The Ghost behind the Masks

The Victorian Poets and Shakespeare

W. David Shaw

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780813935447
• eBook ISBN: 9780813935454
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In The Ghost behind the Masks, W. David Shaw traces Shakespeare's influence on nine Victorian poets: Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Christina Rossetti, Thomas Hardy, Matthew Arnold, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Algernon Swinburne, Arthur Hugh Clough, and George Meredith. Often, he writes, the transparency of Shakespeare's influence on Victorian poets and the degree of their engagement with Shakespeare exist in inverse ratio. Instead of imitating a play by Shakespeare or merely quoting his lines, a Victorian poet may embrace more elusive elements of rhetoric and style, adapting them to his or her own ends.

Shaw argues that the most Shakespearean attribute of the Victorian poets is not their addiction to any particular trope or figure of speech but their reticence, the classical restraint of their great monologues, and their sudden descent from grandeur to simplicity. He explores such topics as man-made law versus natural right, Stoic fatalism versus self-reliance, and the sanity of lunatics, lovers, and poets versus the madness of commonplace minds.

PART I

POETIC
BEGINNINGS

1

Word and Love Games

BEROWNE AND IDA’S PRINCE

IN LOVE’S LABOR’S LOST, SHAKESPEARE SHOWS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN the Princess of France and a bevy of her ladies visit the little academy of Navarre, a stronghold of young male courtiers and pedants resolved to woo their female guests with displays of extravagant erudition and wit. The young playwright celebrates his love affair with words while poking fun at their potential absurdity and excess. The play’s most brilliant adaptation, Tennyson’s The Princess, is an aspirant’s discovery of his own genius as a lyric poet. Tennyson also delights in the adolescent pranks of male transvestites, and gently satirizes the grand pretentiousness of Ida’s schemes for educational reform. Since the pretensions of Ida and her female colleagues are no less absurd than the pranks of the transvestite Prince and his fellow intruders, Tennyson, like Shakespeare, is able both to mock what he values and to celebrate what he mocks.

Like Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech in Romeo and Juliet, Berowne’s discourse on light in Love’s Labor’s Lost is a spontaneous display of intellectual exuberance and wit. Ida’s exquisite songs and lyrics in The Princess function as the emotional counterpart of such esprit. They are specimens of “wordmusic,” a phrase one critic uses to describe verse “with a minimum of meaning . . . (but of maximum emotional value . . . to the character that has to speak it)” (Granville-Barker, 1946–47, 2:418). Tennyson’s satire on women’s rights and educational reform is now as dated as Shakespeare’s attack on academic pedantry. But just as The Princess lives today in the acknowledged beauty of its songs and lyrics, so many of the dead jokes and lost topical allusions in Love’s Labor’s Lost are redeemed by flashes of poetic exuberance and wit. Amid his verbal gymnastics and brilliant antics as a poet, Shakespeare is learning his art as a dramatist. Tennyson’s very limits as a writer of satiric narrative and mock-epic verse also help him mature as a writer of songs and lyrics. In each case the weakness of the aspiring satirist is the strength of the evolving playwright or poet.

The most artful youth in the retinue of Navarre’s king is Berowne, whose over-flow of high spirits is both an exercise in sophisticated wit and a criticism of wit’s excess. Even in praising the female eye, Berowne is trapped in a toil of narcissism.

Why! all delights are vain, but that most vain

Which with pain purchas’d doth inherit pain:

As, painfully to pore upon a book

To seek the light of truth; while truth the while

Doth falsely blind the eyesight of his look.

(Love’s Labor’s Lost 1.1.72–76)

Addicted to couplets and snared by his use of four rhymes in two lines, Berowne is more enamored of the idea and language of love than of love itself. To fall in love with words that lack the light of reason and invention is to woo the mirror reflection of love, its shadow not its substance. In a riot of self-destructive wit, Berowne uses multiple meanings of light to show that the eye made blind by study beholds neither light nor knowledge but only darkness.

Light seeking light doth light of light beguile:

So, ere you find where light in darkness lies,

Your light grows dark by losing of your eyes.

Study me how to please the eye indeed,

By fixing it upon a fairer eye.

(1.1.77–81)

Though the sixfold play on “light” is “the sheer exuberance of an athlete who has discovered that he can play what game he likes with words,” G. B. Harrison believes the speech is still important. “It is the answer of the ‘upstart crow’ whose Latin was little and whose Greek was less to those intellectual snobs who believed all learning lived in books” (1947, 890).

Berowne never loves any woman as ardently as the Prince comes to love Ida in Tennyson’s version of Love’s Labor’s Lost. In truth, Berowne’s climactic speech, purportedly a celebration of love’s victory over learning, is little more than a triumph of special pleading and paradox. As Harold Bloom says, the speech “is superbly free of any concern for Rosaline, ostensible object of his passion” (1998, 130).

O! we have made a vow to study, lords,

And in that vow we have forsworn our books:

For when would you, my liege, or you, or you,

In leaden contemplation have found out

Such fiery numbers as the prompting eyes

Of beauty’s tutors have enrich’d you with?

(4.3.315–20)

More in love with learning than with women, Berowne confesses to forswearing books only because he finds in “the prompting eyes” of women better tutors of beauty than Plato or the love poets he studies. A scholar’s praise of love begets an infinite regress, since he finds in women’s eyes new libraries in which endlessly to study and extend his learning by giving “to every power a double power, / Above their functions and their offices” (4.3.328–29). Within each power or faculty, a male admirer of women sees a double (or reflex) image of that power. Abounding in the same exaggerated tropes and conceits of courtly love that Romeo uses before falling in love with Juliet, Berowne’s witty discourse serves only to confirm and reinforce a pervasive male narcissism.

Using the mirror trope chiasmus—“a word that all men love,” “a word that loves all men”—Berowne appeals to the biblical paradox that we must lose our life to find it. Since St. Paul claims that charity fulfills the law, and since charity is only another name for love, it follows with the force of a syllogism that we men should forsake our studies for the love of women.

It is religion to be thus forsworn;

For charity itself fulfils the law;

And who can sever love from charity?

(4.3.360–62)

Shakespeare complicates the natural order of thoughts by introducing chains of syllogistic reasoning, artificial resemblances between words like “grace” and “disgraced” (1.1.3), and even a tautology designed to clinch an argument: “And who can sever love from charity?” (4.3.362). Such artifice has more affinity with Mercutio’s volatile discourse on Queen Mab than with the fire that ignites Romeo and Juliet and blasts the lovers into a new dimension. As an art of spontaneous combustion, the pyrotechnics of Berowne and Mercutio has no efficient cause. After burning a combustible world in one small space, both speakers finish in a flare, leaving only “airy nothings” in their wake. As Coleridge says, Berowne makes “the words themselves the subjects and materials of . . . surplus action.” The language “agitates our limbs and forces our very gestures into states of high excitement” (1930, 1, 96).

Late in the play, this acrobat of language decides to renounce the “taffeta phrases,” “silken terms precise,” and “three-piled hyperboles” (5.2.406–10) that make his head a grave rather than a treasure-house of learning. But as Peter Hyland notes, the speech in which Berowne renounces an affected style (5.2.394–415) is itself affected, consisting “of five quatrains and a final rhyming couplet,” and whose “last fourteen lines constitute a sonnet” (1996, 116). Like Shakespeare’s academy, institutes of learning are too often Pentagons of pedantry that chain rather than liberate the muses. C. L. Barber believes that “the most delightful touch in the whole play is the exchange that concludes Berowne’s reformation, in which he playfully betrays the fact that his mockery of sophistication is sophisticated, and Rosaline underscores the point as she deftly withdraws the hand she has taken” (1972, 108).

And to begin: wench, so God help me, law!

My love to thee is sound, sans crack or flaw.

Rosaline. Sans “sans,” I pray you!

(5.2.414–16)

It is easier for Berowne and his male companions to renounce romance than their love affair with word games and wit.

The extravagant conceits Berowne vows to censure are a symptom of Romeo’s distemper when, like Berowne, he falls in love with the idea of being in love. Instead of wooing his shadowy mistress, “the fair Rosaline,” Romeo retires from the world as sick at heart as an invalid who has just been diagnosed with a serious attack of courtly love.

Here’s much to do with hate, but more with love.

Why then, O brawling love! O loving hate!

O anything, of nothing first create!

O heavy lightness! serious vanity!

Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms!

Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire,

sick health!

(Romeo and Juliet 1.1.182–87)

Witty but mannered, and punctuated by no fewer than seven exclamation points, this outburst by Romeo is not the idiom of heartfelt love. Lacking the gravity and pith of the Prince’s paradoxes (“See what a scourge is laid upon your hate, / That heaven finds means to kill your joys with love” [5.3.293–94]), the oxymorons of “brawling love” and “loving hate” imitate the overflow of Berowne’s heady high spirits. No youth deeply in love would dissipate his fire in a volley of antonyms as effervescent yet coldly labored as “feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health” (1.1.187). The moment the god descends and pierces Romeo’s heart with passion for a warm and ardent teenage girl, the lover demands to know Juliet’s name. Instead of retreating from the world, he seizes the first opportunity to speak to her.

Like Berowne, the conceited Osric is another Shakespearean prototype of the Victorian aesthete. His praise of Laertes, a vapor of airy nothings, fails to condense into any meaning Horatio can discern.

. . . indeed to speak feelingly of him, he is the card

or calendar of gentry, for you shall find in him the

continent of what part a gentleman would see.

(Hamlet 5.2.113–16)

Instead of wrapping his subject in raw breath, Osric conceals it in silken phrases—“card or calendar of gentry,” “continent of what part”—whose euphuistic pairings are emptier of content than even the flights of fancy favored by Mercutio or Berowne. Since any praise Osric has to offer is lost in a maze of words, Horatio wonders if it might be possible to understand him “in another tongue.”

Coruscating on a thin ice of verbal artifice, the symbolism of some Pre-Raphaelite poets and aesthetes is as “unconsummated” as the aborted love-making in Love’s Labor’s Lost. D. G. Rossetti’s “cup of three in “The Wood-spurge” (line 16), his “feast-day of the sun” in “The Hill Summit” (line 1), and William Morris’s strange choosing cloths in “The Defense of Guenevere” have all the hallmarks of a conventional symbolism except one: an assigned connotation. Whereas T. S. Eliot’s “blue” in “Ash Wednesday” has a symbolic meaning, “blue of larkspur, blue of Mary’s color” (4.10), the significance of Morris’s “blue” in “The Defence of Guenevere” is purely arbitrary, a triumph of caprice over logic, of surprise over expectation.

“And one of these strange choosing cloths was blue,

Wavy and long, and one cut short and red;

No man could tell the better of the two.

“After a shivering half-hour you said:

‘God help! heaven’s color, the blue:’ and he said, ‘hell.’ ”

(“The Defence of Guenevere,” lines 34–38)

In The Merchant of Venice words rhyming with “lead”—“bred,” “head,” and “nourishéd”—guide Bassanio to his choice of the proper lead casket.

Tell me where is fancy bred,

Or in the heart or in the head?

How begot, how nourishéd?

Reply, reply.

(The Merchant of Venice 3.2.63–66)

But in Morris’s poem, the rhyme of “said” with “red,” which would have led to the right choice of color, is too oblique to be helpful. In the suppressed rhyme of “blue” with “true,” fate seems to be misleading Guenevere by mixing the clues. It is possible, of course, that Morris expects Guenevere to know that blue, originally a symbol of fidelity in love, came in the Middle Ages to represent its own opposite. As Johan Huizinga explains, “by a very curious transition, blue, instead of being the color of faithful love, came to mean infidelity, too, and next, beside the faithless wife, marked the dupe. In Holland the blue cloak designated an adulterous woman, in France the “cote bleue” denotes a cuckold. At last blue was the color of fools in general” (1949, 292).

Like Berowne and Osric, some Victorian poets favor sound over sense. Tennyson’s “moan of doves in immemorial elms / And murmur of innumerable bees” (The Princess 7.206–7) is a triumph of alliterative virtuosity. But it is too contrived to succeed completely as imitative harmony. More effective is the restrained alignment of sound with sense in the opening lines of “Oenone”: “There lies a vale in Ida, lovelier / Than all the valleys of Ionian hills” (lines 1–2). The alliteration is sinuous. The unstressed feet wind their way through peaks of accented consonants and open vowels with as much tenacity and grace as the vale of Ida and other valleys wind their way through Ionian hills. But too often Victorian alliteration has to be rescued from the wreckage of sound left littered in its wake by a “maze of monotonous murmur, / Where reason roves ruined by rhyme” (Swinburne, “Poeta Loquitur,” lines 9–10). Rivaling Osric’s virtuosity and Berowne’s play on six forms of “light,” Swinburne in “The Garden of Proserpine” revels in a volley of triple feminine rhymes and a ripple of seven alliterating w’s, which imitate the trembling of the lip in the initial stages of weeping.

Wan waves and wet winds labour,

Weak ships and spirits steer;

They drive adrift, and whither

They wot not who makes thither;

But no such words blow hither,

And no such things grow here.

(lines 19–24)

We know that as a Cambridge undergraduate Tennyson took part in the Apostles’ performance of several of Shakespeare’s plays. And as Linda H. Peterson has shown, the poet was also “part of an artistic coterie” that in the late 1820s an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Poetic Beginnings
• Part II Hamlet’s Afterlives
• Part III Shades of King Lear
• Part IV Grace and Death
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index