Shakespeherian Rags

Shakespeherian Rags JOHN H. ASTINGTON Shakespeare's presence is difficult to miss in Long Day's )ourney lntoNighr. If we don't catch sight of his portrait over the bookcase in the room where the action takes place, then the repeated quotations, allusions, and both Tyrone's bitter memories ofhis lost chances as a great classical actor, and his admonition to Edmund to "remember your Shakespeare and forget the third-raters"J alert us to some kind of reference from the drama of the four haunted Tyrones to the patterns of Shakespearean tragedy.2 Obvious as this may be, what has not been widely recognised is that as O'Neill changed the working title ofhis play - at its barest it was simply the "New London play'" - he moved, probably not fully consciously, towards Shakespearean cadences. The work that was variously called "What's Long Forgotten" and "Diary ofa Day's Journey" eventually was given the familiar title we now know. So sonorous and rhythmical in its own right, it might yet be felt to have a ratherodd relationship to a naturalistic drama offamily conflict. Purely as a description ofthe chronological movement ofthe action it is both naive and top-heavy; while one might justly admire it as a title, its actual connection to the play seems to have drawn little challenge or scrutiny, perhaps because it has been felt that O'Neill simply had a way with titles. Allusive, alliterative, and well-shaped, the names ofhis plays speak with an economy and elegance oftheir own. Of Long Day's )ourney IntoNight it has presumably also been felt that the symbolism of the title, so appropriate to the darkening days of all the Tyrones, is obvious enough to preclude further commentary. Yet it was not there in the earlier drafts, and its emergence from the tentative phrasing of the earlier versions of the title is a sign of the playwright's growing confidence in his achievement. O'Neill knew that this most personal of plays was likely to be his best: "better than any 1 have ever written - does most with the least - a quiet play! - and a great one, I believe.'" The ambitious associations of the title are hardly "quiet," however, and they 74 JOHN H. ASTINGTON suggest the dramatist's claim to his place on the bookshelf among the World's Best Literature. Embedded in the language and imagery of O'Neill's title were Shakespearean originals from two great love tragedies, neither of which is otherwise quoted in Long Day's Journey Into Night. The first, and more generally important, is Antony and Cleopatra: O'Neill's title combines Antony's lines as he prepares himselffor death - "Unarm, Eros, the long day's task is done,/ And we must sleep" (4. 14.35- 6)5- and Iras's very similar words to Cleopatra in the fmal scene - "Finish, good lady, the bright day is done,/ And we are for the dark" (5.2.193-4). Consciously or not, in the search for expression O'Neill's literary memory provided him with phrases which were instinct with exhausted desolation, corresponding fully to the mood of his own play. The "journey" of the day is an image from Romeo and Juliet, in which play the symbolic functions oflight and darkness are even more insistently present in the language than in Antony and Cleopatra. Juliet, waiting for the Nurse to return from her midday meeting with Romeo, impatiently observes: "Now is the sun upon the highmost hilU Of this day's journey" (2.5.9-10). O'Neill, remembering his father perhaps, remembered his Shakespeare, but why he was led to quote from these two plays in particular is a question having some bearing on more than the title of Long Day's Journey Into Night. Both Shakespeare plays dramatise the disastrous end of a marriage, as does Othello, otherwise referred to during O'Neill's play, but crudely to lump the four together thus would be to indulge in what a recent commentator has called Fluellenism.6 James and Mary are certainly no Romeo and Juliet, nor does their courtly affection, in the briefand very telling moments when their love...