UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Treason in My Breast: Wormwood and Hamlet's Petrarchism Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8k99054x Author Morphew, Jason Ligon Publication Date 2017 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Treason in My Breast: Wormwood and Hamlet’s Petrarchism A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in English by Jason Ligon Morphew 2017 © Copyright by Jason Ligon Morphew 2017 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Treason in My Breast: Wormwood and Hamlet’s Petrarchism by Jason Ligon Morphew Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Los Angeles, 2017 Professor Helen E. Deutsch, Co-Chair Professor Lowell Gallagher, Co-Chair T.S. Eliot viewed Hamlet as a dramatic failure, because “like the sonnets, it is full of some stuff that the writer could not drag to light.” C.S. Lewis, Harold Bloom, and Alexander Shurbanov agree that the play contains a lyric essence, but they do not trace that essence to its source. “Treason in My Breast” argues that Hamlet is a Petrarchan poem, a more fully realized expression of the Italian poet’s influence than Shakespeare’s Sonnets or Romeo and Juliet. Out of this argument emerges a poetic anthropology of the early modern Human: beginning in Petrarch’s poetry, reaching its apex in Hamlet, terminating in the poems of Jonathan Swift. After explicating in the Introduction the most explicitly Petrarchan document in Hamlet—the II.ii letter-poem from the Prince to Ophelia—Chapter One explores the ii letter-poem’s philologically vexed “etcetera” moment, represented in the Second Quarto of the play as an ampersand, a ligatory symbol invented by Cicero’s slave and secretary Tiro. Chapter Two connects the inscrutability of the god Janus to the goddess Diana, the latter of which is significant in Petrarch’s Canzoniere, the former of which makes explicit the “double move” of the Renaissance and of Hamlet—compelled toward oblivion while obsessed with the past. Chapter Three looks past the Roman Diana to the tradition of her precursor Artemis, from whom the taxonomical name for wormwood—Artemisia—is derived. This mythological etymology, and wormwood’s attendant botanico-medical history of use as weaning agent, abortifacient, and vermifuge, is important for appreciating Hamlet’s other explicitly Petrarchan moment—“Wormwood, wormwood”— which the Prince utters while watching The Mousetrap, and which Chapter Four explores in detail. Wormwood haunts the Canzoniere’s bitter-sweetness, especially in one clutch of the book’s anachronistically Hamletian poems (206-215). These poems represent autonomous life as a miserable delay, spanning “from the day when I left the breast until my soul is uprooted from me.” Chapter Five finds in Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” and Graveyard scenes a satiric bridge from Petrarch to Swift, in whose poetry Chapter Six finds the terminus of the Petrarchan mode and, hence, the early modern Human. iii The dissertation of Jason Ligon Morphew is approved. Arthur L Little Peter James Stacey Helen E. Deutsch, Committee Co-Chair Lowell Gallagher, Committee Co-Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2017 iv DEDICATION For Matilda and Venice, strong and free v TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Introduction: Hamlet’s Inarticulacy 47. Chapter One: &. 75. Chapter Two: Janus 110. Chapter Three: Artemisia, Wet Nurses, and Weaning 152. Chapter Four: Wormwood, wormwood 197. Chapter Five: To be or not to be/Graveyard Scene 221. Chapter Six: Swift as Meditation 263. Appendix 264. Bibliography vi PREFACE Wal-Mart Parking Lot, Hot Springs, Arkansas, 1990 A jackhammer slams loudly in the distance. Author, 18: Wait. You never breastfed me? Author’s Mother, 35: People weren’t doing it then. So you swear you will never publish anything that relates in any way to your family? Author: I swear. Author’s Mother: You think I’m a Christian just because I’m from here, but you could put me anywhere at any point in time and I would still believe in Jesus Christ as sovereign Lord and savior. Author: Shang Dynasty China? Author’s Mother: Tell me something, son. What’s so great about an open mind? What follows is an archaeological dig, using Petrarchan “lyric substance” as a tool to find an occasion generative for that substance’s existence. “Lyric substance” is Daniel Tiffany’s phrase, taken from page six of his brilliant Toy Medium. Though I discuss the phrase in the context of Tiffany’s meaning later in the Introduction, this study appropriates the phrase for its own devices, largely irrespective of Tiffany’s intentions; in this way, my philological method is as indiscriminate as Petrarch’s Laura is faithful to her husband. By “lyric substance” I mean the flash-like, perverse poetic energy that not only binds lyric to satire and tragedy but also pre-dates lyric itself. Lyric brevity models life’s and emotions’ brevity, suggesting that all three are connected, if not somehow the same; this brevity is a chief component of lyric substance, which can anachronistically be understood in contrast to forms it predates: epic, narrative, novel. Rather than subscribing to a nostalgically stable, novelistic view of Early Human—gathered around vii the campfire in fuzzy clothing, telling hunting stories in order to craft the world’s first meaning—I find it infinitely more likely that Early Human first experienced flashes of a sense of meaning beyond her powers of articulation. This ultimate, inevitable failure of articulation is what I mean by “lyric substance” and is an explicit aspect of Hamletio- Petrarchism. Poetic language is a lunge at transcending/transgressing an elemental inarticulation that precedes speech and thereby infuses it with a mystical foreclosure: words are not enough/I have no words/words cannot begin to describe. There is something under language, something beneath it, a primordial instinct that precedes and is therefore always transmitted via its poetic iterations, even/especially when those iterations are not officially classified as Poetry. In Hamlet, Shakespeare seems to have discovered that drama—which “harnesses a continual rhetorical anxiety—the fear that language might regain its primordial union with other sounds”1—is an ideal medium for expressing lyric substance. T.S. Eliot thinks Hamlet fails as a play because it is too much like Shakespeare’s successful poems;2 Harold Bloom hails the play as a success in his book about the play whose subtitle is Poem Unlimited.3 Alexander Shurbanov argues that Hamlet’s structure 1 A.R. Braunmuller, “The arts of the dramatist,” The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama, p. 67. 2 Eliot expresses this idea in “Hamlet,” in his Selected Essays. I will further discuss Eliot’s opinion in the Introduction. 3 I refer to Bloom’s Hamlet: Poem Unlimited. A dissertation begs to be written on the topic of why Shakespeare gives foolish, pettily treacherous Polonius some of the finest phrases in a play that teems with some of the finest phrases in the English language. The counselor utters “poem unlimited” in II.ii, in his near-slapstick send-up of early modern generic hybridity. viii is lyric in nature.4 There is surprising consensus amongst critics that what is widely regarded to be Shakespeare’s theatrical masterpiece is not actually a play. If the play works better as a poem—indeed, if it operates as a poem—then we should look into the nature of its poetics. The study that follows takes up this challenge and argues that Hamlet is a Petrarchan poem, a more fully realized expression of the Italian poet’s influence than Shakespeare’s Sonnets or Hamlet’s stylistic and thematic cousin, Romeo and Juliet.5 This study treats psychoanalytical perspectives on mythology and literature as merely other, late-coming tools. Indeed, this study treats everyone and every creation as if he, she, and it were poetic constructs describing their own construction, constantly seeking to reconstitute the site of their coming into being and their subsequent, inevitable rejection by their creators. Tautological selfhood/Petrarchan machine-hood, always circling back, lyric poem-like, in order to reiterate itself, precludes the possibility of an open mind and proves apt the Author’s Mother’s rote satire. I use the term satire generally to refer to that which seeks to undermine the foolishly and/or uselessly nostalgic, the former sharing a symbiotic relationship with the latter whose boundaries are not clearly defined. I take the phrase Petrarchan machine from Hamlet’s II.ii letter- poem’s signatory flourish “While this machine is to him,” recognizing in Hamlet’s words 4 I refer to Shakespeare’s Lyricized Drama. 5 In 1942 C.S. Lewis published an essay called “Hamlet: The Prince or the Poem?” in which he writes, “I believe that we read Hamlet’s speeches with interest chiefly because they describe so well a certain spiritual region through which most of us have passed and anyone in his circumstances might be expected to pass, rather than because of our concern to understand how and why this particular man entered it.” Though Lewis and others have noticed the extremity of Hamlet’s lyric nature, I have yet to encounter a scholar ready to determine the Petrarchan source and nature of that lyricism. ix a pre-Cartesian allusion to a post-human energy at the heart of Renaissance Humanism. This project appropriates Hegel’s concept of “infinite subjectivity,” defining and redefining it, finding in the late-coming phrase a ready tool for unearthing Petrarchan foundations embedded in Hamletian terrain. Also key to what follows is misogyny, a term frequently deployed to describe Hamlet and Swift, and whose loaded quality can prevent the study of it use as literary device.