A Shakespeare Joke in The Dick Van Dyke Show

“Buddy, Can You Spare a Job?” By Walter Kempley. Perf. Dick Van Dyke, Mary Tyler Moore, Rose Marie, Richard Deacon, and Lennie Weinrib. Dir. James Komack. The Dick Van Dyke Show. Season 1, episode 14. CBS. 26 December 1961. DVD. Allied Vaughn, 2023.

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In this episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show, Buddy Sorrell, one of the writers for the show-within-the-show (there's some Shakespeare right there, as a matter of fact), has arranged to be let go from The Alan Brady Show. Mel Cooley, who's the producer in charge of the writing staff, is only too happy to see the back of him. Mel is sick of Buddy's (probably mostly good-natured) insults. But (because of a series of plot complications) Buddy wants—needs, really—his job back. 

Rob and Sally, the remaining writers, decide that the only way to get Mel to re-hire Buddy is to attempt to hire a writer who is even more insulting to Mel than Buddy ever was.

Here's how that plays out:

The idea of someone claiming—seriously or not—that they've been engaged over the past two years in translating Shakespeare into Pig Latin is priceless. And the rest of the scene is likewise a comic masterpiece.

I'll keep you updated on any further Shakespeare that I find!

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Links: The Episode at IMDB.

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The First Feature-Length Hamlet

Hamlet. Dir. Hay Plumb. Perf. Sir J. Forbes-Robertson, Miss Gertrude Elliot, and the Full Drury Lane Company. 1913. On-line video [available to those in the UK on the BFI Player]. Hepworth.

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Cowboy Junkies. "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry." The Trinity Session. Compact Disc. Latent Recordings, 1988. 

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I'm still fascinated by silent Shakespeares, and I was thrilled when I found that the first feature-length silent Hamlet became available.

"Feature length," for early silent films, means approaching one hour. 

Imagine trying to convey the depth and breadth of one of Shakespeare's masterpieces in less than an hour and without any complete speeches! Such a production, which must depend on prior knowledge of the play, could easily become not much more than the CliffsNotes version of the play. I had a Shakespeare professor who was fond of talking about a five-minute silent film version of Hamlet. He used the anecdote to illustrate what Horatio's account of the events of the play must have been like:

                                   So shall you hear
Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,
Of deaths put on my cunning and [forc'd] cause,
And in this upshot, purposes mistook
Fall'n on th' inventors' heads: all this can I
Truly deliver. (V.ii.380–86)

A five-minute silent Hamlet, he argued, might not even do as much as that.

The 1913 Hay Plumb Hamlet does significantly more, but, I think, only for those who have more than a passing familiarity with the play. The title cards, for example, mainly start us off with the first line or two of a scene or a soliloquy and leave the audience to run with it.

Still, even with that limitation, it's a powerful adaptation of the play. It opens with brief portrayals of Hamlet and Ophelia, each with what might be considered a representative line, and then it throws us in to the world of the play.

Taking those two brief, almost dumb-showesque scenes as my cue, I've put together a (roughly) five-minute sampling of the film. Note: The film itself is widely available on the internet, but none of the versions I've seen have supplied any soundtrack. I've rectified this with a song by the Cowboy Junkies (I happened to be listening to it while editing the clip, and it happened to be just the right length—and also to fit the melancholy mood of the play.

That should give you a sense of the film and its approach to the Hamlet / Ophelia relationship. 

I'm particularly fond of the most famous speech in Shakespeare boiled down to a one-line title card. But, in this setting at least, that's enough. 

And we learn (via title card) that "Hamlet discovers the King behind the curtain"—without any mention of Polonius. That emphasis means that we don't get a "Where's your father?" title card . . . and that we just jump straight to "Get thee to a nunnery." 

The film is worth watching in its entirety. Indeed, I'm working on ways to bring it in to my current Shakespeare and Film course!

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Links: The Film at IMDB. The Film on the BFI Player (for those in the UK).

Bonus Image: The Best-Known Title Card from the Play:

C. S. Lewis on Hamlet

Lewis, C. S. "Hamlet: The Prince or the Poem?" In Selected Literary Essays, edited by Walter Hooper. Cambridge University Press, 1969.

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In the circles in which I teach, we joke about increasing enrollment in courses simply by adding ". . . and Lewis" to the course title. "T. S. Eliot and D. L. Sayers . . . and C. S. Lewis" or "British Literature to 1798 . . . and C. S. Lewis" or "Contemporary Non-Western Literature . . . and C. S. Lewis" will almost certainly get more students.

Lewis is a remarkable writer on Medieval English literature—his Allegory of Love is particularly admirable—and non-dramatic English Renaissance literature (his English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama is tremendous). 

But when it comes to Shakespeare, I'm not altogether convinced. I've tried multiple times to read Hamlet: The Prince or the Poem?—the Shakespeare lecture he gave to the British Academy on Shakespeare's Birthday Eve in 1942—and I find it less than compelling and not altogether useful.

But perhaps I am too much embedded in those elements of the academy that Lewis is critiquing.

The work starts off well enough—Lewis is critiquing the current state of criticism on Hamlet: 

All of that is well and good—if not entirely fair. It's true that T. S. Eliot's 1920 "Hamlet and his Problems" argued that Hamlet, lacking an "Objective Correlative" is "most certainly an artistic failure." Here's the relevant passage from Eliot:

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. If you examine any of Shakespeare’s more successful tragedies, you will find this exact equivalence; you will find that the state of mind of Lady Macbeth walking in her sleep has been communicated to you by a skillful accumulation of imagined sensory impressions; the words of Macbeth on hearing of his wife’s death strike us as if, given the sequence of events, these words were automatically released by the last event in the series. The artistic “inevitability” lies in this complete adequacy of the external to the emotion; and this is precisely what is deficient in Hamlet.

 

I do appreciate Lewis' argument that we can find ourselves convinced by that argument—until we read or see the play again. But I don't think critics are paralyzed by the thought of their being multiple Hamlets in multiple Hamlets. 

Lewis' conclusion is better—but still, somehow, inadequate. He wants the critics to get out of the way of the play—to read the play with a sense of childlike wonder:

Although I entirely sympathize with this view of Gulliver's Travels, I'm not sure how far this takes us. Is it an admonition to us as teachers not to demand a specific reading of Hamlet? Is it advice to us as readers to get caught up in the imaginative world of the play? Is it something remarkably profound and life-altering that I just don't get?

I welcome the direction of those who know more about Lewis and Shakespeare than I.

 

Update: The article "Hamlet in Narnia" opens some interesting doors on this subject (Sarah R. A. Walters, "Hamlet in Narnia: The Prince and the Poem in Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia," Mythlore: A Journal of J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature 43, no. 1 (2024): 41–64).

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Julie Taymor's Midsummer Night's Dream

A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Dir. Julie Taymor. Perf. Kathryn Hunter, David Harewood, Tina Benko, Max Casella, Zach Appelman, Brendan Averett, Roger Clark, Lilly Englert, Hermia, Joe Grifasi, Jake Horowitz, Z Infante, Robert Langdon Lloyd, Mandi Masden, Helena, Jacob Ming-Trent, Okwui Okpokwasili, and William Youmans. 2014. Blu-ray. Kino Lorber, 2014.

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I put off watching Julie Taymor's Midsummer Night's Dream far too long. I knew that it would be visually interesting, but I did not realize it would be stellar in nearly every aspect—from its conception to its acting to its deep understanding of the play.

I don't think I could do better than to show you some representative scenes.  

In this scene, we meet the rude mechanicals and get some sense of the stage Taymor has at her disposal:

Here's where the lyricism of Shakespeare's poetry beautifully harmonizes with the visual effects Taymor uses:

And I showed you that first scene to show you this. You have a sense of Bottom; now see Bottom translated:

It's quite a remarkable transformation—and a great piece of stage technology.

I wish I could show you the rest of the show. Puck is wild and wonderful. The woods outside Athens is created with dozens of poles that are manipulated by the actors in a terrific choreography. Francis Flute's final speech as Thisbe is remarkably moving—delivered by an excellent actor who had been playing a terrible actor and who then becomes a very good actor.

Track it down—the show bears watching and re-watching.

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Links: The Film at IMDB.

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Book Note: The Quality of Mercy

Kellerman, Faye. The Quality of Mercy. Fawcett Crest, 1989.

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Note: I have not made it through this novel. And the more often I start over from the beginning, the less likely it seems that I will ever finish it. I keep getting to "Reproach me not" shortly followed by "I know not" and finding a singular lack of the momentum needed to carry on. 

I came across Faye Kellerman's Quality of Mercy in various sources while preparing my Mystery and Detective Fiction course. But I've seldom found a Shakespeare-related novel that failed to grip as much as this one.

It starts off immediately after the funeral of the murdered famous actor Harry Whitman, and Shakespeare, one of the few mourners, provides the point of view. 

Let me give you the opening few pages to give you a flavor:

I'm quite curious to know how many of you want to read on after that—and how many of you even made it that far.

The blurb on the back of the edition I read will let you know something about what to expect next:

If anyone has insight into the novel, let me know, but I don't think I'll make any further investment (unless an audiobook version turns up somewhere).

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What's a Montjoy?

The Song of Roland. Translated by Dorothy L. Sayers. Penguin Books, 1957.

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Shakespeare, William. King Henry V. Ed. T. W. Craik. Arden Shakespeare. Third Series. Methuen Drama, 1995.

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In my seemingly never-ending quest to read everything Dorothy L. Sayers ever wrote, I finally came to her marvelous translation of the anonymous Song of Roland, an epic poem in Old French from around the eleventh century.

The story is thrilling and the history of the events it relays is fascinating.  And Sayers' notes and translation are astonishing.

It's also very funny at times. The last line of a given stanza is often a corporate response, and I think they're mostly hilarious. Observe:

Quoth Blancandrin . . . .

"Better their heads should fall into their laps

Than that fair Spain should fall from out our hands,

And we should suffer grave losses and mishap."

The Paynims say: "There is some truth in that."  [Stanza 4, page 53]

And . . .

"If you contrive this treaty to arrange,

Of gold and silver I'll give you goodly weight,

And lands and fiefs as much as heart can crave."

The Paynims answer: "That will be ample pay."  [Stanza 5, pages 53–54]

Or the last line sometimes has a quick understatement / summary of action, as when a number of knights (in essence) are making proposals to Marsilion and we learn who gets the glove of approval:

"I'll set Spain free, unloosing of her bonds

From Gate of Spain to Durstant and beyond.

Charles will lose heart, the French will yield anon,

You shall be quit of wars your whole life long."

He gets the glove from King Marsilion. [Stanza 69, pages 85–86]

In addition, the used copy I read was annotated, emended, and illustrated by (most likely) a slightly-bored high school student. The most amusing change Eric made (his name is on the flyleaf) was changing the name of Duke Naimon to "Duke Nukem."

But I haven't gotten to the Shakespeare connection (which is, I admit, oblique). As the French go into battle, they often cry "Mountjoy!" or "Mountjoy St. Dennis!" and it reminded me of the only Mountjoy I knew: Montjoy, The French Herald from Shakespeare's Henry V. Here's where I learned what the word meant around the year 1100:

That seems to be in line with the word when it finally entered English as montjoy in 1653 (according to the OED):

What, then, does Shakespeare mean by Montjoy? Every time I had read Henry V before reading Song of Roland, I had assumed that it was a name: "Dr. Jones? Have you met Mr. and Mrs. Montjoy yet?" 

With my mind opened to other possibilities, I checked the notes to the Arden edition. In the "List of Roles," I learned that Montjoy's "name is titular, not personal." And in Act III, scene vi, I found this note:

I find that fascinating! It's also fascinating to note that Kenneth Branagh's film version of Henry V replaces the "Ambassador" who brings Henry tennis balls in Act I with the Montjoy who first appears in Act II of Shakespeare's play.

But that's not all! Dorothy L. Sayers herself brings Shakespeare in with a note to Stanza 114:

Naturally, we now need to head over to Venus and Adonis (from William Shakespeare, The Poems, ed. F. T. Prince (Arden Shakespeare, 2000):

The note to lines 295–98 is priceless. It also takes us to Virgil's Georgics.

But I'm going to call it a day, leaving that as an exercise to the reader.

In short, ain't it marvelous what we can learn from Shakespeare and how what we learn elsewhere can take us back to Shakespeare?

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Hamlet in The Dick Van Dyke Show

“Washington vs. the Bunny.” By Carl Reiner. Perf. Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore. Dir. John Rich. The Dick Van Dyke Show. Season 1, episode 4. CBS. 24 October 1961. DVD. Allied Vaughn, 2023.

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I've only seen occasional episodes and (more often) clips of The Dick Van Dyke Show. But I'm trying to remedy this deficiency.

And you're all well-aware that, as I do so, I'll be looking for the Shakespeare.

In an early episode, Rob and Laura Petrie are discussing Rob's family duties—a work trip is going to prevent him from seeing little Ritchie's school play.

That's when we learn about the only other school play that Rob has missed in the past:

I like the idea that Hamlet is the one role that Rob can miss. All that play boils down to, really, is a guy holding a skull.

Later, there's a dream sequence where Dick Van Dyke uses his extraordinary physicality to dance like a marionette on the end of Mary Tyler Moore's strings. I wish I could consider that a version of the play-within-the-play in Hamlet, but that would be stretching it.

The Hamlet reference is a small moment, but one should always leave them wanting more, shouldn't one? I'll keep my eyes open.

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Links: The Episode at IMDB.

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Five Words from Macbeth in an Episode of Deep Space Nine

“Sons of Mogh.” By Ronald D. Moore. Perf. Tony Todd and Michael Dorn. Dir. David Livingson. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Season 4, episode 14. Syndicated television. 12 February 1996. DVD. Paramount Pictures Home Entertainment, 2021.

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[Note: The five words in the image here aren't the five I'm talking about. Let's just keep the suspense for a little while.]

With the Shakespeare Radar™ turned on, I've been re-watching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

But I freely admit that it may be too sensitive. Are these five words, unquestionably found in Macbeth in this exact sequence, deliberately and purposefully quoted? Or is it mere coincidence? [Note: All right. I admit it. In the play, two of the words are contracted, so it's technically four words in the play and a five-word misquotation in the episode.]

Perhaps you will agree to be the judge:

In Act III, Lady Macbeth says, "Things without all remedy / Should be without regard: What's done, is done" (III.ii.11–12). Here, Worf gives us a very close paraphrase. 

Unfortunately, I can't find any genuine connection between the plot of the episode and the plot of Shakespeare's play.  We don't even get the variant "What's done cannot be undone" (V.I.68) that Lady Macbeth utters when she's sleepwalking.

But I'll keep watching, hoping to find any further (and deeper) connections between Shakespeare and Star Trek.

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Links: The Episode at IMDB.

For more connections between Star Trek and Shakespeare, head to Shakespeare and Star Trek Complete.

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The 2026 Macbeth at the Guthrie Theatre

Macbeth. Dir. Joe Dowling. Perf. John Catron, Regina Marie Williams, Sun Mee Chomet, Bill McCallum, Daniel Petzold, Pierce Brown, James A. Williams, Michelle O'Neill, Daniel José Molina, Meghan Kriedler, Peter Christian Hansen, Charles Foster, Kaden Hesser, and David Michaeli. Guthrie Theatre Company. Minneapolis. 31 January—22 March 2026.

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This is far more on the side of "Just Go See It" than "Here's my Review."

The essence is that Joe Dowling is once again directing a production of Macbeth at the Guthrie Theatre—and it shouldn't be missed.

Dowling last directed Macbeth at the Guthrie in 2010 (for which, q.v.). The 2026 production is much more sparse—but simple doesn't mean simplistic. This production is complex and deeply moving.

Part of that is the production's thoughtful use of the stage.

The Guthrie's stage is very deep, but that deep expanse is not often used. A couple of production stills will illustrate that best.

In this image, we see a narrow band of light between two walls:

But those walls can move to open up the vast expanse of the stage:

The show itself has a lot of humor and a lot of humanity. When Macbeth can laugh at himself, it's hard not to have at least some sympathy for him—even though he's making a ton of mistakes.

One place where that happens is at the end of the banquet scene. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth both acknowledge that the party could have gone better. Lady Macbeth seems to internalize that disaster while Macbeth tries his best to shrug it off at look forward. This image captures that:

There's lots more to say, but I really just want to get this out there so everyone knows about the production and can get tickets before it closes on March 22.

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Links: Tickets for the show.

A Midsummer Night's Dream at University of Northwestern—St. Paul

A Midsummer Night's Dream. Dir. Jennifer Hunter. Perf. Roman Bock, Khya Boldt, Solveig Booth, Noah Carlson, Kylie Clark, Jane Dalida, Sophia Danielson, Rebekah Dobbs, Sydney Foss, Kaila Fremling, Serenna Hartsock, Amber Hayton, Caleb Hight, Ava Hunter, Krister Kahl, Trinia Kroll, Janae Krueger, Carter Lambert, Katherine Lawrence, Olivia Lundberg, Eva Manrodt, Abigail Marshall, Juan Mendoza, Eli Murphy, Derek Penner, Alaina Posavad, Cassidy Ritzema, Danny Showalter, Katie Simon, Serenity Smith, and Marie Urquia. University of Northwestern Theatre. St. Paul. 20 to 28 February 2026.

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It's been over ten years since University of Northwestern put on that production of A Midsummer Night's Dream with the terrific Philostrate (for which, q.v.). 

But a new production will open in two weeks! The promotional material welcomes us to "to a steampunk-inspired dreamworld, where steam power meets fairy power, and nothing is as it seems."

I'm excited to see precisely what that means, but I have great faith in the director (and adaptor), Professor Jennifer Hunter, and in all the fine actors and students involved.

For now, here's a brief behind-the-scenes video the production has released:

All that remains is for you to join the audience. I'll see you there!

Update: The Opening Night Video:

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Links: Ticket Sales.

Note: Should the embedded videos above go sour, here are blog-native versions:

 

Book Note: Guilty by Definition

Dent, Susie. Guilty by Definition. Sourcebooks Landmark, 2025.

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Guilty by Definition was published too recently to be considered as part of my Mystery and Detective Fiction course, but it would probably have made it in as a student selective rather than a required text. In creating a world with imagined Shakespeare-related artifacts, it would serve as a fair companion to Ngaio Marsh's Death at the Dolphin (for which, q.v.). But it isn't quite as tightly plotted or filled with carefully-delineated characters.

Since this book is so recent, I'll be even more careful to avoid spoilers. But if you get ten pages in, you'll find out that anonymous letters with quotes from Shakespeare have started arriving at the offices of a major historical dictionary, perplexing and challenging the employees. Here's the first such letter and a bit of the reaction to it: 

This establishes the pattern: A cryptic message arrives, the office starts to take it apart, some time passes (to give readers a chance to solve it, too), and then the solution is given. One of the flaws of the novel is that the pattern soon becomes formulaic. 

Nonetheless, word enthusiasts, Shakespeare aficionados, and mystery lovers can enjoy this novel—even if there's little or no overlap in the Venn Diagram of those audiences. And there's a Shakespeare-related item that figures largely—but I'll leave it to you to read the book and find out that part.

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Book Note: A Taste for Death by P. D. James and its Puzzling Use of "Shakespeare"

James, P. D. A Taste for Death. Alfred A. Knopf, 1986.

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As P. D. James novels go, this isn't in my top ten. The mystery is pretty good, but it becomes a not-altogether-successful mashup of the detective genre and the suspense / thriller. It could be reduced by a third and be all the more compelling for it. It's her tenth novel, and it may be that her editors were reluctant to stand up to such an established novelist.

The editors may also have missed something—though that's not certain. And that brings us to the Shakespeare puzzle at the heart of the novel.

A Taste for Death introduces the character of Inspector Kate Miskin, a promising detective intent on rising through the ranks. She was raised by her grandmother after her mother died. Late in the novel [spoiler alert], we learn that her absent father was a policeman who had a wife and two kids (and who was killed in a car accident in the line of duty some time earlier).

As we learn about Inspector Miskin's determination to succeed, we are presented with a Shakespeare quote as something of an origin story (p. 151):

The problem is that Shakespeare didn't write that.

For ease of reference, here's the text of the "Shakespeare" quote:

What matters it what went before or after,

Now with myself I will begin and end. 

When they don't assert that it's a Shakespeare quote, sources on the internet will definitively state that it comes from John Webster's The White Devil, and if they mean that it's a paraphrase of a few lines in that play, they're right. My edition—edited by John Russel Brown, The Revels Plays (Methuen, 1960), gives us this exchange between Vittoria and Flamieno, both fatally wounded by an avenger:

Vittoria
My soul, like to a ship in a black storm,
Is driven I know not whither. 

Flamineo
                            Then cast anchor.
Prosperity doth bewitch men seeming clear,
But seas do laugh, show white, when rocks are near.
We cease to grieve, cease to be Fortune’s slaves,
Nay cease to die by dying. Art thou gone?
And thou so near the bottom?—false report
Which says that women vie with the nine Muses 
For nine tough durable lives: I do not look
Who went before, nor who shall follow me;
No, at myself I will begin and end:
While we look up to heaven, we confound
Knowledge with knowledge. O I am in a mist!

Vittoria
Oh, happy they that never saw the court,
Nor ever knew great men but by report! [Vittoria dies.] (V.vi.248–62)

Flamieno makes a final speech and then dies as well.

That solves the puzzle of the quotation's (really, the paraphrase's) origin. But the puzzle of its misattribution to Shakespeare remains.

P. D. James knew her Shakespeare and her Webster quite well. We just saw her careful use of quotations by both authors in her Skull Beneath the Skin (for which, q.v.). Is this a case of Homer nodding (in which case, Homer's editor also nodded)? Or did James misattribute the quote (and also paraphrase it instead of quoting it directly) on purpose? In that case, the ideal editor would have drawn her attention to it and confirmed that the "mistake" is no mistake at all but a purposeful, intentional slip.

The novel introduces the lines as "Two half-remembered lines of Shakespeare" from Inspector Miskin's perspective. That may point toward the intentionality behind the misattribution. They're half-remembered (i.e., paraphrased), and their author is also misremembered.

I'm at a bit of a loss to understand the reason(s) for doing so, though I am much more inclined to give credit to James for knowing her Shakespeare and Webster (and extending that credit to her editor) than to say that she erred.

Perhaps it's a subtle way of undermining the character of Inspector Miskin. If her life philosophy is based on a misattributed misquotation, perhaps that brings her pursuit of her vocation into question as well.

I haven't found any published scholarship on the issue. In Susan Baker's "Comic Material: 'Shakespeare' in the Classic Detective Story" (in Acting Funny: Comic Theory and Practice in Shakespeare's Plays, ed. Francis Teague (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1994), 164–179), the passage is treated as if it were Shakespeare—the question of its actual origin doesn't arise. We're just told that "Shakespeare is crucial to Kate's upward mobility" (168). 

Let's go back to the other Shakespearean elements in the novel.

One of the murder victims is named Paul Berowne, and the name's connection of Love's Labour's Lost is made clear in the course of the novel itself. Miskin's boyfriend is the one to call our collective attention to it (p. 155):

[Note: Major Spoilers Follow]

Miskin uses this newly-gained information to send a message of distress when she and her grandmother are being held at gunpoint by the murderer. She calls her boyfriend—ostensibly to cancel a dinner engagement for that evening (p. 437):

The murderer does become suspicious, but I'm not sure he has much greater familiarity with Shakespeare than Inspector Miskin (p. 445):

Looking at my bookshelves, it's hard to get in the mindset of "You already have one complete Shakespeare; why would you need an edition of just one of the plays?"

All in all, it's not a terrific novel. Though this final use of Shakespeare is nicely done, I remain confused about the non-Shakespeare non-quote early on.

I'm currently reading (and, in some cases, re-reading) the P. D. James novels, and I may get a better sense of this novel's use of Shakespeare with Kate Miskin's characters as I read on. Stay tuned.

Update:

Reading forward in the P. D. James canon, I find that the quote re-appears in A Certain Justice. Late in the novel (on page 195, to be precise), Kate Miskin is pondering her life choices, and she reminds herself of her philosophy:

Here, then, we have more ambiguity about the quote's origin—now it's "never identified." 

I have more reading to do, but is it too much to imagine that we're taking the slow boat from thinking the quote is by Shakespeare to being uncertain to realizing it's a paraphrase to pinpointing its precise origin in John Webster's The White Devil, V.vi.256–58, in the quote "I do not look / Who went before, nor who shall follow me; / No, at myself I will begin and end"? 

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Bonus Images: The Relevant Speeches (and some additional context) from The White Devil:

Bonus Bonus Image: Footnote to "lions i' th' Tower" from the New Mermaids edition

(slightly more relevant if I'd posted this yesterday . . . Groundhog day):

Book Note: The Skull Beneath the Skin by P. D. James

James, P. D. The Skull Beneath the Skin. Charles Scribner's Sons, 1982.

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Since I started teaching my Mystery and Detective Fiction course, I've been slowly making my way through the corpus (ha!) of P. D. James. I had read a few intermittently through the year with varying degrees of enjoyment.

Teaching An Unsuitable Job for a Women, the novel that introduces the Private Investigator Cordelia Gray, in the course gave me a renewed interest in James' novel (though I'm still finding that the quality varies considerably.

All that brings us to the second (and only other) Cordelia Gray novel.

And it's showing up here because of all the Shakespeare.

Like Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, James frequently invokes Shakespeare and other authors of the English Renaissance. In The Skull Beneath the Skin, she does so more frequently and to greater effect than elsewhere.

The novel starts with T. S. Eliot's famous line about the playwright John Webster (c. 1578 to c. 1632):

And then the novel takes us straight in to its use of Webster, Shakespeare, and others. On pages 11 to 13, we learn that a well-known actress has been receiving threatening message and that the messages all come from plays in which the actress has played a role:

The quotations are respectively from Measure for Measure, The Tempest, Othello, Hamlet, and Webster's The Devil's Law Case.

The context for that last one may not be known to everyone, but it's interesting, particularly in light of the opening quote from Measure for Measure. In Shakespeare's play, Claudio, condemned to die, is comforted by a Friar (really the Duke of Vienna in disguise), and he seems to take it to heart—and then delivers the speech quoted above to his sister. In The Devil's Law Case, a monk comes to Romelio, who may die in a forthcoming duel, and he offers those lines before presenting a masque with two coffins:

John Webster, The Devil's Law Case, ed. Elizabeth M. Brennan (Ernest Benn, 1975), V.iv.102–08.

But, instead of being moved to consider his own mortality more seriously, he locks the monk in an inner room to stop the monk pestering him.

Moving ahead in James' novel (though still without major spoilers), we find another set of threatening quotations on pages 52 and 53:

That adds one White Devil (and, according to the New Mermaids edition I have, Cordelia is right about the comma), two Doctors Faustus, an Antony and Cleopatra and a 3 Henry VI.

And there are many more throughout the novel—in addition to the rehearsals for a performance of John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi.

Those elements are the fun part of the novel. As to the rest, it's fairly disappointing. The novel could easily be reduced by a third and made all the better and all the more effective for it.

Still, you can safely put this on your gift list for the Early Modern Scholars in your life (or your own list if you happen to be one yourself).

Note: This Book Note will help form the framework for a later post on a Shakespearean puzzle in a different P. D. James novel. Stay tuned!

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