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Shylock, Iago, and Sir Thomas More: With Some Further Discussion of Shakespeare's Imagination

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

William H. Matchett
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Abstract

The association of ideas as manifested in Shakespeare’s image clusters, discussed by Caroline Spurgeon and Edward Armstrong, was used by R. W. Chambers as a test of authorship for the Sir Thomas More fragment. Some unstudied associations tie Iago to one side of Shylock and the More fragment to another, providing further evidence of Shakespeare’s authorship and the probable date of composition. Image clusters similarly suggest that King John preceded Richard II; and King Lear, Timon of Athens. Our consideration needs to be broadened beyond exclusively verbal terms: Shakespeare’s imagination is fully theatrical. Association is not a mere stimulus-response limiting of the imagination; it provided flexible and wide-ranging systems of intermeshing concepts at Shakespeare’s most creative moments.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 92 , Issue 2 , March 1977 , pp. 217 - 230
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1977

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References

Notes

1 All line references are to The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare, gen. ed. Sylvan Barnet (New York: Harcourt, 1972).

2 Shakespeare's Imagery and What It Tells Us (New York: Macmillan, 1936), p. 195.

3 This familiar term was established by Edward A. Armstrong in Shakespeare's Imagination: A Study of the Psychology of Association and Inspiration (London: Lindsay Drummond, 1946). Though Spurgeon did not, to my knowledge, use the term, she came close: “groups of ideas which recur together” (p. 191), “linked ideas” (p. 192), “a certain chain of ideas” and “a rather curious set of images” (p. 195), “this curious and repeated sequence of ideas” (p. 197), and, perhaps closest, “thoughts, views, images and clusters of ideas” (p. 186).

4 In “Imagery in the Sir Thomas More Fragment” (Review of English Studies, 6, 1930, 257–70), Spurgeon lists a number of Shakespearean parallels for the twelve images she found in the More fragment. She does not deal directly here with the idea of association, but some of the parallels she notes are striking and her cumulative evidence strengthens the case for Shakespeare's authorship. She quotes Chambers' 1923 chapter frequently in this article, but does not mention it in her book six years later. True, Sir Thomas More is also missing from her index. As a result of confining herself to the accepted canon, she overlooked the best instance of the procedure she was advocating.

5 R. W. Chambers, “The Expression of Ideas—Particularly Political Ideas—in the Three Pages, and in Shakespeare,” in Shakespeare's Hand in The Play of Sir Thomas More, ed. Alfred W. Pollard (Cambridge, Eng.: Univ. Press, 1923), p. 165.

6 “Shakespeare and the Play of More,” in Man's Unconquerable Mind (London: Jonathan Cape, 1939), pp. 204–49, quoting p. 204.

7 In a recent article, “Linkages of Thought and Imagery in Shakespeare and More” (Modern Language Quarterly, 34, 1973, 384–405), Karl P. Wentersdorf adds an additional element, the motif of cruel pagans or savages, and then traces the entire “linkage” through eleven further occurrences in seven additional Shakespeare plays.

8 As Armstrong was aware. Recognizing that more than images are involved in the clusters, he defended his term as follows: “I have spoken of ‘image clusters’ rather than ‘word linkages’ for the reason that, although in such groups some of the elements may not be images in the strict sense, yet they have the potentiality of participating fully in the imagery and their association with images often gives them image characteristics. Above all, the use of the term ‘image’ is a reminder that we are dealing with the intricacies of mental activity and not with syntax” (p. 10). Images are indeed central to the clusters—they are usually the elements that make such clusters recognizable—but ideas and repeated words (which may or may not have “image characteristics”) are also involved. On one occasion (on pp. 230–31), Chambers appears to see “thought” as manifested in three ways, as “images,” yes, but also as “doctrine” and “phrases” (which I have just called “ideas” and “words”). But Chambers too allows an associational primacy to imagery: “Common Elizabethan phrases have too often been claimed as proofs of two authors being the same man, when they only show that two authors used a common language. Still, verbal echoes are not to be neglected, least of all when they are connected with a real image in the writer's mind” (p. 226).

9 Dover Wilson, as will be noted below, pointed to the existence of Merchant of Venice parallels in the More fragment, though he indicated only one of them. Years earlier, Tucker Brooke, in discussing the fragment in his introduction to The Shakespeare Apocrypha (Oxford: Clarendon, 1908), made the somewhat deflating generalization that “The numerous parallels of word and phrase with the acknowledged works will not escape the notice of any reader” (p. li). But random parallels are one thing, image clusters quite another.

10 Merchant ii.viii.8, where Ql has “Gondylo” and F has “Gondilo”; Othello i.i.122 (not in Ql), where F has “Gundelier.” The only other appearance in Shakespeare shows the gondola as the flaunted sign of foreign travel: in As You Like It, Rosalind taunts Jacques to keep up his performance, “or I will scarce think you have swum in a gundello” (iv.i.35–36).

11 The Rialto Bridge, taking its name from an existent district, was the first across the Grand Canal. The original bridge, presumably wooden, was replaced in 1592 by the bridge we know. This new bridge was thus a recent wonder when The Merchant of Venice was being written. It is not at all certain that Shakespeare knew of it. Once his phrase is “upon the Rialto” (i.iii.19), and three times “on the Rialto” (i.iii.36, iii.i. 1 and 43). These might easily refer to the bridge, but the fifth reference, “in the Rialto” (i.iii.104), suggests that, all along, he may not have been thinking of a bridge at all but only of the financial district, or perhaps of something like Gresham's Royal Exchange (built in 1566). The OED quotes from Nashe, in 1589, “I little thought to meete thee so suddenly upon the Exchange” (“Exchange,” 10). If such is the situation, there would be no impetus to refer to the Rialto in Othello, a play focusing on soldiers and councillors, not merchants.

12 The next line, 305, is: “Abuse him to the Moor in the rank garb.” The Folio has “right,” the Quarto, “rank.” It is apropos that M. R. Ridley's note to this line in the Arden Othello (London: Methuen, 1958), arguing for the appropriateness of “rank,” quotes from the same scene in The Merchant of Venice among the related instances of the word: “the ewes being rank / In the end of autumn turned to the rams” (i.iii.77–78).

13 E. A. J. Honigmann, The Stability of Shakespeare's Text (London: Edward Arnold, 1965), pp. 170–71. I add here reference to a note published after I had completed this article. Richard S. Veit, in “ ‘Like the Base Judean’: A Defense of an Oft-Rejected Reading in Othello” (Shakespeare Quarterly, 26, 1975, 466–69), argues for “Judean” by citing the evidence of “tribe.” In a footnote he asks whether he is “going too far in suspecting that this is one of several hints that lago is a Spanish Jew?” (p. 468). I would say that such would indeed be going too far.

14 Chambers quotes Dyce as calling “this wrestling metaphor … one of which [Shakespeare] is especially fond,” and implies that, for that reason (though Dyce did not so claim), it is an argument for Shakespearean authorship of the More fragment (“Shakespeare and the Play of More,” p. 219). I do not see three closely related uses as evidence of any special fondness; the point, in any case, is not frequency of repetition but the context in which the repetition occurs, not repetition as such but association.

15 I quote from and give line references to the fragment as modernized by Thomas Clayton in his monograph The “Shakespearean” Addition in the Booke of Sir Thomas Moore: Some Aids to Scholarly and Critical Shakespearean Studies, Shakespeare Studies Monograph Series 1 (Dubuque: Wm. C. Brown, 1969), pp. 78–82.

16 Chambers, in his 1923 chapter, pointed to the similarity, but, the disintegrators still being strong, he turned all his attention to “Shakespeare's undisputed work” (p. 144). Fifteen years later, he was able to deal with Henry VI, Part 2 at greater length without even having to mention any doubts about authorship.

17 I am convinced by Wentersdorf's contention that this is “a variant of mahometanish” (p. 404).

18 It may be worth mentioning—though no weight could be placed on it as an isolated fact—that the More fragment (assuming, as I now do, that it is his) has here Shakespeare's sole use of the word “appropriate” (I. 137), while The Merchant has his sole use of any related form, “appropriation” (i.ii.40).

19 The only parallel he quotes directly is “Spurn you like dogs.” The letter is brief, the whole of it appearing on p. 407, though it is not clear whether the material on the next page is a postscript by Dover Wilson or a comment by Chambers. At any rate, my quotations are all from p. 407.

20 W. W. Greg, Dramatic Documents from Elizabethan Playhouses: Commentary (Oxford: Clarendon, 1931), p. 243.

21 “The Booke of Sir Thomas More, and Its Problems,” Shakespeare Survey 2 (Cambridge, Eng.: Univ. Press, 1949), p. 53.

22 Poet and playwright Paul Hunter has reminded me in this connection of Susanne Langer's chapter “The Dramatic Illusion,” in Feeling and Form (New York: Scribners, 1953). Langer quotes Charles Morgan, “until the play is over form does not exist” (p. 309), and herself adds, “Dramatic action is a semblance of action so constructed that a whole, indivisible piece of virtual history is implicit in it, as a yet unrealized form, long before the presentation is completed” (p. 310). Hunter comments, in a note to me, “Thus the ‘meaning’ would consist of a recognition of common elements, distanced through the body of the play, that ‘cluster’ in retrospect. I suspect that this associative process is the same for author as for audience: you don't know where you are till you are there, and then you suddenly recognize elements of the final situation that have been with you all along… . the clustering couldn't work in reverse, and degenerate or explode. When Shakespeare has already been somewhere, what he uses is not so much compressed as it is shorthand.”

23 “Hot Irons and Fever: A Note on Some of the Imagery of King John,” Essays in Criticism, 4 (1954), 128–44.

24 “Trial,” “bitter,” “clamor,” “arbitrate,” “cause,” and “betwixt” also occur in King John, but not in such contexts or with such frequency as to render them thematic.

25 The following list of cluster-elements in ii.i omits a number of appearances of the word “blood,” which I have included only when it is associated in the same speech with some other element of the cluster: “zealous kiss” (1. 19); “each drop of blood … hot rash haste” (11. 48–49); “we coldly pause” (1. 53); “blood and strife … Rash, inconsiderate, fiery” (11. 63–67); “hospitable zeal … lusty blood” (11. 244–55); “this hot malicious day … Frenchmen's blood” (11. 314–16); “one drop of blood / In this hot trial” (11. 341–42); “rich blood ... set on fire” (1. 351); “zealous love … richer blood” (11. 428–31); “lusty blood … plain cannon fire … tongue … word … words” (11. 461–66); “Lest zeal … cool” (11. 477–79); “zeal and charity” (1. 565).

26 “The Sources of The Life and Death of King John” in the Signet Classic Edition of King John (New York: NAL, 1966), rpt. in The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare, pp. 561–64.

27 Alexander, Shakespeare's Life and Art (London: J. Nisbet, 1939), p. 85, and, esp. Shakespeare (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1964), pp. 167–72; Honigmann, ed., King John, The Arden Shakespeare, 4th ed. (London: Methuen, 1954), p. lviii.

28 Indeed, Launcelot Gobbo continues to develop within his play, starting as Shylock's clownish servant and becoming, with his “livery / More guarded than his fellows” (ii.ii.152–53), an incipient allowed fool, moving from Launce toward Feste. This shift occurs whether or not it is confirmed by the first entry of ii.v, in which Launcelot may be understood either as Shy-lock's “man that was, the clown” or as Shylock's “man, that was the clown.”

29 The association between “impediments” and marriage goes back to the Book of Common Prayer, if not further. Such might arguably be all that is involved in Antony and Cleopatra, but Shakespeare's sonnet using that association in the syntactical pattern echoed here was presumably as close to his imagination as the Book of Common Prayer itself, and “mind” is not a surprising element to contrast with Cleopatra.

30 An emendation by Steevens, but thoroughly justified, not only by the context in The Tempest from which he argued but by the broader context of this image cluster.

31 Folio and Quarto agree on “The Troians trumpet.” When the same phrase is used later in the play (v.viii. 16), F has “The Troian trumpets sounds,” while Q has “The Troyans trumpet sound,” with equal but opposite errors of subject-verb agreement. If the Folio form, avoiding the pun, is a compositor's accident, it is a most felicitous difference from iv.v.64.

32 Enorbarbus, having referred to Octavia as “cold,” immediately follows by referring to Cleopatra as Antony's “Egyptian dish,” which leads to “blow the fire up” (II.vi.123–27). Similarly, Achilles' “fragment” is immediately contrasted with “full dish” by Thersites (Troilus and Cressida, v.i.8–9).

33 This is, however, a common enough association outside of Shakespeare. Prince Arthur, e.g., rages “As salvage Bull … That all the forrest quakes to hear him rore” in The Faerie Queenc ii.viii.42.

34 “The savage bull,” with cuckold's “horns” in the immediate context but without a “yoke,” turns up twice further in Much Ado, at v.i.180 and v.iv.43.

35 If Pompey—who incidentally, as a tapster (Measure for Measure i.ii.lll; ii.i.62 and 195–221), ties in with Francis and that cluster—surfaces as a hangman in Antony and Cleopatra, he surfaces again, and even more directly, in Pericles, where Marina tells Boult, the bawd, that he would improve his condition were he to “Serve by indenture to the common hangman” (iv.vi.180), while Boult's preceding complaint of Marina's purity—“She makes our profession as it were to stink afore the face of the gods” (11. 140–41)—reminds us of Pompey's admission, when challenged about his living, “Indeed, it does stink in some sort, sir” (Measure for Measure iii.ii.29).

36 All of this interlocks further, should anyone care to pursue it, with the “Kites and Coverlets” cluster with which Armstrong begins his study of Shakespeare's Imagination.