In Austen-L and Janeites earlier today, Elissa
Schiff wrote: "...there can be no doubt that Emma, with its constant shifting of light to shade, of perspective
from outsider to insider and from high ground to low, from a character's
backstory to present, from the public faces its characters present to society
to the more true inner realities they grapple with, and from its often
comedically presented shifts from misperception to reality for virtually all of
its characters, is of all Austen's novels, the very one *most* like As You Like It." END QUOTE
To
very briefly recap, my post yesterday...
...which
prompted the above response from Elissa, was about the complex, intentional,
and textually specific allusion I claim Jane Austen made to As You Like It in Pride & Prejudice.
However,
I did also, in the first paragraph of my post, provide a link to my post
earlier this year....
…in
which I similarly laid out textual evidence I found for the complex,
intentional, and specific allusion I claim Jane Austen made to As You Like It in Emma.
I
can’t tell from what Elissa wrote, above, whether she realized that I wrote
about that AYLI-Emma connection
earlier this year, but no matter. It merely induces me to repeat what is
factual, i.e., that I am the first literary scholar to note that allusion---unless
someone brings forward a citation for an earlier “catch” that I somehow
overlooked. Which does tend to suggest that the allusion was not only not obvious, the more plausible inference is that the allusion has been
invisible to many generations of scholars whose day job is to write about such
things when they find them.
Speaking
of an earlier-generation scholar, in that post of mine from earlier this year,
I did note that Lionel Trilling, in his influential 1957 discussion of Jane
Austen’s fiction, suggested that Emma
was part of the same literary “pastoral idyll” tradition as As You Like It. But Trilling did not make the next (crucial) leap of
noting Jane Austen’s actual, intentional, specific allusion to As You Like It. They’re two very
different things, and I think the distinction is worth discussing for a
paragraph, since Triling’s is the much more common sort of claim by literary
scholars than mine.
Put
in terms of pastoral metaphor, Trilling claimed that Shakespeare and Jane
Austen dipped their feet into the same vast “pastoral idyll” river of literary
history, whereas I claim that Jane Austen intentionally dipped her “Emma” toe in Shakespeare’s “As You Like
It” rivulet. In Trilling’s formulation, JA is not particularly
focused on any particular play of Shakespeare; in mine, As You Like It was one of her specific foci while writing Emma.
To
make my much stronger claim, I of course know I need to do more than, as
Trilling did, merely cite non-specific, general tropes, however insightfully, about
the pastoral idyll. I need to make the case that Jane Austen intentionally left
specific textual “bread crumbs” in Emma
which point to As You Like It in such
ways as to be clearly intentional, and not merely accidental or unconscious on
JA’s part, or pointing to a tradition rather than a specific literary source.
In
that context, I’d say that my 2005 discovery of Mrs. Elton’s inadvertently
speaking the exact title of As You Like
It spanning two sentences (immediately preceding the pastoral passage in Emma that Trilling quoted in his
article, without his spotting the actual play title there) constitutes a
quintessential example of such a probative “bread crumb” (and, as I also
pointed out, an apparent Trojan Horse Moment for Trilling).
And
of course, then, the additional textual allusions in Emma which I identified in
that earlier post, provide the confirmation that the word game on the play
title is not (as I initially thought it was from 2005-2010) just some devilishly
clever wordplay without additional meaning. I’ve learned a lot since then, and
now I know it was so much more than just that.
Next,
very briefly on to a new but related Austen-Shakespeare subject---my claim
yesterday about JA’s allusion to AYLI in P&P-----as I noted straight out, I
am not the first to claim that
allusion is real, far from it. But I am
the first to explicate that allusion beyond the first step (taken by several
previous and famous scholars) of noting the obvious resonance between Lizzy and
Rosalind. What I am the first to show is that the allusion actually implicates
pretty much all the major characters of P&P, in often surprising and at
times disturbing ways. I think that’s a big deal. So, in a way, Lizzy as
Rosalind in P&P is a little like the hidden title of As You Like It in Emma-the
smoke that emanates from a large but concealed fire.
And
now my third and last topic-- the Big Picture in all of this, I claim, is
twofold: (i) Jane Austen alluded to specific Shakespeare plays repeatedly in
several of her novels, and (ii) Jane Austen alluded to multiple Shakespeare plays in each of her six novels. There’s
a wonderful symmetry in those two aspects of Jane Austen’s deep love of Shakespeare. And, I
cannot overemphasize, this is not a Big Picture that is even close to being mainstream
in Austen studies in 2013. For the most part, Trilling’s sort of generalized
hit-and-run analysis of Shakespeare allusions in Jane Austen is still the norm.
But
I aim to change that status quo over time. Only by my painstaking fleshing out
of so many of these allusions as I have made public during the past 2 years….
….
has the full meaning of Henry Crawford’s famous discussion with Edmund Bertram
begun to be brought into vivid focus:
[Henry]
“…But Shakespeare one gets acquainted with without knowing how. It is a part of
an Englishman's constitution. His thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad
that one touches them everywhere; one is intimate with him by instinct. No man
of any brain can open at a good part of one of his plays without falling into
the flow of his meaning immediately."
[Edmund]
"No doubt one is familiar with Shakespeare in a degree," said Edmund,
"from one's earliest years. His celebrated passages are quoted by
everybody; they are in half the books we open, and we all talk Shakespeare, use
his similes, and describe with his descriptions; but this is totally distinct
from giving his sense as you gave it. To know him in bits and scraps is common
enough; to know him pretty thoroughly is, perhaps, not uncommon; but to read
him well aloud is no everyday talent." END QUOTE
I
believe that Henry Crawford is being totally disingenuous and falsely modest here---he
knows damned well that his alleged instinctive mastery of Shakespeare is not
merely something he fell into, and, more importantly to the story in Mansfield Park, he knows that Fanny
knows he must be a genuine scholar of Shakespeare, under the mask of casual Shakespeare
loiterer. Plus, he knows that literal-minded, straight-thinking Edmund will
then promptly say it for him anyway! And I then say that this passage also reflects JA’s
own honest pride in her own enormous accomplishment as a lifelong amateur
Shakespearean scholar.
What accomplishments? My excavations of her
Shakespearean allusions demonstrate just how painstaking, comprehensive and persistent JA’s
Shakespearean studies had to have been, over 2 ¾ decades---from age 14 to age 41-- in order
for her to have repeatedly gotten to the essence of the significance of the
jewels that Shakespeare left to be found by deep sea textual divers like her. I
haven’t taken a full count recently, but I estimate that among the comedies,
romances and tragedies, I can’t think of more than a few to which she did not
allude repeatedly. And I believe my not finding more traces of his histories in
her novels is merely a reflection of my own lesser familiarity with his
histories, a gap I will one day fill.
So
I believe Jane Austen knew Shakespeare as no other Shakespeare scholar up till
her time ever knew him, and in many ways, her insights into the thematic
nuances of his plays were more advanced even than that of most 20th
and 21st century Shakespeare scholars who’ve had the benefit of two
more centuries of accumulated literary knowledge. It is always a rare thrill
for me to reach the stage, as I did after several hours of intensive study yesterday, of reviewing all
the allusions to AYLI I managed collect from P&P, and to then reflect on
their totality. When I did that, I was fortunate to extract from them all the
common denominator that I then articulated, i.e., that many of the allusions
run against the grain of Janeite
expectation, not with it. And that only reinforced my conviction in the
rightness of my “seeing double” in Jane Austen’s fiction…and in Shakespeare,
who anticipated such readings of his plays when he put these words in Antonio’s
mouth at the end of Twelfth Night
when everyone realizes for the first time that Sebastian and Viola-as-Cesario
are two different people:
How have you
made division of yourself?
An apple, cleft in two, is not more twin
Than these two creatures. Which is Sebastian?
An apple, cleft in two, is not more twin
Than these two creatures. Which is Sebastian?
Each
of his plays is such an “apple”, and
each of Jane Austen’s novels—but particularly Emma is, too.
And
finally, in that same vein, since a suggestion has been made otherwise, I
conclude by pointing out that I have indeed closely read As You Like It (and also all of Shakespeare's comedies, romances,
and tragedies) multiple times since 2005 when I first learned of the paramount
importance of Shakespeare in Jane Austen’s imagination. And….I have also taken
advantage of the Internet and the Interlibrary Loan system by reading a very wide
range of scholarly journal articles and book chapters about all of those plays,
with my primary persistent focus being on the way Shakespeare used specific
words and phrases subliminally and thematically. That’s my specialty, that’s
what I love to do.
I
often use word searches to assist my research, mainly to help me find leads, and
to help me flesh out my own intuitions and find out if they are valid. But I
would think it obvious (i) that such searches are only the beginning of good scholarship,
not the end, and (ii) that there are so many subtle understated patterns of
wordplay in both Shakespeare and Jane Austen, which are simply not detectable
on a reliable basis by anyone who lacks a photographic memory or 200,000 hours
to keep manually reading and rereading millions of words looking for hundreds
of needles in two very large haystacks.
That
is precisely why I keep finding so many allusions that have never been found
before----why anyone who has access to such powerful tools would not want to be
relieved from countless hours of drudgery is beyond me, when those hours could
then be infinitely better spent analyzing the results of those quickly-performed
searches, and discerning their meaning.
Just
as new educational concepts like the Khan Academy and TED Talks are enabling
education in which teachers are freed from teaching basics to students that
they can learn themselves online, and therefore have much more time for
individual spot mentoring to help students help themselves, so, too, I use
technology to bring literary criticism into the 21st century, but
never for one second forgetting my original goal of retrieving, and better
understanding, the genius of centuries past.
Now,
back to Jane Austen and Shakespeare one more time--- the subliminal thematic
usage of specific words and phrases is exactly what Jane Austen did in all her
novels, and that's why I have been convinced since 2005 that she was
consciously emulating (but always in a creative, original way) Shakespeare in
this authorial practice, and I’ve been scouring them both for the textual
evidence of same.
And
now I wonder whether the textually-sensitive Austen scholar Emily Auerbach
chose as a title Searching For Jane
Austen in part because she utilized computer searches to assist her
studies. If she did, bravo to her for the meaningful pun!
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
on Twitter
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