With the recent news that a publisher is coming out with a version of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that will be excised of racial slurs, once again people are turning to Shakespearean examples, especially The Merchant of Venice and Othello, for evidence in making their cases, whatever they may be. And so once again, I feel compelled to write the following: Shakespeare didn't say anything in his works; his characters did. Yes, things of a prejudiced nature are said in the plays, but to assume that a character is speaking for the author is a mistake of frightening magnitude. Gentle readers, please do me this favour: Inform as many people as you possibly can of the foolishness of this position. It's an error that has prevented many, many people from having the right perspective toward reading Shakespeare - and Twain as well, for that matter - and even worse, in some cases, from reading them at all.

Here are three quotes which may help in building your arguments:

"Tell all the truth, but tell it slant."

- Emily Dickinson

"That which can be made explicit to the idiot is not worth my care."

- William Blake

"Shakespeare was in one sense the least moral of all writers: for morality (commonly so called) is made up of antipathies; and his talent consisted in sympathy with human nature in all its shapes, degrees, depressions, and elevations."

- William Hazlitt

One of the most important books in the history of Shakespeare criticism, Caroline Spurgeon's Shakespeare's Imagery and What it Tells Us, first published in 1935, contains many enlightening observations. One of the most telling is her comparison of Shakespeare's use of recurring image patterns with the illustrations found in the illuminated poetry of William Blake (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Blake#Illuminated_books). First, she gives an astonishingly accurate description of these unique masterpieces, and in particular the illustrations found in them: "These are not, for the most part, illustrations in the ordinary sense of the term, the translation by the artist of some incident in the narrative into a visual picture; they are rather a running accompaniment to the words in another medium, sometimes symbolically emphasising or interpreting certain aspects of the thought, sometimes supplying frankly only decoration or atmosphere, sometimes grotesque and even repellent, vivid, strange, arresting, sometimes drawn with an almost unearthly beauty of form and colour."

She then brilliantly relates Blake's work to Shakespeare's by comparing the effect of these illustrations to the one created by poetic image patterns in the plays: "Thus, as the leaping tongues of flame which illuminate the pages of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell show the visual form which Blake's thought evoked in his mind, and symbolize for us the purity, the beauty, and the two-edged quality of life and danger in his words, so the recurrent images in Macbeth or Hamlet reveal the dominant picture or sensation - and for Shakespeare the two are identical - in terms of which he sees and feels the main problem or theme of the play, thus giving us an unerring clue to the way he looked at it, as well as a direct glimpse into the working of his mind and imagination." Tomorrow, I'll summarize some of Spurgeon's thoughts on the imagery of Romeo and Juliet.

Wednesday's post concerned Shakespeare's use of Cinthio's prose tale as a source in the writing of Othello. Over the next couple of days, I'll discuss some of the other sources delineated by Norman Sanders in his introduction to the New Cambridge edition, and give some conjecture regarding Shakespeare's way of working with them. Incidentally, there is no evidence that Shakespeare ever left England. This puzzles some, who feel that first-hand knowledge must be necessary for someone to write so convincingly of settings as diverse as those found in the plays. I would argue that all the evidence points to Shakespeare being what Blake called a "mental traveller", and that his reading provided his imagination with everything it needed. And so, in honour of the upcoming film version of The Tempest, I'll end with an appropriate quote from Prospero (often considered to be an alter-ego of the author), who in telling his daughter Miranda about the treachery that led to their exile, recounts the kindness of Gonzalo who saved them and allowed Prospero to keep his most-loved possessions:

Some food we had and some fresh water that

A noble Neapolitan, Gonzalo,

Out of his charity, being then appointed

Master of this design, did give us, with

Rich garments, linens, stuffs and necessaries,

Which since have steaded much; so, of his gentleness,

Knowing I loved my books, he furnish'd me

From mine own library with volumes that

I prize above my dukedom.

Harold Goddard's The Meaning of Shakespeare (1951) contains many highly original insights. The one I'm concerned with today is his contention that the turning point in Hamlet actually occurs during the play-within-the-play scene. At this point, Hamlet has not yet killed anyone (whereas by the end of the play, he's directly responsible for five deaths, and not quite as directly, for two others - three if you include his own), so theoretically the story could still end happily. Goddard states that the key moment is when Hamlet decides to not simply let the play do its work, but rather to intercede with a running commentary (maybe Shakespeare was taking a jab at critics). The actor playing Lucianus is about to act (or reenact) the murder, by pouring poison in the ear of the king, when Hamlet makes his fateful interjection:

LUCIANUS

Thoughts black, hands apt, drugs fit, and time agreeing;

Confederate season, else no creature seeing;

Thou mixture rank, of midnight weeds collected,

With Hecate's ban thrice blasted, thrice infected,

Thy natural magic and dire property,

On wholesome life usurp immediately.

(Pours the poison into the sleeper's ears)

HAMLET

He poisons him i' the garden for's estate. His

name's Gonzago: the story is extant, and writ in

choice Italian: you shall see anon how the murderer

gets the love of Gonzago's wife.

OPHELIA

The king rises.

Goddard's position is that the court would not see the king rising as an admission of guilt, but rather that the prince's lunacy had reached an intolerable point, thus occasioning the king's departure. And that, left alone, the play would have perhaps had the effect of working his conscience toward confession, maybe even abdication. We'll never know. Goddard brilliantly sums up the two warring states in Hamlet at this point by invoking Blake's phrase, "Art Against Empire". Of course, this theme is dealt with throughout the sonnets, as well; see 65 for a particularly pertinent example.