WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE AND E. E. CUMMINGS: A STUDY IN ORIGINAL PUNCTUATION
AND SPELLING
THE objections that are raised against the ‘freakishness’ of modernist
poetry are usually supported by quotations from poems by E. E. Cummings
and others which are not only difficult in construction and reference
but are printed queerly on the page. The reader naturally looks for
certain land-marks in the poem before he can begin to enjoy it: as
the visitor to Paris naturally sets his mental map of the city by the
Eiffel Tower and, if the Eiffel Tower were to collapse, would have a
difficult time finding his way about for a few days. Modernist poets
have removed the well-known land-marks and the reader is likewise
bothered. The reasons given for this removal are that land-marks tend
to make paths, that paths grow to roads, that roads soon mean walls and
railings, and that the pedestrian or motorist, who must keep to the
roads, never sees any new scenery.
because
you go away i give roses who
will advise even yourself, lady
in the most certainly (of what we
everywhere do not touch) deep
things;
remembering ever so ... etc.
This is the beginning of one of Mr. Cummings’ poems. The first obvious
oddity is the degrading of the personal pronoun ‘I’ into ‘i’. This has
a very simple history. The ‘upper case’ was in mediaeval times used for
all nouns and proper names and the adjectives formed from them; for
the Deity; for Royalty (in ‘We’ and ‘Our’); for certain quasi-divine
abstractions such as Mystery, Power, Poetry; and sometimes for ‘She’
and ‘Thou’ and so on, where love gives the pronoun a quasi-divine
character. Mr. Cummings protests against the upper case being also
allotted to ‘I’: he affects a casualness, a humility, a denial of
the idea of personal immortality responsible for ‘I’. Moreover ‘i’
is more detached: it dissociates the author from the speaker of the
poem. This use of ‘i’ is in keeping with his use of the word ‘who’,
instead of ‘which’, to qualify the roses; the roses become so personal
as to deserve the personal rather than the neutral relative. His next
idiosyncrasy is his refusal of a capital letter to each new line of
the poem. Now, if this convention were not so ancient, it would
seem as odd and unnecessary as, for instance, quotation-marks seem
in eighteenth-century books enclosing each line of a long speech
instead of occurring only at the beginning and end of a passage. The
modernist rejection of the initial capital can be justified on the
grounds that it gives the first word of each line, which may be a
mere ‘and’ or ‘or’, an unnatural emphasis. If for special reasons the
poet wishes to capitalize the first word, the fact that it is anyhow
capitalized like all the other initial ‘And’s’ and ‘Or’s’ makes any
such niceness impossible. Later in the poem Cummings uses the capital
letter at the beginning of a new sentence to call attention to the
full-stop which might otherwise be missed: but the ‘because’ at the
beginning of the poem need not be capitalized because it obviously
_is_ the beginning. Similarly, he has suppressed the conventional
comma after ‘lady’ because the end of the line makes a natural pause
without punctuation. Commas he uses to mark pauses, not merely as
the geographical boundaries of a clause. He has even in another poem
inserted one between the ‘n’ and ‘g’ of the word ‘falling’ to suggest
the slowness of the falling. Colons and semicolons and full stops he
uses to mark pauses of varying length. To give a longer pause still
he will leave a blank line. In the quotation just given, the new line
at ‘remembering’ is to mark a change of tone, though the pause is not
longer than a semicolon’s worth. Parentheses he uses for _sotto
voce_ pronunciation; or, if they occur in the middle of the word, as
in “the taxi-man p(ee)ps his whistle”, they denote a certain quality
of the letters enclosed--here the actual sharp whistling sound between
the opening and closing (the two p’s) of the taxi-man’s lips. When this
system is carried to a point of great accuracy we find lines like the
following:
with-ered unspea-king: tWeNtY, f i n g e r s, large
which, quoted detached from their context, seem to support any charge
of irrational freakishness, but in their context are completely
intelligible. Moreover, Mr. Cummings is protecting himself against
future liberties which printers and editors may take with his work, by
using a personal typographical system which it will be impossible to
revise without destroying the poem.
It may be that he has learned a lesson from the fate that has overtaken
Shakespeare’s sonnets: in which not only have changes in spelling
and pronunciation been used to justify the liberties that have been
taken in ‘modernizing’ the texts; but certain very occasional and
obvious printer’s errors in the only edition printed in Shakespeare’s
lifetime have been made the excuse for hundreds of quite unjustifiable
emendations. Mr. Cummings and Shakespeare have in common a deadly
accuracy, and that accuracy makes poems difficult rather than easy.
It is this accuracy that frightens Mr. Cummings’ public, it was
Shakespeare’s accuracy that provoked his editors to meddle with his
texts as being too incomprehensible as they were written. Actually we
shall find that Shakespeare is more difficult than Mr. Cummings in
thought, though his poems have a more familiar look on the page: Mr.
Cummings expresses with an accuracy peculiar to him what is common to
everyone, Shakespeare expresses in the conventional form of the time,
with greater accuracy, what is peculiar to himself. Let us print two
versions of a sonnet by Shakespeare, first the version found in the
_Oxford Book of English Verse_ and other popular anthologies
which have apparently chosen this sonnet from all the others as
being particularly easy to understand, and next the version printed
in the 1609 edition of the Sonnets, and apparently, though pirated,
printed from Shakespeare’s original manuscript. The alterations, it
will be noticed in a comparison of the first with the second, are,
with a few exceptions which we will point out later, chiefly in the
punctuation and spelling. By showing what great difference in the sense
the juggling of punctuation marks has made in Shakespeare’s original
sonnet, we shall perhaps be able to sympathize somewhat with what seems
typographical perversity in a poet like Mr. Cummings. The modernizing
of the spelling is not quite so serious a matter, though we shall see
that to change a word like _blouddy_ to _bloody_ makes a
difference not only in the atmosphere of the word but in its sound as
well.
I
Th’ expense of Spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
Enjoy’d no sooner but despisèd straight;
Past reason hunted; and, no sooner had,
Past reason hated, as a swallow’d bait
On purpose laid to make the taker mad:
Mad in pursuit and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell
II
(No. 129)
Th’ expence of Spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action, and till action, lust
Is periurd, murdrous, blouddy full of blame,
Sauage, extreame, rude, cruell, not to trust.
Injoyd no sooner but dispised straight,
Past reason hunted, and no sooner had
Past reason hated as a swollowed bayt,
On purpose layd to make the taker mad.
Made In pursut and in possession so,
Had, hauing, and in quest, to have extreame,
A blisse in proofe and proud and very wo,
Before a joy proposd behind a dreame,
All this the world well knowes yet none knowes well,
To shun the heauen that leads men to this hell.
Let our method first be, before trying to match our own intelligence
with Shakespeare’s intelligence, to compare these two versions, the
original one and the modern one, in order to feel as intimate with
the language in which the poem was written as if all these years
did not stand between ourselves and Shakespeare. First, then, as to
the spelling. As a matter of course the _u_ in _proud_
and _heauen_ changes to _v_; the Elizabethans had no
typographical _v_. There are other words in which the change
of spelling does not seem to matter. _Expence_, _cruell_,
_bayt_, _layd_, _pursut_, _blisse_, _proofe_,
_wo_--any of these words taken by themselves are not necessarily
affected by modernization; but undoubtedly much of the original
atmosphere of the poem is lost by changing them in the gross. Sheer
facility in reading a poem is no gain when we are trying to discover
what the poem was like for the poet. And when one considers all
that has happened to the language since Shakespeare’s time one can
understand why Mr. Cummings should set his poems down so that when
read they are read as ‘in the original’. But other changes to make
this sonnet comprehensible to modern readers have involved more
than changes in spelling. _Periurd_ to _perjured_ would
have meant, to Shakespeare, the addition of another syllable, as
_murdrous_ to _murderous_. _Injoyd_, with the same
number of syllables as _periurd_, is however made _Enjoy’d_;
while _swollowed_, which must have been meant as a three-syllabled
word (Shakespeare used _ed_ as a separate syllable very strictly
and did frequently allow himself an extra syllable in his iambic
foot) is printed _swallow’d_. When we come to _dispised_,
we find in the modern version an accent over the last syllable. By
apostrophes and accents and changes of spelling the rhythm and the
consistency in spelling of the original is sacrificed; and without
making it an easier poem, only a less accurate one. The sound of the
poem suffers through respelling as well as through false alterations in
the rhythm. _Blouddy_ was pronounced more like _blue-dy_ than
_bluddy_; the _ea_ of _extreame_ and _dreame_ were
sounded like the _ea_ in great; _Injoyd_ was pronounced as
it was written; _periurd_ was probably pronounced _peryurd_.
But the changes in punctuation do the most damage: not only to the
personal atmosphere of the poem but to the meaning itself. In the
second line a semicolon after the first _action_ instead of a
comma gives a longer rest than Shakespeare gave; but it also cuts
off the idea at _action_ instead of keeping _in action_
and _till action_ together as well as the two _lust_’s. A
comma after _blouddy_ separates it from _full_ with which
it really forms a single word meaning “full as with blood”. Next come
several semicolons for commas; these introduce pauses which break up
the continuous flow of ideas treading on one another’s heels. (If
Shakespeare had wanted such pauses he would have used semicolons as he
does elsewhere.) Particularly serious is the interpolation of a comma
after _no sooner had_; for this confines the phrase to a special
meaning, _i.e._ “lust no sooner had is hated past reason,” whereas
it also means “lust no sooner had _past reason_ is hated past
reason”. The comma might as well have been put between _reason_
and _hated_; it would have limited the meaning but no more than
has been done. On the other hand a comma is omitted where Shakespeare
actually did put one, after _bayt_. With the comma, _On purpose
layd_--though it refers to _bayt_--also takes us back to the
original idea of _lust_; without the comma it merely carries
out the figure of _bayt_. In the original there is a full stop
at _mad_, closing the octave; in the revised version a colon is
used, making the next line run right on and causing the unpardonable
change from _Made_ to _Mad_. The capital _I_ of
_In_ shows how carefully the printer copied the manuscript.
Shakespeare undoubtedly first wrote the line without _Made_, but
probably deciding that such an irregular line was too bold, added
_Made_ without changing the capital _I_ to a small one.
_Made_ logically follows from _make_ of the preceding line:
‘to make the taker mad, Made (mad)’; but it also returns to the general
idea of lust. This change from _Made_ to _Mad_ limits the
final _so_ of this line to _Mad_ and provokes another change
from comma to semicolon, _i.e._ ‘Mad in pursut and in possession
so (mad)’, whereas the idea of _Mad_ is only vaguely echoed in
this line from the preceding line. The meaning of the line might
reasonably be restricted to: ‘Made In pursut and in possession as
follows’: since it is the first line of the sestet, it is more likely
to refer forward than back. As a matter of fact, it does both.
The comma between _in quest_ and _to have extreame_ has been
moved forward to separate _have_ from _extreame_. The line
originally stood for a number of interwoven meanings:
1. The taker of the bait, the man in pursuit and in possession of lust,
is made mad, is made like this: he experiences both extremes at once.
(What these extremes are the lines following show.)
2. The _Had, having, and in quest_, might have been written
in parentheses if Shakespeare had used parentheses. They say, by
way of interjection, that lust comprises all the stages of lust:
the after-lust period (_Had_), the actual experience of lust
(_having_), and the anticipation of lust (_in quest_); and
that the extremes of lust are felt in all these stages (_to have
extreame_, _i.e._ to have extremes, to have in extreme degrees).
3. Further, one stage in lust is like the others, as extreme as the
others. All the distinctions made in the poem between _lust in
action_ and lust _till action_, between lust _In pursut_
and lust _in possession_ are made to show that in the end there
are no real distinctions. _Had, having and in quest_ is the
summing up of this fact.
4. The _Had_, _having_, separately sum up _possession_:
that is, the _action_ of lust includes the _expence of
Spirit_, _the waste of shame_. The _in quest_, naturally
refers to _In pursut_.
5. It must be kept in mind throughout that words qualifying the
lust-business refer interchangeably to the taker (the man who lusts),
the bait (the object of lust) and lust in the abstract. So: _Had_
may mean the swallowing of the bait by the taker, or the catching of
the taker by the bait, or ‘lust had’, or ‘had by lust’; _having_
and _in quest_ are capable of similar interpretations.
These are the numerous possibilities in the line if the original
punctuation is kept. But in the revised punctuation it has only one
narrow sense, and this not precisely Shakespeare’s intention. By the
semicolon placed after _so_ of the preceding line, it is cut
off from close co-operation both with the line before and the other
preceding lines. By the shifting of the comma not only is a pause
removed where Shakespeare put one and the rhythm thus changed, but
the line itself loses its point and really does not pull its weight
in the poem. In this punctuation the _whole_ line ought to be
put into parentheses, as being a mere repetition. The _to have_
linked with _in quest_ is superfluous; _extreme_ set off
by itself like this is merely a descriptive adjective already used.
Moreover, when the line is thus isolated between two semicolons (after
_so_, after _extreme_) _Had_, _having_, etc.,
instead of effecting a harmony between the various senses given to
_lust_ (taker, bait, lust in the abstract), disjoint them and
become ungrammatical. _Mad in pursuit, and in possession so_;
only refers to _the taker mad_. _A bliss in proof, and proved,
a very woe_; can only refer to lust in the abstract. Thus this
intervening line is just a pompous confusion. The next line (_A
blisse in proofe and provd and very wo_,) should explain _to have
extreame_; it is not merely another parenthetical line as in the
revised version. To fulfil the paradox implied in _extreame_ it
should mean that lust is a bliss during the proof and after the proof,
and also _very wo_ (real woe) during and after the proof. The
altered line only means that lust is a bliss during the proof but a woe
after the proof, denying what Shakespeare has been at pains to show all
along, that lust is all things at all times. Once the editors tried to
repunctuate the line they had to tamper with words themselves in the
text. A comma after _proof_ demanded a comma after _proved_.
A comma after _proved_ made it necessary to change _and very
wo_ to apply to _provd_ only. Another semicolon at the end of
this line again detaches a line and further breaks the continuity of
the poem. Specifically, by cutting off the following line from itself,
it in turn does to the following line what the preceding line did to
it: makes it only another antithesis or rhetorical balance (‘a joy in
prospect, as against a dream in retrospect’, to repeat the sense of a
bliss during proof as against a woe after proof) instead of permitting
it to carry on the intricate and careful argument that runs without a
stop through the whole sestet. The important thing about this line is
that it takes all the meanings in the poem one stage further. Lust in
the extreme goes beyond both bliss and woe; it goes beyond reality. It
is no longer lust _Had, having and in quest_, it is lust face
to face with _love_. Even when consummated, lust still stands
before an unconsummated joy, a proposed joy, and proposed not as a joy
possible of consummation but one only to be desired through the dream
by which lust leads itself on, the dream behind which this proposed
joy, this love, seems to lie. This is the final meaning of the line. It
is inlaid with other meanings, but these should follow naturally from
the complete meaning, it should not be built up from them. For example
the line may also be read: “Before a joy (lust) can be proposed, there
must be a dream behind, a joy lost by waking” (“So that I wake and cry
to dream again”); or: “Before a joy can be proposed, it must first be
renounced as a joy, it must be put behind as a dream; you know in the
pursuit that possession is impossible”; or: “Before the man, in lust
is a prospect of joy, yet he knows by experience that this is only a
dream”; or: “Beforehand he says that he definitely proposed lust to be
a joy, afterwards he says that it came as a dream”; or: “Before (in
face of) a joy proposed only as a consequence of a dream, with a dream
pushing him from behind”. All these and even more readings of the line
are possible and legitimate, and each reading could in turn be made
specially to explain why the taker is made mad or how lust is _to
have extreme_ or why it is both _a bliss_ and _very wo_.
The punctuated line in the revised version, cut off from what has gone
before and from what follows, can only mean: ‘In prospect, lust is a
joy; in retrospect, a dream.’ Though a possible contributory meaning,
as the _only_ meaning it makes the theme of the poem that lust is
impossible of satisfaction, whereas the theme is, as carried on by the
next line, that lust as lust _is_ satisfiable but that satisfied
lust is in conflict with itself. The next line, if unpunctuated except
for the comma Shakespeare put at the end, is a general statement of
this conflict: the man in lust is torn between lust as he well-knows it
with the world and lust in his personal experience, which crazes him to
hope for more than lust from lust. The force of the second _well_
is to deny the first _well_: no one really knows anything of lust
except in personal experience, and only through personal experience can
lust be known _well_ rather than “well-known”. But separate the
second _well_ from the first, as in the revised version, and the
direct opposition between _world_ and _none, well knowes_
and _knowes well_ is destroyed, as well as the whole point of the
word-play between _well knowes_ and _knowes well_; for by the
removal of the comma after the second _well_, this is made merely
an adverb to modify _To shun_ in the following line--_well_
here means merely _successfully_ with _To shun_, not _well
enough_ with _knowes_. This repunctuation also robs _All
this_ of its real significance, as it refers not only to all that
has gone before but to the last line as well: “All this the world
well knows yet all this none knows well” (_i.e._ the character
of lust), and “All this the world well knows yet none knows well”
the moral to be drawn from the character of lust (_i.e._ _to
shun the heaven that leads men to this hell_). The character and
the moral of lust the whole world well knows, but no one knows the
character and the moral really well unless he disregards the moral
warning and engages in lust, no one knows lust well enough to shun it
because, though he knows it is both heavenly and hellish, lust can
never be recognized until it has proved itself lust by turning heaven
into hell.
The effect of this revised punctuation has been to restrict meanings
to special interpretations of special words. Shakespeare’s punctuation
allows the variety of meanings he actually intends; if we must choose
any one meaning, then we owe it to Shakespeare to choose at least one
he intended and one embracing as many meanings as possible, that is,
the most difficult meaning. It is always the most difficult meaning
that is the most final. (There are degrees of finality because no prose
interpretation of poetry can have complete finality, can be difficult
enough.) Shakespeare’s emendators, in trying to make him clear for the
plain man, only weakened and diluted his poetry. Their attempts to make
Shakespeare easy resulted only in depriving him of clarity. There is
but one way to make Shakespeare clear: to print him as he wrote or as
near as one can get to this. Making poetry easy for the reader should
mean showing clearly that it is difficult.
Mr. Cummings makes himself safe from emendation by setting down his
poems, which are really easy as poetry, so that their most difficult
sense strikes the reader first. By giving typography an active part to
play he makes his poems fixed and accurate in a way that Shakespeare’s
are not. In doing this he loses the fluidity Shakespeare got by not
cramping his poems with heavy punctuation and by placing more trust
in the plain reader--by leaving more to his imagination than he seems
to have deserved. The trouble with Mr. Cummings’ poems is that they
are too clear, once the plain reader puts himself to work on them.
Braced as they are, they do not present the eternal difficulties that
make poems immortal, they merely show one difficulty, how difficult
it is for Mr. Cummings or for any poet to stabilize a poem once and
for all. Punctuation marks in Mr. Cummings’ poetry are the bolts and
axels that make the poem a methodic and fool-proof piece of machinery
requiring common-sense for its operation rather than imagination. The
outcry against his typography shows that it is as difficult to engage
the common-sense of the reader as his imagination. A reviewer of Mr.
Cumming’s latest book, “is 5”, writes:
I know artists are always saying that a good painting looks as well
upside down as any other way. And it may be true. The question now
arises: does the same principle apply to a poem? But it is not
necessary to answer the question; if a poem is good, people will
gladly stand on their heads to read it. It is conceivable, if not
probable, that the favourite poetic form of the future will be a
sonnet arranged as a cross-word puzzle. If there were no other way
of getting at Shakespeare’s sonnets than by solving a cross-word
puzzle sequence, I am sure the puzzles would be solved and the sonnets
enjoyed. But what about Mr. Cummings? Can his poems surmount such
obstacles? Well, perhaps if they cannot survive as poems they can
survive as puzzles.
This may be the immediate verdict on Mr. Cummings’ typography; but one
thing Cummings can be sure of that Shakespeare could not have been
sure of, is that three centuries hence his poems if they survive (and
worse poets’ have) will be the only ones of the early twentieth century
reprinted in facsimile, not merely because he will be a literary
curiosity but because he has edited his poems with punctuation beyond
any possibility of re-editing. The Shakespeare to whose sonnets this
reviewer makes a rhetorical appeal is the popular Shakespeare of the
anthologies and not the facsimile Shakespeare. How many of those who
read this had ever before read sonnet 129 in the original? So few,
surely, that it is safe to conclude that no one is willing to stand on
his head to understand Shakespeare, that everyone wants a simplified
Shakespeare as well as a simplified Cummings. Indeed, very few people
can have looked at Shakespeare’s sonnets in the original since the
eighteenth century, when the popular interest in Shakespeare’s more
high-spirited comedies sent a few dull commentators and book-makers
to his poems. In 1766 George Steevens printed the _Sonnets_ in
the original and without annotations apparently because he thought
they were not worth them. Twenty-seven years later he omitted the
_Sonnets_ from an edition of Shakespeare’s works “because the
strongest Act of Parliament that could be framed would fail to compel
readers into their service”. People were certainly not more ready to
stand on their heads to understand Shakespeare in that time than in
this and Malone, who undertook in 1780 to justify Shakespeare to an
apathetic public by simplifying the difficult originals (cross-word
puzzles, if you like), was considered by Steevens to be “disgracing his
implements of criticism by the objects of their culture”. Steevens’
view was the general one; (Chalmers reaffirmed it in 1810), and if
Malone by his emendations, which have become the accepted Shakespearian
text, had not overridden the general critical opinion of the
_Sonnets_ and presented them fileted to the plain man, the plain
man of to-day would undoubtedly be unaware of the existence of the
_Sonnets_. Unlike Cummings’ poems, Shakespeare’s _Sonnets_
would not even have “survived as puzzles”.
Thus far does a study of the typography of Shakespeare take one.
The lesson of this for modernist poetry is an appreciation of the
difficulties of a poet with a large audience to whom his meanings are
mysteries and for the most part must remain mysteries. The modernist
poet handles the problem by trying to get the most out of his audience;
Shakespeare by trying to get the most out of his poem. Logically,
the modernist poet should have more readers than Shakespeare with an
elementary understanding of his poems, and Shakespeare only a few
readers, but these with an enlarged understanding of his poems.
The reverse, however, is true because the reading public has been
so undertrained on a simplified Shakespeare and on anthology verse
generally, that modernist poetry seems as difficult as Shakespeare
really ought to seem. Typography, we see, then, is really the subject
of the fate of poetry with its audience. Since it is, even at its
worst, the least disturbing method of communication, both for the ideas
communicated and for the audience, it is still the surest guide to the
understanding of a poem that we have--even when the typography of a
poem has been through a whole history of misunderstanding.
Only a few points in sonnet 129 have been left uncovered in our
typographical survey of the poem, and these occur principally in the
first few lines; for these suffer less from emendations than the rest
of the poem. The very delicate interrelation of the words of the first
two lines should not be overlooked: the strong parallelism between
_expense_ and _waste_ and _Spirit_ and _shame_
expressing in the very first line the terrible quick-change from
lust as lust-enjoyed to lust as lust-despised; the double meaning
of _waste_ as ‘expense’ and as ‘wilderness’, the _waste_
place in which the Spirit is _wasted_; the double meaning of
_expense_ as ‘pouring out’ and as the ‘price paid’; the double
meaning of _of shame_ as ‘shameful’, _i.e._ ‘deplorable’ and
as _ashamed_, _i.e._ ‘self-deploring’; the double meaning
of _shame_ itself as ‘modesty’ and ‘disgrace’; again the double
meaning of _lust in action_ as ‘lust’ unsuspected by man ‘in his
actions’ because disguised as ‘shame’ (in either sense of the word)
and condemned by him because he does not recognize it in himself, and
as ‘lust in progress’ as opposed to ‘lust contemplated’. All these
alternate meanings acting on each other, and even other possible
interpretations of words and phrases, make as it were a furiously
dynamic cross-word puzzle which can be read in many directions at
once, none of the senses being incompatible with any others. This
intensified inbreeding of words continues through the rest of the poem.
_Periurd_ is another obvious example, meaning both ‘falsely spoken
of’ and ‘false’. Again, _heaven_ and _hell_ have the ordinary
prose meaning of ‘pleasure’ and ‘pain’, but also the particular
meanings they had in Shakespeare’s poetic vocabulary. ‘Heaven’ to
Shakespeare is the longing for a temperamental stability which at the
same time he recognizes as false. ‘Hell’ is Marlowe’s hell, which
hath no limits nor is circumscribed
In one selfe place, for where we are is hell.
The reader complaining of the obscurity of modernist poets must be
reminded of the intimate Shakespearian background he needs to be
familiar with before he can understand Shakespeare. The failure of
imagination and knowledge in Shakespeare’s emendators has reduced
Shakespeare to the indignity of being easy for everybody. Beddoes, an
early nineteenth century imitator of Shakespeare, said:
About Shakespeare. You might just as well attempt to remodel the
seasons and the laws of life and death as to alter one “jot or tittle”
of his eternal thoughts. ‘A Star’, you call him. If he was a star all
the other stage-scribblers can hardly be considered a constellation of
brass buttons.
The modernist poets are not many of them Stars but they are most of
them very highly polished brass buttons and are entitled to protect
themselves from the sort of tarnishing from which Shakespeare, though a
Star, has suffered.
Shakespeare’s attitude toward the perversely stupid reorganizing of
lines and regrouping of ideas is jocularly shown in the satire on
repunctuation given in the prologue of _Pyramus and Thisbe_ in his
_A Midsummer Night’s Dream_.
_Bottom._ If we offend, it is with our good will.
That you should think, we come not to offend,
But with good will. To show our simple skill,
That is the true beginning of our end.
Consider, then, we come but in despite.
We do not come, as minding to content you,
Our true intent is. All for your delight,
We are not here. That you should here repent you
The actors are at hand; and by their show,
You should know all, that you are like to know.
_Theseus._--This fellow doth not stand upon points. His speech
was like a tangled chain, nothing impaired but all disordered.