Covert Appropriations of Shakespeare: Three Case Studies

Papers on Language and Literature, Winter 2007 by Hirsh, James

These three cases of appropriation have quite a few noteworthy similarities. (1) Each involves a work or an episode that is generally regarded as the author's highest artistic achievement. (2) In the course of his or her life, each appropriator exhibited a profound admiration for Shakespeare and some anxiety of influence.

(3) When Browning sought a model for a sincere, eloquent expression of love, when Clemens sought a model for a moral struggle, and when O'Neill sought a model for a poignant character, they did not round up the usual suspects. In each case they located an unlikely model in a Shakespearean villain. This suggests something about the artistic procedures of Shakespeare on the one hand and those of the three appropriators on the other. What it says about Shakespeare is that his villains are complex. Despite her villainy, Goneril is capable of eloquence. Despite his villainy, Claudius experiences a genuine moral struggle. Despite her villainy, Lady Macbeth is overwhelmed by remorse, suffers intensely, and becomes vulnerable and pitiable. Rather than "misreading" a Shakespeare text,1Heach appropriator had the insight to recognize an incongruous element in the portrait of a Shakespearean villain. (4) Browning, Clemens, and O'Neill had the artistic daring to appropriate what they needed from superficially incongruous sources. (5) In each case the appropriation involves a large number of specific, substantive resemblances. (6) Even though in each case the appropriator redeployed Shakespearean material in a radically different context, the primary motivation behind the appropriation was probably not an impulse to do battle with a precursor, "to talk back to Shakespeare,"19 although this may have been an important secondary factor. It is unlikely, for example, that Clemens first decided to revise the prayer scene of Hamlet and then invented a moral crisis for Huck in order to accomplish this. It is more likely that in each of these cases the appropriator was primarily concerned with constructing a sincere speaker or an admirable character or a sympathetic character and then realized that a certain passage in Shakespeare could be appropriated to serve this purpose. This appropriation may well have triggered the appropriator's anxiety of influence, but Harold Bloom overstated the case, perhaps for rhetorical effect, when he argued that each literary work is first and foremost a struggle with an earlier work. (7) In none of the cases did the appropriator acknowledge the appropriation. None of the new works includes explicit references to the source or extended verbatim quotations. (8) All three appropriators took steps, furthermore, to obscure the appropriations by including Shakespearean red herrings, explicit or obvious allusions to other Shakespearean material. (9) In each case the appropriator chose to obscure the appropriation presumably because of a fear that a reader's awareness that the new poetic speaker or the new character was based on a Shakespearean villain would undermine the primary goal of the new poem or episode, to create a sincere speaker or an admirable character or a pitiable character. At least in the case of Browning this fear was warranted. Heilman used the evidence of the appropriation as ammunition in his denigration of her poem. (10) In each case the tactic of disguising of the appropriation worked, at least for a while. Even though each work was the subject of considerable commentary from the moment of its initial publication, the earliest published comment on the appropriation did not occur until many years later. (11) In each case commentators on the appropriation have treated the appropriation as a simple imitation and have thereby obscured the artistic daring of the appropriator, who modeled a sincere speaker, or an admirable character, or a pitiable character on a Shakespearean villain.