'Which is the Best of Shakspeare’s Plays?'

“Which is the best of Shakspeare’s [sic] plays? I mean in what mood and with what accompaniment do you like the sea best?”

Some things are too grand to dissect or discriminate among. Their worth is self-evident. Finer distinctions are difficult and probably irrelevant. Keats likens Shakespeare to the sea. Both are bigger than us, too large to perceive all at once, a human challenge to human understanding. He is writing on this date, September 14, in 1817 to Jane Reynolds, the sister of his friend John Hamilton Reynolds. He goes on to quote or allude to Romeo and Juliet, Cymbeline, The Tempest and Henry VIII, not to mention the King James Bible, Spenser, Wordsworth and Sterne.

 

Shakespeare is an ongoing theme in the letters he addresses to John Reynolds, a poet, playwright and journalist who for several years worked as clerk for a London insurance company, the marvelously named Amicable Society for Perpetual Assurance, which nicely encapsulates the role Reynolds played in Keats’ life.

 

In an April 17-18, 1817 letter to Reynolds written from Carisbrooke on the Isle of Wight, Keats tells him he found a portrait of Shakespeare hanging in the inn where he was staying: “Well—this head I have hung over my books.” His first Shakespeare allusion in the letter is unannounced: “I see Carisbrooke Castle from my window, and have found several delightful wood-alleys, and copses, and quick freshes.” In The Tempest (Act III, Scene 2), Caliban chirps: 

 

“What a pied ninny’s this! Thou scurvy patch!

I do beseech thy greatness, give him blows

And take his bottle from him: when that’s gone

He shall drink nought but brine; for I'll not show him

Where the quick freshes are.”

 

The meaning is clear from context but the OED gives “of water: Not salt or bitter; fit for drinking.” Clean water, unpolluted, potable. Though young, Keats has absorbed Shakespeare, sees with his eyes, hears with his ears. Two lesser references follow, from A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Merry Wives of Windsor. Again, Keats makes no big show of his Shakespeare-suffused sensibility:

 

“The wind is in a sulky fit, and I feel that it would be no bad thing to be the favorite of some Fairy, who would give one the power of seeing how our Friends got on, at a Distance - I should like, of all Loves, a sketch of you and Tom and George [Keats’ brothers] in ink which [Robert] Haydon will do if you tell him how I want them.”

 

Finally, Keats writes: “From want of regular rest, I have been rather narvus - and the passage in Lear -- `Do you not hear the Sea?’ -- has haunted me intensely.” The allusion is to Act IV, Scene 6, Edgar’s cruel charade to Gloucester: “Hark, do you hear the sea?” He includes a new sonnet, “On the Sea,” and returns to Shakespeare the following day:

 

“I'll tell you what - on the 23rd [of April] was Shakespeare born - now if I should receive a letter from you and another from my Brothers on that day ’twould be a parlous good thing. Whenever you write say a word or two on some Passage in Shakespeare that may have come rather new to you, which must be continually happening, not withstanding that we read the same Play forty times.” Which he surely had. Only at this point in his letter does he declare to Reynolds: “I find I cannot exist without Poetry.”

 

On November 22 that same year, Keats writes again to Reynolds: “One of the three books I have with me is Shakspeare’s Poems: I never found so many beauties in the sonnets—they seem to be full of fine things said unintentionally—in the intensity of working out conceits. Is this to be borne? Hark ye!”

 

I can’t think of another writer who is so thoroughly suffused with the spirit of another, without a hint of aping or plagiarism. Shakespeare’s language set Keats free to fashion his own music. He quotes lines five through eight of Sonnet 12, followed by the “cockled snails” reference in Love’s Labour’s Lost, six lines from “Venus and Adonis,” plus three more sonnets, all in slightly more than a paragraph. We sense in Keats’ manner an excitement and nervous tension, not showing off. For Keats, Shakespeare is a stimulant.

 

In the letter’s final paragraph, without identifying the allusions, he gives us “lend me thy hand to laugh a little,” from Act II, Scene 4 of Henry IV, Part 1; “send me a little pullet-sperm” from The Merry Wives of Windsor, Act II, Scene 5; and “a few finch eggs” from Troilus and Cressida, Act V, Scene 1. Keats is one of literature’s great autodidacts. In little more than three years, he would be dead at age twenty-five. His enthusiasm is heartbreaking.

 

[The person to see when it comes to Shakespeare in the bookish precincts of the blogosphere is Di Nguyen at the little white attic. She loves the work and is never dry or academic.]