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Sherlock Holmes
By Tom Ue, Jonathan Cranfield Intellect Ltd
Copyright © 2014 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78320-274-4
CHAPTER 1
Sherlock Holmes and Shakespeare
Tom Ue
->Early on in A Study in Scarlet (2003; Vol. I), Watson deftly sums up his first impression of Holmes's knowledge of literature with the word 'Nil', though, Watson allows, '[h]e appears to know every detail of every horror perpetuated in the century.' As Watson learns more about Holmes, many of his early impressions, like this, are put into question. Holmes's 'ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge' (emphasis added). He may not know the extremely influential nineteenth-century essayist, historian, novelist and social and political commentator Thomas Carlyle and his writing, yet Holmes's reading ranges widely from Petrarch's sonnets to Honoré de Balzac's and George Meredith's fiction, from miracle plays to Henry David Thoreau's journal, and from early English charters and Shakespeare's plays to criminal news, agony columns and the Newgate Calendar. Let us not forget 'Humpty Dumpty'. Holmes's reading provides a lens through which we can gain a whole new appreciation for both his stories and Conan Doyle's aesthetics, and as Tanya Agathocleous puts it,
Holmes' scientific outlook [...] is importantly allied with artistic experience – his tortured appreciation of the violin and his 'immense' knowledge of sensational literature prepare him for his crime-solving as well as, if not better than, his knowledge of either chemistry or the law.
Conan Doyle returns to Shakespeare time and again. In The Hound of the Baskervilles (2003; Vol. I), for example, the cabdriver, who carried the man dogging Sir Henry and Dr Mortimer, told the surprised Holmes and Watson that the man had given his name. 'Oh, he mentioned his name, did he? That was imprudent. What was the name that he mentioned?,' asked Holmes, as he 'cast a swift glance of triumph' at Watson. The cabman's response – that the man had claimed to be 'Mr. Sherlock Holmes' – moved the real Holmes into confessing defeat: 'A touch, Watson – an undeniable touch!' In a seemingly unrelated scene, in The Valley of Fear (Vol. II), Holmes interrupts Watson's periodic statement in which he identifies Professor Moriarty as a 'famous scientific criminal, as famous among crooks as [...] he is unknown to the public'. Although Watson's annoyed response at being interrupted for the second time that morning is not narrated to us on this occasion, it nevertheless leads Holmes to cry: 'A touch! A distinct touch! [...] You are developing a certain unexpected vein of pawky humour, Watson, against which I must learn to call myself.'
These two scenes share in common – besides Holmes's being proven wrong – a gesture to Hamlet and Laertes's fencing match in Act V Scene II of Hamlet, and a synthesis of Osric's identification of Hamlet's successful hit as 'A hit, a very palpable hit' and Laertes's of another as 'A touch, a touch, I do confess'. If, in the play, both Hamlet and Laertes fight a losing battle – Hamlet, because he little suspects that Laertes will fight with a sword that is not blunted and that he will coat it with poison; and Laertes, because he is used by Claudius – the sword touch, from Holmes's lips, is indicative of his mock and not his actual (much less mortal) defeat, as the appearance of both allusions in the early chapters of both mysteries would suggest. Holmes exaggerates his despondency and his defeat, and we are meant to respond to his comic resignation with a smile. Conan Doyle's parodies of the Danish prince here reveal a sophisticated command of his source material and the skill with which he rewrites and adapts Shakespeare freely and for different ends. The Victorians knew their Shakespeare. Conan Doyle experienced Shakespeare in a variety of formats including, quite possibly, H. M. Paget and Walter Paget's 1890 booklet Shakespeare Pictures and H. M.'s title page for The Graphic: An Illustrated Weekly Newspaper on 19 November 1892, which showed Ellen Terry as Cordelia and Henry Irving as Lear. In what follows, I will explore some of the numerous ways in which Shakespeare's writing affected Conan Doyle in his creation and writing of Sherlock Holmes and his stories. My aims are to put Conan Doyle's reading of Shakespeare at the heart of his own writing, while giving a glimpse of the literary and social debates at the turn of the nineteenth century with which he was actively engaged, and to show Conan Doyle and Holmes themselves as fans in their own right. This chapter is divided into three parts. The first examines Conan Doyle's views about the authorship question by analysing some of his nonfiction and his poetry. The second argues that drama informs both the narrative structure of Conan Doyle's short stories and Holmes's methods. The third examines how Conan Doyle rewrites Shakespeare through close readings of 'The Boscombe Valley Mystery' (Vol. I) and 'The Missing Three-Quarter'.
Conan Doyle and Shakespeare
Conan Doyle writes, in a letter to Charlotte Drummond, on 12 April 1888:
Poor old Shakespeare! I fear it is all up with him. Alas and alas for the good burghers of Stratford! Alas too and alas for the globe trotting Yankees who have come from the other end of the world to gaze upon the habitation of the man who did not write the plays! What a topsey-turveydom it is! There were many reasons before this to think that Bacon was the true author, but if the Cryptogram on being tested proves to be true it is simply conclusive. (original emphasis)
The Cryptogram refers to a system devised by Ignatius Donnelly, a Baconian whose thousand-page magnum opus The Great Cryptogram: Francis Bacon's Cipher in the So-Called Shakespeare Plays (1888) 'scores already familiar points about the illiteracy of Shakespeare and the profound learning (especially legal learning) displayed in the plays', notes Schoenbaum. More interesting is the sheer number of works that Donnelly attributes to Bacon:
This busy scribbler penned Montaigne's Essays, Burton's Anatomy, the numerous plays of Shakespeare apocrypha, a bit of Peele, and the whole Marlowe corpus. [...] [A]fter all, Donnelly calculates, if Bacon took time out from his public life and private studies to dash off a play every fortnight from 1581 to 1611 (why not?) he would have written "seven hundred and eighty plays!"'
The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown, 2004) pales in comparison with Donnelly's cipher, which he finds embedded in Parts 1 and 2 of Henry IV:
'A long, continuous narrative, running through many pages, detailing historical
events in a perfectly symmetrical, rhetorical, grammatical manner.' Such a narrative, 'always growing out of the same numbers, employed in the same way, and counting from the same, or similar starting-points cannot be otherwise than a prearranged arithmetical cipher.'
As Schoenbaum has revealed, The Great Cryptogram and its imperfect and, by no means, impartial mathematician were received by 'an ungrateful world [...] with disbelief, indifference, or laughter,' yet '[t]hat Donnelly's methods were loose and vulnerable only spurred on others to find the key that would break the code'. What is striking about these attempts to understand Shakespeare through cipher is a commitment to and a knowledge of Shakespeare the man and his work. The personal involvement and emotional investment of these late Victorians seem to suggest that in discovering the truth about Shakespeare, they will learn more about themselves, and that, on a more personal level, Shakespeare speaks to them.
Conan Doyle returns to the authorship question in his introduction, as chairman of the Authors' Club, to Sidney Lee, the prominent Shakespearian and editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, on 31 October 1910. He expresses his wish that Lee 'will not brush aside the Baconian hypothesis as unworthy of refutation, but will deal with it, however straitly'. Conan Doyle admits his own ambivalence when it comes to the authorship question:
I suppose it is the result of a perverse habit of always seeing the other side of a question, but I have found that an aggressive Shakespearian statement has usually inclined me to Bacon while an interview with a rabid Baconian has invariably brought me back to orthodoxy.
He proceeds to give an anecdote of a visitor armed with a facsimile of Ben Jonson's dedication in the folio:
He explains to me that if I took a root number and counted the letters backwards and then looked at them upside down – that was the general impression conveyed to my mind – I would always come on the number 1623 which was the year of publication. Since the year was printed on [the folio] and was never in dispute I confess I could not understand why the information should be conveyed in so roundabout a fashion. But when my instructor proceeded to point out that by some other juggle I could always get 1910, which proved that Jonson had foreseen that that was the year on which the mystery would be solved, I began to feel my faith in Shakespeare considerably fortified.
While it is likely that additional juggling of numbers would bring them to 2011, and possibly even to some combination of today's date, Conan Doyle admits that 'we must at least give [this gentleman] credit for the courage of his convictions' and, more importantly, that no matter who the writer of Shakespeare's works is, he remains 'the most wonder[ous] [sic] creative machine that the world has ever seen, the widest in its range of sympathy, the broadest in its emotions, the most dainty in its fancy, [and] the most felicitous in its choice of expression'. The more mature Conan Doyle, then, privileges Shakespeare's work over the man.
Conan Doyle refers to Shakespeare in two poems: 'H.M.S. "Foudroyant"' and 'Shakespeare's Expostulation'. He returns to the authorship question in the latter, a dramatic monologue in blank verse – the metre Shakespeare used most often – that was collected in his 1911 volume Songs of the Road. Made restless in his grave by 'crazy wrights' who insist that Bacon had authored Shakespeare's plays, the unnamed monologist of 'Expostulation' spells out and responds to the argument that Shakespeare could not have known all that he knows to write his plays. The speaker reasons that although he was denied learning in colleges, 'Yet may a hungry brain still find its food / Wherever books may lie or men may be.' He addresses the claim that Shakespeare was a college fellow:
If I be suspect, in that I was not
A fellow of a college, how, I pray,
Will Jonson pass, or Marlowe, or the rest,
Whose measured verse treads with as proud a gait
As that which was my own? Whence did they suck
This honey that they stored? Can you recite
The vantages which each of these has had
And I had not? Or is the argument
That my Lord Verulam [Bacon] hath written all,
And covers in his wide-embracing self
The stolen fame of twenty smaller men?
The recite-ability of Shakespeare's work is telling: most of us can recite a line or two from Hamlet without having read it. The centrality of recitation cannot be overstated: in the nineteenth-century, memorization and performance in school plays – often Shakespeare's – are central to the education system and poetry was generally meant to be read aloud. However, familiarity with Shakespeare's writing does not prove that it is written by the man himself, and this crux is made more prominent as the poem progresses. The speaker cites the 'want of learning' reflected in his writing as evidence that he is the author: 'Have I not traced / A seaboard to Bohemia, and made / The cannons roar a whole wide century / Before the first was forged?' And yet, his awareness of these factual errors need not suggest a lack of learning since he could very well have made them on purpose in an attempt to pass them as Shakespeare's. If these errors are made accidentally, they do not prove that Bacon did not make them. He says, of Bacon's now-discovered poems, 'You may read his verse, / And judge if mine be better or be worse: / Read and pronounce! The meed of praise is thine; / But still let his be his and mine be mine.' The speaker appeals to Jonson's epitaph and argues that their contemporaries 'must have smiled to see the marbled fraud' if indeed he is one, and he makes a final plea: 'My brow shall speak when Shakespeare's voice is dumb, / And be his warrant in an age to come.' If the speaker's argument seems suspect since images of his forehead prove nothing, since he never identifies himself as Shakespeare, and since he does not claim Shakespeare's voice as his own in the lines quoted above, the monologue as a whole only raises questions about what it seeks to prove: we are uncertain who the speaker is. Indeed, the poem's very title is precariously unclear about whether it is Shakespeare protesting or a protest made on his behalf.
Sherlock Holmes and drama
As in Conan Doyle's poem, the Sherlock Holmes canon is a site of negotiations. Holmes's home, The Strand Magazine, is a middle-class-oriented monthly of immense popularity from its inaugural issue in January 1891 to its final in March 1950. Priced at sixpence – significantly less than most established journals and more than the penny papers, as noted by Wiltse – it is distinct from the yellow-backed novels for which Watson has developed such aversion in 'The Boscombe Valley Mystery'. As Wiltse suggests, thematically, Conan Doyle's stories reflect this middle ground for literature: they occupy a liminal position that defines itself against
both the 'low' culture, [composed of] true crime narratives so popular throughout the nineteenth century, and [...] the 'fantastic' detective tales that Holmes scorns when Watson tries to compare his own newly minted professional specialty to the activities of Poe's Dupin and Gaboriau's Lecoq.
Holmes tells Watson:
If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generation, and leading to the most outré results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.
Here, Holmes draws on the first of Hamlet's soliloquies in the passage. In Act I Scene II, he rails – 'O God, O God, / How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable / Seem to me all the uses of this world!' – against his mother Gertrude's and, more generally, woman's infidelity. Ed Wiltse connects Holmes to Hamlet. '[T]he final allusion to Hamlet,' for Wiltse
that other alienated, hyper-ratiocinative bachelor, that other man who knew too much, at once reinforces Holmes's disconnection from the normative social 'conventionalities' he is purported to police, and reminds us that unlike Hamlet, Holmes gets away with his mad behaviors.
What Hamlet sees as immoral in Denmark – the severity of which is shown to us by the sheer panic of the sentinels at the start of the play – and, more importantly, what he tries to rectify, Holmes sees as the limits of literary realism. Watson largely agrees with Holmes's desire for realism, as we may infer from his dismissal of a yellow-backed novel in 'The Boscombe Valley Mystery'. His criticism betrays his preoccupation with story:
The puny plot of the story was so thin, however, when compared to the deep mystery through which we were groping, and I found my attention wander so continually from the fiction to the fact, that I at last flung it across the room and gave myself up entirely to a consideration of the events of the day.
Holmes criticizes Watson's writing time and again. In response to Watson's write-up of A Study in Scarlet, for example, Holmes tells him in The Sign of Four (Vol. I):
Some facts should be suppressed, or, at least, a just sense of proportion should be observed in treating them. The only point in the case which deserved mention was the curious analytical reasoning from effects to causes, by which I succeed in un-ravelling it.
It is only when Holmes comes to write his own stories in 'The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier' and in 'The Adventure of the Lion's Mane' (Vol. II), that he recognizes the need to covet the reader's interest, and that 'had [Watson] but been with [him] [...] he might have made [much] of so wonderful a happening and of [Holmes's] eventual triumph against every difficulty!' ('The Adventure of the Lion's Mane'). Watson is understandably hurt by Holmes's vocal and predominantly unflattering criticism, as he protests in The Sign of Four:
I was annoyed at this criticism of a work [A Study in Scarlet] which had been specifically designed to please him. I confess, too, that I was irritated by the egotism which seemed to demand that every line of my pamphlet should be devoted to his own special doings. More than once during the years that I had lived with him in Baker Street I had observed that a small vanity underlay my companion's quiet and didactic manner.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Sherlock Holmes by Tom Ue, Jonathan Cranfield. Copyright © 2014 Intellect Ltd. Excerpted by permission of Intellect Ltd.
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