Without further (or much) ado, I’ll give answers to my quiz,
in a series of 2 posts, this being the first:
QUIZ QUESTION: “I’m thinking of a work of literature which
fits each and every one of the following 37 (+1) clues, from the macro scale
all the way down to the micro. What is its title, and who wrote it?”
CLUE #1: “The work is one of the most famous and popular
works in literature, even though it was written centuries ago.”
Hamlet by William
Shakespeare (2nd Quarto version 1604)
Pride and
Prejudice by Jane Austen (1813)
There
needs no ghost, reader, come from the grave,
to tell knowledgeable
Janeites that Jane Austen was speaking about herself ventriloquistically when,
in her most overtly Shakespearean play, Mansfield
Park (as to which I gave a breakout talk, Session D2 at the 2014 JASNA AGM
http://www.jasna.org/agms/montreal/breakout.html ), Henry C. and Edmund B. discuss the Bard:
[Henry] “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.”
“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.”
13 1/2
years of researching Austen’s art of novelistic allusion has long since convinced
me that she had a most uncommon –indeed, elite-- knowledge and grasp of
Shakespeare’s plays. It was a knowledge born from genius, coupled with a lifelong
habit of close, outside-the-box reading of his entire canon; and I claim that
she reflected that vast and deep well of Shakespearean erudition in all six of
her completed novels (as well as in the rest of her unpublished writings).
Zeroing in on Pride
& Prejudice, did you know that the first reader to notice, and mention
in print, the Shakespeare in P&P was Sir Walter Scott? In his (now famous,
but then anonymous) 1816 review of P&P and Emma, Scott noted that the extraordinary repartee between Elizabeth
Bennet and Mr. Darcy was modeled on the “merry war” between Beatrice and
Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing.
[You
needn’t follow any of the below links to my prior blog posts in order to follow
the sense of this current post; I provide them if you want to get into the
weeds on allusive claims I make as I go along]
Here is my most recent post summarizing Austen’s multifaceted
allusion in P&P, her greatest romantic comedy, to Much Ado, what is arguably Shakespeare’s greatest romantic comedy:
I’ve also, at various times, pointed out a number of other
Shakespeare plays besides Hamlet which
live on in the shadows of Pride &
Prejudice, including but not limited to the following sampler:
The Taming of the
Shrew: http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2013/01/darcys-we-neither-of-us-perform-to.html
Twelfth Night: http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-veiled-allusion-to-twelfth-night-in.html
As You Like It: http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-twenty-clever-and-clever-twenty.html
The Merchant of
Venice: http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2012/07/part-three-of-answers-to-my-austen.html
Romeo &
Juliet: http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2016/04/juliets-nurse-mrs-bennet-shakespeares.html
I’ve also previously argued that Hamlet was a significant allusive source for all the other five
Austen novels besides P&P, including this sampler:
Northanger Abbey
Mansfield Park
Emma &
Persuasion
And several other Austen scholars who came before me have
also pointed out hints of Hamlet in
Austen’s writings.
With all that as background and context, I claim that, as
Henry and Edmund’s paeans to Shakespeare suggest, Jane Austen was intimate, by
both instinct and study, with Shakespeare; and Hamlet in particular was as prominent in her mind as any of the
Bard’s 38 plays. Shakespeare’s ghost haunted Jane Austen’s imagination….in the
most positive way possible. And now I’m
ready to make the case in the remainder of my answers, that the ghost of Hamlet (the play) haunts Pride & Prejudice (the novel), poking its head out from the
literary “cellarage” no less than 37 (+1) times, answering the question “Who’s
there?” by whispering “Remember me”. 😉
One crucial caveat as you read along: my argument is cumulative; i.e., I freely acknowledge
that several of the following clues, standing alone, would not be strong evidence of an intentional Austenian allusion in
P&P to Hamlet. However, in the
aggregate, given that I’ve collected 37 clues, a number of which are extremely
specific, the odds of this aggregate parallelism being random or unintended on
Jane Austen’s part are minuscule. I hope you’ll agree.
CLUE #2: “The work is filled with famous, witty epigrammatic
quotations, which pop up regularly in 21st century popular culture;
many of the best ones are spoken by the witty, brilliant protagonist; and the
rhetorical device of hendiadys is prominent.”
Hamlet is arguably the wittiest of all literary characters, and the
catalog of his bons mots fills
several pages. The same is true of the rapier sharp wit of Elizabeth Bennet, and of
the witty narrator of P&P who sounds so much like her, who gave us “A truth
universally acknowledged”, etc. etc.
Less well recognized [see “Hendiadys
and Hamlet” by George T. Wright PMLA 96/2
(March 1981), 168-193] is how Hamlet is marked by (according to
Wright’s count) about 70 “hendiadyses”, defined as the expression of a
single idea by two words connected by “and”, such as “slings and arrows”. I see this a
reflection of the fundamental ambiguity and duality of everything and everyone in
the world of that most mysterious of plays. Pride
and Prejudice’s title is the most famous hendiadys of all (and don’t forget
Sense and Sensibility and “Love and
Freindship”!)
CLUE #3: “Conversely to CLUE #2, the work also has an
iconically tedious character: a verbose, sometimes nonsensical parent who
criticizes the daughter-heroine’s courtship behavior, and is also disrespected
by the hero.”
Polonius is an Elizabethan Era helicopter parent who micromanages
both his young adult children, Laertes, and even more so, Ophelia; and he is
mocked by Hamlet, before being eventually (accidentally) killed by Hamlet. Mrs,
Bennet hovers over all her daughters, but particularly criticizes Lizzy for her
responses to her suitors; and she is definitely not respected by Darcy -- although Darcy does not directly sport
with Mrs. Bennet, saving his digs for the ears of others.
And I believe I’m correct that Shakespeare created no fool
more tedious than Polonius; and Mrs. Bennet is outdone only by Miss Bates in
Austenian logorrhea. However, Darcy never kills Mrs. Bennet, even after she
becomes his mother in law—or, at least, we don’t hear about it if he did!
CLUE #4: “The work is set in a period of war, with the
protagonist’s home country under threat of invasion from a powerful hostile
neighboring country.”
Fortinbras threatens, and then actually leads, Norway in an
invasion of Denmark. Napoleon threatened to lead France in an invasion of England,
hence the presence of Wickham and the rest of the militia in Meryton. Of course
there was paranoia about French invasion in Shakespeare’s world as well as
Austen’s, and so it’s no surprise that Austen would’ve tracked this theme from Hamlet.
And she was not alone – Lord Byron in his 1814 journal (i.e.,
only a year after P&P was published) confessed that he saw himself as a weak
Hamlet compared to Napoleon’s strong Fortinbras. That becomes more interesting
still when you consider my claim that the character of Darcy not only echoes
Hamlet, but also that of Lord Byron himself—wheels within allusive wheels!
CLUE #5: “The work is famous for its multilayered
ambiguities; in particular, the protagonist is plagued by persistent doubts
about the guilt or innocence of another major character, until those doubts are
eventually and dramatically resolved.”
Of all Shakespeare’s plays, and all of Austen’s novels, none
are more overtly concerned with the solving of a fundamental mystery, than Hamlet and Pride & Prejudice, respectively. Hamlet tries to determine if
his uncle killed his father, and when he becomes convinced that he did, he
eventually exacts his revenge; Lizzy tries to determine if Darcy intentionally
“killed” Jane’s reputation with Bingley; and when she becomes convinced that he
did not, she marries him. In both works, the protagonists’s doubts take up a
great deal of space in the story-telling, as the reader accompanies the
doubting protagonist on his or her tortured path through the dilemmas that
confront them.
CLUE #6: “The heroine is one of the most famous heroines in
literature.”
Ophelia is one of Shakespeare’s numerous very famous
heroines, and Elizabeth Bennet is, in 2018, as famous and popular as any
heroine in literary history. However, I’d argue that Austen tweaks her model,
by making Jane, Elizabeth’s sister, the more Ophelia-like character in P&P.
Much more on that in the future.
CLUE #7: “The heroine is a young woman with a doting father.”
Polonius doesn’t exactly dote on Ophelia, but he is extremely
diligent in his close parental attention to his daughter. Of course, Mr. Bennet
extravagantly dotes on Elizabeth, his favorite daughter by a long shot.
Interestingly, however, both of them question the wisdom of the romantic
relationship between their daughter and her high-born suitor.
CLUE #8: “When the heroine’s sibling travels to an exciting
city, questions are raised as to the risks of the sibling’s misbehavior, while
there without parental supervision.”
This is now getting into the weeds of specific and unusual
parallels. As Laertes is getting ready to leave Elsinore for Paris, Polonius
not only waxes tedious about hot-blooded Laertes being true to himself by
following the dozen instructions his father gives him, Papa Polonius then sends
Reynaldo to Paris to spy on Laertes to make sure Laertes is not misbehaving.
In a strikingly similar way, as hot-blooded Lydia is getting
ready to leave Meryton for Brighton, it is sister Elizabeth who raises serious
concerns to her father about the risks of Lydia’s misbehaving there, but her
father drops the ball and relies on the lax supervision of Colonel Forster,
with disastrous results.
CLUE #9: “The hero is one of the most famous heroes in
literature.”
I need only write the names “Hamlet” and “Mr. Darcy” to prove
this point.
CLUE #10: “The hero’s father, whom he speaks of idolizingly,
is dead when the work begins.”
Hamlet speaks of his late father King Hamlet as “Hyperion to
a Satyr” (i.e., Claudius), and in a number of other speeches – Hamlet is “haunted”
by his awe-inducing father in all senses of the word.
The situation is more understated in P&P, in typically
ironic Austenian fashion, but in essentials it’s not really different. Mr. Darcy
writes to Elizabeth: “My excellent father died about five years ago”, and also
describes how his generous, loving father took great care of Wickham, his
steward’s son.
And so I say it's no coincidence that in his followup comment, Wickham echoes Hamlet's MOST famous words: “Some time or other he will BE—but it shall NOT BE by me. Till I can forget his father, I can never defy or expose him.” : TO] BE [OR] NOT [TO] BE ! ;)
In fact, it is Wickham who sounds more like Hamlet, when speaking about his GODfather Mr. Darcy:
“His father, Miss Bennet, the late Mr. Darcy, was one of the best men that ever breathed, and the truest friend I ever had; and I can never be in company with this Mr. Darcy without being grieved to the soul by a thousand tender recollections. His behaviour to myself has been scandalous; but I verily believe I could forgive him anything and everything, rather than his disappointing the hopes and disgracing the memory of his father….”
And so I say it's no coincidence that in his followup comment, Wickham echoes Hamlet's MOST famous words: “Some time or other he will BE—but it shall NOT BE by me. Till I can forget his father, I can never defy or expose him.” : TO] BE [OR] NOT [TO] BE ! ;)
Of course, neither Shakespeare nor Austen ventures explicitly
into the possibility of illegitimate children among the principal younger
characters; but in the future, I’ll address those shadowy possibilities too.
CLUE #11: “The hero is 28-30 years old, about a half dozen
years older than the heroine.”
Hamlet’s age is not 100% clear, but close readers, working
from textual clues, generally consider him to be in his late twenties, the same
as Darcy; and we know Elizabeth to be not quite 21, and Ophelia, who seems new
to the courtship game, is generally considered to be about the same as Eliza.
CLUE #12: “The hero is high in status, and much higher in
status than the heroine.”
This is another key parallel. In both Hamlet and P&P, much is made about the wide distance in status
between the hero and the heroine. For Ophelia, marriage to Hamlet would elevate
her from a courtier’s daughter to a princess; for Elizabeth, marriage to Darcy
would elevate her from a gentleman’s daughter to “mistress of Pemberley”. This
is a central theme in both works.
CLUE #13: “The hero has had a university education.”
We know Hamlet attended university in Wittenberg, and we
infer from Wickham’s having been sent to Cambridge by Darcy, Sr. that Darcy
also attended Cambridge, where Darcy had, as he explains to Elizabeth, the
opportunity to observe Wickham in “unguarded moments”.
CLUE #14: “The hero is often accompanied by a close male
friend, who is extremely deferential to the hero.”
This is another highly significant parallel. Horatio, of
course, is nearly never seen except in company with Hamlet, whom he almost
never speaks to except to agree. I might be wrong on this, but I do believe we
also never see Bingley in an enacted scene, except when he is in company with
Darcy. And here is Elizabeth’s final thought about the two friends: “Elizabeth longed to observe that
Mr. Bingley had been a most delightful friend; so easily guided that his worth
was invaluable; but she checked herself.”
CLUE #15: “The hero is moody, withdrawn, and taciturn, before
undergoing an apparent shift for the better.”
Yet another striking parallel. I’ve found Twitter to be a
rough measure of the literary zeitgeist, and if you search “Hamlet Darcy”
there, you’d be amazed to see how many Tweeps speak of Darcy and Hamlet in the
same breath – and yet, such is the widespread unawareness of Austen’s
Shakespeare obsession, that it doesn’t occur to any of ‘em that this
resemblance is not a coincidence or unintentional!
Commentators have given a lot of attention to the miraculous
personality transformations of the two heroes – Darcy becomes a generous hero
instead of a selfish jerk; Hamlet becomes decisive instead of ineffectual and
suicidal. I suggest that Austen penetrated to the core of that mystery in
Hamlet; and also understood that Hamlet was a major source for a number of
later heroes, such as Milton’s Satan and Richardson’s Lovelace, and added Darcy as her link
in a great chain of literary allusion that later included Bronte’s Rochester.
And that seems as good a place as any to pause, and hear
feedback from readers, before posting Part Two in the next few days. I’ll then
address the remaining 22 clues, the answers to which collectively will further demonstrate
that P&P owes as much to Hamlet as
it does to any other earlier literary work. Here are those remaining clues, if you want to have a go at them in the interim:
38: Its hero stages a “play” involving performances by others at his direction, with the specific goal of provoke another person (whom he’s obsessively focused on) to reveal a character.
16: The hero makes a famous generalization about each person
having one particular natural defect.
17. The hero experiences an ambivalent attraction to the
heroine, and other characters speculate about this, including about the obstacle
posed by the large difference in status between them.
18: The hero engages with the heroine in famous sexual repartee,
focused on the word “country” (a la Samantha Bee vis a vis Ivanka Trump) and the
word “nothing”.
19: The hero also makes a risqué bon mot about the heroine
putting on a sexual show for a group.
20: The hero is very focused on the poetry of love.
21: There is a foil to the hero who strongly resembles the
hero in some key characteristics, and who is in conflict with the hero at times
during the story.
22: The heroine receives a letter (the full text of which is presented
in the work) from the hero, written to convince and explain to the heroine she
has misjudged his worthy intentions.
23: There is reference to a duel.
24: A devious plot by the main villain is ultimately foiled
by the hero’s proactive intervention.
25: The word “merry” is used in relation to sexual license.
26: The word “philosophy” is used in a generalization by a
lead character about how to think about life.
27: The exclamation “Heaven and earth” is used in a famous
passage referring to ghosts.
28. There are repeated occurrences of surprising haunting
encounters.
29: The word “pollution” is used to referred to the dead.
30: The death of a father is a major plot element.
31: The protagonist utters a heartfelt speech expressing
strong disillusionment with the human race.
32: There are repeated references to drunkenness.
33: There is sexual punning on the word “private”.
34: There is sexual punning on the word “instrument”.
35: There is punning on the word “desert/deserve”.
36: The protagonist gazes adoringly on a portrait of a
beloved man.
37: There is reference to protesting against a second
proposal to the same woman.
BONUS CLUE (there’s a huge reason why I’ve set this clue
apart from the first 37 clues):
38: Its hero stages a “play” involving performances by others at his direction, with the specific goal of provoke another person (whom he’s obsessively focused on) to reveal a character.
Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter
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