Who Is Ozymandias? by John Fuller

Author:John Fuller
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781407075136
Publisher: Random House

5

WHERE HAVE WE SEEN THEM BEFORE?:

BORROWED CHARACTERS

TENNYSON’S MARIANA

Here in this chapter are some particular examples of problems that arise when a poet borrows a pre-existing character. It is perhaps a special case of the problems already addressed of how far we trust the poet, or guess what he intends. A new character must be created in all his complexity and significance, but an existing character carries his story and significance with him. Suppose not all of it is needed? Or that the reader is uncertain as to how much of it is meant to be remembered?

A common puzzle in a lyrical poem is how properly to understand the predicament of a character borrowed from elsewhere, when the known outcome of the story would import powerful ironies. You can imagine extreme examples of the difference it would make to the whole point of a poem (if, for instance, Burns’s ‘O my Luve’s like a red, red rose’ were to be entitled ‘Aeneas to Dido’, and we knew that it didn’t need the seas to run dry before he found good reasons to abandon her), but some degree of ironical implication results from all such borrowings. In cases where the events of the original story are well known and decisive, to sideline the crucial facts can be problematical. Or, it has to be said, fascinatingly dramatic and significant, as when the ‘fact’ of the Christian atonement is just beyond the enquiring speculation of Browning’s Karshish or Eliot’s Magus. In such cases the irony is the whole point of the poem, but our present puzzle is: how can we exclude such irony when it is unlikely to be the whole point? Or how do we decide that it isn’t in the first place the point at all?

One of the most celebrated examples of a poem about an existing fictional character in utter ignorance of the peculiar outcome of her original story is Tennyson’s ‘Mariana’. Tennyson, of course, is not ignorant of it, but does he want us to forget it? In Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure she is the lady who, having once been espoused to the hypocritical magistrate Angelo per verba de futuro (with a date already set for the wedding), is abandoned by him when her brother is shipwrecked and all her dowry goes down with him. Angelo’s treatment of her is despicably mercenary but perfectly within the letter of that law whose un-Christian character is explored generally in the play. When she is first referred to, Shakespeare goes out of the way to show her cruelly treated:

[Angelo] left her in her tears, and dried not one of them with his comfort; swallowed his vows whole, pretending in her discoveries of dishonour; in few, bestow’d her on her own lamentation, which she yet wears for his sake; and he, a marble to her tears, is washed with them, but relents not.

‘This dejected Mariana’ has retreated to a lonely farmhouse (a ‘moated grange’) in the protection of a religious establishment called St Luke’s.

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