“Whence is
that knocking?
How is’t
with me, when every noise appals me?
What hands
are here? ha! they pluck out mine eyes.
Will all
great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood
Clean from
my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The
multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the
green one red.”
Certain
words, often rare ones we may never use in conversation or in print, are linked
in memory to specific works of literature. “Incarnadine” trails Macbeth (Act II, Scene 2), that bloody
play, and echoes carnal and carnivore, and more distantly, incarnate. And another word, intrinsicate, which my spell-check
software doesn’t recognize. It brings with it Antony and Cleopatra (Act V, Scene 2). Cleopatra addresses the asp she
is about to press to her breast:
“With thy
sharp teeth this knot intrinsicate
Of life at
once untie: poor venomous fool
Be angry,
and dispatch.”
How much
more evocative in sound and sense is intrinsicate
than a near echo, intricate, or the OED’s
preferred synonyms, “involved, entangled.” With the sound there is the sense: like
us, Shakespeare, in frustration has used his teeth to undo a stubborn knot.
This too is an aspect of his genius. He is, in the Jamesian sense, one of those
rare writers on whom nothing is lost. C.H. Sisson says of him in “Natural
History” (The Avoidance of Literature, 1978):
"One imagines
that Shakespeare could turn anything to account because his receiving apparatus
was as nearly perfect as could be, but most writers can manage only a few
scratchings on the limited subject-matters of which, amid the general obscurity
of their lives, they manage to apprehend something more or less concretely. Why
their gropings should sometimes succeed and sometimes not is about as
explicable as why love and liking turn up how and when they do."
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