Signs & Wonders by Marina Warner

Author:Marina Warner [Marina Warner]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2004-10-06T16:00:00+00:00

The orotund, courtly style of Glendower’s boast strikes Hotspur’s ears as ‘mincing poetry’ – he prefers grinding and screeching – or so he says.

Shakespeare, faced with the tradition that cast magic in the language of bombast – the ‘vasty deep’ – can also ventriloquise most eloquently Hotspur’s disgust, and protest against the literary mode. Prospero does indeed wax Glendowerish when conjuring. But Shakespeare’s most potent charms and spells do seem to turn to the non-literary, performative tradition of utterance. The devil’s works are associated with duplicity, not simplicity, with counterfeit contrivances, not direct utterance. So the counter-magic or theurgy of Shakespeare’s own verbal art sometimes rejects ‘mincing poetry’, the courtly style, the learned measures of classical necromancers; it pursues instead an earthy, aural, natural language that lies outside these cultured purlieus – the mew of the kitten, the grinding of a candlestick on a lathe or the screech of an ungreased wheel. Hotspur’s hideous list of noises brings a touch of the grotesque to the issue, and Shakespeare does indeed like to introduce grotesque touches at moments of intense magic. For example, Ariel’s eerie, beguiling song ‘Come unto these yellow sands’ ends inexplicably, ‘Bow wow bow wow’ – a nod to the canine metamorphoses of spirits in the play perhaps, but also a jarring note after the lyrical picture of the preceding lines. It’s not for comic effect alone, however, that Shakespeare puts near-doggerel to work: the witches’ uncouth rigmaroles from Macbeth, grotesque as they are, don’t inspire laughter.

Shakespeare’s own enchantments, his rough magic, arise from his use of such rhymes. For he characteristically casts magic charms in verse – often in popular, vernacular metres, to the rhythms of ditties and nursery rhymes, popular songs, nonsense, and yes, ballads (through Hotspur includes them in his derision). This habitat – anonymous, verbal music – coincides with the realm of the supernatural, that supplementary dimension of fancy and dream that Shakespeare puts on stage and especially on the lips of mere mortal fools. ‘Bottom’s Dream’ will be a ballad, so Bottom promises. And in The Merry Wives of Windsor, during the assault on Falstaff, Mistress Quickly reveals unexpected – indeed magical – verbal dexterity. As Anne Barton has pointed out, she becomes quite Titania-like in her self-styled role of Queen of the Fairies:

Fairies, black, grey, green and white,

You moonshine revellers, and shades of night . . .

Attend your office and your quality.

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