The First Law of Shakespeare Soliloquy I: Too Solid Flesh Don't think everything in Hamlet is already explained, that there are no questions left to answer -- and don't overvalue experts. They're helpful, but when they're wrong, they're very wrong -- and unintentionally funny. Don't be afraid to boldly go where nobody has gone before (nor split infinitives -- Shakespeare did it all the time). He made Hamlet so deep that there is still gold to find, even by amateurs, if we mine the texts and look for evidence inside the poetry. Until the twentieth century, there was little challenge to the Folio reading, "O that this too too solid flesh would melt, /Thaw and resolve itself into a dew." In the 1877 Variorum, Furness doesn't give sullied any weight, only to note that it is from the Second Quarto. Late in the nineteenth century, sallied was proposed as Shakespeare's actual intention, but the suggestion had little traction. Then, apparently after a letter to the Times by J Dover Wilson, sullied crept into vogue despite the traditional preference for solid. Today sullied is all the rage. Sylvan Barnet prefers it, although he notes that solid goes better with melt. Harry Levin* says in his preface to The Question of Hamlet, "...I have parted from my revered teacher [GL Kittredge] and followed a prevailing trend among later editors and commentators in one particular reading: 'sullied' for 'solid' in the first line...." Arden's Harold Jenkins, one of the most influential editors, prefers sullied -- and even Harold Bloom goes with it. So we can't disagree. Or can we? Here's the Enfolded Hamlet: {Quarto only} <Folio only> 313 O that this too too {sallied} <solid> flesh would melt, 314 Thaw and resolue it selfe into a dewe, 315 Or that the euerlasting had not fixt 316 His cannon gainst {seale} <Selfe> slaughter, ô God, <O> God, 317 How {wary} <weary>, stale, flat, and vnprofitable 318 {Seeme} <Seemes> to me all the vses of this world? From this, let's posit a working text, absorb it, O that this too too __ _ flesh would melt, Thaw and resolve itself into a dew, Or that the everlasting had not fixed His canon 'gainst self-slaughter -- O God, God! How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable Seem to me all the uses of this world. then dissect the couplet to look at the word in question, O that this too too __ _ flesh would melt, Thaw and resolve itself into a dew and get a feel for the meter of the couplet O that this too too __ _ flesh would __ , __ and _ __ itself into a __ and the words that make it up: SOLid MELT THAW reSOLVE DEW Before proceeding with the textual analysis of Hamlet, however, we need to state a basic assumption: If there is one perfect way to say something, Shakespeare will have found it. He is to literature as Newton is to physics -- so this we are going to call The First Law of Shakespeare. *He pronounced it 'LeVIN.' NOTE: It's hard to assign priority for the invention of the First Law, but it arose from a conversation with Roger Brown, | Now, to return to the analysis of the couplet: a major idea in this speech is undoing -- Hamlet rejects the fleshy bond between his mother and Claudius. Perhaps by vicarious shame his own flesh repels him (there's close proximity in the couplet between flesh and self). So sullied would make some sense. But it seems more visceral than that: Hamlet wants to excoriate his flesh, not give it a bath. (And Adam and Eve didn't try to cleanse themselves of shame, they tried to vanish from the sight of God. They hid.) Shame makes you feel dirty, yes -- but a more primal aspect is that shame makes you want to disappear, to melt. Shakespeare's friends who edited the Folio preferred solid. This makes more sense: The Elizabethans were less concerned with hygiene than with morality. (See also Henry IV, Part 2, Act III, scene 1, lines 47-49: The old king says that time and fate "Make mountains level, and the continent/ Weary of solid firmness, melt itself/ Into the sea!" Solid, melt, itself, and into appear in a construction gramatically identical to the First Soliloquy, the same words used as the same parts of speech.) In the Folio, or solid, version, Hamlet's task of undoing avails itself of contrary meanings to solid: the verbs melt, thaw, and resolve (dissolve) meaningfully contradict solid. So there is internal evidence for solid woven into the poetry -- word meaning + the trope of antithesis. It is a very dense matrix of meaningful internal relationships if the word is solid (less so for sullied, and Wilson is stubbornly ignoring this fact). The First Law is obeyed: There is just one perfect way to say this, and it ain't sullied. But just for fun, how might Shakespeare have made sullied work? Consider the word meanings attached to sullied and ask, what needs to be undone and still preserve the tightly woven integrity of the poetry? (It's not unlike a reductio ad absurdum.) Think antithesis. sullied = dark, dirty, and sinful versus: light, clean, and good One strategy for playing with this is to dissect the couplet, word and meter as above, and suppose plausible alternatives. In other words, let's use the same antithesis and other internal poetic tethers we claim for the use of solid, and see how substituting sullied could be made to work. We need referents to light, cleanliness, and goodness or purity. Just as an example, maybe we'd substitute shine for melt, cleanse for thaw, reform for resolve -- and for dew, let's substitute snow (which was Wilson's suggested undoer for dirt). Let's form an alternative version and check the scansion. SULlied SHINE CLEANSE reFORM SNOW If sullied is used with these particular undoers, the meter is not quite perfect, but the meanings work better with these undoers than do thaw, melt, resolve, and dew. If Shakespeare had wanted to use sullied and really nail it down, he certainly had the wit to weave it into the text with three or four more meaningful allusions. After all, solid is tacked down by four allusions, and within two lines: melt, thaw, resolve, and dew. And being Shakespeare, he would have exploited the nuances of negation, the layers, of sullied -- light, clean, and good. For instance he could have said it this way O that this too too sullied flesh would shine, Cleanse and reform itself into snow .... but he didn't. Of course being Shakespeare, he would have found a way to make it beautiful. And if he had preferred sullied, which is a big if, there ought to be more internal evidence in the poetry. What does sullied have to do with thawing and melting and evaporating and re-condensing into a dew? With transformations from solids to liquids to vapors? Nothing. But solid does. (Harold Bloom, otherwise always brilliant, must not have been paying attention. But equally astonishing is that the 2006 Thompson and Taylor Arden Hamlet goes with sallied -- yes sallied -- dispositively refuted by J Dover Wilson in his 1918 TLS letter.) The point is that even an amateur, listening with the heart, can at times outthink the academy. So read Shakespeare for yourself, don't let somebody else do your thinking for you. And when in doubt, go with the beautiful: O that this too too solid flesh would melt, Thaw and resolve itself into a dew .... There is only one perfect way to say it. -- J Groves groves.james@mgh.harvard.edu shakespearereadsfreud.com |