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THE SEA AS AN EPIC SIGNIFIER BY THOMAS KULLMANN When William Shakespeare, in the 1570s, attended Stratford Grammar School, we can be sure that Virgil’s Aeneid, as the most eminent and most dignified of the classic Latin texts, formed one of the highlights of his course of studies. (Cf. Baldwin, esp. vol. 1, 122-124, 342-351, and Mack. 12-14) It is very likely that the class was told to start construing the text at the beginning of book I, with its famous first line “Armavirumquecano, Troiae qui primus aboris ...”. Aeneas, we are told, escaped from burning Troy to travel to Italy to become the founder of a settlement and ancestor to the founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus. The first sustained incident narrated by Virgil is the shipwreck of Aeneas in a tempest off the coast of Carthage (I, 29-183). The tempest is caused by the goddess Juno, who is still angry at the Trojans for the slight sustained through Paris, the Trojan prince who gave the golden apple to Venus, the goddess of love, rather than herself, the goddess of marriage. Juno asks Aeolus, the god of winds, to stir up the waters to destroy the fleet of Aeneas. After most of the ships are destroyed, Neptune, the god of the sea, becomes aware of what happened; as he sympathizes with the Trojan hero he calms the seas and allows Aeneas and some of his followers to reach the African shore. After mastering the intricacies of Latin grammatical forms and sentence structure, the Stratford Grammar School teacher would probably ask his students: ‘And what, do you think, does the poet intend to tell us?’. Students will have been well aware that ancient classical texts, like the Bible, are supposed to provide moral lessons. (Cf. Mack, 14-24) The practice of interpreting implied a search for analogies between the story narrated and the life and conditions of life of the reader. The particular attraction of classical texts lay in their pagan origins, so that the moral lesson reached should dispense with the Christian God altogether. While in a Christian context the lesson taught by a shipwreck would be to pray to and trust in God in adversity, the ‘pagan’ interpretation would probably be in line with Stoic philosophy: Like Aeneas we should be aware of our limitations and our inability to fight against the inevitable; and like Aeneas we are called upon to suffer and endure the strokes of fortune calmly, to persevere in our tasks and never to give up hope, as we might survive tempests and other misfortunes. In the long run, these misfortunes could even turn out to be beneficial. The sea and its dangers, I should like to argue, was introduced to English schoolboys as a fitting image of the human condition in general. The changeful course of our lives is represented by the image of a voyage at sea. Our attitude with respect to this changefulness, according to both Stoic and Christian teaching, should first and foremost be one of patience and humility. www.shakespeare-gesellschaft.de/publikationen/seminar/ausgabe20
28 The Sea as an Epic Signifier Shakespeare’s acquaintance with the Virgilian passage becomes obvious time and again. In Henry VI, Part 2, Queen Margaret reminds the King of the “awkward wind” which “nigh wrack’d” (3.2.82f.) 1 her ship when she crossed the Channel to become Queen of England. Following Virgil, Margaret ascribes the tempestuous wind to Aeolus, the wind god, to whom she compares her husband: Yet Aeolus would not be a murtherer, But left that hateful office unto thee. The pretty vaulting sea refus’d to drown me, Knowing that thou wouldst have me drown’d on shore With tears as salt as sea, through thy unkindness: The splitting rocks cow’r’d in the sinking sands, And would not dash me with their ragged sides, Because thy flinty heart, more hard than they, Might in thy palace perish [Margaret]. (3.2.92-100) Margaret goes on to compare herself to Dido, the Queen of Carthage, who gave shelter to Aeneas after the shipwreck and fell in love with him, only to be abandoned by him in the consequence. To Suffolk she ascribes the role of Ascanius, Aeneas’s little son in whose shape Cupid bewitched Dido (3.2.114-121). Margaret’s speech testifies to the presence of Aeneas’s voyage in the Elizabethan cultural consciousness as well as to the practice of interpreting this voyage allegorically, of looking for parallels between this voyage and troubling incidents in individual lives. Shakespeare also refers to Aeneas’s voyage in The Comedy of Errors, where Egeon repeats Aeneas’s word to Dido (1.1.31f.) and The Tempest, where Gonzalo points out that Tunis was Carthage (2.1.84). 2 In this paper, however, I should like to draw particular attention not to plots but to images, i. e. metaphors or similes, in which the sea functions as a “vehicle”, 3 even if they do not contain any direct reference to the Aeneid or any other particular literary tempest. Most often, the sea occurs as an image of immeasurable quantity. In The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Valentine, in love with Silvia, considers himself as rich in having such a jewel As twenty seas, if all their sand were pearl, The water nectar, and the rocks pure gold. (2.4.169-171). After Valentine’s banishment, Silvia’s “heart” is “as full of sorrows as the sea of sands” (4.3.32f.). Juliet describes her love for Romeo like this: “My bounty is as boundless as the sea/ My love as deep” (2.2.133f.). In Much Ado About NothingLeonato complains that his daughter Hero is so tainted by her apparent crime that “the wide sea/ Hath drops too few to wash her clean again” (4.1.140f.). After the 1 2 3 Words and passages from Shakespeare are quoted according to The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2 1997. On issues of intertexuality involved cf. Kullmann 2004, 77-88. On the history of this term in the context of sixteenth- and twentieth-century theories of imagery cf. McDonald, 59f. On twentieth-century theories of metaphor as applied to Shakespeare cf. also Thompson and Thompson. Shakespeare Seminar 9 (2011)
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