SHAKSPER 2000: Roth on Verse

From: Hardy M. Cook (editor@ws.bowiestate.edu)
Date: 12/11/00 

The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 11.2297  Monday, 10 December 2000

From:           Werner Brönnimann <Werner.Broennimann@unibas.ch>
Date:           Saturday, 09 Dec 2000 17:52:08 +0000
Subject:        Roth on Verse

In Philip Roth's "I Married a Communist", p. 302, we can find a detailed
analysis of the insistent and obsessive afterlife of Shakespearean
sounds:

'And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.'  Line of
prose.  Recogonize it?  From the last act of Twelfth Night.  Feste the
clown, to Malvolio, just before Feste sings that lovely song, before he
sings, 'A great while ago the world begun, / With hey ho, the wind and
the rain,' and the play is over.  I couldn't get that line out of my
head.  'And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.'  Those
cryptogrammic g's, the subtlety of their deintenisification--those hard
g's in 'whirligig' followed by the nasalized g of 'brings' followed by
the soft g of 'revenges.'  Those terminal s's..., thus brings his
revenges.  The hissing surprise of the plural noun 'revenges.'  Guhh.
Juhh.  Zuhh.  Consonants sticking into me like needles.  And the
pulsating vowels, the rising tide of their pitch--engulfed by that.  The
low-pitched vowels giving way to the high-pitched vowels.  The bass and
tenor vowels giving way to the alto vowels.  The assertive lengthening
of the vowel i just before the rhythm shifts from iambic to trochaic and
the prose pounds round the turn for the  stretch.  Short i, short i,
long i. Short i, short i, short i, boom!  Revenges.  Brings in his
revenges.  HIS revenges.  Sibilated.  Hizzzzzuh!  Driving back to Newark
with Ira's weapons in my car, those ten words, the phonetic webbing, the
blanket omniscience... I felt I was being aspyhxiated inside
Shakespeare.

Going out for air,
Werner Brönnimann
Basel U


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