Sarah Säckel
What’s in a Wodehouse? (Non ) Subversive Shakespearean Intertextualities in P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster Novels
P.G. Wodehouse’s use of intertextual references in his popular comic novels achieves several effects. Most quotations from canonised texts create incongruous, humorous dialogues and scenes. Frequent repetitions of the same quoted material turn it into a part of the ‘Wooster world’, achieve a certain ‘monologic closedness’ and heighten the effect of readerly immersion. On the other hand, the intertexts also open up the novels to an intertextual dialogue which trig gers comparative readings. The usage of mainly English intertexts, however, creates a ‘monocul tural’ dialogue which emphasises the texts’ portrayal of ‘Englishness’ and ‘English humour’. The intertextual references thus work as pillars of English cultural memory; pillars on which the Jeeves and Wooster novels’ reception itself is built. This paper shall concentrate on the predomi nating intertextual dialogue between P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster novels and a selec tion of William Shakespeare’s plays.
Introduction and Theoretical Approach What’s in a Wodehouse? – Shakespeare and much more. Various forms of intertextual reference such as allusion, imitation, rewriting, parody and quo tation abound in P.G. Wodehouse’s comic Jeeves and Wooster1 novels. Pos sibly one of the most quoted sentences in secondary texts concerned with the analysis of P.G. Wodehouse’s comic novels is the following statement in which the author describes his style:
I believe there are two ways of writing novels. One is mine, making a sort of musical comedy without music and ignoring real life altogether; the other is going right deep down into life and not caring a damn.2
1 None of the novels is actually called Jeeves and Wooster. I chose this umbrella term for the series of novels, which is in fact the title of the successful BBC Jeeves and Wooster comedy series starring Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie. 2 As mentioned above, these words are quoted frequently, e.g. in the blurb to all Penguin editions (cf. Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit, n.p.) and in Mooneyham (119), which shows that the novels were not only produced, but are also read as musical comedies. According to Robert Kiernan “the three act economy of musical comedy shaped Wodehouse’s sense of narrative development” (Kiernan 99) and his “characters […] correspond to stock types of the musical stage” (Kiernan 99).
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This describes both his anti intellectual and critical attitude towards modern ist writing and emphasises that the novels, which are written in a realist mode, are in fact very fictitious intertextual and intermedial creations. Thompson aptly describes his plots as a combination of the “Holmesian de tective story structure with an inverted romance plot” (Thompson 159). This description, however, mainly scratches the surface of Wodehouse’s multifac eted and numerous uses of intertextual quotation, allusion and rewriting. The novels’ protagonists Bertram Wilberforce Wooster, the narrator, and his personal gentleman’s gentleman, Reginald Jeeves, can be linked to many literary predecessors. Bertie Wooster’s quixotic reading of detective fiction often worsens the ‘scratch he is in’ and necessitates a solution from Jeeves, who is a mixture of the clever servant from Greek and Roman comedy, the classic detective and Dickens’ Sam Weller (cf. Mooneyham 124). Being Bertie’s intellectual superior, the presentation of Jeeves inverts social class prejudices but can also be linked to a long tradition of clever servants (cf. Smith 206, Frye 173). Whereas Bertie Wooster’s favourite readings are de tective and ghost stories, Jeeves reads Spinoza, Marc Aurelius and, of course, Shakespeare and his language is infused with quotations from these authors and philosophers. Bertie Wooster, on the other hand, learns these quotations from Jeeves and frequently takes them as Jeeves’ own words, as in the fol lowing example, which is a quotation from Shakespeare’s historical play Julius Caesar (Act 4.3.217 220):
“Yes, sir. There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to for tune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries.” “Oh, rather. Quite. No argument about that. But –” (Joy in the Morning 174f.)
Numerous canonical and popular texts, biblical quotations, English proverbs, idioms and songs are rewritten in a similar way. Wooster for example refers to himself as “a pretty good silver lining spotter” (Joy in the Morning 181) and Dame Daphne Winkworth’s entrance is narrated by Bertie Wooster as follows: “[h]er eye, swivelling round, stopped me like a bullet. The Wedding Guest, if you remember, had the same trouble with the Ancient Mariner” (The Mating Season 185). The intertexts are taken from so many diverse texts that for Thompson Wodehouse “does not parody any one particular literary work; he parodies nineteenth century literature itself” (Thompson 5). In this paper I shall argue, though, that besides its element of parody, P.G. Wodehouse’s use of intertextual references achieves several effects. As shown above, most quotations from or references to canonised and popular texts are used for the creation of humorous dialogues and scenes. Frequent repetitions of the same quoted material, however, turn it into a part of ‘Woos ter’s world’, achieving monologic textual closure and strengthening readerly