30 Great Myths about Shakespeare (14 page)

The problem is obvious: the long fourteener unavoidably breaks into two parts and becomes jog trot.

It was Christopher Marlowe who established blank verse (“blank” because it does not rhyme) as the medium of dramatic poetry and exploited the range of the more fluid pentameter line. He announced his innovation in the prologue to
Tamburlaine
(1587):

From jigging veins of rhyming mother wits,

And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay,

We'll lead you to the stately tent of war,

Where you shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine

Threatening the world with high astounding terms.

He distances himself from earlier drama both in subject matter (he promises soldiers not clowns) and in sound (he promises not rhymes but rhetoric: “high astounding terms”). It was an acoustic paradigm shift. Thereafter almost every dramatist of the early 1590s tried to sound like Marlowe: Peele, Greene, Nashe, Shakespeare, Anon. And it is not just authors who are aware of the sound of Tamburlaine (the hero and the play); literary characters themselves frequently mention what it is like to hear, or talk like, Tamburlaine. Simon Eyre, shoemaker-turned-mayor in Thomas Dekker's comedy
The Shoemaker's Holiday
, says he is not nervous about meeting royalty because he “knows how to speak to a Pope, to Sultan Soliman, to Tamburlaine and [if] he were here” (20.59–60).
⁶

Eyre means, primarily, that he can hold his own in terms of tone and vocabulary. But other literary characters are equally sensitive to poetry and prose rhythms and the differences between the two. In George Peele's
The Old Wife's Tale
(1595) a character who has just spoken in hexameter verse (verse of six stressed syllables) says, “I'll now set my countenance and to her in prose” (l. 641).
⁷
When Orlando greets Ganymede/Rosalind in
As You Like It
—“Good day and happiness, dear Rosalind!”—Jaques takes this as his cue to exit: “Nay, then, God b'wi'you an you talk in blank verse” (4.1.29–30). Jaques has just been conversing with Rosalind in prose; he draws the audience's attention to the fact that the scene is now changing register from (satiric) prose to (Petrarchan) poetry. Rosalind is similarly sensitive poetically when Celia first quotes Orlando's love poems to her: she criticizes them for being hyper-metrical (having “more feet than the verses would bear”; 3.2.162–3). And in this play even the goatherd Audrey wonders what “poetical” means. When Benedick tries to write a love poem in a play written almost entirely in prose,
Much Ado
, he is aware of literary precedent: classical lovers like Leander and Troilus “still run smoothly in the even road of a blank verse” (5.2.32–3). Blank verse is synonymous with poetry. When the players arrive in Elsinore, Hamlet anticipates that the boy actor playing the lady “shall say her mind freely, or the blank verse shall halt for't” (2.2.326–7). In other words, if she is censored or interrupted, the lines will not scan.

It is interesting to note the dates of these three Shakespeare plays; they cluster together in the period 1598–1600. These are plays in which the characters are intensely aware of the relations between drama and life; part of that awareness is a self-consciousness about sound. In the same period, in
Julius Caesar
(1599), Cassius comments on the inept rhymes of the poet who has entered with a couplet to try to reconcile Cassius and Brutus: “How vilely doth this cynic rhyme!” (4.2.185).
⁸
Brutus agrees, calling the poet a “jigging fool” (4.2.189)—a pejorative phrase like Marlowe's “jigging wits” (the RSC Shakespeare edition glosses it as “rhyming in a jerky and
metrically unsophisticated
manner”; our italics). As the RSC gloss indicates (and our italics emphasize), references to rhyme are often in tandem with references to meter. They are part of an awareness of what poetry sounds like.

In Marston's
Antonio and Mellida
(1599), a discussion about meter moves quickly to a dialogue about rhyme (and is also filled with double entendres: as those highly charged split pentameter lines attest, poetic rhythm has a sexual component). Balurdo tries to compose a poem. His page, Dildo, identifies an error in Balurdo's versification; he then offers a (bathetic) rhyme:

Balurdo:
I'll mount my courser and most gallantly prick –

Dildo:
“Gallantly prick” is too long, and stands hardly in the verse, sir.

Balurdo:
I'll speak pure rhyme and so will bravely prank it

That I'll to love like a—prank—prank it—a rhyme for “prank it”?

Dildo:
Blanket.

(4.1.268–73)

Benedick has the same problem in
Much Ado
: “I can find out no rhyme to ‘lady’ but ‘baby’” (5.2.35–6).

The mechanicals in
Midsummer Night's Dream
don't discuss rhyme but they too are metrically aware. When they plan to add a prologue to their interlude, their first consideration is the meter in which it should be written. Quince proposes “eight and six” (alternating lines of eight syllables and six syllables); Bottom favors two more: “let it be written in eight and eight” (3.1.22–4). A character in Chapman's comedy
The Gentleman Usher
(1605) proposes composing “in a verse of ten” (i.e. pentameter) (2.2.71).
⁹
We in the audience are inescapably aware of Shakespeare's prosody, if only because the characters call our attention to it. But although meter and rhyme are often invoked in plays, we cannot consider these references independently of references to language generally. Characters from the comic Polonius in
Hamlet
to the romantic hero in
Antonio and Mellida
are consistently linguistically aware. Here is Polonius trying to be a literary critic: “‘mobbled queen’ is good” (2.2.507). Here is Marston's Antonio, confronting the inadequacy of similes to express the beauty of his beloved:

Come down; she comes like—O, no simile

Is precious, choice or elegant enough

To illustrate her descent. Leap heart, she comes,

She comes.

(
Antonio and Mellida
1.1.151–4)
¹⁰

In its monosyllabic—but repeated—simplicity, “She comes” is every bit as “poetic” as a simile.

Partly thanks to humanism (see Myth 2), Shakespeare's was a linguistically self-aware age. Meter is part of a composite package of poetic language that includes vocabulary and metaphor and rhyme and rhetorical devices. Together they are a play's soundscape. And when you include stage noise—like the knocking in
Macbeth
, or the “sennet” or “alarums” sounding—it is clear that there is a lot more to the “sound” of Shakespeare than the mechanical scansion of lines.

We must not forget that prose has a rhythm too. Prose may not scan according to rules, as poetry does, but it has its own internal balance, incremental developments, and repetitions, all of which work on our ear in a fashion similar to poetry. Malvolio bursts upon the midnight revelers in
Twelfth Night
with “My masters, are you mad?” (2.3.83). The alliterative frame gives the phrase a neat symmetry, not unlike rhyme; but the phrase also has an acceleration of rhythm because of the three monosyllables which lead to the terminative emphasis on the adjective “mad”—a significant theme in the play.

Malvolio continues with two triadic structures: “Have you no wit, manners, nor honesty? … Is there no respect of place, persons, nor time in you?” (2.3.83–9). Shakespeare uses triads in blank verse too: Antony's “Friends, Romans, countrymen” in
Julius Caesar
(3.2.74); the Bastard in
King John
muses “Mad world, mad kings, mad composition!” (2.1.562). Shakespeare's prose and poetry are here using the same rhetorical structures; his prose and his poetry overlap.

The close relationship between prose rhythm and poetic rhythm can be seen in a phrase in Florio's translation of Montaigne that clearly caught Shakespeare's ear as much as his eye. In Florio's translation of “An Apologie of Raymond Sebond,” Montaigne wonders “whether it be lawfull for a subject … to rebell and take arms against his prince.”
¹¹
In
Hamlet
the prince wonders whether “'tis nobler in the mind to suffer … / Or to take arms against a sea of troubles” (3.1.59–61). Florio's/Montaigne's literal use of arms (to oppose one's ruler) becomes in Shakespeare a metaphor (material arms against a liquid sea would be of little use). But what seems to have caught Shakespeare's attention first was the syntactical balance of Florio's prose. In prose he heard poetry.

The contemporary poet Peter Porter has said that “a poem is a form of refrigeration that stops language going bad.” The same can be said of Shakespeare's prose. Just as we cannot separate iambic pentameter from everyday speech, neither can we entirely separate prose from poetry.

Notes

¹
 Terry Eagleton,
Literary Theory: An Introduction
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), p. 2.

²
 Derek Attridge,
Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 166.

³
 Cicely Berry,
The Actor and the Text
(New York: Applause Theater Books, 1987), p. 63.

⁴
 Thomas de Quincey, “On the Knocking at the Gate in
Macbeth
,” in
Miscellaneous Essays
(The Project Gutenberg EBook of Miscellaneous Essays, by Thomas de Quincey; accessed 8 July 2012;
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10708/10708-8.txt
).

⁵
 
Gammer Gurton's Needle
, in
Five Pre-Shakespearean Comedies
, ed. Frederick S. Boas (1934; reissued Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970).

⁶
 Thomas Dekker,
The Shoemaker's Holiday
, ed. Robert Smallwood and Stanley Wells, Revels (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999).

⁷
 George Peele,
The Old Wife's Tale
, ed. Charles Whitworth (London: A. & C. Black, 1996).

⁸
 In all other Shakespeare editions this is 4.3.133.

⁹
 George Chapman,
The Gentleman Usher
, ed. Robert Ornstein in
The Plays of George Chapman
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970).

¹⁰
 John Marston,
Antonio and Mellida
, ed. G.K. Hunter (London: Edward Arnold, 1965).

¹¹
 Michel de Montaigne,
The essays or morall, politike and militarie discourses of Michaell de Montaigne
, trans. John Florio (London, 1603): ‘An Apology of Raymond Semond’, p. 254 (sig. Z1
^v
).

We all enjoy equivalence, symmetry, and circularity, from the fun of card games like Snap through the fascination of identical twins, to the pleasure of coincidence or a delight in rhyme. In
Julius Caesar
Cassius dies on his birthday (“This day I breathèd first. Time is come round, / And where I did begin, there shall I end”; 5.3.23–4). So did Shakespeare: he was baptized on 26 April, and can have been born only two or three days before that; he died on 23 April. The birthday of England's national poet coincides with the day dedicated to England's national saint. The age at which Shakespeare died—52—is the same as the age at which Augustan Rome's greatest poet died: Virgil.

The relationship of the name of Shakespeare's son, Hamnet, to the tragic hero, Hamlet, comes into this same pleasurable category of seeing or seeking equivalence. Sigmund Freud, for one, was confident that the son and the prince were the same. In
The Interpretation of Dreams
(1900) he wrote:

it can of course only be the poet's own mind which confronts us in Hamlet. I observe in a book on Shakespeare by Georg Brandes (1896) a statement that
Hamlet
was written immediately after the death of Shakespeare's father (in 1601), that is, under the immediate impact of his bereavement and, as we may well assume, while his childhood feelings about his father had been freshly revived. It is known, too, that Shakespeare's own son who died at an early age bore the name of “Hamnet”, which is identical with “Hamlet”.
¹

Note the interpretative and biographical elision—Hamlet equals Shakespeare; Hamnet equals Hamlet—and the certainty with which it is expressed: “it can
of course
only be the poet's own mind which confronts us in Hamlet … ‘Hamnet’ is
identical
with ‘Hamlet’.”

Certainly, Elizabethan names are fluid, as the surname of Shakespeare's contemporary and rival Marlowe—spelled variously as Marlow, Marloe, Marley, Marlin, Malyn, Morley, Merlin—shows. Shakespeare's wife was called Anne, or Agnes, or Annis. This is not the same as the Marlowe variants because here the pronunciation is almost identical. Agnes can be pronounced An-yes (the name derives ultimately from Greek
hagnos
[pure, chaste] but it was also associated with the Latin
agnus
[lamb, a symbol of Christ]); it can also, with a silent “g,” be pronounced Annis, and thence abbreviated to Anne. Hamnet and Hamlet do not come into either of these categories of variation. “N” and “l” would be an unusual variant.
Pace
Freud, Hamnet is not (likely to be) Hamlet.

Shakespeare's son Hamnet, and his twin sister Judith, were named after their godparents, Stratford neighbors Hamnet and Judith Sadler. The twins were born in 1585; Hamnet died, aged 11, in 1596 (Judith lived until 1661/2). The cause of Hamnet's death is not known (but August, the month in which he died, was always a bad month for plague deaths). Biographers point out that one twin is often weaker than the other; the sixty-five-year discrepancy in death dates between Hamnet and his twin sister suggests that he may have been the weaker one.

The reason for thinking that Hamlet is Hamnet is that the tragedy of which he is the hero is a play about father–son relationships. It is also a play about grief. From Hamlet's unnatural extended mourning (he exceeds the official court mourning period for his deceased father) to his rejection of his stepfather's
memento mori
wisdom (the “common theme [of life] / Is death of fathers” [1.2.103–4] is Claudius's consolatory pull-yourself-together observation) to the play's two visitors from beyond the grave (the ghost in Acts 1 and 3, the skull of Yorick in Act 5 [see Myth 27]) to the incapacitating grief of memory (“Heaven and earth, / Must I remember?”; 1.2.142–3) to the anecdotes about the death of Julius Caesar to Hamlet's contemplation of suicide to his acceptance of death (“there's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow”; 5.2.165–6), the play is haunted by thoughts of death. So too, some think, was its author.