Leontes 1.2.281-293

Is whispering nothing?
Is leaning cheek to cheek? Is meeting noses?
Kissing with inside lip? Stopping the career
Of laughter with a sigh?—a note infallible
Of breaking honesty! Horsing foot on foot?
Skulking in corners? Wishing clocks more swift?
Hours minutes? Noon midnight? And all eyes
Blind with the pen and web but theirs, theirs only,
That would unseen be wicked? Is this nothing?
Why then the world and all that’s in’t is nothing,
The covering sky is nothing, Bohemia nothing,
My wife is nothing, nor nothing have these nothings
If this be nothing.

Much of The Winter’s Tale coasts along at a sort of midrange—characters saying what they need to say, with the appropriate degree of anger or love, in loose (rather, jam-packed) iambic pentameter, as all sorts of horrible or baffling things happen onstage (cast the baby into the desert! let’s see Antigonus shredded by a bear!). There are exceptions, though, and we might see occupying two opposite stylistic poles 1) the moments, longer than moments, when speech becomes mostly a vehicle for explicit narration and 2) the most violently impassioned utterances, when speech has the effect not of advancing narration but making itself the main event.

Into the former category I put the couplets by Time. Though they’re hardly unskilled (and are skillfully enjambed), the grammar is rather stilted, the feminine rhymes lilt, and a few of the rhyme pairs are near-howlers (“Florizel” and “well”…). If time’s triumph is in the plot, it’s not in the verse. I also put in this category the dialogue with the (completely interchangeable) gentlemen in 5.2, who go on at length in polite prose about something we could get the important details from in a few lines. What’s Shakespeare up to here?

At the opposite pole I put some of Leontes’ speeches in the first half of the play. 1.2.177-205 and 1.2.281-293 (above) are particularly remarkable, the first for its interinvolved metaphors, and the second for its rhythms. Of the latter, we see in its first few lines that the questions have an energy all their own: first just inching past the endstop with an extra unstressed syllable (“nothing,” “noses,” “career”), then breaking it with hard enjambment (“stopping the career / Of laughter” “a note infallible / Of breaking honesty). As the momentum builds, the grammatical elisions stack up. First we have understand that “Is ___ nothing” remains implied. Then “wishing” is elided too. And we never even get the necessary “be” verb that should be within the “wishing” questions (i.e. ‘is wishing clocks were more swift nothing?’ hours were minutes? Noon were midnight?’). And how do we scan “Hours minutes? Noon midnight” anyway? Leontes lops off more grammar and stretches the meter to a breaking point as his questions heap up. It’s an electrifying utterance.

I think for all the stress Shakespeare puts on the line in this play, though, it’s important not to say that the line no longer matters. We see in this very speech how the line can contribute even to a frantic energy; it’s not always just a calming balm or restricting force. At the end of the speech, Shakespeare plots first one “nothing” in the lines, then two, then three; the use of the line becomes a way to measure (or just feel) the intensity of repetitions becoming more frequent. And he uses the end of the line four times in a row to really ring out the “nothing,” so that it bangs like a drum punctuating each line end while the line itself correspondingly gives the performer the chance to sound out the “nothing” even more.

-Scott

Passage for Emphasis: The searching eye of heaven and this terrestrial ball

Richard:

Discomfortable cousin, know’st thou not
That when the searching eye of heaven is hid,
Behind the globe and lights the lower world,
Then thieves and robbers range abroad unseen
In murders and in outrage boldly here;
But when from under this terrestrial ball
He fires the proud tops of the eastern pines
And darts his light through every guilty hole,
Then murders, treason and detested sins,
The cloak of night being plucked from off their backs,
Stand bare and naked trembling at themselves.
So when… (3.2.36-47+)

Wait, what? If our own emphasis this week is on figuration, I thought this passage would be one to emphasize, for this epic simile takes its ornament to the extreme. The Christmas tree is all tinsel. Carried so far from common utterance that it doesn’t just deceive the ear but almost resists the intelligence, this transport might even require translation. The semantic skeleton, then (or trunk?—if I want to keep up my own metaphor), would read something like this: “As the sun gives cover to criminals here when it shines on the other side of the earth but brings them to light at dawn, so I….”

But grant Richard that he wouldn’t speak so plainly as I have, we can still see he doesn’t just rest content with elevation. Rather, he loads every rift with ore. Turn to his own language; consider this revision that keeps his lofty diction but excises the grammatically inessential:

know’st thou not
That when the searching eye of heaven is hid,

Then thieves and robbers range abroad unseen

But when from under this terrestrial ball
He fires the proud tops of the eastern pines

Then murders, treason and detested sins,

Stand bare and naked trembling at themselves.

Only about every other line is actually necessary to “the point”—unless elaboration is the point. What I want to think about, then, and hope we can talk about in class, is the way elaboration can be heaped upon elaboration, figure upon figure, the way an epic simile can set up a series of metaphors, the way metaphors themselves might host further metaphors, and the effect all this figuration has on syntax and grammar. At what point, too, does lofty language collapse under the weight of the decoration that gets it off the ground in the first place? At what point, that is, does this all become silly, more mock than anything else?

To point to just a couple of specific examples in this passage of its nested—or piled-up?— figuration: I’d note the metaphor (“searching eye of heaven”), personification (“murders, treasons and detested sins,” not “murderers”), and the transferred epithet (“guilty holes”). And speaking of silly, what even is a term for that ridiculous approach to diction that casts the earth as a “terrestrial ball”? It seems sort of like a metonymy.  The “ball” could be an example of Burke means as the “realism” that metonymy shares with science. It’s so literal it’s figurative. But to me the word choice mostly aims to get as many syllables as possible out of any single signified.

I look forward to seeing what you all think of this passage’s excesses!

-Scott