Foreshadowings (1H6 1)

Henry VI Part 1 may be Shakespeare’s first play, but it opens, dizzyingly enough, with the death of one of his great heroes, Henry V. “England ne’er had a king until his time,” one of the dead king’s brothers laments in the opening scene (1.1.8). It’s hard to recognize the fellow in the coffin as the charismatic Prince Hal, however, because he is eulogized with the bald, flat exaggeration appropriate to a superhero. “We mourn in black: why mourn we not in blood?” asks one of the dead man’s uncles. The trouble, I think, is that Shakespeare hasn’t yet mastered the trick of writing well the voices of people who speak poorly—of writing in such a way that his authorial talent is distinct from the characterological faults he is trying to reveal. It’s not obvious enough, that is, that Shakespeare knows that the Duke of Bedford, one of the late king’s brothers, is bombastic and ridiculous. He must have known it, though. The rhetoric of Bedford’s mourning is implausible and grandiose: Bedford claims that England’s future babies will be doomed to suck “at their mothers’ moist’ned eyes” (1.1.50), and he calls for the late Henry calls be memorialized as a constellation—the fifteenth-century equivalent, I suppose, of naming an airport after a president. Bedford overreacts to some bad news by exclaiming,

Is Talbot slain? then I will slay myself,
For living idly here in pomp and ease,
Whilst such a worthy leader, wanting aid,
Unto his dastard foemen is betrayed. (1.1.41–45)

“O no, he lives,” a messenger contradicts him, and I suspect the audience is supposed to enjoy the check placed on the hysteria.

The bishop of Winchester’s poetry is bad in a different way. An unctuous and disingenuous person, his mourning sounds both hyperbolic and calculated, marked by vacuous repetition and stagey chiasmos:

He was a king blessed of the King of kings.
Unto the French the dreadful judgement-day
So dreadful will not be as was his sight. (1.1.28–30)

The only enjoyable lines are those of the duke of Gloucester, who compares the late king to a dragon, in words that Wilson points out derive from Spenser, and who, like a dragon himself, breathes fire at the bishop for insinuating that the church was responsible for the late king’s triumphs.

The church! . . .
None do you like but an effeminate prince,
Whom, like a school-boy, you may over-awe. (1.1.34–37)

Gloucester is a good hater, and one likes him at once for it. On the French side, the duke of Alençon speaks with a similar forthrightness. Mocking the English for seeming faint with hunger, Alençon says that

They want their porridge and their fat bull-beeves:
Either they must be dieted liked mules
And have their provender tied to their mouths,
Or piteous they will look, like drownéd mice. (1.2.9–12)

With some characters, then, the young Shakespeare is able to show his mettle.

With others, it remains hidden. Almost as unrecognizable as the future Henry V is a near-throwaway reference to his future sometime drinking companion, Sir John Falstaff, who appears here as an offstage villain, guilty through cowardice of having lost a battle that Talbot might otherwise have won (1.1.131–32). After being ransomed from French prison, Talbot (like Gloucester, a likable and martial person) exclaims,

O! the treacherous Falstaff wounds my heart,
Whom with my bare fists I would execute,
If I now had him brought into my power. (1.4.35–37)

Falstaff seems to mean nothing to Shakespeare at this point. He’s a vessel for blame, and at the moment, that seems like an uncomplicated thing, or at any rate not the sort of thing to which one devotes attention.

He already knows, however, that he needs to pay attention to Joan of Arc, the witch, who appears in scene two, though one knows that Shakespeare will make much more of her type later. She is the one whose saying makes it so—a precursor to Prospero, and a figure of the poet. She is also—and the two roles seem linked—the first double cross-dresser in his plays, and it is startling to meet her so early. Hers is the first voice that Shakespeare wrote for a man playing a woman dressed as a man. That makes it all the stranger that a scholar like Wilson doesn’t think that Shakespeare introduced her to the play or even wrote her lines. Did Shakespeare simply find her, ready made? Maybe sometimes, when a writer first finds a character, it feels like an accident yet is not one. Whether Shakespeare wrote Joan of Arc somehow doesn’t matter; she became his. The character returns throughout his life. She changes, because his understanding of her changes as he grows older. That is why she has different names in different plays.

Halcyon days

Walking the dog one evening last week, after dark and in a drizzle, I was surprised to find a number of young families leaving the park as I entered it. The night was fairly warm, but now that the dark comes early, it is not often hazarded by more than a runner or two. That evening the light rain added a further deterrent. As I crossed the ring road, however, and followed a path that turns right to run beneath a row of lamps, I found even more families, and Toby pulled me between them. They were speaking German. Almost all the children were carrying paper lanterns, for the most part home-made. Between the two baseball diamonds, where they had gathered beside the path under their umbrellas, someone was holding a pony by its bridle. As I passed, I asked a couple pushing a stroller what the holiday was. "Saint Martin's Day," the father told me. "A fine old German tradition, come all the way to Park Slope."

It was strange to find an unsuspected ritual near to home. Though I've lived in Park Slope more than half a dozen years, I had no idea that people here brought lanterns to the park once a year after nightfall, nor that they did so with so much enthusiasm that they were willing to brave rain and hire a pony. Fortuitously I had heard of Saint Martin; I even knew that his saint's day had recently passed. I'd just begun reading Shakespeare's Henry VI Part 1, and in that play, Joan of Arc promises her aid to Charles, the future king of France, in these words:

Expect Saint Martin's summer, halcyon days,
Since I have enterèd into these wars. (1.2.131–32)

Saint Martin's summer, the notes at the back of my edition explain, is "warm weather in late autumn, St Martin's Day being 11 Nov." The explanation stuck in my mind because it was 11 November when I read it. The celebration in Prospect Park came a day or two later—maybe the English and the Germans honor him according to different calendars. The week was indeed mild for late autumn, as Saint Martin and Joan of Arc augured. When Peter and I bicycled into the city on Sunday afternoon, we had to shed both our jackets and our sweaters. But I'm straying from Shakespeare, whom I mean to talk about somehow. "Halcyon days," the notes further explain, are named after the halcyon, a bird thought by the ancients to make its nest on the sea around this season of the year, and to "charm the waves to a calm" while it brooded.

In graduate school, when I was a youth drunk with the breath of my own significance, I read several of Shakespeare's plays and wrote about them in a notebook, in a hermetic style, believing myself to have pierced through to their true drama, which was, as I then saw it, a war between the characters for possession of the poetic power in the words that formed them. I stopped after a handful of plays, because I had a dissertation to write. More than a decade has gone by since then, and now I'm at the age where one wonders if one will ever get around to achieving certain ambitions. I still want to read Shakespeare's plays and take notes on them. This time I want to read all of them, in the order he wrote them. I gather that a fair amount of guesswork has gone into the order that scholars have established, so I'm not going to be strict about my sequence. As I understand it, for example, there's some evidence that Henry VI Part 1 was written after Henry VI Part 2 and Part 3, but I'm starting with Part 1, as the first of many acknowledgments that I'm reading as an amateur, not as a scholar. Another such acknowledgment is my choice of edition: John Dover Wilson's New Cambridge Edition. As best I can suss out, it's respectable but superseded. Wilson, however, is very companionable as a writer of notes, and the books themselves, hardcover duodecimos from the 1930s and 1950s with typography by Bruce Rogers, approach in size and style my ideal of what a book should physically be. Also amateurish will be the schedule I keep.

Cockney Keats?

“Keats Speaks,” my essay about whether the real Keats spoke the way the one in the recent Jane Campion movie does, appears in the 1 November 2009 issue of the New York Times Magazine.

You can read the Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine article that accused Keats of “Cockney rhymes” here (though signed “Z.,” it was by John Gibson Lockhart, and it appeared in the August 1818 issue). Just as infamous was a similar attack in the Quarterly Review by John Wilson Croker (though the issue was dated April 1818, it actually appeared in September).

My review of Daniyal Mueenuddin’s “In Other Rooms, Other Wonders”

"A Very Different Pakistan," my review of Daniyal Mueenuddin's story collection In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, appears in the 5 November 2009 issue of the New York Review of Books. You need an electronic subscription to the NYRB in order to read my article online; to buy one, or to buy an old-fashioned ink-on-paper subscription, click here.

Mueenuddin has been nominated for a National Book Award in fiction, which he surely deserves. The New York Times published an interesting profile of him in July. As you'll see if you read my review, I was struck by the parallels between Mueenuddin and the nineteenth-century Russian novelist Turgenev. Sometime after finishing my review, I discovered yet another such parallel. Mueenuddin's description of a woman's scorn for her father's new lover struck me as sharp and amusing, and I quoted it in my review:

When the lover speaks up one day at lunch, Mueenuddin brilliantly captures the daughter's scorn: "Sarwat looked at her in amazement, as if the furniture had spoken."

It turns out that Turgenev used a similar metaphor in Virgin Soil, to describe the scorn that the landowner Sipyagin came to feel for Nezhdanov, the young anarchist whom he had hired as a tutor for his son:

For Sipyagin, Nezhdanov had become simply a piece of furniture, or an empty space, which he utterly—it seemed utterly–failed to remark! These new relations had taken shape so quickly and unmistakably, that when Nezhdanov during dinner uttered a few words in reply to an observation of his neighbour, Anna Zaharovna, Sipyagin looked round wonderingly as though asking himself, "Where does that sound come from?"

I don't know whether this is Mueenuddin's clever homage to Turgenev, or an example of great minds running on similar tracks. In either case, I highly recommend Mueenuddin's book.