Oedipus's Nap

Author(s): Anne Carson

Source: The Threepenny Review, No. 77 (Spring, 1999), p. 7
Published by: Threepenny Review
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4384808 .
Accessed: 17/05/2011 17:55

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at .
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=tpr. .

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Threepenny Review is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Threepenny
Review.

http://www.jstor.org
ter for the father, in Shakespeare's
source. Surely even the stunted readers
who actually imagine that Shakespeare
in his heights never wrote out of his
own heart (let me commend to them a
lecture called "The Mythical Sorrows
of Shakespeare," following which I
awaited with true Schadenfreude
Professor Sisson's studies in the mythi-
cal sorrows of St. Paul, Villon,
Dostoyevsky, Father Hopkins, and
Hart Crane, but the eminent scholar
perished some years ago, after a life of
no sorrows) will concede that we have
come on a subject deserving of explana-
tion, if any can be proposed.
What is the subject? A mourning, in
age, of the recent loss of an old col-
league in virtues and also in a quirk, by
no means universal, presented as a
crowning virtue: an anxiety not to
stand in the way of the next generation.
Can we, after these centuries, discover
any avenue of approach to this? Well,
one stares us in the face, broad and sin-
gular-though over nearly forty years
of Shakespearean reading I cannot
recall one remark of its singularity. It is
a fact that Shakespeareretired from the
theatrical world early, at about forty-
seven, at a peak moreover of his dra-
matic power, bidding London farewell
with The Tempest itself, and retiring to
Stratford to walk up and down in his
orchard. My god, what a vision. There
will be a great deal to say about this in
the end. What concerns us just now is
the fact, and the oddness of the fact,
both suggesting very energetically
indeed that Shakespeare shared the
anxiety of his French king's equally
imaginary friend. Perhaps we can now
say we know something about him.
Why is it, shall we ask in passing,
that nobody, of all those who have
attended to this man's career, has
expressed any wonder at its abrupt
end? Who can imagine Rembrandt or
Beethoven quitting in mid-career, that
is to say, ever, just abandoning art?
and loafing? Yet we feel very comfort-
able with this view of Shakespeare. It is
no good dismissing it as the mere
butcher's-son-goes-to-city-makes-good-
gets-out image conveyed by his biogra-
phers Sidney Lee and J. Q. Adams. The
delusion, frankly, is as old as his own
time. We meet it first in his intimate
Ben Jonson: "That Shakespearewanted
Arte"-so Drummond of Hawthorn-
den reports him, possibly drunk; and
this version of the delusion was shared
by another perfectionist, John Milton
(born a few hundred yards from
Shakespeare's lodgings in the year of
Coriolanus and the death of Shake-
speare's mother), who groaned in
1630: "whilst to th'shame of slow-
endeavouring art, / Thy easie numbers
flow." The sense of the inscrutable
Shakespeare begins there, which
Wordsworth was concerned even to
defend, which finds its ripest expression
in Arnold's ineffable "Others abide our
question. Thou art free," and which is
with us still in E.A. Robinson's wide-
ranging sharp-eyed poem "Ben Jonson
Entertainsa Man from Stratford":
To me it looks as if the powerthatmade
him,
Forfearof givingall thingsto one creature,
Leftout the first,-faith, innocence,illusion,
Whatever'tisthatkeepsus out of Bedlam,-
Andthereby,for his too consumingvision
Empoweredhimout of nature
SPRING1999
and
"No, Ben,"he mused;"it'snothing.It'sall
nothing"
and
0 Lord,thatHousein Stratford!
Perhaps we may pause a little longer to
comment on one of these delusions.
That Jonson, though jealous, valued
Shakespeare passionately enough, his
great threnody proves; but himself a
"classic," devoted to imitative punctil-
ious crafting labor, he never really
approved of the author of the careless
dialogue that opens Timon of Athens:
Painter.You areraptsir,in someworke,
someDedication
To the greatLord.
Poet.A thingsliptidlyfromme.
Ourpoesieis as a Gumme,whichoozes
Fromwhence'tis nourished:the Fire
i'the'flint
Shewesnot, till it be strooke:ourgentle
flame
Prouokesit selfe,andlikethe currantflyes
Eachboundit chafes.Whathaueyou there?
Painter.A Picturesir...
It is a prettymockingof the life:
Heareis a touch:Is'tgood?
Poet.I will say of it,
It tutorsNature,Artificiallstrife
Liuesin thesetoutches,liuelierthenlife.
There is posing in "idly," true enough,
like Kierkegaard's ten-minute appear-
ances at the theater to chat in the inter-
vals, persuading Copenhagen of his
idleness, when actually he was not at
the play, he was home writing six
books at once to flood forth pseudony-
mously. But Shakespeare'spreternatur-
al fluency was real too, as his friends
Heminge and Condell tell us in the
Folio: "His mind and hand went
together: And what he thought, he
uttered with that easinesse, that wee
haue scarse receiued from him a blot in
his papers." Note "scarce," though,
and even so, they exaggerate: the
British Museum manuscript of his
scene for Sir Thomas More shows a
score of blots. He wrote rapidly,
Mozart wrote rapidly-after long
hours of patient immobile attention:
only when all was clear began the fault-
less hand his father taught him.
Manuscripts witness simply to manual
labors like Housman's pyramiding of
epithets.
The avenue invites us backward in
Time. But what point is this from
which we are starting? How near this
end-the retirement-are we?
Unfortunately, the dating of All's
Well is one of the most vexed of canon-
ical topics. Malone put it in 1606,
Delius in 1598, Coleridge changed his
great mind again and again. It was F. G.
Fleay (1878) who, linking it with
Measure for Measure (1604), inserted it
in the tragic period, between Ham-
let and Othello, though he found in it
remains (I.i.230-44, I.iii.133-42,
II.i.130-214, III.iii.80-210, III.iv's son-
net and end) of very early work, which
he assigned to 1591-92. There, for a
century now, I am afraid the matter has
stuck. Dover Wilson, predictably, esca-
lated the revision theory, while
Chambers, predictably, was rejecting it
(though allowing, weirdly, in parts I-V
"a quality which for whatever reason
approximates to that of the blank verse
of Chapman"). No record of perfor-
mance survives, parallels to other plays
remain controversial, and discussion
had been bedeviled by a confusion of
this comedy, or its first version, with
the mysterious Love's Labour's Won
(pre-1598). Meanwhile, confident stud-
ies of Shakespeare's "Problem Com-
edies"-Troilus adjoined with All's
Well and Measure-proliferate. Yet
what really links the latter two but the
bed trick, a straw as frail as this linkage
to The Merchant of Venice (1596) by
the ring trick? Let us nod to this pathet-
ic history and start enquiry afresh.
The base style must be very late.
Versification, diction, phrasing, syntax,
tone, all more or less forbid the accept-
ed 1602-3. Scientific metrical study
began with Charles Bathurst (1857),
who found the style of All's Well
"harsh" and "uneasy" and later than
King Lear-bravo, old pioneer who did
not even sign your book. Its results
were tabled by Chambers in 1930, with
much labor, many improvements, and
this made possible H. D. Gray's decisive
advance. Gray insists (MLN 1931, p.
148) on an average of the three per-
centages of: double-endings, run-on
lines, speeches ending in-line. His
chronological results, for the thirty-one
plays considered "normal" (eight rank
as "abnormal") can only be called
uncanny. With just three exceptions,
the plays of the canon march in gor-
geous and pleasing procession from 8.7
(2 Henry VI) to 53.8 (The Tempest)-a
magnificent confirmation of the over-
all rightness of the end-product of the
labors of a dozen generations of schol-
arship. All's Well is the exception; at
43.9 it "belongs" after Lear, just where
Bathurstput it. No triumph, this, mere-
ly a suggested terminus a quo and that
merely for a play which is half prose,
besides being possibly of two dates; but
encouraging surely, hostile to 1602-3.
So is the character of hendiadys:
instead of Hamlet's characteristic"Out
of the shot and danger of desire," we
have not only the French king's more
daring "Catastrophe and heele of pas-
time" already cited, but "captious and
intenible Sieue," "the staggers and the
carelesse lapse/Of youth and igno-
rance," and Helena's exquisite
Oedipus's Nap
Scorchedto wake lawless, loose
In the sockets of him.
A fell dark pink Februaryheaven
Pulling the clouds home, balancing massacre
On the rips.
'twereall one,
ThatI shouldloue a brightparticularstarre,
Andthinkto wed it, he is so aboueme:
In his brightradienceandcolateralllight
MustI be comforted,not in his sphere.
Both in abstract diction and convoluted
syntax-twice in his sixteen-line speech
the king interrupts himself at length,
expressing finely his special absorption
as well as the general inconsequence of
age-this style is to 1600 as is the style
of The Golden Bowl to A Portrait of a
Lady's. A movement towards complex-
ity accompanies regularly in the works
of aged artists-the Paradiso (for
instance, xi, 28ff. on St. Francis),
Beethoven's quartets Op. 127 through
135-an even more drastic movement
towards simplicity. The Tempest fulfills
this counterpoint, but we must be on
the way there, well along, too.
One would welcome a historical fact
at this point, and happily some are
available, heretofore neglected. The
actors indicated by "G" and "E" at the
end of I.ii and in IV.iii ought to be
Robert Gough and John Edmans, lega-
tees in 1604 of Shakespeare'slong-time
fellow (since, in fact, Lord Strange's
Men) Thomas Pope. Gough too was
with Strange's and then the King's
Men, marriedAugustine Phillips'ssister
in 1603, played Memphronius in The
Second Maiden's Tragedy (1611), and
is in the Folio "Names of the Principall
Actors in all these Playes." Edmans is
not (but note "Principall");he married
a fellow legatee of Pope's-all these
men were far more closely connected
than scholars have been willing to rec-
ognize-and begot children from 1605
to 1615, being a Globe lessee in 1612.
William Ecclestone, of the Folio list,
has been proposed for "E": he had
marriedAnne Jacob in the year 1603 at
St. Saviour's, Southwark, just one week
after Gough's marriage there. That
same week a termer noted in his diary
(February 12, 1603) that "Ben Jonson
the poet now lives upon one [Aurelian]
Townesend and scornes the world"
(John Manningham's Diary, p. 130).
Eccleston played in The Alchemist and
Catiline in 1610-11; he'd do us too.
One begins to feel at home, indeed, in
that remote world. D
Was
-Anne Carson
7