The Ghost behind the Masks: The Victorian Poets and Shakespeare

12. Oracle Meets Wit

12 Oracle Meets Wit The Promised End Literary influence is never a matter of mere quotation. It also embraces more elusive elements of rhetoric and style. One unexpected discovery made in the course of this study is that Browning and Hopkins , the Victorian poets who sound most like Shakespeare, allude to him less often than do Tennyson and Clough. Few monologues are more Ovidian (and hence Shakespearean) in subject matter than Tennyson’s “Tithonus,” whose speaker in Greek myth suffers the indignity of being turned into a grasshopper. But the poem is full of sound effects and grammatical devices that are less typical of Shakespeare than of Keats and Milton. Aligning Browning and Hopkins with Shakespeare are two rhetorical tropes, asyndeton and hendiadys. Lust Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame, Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust. (sonnet 129, lines 2–4) Asyndeton, or the dropping of connectives, imparts a savage chop to Shakespeare ’s lines. Incisive caesural breaks compact a sense of riot and madness in the blood with a sense of pained and heavy breathing. Equally frenetic and terror-stricken are the lines in which Browning’s Caliban, a vengeful David Hume, sheds connective words as fast as Hume sheds fictions of causal necessity . “So must he do henceforth and always.”—Ay? Would teach the reasoning couple what “must” means! ’Doth as he likes, or wherefore Lord? So He. (“Caliban upon Setebos,” lines 238–40) Though Browning, like Shakespeare, retains many Latinate words, he “moves,” as one critic says, “toward the native English monosyllable, which often makes oracle meets wit 221 his verse creak and grind with its knots of consonants: “Irks care the cropfull bird? Frets doubt the maw-crammed beast?” (De Vane, 1954, 478). Often Hopkins’s style is equally contorted and elliptical. But how shall I . . . make me a room there: Reach me a . . . Fancy, come faster— Strike you the sight of it? look at it loom there, Thing that she . . . there then! the Master, Ipse, the only one, Christ, King, Head. (“The Wreck of the Deutschland,” 28.1–5) Language falters, halts, then stops altogether, reduced to fragments by a daring use of aposiopesis, the rhetorical art of breaking off in the middle of a sentence, as if from some deep reluctance or incapacity to proceed. Of this technique Shakespeare’s Antony in the funeral oration from Julius Caesar is the undisputed master. In his sonnet “Thou art indeed just, Lord,” Hopkins shares Lear’s distaste of procreation or breeding. The dropping of connectives, the rude alliteration, and the sharp caesural breaks are as harsh and intemperate as Shakespeare’s. Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend, How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost Defeat, thwart me? (lines 5–7) “The sots and thralls of lust” may thrive more than Hopkins. But what if they beget monsters by their breeding, who betray their progenitors, condemn them to death, or torture them like Edmund? Shakespeare views both childlessness and parenthood with terror. Lear experiences parenthood, the fathering of “Pelican Daughters,” as nemesis. And Edgar tells his brother that “the dark and vicious place” where their father begot him cost Gloucester his eyes. But the terror of being childless is just as great. Without heirs, Macbeth ’s desire to be founder of a royal line will be thwarted. And in sonnet 16 Shakespeare’s reproof of the youth who refuses to propagate his kind is as gently stern as it is witty and paradoxical: “To give away yourself keeps your self still.” Equally oppressed by celibacy, Hopkins, “Time’s eunuch,” who builds not but strains, expresses dismay that he alone can breed no “work that wakes.” In sonnet 13 Shakespeare chides the celibate youth: “You had a Father, let your Son say so.” He would rather commit an Irish bull than thwart the purpose of a creator who built procreation into the dictionary definition of “father.” Indeed, even Hopkins’s God wouldn’t be God unless he were Father to a Son. The rest of creation breeds and fathers-forth. Why should Hopkins alone, like the surly celibate in Shakespeare’s sixteenth sonnet, refuse to pro- 222 grace & death create? As the sonnet approaches its close, however, the courteous and prophetic tones of a prayerful servant begin tempering and displacing the indignant pleas of a plaintiff in a law court. It is hard to exaggerate the difference in tone between the...