The Ghost behind the Masks: The Victorian Poets and Shakespeare

Introduction

The ghost behind the masks Introduction To think like Shakespeare and the great Victorians is not to know but to see wonder, mystery, and the unknown everywhere, especially at the heart of what we think we know. Swaying between opposing possibilities and wavering between worlds, Shakespeare and the Victorian poets both express and nourish a genius for speculative wonder and debate. Though I do not pretend to offer a single argument about Shakespeare and the Victorians, my exploration of such topics as the contest between manmade law and natural right, Stoic fatalism and self-reliance, the sanity of lunatics , lovers, and poets and the madness of commonplace minds supports the claim that the Victorian poets follow Shakespeare in substituting for the closed dome of an age of belief the unsealed dome of the Pantheon. Marked by perplexed persistence and doubt, the Shakespeare Victorians value and emulate is a master of the antiphonal style displayed in Hamlet’s tortuous soliloquies, in Brutus’s soliloquy in the garden, and in the great unresolved debates over individual will and the claim of Platonic universals in Troilus and Cressida. Like Lear, who tells Cordelia he must wipe his hand first, for “it smells of mortality” (King Lear 4.6.136), Tennyson never seems to get over the taste of death in the new geology of Robert Chambers and Charles Lyell. But as Tennyson ’s Ulysses passes through untraveled worlds, whose margins fade forever and forever as he moves, it is hard for him to see death as a boundary, since it is precisely his knowledge of death’s “closing all” that propels him through and beyond boundaries. Though “death is terrible, disruptive, and final,” it is our awareness of death, “more than the experience of death itself,” that constitutes “the unique burden of being human” (Kushner, 1996, 154–55).1 Instead of indoctrinating a reader or raising some scaffold of belief as Milton or Dante do, the lofty edifice Shakespeare raises, like the dome of Hamlet’s “excellent canopy, the air,” replaces boundaries with horizons. The problem with belief 2 the ghost behind the masks is that it sets a boundary to vision. The Shakespeare whose greatness once assumed flesh for a corps of Victorian disciples is a skeptic and a visionary, an apostle of higher ignorance like Montaigne. $$$ In the first section of the book, “Poetic Beginnings,” I show how Tennyson in The Princess, his inimitable mock-heroic imitation of Love’s Labor’s Lost, is able to mature as a writer of songs and lyrics, just as Shakespeare, amid his verbal gymnastic and poetic antics, is able to learn his art as a playwright. In the second chapter, I trace a similar development in Browning, who once told J. S. Mill that he owed his origins as a poet to a performance of Edmund Kean as Richard III. After the success of Dramatic Lyrics, Browning might easily have gone on to exploit the popular success of theatrical masterpieces like “My Last Duchess,” just as Shakespeare could have gone on to produce more Richard the Thirds. But instead of prostituting their poetic gifts to theatrical popularity, Browning turned to the more challenging task of resurrecting historical personages like Andrea del Sarto and Fra Lippo, while Shakespeare learned to represent contending, self-divided states of mind in soliloquies by Richard II, Brutus, and Hamlet, whom Stephen Greenblatt hails as a “prince of the inward insurrection” (2004, 303). The second section of the book, “Hamlet’s Afterlives,” opens with a chapter exploring Dickens’s art of incongruously combining in Pip, the hero of Great Expectations, the tragic fate of Hamlet and the darkly comic fate of Malvolio. In the second chapter of this section, I compare Tennyson’s portrait of man, the cosmic accident and tragic misfit of In Memoriam, with Hamlet’s famous discourse on the paragon of animals. Juxtaposing the two passages, a reader may see how, after astronomy and physics have turned the universe into a machine without a will, Kant’s starry heavens, an image once of God’s presence, begin to pale in grandeur beside the consciousness of speakers like Hamlet and Tennyson’s mourner, the new ghosts in the machine. Hamlet’s angel of dust, a god in exile, shapes the dual vision of Tennyson’s elegy, which sees man both as a monster, “a dream, a discord,” and as the roof and crown of things, the summit of creation. In the third section of the book, “Shades of...