(From The Short Cambridge History of
English Literature, by George Sampson, 1972 ed.)
Whether The Spanish Tragedy is
earlier than Tamburlaine,
as some suppose, does not greatly matter, for, historically, Kyd and
marlowe are not easily separable; they both attained great popularity
at the same time and both fell together.
The sentimentalists can no longer make a pathetic story out of
Christopher Marlowe's life (1564-93). Additions to our knowledge have
left us few illusions. Marlowe, son of a Canterbury shoemaker, passed
from the King's School in his native city to Cambridge, where he
absorbed the music and the legends of Latin poetry and indulged in some
unusual reading and speculation. Though he lived as wildly as Greene
and Nashe, he was never one of their fellowship. He was, in fact, a
"university wit" who had made himself common, and appears to be pointed
at with Nashe's finger of scorn. The facts about his life and works are
as obscure as the circumstances of his death. He had become notorious
for "atheism", and he was fatally stabbed in a Deptford tavern at the
end of a long day spent with three men of very dubious repute. Some
time before, Kyd had been arrested for "mutinous sedition", but was
released after Marlowe's death, having shown that heretical papers
found in his room belonged to Marlowe, whom he accused of blasphemy.
There is no profit in speculating on what was behind Marlowe's death.
He had lived dangerously and was such a man as could have written his
plays. (The most reliable biography is The Tragicall History of Christopher
Marlowe, 1942, by the American scholar John Bakeless). His
literary life begins with an undated translation of Ovid's Amores, called Elegies by the publishers. This has
more merits than is usually allowed. Like Shakespeare, Marlowe set
forth on his way as a poet of classical amorism, but, unlike
Shakespeare, he did not immediately find his natural magic and music.
Marlowe's first original work was Tamburlaine
the Great,
in two parts, played in 1587 or 1588 and printed
anonymously in 1590. The grandeur of the style, the powerful acting of
Alleyn and the superiority of the piece to the plays which had so far
held the popular stage gave Tamburlaine
great popularity. Yet, save in one obscure and hostile allusion by
Greene, the author is nowhere named. Even Heywood, who mentions both
Marlowe and Tamburlaine in
his Apology for Actors,
does not clearly associate them. The dramatic excesses of the play were
disliked by some, but, of course, the real offence was that Marlowe
succeeded. Like Swinburne he carried the young men away by the
irresistible force of his style. The
Tragicall History of D. Faustus,
of which the first known edition is the quarto of 1604, is assumed to
be his next play and is dated c. 1588; but there is good reason for
refusing it a date earlier than 1592. Faustus,
however, is not so complete a thing as Tamburlaine.
The comic scenes are almost abjectly bad, and prove either that
Marlowe's excesses of humour are worse than his excesses of tragedy, or
that his play has suffered from foolish theatrical additions.
Nevertheless the greatest parts of Faustus
show him at the height of his poetic and dramatic magnificence. The
same difficulty is presented in another play, The Jew of Malta. It is mentioned
as early as 1592; but as there is no evidence that it was printed
before 1633, we have a reasonable excuse for disclaiming the poorer
passages as playhouse alterations. In The
Troublesome Raigne and Lamentable Death of Edward the Second
(printed 1593-4), Marlowe gave us the first historical play of the type
which Shakespeare followed in Richard
II. The Massacre at Paris and The
Tragedie of Dido Queene of Carthage complete the list of
Marlowe's accepted dramas. The first known edition of the former is
undated; it was acted in 1593; the earliest text of the latter belongs
to the year 1594. The Massacre,
badly transmitted, has fitful power. Dido,
usually dismissed with undeserved contempt, bears the name of Nashe on
its title as co-author; but of Nashe's hand there is little trace.
The supposed association of Marlowe with works attributed to
Shakespeare or used by Shakespeare must be barely mentioned in a survey
such as this. Assertions about composite authorship are easy to make
and hard to establish or refute. Still, composite authorship and
revision by several hands are known facts of the time. Readers should
trust their own convictions and not accept attributions too readily. In
Titus Andronicus and in Henry VI there is some show of
argument for Marlowe's hand. The full-bodied verse of Titus and the soaring, defiant
character of Aaron might be the work of the author of Tamburlaine, but might equally be
the work of a young admirer. Marlowe may have had a share in Henry VI, but the nature and extent
of that share (if any) cannog be discussed briefly. At this time of day
it is impossible to distinguish between the verse of Marlowe and the
verse of a young poet writing with Marlowe's infectious tune in his
head. Arden of Feversham is
one of the pseudo-Shakespearean plays in which some students have
detected Marlowe's hand. The whole question is discussed in F. P.
Wilson's Marlowe and the Early
Shakespeare (1953).
Two other works, non-dramatic, remain for mention: Hero and Leander and Lucan's First Booke Translated Line for
Line, both entered for printing in 1593. The first, unfinished,
was published in 1598, afterwards with a completion by Chapman; the
second appeared in 1600. The famous short poem "Come live with me and
be my love" appeared first in The
Passionate Pilgrim (1599) and next, in a fuller form, in Englands Helicon (1600). The nearly
simultaneous publication of these pieces appears to indicate an effort
by friends to leave little or nothing of the poet's work unprinted. We
gather, from various allusions, that Marlowe had friends and admirers
in spite of his ill-repute.
The first duty of a historian is to dwell, not upon Marlowe's faults,
but upon his achievements; and the fact to be recorded is that Marlowe
is a prime creative force in English literature, and a creative force
of a new kind. Till Marlowe's time no one had made possible and
credible such daemonic figures as Tamburlaine, Faustus, and Barabas,
whose tragic doom is compelled by forves within themselves and not by
mischances from without. Marlowe's heroes confront the fates; they are
not the sport of destiny. Marlowe himself has the self-possession of
the strong man, and could use his sources creatively. His violence is
native, and the inequalities in his art are the effect of his strength,
not the signs of undeveloped power. His work was finished at an age at
which few poets have really begun. Edward
II
stands by itself among his plays. There is a temptation to overpraise
it. because it is the first complete historical play of the stricter
type without lapses into foolery, it is singled out as Marlowe's best
dramatic effort. But it merely seems the best because it never sinks to
the worst depths of Tamburlaine
and Faustus.
Just as certainly it never touches their greatest heights. In passion
and word-music the play is inferior to the greater pieces; it lacks,
too, the touch of caricature that gives them convincing vitality.
Still, it is the first successful attempt we have at the interpretation
of history on the stage; for a successful history-play must interpret
history, it must not merely label figures with historical names. The
earlier historical plays were only another form of the cautionary
historical poems in A Mirror for
Magistrates. After Marlowe's Edward
II, Shakespeare's Richard II and
its great successors became possible; but Marlowe could never have
attained the all-embracing versatility of Shakespeare. Edward II showes
his limitations as clearly as his powers. No one remembers its
characters and scenes as one remembers the characters and scenes of Richard II.
Marlowe gave his age true tragedy. He also gave it tragedy's true
instrument, great verse. Gorboduc
had taught blank verse how to speak on the stage; Tamburlaine
taught it how to sing. Indeed, it might be said that Marlowe's genius
is operatic, and he obviously learned something of his music from
Spenser. His famous passages are like great solos, superbly lyrical and
appropriate, but not integrally woven into the texture of the drama.
His dramatic blank verse unites the formal dignity of Gorboduc with the musical fluency
of The Faerie Queene;
and so it is rhythmically free and inventive, capable alike of magic
and of majesty, always the master and never the slave of its metrical
pattern. And though his daemonic figures may seem excessive in deed or
aspiration, their poetic speech, however "mighty", is spontaneous,
natural, and even simple.
Thomas Kyd (1558-94) appears to be the person held up to contempt by
Nashe in his preface to Menaphon
as an example of those who "could scarcelie latinize their necke-verse
if they should have need". Kyd's great offence was that he had made an
immense theatrical success with The Spanish Tragedy.
The extent of Kyd's Latinity may not have been great; but though he
"never ware gowne in the Universitie" he was a fellow pupil with
Spenser at Merchant Taylors.' His translations from the Italian and
French, which seem to have annoyed Nashe specially, are quite
unimportant. The Italian work is a pamphlet, and the French a version
of Robert Garnier's Cornélie under the title Pompey the Great, his fair Corneliaes Tragedie
(printed 1594—there is no record of its being acted). Other works
attributed to him raise too many bibliographical problems to be
accepted readily. The First Part of Jeronimo, extant in a quarto of 1605, is possibly a "first part" to The Spanish Tragedie, but not very probably written by Kyd himself. The Tragedye of Solyman and Perseda (published 1592) may perhaps be his, for that is the subject of the play within the play in The Spanish Tragedie; but it is quite definitively inferior to that piece. Even the Tragedie
itself is a problem. Its date is unknown. It may have been written just
before 1588. By 1592 it was enjoying great popularity. Its first known
quarto is dateless; but even that is described as "Newly corrected and
amended of such grosse faults as passed in the first impression", so it
may not be the first; the second known quarto appeared in 1594, and the
third in 1599. None of them gives the least clue as to the author's
name; and it is not till 1612 that "M. Kid" is named casually by
Heywood, as the author, in his Apology for Actors.
The play out-Senecas Seneca in its wild horrors and in the excesses of
its style. But there van be observed a faint resemblance to Hamlet,
not merely in details of the story, but in the halting, suffering,
distracvted, self-communing character of Hieronimo, who was an entirely
new kind of tragic hero. The Spanish Tragedy is the first example we possess of the Hamlet type of play.
Kyd can be easily underrated. His contribution to drama is
intrinsically as well as historically important. He was the first
English dramatist to discover the bearing of episode and of dramatic
"movement" upon character, and the first to give the audience a hint of
the development that follows from this interaction. In other words, he
is the first English dramatist who writes dramatically. We have parted
company with the older declamatory tragedy of the English Senecans,
with the "operatic" tragedy of Marlowe, and we are nearer the manner of
Shakespeare. That the young Shakespeare knew The Spanish Tragedy
is evident. Was there a closer association? What are the "whole
Hamlets" of "tragicall speaches" referred to by Nashe in 1589 and
apparently associated with Kyd? Did Kyd write a play upon the
well-known story of Hamlet? Did Shakespeare make that play the basis
of his own? Does the First Quarto of Hamlet
(1603) carry over some sections of an older, non-Shakespearean play?
There is no certain answer to any of these questions. Perhaps in some
obscure library there lies unrecognized the lost Hamlet of Kyd, or another, as the lost Fulgens and Lucres lay unrecognized till 1919. Perhaps, on the other hand, there never was such a play.
James Joyce was born in Dublin, son of a
talented but feckless father who is accurately described by Stephen Dedalus
in A Portrait of the Artist as Young
Man as a man who had in his time been "a medical student, an
oarsman, a tenor, an amateur actor, a shouting politician, a small
landlord, a small investor, a drinker, a good fellow, a storyteller,
somebody's secretary, something in a distillery, a tax-gatherer, a
bankrupt, and at present a praiser of his own past." The elder Joyce
drifted steadily down the financial and social scale, his family moving
from house to house, each one less genteel and more shabby than the
previous. James Joyce's whole education was Catholic, from the age of
six to the age of nine at Clongowes Wood College and from eleven to
sixteen at Belvedere College, Dublin. Both were Jesuit institutions and
were normal roads to the priesthood. He then studied modern
languages
at University College, Dublin.
From a comparatively early age Joyce regarded himself as a rebel
against the shabbiness and Philistinism of Dublin. In his early youth
he was very religious, but in his last year at Belvedere he began to
reject his Catholic faith in favor of a literary mission that he saw as
involving rebellion and exile. He refused to play any part in the
nationalist or other popular activities of his fellow students, and he
created some stir by his outspoken articles, one of which, on the
Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, appeared in the Fortnightly Review for April 1900.
He taught himself Norwegian to be able to read Ibsen and to write to
him. When an article by Joyce, significantly titled The Day of the Rabblement, was
refused, on instructions of the faculty adviser, by the student
magazine that had commissioned it, he had it printed privately. By
1902, when he received his A.B. degree, he was already committed to a
career as an exile and writer. For Joyce, as for his character Stephen
Dedalus, the latter implied the former. To preserve his integrity, to
avoid involvement in popular sentimentalities and dishonesties, and
above all to be able to re-create with both total understanding and
total objectivity the Dublin life he knew so well, he felt that he had
to go abroad.
Joyce was sent to Paris after graduation, was recalled to Dublin by his
mother's fatal illness, had a short spell there as a schoolteacher,
then returned to the Continent in 1904 to teach English at Trieste and
then at Zurich. He took with him Nora Barnacle, an uneducated Galway
girl with no interest in literature; her native vivacity and peasant
wit charmed Joyce, and the two lived in devoted companionship until
Joyce's death, although they were not married until 1931. In 1920 Joyce
settled in Paris, where he lived until December 1940, when the war
forced him to take refuge in Switzerland; he died in Zurich a few weeks
later.
Proud, obstinate, absolutely convinced of his genius, given to fits
of
sudden gaiety and of sudden silence, Joyce was not always an easy
person to get along with, yet he never lacked friends, and throughout
his thirty-six years on the Continent he was always the center of a
literary circle. Life was hard at first. At Trieste he had very little
money, and he did not improve matters by drinking heavily, a habit
checked somewhat by his brother Stanislaus, who came out from Dublin to
act (as Stanislaus put it much later) as his "brother's keeper." His
financial position was much improved by the patronage of Mrs. Harold
McCormick (Edith Rockefeller), who provided him with a monthly stipend
from March 1917 until September 1919, when they quarreled, apparently
because Joyce refused to submit to psychoanalysis by Carl Jung, who had
been heavily endowed by her. The New York lawyer and art patron John
Quinn, steered in Joyce's direction by Ezra Pound, also helped Joyce
financially in 1917. A more permanent benefactor was the English
feminist and editor Harriet Shaw Weaver, who not only subsidized Joyce
generously from 1917 to the end of his life but occupied herself
indefatigably with arrangements for publishing his work.
Joyce's almost lifelong exile from his native Ireland had something
paradoxical about it. No writer has ever been more soaked in Dublin,
its atmosphere, its history, its topography; in spite of doing most of
his writing from Trieste, Zurich, and Paris, he wrote only and always
about Dublin. He devised ways of expanding his accounts of Dublin,
however, so that they became microcosmos, small-scale models, of all
human life, of all history, and of all geography. Indeed that was his
life's work: to write about Dublin in such a way that he was writing
about all of human experience.
Joyce began his career by writing a series of stories etching with
extraordinary clarity aspects of Dublin life. But these
stories—published as Dubliners
in 1914—are more than sharp realistic sketches. In each, the detail is
so chosen and organized that carefully interacting symbolic meanings
are set up, and as a result, Dubliners
is a book about human fate as well as a series of sketches of Dublin.
Furthermore, the stories are presented in a particular order so that
new meanings arise from the relation between them.
Tha last story in Dubliners,The Dead,
was not part of the original draft of the book but was added later, at
a time when Joyce was preoccupied with the nature of artistic
objectivity. A series of jolting events frees the protagonist,
Gabriel, from his possessiveness and egotism; the view he attains at
the end is the mood of supreme neutrality that Joyce saw as the
beginning of artistic awareness. It is the view of art developed by
Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man. Dubliners represents
Joyce's first phase: he had come directly to terms with the meaning of
his own developement as a man dedicated to writing. He did this by
weaving his autobiography into a novel so finely chiseled and carefully
organized, so stripped of everything superfluous, that each word
contributes to the presentation of the theme: the parallel movement
toward art and toward exile. A part of Joyce's first draft has been
posthumously published under the original title of Stephen Hero (1944); a comparison
between it and the final version that Joyce gave to the world, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
(1916), will show how carefully Joyce reworked and compressed his
material for maximum effect. The Portrait
is not literally true as autobiography, although it has many
autobiographical elements, but it is representatively true not only of
Joyce but of the relation between the artist and society in the early
twentieth century.
In the Portrait Stephen
worked
out a theory of art that considers that art moves from the lyrical
form—which is the simplest, the personal expression of an instant of
emotion—through the narrative form—no longer purely personal—to the
dramatic—the highest and most nearly perfect form, where "the artist,
like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above
his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring
his fingernails." This view of art, which invokes the objectivity, even
the exile, of the artist (even though the artist uses only the
materials provided for him or her by his or her own life), is related
to that held by the poets of the 1890s. More widely, it is related to
the rejection by the artist of the ordinary world of middle-class
values and activities that we see equally, tough in different ways, in
Matthew Arnold's war against the Philistines and in the concept (very
un-Arnoldian) of the artist as bohemian. Joyce's career belongs to that
long chapter in the history of the arts in Western civilization that
begins with the artist's declaring independence and ends with his or
her feeling inevitable alienation. But if Joyce was alienated, as in
certain ways he clearly was, he made his alienation serve his art: the
kinds of writing represented by Ulysses
and Finnegans Wake
represent the most consummate craftsmanship put at the service of a
humanely comic vision of all life. Some of Joyce's innovations in
organization and style have been imitated by other writers, but these
books are, and will probably remain, unique in our literature.
From the beginning, Joyce had trouble with the Philistines. Publication
of Dubliners
was held up for many years while he fought with both English and Irish
publishers about certain words and phrases that they wished to
eliminate. (It was one of the former who finally published the book).
His masterpiece Ulysses was
banned in both Britain and America on its first appearance in 1922; its
earlier serialization in an American magazine, The Little Review
(March 1918-December 1920) had had to stop abruptly when the U.S. Post
Office brought a charge of obscenity against it. Fortunately, Judge
Woolsey's history-making decision in favour of Ulysses
in a U.S. district court on December 6, 1933, resulted in the lifting
of the ban and the free circulation of the work first in America and
soon afterward in Britain.
Ulysses
Ulysses is an account
of one day in the lives of citizens of Dublin in the year 1904; it is
thus the description of a limited number of events involving a limited
number of people in a limited environment. Yet Joyce's ambition—which
took him seven years to realize—is to make his action into a microcosm
of all human experience. The events are not, therefore, told on a
single level; the story is presented in such a manner that depth and
implication are given to them and they become symbolic of the activity
of the individual in the World. The most obvious of the devices that
Joyce employs to make clear the microcosmic aspect of his story is the
parallel with Homer's Odyssey:
every episode in Ulysses
corresponds in some way to an episode in the Odyssey.
Joyce regarded Homer's Ulysses as the most "complete" man in
literature, a man who is shown in all his aspects—both coward and hero,
cautious and reckless, weak and strong, husband and philanderer, father
and son, dignified and ridiculous; so he makes his hero, Leopold Bloom,
an Irish Jew, into a modern Ulysses and by so doing helps make him
Everyman and make Dublin the world.
The book opens at eight o'clock on the morning of June 16, 1904.
Stephen Dedalus (the same character we saw in the Portrait,
but this is two years after our last glimpse of him there) had been
summoned back to Dublin by his mother's fatal illness and now lives in
an old military tower on the shore with Buck Mulligan, a rollicking
medical student, and and Englishman called Haines. In the first three
episodes of Ulysses,
which
concentrate on Stephen, he is built up as an aloof, uncompromising
artist, rejecting all advances by representatives of the normal world,
the incomplete man, to be contrasted later with the complete Leopold
Bloom, who is much more "normal" and conciliatory. After tracing
Stephen through his early-morning activitites and learning the main
currents of his mind, we go, in the fourth episode, to the home of
Bloom. We follow closely his every activity: attending a funeral,
transacting his business, eating his lunch, walking through the Dublin
streets, worrying about his wife's infidelity with Blazes Boylan—and at
each point the contents of his mind, including retrospect and
anticipation, are presented to the reader, until all his past history
is revealed. Finally, Bloom and Stephen, who have been just missing
each other all day, get together. By this time it is late, and Stephen,
who has been drinking with some medical students, is the worse for
liquor. Bloom, moved by a paternal feeling toward Stephen (his own son
had died in infancy and in a symbolic way Stephen takes his place),
follows him during subsequent adventures in the role of protector. The
climax of the book comes when Stephen, far gone in drink, and Bloom,
worn out with fatigue, succumb to a series of hallucinations where
their subconscious and unconscious come to the surface in dramatic form
and their whole personalities are revealed with a completeness and a
frankness unique in literature. Then Bloom takes the unresponsive
Stephen home and gives him a meal. After Stephen's departure Bloom
retires to bed—it is now two in the morning on June 17—while his wife,
Molly, representing the principles of sex and reproduction on which all
human life is based, closes the book with a long monologue in which her
experiences as woman are remembered.
On the level of realistic description, Ulysses
pulses with life and can be enjoyed for its evocation of early
twentieth-century Dublin. On the level of psychological exploration, it
gives a profound and moving presentation of the personality and
consciousness of Leopold Bloom and (to a lesser extent) Stephen
Dedalus. On the level of style, it exhibits the most fascinating
linguistic virtuosity. On a deeper symbolic level, the novel explores
the paradoxes of human loneliness and sociability (for Bloom is both
Jew and Dubliner, both exile and citizen, just as all of us are in a
sense bothe exiles and citizens), and it explores the problems posed by
the relations between parent and child, between the generations, and
between the sexes. At the same time, through its use of themes from
Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare and from literature, philosophy, and
history, the book weaves a subtle pattern of allusion and suggestion
that illuminates many aspects of human experience. The more one reads Ulysses,
the more one finds in it, but at the same time one does not need to
probe into the symbolic meaning to relish both its literary artistry
and its human feeling. At the forefront stands Leopold Bloom, from one
point of view, a frustrated and confused outsider in the society in
which he moves, from another, a champion of kindness and justice whose
humane curiosity about his fellows redeems him from mere vulgarity and
gives the book its positive human foundation.
Readers who come to Ulysses
with expectations about the way the story is to be presented derived
from their reading of Victorian novels or even of such
twentieth-century novelists as Conrad and Lawrence will find much that
is at first puzzling. Joyce presents the consciousness of his
characters directly, without any explanatory comment that tells the
reader whose consciousness is being rendered (this is the stream of
consciousness method). He may move, in the same paragraph and without
any sign that he is making such a transition, from a description of a
character's action—e.g. Stephen walking along the shore or Bloom
entering a restaurant—to an evocation of the character's mental
response to that action. That response is always multiple: it derives
partly from the character's immediate situation and partly fro the
whole complex of attitudes that his past history has created in him. To
suggest this multiplicity, Joyce may vary his style, from the flippant
to the serious or from a realistic description to a suggestive set of
images that indicate what might be called the general tone of the
character's consciousness. Past and present mingle in the texture of
the prose because they mingle in the texture of consciousness, and this
mingling can be indicated by puns, by sudden breaks into a new kind of
style or a new kind of subject matter, or by some other device for
keeping the reader constantly in sight of the shifting, kaleidoscopic
nature of human awareness. With a little experience, the reader learns
to follow the implications of Joyce's shifts in manner and content—even
to follow that at first sight bewildering passage in the "Proteus"
episode in which Stephen does not go to visit his uncle and aunt but,
passing the road that leads to their house, imagines the kind of
conversation that would take place in his home if he had gone to visit his uncle
and had then returned home and reported that he had done so. Ulysses
must not be approached as though it were a novel written in a
traditional manner; all preconceptions must be set aside and we must
follow wherever the author leads us and let the language tell us what
it has to say without our troubling whether language is being used
"properly" or not.
Finnegans
Wake
Joyce's last work, Finnegans Wake,
was published in 1939; it took more than fourteen years to write, and
Joyce considered it his masterpiece. In Ulysses he had made the symbolic
aspect of the novel at least as important as the realistic aspect, but
in Finnegas Wake
he gave up realism altogether. This vast story of a symbolic Irishman's
cosmic dream develops by enormous reverberating puns a continuous
expansion of meaning, the elements in the puns deriving from every
conceivable source in history, literature, mythology, and Joyce's
personal experience. The whole book being (on one level at least) a
dream, Joyce invents his own dream language in which words are
combined, distorted, created by fitting together bits of other words,
used with several different meanings at once, often drawn from several
different languages at once, and fused in all sorts of ways to achieve
whole clusters of meaning simultaneously. In fact, so many echoing
suggestions can be found in every word or phrase that a full annotation
of even a few pages would require a large book. It has taken the
cooperative work of a number of devoted readers to make clear the
complex interactions of the multiple puns and pun clusters, through
which the ideas are projected, and every rereading reveals new
meanings. It is true that many readers find the efforts of explication
demanded by Finnegans Wake
too arduous; some, indeed, feel that the law of diminishing returns has
now begun to operate, and that the effort of both author and reader is
disproportionate. Nevertheless, the book has great beauty and
fascination even for the casual reader. Students are advised to read
aloud—or to listen to the record of Joyce reading aloud—the extract
printed here to appreciate the degree to which the rhythms of the prose
assist in conveying the meaning.
To an even greater extent than Ulysses,
Finnegans Wake
aims at embracing all of human history. The title is from an
Irish-American ballad about Tom Finnegan, a hod carrier who falls
off a ladder when drunk and is apparently killed, but who revives when
during the wake (the watch by the dead body) someone spills whiskey on
him. The theme of death and resurrection, of cycles of change coming
round in the course of history, is central to Finnegans Wake,
which derives one of its main principles of organization from the
cyclical theory of history put forward in 1725 by the Italian
philosopher Giambattista Vico. Vico held that history passes through
four phases: the divine or theocratic, when people are governed by
their awe of the supernatural; the aristocratic (the "heroic age"
reflected in Homer and in Beowulf);
the democratic and individualistic; and the final stage of chaos, a
fall in into confusion startles humanity back into supernatural
reverence and starts the process once again. Joyce, like Yeats, saw his
own generation as the final stage awaiting the shock that will bring
humans back to the first.
A mere account of the narrative line of Finnegans Wake
cannot, of course, give any idea of the content of the work. If one
explains that it opens with Finnegan's fall, then introduces his
successor Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, who is Everyman, and whose dream
constitutes the novel, that he is presented as having guilt feelings
about an indecency he committed (or may have committed) at Phoenix
Park, Dublin; that his wife, Anna Livia Plurabelle or ALP (who is also
Eve, Iseult, Ireland, the river Liffey), changes her role just as he
does; that he has two sons, Shem and Shaun (or Jerry and Kevin), who
represent introvert and extrovert, artist and practical man, creator
and popularizer, and symbolize this basic dichotomy in human nature by
all kinds of metamorphoses; and if one adds that, in the four books
into which Finnegans Wake is
divided (after Vico's pattern), actions comic or grotesque or sad or
tender or desperate or passionate or terribly ordinary (and very often
several of these things at the same time) take place with all the
shifting meanings of a dream, so that characters change into others or
into inanimate objects and the setting keeps shifting—if we explain all
this, we still have said very little about what makes Finnegans Wake
what it is. The dreamer, whose initials HCE indicate his universality
("Here Comes Everybody"), is at the same time a particular person, who
keeps a pub at Chapelizod, a Dublin suburb on the river Liffey near
Phoenix Park. His mysterious misdemeanor in Phoenix Park is in a sense
Original Sin: Earwicker is Adam as well as a primeval giant, the Hill
of Howth, the Great Parent ("Haveth Childers Everywhere" is another
expansion of HCE), and Man in History. Other characters who flit and
change through the book, such as the Twelve Customers (who are also
twelve jurymen and public opinion) and the Four Old Men (who are also
judges, the authors of the four Gospels, and the four elements), help
weave the texture of multiple significance so characteristic of the
work. But always it is the punning language, extending significance
downward—rather than the plot, developing it lengthwise—that bears the
main load of meaning.
From The Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed.
Margaret Drabble.
The Canterbury Tales,Chaucer's
most celebrated work
probably designed about 1387 and extending to 17,000 lines in prose and
verse of various metres (though the predominant form is the rhyming
couplet). The General Prologue describes the meeting of 29 pilgrims in
the Tabard Inn in Southwark (in fact they add up to 31; it has been
suggested that the prioress's 'preestes three' in line 164 may be an
error since only one 'Nun's Priest' is mentioned in the body of the
work). Detailed pen-pictures are given of 21 of them, vividly described
but perhaps corresponding to traditional lists of the orders of
society, clerical and lay (see J. Mann, Chaucer and Medieval
Estates Satire, 1973). The host (see BAILLY)
proposes that the pilgrims should shorten the road by telling four
stories each, two on the way to Canterbury and two on the way back; he
will accompany them and award a free supper on their return to the
teller of the best story. The work is incomplete; only 23 pilgrims tell
stories, and there are only 24 stories told altogether (Chaucer tells
two). In the scheme the stories are linked by narrative exchanges
between the pilgrims and by prologues and epilogues to the tales; but
this aspect of the work is also very incomplete. It is uncertain even,
in what order the stories are meant to come; the evidence of the
manuscripts and of geographical references is conflicting, as is the
scholarly interpretation of that evidence. The order that follows is
that of the Ellesmere manuscipt, followed in the best complete edition
of Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, (ed. L. D. Benson et al.,
1988).
(1) 'The Knight's Tale', a shortened version of the Teseida of
Boccaccio, the story of the love of Palamon and Arcite (told again in
Shakespeare's The Two Noble Kinsmen),
prisoners of Theseus king of Athens, for Emelyie, sister of Hippolyta
queen of the Amazons, whom Theseus has married. The rivals
compete for her in a tournament. Palamon is defeated, but Arcite, the
favourite of Mars, at the moment of his triumph is thrown and injured
by his horse through the intervention of Venus and Saturn, and dies.
Palamon and Emelye, after prolonged mourning for Arcite, are united. Riverside
follows the Ellesmere division of the tale into four parts, but it is
not so divided in all the manuscripts. An interesting interpretation of
the tale as ironic is given by Terry Jones in Chaucer's Knight
(1978). (2) 'The Miller's Tale', a ribald story of the deception, first of a
husband (a carpenter) through the prediction of a second flood, and
secondly of a lover who expects to kiss the lady's lips but kisses
instead her 'nether eye'. He avenges himself on her lover for this
humiliation with a red-hot ploughshare. The Tale has been said to be a
parody of a courtly-love story. (3) 'The Reeve's Tale' is a fabliau about two clerks who are robbed by
a miller of some of the meal which they take to his mill to be ground,
and who take their vengeance by sleeping with the miller's wife and
daughter. There are two manuscript versions of a French analogue in
Bryan and Dempster, Sources and Analogues of Chaucer's Canterbury
Tales
(1941), 126-47, 'Le Meunier et les II clers'. In Chaucer's context, it
is an obvious rejoinder to the miller's tale of the duping of a
carpenter, the reeve's profession. (4) 'The Cook's Tale' of Perkyn Revelour only extends to 58 lines
before it breaks off. It is another ribald fabliau which ends with the
introduction of a prostitute, and it has been suggested that Chaucer
may have decided that the occurrence of three indecent tales together
was unbalanced. The tale of Gamelyn, not by Chaucer, is introduced for
the cook in some manuscripts. The cook himself, Roger (by nickname
traditionally Hodge) of Ware (l. 4336), has been identified with an
attested cook of that name. See Riverside, p. 814. (5) 'The Man of Law's Tale' is the story of Constance, daughter of a
Christian emperor of Rome, who marries the sultan of Syria on condition
that he become a Christian and who is cast adrift on a boat because of
the machinations of the sultan's jealous mother. It is a frequently
told medieval story, paralleled by the romance Emaré and by
Gower's Constance story in Confessio Amantis,
ii. 587ff.; there is argument about the priority of Chaucer's and
Gower's versions. It is certain, at least, that Chaucer's is based on a
passage in the early 14th-cent. Anglo-Norman Chronicle by Trivet. Both
Trivet's and Gower's versions are in Bryan and Dempster. (6) 'The Wife of Bath's Tale' is preceded by an 856-line prologue in
which she condemns celibacy by describing her life with her five late
husbands, in the course of which Chaucer draws widely on the medieval
anti-feminist tradition, especially on Jean de Meun's La Vielle
(the Duenna) in the Roman de la Rose.
After this vigorous, learned, and colourful narrative, the following
tale, though appropriate, seems rather flat. It is the story of 'the
loathly lady' (paralleled by Gower's 'Tale of Florent' in Confessio
Amantis, i. 1396 ff., and by the romance Weddynge of Sir Gawen
and Dame Ragnell, edited in D. B. Sands, Middle English Verse
Romances,
323-47) in which a knight is asked to answer the question, 'what do
women most desire?' The correct answer, 'sovereignty', is told him by a
hideous old witch on condition that he marry her; when he does she is
restored to youth and beauty. Since Kittredge (Chaucer and His
Poetry,
1915, 185 ff.) it has generally been thought that this Prologue-Tale
sets in motion a discussion of marriage, 'The Marriage Group', which is
taken up (after interruptions) by the clerk, the merchant, and the
franklin (see 9, 10, 12 below). (7) 'The Friar's Tale' tells how a summoner meets the devil dressed as
a yeoman and they agree to share out what they are given. They come
upon a carter who curses his horse, commending it to the devil; the
summoner asks the devil why he does not take the horse thus committed
to him and the devil replies that it is because the commendation does
not come from the heart. Later they visit an old woman from whom the
summoner attempts to extort twelve pence, whereupon she commends him
to the devil. The devil carries him off to hell because her curse was
from the heart. The story is widely attested in popular tradition, and
its motif is referred to as ex corde, 'from the heart'.
Chaucer's exact source is not known, but it is clear that the friar
tells it to enrage the summoner on the pilgrimage, who interrupts the
narrative and rejoins with a scurrilous and discreditable story about a
friar. (8) 'The Summoner's Tale' tells of a greedy friar who undertakes to
divide a deathbed legacy amongst his community; he receives a fart and
has to devise an ingenious stratagem to divide it with perfect justice. (9) 'The Clerk's Tale', which the poet tells us he took from Petrarch,
was translated into Latin by the latter from the Italian version of
Boccaccio in The Decameron (Day
10, Tale 10). Boccaccio was the first writer (in 1353) to take the
story from popular currency, and there are several versions of the
story in Italian, Latin, and French before Chaucer's (indeed it is
clear that Chaucer's version is rather more dependent on a French prose
version than on Petrarch's Latin). The story tells of patient Griselda
and her trials by her husband, the Marquis Walter. Chaucer's version
has more hints of criticism in the relentless husband than any of his
predecessors (except Boccaccio, whose narrator frowns on Gualtieri's
'strange desire' to try his wife's obedience). Apologists for 'The
Marriage Group' (see 6 above) regard the tale as a response to the wife
of Bath, partly because the Clerk concludes with an expression of good
will towards her (IV. 1170 ff.). (10) 'The Merchant's Tale', in which the merchant, prompted by the tale
of Griselda's extreme obedience, tells his 'Tale' of January and May,
the old husband with his young wife, and the problems with obedient
fidelity involved in this relationship. After a lengthy review of the
pros and cons of taking a young wife, January ignores the good advice
of Justinus in favour of the time serving opinion of Placebo and
marries May. When he goes blind she makes love to her suitor Damyan in
a pear-tree round which January wraps his arms. Pluto mischievously
restores January's sight at this point, but Proserpine inspires May to
explain that the restoration of his sight was brought about by her
activities in the pear-tree and that this had been their purpose.
Critics have argued about the relative proportions of mordancy and
humour in the tale; see E. Talbot Donaldson in Speaking of Chaucer
(1970), 30-45. There are parallels to the various sections of the story
in French, Latin, Italian, and German (see D. S. Brewer (ed.), Medieval
Comic Tales, 1973, German no. 3 and Latin, (o)).
(11) 'The Squire's Tale', of Cambuscan, king of Tartary, to whom on his
birthday an envoy from the king of Arabia brings magic gifts, including
a ring for the king's daughter Canacee, which enables her to understand
the language of birds. A female falcon tells Canacee the story of her
own desertion by a tercelet. The tale is incomplete but it seems likely
that Chaucer meant to finish it, judging from the fact that there is no
suggestion that it is unfinished in the laudatory words of the franklin
that follow it (V. 673 ff.). The precise origin of the tale is unknown,
but a number of parallels are suggested by H. S. V. Jones in Bryan and
Dempster, pp. 357-76. (12) 'The Franklin's Tale', of Dorigen, wife of Arveragus, who to
escape the attentions of her suitor, the squire Aurelius, makes her
consent depend upon an impossible condition, that all the rocks on the
coast of Brittany be removed. When this condition is realized by the
aid of a magician, the suitor, from a generous remorse, releases her
from her promise. Chaucer states that the tale is taken from a 'breton
lay', but if this is true, the original is lost. There are a number of
parallels in medieval literature, of which the closest is Boccaccio's Il
filocolo,Question 4. See N. R. Hayely, Chaucer's
Boccaccio (1980). (13) 'The Physician's Tale' tells of Virginia who, at her own request,
is killed by her father to escape the designs of the corrupt judge
Appius. The original source is Livy's History, and this is what
Chaucer cites, though his version seems to rely principally on the Roman
de la rose, ll. 5589-658, by Jean de Meun. (14) 'The Pardoner's Tale' follows a prologue in which he declares his
own covetousness, and takes covetousness as its theme, relating it to
other sins: drunkenness, gluttony, gambling, and swearing. Three
rioters set out to find Death who has killed their companion; a
mysterious old man tells them they will find him under a particular
tree, but when they get there they find instead a heap of gold. By
aiming to cheat each other in possessing the gold they kill each other.
The character of the pardoner in the prologue here is related to Faus
Semblant (False Seeming) in Jean de Meun's part of the Roman de la
Rose,ll. 11065-972 (a section corresponding to the Middle
English Romaunt of the Rose,
Fragment C, lines 67061 ff.: Robinson, pp. 621 ff.). There are many
analogues for the tale, in Latin, Italian, and German, but Chaucer's
exact source, if he had one, is not known. (15) 'The Shipman's Tale.' There is a similar story in The Decameron
(Day 8, Tale 1). The wife of a niggardly merchant asks the loan of a
hundred francs from a priest to buy finery. The priest borrows the sum
from the merchant and hands it to the wife, and the wife grants him her
favours. On the merchant's return from a journey the priest tells him
that he has repaid the sum to the wife, who cannot deny receiving it. (16) 'The Prioress's Tale' tells of the murder of a child by Jews
because he sings a Marian hymn while passing through their quarter and
of the discovery of his body because of its continued singing of the
hymn after death. There are a great many parallels for the story. Some
critics, perhaps anachronistically, see the bland anti-Semitism of the
story as a comment on the uncritical nature of the prioress. (17) 'Chaucer's Tale of Sir Thopas' is a witty and elegant parody of
the contemporary romance, both in its subject and in the
insubstantiality of its tail-rhyme form. Its butts are no doubt
general, but it can perhaps be taken to have special reference to the
heroes it catalogues (VII. 898-900): Horn Child, the legend of Ypotys,
Bevis of Hampton, Guy of Warwick, the unidentified Pleyndamour, and
Libeaus Desconus. It is closest, it has been argued, to the last of
these. (18) When the Host interrupts the tale of Sir Thopas, Chaucer moves to
the opposite extreme with a heavy prose homily, 'The Tale of Melibeus'.
This story of the impetuous Melibeus and his wise wife Prudence dates
from Italy in the 1240s, when the story was written in Latin prose for
his third son by Albertano of Brescia. Chaucer's immediate source was
the 1336 version in French prose by Renaud de Louens. (19) 'The Monk's Tale' is composed of a number of 'tragedies' of
persons fallen from high estate, taken from different authors and
arranged on the model of Boccaccio's De Casibus Virorum Illustrium.
The tale is in eight-line stanzas. (20) 'The Nun's Priest's Tale' is related to the French cycle of Renart
(see Reynard), telling of a fox that beguiled a cock by praising his
father's singing and was in turn beguiled by him into losing him by
pausing to boast at his victory. The mock-heroic story is full of
rhetoric and exempla, and it is one of the most admired of the Tales,
regarded as the most typically 'Chaucerian' in tone and content.
The fable is very familiar, but the parallels to Chaucer's treatment of
it are not very close. The famous ending of the tale invites the reader
to 'take the morality' of the Tale in spite of its apparent lightness
of substance, on the grounds that St Paul says everything has some moral;
this invitation has been taken with surprising solemnity by many
critics. (21) 'The Second Nun's Tale', in rhyme-royal, is perhaps translated
from the life of St Cecilia in the Golden Legend of Jacobus de
Voragine. It describes the miracles and martyrdom of the noble Roman
maiden Cecilia and her husband Valerian. (22) 'The Canon's Yeoman's Tale' is told by a character who joins the
pilgrims at this late stage (VIII. 554 ff.) with his master, the
dubious canon whose alchemical skills the yeoman praises. The first 200
lines of the tale tell of the Alchemist's arcane practice and its
futility, before proceeding to the tale proper which tales of how an
alchemical canon (who is not
his master, he protests, perhaps suggesting that it is) tricks a priest
out of £40 by pretending to teach him the art of making precious
metals. The dishonesty of the alchemists was much discussed and
condemned in the 14th cent.; there is a close analogue to Chaucer's
story in one of the Novelle of Sercambi (included in Bryan and
Dempster, pp. 694-5). The most significant literary parallel, of
course, is Jonson's The Alchemist. (23) 'The Manciple's Tale' is the fable of the tell-tale crow, told by
many authors from Ovid in Metamorphoses
(2. 531-62) onwards. Phebus (Phoebus) has a crow which is white and can
speak. It reveals to Phebus the infidelity of his wife (nameless in
Chaucer, but Coronis in Ovid and most of the writers who follow him)
and Phebus kills her in a rage. Then, in remorse, he plucks out the
crow's white feathers, deprives it of speech and throws it 'unto the
devel', which is why crows are now black. A very similar version of the
story is told in Gower's Confessio Amantis (iii. 768-835), and
there are other examples by Guillaume de Machaut and in the Ovide
moralisé (c. 1324). As well as these, J. A. Work in Bryan and
Dempster edits as analogues a story from The Seven Sages of Rome
which does not name Phebus and which exchanges the fates of wife and
bird, as well as some sententious parallels from Boethius and Jean de
Meun. (24) 'The Parson's Tale' which concludes the work (and was, no doubt,
meant to, even if the main body of the Tales is
incomplete) is a long prose treatise, ostensibly on Penitence but
dealing at most length with the Seven Deadly Sins. The two principal
sources are Raymund de Pennaforte's Summa (dating from the
1220s) for the sections on Penitence, and Guilielmus Peraldu's Summa
Vitiorum (probably from the 1250s) for the Seven Deadly Sins. Most manuscripts have 'The Parson's Tale' leading straight into
Chaucer's closing 'Retracciouns' in which he takes leave of his book.
He asks forgiveness of God for his 'translacions and enditynges of
worldly vanities', including 'The Tales of Caunterbury, thilke that
sownen into [i.e. tend towards] synne'. But this rhetorical conclusion
need not be read as a revocation of his work by the poet; following St
Augustine's Retractationes, many medieval works end by
distancing the writer from the non-spiritual elements in his work: the
Author's Epilogue in The Decameron and Chaucer's Troilus
are other familiar examples. See N. F. Blake, The Canterbury Tales,
Edited from the Hengwrt Manuscript (1980); H. Cooper, The
Canterbury Tales (1989). Also an edition by V. A. Kolve and G.
Olsen (1989).
