Melville’s Billy Budd and the Disguises of Authorship

No utter surprise can come to himWho reaches Shakespeare’s core;That which we seek and shun is   There—Man’s final lore. —Herman Melville, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, 1866

During his earliest days as an author, before his disillusionment with the idea of literary fame, Herman Melville first encountered the subject that not only haunts Billy Budd but also supplies the novella with its subliminal coherence of form, connecting the historical shell of the allegory—the 1797 rebellions of the Nore and Spithead and naval discipline on board the Georgian “man o’ war”—with the literary and philosophical questions that had absorbed him for many decades. The novella, on which he worked from 1888 until the year of his death, 1891, was not published until 1924; the seeds were planted in 1848 when his Wiley & Putnam editor Evert A. Duyckinck, recently installed as editor of the Literary World, sent him a review copy of Joseph C. Hart’s The Romance of Yachting: Voyage the First (1848). Hart’s rambling travelogue takes extensive detours on subjects completely unrelated to seamanship, including an early attack on Shakespeare as a “fraud upon the world” and a call for inquiry into the identities of “the able literary men who wrote the dramas imputed to him.” Melville was unimpressed. He hated Hart’s book with such an abiding passion that he unconditionally refused Duyckinck’s request:

What the deuce does it mean? . . . Here’s a book positively turned wrong side out, the title page on the cover, an index to the whole in more ways than one. . . . then I’m set down to a digest of all the commentators on Shakespeare, who, according to ‘our author’ was a dunce and a blackguard—Vide passim. . . . Seriously, Mr. Duyckinck, on my bended knees, & with tears in my eyes, deliver me from writing ought upon this crucifying Romance of Yachting. What has Mr. Hart done that I should publicly devour him? I bear the hapless man no malice . . . the book is an abortion . . . take it back, I beseech, & get some one to cart it back to the author.

At first glance, Melville’s splenetic reaction to Hart’s book might seem to exonerate him from any accusation of dabbling in unconventional theories about Shakespeare. But with Herman Melville, nothing was ever so simple. In an 1851 letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne he was soon remarking on his own unrestricted capacity for endlessly remodeling his whole conceptual universe, the very sort of capacious rethinking that would soon estrange him from contemporary intellectuals unable or unwilling to follow his intrepid mind:

I am like one of those seeds taken out of the Egyptian Pyramids, which, after being three thousand years a seed and nothing but a seed, being planted in English soil, it developed itself, grew to greenness, and then fell to mould. So I. Until I was twenty-five, I had no development at all. From my twenty-fifth year I date my life. Three weeks have scarcely passed, at any time between then and now, that I have not unfolded within myself.

Only three months after his encounter with The Romance of Yachting, apparently still vexed by Hart’s attack on the learning and talent—not to mention the identity—of Shakespeare, Melville “unfolded” himself again, embarking on an earnest quest to read the Bard’s collected works. In a space of days, as if struck by lightning, he blazed through a copy of Hilliard and Gray’s 1837 edition of the collected works, dashing off a letter to his confidant Duyckinck:

Dolt and ass that I am I have lived more than 29 years, and until a few days ago never made acquaintance with the Divine William . . . Ah, he’s full of sermons-on-the-mount, and gentle, aye, almost as Jesus. I take such men to be inspired. I fancy that this moment Shakespeare in heaven ranks with Gabriel, Raphael and Michael. And if another messiah ever comes, ’twill be in Shakespeare’s person.

Melville’s New England...