The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 20.0183 Saturday, 25 April 2009
[1] From: Jim Ryan <
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Date: Thursday, 23 Apr 2009 07:23:58 -0400
Subj: Re: SHK 20.0171 Much Ado "Picture"
[2] From: Thomas W. Krause <
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Date: Thursday, 23 Apr 2009 07:30:59 -0400
Subj: Re: SHK 20.0177 Much Ado "Picture"
[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Jim Ryan <
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Date: Thursday, 23 Apr 2009 07:23:58 -0400
Subject: 20.0171 Much Ado "Picture"
Comment: Re: SHK 20.0171 Much Ado "Picture"
Skip Nicholson asks about the last line in Act 2 scene 3 of Much Ado,
when Benedick exits saying that he will get Beatrice's picture.
Benedick's desire for an image of Beatrice is one stage of the dynamic
of language in the play. Words stimulate the imagination and this in
turn causes a physical change in the character. Much Ado dramatizes a
number of analogous instances of this "psychosomatic" phenomenon,
summarized most succinctly by Benedick in agreeing not to reveal that
Hero is alive: "I will deal in this As secretly and justly as your soul
Should with your body" (4.1.247-49). The process is most explicitly
stated by the Friar in describing the effect the fiction of Hero's death
will have on Claudio:
The idea of her life shall sweetly creep
Into his study of imagination
And every lovely organ of her life
Shall come appareled in more precious habit,
More . . . full of life
Into the eye and prospect of his soul
Then when she lived indeed . . . .
. . . Then shall he mourn (4.1.223-30).
The mourning succeeds the recreation of the ideal Hero "in the eye and
prospect of his soul." The mourning is consequent to the workings of the
imagination; the mourning embodies the fiction. The other two plots also
turn on this same process. Overhearing that he is loved, Benedick first
takes off in a flight of imagination, torturing Beatrice's invitation to
dinner and desiring her picture, her idealized image (2.3.257-264). He
then becomes, embodies, the fashionable image of a lover: he shaves and
spruces himself up. He has a real or feigned toothache as the socially
accepted means of explaining his lovesickness. The lovesick Beatrice,
similarly touched to imaginative excess, soliloquizes in a
one-quatrain-short sonnet (3.1.108-17). She then appears in the scene
mirroring Benedick's lovesickness "stuffed" (3.4.61-2) with a cold, with
Margaret's punning on the word suggesting a psychosomatic preparation
for requiting Benedick's love. In both lovers the word stimulates the
imagination toward an artful construct -- a picture, a sonnet -- and
then alters them physically. This language dynamic is, comically, denied
by Leonato. He refuses to believe that a comforter might "Charm ache
with air and agony with words" (5.1.26) just before responding with
alacrity to Antonio's words of advice. At the other extreme is the Watch
who creates from a mere word a person named "Deformed" (3.3.125); the
word becomes flesh indeed. The further implications of this language
dynamic, not only for the third plot but for the entire play, are
suggested by Dogberry's elliptical reference to the Incarnation --
"God's a good man" (3.5.35) -- in the constable's crucial speech
denigrating Verges. Throughout Much Ado, by means of the incarnating
efficacy of imagination, the word becomes flesh.
[2]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Thomas W. Krause <
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Date: Thursday, 23 Apr 2009 07:30:59 -0400
Subject: 20.0177 Much Ado "Picture"
Comment: Re: SHK 20.0177 Much Ado "Picture"
I agree that Benedick was probably thinking about a miniature.
For those who cited Hamlet's "picture in little" line and the
"counterfeit presentment" of two "pictures" from the queen's closet
scene, I agree that both of those scenes can also bring miniatures to
mind. But it's interesting to consider that those lines might also
embody the sort of "carefully counter-posed alternative possibilities"
remarked on by Ron Rosenbaum (as recently quoted on SHAKSPER).
Long ago, Frank Marshall suggested that "picture in little" might refer
to coins bearing Claudius's picture (A Study of Hamlet (1875), p. 172
n*, available for free on Google Books). And I've always felt that use
of coins in the queen's closet scene (a la Michael Redgrave) breathed
wit into the queen's "this is the very coinage of your brain" line.
Perhaps (continuing the Rosenbaum quote), these alternatives "deepen and
enrich" "our appreciation of what we would otherwise think of as the
strict single-mindedness of reality."
n.b. For those with long memories, I'm not trying to rekindle old
arguments; I'm just joining Anna Kamaralli in considering Rosenbaum's
musing worth pondering.
Tom Krause
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