though of course that information may not be true (as in ‘Cuba’: the real Muldoon has no elder sister). It is flagrantly, wildly, famously not true if by ‘information’ you mean the kind of thing a reader might have to look up: the migrating habits of birds, or the geology of central New Jersey, or the Elvis Costello back catalogue. Much more such information enters the poems after Muldoon’s move to America: you might say that in this way the poems get more difficult. Yet difficulty is almost as complicated a word as significance. Does it mean that the poems hold puzzles with solutions, or apparent puzzles without solutions, or that we find certain parts incomprehensible, or else that we find it hard to put their parts together, or to perceive them as wholes? We can find poems that fit each of these rubrics in all of Muldoon’s books, at least starting with Quoof. George Steiner gave ‘difficulty’ a well-known fourfold taxonomy: contingent difficulty, which disappears once you look this or that thing up; modal difficulty, in which we are not sure how to take something (it is a kind of irony); tactical difficulty, in which the writer is trying to send a message to an in-group, or to create such a group, or trying to work around censorship; and ontological difficulty, in which the poem is hard to read because the world itself is hard to understand.17 All four kinds of difficulty occur in Muldoon, mixed together or separated out. But none of them speaks to how it feels to read him. Can we find other accounts, not of the reason for trivia and weird words in one or another poem, but for the effects they have over and over, the reason they seem – as the book title admits – to characterise his work? We can – but we have to pursue them in tandem, and be willing to put them together, rather than having to choose just one. And we have to start by asking not what makes the poems hard to understand, but why – intellectually and emotionally – so many of us want to try. Kendall quips that ‘So what?’ is ‘the most fundamental, and most potentially destructive, question to ask about Muldoon’s work’.18 What if it is all trivia, in the pejorative sense? What if everything is? What if nothing we do really matters? If we begin trying to answer that question by claiming that we, or the poetry we like most, or the causes for which we work, are literally causes – that they have narrative force or causal power – we may then ask why their results matter. Soon enough we may have painted ourselves into the kind of instrumentalist corner in which either only a few jobs (medical and political ones) are worth the effort it takes to learn how to do them, or else into what Auden (quoting John Foster Hall) called the social worker’s dilemma: ‘We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for, I don’t know’.19 But if we reject that dilemma, we may realise that there is no a priori, purely logical way to know whether you are overvaluing, or undervaluing, a trifle, or an upside-down postage stamp, or sexual satisfaction, or a trip to Donegal. That question of value – arguably raised by the mere persistence of lyric poetry, and of song – comes to the fore, becomes very hard to ignore, when it gets mixed up with all the trivia, and the self-consciousness about triviality, in Muldoon’s late poems. We may react to that question of value defensively, defiantly, by celebrating the trivial and deprecating anything ‘important’: Oscar Wilde does, or at least his characters do. One of Muldoon’s short poems in memory of Wilde, called ‘The Bed’, presents a vision of the aesthetic liberated both from practicality and from unjust law: A stone-breaker on his stone bed lay no less tightly curled than Opposite-leaved Saxifrage that even now, unfurled, has broken through its wall of walls into this other world.20 Of course it’s a poem of gay pride, about somebody who went to prison, and it may also point to Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Sonnet’, another short poem in trimeters about long-delayed gay liberation. But it is also a poem in which life no longer, at last, looks like a matter of practical tasks. In this other, better, world, nobody asks ‘So what?’ Yet Muldoon is not always so close to Oscar Wilde; indeed, in terms of tone and framing, his page-based poems (the songs are another matter) rarely seem airy, or light, or campy in the way that Wilde’s drama and dialogues usually do. Muldoon resorts most vigorously to trivia in poems whose burdens might seem heavy indeed – his elegies are full of it. Even ‘A Trifle’ does not feel Wildean; the colourful dessert quivers, and just barely survives. For the significance of insignificance all over Muldoon we might do better to start with one of his heaviest (and most widely admired) poems, one of the first poems that he packed with trivia, and his first long poem to serve as an elegy for a real person, ‘Incantata’, in memory of Mary Farl Powers. There, ‘all that’s revelation, all that’s rune’ is ‘all composed of odds and ends’, some of it from the poet’s life in the years when he and the painter were a couple (‘how you called a Red Admiral a Red / Admirable’), but some of it could also work as answers on a quiz show. What modern sculptor derived his characteristic materials from (so he claimed) the Asian nomads who rescued him after a plane crash? What sound do amphibians make for a Beckett protagonist whose name denotes a unit of electrical power? We can find answers by hearing, in Muldoon’s poem, ‘Joseph Beuys’s pack of hounds / crying out from their felt and fat “Atone, atone, atone”’, or (in the same stanza) ‘Watt remembering the “Krak! Krek! Krik!” / of those three frogs’ karaoke / like the still, sad basso continuo of the great quotidian’.21 These details – as the poem goes on to tell us, as other Muldoon poems will also tell us – say how much is lost when one mind, and one memory, is lost to death (and how little is lost, by contrast, when lovers split up). ‘Incantata’, like the unspooling trivia in Muldoon’s later long elegies, such as ‘Sillyhow Stride’, treats its trivia as especially salient cases of the truth that death brings to us all. ‘All will be lost’, as ‘Incantata’ exclaims; all language will eventually become as meaningless, as insignificant to us, as the babbling from the middle of Waiting for Godot, as Krak! Krek! Krik! to non-frogs, as facts about geography or geology or old Western heroes like Odysseus or Cuchulain or Beckett himself. This association between trivia and elegy (never present in Wilde) runs through all the late books, through all the longer elegies, and through such stunt-like short poems as ‘Famous First Words’, a list of real famous people’s famous last words, among them Gertrude Stein’s winning answer to her own final jeopardy: ‘What is the question?’ The trivial collection, the fixation on what has seemed unimportant, comes across in the elegies both as an attempt to preserve absolutely everything (since it will all be equally lost) and as what Tennyson called a ‘sad mechanic exercise’, a way to engage the mind in an endless task that removes it from grief: ‘As for actually learning to grieve, / it seems to be a nonstarter’ (OTT, 7). This resort to trivia – sometimes in the form of a classic competitive trivia question – has become one of Muldoon’s usual moves in elegiac verse. The eighteen-line ‘Catamaran’ folds into itself the real death of Charles Monteith, Muldoon’s first editor at Faber; the death of a fictional character (‘Piggy’) from Lord of the Flies, the novel that Monteith famously rescued from rejection; and the future in which either Muldoon or his wife will die first, and their son (we hope) will survive them: Now I imagine lying by my dead wife just as a sperm whale lies by its dead mate as if it might truly be said to mourn. A corruption of the Tamil term for ‘two logs lashed together with rope or the like,’ the word we use is ‘catamaran.’        (OTT, 62) Muldoon had commemorated Monteith (1921-95) almost twenty years earlier, in the sonnet ‘Burma’, from Hay. The trivia in Muldoon’s poems can make them feel elegiac even when elegy is not their dominant genre. ‘Honey’ begins with a sight from the air (‘our plane takes hill upon hill’) and modulates into the ‘personal effects’ found with Buddy Holly after his death in a famous plane crash, among them ‘the $193.00 in cash / from which the coroner deducted $11.65 in fees’ (OTT, 77). It’s not as if Holly would have spent the money on something else: that money, too, proved (for him) ineffectual, or trivial. The bric-a-brac that fills or overfills the poetry in Hay (and in subsequent books), as John Kerrigan writes, may be a sign of middle age, of a full house, ‘junk that can be read as an archive of life’, or else a sign of travel far from home, labels from many countries reflecting ‘global consumerism and cheap tourism’.22 But it may also be a kind of street barricade against entropy, mortality, and oblivion. It reminds us how much we have to lose, how much the dead lose, how much only memory holds. And that effect makes them vehicles for nostalgia, asking who else – perhaps in our generation, or from our home town – remembers that. ‘The pink cloud hanging over Barry’s amusement park in Portrush. / So plainspoken, candy floss’, might seem like a trifle, but it functions as a Proustian madeleine: so, in the same poem, do ‘Yellow Polka Dot Bikini’, or ‘Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha’ (OTT, 23). In this context the profundity of the song, or the book, or the ride, does not matter: poetic novelty, or innovation, hold exactly the same weight as ‘novelty songs’ (OTT, 23). But nostalgia is not all there is. Grief and deflection of grief are hardly all there is. We may also treat the mastery of trivia as a skill fit for use in a game: some people win money with it. Others play trivia games for their own sake, almost as some poets compose complicated verse. Games and sports are marvellous distractions: we turn to them when we are frustrated, or bored, or angry about the more consequential parts of our lives. Why should we not want poems that distract us too? Poems with these kinds of puzzles (Adrienne Raphel has compared them to cryptic crosswords23) may give us, not the kind of escape we get from The Lord of the Rings or His Dark Materials, but the kind we get by watching football or ice skating: they take us out of ourselves. That kind of effect matters more the sadder we feel, the more we want, as Eliot put it, to escape from personality and emotion. And that is to say that the trivia take part, not just in games and competitions and displays of skill, but also in the more or less abstract or arbitrary patterns that we also find all over Muldoon’s verse. These patterns look at first like riddles. But they rarely make good on their promise of solutions: they are, as Lyon and others have claimed, more snark, or snark hunt, than whodunit. ‘Who knew “forensic” derived from forum, / which senator’s sword sealed the deal?’ (Maggot, 64). ‘It was now far too late to know if this was even the scene of the crime’ (Maggot, 66). ‘Flags and Emblems’, from Horse Latitudes, is a poem of sexual jealousy and anger about the Troubles, which have no solutions, disguised as a set of trivia questions with the refrain ‘Riddle-me-O’.24 Maggot begins with a kind of trivia story that is also about a death, the electrified death, thanks to Thomas Edison, of Topsy the Coney Island elephant (Maggot, 5). One page later we encounter the Chazon Ish, ‘the wisest Jew alive’, and ‘the etymology of “dork”’ (Maggot, 6). It’s a poem about how to handle anxiety, fear, and grief, not by learning the one thing that will solve all our problems, but by imagining poise in a formal pattern, even a pattern you know you made up, like the patterns and trifles that Muldoon had already imagined during his years in Belfast,  my perfect deportment all those years I’d skim over the dying and the dead looking up to me as if I might at any moment succumb to the book balanced on my head.       (Maggot, 9) Young people used to balance books on their heads in order to learn better posture or deportment. Will Muldoon be able to keep his balance in an uncertain world, a world full of death that does not seem to touch him? Will all his books help? His trivia might. The US quiz show champion Ken Jennings writes that ‘game shows, unlike real life are a tightly ordered universe where every rule is well established and explained to the contestants in advance’.25 That universe is not ours, but an informative, stylised, non-realistic alternative to ours. If we visit it, we can then come back; we can recognise the distance between the perfect system and the fragile, baffling real world, the logical model and the messy reality. That is how most of the best episodes of Star Trek (the original series) end, with Spock ruminating on what is and what is not logical. It is also the function of strict verse form, according to no less an authority on such form than Richard Wilbur, who objected, early in his career, when critics saw his poems as theodicies. Instead, Wilbur wrote, ‘strict poetic forms … serve both to limit the work of art, and to declare its artificiality: they say, This is not the world, but a pattern imposed upon the world or found in it’.26 Muldoon’s poem dedicated to Wilbur begins with another outré factoid: ‘It was Charles Barrett in his Wild Life of Australia and New Guinea / who inspired her devotion to Polerus Jack, the pilot dolphin of Cook Strait’, a parody of devotion to a patron saint (Maggot, 14). Rather than literally religious devotion, Muldoon instead displays devotion to people he knows personally, and to game-like patterns. A sestina is one such pattern; another is the network of allusions in any post-1988 medium-length poem by Paul Muldoon, and another is the pattern described in the middle of one such poem, the frankly baffling sequence called ‘The Humors of Hakone’: ‘At Ryoan-ji a monk must rake and re-rake / the gravel with a birch-wood tine / till it looks like a series of waves always just about to break’ (Maggot, 70). Such lines exist to be part of a pattern, not for any potential isolable effect. Jennings quotes the quiz bowl coach Eric Hillerman schooling his team on how to ‘remember the difference between Ayacucho and Chacabuco’, ‘the two battles of South American independence you have to know’.27 It’s the kind of line that could end up in a Muldoon poem. The mnemonic (which Jennings never gives) is surely about how the names sound, not about the generals who won or lost them, nor about their consequences for governance; they will be, like the names of the battles themselves for most of us who are not South American or historians, unlinked to anything with practical or even lasting intellectual use. They are instead just parts of formal systems, fit for games. Another such system might be the rules of a sestina, or an exploded sestina like Muldoon’s poem ‘Yarrow’, or the complete list of English words that end on a given rhyme, as in the poems of monorhyme we find in Hay, or the set of ninety – yes, ninety – repeated rhymes that Nathaniel Myers has tracked through ‘Yarrow’ and ‘Incantata’ and into the later poems.28 These patterns allow not just for grief, and for the avoidance of grief, not just for play and glee, but for escape into modes of understanding that are not the modes of history, causality, consequence: they shape a reaction – an emotional reaction; it’s tempting to say a revulsion – to the demand that we assume a position of adult authority and take sides. It is not a demand found only in Ireland, or only in the contexts the Troubles brought forth. ‘The Fish Ladder’ recalls the role that all Muldoon’s best critics had found in his earlier work, ‘our dual role // as proven escape artist and proven identity switcher’ (Maggot, 25). These roles seem, to Muldoon, intensely preferable to the later, older roles of teacher, explainer, authority. And those are the roles that Muldoon’s high-intensity spray of unrelated facts lets him refuse. Muldoon’s collocations of trivia that no one person, barring the poet himself, could possibly know are not just a non serviam to organised religion and to the Troubles; they are, also, a fork in the eye against the critics who opine that America, or Britain, or Ireland, or the Western world used to have, and has recently lost, and somehow needs to get back, a common culture with reference points that everybody knows. Some trivia buffs hold this opinion too. Jennings comes close: ‘We live in an age of specialization’, he writes. ‘Time was, you knew and understood what everyone on your street did for a living.’ Now, though, we live in ‘narrow niches’, and risk speaking ‘entirely different languages’. Trivia, though, ‘is the stuff that used to be called good old-fashioned “general knowledge”, the stuff that everybody was supposed to remember from school’.29 We may recognise these arguments from 1980s chestnuts such as E. D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy, or more broadly from what we used to call the Canon Wars, when they pertained not to the release date for The Empire Strikes Back or the ingredients for a martini (Jennings’s examples) but to George Washington, or the Gospel of Luke. And, of course, these examples may strike us differently depending on whether we are American, Irish, or Nigerian, white or Ojibwe, Muslim or Christian or Baha’i. If you have undertaken the melancholy exercise of designing a literary studies curriculum for undergraduates in the US, or even of teaching them creative writing (as Muldoon began to do when he moved there) you have probably noticed that if you list all the texts and authors that your colleagues honestly think students ought to know, you will have a list much longer than anything you could require that they read. There’s just too much out there for us to require everything, and the range of works that could prove crucial somewhere now, for some contemporary writers, clearly extends beyond the once narrow bounds of Matthew Arnold’s best that has been thought and said. If you are a contemporary poet who loves allusion, quotation, and proper nouns, you can approach this conundrum in several ways. You can limit yourself to the most common knowledge, or to none. You can make your more personal, local, or unusual references easy to look up and integrate into the poem (Seamus Heaney did something like that for much of his career). You can suggest, as Geoffrey Hill sometimes did, that the range of your actual readers’ ignorance measures how far our civilisation has fallen, or fallen short of what it ought to be. Or you can use your allusions and uncommon knowledge in the full and relatively cheerful awareness that nobody else knows exactly what you know, and different readers will click with different subsets of the information you use, whether or not they google, or could ever google, the rest. That is what the later Muldoon has done, and it’s how the trivia that spill out of so many late poems defeat the ongoing debate about common knowledge, about a or the tradition, and about the future of a culture where Peter Parker has more name recognition than St Peter, Professor Xavier more than the Basque saint. Again, Muldoon was present for that debate: it lies behind parts of The End of the Poem, and behind the attacks on top-down schooling, on teachers who think they know what you need to know, who believe there is one single point to education, that we can find in Muldoon’s earlier career. There is no single sharp point, in his sonnet ‘The Point’ (from Hay), to education, nor to any particular detail, just as there is no good unifying rationale for all the things that happen in a schoolroom, or a mud-room, from trivia contests to pencil fights. Muldoon’s insistence that we cannot neatly rope together everything we need to know, that knowledge comes only in untidy, over-full packages, also turns up in Hay through the volume’s collection of stacks and books and bales. The title sonnet from Hay begins ‘This much I know’, and concludes, as if admitting that he could not quite wrap things up neatly, ‘This much, at least, I know’.30 Muldoon is certainly old enough to remember when many critics and scholars (Hirsch among them) insisted that Western culture involved a set of baseline references, things that you really need to know in order to be a good citizen, a careful reader, an alert consumer, or a good audience for the best that has been said and thought in the world. ‘Cultural Literacy’ was one favoured term. ‘Western Civilisation’ was another. But that version of Western Culture turned out to be not just limited, but unteachable: American literary academics realised that it could not be passed on, not even by older professors who found it wholly credible. That is partly a contingent fact of American undergraduate education, with its elective systems and distribution requirements, but partly a fact about culture, where traditions are real but a unitary tradition that reflects an enduring consensus is an illusion, or a projection from people who have not noticed (what Muldoon’s poems keep trying to get us to notice) the observer-dependence of so many claims that we used to believe were fixed truths. Hirsch defined cultural literacy, in 1988, as all the ‘background knowledge necessary for functional literacy and effective national communication’, adding that ‘the goals of political liberalism require educational conservatism’ so that ‘everybody will be able to communicate with strangers’; certain ‘information’ ought to be ‘the possession of all Americans’.31 Muldoon’s American poems do not so much suggest that this goal is un-desirable as imply that, taken literally, it is both ethnocentric and impossible: what would an Irish citizen working with Ojibwe archaeologists need to know? What if they played in a rock band? (Who needs to know Irish?)32 Muldoon sometimes ends poems (and not only in One Thousand Things) by telling us that nobody knows in advance what we should know, and that what matters to him may not matter to you: consider the SAT-analogy joke about Keats at the end of ‘Recalculating’, ‘Earth is to all ye know as done is to dusted’, or the much earlier quip from ‘Sleeve Notes’ that Leonard Cohen’s ‘songs have meant far more to me / than most of the so-called poems I’ve read’.33 Hirsch’s book concludes with a list of five thousand things Americans need to know. One avowedly multicultural response to Cultural Literacy got it right in 1988: ‘we need to know much more’.34 We also need to change how we view knowledge. It would be a mistake to identify Muldoon, as critic or poet or public figure, with the entirety of the educational agenda advocated by Paulo Freire. At the same time it is remarkable how the model of specialised knowledge in Muldoon’s poems – where so much is esoteric, so little seems mandatory, so much seems pathetic or comic, and nobody knows it all – speaks to some of the goals in Freire’s work, where knowledge ought to be something we make as we read, speak, and listen rather than something sorted and chosen for us in advance. The End of the Poem and One Thousand Things Worth Knowing are not only entertainments, but also reductio ad absurdum attacks on what Freire calls the transfer-of-knowledge model, in which ‘knowledge is produced in a place far from the student, who is asked only to memorize what the teacher says or causes us to read’.35 That model cannot be the end of these poems. What is significant? What is meaningful? What matters? What does a poet, or an American, or an Irish writer, need to know? These questions cannot be answered in general, or in advance, even though Muldoon’s contemporaries, and yours, and mine, and various educational authorities and politicians have built entire careers on claims that they can. The poems’ insistence that they can always give us more facts, but no final answers, belongs to the experience of reading them, of discovering that there are far more than a thousand things the poems would like us to know, as well as to the critical experience of discovering, as Kenneth Keating (for example) has discovered in Muldoon’s oeuvre, a Derridean ‘chain of supplements’ whose ‘origin or centre cannot be located’.36 The endless chains of facts reflect larger questions that do not, for Muldoon, have answers: Why are we at war? Why do we die? And the playful, exasperating, informative Oxford University lectures he gave in the early 2000s, The End of the Poem, can do the same thing: they are a run straight at the idea that the right interpreters can have the right answers, which isn’t to say that everything is permitted and nobody is ever wrong, but rather that poetry-making is a game that may never end, a game in which the ornaments are central and the centre is just one more ornament. Another name for ornament is trivia. The End of the Poem can feel like a trivia contest itself, with a set of multi-part questions. Take Muldoon’s comments on Marianne Moore’s ‘Poetry’, itself a counterattack on people who think they know what poetry is and does. Moore, for Muldoon, fears ‘that she might be too overtly ornamental, too Moorish’, and ‘Moorish designs include … zigzags’ as well as ‘the horse-shoe arch’, which suggests the horseshoe ‘six lines after the “fritillary zigzag”’ in another Moore poem. And now we are off: ‘Now, I know that this kind of reading may sometimes seem a little fritillarian … perhaps a little fiddle-headed, but what can I do? I’m sitting at a desk I acquired from the gentleman who looks after the surplus furniture at Princeton. His name is Sam Formica’.37 Moralised defenders of Western Civilisation propose that if we know the Western canon we can become better people, finding evidence that will let us better follow ethical rules. Instead, here is Muldoon’s idea of a useful generalisation: ‘the left ball hangs lower than the right as a general rule’ (Maggot, 93). This notion of witness, or testimony, speaks to the people who mourn ‘the loss of Latin, the loss of a sense of the Latin root and stem / that would help us weigh in one which came first – be it testis as “witness” / or testis as ‘the “ball” on which the oath was sworn’ (Maggot, 94). Good for you if you want to learn Latin; but as for the notion that we all ought to learn it before we can write or read poems, unless it applies as well to learning Irish, and learning Ojibwe, and learning the Elvis Costello songbook, that’s just nuts. In this respect the analyses of hypercanonical poems in The End of the Poem do the same work as Muldoon’s widely viewed, and widely mocked, exegesis of Ke$ha.38 Just because you can do a close reading of something doesn’t make it great literature; just because something doesn’t qualify as great literature by one or another standard doesn’t mean you shouldn’t commit it to memory, and there is no way to know in advance what you should know – no more than you can know in advance how you’ll die. The single book containing all the world, the user’s manual for life on Earth, that could explain death and balance everything in your head, the book that earlier poets and sacred texts had hoped to provide, now seems no better than the World Book encyclopedia, or the instructions of a high-school teacher in an order: ‘I too was schooled by a high-minded monk / who ruled the world-book must be read aloud’ (OTT, 78). Go on to graduate school, and instead of required reading you get ‘required fields’, the title that Muldoon gives to another poem in which ‘Everybody knows that teazle / is the prototype of the hook and eye’ (OTT, 87). We may not know. We do not need to know. But it’s fun to find out. Jennings compares ordinary reference works to ‘something unpleasant but nutritious … for fortifying young minds’; books of trivia, and the contests that arise from them, are ‘light, airy dessert’, ‘pleasurable for its own sake’.39 He might well have added ‘A Trifle’. These cascades of trivia make one further point: the same arrays of obscure references which block Muldoon from appealing to any sense of common culture or common heritage (because that sense was always, in part, an unfair illusion) also connect him to individual readers. The trivia – not the individual bits we can look up, but rather the sense that there are so many of them, that they form an idiosyncratic trivial system – may even, for some of Muldoon’s readers, help to create the emotional bonds which his detractors claim his work often lacks. Go back for a moment to the typical mixed or negative Muldoon review, the sort of review that he has been receiving since he was first singled out for praise: this sort of review calls his poems cerebral, evasive, non-committal, too clever by half, and (if it covers the American work) it adds that that the poems are full of bric-a-brac, that he’s a know-it-all with nothing to say. One review of One Thousand Things, for example, admires the ‘dazzling maze of arcane miscellany’ but finds it too much like ‘a good show’: it lacks, this reviewer says, ‘a human voice that speaks beside you’.40 Apparently it has a hole where the feelings should be, or does not show those feelings in the correct, direct, expected ways. But the stacks of facts are bulwarks against grief, and (as some earlier critics maintained) they push back against demands for partisan commitment, and they involve us in some high-level fun. These, too, are human feelings, and Muldoon’s bales of trivia, arranged amid intricate rhyme-schemes, express them. The feeling of resentment, or of mild political anger, against demands for a unitary, US- or UK-centric common culture with a single (and white) common centre – that’s a feeling too. And there is at least one more feeling that can, perhaps, be expressed best, or only, through stacks of trivia, nets of allusions, proper nouns, things most people won’t get: that is the feeling that you yourself are never quite available directly in the way that other people, or poets, have been, that you can’t make yourself direct or authentic or intuitive to others, even if you try. It is a feeling familiar to (though certainly not only to) people who feel they cannot read faces, or grasp non-verbal social cues, or guess well at others’ feelings; some such people (certainly not all of them) place ourselves on the autism spectrum, or label ourselves as ‘neurodiverse’. It’s not that such people do not have feelings, or do not reach out to other people: rather, we may express them only in indirect ways, through shared and sometimes obscure systems of information. And trivia, in this sense – and beyond it, the sharing of abstract systems – can create, for some people, the connection, the sense of belonging, that other people find through intuition. It’s frustrating when you are told that your intuition should simply give you the right answer, and it does not, or it never has; it’s even more frustrating to be told that you should be able to make your feeling recognisable to others – or recognise their feeling – without any kind of detour through reference, analogy, fictional characters, stories, or proper nouns. Such frustration is a feeling too. It’s a kind of frustration that goes with winning trivia contests, with completing intellectual tasks other people find pointless, with a delight in mastering specialised domains of knowledge whose relevance to some putative common culture is never the point. It is the kind of frustration, and the kind of joy, that cultural critics who write about the autism spectrum have described, and found, in other media, though I have yet to see it connected to poetry. One especially trustworthy writer describes his ‘compulsive tendency to get swept away in minutiae’ and says that he has a strong sense of ethics but not quite a sense of instinctive empathy, only ‘well-honed pattern recognition’ that has served him almost as well.41 The autistic communities described in Steve Silberman’s important study NeuroTribes demonstrate that ‘the same behaviors that had been viewed for so long as inherently antisocial could become social in a group of autistic adults’. A family of Star Trek fans, for example, where both parents and children identify as autistic, has developed elaborate systems for cooking and cleaning: these systems are not so much ‘an expression of … need for order and routine’, but ‘a family in-joke at the expense of those who thought that autistic people were incapable of “getting” humor’. Joy, and humour, in pattern recognition, in trivia, in knowing what other people might have to look up, commingles in these scenes with some exasperation over distance from other, neurotypical, people, who cannot understand, who feel shut out.42 This is a kind of creativity, a species of sustaining pleasure, of which the neurotypical may doubtless possess their own versions: it is a kind of seriocomic attitude that might well suffuse the strangest of Muldoon’s short, and some of his long, poems, thanks to his trivia. And once you find that kind of sharing, and that kind of humour, in Muldoon’s work, you may also find a way in which the poems’ networks of trivia reach out to like-minded readers, not as the potential centre of a present or future common culture, but in a sly way that acknowledges networks of fans. The games of association that Robbins finds, both in the poems and in The End of the Poem, in effect invite us to play along. They make of us not disciples so much as fans, and I mean ‘fans’ in the strong sense that you can also use for Star Trek fans. Of course I do not mean to identify Muldoon, nor even the personae within his poems, as autistic, any more than I mean to identify him as a radical educator devoted to Freire. Rather, I mean that his uses of trivia – of just so much trivia, over and over, and of so much information that could be crucial to some and trivial to another, without much explanation except the poems’ own complicated arrangement – not only refuse demands for political engagement; not only create loci for nostalgia and grief; not only respond to recent calls that educators describe a common culture; but also, above and beyond all those effects, imagine the kinds of interpersonal bonds fortified, rather than damaged, by apparently pointless intellectual pursuits. Muldoon’s poetry has been described – disparagingly – as ‘pyrotechnical autism’.43 Other, less charged, complaints against Muldoon – the poems lack feeling, and seem self-involved; they avoid emotions in favour of elaborate, meaningless forms; they cannot reach others – echo the kinds of ‘Theory of Mind’ diagnoses that neurotypical clinicians have long used to define autism. According to Theory of Mind models, autistic people can process data, but do not see other people as people; they supposedly (in Melanie Yergeau’s acerbic paraphrase) ‘do not understand that other people have their own unique mental states, lives, and experiences’. Today’s autistic writers find such models at once inaccurate and dehumanising: indeed, their own writing serves as repeated disproof of such models. Autism is not the absence of an awareness of other minds but another way of experiencing mind and body, one that may be a gift or a disability, a source of isolation or a source of community, or both at once. ‘Autism is embodied: my embodiment is autism’, declares Yergeau.44 Rather than sharing and demonstrating emotions in neurotypical ways, autistic people do something else, something those outside their circles may find difficult to understand. They may, for example, share trivia. Another word for trivia, as we have already seen, is trifle. Behind both words you might, following Robbins following Muldoon, hear a third word, and a fourth word: tribble, or troubles, as in the Troubles, or in ‘The Trouble with Tribbles’, the 1967 Star Trek episode in which hamster-like creatures multiply illogically, until their ill health helps the crew spot a Klingon spy. Alas, there are no direct Star Trek references in Muldoon’s poems. Instead there are Leonard Cohen, and Áedán mac Gabraín, and the funfair at Portrush, and SINIMIAINIAIS, and Francis Bacon, and Francis Bacon. You might know some of these things already, but you will not know them all; you will not, so to speak, bat one thousand. On the other hand, you may recognise yourself as (along with Muldoon) a member of a community that shares some of them. Because Muldoon’s various trivia sets work on differing readers in differing ways – the Irish language on one set, the Warren Zevon completism on another, the South American history on yet another, and so on – he can fox the Anglo-American nostalgia for one common culture (presumably that culture would not require that we all learn Irish, or learn tabs for Warren Zevon) while still appealing to what Jennings calls the ‘immediate sense of cameraderie, of a created bond … when two people realize they own some piece of knowledge in common’.45 Muldoon – to judge by his twenty-first century poetry – does not want to become a schoolmaster, an authority, deciding what belongs in an officially recognised school. Instead, he is quite willing – sometimes he feels it’s required – to keep up a fan community, a set of friendships, even a kind of secular successor to what a sonnet from Horse Latitudes names as a hedge school. Such a school might include (as the actual hedge schools, secret sites of Catholic instruction during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did) Irish and Latin, but it could also keep up semi-secret knowledge about (from his elegy for Warren Zevon) ‘Parsi Towers of silence’, and ‘Space Lab [italics mine]’.46 Various readers see various parts of Muldoon, and see or fail to see various emotions, because we share various histories, various special interests; they, or we, know, and will always know, different subsets among those one thousand things. In fact, such difference often divides, but also unites, Muldoon’s fans: the ones who read his work for fun, who are, now as before, the best readers of Muldoon’s insistently double-minded, canny, evasive, trivial, and yet deeply affecting and even intimate poems. Footnotes 1 Paul Muldoon, Plan B (2009), p. 50. 2 Paul Muldoon, Horse Latitudes (New York, 2006), p. 93. 3 Randall Jarrell, Kipling, Auden & Co. (New York, 1980), p. 56. 4 Helen Vendler, ‘Anglo-Celtic Attitudes’, New York Review of Books, 6 Nov. 1997, pp. 57-60: 57. 5 Paul Muldoon, One Thousand Things Worth Knowing (New York, 2015); hereafter OTT. 6 For more on this poem and its medieval references, see Conor McCarthy, ‘Muldoon Mourning Heaney: “Cuthbert and the Otters”’, English, 67 (2018), 359-74, and Sally Connolly, ‘Two Genealogical Elegies for Seamus Heaney’, Literary Imagination, 18/3 (2016), 221-9. 7 Michael Robbins, ‘Paul Muldoon’s Covert Operations’, Modern Philology, 109/2 (2011), 266-99: 270. 8 Paul Muldoon, Maggot (New York, 2010), pp. 50-1. Sub-sequent references are given in the text. 9 Paul Muldoon, Hay (New York, 1998), pp. 5, 7. 10 Claire Wills, Reading Paul Muldoon (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1998), p. 22. 11 Paul Muldoon, Rising to the Rising (Oldcastle, Ireland, 2016), p. 10. 12 See Roland Barthes, ‘The Reality Effect’, in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1989), pp. 141-8. 13 Paul Muldoon, Moy Sand and Gravel (New York, 2002), pp. 4, 7. 14 Tim Kendall, ‘Paul Muldoon’s Twins’, in Elmer Kennedy-Andrews (ed.), Paul Muldoon: Poetry, Prose, Drama (Gerrards Cross, 2006), pp. 71-84: 72-3. 15 John Lyon, ‘“All That”: Muldoon and the Vanity of Interpretation’, in Tim Kendall and Peter McDonald (eds.), Paul Muldoon: Critical Essays (Liverpool, 2004), pp. 110-24: 111, 113-14, 122. 16 Tim Hancock, ‘Dining Out with Paul Muldoon: Poetic and Personal Relations in the Restaurant Poems’, in Kennedy-Andrews (ed.), Paul Muldoon, pp. 85-100: 89. 17 See George Steiner, On Difficulty and Other Essays (New York, 1978). 18 Kendall, ‘Paul Muldoon’s Twins’, p. 81. 19 Edward Mendelson, ‘A Few Things Auden Never Wrote’, W. H. Auden Society Newsletter (Dec. 2007; rev. 2014); <http://audensociety.org/neverwrote.html>. 20 Paul Muldoon, ‘The Gate and the Bed’, Guardian, 1 Dec. 2000. 21 Paul Muldoon, Poems 1968-1998 (New York, 2001), p. 339. 22 John Kerrigan, ‘Paul Muldoon’s Transits: Muddling Through after Madoc’, in Kendall and McDonald (eds.), Paul Muldoon: Critical Essays, pp. 125-49: 133. 23 See Adrienne Raphel, The Crossword (New York, forthcoming). 24 Muldoon, Horse Latitudes, p. 51. 25 Ken Jennings, Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs (New York, 2006), pp. 79-80. 26 Richard Wilbur, ‘Statement of Poetics’, in John Ciardi (ed.), Mid-Century American Poets (New York, 1950), pp. 5-9: 7. 27 Jennings, Brainiac, p. 31. 28 See Nathaniel Myers, ‘End Rhymes and End-Rhymes: Paul Muldoon’s Echoic Elegies’, in Jefferson Holdridge and Brian Ó Conchubhair (eds.), Post-Ireland? Essays on Contemporary Irish Poetry (Wake Forest, 2017), pp. 221-44. 29 Jennings, Brainiac, pp. 140-1. 30 Muldoon, Hay, pp. 10, 50. 31 E. D. Hirsch, Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (New York, 1988), pp. xi, xiv. 32 See especially Justin Quinn, ‘Paul Muldoon and the Irish Language’, Literaria Pragensia, 28 (2018), 30-42. 33 OTT, 46; Muldoon, Poems 1968-1998, p. 416. 34 Rob Simonson and Scott Walker (eds.), Graywolf Annual 5: Multi-Cultural Literacy (St Paul, 1988), p. xi. 35 Paulo Freire and Ira Shor, A Pedagogy of Liberation (New York, 1987), p. 8. 36 Kenneth Keating, Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Canon (New York, 2017), p. 73. 37 Paul Muldoon, The End of the Poem (New York, 2006), p. 249. 38 See ‘Paul Muldoon Critiques Ke$ha’s Tik Tok’, The Princeton Tiger, 10 Sept. 2010, <http://www.tigermag.com/2010/09/paul-muldoon-critiques-kehas-tik-tok/>, and ‘“I’ve Tried to Be Trashy”: Paul Muldoon on Ke$ha’, Poetry Foundation, 23 Nov. 2011, <https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2011/11/ive-tried-to-be-trashy-paul-muldoon-on-keha>. 39 Jennings, Brainiac, p. 59. 40 Fred Dings, review of One Thousand Things Worth Knowing, World Literature Today (Jan. 2016), n.p. See also Fran Brearton, ‘An Intricate Tour-de-Force’, Guardian, 6 Feb. 2015, and John McAuliffe, ‘One Thousand Things Worth Knowing’, Irish Times, 25 Jan. 2015. 41 Jay Edidin, ‘I See Your Value Now’ (2014), <https://edidin.wordpress.com/2016/04/15/i-see-your-value-now-aspergers-and-the-art-of-allegory/>. 42 Steve Silberman, NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity, 2nd edn. (New York, 2016), pp. 444, 429. 43 Quoted in Charles McGrath, ‘Word Freak’, New York Times Sunday magazine, 19 Nov. 2006, p. 60. 44 Melanie Yergeau, ‘Clinically Significant Disturbance: On Theorists who Theorize Theory of Mind’, Disability Studies Quarterly, 33/4 (2013), n.p. 45 Jennings, Brainiac, p. 141. 46 Muldoon, Horse Latitudes, p. 95. © The Author(s) [2020]. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)

Romer,, Stephen

doi: 10.1093/escrit/cgz028pmid: N/A

Who reads G. K. Chesterton today? I daresay there are Chesterton Societies, and Father Brown Reading Circles, but to a certain generation, educated according to the strictures of Eliot and Leavis, he seemed (and still seems) as out of date as an antimacassar or an elephant’s foot umbrella stand; some piece of Edwardian clutter. His gargantuan bulk, as caricatured by Max Beerbohm or Edmund Kapp, combined with the sheer awesome (awful?) quantity of his writings, the chatter of those weekly columns, all that dead polemic – ‘the burblings of a dung hill’ said Pound, disobligingly – combine to extinguish all desire and curiosity. When the present reviewer thinks of Chesterton, it is of the Father Brown story ‘A Twitch upon the Thread’, because it occurs at a fraught moment in Brideshead Revisited: it is being read aloud by Lady Marchmain to the devouter of her children, excluding Sebastian, who will soon interrupt the cosy session and make a drunken and tearful scene. Even here, the smug apologetics of GKC and his ‘little priest’, with his logic-chopping and love of paradox, are insufferable; and Waugh I think intended it so be so (the proselytising purpose in that novel, if it exists at all, is strangely conflicted). All this is undoubtedly to underrate Chesterton, and it is part of Michael Shallcross’s purpose in this engaging and original book to take up the cudgels on his behalf, and try and persuade us that at least he was significant, as a goad and an irritant, to the Men of 1914. Undertaking this review, I knew that I would have to overcome my own prejudices, and largely ignorant prejudices at that. So I read some Chesterton: the more famous Father Browns, including the story that is a light-hearted satire of Pound and Marinetti, ‘The Paradise of Thieves’, and the 1908 novel that has remained his enduringly popular work of fiction, The Man Who Was Thursday. This brilliant and exuberant narration starts with a poem, addressed to his friend E. C. Bentley, in which he and his friend’s joint ‘position’ vis-à-vis the literary fashion of the day is explicitly evoked:           I feel the hour that flings Far out of fish-shaped Paumanok some cry of cleaner things; And the Green Carnation withered, as in forest fires that pass, Roared in the wind of all the world ten million leaves of grass; Or sane and sweet and sudden as a bird sings in the rain – It was Whitman who liberated the two friends, and who punched a window out of the hothouse of Decadence, ruled over by Huysmans and Wilde. Whitman’s barbaric yawp sounded over the roofs and broke through into the study of Des Esseintes – and Chesterton, with faultless logic, attached this yawp to his high ideal of democracy, and to his lifelong defence of popular culture, pitted against elitism, notably in aesthetics. It is this opposition, this brawl and punch-up, that is the beating heart of the book under review. Certainly it is the matter that will be of most interest to scholars of modernism and its self-appointed high priests – Pound, Lewis, Eliot, and Joyce. But Shallcross needs to set the scene, and the first sections of the book are devoted to Chesterton as a young Turk in the world of Edwardian letters, ruled over by the gargantuan figure of Wilde, in full fig and green carnation, mouthing vaguely progressive liberal sentiments from the safety of a Mayfair sofa. With his great comrade of those early days, E. C. Bentley, it was the discovery of Leaves of Grass that signalled the end of Decadence for Chesterton, or at least the start of their campaign to end it. Hanging spiderlike over Decadence, instilling his poison into the literary vein, was Schopenhauer, the philosopher of pessimism, of determinist Will and of misogyny: his influence was ubiquitous at the time. The remedy could really only be that ‘cry of cleaner things’. The succeeding cultural wave – and twist – began when Pound came to Europe, shaking the dust of the Midwest from his shoes, and detesting Whitman. This was in 1908, the year The Man Who Was Thursday was published. Pound visited the Italian cities, and wrote about them rapturously in his best Pre-Raphaelite vein, before settling for some months in Venice, where he published his first collection, A Lume Spento. He settled in London later the same year, arriving when men like Shaw, Chesterton, Wells, and Galsworthy were the literary lions. Henry James, who died in 1916, cast his large and distinguished shadow over proceedings, and this was to be the shadow that Pound first wrapped around him, to take his bearings. Pound, never slow to make up his mind or deliver himself of an opinion, decided the current scene was sclerotic, and set about reforming it. He would have found the last dregs of Wildean Decadence and Georgian poetry. He would also have encountered progressive politics, the socialism and vegetarianism of Shaw, pitted half in jest against the populist, self-abasing clown Chesterton, who tended to disguise his radical and theological views. Shallcross describes well the figure of Chesterton as the ‘licensed jester’, paid to provoke the mighty GBS in the public ‘duels’ they would stage to entertain the Edwardian public. For his part, Pound acted rapidly to counteract the watered-down imitations of Swinburne and Rossetti, the kind of stuff turned out by Arthur Symons or John Addington Symonds; it was to correct the vices of the latter that Pound listed ‘A Few Don’ts’ (1913), his hugely influential ground rules for prospective Imagists. Adventurous editors like A. R. Orage or Ford Madox Ford were ready to take a wager on Pound, and on Wyndham Lewis, and on the relative latecomer T. S. Eliot. One thing that Michael Shallcross achieves in Rethinking G. K. Chesterton and Literary Modernism is to show very clearly how cultural shifts – even coups – are managed. How Chesterton and Bentley (and later Hilaire Belloc) battered and blustered their way into public notice; and soon enough, in the opposite corner, spitting fury and contempt, like a couple of bulldogs on leads, was the Pound and Lewis gang, Lewis being given here, and rightly, sustained attention. In a word, they were the Vorticists; their organ, Blast. Chesterton had fun with them, more especially with the Futurists. He never took Marinetti remotely seriously, joking that ‘you cannot be a Futurist unless you are frightfully rich’, and hence unmasking its intrinsic elitism. In the literary spats that were to come, it was this brand of easy humour, of superior British whimsy, that Pound and Lewis and Eliot came to revile: they saw it as a blight on serious art, with Chesterton as the chief offender. Just as Shaw ‘required’ Chesterton as a foil – and their duels were after all mutually beneficial, earning good money and keeping them before the public – so the Men of 1914 required Chesterton as a whipping boy, an object to revile. This kind of humour, Chesterton’s jovial ‘raspberry blowing’ from his populist charabanc, directed at the perceived attitudinising of the young Futurists, came to be seen as something literally deadly. It is reminiscent of what Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited says about ‘charm’ to Charles Ryder, when ‘explaining’ the latter’s paintings to him with ‘well-reasoned abuse’: ‘Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, Charles, it has killed you’. For ‘charm’ read ‘humour’, and one understands better Lewis’s anatomy of it in Blast (issue 1, 1914): BLAST HUMOUR Quick English drug for stupidity and sleepiness. Arch enemy of REAL, conventionalizing like       gunshot, freezing supple REAL in       ferocious chemistry of laughter He would set ‘humour at humour’s throat’. For scholars of modernism the most entertaining sections of this book involve discussion of the pungent insults that were bandied about, especially by the younger men against their older antagonist. What irritated them beyond measure was Chesterton’s ability to play what Shallcross calls the ‘half-conscious buffoon’; as such, they feared him – they feared the ‘perspicacious fool’. For just as Chesterton could take down Shelley – ‘Shelley, the ethereal bard, who had / A tidy income from his dad’ – and later Marinetti, he could surely take them down as well. Chesterton had staked out his ‘populist’ credentials, and he stood his ground; and because he traded in self-mockery, he could more easily denounce pretentiousness, lack of humour, and humbug in others. Taking his stand with Whitman, even though he detected in the great democrat a single defect, ‘that he never does see the fun of himself’, it was in keeping that the one time he referred to Baudelaire was to call him ‘loathsome’. That alone could have earned the rebuke of the younger men, and forfeited his right to serious consideration. In fact, it was to be Chesterton’s Father Brown story ‘A Paradise of Thieves’ (1913) that stirred the younger men into a virulent series of attacks. In this story, one Ezza Montano, a gryphon-like conflation of Marinetti and Ezra Pound, is a rather sinister chameleon courier-figure, accompanying the wealthy English banker Mr Harrogate and his beautiful daughter on a perilous journey over the Italian Alps. He is also accomplice to the more vaudeville-style ‘young Tuscan poet’ Muscari, who sports a black cape in a way reminiscent of the young Wyndham Lewis, and of Chesterton himself. Muscari is thus a kind of ‘Chesterlewis’, and as Shallcross suggests, he is treated with much more leniency than the Marinetti-Pound grotesque. Muscari is dubbed ‘a troubadour’, whereas Montano sports a sneer (a very bad mark in the Chesterton code). Ezza Montano is described as having a very vivacious head, ‘that rose abruptly out of the standing collar like cardboard and the comic pink tie’, which is unmistakably a caricature of the young Ezra as he first appeared in London literary salons, very correctly dressed, but always with flowing tie (and, later, with open collar). Chesterton’s story is negligible, and the plot childish, but a sentence like this contains animus enough to have humiliated Pound: This youth had been a prodigy at college, and European fame was promised him when he was barely fifteen; but when he appeared in the world he failed, first publicly as a dramatist and a demagogue, and then privately for years on end as an actor, a traveller, a commission agent or a journalist. There may even be a jab here at Pound’s early persona poems, when Chesterton has Ezza say: ‘I am only a bundle of masks, and you can’t fight a duel with that’. Ezza is attached to the banker for his own financial gain; this, added to the portrait of him as a demagogue and promoter of himself and his associates, comes close enough to hurt at the same time as giving a nasty (and unjustified) spin on Pound’s financial and promotional activities. The irony is that Chesterton and Pound were united in their hatred of big banking, and both came up with schemes that would abolish banks lending money at interest. The interests and convictions shared by Pound and GKC concerning the iniquities of Capitalism, and by Eliot and GKC concerning Religion and Society, emerged only later, and Shallcross is good at tracing the rather rueful recognition of this on the part of the modernists. For the moment, this story of Chesterton’s contained just enough intelligent mockery to wound, and enough of trivial style – ‘The great Muscari, most original of the young Tuscan poets, walked swiftly into his favourite restaurant …’ etc., etc. – to enrage. The riposte, both in private correspondence and in print, was not long in coming, and it was formidable. Most publicly, Pound skewered Chesterton for his sanitising effect on things, the implication that the bluff breezy no-nonsense humorous ‘attitude’ is inimical to serious writing. Pound’s verse in Blast, with the title ‘The New Cake of Soap’ consists of just two lines: ‘Lo, how it gleams and glistens in the sun / Like the cheek of a Chesterton’. A gleaming cheek, and a cheekiness, aching to be slapped. Meanwhile, Wyndham Lewis took furious issue with Chesterton for suggesting that Marinetti was really no more than a harlequin figure, a harmless prankster: [Chesterton] weak-mindedly succumbed to the romance of the practical joke many years ago, and has been its maudlin and dribbling swain ever since. The pages of his discourse are one long mechanical dribble of empty inversions and wearisome similes from the nursery. A consequence of Chesterton’s attack, and Shallcross defends its perspicacity, was that Lewis and Pound were able to locate what it was that was so deadly (and deathly) about his influence: Chesterton ‘emerged as the unspoken figurehead of the form of British humour’ that was akin to philistinism and bore its stamp. He was no more than a ‘foaming toby-jug’, and the chief target of the younger men’s intent to ‘Kill John Bull with Art’. Meanwhile, in private correspondence to Joyce, Pound calls Chesterton ‘a yahoo’, and a ‘pandar to public imbecilities’; and, astutely, writes that ‘Chesterton is so much the mob, so much the multitude … a symbol for all the mob’s hatred of all art that aspires above mediocrity’. It remained for Eliot, who arrived in London in 1914, to join the affray. Writing in The Egoist in 1918 as T. S. Apteryx, he alludes to Chesterton’s very popular ‘Ballad of the White Horse’: I have seen the forces of death with Mr Chesterton at their head upon a white horse. Mr Pound, Mr Joyce, and Mr Lewis write living English; one does not realize the awfulness of death until one meets with the living language. Of this dismissal by Eliot, Shallcross shrewdly observes that it was self-serving, since the young poet thereby aligned himself with the Vorticist gang, ranged against the forces of reaction. In fact, Eliot had recommended Chesterton’s critical works to students attending his wartime extension lectures. Trawling through volume 3 of Eliot’s Letters I came across an annotation made by the editors to a review the poet wrote of books on economics by Chesterton and his by then bosom comrade, Hilaire Belloc. Eliot writes: ‘One has much sympathy with the Belloc-Chesterton gospel of Distributive Property. It is a fertile idea …’. Distributism was a scheme ‘to put productive property directly into the hands of families and local communities (as against control by the State, big business or a few wealthy individuals)’. This shows not only that Eliot continuously ‘took notice’ (necessarily, as editor of The Criterion), but also how ‘Chesterbelloc’, in social and economic matters, was strangely close to Pound and his championing of social credit. This was in 1927, and by 1928 Eliot and Chesterton were engaged in an increasingly cordial correspondence. The main story related in the latter part of Shallcross’s book is the unlikely and partial, but nevertheless appreciable, degree of reconciliation that took place between all the protagonists. Eliot (now a convert to Anglo-Catholicism, and suddenly closer in his religious beliefs to GKC than to his erstwhile associates) writes in a letter of 1929: ‘I have much sympathy with your political and social views’. Chesterton became an unlikely ally, when Eliot was quarantined by Pound and Lewis on suspicion of his being a reactionary turncoat. Lewis, polemical passion spent, finally found it in himself to invite GKC to sit for a portrait; and even Pound, writing from Rapallo in 1935, and by then less engaged by the aesthetics of Marinetti than the policies of Mussolini, admitted that he had failed, in an earlier piece ‘to dissociate Chesterton’s early playful style … from his present, perfectly straightforward writing on social infamies’. Singularly less attractive was the anti-Semitism that both men exhibited, also intelligently examined by Shallcross. Pound and Chesterton did actually meet, near the end of the latter’s life, in Rapallo: Pound discovered (ruefully? regretfully?) that after all he rather liked the man! This is all very satisfying, and amusingly piquant, especially for an admirer of Chesterton, as Shallcross clearly is. Often brilliant, and thoroughly researched, there are nevertheless longueurs in his book, and passages that could have been edited. There is a recurrent appeal to French theory, notably to Kristeva, that seems tacked on and adds little. The passages on sartorial matters and theories of disguise are too drawn out. Adducing Marinetti as (yet one more) possible presence around Prufrock’s composite self, or even around the earlier Laforguian ‘Marionette’ poems, is far-fetched. Wherein, then, lies the value of this book? Why dig up Chesterton? One could argue that a figure so hugely influential in his time, and who has suffered such an eclipse, deserves revisiting. The main value of the book, to my mind, lies in describing the nature of the modernists’ polemic against Chesterton. His writing, and his unkillable resilience, brought forth some of the choicest bile, some of the most memorable epithets, some of the most colourful insults that the Lewis and Pound set would generate; and on a deeper level, the malaise that Chesterton created in them, as of being found out by the ‘perspicacious mob’, by a bluff humourist and denouncer of humbug, led them to recognise this brand of humour as itself a form of philistinism. This was a crucial discovery. Nowhere, one notes, does Shallcross praise the quality of Chesterton’s creative work, and his omission to do so is in itself an admission. It seems scarcely fair to draw attention to the dramatic contrast between the reputation of Pound and Eliot today and that of Chesterton. In a private letter to Joyce, dated 1916, Pound wrote that Chesterton ‘creates an atmosphere in which art is impossible’. On ne saurait mieux dire. © The Author(s) [2020]. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)

Rodensky,, Lisa

doi: 10.1093/escrit/cgz027pmid: N/A

Stefan Collini’s most recent book returns to the 1920s, starting with T. S. Eliot’s early prose (particularly The Sacred Wood, Homage to John Dryden, and his Clark Lectures). This is the decade when, argues Collini, Eliot would covertly write both a literary history and a general history that would influence (almost) every critic of his generation and their reading publics. Collini’s well-researched and spirited book asks readers to confront ‘just how much literary discussion in mid-twentieth-century Britain took place within a framework derived from Eliot’s throwaway remarks about the seventeenth century’s “dissociation of sensibility”’. F. R. Leavis, Basil Willey, L. C. Knights, and Raymond Williams engage Collini’s most sustained interest as the important writers who absorbed the Eliotic history of intellectual and cultural decline (this term, and not the titular ‘nostalgic’, is what Collini uses) and deployed it for their own reasons. Only William Empson emerges as the outlier who both resists the declinist narrative and produces ‘a consciously and pervasively historical understanding – one resting on a distinctive method of linguistic analysis to which, even now, historians might with profit pay closer attention’. Historians of the first half of the twentieth century should also have paid attention to Eliot, Leavis, and Williams – not to profit from their historical work but to upend it. They ought to have rejected (as Empson did) the declinist history and the bad historical work literary critics circulated. Instead, historians (at least the ‘professional’ ones Collini blames) rested on what Collini calls their ‘sense of proprietorial entitlement’; they foolishly ignored the histories Eliot et al. published. While they were busy shrugging off such work, literary critics moved in and set about producing their ‘quasi-histories’ of decline that generations of readers accepted. Against such proprietorial entitlement, Collini sets the ‘misplaced intellectual imperialism of literary criticism’ and ‘the imperial claims of a certain style of literary history’. At the heart of The Nostalgic Imagination are Collini’s acts of exposure and correction. He does what historians eighty-odd years ago should have done: undo the imperial claims that these quasi-historians made. And it is with Eliot’s claims that Collini begins. Of Eliot’s famous pronouncements about the seventeenth century’s dissociation of sensibility, Collini argues that they are of a piece with Eliot’s attacks in the 1920s on the Whig interpretation of history and his efforts ‘to dispossess the “whigs” of their ownership of that history’. Collini gives detailed accounts of Eliot’s efforts to replace Macaulay’s version of progress, including an analysis of a recently published (2014) Eliot lecture (delivered in 1924) in which he attacks Renaissance humanism (Donne is a target, as is Dostoevsky) while Dante is heralded. The arguments Collini analyses aren’t surprising; still, it’s illuminating to see how this early Eliot lecture offers up a very clear set of views. When Collini turns his mind to the Clark Lectures (delivered in 1926), he zeroes in on Eliot’s ‘remarkably high-handed confection of literary and intellectual history even by the standards of this notoriously high-handed critic’ and the more than implied but less than explicit historical argument that emerges from the trajectory created by his handling of the three periods under consideration (thirteenth century, early seventeenth century, and late nineteenth century). What troubles Collini about Eliot’s work (and, later, Leavis’s and Williams’s – and additionally Willey, Knights, and Q. D. Leavis) is not the fact that literary critics wrote history; it’s the irresponsible and self-serving histories that got written that offend him. Taking up the Clark Lectures, Collini reveals Eliot’s ‘half-recognition of the claims of “general history”’, where Eliot wants it both ways: to assert a historical argument and to disclaim that he is doing so. Collini distinguishes the moments of assertion from ‘passages where he seems suddenly seized by a kind of self-consciousness or embarrassment about the extent of his bare-faced trespassing on the historian’s domain’. Others before Collini have called out literary critics (particularly those associated with close reading) for smuggling in history while dismissing its significance. Collini mounts a case for his own enterprise in The Nostalgic Imagination by noting that while we now acknowledge how many historical assumptions underlie, say, the close readings that Leavis’s Scrutiny lieutenants produced, more than acknowledgement is required: someone needs to expose the Eliotic declinist history that has long underpinned such readings and discuss its consequences in detail. An interdisciplinary scholar of literature and history, Collini is up to the task. He asks readers to see that ‘the more closely we scrutinize [Eliot’s] critical writings, the more we see they are shot through with historical (or perhaps meta- or even pseudo-historical) assertions’. Later on in his analysis, Collini is even less diplomatic. Introducing a passage from Eliot’s Norton Lectures (1932-3), he asserts that there (as elsewhere), Eliot was content ‘to throw out sweeping pseudo-historical judgements’. That’s not how reputable history – literary or general – should be written, and certainly no history written like this should have had the influence that Eliot’s historical arguments had. One might say, in response, that no one (then or now) would have believed that Eliot was writing carefully researched historical arguments that he expected readers to believe, but Collini takes care to show, first, that Eliot took his historical assertions seriously, and second, that they exercised a profound influence on critics. While two instances of ‘pseudo-historical’ show up in Collini’s Eliot chapter (the only two in the book), his more frequently used term of disparagement is ‘quasi-historical’. And yet many’s the time in the book when the clear implication is that literary critics (Eliot, and those following his declinist lead) acted in bad faith. What they wrote (in Collini’s estimation) were not just half-histories but intentionally fraudulent histories conjured to serve their own agendas. There’s an unsatisfyingly cautious quality to ‘quasi’ in Collini’s text: since he can’t quite make good on the bad faith he sees in the critical work, he resorts to ‘quasi’ in ways that weaken the force of his arguments. That Collini’s Leavis chapter follows on from Eliot seems predictable; nevertheless, his close examination of other (besides Eliot’s) and earlier influences on Leavis’s historical framework is illuminating. Turning first to Leavis’s Ph.D. thesis, Collini finds little connection to Eliot but plenty to Alexandre Beljame, G. M. Trevelyan, and Leslie Stephen, issuing in his claim that ‘the interpretation of English history that animated Leavis’s cultural criticism melded several not easily compatible perspectives’. Moving forward into the 1930s, Collini adduces Eliot’s hand in Leavis’s historical claims while still registering the historical accounts indebted to Whiggish historians. Collini’s research here brings to light the differences between Eliot and Leavis, and yet the differences don’t make any difference to Collini’s final judgement of the histories they wrote. Collini reserves his most stringent criticism of Leavis’s historical claims for his work on the reading public. Though chapter 5 begins with Q. D. Leavis (the lone woman in the study), she occupies only a handful of pages (and is an easy target for Collini: having unearthed the examiners' reports for her thesis, he finds and quotes a choice comment by E.M. Forster about her limitations as a critic – an inclusion that seems gratuitous, even in a footnote). The elder Leavis quickly resurfaces and Collini catches him out just as quickly: quoting from Revaluation, Collini finds Leavis asserting that Herrick ‘is still an overrated figure’ – ‘still’ signalling that this is not just a recent piece of foolishness. Yet, the ‘triviality of Herrick’s talent’ (in Leavis’s unforgiving phrase) means that ‘beside him Carew looks like a major poet’. The mere act of juxtaposition is sufficient to sustain the judgement. But in that case, must not the serious and responsible and (what is more) authoritative reading public that allegedly existed in earlier centuries have been asleep on the job? And what’s more, how (asks Collini) did Leavis square his own large readership with the claims about the moral vacuity of twentieth century readers? A fair question, to be sure. At every turn, Collini persuasively exposes the underlying contradictions in Leavis’s assertions. It’s hard to imagine that Collini’s readers (or his Ford Lecture audiences – the book is based on the lectures he delivered in 2017) would have gasped to learn that F. R. Leavis (of all people!) had offered a deeply biased argument with little evidence to support it. Still, the detailed undoing of Leavis’s historical claims brings home how Leavis deployed the historical narrative of cultural decline to serve his agenda. As a historian, Raymond Williams fares no better. Unlike Eliot, whom Collini sees as abashed by his incursions into historians’ territory, Williams’s ‘work is pervasively and assertively historical, a series of arguments about change’, but only ‘ostensibly’ so: ‘there is a constant undertow, a pull towards the omnivorous present of Williams’s determined, all-encompassing argument’. This doesn’t bode well for Williams. Collini produces example after example of Williams’s ‘rough handling of the textual evidence’, and he begins by walking readers through Williams’s fraudulent account of his discovery of ‘culture’ in the Seaford public library’s copy of the OED, a cooked-up Eureka! tale designed to set in motion Culture and Society’s preconceived declinist narrative (owing much to the twin influences of Eliot and Leavis): ‘the more closely one looks at the OED entry’, argues Collini, ‘the less clear it becomes just what Williams believed he had discovered’. Whatever the uncertainties about this, Williams assuredly asserted that a change in the uses of ‘culture’ happened in the first half of the nineteenth century and that the Industrial Revolution was to blame. To figure out what historical evidence Williams relied on to support this claim, Collini looks (first) not into Culture and Society but instead a 1953 Essays in Criticism article (‘The Idea of Culture’), where Williams identifies his evidence more fully. Examining how Williams deploys quotations from The Prelude and The Excursion, Collini shows how he manipulates both poems to make the textual evidence do his historical bidding. Collini masterfully demonstrates the ways in which Williams positions a key instance from The Excursion as a consciously outmoded use as against the instance in The Prelude which, Williams claims, is genuinely transitional. It has elements of the old sense of process, but it can be read also in the developed nineteenth-century sense of an absolute. However this may be (and I think myself that it is the first significantly modern use), the development of culture as a concept, the idea of culture, was thereafter rapid. Going toe to toe with Williams here, Collini is ready to grant that ‘culture’ in The Prelude passage is ambiguous, but he will not let the rest stand: Williams’s rather breezy ‘however this may be’ indicates that his mind is made up: this is where the ‘modern’ sense dates from. And one would certainly have to put a lot of weight on this single, ambiguous illustration in order to conclude that the abstract sense emerged at the beginning of the nineteenth century and then developed rapidly, since that edition of the OED gave no other example for this sense earlier than the 1860s, starting then from that most predictable of sources, Matthew Arnold. In other words, the whole case for the claim that the modern sense of ‘culture’ becomes established at the beginning of the nineteenth century thus far seems to rest on a highly contestable reading of one line of poetry, and that from a source which, though probably written in or prior to 1805, was not actually published until 1850. Interestingly, the relevant section of Culture and Society, which does not follow the 1953 article in attending so closely to the OED entry, also does not reproduce the passage from the Prelude and the related commentary, though Williams’s later claim would seem to make it the essential stimulus for that book. This analysis models much of the book’s excellent work, a powerful bringing together of close reading and historical fact-finding to make a convincing case that Williams’s already made-up mind distorted the evidence he presented. And Collini doesn’t stop with exposing the fast and loose use of evidence in the 1953 Essays in Criticism article. Researching the examples Williams uses in Culture and Society in its first five chapters, Collini finds that ‘“the word [culture] itself in its general modern uses” never occurs in the works he discusses by Burke and Cobbett, Southey and Owen, Blake and Wordsworth, or even Coleridge and Carlyle’. I will leave it to readers to see for themselves what Collini does with Williams’s appropriation of Newman’s Idea of a University as (non) evidence. What Collini finds is not a quasi- but a pseudo-history, even though he stops short of saying so. Was there any important literary critic of the period who wouldn’t swallow whole Eliot’s narrative of cultural decline? Yes, there was at least one: William Empson. Among the made-up minds of the ‘declinist history’ critics, Empson emerges as a freethinker. And yet, if Empson didn’t fit himself into the historical narrative that other critics told, neither does he fit comfortably into that of Collini, who does ‘concede at the outset that Empson is the most improbable, or at least most challenging, candidate for inclusion here’. What Collini means is that because Empson’s criticism seems most insistently ahistorical, it’s a feat to bring him into a book about history. It may indeed be the case, as Collini asserts, that ‘Professional historians have never had cause to attend to Empson, and nor, it would appear, did he much attend to them’, but I don’t agree that Empson’s readers today (or even yesterday) wouldn’t know how important history was to Empson and his work. I agree that Collini does have a challenge here, but it is, rather, to distinguish Empson’s unscholarly historical scholarship from what he finds in the others. While Collini makes more visible the historical assumptions shaping Empson’s arguments, instead of exposing a distorted history in the early work (he focuses on Seven Types of Ambiguity, Some Versions of Pastoral, The Structure of Complex Words, and Milton’s God), he reveals a history well worth uncovering. So, with Seven Types, Collini argues that it tells ‘a history of increasing self-consciousness about multipli-city of meaning’, and, more to his point, the histories Empson produces don’t trot out the Industrial Revolution as the explanation for what happened between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. After reading the Empson chapter, one might ask Collini why he lets Empson off the hook for his offhand manner with sources (and missing scholarly apparatus), while Eliot, Leavis, and Williams receive no such generosity. Perhaps one answer lies in the difference between ‘offhand’ and ‘high-handed’ (the latter gets attached to Eliot three times, Williams once, and Leavis once; the former modifies Empson three times, and Eliot once: ‘Eliot’s early historical gestures are high-handed and offhand in almost equal measure’). Tone isn’t everything, but in Eliot, Leavis, and Williams it signals the ‘intellectual imperialism’ that Collini finds intolerable. Still, though tone might have something to do with the conclusions reached, it doesn’t give enough credit to Empson or Collini. In the Empson texts he examines, Collini has no occasion to lay bare some argumentative sleight of hand that he so often uncovers in the others. What’s key here is that Empson doesn’t start an analysis already knowing where it needs to come out. No critic was ever more resistant to doctrine than Empson. The writer most likely to catch Empson in a too-reductive way of reading a text was Empson himself. At the same time, one wonders whether Collini fact-checked Empson’s OED work in, say, The Structure of Complex Words in the way he checks up on Williams, or whether, because (like Collini himself) Empson rejected Eliot’s declinist narrative, he takes it on faith that Empson uses evidence fairly. That Empson gives so much evidence (even when it conflicts with his own argument) suggests that perhaps Collini felt he didn’t need to, and with such an approach I concur. Collini’s narrative ends with a literary-critical retreat: the ground historians ceded to critics in the first half of the century they took back in the last half (and thereafter). Not only did the declinist history fall out of favour by the 1950s (never to recover), but so too did it come to pass that literary critics could no longer dispossess historians of what they felt was theirs by right. As Collini notes, ‘the next generation of literary scholars was less disposed to assert its dominion over the terrain of social and cultural history, while the more adventurous work of a new generation of professional historians in the 1960s and 1970s demonstrated their claims to sovereignty over it’. Over the course of his book, Collini demonstrates frequently how literary critics attempted to move historians into supplementary roles in the writing of cultural history. Collini even tags Empson as expressing ‘a confidence that the right kind of literary criticism could achieve something beyond the reach of mere historians – namely, to generate “an entire cultural history”’. That said, Collini does more than describe how the turf wars between literary critics and historians played out in these later decades. He has his own argument to make about what literary critics do with history: In this book I am arguing, among other things, that literary critics are always, by default, second-hand historians, especially when they aspire to be social critics, too; but it is no part of my case that the historical assumptions that can be teased out of their work need necessarily be seen as either consistent or persuasive. I’ve read this sentence over many times, and the more I read it, the less I like it. ‘Second-hand’ isn’t second-rate, but the sense of the derivative or untrustworthy finds its way into the assertion, all the more so in the second part of the sentence, where what literary critics offer are historical assumptions (not claims, not facts) that readers have to tease out, only to discover that those assumptions might be at once contradictory and unpersuasive. And why say that it is no part of the argument that readers must (‘need necessarily’) see those assumptions ‘as consistent or persuasive’? It is as if Collini is anticipating a readership that needs to be told in no uncertain terms that it should not trust the historical work that literary critics do – or at the very least, they should not ‘necessarily’ trust such work. (One might add that readers need not necessarily trust historians either – or interdisciplinary scholars, for that matter.) Collini’s own ambivalence emerges here – the doubled-up passive-voice constructions and the adverbial hedge define the aggressive assertion that trust in literary critics as historians will have no part in his argument. The present tense of Collini’s argument (‘literary critics are always, by default, second-hand historians’) tells readers that The Nostalgic Imagination isn’t just a looking back at the his-tories (pseudo, quasi, or otherwise) that literary critics produced in the first half of the twentieth century. It is also a book about how literary critics ought to use historical evidence. They ought to use it responsibly, accurately, fairly. Collini provides a model of such usage, for literary critics and historians alike. © The Author(s) [2020]. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)

Flesch,, William

doi: 10.1093/escrit/cgz025pmid: N/A

The legal theorist Ronald Dworkin had a theory of interpretation that must be right: any work of literature should be interpreted in a way that makes it the best possible work it could be. (He had a similar principle for interpreting the US Constitution.) But how can we know what’s possible? Anything in cipher could mean anything else, but William Logan explicitly denies that poems should be thought of as written ‘in code’, even if we can or should or do decode them with a cleverness or ‘cunning … worthy of Sherlock Holmes’. For Logan, the possible is governed by what a poet could have known and meant, or what a poem, or a line from a poem, could have known or meant. Probabilities shade into possibilities and make them more likely, but then they shade into improbabilities and so into impossibilities. At some point its very improbability itself will make a reading bad. But when? Logan likes to explore the territory of the unlikely, not quite to set limits to his extraordinary readings of the poets he considers in this wonderful book but to guess where they would finally demur. (Frost, of course, would demur at almost everything, but we can guess that that’s a simultaneously cornpone and defensive act on his part: recognising his well-disguised, uncanny reserve about his poems makes them the best poems they could possibly be.) Logan always signals when he may be getting lost in the woods, lovely, dark and deep as they are, or treading onto thin ice on the frozen lake. Here’s a quick catalogue of moments where he speculates that his speculations might be going ‘too far’: ‘We could take the allusion too far’ [by seeing Robert Lowell’s poem ‘Skunk Hour’ not only as alluding to Milton but as recapitulating the fall of humanity]. ‘If that’s a joke too far’ [he nevertheless won’t suppress his own witty idea that Seamus Heaney is thinking of himself as Puck in his poem ‘The Skunk’ because as his wife searches in ‘a bottom drawer’ for a sexy nightdress, her head is down, ‘tail-up’, and Logan reminds us that ‘Puck gave Bottom the head of an ass’; that of course can’t be Shakespeare’s joke – ass didn’t mean bottom until 1672, according to one of Logan’s most treasured sources, the Oxford English Dictionary, but it certainly could mean that to Heaney, as it does to T. S. Eliot]. ‘It’s easy to go too far with meter’ [but he shows us, efficiently and brilliantly, where it might trundle us, before we decide where too far would be in reading Williams’s ‘Red Wheelbarrow’]. ‘This goes too far’ [if we take the wheelbarrow as a symbol of Williams’s poetic task or vocation, a symbol which, given the barrow’s vestigial embodiment of an occupation no longer central or necessary (in Logan’s reading), might suggest Williams’s disappointment at what he felt was the way he was underrated]. ‘To press the reading further, and even too far, “Quartz contentment” is a striking metaphor for feeling crystallized within’ [in Dickinson’s ‘After great pain’]. ‘It might be tempting to recall the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice – another journey to the underworld to rescue someone dear, and a failure. That presses the possibilities too far. The archeology of image is difficult; and the critic can do little more than strew a few suggestions relevant to the poet’s state of mind, insofar as such a transient thing can be explored at all. The poem does not need [Pound’s patron Margaret] Cravens to conjure up the passage through the underworld’ [but perhaps Pound was thinking of Cravens, who had committed suicide in 1912, leading some to think – mistakenly, Logan says – that her motive was disappointed love for Pound, so that now he was feeling an Orphic guilt]. What makes these readings only possibly possible? What makes them seem as though they might have gone too far, but in directions pointed by the certainly possible? We can say of Logan as a critic what he says of Lowell as a poet: ‘Any poet may be lucky, but a good poet knows how to take advantage of accident’. Much of Logan’s luck and the possibility that luck opens up for him to dwell in comes from his vast knowledge and rapturous research, into late nineteenth and early twentieth century wheelbarrows for example: some are wood and some are metal; some red and others green. You’ll also learn about what white chickens the Committee on New Breeds of the American Poultry Association recognised. Was all of this in Williams’s mind and so relevant to the poem? Well, yes, actually. However inconspicuous the importance of such facts was for him when writing the poem, their presence ‘makes the vision more compelling. Without these historical particulars, these secrets art ignores, it’s hard to believe that the objects – and therefore the poem – could have meant so much to the poet’. Is it going too far to see in ‘historical particulars’ an ambivalently admiring allusion to, as well as empiricist rebuke of, William Blake, and so of one of his great champions, Harold Bloom? Blake too insisted that we ‘Labour well the Minute Particulars: … / General Forms have their vitality in Particulars’ (‘Jerusalem’). Those particulars are highly various, as they should be, so that along with the breed of chickens Logan stresses Williams’s own testimony about how much the poem meant to him. That testimony too stimulates interpretation. In Logan’s splendid observation, ‘“The Red Wheelbarrow” implies that being initiated into the vision will allow us to understand – that’s the logic of the phrasing’. So how to become initiated? That takes some strenuous background digging, to recur to the metaphor of ‘the archeology of image’ – or to use another, it demands much watching of the skies: as Logan points out in his account of ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’, William Herschel ‘had spent months methodically examining the sky sector by small sector for double stars [and so discovered] something passed over by all watchers before’. It was Uranus that swam into his ken. (‘It’s amusing but irrelevant that Herschel did not know exactly what he’d seen.’) Logan’s watching and digging discover a lot: insurance records indicate that the man to whom the wheelbarrow belonged – Thaddeus Marshall – had stopped selling eggs by 1920 (the poem came out in 1923), and this is why the wheelbarrow might, for Williams, recall ‘a way of life recently vanished’, but nevertheless and at the same time stand for ‘an occupation grasped; even if eventually abandoned, it got a man through life’. ‘You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough’, says one of Blake’s proverbs of Hell: ‘Enough! or Too Much!’ Or as Logan says, ‘Too much can be made of such things’, just as ‘Too much can be made of metaphor’. It may be pressing the significance of the underworld Logan justly finds in Pound’s Metro station too far, saying too much, to see a reference to Orpheus and Eurydice there, but that far limit safely encloses the more likely references to Odysseus and Aeneas and the silence they found there in the faces of the apparitions of those they had wronged. Indeed, in Virgil’s version, Eurydice is not silent, not just an apparition. She does lament Orpheus’s disastrous look back at her; but then again in Ovid she is overtly silent, as Ovid’s narrator (making fun of Virgil) insists. And how do we decide which possible reading is best? Here it seems that then we are, like it or not, on Bloomian ground, even if not interpreting Harold Bloom’s particular canon. After all, Logan’s subtitle is ‘Poetry in the Shadow of the Past’, an allusion, no doubt, to Walter Jackson Bate’s The Burden of the Past and the English Poet, but inevitably as well to the parallel ideas in Bloom’s work. Logan’s canon, in this book at any rate, includes, besides the poets of his title, Dickinson and Frost (also in Bloom’s), Shelley and Keats (very much in Bloom’s), Robert Lowell (no) and Heaney (yes), Richard Wilbur and Donald Justice (yes, in Appendix D to his Western Canon), Pound and Williams (not at all), Lewis Carroll (of course) and Longfellow (perhaps not really in either’s), and Shakespeare (naturally) – these are poets who provide individual poems that Logan reads with great learnedness, care, precision, and imagination, so that every least revelation he offers is a revelation. Most Bloomian in Logan’s method is his practice of pairing poems: Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ with Horace Smith’s, written in friendly competition with Shelley, and both published by Leigh Hunt; Frost’s draft horse and Wilbur’s dream horse; Lowell’s skunk(s) in ‘Skunk Hour’ and Heaney’s skunk (an all-American animal, by the way) in ‘The Skunk’; Longfellow’s ‘Hiawatha’ and the great parodies it inspired, Lewis Carroll’s, especially; Keats’s Chapman’s Homer and Donald Justice’s Henry James (here each pair is itself a pairing); two versions of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 2 (‘When fortie Winters shall besiege thy brow’) – would you pair Shakespeare? pair him with Shakespeare – go no further; Pound and Williams; and finally, in the title chapter, Dickinson and Frost (again, but with a different horse). Logan is a notorious hanging judge as a critic, but this means that when he acquits or finds for the poem, it is bound to be (as his readings show) a very great poem indeed. When he does Justice he does sufficient justice to make the former happy: ‘I once asked Donald Justice whether he had recognized the odd, subterranean links between “Chapman’s Homer” and “Henry James by the Pacific.” He seemed surprised, then gratified. After thinking for a moment, he said, “Not at all”’. This is a Bloomian moment: Bloom says that ‘the meaning of a poem can only be another poem’. With Empson (the common critical ancestor of Bloom and Logan), Bloom thinks such meanings may be unconscious, as, evidently, Justice did. This is not the Freudian unconscious (appeals to which Logan and William Empson are both somewhat and explicitly chary about) but rather what Logan at one point calls nonchalance: a large set of tones, he says of the last lines of Frost’s ‘Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening’, ‘suggest themselves even were the lines tossed off nonchalantly. Nonchalance may be the deepest road into the self’. The nonchalant assumes the peripheral world or (what is the same thing) the periphery of thought, what a poet or poem may not be aware of being aware of but that is so much a part of her way of thinking and of perceiving the world, so much an untroubled undercurrent in her thinking, that it waters and freshens the living poem, for living readers, including sometimes the poet too. Logan has Empson’s sensitivity to metre, a topic all but absent from Bloomian analyses, and also (like Empson but generally to a more exhaustive degree) a powerful sense of material, economic, and social history. By contrast with most contemporary historicist and new historicist critics, Logan is not interested in using a poem to make an argument about history or ideology. (How would that make it the best poem it could be? So much these days is about making a poem the morally or politically worst document it could be.) Rather, he wishes to provide all the historical context needed to delve as fully as possible into the poem, which he rightly takes as the object of value. Like George Eliot’s candle haloing itself in the scratched pier-glass mirror in Middlemarch, the detailed brilliance of each reading of each individual poem organises manifold contextual graininess into relevant and dazzling design. So what will you get from reading this book? If you read the whole book, which you very much should, you’ll learn many ‘stray facts’, not only about wheelbarrows and chickens and the history of astronomy but about the archaeology of Egypt; the topography, so familiar to Lowell but not to most of us, of Nautilus Island in Maine; the history of the Metro and its illumination in the early twentieth century – far superior to the illumination of London’s Tube; Henry James’s train trip across the United States; Frost’s failure as a farmer; genetic facts about different species of horse, including the information that Przewalski’s horse has sixty-six chromosomes where all other modern horses have sixty-four; the geological facts about quartz that Dickinson would have learned from the Reverend Edward Hitchcock’s Elementary Geology, Third Edition, a book to be found in the Dickinsons’ house – Dickinson studied geology as a girl and may have attended Hitchcock’s lectures at Amherst, so she might have known that quartz is not a stone, as Hitchcock knew although he sometimes uses the phrase ‘quartz stone’, so that she has a precedent in her treating it ‘like a stone’; the passages of Homer that Keats and Cowden Clarke read in Chapman, the streets that Keats walked home on, the planets he might have seen, the things he would have once known Cortez saw (hint: not the Pacific, though Donald Justice and Seamus Heaney certainly did see it); and the arguments for seeing the printed version of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 2 as a revision of an earlier version surviving in a manuscript copy in Westminster Abbey. You may not be learning all of this for the first time, but different parts of it will be new to every reader, and what wasn’t new to me is almost always accurate. I’ll mention one interesting inaccuracy, if that’s the word for it, below: I suppose inaccuracies are inevitable in a book so full of small points, each one contributing to the dazzling pointillist Gestalt that Logan offers of poem upon poem, and of the makers of those poems. For example, although lead has a higher atomic weight than gold, Dickinson would not have known this, so it’s irrelevant that ‘Apart from uranium, lead is the heaviest naturally occurring element’: even if we ignore plutonium as natural but not recognised in Dickinson’s day, gold seemed heavier, since macroscopic gold is denser than lead and therefore any particular volume of gold is heavier than the same volume of lead. Not that this matters much. Perhaps saddest among the very small number of inaccuracies, though, is Logan’s throwaway line: ‘Whether the Sirens sang in Greek or just warbled indecently remains unknown’. No: the authoress of the Odyssey quotes them, quotes the content of their song, and they are singing in Greek; not, however, the Greek of the Odyssey: their Greek is the Iliad’s, as Piero Pucci showed. What general takeaway will you get from the book if you read every word? That reading every word is always crucial, that the history and meanings of words, their contexts, their possibilities, their referents can only make you see more about what a poem is doing. (Owen Barfield, whom Logan doesn’t cite, might be another ancestral voice here.) But, perhaps more important, you’ll understand, even sometimes by disagreeing with Logan’s readings, a good dozen and a half poems, perhaps as fully and as well as they can be understood. Do I disagree? Sometimes, and I am glad to do so. For example, Logan is pretty sure, with Cleanth Brooks, that in Dickinson’s ‘After great pain’, when The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’ And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’? that ‘He’ refers to Jesus. Partly this is because of the upper-case H: ‘If her capitals were not accidental, merely inconsistent, the reading must be Christian’, and while Logan agrees they’re inconsistent he’s unwilling to call them accidental. He continues: ‘Had the Heart questioned the duration of its own sorrow, the psychology might have been more intense; but then the Heart should have asked, “Was it I that bore?”’ I think this is possibly inaccurate. Logan seems committed to the theory that in direct quotation, set off by quotation marks, the pronouns should be preserved verbatim. This is true now, but not so true for Dickinson’s nineteenth century habits. Consider the first two stanzas of ‘I died for Beauty’: I died for Beauty – but was scarce Adjusted in the Tomb When One who died for Truth, was lain In an adjoining Room – He questioned softly “Why I failed”? “For Beauty”, I replied – “And I – for Truth –Themselves are One – We Bretheren, are”, He said – Note that the pronoun in the other (Keatsian) corpse’s quoted question refers to Dickinson (or her speaker) and not to himself. A direct quotation would go something like: ‘Why did you fail?’ But decently accurate, mostly verbatim indirect quotation was still frequently set off by quotation marks, even in the 1860s (even sometimes in the twentieth century) as a way to indicate the reasonable accuracy of the words. It may be going too far to remark that Dickinson uses double quotation marks here, which (as American punctuation) would tend to make the quoted words even more likely to be verbatim than those quoted with single quotation marks in ‘After great pain’. And yet they’re not. Note too that the other One who has died gets a capital H at the end of the second stanza. Does this over-estimation of his evidence matter? Not much. Logan is right about the ‘fracturing of identity’ in ‘After great pain’: part of that is the formalism of the Heart’s seeing itself from outside itself in both time and space. I think that the point he gets wrong here (as I believe) is simply one point among a glittering multitude. I myself would have paired ‘Because I could not stop for Death’ with ‘Stopping by Woods’, but perhaps that’s too obvious. As with so much else in this extraordinary and exemplary book, Logan’s pairings, and the vast contexts he opens up thereby, are wonderful. The meaning of a poem is not only another poem but everything that helps determine both. © The Author(s) [2020]. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)