English 67

Because I had to rush through this attempt at reading Milton via psychoanalysis, a fuller reading is offered here.

My attempted psychoanalytic reading of Milton’s “On Shakespeare 1630” takes as its starting place Harold Bloom’s idea of the The Anxiety of Influence which, briefly summarized, revises Freudian Oedipal theory to create a theory of literary influence and poetic invention. The idea is that “strong” poets need to clear imaginative space for themselves by first “misreading” and then symbolically “killing” their strong literary predecessors who exert a powerful influence over them. Clearly, such an idea is heavily invested in psychoanalytic theory, without acutally being a theory of psychoanalysis.

My reading stipulates that Milton, writing this dedicatory verse in 1630, a mere 14 years after Shakespeare’s death, for the second folio of Shakespeare’s plays, saw Shakespeare as a powerful poetic predecessor in English. Milton had just taken his MA degree, and was not himself well known as a poet. The poem is ostensibly in praise of Shakespeare, but certain key terms in the dedicatory poem seem to call into question the conventions of praise the poem evokes.

Why is the poet referred to as “my Shakespear” (1)? Is this affection, devotion? Or a kind of domestication, and therefore mastery? The poem calls the Bard’s remains “hallow’d reliques” (2) – which certainly evokes the cult of relics (saints, and pieces of the true cross, for example). Relics and their supposed healing properties were prime targets for Protestant censure, and were in fact outlawed in England after the Reformation. Milton, as Cromwell’s Latin secretary, would attain a reputation as an arch-Protestant. Invoking outlawed Catholic doctrine in a poem of praise may be mere metaphor, or it may be a sly allusion to the rumour that Shakespeare “died a Papist” according to Dryden and others. Calling someone a “papist” in Milton’s day was not unlike calling someone a terrorist today.

The poem asks why his remains should be hidden under a “star-ypointing Pyramid” (4). As mentioned earlier, Milton was possibly the greatest linguist of his time, mastering Latin, Greek and Hebrew at an alarmingly early age. He also knew a good deal about earlier forms of English, and the use of a “y” prefix as a past-participle is a deliberate archaism: except that it’s incorrect. It’s not a past-participle at all when it has an “-ing” ending. The correct form would be “y-pointed.” Milton simply didn’t make grammatical mistakes. It could be argued that this flaw was an irruption of Milton’s subconscious poetic hostility for his predecessor into the text.

“What needs thou such a weak witnes of thy name?” asks line 6. The poem is about the conventional idea that no monument could do justice to the poet, and that the plays and poems are the true monument to the dead poet. In isolation, the line is ambiguous. Whose work is “weak” here? Milton refers to Shakespeare’s “easy numbers” – that is, iambic pentameter verse – as beggaring those more complicated Latinate and Greek verse forms of which Milton was master. This seems like damning with faint praise, as though Shakespeare’s lines were poetic baby food: crowd pleasing fluff from a second-rate intellect who never went to university. Shakespeare’s work is described as an “unvalu’d Book” – meaning “invaluable”? Or “without value?” The efforts of other poets, such as Milton, who become as statues, laboring for hours on end over Horation odes and Greek hexameters, becoming ” . . . Marble with too much conceaving” (14). Does this reference evoke Shakespeare’s Sonnet 55, which asserts a kind of phallic/linguistic mastery over time, claiming “Not marble, nor the gilded monuments/Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme” (1-2). If Milton saw Shakespeare as a kind of poetic father in English, whose mastery of Logos/Law (think of Derrida’s reading of the myth of Theuth in “Phaedrus”) made him powerful, then these lines then simultaneously praise and bury the poetic father Shakespeare. Shakespeare lies “sepulchr’d” in a tomb fit for a king. Given Milton’s anti-monarchial sympathies and his eventual role in the government of Cromwell (after king Charles was executed), “king” cannot be an unalloyed signifier of praise.

Finally, Milton’s poem appeared in the Second Folio of Shakespeare. The dedicatory verse in the First Folio may have been written by John Milton’s own father, who was a trustee of Blackfriars, a playhouse in which Shakespeare was part owner. Is Milton’s poetic intervention here a dual Oedipal act, a replacement of his own father, and a symbolic burial of his poetic father?

Some caveats about this reading: This is for demonstration purposes only. I wouldn’t want to try to argue this in a paper wihtout a whole lot more research. It could be objected that even if Milton saw Shakespeare as a strong predecessor, this isn’t necessarily confirmation of Bloom’s theory of anxiety and influence. Other readings are available for this poem. Notice, also that this psychoanalytic reading also draws on other critical methodologies: history and biography, post-sructural linguistics in particular.