The Valve - A Literary Organ | Edward and Henry and Angelo and Troilus and Crockett and Tubbs

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Sunday, May 14, 2006

Edward and Henry and Angelo and Troilus and Crockett and Tubbs

Posted by John Holbo on 05/14/06 at 08:45 PM

I’m still busy with Zizek, but I’ll pause to comment on Scott’s post about self-plagiarism in Michael Mann. Empson discusses Shakespeare’s self-plagiarism in a pair of chapters in Some Versions of Pastoral [amazon]. He discusses Sonnet 94 - the “they that have the power to hurt and will do none” one. He has a rather amusingly ironic reading of it as a kind of crypto-protest against Shakespeare’s parvenu patron. (Are there other possibilities? Empson suggests that when you have composed a table of all the possible arrays of flower, lily, person addressed, ‘owner’, and sorted out possible oppositions and alliances, there are at least 4096. Better just to say what you think, then. Probably he is bluffing.) At any rate, of the last four lines (lilies that fester, smell far worse than weeds):

You may say that Shakespeare dragged in the last line as a quotation from Edward II that doesn’t quite fit: it is also possible (as often happens to poets, who tend to make in their lives a situation they have already written about) he did not till now see the full width of its application.

Warwick: “Dark night seems darker by the lightning flash/Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.” Perhaps you recall the context?

Empson adds a bit more in part II of his discussion. A sonnet like this supports such a preposterous range of interpretations because relations are asserted absolutely, so that more sensible, proportional interpretation is entirely left to the reader’s discretion. And Shakespeare himself was hardly a conservative interpreter of his own works in this regard.

It is hard not to go off down one of the roads at the crossing, and get one plain meaning for the poem from that, because Shakespeare himself did that so very effectively afterwards: a part of the situation of the Sonnets, the actual phrases designed for it, are given to Prince Henry, to Angelo, to Troilus, to the Greek army; getting further from the original as time went on.

Perhaps the same goes for Michael Mann. I couldn’t say. But I like Heat as a sort of lovable reductio ad absurdum on the possibility for inserting real characters in a certain sort of action flick. I’m thinking of Pacino and DeNiro in the diner, hashing it out about having the power to harm.

Comments

From earlier in the Edward II speech:

Deck an Ape
In tissue, and the beauty of the robe
Adds but the greater scorn unto the beast.

Which, given the meanings of the word ‘ape’, seems nicely appropriate here. A different sort of ‘ape’ in Heat, though.

By Adam Roberts on 05/17/06 at 04:37 PM | Permanent link to this comment

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Sunday, May 14, 2006

Edward and Henry and Angelo and Troilus and Crockett and Tubbs

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