Review of Periodicals 42.2 Summer 1992 (pp. 35-36)

Hamlet, Macbeth and the Bible

Peter Milward (Sophia University, Tokyo) finds echoes of the Old Testament (particularly Job, Psalms and Ecclesiastes) in Macbeth’s “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” soliloquy and Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” soliloquy. These books are concerned with the presence of innocent suffering in the world, a problem which leads Ecclesiastes to its pessimistic conclusion that all is vanity. Hamlet’s problem is like Job’s, and presents similarities of phrasing and situation (e.g. “the arrows of the Almighty are in me,” Job 6:4; Job fears lest he be afflicted “with dreams…with visions,” Job 7:13-14). Macbeth also echoes Job (e.g. “…wilt thou bring me into dust again,” Job 10:9), but also Psalm 90 (“All our days are passed away in thy wrath… We spend our years as a tale that is told.” verse 9). In each case, the play provides a fuller Biblical context, in which this Old Testament pessimism is matched by New Testament emphasis on readiness and the Second Coming of Christ. Thus Hamlet’s “readiness is all” echoes Christ’s “Be ye also ready” (Matthew 24:44); while Macbeth’s fate is fixed, at the end of Act IV, by the readiness of Malcolm’s power and Macbeth’s being “ripe for shaking” (cf Revelation 14:15: the harvest of the earth is ripe”).

[“Two Biblical Soliloquies,” Notes and Queries, n.s., 38:4 (December 1991), 486-9]

Claudius’ Pearl

In the celebrated classical and modern instances of drinking pearls in wine (Sir Thomas Gresham’s drinking an expensive powdered pearl to the health of the Queen; Sir William Capell’s equivalent, if somewhat less costly, gesture to Henry VII; Cleopatra’s wager with Antony leading to consumption of a pearl worth ten million sesterces), the pearl is always dissolved. However, argues Gilian West (University of Hull), Claudius seems to be making Hamlet a gift of his pearl (“Hamlet this pearl is thine” [5.2]). Whether or not Shakespeare’s audience thought that the pearl would, in fact, dissolve, they might, she suggests, recognize that Claudius is “perverting what had been a gesture of astounding grandeur.” In addition, West proposes that the idea of a player-king making the gesture might derive from Pliny’s second example, following Cleopatra, involving Clodius, the son of the tragic actor Aesopus. Pliny points out that this action by a low predecessor (“one who was virtually an actor”) itself demeans Cleopatra’s gesture.

[“Hamlet: The Pearl in the Cup,” Notes and Queries, n.s., 38:4 (December 1991), 479]

Editorial Bias: the Case of Claudio

Following on from his examination of the extent to which editorial alterations of the Quarto and the Folio of Much Ado about Nothing have affected the characterization of Beatrice (“Hush’d on Purpose to Grace Harmony’: Wives and Silence in Much Ado about Nothing,” Theatre Journal, 42 [1990], 350-63), Michael D. Friedman (University of Scranton) analyzes the ways in which editorial practices–and theatrical presentations based on them–have tended to alter the text in the direction of a more sympathetic Claudio. The logic of editorial work (as evidenced in Kemble’s acting edition of 1810, Quiller-Couch and Dover Wilson’s New Shakespeare of 1923 and Humphreys’ Arden of 1981) has operated in a circular fashion: because the play is assumed to be a “romantic” comedy involving forgiveness and reconciliation at the end, Claudio is obliged to become, in Humphreys’ words, “a brave inexperienced youth … not overblameworthy for his appalling error, and so not disqualified for future happiness.” Friedman cites interpretations of Borachio’s odd advice to Don John (that he offer Claudio and Don Pedro “instances, which shall bear no less likelihood than to see me at her chamber-window, hear me call Margaret Hero, hear Margaret term me Claudio,” 2.2), which have led to productions inserting an explanatory “window-scene” so organized as to make Claudio’s belief in Hero’s supposed infidelity more credible; and of the tomb-scene (5.3), where editors have proposed stage- business and actual alterations to the text in order to present a more forthcomingly repentant Claudio than either the Quarto or the Folio vouchsafes. In addition, Friedman argues that revisions have sought–in the interests of “romance”–to obscure the possibility that Hero’s actions are motivated at least as much by devotion to her father as by affection for Claudio. Claudio’s resemblance to Bertram and Angelo, he suggests, perhaps locates Much Ado about Nothing closer to the “problem plays” than editors and directors (Mares’ 1988 New Cambridge apart) are willing to countenance.

[“The Editorial Recuperation of Claudio,” Comparative Drama 25:4 (Winter 1991-92), 369-86]

Locating the Neighbour Bottom

An instructive geographical note on Shakespeare’s use of “bottom” as a landscape term is provided by David-Everett Blythe (Grand Valley State University). Editors of As You Like It tend to equate the term in Celia’s “West of this place, down in the neighbour bottom,/The rank of osiers by the murmuring stream” (4.3) with “valley.” But there are no valleys in the Arden of Warwickshire, it being a land of hill and flat, not hill and valley. “Bottomland” – as in Hotspur’s reference to channelling the river Trent in such a way as not to rob him “of so rich a bottom here” (I Henry IV, 3.1-the only use of the word as a landscape term in Shakespeare’s plays) – signifies lush and rich land by slow-moving water, a significance adapted for sexual implications when Venus likens her lower anatomy to “sweet bottom grass” (Venus and Adonis, 236).

[“Shakespeare’s As You Like It,” The Explicator, 50:1 (Fall 1991), 9-11]

Timon’s Economy

At the end of his study of the economic system in Timon of Athens, Michael Chorost (University of Texas, Austin) cites the recent case of a man who, having run up a credit-card debt of $35,000 at high interest rates so that his generosity might retain the fidelity of his wife and children, told the Wall Street Journal that it had never crossed his mind that he would have to pay back the money. Therein lies the problem at the heart of a money- and credit-oriented economy like that depicted by Shakespeare: human bonds are translated into economic transaction, sterility of human relationships being replaced by the biological metaphor of money breeding. Timon, argues Chorost, begins as what Marcel Mauss (The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, New York, 1967) describes as the tribal “potlatcher,” i.e. a chieftain who seeks to sustain his social status by giving away gifts. Timon pretends to be part of a circular economy, receiving as well as giving, but in fact is engaged in the linear process of just giving. Circular economies reinforce friendship, linear ones reinforce power: hence Timon’s shattered response to his realization that his generosity has not obtained a sense of mutual obligation on the part of his courtiers. In order to support his lincar gift-economy, Timon is continually borrowing, so that the fiction of huge financial resources is needed to serve the fiction of a circular economy. Timon is finally ruined by the interest rates set by his usurers, for whom money is not a sterile, static object–as it is for Timon–but a fertile, dynamic commodity. For them, personal profit is a financial, not a human, aim; and so money for them acquires the characteristics of a biological force. As Marx argues in Das Kapital, economic activity within a money-exchange economy becomes valued for its own sake, and so money takes on a self-defining vitality of its own. The change from Timon the philanthrope to Timon the misanthrope is that from a gift-giving economy to a money-economy, from the sterility of money to the fertility of money, from the economy of Timon to the economy of his creditors.

[“Biological Finance in Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens,” English Literary Renaissance, 21:3 (Autumn 1991), 349-70]