The Ghost behind the Masks: The Victorian Poets and Shakespeare

Notes

Notes Notes to pages 000–000 Introduction 1. In Philip Larkin’s elegy “An Arundel Tomb,” the unobtrusive gesture of the knight’s ungloved hand as it reaches out to touch the hand of the sculptured figure reposing by his side proclaims in all but words their only true and enduring blazon: “What will survive of us is love” (line 42). When two of my daughters died, I instinctively turned to Shakespeare and the Victorian poets, writers I knew or loved best, to ask what, if anything, survives of us. Does death close all, or is it a point of entry into “that deep dawn behind the tomb” evoked by Tennyson in In Memoriam 46.6? Is death a passport to Hamlet’s undiscovered country, or just “the anaesthetic from which none come round” (Larkin, “Aubade,” line 30)? 2. Quite distinct from such Shakespearean imitations as The Princess or “Caliban upon Setebos” are poems like The Wreck of the Deutschland, which is less an example of Hopkins ’s appropriating Shakespeare than of Shakespeare’s taking possession of him. Tennyson, Hopkins, and Christina Rossetti develop styles of such breathtaking simplicity and power that we feel impelled to say: this is the kind of poetry that a song, a soliloquy, or a sonnet by Shakespeare was invented to express. 3. Unlike Browning’s hero, the visionary Shelley, Shakespeare is so self-withholding that Browning wonders if he truly possessed a poet’s soul at all. The speaker in Aristophanes’ Apology calls Shakespeare an extraordinary word machine (line 5141). Reducing the poet’s facility with words to a mere computing mechanism, Browning’s Bishop Blougram suggests that after making enough money as a playwright, Shakespeare retired to a bourgeois life in Stratford, because his interest in his art was, in the end, only commercial. In Browning’s poems “House” and “Shop,” Shakespeare’s true home is the Globe Theatre, which he operates as a production company. We like to think that Shakespeare’s art, like God’s grace, is part of the economy of gift. But Blougram believes Shakespeare, the Stratford burgher, showed more interest in the market value of his art than in any gift he might possess as a poet or a playwright. It is useful to remember that the word “talent,” which now means “gift,” once denoted a unit of money. Ironically, Henry James says of Browning what Browning himself says of Shakespeare. James found it hard to believe that Browning, the man-about-town he met at dinner parties , possessed the acute psychological insight into minds and motives displayed in The Ring and the Book and a host of introspective lyrics and dramatic monologues. Browning was 254 notes to pages 5–15 “no more like to Paracelsus than I to Hercules,” James writes to William Dean Howells. He was “a great chatterer, but no Sordello at all” (quoted in Edel, 1985, 224). Similarly, how could Shakespeare, the burgher who retired from the theater to live in the finest house in Stratford, have written the immortal plays and sonnets? The man and his masks are too far apart. Only a spy like James, who preferred to eavesdrop on life from the sidelines, could have kept an incognito so perfectly in place as Shakespeare. In a little-known preface to The Tempest, written in 1907 for Sir Sidney Lee’s edition of Shakespeare, James expresses his conviction that Shakespeare the man, the burgher of Stratford whom curious biographers still want to know and meet, never in fact existed. As Leon Edel puts it, “What existed was simply the Artist—‘the monster and magician of a thousand masks’” (562). Like Browning, James insists that Shakespeare gives us the mere illusion of “meeting and touching the man.” We meet the essential Shakespeare only in his art. 4. It is fitting that when Shakespeare, the most silent and self-effacing of playwrights, appears in Hamlet, it is as the ghost of Hamlet’s father. Like Shakespeare’s prince of Denmark and Browning’s spiritual medium, Mr. Sludge, the Victorian poets are constantly trying to make contact with ghosts. Thomas Hardy is haunted by the ghost of his wife, Emma. And many of Browning’s most famous monologues are séances at which the medium conjures up shades of historical personages like Andrea del Sarto and Fra Lippo Lippi or the ghosts of such fictional characters as Shakespeare’s Childe Roland and Caliban. Like Dante’s Ulysses, who is only a shade in hell, Tennyson...