The Shakespeare Within Eugene O'neill's Tao House Plays By

Ghosts Within Ghosts: The Shakespeare Within Eugene O’Neill’s Tao House Plays

by Patrick Midgley, BA/MFA A Dissertation In Theatre

Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Texas Tech University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Approved Dr. Mark Charney Chair of the Committee

Dr. Robert M. Dowling Dr. Felicia Londre Dr. Bill Gelber Dr. Sarah Johnson

Dr. Mark Sheridan Dean of the Graduate School

May 2021

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Acknowledgments

I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to many people who proved invaluable as I wrote this dissertation.

First and foremost, I wish to thank my adviser, Dr. Mark Charney, without whose guidance, compassion, and unwavering belief in my potential I would not have attempted such an ambitious project. I first met Dr. Mark Charney when I was an undergraduate at the Kennedy Center/American College Theatre Festival’s National Critic’s Institute in

June of 2002. Dr. Charney and I formed a strong and immediate bond: I like to think he admired my writing, but I certainly admired his energy, professionalism, and passion for theatre education, as well as his equally erudite and entertaining criticism. Dr. Charney and I maintained correspondence throughout my time as a graduate student at Purdue

University’s Professional Actor Training Program as well as during my acting career at the American Shakespeare Center. When I came to study at Texas Tech, I did so primarily because of my desire to study under such an eminent, exacting, and compassionate educator. The past five years have been a delight, and I am truly lucky to call Dr. Charney both a mentor and a friend.

Next, I wish to thank the numerous organizations that have supported my work during my Presidential Fellowship at Texas Tech University, primarily President

Lawrence Schovanec, Graduate School Dean Mark Sheridan, College of Visual and

Performing Arts Dean Noel Zahler, and the Ed and Linda Whitacre Graduate Fellowship

Endowment. The Presidential Fellowship provided me with a generous income as well as a travel allowance, enabling me to present my work from Galway, Ireland to the United

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Arab Emirates. They covered my travel fees and conference registrations at The Modern

Languages Association, The Comparative Drama Conference, The American Literary

Association, The American Society for Theatre Research, and The American College

Theatre Festival. As the first Presidential Fellow in the Fine Arts at Texas Tech, I cannot overemphasize how deeply this award impacted my life. My goal, every day for the past five years, has been to live up to the privilege and principles that award represents.

In addition, I wish to thank the numerous scholars, artists, and organizations who have taken me under their wing during my time at Texas Tech. Foremost among these are the members of the Eugene O’Neill International Society, including Dr. Robert M.

Dowling, Dr. Beth Wynstra, Dr. Steven Bloom, Dr. Alexander Pettit, Dr. Zander

Brietzke, Dr. David Palmer, Dr. Katie Johnson, and many others. Joining the O’Neill

Society has been one of the most pleasant and enlightening experiences of my scholarly career, and I am honored to serve as that organization’s Secretary/Treasurer. The Eugene

O’Neill Foundation provided me with the Travis Bogard Artist-In-Residence Fellowship, where this project was truly born. The Association for Theatre in Higher Education awarded me with a regional award for Excellence in Graduate Instruction and Research, which brought more attention to my work and helped me uncover ways in which I can bring my insights into the classroom more effectively.

I am grateful to write for one of the finest dissertation committees imaginable.

Thank you to Dr. Felicia Londre, Dr. Robert M. Dowling, Dr. Bill Gelber, and Dr. Sarah

Johnson. Without your time and expertise, this project would not have been possible.

Lastly, and most importantly, to my wife, Sarah: thank you.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements.……………………………………………………………………….ii

Abstract…...……………………………………………………………………………….v

List of Abbreviations……….…………………………………………………………….vi

I. Chapter One: The Dark Mirror………………………………………………………….1

II. Chapter Two: The Shakespeare Within O’Neill……...………………………………18

III. Chapter Three: “Insubstantial Pageant Faded”: The Shakespeare Within Long Day’s Journey Into Night……….……………………………..…………………...38

IV. Chapter Four: “An Ad for the Past”: The Shakespeare Within A Moon for the Misbegotten…...……………………………………………………..86

V. Chapter Five: “Sing Willow”: The Shakespeare Within The Iceman Cometh……………………...………………………………………….120

VI. Chapter Six: Epigraph...…………………………………………………………….144

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………152

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021

Abstract

In several of the Tao House plays — those written between 1936 and 1943 at

Eugene O’Neill’s remote Danville, California, estate, including The Iceman Cometh

(1940), Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1941), and A Moon for the Misbegotten (1943)

— American playwright Eugene O’Neill alludes to Shakespeare, both directly and indirectly, with a sudden frequency and urgency. Each of these plays excruciatingly exorcises a personal demon, and, as O’Neill turns toward his past, he also turns towards a refracted image of William Shakespeare.

In this dissertation, I argue that the Shakespeare within Eugene O’Neill’s Tao

House plays is among the most important and least understood elements of Eugene

O’Neill’s playwriting. More than an esoteric, literary feature of the plays, O’Neill’s use of Shakespeare is crucial to understanding, interpreting, and playing these foundational

American works. O’Neill did more than embed a glimpse of Shakespeare within the Tao

House plays — in them, he creates his own personal and partial Shakespeare. Expressed through the distinctly theatrical time signature or rotating repertory, the Tao House

Shakespeare is among the most fascinating, complex, and moving achievements in twentieth century American drama.

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List of Abbreviations

CP1: Eugene O’Neill: The Complete Plays, Vol. 1: 1913-1920. Travis Bogard, ed. The Library of America, 1988. CP3: Eugene O’Neill: The Complete Plays, Vol. 3: 1932-1943. Travis Bogard, ed. The Library of America, 1988. CW: William Shakespeare: Complete Works. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, ed. The Modern Library/The Royal Shakespeare Company, 2007. WD: O’Neill, Eugene. Work Diary 1924-1943, transcribed by Donald Gallup, preliminary edition. 2 vols. Yale University Library, 1981.

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Chapter One

The Dark Mirror

In a shadowy corner of the Tao House, an obsidian mirror, dark as the night sky of Danville’s foothills, hangs on a wall adjacent to O’Neill’s bedroom. As you stare into it — or, I should say, as it stares into you — the present moment expands, both deep into the past and eerily into the future. The mirror cannot be held, as ‘twere, up to nature: it does not reflect accurately what is there.

I could only glance at it in passing as I toured the Tao House on my first day as a

Travis Bogard Artist-In-Residence Fellow. But for the rest of my time at O’Neill’s home, its ominous reflection haunted me as I wrote, read, and rehearsed. Late at night, as I worked alone in the Barn Theatre drilling speeches and ironing out transitions, I found myself still thinking about its dark reflection.

I was thirty-one years old, the youngest recipient of the Bogard fellowship, and I had been invited to the Tao House to write, rehearse, and perform a new play, titled

Shakespeare and O’Neill, Cheek by Jowl: A One-Man Mash-Up. It was a play as young and naïve as I was, full of gee-whiz sentimentality and an almost desperate earnestness.

But its over-eager charm masked a deep desire. I wanted to grasp and embody the literary, theatrical, dramaturgical, and psychological connections between Shakespeare and Eugene O’Neill, particularly in the late plays O’Neill composed at Tao House, when he began alluding to the Bard with increasing frequency and intensity. But none of that was on my mind now, as I stood in front of this mystical mirror.

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021

My tour guide, Wendy, noticed that I had paused in front of my darkened reflection. “Chic,” she said. That, according to Wendy, is the word Carlotta Monterey used to describe the mirror when it was first hung in 1939 (the same year O’Neill completed The Iceman Cometh). I had to laugh. Carlotta’s euphemism struck me as impossibly optimistic.

Wendy smiled politely, amused by my reaction. She explained that Eugene and

Carlotta were once visited by Russel Crouse, the co-author of the Broadway mega-hit

Life With Father. Crouse and O’Neill had been friends and correspondents for years.

When Crouse first saw the mirror, Wendy continued, he turned to O’Neill and said, “It makes me feel as though I am dead.” O’Neill responded, “It makes me feel alive.”

It made me feel neither dead nor alive, and certainly not chic, either. It made me feel insignificant: gravitas-less, common, intrusive. I stood before it in flattened running shoes and faded shorts, entirely undignified, a backpack slinked awkwardly over my shoulders. “Some visitors find the mirror a bit unnerving,” Wendy said with a wink, and walked down the stairs, leaving me alone with the mirror.

I inched forward and squinted into the mirror, zeroing in on the left strap of my backpack. One centimeter at a time, it was beginning to rip under the burden of O’Neill’s

Complete Plays (all three volumes) and The Royal Shakespeare Company’s Complete

Works. Reflected in the black glass, the strap triggered a memory, and I was transported to a moment just a few months prior when I felt just as I did now, both connected to, and impossibly distant from, the playwright whose work and life fascinated me.

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Deja-Vu

Eight months earlier, I experienced the ferry ride from Boston to Provincetown. I was a newly minted Ph.D. student at Texas Tech, only three weeks into my classes and still sweatily schlepping that same heavy backpack. This time, it was overstuffed with a week’s worth of readings for the seminars I would miss over the next seven days. I really mean “miss,” too — I was anxious about the trip, anxious to be leaving my familiar, beloved classrooms for this choppy sea voyage into the fog. My thick glasses and freshly pressed khakis, intended to lend me an aura of credibility, felt silly and out-of-place aboard a luxury yacht at the end of the summer season in Massachusetts.

True to form, and after finding an aisle seat near the exit (in case of explosion,

Coast Guard inspection, or other unforeseen act of God), I rifled through my backpack and pulled out David Savran’s “The Canonization of Eugene O’Neill” from Modern

Drama. As I read of O’Neill’s modernist credo and the terrifying proclamation of the death of God, our cruise-ship-in-miniature was enveloped by a deepening fog.

I began to scribble a note when we hit a particularly choppy wave. My pen slashed violently across the paper. My left hand instinctively flew out to grab my flailing right, but I overcorrected and, in a painfully quintessential “grad student” moment, a week’s worth of reading flopped out of my lap and onto the floor of the yacht. A young, well-dressed couple at the bar set down their mimosas, smiling at my mess. Disgusted with myself, with Savran, and with the whole enterprise, I quickly collected my papers and walked through the cabin’s sliding glass doors onto the bow. There I could be alone.

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I intended to watch Provincetown rise from its place just beyond the horizon and commune, Edmund-like, with O’Neill’s Spirit.

The weather had other ideas. This was late September somewhere in the

Massachusetts Bay. Translation: it was wet out there. The sea, the boat’s splashing wake, the fog, and a damp wind all converged precisely on the two square inches of glass shielding each of my eyes. Drenched and squinting, “with hair up-staring then like reeds, not hair” (CW 12), I leaned into the wet wind, struggling to catch a glimpse of the

Wooden O of P-Town. I clung to a romantic notion that somewhere in the mist and the fog I could find permanent inspiration. I let the wind whip into my eyes and tasted the yacht’s wake as I awaited my epiphany.

It never came.

As we docked, the fog finally broke and I stumbled onto the wharf, shoulders bowed by the soggy hardcovers I was schlepping to shore. I wiped down my glasses and beheld, for the first time, The Birthplace of Modern American Drama. As I walked down the faded boards, the swells, which moments ago left me nauseous and terrified, now caressed me ashore.

I had made it. Like nearly every other well-intentioned graduate student ever to have been invited to a conference, I could not imagine the embarrassment of riches that lay before me. Unlike nearly any other well-intentioned graduate student ever to have been invited to a graduate conference, I had read O’Neill’s complete works in chronological order, and, for the past eight years, had acted professionally in more than fifty productions of Shakespeare’s plays in the nation’s most demanding rotating

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021 repertory company (fifty-two weeks a year) at The American Shakespeare Center. I loved

Shakespeare, to be sure, and I knew him well, but O’Neill somehow swam in my bloodstream. Whether fate or heritage (or both), whether blessing or curse (or both), I felt at home in his plays.

I had pilgrimaged from West Texas to better appreciate and understand what the conference program described as the connections between Eugene O’Neill’s plays and

“some of [Tennessee] Williams’ more intriguing literary side doors” (Kaplan par. 1): plays like A Perfect Analysis Given by a Parrot and In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel were here stubbornly programmed alongside Desire Under the Elms and Marco Millions.

This straightforward style of comparative drama, of forcibly juxtaposing two playwrights, evoked in me a notion of deep viewing: a way to experience a play, its influences and echoes simultaneously, in which an awareness and understanding of a work, its resonances and its textual echoes combine, expanding the emotional impact on the spectator. I imagined writing a comparative drama dissertation, where I could investigate the dramaturgies, psychologies, and philosophies — as well as the cultural, historical, and personal factors — that shaped America’s foundational playwrights.

***

The left strap of my backpack was beginning to snap. I peered deeply into the dark mirror for one final moment, checking to see if I was still there, just as O’Neill must have once done in this very spot. But it was as if as if the Provincetown fog was still lingering in the dry Danville air, as if the present and the past, the glass and the fog, were conspiring together behind my back.

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In that moment, I had no idea that I would travel half-way across the globe, write hundreds of pages of close textual and historical analysis, perform and direct O’Neill and

Shakespeare in Ireland and the United Arab Emirates, consult the world’s leading experts on O’Neill, or, indeed, write this dissertation as part of my quest to uncover the O’Neill-

Shakespeare connection and begin to articulate my view of comparative drama. In that moment only one line came to my mind as I turned away from the mirror’s dark reflection, Mary’s from Long Day’s Journey Into Night: “The past is the present, isn’t it?

It’s the future, too” (CP3 765).

Stage Poet

For O’Neill, the past was a living and dynamic force that shaped his plays in conscious and subconscious ways. Like the dark mirror, it both reflects and distorts his own history, fueling his creativity but also forcing him to confront the darkest sides of his personality. Like the fog, it is everywhere, impossible to grasp, equally terrifying and beautiful.

In Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O’Neill, Travis Bogard describes

O’Neill, first and foremost, not as a playwright but as an autobiographer. To Bogard,

O’Neill uses his plays to sound the depths of an existential angst, a highly personalized

Original Sin, and a shameful, all-consuming guilt. Bogard poetically imagines O’Neill mining the materials of his life:

Much as the wind and water leave traces of their passages on the surface of the land, an autobiographer seeks to shape a contour in time. He denies that his is like the lives of most men — a random sequence, jumbling instinctual action and chance into a drift of days. Disregarding the self-cancelling interplay of mastery and infirmity, he asserts that the course of his life is rational, and that, like the

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action of a drama, it moves toward a fulfillment in the complete understanding of its author-subject. (Bogard xii)

Many O’Neill scholars arrive at a similar, if less poetic, conclusion: a close study of

O’Neill’s plays urge a close study of his life. As Bogard intimates, the work and the man progress on gradually intersecting tracks. O’Neill’s identity within his plays forms one of the starkest differences between studying Shakespeare and O’Neill: while we know next to nothing about the historical Shakespeare; we know nearly everything about the historical O’Neill.

Nevertheless, O’Neill wrote plays, not autobiographies, and much has been made of the tensions between O’Neill the man and O’Neill the artist. To capture the essence of

O’Neill’s personality, scholars rely on the rich library of O’Neill biographies, many written by those who knew O’Neill personally. Some, like Arthur and Barbara Gelb (a married couple who co-wrote O’Neill in 1962, Life with Monte Cristo in 2000, and By

Women Possessed in 2006), were continually revising, expanding, or reframing their perspective of the playwright as their understanding of O’Neill’s work changed. Others, like Stephen A. Black’s Eugene O’Neill: Beyond Mourning and Tragedy, approach

O’Neill’s plays from a psychological and literary perspective. Regardless of their angles, however, nearly all the biographies are page-turners, written with the panache, verve, and tragic acceleration their subject inspires. In other words, they explode into action and resolve in denouement with the force of — what else? — great drama.

It is difficult to read any of the major studies of O’Neill and not be struck by the inherent theatricality of his life. Robert M. Dowling sub-titled and structured his acclaimed biography of O’Neill as “A Life in Four Acts.” Within the pages of the Eugene

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O’Neill Review, dozens of articles trace the history of his father’s performances, the fated and tragic fragility of his mother, and the unbearable truths his brother Jamie would share with him before his death, as well as the impact of his three wives. Each scholar takes a different stance on this cast of characters lurking in the wings of his plays, but most agree that an undeniably dramatic arc drives the story — that O’Neill is fated to dramatize the story of his life. But it is a playwright, not a scholar, who most clearly illuminates the effect of the O’Neill’s theatrical life within his plays.

Tony Kushner’s 2004 article “The Genius of O’Neill” is a moving but never sentimental tribute to O’Neill, and a keen analysis of O’Neill’s talent. Kushner takes aim at the most dogged, persistent critiques of O’Neill: that he was no poet, that his dialogue was clunky and unwieldy, and that his plays lack the sense of tragedy and fate to which

O’Neill aspired. This pesky criticism, which many critics still put forth in reviews of contemporary productions, maintains that he was a clumsy, awkward writer, undeservedly crowned as the national poet-laureate and mistakenly understood as

America’s Shakespeare.

Kushner dismisses this idea. He argues that O’Neill’s critics entirely misunderstand the nature of his gift. For evidence, he singles out Mary McCarthy’s criticisms of O’Neill. Writing in 1946, McCarthy describes O’Neill’s plays as “logical, graceless works” which “arrive not at despair but at a strange, blank nihilism” (qtd. in

Kushner 251-2). To be fair, Kushner often agrees with McCarthy: “In her review of

Moon, McCarthy identifies ‘[the] tone of barbershop harmony in all of O’Neill’s work,’ and alas, one knows what she is talking about” (Kushner 253). However, Kushner also

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021 feels that while her critiques are valid, McCarthy approaches O’Neill’s plays from the wrong perspective.

Kushner describes McCarthy’s “perfect indictment” as one which completely lacks understanding: “what [McCarthy] mistakes as quaint in O’Neill’s dialogue is [...] a stage poetry that jangles and snaps and jitters and abrades” (254). Pushing back against what he perceives as an anti-theatrical prejudice, Kushner maintains that O’Neill’s stage poetry emerges only when O’Neill’s lines are spoken by an actor. O’Neill was not a writer, and he was not an autobiographer, either, at least not entirely. He was a playwright.

Kushner summarizes his defense of O’Neill’s work by reflecting on a play most critics and scholars still continue to be his finest work, Long Day’s Journey Into Night. It is the kind of double-minded insight that best characterizes a truly theatrical imagination, and the kind of compliment that only one great playwright could make to another:

The play is about actors, about the theatre, it is a theatrical manifesto as much as it is a gravestone or a resurrection of the definitive family drama or an indictment of the marketplace or a definitive drama of American immigrant life, or anything else. “Edmund,” who is Eugene O’Neill — Edmund is a Lear reference and also the name of O’Neill’s dead infant brother — is speaking to his father, who keeps asking the all-important question, as they take turns distractedly playing their hands in a card game: ‘Whose play is it?’ (256)

This beautifully written and complex tribute presents three important insights about

O’Neill’s stage poetry.

First, it liberates the notion that Long Day’s Journey Into Night is exclusively and entirely a work of autobiography, encouraging an understanding of the tensions between fact and fiction as generative components of O’Neill’s stagecraft. O’Neill’s “family” in

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021 the play is not a recreation but a resurrection: they are grounded in fact but given new life in fiction. To risk callousness, they are the raw materials of O’Neill’s dramas — neither entirely imaginative nor entirely historical. They are a blend of each, as memories generally are.

Second, by introducing the notion of Edmund “playing” Eugene, of Tyrone

“playing” James O’Neill, and by pointing out Tyrone’s possible pun on the word “play,”

Kushner reveals that each moment in O’Neill’s greatest work is (at least) doubly haunted: beneath the characters onstage there is not only a biographical and historical, but also a theatrical, ghost. As Kushner notices, James Tyrone is punning on the word “play,” possibly asking, “Whose story am I living in?” O’Neill’s characters are given an added haunted dimension when played onstage, and this complex meta-theatricality is frequently neglected by O’Neill scholars, partially because, until the publication of

Marvin Carlson’s The Haunted Stage: Theatre as Memory Machine (2003), few firm theoretical frameworks existed for discussing these haunted and haunting afterlives. This complex meta-theatricality can be perceived in the very structure of O’Neill’s Tao House plays; at its root, ghosting arises from O’Neill’s relationship to Shakespeare.

Third, and most importantly, Kushner reveals Shakespeare’s centrality within

O’Neill’s dramatic imagination. Edmund, the name-sharing bastard in King Lear, is every inch the equivocating, tantalizing, self-tortured figure that Edmund, the autobiographical avatar for Eugene O’Neill, was. Edmund is the perfect avatar for Edmund. This densely coded and personalized allusion to Shakespeare’s tragic hero intertwines the dramatic imagination of Shakespeare within O’Neill’s conceptual blend of his own past (here, his

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021 dead brother Edmund, who died of tuberculosis as an infant after his older brother Jamie, himself infected, got too close to the cradle) and his theatrical creations.

These blends, in turn, are further haunted by O’Neill’s conception of Shakespeare, itself inescapably shaped by his father’s. Nothing, it seems, can touch O’Neill’s complex psychology virginally. “Shakespeare” cannot merely stand for “cultural icon” or “great playwright” within O’Neill’s consciousness. His father, James, was a Shakespearean actor who had abandoned his promise as a performer of the classics for the assured box office success of The Count of Monte Cristo, a popular melodrama that made him a matinee idol but filled him with a permanent and inescapable regret.

O’Neill was convinced that his father tried to warn him of this Faustian bargain on his deathbed. As he worked to resurrect a version of his father onstage in Long Day’s

Journey Into Night, O’Neill probed his father’s prophecy. O’Neill’s father, James, Sr., haunts all the Tao House plays as much as Shakespeare’s do in an overwhelming number of significantly placed allusions. In other words, to understand O’Neill’s relationship to

Shakespeare, we must also understand his relationship to his father.

To experience the full scope of the Tao House plays, O’Neill’s relationship to

Shakespeare must be as thoroughly explored and as carefully delineated as any consideration of his personal past, for O’Neill blends the two more intricately, and in denser, more concentrated layers, than any other American playwright. We can never be in one mind as we read O’Neill or see his plays presented onstage. We must always ask, as Tyrone questions his son, “Whose play is it?”

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Chapter Summaries

In the following chapters, I address the three central Tao House plays (The

Iceman Cometh, Long Day’s Journey’s Into Night, and A Moon for the Misbegotten) to illustrate the influence — the “flowing in” (Berlin 6) — of Shakespeare within them. The

Tao House plays are those written between 1936 and 1943 at Eugene O’Neill’s remote

Danville, California, estate, and include The Iceman Cometh (1940), Hughie (1941),

Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1941), and A Moon for the Misbegotten (1943). Two additional plays written at Tao House, More Stately Mansions (1939) and A Touch of the

Poet (1942) form the basis for O’Neill’s Cycle project, “A Tale of Possessors Self-

Dispossessed.” This Cycle focuses on the effects of greed, ambition, and materialism on the American character, whereas the central Tao House plays, treated here, explore themes closely related to O’Neill’s personal history. Within these plays, O’Neill also alludes to Shakespeare, both directly and indirectly, with increasing frequency and urgency. Each of these plays excruciatingly exorcises a personal demon, and as O’Neill turns toward his past, he also turned towards a refracted image of William Shakespeare.

By pairing each of the central Tao House plays with several of Shakespeare’s which flow in through ideology, style, and psychology, as well as through quotation and allusion, I explain why O’Neill absorbed Shakespeare’s influence and how an understanding of that influence changes those plays. Theory, history, and traditional literary analysis serve me well in this discussion, particularly Normand Berlin’s careful analysis of Shakespearean allusion and quotation in O’Neill’s plays, but they are not enough. Shakespeare’s influence is layered into the very structure of these plays, and to

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021 glimpse this interconnected relationship, we must look at both playwright’s works creatively and inclusively.

Chapter One, “The Shakespeare Within O’Neill,” contains three sections. First, I survey and summarize the current understanding of the O’Neill-Shakespeare connection.

Catherine Loomis’ 2019 “re-review” of Berlin’s O’Neill’s Shakespeare (1994), published in a 2019 edition of the Eugene O’Neill Review, is central to this discussion. Finding the current understanding of the O’Neill-Shakespeare connection more fragmentary than firm, I argue that it is best understood as both an influence (a literary and theatrical relationship evident in allusions, quotations, and mirrored structures) as well as an inheritance (a highly personal, sustaining thread between the Tao House plays, reflected in O’Neill’s creatively transformed memories of his family). Next, I present my central example of Shakespeare’s presence within the Tao House plays, which I term “Jamie’s

Rotating Rep.” This section also features a biographical sketch of O’Neill’s brother,

James, Jr., which informs my close reads of Long Day’s Journey Into Night and A Moon for the Misbegotten in Chapters Three and Four.

Chapter Two, “Insubstantial Pageant Faded,” discusses Long Day’s Into Night, a play packed with significantly-placed Shakespearean allusions and quotations, as well as appropriations, misquotes and distant echoes. I introduce four key strains of influence between O’Neill’s work and Shakespeare: (1) Edmund’s parodic paraphrase of

Prospero’s most famous lines from The Tempest; (2) the recurring connection between

Jamie and James and Iago and Othello; (3) Mary Tyrone’s connection to Ophelia and its effect on O’Neill’s view of tragedy; and (4) a faint Shakespearean echo between Long

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Day’s Journey Into Night and O’Neill’s 1919 play Exorcism, which sheds light on

Shakespeare’s intimate connection with O’Neill’s vision of his father onstage.

Chapter Three, “An Ad for the Past,” casts A Moon for the Misbegotten as a play in which O’Neill demonstrates a nuanced, brilliant, and highly personal incorporation of

Shakespeare. Again, four key strains of influence emerge: (1) I link Harder’s introductory comic scene to the perceptual functions of a Shakespearean clown; (2) I explore and expand the intersections between Josie and Jim’s roleplaying and metamorphosis, to reveal how O’Neill, like Shakespeare, frames performance within a liminal space between fact and fiction, reality and imagination, and memory and regret; (3) I position the play’s emotional climax, during which Jim quotes from Othello (a play densely haunted by Eugene O’Neill’s father’s own history), as the most important and least understood Shakespearean allusion in O’Neill’s career; and (4) I connect the play’s living pieta, formed by Josie and Jim, to the “resurrection” of Hermione’s stature in The

Winter’s Tale.

Chapter Four, “Sing Willow,” repositions The Iceman Cometh alongside two of

Shakespeare’s most famous tragedies. Sounding the depths of O’Neill’s most famous

(and least understood) title, The Iceman Cometh, and building on the work of Cyrus Day and Winifred L. Frazer, I uncover formal and thematic connections between Iceman and

King Lear. Next, I concretize the connection between Evelyn, Hickey’s murdered wife, and Shakespeare’s Desdemona from Othello, a play deeply interwoven with O’Neill’s family history and personal memories.

The epigraph, “Ghost Light,” outlines my future research in influence studies and comparative drama, and discuss this dissertation’s position in what, I hope, will be my

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021 first book. In addition, I consider a striking omission in Marvin Carlson’s seminal work,

The Haunted Stage: Theatre as Memory Machine, and consider the implications of that small oversight and what it teaches theatre critics and scholars about the relationship between Eugene O’Neill and William Shakespeare.

While I advocate a chronological read of O’Neill’s plays — indeed, I advocate a chronological read of any playwright’s works, including Shakespeare’s — O’Neill scholars will surely note that I am not discussing the Tao House plays in the order they were written. Rather than presenting them sequentially, I present them in “repetorially”

—that is, in the order I would produce them if I were the artistic director of a theatre company producing the Tao House plays for a popular audience. I lead with O’Neill’s tour-de-force, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, written in 1941 and first published in

1956, before considering Long Day’s Journey Into Night’s companion and coda, A Moon for the Misbegotten, written in 1941-43. Finally, in Chapter Five, I move backwards in time to The Iceman Cometh, written in 1939, where the faint Shakespearean influence requires delicate consideration. This non-linear treatment enables me circuitously to weave O’Neill’s personal and poetic history, linking moments theatrically rather than historically. Beginning with the works most densely haunted by the Bard also equips readers to better understand the more nuanced strains of Shakespearean echoes in plays with a less apparent Shakespearean indebtedness.

Mutual Friends

My backpack strap held out for many years and lugged my hardcover editions without complaint. If I went somewhere during my time as a graduate student, those four

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021 heavy books and that long-suffering backpack accompanied me. Naturally, I brought it along to my first MLA conference — I wasn’t sure if a sudden insight or late-night revelation might require me to consult, say, Lazarus Laughed and Act Four of Pericles,

Prince of Tyre in a late-night parallel read. When it comes to research, you just never know.

Standing outside a conference room of the Sheraton Hotel in Chicago, I was waiting for the O’Neill Society’s panel to begin. I was slated to read a paper alongside

Drs. William Davies-King and Anne Fletcher, both authoritative O’Neillians and theatre historians whom I had admired for years. I am always nervous reading my own work — a by-product of speaking Shakespeare’s verse professionally is that you prefer the sounds of his words to almost anyone else’s, especially your own — and the presence of such well-known scholars heightened my jitters. I stood outside the door, my sweaty hands clenching the straps of the loaded-down backpack, and silently prayed that I might read first and go mostly unnoticed.

From the opposite end of the hallway, a buoyant voice called out to me: “Patrick!

I’m so excited to meet you!” It was Dr. Fletcher, the beloved professor of Theatre History and Dramaturgy at Southern Illinois University. She had taught several of my friends and colleagues — our “Mutual Friends” pull-down menu on Facebook was surprisingly expansive — and she was genuinely happy to finally connect in person. But as I turned to discover who was addressing me, the left strap finally died, introducing Shakespeare and

O’Neill to the Sheraton lobby’s floor. I tried to ignore my busted bag, but Dr. Fletcher giggled while asking if she could help me gather my materials.

“Looks heavy. Is that your carry-on?” she asked.

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021

“No,” I said. “I got in last night. I already put my things in my room,” I muttered, wincing at the utter pointlessness of the remark. “It’s just…well.” I gave up and gestured vaguely at the books on the floor.

“You don’t need to carry all that, I’m sure,” she said. “From what I’ve heard, you’ve got most of it memorized anyway!”

Poring over the texts had taken me at least that far, I thought. A scholar I admired acknowledged my expertise. It was time to stop relying on the words and ideas of canonical playwrights and share what I had learned from all that reading.

And it might be time, I thought, to stop carrying so many hardcovers. Maybe a

Kindle?

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021

Chapter Two

The Shakespeare Within O’Neill

In 2019, the Eugene O’Neill Review introduced a recurring feature to its table of contents: “Used Books,” a new section publishing “re-reviews” of books from the past deserving a second (or hundredth) look. In the premiere edition of “Used Books,” Dr.

Alex Pettitt, editor of the Review and Professor of English at the University of North

Texas, commissioned a re-review of Normand Berlin’s O’Neill’s Shakespeare (1993) by the Shakespearean scholar Catherine Loomis. Berlin’s work is the first and, to this date, only one devoted exclusively to the connections between the world’s most famous playwright, William Shakespeare, and America’s foundational dramatist, Eugene

O’Neill.

Loomis’ re-review was a rare opportunity for a renowned Shakespearean scholar to re-appraise a foundational text in O’Neill studies from a contemporary perspective. In his Editor’s Foreword, Pettit presaged the rough handling O’Neill’s Shakespeare was to receive: “That chestnut [Berlin’s book], Loomis suggests with due tact, is due for supersession” (vi). To paraphrase Romeo and Juliet’s Capulet, O’Neill’s Shakespeare appears to be well past its dancing days.

In a well-written four-pages, Loomis swiftly summarizes Berlin’s argument. For her, Berlin maintains “that the playwrights have an ‘organic relationship’” (Loomis 233), but he never pins down its precise nature. Berlin argues that a symbiosis between the two playwrights is most clear in O’Neill’s late masterpieces, particularly Long Day’s Journey

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Into Night, a play saturated with Shakespearean quotation and allusion. However, according to Loomis, Berlin’s analysis of even this play — so rich and densely connected to several of Shakespeare’s plays — is too superficial to shed new light on the relationship.

Loomis accuses Berlin of falling short of an ambitious and worthy aim. She praises his animating drive: “…the title of this book…points to the Shakespeare that

O’Neill uses in his dramatic art, but it also suggests that O’Neill contains Shakespeare”

(254; emphasis original). Ultimately, she finds that “Berlin’s analysis—vague, simplistic, and deeply dependent on plot summary — fails to support his argument” (ibid). This failure, Loomis writes, manifests in two ways.

First, Loomis critiques Berlin’s organization as rigid and unimaginative. She laments that “Berlin attempts to shove the round peg of O’Neill’s varied oeuvre into the square holes conventionally used to organize an edition of the complete works of

Shakespeare: chapters are called ‘Comedy,’ ‘History,’ ‘Tragedy,’ and ‘Tragicomedy’”

(ibid). This inflexible, generic structure leads Berlin to reductive conclusions: he observes that both playwrights use soliloquies (89), both playwright’s canons include families (25), and both “thrive on ambiguities” (76), to include a few underwhelming examples.

Second, and more importantly, Loomis critiques Berlin’s analysis, which misses multiple opportunities for integrative and expansive insight. Rich potentialities, such as

O’Neill’s “literal and figurative references to oceans, nautical voyages, and sea-changes” linking “the complex rigging found on ships and theatre stages” are ignored. Instead,

Berlin plays what Loomis calls “spot the allusion” (234-35), where Berlin seeks out one-

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021 to-one comparisons between Shakespeare and O’Neill. The problem, of course, is that he finds far too many: “Mary is Cordelia, Claudius, Gertrude, Ophelia, and, in her drug- induced night wandering, Lady Macbeth” (235). While admitting that the links between characters are valid, Loomis accuses Berlin of failing sufficiently to distinguish or expand these broad connections. Again, while Berlin may prove successful in showing how — or at the very least, when — O’Neill uses Shakespeare, he does not show us how

O’Neill contains him. Having finished O’Neill’s Shakespeare, Loomis understands that

O’Neill’s plays are heavily peppered with Shakespearean allusion, but she remains uncertain about the significance of the relationship between the two playwrights.

Furthermore, Loomis argues that there is considerable risk in any study about

Shakespeare’s influence on a later playwright. An ambitious scholar, she worries, may well wind up like Fluellen in Henry V: “eager to impress the king, [Fluellen] compares

Harry on Monmouth to Alexander the Pig, finding enormous significance in the fact that both Macedon and Monmouth have rivers” (236). While, for some, there is an inherent pleasure in the erudite search for allusions and recurring motifs between Shakespeare’s plays and modern works, it is only meaningful when it points toward new discoveries about the later playwright.

Loomis’ re-review, however, is not entirely negative. She rightly points out that

O’Neill’s Shakespeare was inspired by Berlin’s demanding teaching schedule, “a useful reminder that great scholarly floods can flow from simple sources” (236). Moreover,

“Berlin’s efforts to find a vocabulary and method to discuss ‘the Shakespeare that is within O’Neill’” (ibid) is Berlin’s most important, if unfinished, aim. She encourages scholars to return to Berlin’s work to “make sense of how Shakespeare’s plays ‘shape’

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O’Neill’s and make them ‘mean more’” (ibid). But she reinvokes the distinction between

O’Neill’s use of Shakespeare and the ways in which O’Neill contains Shakespeare — a critical distinction which, for her, Berlin should have clarified, and invites additional engagement and expansion. While Berlin’s study illuminates many of the fascinating intersections between Shakespeare’s plays and O’Neill’s, it does not help scholars to see how those connections create an understanding of the Shakespeare within O’Neill, nor how that understanding sheds new light on O’Neill’s plays.

Berlin might well cheerfully agree with this assessment. In fact, his introduction to O’Neill’s Shakespeare anticipates Loomis’ objections, inviting further revision:

Some readers will find that I neglected some connections, that more could have been found and more discussed. Of that I have no doubt. But what I’m presenting is not a collection of quotations or allusions or echoes, not a listing of connections or analogues, not a cataloguing of parallels and sources. I have not attempted to be thorough. This is the first book-length study of a relationship that I’m sure will be examined by others through the years. My approach, it will be obvious to any reader, is personal and partial, and my hope is that my aim, which is driving me, does not distort the uniqueness of the plays under discussion. (Berlin 8)

His foundational work initiates an ongoing discussion; more than thirty years later,

Loomis’ fresh reappraisal echoes his call. Both writers agree on at least one point, however: the connections between Shakespeare and O’Neill are as promising as they are incomplete.

Berlin’s approach to uncovering the Shakespeare within O’Neill is “personal and partial” (ibid), generated by close readings of Shakespeare and O’Neill’s texts. But part of the joy and challenge of reading and watching O’Neill is his omnipresence in his plays, which cuts against the grain of such “personal and partial” close reads. O’Neill is an authoritative author whose biography can, at times, seem to limit the range of

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021 interpretive possibilities. From The Rope (1918), which presents “O’Neill’s most intimate feelings towards his family” and features “O’Neill’s mother […] in the soft-minded child whose commonplace name is actually her own: Mary” (Alexander, Struggle 26), through

Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1941), in which the entire Tyrone family is closely modeled after Eugene’s, O’Neill and his most intimate relationships are almost always part of the story. The thesis of Stephen A. Black’s 1999 biography, Eugene O’Neill:

Beyond Mourning and Tragedy, for example, is that the Tao House plays represent a culmination of O’Neill’s dual processes of mourning and playwriting. The deaths of his brother, father, and mother, all of which occurred in a three-year period, were the primary fuel for O’Neill’s creativity; those plays, therefore, take on deeper significance when viewed through the prism of O’Neill’s biography.

The relative lack of information about the historical Shakespeare impedes readings of Shakespeare’s plays from a biographical bent. In fact, many 21st-century studies defend and celebrate Shakespeare’s perpetual opacity. In This is Shakespeare

(2019), for example, Emma Smith, Oxford University Professor of Shakespeare Studies, argues that “Shakespeare” cannot be satisfactorily understood as a transcendent, literary par excellence, nor can he be found within dusty archives or historical documents. To establish a rewarding, appreciative relationship with Shakespeare, readers should seek him out within the unresolvable, ambiguous questions his plays pose. There is, in other words, a generative and productive tension between gaps in the record and the mysteries embedded in Shakespeare’s plays. His elusiveness, what Smith calls “the sheer and permissive gappiness of his drama” (14), encourages readers to know themselves better.

Shakespeare, for Smith, is a vehicle for exploring our own psyches as we navigate the

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021 moral dilemmas of Shakespeare’s plays and see ourselves reflected in his characters. We do not discover an author at the root of the plays; rather, we uncover new dimensions of ourselves within them.

Smith’s view extends earlier Shakespearean scholarship which distanced itself from New Historicism in favor of a more blended methodology, one that unites the contextual insights of the New Historicists with close reading. This methodology is increasingly popular among Shakespearean scholars. In his brilliant work Shakespeare the Thinker (2007), Oxford Professor of English and Shakespearean scholar A.D. Nuttall advocates for “elastic universals” (10) within Shakespeare’s plays, clearly rejecting a view of Shakespeare as a bounded historical entity, but he acknowledges that scholars must carefully “negotiate [with] the societal causations of Shakespeare’s plays” (11).

Like Smith, Nuttall sees Shakespeare’s elusiveness as one of the core characteristics of his playwriting: “Shakespeare’s work is a huge vanishing act” (18). Every glimpse of him is duplicitous, obscured, and highly conjectural, no matter how carefully we contextualize the plays or research his biography. Like Smith, Nuttall finds Shakespeare within the plays, and his close reading of those plays creates his Shakespeare.

Nuttall summarizes his view with an epigrammatic (and, as Berlin might appreciate, organic) maxim: “the root is not the flower” (8). He means here that there is a danger in myopically focusing on the historical factors and societal pressures surrounding

Shakespeare’s plays — something he accuses many New Historicists of having done. For

Nuttall, Shakespeare is best uncovered not within the archives but within close reads of his plays.

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021

Similarly, the Shakespeare that is within O’Neill is best uncovered within the Tao

House plays, but he is inescapably linked both to O’Neill’s personal past and to his evolving conception of tragedy. Loomis was right to advocate for a closer look at the ways in which O’Neill both uses and contains Shakespeare. O’Neill uses Shakespeare through a network of allusions, quotations, paraphrases, and mirrored structures that I will uncover within the Tao House plays. But O’Neill’s memories contain a personalized version of Shakespeare, one blended within the creative transformations of his family, that can only be understood after a careful consideration of O’Neill’s biography. Only when these two strains of influence — O’Neill’s technical use of Shakespeare’s plays, and the personal, biased, and haunted Shakespeare that is contained in his memories — are studied together does the Shakespeare within O’Neill fully emerge.

Influence and Inheritance

O’Neill’s willingness to excavate his personal history and artistically transform painful personal memories remains, in large part, the foundation for his continual mystique within American playwriting. In his forward to the 2016 edition of Stephen

Karam’s play The Humans, Columbia University professor and New York Times columnist Samuel G. Freedman praises the play as a “family drama that speaks far beyond domestic concerns alone” (vii). For Freedman, any consideration of the American family drama initiates with O’Neill:

Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night stands as the common ancestor and impossibly lofty standard for all the plays and playwrights to follow, from Tennessee Williams (The Glass Menagerie) to Arthur Miller (All My Sons, Death of a Salesman) to Sam Shepherd (A Lie of the Mind, Buried Child) to Marsha Norman (‘night, Mother) to Wendy Wasserstein (The Sisters Rosenweig) to August Wilson (Fences, The Piano Lesson). (ibid)

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Each of these plays, like O’Neill’s foundational Long Day’s Journey Into Night, portrays an American family influenced by larger societal forces. Each play depicts the boundary between memory and nostalgia as permeable and fluid; each asks if it is possible to escape the past and transcend familial fate; and each play is based upon the biography of its playwright.

Professor Emerita of English at the City University of New York, Doris

Alexander, studies the similarities and gaps between playwrights’ biographies and their plays, or what she terms “the mystery of the creative process” (Alexander, Struggle 1).

Not surprisingly, much of her work centers upon Eugene O’Neill. In Eugene O’Neill’s

Creative Struggle: The Decisive Decade, 1924-1933 (1992), the first of two books she devotes to O’Neill’s “creative process,” she argues:

For Eugene O’Neill […] a play was an opportunity to confront and solve a pressing life problem, and the order in which he tackled his plays, and the arousal in his mind of a particular configuration of memories and ideas to shape them, came from the urgency of the life problem that he was facing in each one. (2)

As she uncovers these pressing problems which urged O’Neill to write his first major successes, she makes three observations about the nature of his creativity.

First, Alexander argues that O’Neill’s mind “has the capacity to create out of the facts symbolic images that get at an emotional or intellectual essence” (7); in other words, it does not work literally. Second, it is a mistake to assume a one-to-one relationship between characters in O’Neill’s plays and their real-life inspirations.

Critically, she implores readers and spectators to “go beyond to an understanding of habitual ways of seeing life on the author’s part” (ibid); that is, they must blend O’Neill’s biography within reads of his plays to decipher how an image or idea forms in his mind,

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021 muddles with his memories and creativity, and results in his “living imagery” (ibid).

Third, Alexander argues that O’Neill was never “mechanically subject to his influences

[…] O’Neill no sooner grasped an idea than he was transforming it creatively” (9). This creative transformation is most apparent in his later plays, which form the focus of

Alexander’s second book on O’Neill’s creative process.

In Eugene O’Neill’s Last Plays: Separating Art from Autobiography (2005),

Alexander aims to map this transformation by separating, as much as possible, historical reality from artistic representation within the Tao House plays. She passionately argues that to interpret O’Neill’s work, it is necessary to distinguish “the overwhelming difference between the historical records of what took place in the lives of O’Neill, his family, and his friends, and the view of it offered up in his literary work” (Alexander,

Separating 3). In a section on Long Day’s Journey Into Night, for example, her rigorous analysis reveals differences between O’Neill’s representation of his parent’s relationship and the historical record (71-8); explains how Carlotta Monterey, O’Neill’s third wife, contributed to O’Neill’s depiction of his mother (80-5); and suggests that O’Neill projected his troubled relationship with his son, Shane, onto the theatrical representation of his father (87-90). She concludes: “O’Neill’s autobiographical play is not autobiographical in the sense of presenting an accurate family history” (90). In other words, Alexander sees Long Day’s Journey Into Night as presenting Eugene O’Neill’s biased, partial, and personal version of history. It is not an autobiographical play — it is a memory play. While Alexander argues that “had O’Neill restricted himself to an accurate retelling of his family’s story, the play would have never developed into a meaningful

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021 work of art” (91), she nevertheless implores scholars carefully to delineate fact from fiction in order to appreciate O’Neill’s creative gifts.

Alexander claims that muddling autobiography into art diminishes O’Neill’s imagination by explaining away the plays as mere by-products of his lived experience; in addition, it does an injustice to O’Neill’s family, whose identities, of course, conflict with

O’Neill’s memories. With the Tao House plays, O’Neill creatively transformed his memories into artistic representations of his family. While grounded in real-life models, the boundaries between O’Neill’s characters are more permeable than they may first appear.

The same is true for his sources: O’Neill’s “creative transformation” of his influences mirrors his artistic representations of his family. In many ways, Shakespeare was as intimately tied up in O’Neill’s memories as his own kin, and subject to all the same biases and contradictions that occur when O’Neill writes about his immediate family. Berlin argues that the Bard “was an essential part of O’Neill’s nurture, almost a member of the family” (6). But despite this deeply ingrained literary heritage, Berlin points out, in a 1989 article also titled “O’Neill’s Shakespeare,” that O’Neill never discussed Shakespeare’s influence on his work:

Surprisingly, Shakespeare was never acknowledged by O’Neill himself as an important presence in his life or art. Perhaps O’Neill chose to minimize the importance of Shakespeare because he connected Shakespeare with a father whom he rejected time and again. Perhaps Harold Bloom’s ‘anxiety of influence’ was at work, O’Neill trying not to compete too openly with the greatest of playwrights. Perhaps it was merely a question of not acknowledging the obvious. (Berlin, “O’Neill’s Shakespeare” 6)

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Berlin enlarges this discussion in the 1994 book version of O’Neill’s Shakespeare. He combines a Freudian read of O’Neill’s family life with Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of influence” — the theory that all writers are caught up in the poetry of the past, and that these poetic influences may converge in the later writer, making his or her work more original, not less. O’Neill’s relationship with Shakespeare is one such generative dialectic. His unacknowledged Shakespearean influence coalesces with the memories of

O’Neill’s father, the famous Shakespearean actor and matinee idol, James O’Neill:

Freud’s ‘family romance,’ which points to the origins of the ‘anxiety of influence,’ strongly applies to O’Neill as ‘son’ of Shakespeare and James O’Neill, who also happens to be a Shakespearean actor. Bloom is accurately persuasive in maintaining that poets are not autonomous egos, that even the most solipsistic poet is ‘caught up in a dialectical relationship (transference, repetition, error, communication) with another poet or poets.’ O’Neill is a strong self ‘caught up’ in such a relationship with Shakespeare, a powerful presence as both precursor dramatist and father image, with the ‘family romance’ as intense as it could be. (Berlin, O’Neill’s Shakespeare 4)

To describe O’Neill as the “son” of Shakespeare may seem extreme, but as we shall see,

O’Neill tightly interweaves his memories of his father with the “living imagery”

(Alexander, Struggle 7) of Shakespeare within the Tao House plays.

Together, Alexander and Berlin reveal that the Shakespeare within O’Neill comprises more than a literary influence: he is an inheritance, as well, and one which

O’Neill creatively transformed in deeper and more complex ways as his career progressed. One-to-one readings which compare and contrast O’Neill’s plays with

Shakespeare’s are insufficient for exploring this relationship. Such parallel analysis is a part of the puzzle, to be sure, but the relationship also contains a highly personal element, one that that merges with memories of O’Neill’s past and of his father. The Shakespeare

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021 within O’Neill is embedded in the Tao House play’s structures and to the recursive, cyclical patterns of memory.

Jamie’s Rotating Rep

As Tyrone foggily recollects his successes as a Shakespearean actor in Long

Day’s Journey Into Night, he also recalls the distinctly theatrical time signature of rotating repertory, in which the past is really the present and the future, too: “In 1874 when Edwin Booth came to the theatre in Chicago where I was leading man, I played

Cassius to his Brutus one night, Brutus to his Cassius the next, Othello to his Iago, and so on” (CP3 824). O’Neill reaches nearly seventy years into the past to resurrect and reframe this Shakespearean rotating repertory, based on the actual career of his father,

James O’Neill, Sr., as the high point of Tyrone’s life. During the play, Tyrone repeatedly reinforces this identification with Shakespeare and entrenches himself in nostalgia as he appropriates lines from many of Shakespeare’s greatest hits, including Prospero,

Macbeth, and Cassius. Shakespeare comes to represent everything fine and noble in life to Tyrone: not what was, but what might have (or should have) been. He laments the loss of his Shakespearean career as heavily as Mary laments her abandoned vocation to become a nun. His sons, Jamie and Edmund, meanwhile, begin to associate Shakespeare with their father’s selective and often rose-colored memory.

Tyrone’s elder son, Jamie, casts himself as the antagonist of these memories in a private performance — a play(s)-within-the-play, not unlike Hamlet’s Mousetrap — which seeks, if not to catch Tyrone’s conscience, at least to stir him from his trance.

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Disgusted by his father’s willowy attitude toward the past, Jamie repeatedly quotes Iago,

Shakespeare’s great un-doer and the enemy of his father’s beloved role, Othello.

But if Jamie begins as an antagonist or villain, set on unravelling his father’s fragile memories, he progresses towards a more tragic terrain in A Moon for the

Misbegotten, in which O’Neill extends the arc of Jamie’s private rotating repertory. In that play, Jamie returns (now as “Jim”) to Othello with one significant alteration: at the play’s emotional climax, he quotes Othello, not Iago, in the most important and least understood allusion of O’Neill’s career. As Jim ultimately plays Othello, his father’s beloved role, in A Moon for the Misbegotten (performed for another character, Josie, who is herself densely haunted by both Mary Tyrone from Journey and Ella O’Neill, Eugene’s mother), he completes his rotating repertory and mimics the high point of his father’s professional life across two of O’Neill’s most personal plays. Jamie (Jim in A Moon for the Misbegotten), who is based upon Eugene O’Neill’s real-life brother, James O’Neill,

Jr., is the fulcrum point of this dense intersection between O’Neill, his artistic representation of his family, and Shakespeare.

Born in 1878, James, Jr. was the eldest of three sons born to Ella and James

O’Neill, Sr.: Edmund Burke O’Neill, the middle child, was born in 1883, and Eugene

Gladstone O’Neill was born in 1888. Tragically, Edmund Burke died at only eighteen months in 1885. While Ella and James were on tour in Colorado, James, Jr., who had been left in the charge of Ella’s mother, contracted measles. He was commanded to avoid his younger brother, but while unsupervised, he wandered into the baby’s bedroom.

Edmund Burke died just a few days later. As Robert M. Dowling points out in Eugene

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O’Neill: A Life in Four Acts, this traumatic incident profoundly impacted the entire

O’Neill family:

[Eugene] O’Neill become convinced in the years to follow that his mother never forgave his older brother Jim, as he called him, for infecting Edmund; and he himself suffered from a tormenting mixture of survivor’s guilt and death envy, later naming his autobiographical character in Long Day’s Journey “Edmund” and the dead child “Eugene.” The reversal of names in the play appears to have an even deeper symbolic meaning for the mother, Mary Cavan Tyrone, who makes clear that she gave birth to her third son to replace the deceased Eugene, and only at the insistence of her husband James (CP3 766). Hence O’Neill proposes that his birth was no more than a mistake made out of desperation that his existence in her eyes was a bedeviling reminder of her guilt over Edmund. (Dowling 34-5)

Dowling traces Mary’s guilt through O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, in which she tells Tyrone, “I knew I’d proved by the way I’d left Eugene [Edmund] that I wasn’t worthy to have another baby, and that God would punish me if I did. I should have never borne Edmund [Eugene]” (CP3 766). But the family’s suffering did not end with

Eugene’s birth:

Worse still, perhaps, a hotel doctor prescribed Ella O’Neill morphine for the intolerable pain of giving birth to Eugene, an eleven-pound baby, thus precipitating a drug addiction that would last for well over two decades and haunt Ella and the O’Neill men to all of their deaths. (Dowling 35-6)

Following the incident, James, Jr. was sent to Notre Dame’s preparatory school in South

Bend, Indiana, at the age of seven.

Black’s biography notes that Jamie was “a favorite at Notre Dame,” and “his record heartened by both his parents” (41) — but as he grew older, scandal marred his bright future. Although he showed great promise as a scholar, rising to the position of editor of the Fordham student newspaper as an undergraduate, Jamie withdrew from the

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021 school in December of 1899, just months before he was to receive his diploma.

Alexander writes, “As for the crucial point of Jamie’s expulsion from Fordham, there is no exact record of his misconduct—only the ambiguous notation, ‘Withdrawn by request’” (Struggle 134). Dowling points out, however, that an exact record of the incident exists: “he was expelled for hiring a prostitute, then introducing her to classmates and at least one priest on campus as his sister” (49). With the prank, James, Jr. seemed to beg for expulsion from the Catholic college, as if, on the precipice of success and independence, he willingly threw away a promise-filled future.

In the summer of 1903, James, Jr., Eugene, and their father watched as their mother attempted suicide at their Connecticut home. Having run out of morphine, Ella ran towards the nearby Thames River, desperate and planning to drown herself. The men ran after and restrained her before she could jump into the water. Both James, Jr. and

James, Sr. had known about Mary’s addiction “for years; but they had, right up to that moment, kept the truth from Eugene” (Dowling 43). Dowling notes that after this incident, Eugene went from calling his brother “Jamie” to “Jim,” and that Jim “eagerly reinforced” Eugene’s own nascent alcoholism, which he embraced as a coping mechanism (43-4). Eugene preserves this name change from “Jamie” to “Jim” in the Tao

House plays: in Long Day’s Journey Into Night, he names the elder Tyrone brother

“Jamie,” and in Moon for the Misbegotten, he becomes “Jim.”

As James, Jr.’s career stalled, his father employed him in his acting company.

Initially, James, Jr. met with success on the stage. By all counts he appears to have been a natural actor. He was charming, as handsome as his father, and a quick study: “Jamie liked to boast how easy it was to memorize lines and once bet his father ten dollars he

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021 could learn Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village in a week” (Gelb & Gelb 189). Eventually,

Jamie was promoted from an understudy to a small speaking role in his father’s famous production of The Count of Monte Cristo, but within a few years, James, Jr. grew disgusted with acting and the stage.

As performances of The Count of Monte Cristo wore on, James, Jr. turned his role into a caricature and increasingly defied his father; all the while, his drinking problem worsened. Stephen A. Black charts Jamie’s increasing defiance and gall onstage:

“Audiences and reviewers pointed out that Jamie was visibly drunk onstage…they could detect the shape of Jamie’s genitals through his costume tights and deduced that he wore no underwear” (77). Black links James, Jr.’s entitlement and disrespect with James, Sr.’s view of himself as Lear-like, spurned by ungrateful children:

Angry and uncomfortable in their dependency, and feeling chronically hopeless about their mother, Eugene and Jamie turned their frustration against their father…Yet James also despised the ingratitude he had lived with for years…He dreamed of playing King Lear, a part he had never tried. It seemed the part that destiny had in mind for him. (95)

Shakespeare was a salve and a moral exemplar for James, Sr. In Long Day’s Journey Into

Night, Tyrone used his talents as a Shakespearean performer to escape the poverty of his youth. He passionately describes his love for Shakespeare’s plays and “the joy of being alive in his great poetry” (CP3 809). James, Sr. remained concerned with preserving the tradition of Shakespearean acting, and his “idealistic concern for the state of acting in

America” made him worry “that the high Victorian style of performing Shakespeare was vanishing” (Black 96). Because of this preoccupation, and also, as Doris Alexander suggests in The Tempering of Eugene O’Neill (1962), because he wished to rehabilitate

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021 and inspire his eldest son (110), James, Sr. created a classical repertory company of young actors in 1907. The company first performed Virginius (1820), an early work by the Irish playwright John Sheridan Knowles and made famous by Charles Macready in

England, as well as by Edwin Forrest in the United States. By taking on a role made famous by the great British and American actors of his day, James, Sr. was proclaiming himself their equal. But his passion for Shakespeare never abated, and he paired

Knowles’ offering with Julius Caesar. Eventually, James, Sr. hoped the company would perform King Lear, and that, one day, he would play the titular role.

Louis Sheaffer’s Eugene O’Neill: Son and Playwright (1968) paints a dismal portrait of the rehearsals for Virginius and Julius Caesar in 1907. He quotes Eugene, who often attended rehearsals, as having asked a group of friends,

Have you ever seen a production of Julius Caesar? Did the Roman mob ever suggest to you anything more than a gum-chewing Coney Island Mardi Gras, or, in the case of a special all-star revival, a gathering of familiar faced modern actors parading uncomfortably in in togas? (Sheaffer 127)

Sheaffer writes that during rehearsals, James, Jr. would walk up and down the stage murmuring, in a stage whisper, “Sandals, scandals, sandals, scandals” as his father did his best to train the other young actors in the troupe (ibid). Eugene’s comment and James,

Jr.’s histrionics are humorous, but they also display a sharp edge: as they casually dismiss productions of Shakespeare’s plays and satirize classical acting, they also imply that their father is hopelessly out of touch and old-fashioned. James, Sr.’s lofty dream of creating a

Shakespearean repertory company, his sons seem to be saying, is little more than a pipe dream.

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021

Despite his sons’ mockery, however, James, Sr.’s Virginius was warmly received at its New York opening — even if, as Sheaffer points out, the audience was “full of nostalgic old-timers” (128). But by September of 1907, the two shows were drawing smaller and smaller houses. Out of necessity, James, Sr. switched back to performing The

Count of Monte Cristo, an assured box office draw. Reviewing the Monte Cristo remount,

The New York Herald was barely able to stifle a yawn: “It was the same play acted in the same old way…as popular as ever…the audience no doubt considered Mr. O’Neill as good as ever” (qtd. in Sheaffer 129). Black summarizes the woeful episode in James,

Sr.’s career: “He lamented that the younger actors were too lazy to learn the style, too cynical to try to understand his Shakespeare. Before long it was clear that he could not make his idea for a repertory company work, and James had to abandon his reform movement” (97). The Shakespeare within James, Sr. failed to inspire his sons or speak to contemporary audiences.

James, Sr. would never play his dream role in Lear.

The theatrical and philosophical divisions between James, Sr. and James, Jr. were never fully reconciled. James, Sr., died on August 10, 1920; Ella soon after, on February

28, 1922. James, Jr. died from complications related to alcohol abuse on November 8,

1923 at just forty-five years old. Sheaffer writes that, for Eugene, the primary legacy of his brother’s death was the liberty “to exploit the family legacy in any way he chose”

(114). The sudden deaths of O’Neill’s father, mother, and brother left him stunned and alone, but also free to mine their painful losses in his work.

Remnants of James, Jr. are scattered across many of Eugene’s plays, from The

Rope (1919) through All God’s Chillun Got Wings (1924) and, of course, within the less

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021 thinly-veiled representations of Long Day’s Journey Into Night and Moon for the

Misbegotten. He can even be seen in The Iceman Cometh: his “emblematic traces” are found in “the guilt-ridden young anarchist, Donald Parritt, who is trying to revenge himself on a neglectful mother — or in Willie Oban, the self-pitying Harvard-educated lawyer who prefers drunken indolence to the practice of law” (Gelb & Gelb 509). But

James, Jr.’s most impactful presences are felt in Long Day’s Journey Into Night and A

Moon for the Misbegotten, within the characters of Jamie and Jim.

The first words Jamie speaks to his father in Long Day’s Journey Into Night are

Iago’s; the final words he speaks before receiving Josie’s benediction and forgiveness in

Act Three of A Moon for the Misbegotten are Othello’s. As Eugene O’Neill sifted through the memories of his family in the Tao House plays, he assigned these densely haunted roles, so central to his father’s career and self-esteem, to Jamie. Whether “Jim” recites Othello’s lines in A Moon for the Misbegotten with sardonic mockery or heartfelt emotion is, of course, a choice that only the actor playing him in any production can determine. But Jamie/Jim’s two-play progression from Iago to Othello — from manipulation and self-satisfied, villainous asides to soliloquized tragic recognition — traces the arc of the Shakespeare that is within O’Neill.

Conclusion

Exploring O’Neill’s relationship with Shakespeare does not explain away the Tao

House plays as mere by-products of Shakespearean influence; on the contrary, the study of the connection between these two playwrights encourages a more complex, personal, and densely haunted view of O’Neill’s texts. It enlarges, rather than diminishes, the

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021 meaning of the Tao House plays. Such profound, personal resonances are not parenthetical to Shakespeare’s influence within O’Neill’s plays; they exemplify, as Berlin maintained, that O’Neill both uses and contains Shakespeare.

O’Neill uses Shakespeare through allusion, quotation, and paraphrase, as well as through recurring images, themes, and motifs. Simultaneously, his plays contain

“personal and partial” (Berlin 6) versions of Shakespeare belonging to individual characters. Each play takes on a deeper meaning, with more expansive resonances, as the

Shakespeare(s) within them is illuminated. The Bard emerges as both literary par excellence and moral exemplar, but he is also an impossible standard and the source of bitter familial conflict.

In Long Day’s Journey Into Night, a web of Shakespearean allusions, references, misquotes and motifs entangle the Tyrone family unit. As Tyrone vainly seeks to claim ownership of Shakespeare and, by extension, justify the wrenching decisions his past, his sons parodically paraphrase his beloved verses and his wife, Mary, replays a suspended, anti-tragic version of Hamlet. Many years later, Tyrone’s Shakespearean legacy is recalled and resurrected by his dying son Jamie, as Othello once again resurfaces in A

Moon for the Misbegotten. But Shakespeare’s influence on the Tao House plays is not confined to the Tyrone family: The Iceman Cometh barroom is filled not just with pipe dreams and abandoned hopes, but with the ghosts of Shakespeare’s plays, as well. The

Shakespeare that is within O’Neill transcends even these thematic and textual resonances finally to become something larger, more personal and mysterious within the Tao House plays: he forms a sustaining thread between fact and fiction, between memory and regret.

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021

Chapter Three

“Insubstantial Pageant Faded”: The Shakespeare Within

Long Day’s Journey Into Night

Shakespeare’s specter haunts Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1942) before a single word is even spoken. In the opening stage directions, O’Neill describes two sets of bookshelves. A “small” shelf, holding works by Balzac, Zola, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche,

Marx, and Engels, as well as Ibsen, Shaw, Strindberg, and Dowson, clearly belongs to the iconoclastic autodidact Edmund. The other “large, glassed-in bookcase” contains works by Dumas, Hugo, and Lever, as well as “The World’s Best Literature in three large volumes” and “three sets of Shakespeare” with “the look of having been read and reread”

(CP3 717). This more substantial bookshelf clearly belongs to Tyrone. By placing the two bookshelves on opposite sides of the room, “O’Neill is establishing the conflicting worldviews of Tyrone compared to Jamie and Edmund, attesting to the importance of literature and history” (Porter, “Lonely” 45). Above the small bookcase, full of dissident philosophy, naturalistic novels, and socially motivated drama — the one belonging to

Edmund, not Tyrone — hangs a portrait of William Shakespeare.

At several conference panels, including the American Literature Association in

Boston (2018) and the Modern Languages Association in Seattle (2019), several O’Neill scholars have argued that, in productions of O’Neill’s plays, the stage directions are privileged information for readers, not viewers. The sets of Shakespeare, for example, cannot be seen by spectators seated in the audience, even in the first few rows. But

O’Neill meant for the audience to perceive them, even if their bindings were illegible.

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Tyrone identifies the authors on the shelves when he recites their names, including “three good sets of Shakespeare” (CP3 799), in Act Four. Just as importantly and even more conspicuously, the portrait of Shakespeare, which echoes the foreboding likeness of Ezra

Manning in Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), stares at the audience for the entirety of the play’s very long journey into night.

Normand Berlin finds the onstage location of this portrait odd, as if, in an act of intellectual colonization, Tyrone deliberately placed it above Edmund’s eccentric bookshelf: “one feels that Tyrone must have furnished the room, giving Shakespeare that prominent position” (“O’Neill’s Shakespeare” 5). While Edmund’s reading list is modern, avant-garde, and revolutionary, forecasting sweeping societal reform and

Nietzschean atheism, Tyrone’s consists of classical, canonical works espousing Victorian ideals. His conspicuous placement of Shakespeare’s portrait, awkwardly straddling the two shelves, is an attempt to elevate his son’s mind above what Tyrone perceives as the

“morbid filth” and “despair and pessimism” (CP3 798) of these modern writers.

Berlin goes on to explain Edmund and Jamie’s Shakespearean inheritance, and in so doing, elides the fictional world of the play with O’Neill’s life:

… Shakespeare was an important part of O’Neill’s nurture, almost a member of the family. His father was forever quoting Shakespeare, much to his two sons’ annoyance. Shakespeare was part of O’Neill’s voracious reading of books in his father’s library. He took a course on Shakespeare during his one year at Princeton University. A wager with his father prompted him to memorize the entire part of Macbeth. For George Pierce Baker, in whose class at Harvard O’Neill studied playwriting [for] a year, Shakespeare was a god. O’Neill saw productions of Shakespeare’s plays, and was especially enthusiastic about John Barrymore’s Hamlet. In short, Shakespeare was tied up with the daily life of O’Neill’s family and with his growth and education. (“O’Neill’s Shakespeare” 6)

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But in Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Shakespeare represents more than an intellectual boundary between Edmund and Tyrone. Just as he was “almost a member of the

[O’Neill] family,” Shakespeare is also “tied up” within Long Day’s Journey Into Night in four primary ways.

First, O’Neill uses Edmund to contest one of Shakespeare’s most famous quotations. In Act Four, Edmund counter-attacks his father’s recitation of Prospero’s line from The Tempest, “We are such stuff as dreams are made on,” with a witty paraphrase:

“We are such stuff as manure is made on, so let’s drink up and forget it” (CP3 796). In

The Theatre of Revolt (1964), theatre scholar Robert Brustein seizes on this exchange, arguing that Edmund’s paraphrase bookends O’Neill’s emergence as a modern playwright and solidifies him as the quintessential playwright of revolt. Normand Berlin, however, opposes this triumphant view, arguing that Edmund “doesn’t appreciate the quotation because it comes from his ham-actor father and because he doesn’t seem to understand its tone or implications” (O’Neill’s Shakespeare 198-99). Both views hold partial truths, but there is more in Edmund’s paraphrase than either Brustein or Berlin recognize. Edmund does fully understand Prospero’s line, perhaps even better than his father. His updated verse is not merely a declaration of independence from canonical playwriting traditions, as Brustein believes, nor is it a petulant and misinformed dismissal or the poignancy of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, as Berlin asserts. It is also the clearest expression of the unsettled and bifurcated, but ultimately transformative, Shakespeare within O’Neill.

Second, Tyrone’s eldest son and Edmund’s brother, Jamie, strongly self- identifies with Iago from Shakespeare’s Othello. But Jamie’s attraction to Iago is not a

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021 coincidental literary allusion — rather, it originates from his father’s past successes in his rotating repertory performances of Othello and Iago, which Eugene’s real-life father,

James O’Neill, experienced. Indeed, as many O’Neill biographers suggest, James O’Neill saw much of his own life through the lens of Shakespeare’s Othello. Jamie’s frequent quotations from Shakespeare’s tragedy entangle James and Jamie both within the roles of

Othello and Iago, as well as within Eugene O’Neill’s dramatized memory of his father.

O’Neill uses the distinctly theatrical time signature of rotating repertory to explore, express, and expand these tightly wound connections.

Third, while O’Neill’s portrayal of Mary Tyrone urges a host of connections to

Shakespeare’s women, including Desdemona and Lady Macbeth, Mary’s connection to

Ophelia is the most revelatory. As Laurin Porter observes, this connection is established by an exclusively male code of communication, as the men never speak a Shakespearean quote to Mary (Porter, “Lonely” 37-8). However, their references culminate in a cruel but apt Shakespearean stage direction spoken by Jamie and referring to Mary: “Enter

Ophelia” (CP3 824). O’Neill activates this allusion to Hamlet to situate his play “within and against” (Westgate 23), rather than alongside and reminiscent of, Shakespearean tragedy. Built upon Shakespearean foundations, Mary’s fate, which forces her to “go on living,” always “dreaming and forgetting” (CP3 825) rather than living and dying, encapsulates O’Neill’s vision of modern tragedy.

Fourth, and finally, a previously unnoticed textual echo between Long Day’s

Journey Into Night and O’Neill’s lost-and-found play Exorcism (1919) reveals how thoroughly O’Neill internalized a very personal blend of Shakespeare and his father beginning from his earliest days as a playwright. O’Neill’s theatrical vision of his own

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021 father is bookended by the same Shakespearean quote: however, the resonances of that quote change greatly over the course of the 22 years separating Exorcism and Long Day’s

Journey Into Night.

Ultimately, Long Day’s Journey Into Night transforms the tragic from a universal and climactic experience in life to an intimate, unresolved condition of life, a shift which both depends upon and rejects Shakespearean tragedy. In so doing, O’Neill paved the way for the American dramatists mentioned in Chapter Two: Williams, Miller, Shepherd,

Norman, Wasserstein, and Wilson, among many others. But the study of how and why

Shakespeare influences Long Day’s Journey Into Night uncovers much more than carefully cited parallel reads and close comparative analysis. More importantly, it urges readers to see O’Neill as shaped by and reshaping the Shakespeare within him.

“More My Idea”: Playwright of Revolt

Despite his physical permanence on Tyrone’s bookshelves, Shakespeare’s presence within Long Day’s Journey Into Night is dynamic and contentious. Rather than serving as a shared foundational heritage, the famous playwright instead marks sharp divisions between the Tyrone men. Nowhere is his conflicting worldview more apparent within Long Day’s Journey Into Night than in Act Four, when Edmund improvises a variation on The Tempest.

After Edmund explains to his father that he wandered alone in the New England fog, he quotes from the English Decadent poet Dowson’s Vita Summa Brevis (1896)

“sardonically”: “They are not long, the days of wine and roses: / Out of a misty dream, /

Our path emerges for a while, and then closes, / Within a dream” (CP3 795). Along with

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021 the Decadents and Symbolists of the late-nineteenth century, Dowson heavily influences

Edmund’s worldview — indeed, he quotes Baudelaire nearly as often as Tyrone quotes

Shakespeare.

After quoting Dowson, Edmund is in a poetic mood (also very tipsy, if not drunk), and he emerges a poet of his own school in his most revelatory monologue:

The fog was where I wanted to be. Halfway down the path you can’t see the house. You’d never know it was here. Or any of the other places down the avenue. I couldn’t see but a few feet ahead. I didn’t meet a soul. Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is. That’s what I wanted—to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself. Out beyond the harbor, where the road runs along the beach, I even lost the feeling of being on land. The fog and the sea seemed part of each other. It was like walking on the bottom of the sea. As if I had drowned long ago. As if I was a ghost belonging to the fog, and the fog was the ghost of the sea. It felt damned peaceful to be nothing more than a ghost within a ghost. (795-6)

In The Theatre of Revolt: An Approach to Modern Drama (1964), Robert Brustein focuses on this passage to situate Edmund as a quintessential example of the attitude of revolt in modern dramatic literature. Perhaps noticing the monologue’s preceding reference to Dowson, Brustein argues that this attitude is inherited from a Romantic worldview and produces a sense of self-involved formlessness (Brustein 21-32), which

Edmund articulates as being within fog — composed of ephemeral mist, simultaneously lost and at home, dead to the world and spiritually alive. One of O’Neill’s most consistent visual motifs, the fog here solidifies (no pun intended) as Brustein’s formless self- involvement, a simultaneous belonging and not-belonging.

It is a compliment to O’Neill’s skill as a playwright that Brustein treats Edmund as an artist unto himself who composes an attitude of revolt. In so doing, Edmund also fulfills Brustein’s prophecy of lonely lives for existential rebels like Edmund: he alienates

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021 himself from his father, who begrudgingly admits, “You have a poet in you but it’s a damned morbid one!” (CP3 796) following this speech.

Brustein’s analysis captures and classifies Edmund’s genius, but it still fails to compass the full scope of O’Neill’s achievement within this scene. O’Neill responds to

Edmund’s revolutionary declaration through the thinly-veiled avatar of his father, James

Tyrone, who sets Edmund’s bleak outlook against what he perceives as Shakespeare’s most redemptive and universal verses: “Why can’t you remember your Shakespeare and forget the third-raters [?] You’ll find what you are trying to say in him, as you’ll find everything else worth saying” (ibid). Tyrone here reminds his son of his Shakespearean inheritance, appealing to the better angels of Edmund’s nature. But the totality of

“everything else worth saying” undercuts any connection his comment might have made, spurring Tyrone toward his most combative quotation of Shakespeare. He summarizes that “everything” as he assumes the role of Prospero and quotes from The Tempest, using his “fine voice”: “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep” (ibid).

The two themes Tyrone seizes upon within Edmund’s monologue are ephemerality and death, both of which are expressed in Prospero’s famous monologue.

First, Edmund’s fog is tied up with Prospero’s “thin air”; second, Edmund’s sense of having died long ago is connected to Prospero’s sleep which “rounds” —that is, precedes and follows — mortal existence:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors (As I foretold you) were all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air, And like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021

The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And like this insubstantial pageant faded Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on; and our little life Is rounded with a sleep. (CW 2317)

The primary metaphor within this speech is life as a theatrical performance. The world is like a stage, or “the great globe itself” (a likely pun on Shakespeare’s outdoor playhouse,

The Globe), and life is linked to a play — an “insubstantial pageant” — which must eventually “dissolve,” leaving nothing behind. The individual is the raw material for dreams, and as our mortality fades, we return to the same condition as before our birth.

Life is a dream; death a slumber. Berlin, who sees Prospero as a surrogate for

Shakespeare in this speech (and who dutifully reminds his reader that Tyrone is a similar surrogate for Eugene O’Neill’s father), maintains that this verse “offers a commonplace idea so effectively that it gathers to itself the force of unequivocal truth” (Berlin 197).

One way to read this open-ended observation is that Shakespeare gives magnificent poignancy to a universal belief. An opposite read, admittedly more jaded but no less accurate, is that Shakespeare says nothing at all, but with great feeling.

Tyrone’s view, of course, is the former. He quotes the line with his “fine” voice to counterbalance Edmund’s existential angst. He may be saying that life really is beautiful

— don’t get so wrapped up in darkness. But such an interpretation evades the darkness within Prospero’s line: his contemplation of the limitless nothingness that precedes and follows existence is among the most morbid thoughts a human being can have. While certainly “worth saying,” as Tyrone insists, and “beautiful,” as Edmund allows, there is sorrow in the line’s sublimity.

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021

Edmund’s view of the speech lies between these two extremes. He counter-attacks the verse through paraphrase and satire. Berlin’s interpretation, however, simplifies this exchange by suggesting that each man has a “limited” (199) view of Shakespeare’s meaning, and furthermore, that Edmund “doesn’t appreciate the quotation because it comes from his ham-actor father and because he doesn’t seem to understand its tone or implications” (198-99). Berlin implies that Tyrone omits the morbidity of Prospero’s speech and reduces Shakespeare to epigrammatic moral instruction while seeking to replace his son’s nascent poetic urges with the cultural cache of Shakespeare’s cozy verses. It is a reductive read.

Berlin is equally dismissive of Edmund, asserting that he “is not wise enough to appreciate the poet who contains ‘everything” (199). Quite to the contrary, I believe that

Edmund fully understands and appreciates the quote, perhaps even better than his father, and that this view of Edmund exposes the root of a significant problem of Berlin’s reads of Shakespeare within O’Neill.

Despite his seeming omnipresence, the Bard does not contain “everything,” nor is he behind every moment in O’Neill’s career, as Berlin occasionally suggests. Tyrone and

Edmund are engaged in a quote-swap and literary debate, albeit one with complex personal resonances. To imply that Shakespeare contains “everything” is to indulge a vague hyperbole; similarly, to suggest that either man’s understanding of The Tempest is

“limited” denies both Tyrone’s genius in selecting this particular quote, so perfectly apropos of Edmund’s pilgrimage through the fog, and Edmund’s brilliant parody of

Shakespeare’s lines, which solidifies him as a poet of revolt. In other words, Berlin’s read

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021 of this passage compares Shakespeare and O’Neill rather than seeking the Shakespeare within O’Neill.

Edmund’s rephrase is a declaration of independence for Brustein’s theatre of revolt, but it also includes a sincere appreciation for the power of Shakespeare’s verse, as parody often does. After Tyrone finishes Prospero’s lines, Edmund says, “Fine! That’s beautiful. But I wasn’t trying to say that. We are such stuff as manure is made on, so let’s drink up and forget it. That’s more my idea” (CP3 796). O’Neill indicates in the stage directions that this line is to be delivered “ironically.” Brustein stresses the importance of the “ironic mode,” itself growing from a foundation of “rotting Romanticism” (41) and

Decadent detritus, for playwrights of revolt. In contemporary speech, irony is often equated with sarcasm, but O’Neill is more likely implying that Edmund would be responding ironically in the traditional sense, meaning that he responds to his father’s quote with great feeling and contemplation, as if hearing the lines naively and for the first time.

It is Edmund, not Tyrone, who detects the sorrow in Prospero’s sublime lines, even if he rejects their conclusion. The Bard is insufficient for summarizing Edmund’s worldview: he does not contain “everything else worth saying,” as his father maintains.

But as Brustein’s Theatre of Revolt emphasizes, Edmund’s worldview rests upon a rejection of the Romanticism which Tyrone’s flowery recitations recall. As an emerging playwright of revolt, Edmund must write his own lines — verses composed of “manure” which appreciate Shakespeare even as they rewrite him. Perhaps O’Neill uses Edmund consciously to anticipate postmodern pastiche and the parodic mode, or perhaps, more

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021 immediately, Edmund’s search for “what [he] was trying to say” propels him to rewrite his father’s Shakespeare and uncover the Bard within himself.

By asserting that Edmund cannot understand or appreciate Tyrone’s quotation from The Tempest, Berlin undercuts his main argument that Shakespeare is an essential part of Long Day’s Journey Into Night. If Tyrone is the authoritative interpreter of

Shakespeare, Edmund’s rejection of the Bard is an angsty, adolescent rebellion against his father’s favorite verses. If, on the contrary, Edmund deeply understands and appreciates Shakespeare’s plays, and the irony of his father’s naïve and rose-colored quotations offends his Shakespearean sensibilities, a more complicated picture emerges.

Edmund, not unlike Treplyev in Chekhov’s The Seagull, rails against the simplistic conventions and interpretations of the classics while simultaneously striving to reinvent them.

Where Berlin sees an Edmund incapable or unwilling to fully grasp Shakespeare, the playwright who “contains everything,” I see an Edmund confidently versed in

Shakespeare’s plays, which defy tidy classifications or epigrammatic morality; because of this, he also glimpses his father’s limited understanding is of the plays he so frequently quotes. Edmund’s parodic paraphrase of Prospero’s most famous lines more than mocks

Tyrone’s recitation: it is a plea with his father to see the sorrow and loneliness — the reality — within Shakespeare’s lines. And as the next section illustrates, Edmund’s brother Jamie is equally capable of using Shakespeare to wage a coded, Shakespearean battle against Tyrone.

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021

Jamie/Iago and James/Othello

Jamie-as-Iago Quote 1: “The Moor, I know his trumpet”

The first words Jamie addresses to his father Tyrone belong to Iago. Early in the play, Jamie mocks his father’s snoring with a relatively obscure line spoken by Iago in

Act Two of Othello, in which a trumpet announces the arrival of Othello’s ship in

Cypress:

JAMIE. (He quotes, putting on a ham-actor manner) “The moor, I know his trumpet.” (His mother and brother laugh.) TYRONE. (scathingly) If it takes my snoring to make you remember your Shakespeare instead of the dope sheet with the ponies, I hope I’ll keep on with it. (CP3 724)

On a surface level, Jamie’s quotation reveals several of the Tyrones’ shared attitudes about Shakespeare. First, both Edmund and Mary share a laugh at the joke, revealing their deep awareness of Shakespeare’s texts; as Berlin observes, Shakespeare is a “almost a member of the family” (6). Next, by assuming the role of Iago (speaking his lines in a

“ham actor manner” to mock his father’s powerful stage voice) and “casting” Tyrone as

Othello, Jamie antagonizes himself against his father by adopting the role of a villain.

Finally, Tyrone endows the Bard with redemptive value as he cajoles his son to study

Shakespeare rather than pore over gambling pamphlets at racetracks. But not everyone laughs at Jamie’s performance: Tyrone responds “scathingly.” His vociferous reply contrasts Shakespeare’s high-minded poetry with the “dope sheets” Jamie presumably studies at the racetracks.

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021

Despite his affection for horseracing, however, Jamie knows his Shakespeare.

Like Tyrone, he can cue up a classical quotation for almost any occasion. Had he wished merely to mock his father’s loud snores, he might have chosen Shakespeare’s most famous verse on the topic — Sebastian’s line to the conspiratorial Antonio from The

Tempest:

SEBASTIAN. Thou dost snore distinctly: There’s meaning in thy snores. (CW 53)

Perhaps Sebastian’s line is simply too on the nose (pun intended), or — more likely —

Jamie wishes to rub salt on an open wound by quoting a character whose animating drive is to destroy Othello, with whom his father deeply identified. For Jamie, this allegiance to

Iago is poetic, or rather, theatrical, justice. The allusion, not the wisecrack, wounds

Tyrone, prompting his “scathing” reply.

Until now, critics have too easily glided over the fact that Jamie’s first words to his father are Iago’s. In her 2013 book, Shakespeare’s Surrogates: Rewriting

Renaissance Drama, Sonya Freeman Loftis swiftly dismisses the quotation, noting only that “[Jamie] uses a line from ‘Othello’ to make fun of James’ snoring” (75, emphasis added). It is not that Jamie is choosing “a line” from Othello. Loftis overlooks the critical point: Jamie chooses Iago’s line.

Normand Berlin dwells a bit longer on the line than Loftis, suspecting a deeper importance to the quotation, but nevertheless describes it as merely “playful” (191).

While allowing that “there is a remarkable appropriateness to all of Jamie’s quoting from

Shakespeare” (ibid), he does not comment on the “appropriateness” of this particular

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021 allusion, instead focusing on the structural similarities between Jamie’s quote and

Shakespeare’s line in their respective plays: that is, he compares the texts separately rather than considering how O’Neill integrates Shakespeare’s. Berlin neatly aligns this mostly sunny, lighthearted scene in O’Neill’s Act One with the optimistic arrival of

Othello in Cypress in Shakespeare’s Act Two. Both scenes, Berlin argues, serve as calms before storms, a parallel which “testifies to O’Neill’s deep acquaintance with

Shakespeare’s play, whether or not he calculatingly aimed for the resonance” (192). In other words, Berlin sees the quote from Othello as mostly coincidental, and for him, the parallels between the two plays, while edifying, are not essential components of O’Neill’s scene.

Richard Brucher approaches Jamie’s quote from a different angle, arguing that

Jamie “wittily appropriates, through parody” (46) Shakespeare’s Othello. He cites

Hutcheon’s definition of parody as “imitation characterized by ironic inversions” in which the target text (Shakespeare’s) is “seen as an ideal or at least a norm from which the modern departs” (5-6). This is closer to the point: the notion of parody urges a consideration of how Shakespeare’s play is integrated and deliberately transformed by

O’Neill’s. Iago is certainly Shakespeare’s greatest master of parody: he goes so far as to define himself through such “ironic inversions.” His proud proclamation, “I am not what

I am” (CW 2122), as Harold Bloom observes, parodically reverses the title “Yahweh” from Exodus 3:14:

And God answered Moses, I AM THAT I AM. Also he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me to you. (qtd. in Bloom, Iago 8)

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021

Bloom pursues Iago’s negative self-definition to its limit, illuminating Iago’s hollow core:

Yahweh, strictly translated, proclaims ‘I will be I will be.’ That is, I will be present wherever and whenever I will to be present. Iago has a wounded sense of being, what might be termed a void of inner presence. His god has rejected him, and he knows no other deity than the god of war. (ibid)

Iago (a name which recalls “Yahweh” as well as both “James” and “Jamie”) defines himself through this reversal of God’s identity (“I am not what I am”), further stretching parody into blasphemy. Bloom’s “void of inner presence” uncovers fundamental connections between Iago and Jamie.

Jamie blames his father for his mother’s drug addiction, and suspects — though he cannot bring himself to admit — that Tyrone’s penny-pinching will lead to Edmund’s death:

JAMIE. (cynically) He’s been putting on the old sob act for you, eh? He can always kid you. But not me. Never again. (then slowly) Although, in a way, I do feel sorry for him about one thing. But he has even that coming to him. He’s to blame. (CP3 814-15)

Jamie’s fury at his father’s histrionics (“the old sob act”) anger him as much as his father’s unwillingness to accept responsibility for the family’s unhappiness, and Jamie’s unswerving belief in his father’s culpability fuels his war.

He wants revenge.

On a superficial level, Iago wants revenge as well — although modern critics from Coleridge to Sloterdijk to Bloom have argued that Iago’s drive stems more from a

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021 psychological emptiness than from an external cause (Pechter 58-61). However, it is a poet who most closely puts his finger on Iago’s pulse. In his essay “The Joker in the

Pack,” W.H. Auden expands Iago’s psyche and illuminates a connection to Jamie. To

Auden, Iago, like Jamie, is fueled by negative drives:

If the word motive is given its normal meaning of a positive purpose of the self like sex, money, glory, etc. then the practical joker is certainly without motive. Yet the professional practical joker is certainly driven, like a gambler, to his activity, but the drive is negative, a fear of lacking a concrete self, of being nobody. In any practical joker to whom playing such jokes is a passion, there is always an element of malice, a projection of his self-hatred onto others, and in the ultimate case of the absolute practical joker, this is projected onto all created things. (257)

Jamie’s initial quotation of Iago’s lines, which Loftus dismisses, which Berlin describes as “playful,” and which his family laughs off as a harmless joke, is immediately related, in Tyrone’s mind, to gambling and the racetrack: “If it takes my snoring to make you remember your Shakespeare instead of the dope sheet with the ponies, I hope I’ll keep on with it” (CP3 724), his father says. But as innocuous as it may appear, the line is far more than a game. Fueled by Jamie’s negative drive, it is a malicious desire to deconstruct his father’s past.

Jamie is tormented by the very sense of nothingness, of being unmoored to reality, that Auden describes. His isolation stems from the childhood trauma of uncovering his mother’s drug addiction — through sobs, he confesses to Edmund, “Never forget the first time I got wise. Caught her in the act with a hypo” (CP3 818) — but his negative drive extends (as Auden writes, it is “projected onto all created things”) beyond this adolescent shock into a vast nihilism, a ceaseless and unresolvable quest to undo.

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Moments after recounting this traumatic discovery to Edmund, Jamie goes on to explain that he deliberately acted as a corrupting influence on his younger brother: “Did it on purpose to make a bum of you. Or part of me did. A big part. That part that’s been dead so long. That hates life” (CP3 818). Paradoxically, and despite his partial hatred towards life, Jamie also depends on his brother to verify his existence, at one point describing Edmund as his “Frankenstein” (819). Auden describes Iago’s sense of self in a similar vein, as “absolutely dependent on [others’]: when he is alone, he is a nullity”

(257). Jamie saves some warmth for his brother— “Don’t get the wrong idea, Kid. I love you more than I hate you” — but ultimately, his inner vacuity, the “dead part,” poisons him and drives him toward malevolence:

The dead part of me hopes you won’t get well. Maybe he’s even glad the game has got Mama again! He wants company, he doesn’t want to be the only corpse around the house! (CP3 821)

Jamie divorces himself from his “dead part,” as if there is another parasitic character inside of him that hollows his core. This spiritual emptiness also supports the notion that there are multiple roles within Jamie’s consciousness, a rotating repertory of demons and ghosts. Bloom’s description of Iago’s “void of inner presence,” along with Auden’s notion of a negative drive (as well as the sensation of being a living corpse), will continue to resonate strongly in his subsequent appearance as Jim Tyrone in A Moon for the

Misbegotten.

Jamie confronts an existential torment symbolized by his brother and made worse by his father’s willful denial of his family’s suffering. But countless literary and dramatic

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021 characters, from Achilles to Hamlet to Emma Bovary, are tormented by this same vacuous interior — nothing exclusively Shakespearean about that. Something more personal and immediate than inner vacuity binds Jamie to Iago: James Tyrone’s deep- seated association with the role of Othello. Raised in a Shakespearean household (recall, again, Berlin’s description of Shakespeare as “almost a member of the family”), Jamie understands his father’s connection to the role, and calculatingly adopts his allegiance to

Iago to combat Tyrone’s sense of self. If Shakespeare first appears on bookshelves, silently symbolizing intellectual boundaries and conflicting worldviews, Jamie pulls him off the shelf, using the Bard to compose a covert performance for — and personal attack against — his father.

In Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Eugene O’Neill gives James Tyrone an almost identical backstory to his thespian father, James O’Neill, who appeared alongside the great American Shakespearean actor Edwin Booth in a production of Othello in Chicago in 1874. Each night, the two men alternated the roles of Othello and Iago, just as Jamie alternates between the two roles in Long Day’s Journey Into Night and A Moon for the

Misbegotten. James earned substantial critical praise for his performances—most particularly, in the role of the Moor (Sheaffer 26-32). In Long Day’s Journey Into Night,

James Tyrone recounts this role-swapping tour de force with tears in his eyes:

…I could have been a great Shakespearean actor, if I’d kept on. I know that! In 1874, when Edwin Booth came to the theatre in Chicago where I was the leading man, I played Cassius to his Brutus one night, Brutus to his Cassius the next, Othello to his Iago, and so on. The first night I played Othello, he said to our manager, ‘That young man is playing Othello better than I ever did!’ (proudly) That from Booth, the greatest actor of his day or any other! (CP3 809)

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For James Tyrone (and perhaps for James O’Neill), these rotating repertory performances represented the pinnacle of his professional life. As he alternated between the roles of

Othello and Iago, one night coolly weaving “the net that shall enmesh them all” and the next murdering Desdemona, Tyrone’s identity, like James O’Neill’s, became intimately tied up with Othello. That self-identification, resurrected night after night in rotating repertory, was further entrenched by the applause he earned after each performance. In other words, James was most alive, most successful, and most himself in the role of

Othello.

In their encyclopedically thorough O’Neill: Life with Monte Cristo (2000), Arthur and Barbara Gelb describe James O’Neill’s brilliance as Othello. When playing the role, he wore a sword which “he had picked up in his early barnstorming days” (59). Because

James had difficulty removing the sword from its scabbard, Edwin Booth, his partner and a veteran Shakespearean, advised him not to wear it onstage. Stubbornly, James neglected Booth’s well-meaning counsel and incorporated the rusty scimitar in a theatrical gamble that culminated in an unforgettable pay-off:

Sidling across the stage towards Booth, [James] uttered his lines:

If thou dost slander her and torture me, Never pray more; abandon all remorse; On horror’s head horrors accumulate; Do deeds to make heaven weep, all earth amaz’d; For nothing canst thou to damnation add Greater than that.

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James approached Booth, his sword half drawn. When Booth had spoken his response, James sprang his surprise. ‘Nay, stay: thou shouldst be honest,’ James said menacingly and let go of the hilt. The sound reverberated throughout the huge hushed theatre. The audience, so knowledgeable that it could be enchanted by even such a minute innovation, nearly fell out of its seats in an effort to applaud James. Booth called James back on stage to take extra bows. (Gelb & Gelb 59)

If the Gelbs are swept away by the glamour of this anecdote, they should be forgiven.

The sound of that scimitar sliding back into its sheathe, echoing throughout the breathless playhouse, is a marvelous moment. At the same time, it is easy to imagine that, as James

O’Neill (or James Tyrone) retold this story to his sons, perhaps embellishing as the years passed, they would come to reject the story’s romance, viewing their father’s

Shakespeare as a rusty, nostalgic relic. Nevertheless, the image of James O’Neill performing for a full house rapt by his performance reinforces the essential connection

Tyrone felt with the role.

James would later abandon the classics for a lucrative star turn in The Count of

Monte Cristo, but he never forgot these performances or his great potential as a

Shakespearean actor: “his coming into the part of Edmond Dantes became a baggage that unsuited him for nobler things…[but] his promise was surely real; the plaudits of his celebrated contemporaries confirm the fact that his talents were everywhere acclaimed”

(Shaughnessy 27). This story of James’ success providing financial stability for his family but corrupting him for “nobler things” mirrors the recurrent pattern of modern tragedy in O’Neill’s plays articulated by John Patrick Diggins, in which ambitious

Americans are driven by competitive democracy to chase ultimately unattainable desires

(Diggins 11-15). For Tyrone, Shakespeare comes to symbolize the core regret of his life.

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Tyrone further aligns his triumphant performances of Othello with his marriage to

Mary, as if the role gave him the desire or confidence to wed: “As I look back on it now, that was the high spot in my career. I had life where I wanted it! And for a time after I kept on with ambition high. Married your mother. Ask her what I was like in those days”

(CP3 809). Richard Bruchner observes that “[Eugene] O’Neill associated his parents with

Othello and Desdemona, at least because O’Neill’s father, James Sr., identified with

Shakespeare’s moor, an outsider who married up to a younger, gently-reared white woman” (47). In this way, Mary is pulled into Tyrone’s self-fashioned Shakespearean myth through the marriage, becoming a surrogate Desdemona, at least in Tyrone’s mind.

In Othello, Desdemona falls in love with Othello’s fantastical stories of danger and adventure. As he describes the couple’s courtship, Othello shares Desdemona’s admiration of his dramatic past with the senate:

She thanked me, And bade me, if I had a friend that loved her, I should but teach him how to tell my story, And that would woo her. (CW 2096)

In Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Mary recalls her first backstage meeting with Tyrone in similarly romantic and theatrical terms. Like Desdemona, she was much younger than her soon-to-be fiancé and overcome by his charm: “…he was handsomer than my wildest dreams, in his make-up and nobleman’s costume that was so becoming to him. He was different from all ordinary men, like someone from another world” (CP3 778). Brucher reinforces the point, bringing the theatrical elements of this recollection into focus:

“Mary falls for James’ acting a hero’s travails — danger, enslavement, escape, exotic travels — that resemble those that won Desdemona’s heart” (54). Desdemona is smitten

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021 by Othello’s “marvelous recital” (Bloom, Iago 15) of his fantastic past, and Mary by

Tyrone’s stage presence and boundless charisma.

O’Neill biographer Louis Sheaffer more deeply entrenches these associations between Mary and Desdemona and James and Othello, arguing that these repeated resonances are essential elements of Eugene O’Neill’s dramaturgy which first appeared long before Long Day’s Journey Into Night, in All Gods’ Chillun Got Wings (1924). In the latter play, Jim Harris, an African American man struggling to pass the bar exam, marries Ella Downey, his childhood friend and a white woman living in New York City.

Sheaffer connects the dots first between Jim and Ella Harris and James and Ella O’Neill and next between O’Neill’s real-life parents and Shakespeare’s fated couple:

[Eugene] O’Neill’s idea of depicting his parents in black-white confrontation originated, possibly, in [James O’Neill’s] fondness for quoting Othello’s defense of his marriage to Desdemona (‘Most potent, grave, and reverent signiors…’), a passage that suggests an analogy between his parents and the Shakespearean couple: just as gentle Desdemona is attracted to the moor by the romance of his strange and dangerous past, so Ella Quinlan had looked on James O’Neill as the glamour of the theatre incarnate. Perhaps the actor had favored the Othello passage because he himself, unconsciously, felt a kinship with the blackamoor. (Sheaffer 118)

Seen this way, the connection between James O’Neill and Othello, whether unconscious or not, takes on troubling racial implications. O’Neill, a white man who played Othello in blackface, appropriates the identity of Shakespeare’s African warrior.

Recently, scholars have more thoroughly unpacked the relationship between

James O’Neill and Othello with these concerns in mind. In her doctoral dissertation, performance studies scholar and Berkeley professor Shannon Steen argues that Eugene

O’Neill shared James’ “kinship with the blackamoor,” finding the connection highly

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021 problematic. She asserts that the white playwright “used the black body as a surface on which to project his own alienation and melancholia” (Steen 353), and that Tyrone’s romantic narrative in Long Day’s Journey Into Night displays a similar easy “projection” of himself onto Othello. Ultimately, however, Steen only retraces the dense intersections between Othello, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, and All God’s Chillun Got Wings to arrive at a perplexing conclusion:

[Eugene] O’Neill may well have internalized the comparison between African and Irish Americans […] O’Neill’s father James certainly identified with black men in his own curious way. In 1874, just before the outburst of black-Irish satire, James O’Neill achieved what he later conceived of as the pinnacle of his career: playing Othello (in the requisite blackface) opposite Edwin Booth’s Iago. Later in his life, James would directly compare his own marriage to Mary ‘Ella’ Quinlan to that of Othello and Desdemona. Conceiving of himself as the lowly outsider marrying into beauty, money, and elite (read: white) power, James frequently launched into Othello’s defense of his ‘seduction’ of Desdemona when in the later stages of a drinking bout. In his own writings, O’Neill literally cast himself in the role of the tragic mulatto figure: in All God’s Chillun Got Wings (1924), the first play with an interracial couple on the Broadway stage, O’Neill named the interracial couple after his parents Jim and Ella. (352)

It is not entirely clear what Steen means when she asserts that “O’Neill literally cast himself in the role of the tragic mulatto figure.” Perhaps she is arguing that, as O’Neill wrote his parents as the black Jim and the white Ella, he imaginatively reconceived himself as a “tragic mulatto.” Regardless, her analysis illuminates the unresolved racial issues behind James O’Neill’s (and James Tyrone’s) strong personal connection with

Othello. To appropriate Shakespeare’s language is one thing; to equate what Steen calls

“alienation and melancholia” with blackness is quite another.

O’Neill biographer and trained psychoanalyst Stephen A. Black writes in Eugene

O’Neill: Beyond Mourning and Tragedy that Othello “was one of the Shakespeare plays

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021 that Eugene carried whole within him: it had been burned into his sensibility by his frequent imagining of his hero-father playing the Moor” (Black 147). Black traces the roots of this image of his father as Shakespeare’s tragic hero back further still, and notes that the connection first appeared in of Eugene’s earliest one-acts, Recklessness (1913), written more than a decade before All God’s Chillun Got Wings:

Recklessness is Eugene O’Neill’s earliest redaction of Othello, with improvements. Gene O’Neill, in the guise of Gene the maid, plays the role of Iago, covert lover of the Moor called Thick Lips (CP1, 66) and destroyer of his rival, Desdemona (now Mildred). The scene in which Othello is aroused to jealousy, in O’Neill as in Shakespeare, comes to its climax when the husband nearly strangles the informer. In Othello, the scene ends with Iago pledging to the Moor, ‘I am your own forever.’ No need for Eugene to have Gene make such a pledge; for the moment, Iago and the playwright are one. (147)

The connection is more than momentary, however. While Black and others find independent instances in O’Neill’s career when Othello appeared within individual plays, no scholar has specifically argued how O’Neill’s preoccupation with Shakespeare’s

Othello was sustained across multiple works — how, in Black’s words, O’Neill “carried whole within him” the Shakespearean tragedy so closely tied up with his father’s history and sense of self..

Othello rises to the surface in plays like Recklessness and All God’s Chillun Got

Wings, but as Jamie assumes the role of Iago at the opening of Long Day’s Journey into

Night, he initiates a string of allusions to Othello which will extend throughout Long

Day’s Journey into Night and its companion and coda, A Moon for the Misbegotten. He quotes Iago twice in Long Day’s Journey into Night; In A Moon for the Misbegotten,

Jamie (or at least “Jim Tyrone,” a character nearly identical to Jamie) switches roles and

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021 quotes Othello’s lines. The reason for this rotating repertory of Shakespearean roles within Jamie/Jim’s consciousness originates in Eugene O’Neill’s lifelong fascination with the memory of his father as (and haunted by) Othello. Just as Tyrone alternated between the roles of Iago and Othello, so too does his son, who quotes Iago’s lines at the dawn of Long Day’s Journey Into Night and Othello’s at twilight in A Moon for the

Misbegotten. For Tyrone, this rotating repertory brought self-discovery and joy: it was, for him, the highlight of his life, the moment he felt most alive. As his son reprises his father’s roles, however, he finds only discord, disappointment, and emptiness: the “dead part,” the inner vacuity and hollow core.

The real-life parallel also applies. Just as James O’Neill also alternated between the roles of Iago and Othello, so too does his son Eugene as he crafts the character(s) of

Jamie/Jim. The next chapter explores the resonances of Jim’s quotation in A Moon for the

Misbegotten, but for now, the biographical connection is irresistible: it is as if O’Neill approaches Othello from different angles in an attempt to understand and deconstruct his star actor father. It is not The Count of Monte Cristo, the play which made his father both a fortune and famous, that most perplexes and preoccupies Eugene O’Neill, but the image of his promise-filled young father as Othello.

Jamie is driven to destroy what he perceives as a narcissistic and nostalgic memory of his father as a faded Shakespearean. Rather than sacrificing a career in the classics for the security of his family, Jamie believes that Tyrone’s theatrical career destroyed the family’s chances for happiness. He attacks his father not only through his quotation of Iago’s lines but also through oblique references to his father’s theatrical performances. In Act Four, he cruelly says to Tyrone, “I claim Edwin Booth never saw

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021 the day when he could give as good a performance as a trained seal. Seals are intelligent and honest. They don’t put up any bluffs about the Art of Acting. They admit they’re just hams earning their daily fish” (CP3 822-23). The remarkable image of his father performing Shakespearean tragedy alongside Booth for enthralled houses is razed, and

Jamie re-casts his father as a desperate ham, less honest than a trained animal. Jamie is obsessed with his father’s weaknesses: his grandiosity, his penny-pinching, and his strong sense of denial. Jamie links each of these blind spots in Tyrone’s character to Tyrone’s identification as an actor. Shakespeare, whom Tyrone elevates to a religious (literally,

Irish Catholic) level, is at the center of this damaging myth.

In summary, there is nothing coincidental or “playful” about Jamie’s first line to his father, “The moor, I know his trumpet.” Jamie speaks the line deliberately to activate all the connections his father felt with the role of Othello — his pride, his abandoned promise as a performer, his marriage that martyrs his pure-hearted bride, his blindness to the suffering he causes his loved ones, and even his own undeniable magnetism, charm, and eloquence. Jamie, who sees Tyrone’s virtues and faults as clearly as anyone in the play, chooses Iago’s line to show that he both understands and opposes his father’s vision of himself. But this instance is only the first of Jamie’s two identifications with Iago, and the second, even more duplicitous than the first, sounds the depths of Othello’s embeddedness within Long Day’s Journey Into Night.

Jamie-as-Iago Quote 2: “Therefore put money in thy purse”

In Act Four, Jamie, heavily drunk, suggests that Edmund does not have consumption at all, that the reason for his diagnosis is simply to line the pockets of a few small-town, corrupt physicians. Edmund responds,

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021

EDMUND. (disgustedly amused) You’re the limit! At the Last Judgment, you’ll be around telling everyone it’s in the bag. (CP3 820)

Edmund means that at St. Peter’s gate, a Lucifer-like Jamie will try to convince departed souls that eternal peace can be easily bought. Not missing a beat, Jamie replies,

JAMIE. And I’ll be right. Slip a piece of change to the Judge and be saved, but if you’re broke you can go to Hell! (He grins at the blasphemy and Edmund has to laugh. Jamie goes on.) “Therefore put money in thy purse.” That’s the only dope. (mockingly) The secret of my success! Look what it’s got me. (ibid)

Jamie quotes Iago’s bitter and worldly refrain to his dupe Roderigo from Act One, Scene

Three of Othello:

Put money in thy purse: follow thou the wars: defeat thy favor with a usurped beard: I say, put money in thy purse. It cannot be long that Desdemona should continue her love to the Moor. Put money in thy purse. Nor he his to her: it was a violent commencement in her, and thou shalt see an answerable sequestration. Put but money in thy purse. These Moors are changeable in their wills. Fill thy purse with money. (CW 2100)

Repeating the phrase “put money in thy purse” like a hypnotist, Iago convinces his fop to finance the journey to Cypress. Roderigo professes to be in love with Desdemona despite the fact that he has never actually met her, and Iago persuades him that he has a chance to win her affection — provided, of course, that he is well-supplied with cash.

Jamie’s nod to Iago in this moment is most obviously an insult to his younger brother, whom he momentarily casts as the dupe Roderigo. But merely placing the passages side-by-side reveals little new information about either play. Jamie is also lashing out against his father, implying he is a pompous performer and tightfisted miser.

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He blames his father’s thrift for much of the family’s suffering and connects his parsimoniousness to what he perceives as Tyrone’s moral bankruptcy. At one point he viciously states that Tyrone, whom he often compares to the miser Gaspard from The

Bells of Corneville, will be happier with Edmund dead:

I’ll bet old Gaspard hasn’t tried to keep you off the booze. Probably give you a case to take with you to the state farm for pauper patients. The sooner you kick the bucket, the less expense. (CP3 814)

It is a brutal attack, spoken under a heavy haze of drink, but Jamie means what he says.

As he later tells his brother, he has come to speak “not drunken bull, but real ‘in vino veritas’ stuff” (820).

The most interesting aspect of Jamie’s quotation has received scant attention from critics and scholars. While “put money in thy purse” is not the secret to Jamie’s success, it is a guiding philosophy — the guiding philosophy? — for James Tyrone. While James is known in the local taverns as a generous patron for down-and-out drinkers, he generally clutches his checkbook tight as he prowls for profitable real estate investments or the best values in houses, cars, or even, as his sons continually remind him, sanitoriums. Jamie is far less prudent. Earlier in the scene, after happily discovering a bottle of his father’s whiskey, Jamie confesses to Edmund the real secret to his success:

“What’s the matter with the Old Man tonight? Must be ossified to forget he left this out.

Grab opportunity by the forelock. Key to my success” (814). This catch-as-catch-can worldview is the opposite of Iago’s mantra to Roderigo, which makes careful allowances for the future.

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Tyrone, not Jamie, follows Iago’s call to put money in his purse. O’Neill reveals that Tyrone, like James O’Neill, abandoned his career in Shakespeare and the classics to pursue the popular (and lucrative) tour of The Count of Monte Cristo. But Tyrone also explains to Edmund the source of this decision, as well as the reasons for lifelong frugality, in one of his most vulnerable monologues:

We never had enough clothes to wear, nor enough food to eat. Well I remember one Thanksgiving, or maybe it was Christmas, when some Yank in whose house mother had been scrubbing gave her an extra dollar for a present, and on the way home she spent it all on food. I can remember her hugging and kissing us and saying with tears of joy running down her tired face: ‘Glory be to God, for once in our lives we’ll have enough for each of us!’ (He wipes tears from his eyes.) There never was a braver woman, or finer…It was in those days I learned to be a miser. A dollar was worth so much then. And once you’ve learned a lesson, it’s hard to unlearn it. (808)

Tyrone’s speech is fragile, and moments later, Jamie smashes it to pieces. He unequivocally and pejoratively labels his father’s emotional tale as a performance (“the old sob act”), reminding his brother of Tyrone’s theatrical talents and calling his credibility into question: “Christ, if you put him in a book,” he says, “no one would believe it…He can always kid you. But not me” (814). This is not to suggest that Tyrone is lying about his past — only that Jamie questions the story, or at least resents his father’s tearful retelling.

Jamie, though, shares his father’s penchant for theatrical self-aggrandizement and pity. His performance to his brother is remarkably similar in tone and style to Tyrone’s emotional speech to his son. Each ends with fading self-pity and lonely lamentation:

JAMIE. “Therefore put money in thy purse.” That’s only dope. (mockingly) The secret of my success! Look what it’s got me. (820)

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Tyrone concludes in a similarly ellipsistic manner:

TYRONE. But it was a great box office success from the start — and then life had it where it wanted me — at from thirty-five to forty thousand net profit a season! A fortune in those days — or even in these. (bitterly) What the hell was it I wanted to buy, I wonder, that was worth — Well, no matter. (810)

This uncanny resemblance opens the door to an intriguing possibility: that Jamie is impersonating the role of his father-as-Iago, an in vino veritas performance which he will reprise in A Moon for the Misbegotten. Jamie’s ironic “The secret of my success!” and self-pitying “Look what it’s got me” are extended resonances of a performance in which he drops the role of Iago but continues to play that of his father. Only a large gulp of whiskey knocks him out of both characters. His complex roleplaying paves the way for the brother’s heart-to-heart about Edmund’s grave illness, a disease of the body, and

Jamie’s incurably corrupt core, a disease of the soul.

Jamie may be the most gifted actor in a family full of talented performers. Like

Tyrone, he knows his audience and can easily win their sympathy. Like Iago, he can seamlessly shapeshift from one world to another as he blurs the lines between role and self in the beholder’s mind. And like Hal in the tavern, Jamie boldly adds the role of his own father, simultaneously to commune with and mock the man whose choices infuriate him. He speaks Shakespeare’s lines in a role-within-a-role, pulled from a play which constituted the most meaningful moments of his father’s life.

O’Neill is known for his bold and ambitious (though occasionally strained) theatricality. From masks to pageantry, from the trance-inducing drums of The Emperor

Jones to the spoken asides in Strange Interlude, O’Neill persisted in a relentless quest to develop a theatre that could speak with urgency and power to a modern audience. His

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021 brilliant incorporation of the role of Iago and the play Othello within Long Day’s Journey

Into Night is a similar, if simpler and subtler, theatrical risk: it delves deeply and with personal immediacy to the heart of what it means to be an actor and play a role. Just as

Jamie can never really leave his father, Iago, with crocodile tears streaming down his face, vows always to haunt Othello: “I am your own forever” (CW 2127). Othello hears it as a promise, but Iago means it as a curse. Men of deep emotional intelligence, Jamie and

James easily lose themselves in roles; but only Jamie, driven to drink and bitterness by the long suffering of his family and his own existential guilt, uses performance to haunt and hurt his own father.

Moreover, Jamie’s association with Iago anticipates what Marvin Carlson refers to in The Haunted Stage as an actor’s “haunted body” (52). For Carlson, the haunted body is generated onstage by three factors: the actor’s previous roles, previous performances of that actor’s roles by others, and the audience’s awareness of the actor as a performer as well as a character. Jamie’s self-identification with Iago stretches

Carlson’s notion to its limit. Jamie inhabits his father’s previous roles, haunted in their own right, as opposed to his own; he deliberately preys upon his father’s previous performances to trouble and reframe his memories; and he does all this in a coded roleplay which only his father and brother clearly glimpse.

The full ramifications of Othello’s dense haunting of James and Jamie is best appreciated alongside Jamie’s re-appearance as Jim Tyrone in O’Neill’s A Moon for the

Misbegotten, the coda and companion play to Long Day’s Journey Into Night. In A Moon for the Misbegotten, Jim swaps roles in a rotating repertory from Iago to Othello, just as his father James had in Chicago alongside Edwin Booth. But while James’ rotating

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021 repertory was the high point of his professional career, Jim’s becomes a mournful eulogy for his own lonely life.

Enter Ophelia: Mary Tyrone, Ophelia, and Lady Macbeth

Long Day’s Journey Into Night is not informed by Othello and The Tempest alone. Jamie, Tyrone, and Edmund are masters of the significantly placed Shakespearean quotation, and they recite lines from Shakespeare’s King Lear, The Tempest, Julius

Caesar, and Richard III. While this dense web of Shakespearean quotation is “tied up” with the family’s shared memories and regrets, these quotes also form an exclusively male code of communication, as O’Neill scholar Laurin Porter observes (“Lonely” 37-8).

Although the Tyrone men never share a Shakespearean quote with Mary, this does not imply Mary is culturally illiterate. Mary was trained as a classical pianist, as she says in

Act Three: “I used to love the piano. I worked so hard at my music in the Convent — if you can call it work when you do something you love” (CP3 776). And in Act Four, she expresses her foggy despair through a “forgetful, stiff-fingered groping” (823) of a

Chopin waltz. But a strong gender bias is still present. While she is equated with Chopin and waltzes, she is excluded from the men’s theatrical and literary allusions.

Late in Act Four, Mary enters in a dope-induced, trance-like state. In the stage directions, O’Neill specifies that “over one arm, carried neglectfully, trailing on the floor, as if she had forgotten she held it, is an old-fashioned white satin wedding gown”

(823-34) taken from the trunk in the attic, which also contains Tyrone’s transcription of

Edwin Booth’s praise for his Othello. A “cracking silence” (ibid) descends on the room, broken only by the final reference to Shakespeare in the play.

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Mary stands in the doorway absent-mindedly, as if she has come to the room to fetch a misplaced item but cannot remember what it is. She does not acknowledge the men, but O’Neill specifies the intensity of the male’s gaze in a stage direction: “They stare at her” (823). Jamie breaks the ensuing silence with a cruel but apt spoken stage direction: “The Mad Scene. Enter Ophelia!” (ibid), and as he soon as he utters the words, both his brother and father turn on him. Without hesitating, Edmund slaps Jamie across the mouth with the back of his hand, and Tyrone, whose “voice is trembling with suppressed fury,” applauds the attack: “Good boy, Edmund. The dirty blackguard! His own mother” (ibid). Mary, however, does not appear to hear Jamie’s comment, nor does she notice the violence. Even in this moment, Shakespeare remains the exclusive domain of the Tyrone men. Mary is simply “a part of the familiar atmosphere of the room,” ignorant of her association with Hamlet’s spurned lover. As she begins to speak, she addresses her lines to an unseen presence beyond the room, as if in prayer.

Two scholars have commented on the intensity of the male gaze which combines with the Shakespearean allusions to intensify Mary’s alienation. David McDonald describes the play’s structure as that of “watchers being watched” (343) and perceives this scene as a meta-theatrical performance constructed by the male gaze (355-56).

Laurin Porter similarly argues that “Mary is constructed by the gaze of the men” (Porter,

“Lonely” 43); where Berlin detects a “hate-love” structure built into the play, Porter detects an oscillation between “intimacy and isolation” (45). Jamie’s announcement of

Mary’s entrance is both constructed by the male gaze and framed by a Shakespearean allusion.

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Jamie’s spoken stage direction from Hamlet — the final reference to Shakespeare in the play — is just that: an allusion, not a quotation. With very few exceptions,

Shakespeare did not write stage directions, nor did he title individual scenes. “The Mad

Scene” is an actor’s shorthand for Ophelia’s most climactic scene in Act Four, Scene

Five of Hamlet, in which Ophelia enters and sings a bawdy St. Valentine’s Day ballad which, as Normand Berlin describes, reveals “Ophelia’s aloneness, her frailty, her true inner feelings, what she has always kept within and can only come out as madness”

(Berlin 214).

The comparison is apt, as O’Neill seems to have consciously framed Mary’s entrance in Long Day’s Journey Into Night with multiple, relentlessly precise parallels to

Ophelia’s scene in Hamlet. Ophelia enters playing a lute; Mary’s entrance is cued by her

“stiff-fingered groping” (CP3 823) of a Chopin waltz on the piano. Ophelia’s hair is disheveled and down; Mary’s “white hair is braided in two pigtails which hang over her breast” (ibid). And while Ophelia speaks in madness, Mary’s line emerges from a trance- like, semi-conscious, and heavily medicated state in what Berlin perceives as yet another clear parallel: “Modern drama’s equivalent to Elizabethan madness as a revealer of truth is drink or dope” (Berlin 215). This is the only scene in Long Day’s Journey Into Night which exhibits such precise and deliberate structural parallels to one of Shakespeare’s scenes.

The comparative scenes have strikingly similar resonances and motifs, as well.

Berlin notes as many as six: (1) both Mary and Ophelia speak of their father and lover;

(2) both Laertes and Tyrone weep as they behold Ophelia/Mary; (3) Laertes calls Ophelia a “rose of May (CW 1887) and Mary refers to the spring of her life; (4) Ophelia carries a

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021 symbol of memory (flowers) and Mary carries a symbol of the past (her wedding dress);

(5) Ophelia leaves the stage to go to her watery grave, and Mary exits to go “deeper into the night” (215-16). Even the men’s reactions to their respective “mad” women are similar: Claudius speaks of “a poison of deep grief” (CW 1874) and Tyrone remarks,

“I’ve never known her to drown herself as deep as this” (CP3 827). Assured of these overwhelming structural and thematic parallels, Berlin concludes: “Some of the echoes are subtle, some are transformed, some may be coincidental, but all point toward an important relationship between Long Day’s Journey Into Night and Hamlet” (Berlin 216).

Nevertheless, the structural similarities seduce Berlin into a point-by-point parallel analysis of the two plays. Over three pages, he asserts that “family relationships” are again “important” in each play, that Jamie and Hamlet’s melancholy is caused by a

“shattering of illusions,” and that the lives of Jamie and Hamlet, whom Berlin believes are as wrapped up in each other as “any two characters in modern drama,” revolves entirely around their mothers (216-17). Ultimately, Berlin settles on the “important relationship” between the two plays:

That the past controls the present is the strongest thematic link between O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey [Into Night] and Hamlet. The return of ghosts of the past, the shattering of illusions, the disappointment with what life has become, the sense of what could have been — these are common to the plays. (219)

While certainly true enough, these exact parallels reveal how, but not why, O’Neill used

Shakespeare within this climactic scene.

In his 2004 article, “’The Mad Scene: Enter Ophelia!’ O’Neill’s Use of the

Delayed Entrance in Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” Stephen F. Bloom adds two layers of complexity to Mary’s entrance. First, he notes that O’Neill borrows the theatrical

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021 technique of the delayed entrance, in which onstage characters discuss the looming entrance of an offstage character to build dramatic tension, to reintroduce Mary into Act

Four.

Like O’Neill, Shakespeare was a master of the delayed entrance, with his most classic example being the most fearful: that of the Ghost in Hamlet, whose presence looms large from the play’s very first lines. Ophelia’s “mad scene” entrance contains a delayed entrance as well: in Hamlet’s Act Four, Scene Five, Gertrude, a servant, and

Horatio spend several dozen lines describing Ophelia’s dangerous and distracted state before she enters.

Bloom argues that in Long Day’s Journey Into Night, the delayed entrance encourages the audience to see the Act Four Mary as a new character, since, until this point, the audience has not seen Mary heavily drugged and hallucinatory. This idea has been adopted by modern directors of the play. In the most recent edition of The Eugene

O’Neill Review’s “Practitioner’s Corner,” director Miles Potter advised the cast of the

2018 Stratford Festival Production of Long Day’s Journey Into Night to think of the play

“as having the structure of a horror story” in which Mary’s “infection” (her morphine addiction) makes her desert her family and “travel back in time” (Barnes et al. 225).

Potter likely detected the delayed entrance technique as an antecedent for more modern horror films in which an evil force lingers throughout expository scenes, revealing itself late in the action.

In addition to providing a horror-esque feel to Act Four, Mary’s delayed entrance also connects Mary to Lady Macbeth through a subtle allusion. Just before Mary enters the scene, Edmund and Tyrone are discussing Shakespeare’s Macbeth:

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021

EDMUND. You can’t accuse me of not knowing Shakespeare. Didn’t I win five dollars from you once when you bet me I couldn’t learn a leading part of his in a week, as you used to do in stock in the old days? I learned Macbeth and recited it letter perfect, with you giving me the cues. TYRONE. (approvingly) That’s true. So you did. (He smiles teasingly and sighs.) It was a terrible ordeal, I remember, hearing you murder the lines. I kept wishing I’d paid over the bet without making you prove it. (He chuckles and Edmund grins. Then he starts as he hears a sound upstairs — with dread) Did you hear? She’s moving around. I was hoping she’d gone to sleep. (CP3 799)

As Berlin observes, “That the dread is caused by a woman who is moving around instead of sleeping carries a more powerful resonance from Macbeth, one that will materialize as stage action when Mary later moves like a sleepwalker” (201). This is perhaps Berlin’s favorite Shakespearean allusion in Long Day’s Journey Into Night. He heaps praise on the section, arguing that “O’Neill is in full control here, manipulating the Shakespeare references and quotations and echoes, not only giving them thematic relevance but also allowing them to color the atmosphere and modify the family relationships,” all while

“Shakespeare is looking at us from that picture on the back wall” (ibid).

Despite these clear parallels and deliberate resonances, Lady Macbeth and Mary ultimately have little in common. There are a few strained echoes — Lady Macbeth’s prophecy that “What’s done cannot be undone” (CW 647), for example, bears passing resemblance to Mary’s lapidary line that “The past is the present, isn’t it? It’s the future, too” (CP3 812) — but the connection between Lady Macbeth and Mary is momentary and atmospheric. Mary’s connection to Ophelia, however, sheds light on the Shakespeare within O’Neill, as well as O’Neill’s conception of modern tragedy.

In addition to his valuable insights into O’Neill’s use of the delayed entrance,

Stephen Bloom also considers the ways in which Ophelia’s death contrasts with Mary’s

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021 lingering perdition. While Ophelia’s demise “accelerates the chain reaction of deaths that bring the play to its tragic denouement,” Mary and the rest of the Tyrone family “remain inert, locked together in a debilitating hell somewhere between the profound regrets of the past and the painful realities of the present” (S. Bloom 236-37). Mary’s “mad scene” is never allowed to reach its climax. O’Neill’s final tableau reinforces this sense of stasis:

Mary “stares before her in a sad dream, Tyrone stirs in his chair [and] Edmund and Jamie remain motionless” (CP3 838). Bloom suggests that the stasis O’Neill constructs, as well as the eerily restless sense of denouement that permeates much of Act Four, is a deliberately departs from more traditional forms of tragedy.

Hamlet, for example, reaches its climax in shocking violence (nine characters lay dead onstage in Act Five), but after the slaughter concludes, Fortinbras enters and restores order. O’Neill cues his reader or audience to anticipate the final completeness of a “Shakespearean” tragedy, but it is a ruse: his anti-ending prevents resolution. Long

Day’s Journey Into Night is suddenly suspended before any traditionally climactic violence — or subsequent resolution — can occur.

Before and during Mary’s mad scene in Long Day’s Journey Into Night, O’Neill continually establishes connections to two of Shakespeare’s most famous tragedies,

Macbeth and Hamlet. But the close thematic and structural parallels between the plays ultimately serves to distinguish, rather than more closely link, the two playwrights.

Mary’s final scene, as well as the play’s final tableau, is carefully set against a

Shakespearean backdrop, but where Shakespearean tragedy is marked by violent purgation — Macbeth falls to Macduff, Rome and Juliet drink the poison, Hamlet dies foiled by his own traps, and so on — the Tyrone family must simply go on.

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By punctuating the play’s final act with such strong resonances to Shakespeare’s most famous tragedies, O’Neill accentuates his dependence upon and departure from the

Shakespeare that is, as Berlin describes, “almost a member of the [Tyrone] family” (9).

O’Neill does not transcend Shakespeare’s influence; rather, he transforms it, using his deep knowledge of Shakespeare’s plays to arrive at a new understanding of tragedy — one is which life is a lingering perdition and death a longed-for dream.

Serpent’s Tooth: The Lear-Exorcism Connection

Just as Shakespeare’s influence extends forward in time to A Moon for the

Misbegotten, O’Neill’s coda and companion piece to Long Day’s Journey Into Night, it also extends backwards in time to O’Neill’s earliest playwriting efforts. O’Neill’s lost- and-found play Exorcism (1919), “the undisputed holy grail for generations of O’Neill scholars” (Dowling 2) because it had been believed to be destroyed, contains a previously unnoticed Shakespearean quotation which directly connects to one from Long Day’s

Journey Into Night.1 This echo reveals how closely Shakespeare was “tied up” within

O’Neill’s dramatized memories of his farther.

In Act Two, Scene Two of Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Edmund, about to make his way to Doc Hardy for an appointment, needs carfare from his father. Incensed, his father launches into a lecture about financial independence, but he catches himself.

His son, after all, is very likely terminally ill. He hands Edmund a ten-dollar bill rather than the single his son expected, and Edmund stares back at him in stunned silence. His father cues him his line — “Thank you” — but Edmund can only dumbly gape back at

1 For a full account of Exorcism’s rediscovery, see Volume 34 (2013) of the Eugene O’Neill Review, entirely dedicated to this exciting event.

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021 him. To break the awkward silence, Tyrone cues up another line, one of King Lear’s most famous:

TYRONE. (he quotes) “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is — " EDMUND. “To have a thankless child.” I know. Give me a chance, Papa. I’m knocked speechless. (CP3 767)

In this short exchange, Shakespeare is both elevated small-talk and an anesthesia, a way for the men avoid a painful conversation about Edmund’s tuberculosis.

While Edmund is shocked by his father’s unprecedented gift, he is also suspicious. Seconds later, he undercuts Tyrone’s generosity asking his father, “Did Doc

Hardy tell you I was going to die?” Silently watching this exchange, Mary launches an attack at both men: “I won’t have it! Do you hear, Edmund! Such morbid nonsense!

Saying you’re going to die! It’s the books you read! Nothing but sadness and death! Your father shouldn’t allow you to have them” (CP3 767). While Tyrone frequently chastises

Edmund’s so-called “morbid” reading material, this is the only time in the play Mary speaks out against it.

Berlin argues that the cumulative effect of this exchange between Tyrone,

Edmund, and Mary distances Tyrone from the audience:

Because the quotation comes so ‘customarily’ to Tyrone, because he’s always the ham actor quoting Shakespeare, and because the familial situation in Long Day’s Journey (a father giving his son carfare) seems so distant from Lear’s situation (a father powerfully cursing his ‘degenerate’ daughter with sterility because she turned away his hundred knights), the audience might be disposed to feel less sympathetic toward him. (193)

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This is an unusual turn for Berlin — he generally avoids discussing the effect of

Shakespearean quotations among audience members. He hovers over the line, convinced of its significance but uncertain how to articulate it. In a strained parallel, Berlin connects

Mary’s line “Nothing but sadness and death!” (CP3 767) with the oft-repeated word

“nothing” in King Lear, pedantically noting that “nothing occurs fifty-one times in Long

Day’s Journey.” This is again unusual for Berlin: it is the only time he resorts to word- counting to argue a point:

Unconsciously, for Mary Tyrone and perhaps for O’Neill, her words extend the King Lear atmosphere in which ‘sadness and death’ hang heavy, and in which Shakespeare makes much ado about nothing, the word that triggers the play’s action when Cordelia says it in the first scene, the word that is repeated often through the play, pointing to the values connected with the play’s world, giving the play a Beckettian stamp. (194)

Perhaps not every Shakespearean quotation in the play is profoundly significant or originates in a revelatory motivation. Perhaps, in this case, Shakespeare is simply a part of the men’s back-and-forth banter, not unlike the way sports statistics and TV quotes are used today. Or perhaps Berlin was right — there really is something essential about this quotation from King Lear — but Berlin was unable to express it.

The answer, of course, is a blend. Yes, Shakespeare’s language is so deeply ingrained within the personalities of Tyrone, Edmund, and Jamie (and indeed, within

O’Neill) that each man casually appropriates his words. Sometimes a quote is just a quote. But Berlin is right to trust his instincts and struggle to forge a connection.

Unbeknownst to Berlin (who published O’Neill’s Shakespeare in 1990, more than twenty

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021 years before Exorcism’s rediscovery in 2012), this exact line from King Lear was quoted in O’Neill’s Exorcism in a strikingly similar scene.

Written in 1919, Exorcism is set in New York City in March of 1912, five months before the action of Long Day’s Journey into Night. The play dramatizes O’Neill’s attempted suicide at Jimmy-the-Priest’s in December of the previous year. Ned Malloy

(“Ned”), the play’s protagonist, serves as a barely masked avatar for Eugene O’Neill, and

Edward Malloy (“Malloy”), his father, stands for a more heavily veiled James O’Neill.

In Act Two, following Ned’s attempted suicide, Malloy arrives at the bar to bring his son home. Malloy is restrained, understanding, and generous towards his wayward son, offering him an opportunity to recuperate in a prestigious sanatorium and a subsequent position in his “office” (Malloy’s profession is never made clear). Ned promises to return home in a day and the men shake hands. After Malloy leaves, one of

Ned’s drinking buddies, Major Andrews, enters the room “drunker than ever” (Exorcism

51). Major is closer in age to Malloy than Ned and empathizes with the boy’s father, which prompts him to quote from King Lear:

MAJOR. Your father appears an — hic — estimable gentleman. (Dolorously) Ah, it’s a thankless task to bring children into the world! What is it the Great Bard — hic — says? ‘How sharper than serpent’s — hic — tooth to have a thankless child.’ (51-2)

Major’s allusion, written 23 years before Long Day’s Journey Into Night, is the only

Shakespearean quotation in Exorcism and a stunning echo of Tyrone’s line from King

Lear.

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In Exorcism, the line is directly linked to the appearance of the play’s father figure. Malloy is a kinder, gentler version of Tyrone, more modest and understanding of his son’s struggles. Major drunkenly mangles the allusion (in performance, one can imagine the actor being barely able to deliver the line through a severe case of hiccups), and his inebriated performance mixes the sacred and profane in a manner that recalls

Berlin’s argument that the grandiosity of Tyrone’s quote does not match the mundanity of a father sponsoring his son’s cab ride.

More importantly, the quotation triply layers the haunted relationships of Long

Day’s Journey Into Night. Tyrone is haunted not only by James O’Neill and by his past as a Shakespearean performer, but also by Eugene O’Neill’s earlier autobiographical effort, Exorcism. Whether O’Neill purposefully included the echo from Exorcism within

Long Day’s Journey Into Night is to miss the point: what matters most is that

Shakespeare was consistently at the center of O’Neill’s recollection and theatrical resurrection of his actor father.

In his introduction to Exorcism, written for the first published edition of the play in 2012, playwright Edward Albee argues that the play illuminates tensions between

O’Neill’s life and what Albee terms “dramatic logic” (ix). Unimpressed by the play,

Albee points out that O’Neill tried to destroy the manuscript because he was dissatisfied with Exorcism’s structure and resolution. For Albee, the play does not open any previously unlocked doors into O’Neill’s playwriting process. Despite this, however, he asserts that while it showcases many of O’Neill’s early weaknesses, Exorcism serves as a revelatory source text for Long Day’s Journey Into Night.

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In Exorcism, Malloy’s presence prompts Major to quote King Lear. In Long

Day’s Journey Into Night, however, Tyrone and Edmund share the line together —

Tyrone initiates it, and Edmund completes it. It is as if O’Neill had, by 1941, arrived at a fuller understanding of Shakespeare’s centrality within his father’s psyche and acknowledged the deep connection Tyrone maintained with his Shakespearean past.

Unlike the more modest Malloy, however, Tyrone sees himself as tragic as Othello, as sinned-against as Lear, and as magnificent and beloved as he was before a rapt audience at McVicker’s Theatre in Chicago.

Citing the play’s naïve neatness, Albee concludes that in 1919, O’Neill had not yet grasped an essential law of playwriting: “we all know that if the facts get in the way of dramatic logic they are expendable” (ibid.). This implies that O’Neill was stumbling over a need to remain faithful to the historical record in Exorcism and that he would later abandon this self-imposed obligation, but in fact, the opposite is true. In Exorcism,

Malloy is a heavily filtered image of O’Neill’s real-life father, whereas in Long Day’s

Journey Into Night, James Tyrone is a near-identical recreation of James O’Neill. Eugene

O’Neill’s “dramatic logic” moved towards the historical record — and towards

Shakespeare — as his career progressed.

Conclusion

Late in Act Four of Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Tyrone is moved by

Edmund’s assertion that “life is so damned crazy” to correct his son’s pessimism. He retorts with a line from Julius Caesar: “More of your morbidness! There’s nothing wrong with life. It’s we who — ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves that

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021 we are underlings’” (CP3 810). This is a rare occurrence in which one of Tyrone’s

Shakespearean quotations serves as a substitution for an unspeakable thought, emotion, or memory.

Generally, Tyrone’s Shakespearean lines, even when they are loose paraphrases or wholesale inventions, are easily recalled and lend nuance, flavor, and erudition to

Tyrone’s emotions. They color and expand, rather than mask, his feelings. In this instance, though, the welling emotion on the other side of Tyrone’s uncompleted line —

“It’s we who…” — is buried beneath Shakespeare’s text. Tyrone’s tense reflections on his past, his swiftly surfacing guilt towards Mary and Edmund’s illness, and the glory and glamour of his Shakespearean hey-days are walking him towards a cliff of incoherent, inarticulate pain. We expect him, if not to acknowledge his culpability, at the very least to rage, to flip the card table and smash his whiskey glass, or to weep.

Instead, he quotes Shakespeare.

In Julius Caesar, Cassius’ line attacks fate and determinism and is a defense of personal agency. In his view, no substantive difference exists between a prince and a pauper — will, not the gods, makes men what they are. For Cassius, the belief expressed by this line reveals his unlimited potential and spurs him toward revolution, but for

Tyrone, the same line reveals his failures as a father and husband. Tyrone’s melancholic recitation of Cassius’ line leads him to realize its truth: since there is no force guiding his life, there is also no one to blame for his past. His choices, not fate or the stars, have led to Mary’s addiction, to Edmund’s illness, and to Jamie’s spiritual malaise.

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The line also reconnects Tyrone to his memories of performing in rotating repertory alongside Edwin Booth. Cassius and Brutus were among the roles the two

Shakespeareans swapped: “In 1874 when Edwin Booth came to the theatre where I was leading man, I played Cassius to his Brutus one night, Brutus to his Cassius the next,

Othello to his Iago, and so on” (809). His recitation of Cassius’ lines remind him of those performances — immediately after the line he “pauses” and then adds “sadly”:

The praise Edwin Booth gave my Othello. I made the manager put down his exact words in writing. I kept it in my wallet for years. I used to read it every once in a while until finally it made me feel so bad I didn’t want to face it any more. Where is it now, I wonder? Somewhere in this house. I remember I put it away carefully. (811)

Edmund quickly answers “with a wry ironical sadness”: “It might be in an old trunk in the attic, along with Mama’s wedding dress” (ibid). This strange exchange is the only reference to the note, and unlike Mary’s dress, never appears in the play. In this densely packed moment, a line from Julius Caesar prompts Tyrone to recall his performance of the role of Othello alongside Edwin Booth, which reminds him of a personal artifact so precious and painful to him he eventually hid it from himself. Edmund’s suggestion — does he know it is in the attic? — that the note is tucked away in a trunk beside his mother’s wedding dress puts two of the play’s central motifs, Shakespeare and Mary’s past, in direct relationship with each other. The note and the dress are reminders of personal betrayals and faded potentials, and Cassius’ line —”The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in our selves that we are underlings” — echoes within Tyrone’s mind as a bitter reminder of all that he has lost.

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021

In his 1994 article for the Eugene O’Neill Review titled “Olivier’s Tyrone,”

Normand Berlin recalled Sir Laurence Olivier’s performance of Long Day’s Journey Into

Night at the National Theatre in 1971. Berlin remarks on the numerous biographical parallels between Olivier and the fictive Tyrone, and because of Olivier’s well-known success as a Shakespearean actor — he was considered by many to be the finest

Shakespearean of his generation — Berlin devoted close attention to Olivier’s treatment of Tyrone’s Shakespearean quotations. Berlin’s description of the Act Four quote of

Cassius’ line from Julius Caesar reveals a fascinating mystery:

Now, this quotation is in the text, and it was delivered by every Tyrone that I’ve seen — Frederic March, Ralph Richardson, Earl Hyman, Jack Lemmon, Jason Robards. What Olivier does, or rather does not do, is a great puzzlement to me. After saying, “It’s we who” he merely says, “Dear Brutus,” snaps his fingers and goes on. Did Olivier forget the line? […] Or is there another explanation? Did Olivier wish to suggest that Tyrone is so far from the great Shakespearean actor he “might have been”— remember, these are the last words before the last light is put out — that he cannot remember some of the most famous words in Shakespeare? Which is it? (“Tyrone” 140)

Berlin cannot answer the question. Only Olivier knows whether the choice was conscious

(and perhaps not even he could know with certainty), but Berlin’s observation reveals that the intimate awareness of Shakespeare’s presence within Tyrone’s memory is not the exclusive domain of scholars. Actors too must determine if and how to play these contradictory and heavily haunted memories. Olivier’s omission, deliberate or not, is a striking and personal example of how one performer’s past can blend within the psyche of his character to evoke stirring moments onstage.

Close study of these strains of Shakespearean influence reveal that O’Neill did much more than allude to Shakespeare with frequency and intensity in Long Day’s

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021

Journey Into Night: Shakespeare is at the core of the Tyrone’s identities. Each quotation and allusion to Shakespeare is pregnant with densely layered, personal association, both for the characters and for the playwright. Additionally, many of the themes and associations related to Shakespeare which O’Neill initiates in Long Day’s Journey Into

Night, including the Jamie/Tyrone and Othello/Iago paradigm, life as tragedy and death as a longed-for dream, and Mary’s post-tragic stasis, will reverberate within A Moon for the Misbegotten, as the next chapter demonstrates.

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021

Chapter Four

“An Ad for the Past”: The Shakespeare Within

A Moon for the Misbegotten

A Moon for the Misbegotten (1943) is Eugene O’Neill’s companion and coda to

Long Day’s Journey Into Night, and the play in which he demonstrates the most nuanced understanding and brilliant incorporation of Shakespeare’s dramatic imagination of any twentieth-century American playwright. The play was written in 1943 and set in

September of 1923, the year Eugene O’Neill’s brother Jamie died and eleven years after the fictional events of Long Day’s Journey Into Night. The action begins around noon on a late September day on the Hogan family farm and continues into the night and the following morning — a long journey through the night and into the dawn.

Progressing from light-hearted and occasionally slapstick comedy to what

Normand Berlin terms “a dark tragic lyricism” (“Traffic” 610), the play portrays Jim

Tyrone seeking maternal forgiveness, absolution, and the release of death in the arms of

Josie Hogan, a twenty-eight-year-old Connecticut farm girl O’Neill describes in the stage directions as “almost a freak” (CP3 857). Ultimately, Josie transforms into a vision of the

Virgin Mary and wishes Jamie “forgiveness and peace” (946) at the play’s conclusion.

Each character is haunted by his or her previous appearance in Long Day’s

Journey Into Night. Jim appears as a shadow of his former self and a walking phantom, haunted not only by his prior appearance as Jamie in Long Day’s Journey Into Night, but also by his father, James Tyrone, and by O’Neill’s real-life brother, Jamie O’Neill. Josie, who assumes the position of the Virgin Mary in the play’s Act Four pieta, is also haunted

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021 by another Mary — Mary Tyrone, the fated matriarch of Long Day’s Journey Into Night, who is in turn an avatar for O’Neill’s mother, Ella O’Neill. Finally, Josie’s father, Phil

Hogan, is haunted by Shaughnessy, the Irish farmer never seen onstage, from Long Day’s

Journey Into Night. O’Neill weaves all the plays’ characters into a densely haunted network, but the most fundamental and frequently overlooked allusive relationship — the deepest haunting of all — occurs between Eugene O’Neill and William Shakespeare.

A Moon for the Misbegotten’s emotional climax occurs when Jim quotes from

Othello. This moment, the most important, complex, and least understood Shakespearean allusion in O’Neill’s career, occurs in Act Three, when Jim reveals a dark secret to Josie: while accompanying his mother’s dead body on a train from California to the east coast, where she was to be buried next to her husband, Jim loaded his small train cabin with cases of bourbon and hired a fifty-dollar-a-night prostitute each night for the duration of the trip. He stayed “too drunk to go to her funeral” and wallowed in guilt and self- loathing. The revelation of this shameful secret prompts Jamie to speak a Shakespearean quotation from Othello:

Forget it. Time I got a move on. I don’t like your damned moon, Josie. It’s an ad for the past. (He recites mockingly) “It is the very error of the moon: / She comes more nearer Earth than she was wont, / And makes men mad.” (CP3 932)

While Jim’s Othello quote is central to understanding the O’Neill—Shakespeare connection, it occurs within a dense network of allusions and strains of Shakespearean influence which all deserve careful consideration.

In this chapter, I analyze four key moments in A Moon for the Misbegotten which link O’Neill’s play to Shakespeare’s dramatic imagination and theatrical techniques.

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021

The first O’Neill describes as the “S play idea” (WD 704) in his Work Diary, and is most concentratedly expressed in Harder’s brief comic episode which infuses the play with the perceptual functions of Shakespeare’s clowns. This clowned atmosphere extends into the second connection: the intersections between Josie and Jim’s roleplaying and metamorphosis, to reveal how O’Neill, like Shakespeare, frames performance within a liminal space between fact and fiction.

The third is a series of momentary allusions and references Jamie speaks in Acts

Two, Three and Four: his paraphrase of a line from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline; his quotation of Othello which forms the play’s emotional climax; and a reference to Hamlet in O’Neill’s Act Four. From these instances, Jim’s quotation from Othello emerges as the single most important moment in O’Neill’s canon which incorporates Shakespeare’s plays.

The fourth moment, the living pieta which Jim and Josie form, connects A Moon for the Misbegotten to The Winter’s Tale’s most miraculous moment: the revelation of

Hermione’s living statue. Taken together, the “S play idea,” the Shakespearean connections between roleplaying and metamorphosis, Jamie’s allusions to Shakespeare, and the living pieta form an essential strain of Shakespearean influence that resonates throughout the play.

The “S” Play Idea”: S(hakespearean)ardonic

Despite its elegiac and lyrical style, A Moon for the Misbegotten is based on a simple idea which O’Neill recorded in his work diary for October 28, 1941:

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S(haugnessy) play idea, based on story told by E(dmund) in first Act of LDJ. – except here Jamie principal character & story of play otherwise entirely imaginary, ex(cept) for Jamie’s revelation of self. (WD 704)

The Shaughnessy play idea originates in Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Jamie describes to his parents a “great Irish victory” (CP3 726) over an “Anglo pseudo-aristocrat” (Lee

156) named Harker in a comic monologue:

EDMUND. (grins at his father provocatively) Well, you remember, Papa, the ice pond on Harker’s estate is right next to the farm, and you remember Shaughnessy keeps pigs. Well, it seems there’s a break in the fence and the pigs have been bathing in the millionaire’s ice pond, and Harker’s foreman told him he was sure Shaughnessy had broken the fence on purpose to give the pigs a free wallow. (CP3 725)

After a few interjections from his parents, both of whom cannot help but laugh in anticipation of Shaughnessy’s shenanigans, Edmund continues:

Shaughnessy got a few drinks under his belt and was waiting at the gate to welcome him. He told me he never gave Harker a chance to open his mouth. He began by shouting that he was no slave Standard Oil could trample on. He was a King of Ireland, if he had his rights, and scum was scum to him, no matter much money it had stolen from the poor […] Then he accused Harker of making his foreman break down the fence to entice the pigs into the ice pond in order to destroy them. The poor pigs, Shaughnessy yelled, had caught their death of cold […] he’d be damned if he’d stand for a Standard Oil Thief trespassing. So would Harker kindly remove his dirty feet from the premises before he sicked [sp] the dog on him. And Harker did! (725-26)

Surprisingly, Jamie’s story is never referred to again. But while it does not advance the plot, it results in a moving moment in production. Despite the tremendous tension in the

Tyrone household, as Jamie theatrically tells the story he, Mary, and James Tyrone all laugh together. The Shaughnessy story is the only shared moment of levity in the weighty family drama.

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Edmund’s Shaughnessy story serves as the impetus for A Moon for the

Misbegotten, in which O’Neill brings all the characters from Edmund’s tale onstage.

O’Neill transposes Shaughnessy into Phil Hogan, Josie’s father — also an Irish immigrant and tenant-farmer on a dilapidated Connecticut farm. Clearly drawing on the

Shaughnessy’s story, O’Neill continually reinforces Phil Hogan’s porcine physicality in

Moon. At Phil’s entrance, O’Neill writes in the stage directions that “his face is fat with a snub nose, long upper lip, big mouth, and little blue eyes with bleached lashes and eyebrows that remind one of a white pig’s” (862). The pseudo-aristocrat Harker becomes

Harder and Jamie becomes Jim. Despite the slight name changes, their characters resemble their previous iterations in Long Day’s Journey Into Night with one exception:

Jim is now “a dead man walking slow behind his own coffin” (874). Notably absent from this return to the Shaughnessy story, however, is Mary, but she still haunts the action.

Josie is a veiled version of the Tyrone family matriarch, and her transformation into the a vision of the Virgin Mary — recalling the name of the Tyrone matriarch in Long Day’s

Journey Into Night, Mary — reinforces this haunted relationship.

In Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Edmund narrates Shaughnessy’s dominance over Harker, but in A Moon for the Misbegotten, Hogan triumphs over Harder onstage in

Act 1. Harder arrives “dressed in a beautifully tailored English tweed coat and whipcord riding breeches, immaculately polished English riding boots with spurs, and…a riding crop in his hand” (884). His outlandish costume indicates his aristocratic status and his desire to appear superior to the Hogan family. Josie wears a “cheap, sleeveless, blue cotton dress” (857), and Phil “wears heavy brogans, filthy overalls, and a dirty short-

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021 sleeved undershirt” (862). Harder is out-of-place amidst his humbly dressed opponents, and his theatrical costume only makes him an easier target for ridicule.

The scene between Harder and the Hogan’s is straightforward and comedic. As

Harder arrives, Jim hides in Josie’s bedroom to escape detection and watch the action unfold. A preening Hogan arrives, and as he introduces himself, he is interrupted by the

“beautifully coordinated” (884) one-two punch of Phil and Josie. The father-daughter duo ruthlessly dissect his words and disorient their ridiculous, uptight victim. Harder can barely manage to spit out a salutation before he is undercut and overwhelmed:

HARDER. (Walks to Hogan. Stiffly) Good morning. I want to see the man who runs this farm. HOGAN. (Surveys him deliberately, his little pig eyes gleaming with malice) You do, do you? Well, you’ve seen him. So run along now and play with your horse, and don’t bother me. (884)

Harder maintains a stiff upper lip and, through clenched teeth, announces his own arrival.

Phil and Josie instantly launch a tag-team assault:

HARDER. My name is Harder. (He obviously expects them to be immediately impressed and apologetic.) HOGAN. (Contemptuously) Who asked your name, me little man? JOSIE. Sure, who in the world cares who you are? (885)

Harder soon begins to lose his temper and cuts to the chase, only to run into yet another trap:

HARDER. Listen to me, Hogan! I didn’t come here—(He is going to add ‘to listen to your damned jokes’ or something like that, but Hogan silences him.)

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HOGAN. (Shouts) What? What’s that you said? (He stares at the dumbfounded Harder with droll amusement, as if he couldn’t believe his ears.) You didn’t come here? (He turns to Josie—in a whisper) Did you hear that, Josie? (He takes off his hat and scratches his head in comic bewilderment). Well, that’s a puzzle, surely. How d’you suppose he got here? JOSIE. Maybe the stork brought him, bad luck to it for a dirty bird. (885-86)

No longer the self-imagined noble hero and benefactor, Harder is reduced to the butt of a joke.

To borrow a phrase from Feste, Olivia’s fool in Twelfth Night, Hogan and Josie are “corrupter[s] of words” (CW 672) in this scene. They disorient, disarm, and deconstruct their self-important prey. But foolery in Shakespeare’s plays is far more than dexterous wordplay: it is the ability to see through pretense and to pierce hypocrisy. In

Twelfth Night, Feste easily fools “Cesario” (Viola-in-disguise) because of both his superior intelligence and his piercing insight into Cesario’s confused emotional state. Put simply, he sees through her disguise:

VIOLA. Save thee, friend, and thy music. Dost thou live by the tabor? FESTE. No, sir, I live by the church. VIOLA. Art thou a churchman? FESTE. No such matter, sir. I do live by the church, for I do live at my house, and my house doth stand by the church. (CW 672)

Additionally, just like Josie and Phil, Feste renders his prey invisible with wordplay:

VIOLA. I warrant thou art a merry fellow and car’st for nothing. FESTE. Not so, sir, I do care for something. But in my conscience, sir, I do not care for you; if that be to care for nothing, sir, I would it would make you invisible. (ibid)

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But again, most importantly, he pierces through the Cesario’s self-conscious disguise:

FESTE. Foolery, sir, does walk about the orb like the sun, it shines everywhere. I would be sorry, sir, but the fool should be as oft with your master as with my mistress. I think I saw your wisdom there. (673)

One of Shakespeare’s most sophisticated and cerebral fools, Feste compares “foolery” to the truth: like the sunshine that touches every corner of the globe, the truth will eventually shine on Cesario/Viola’s deception, as well. Foolery is embedded with truth; fiction is inhabited by fact.

Perhaps sensing this connection to Shakespeare’s fools, scholars have rightly detected an indebtedness to Shakespeare within the Hogan-Harder standoff in A Moon for the Misbegotten, even though it does not allude directly to his plays. For Aurelie

Sanchez, “Hogan provokes a three-fold reversal: a social one, a linguistic one, and a reversal of situation,” and she argues that because of this, “he recalls the Shakespearean clown” (Sanchez 40). This supports a connection between Hogan and Feste. But is

Sanchez right to argue for an indebtedness to Shakespeare’s clowns in Hogan, the grizzled Irish farmer who is himself haunted by the image of Shaughnessy in Long Day’s

Journey Into Night?

Shakespeare’s clowns, as Feste reveals, are far more than figures of comic relief.

While they interact with and affect the narrative, their more fundamental role is to problematize and reshape the audience’s perceptions about the play they inhabit. Hogan fulfills some of the surface-level features of a Shakespearean clown, he does not perform these deeper functions. Nevertheless, because the cumulative effect of the Harder scene does perform these functions, Sanchez is correct to recognize O’Neill’s indebtedness to

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Shakespeare, even in this early comic episode. The crucial point is that the clown influence is dispersed between and among all three characters in the scene. Orchestrating this blended effect, O’Neill deeply absorbs Shakespeare’s theatrical techniques as well as his subtle shifts in tone.

Shakespeare’s clowns affect these subtle shifts in complex ways. Bente

Vidabaeck’s The Stage Clown in Shakespeare’s Theatre authoritatively classifies the characteristics and dramatic functions of Shakespeare’s clowns. I further break down her eight main features into two large categories, the first of which I term “performance- based.” Under this category, Vidabaeck detects the surface level features of the clown: they appear at specific turning points in the plot; they represent a hybrid of theatrical conventions and traditions; they are set apart onstage by their clothing; and they love creature comforts (Videbaek 2-4). But Harder, not Hogan, neatly fits each of these performance-based qualities: he appears shortly after Jim’s arrival, marking the beginning of Jim and Josie’s moonlit scene; he is a hybridization of the Restoration fop and the moustache-twirling villain of melodrama; he wears a ridiculously pompous equestrian outfit complete with breeches and riding crop; and he has only come to secure his personal income. However, these are only the most superficial features of

Shakespeare’s clowns. Perhaps Hogan fulfills the more essential functions?

The second category of features Vidabaeck describes I term “perceptual.” These

Feste-like feature are more related to what Sanchez calls “a higher level” of the play expressed in a “two-fold interaction” (Sanchez 108) between the clown and the audience.

Under this perceptual category, Vidabaeck includes the following: clowns operate a distance from the other characters in the play; they speak directly to the audience; and

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021 they serve as a guide or teacher as they break down the divisions between the stage and the audience (1-5). Harder does not fulfill any of these functions: he interacts directly with Phil and Josie, not at a remove; he does not speak directly to the audience as Josie and Jim do; and he exists more as a comic relief figure than a guide or teacher. Hogan and Josie do not fill them either, and Jim remains mostly silent and hidden inside the house.

It would be easy enough to argue that, because Harder does not enact the perceptual functions, Sanchez generalizes, discounting the complex and essential perceptual functions of a Shakespearean clown. At best, Harder fits a few superficial, performance-based features of Shakespeare’s clowns. But this conclusion is equally rushed.

Each of the three perceptual functions of the Shakespearean clown is directly related to the conventions of the Renaissance stage which O’Neill admired and often tried to emulate through “modern” conventions such as masks, music, pageantry, and the stilted soliloquizing in Strange Interlude. O’Neill yearned for what Sanchez describes as the perceptual function of the clown within the modern American drama: “a twofold interaction,” “a higher level of perception,” “an omnipresence” (108), and in many ways, the Harder scene does achieve the perceptual functions — but it is the entirety of the scene, not Harder alone, which performs the function. In other words, Harder embodies the performance-based functions of the clown, while O’Neill as playwright orchestrates the perceptual functions through all the characters onstage, infusing the scene with a clowned atmosphere.

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Shakespeare’s clowns problematize and reframe the action presented onstage.

Vidabaeck explains that the clown’s “time is spent in commenting and exposing rather than participating” (100). In Twelfth Night, for example, Feste draws out the “benign foolishness” of Sir Andrew and the “sinister” (101) foolishness of Malvolio, questions the merit of Olivia’s mourning for her deceased brother, and exposes the grandiose swaggering of Viola in disguise. The clown serves to peel back surface appearances, exposing the core emotional experiences of the characters onstage. Characters present themselves one way to the world and the clown, through either inverted logic, invented philosophy, or blunt honesty disarm them and reveal their hidden interiority. Straddling an uncomfortable boundary between comedy and tragedy, Shakespeare’s clowns never allow their “plays” to resolve neatly, nor do they permit the hypocrisy within them to go undetected.

The combined effect of the Harder scene, in which the strange family of Josie,

Jim, and Phil share a laugh, is perhaps the primary reason why Sanchez detects an indebtedness to Shakespeare’s clowns. Even though most literary analysts would be forced to conclude that no single character fits the functions of the clown, the final moments of the scene contain the flavor of the Shakespeare’s most nuanced and darkly shaded Shakespearean clown scenes:

(Harder’s retreat becomes a rout. He disappears on left, but a second later his voice, trembling with anger, is heard calling back threateningly.) HARDER. If you dare touch that fence again, I’ll put this matter in the hands of the police! HOGAN. (Shouts derisively) And I’ll put it in my lawyer’s hands and in the newspapers! (He doubles up with glee.) Look at him fling himself on his nag and spur the poor beast! And look at McCabe behind him! He can hardly stay in the saddle for laughing! (He slaps his thigh.) O Jaysus, this is a great day for the poor

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and oppressed! I’ll do no more work! I’ll go down to the Inn and spend money and get drunk as Moses! JOSIE. Small blame to you. You deserve it. But you’ll have your dinner first, to give you a foundation. Come on, now. (They turn back toward the house. From inside another burst of laughter from Tyrone is heard. Josie smiles) Listen to Jim still in stitches. It’s good to hear him laugh as if he meant it. (CP3 889)

Josie earlier describes Jim as “a dead man walking slow behind his own coffin” (874).

These lines about Jim’s genuine laughter, prompted by the celebratory moment of Phil’s triumph, are promise-filled: perhaps the brief distraction will bring Jim back to life. For a moment, it appears that it might, as Jim walks out of the house laughing:

TYRONE. O God, my sides are sore. (They all laugh together. He joins them at the corner of the house) JOSIE. It’s dinner time. Will you have a bite to eat with us, Jim? I’ll boil you some eggs. (CP3 889)

Just like the moments after Jamie’s telling of the Shaughnessy story in Long Day’s

Journey Into Night, this one is striking because of the moment of shared laughter. All the family members are fully, finally themselves — all of them can laugh, albeit temporarily.

Josie offers Jim eggs because she believes (correctly) that they are the only food the still-hungover Jim can stomach. As he follows her up the stairs into the house to eat, she begs him to nourish his body and return to the land of the living:

JOSIE. …Promise me you’ll eat something, Jim. You’ve got to eat. You can’t go on the way you are, drinking and never eating, hardly. You’re killing yourself. TYRONE. (Sardonically) That’s right. Mother me, Josie, I love it. (891)

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O’Neill precisely orchestrates each of these shifts in tone from within the stage directions: “they all laugh together” (889) is followed hard upon by Jim’s line to Josie, spoken “sardonically” (891). The Harder scene brings the misbegotten family together, but its immediate aftermath again unleashes the demons lurking in the wings.

In this scene, O’Neill uncomfortably straddles the boundary between comedy and tragedy and between laughter and silence. Harder, who embodies the performance-based functions of Shakespeare’s clowns, is only half of the picture: O’Neill completes it by inserting the perceptual functions of the clown within the scene he composed. Sanchez was indeed correct to detect Shakespeare’s influence within the Harder scene; if anything, she did not take the hunch far enough: Shakespeare’s clowns are not haunting

Hogan alone. While the “S” in O’Neill’s diary entry stands for “Shaughnessy,” it could very well stand for “Shakespeare,” as well.

Roleplay/Metamorphosis

Shakespeare also permeates the intersections between roleplaying and metamorphosis. Sanchez sees the eponymous moon as a symbol not merely for romance, but also for Josie and Jim’s multiple and contradictory identities: “the multi-faceted moon mirrors the protean form of the play and the metamorphosis of the two main characters”

(Sanchez 49). Each undergoes transformations in moments reminiscent of the

Shakespearean clown.

Josie spends much of the first half of the play performing the role of a country tart. She has the town — and her family — fooled:

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HOGAN. (after a pause of puffing on his pipe) What did that donkey, Mike, preach to you about? JOSIE. Oh, the same as ever—that I’m the scandal of the countryside, carrying on with men without a marriage license. HOGAN. (gives her a strange, embarrassed glance and then looks away. He does not look at her during the following dialogue. His manner is casual.) Hell roast his soul for saying it. But it’s true enough. JOSIE. (defiantly) It is, and what of it? I don’t care a damn for the scandal. (CP3 865)

Josie’s act fools her brother Mike and her father, but Jim sees through her pretense:

TYRONE. (he looks up at her sardonically) And how’s my Virgin Queen of Ireland? JOSIE. Yours, is it? Since when? And don’t be miscalling me a virgin. You’ll ruin my reputation, if you spread that lie about me. (She laughs. Tyrone is staring at her.) (877)

O’Neill’s stage direction for Jim to look at Josie “sardonically” echoes Jim’s previous clown-like moment when he asks Josie to mother him “sardonically,”2 but even more important than this internal echo is Jim’s ability to be wise to Josie’s performance.

Josie plays the roles of virgin, tart, moonlit lover, nurturing mother, and daughter before transforming into a vision of the Virgin Mary in the Act Four pieta scene. Jim, a consummate actor, is repulsed and ashamed of his chameleon-like ability to instantly morph into roles. When he describes to Josie his inner monologue as he tried to force himself to mourn for his mother’s funeral, he says, “I kept saying to myself, ‘You lousy ham! You God-damned lousy ham!’” (CP3 931). Elsewhere, he describes his theatrical

2 Theatre critics frequently refer to Shakespeare’s clowns and fools—Feste from Twelfth Night, most especially—as “sardonic.” See Rooney, David. "Legit Reviews: A 'Night' to Remember: Off Broadway: "Twelfth Night"." Variety, vol. 415, no. 7, Jun, 2009, pp. 43-44.

Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021 double-consciousness as a “bluff” (913), “poet’s blab” (926), or “bunk” (942). Because of his skilled hypocrisy, he sees through Josie’s front, as well:

TYRONE. You can take the truth, Josie—from me. Because you and I belong to the same club. We can kid the world but we can’t fool ourselves, like most people, no matter what we do… (923)

Kidding the world but failing to fool one’s self is the curse of the self-conscious actor — the haunted heritage of the misbegotten.

Josie’s father, Hogan, reveals Jim’s uncanny ability to not be taken in by Josie’s act in a drunken rant after returning from the inn. As she listens to the truth, Josie is gripped by a sudden stage fright that betrays her lie:

HOGAN. He said you had great beauty in him that no one appreciated but him. JOSIE. (shakenly) You’re lying. HOGAN. Great strength you had, and great pride—and great goodness, no less! But here’s where you’ve made a prize jackass out of him, like I said. (with a drunken leer) Listen now, darlin’, and don’t drop dead with amazement. (He leans towards her and whispers) He believes you’re a virgin! (Josie stiffens as if she’d been insulted. Hogan goes on) He does, so help me! He means it, the poor dunce! (901)

Hogan is confused by his daughter’s inability to laugh along:

HOGAN. Why the hell don’t you laugh? Be God, you ought to see what a stupid sheep that makes him. JOSIE. (forces a laugh) I do see it. (ibid)

Josie “forces” a laugh because she is shaken by Jim’s ability to see through her deception and into her heart.

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O’Neill emphasizes Jim’s truth in the following pages. Hogan proposes a “bed trick” to trap Jim in bed with Josie. He suggests that Josie lure Jim into her bed, whereupon Hogan will burst through the door, discover the would-be lovers, and corner

Jim into a shotgun wedding. As Hogan lays out his plans, Josie fights back tears:

HOGAN. That’ll show him two can play at tricks! And him believing you so innocent! Be God, you’ll make him the prize sucker of the world! Won’t I roar inside me when I see his face in the morning! (He bursts into coarse laughter) JOSIE. (again, with seething resentment) Stop laughing! (905)

The more her father laughs at his proposed bed trick, the more her resentment grows.

Josie is “seething” not only because her father diminishes Jim, but also because Jim has so effortlessly and entirely seen through her pretense. As she imagines the ridiculous

“discovery” of the mismatched lovers in bed, O’Neill writes that Josie “ends up on the verge of bitter humiliated tears” (ibid).

The bed trick is indeed grotesque. It is also a device employed in two of

Shakespeare’s most troubling works, occasionally referred to as “problem plays” for their uneasy and awkward endings: All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure. In

All’s Well, Bertram is duped into consummating an arranged marriage with Helena in a darkened bedroom. In Measure, the calculating Angelo expects to marry Isabella, but instead is reunited with his abandoned fiancé, Mariana. Each of these cringe-worthy moments lends its respective play a discordant final note by uniting mismatched couples.

In Moon, the bed trick, proposed and abandoned, transforms into a simulated Pieta in which Josie and Jim confess and confront the demons of their past. This is a rare example of a Shakespearean echo which informs the plot of O’Neill’s play and, simultaneously, harkens back to O’Neill’s past.

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O’Neill biographer Robert M. Dowling links Moon’s Shakespearean bed trick in both literal and poetic terms to Eugene O’Neill’s marriage to his first wife, Kathleen

Jenkins. As Dowling observes, O’Neill employed a real-life bed-trick to secure a divorce from his first wife:

The following is a summary of the eyewitness accounts of O’Neill’s infidelity: On the night of December 29, 1911, O’Neill met with the legal counsel of Kathleen’s mother…and his associates…and O’Neill’s friend the Irish painter Edward Ireland. The co-conspirators gathered for dinner at Ireland’s apartment…then commenced a bar crawl…they eventually landed at a brothel around three a.m…a couple of blocks from where O’Neill was born…O’Neill selected ‘some girl there that attracted him’…and followed her upstairs. [O’Neill’s associates] waited in the lobby for two hours until O’Neill instructed a maid to call them up, whereupon they found O’Neill naked with the prostitute. They had a drink or two, and then, duties fulfilled, left at around half-past six or seven a.m. End of testimony. End of marriage. (Dowling 77)

The following night, O’Neill was discovered “half dead” at Jimmy-the-Priest’s saloon in

New York City. He had attempted to kill himself with “an overdose of barbiturate veronal” (ibid), an experience he would dramatize in his 1919 play Exorcism. Dowling points out that Exorcism contains both themes and specific images which O’Neill returns to in A Moon for the Misbegotten, including Jim’s description of gray dawns and nights spent with prostitutes described as “pigs” (78). Dowling’s linkage of one of O’Neill’s darkest moments with the genesis of Moon elides the play, as well as its Shakespearean shadows, with the pain and shame in O’Neill’s past. The abandoned Shakespearean bed trick in Moon reveals how deeply Shakespeare resides in O’Neill’s past and psyche.

O’Neill, it seems, cannot bring himself to see Jim, his brother Jamie’s avatar, enact the shameful bed trick in Moon.

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Josie’s inverted shame for her virginity exhibits the reverberations of this dark episode in O’Neill’s past, which she expresses in Act Three. Josie feels that her callused father uses her to secure Jim’s money, but Jim tries to remind her that Hogan loves her.

In so doing, Jim reveals his own feelings, prompting Josie’s strange reverse-confession:

TYRONE. Don’t be a damned fool. Of course he cares. And so do I. (He turns toward her and pulls her head down and kisses her on the lips) I care, Josie. I love you. JOSIE. (with pitiful longing) Do you, Jim? Do you? (She forces a trembling smile—faintly) Then I’ll confess the truth to you. I’ve been a crazy fool. I am a virgin. (She begins to sob with a strange forlorn shame and humiliation) And now you’ll never—and I want you to—now more than ever—because I love you more than ever, after what’s happened. (924)

In this moment, the Shakespearean bed trick literally fails but poetically succeeds. Rather than trapping Jim in flagrante delicto, reminiscent of O’Neill’s indiscretions, the aborted deception unites the lovers in a willing communion. Like Hal and Falstaff in the tavern,

Jim and Josie most clearly glimpse each through a series of roleplays. This mean-spirited perversion, doubly haunted by Shakespeare’s discordant “problem plays” as well as a dark moment in O’Neill’s past, conceives A Moon for the Misbegotten’s most tender and fragile moment.

Like Shakespeare’s clowns, Jim sees the “real” Josie shining through her performance of the country tart. Because of this, Josie is free to confess her virginity to him and he is free confess his darkly Oedpial sin to her. They remove each other’s masks in a sacramental exchange and transform into the living pieta statue.

Josie, who Jim teasingly refers to as “Messalina” (923), assumes the role of the

Virgin Mary, and as the moon recedes into the sunlit dawn. Jim, who O’Neill describes as

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Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021 possessing a “certain Mephistophelean quality” (875), assumes the role of both martyr and miracle infant. O’Neill carefully designates the effect of the Act Three to Four transition in his stage directions:

It is dawn. The first faint streaks of color, heralding the sunrise, appear in the eastern sky at left[...] The two make a strangely tragic picture in the wan dawn light—this big sorrowful woman hugging a haggard-faced, middle-aged drunkard against her breast, as if he were a sick child. (935)

This is perhaps O’Neill’s most Catholic stage tableau, in which the mutual confessions of

O’Neill’s Mephistopheles and Messalina lead to a strange new birth that is also a death.

Josie describes it as “a great miracle” in which “a virgin…bears a dead child in the night, and the dawn still finds her a virgin” (936). Not surprisingly, Shakespeare can be found lurking behind and within this moment, as well — not in its systematic deconstruction of

Catholic iconology, perhaps, but certainly within its visceral impact.

Normand Berlin describes A Moon for the Misbegotten as progressing “toward a final affirmation, toward a rebirth, toward a sense of forgiveness, with death as a strong focus.” This “duplicates the movement of Shakespeare’s last plays” (233), most especially The Winter’s Tale: “both O’Neill and Shakespeare do not allow us to forget death even as [we] turn our attention to life” (ibid). The pieta straddling Acts Three and

Four of O’Neill’s play reminds Berlin of The Winter’s Tale’s fantastical Act Three, Scene

Three.

In this scene, Antigonus arrives ashore in Bohemia after a terrible sea storm.

Carrying the infant Perdita in his arms, he delivers a long soliloquy to the audience, sharing that Paulina’s spirit visited him in a dream and delivered a terrible prophetic command: abandon the baby in the Bohemian woods. As he tearfully discharges his duty,

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Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021 a hungry bear emerges from behind the trees. For a moment, it appears as though the bear will attack the infant, but it chooses Antigonus instead. Shakespeare describes Antigonus’ final moment in his most famous stage direction: “Exit, pursued by a bear” (CW 733).

Antigonus is mauled by the bear while the child sleeps soundly in the woods.

A Bohemian Shepherd immediately enters and discovers the crying baby. He instantly adopts the girl, and as takes her in his arms, his son, the clown, enters, describing the storm that drove Antigonus ashore. Unaware of the connection between these two events and cradling his providential daughter, the Shepherd remarks,

SHEPHERD. Heavy matters, heavy matters! But look here, boy. Now bless thyself. Thou met’st with things dying, I with things new-born. (734)

Dreams, birth, and death; sea storms and darkened woods; Shakespeare blends all these psychological and natural liminal spaces together. Death walks hand-in-hand with new life and sorrow ushers in joy. Berlin draws a parallel: “A dead Jim Tyrone becomes a newborn child in his mother’s arms; restored to peace, forgiven, he is ready to die…In

The Winter’s Tale the newborn child Perdita will help to make the winter’s tale a spring’s tale” (234). Moon is set in the autumn, and as the “newborn infant” Jim Tyrone traverses down the dusty Connecticut road in Act Four, he walks toward his death. To deserve salvation, Jim had to confess his sins — sins which also gave him the insight and empathy to uncover the innocence beneath Josie’s mask.

For O’Neill, as for Shakespeare, roleplaying is not a deception; rather, it is a sophisticated way to reveal truth by embodying a lie. Death haunts life’s new beginnings: sin conceives grace, fiction cohabits truth.

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Breathing Pietas and Living Statues

One final roleplay links A Moon for the Misbegotten’s visceral, iconographic roleplay with The Winter’s Tale: Josie and Jim’s as virgin mother and forsaken savior in the living pieta. The scene occupies a liminal space between Acts Three and Four in A

Moon for the Misbegotten’s text, just as “Time’s” soliloquy, which occurs immediately after the Shepherd and the clown adopt the infant Perdita between Acts Three and Four of

The Winter’s Tale.

In all likelihood, Shakespeare did not designate the demarcations between act and scene that modern editions contain, and in Shakespeare’s theatre, each scene follows another without transition. This means that, as the Shepherd, the clown, and the divinely spared infant exit on one side of the stage, Time enters from another. As a liminal, clown- like figure clearly indebted to the Vice figures of medieval drama, the actor playing Time would be free both to enact the perceptual functions of Shakespeare’s clowns and interact with the other actors. In theatrical terms, this means that Time itself might smile as it holds the stage door open for the small family’s exit.

To carry this conjecture further, Time’s cue to open the door would fall during the concluding lines of Act 3, scene 3, in which the clown refers to Antigonus’ corpse and, oddly enough, the Virgin Mary:

CLOWN. If there be any of him left, I’ll bury it. SHEPHERD. That’s a good deed. If thou mayst discern by that which if left of him what he is, fetch me to the sight of him. CLOWN. Marry, will I. And you shall help to put him i’th’ ground. SHEPHERD. ‘Tis a lucky day, boy, and we’ll do good deeds on’t. (CW 734)

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The clown’s oath, “Marry, will I,” a reference to the Virgin Mary, caps an oddly religious streak for the clown. After watching both the shipwreck and the bear devouring

Antigonus, the clown has experienced more than his share of death for the day. Happy that his father has discovered the new child (and the case of gold next to the sleeping baby), the clown cautions him he may face a divine reckoning for this good fortune:

CLOWN. You’re a made old man. If the sins of your youth are forgiven you, you’re well to live. Gold, all gold! (ibid)

The clown’s central line — “If the sins of your youth are forgiven you, you’re well to live”— reads as a neat summary of A Moon for the Misbegotten.

Sobered by his close encounters with death, the clown prepares to bury Antigonus while reflecting upon the natural and celestial cycle of life, death, resurrection, and rebirth. The image of the infant Perdita, miraculously spared by the bear and

“immaculately conceived” by the old Shepherd, gives the clown reason to swear by Mary

— the only reference to the Virgin Mother in the play. Josie’s moonlit vigil with Jim serves a similar function. She describes the night’s events to Phil as “a great miracle they’d never believe” in which “a virgin” bears “a dead child in the night” (CP3 936).

The living pieta statue formed by the mismatched couple recalls another miracle from The Winter’s Tale: the re-animation of Hermione’s statue. Berlin notes that this

“onstage miracle” is “the only time Shakespeare in all of his thirty-eight plays does not work with audience awareness, so that the resurrection, the surprise, is felt by the audience as well as the players. Music awakens the ‘statue,’ Hermione has life again,

Leontes is forgiven in the arms of his wife, the heavens directing the miracle” (Berlin

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236). But Berlin’s interpretation that Leontes is “forgiven” by Hermione is not supported by Shakespeare’s text. The Winter’s Tale does not conclude with tidy forgiveness; instead, it ends with a troubled reunion and a mixture of overwhelming joy, buried regret, and lingering wounds. This discordant conclusion links Shakespeare’s play closer still to

Moon’s equally equivocal final moments.

Hermione’s “statue” resides in Paulina’s gallery. Leontes brings their daughter

Perdita, with whom he recently reunited, to visit her mother’s statue. Hermione was last seen sixteen years earlier in the dramatic “trial scene” of Act Three, Scene Two. In this scene, Hermione, pregnant with Perdita, defends her honor against her husband’s baseless accusations of infidelity. An oracle confirms her innocence, but Leontes ignores the truth and resumes his jealous suit against her. As the trial concludes, a servant arrives and shares more terrible news: Leontes and Hermione’s first-born son, Mamillius, is dead.

Hermione collapses to the floor in shock and exhaustion and is carried offstage. Leontes has a sudden change of heart and vows to “new woo” (CW 730) his queen, but it is too late: Paulina enters moments later and tells the king that Hermione has died of grief.

For sixteen years, Paulina maintained a statue of Hermione in a lonely art gallery.

Paulina never identifies the sculptor, but she frequently refers to his or her remarkable skill (perhaps implying that she is the artist). After revealing the statue and permitting

Leontes and Perdita to admire it, she prepares them for one final surprise and the play’s

“miracle:”

PAULINA. It is required You do awake your faith. Then all stand still […] Music; awake her; strike! ‘Tis time: descend: be stone no more: approach: Strike all that you look upon with marvel. Come,

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I’ll fill your grave up. Stir. Nay, come away. Bequeath to death your numbness, for from him Dear life redeems you. (765)

The “statue” — Hermione — comes to life and approaches her family. Leontes takes her hand, but the interaction between husband and newly resurrected wife is as cold as stone.

While she puts her arms around him, she does not speak. Paulina remarks,

But it appears she lives, Though yet she speak not. Mark a little while. (766)

Hermione can speak; she chooses not to address her husband. Upon seeing her daughter, she instantly offers a prayer of thanks and begs her daughter for a sixteen-year update. It is easy to imagine the joyful reunion mother and daughter will soon share:

HERMIONE. You gods, look down And from your sacred vials pour your graces Upon my daughter’s head!—Tell me, mine own. Where hast thou been preserved? Where lived? How found Thy father’s court? (ibid)

But Hermione and Leontes only share a single momentary embrace. Hemione has not yet forgiven her husband, as Berlin believes. She embraces him but will not speak to him.

Hermione’s restraint saves the play from a neat resolution.

Scholars mostly agree that The Winter’s Tale was written sometime between 1609 and 1611. Shakespeare’s son Hamnet died in August of 1596 when he was only eleven years old. Perhaps Shakespeare was unwilling to forgive Leontes, a father who abandons his first-born son and “kills” his wife while she is pregnant with their second child. The

Winter’s Tale concludes with Camillo and Paulina’s marriage, arranged by Leontes, and

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Berlin draws a conclusion about Jim and Leontes which once again hinges on forgiveness. He writes that Jim, “like Leontes, believes he caused the death of the woman he loved most” and that “he, like Leontes, needs forgiveness, and receives it from a woman in a scene touched by stage magic and informed by Christian ideas” (236). But a close read of Jim and Josie’s final moment together reveals that, like Leontes, Jim does not receive forgiveness from Josie in his final moment:

JIM. I’m a liar! I’m a louse! Forgive me, Josie. I do remember! I’m glad I remember! I’ll never forget your love! (He kisses her on the lips) Never! (Kissing her again) Never, do you hear! I’ll always love you, Josie. (He kisses her again) Good-bye — and God bless you! (He turns away and walks quickly down the road off left without looking back. She stands, watching him go, for a moment, then she puts her hand over her face, her head bent, and sobs) (CP3 944)

Josie has forgiven him the night before, but she grants it through Jim’s mother: “I do forgive…as she forgives, do you hear me! As she loves and understands and forgives!”

(933) In other words, Jim’s sins against his mother are forgiven, but the events following his confession — including his attempted rape of Josie — are not.

Hermione’s silence and Josie’s sobs are born of the same remorse: each woman has been too deeply betrayed by the man she loves speak to him or grant forgiveness.

Josie’s final benediction to Jim, spoken to his shadow “as she turns for a last look down the road” after he has gone, require close attention:

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JOSIE. May you have your wish and die soon in your sleep, Jim, darling. May you rest forever in forgiveness and peace. (946)

In other words, may you find “forgiveness and peace” in death, for you will not find it on earth. Jim, a walking phantom and a drunken Mephistopheles, will never find happiness as Josie’s husband; Leontes, who in a jealous rage took the lives of his wife and children, may never find tranquility again in the arms of his resurrected wife. Both Jim and

Leontes are caught in the sins of their past. As Jim puts it to Josie,

It was long ago. But it seems like tonight. There is no present or future—only the past happening over and over again—now. You can’t get away from it. (920)

Jim’s Shakespearean Quotations and References

There are three direct allusions and references to Shakespeare in Moon, all spoken by Jim. The first is a phrase from Cymbeline in Act Two, the second is a quotation from

Othello in Act Three, and the third is a reference to Hamlet in Act Four. Of these, the quotation from Othello is the most generative and revelatory, but I will address each in the order they appear to reveal how O’Neill uses Shakespeare to add additional shades of complexity to Jim’s character, as well as how he blends the memories of his real-life brother and father with the refracted verse of Shakespeare.

Jim’s First Allusion: “Hark, hark, the Donegal lark”

Near the end of Act Two, Josie senses Jim’s anxiety and encourages him to lay his head on her breast. In the distance, he can hear Josie’s father, Phil Hogan, singing an

Irish dirge. As he listens, he speaks a double allusion:

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TYRONE. (relaxes—simply and gratefully) Thanks, Josie. (He closes his eyes. For a moment, she forgets everything and stares down at his face with a passionate, possessive tenderness. A pause…He acts embarrassed, as if he felt he’d been making a fool of himself—mockingly) Hark, hark, the Donegal lark! ‘Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird.’ Can’t Phil sing anything but that damned dirge, Josie?

These two verse fragments are from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and Keats’ 1819 Ode to a

Nightingale. Jim switches from Shakespeare to Keats and lark to nightingale in a rapid recitation that appears, at first glance, to make sense only in his mind. Several scholars, including the Shakespearean scholar Jonathan Bate and O’Neill scholar Laurin Porter, have carefully glossed this allusion to Keats elsewhere, and their fascinating analyses links Keats back to Shakespeare in careful detail.3 I will focus entirely on Jim’s first allusive line, “Hark, hark, the Donegal lark.”

Normand Berlin notes that this line is not an accurate quotation of Shakespearean allusion — it is a loose paraphrase, indicated by the fact that O’Neill does not place it within quotation marks. Berlin takes this as a sign that O’Neill knows it is a loose paraphrase even if Jim does not, and Jim’s mocking tone reinforces this position. But despite its looseness, Jim’s paraphrase originates in Shakespeare’s s Cymbeline.

Cloten, the play’s villain, fool, and fop, sings the following lines to awaken and impress Imogen in Act Two:

Hark, hark, the lark at heaven’s gate sings, And Phoebus gins arise, His steeds to water at those springs On chaliced flowers that lies: And winking Mary-buds begin to ope their golden eyes

3 See Jonathan Bate’s Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination and Laurin Porter’s “Musical and Literary Allusions in O’Neill’s Final Plays.” Normand Berlin also links the Keatsian allusions back to Shakespeare in chapter “Tragicomedy” in O’Neill’s Shakespeare.

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With everything that pretty is, my lady sweet, arise: Arise, arise! (CW 2264)

Perhaps because it is a paraphrase and not a precise quotation, no scholar has devoted sustained attention to Cloten’s influence on Moon. Several scholars see Cymbeline as generally influential, but Shakespeare’s evil clown is given short shrift. Porter agrees that

Jim is indeed referring to Cymbeline but focuses on the resurrections of Imogen,

Posthumus, and Cymbeline’s two sons (“Allusions” 140). Similarly, Berlin observes that

“Cymbeline…is a play that gives us miraculous restorations and reconciliations,” (250) but beyond this broad comparison, he gives no reason why Jim would choose loosely to paraphrase Cloten’s lines in this moment. Eventually, Berlin abandons Cymbeline altogether, arguing that it primarily serves as a bridge to connect Jim and Josie to

Shakespeare’s best-known lovers, Romeo and Juliet (251-52). But given that Shakespeare swam so deeply in O’Neill’s bloodstream, and accepting that Jim knows his Shakespeare as well as any member of the Tyrone family in Long Day’s Journey Into Night, perhaps there is a compelling reason for Jim to speak Cloten’s lines in this moment.

The Jim-Cloten connection depends on one critical parallel between the two characters: Cloten intends to rape Imogen, and Jim attempts to rape Josie. In Act Four,

Cloten, attired in Posthumus’ clothes, lustily announces his plan to the audience:

CLOTEN. Posthumus, thy head, which now is growing upon thy shoulders, shall within this hour be off, thy mistress enforced, thy garments cut to pieces before thy face. (CW 2289)

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“Thy mistress enforced” means that Cloten will force himself upon her. His plan fails: before he sees Imogen again, Guiderus chops off his head in a duel. But the jealous

Cloten had both the means and desire to rape the woman whose affection he could not earn.

Jim has a similarly craven desire in Act Three of Moon and comes much closer to committing the terrible deed. After Josie admits her virginity to him and invites him into her bedroom, Jim’s demeanor entirely shifts:

TYRONE. (A strange change has come over his face. He looks her over now with a sneering cynical lust. He speaks thickly as if he were suddenly very drunk.) Sure thing, Kiddo. What the hell else do you suppose I came for? I’ve been kidding myself. (He steps up beside her and puts is arm around her and presses his body to hers.) You’re the goods, Kid. I’ve wanted you all along. Love, nuts! I’ll show you what love is. I know what you want, Bright Eyes. (CP3 925)

Josie wards off his advance — remember, she is a powerfully built 180 pounds — and sends Jim flying back. Perhaps, during this tussle, the white flower pinned to her bosom, which first appears at the top of Act Two (892), falls to the ground. Reeling from the blow, Jim nearly topples down the stairs, but Josie catches his arm and holds him up.

Dazed, he asks her,

TYRONE. (Confusedly, as if he didn’t know what had happened) What the hell? Was I trying to rape you, Josie? Forget it. I’m drunk — not responsible. (925)

But his lame excuse falls on deaf ears, and the damage has been done. As I have argued in the previous section, Josie never forgives Jim for this heinous and traumatic act. In the moments following the attempted rape, any sexual charge between them shifts into what

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O’Neill describes as a “tender, protective maternal passion” (927). Like Abbie in Desire

Under the Elms, Josie now takes on the dead mother’s role. She offers understanding and forgiveness for Jim’s sins against his mother, but, as for the sin he has committed against her, she remains silent.

Jim’s choice to paraphrase Cloten’s lines is not coincidental, nor is it based on what Berlin describes as “miraculous restorations and reconciliations.” Instead, it links the two men’s dark sexual desires seething beneath the surface of their flowery language and calculated histrionics. Each man’s unrestrained urges undoes them: for Cloten, it leaves him victim to Guiderius’ sword, and for Jim, it destroys any hope for a real relationship — one acknowledged in the light of day, soberly and whole-heartedly — with Josie, beyond the fragile pieta in Moon’s final act.

Jim’s Second Allusion: “Makes men mad”

Jim’s second Shakespearean allusion occurs in Act 3, when he quotes

Shakespeare’s greatest domestic tragedy, Othello:

TYRONE. Forget it. Time I got a move on. I don’t like your damned moon, Josie. It’s an ad for the past. (He recites mockingly) “It is the very error of the moon: / She comes more nearer Earth than she was wont, / And makes men mad.” (CP3 932-33)

This is the most densely layered allusion in Moon and perhaps in O’Neill’s entire career.

While the line is recited “mockingly,” Jim is not merely hamming it up or lampooning an over-the-top Shakespearean actor to lighten the mood. He is conjuring up the spirits of his past and connecting his family’s “tragic inheritance” (Westgate 21) to the dramatic fate of Othello and Desdemona in a meta-theatrical and self-referential performance.

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Three eminent scholars have devoted considerable attention to this allusion.

American theatre scholar Laurin Porter argues that Jim’s quote from Othello exerts pressure on Moon in three ways: it links Jim to his father, James O’Neill, as well as his avatar James Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey Into Night; it emphasizes the mythical and romantic qualities of the titular moon; and it “reinforces the play’s resurrection theme”

(Porter, “Allusions” 139-140).

Shakespeare scholar and O’Neill expert Richard Brucher takes a more personal stance on the Othello allusion. For him, Shakespeare’s tragedy occupies a central place in

“O’Neill’s cultural and psychological baggage”:

Biographical evidence suggests that O’Neill associated his parents with Othello and Desdemona, at least because O’Neill’s father, James Sr., identified with Shakespeare’s Moor, an outsider who married up to a younger, gently-reared white woman. Playing opposite Edwin Booth’s Iago in 1874 marked the high point of James’ career, symbolizing his promise as a serious actor, his mastery of the dominant culture, and ultimately his betrayal of his art and self when he sacrificed Othello to the easy money to be made playing the Count of Monte Cristo. (Brucher 47)

This argument has been discussed thoroughly in Chapter Three.

Finally, Normand Berlin carefully outlines the parallels in content and dramatic structure between Othello and Moon activated by Jim’s quotation:

By quoting Othello, Jim is clearly connected to his father — also ‘Tyrone’— who played Othello so brilliantly that he received praise from Booth. This adds further support to the idea that O’Neill wrote his play as a benediction to his brother and to his father, who share many qualities in [Moon]. The Othello who presents the quoted lines has just killed Desdemona, the pure wife he believes to be a whore. Jim Tyrone is obsessed with his mother, whom he connects to the whore on the train. Revenge is the motive of the action for both protagonists. Both men kill the women they love: Othello literally kills Desdemona, Jim indirectly kills his mother when she realizes he has returned to the bottle. Desdemona miraculously ‘returns’ from death in order to absolve Othello of his crime: ‘A guiltless death I

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die…Commend me to my kind lord. O, farewell.’ Jim’s mother ‘returns’ from death in the person of Josie Hogan to forgive his sin. Both Othello and Jim Tyrone are self-dramatizers, and each seeks death at play’s end. Othello kills himself, knowing he will be roasting in sulfur, going to hell: Jim walks toward the grave he will soon occupy, his tomb the womb of earth, a union with his mother (Berlin 246-47)

Each of these arguments exposes the multiple layers of “self” contained within Jim’s allusion.

As Jamie quotes Othello, he is not only quoting Shakespeare: he is also both quoting and becoming his father, James Tyrone, who so brilliantly played Iago and

Othello opposite Booth at McVicker’s in Chicago in 1894. James was only twenty-seven years old when he played Othello and spoke these same lines; Jim, in Moon, is just past forty.

O’Neill’s father, his past, the captivity of performance and O’Neill’s capacity for mystery are all expressed through Shakespeare’s stolen words, wrenched from a heartbreaking tragedy in which a man destroys himself by murdering his family, and spoken by a middle-aged drunkard. Both father and son, in O’Neill’s imagination, appropriate Shakespeare’s words at the respective emotional climaxes of their lives. For

O’Neill’s father, Othello’s lines were full of drama, excitement, and potential—as James

Tyrone says in Long Day’s Journey Into Night, as he spoke those lines he “had life right where [he] wanted it” (CP3 809). Jim, drowning in his father’s enormous wake, recites them “mockingly,” remembering his father’s abandoned dreams and his own faded potential.

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Jim’s Third Allusion: “More melancholy than ten Hamlets”

In Act Four, Jim briefly refers to Hamlet in the dawn after the pieta. He is hungover, his eyes barely opened, and his body is stiff and sweaty. He can barely remember the previous night, and as he works to piece the evening together, he tells

Josie:

TYRONE. I remember I was having a grand time at the Inn, celebrating with Phil, and then suddenly, for no reason, all the fun went out of it, and I was more melancholy than ten Hamlets. (He pauses.) Hope I didn’t tell you the sad story of my life and weep on your bosom, Josie. (CP3 942)

This is a reference, not a quote, but nevertheless it exposes two new features of O’Neill’s relationship with Shakespeare in A Moon for the Misbegotten: it reveals the ways in which Jamie’s familiarity with Shakespeare comprises a constant frame of reference, and it connects him to Hamlet as an Oedipal figure, like the massively melancholy Dane.

Hamlet confronts mother in Gertrude and lover in Ophelia; Jamie confronts both in Josie.

But beyond these parallels, the swiftly passing reference to Hamlet illuminates one final aspect of Jim’s personality: as a consummate actor, he uses witty repartee, dense literary allusions, and riveting line readings to construct an emotional distance between himself and the world. In the morning after the pieta, Jim is overwhelmed by the powerful effects of his emotional intimacy with Josie. Hamlet is a scape goat and an excuse: “Don’t buy all the theatrics,” he seems to be saying; “That’s just how us theatre types are.” For a moment, he wants Josie to forget his embarrassing vulnerability. He wants to go back to the way things used to be, when Josie wore her “country tart” mask and he could safely, teasingly, knowingly flirt with her. But the masks are left behind in

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Jim, darling. May you rest forever in forgiveness and peace” (CP3 946).

Conclusion

Taken together, the four primary connections to Shakespeare within A Moon for the Misbegotten — the “S play idea,” Josie and Jim’s roleplaying and metamorphosis,

Jim’s series of quotations in Acts Two, Three, and Four, and, finally, the living pieta — comprise an essential and highly emotional strain of Shakespearean influence that resonates throughout A Moon for the Misbegotten. In Long Day’s Journey Into Night,

James Tyrone saw himself as a version of Shakespeare’s Othello. As if in response, his family is drawn into a series of Shakespearean shadow roles: Jamie casts himself as Iago,

Mary is compared to Ophelia behind her back, and, as Edmund glimpses his own mortality, he rewrites Shakespeare’s most famous lines. In Moon, Jim Tyrone reckons with his Shakespearean inheritance. His recitation of his father’s lines as Othello does not recreate but reclaims that history. Jim may forgive his father in that moment, or he may curse and damn him, or he may come to finally understand him. That is a choice an actor must make. But what is certain is that Jim’s recitation of Othello’s is not an arbitrary allusion, nor is it a shallow display of intellectual snobbery or well-read erudition. In that moment, O’Neill creates a stunning moment of theatrical fusion between his real-life father and brother, his fictional recreations of those figures across two of his finest plays, and Shakespeare’s powerful presence within his actual and fictional family’s histories.

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Chapter Five

“Sing Willow”: The Shakespeare Within

The Iceman Cometh

The Iceman Cometh (1939) occupies an uneasy position in American drama. In his 2007 book Desire Under Democracy: Eugene O’Neill’s America, John Patrick

Diggins argues that The Iceman Cometh’s popularity and critical reputation ebbs and flows with the cultural moment. He opens his book with a straightforward observation: the premiere performance of The Iceman Cometh, which opened on October 9, 1946, at the Martin Beck Theatre in New York City, was largely unsuccessful. However, subsequent revivals — including the 1956 production starring Jason Robards and directed by Jose Quintero, and the 2000 production starring Kevin Spacey and directed by

Howard Davies — were acclaimed. To Diggins, the primary reason for the play’s increasing status is that O’Neill was ahead of his time: in 1939, O’Neill was already a postwar dramatist, disaffected by the American experience. Unlike other playwrights of the moment, including Miller, Odets, Brecht, O’Casey, and Shaw, “O’Neill alone realized that the promise of politics had simply replaced the promise of religion in claiming to save the world from sin and destruction” (Diggins xiv). Regardless of its prescience or wisdom, most Americans did not want to hear this message in 1946 as the country emerged from the trials of the Great Depression and horrors of the Second World

War. As America’s position in the world grew increasingly unclear, O’Neill’s tavern tragedy took on increasing resonance.

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Diggins acknowledges that his view of O’Neill as an American Cassandra, cursed to utter true but nevertheless disbelieved prophecies, is indebted to Travis Bogard, who, in turn, maintains that O’Neill “became one of the greatest historical dramatists since

Shakespeare” (qtd. in Diggins 81, emphasis added). Eager to support this view, Diggins explicates several similarities between Shakespeare and O’Neill as historical thinkers:

O’Neill took American history as seriously as Shakespeare took English history, and both sought to cover a century of their respective histories […] Both related family to political and social conditions, whether the royal family in aristocratic Europe or a rich family in Democratic America or, as often the case with O’Neill, a poor family resentful of the rich. Shakespeare’s histories and tragedies are seldom end on an upbeat, and one has no exception that an O’Neill play will leave us with a smile […] Both playwrights saw human conduct carrying on its expected ways regardless of the nature of the political regime, whether a monarchy or a republic. (ibid)

But these are broad similarities, and, ultimately, Diggins is more interested in O’Neill’s historical and philosophical influences, such as the expressions of Oswald Spengler’s theories of cultural morphology in the stage directions of Marco Millions. Even for scholars like Diggins, eager and willing to detect Shakespeare’s traces within The Iceman

Cometh, the path is obscure and uncertain, and the results are often vague, obvious, or both.

The Shakespeare within O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh is difficult to detect at first glance. Unlike Long Day’s Journey Into Night and A Moon for the Misbegotten, O’Neill does not pepper Iceman with Shakespeare’s famous verses. There is no faded classical actor among the bar’s dreary denizens. Although many of the characters are drawn, at least in part, from O’Neill’s own down-and-out experiences in New York City, it seems that Shakespeare plays little part in Harry Hope’s saloon. But while Shakespeare is not as

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In this chapter, I analyze two strains of influence which reveal the Shakespeare within O’Neill’s tavern tragedy. The first stems from the play’s much-maligned title, The

Iceman Cometh, which mixes the sacred and profane, as well as the ancient and the modern, in a deliberately anachronistic genre blur typical of Shakespeare’s playwriting.

Building on the work of Cyrus Day and Winifred L. Frazer, I enlarge the ways in which

O’Neill’s title responds to King Lear. When viewed through a Shakespearean lens, The

Iceman Cometh emerges as one of the most, if not the most, densely layered and meaningful titles in American drama.

Next, I solidify and specify a generalized connection between Evelyn and

Desdemona from Shakespeare’s Othello. It is easy enough to accept a cursory connection, grounded in shared innocence, between Evelyn and Desdemona: both women are innocent victims of unquestionable virtue, murdered by their husbands in their beds.

But O’Neill’s embeds a recurrent motif within The Iceman Cometh which points back, once again, to Shakespeare’s Othello, a play deeply ingrained in O’Neill’s memories and creativity. The connections between Evelyn and Desdemona, and The Iceman Cometh and Othello, run far deeper than previous scholarship has acknowledged.

These connections, especially when considered beside an analysis of how O’Neill both uses and contains Shakespeare within Long Day’s Journey Into Night and A Moon for the Misbegotten, encourage a more complete view of the Shakespeare within The

Iceman Cometh.

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The “Concealed Blasphemies” of O’Neill’s Title

O’Neill is among the finest title-writers in all of drama. The Iceman Cometh, perhaps his most memorable title and certainly the one most ripe for parody, is also his most meaningful. Biographer Louis Sheaffer senses its tensions between “ribald and sinister meanings” and “biblical one[s] as well” (495). With just three words, O’Neill draws a foggy boundary between sacred and sexual meaning as well as between modern and antiquated language. As the noun “iceman” recalls the mundanity of modern domestic life, the archaic verb “cometh” works against these humdrum associations, forcing the play into tragic territory. The conflicting forces and competing tensions draw upon biblical sources, but O’Neill’s title is most heavily indebted to Shakespeare.

Many theatre scholars have picked up on the critic’s discomfort with the title and carried it further, occasionally even supplying O’Neill with revisions. Harold Bloom suggests that “The Iceman Cometh might as well have been called The Dance of Death”

(Bloom, Iceman 2) to more closely align the play with its Strindbergian influences.

Normand Berlin suggests “Waiting for Hickey” (Berlin 168) to urge a comparison with

Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Such parodies and revisions are amusing, but in addition, they imply an urge to take up the mantle of naming the play — quite the tribute to

O’Neill. However, they also limit and obscure the manifold messages within O’Neill’s haunting title.

In a 1958 article devoted exclusively to the title, O’Neill scholar Cyrus Day burrows more deeply into its possible meanings. Day argues that on one level, the title “is a reference to Hickey’s ribald jest that he knows his wife is safe because he has left her

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Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021 with iceman in the hay” (Day 11). Simply put, the title is a sex joke. But Day also uncovers a second, deeper meaning for the title: “the iceman represents death” (ibid).

Day argues that this dark presence emerges within Hickey as an anti-Christ and anti-

Christian figure, and that O’Neill uses the specter of death to reverse biblical lore. As evidence, he cites the relentless parallels between O’Neill’s play and aspects of the New

Testament:

Hickey as savior has twelve apostles. They drink wine at Hope’s supper party, and their grouping on the stage, according to O’Neill’s directions, is reminiscent of Leonardo da Vinci’s painting of the Last Supper. Hickey leaves the party, as Christ does, aware that he is about to be executed. The three whores correspond in number to the three Marys, and sympathize with Hickey as the three Marys sympathize with Christ. (13)

Further noting that Parritt resembles Judas, most obviously in his climactic suicide but also in his far-off origins, his betrayal of his mother, and his knack for reading Hickey’s mind and motives, Day convincingly argues that the play’s biblical echoes and resonances, latent in the title but manifest in all of the play’s action, are far too pervasive to be coincidental (13-14). O’Neill’s so-called “concealed blasphemies” (15), Day finds, lends the play powerful anti-Christian undertones.

The Iceman Cometh’s biblical associations can be further traced beyond these blasphemous plot reversals to a specific passage in the New Testament. In his biography of O’Neill, Louis Sheaffer explicates the play’s connections to the Gospel of Matthew by way of Waldo Frank’s 1939 novel The Bridegroom Cometh. That novel, released the same year O’Neill completed The Iceman Cometh, alludes, in its title, to Matthew 25 and the Parable of the Ten Virgins: “While the bridegroom tarried, they all slumbered and

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Sheaffer 495). O’Neill biographer Robert M. Dowling has recently corrected a longstanding belief among O’Neill scholars that Frank’s novel was the sole source of inspiration for the play’s title (Dowling 428-9). Dowling reveals that O’Neill had been fascinated by Matthew 25 well before Frank’s novel: his second known literary work was a 1917 poem titled “The Bridegroom Cometh” (63). Clearly, Christ’s Parable of the Ten

Virgins from Matthew 25 was a lifelong interest for O’Neill and a strong influence for this evocative title.

Two elements of this parable relate to O’Neill’s play. The first is plot-based:

Hickey represents the bridegroom, the drunken denizens of the bar represent the ten virgins who “slumbered and slept,” and the cry at midnight represents the celebration of

Harry Hope’s birthday. The second, however, relies upon the “ribald and sinister” meanings which Sheaffer senses. In Matthew’s Gospel, Christ uses his parable to explain how best to prepare for the son of man’s arrival. His message is simple: do not fall asleep; be vigilant. But the lesson also contains an unavoidable, if sub-textual, sexual anticipation. Christ imagines himself as a bridegroom arriving at his wedding night, eager to consummate his marriage. He mixes spiritual and sexual energies as he struggles to express his desire for union with all mankind.

This taboo border between the holy and the wholly human points firmly in the direction of William Shakespeare. The first scholar to detect this deeply embedded, biblically based strain of Shakespearean influence was Winifred L. Frazer, who considers

The Iceman Cometh alongside Shakespeare’s King Lear. Building upon Cyrus Day’s

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Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021 work, Frazer illuminates a faint but essential link between The Iceman Cometh’s punning title and Shakespeare:

The ‘double death’ meaning of his title, which O’Neill thought so exactly fitted the content of the play, includes the double implication of the iceman as death and of the ‘coming’ as also in slang parlance being the ‘dying’ which Shakespeare makes King Lear faces in his ironic exclamation to Cordelia’s Gentleman. (268)

Just as “the iceman” has a double meaning (Hickey and death), “cometh” does, as well: it implies both literal arrival and sexual climax. While many scholars have detected and commented upon these double-entendres, Frazer was the first to sense that they are heavily indebted to a single scene in Shakespeare: King Lear’s Act Four, Scene Five.

In that scene, Shakespeare’s eponymous hero is teetering on the edge of madness.

Moments before he is reunited with Cordelia, Lear borrows Christ’s metaphor and imagines himself as a bridegroom:

I will die bravely, like a smug bridegroom. What?

I will be jovial. Come, come, I am a king,

Masters, know you that? (CW 2060)

The king is juxtaposing his tragic situation with bawdy wordplay. "Die," again, is a pun and double entendre, meaning literal death as well as orgasm. "Smug,” in this instance, does not mean superior or self-satisfied: in Shakespeare's time, the word implied

“handsome” or “attractive.” "Bravely" here means "in a becoming manner" (Schmidt

136), and Lear underscores these sexual connotations through repetition: "come, come."

In these lines, Lear mixes a high-minded sentiment (“I am a king”) with a low-brow sex

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Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021 joke, making lewd puns even as he imagines his daughter’s arrival and fantasizes about a dignified, pitiable death. Not unlike Hickey, Lear, on the borderline of sanity, is macabre and crass. He is disturbingly funny, irreverently bawdy, and deeply tragic.

Both Christ’s parable and O’Neill’s title, The Iceman Cometh, can be glimpsed within Lear’s oscillation between the sacred and the sexual. Christ imagines himself as a bridegroom eager to consummate his relationship with humanity, and Lear imagines himself as a bridegroom eager to experience his reunion (and death) alongside Cordelia.

O’Neill synthesizes these dark themes. With his simultaneously prosaic and profound title, he links Hickey to both Christ and Lear, capitalizing on a dense literary network of taboo yearning.

It appears, then, that O’Neill mixes biblical and Shakespearean sources in equal measure within his title, The Iceman Cometh, but this is not the case. O’Neill relies more heavily on Shakespeare’s multifarious themes mischievous wordplay — Frazer describes this as Lear’s “ironic exclamations” (268) — than on biblical plot structure. As Cyrus

Day points out, O’Neill mirrors his biblical source to plant “concealed blasphemies” (14) within his plot: he reinvents the disciples as the denizens of Hope’s saloon, he corrupts the three Marys into the three tarts, he transposes the Christ figure into the harbinger of death, and so on. On the other hand, and as Frazer observes, O’Neill creatively transforms, rather than merely mirrors, his Shakespearean source:

Harry Hope’s birthday party turns out to be a wake, as Lear’s division of the kingdom brings death to him and his beloved Cordelia. And Hickey’s words about his own life could well apply to Lear: ‘Well, it’s all there, at the start, everything that happened afterwards.’ So Hickey was committed to loving Evelyn, who would have nothing but him, as Lear was committed to loving Cordelia beyond the bounds of fatherly affection, and love destroyed them both. (275)

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So, while the Bible inspires The Iceman Cometh’s plot, King Lear impacts both its punning title and its overall themes of the destructive nature of love. Both Lear and

Hickey expose the verges of love and forgiveness, finding that the desire for union leads only to tragedy. The Iceman Cometh and King Lear both suggest that this union — sexual, filial, spiritual, or political — leads to humankind’s undoing.

The title of The Iceman Cometh, like so many allusions in O’Neill’s work, functions on multiple levels, simultaneously departing from and paying homage to foundational texts in O’Neill’s imagination. First, O’Neill recalls and reverses biblical lore with its blasphemous allusion to Christ’s parable in Matthew. But on a second, deeper level, the title uneasily transplants King Lear’s nihilistic worldview into modernity. Shakespeare-like, O’Neill expresses this ruthless attitude within a playful pun.

In fatalistically seeking union — in “coming” together — humanity opens the door for the iceman, death.

Iceman and Othello

In O’Neill’s Shakespeare, Normand Berlin observes that Hickey’s confession to

Evelyn’s murder recalls Shakespeare’s Othello:

Hickey’s murder of his wife calls to mind the bedroom scene of Desdemona’s murder, a scene of love and death in which Othello literally kisses death […] In both plays men kill the women they think they love because their love is bound up with the feeling that their women are ideal […] In both plays the atmosphere is charged with the idea that the women will always sleep with the iceman. (182)

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Berlin’s central thesis is right: The Iceman Cometh’s horrifying climax recalls Othello’s.

Both Evelyn and Desdemona are murdered by their husbands in bed. However, Berlin’s far too general reading diminishes the complexity of this connection in three ways.

First, Berlin views the links between these two plays from a mostly male-centered perspective, which leads to a sympathetic reading of Evelyn and Desdemona’s murder.

His assertion that Hickey and Othello kill their wives “because their love is bound up with the feeling that their women are ideal” overlooks an essential difference: both men kill their wives because they are driven by an obsessive delusion. Hickey’s delusion is that he can free Evelyn from the cycle of emotional torment he causes by killing her, and

Othello’s delusion is his belief in Iago’s masterful manipulations rather than his wife’s outright denial. Blaming either woman’s “ideal” natures for their murders dehumanizes

Evelyn and Desdemona and transfers blame from the killers to the victims.

Second, Berlin neglects the ways in which O’Neill reverses and creatively transforms his classical source. It is not enough to say, as Berlin does, that O’Neill’s play merely recalls Shakespeare’s — it departs from Shakespeare in significant ways, as well.

In Othello, the Moor is falsely led by Iago to suspect that his wife, Desdemona, has been unfaithful to him with his dismissed lieutenant, Cassio, and as a result of Iago’s brilliant fabrications, Othello ultimately decides to murder his wife. In The Iceman Cometh,

Hickey is indeed unfaithful to his wife, many times, and Evelyn is aware of this fact and deeply wounded by it; nevertheless, she continually forgives her husband, and that self- imposed cycle of unfaithfulness and forgiveness leads Hickey to believe that he must murder his wife to set her free. In Othello, it is Iago who convinces Othello to murder his wife in their marriage bed, and Othello warns Desdemona, point-blank, that he is

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Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021 determined to kill her. In The Iceman Cometh, Hickey kills his wife in her bed while she is asleep, and by his own admission, he lacks the courage to explain why she must die.

Othello’s jealously, and the subsequent murder of his wife, is based on a lie. Hickey’s guilt is much like Othello’s jealously — it gnaws at him, gradually driving him towards the murder of his wife — but it is entirely self-inflicted. In O’Neill’s play, seductive self- delusions — O’Neill calls them “pipe dreams” — replace Machiavellian super-villains.

The denizens of Harry Hope’s saloon do not require master manipulators to control their fate: they author their own self-destructive fantasies. O’Neill’s veiled allusion to Othello situates Hickey and Evelyn “within and against” (Westgate 23) the tragedy of Othello and Desdemona.

Third, Berlin neglects to mention the deep personal and psychological associations O’Neill has with Shakespeare’s plays in general, and with Othello in particular. This stems from Berlin’s tendency to consider Long Day’s Journey Into Night and A Moon for the Misbegotten as companion pieces, but to see The Iceman Cometh as distinct and separate from these two plays. This tendency, to an extent, is understandable:

Journey and Moon chart the degradation of a single character, Jamie/Jim Tyrone. In addition, O’Neill’s identification with Shakespeare manifest clearly in Journey and Moon through dozens of allusions, quotations, paraphrases, and parodies. Detecting the nascent and coded Shakespeare within The Iceman Cometh is a far more subtle task. It relies on an awareness of the clues O’Neill leaves in these later plays, which Berlin excludes from his analysis.

Ultimately, Berlin’s male-centric and overly generalized reading of the plays’ respective climaxes obscures a deeper, more powerful way in which O’Neill embeds

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Othello’s echo within his tavern tragedy: a recurrent aural motif to willow trees, which recalls Desdemona’s tranquil moments in her bedchamber before her murder. This veiled allusion has been largely overlooked, but tracing its faint outlines uncovers how Othello further impacts The Iceman Cometh.

From Freiligrath’s Freedom to Desdemona’s Willows

O’Neill punctuates Acts Two, Three, and Four of The Iceman Cometh with references to willow trees. In Act Two, Hugo Kalmar, the failed German Marxist revolutionary, hopefully exclaims that systemic political reform is imminent: "Ve will eat birthday cake and trink champagne beneath the villow tree!” (CP3 645). In Act Three, as his pipe dream disintegrates, Hugo laments, “Always there is blood beneath the villow trees! I hate it and I am afraid" (CP3 680). Other characters use offer variations on the willow tree lines, as well. Moments before his suicide in Act Four, Parritt takes up the refrain, vaguely promising Hugo, “Tomorrow! Beneath the willow trees!” (CP3 705).

The play’s concluding lines, spoken or sung by all the denizens of the bar, in unison, is:

“The days grow hot, O Babylon! ‘Tis cool beneath thy willow trees!” (CP3 711). This collection of quotations and recitations, all delivered by characters who are connected to the anarchist and socialist themes of the play, suggest, on one level, that Marxist utopias

(or any political progress) are just another pipe dream. On another level, however, the insistent willow tree refrain threads together Othello and The Iceman Cometh.

Only a small handful of scholars have charted the willow tree imagery in The

Iceman Cometh. Theatre and film scholar John Orr feels that the recurrent lines turns the denizens of the bar into something of a chorus which “approximates most closely to the

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Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021 lyrical and auratic power of a Greek tragedy” (87). O’Neill’s choral use of these lines, progressing from optimism to despair and denial before returning to hope once again, reinforces the thematic resonance of the pipe dream. But it is once again Winifred L.

Frazer who most fully excavates the precise origin of the willow tree imagery:

A poetic line—“The days grow hot, O Babylon! ‘Tis cool beneath thy willow trees!”—is repeated with variation some dozen times in The Iceman Cometh by the anarchist character Hugo Kalmar. Biographers and critics of O’Neill have failed to note the origin of this important thematic line which reinforces the connotations of the title, wherein the warm, loving bridegroom of the Bible is replaced by the cold, profane iceman of death. The absence of comment might make one wonder if O’Neill made up the line and its variations himself, were it not that they appear in quotation marks and are designated as ‘Hugo’s favorite quotation.’ (Frazer, “Revolution” 1)

Frazer observes that Hugo’s beloved lines appear in the poem “Revolution” (Die

Revolution), written in 1850 by the German writer Ferdinand Freiligrath (1810-76).

Interestingly, however, Frazer also points out that O’Neill knew next to nothing about

Freiligrath. O’Neill could have encountered Freiligrath’s poem while studying

“philosophical anarchism” and the writings of the German philosopher Max Stirner

(Dowling 50-51), as he appears to have remembered that the verses were written by a

German poet and assigns most of the willow tree references to the German revolutionary,

Hugo. Beyond that, however, it seems that O’Neill was largely unaware of the origin of

Hugo’s favorite quotation.

O’Neill wrote the willow lines from memory and, struck by their resonance, asked his friend Saxe Commins if he knew where the lines came from (Commins was O’Neill’s dentist and a lifelong friend; he was also remarkably well-read, and he and O’Neill frequently discussed playwriting in their letters). When Commins could not determine the

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Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021 origin, O’Neill, according to Commins, responded, “It didn’t matter too much because the quotation served his purpose and that ultimately its origin would be traced” (qtd. in

Frazer, “Revolution” 3). Frazer does just that. She carefully traces the connections between O’Neill’s remembered lines, Freiligrath’s poem, Psalm 137 of the Bible, and

Marx’s Communist Manifesto.

Frazer concludes her analysis with a conjecture: “One wonders if Ferdinand

Freiligrath’s ‘Revolution,’ the last lines of which stuck for so many years in the playwright’s memory and which so precisely fit the revolutionary motifs of Iceman, did not actually help direct its course” (“Revolution” 7). Such open-ended analysis does not seek to untangle the messiness of memory. Frazer explicates the origins and implications of O’Neill’s allusion as well as he can, but his final question — if and how the poem

“direct [the play’s] course” (ibid) — encourages scholars to expand upon his observations. The question that Frazer ultimately recaches for is not so much where the lines originate from (Frazer fully answers this) as why they continued to echo within

O’Neill’s memory. The answer to this question, once again, points back to William

Shakespeare.

Many O’Neill scholars, including Richard Brucher, Louis Sheaffer, and Stephen

A. Black, persuasively argue that Eugene O’Neill’s farther, James O’Neill, strongly self- identified with the role of Othello, even going so far as to compare his marriage to Ella

Quinlan with Othello’s marriage to Desdemona (see Chapter Three). In both Long Day’s

Journey Into Night and A Moon for the Misbegotten, Eugene O’Neill sounds the depth of his father’s Shakespearean self-identification, and alludes to Othello in theatrically

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Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021 effective, philosophically complex, and emotionally resonant ways. Shakespeare, and most specifically, Othello, is at the very center of these two later Tao House plays.

Until now, very little has been made of the connection between Othello and The

Iceman Cometh beyond Berlin’s broad assertion that both Desdemona and Evelyn are wrongfully murdered by their husbands in their beds. But O’Neill’s insistent repetition of the willow tree imagery unlocks a new connection between these two plays. Very likely, one of the primary reasons Freiligrath’s lines about the willows rang out in O’Neill’s memory is their link to Othello. Shakespeare refers to willow trees in several plays, including Hamlet, his most effective theatrical and thematic use of willow tree imagery occurs in Act Four, Scene Three of Othello.

“His scorn I approve”: The Willow Song

In that scene, during the final, fragile moments before her murder, Desdemona remembers a song from her childhood about betrayal, lost love, and willow trees. She sings the song to her Emilia, her maid, as she is dressing for bed:

The poor soul sat sighing by a sycamore tree, Sing all a green willow: Her hand on her bosom, her head on her knee, Sing willow, willow, willow, The fresh streams ran by her, and murmured her moans, Sing willow, willow, willow, Her salt tears fell from her, and softened the stones, Sing willow — lay by these — willow, willow, Prithee, hie thee, he’ll come again anon — Sing all a green willow must be my garland. Let nobody blame him, his scorn I approve — Nay, that’s not next — Hark, who it’s that knocks? (CW 2143)

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Writing in 1953, Shakespeare scholar and Columbia University Professor of English

Ernest Brennecke maintains that this scene “may be recognized as one of [Shakespeare’s] triumphs of insight, pathos, and tragedy” (38). Desdemona’s song, Brennecke explains, is a variant of a popular ballad of the Elizabethan and Jacobean era, in which a scorned male lover sings a sorrowful song to a willow tree. According to Brennecke, Shakespeare creatively transforms this popular ballad in several ways: that is, the actor playing

Desdemona sings a popular song that the audience knew well, but Shakespeare’s version includes a few twists and revisions, which may have helped his audiences hear the popular song in a new way.

First, Shakespeare adds an origin story: before she sings, Desdemona explains that her mother’s servant, Barbary (Brennecke changes this name to “Barbara” in his article), whose lover “proved mad” (CW 2143) — meaning that he was either insane, or faithless, or both — taught her the song. Second, Shakespeare interrupts Desdemona’s intimate aria with tense, domestic interruptions, spoken by both Emilia and Desdemona, which momentarily break the heavenly performance and return us to the here-and-now:

“Nay, unpin me here,” “Lay by these,” “Prithee, hie thee; he’ll come again anon,” etc.

(ibid). Third, Shakespeare breaks the context and rhyme scheme of the song’s original version to include the lines “Let nobody blame him; his scorn I approve” (ibid) to highlight Desdemona’s almost superhuman capacity for grace and forgiveness

(Brennecke 35-38).

While Hickey never specifically mentions willow trees in his confession, O’Neill parallels these three transformations of the popular ballad within Hickey’s long speech in

Act Four of The Iceman Cometh. First, Hickey “proves mad” when he admits that he

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Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021 continually betrays his wife. As for the question of Hickey’s sanity, O’Neill never directly resolves the issue, and it is possible to read the play either way: Hickey is either feigning madness for the police, or he murdered Evelyn in a blind fit of temporary insanity. However, the fact that Hickey leads his listeners to believe he is mentally ill —

“All I want you to see is I was out of my mind afterwards, when I laughed at her! I was a raving lunatic or I couldn’t have said…”(CP3 703) likely indicates that he believes being proven insane will lessen his sentence and ease his conscience. Like Barbary’s lover and

Othello, Hickey “proves mad,” but unlike Barbary’s lover and Othello, Hickey’s madness is self-serving, self-imposed, and ultimately unresolved. When Othello proves mad, he is driven to suicide; Hickey hopes to save his life. Hickey works hard to convince himself and his audience that he is a tragic hero, but falls short of the mark, instead revealing his wife’s tragic innocence. His effort to unite himself with Othello has the opposite effect: it drives him apart from Shakespeare’s tragic hero even as it unites Desdemona and Evelyn.

O’Neill thus capitalizes on what Grennan describes as an “extensive sisterhood of grief”:

Singing, [Desdemona] ascends to a place of pure performance, and becomes in our mind the last of a long line of abandoned women, stretching back through Barbary and the countless women who have sung the song before Desdemona to the girl herself in the song, that anonymous ‘poor soul’ responsible for this extensive sisterhood of grief. (279)

Like Mary Tyrone, whom Jamie cruelly unites with Shakespeare’s Ophelia in Long

Day’s Journey Into Night, Evelyn is drawn into a tragic Shakespearean landscape by a man she loves, trusts, and continually forgives. As Hickey “proves mad,” he draws

Evelyn into the same “extensive sisterhood of grief” of which Desdemona sings.

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Second, O’Neill borrows the numerous interruptions and changes of pace and tone that Shakespeare interlaces within Desdemona’s song. Many scholars have commented on Desdemona’s oscillation between song and spoken word, as well as

Emilia’s tense, deictic interjections, in Act Four, Scene Three. The eminent

Shakespearean scholar Maynard Mack interprets this back-and-forth as a symbolic confrontation between the soul, represented by Desdemona, and the body, represented by

Emilia (30-32). Eamon Grennan describes Othello’s Act Four, Scene Three “as one of the most dramatically compelling in Shakespeare,” pointing to its “unhurried simplicity” and effortless, natural transitions from song to spoken word (276-277). In her highly influential article “Unpinning Desdemona,” Vassar Professor of Drama Denise A. Walen finds that the scene “portrays an active and tragically nuanced Desdemona and raises empathy for her with its psychological expose” (487), while its “emotional intensity and interruption” encourages the audience “to ponder the prospects of murder orchestrated for the final act” (497-498). The tone of the scene is delicate, and its deft movement from song to spoken word function like gathering storm clouds as the play approaches its inevitable, tragic end.

Hickey’s confession, like Desdemona’s song, has an oscillating structure which portrays — to borrow Walen’s phrase — a “tragically nuanced” Evelyn. In the stage directions, O’Neill describes Hickey’s lengthy monologue gradually changing in tone, from “musingly reminiscent” (CP3 693) or “fond, sentimental reminiscence”(694) to a

“strange bitterness” (ibid) that is “convulsed with self-loathing” (697). The pauses punctuating the speech are “suspended, waiting silence[s]” (695) that resemble those “in the room of a dying man where people hold their breath, waiting for him to die” (698).

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Parritt continually interrupts this lengthy monologue in what O’Neill describes as “a low insistent tone” (ibid) and “a low voice in which there is a strange exhausted relief” (700).

Whereas Shakespeare oscillates between song and spoken word, highlighting the tragic tension and terror soon to come, O’Neill oscillates between Hickey’s gregarious and captivating performance and Parritt’s hushed, parenthetical tones. Like Shakespeare,

O’Neill carefully orchestrates these delicate tonal shifts, assuring that the scene has an almost musical score. O’Neill, it seems, was drawn to Shakespeare’s Act Four, Scene

Three, not just for its personal and emotional resonance but also for its simultaneously sophisticated and natural style. The theatrical effectiveness of both scenes hinge on each dramatist’s carefully orchestrated tonal shifts.

Third, O’Neill underscores the sentiment in Desdemona’s improvised or mistaken lines during her willow song, linking her temperament and personality, once again, to

Evelyn’s. During her performance of Babary’s song, Desdemona either mis-remembers or improvises a line, infusing her performance with a “Freudian slip” (Grennan 280).

Alternating between her aria and simple instructions to her maid, Emilia, Desdemona makes a foreboding and revelatory mistake:

Sing willow — lay by these — willow, willow — Prithee, hie thee; he’ll come again anon — Sing all a green willow must be my garland. Let nobody blame him, his scorn I approve — Nay, that’s not next. Hark, who is’t that knocks? (CW 2143)

“Let nobody blame him, his scorn I approve” is an error, as the next line — “Nay, that’s not next” – indicates, but this mistaken line has direct bearing on her current situation.

Like Evelyn, who unconditionally accepts Hickey’s apologies and perpetually hopes for

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Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021 his reform, Desdemona loves Othello unconditionally, even after Othello strikes her in public and calls her “devil” and “whore” (2136). Emilia, on the other hand, wishes

Desdemona had never laid eyes on Othello, to which Desdemona replies:

So would not I: my love doth so approve him That even his stubbornness, his checks, his frowns — Prithee, unpin me here — have grace and favor. (2142)

Desdemona’s feelings towards Othello do not change, indicated by her repeated use of the word “approve” in this speech and in the misremembered line of her song. Her

“approval” of Othello remains constant, even as her most trusted friend, Emilia, tries to make her see that her life is in danger.

In Hickey’s confession, he portrays his wife in terms that could also describe

Desdemona’s constancy and near-limitless capacity for love and forgiveness. O’Neill piles on the parallels: Evelyn’s well-to-do family initially objected to the match, just like

Desdemona’s father; Hickey describes Evelyn’s “sweetness and love and pity and forgiveness” (CP3 698) with words reminiscent of Othello’s “She loved me for the dangers I had passed, and I loved her that she did pity them” (CW 2096); Hickey describes Evelyn as “looking white and scared” (CP3 695) just as Othello frequently dwells on his wife’s whiteness, calling her “as fresh as Dian’s visage” (CW 2124), and possessing “whiter skin […] than snow / And smooth as monumental alabaster” (2147).

These metaphors — white as snow, smooth as alabaster — reinforce Othello’s blackness.

In Act Five, Scene Two, when he is left alone with Desdemona’s body, Othello expands the metaphors’ scale:

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Methinks it should be now a huge eclipse Of sun and moon, and that th’affrighted globe Did yawn at alteration. (2149)

Othello’s comparisons between his blackness and Desdemona’s whiteness arrive at this celestial climax: he is the sun, she is the moon, and their tragic union creates an eclipse that covers the “globe” (Shakespeare here likely means both “world” and “stage”) in darkness, terror, and pity.

O’Neill returns to this multi-layered metaphor in a later play. Consider Othello’s lines in Act Five, Scene Two which describe the madness infecting his reason:

It is the very error of the moon: She comes more nearer Earth than she was wont, And makes men mad. (2150)

These same words comprise the emotional climax of O’Neill’s later Tao House play, A

Moon for the Misbegotten. As Jim recites Othello in Moon, Shakespeare draws together three ghosts of O’Neill’s past: his mother, brother, and father. The key for unlocking this connection lies in Hugo Kalmar’s repeated lines about the willows. Othello’s personal and partial resonances within that play, as well as within Long Day’s Journey Into Night, originate in the intersections between Hickey’s confession in Act 4 of The Iceman

Cometh and Desdemona’s willow song in Act Four of Othello.

It is not to enough to say, as Berlin does, that The Iceman Cometh “calls to mind”

(182) Shakespeare’s Othello, a play which was central in O’Neill’s imagination and

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Conclusion: “De ol’ foolosopher”

Writing about Larry Slade, a character “pleased with his own objective stance and his own ability to see the world more clearly than the others” (178), Normand Berlin detects a connection to Shakespeare’s As You Like It and the fool/philosopher, Jacques.

Slade’s cynical proclamations, uttered from behind a stoic facade, recalls many of

Shakespeare’s fools — not just Jacques, but Feste or Lear’s fool, as well. Slade could slide quite easily into such a role:

To hell with truth! As the history of the world proves, the truth has no bearing on anything. It’s irrelevant and immaterial, as the lawyers say. The lie of the pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober. (CP3 569-70)

This sardonic humor, wry legalese, and even the ironic equation of sobriety with drunkenness all place him in motley territory: this is such stuff as Shakespeare’s finest fools are made of. But less than a page later, and despite Slade’s honorary title as the saloon’s “foolosopher,” a moniker which all but begs a comparative analysis between

Slade and Shakespeare’s fools, Berlin ascribes nearly identical character traits — disillusionment, detachment, and “dark comments on human nature” (179) — with

Hamlet. This new case for a Slade-Hamlet connection rests on a series of parallels: both are melancholic, both are preoccupied with the similarities of sleep and death, and both are complex thinkers capable of seeing what Slade describes as “all sides of a question”

(CP3 580). Vaguely, and dwelling, perhaps, on the repetition of the word “question,”

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Berlin concludes that both Slade and Hamlet often consider “the most important question of to be or not to be” (179).

The two-page tug-of-war between As You Like It and Hamlet leaves the reader with whiplash. Is Slade like Jacques, the sardonic fool who abandons the Forest of Arden to pursue a life of self-abnegation and spiritual reflection? Or is he like Hamlet, destined to destroy the world he seeks to set right? The answer is both — and neither. Like

Jacques, Slade dispenses world-weary witticism and sardonic criticism from a physical and emotional remove. Like Hamlet, Larry can see all sides of a question and is morbidly fascinated with the sleep of death. But unlike Jacques, Slade’s cynical wit belies his compassion and betrays his guilty conscience, and unlike Hamlet, Slade has no interest in vengeance. Furthermore, Slade, as Robert M. Dowling and other scholars have observed, is based upon Terry Carlin, whom O’Neill presents “with little modification […] from

O’Neill’s heavy drinking days through the 1910s” (428). But the real trouble with the

Slade-Jacques and Slade-Hamlet connections is not that Slade is strongly based on

Carlin. After all, Jamie/Jim is strongly based on O’Neill’s brother, and he, more than any other character in the oeuvre, reveals Shakespeare’s centrality within O’Neill’s personal history and dramatic imagination. The real trouble it is that they are far too general to make more meaning within The Iceman Cometh.

As Berlin wavers between Slade’s potential connections to two of Shakespeare’s most complicated personalities, Catherine Loomis’ critique rushes back into focus.

Loomis compares Berlin and Fluellen in Henry V: “eager to impress the king, [Fluellen] compares Harry on Monmouth to Alexander the Pig, finding enormous significance in the fact that both Macedon and Monmouth have rivers” (236). She is pointing out that, if

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Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021 one is willing to look hard enough, or if one clutches at superficial shared attributes rather than patiently searches for deeply embedded resonances, Shakespeare can be found almost anywhere.

Unpacking the Shakespeare within the densely coded title of The Iceman Cometh, or within Hugo’s willow tree refrain, sheds new light on how O’Neill both uses and contains Shakespeare. These resonances, while difficult to detect, make O’Neill’s plays mean more. But dwelling on general parallels and passing similarities, as Berlin occasionally does, diminishes, rather than strengthens, the Shakespeare-O’Neill connection. Shakespeare’s most powerful presences within O’Neill’s plays are specific, nuanced, and often quite carefully hidden, but they shed new light on O’Neill’s most well-known and highly regarded plays.

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Chapter Six

Epigraph

In the first few months after defending my dissertation, I have three primary goals. The first is to seek out and apply for academic positions that will enable me to pursue my scholarly and artistic projects in a rigorous teaching environment. As I write this epigraph (fall 2020), the US is still in the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic, and the academic job market is suffering. I have applied for four positions (Santa Clara

University, Bowdoin College, Dixie State University, and the University of Iowa) and hope to add substantially to list by the first few months of 2021.

My second goal is to write a commissioned article for the Eugene O’Neill

Review’s “Practitioner’s Corner.” Review editor Alex Pettit has asked me to write a curated interview/essay on a 2019 production of Long Day’s Journey Into Night at

Tampa Bay, Florida’s American Stage, directed by Brendon Fox. I attended the production in July of 2019 because the production featured my former American

Shakespeare Center colleague, James Keegan, in the role of James Tyrone. I look forward to returning to this excellent production; just as importantly, I hope to submit an excellent piece to an influential editor that will serve as my debut in the Eugene O’Neill Review.

Dr. Pettit has asked that the piece be ready for peer review on March 1, 2021.

My third goal is to prepare sections of this dissertation for conference presentation and publication. My research has been accepted at two major national conferences in

2021: The Comparative Drama Conference (April 2021) and the Eugene O’Neill

International Conference (current date unknown). At the Comparative Drama

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Conference, I plan to focus my presentation on Chapter Three and A Moon for the

Misbegotten. At the O’Neill Conference, I plan to focus my presentation on Chapter Two and Long Day’s Journey Into Night. After further post-conference revision and feedback,

I will submit each of these revised and expanded papers for publication. My ideal journal for Chapter Two is Text & Performance, the publication of the Comparative Drama

Conference, and in which I have previously published a book review. My ideal journal for Chapter Three is Modern Drama, a journal focusing primarily on dramatic literature and which often solicits articles urging new perspectives on foundational dramatists The

March 2022 edition, for example, will focus on Harold Pinter.

Notably absent from this list is the Eugene O’Neill Review. Given that I will publish an article for the “Practitioner’s Corner” while still at Texas Tech, I feel that it is most prudent to submit to as many leading journals as possible. In addition, my role as

Secretary/Treasurer for the Eugene O’Neill Society might be seen by some hiring committees as influencing the Review’s decisions to publish my work. Once I am in an academic position, I plan to publish per that university’s promotion and tenure processes.

Should I be privileged with a tenured position in the future, I plan to submit to the

Eugene O’Neill Review much more frequently.

Beyond these three most immediate concerns, I hope that the ideas (as well as the writing) within this dissertation lays a strong foundation for a book project that considers the ways in which Shakespeare’s legacy shaped and influenced twentieth-century

American drama. The first chapter of this book, focusing on O’Neill, will be based on my dissertation. Additional chapters could discuss Tennessee Williams, August Wilson,

Paula Vogel, Susan-Lori Parks, Taylor Mac, and Annie Baker. Rather than serve an

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Ghost Light

In his 2002 book The Haunted Stage: Theatre as Memory Machine, Marvin

Carlson observes that “audiences…use their memories of past performances of actors to orient themselves to the interplay of characters” (111). Carlson’s main point is that every theatrical experience, no matter how novel, recycles cultural memories and artistic techniques. It is impossible to approach a theatrical work naively: every performance, excepting the very first, responds to and relies upon its predecessors.

When Carlson turns his attention towards the work of Eugene O’Neill, he focuses primarily on the shifting and contradictory images of Shakespeare within the Tao House plays, as if the relationship between these two dramatists best typifies his notion of onstage ghosting. Carlson selects a moment from the 1971 production of Long Day’s

Journey Into Night starring Sir Laurence Olivier: when, in the role of Tyrone, Olivier speaks about Shakespeare — "I could have been a great Shakespearean actor, if I’d kept on” (CP3 809), for example — Carlson maintains that Oliver’s performance is “ghosted” to a remarkable degree. Olivier was one of the most beloved twentieth-century interpreters of Shakespeare’s plays. The character of Tyrone, when played by Olivier, is haunted by the historical James O’Neill as well as the legacy of Olivier, who is himself an embodiment of what Tyrone (and James O’Neill) failed to achieve. Struck by the manifold ways in which the real-life Olivier and the fictive Tyrone overlap, Carlson

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When the aging Olivier played the aging James Tyrone…he created an unforgettable moment when the miserly Tyrone climbs on the table to turn off an overhead light and pauses a moment, looking out into the audience with the light sharply defining his features. In that instant the fictive Tyrone achieved a stunning fusion with the awareness of Olivier as actor and as an index for the art of acting itself. (Carlson 92-3)

Carlson peels back the layers of Olivier’s previous roles, the previous performances of

James Tyrone by other actors, as well as the audience’s awareness of Olivier’s celebrity, to reveal that all these factors fuse within a single theatrical moment. He helps his readers to see the manifold manners in which an actor aligns with the text to create additional meaning that the text alone cannot communicate.

As I re-read Carlson’s book in preparation for this dissertation, two points about the Olivier-Tyrone connection leaped off the page. My first reaction was that of a scholar: Normand Berlin had written about this same performance (indeed, this same moment) in his 1994 article “Olivier’s Tyrone,” and, just like Carlson, was struck by the uncanny intersections between Sir Laurence and James Tyrone. Perhaps, I thought, Berlin had shaped Carlson’s thoughts as much as theatre theorists like Joseph Roach and

Herbert Blau. The second reaction was more artistic, instinctual and evocative. Nowhere in Carlson’s book did he mention a single, powerful object that, for me, symbolizes and embodies Carlson’s theories: the ghost light.

As anyone who has worked in a theatre knows, a ghost light is a single, exposed light bulb, housed inside a wire cage and mounted atop a light stand. Notoriously ugly

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Texas Tech University, Patrick Midgley, May 2021 and often shoddily constructed, ghost lights nevertheless serve a vital purpose: they burn all through the night, so that anyone who enters the theatre after a performance, legally or otherwise, will be able to see and avoid damaging the set or suffering an injury. But that, of course, is merely the official function of the ghost light. Unofficially, the crude fixtures are installed to comfort and appease the ghosts that haunt every theatre. Dark, empty stages can be eerie places, and thespians a superstitious lot. The ghost light is both a practical consideration and a charming tradition.

Despite any number of ghastly and ghoulish metaphors in The Haunted Stage,

Carlson never once mentions the apropos ghost light. And while I am loath to compare or contrast myself with one the world’s most eminent and esteemed theatre theorists, the omission underscores an important difference between us. Carlson’s time was mainly spent in packed theatres watching fully realized, live performances, and then at his desk, writing essays and reviews. My background as an actor, on the other hand, meant that most of my time was spent alone in empty theatres and rehearsal rooms poring over scripts, memorizing lines, and analyzing text.

Many people are surprised when I tell them that I spent far more time preparing for rehearsals than rehearsing, and more time rehearsing than performing. Acting can be a very lonely business. Ghost lights kept me company all throughout my career — so frequently, in fact, that I began to wonder if the “ghosts” these lights were designed to keep company might be the actors haunting the wings. I enjoyed those quiet moments backstage, endlessly repeating my lines, the ghost light my only companion. As Edmund says, and as I quite often felt, “it felt damned peaceful to be nothing more than a ghost within a ghost” (CP3 796).

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Carlson arrived at his theorizations by watching thousands of live performances.

But most of the insights I have generated here — Jamie’s rotating repertory in Long

Day’s Journey Into Night and A Moon for the Misbegotten, for example, or the connections between the willow refrain in The Iceman Cometh and Act 5 of

Shakespeare’s Othello — originate with the skills I developed as an actor. Actors understand text in a tangible, intimate, and often messily interconnected manner. Words, thoughts, and emotions are stitched together through the often hasty and highly subjective techniques of memorization — verbal cues, pneumonic devices, emotional triggers, physical actions, and evocative visualizations. Great actors internalize text to such an extent that it becomes nearly impossible, in the spectator’s mind, to divorce the actor from the words.

When Jamie/Jim uses Iago and Othello’s lines to both undermine and eulogize his father, he is working to understand him in the way an actor comes to understand a role.

The lines he chooses (“The Moor, I know his trumpet”; “It is the very error of the moon”) recur and morph across multiple plays, and his performances of them deepen as he grows in compassion, in emotional maturity, and in his awareness and acceptance of familial fate. Jamie/Jim goes from being a reluctant and vaguely embarrassed actor, more than a little ashamed of his father’s chosen profession who recites Shakespeare only to mock him, to a transformative actor who makes his audience experience Shakespeare’s words in an entirely new way. Part of the reason for this change in Jamie/Jim’s character is that he performs his own version of a rotating repertory between the roles of Iago and Othello, just as has father had in years past. Through repertory, Jamie/Jim comes to see both sides of his father’s past: he is infuriated but understands; he blames even as he forgives.

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There are two tragedies within Jim’s final recitation of Othello’s lines in A Moon for the Misbegotten. First, Jim and Josie will never reconcile. As deep as their connection may feel, it is created in the fog of drink and by the haze of regret. Like Jim, who remains the ghost within a ghost that his brother Edmund describes in A Long Day’s Journey Into

Night, their romance is phantasmic. But the understated power of Jim’s performance is just as tragic. Jim comes to understand his father too late. He forgives himself only after he assured his own destruction by drink. In the moment he emerges as an actor as great

(or perhaps greater) than his father, Jim also vanishes, like Prospero’s pageant, into thin air.

As he wrote, Eugene O’Neill did more than embed a glimpse of Shakespeare within the Tao House plays — he created his own personal and partial Shakespeare.

Expressed through the distinctly theatrical time signature or rotating repertory, the Tao

House Shakespeare is among the most fascinating, complex, and moving achievements in twentieth century American drama. But uncovering the Tao House Shakespeare is more than an exercise in theatrical appreciation or literary criticism: it is also a sterling example of how theatrical thinking creates its own layers of meaning. While the tools of textual analysis are required to grasp it, they are not enough. Ultimately, the Tao House

Shakespeare is best uncovered by an actor — after all, it was Olivier who, deliberately or not, created the tableau that helped Carlson discover his “index for the art of acting itself”

(Carlson 93).

As I transition into the next phase of my career, and, I hope, the next level of complexity and sophistication of my writing and research, I am heartened that the primary inspiration for my doctoral dissertation unites art with criticism and history with

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