Emily Brontë's "Remembrance" (1845)

Cold in the earth—and the deep snow piled above thee,
Far, far removed, cold in the dreary grave!
Have I forgot, my only love, to love thee,
Severed at last by Time's all severing wave?

Now, when alone, do my thoughts no longer hover
Over the mountains, on that northern shore,
Resting their wings where heath and fern leaves cover
Thy noble heart forever, ever more?

Cold in the earth and fifteen wild Decembers,
From those brown hills, have melted into spring;
Faithful indeed, indeed, is the spirit that remembers
After such years of change and suffering!

Sweet love of youth, forgive if I forget thee,
While the world's tide is bearing me along;
Other desires and other hopes beset me,
Hopes which obscure, but cannot do thee wrong!

No later light has lightened up my heaven,
No second morn has ever shone for me;
All my life's bliss from thy dear life was given,
All my life's bliss is in the grave with thee.

But, when the days of golden dreams had perished,
And even Despair was powerless to destroy,
Then did I learn how existence could be cherished,
Strengthened, and fed without the aid of joy.

Then did I check the tears of useless passion—
Weaned my young soul from yearning after thine;
Sternly denied its burning wish to hasten
Down to that tomb already more than mine.

And, even yet, I dare not let it languish,
Dare not indulge in memory's rapturous pain;
Once drinking deep of that divinest anguish,
How could I seek the empty world again?

This poem of loss and grief is, like Wuthering Heights which was published a few years later, entirely imaginary. Both are works of fiction, and that's all they have in common. The novel, like the poem is about loss and grief, but with what a difference! The poem is about moral and emotional discipline—"Then did I learn how existence could be cherished, /Strengthened, and fed without the aid of joy"— about having your grief and holding on to it without letting it consume you. The novel is about a woman who has no moral or emotional discipline—Catherine Earnshaw (and has been endlessly romanticized on that account); and a man, Heathcliff, who loves her and no one else and digs up her coffin after she dies for another look—the novel coming very close at this point to necrophilia. He knocks the side of her coffin loose planning to have the corresponding side of his own coffin removed when he is eventually buried next to her. What could he be thinking of? Does he really think that they will literally be reunited there in that churchyard? As if that weren't enough, EB adds a bit of spookery. When Heathcliff doesn't die fast enough, Catherine's spirit comes after him and tells him to hurry up, which he does: a man in perfect health wills his own death.

You wouldn't think the same person could have written this poem and this novel. The poem is all about discipline and delicacy, as well as intensity, of feeling; the novel is about intensity—of love or hatred or contempt—and self-indulgence, and not much else. Both poem and novel are romantic: both, for instance, take it for granted that love is the highest good, but it is only in the poem that we are shown with dramatic (occasionally melodramatic) clarity the choices that the romantic lover faces, whether knowingly or not, when the loved one has been lost: you can make your grief the center of your life, or you can, stoically, figure out how existence can be cherished, strengthened, and fed, in an "empty world", without the aid of joy. Or, as one of Samuel Beckett's characters says, "I can't go on. I must go on." One has promises to keep.



.

Pure Poetry: Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Whose poem this is I think you know: it's Robert Frost's. It is, to my way of thinking, a perfect poem. Like music, considered by Schopenhauer and Valery to be the perfect art form because it is about itself and nothing else, this poem is about nothing but itself. Maybe that's why people can't let it alone; what does it mean? they ask. Why does Frost repeat that last line? Is he really talking about death? What about those promises he says he has to keep? 

Silly questions. 

Each stanza has exactly four beats. Three of them follow the same rhyme scheme, aaba, with the word ending the third line being the dominant rhyme in the next verse; the last stanza repeats the same rhyme four times, picking up on the word "sweep" at the end of the third line in the previous stanza. Frost has created a rhyme pattern without end, yet he must end it. How can he solve this problem and at the same time preserve the perfection of the poem? Simple: by repeating the last line.

The woods are beautiful but he can't stay there and admire them, much as he might like to, for several reasons, one of which is obvious but unstated: it would take a long time to watch them fill up with snow and anyone who does that sort of thing in midwinter is likely to freeze to death, a fate  in which he shows no interest. (Though I have to admit that the speaker's interest in the depth and darkness of the woods is slightly and momentarily ambiguous.) He is not out there on the darkest night of the year for the fun of it. He is on his way someplace for reasons that we don't need to know, aside from the fact that like anyone else he may have promised to be there at a certain time; which reminds him that, like anyone else, he has made other promises as well. And that's absolutely all there is to it—aside from the fact that is a beautiful and deceptively simple poem. Why 'deceptively'? Because Frost, knowing his readers better than they know themselves, and knowing that they are never satisfied with perfect simplicity and are forever clutching at allegory, has quietly and perhaps, ironically, given them something to clutch at.

Santayana's Critique of Whitman

Note: the following material is taken from Interpretations of Poetry And Religion, 1900, by George Santayana (ch. 7, "The Poetry of Barbarism").

"The works of Walt Whitman offer an extreme illustration of this phase of genius, both by their form and by their substance. It was the singularity of his literary form—and the challenge it threw down to the conventions of verse and language—that first gave Whitman notoriety: but this notoriety has become fame, because those incapacities and solecisms which glare at us from his pages are only the obverse of a profound inspiration and of a genuine courage. Even the idiosyncrasies of his style have a side that is not mere perversity or affectation; the order of his words, the procession of his images, reproduce the method of a rich, spontaneous, absolutely lazy fancy. In most poets such a natural order is modified by various governing motives—the thought, the metrical form, the echo of other poems in the memory. By Walt Whitman these conventional influences are resolutely banished. We find the swarms of men and objects rendered as they might strike the retina in a sort of waking dream. It is the most sincere possible confession of the lowest—I mean the most primitive—type of perception.  All ancient poets are sophisticated by comparison and give proof of longer intellectual and moral training. Whitman has gone back to the innocent style of Adam, when the animals filed before him one by one and he called each of them by its name.


"In fact, the influences to which Walt Whitman were subject were favorable as possible to the imaginary experiment of beginning the world all over again. Liberalism and transcendentalism both harbored some illusions on that score; and they were in the air that our poet breathed. Moreover he breathed this air in America where the newness of the material environment made it easier to ignore the fatal antiquity of human nature. When he afterward became aware that there had been a world with a history, he studied that world with curiosity and spoke of it not without a certain shrewdness. But he still regarded it as a foreign world and imagined, as not a few Americans have done, that his own world was a fresh creation, not amenable to the same laws as the old. The difference in the conditions blinded him, in his merely sensuous apprehension, to the identity of the principles.


". . . . He must have read or heard something . . . of the English classics; his style often betrays the deep effect made upon him by the grandiloquence of the Bible, of Shakespeare, and of Milton. But his chief interest,  if we may trust his account, was already in his own sensations. The aspects of Nature, the forms and habits of animals, the sights of cities, the movement and talk of common people, were his constant delight. His mind was flooded by these images, keenly felt and afterward to be vividly rendered with bold strokes of realism and imagination.


"Many poets have had this faculty to seize the elementary aspects of things, but none has had it so exclusively; with Whitman the surface is absolutely all and the underlying structure is without interest and almost without existence. He had had no education and his natural delight in imbibing sensations had not been trained to the uses of practical or theoretical intelligence. He basked in the sunshine of perception and wallowed in the stream of his own sensibility, as later at Camden in the shallows of his favorite brook. Even during the civil war when he heard the drum-taps so clearly, he could only gaze at the picturesque and terrible aspects of the struggle and linger among wounded day after day with canine devotion; he could not be roused either to clear thought or to positive action. So also in his poems; a multiplicity of images pass before him and he yields himself to each in turn with absolute passivity. The world has no inside; it is a phantasmagoria of continuous visions, vivid, impressive, but monotonous and hard to distinguish in memory, like the waves of the sea or the decorations of some barbarous temple, sublime only by the infinite aggregation of parts.


"This abundance of detail without organization, this wealth of perception without intelligence and of imagination without taste, makes the singularity of Whitman's genius. Full of sympathy and receptivity, with a wonderful gift of graphic characterization and an occasional rare grandeur of diction, he fills us with a sense of the individuality and universality of what he describes—it is a drop in itself but a drop in the ocean. The absence of any principle of selection or of a sustained style enables him to render aspects of things and of emotion which would have eluded a trained writer. He is, therefore, interesting even where he is grotesques or perverse. He has accomplished by the sacrifice of almost every good quality, something never so well done before. He has approached common life without bringing in his mind any higher standard by which to criticize it; he has seen it, not in contrast with an ideal, but as the expression of forces more indeterminate and elementary than itself; and the vulgar, in this cosmic setting, has appeared to him sublime.


"There is clearly some analogy between a mass of images without structure and the notion of an absolute democracy. Whitman, inclined by his genius and habits to see life without relief or organization, believed that his inclination in this respect corresponded with the spirit of his age and country, and that Nature and society, at least in the United States, were constituted after the fashion of his own mind. Being the poet of the average man, he wished all men to be specimens of that average, and being the poet of a fluid Nature, he believed that Nature was or should be a formless flux. This personal bias of Whitman's was further encouraged by the actual absence of distinction in his immediate environment. Surrounded by ugly things and common people, he felt himself happy, ecstatic, overflowing with a kind of patriarchal love. He accordingly came to think that there was a spirit of the New World  which he embodied, and which was in complete opposition to that of the Old, and that a literature upon novel principles was needed to express and strengthen this American spirit.


"Democracy was not to be merely a constitutional device for the better government of given nations, not merely a movement for the material improvement of the lot of the poorer classes. It was to be a social and moral democracy and to involve an actual equality among all men. Whatever kept them apart and made it impossible for them to be messmates together was to be discarded. The literature of democracy was to ignore all extraordinary gifts of genius or virtue, all distinction drawn even from great passions or romantic adventures. In Whitman's works, in which this new literature is foreshadowed, there is accordingly not a single character nor a single story. His only hero is Myself, the 'single  separate person,' endowed with the primary impulses, with health, and with sensitiveness to the elementary aspects of Nature. The perfect man of the future, the prolific begetter of other perfect men, is to work with his hands, chanting the poems of some future Walt, some ideally democratic bard. Women are to have has nearly as possible the same character as men: the emphasis is to pass from family life and local ties to the friendship of comrades and the general brotherhood of man.  Men are to be vigorous, comfortable, sentimental, and irresponsible.


"This dream is, of course, unrealized and unrealizable, in America as elsewhere. Undeniably there are in America many suggestions of such a society and such a national character. But the growing complexity and fixity of institutions necessarily tends to obscure these traits of a primitive and crude democracy. What Whitman seized upon as the promise of the future was in reality the survival of the past. He sings the songs of the pioneers, but it is in the nature of pioneer that the greater his success the quicker must be his transition into something different. When Whitman made the initial and amorphous phase of society his ideal, he became the prophet of a lost cause. That cause was lost, not merely when wealth and intelligence began to take shape in the American Commonwealth, but it was lost at the very foundation of the world, when those laws of evolution were established which Whitman, like Rousseau, failed to understand. . . . He is surely not the spokesman of the tendencies of his country, although he describes some aspects of its past and present condition: nor does he appeal to those he describes, but rather to the dilettanti he despises. He is regarded as representative chiefly by foreigners, who look for some grotesque expression of the genius of so young and prodigious a people.


"Whitman, it is true, loved and comprehended men; but this love and comprehension had the same limits as his love and comprehension of Nature. He observed truly and responded to his observation with genuine and pervasive emotion. A great gregariousness, an innocent tolerance of moral weakness, a genuine admiration of bodily health and strength, made him bubble over with affection for the generic human creature. . . . Yet, for all his acquaintance with the ways and thoughts of the common man of his choice, he did not truly understand him. For to understand people is to go much deeper than they go themselves; to penetrate to their characters and disentangle their inmost ideals. Whitman's insight into man did not go beyond a sensuous sympathy; it consisted in a vicarious satisfaction in their pleasures, and an instinctive love of their persons. It never approached a scientific or imaginative knowledge of their hearts.


"Therefore Whitman failed radically in his dearest ambition: he can never be a poet of the people. For the people, like the early races whose poetry was ideal, are natural believers in perfection. They have no doubts about the absolute desirability of wealth and learning and power, none about the worth of pure goodness and pure love. Their chosen poets, if they have any, will be always those who have known how to paint these ideals in lively even if in gaudy colors. Nothing is further from the common people than the corrupt desire to be primitive. They instinctively look toward a more exalted life, which they imagine to be full of distinction and pleasure, and the idea of that brighter existence fills them with hope or with envy or with humble admiration.


"If the people are ever won over to hostility to such ideals, it is only because they are cheated by demagogues [or idealogues] who tell them that if all the flowers of civilization were destroyed its fruits would become more abundant. A greater share of happiness, people think, would fall to their lot could they destroy everything beyond their own possible possessions. But they are made envious and ignoble only by a deception: what they really desire is an ideal good for themselves which they are told they may secure by depriving others of their preëminance. Their hope is always to enjoy perfect satisfaction themselves; and therefore a poet who loves the picturesque aspects of labour and vagrancy will hardly be the poet of the poor. He may have described their figure and occupation, in neither of which they are much interested; he will not have read their souls. They will prefer to him any sentimental story-teller, any sensational dramatist, any moralizing poet; for they are hero-worshippers by temperament, and are too wise or too unfortunate to be much enamored of themselves or of the conditions of their existence.


"Fortunately, the political theory that makes Whitman's principle literary prophecy and criticism does not always inspire his chants, nor is it presented even in his prose works, quite bare and unadorned. In "Democratic Vistas" we find it clothed with something of the same poetic passion and lighted up with the same flashes of intuition which we admire in the poems. Even there the temperament is finer than the ideas and the poet wiser than the thinker. His ultimate appeal is really to something more primitive and general than any social aspirations, to something more elementary than an ideal of any kind. He speaks to those minds and to those moods in which sensuality is touched with mysticism. When the intellect is in abeyance, when we would "turn and live with the animals, they are so placid and self-contained" [Thoreau], when we are weary of conscience and ambition, and would yield ourselves for a while to the dream of sense, Walt Whitman is a welcome companion. The images he arouses in us, fresh, full of light and health and of a kind of frankness and beauty, are prized all the more at such a time because they are not choice, but drawn perhaps from a hideous and sordid environment. For this circumstance makes them a better means of escape from convention and from that fatigue and despair which lurk not far beneath the surface of conventional life. In casting off with self-assurance and a sense of fresh vitality the distinctions of tradition and reason a man may feel, as he sinks back comfortably to a lower level of sense and instinct, that he is returning to Nature or escaping into the infinite. Mysticism makes us proud and happy to renounce the work of intelligence, both in thought and in life, and persuades us that we become divine by remaining imperfectly human. Walt Whitman gives a new expression to this ancient and multiform tendency. He feels his own cosmic justification and he would lend the sanction of his inspiration to all loafers and holiday-makers. He would be congenial patron to farmers and factory hands in their crude pleasures and pieties, as Pan was the patron of the shepherds of Arcadia: for he is sure that in spite of his hairiness and animality, the gods will acknowledge him as one of themselves and smile upon him from the serenity of Olympus."

Walt Whitman, American Dionysius

Like America itself, Whitman's Song of Myself, published anonymously in 1855, is unprecedented. No one had ever written anything like it, this great, huge sprawling anti-literary, anti-poetic poem, which
comes out of nowhere (no one really knows how this rather ordinary, self-educated guy did it) and defies even as it invites criticism. As the poet says of himself, it contains multitudes including its many critics as well as its fervent admirers. I read the critics, both those who despise and those who love Whitman's poetry and find myself agreeing with many of them, on both sides.

George Santayana's brilliant critique of Whitman, in Interpretations of Religion and Poetry (1900)—the subject of my next posting—is worth reading on its own account.

One thing is certain: this poem is fun to read aloud; it sounds good, it's got drive and momentum, it swings. As Duke Ellington says, if it sounds good it is good. And it's unique, one of a kind, which means that comparisons with Shakespeare or Milton or Dante or Homer who are deeply rooted in literary and intellectual traditions of great antiquity are pointless.

It must also be said that Whitman has a had a bad influence on American poetry: he made it look easy. Most free verse (that is, poetry without meter and/or rhyme) is, as Robert Frost said, like playing tennis without a net.

The best thing I can do for this strange poem (and for you, my readers, whoever you are) is to quote some sizable chunks; should you wish to read more, click on the following link, Song Of Myself (1855), which will take you to the poem itself in its original (1855) version.

Song Of Myself, by Walt Whitman


I celebrate myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.




I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease . . . . observing a spear of summer grass.




Houses and roof perfumes . . . . the shelves are crowded with perfumes,
I breathe the fragrance myself, and know it and like it,
The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.




The atmosphere is not a perfume . . . . it has no taste of the distillation . . . . it is odorless,
It is for my mouth forever . . . . I am in love with it,
I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.


The smoke of my own breath,
Echos, ripples, and buzzed whispers . . . . loveroot, silkthread, crotch and vine,
My respiration and inspiration . . . . the beating of my heart . . . . the passing of blood and air through my lungs,
The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and darkcolored sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn,
The sound of the belched words of my voice . . . . words loosed to the eddies of the wind,
A few light kisses . . . . a few embraces . . . . a reaching around of arms,
The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag,
The delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields and hillsides,
The feeling of health . . . . the full-noon trill . . . . the song of me rising from bed and meeting the sun.


Have you reckoned a thousand acres much? Have you reckoned the earth much?
Have you practiced so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?




Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun . . . . there are millions of suns left,
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand . . . . nor look through the eyes of the dead . . . . nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.




I have heard what the talkers were talking . . . . the talk of the beginning and the end,
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.




There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now;
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.




Urge and urge and urge,
Always the procreant urge of the world.




Out of the dimness opposite equals advance . . . . Always substance and increase,
Always a knit of identity . . . . always distinction . . . . always a breed of life.




To elaborate is no avail . . . . Learned and unlearned feel that it is so.




Sure as the most certain sure . . . . plumb in the uprights, well entretied, braced in the beams,
Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical,
I and this mystery here we stand.




Clear and sweet is my soul . . . . and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul.




Lack one lacks both . . . . and the unseen is proved by the seen,
Till that becomes unseen and receives proof in its turn.




Showing the best and dividing it from the worst, age vexes age,
Knowing the perfect fitness and equanimity of things, while they discuss I am silent, and go bathe and admire myself.




Welcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of any man hearty and clean,
Not an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none shall be less familiar than the rest.




I am satisfied . . . . I see, dance, laugh, sing;
As God comes a loving bedfellow and sleeps at my side all night and close on the peep of the day,
And leaves for me baskets covered with white towels bulging the house with their plenty,
Shall I postpone my acceptation and realization and scream at my eyes,
That they turn from gazing after and down the road,
And forthwith cipher and show me to a cent,
Exactly the contents of one, and exactly the contents of two, and which is ahead?




Trippers and askers surround me,
People I meet . . . . . the effect upon me of my early life . . . . of the ward and city I live in . . . . of the nation,
The latest news . . . . discoveries, inventions, societies . . . . authors old and new,
My dinner, dress, associates, looks, business, compliments, dues,
The real or fancied indifference of some man or woman I love,
The sickness of one of my folks -- or of myself . . . . or




ill-doing . . . . or loss or lack of money . . . . or depressions or exaltations,
They come to me days and nights and go from me again,
But they are not the Me myself.




Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,
Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary,
Looks down, is erect, bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest,
Looks with its sidecurved head curious what will come next,
Both in and out of the game, and watching and wondering at it.




Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog with linguists and contenders,
I have no mockings or arguments . . . . I witness and wait.




I believe in you my soul . . . . the other I am must not abase itself to you,
And you must not be abased to the other.




Loafe with me on the grass . . . . loose the stop from your throat,
Not words, not music or rhyme I want . . . . not custom or lecture, not even the best,
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.




I mind how we lay in June, such a transparent summer morning;
You settled your head athwart my hips and gently turned over upon me,
And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my barestript heart,
And reached till you felt my beard, and reached till you held my feet.




Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and joy and knowledge that pass all the art and argument of the earth;
And I know that the hand of God is the elderhand of my own,




And I know that the spirit of God is the eldest brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers . . . . and the women my sisters and lovers,
And that a kelson of the creation is love;
And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,
And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,
And mossy scabs of the wormfence, and heaped stones, and elder and mullen and pokeweed.




A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? . . . . I do not know what it is any more than he.




I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.




Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropped,
Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?




Or I guess the grass is itself a child . . . . the produced babe of the vegetation.




Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.




And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.


Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them;
It may be you are from old people and from women, and from offspring taken soon out of their mothers' laps,
And here you are the mothers' laps.



This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,
Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.




O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues!
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths
for nothing.




I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.




What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?




They are alive and well somewhere;
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceased the moment life appeared.




All goes onward and outward . . . . and nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.




Has any one supposed it lucky to be born?
I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.




I pass death with the dying, and birth with the new-washed babe . . . . and am not contained between my hat and boots,
And peruse manifold objects, no two alike, and every one good,
The earth good, and the stars good, and their adjuncts all good.



I am not an earth nor an adjunct of an earth,
I am the mate and companion of people, all just as immortal and fathomless as myself;
They do not know how immortal, but I know.




Every kind for itself and its own . . . . for me mine male and female,
For me all that have been boys and that love women,
For me the man that is proud and feels how it stings to be slighted,
For me the sweetheart and the old maid . . . . for me mothers and the mothers of mothers,
For me lips that have smiled, eyes that have shed tears,
For me children and the begetters of children.




Who need be afraid of the merge?
Undrape . . . . you are not guilty to me, nor stale nor discarded,
I see through the broadcloth and gingham whether or no,
And am around, tenacious, acquisitive, tireless . . . . and can never be shaken away.




The little one sleeps in its cradle,
I lift the gauze and look a long time, and silently brush away flies with my hand.
The youngster and the redfaced girl turn aside up the bushy hill,
I peeringly view them from the top.




The suicide sprawls on the bloody floor of the bedroom.
It is so . . . . I witnessed the corpse . . . . there the pistol had fallen.




The blab of the pave . . . . the tires of carts and sluff of bootsoles and talk of the promenaders,
The heavy omnibus, the driver with his interrogating thumb, the clank of the shod horses on the granite floor,
The carnival of sleighs, the clinking and shouted jokes and pelts of snowballs.



The hurrahs for popular favorites . . . . the fury of roused mobs,
The flap of the curtained litter -- the sick man inside, borne to the hospital,
The meeting of enemies, the sudden oath, the blows and fall,
The excited crowd -- the policeman with his star quickly working his passage to the centre of the crowd;
The impassive stones that receive and return so many echoes,
The souls moving along . . . . are they invisible while the least atom of the stones is visible?
What groans of overfed or half-starved who fall on the flags sunstruck or in fits,
What exclamations of women taken suddenly, who hurry home and give birth to babes,
What living and buried speech is always vibrating here . . . . what howls restrained by decorum,
Arrests of criminals, slights, adulterous offers made, acceptances, rejections with convex lips,
I mind them or the resonance of them . . . . I come again and again.




The big doors of the country-barn stand open and ready
The dried grass of the harvest-time loads the slow-drawn wagon,
The clear light plays on the brown gray and green intertinged,
The armfuls are packed to the sagging mow:
I am there . . . . I help . . . . I came stretched atop of the load,
I felt its soft jolts . . . . one leg reclined on the other,
I jump from the crossbeams, and seize the clover and timothy,
And roll head over heels, and tangle my hair full of wisps.




Alone far in the wilds and mountains I hunt,
Wandering amazed at my own lightness and glee,
In the late afternoon choosing a safe spot to pass the night,
Kindling a fire and broiling the freshkilled game,
Soundly falling asleep on the gathered leaves, my dog and gun by my side.



The Yankee clipper is under her three skysails . . . . she cuts the sparkle and scud,
My eyes settle the land . . . . I bend at her prow or shout joyously from the deck.




The boatmen and clamdiggers arose early and stopped for me,
I tucked my trowser-ends in my boots and went and had a good time,
You should have been with us that day round the chowder-kettle.




I saw the marriage of the trapper in the open air in the far-west . . . . the bride was a red girl,
Her father and his friends sat near by crosslegged and dumbly smoking . . . . they had moccasins to their feet and large thick blankets hanging from their shoulders;
On a bank lounged the trapper . . . . he was dressed mostly in skins . . . . his luxuriant beard and curls protected his neck,
One hand rested on his rifle . . . . the other hand held firmly the wrist of the red girl,
She had long eyelashes . . . . her head was bare . . . . her coarse straight locks descended upon her voluptuous limbs and reached to her feet.




The runaway slave came to my house and stopped outside,
I heard his motions crackling the twigs of the woodpile,
Through the swung half-door of the kitchen I saw him limpsey and weak,
And went where he sat on a log, and led him in and assured him,
And brought water and filled a tub for his sweated body and bruised feet,
And gave him a room that entered from my own, and gave him some coarse clean clothes,
And remember perfectly well his revolving eyes and his awkwardness,
And remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck and ankles;



He staid with me a week before he was recuperated and passed north,
I had him sit next me at table . . . . my firelock leaned in the corner.

...........................................................................................................

Falstaff, Lord Of Misrule

Samuel Johnson had this to say about Falstaff, in 1765, in the Preface to his edition of Shakespeare's plays:

None of Shakespeare’s plays are more read than the first and second parts of Henry the fourth. Perhaps no authour has ever in two plays afforded so much delight. The great events are interesting, for the fate of kingdoms depends upon them; the slighter occurrences are diverting, and, except one or two, sufficiently probable; the incidents are multiplied with wonderful fertility of invention, and the characters diversified with the utmost nicety of discernment, and the profoundest skill in the nature of man.
The prince, who is the hero both of the comick and tragick part, is a young man of great abilities and violent passions, whose sentiments are right, though his actions are wrong; whose virtues are obscured by negligence, and whose understanding is dissipated by levity. In his idle hours he is rather loose than wicked, and when the occasion forces out his latent qualities, he is great without effort, and brave without tumult. The trifler is roused into a hero, and the hero again reposes in the trifler. This character is great, original, and just. Percy is a rugged soldier, cholerick, and quarrelsome, and has only the soldier’s virtues, generosity and courage.


But Falstaff unimitated, unimitable Falstaff, how shall I describe thee? Thou compound of sense and vice; of sense which may be admired but not esteemed, of vice which may be despised, but hardly detested. Falstaff is a character loaded with faults, and with those faults which naturally produce contempt. He is a thief, and a glutton, a coward, and a boaster, always ready to cheat the weak, and prey upon the poor; to terrify the timorous and insult the defenceless. At once obsequious and malignant, he satirises in their absence those whom he lives by flattering. He is familiar with the prince only as an agent of vice, but of this familiarity he is so proud as not only to be supercilious and haughty with common men, but to think his interest of importance to the duke of Lancaster. Yet the man thus corrupt, thus despicable, makes himself necessary to the prince that despises him, by the most pleasing of all qualities, perpetual gaiety, by an unfailing power of exciting laughter, which is the more freely indulged, as his wit is not of the splendid or ambitious kind, but consists in easy escapes and sallies of levity, which make sport but raise no envy. It must be observed that he is stained with no enormous or sanguinary crimes, so that his licentiousness is not so offensive but that it may be borne for his mirth.
The moral to be drawn from this representation is, that no man is more dangerous than he that with a will to corrupt, hath the power to please; and that neither wit nor honesty ought to think themselves safe with such a companion when they see Henry seduced by Falstaff.

If, in 1765, King Henry IV was the most widely read of all Shakespeare's plays, it was because of Falstaff. Even Johnson, one of the most powerful and astute literary minds ever to write in English, feels the charm of this "despicable" man, the sort of man that everyone knows, a cheat and a fraud who sucks up to the strong and takes advantage of the weak, a man who knows there's a sucker born every minute and makes full use of that knowledge. You might have thought that there is nothing new to be said about such people but Shakespeare has done it. Falstaff is as ancient as civilization itself, yet still a mystery, a man who can make you laugh and pick your pocket at the same time while you wonder how the devil he does it.

The question is, what is this jester-buffoon-con-man doing in this dead serious play which, if it is about anything, is not only about a rebellion against a king whose sovereignty may not be entirely legitimate but about the education of a Prince and future King—and a great King at that (King Henry V)— who evidently prefers the society of Falstaff and his low friends and drinking companions to that of the King and the Court.

To answer this question, one needs to know something about the historical King, Richard II, as well as the play that Shakespeare wrote about him. The historic Richard II invented the theory of Divine Right, not out of whole cloth to be sure, and was deposed by Parliamentary forces led by Henry Bolinbroke (there was no House of Commons in the 14th century) because Richard was claiming that the laws "were in his own mouth." It was what we would call today a constitutional crisis but the phrase and even perhaps the concept had not yet been invented. In the play, Richard II, the king has surrounded himself with his own cronies who are enriching themselves at the expense of the commonwealth (a peculiarly English word that seems to combine the ideas of a nation and the common good) which causes much grumbling but no action until Richard goes too far, exiles a great noble, Henry Bolingbroke and, in his absence, confiscates his lands and inheritance. Bolingbroke returns with an army ostensibly to recover his inheritance, but once the Richard has been defeated and imprisoned there is really no reason to keep him alive and he is discreetly murdered.

As the play, King Henry IV, begins the new King confronts two problems as he surveys his war-ravaged kingdom: the great nobles who supported his rebellion think that the spoils of victory have not been fairly distributed; and what do they want with a King anyway? They've just rid themselves one king; why not this one as well? And here's the Prince: not only does he show no interest in government or statesmanship but from the company he keeps he is beginning to look like another Richard II surrounded by cronies and bloodsuckers. This relationship between Prince Hal and Falstaff is the central problem of this two-part play and Shakespeare loses no time in introducing us to these two characters. But he does so in a way that radically changes the tone of the play: having in the first scene begun grimly, the play suddenly veers off into comedy in the second. Only in a comedy—and only in England, perhaps—could you have had a prince and future King hobnobbing in the most familiar terms with a ruffian like Falstaff. And what are they talking about? Misrule, of course. For all the joking around, this is serious stuff: Falstaff is asking for a license to steal and the Prince is fending him off.

  Fal.  Now, Hal, what time of day is it, lad?
  Prince.  Thou art so fat witted with drinking of old 
sack, and unbuttoning thee after supper, and sleeping
on benchesafter noon, that thou hast forgotten to 
demand that truly which thou woulds't truly know. 
What a devil hast thou to do with the time of day? 
unless hours were cups of sack, and minutes capons, 
and clocks the tongues of bawds, and dials the signs of 
leaping-houses [brothels], and the blessed sun himself 
a fair hot wench in flame-color'd taffeta; I see no reason why 
thou shouldst be so superfluous as to demand the time 
of the day.
  Fal.  Indeed you come near me now, Hal, for we 
that take purses go by the moon and the seven stars, 
and not by Phoebus, he, "that wand'ring knight 
so fair." And I prithee, sweet wag, when thou art a 
king, as, God save thy Grace—Majesty I should say, 
for grace thou wilt have none—
  Prince.  What, none?
  Fal.  No, by my troth, not so much as will serve to be
prologue to an egg and butter.
  Prince.  Well, how then? Come, roundly, roundly.
  Fal.  Marry, then sweet wag, when thou art king,
let not us that are squires of the night's body be call'd
thieves of the day's beauty. Let us be Diana's
foresters, gentlemen of the shade, minions of the moon,
and let men say we be men of good government, being
govern'd, as the sea is, by our noble and chaste mistress
the moon, under whose countenance we steal.
  Prince.  Thou sayest well, and it holds well too, for
the fortunes of us that are moon's men doth ebb and
flow like the sea, being govern'd as the sea is, by the
moon. As, for proof, now: a purse of gold most
resolutely snatch'd on Monday night and most
dissolutely spent on Tuesday morning; got with
swearing "Lay by," and spent with crying "Bring in";
now in as low an ebb as the foot of the ladder, and by
and by in as high a flow as the ridge of the gallows.
  Fal.  By the Lord, thou say'st true, lad. And is not
my hostess of the tavern a most sweet wench?
  Prince.  As the honey of Hybla, my old lad of the
castle. And is hot a buff jerkin a most sweet robe of durance?
  Fal.  How now, how now, mad wag? What in thy
quips and quiddities? What a plague have I to do
with a buff jerkin?
  Prince.  Why what a pox have I to do with my
hostess of the tavern? . . . . . 

  Fal. . . .                                      But I prithee,
sweet wag, shall there be gallows standing in England
when thou art King? and resolution thus fubb'd as
it is with the rusty curb of old father antic the law?
Do not, when thou art king, hang a thief.
  Prince.  No, thou shalt.
  Fal.  Shall I? O rare! By the lord, I'll be a brave judge.
  Prince.  Thou judgest false already. I mean thou
shalt have the hanging of thieves, and so become a 
rare hangman.
  Fal.  Well, Hal, well, and in some sort it jumps with
my humor as well as waiting in the court, I can tell you.
  Prince.  For obtaining of suits?
  Fal. Yea, for obtaining of suits, whereof the hangman
hath no lean wardrobe. 'Sblood, I am as a melancholy
as a gib cat or a lugg'd bear . . . .
But, Hal, I prithee trouble me no more with vanity;
I would to God thou and I knew where a commodity
of good names were to be bought. An old man of the 
Council rated me the other day in the street about 
you, sir, but I mark'd him not, and yet he talk'd very
wisely, but I regarded him not, and yet he talk'd wisely
and in the street too.
  Prince.  Thou didst well, for wisdom cries out in
the streets, and no man regards it.
  Fal.  O, thou hast damnable iteration, and art indeed
able to corrupt a saint. Thou hast done much harm upon
me, Hal, God forgive thee for it! Before I knew thee,
Hal, I knew nothing, and now am I, if a man should
speak truly, little better than one of the wicked. I must
give over this life, and I will give it over. By the Lord,
and I do not, I am a villain, I'll be damned for never a
king's son in Christendom.
  Prince.  Where shall we take a purse tomorrow,
Jack?
  Fal.  'Zounds, where thou wilt, lad, I'll make one,
an' I do not, call me villain and baffle me.
  Prince.  I see a good amendment of life in thee,
from praying to purse-taking.
  Fal.  Why, Hal, 'tis my vocation, Hal, 'tis no sin
for a man to labor in his vocation.


Then, suddenly, the question that had been merely hypothetical, suddenly becomes real, with the entry of Poins, another member of Falstaff's band of buddies:

  Fal.  Poins! Now shall we know if Gadshill have set
 a match. O, if men were to be sav'd by merit, what hole in
hell were deep enough for him? This is the most
omnipotent villain that ever cried "Stand!" to a true man.
  Prince.  Good morrow, Ned.
  Poins.  Good morrow, sweet Hal. What says 
Monsieur Remorse? What says Sir John Sack and
sugar? Jack, how agrees the Devil and thee about thy
soul that thou soldest to him on Good Friday last, for a 
cup of Madeira and a cold capon's leg?
  Prince.  Sir John stands to his word, the devil shall
have his bargain, for he was never yet a breaker of
proverbs. He will give the devil his due.
  Poins.  Then art thou damn'd for keeping they word
with the devil.
  Prince.  Else had he been damn'd for cozening the devil.
  Poins.  But, my lads, to-morrow morning
by four a' clock early at Gadshill, there are
pilgrims going to Canterbury with rich offerings, and
traders riding to London with fat purses.


The Prince refuses, at first, to have anything to do with this lawless scheme, but when Poins takes him aside and explains his real object, to expose Falstaff as the cowardly blusterer that he is, he agrees to go along. The robbery, accordingly, goes off as planned, no one is hurt, (the money returned) but Poins' plot against Falstaff misfires; Falstaff can wriggle out of anything: instead of humiliation, triumph.

Meanwhile, the really big robbery, or coup, that the disaffected nobility have been planning is going forward. Though this rebellion has a charismatic but erratic hero, Hotspur, to front for it, the rebels are fractious and undisciplined; the well organized and well led armies of the King easily defeats them at the Battle of Shrewsbury in which Falstaff, characteristically playing his comic and self-serving role, manages simultaneously to save his skin and by hutzpah and bluster alone get himself acclaimed as the hero who won the battle. And so the play ends, though the problem of misrule, or corruption, has not been dealt with; that's what Part 2 is about.



Being naturally social and political animals, as Aristotle observes, we
cannot elude identification indefinitely. Even Falstaff is finally pinned
down. When Prince Hal becomes King Henry V, in the second part of
King Henry IV, he too acquires a social role and identity that he cannot
slough off. He can govern well or ill but govern he must. His first test,
and one that everyone expects him to fail, is pretty basic: what will he
do about his former cronies including, most especially, Falstaff?
Even today, cronyism is the norm in most societies. The idea that
justice should be no respecter of persons has still not taken hold, or is
only beginning to do so, outside of Europe and North America. The
ancient notion that Socrates (or Plato) set his face against, that a good
man is one who uses his power to help his friends and hurt his enemies,
is still widely accepted. It seems to have been the undoing of
(Shakespeare’s) Richard II. Shakespeare is absolutely unequivocal on
this point and for this he has taken a lot of heat from Falstaff's more
sentimental admirers.

The first thing the new king does is tell his Chief Justice, who has
been expecting the worst, that he respects his integrity and that of his
office and confirms him in it. Next, he puts Falstaff in his place—with
an allowance so he won’t be forced to prey on others (vain hope!). And
what is that place? Ten miles, at least, from wherever he, the King, happens
to be. But Falstaff is an idea and a fact of life and human nature
as well as a person and cannot be exorcised, as the King seems to be
trying to do. Falstaff is mortal, but his irreverent, bawdy, amoral wit
lives on. Shakespeare makes him an old man, which is appropriate, for
he had been around for a very long time when Shakespeare discovered
or invented him; there have always been people like him and there
always will be. They are not always as witty and charming as Falstaff;
they are mostly a lot meaner and lot less funny. People like them are
what laws are for.

Falstaff, with his latest victim at his side, is stunned, though he
might have known what was coming had he paid attention to what the
Prince has been telling him all along, that he would not, as king, accept
Falstaff's idea of good government. But suddenly all that seems irrelevant.
Even those of us who have been paying attention are likely to feel
that Hal’s icy and humiliating rejection goes too far. If this is what good
government requires, we want none of it.

Unfortunately, it is what good government requires—necessary
though not sufficient. Shakespeare is making a point and making it
more pointedly than he has to, perhaps, because he really does not like
the man Hal has turned into any better than we do. It is a point that
Machiavelli would have understood, though it did not occur to him to
make it in quite this way. Those who have it in their power to make or
break the lives of others in the interest of some common good have to
be or become different from you and me. They cannot afford to have the
same feelings or friendships as ordinary people; not if they know their
business. They must know how to be cold and hard. So, in Henry V, Hal
hangs his old pal Bardolph for a trivial offense, without the slightest
compunction. The law is the law and that’s that.

Prince Hal, like Queen Elizabeth, has the virtues of a good governor,
and that’s a fact which Shakespeare leaves unexplained. It is a fact that
this Prince has the wisdom to discern both the limitations and virtues of
Hotspur, and the creative-destructive wit of Hotspur’s polar opposite,
Falstaff. Politicians who want to know people as they are had better get
to know the witty rascals, riffraff and scoundrels of Falstaff’s world as
well as the more glamorous and honorable Hotspurs; there are a lot
more of the former than the latter. This is not the sort of thing they teach
in schools or churches; though political wisdom is undoubtedly learned,
it cannot be taught, but only shown: in a play like this one, for instance.

"Why, this is the best fooling when all is done"— Shakespeare's supreme comedy, Twelfth Night

Before reading this play,  Twelfth Night, Or What You Will, with Anne Barton's introductory essay (so much better than anything I could have written), listen to Feste's beautiful song, which like fooling (of which Feste is also a master) sets the tone of this play:

O mistress mine, where are you roaming?
O, stay and hear, your true-love's coming,
That can sing both high and low.
Trip no further, pretty sweeting;
Journeys end in lovers meeting,
Every wise man's son doth know.


What is love? 'Tis not hereafter;
Present mirth hath present laughter;
What's to come is still unsure.
In delay there lies no plenty,
Then come kiss me sweet and twenty;
Youth's a stuff will not endure. (II.3.39-53)


"Twelfth Night, Or What You Will, is the only play for which Shakespeare provided an alternative title. As with Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, and All's Well That Ends Well, his other late Elizabethan comedies, the title as a whole is more serious than it offhand and casual manner would suggest. The world 'will' possessed for  Elizabethans its modern sense of "wish" or "inclination," and is its primary significance here: and airy invitation to reader and audience to rechristen the comedy according to individual taste and reaction. . . Elizabethans, however, also used the noun 'will' for irrational  desire, passion (often physical) uncontrolled by judgment. . . in this sense the comedy is about what people —Olivia,  Orsino, Antonio, Malvolio, and even Viola—"will,"  the frightening suddenness  with which the "pales and forts of reason" as Hamlet termed them, may be swept away by a kind of emotional thunderstorm. . . . .

"Even if the comedy received its first performance on Twelfth Night, Shakespeare is most unlikely to have given it this name purely for so accidental and ephemeral a reason. Within the play itself there are no specific references to the Feast of the Epiphany, the twelfth and culminating day of the Christmas season . . . . Epiphany was originally a major Christian feast, even more important thanThe  Christmas. It commemorated not only the coming of the Magi with gifts to Bethlehem, but later events in the life of Jesus: his baptism, and the miracle at Cana. Human nature being what it is, it was perhaps inevitable that a  celebration which initially was wholly pious should, with time, alter its complexion, attracting to itself in the process a good deal of the license and even the specific customs of the pagan Saturnalia. Before long, the Church found itself struggling to suppress what had gradually become a kind of annual orgy within sacred precincts: the celebration of a world turned ritually upside down. The effort was in part successful. By the end of the fifteenth century the riotous Feast of Fools, now associated with Epiphany, had at last been driven out of the Church itself and forced to adopt less overtly blasphemous forms. In secular society, however, especially at the Inns of Court and in the universities and in princely gatherings, it continued to flourish in Shakespeare's lifetime.  If he christened a comedy Twelfth Night, it seems reasonable to assume that he intended that title to summon up images of Epiphany as it was celebrated in his own time: a period of holiday abandon in which the normal rules and order of life were suspended or else deliberately inverted, in which serious issues and events mingled perplexingly with revelry and apparent madness. This, in effect, is the atmosphere in Illyria: a country where everyone (except, perhaps, Feste) is very much in earnest, but also a little insane. . . .

"The words "Twelfth Night" not only suggest a carnival world; they warn an audience that it is not to ask too many awkward questions about the miraculous resemblance of boy and girl twins who, on the stage, will almost invariably look less than identical. Nor are we to question love at first sight, a duke who accepts as his wife a servant he thought only five minutes before, was a boy, or feasibility of persuading a man that he can make his fortune forever by way yellow stockings and crossed garters. In a world that is ritually upside down, almost anything can happen. There is a sense in which Sir Toby Belch is the master of these disorderly revels, a man literally intoxicated throughout most of the play, for whom time in its logical, workaday aspect has simply ceased to exist: "To be up after midnight and to go to bed then, is early; so that to go to bed after midnight is to go to bed betimes." (II.3.7-9) As a kind of carnival, or temporary, king, Sir Toby rules his sector of Olivia's household according to the rules of holiday inconsequence. His chief enemy, of course, is Malvolio. Olivia's steward is not only dedicated to work, sobriety, and regular hours: he insists that all the world should follow his example, that there should be no cakes and ale, no tang of ginger on the tongue, and no relaxation of discipline in man's progress from cradle to grave. He has no use for folly, whether it is that of Feste the professional, or Fabian's low taste for the sport of bear-baiting, or the nightly songs and carousals of Sir Toby and his companion Aguecheek.

"Toby himself is a parasite sponging off a young and beautiful niece. He uses this position to deceive and profit from the ridiculous ambitions of a hanger-on of his own, Sir Andrew Aguecheek. In the final scene he will turn viciously on this supposed friend: "Will you help? —an ass-head and a coxcomb and a knave, a thin-faced knave, a gull!" (V.1.206-7) There is nothing lovely, or even honest, about Sir Toby's riotous little court. Yet a theater audience will always, at least up the point of  Malvolio's incarceration in the dark house of Act IV, support Sir Toby, Sir Andrew, Maria, Feste, and Fabian in their plot against the steward. In the study it is possible to be more soft-hearted. To watch Twelfth Night on the stage, however, is to participate and delight in a heightened world temporarily free from time and normal responsibility. At a party where everyone is gloriously drunk, Malvolio is the guest who insists on remaining cold sober, who reads long lectures on temperance to everyone else, and threatens to summon the police. As such, he is our enemy as well as Sir Toby's, not only because he tries to suppress music and revelry which we find entertaining, but because we recognize that,  in his view, we ought not be indulging ourselves by going to the theater at all. This is why his downfall, in its early stages is so delicious. Yellow-stockinged and cross-gartered, trying to learn how to smile, Malvolio has become the unconscious victim of precisely that irrational spirit of holiday which he so despises. He has harbored a private folly all along—his conceit, born of self-love and isolation, that Olivia adores him—and when his enemies employ it against him, his behavior becomes at least as mad as theirs.

"Madness in Illyria is by no means confined to Sir Toby, his entourage, and the deceived Malvolio. The very first scene of the comedy introduces Orsino, a nobleman committed to a course of wild extravagancy, in the Elizabethan sense of that word. He is bound up within a fiction, a dream of romantic passion, in which the voyage itself is really more important than its specific goal. . . Whatever some critics may say, the lovelorn Orsino is not a figure of fun. Indeed, the verse he speaks at the beginning of the play is seductively beautiful: intense, metaphoric, and imaginative. Only by the slightest touches—the way his hunting image,  for instane, threatens to overbalance into an Actaeon/cuckold joke which the speaker certainly does not intend—does Shakespeare hint at something that Feste, later, will make explicit: the fact that Orsino's love melancholy is essentially sterile and self-induced,  a state of mind dependent  upon that very absence and lack of response from Olivia which it affects to lament.

"On the whole, Olivia will suffer greater humiliation than Orsino in the course of the comedy, although her lack of self-knowledge is no more acute than his. She is described from the beginning in words that evoke a complex response.

The element itself, till seven years'  heat,
Shall not behold her face at ample view;
But like a cloistress she will veiled walk,
And water once a day her chamber round
With eye-offending brine; all this to season
A brother's dead love, which she would keep fresh
And lasting in her sad remembrance.  (I.1.25-31)

"The underlying image here is homely, even a little grotesque. Like a housewife who carefully turns a piece of pickled meat once a day in its brine bath, Olivia intends through salt tears to preserve the memory of her dead brother beyond the normal span of grief. There is something forced and abnormal about such mourning, but there is also—as Orsino's reaction makes clear—something noble. . . Olivia is engaged in a war against time and human forgetfulness . . . the attempt fails . . . At the first sight of Cesario she abandons her veil and, in rapid succession after that, her tears, her rites of memory, her pride, and even her modesty. It is right and proper, in accord with all the laws of comedy, that this should happen,  that Sebastian ultimately should fill up the place of the dead brother in Olivia's heart. Seven years is a long time and youth is very short . . . Yet Olivia's ignominious collapse, while necessary, is also sad. Man has his glimpses of the ideal, whether of love or of fidelity to the dead. Not  even in Illyria, however, an such ideals be sustained.

"In the comedies that he wrote before Twelfth Night, Shakespeare had created a number of fantasy worlds, places that never were on sea or land, where life has some of the qualities of a dream. He invented Portia's house over the sea at Belmont, with its riddle-game, its music, and its limitless wealth; the forests of As You Like It, The Two Gentlemen of Verona and A Midsummer Night's Dream; the withdrawn, artificially  enclosed park of Love's Labor's Lost. Even in The Come,dy of Errors, The Taming of The Shrew, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Much Ado About Nothing there are shadowy traces of this pattern of movement from an ordinary world to a second, somehow magical, environment in which characters are transformed, but which they must leave at the end of the comedy to take up the burden of the everyday. The people who set out from Arden, Navarre, Oberon's wood, Windsor great park, or the nightmare house of Petruchio are not quite the same as those who have sojourned there. Their experiences in this second, heightened world have altered them, usually for the better. It is clear, however, that their future lies  in a harsher, more realistic society, subject to imperfection, death, human limitation, and Time, which we accept as an image of our own.

"In the final romances [a term that has been invented by modern editors; in the First Folio, all the plays that were neither history plays nor tragedies, were comedies] Shakespeare abandoned this comic pattern. The Tempest is the only play which even approximates to it, and it does so in a very peculiar sense indeed.   [If it weren't for Caliban, in my opinion, that play would be dead, dead, dead.] The characters of the last plays are constantly travelling, but the places from which they set out, to which they journey, and to which they return are all equally marvellous. There is no distinction in this particular sense between Tharsus, Tyre, and Mytilene in Pericles, between Sicily and Bohemia in The Winter's Tale, between Cymbeline's court and the forest to which Imogen flees. People may be transformed within it, but their transformation no longer depends upon their experience of an extraordinary place where the demands of life as they know it are, for a time, suspended and which they must leave at the end.

"In ways that go beyond the implications of its title, Twelfth Night is a kind of Janus-faced play, mediating between the early comedies and the last romances. Viola's disguise as Cesario recalls the masculine disguise of Julia [in Two Gents] and Rosalind. Yet in her strange passivity, her insistance on enduring events rater than creating them, she is like Perdita and Miranda, Marina and Imogen. The theme of mistaken identity, that confusion between twins which finally gives Sebastian to Olivia, Viola to Orsino, Shakespeare had exploited years before in The Comedy of Errors. Its emotional quality in Twelfth Night, however,  prefigures the highly charged reunions of Pericles and The Winter's Tale. With respect to the idea of two comic worlds, one of them heightened, the other an analogue to our own reality, Twelfth Night seems to strike a balance between the practice of early and late Shakespearean comedy. Viola and Sebastian are shipwrecked into Illyria, even as (metaphorically at least) Hermia, Helena, Demetrius and Lysander are 'shipwrecked' into the forest by the harsh laws of Athenian society, or as Bassanio flees the poverty of his condition in Venice in search of the golden fleece in Belmont. But the Twelfth Night  characters remain in Illyria; they do not return. Nor do we get any sense of what Messaline, the place from which they say they have come, is like. Any contrasts between the heightened and the ordinary must be found within Illyria itself.

"Both Viola and Sebastian, the two intruders from the sea, accept Illyria as they find it. They may be momentarily baffled by the topsy-turvy world of the revels: both yield themselves to the current without trying, as Malvolio tries, to alter its course. Sebasian cheerfully marries a woman he doesn't know, and who may well be mad, simply because she is lovely and lays passionate claim to him. Viola, once committed to her role as Orsino's page, conscientiously does whatever she is told, however painful, without trying to impose her own will upon events. She is careful to keep at arm's length from the love-crazed Olivia, but essentially she plays a waiting game, believing that Time 'must untangle this, not I.' (II.2.40) When circumstances provide her with virtual proof that her twin brother is not only alive but the source of considerable confusion and misunderstanding in Illyria, she not only makes no attempt to explain, let alone find him: she sits almost unnaturally still, leaving the wretched Antonio to flounder in an agony of mind, and her own love Orsino to entertain the most murderous suspicions and intents. Hopelessly entangled herself in the rough-and-tumble world of the underplot, deceived by the false challenge of Sir Toby, terrified by the bare prospect of combat with Sir Andrew, her efforts are all to evade action rather than, like Rosalind, to initiate it. Even her boy's disguise operates not as a liberation but merely as a way of going underground in a difficult situation, of waiting to see what Time will bring. This attitude, it turns out, is the best she could have adopted. By surrendering herself unquestioningly to the madness of Illyria, by remaining aware but passive, she contrives to win Olivia for her brother, redeem Antonio's life, and marry Orsino herself.

"Time, however, is a two-fold entity in Twelfth Night. Even Viola, for all her faith in Time as a redemptive and beneficent force, can see that it has another face. When she tells Orsino about that supposed sister who never told her love but sat 'like Patience on a monument, / Smiling at grief" (II.4.114-15), until it was too late, or agrees with him sadly that women are like summer roses which 'die, even when they to perfection grow' (II.4.41), her words are filled with a bitter consciousness that for her too the months are passing and slowly diminishing her beauty and her youth, hidden in a boy's disguise. The chief spokesman for this second, realistic kind of Time is not, however, Viola but Feste. Feste is not only a wise fool, a man in complete intellectual and emotional control of himself, who has chosen the part of professional jester: he operates throughout the comedy as a truth-teller who reminds the other characters that holiday, by its very nature is not eternal. It is Feste who points out to the revellers that the future is uncertain, laughter momentary, and youth 'a stuff will not endure' (II.3.52). He tells Olivia sometehing she does not want to hear, that 'beauty's a flower' (I.5.52), and suggests ominously beneath his seeming lightness that 'pleasure will be paid, one time or another' (II.4.70-1). An isolated figure, with no discernible loyalties, involvements, or private life [but where has he been when he gets scolded for being absent so long?], he seem to be as much (or as little) at home in Orsino's house as in Oilivia's. In both he remains watchful, observant, and essentially detached.

"Elizabethans would naturally have expected Feste to be heavily involved in the plot against Malvolio, not only because he has a personal grudge against the steward, but because such behavior was appropriate to a Fool. Real-life fools, if they had sufficient wit, were much given to the perpetration of practical jokes, as witness some of the stories told in a A Nest of Ninnies (1605), that scarifying anthology compiled by Robert Armin, the actor who originally played Feste. Shakespeare, however, keeps Feste apart from the gulling of Malvolio until the Sir Topas scene just before the end. This is the scene in which it is first intimated that the spirit of carnival [and license] is about to break. Even Sir Toby can scent the morning air. He begins to worry that they've gone too far . . . and wishes that they 'were well rid of all this knavery' (IV.2.67-8). In Act V, images of death and violence proliferate. Antonio appears bound, anguished, and facing the prospect of execution. His presence summons up the memory of war and destruction, that sea-fight in which Orsino's nephew had been maimed for life. Maddened by jealousy, Orsino threatens to kill Cesario. Sir Toby and Sir Andrew, having narrowly escaped serious injury at the hands of Sebastian, arrive on the scene covered with blood and calling for a surgeon. The party it seems is over. Suddenly sober and disillusioned, Sir Andrew wishes pathetically that he were at home. Two broken revellers, even their friendship [such as it was] destroyed, they vanish from the stage, not to reappear. Maria does not appear either, to give us any indication about how she feels about her marriage bargain with Sir Toby. As for Malvolio, he intrudes briefly on the scene of joy at the end, without understanding any of it, and departs as a figure of violence, threatening revenge on this society in which he is an alien.

"At the end of Twelfth Night, the two kinds of time that have coexisted throughout the comedy suddenly diverge. They are used to distinguish a world of fiction from one of fact. For Viola and Orsino, Olivia and Sebastian, there will be no awakening from the dream, no need to leave a heightened  realm. The clock by which they live is that of fairy-tale: beneficent, unhurried, and admittedly unreal. Shakespeare goes out of his way to stress the formal, distanced quality of their story at its conclusion. This is why Sebastian and Viola, twins parted for only three months, put one another through a question-and-answer test of the most artificial kind, why Viola (unlike Rosalind) does not return to her girl's clothes. Orsino simply accepts a woman he has never, in fact, seen. Olivia accepts as husband a stranger she has mistaken for someone else. The resolutions and accords are powerful and emotionally charged, but they are also deliberately play-like and literary, not to be confused with the way of the world as we know it to be. Olivia and Sebastian, Viola and Orsino confront us at the end less as representatives of a new society but as people who, by the special dispensation of Comedy, have been allowed to escape from death and time.

"There is a disturbingly large number of important absentees in the ending of Twelfth Night, more than in any other Shakespearean comedy. Sir Andrew, Sir Toby, Maria, and Malvolio do not participate in this happy ending. Antonio is present but seems to have no part to play. Feste is absent too during the revelations and explanations, but he seems (characteristically) to understand and accept what has happened when he appears to end the comedy . . . Our revels, too, have ended. It is the task of Feste in his final song to tell us this, and to build a bridge from that remote enchanted place where the two romantic couples remain forever, to the very different world outside the theater which is our own. Like Jacques' summary of the seven ages of life from the cradle to the grave, Feste's account [in his final song, which will be alluded to by the Fool in King Lear] of man's inexorable progress from a child's holiday realm of irresponsibility and joy into age, vice, disillusionment, and death draws from an old didactic tradition. Its basic pessimism is informed and sweetened, however, not only by the music to which it is set,  but by the tolerance and acceptance of Feste himself. Precisely because of his anonymity and aloofness in the play now ended, he can be trusted to speak for all mankind, and not simply for himself. There is nothing that can be done about those harsh facts of existence to which Feste points, any more than about the wind and the rain. They must simply be endured. Like childhood happiness, all comedies come to an end. The great and consoling difference lies in the fact that one can, after all, as Feste points out, return to the theater: and there 'we'll strive to please you every day.'"

Much Ado About Nothing

"In its basic outline," says Anne Barton in her introduction to this play (Riverside edition, 1997), the Hero and Claudio plot is of great age, tracing its ancestry back to the romance literature of ancient Greece. It seems, however, to have acquired an especial popularity during the Renaissance . . . .  Usually, although by no means always, the villain of the piece is the lover's friend: a man treacherously in love with the lady himself [as in Two Gentlemen of Verona] who slanders her in order to break off the match. . . .

"In Much Ado About Nothing Shakespeare transferred the rivalry between love and friendship to a position slightly outside the main imbroglio. Don John, the source of a misunderstanding that comes close to being fatal, has no interest in Hero herself. A man incapable of any genuine human relationship, he is not even Claudio's friend let alone his rival in love. Don John is a malcontent pure and simple, a man who might say with the cold Duke in Thurber's story The Thirteen Clocks: "We all have faults, and mine is doing wickedness." Certainly, Shakespeare makes no attempt  to provide him with even the kind of fairy-tale motivation that Oliver has for practicing against the life of his younger brother in As You Like It. The fact that Don John was born a bastard [like Edmund in King Lear]  becomes an all-sufficient explanation of why it is that he is treacherous, scheming, savage, and morose. A thing of darkness, out of step with his society, he hates the children of light simply because they generate radiance in a world he prefers to see dark. This is why he plans to wreck the intended marriage of Claudio and Hero. He has nothing to gain personally from such a tactic, except the pleasure of annoying his brother, grieving Claudio, turning laughter to tears, and reducing everyone around him to the state of misery and gloom in which he languishes himself. A plot mechanism more than a complex character in his own right, Don John appears in the play as a kind of anti-comic force [like Malvolio in Twelfth Night], the official enemy of all happy endings.

"Much Ado About Nothing represents a variant on the more usual Shakespearean comic pattern of a journey from an urban to a rural, an ordinary to a heightened world, and back again. All the action of the play takes place in Messina, but it is a town temporarily lifted out of its ordinary habits and atmosphere by the fact that it happens to be filled with glamorous strangers . . . .  In the Messina of the comedy, masked faces, revels and dances are the order of the day. Apart from Dogberry and his associates, this is a courtly world enjoying a period of carnival. Some of the deceits, like the one that
brings Beatrice and Benedict together are harmless and even beneficent. Others are not. The general atmosphere, however, is conducive to eavesdropping, mistaken identity, game-playing, and conversations reported wrongly, even as it is to music, feasting, and marriage. Claudio's wooing of Hero seems almost like an expected and conventional response to the times: an acknowledgement that, when wars are over it is advisable to start replenishing a population diminished by bullets and swords. Certainly, Claudio's courtship of Hero is of the most formal and socially proper kind. He takes her wealth and position as Leonato's only child into careful account, seeks the advice and approbation of his prince before embarking on the match, and behaves in every way like a sober and prudent man contracting a dynastic alliance in which the charms of the lady matter, of course, but scarcely inspire in him the recklessness of a Romeo.  A man does not allow his prince, however respected, to propose marriage for him in disguise unless he sees that marriage in social more than personal terms. This, however, is what Claudio does. Only when Don Pedro has secured the consent of both the lady and her father does the prospective bridegroom speak to Hero herself. With the war happily ended, Claudio feels that the time is right for matrimony and for begetting an heir. His practicality in this respect is not exactly held against him, but it does explain the ease with which he believes Don John's slanders, and the unconsidered violence with which he shames Hero and casts her off. Claudio is a man who thinks he has been duped in a bargain, not a Troilus whose whole world shatters around him because he has to recognize that the  goddess of his idolatry is false.

"Hero too is docile and passive. She welcomes the alliance with Claudio, but there is no suggestion that she has been pining with love for the young Florentine while he has been away at the war. . . Elizabethans must have detected a certain irony in the name Shakespeare bestowed upon this singularly dutiful daughter. In Greek mythology, Hero was the lady beloved of Leander, who broke her religious vows in oder to enjoy a clandestine love affair with him. When, through the enmity of the gods, Leander was drowned while swimming the Hellespont one night to a secret meeting with her, Hero killed herself. Shakespeare knew Marlowe's great narrative poem on the subject and, in As You Like It, quoted a line from it: "Who ever lov'd that lov'd not at first sight." [This is the only line from a contemporary poet that Shakespeare ever quoted or even referred to. Marlowe, the dead shepherd referred to as the writer of that line, had been a friend of his.] It would be hard to imagine an attitude further away from the caution and circumspection of Claudio's Hero.

"The affairs of these two lovers, often conducted through third parties, are inveterately public. The rupture between them, when it comes, is public too. Claudio denounces Hero in church, on their wedding day, before a crowd of people, and with the backing of the Prince. Even Leonato, Hero's own father, is convinced. In the bitterest speech of the comedy, he begs his own child at least to have the decency to die, and tries to prevent anyone from reviving her. The friar has some difficulty in persuading him that this condemnation may be too hasty. Apart from the friar, only Beatrice and Benedict suspect, from the first that Hero is really innocent and the prince and Claudio misled. Beatrice, in particular, reacts violently against Claudio's public denunciation of her cousin: "What, bear her in hand until they come to take hands, and then with public accusation, uncover'd slander, unmitigated rancor—O God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the market-place" (IV.1.303-7).
Her indignation is just; and it also serves to indicate the distance between her own intensely personal attachment to Benedict and the more formal outward bond which unites [eventually] Claudio and Hero. Claudio's atonement when the truth is known, even his reunion with Hero, are wholly consistent with the nature of this plot: his penitence before Hero's tomb in V.3 is again public, a ritual demonstration of sorrow, and he gets his lady back only because he agrees to ally himself, sight unseen, with another daughter of Leonato's house.

"Much Ado About Nothing is usually dated 1598. There is no specific source for the Beatrice and Benedict underplot . . . . There is a suggestion in the text that these 'two bears' were once, at some indeterminate past time, in love with each other (II.1.280-82). Shakespeare does not say why the relationship broke down but, in the comedy itself each one is obsessed with and continually talking about the other in a manner that makes it clear  from the start that their animosity is a cloak for feelings of a very different kind [which, we should add, they are not quite consciously aware of]. This is why they can be tricked with such ease. All that the conspirators have to do is suggest to each that the other has yielded first, has taken the first step towards an admission and acknowledgment of love,  and all defenses crumble. Both Beatrice and Benedict, for all their surface gaiety, their scorn of the married state, are essentially lonely people. They are older than Claudio and Hero and in danger of finding themselves imprisoned for life within a set of attitudes and social responses which, though witty and amusing, are nonetheless inhibiting and sterile. Neither can break these self-imposed fetters without help from outside. When this help arrives, they turn joyously to one another with a freedom and depth of engagement lacking in the relationship of Hero and Claudio.

". . . . . For all its surface aggression, its deflationary quality, their wit is really defensive: a way of protecting a self that they know to be vulnerable. Beatrice savages Benedict in public, and mocks him behind his back, because she cannot help thinking about him and needs to camouflage this interest [from herself as well as others]. Benedict defends the bachelor state, inveighs against women and even against the courtly art of music, affecting a spirit of bluff masculine camaraderie on all social occasions, in order to fend off alternative ways of thinking and feeling. Both use wit to distance emotions which they recognize as potentially dangerous. They cling to the society of their own sex because there they feel safe, but they cannot help launching provocative shafts of ridicule or inquiry into the enemy's  terrain.

"Although Beatrice has no evidence to advance against the damning account of how Don Pedro, Don John and Claudio actually saw Hero talk with a ruffian at her chamber window after midnight, she never for an instant believes that her cousin is guilty. Her logic here is that of the instincts and the heart, but it happens to be entirely right. Benedict, understandably, is slower to commit himself to the defense of Hero, although from the first he is puzzled by the charge against her. He makes an important decision, however, when he does not leave the church with Claudio, Don Pedro and the bastard, as might be expected. He chooses, instead, to remain behind with Hero, Leonato, the friar, and Beatrice. In doing so he breaks with the little all-male society of soldiers which has hitherto claimed his allegiance. He behaves in this seemingly uncharacteristic fashion although he and Beatrice have not yet, in fact, reached an understanding, simply because he is beginning to see the world through different eyes. Leonato, in the last scene of all will claim: 'The sight whereof I think you had from me. / From Claudio, and the Prince' (V.4.25-26). This is true, however, only in the sense that had it not been for the conspiracy, Benedict would never have been able to liberate and admit responses buried deep inside himself.

"The flight of Don John from Messina, together with Borachio's confession of the plot against Hero, relieves Benedict of the necessity of turning his sword against his former friend, but it is important that he should have accepted Beatrice's passionate and impulsive commission. We in the audience never believe that Benedict will kill Claudio. Law and justice in Messina are, to put it mildly, inefficient, but it is nonetheless evident, even in scene where the challenge is formally delivered, that Hero's innocence will shortly be vindicated without any help from Benedict. What his engagement in her cause demonstrates is the new priority in his life of love, and the extent to which this love supersedes  and cancels out older ties. As for Beatrice, the woman who pretended, early in the comedy, that she could not imagine why anyone should think her life incomplete without a man . . . finds herself in Act IV wishing no fewer than three times 'that I were a man.' Her appeal to Benedict to do what, as a woman, she herself cannot manage, and her gratitude to him, represent, on her part, as radical a transformation of attitude as does his challenge to Claudio."



The rest of Anne Barton's commentary is worth reading but I'll leave that up to you. There's something  that needs to be said about the Beatrice-Benedict story that she doesn't say: this story, of two people who are in love but don't know it and have to be pushed into each other's arms by their friends, who know them better than they know themselves, is unprecedented—and modern. It is the only story that Shakespeare entirely invented, out of whole cloth as it were, because nothing remotely like it existed in the earlier literature, Classical or Medieval. Barton calls it a subplot, but from the evidence she cites in her introduction (which I have left out), it is clear that it soon became for most audiences the main story, with the Claudio-Hero story providing a sort of melodramatic launching-pad.