Emily Dickinson's Shakespeare

Introduction - "Whose Pencil - here and there - / Had notched the place that pleased Him"

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 [First Page] [1], (1) Lines: 0 to ——— 6.854pt ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TE [1], (1) i n t r o d u c t i o n “Whose Pencil - here and there - / Had notched the place that pleased Him” I n the Emily Dickinson Room at the Houghton Library at Harvard is the Dickinson household’s eight-volume pictorial and national edition of Shakespeare, edited by Charles Knight; Edward Dickinson purchased this for his family in 1857.1 The Dickinsons, like many of their contemporaries, marked their books, and this edition of Shakespeare is no exception.2 The contents page of the incredibly fragile fifth volume contains crosses beside Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and Othello, and between Timon of Athens and King Lear. Curiously, fourteen of the sixteen other pencil markings in the rest of the edition are found beside various lines from Othello. Eight sections of that play are marked with a notch on their right side, five are marked on the left, and one is marked on both left and right.3 The lack of consistency might indicate marking on different occasions, perhaps by different hands. We are reminded of Dickinson’s poem about the marginalia of a dear absent friend, “Whose Pencil - here and there - / Had notched the place that pleased Him - ” (F640).4 A note at the beginning of the catalogue for the Emily Dickinson Room warns the impetuous scholar that after years of searching for “annotation in the handwriting of Emily Dickinson” no single mark has been “positively assigned to her.”5 Nevertheless, critics continue to interpret the markings in books from the Dickinson library as the poet’s.6 While discovering the certain origin and meaning of these markings is impossible, at the very least they are the remnants of reading, and reveal that key scenes in Othello pleased members of the Dickinson household in some way.7 It is very suggestive that these marks accompany the Shakespeare play Dickinson refers to most often in her letters. The first mark in Othello occurs on the right side of Brabantio’s reluctant parting with his daughter, where he tells Othello, “I here do give thee that with all my heart, / Which, but thou hast already, with all my heart / I would keep from thee.” (I iii 193–95). Dickinson refers to this scene in four letters; in two, she actually quotes these lines. Thus, in an 1878 letter to her friend Maria Whitney, she precedes an exact quotation with the remark, “To relieve the irreparable degrades it. Brabantio’s resignation is the only one -” (L538).8 This letter, whose manuscript is lost, appears to refer to the recent death of Whitney’s and the poet’s mutual friend, Samuel Bowles, 1 2 i n t r o d u c t i o n 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 [2], (2) Lines: 18 ——— 0.0pt PgV ——— Normal P PgEnds: [2], (2) the editor of the Springfield Republican. Dickinson equates their shared loss with Brabantio’s loss of his daughter. Unwillingness and endured suffering must accompany such an unalterable privation; to say otherwise would insult their shared love of Bowles. This allusion tells us much about how Dickinson read this scene. Shakespeare’s lines confirm that loss, renunciation, and deprivation are “piercing Virtues” (F782); destitution and abstemiousness are self-empowering and self-affirming strategies, as well as self-destructive ones.9 Further, this scene, where a father relinquishes his daughter, must have had a special significance for a woman who, unlike Desdemona, never married, and in 1869 told her literary preceptor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “I do not cross my Father’s ground to any House or town” (L330). Her letters do not refer to any of the other lines marked in this play. Jay Leyda, however, offers “He that is robb’d, not wanting what is stolen, / Let him not know ’t, and he’s not robb’d at all” (III iii 342–43), which has marks on both sides, as an example of Dickinson’s marginalia...