By Steve Mentz
We'd like a poetic heritage of the sea, and Shakespeare will help us locate one. There’s extra actual salt within the performs than we'd count on. Shakespeare’s dramatic ocean spans the God-sea of the traditional international and the large blue vistas that early glossy mariners navigated. all through his occupation, from the outlet shipwrecks of The Comedy of mistakes during the Tempest, Shakespeare’s performs determine the sea as surprising actual fact and mind-twisting image of swap and instability. To fathom Shakespeare’s ocean – to head right down to its backside - this book’s chapters concentrate on various things that people do with and in and close to the ocean: fathoming, conserving watch, swimming, beachcombing, fishing, and drowning. Mentz additionally units Shakespeare’s sea-poetry opposed to smooth literary sea-scapes, together with the sizeable Pacific of Moby-Dick, the rocky coast of Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems, and the lyrical waters of the postcolonial Caribbean. Uncovering the depths of Shakespeare’s maritime international, this booklet attracts out the centrality of the ocean in our literary culture.>
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Additional resources for At the Bottom of Shakespeare's Ocean (Shakespeare Now)
Sample text
Both characters imagine oceans as parts of stable systems, with an internal balance that prevents either too much fire or too much water. In The Tempest, Prospero and Ariel provide that order. In King Lear, no one can. The most resonant observations of oceanic chaos come from Edgar, who measures rising waters within the hovel with the word Fathoming: The Tempest and King Lear 15 that would later become Ariel’s maritime touchstone. When Lear is about to follow the Fool inside, Edgar’s off-stage voice interrupts: “Fathom and half: fathom and half!
For know, my love,” she says, as easy mayst thou fall A drop of water in the breaking gulf, And take unmingled thence that drop again Without addition or diminishing, As take from me thyself, and not me too. 123), with the anonymity of drops in the “breaking gulf,” she celebrates the loss of self that the Syracusan Antipholus defines in metaphor and Egeon in narrative. 112) – but she pleads that her husband join her in an all-embracing sea. At the comedy’s center, two landlocked women – Adriana who find unity in the waters, and Luciana the misidentified “mermaid” – provide chains that finally anchor this maritime family in Ephesus.
Faced with immersion, Egeon learns to survive the Aegean through patience and a deep fatalism. He sees a maritime nature nearly as incomprehensible as Pip’s, but he never looks for God in those waters. Instead, nature and society rescue him together. 88–91) – and the family returns to the human world, through “Two ships . . 92–3). 103–4). 105). 46). Egeon’s frame-tale, which derives from Latin miracle tales like Apollonius of Tyre and Greek romance as well as biblical narratives like St. Paul’s shipwreck on Malta, emphasizes the enduring mystery of the natural world, especially the sea.