Three interruptions

I think Shakespeare, in the early seventeenth century, was thinking (or noticing) acts of self-interruption, and what they could do. When a speaker interrupts themselves, we realize that they're hearing just what we're hearing. So Hamlet interrupts his performance of Aeneas's tale to Dido:

The rugged Pyrrhus, like th’ Hyrcanian beast—
’tis not so; it begins with Pyrrhus:
The rugged Pyrrhus, he whose sable arms,
Black as his purpose, did the night resemble
When he lay couchèd in th’ ominous horse,
Hath now this dread and black complexion smeared
With heraldry more dismal. Head to foot,
Now is he total gules, horridly tricked
With blood of fathers, mothers, daughters, sons,
Baked and impasted with the parching streets,
That lend a tyrannous and a damnèd light
To their lord’s murder. Roasted in wrath and fire,
And thus o’ersizèd with coagulate gore,
With eyes like carbuncles, the hellish Pyrrhus
Old grandsire Priam seeks.

The interruption comes to a speech which considers others, those in an extreme condition, those the speaker -- Aeneas or Hamlet -- ie forever separated from, and yet who represent a universe one might live in, if one could. Not long ago I commented on this speech in Macbeth:

Seyton!--I am sick at heart,
When I behold--Seyton, I say!--This push
Will cheer me ever, or disseat me now.
I have lived long enough: my way of life
Is fall'n into the sear, the yellow leaf;
And that which should accompany old age,
As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have; but, in their stead,
Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honour, breath,
Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not. Seyton!

I was haunted by the way Macbeth has a set piece in mind, but is also alert to the world around him, to the fact of another person, even as he is aware of the encroaching limits of the world: the bourn that life sets on how far to be beloved, the bourn that no traveler returns from once they've crossed it. Somehow, despite a note comparing (and contrasting) Seyton as the last residual figure still loyal to the Macbeth to Lear's Fool, I don't think I'd ever put it together with a very similar moment in King Lear which I also love, and which may have been the play Shakespeare wrote right before Macbeth:

Prithee, go in thyself. Seek thine own ease.
This tempest will not give me leave to ponder
On things would hurt me more. But I’ll go in.—
In, boy; go first.—You houseless poverty—
Nay, get thee in. I’ll pray, and then I’ll sleep.
Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your looped and windowed raggedness defend you
From seasons such as these?

Each interrupts himself and begins again after a kind of anacoluthon. They make a sort of gesture outwards to another, and then return to themselves, but after populating the emptiness around them with the possibilities of others: "troops of friends" or "you houseless poverty," "poor naked wretches, whereso'er you are." There's a fundamental loneliness that this evocation of others makes us feel: the loneliness of the others and not only of the soliloquist, a kind of sense, then of the fundamentality of loneliness.

David Lewis, uses fictional worlds as a way of exploring the idea of the proximity of possible worlds, but confesses he's not quite sure what to do with fictions within fictions.

One thing some writers have done is to write the actual (our-word) fictional work that some fictional work only mentions.  They give it to us for our use.  (This is the converse of the sort of thing that Borges and Lem do.)

A few such useful texts spring to mind right away, in chronological order:

Prencipe Galeotto: Dante has Francesca say of the book she and Paolo are reading together when they stop reading, "Galeotto fu 'l libro e chi lo scrisse."  So Galeotto -- Prince Galahad (perhaps; it's not clear whether Dante identified Galeotto and Galahad), vicariously catalyzing their mutual seduction -- is both the author and the book itself. Boccaccio gives the Decameron the sub- or alternative title Prencipe Galeotto, making it into the book that Paolo and Francesca were reading, and promising it as a conversation piece for later lovers to seduce each other with.

Spenser completes one of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the Squire's, in Book IV of The Faerie Queene.  (Spenser takes it as complete -- a real thing that Chaucer mentions, but that we don't have.

"Where is the Life that Late I Led?"  Petruchio interrupts himself after he starts singing this song in Taming of the Shrew.  Cole Porter gives us the whole song (with a bridge and a slight modification of Petruchio's second line).

"Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came": Browning writes the poem that Edgar quotes in King Lear.

The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: From Muriel Spark's Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, the book that Sandy Stranger writes when she becomes a nun (Sister Helena). Arthur Danto (not Dante!) then wrote a book about the philosophy of art with that title.

The Secret Goldfish: D.B.'s "terrific book of short stories" in Catcher in the Rye, and the title of a book of short stories by David Means.

Can you think of others? 

Patty Duke of Ilyria

We know that the Elizabethan stage used doubling a lot: one actor, several characters. That saved money and made possible plays with a large set of characters. But it also allowed (like The Wizard of Oz) for a kind of metatheatrical linking of characters, and we know that Shakespeare loved metatheatrical moments: "too long for a play"; "my father died within these two hours"; or the moment when Jaques notices that a prose line (in a scene that's all prose) is also iambic pentameter, as many, perhaps the plurality of our fully formed sentences are:

ORLANDO: Good day and happiness, dear Rosalind!
JAQUES: Nay, then, God be wi' you, an you talk in blank verse.

Thus doubling can link Hamlet Senior to Claudius, if they're played by the same actor, or again the Fool to Cordelia (since they both very likely were played by Robert Armin), or Mamillius to Perdita.

So I was wondering about near-identical twins in Shakespeare -- he liked such Plautian stories as we know from The Comedy of Errors. But what about writing plays so that one actor can play both twins? Well if the twins are going to meet (and they are), you need two actors. But do you need them all the way through? I was thinking about this in Twelfth Night, and noticed this. Viola (dressed as the boy Cesario) exits Act I, Scene v after expostulating with Olivia. But the scene isn't over: Olivia broods about loving "him," then summons Malvolio to send him the ring, etc.

Next scene (II.i): enter Sebastian and Antonio. If the same actor is now playing Sebastian, the business at the end of the previous scene has given him time to change. They talk, express their love and mutual admiration, etc., and then off goes Sebastian. But Antonio stays on stage to say some more about how much he likes Sebastian and also why he (Antonio) has to be discrete. This gives the actor enough time to change again and begin the next scene (II.ii) as Viola/Cesario.

We next see Sebastian in III.iii, in a scene considerably later than Viola's last appearance in scene i; then after Sebastian's exit at the end of scene iii, Viola reappears in the next scene, but only half-way through it (again, plenty of time for the actor to change). She exits near the end of the scene, but some business after her exit between Sir Toby, Fabian, and Sir Andrew allows the actor time to change costume and re-enter as Sebastian in IV.i, where he first meets Olivia. Neither of them is in the next scene, so Sebastian doesn't have to change before he re-enters in IV.iii.

But he stays till the end of IV.iii, so Shakespeare has to write a little interchange for the beginning of the next scene (V.i) between Fabian and Feste before the actor re-enters as Viola/Cesario a few lines later. Into this last scene, of course, Sebastian will also enter, and he and Viola will reunite. But I suggest that it's only in this scene that a new actor plays Sebastian, so that he can appear on stage at the same time as Viola. (If you did a play version of The Prestige or of Dead Ringers it would be the same deal, I think.)

So I am now going to Google to see if this is generally known -- but I think it's a pretty cool thing and I am glad to have worked it out myself.

*Googles*

Well, apparently this is not general knowledge, since Stanley Wells generally knows. But I am sure it has to be true. So: COOL!

Shakespearean slips

I am wondering whether Shakespeare invented the Freudian slip.
Did other people before Shakespeare represent mistakes on stage? I am thinking of the way Shakespeare has people make everyday mistakes (the mistakes of everyday life), as in certain kinds of forgetfulness

Courteous lord, one word.
Sir, you and I must part, but that's not it:
Sir, you and I have loved, but there's not it;
That you know well: something it is I would,
O, my oblivion is a very Antony,
And I am all forgotten. (Cleopatra)

what was I
about to say? By the mass, I was about to say
something: where did I leave? (Polonius)

HOTSPUR    Lord Mortimer, and cousin Glendower,
Will you sit down?
And uncle Worcester: a plague upon it!
I have forgot the map.

KENT               I am come
To bid my king and master aye good night:
Is he not here?

ALBANY   Great thing of us forgot!
Speak, Edmund, where's the king? and where's Cordelia?

I don't think this is just the reality effect, though it is that. Or maybe it would be better to say that the reality effect is one in which something real is going on, something real offered and bargained for and exchanged and clarified.  It matters to Polonius that he was about to say something, and it matters that Reynaldo reminds him of what he wanted to say, show's him a kindness where Hamlet would scorn him.  It matters that Albany forgets Lear and that he has to remember him before Edmund is willing to help: recalling the fates of Lear and Cordelia makes Edmund count.

In a previous post I alluded to Grice's distinction between naturalistic and non-naturalistic meaning.  A fever of 102 degrees F means you're sick, whether you say so or not; "I'm sick and can't come to work today" also means you're sick, whether you are or not.

Freud (we know) had trouble with theorizing repression, because the unconscious mind seemed split between the part that wanted to tell the truth (about its desires, judgments, demands, etc.) and the part that was censoring the part that wanted to tell the truth.  The result of this split was a compromise formation: the unconscious got to tell the truth slant.  Parapraxes -- Freudian slips -- were good evidence for this, he thought.  Whether this is true or not, it's certainly true in some literary contests, where a writer or performer imitates a telling and revelatory lapsus linguae.  But how do we analyze how it's telling?

Does an unconscious communication, a hysterical symptom, a slip of the tongue, mean naturalistically (it's a sympton! like a fever) or non-naturalistically (it's discursive! it knows what it's saying and wants to say it).  Some extreme Freudian formulations (I am looking at you through my -- gulp! -- myopic eyes, Otto Fenichel) saw all symptoms as non-naturalistic meaning, as expressions of unconscious intentions.  Although the intentions themselves might not have been intentions to express, so that naturalistic meaning can come back that way, this doesn't seem true of slips of the tongue: they are my unconscious talking, and my unconscious is talking to you.  So they may have naturalistic meaning on a conscious level (they mean I am repressing something) and non-naturalistic meaning on the unconscious level: they say what my unconscious mind wants to say.

I am interested in costly or honest signaling, how such signaling evolved, what happens when such signaling interacts with conscious expressive intention, what such signaling hopes to elicit (e.g. Reynaldo's aid, Antony's love, Hotspurian enthusiasm; in the Lear case, it's more like we've all forgotten, and need Edmund as he needs to be needed: Albany's forgetfulness is his as well, and only Kent remembers).  One argument in favor of Freud's view is that Freudian slips would be uncontrollable and therefore honest signals, and cooperative species, especially hypercooperative species like our own, need honest signals.  Freudian slips, and maybe the Freudian unconscious, solve a problem in cooperation for a species that has to be able to use language in an extremely skillful and fine-grained way, without being able to lie too easily and at will.  We need to be able to tell when someone is lying, and the way to tell that is both by detecting lies and by detecting truths that they might not wish to admit.  (Some of these truths can be happy ones: she's too shy to admit it but she does love me! Upon that hint I'll speak!)

Anyhow, I think Shakespeare saw this and used it.  Here are two examples of classic Freudian slips, a quick one and a more subtle and therefore more telling one (since what's telling about them is the point).  The quick one is this: when at the end of Twelfth Night Orsino realizes that his page and friend is actually a woman, Viola, he's delighted.  He can marry her.  His repressed homoerotic affection for her now finds heteronormative (sorry, seriously) legitimation.  And so he speaks, and calls her... Cesario.

Cesario, come.
For so you shall be, while you are a man...

He quickly corrects himself, but the mistake isn't one.  That she is pricked out as Cesario is not a bug but a feature.

Here’s my other, longer example, from Richard II.  Richard has gone to Ireland, his rebel cousin Bullingbrook has landed at Ravenspurgh in Yorkshire.  York is the last, despairing survivor of the previous generation.  The trouble in the play begins when his brother (Bullingbrook’s father) the Duke of Lancaster dies; now he receives news that his sister-in-law (“my sister Gloucester”), who had been the close confidante of the last two surviving brothers has just died, and he is the last surviving member of the great generation of Edward’s sons and their widows.  The Duchess of Gloucester doesn’t count as one of them in the psychology of the play because she is not a widow, but a wife and mother who will be called on to interpose between husband and son.  Shakespeare has a bit of playcraft to do here; he has to make plausible the fact that York will change sides, and that the Duchess of York isn’t reason enough to stay loyal to the old regime and its legacy, though loyalty is his natural instinct.  The whole play is about the counterpoint, divergence and convergence between public, politico-theological fidelity and obligation on the one hand and private loyalties and motives on the other.  Shakespeare must represent York as a figure who believes himself to be acting according to the dictates of political theology (as his brother Gloucester certainly had), but who nevertheless is too weak-willed and weak-minded to represent the true principle that he wishes to and thinks he does.  So Shakespeare makes him needy: what’s best is to feel that public duty and private commitment coincide.

Shakespeare has already begun this portrait of his character by showing how Richard manipulates him (in the same way but far more easily than he manipulated Lancaster into voting to banish his own son) by making him his deputy when he goes to Ireland, playing on York’s desire to show his loyalty against his own private preferences, while realizing that this desire is itself a private preference. The Queen contributes to that.  Everyone capable of loving loves her (a fact Bullingbrook capitalizes on); we do, and York does too, so that she adds a private incentive to his preference to do the right official thing.  The Freudian slip that Shakespeare writes for York shows his neediness, his loneliness, his fecklessness and confusion, all of which are necessary to his character, even while adding another touch to the portrait of the sorrow of the Queen, whose husband is later to be murdered just as the Duchess of Gloucester has been murdered.  Off York must go to prepare for Bullingbrook’s invasion, and he takes the Queen with him, calling on her (as Orsino has called on Cesario):

Come, sister,--cousin, I would say--pray, pardon me.

He wants her to be his sister, to replace the sister he has just lost who herself replaced the brother he had lost before.   But she is not his sister and won’t be Queen long, and he no longer has a friend or close relation to support him in his last attempt to support his generation’s view of the world.  He is like Polonius, flustered by a new world, whose grimness his discomfiture underlines. We see he's flustered, we see his need.  Shakespeare, at least, thought such slips worth the telling.  He may not have invented, but discovered them.

Macbeth's friendlessness

I've always been haunted by this soliloquy --

Seyton!--I am sick at heart,
When I behold--Seyton, I say!--This push
Will cheer me ever, or disseat me now.
I have lived long enough: my way of life
Is fall'n into the sear, the yellow leaf;
And that which should accompany old age,
As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have; but, in their stead,
Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honour, breath,
Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not. Seyton!

-- by the way Macbeth begins by calling upon Seyton, twice, the way it interrupts itself and then begins again, and then interrupts itself once more to call for Seyton again.  I vacillated between writing "the way it interrupts itself" and "the way he interrupts himself."  But it's the speech that's interrupting itself: the sense of social agency that belongs to a person speaking is over now, or all but over.

This is the first time that Macbeth calls on Seyton, the first time he's mentioned.  Shakespeare was writing Antony and Cleopatra at the same time as Macbeth, and in both plays he is interested in the last unimportant figures who stay loyal to the end, whose loyalty is only noticeable, who are themselves only noticeable, at the end (in A&C it's the schoolmaster Antony sends to negotiate with Caesar).  Seyton matters here because he's the only person Macbeth can count on, because Macbeth still knows that persons are what you count on, that being a person, being able to speak, means being able to speak with someone, to have them care what you say.

I think I'm obsessed by the minimalism of this soliloquy (as in sonnet 73, the language is headed towards the lesser adjectives: sear to the understated yellow; cf. yellow leaves, or none, or few, as though "few" were fewer still than none, as yellow is consciously less sublime, less an achievement, than sear).  "Honour" isn't replaced by abasement but by "mouth-honour," a repetition with a difference that is not revolution.  And he must not look to have these things: it's not just that he won't have them, but that he can't dally with their false surmise.  But he can call Seyton, good air, his only friend.

"When I behold--": prelude to some grand comment on life and its depths, as in the roughly contemporaneous Sonnet 12:

When I do count the clock that tells the time,
And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;
When I behold the violet past prime,
And sable curls, all silvered o'er with white;
When lofty trees I see barren of leaves,
Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,
And summer's green all girded up in sheaves,
Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard,
Then of thy beauty do I question make,
That thou among the wastes of time must go,
Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake
And die as fast as they see others grow;
And nothing 'gainst Time's scythe can make defence
Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence.

Shakespeare questions even the young man's beauty and its defense against time, when he beholds the violet past prime; Marvell worries, "When I behold the poet, blind yet bold," that Milton will ruin the sacred truths; Wordsworth's heart leaps up when he beholds a rainbow in the sky.  But Macbeth doesn't need to finish the thought: there's no lesson to be learned here, no reaction that matters, no when which marks any sort of achievement or perspective.  He has lived long enough to be past whens (she should have died hereafter, either way, so when doesn't matter).

I love this soliloquy, I think, because it doesn't state anything, any insight, any generalization, or rather it's all generalization, since there are no particulars that matter any more, nothing he may look to have.  "The poor heart" isn't it's own, but it's what all hearts are now, thanks to him.  He calls Seyton, I think, partly to interrupt these thoughts, but partly to confirm them: calling Seyton and being alone are the same thing.  Not that Seyton is indifferent to him, but that being alone is the human condition in a different way from the way we imagined.  It's not that we're irremediably separated from each other; it's that we're alone together, that we think for others (that's what soliloquies are always about), but what we think about for them is being alone.

-------

Note: Do not say that Shakespeare is writing a hysterical speech for Macbeth here, that he's calling Seyton so insistently so as not to be alone with his own thoughts, like Lear calling on the storm so as not to ponder on things would hurt him more.  Seyton is more like his Fool, but without any of the Fool's presence: most of the Fool's loneliness is internalized in Macbeth, and Seyton represents more the residual element in Macbeth's character that corresponds to the part of Lear's heart that is sorry for the Fool yet.  But Macbeth is not sorry for Seyton: that's just not in question within the residual affect of the scene 

Sweets to the sweet

I've been loving, for a long time, the way Shakespeare uses the word sweet.  Two obvious instances.  In Richard II the Queen, puzzled over her own free-floating sadness, says:

                                                   I cannot tell
Why I should welcome such a guest as grief
Save bidding farewell to so sweet a guest
As my sweet Richard.

And then Edgar's amazing, ambivalent lament:

                                 O our lives' sweetness
That we the pain of death would hourly die
Rather than die at once.

It's an amazing word for Shakespeare, and tends to come at times of sadness and need: "If you do love old men, if your sweet sway allow obedience, if you yourselves are old," Lear pleas with the heavens. Sweet sway.

And I've been thinking why it's such a good word: because it's great and ephemeral, the experience of tasting, not possessing, and the purer the sweetness the less it's about even the idea of something lasting. It's Ashbery's "charity of the hard moments," but without hardness or charity: the sweetness of the moment, as it "Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself / Unto our gentle senses." It's just for now, but that's pretty great, the way a play can be pretty great.

Rhyme and meter, part 4b: Childe Roland

The second in a series of fairly frequent, short(ish) followups to Part 4 in this series.

"Childe Roland to the dark tower came"comes from Edgar's song in Lear, and then is to be found again in Browning's poem titled " 'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.' " Note that the quotation marks and the sentence-ending period are part of the title --




-- and that this is confirmed by the running heads in the original:




Browning's title is a quotation of Shakespeare's line, and the fact that it's a quotation matters. In Shakespeare the line doesn't rhyme; and yet it feels like a line that must rhyme in the song of which it's a fragment. At least it feels that way to Browning, whose attributional parenthesis under the title is: "(See Edgar's song in Lear.)", also with a period at the end (I could be convinced that case matters to, but I don't think that here there's any harm in the mild difference between our titling conventions and Browning's):



Then, at the end of Browning's poem - it's not the song Edgar is singing; rather Edgar must be singing a song based on Roland's adventure, which, Bloomianly, transumes the song - at the end of Browning's poem, we get the line in both quotation marks and italics --



-- as Roland achieves the italicized otherness, timelessness, of the original. Italics were invented by Aldus in the fifteenth century (and supposed to imitate Petrarch's handwriting, so a great authority's annotation or addition to a printed text.  They stand, originally, for something that comes from elsewhere, something that doesn't belong to the original, to the utterer of the text we are reading, but to which that text is sufficiently relevant that it is entitled to demand or to entreat the italicized words. They are words granted or permitted from elsewhere. The italicized words in the King James Bible are the translators' clarifying additions, permitted, but only under that flag, by the sublime austerity of the original, its sublimity reflected in the italics that the supplementary words must display; the italicized words in quotations (italics were far older signs of quotation than are our inverted commas) were the words of another that for a moment the text wishes to display while not presuming to take possession of them. We put titles in italics to show that their title belongs to some other, that we are not the originators of the phrase. Italics and quotation marks have a similar genealogy and have leap-frogged each other in their somewhat out-of-synch history, but the point is whatever quotation marks have ever done, so have italics, and vice versa.

At the end of " ' Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came. ' " the quotation marks are for Roland himself: here are the words I uttered. But he didn't quite utter them: he blew them (in proper Shelleyean manner) through the slug-horn, both horn and slogan (the origin of the word), so that what he blew became the self that was that quotation. And if the quotation marks are his, the sign of his breath through the horn, his utterance of words come from elsewhere, through the trumpeting of the prophecy that the words constitute, the italics denote Shakespeare, or Edgar, or Lear (the play), or the source that makes Edgar's song a quotation of a line from elsewhere. That last most of all: Shakespeare quotes them from elsewhere, and now Browing is quoting them from that same elsewhere.

What does this have to do with shortish accounts of the rhyme? Only this: that we feel the rhyme must rhyme (that's why it's from a "song"); and Browning makes it rhyme (with "flame" and "frame"), and yet the line still stands alone, rhyming with some word in a context orthogonal to the poem and to the song, a kind of signal from that other world of the rhyme we'll never know, but a rhyme that we know the line we do have nails, know it simply through the fact that Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.

Tasks and answers

(A short post to keep my hand in, while I write the two overdue things I'm writing and finish up the semester....)

One of the great and difficult things about King Lear is its fairy-tale quality.  Writing gripping and unmotivated situations - nothing seems easier, but nothing is harder. Even the Mariner's shooting of the albatross doesn't quite do it, as Coleridge himself acknowledged when Anna Letitia Barbauld complained of the story's want of moral point:

Mrs Barbauld tole me that the only faults she found with the Ancient Mariner were — that it was improbable and had no moral. As for the probability — to be sure that might admit some question — but I told her that in my judgment the poem had moral, and that too openly obtruded on the reader, It ought to have no more moral than the story of the merchant sitting down to eat dates by the side of a well and throwing the shells aside, and the Genii starting up and saying he must kill the merchant, because a date shell had put out the eye of the
Genii's son.

It's worth remembering that Barbauld was an innovative and charismatic teacher as well as poet, and that she wrote a good deal, and successfully for children. But Coleridge was after that near-impossible quality: gratuitous narrative that brings you in so quickly that you don't have time to wonder why or how such situations should ever arise.  To see what I mean notice how well Kafka achieves something akin to the great beginning of the Grimms's "Town Musicans of Bremen" --

A man had a donkey, who for long years had untiringly carried sacks to the mill, but whose strength was now failing, so that he was becoming less and less able to work. Then his master thought that he would no longer feed him, but the donkey noticed that it was not a good wind that was blowing and ran away, setting forth on the road to Bremen, where he thought he could become a town musician 

-- in the opening of the Metamorphosis:

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from troubled dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous insect.  He was lying on his hard, as it were armor-plated, back and when he lifted his head a little he could see his dome-like brown belly divided into corrugated segments on top of which the bed quilt could hardly keep in position and was about to slide off completely.  His numerous legs, which were pitifully thin compared to the rest of his bulk, flimmered helplessly before his eyes. [Nabokov's modified translation of the Muirs with one reversion to their version; "flimmered" is his portmanteau of flickered and shimmered]

Shakespeare achieves what Coleridge doesn't at the beginning of King Lear.  His source -- the Chronicle History of King Leir -- has the King set the love contest up as a trick.  He is sure that Cordella will vow her absolute love and obedience to him, which will then enable him to require her to marry the husband he has picked for her rather than the man she loves (cf. the less fairy-tale-like Midsummer Night's Dream).  In Shakespeare's version, Lear simply asks the question:

Which of you shall we say doth love us most?

He means the question to set him up as the judge of their answers - a finely fatherly thing to do. But the question is deeper than that, I've just been realizing: it's the question of the play.  Which daughter will he say loves him most? And the answer comes only at the end, when he finally says that it's Cordelia.  That question is answered for us, but for her also: "Which of you?" The second person matters: it's when he says it to her that the question is answered.  We wait, and she waits, for the answer during the whole play. It is then that he gives the answer to the question he has unwillingly posed himself.  He had no idea that the question was not simply the catalyst of what comes next but the question of the play.  Will he say it? About Cordelia? When?

The "shall" turns out to indicate the whole temporal span of the play: Lear's fairy tale question and fairy tale crisis also shows him setting himself the task that it will take the whole play to fulfill: saying who loves him most.  And when he does that, everything's over.  But the second person also matters because he's setting her the task (in proper Proppian form): make him say it.  And that takes the whole play and her whole life, and his whole life too.

I think this is all obvious, and yet I think somehow it's not: that the story is simpler and deeped than anything in Tolstoy, which is why he (Tolstoy) disparaged it.  The best fairy-tale writer of the nineteenth century, Tolstoy's works have the fairy-tale slyness of the Chronicle History of King Leir.  Perhaps they sometimes rival the the austere complexity, that is to say the simplicity, of King Lear.  But it's King Lear that they rival.

Forms of Farewell, or: Still a voice in my heart keeps repeating: You, you, you

Well-managed repetition is a great though difficult thing.  One of the touchstones for an actor in King Lear is the line "Never, never, never, never, never."  I love the way Paul Scofield does it, and the very different way that James Earl Jones does.  It's right up Derek Jacobi's alley too, perhaps too much so. But the point is the line is earned by the play, which is why Scofield and Jones can do it so well: it's there to be done well.

I was thinking about this because I was thinking about the way poems sometimes end with those kinds of repetitions, like this of Larkin's:

The Trees

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

"Never" repeats its own finality, so that even finality isn't resolution. "Afresh" repeats its own élan, acknowledging that what begins afresh has begun before, countless times, and is no longer fresh: and yet that freshness floods any demurral.

Stevens's "Waving Adieu, Adieu, Adieu" does its repetition in the title, so that the singularity of the moment of adieu can stand simply there without moving a hand:

                                              Ever-jubilant,
What is there here but weather, what spirit
have I except it comes from the sun?

The finality ("the the") is all the more final because it seeks neither to master repetition nor to express itself through its failure to master it.  The title tells you all you need to know about the finality of this form of farewell, the infinite incremental separation of life and death, which is aging, which is death ("World, world, O world! / But that thy strange mutations make us hate thee / Life would not yield to age").  That's the incremental decoherence of what the heart and heart-beat misses in Alvin Feinman's sense of the world undoing itself:

Something, something, the heart here misses.

Freud called repetition an attempt to stay the moment of disaster, to skip backwards like a record at its edge. "Cordelia, Cordelia" -- that's a heartbeat too -- isn't it? -- with a dying fall, since her name means heart. "Cordelia, Cordelia, stay a little" - what else should Lear say at the end?

It is always at or near the end that these sad repetitions occur - the happy ones (since "deny, deny, deny is not all the roosters cry") such as those in Cole Porter, in Martin and Blane ("Zing zing zing went my heartstrings") may suggest that the moment is self-perpetuating, self-energizing, effortless, and so they can come in the midst of things. By contrast Larkin's ending is just "sadness, sadness, sadness" (last line of Dennis Johnson's poem "Our Sadness"); the fact that it's an ending makes it as effortful as the trees he's describing, like the end of Hopkins's sad lament for the felled Binsey poplars:

Binsey Poplars

      (Felled 1879)

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled;
Of a fresh and following folded rank
Not spared, not one
That swam or sank
On meadow and river and wind-wandering
weed-winding bank.

O if we but knew what we do
When we delve or hew-
Hack and rack the growing green!
Since country is so tender
To touch, her being so slender,
That, like this sleek and seeing ball
But a prick will made no eye at all,
Where we, even where we mean
To mend her we end her,
When we hew or delve:
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.
Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve
Strokes of havoc unselve
The sweet especial scene,
Rural scene, a rural scene,
Sweet especial rural scene.

These repetitions stand against the strokes of havoc, try to, fail to. The repetitions are oriented towards the past, sometimes reduced to the pure sterility of the reduction to repetition itself, as in this moment from Hart Crane:

The grind-organ says…  Remember, remember
The cinder pile at the end of the backyard
Where we stoned the family of young
Garter snakes under ... And the monoplanes
We launched---with paper wings and twisted
Rubber bands…  Recall---recall

(The poem goes on, but the stanza is integral as a repeated call to repetition.)

Forms of farewell, as Stevens says, and yet they have a kind of choral quality, a sense that the farewell itself yields a culminating verse or line or chant or song: "afresh, afresh, afresh." As with Lear calling on the men of stones around him, or to Cordelia, as with Larkin or Hopkins flying to the trees, or Stevens waving adieu, the pressure of departure makes the words sing, as in the third of the endings of Flann O'Brien's great At Swim-Two-Birds:

Well known alas is the case of the poor German who was very fond of three, and made every aspect of his life a thing of triads. He went home one evening and drank three cups of tea with three lumps of sugar in each cup. He cut his jugular with a razor three times and scrawled with a dying hand on a picture of his wife, goodbye goodbye goodbye.

 This is more or less O'Brien's version of Cervantes's last words, which Javier Marías quotes and Margaret Jull Costa translates:

Farewell wit, and farewell, charm, farewell dear departed friends, hoping to see you soon, happily installed in the other life.

 I can't find this in Spanish, but the standard English translation has "merry friends." I prefer "departed friends." He is saying farewell to those already dead in this life, but saying farewell as though they're still here.  Where else would they be? That's Cervantes, that's the song that repetition sings, a lingering song of departure.

Shakespeare's craft: Othello and Twelfth Night

In Shakespeare, as in history, everything happens twice, first as tragedy, then as farce, sometimes, but sometimes vice versa. Consider Twelfth Night (1602) and Othello (1603).

I've long insisted that Dan Decker's great how-to book for writing for Hollywood, Anatomy of the Screenplay, is the best single book on Shakespeare that I've ever read, despite the fact that Decker never mentions him. What I learned from that book is the sublimity of Shakespeare's construction, of his skill.

I was thinking about that today - well this week actually, since I went to see Derek Jacobi's Lear at BAM on Saturday. What I saw there, on that bare stage, was how perfectly the director, Michael Grandage, had blocked the play, from start to finish. I'd never really noticed the obvious fact that one reason for the contest among the daughters is to establish those three characters (Grandage properly brings out the differences between Goneril and Regan, so that we don't, as in so many other performances, just lump them together as evil step-sister-types). The play has a lot of important parts for an audience to keep track of: Lear and his three daughters and Kent and the Fool (6); the elder daughters' husbands (2 more); Goneril's servant Oswald (+1); Gloucester and his two sons (another 3): that's a total of twelve important roles. I think the general rule is that without famous actors (or famous characters) an audience can't keep control of who's who if there are more than eight people in a movie, but Shakespeare pushes well beyond that (off hand I think only Hamlet rivals Lear in the number of important figures). So part of his craftsmanship is telling us who's who at every moment, and the contest does that with very great economy and skill.

It also makes it clear whose side we're on: Cordelia's and not her sisters'. This is so obvious as not to warrant a mention, but it got me thinking about how we know whose side to be on in other plays. Why Othello's and not Roderigo's? Again, easy. Still the point is that (as Decker says) every scene consists of people talking to each other who want things from each other and don't want to keep things from each other. Everyone wants something. How do we decide whom we want to get what they want, and whom we don't?

Twelfth Night, for example, might be a little harder. The very first speech establishes a love-lorn figure (like Roderigo in Othello) who loves a woman who doesn't love him back. This being romantic comedy, it seems significant that she doesn't love another. In romantic comedies in general, if the obstacle to mutual love is misunderstanding or misapplication of one's energies or talents, the story will show how that obstacle may be overcome. If the obstacle is true-love for another person, well, the protagonist's gain comes at the expense of that other person, at the expense true-love, and the result is at best bittersweet. Ilsa must go with Victor Lazlo; whereas Ginger Rogers may be engaged to others, but never loves anyone but Fred Astaire.

But here Orsino loves Olivia, and she, for her part, is just making excuses. Defeasible excuses. Excuses that the story can overcome, or so it would seem.

But then there's Viola. She loves Orsino, but he loves another. Structurally, she's in more or less the same position as Malvolio. (Olivia is somewhat different: Malvolio doubles and so serves as a foil for Viola; whereas Olivia, willing to marry someone like but not identical to the person she thought he was, doubles and serves as a foil for Orsino. Malvolio and Olivia are possibilities that bring out some less satisfying routes Orsino and Viola's characters could have taken.) Why do we root for her and not for him?

The answer illuminates the very fact that we do root for one and not the other. Why do we root at all? Rooting for a preferred romantic outcome in a play is a type of prosocial behavior. We like someone - Orsino or Viola or Hermia or Ginger Rogers or Fred Astaire - and we have an interestingly unselfish reaction to liking them. We want to see them happy. They don't have to like us or know us or notice us. In plays they don't; in novels still less; in movies least of all, perhaps. We're lookers on, but we look on with good will, not Malvolio's malevolence.

What we feel good will for, in the virtuous circle of prosocial interaction, are those with good will. Audiences feel unified when we all root for the same thing, especially when we root for those who are similarly good-natured. That's what it means to see a feel-good movie or play. Everybody's happy because everybody's happy.

So we root for Viola because she's rooting for Orsino. She tries to help him. She loves him, but her love is sufficiently unselfish, sufficiently like an audience's, that she works to bring him a happy ending to which she'll be a spectator. See, too, the melancholy joy with which Paulina congratulates "you precious winners, all" in The Winter's Tale. Paulina, Beatrice, Viola, Theseus, Hippolyta: they root for the happiness of those they love, even love erotically. So (in the same way) we root for theirs, and so (therefore) we root for theirs.

Shakespeare makes us like those generous-hearted characters who don't stand too squarely in the way of what other generous-hearted characters want. That's Viola. She's helpful, against her own interests. Whereas Malvalio isn't. That's (strangely enough) Helena. But she's helping, against her own interests, a character who isn't generous-hearted (Demetrius), so we are more ambivalent about her. (Shakespeare experiments with every combination, and the comparison of Helena to Viola is extremely useful.)

And if Viola were playing for herself and not for Orsino? If she were strategizing to get her man by interfering with the love she's supposed to be trying to forward? Well, she'd be the villain, and the story would be a tragedy, and her name would be Iago.