'To Lie in Cold Obstruction and to Rot'

Half a century ago my professor in “Advanced Shakespeare” urged us to pay closer attention to the lesser plays and not dwell obsessively on the acknowledged masterpieces – Hamlet, King Lear, et al. For the final paper he suggested I write about Measure for Measure, a play I hadn’t read before enrolling in his class. It’s a tonally curious work, not a conventional comedy, so reading it makes more sense than trying to stuff it into a box. In his Lectures on Shakespeare (ed. Arthur Kirsch, 2000), Auden tells us the play is about three things: “the nature of justice, the nature of authority, and the nature of forgiveness.” He describes Claudio as a “hard case,” adding, “hard cases make bad law, but there is no law without at least some hard cases.” 

In the September 1997 issue of Chronicles, I read the acceptance speech Richard Wilbur delivered when receiving the 1996 T.S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, including this passage:

 

“[P]oetry, which aspires to the fullest possible consciousness, masters bad thoughts by uttering them perfectly. I think that Shakespeare must have rejoiced when he got our fears of the grave into one horrible line: ‘To lie in cold obstruction and to rot.’”

 

Wilbur doesn’t identify the play but Claudio jumps out at me. The quoted line is from Act III, Scene 1.Claudio is in prison, awaiting execution, and says, rather blandly, “Death is a fearful thing,” to which his sister Isabella replies, “And shamed life a hateful.” Now Claudio grows eloquent and sounds like an unlikely mingling of Dante and Philip Larkin:

 

“Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;

To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;

This sensible warm motion to become

A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit

To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside

In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;

To be imprison’d in the viewless winds,

And blown with restless violence round about

The pendent world; or to be worse than worst

Of those that lawless and incertain thought

Imagine howling: ’tis too horrible!

The weariest and most loathed worldly life

That age, ache, penury and imprisonment

Can lay on nature is a paradise

To what we fear of death.”

 

Hazlitt praises “the dramatic beauty of this scene and the effect of Claudio’s passionate attachment to life.” Death is the force that turns a human into an inert thing – “a kneaded clod.” Claudio is exuberant in his wish to go on living. He sings. As Wilbur says, “[T]here is indeed a sort of rapture in any line of verse which articulately braves the darker areas of our experience.” He quotes Auden’s great elegy for Yeats who urges poets to “Sing of human unsuccess / In a rapture of distress.”