"To Admire and Do Otherwise": Hopkins's Modified Translations of Shakespeare's Casket Song.

Classical studies formed the core of Gerard Manley Hopkins's curriculum at Oxford, and Hopkins and his peers spent a considerable amount of time translating from and composing in Greek and Latin. To demonstrate a command of verse for the Moderations examination in literae humaniores, for example, students translated English verse into Latin hexameters, elegiacs, and lyrics and into "Greek iambics, hexameters, comic verse, and anapests" (Ox. Ess., p. 76). Several graduates then went on to publish translations of Virgil or Livy, while those with particular skill navigating the classical languages displayed their knowledge by publishing English lyrics translated into Greek and Latin. The best of these also attempted to do so with Shakespearian verse. (1) Hopkins himself was asked to translate "Sonnet 32" into Latin elegiacs for his Moderations examinations during the Michaelmas term of 1864 (PW, p. 467).

Nevertheless, when Hopkins composed a string of translations of Shakespeare's songs, including Greek and Latin variations of Portia's "casket song" ("Tell me where is Fancy bred") from The Merchant of Venice (3.2.63-72) two decades later in 1886, he was hardly completing an exam exercise. Although he was certainly grading plenty of classics exams at the time for the Royal University of Ireland, his own compositions display a facility with classical verse forms exceeding that of the pedagogical exercise. (2) Not only did Hopkins use obscure and even inventive Latin and Attic forms, but he also significantly altered the forms of Shakespeare's songs in more than one instance as he set them in the classical languages. Hopkins's version of "Tell me where is Fancy bred" is a text in translation alive to the possibilities within Shakespearian verse for poetic play. Hopkins's translations from English into Greek and Latin, therefore, serve as a sketch pad for some of his experiments in poetic form outside the confines of English prosody. Examining Hopkins's adaptive translations as more than merely studies in metrics, this essay considers how Hopkins's additional lines in his Latin verse underscore the ironic tragedy of love's death and how his Greek variant clarifies Shakespeare's ambiguous voices in the song from The Merchant of Venice. In light of Annmarie Drury's recent work on the relationship between Victorian poetic translation and experimentation, Hopkins's texts prove an important case study. Rather than transferring an artistic artifact out of its native language and into English, Hopkins furthers the afterlife of Shakespearian songs by antiquating them. (3) In so doing he gives attention to the intricacies of the narrative ambiguities within the songs themselves while bending English verse to classical forms. (4)

Hopkins's Work in the Classics

Even as an undergraduate, Hopkins showed more than an average proficiency in the classical languages. While at Balliol, he described to his mother his studies under many acclaimed classicists of the day. For example, in a letter dated April 1867, Hopkins complained about the two days of practice exams, set by his tutor Benjamin Jowett, that he found "most trying" (Corres., 1: 143). (5) His efforts, at least for Jowett, were noticed; Hopkins's first biographer, Gerald Lahey, S.J., describes Jowett's referring to Hopkins as "the star of Balliol." (6) By the time he completed his degree in June 1867, Hopkins had achieved a "first" in Moderations and a "first" in literae humaniores in Greats.

Hopkins's knowledge of Greek and Latin made teaching an excellent possible career path. Despite his acute disappointment and exasperation with teaching students of various ages at the Oratory School in Birmingham, then in Roehampton and Stonyhurst, his name did come up for a double appointment in Dublin: as a classics professor at University College Dublin and a fellow of the Royal University of Ireland (RUI). While noting his "eccentricity," both the English assistant to the Jesuits' superior general and the English provincial of the Society of the Jesuits praised his "cleverness" and "training" in classics (DN, p. 233). Hopkins moved to Dublin in February 1884; he began examining for the RUI almost immediately, and he began to teach Greek and Latin at University College in September 1884.

Hopkins's lectures at University College focused on Roman literature, history, and culture. Because of his appointment as RUI fellow, his "duties were to examine students from all over Ireland in the classics for the B.A. degree." (7) Hopkins spent the majority of his time grading over 1,000 Latin and Greek matriculation exams each year. Even a cursory glance through his Dublin notebook suggests the disproportionate time Hopkins spent grading; the pages are filled with tiny check marks and sums scribbled in the margins totaling up examination scores. (8) He described the labor to Richard Watson Dixon as "killing work to examine a nation" (Corres., 2: 943).

Hopkins's Dublin notebook (1884-1886) also contains a variety of his own projects with classical texts, including early versions of his analyses of Pindar's odes and notes on the tragedies of Sophocles. In his letters to Alexander Mowbray Baillie and John Henry Newman in February 1886, Hopkins explores linguistic connections between Greek and Egyptian, particularly in the works of Homer. (9) Hopkins was eager to publish further work in the classical field, in part to justify his appointments. Yet, despite his desire to publish, particularly his "discovery" regarding the metrics of Dorian rhythm, none of these projects materialized, much less made their way into print (Corres., 2: 817). To Bridges, for example, he expressed his disappointment that Hermathena, the classics journal, did not take translations (Corres., 2: 816). (10) Nonetheless, in addition to his own research, Hopkins endeavored to keep up with current classical scholarship during his years in Dublin, referencing Thomas Keightley's Mythology (1880), George Rawlinson's History of Egypt (1881), and John Henry Middleton's Ancient Rome (1885) in his correspondence. (11) When Hopkins composed his modified translations of Shakespeare's songs into Greek and Latin in the fall of 1886, it would be difficult to overstate his immersion in the classical languages.

Hopkins and Shakespeare

Much of the scholarly work on Hopkins's relationship with Shakespeare has focused on linguistic similarities between the two writers. John Nist refers to their shared "textual intensity" whereby each "bends English syntax to his will, turns nouns into verbs and verbs into nouns, loads his lines with alliteration, assonance, consonance, dramatic repetitions, jammed stresses, breathless junctures, extra-linguistic pitches, and perfect rhythmical correlatives to states of emotion" (p. 498), and W. H. Gardner was among the first to trace the direct influence of Shakespeare's diction on Hopkins's early sonnets. (12) Others have traced the influence of specific Shakespearean plays on Hopkins's diction and allusions in particular poems as R. K. R. Thornton has done with Henry IV, Ralph Baxter and Joaquin Kuhn with Henry V, Mark Wolmald with Hamlet, and Jean-George Ritz and Norman White with King Lear. Paul Mariani has analyzed the characters in Hopkins's fragmentary dramatic works in terms of Shakespeare's character development, comparing the villain Caradoc ("St. Winefred's Well") to Lady Macbeth, another "intelligent person who sees the full evil of his act but sticks by it" and one who cannot wash away the blood after a murderous act (p. 246). Most recently, Kumiko Tanabe has examined Hopkins's and Shakespeare's treatment of "fancy," studying Hopkins's "poetic diction with underthought as the truth hidden beneath the surface but discovered with minute observation" alongside Hopkins's admiration for Shakespeare's "ability to maintain 'overthought' (syntactical meaning) with 'underthought' (deeper meaning) in the imagery." (13) Tanabe also explores Hopkins's fascination with Shakespeare's use of disguise, suggesting that Hopkins drafted his short play Floris in Italy in imitation of Shakespeare's disguised female protagonists (p. 95).

Hopkins directly praises Shakespeare in his diaries and letters. His unfinished poem "Shakspere" juxtaposes Shakespeare's mortality and fame, and he confesses to Robert Bridges that when composing Floris, he could never match Shakespeare's authenticity: "In reading Shakespeare one feels with despair the scope and richness of his gifts, equal to everything; he had besides a sufficient experience of life and, of course, practical knowledge of the theatre" (Corres., 1:368). Given his own perceived lack of experience, Hopkins borrows from Shakespeare liberally. In addition to reminding himself in his diary to read the histories (Diaries, p. 56), Hopkins mentions eighteen Shakespeare plays and a host of sonnets in his correspondence. (14) When explaining to his mother that "Wreck of the Deutschland" was passed up for publication, he quotes from Much Ado about Nothing, "Sigh no more" (Corres., 1: 255). In his letters to Richard Watson Dixon, Hopkins praises both Shakespeare's "finest faculty of observation" (despite some "inconsistencies" in his works) and the "well calculated strain of incidents" out of which Shakespeare created a sense of "romance" (Corres., 2: 799, 592). Hopkins's undergraduate dialogue "On the Origin of Beauty" praises Shakespeare's ability to "run" a distinct "spirit" through his poems and not just to communicate plot (Ox. Ess., p. 150).

Hopkins as a Poetic Translator

Because Hopkins cared for both the syntactical emphasis of poetic diction and an individual word's "underthought" in the way that it contributed to a text, it is no surprise that he took the task of translation seriously. In grading scholarship examinations for the RUI, Hopkins uses a range of terms to describe students' skills in translation; he grades for display of "intelligence" (including the lack thereof: "poor fellow and no intelligence"), "style," "knowledge," and "judgment" (DN, p. 141). In these distinctions Hopkins shares Dante Gabriel Rossetti's conviction that the translator must strive not merely for "literality" but also for "fidelity" in preserving the whole meaning of the original poet. (15)

While reading students' exams, Hopkins gives attention to "literality" by giving points for "knowledge" and "intelligence," and he rewards "fidelity" in translation by awarding points for "style" and "judgment." Although Rossetti pays particular attention to close metrical equivalences in translations, Hopkins privileges sense. For Hopkins, the gulf to be bridged between English and classical poetry is one of rhetoric: "The [begin strikethrough] ins [end strikethrough] strictly poetical insight and inspiration of [English] poetry seems to me to ^be^ of the very finest, finer perhaps than the Greek, but the its rhetoric is inadequate," he informed Dixon (Corres., 2: 800). Hopkins defines rhetoric as "the common and teachable element in literature, which grammar is to speech, what thoroughbass is to music, what theatrical experience gives to playwrights" (Corres., 2: 800). This metaphorical definition of rhetoric underscores the importance of sense in Hopkins's notion of poetry. He praises the capacity in English poetry for perception while lauding the greater rhetorical range available in the classical languages for communicating such a perception. With an acute awareness of the way each language conveys sense, Hopkins identified and employed Latin and Greek vocabularies, allusion, and refrains capable of teasing out the underthoughts of Shakespeare's songs. Feeling isolated in Dublin and fatigued by the professional and emotional strains of his academic appointments, Hopkins turns to translation to experiment with and create classical forms.

Hopkins and the Songs of Shakespeare

In a letter to Robert Bridges on 13 October 1886, Hopkins observed that Fr. Matthew Russell, S.J., editor of The Irish Monthly, asked him "for an opinion of some Latin verses furnished him" (Corres., 2: 812). This, in turn, inspired Hopkins "suddenly" to turn "a lot of Shakspere's songs into elegiacs and hendecasyllables," for Hopkins described his "Latin muse having been wholly mum for years" (Corres., 2: 813). (16) Russell then published two of Hopkins's Latin songs in The Irish Monthly in 1886 and 1887, (17) and these songs from The Tempest represent a significant portion of poetry by Hopkins actually published during his life. Hopkins also created two Greek variants from the songs of Love's Labour's Lost and The Merchant of Venice; he divided the former into a strophe and antistrophe, and the latter he wrote as a stylized parodos, like an Attic tragedy. Hopkins did not initially call his variations on Shakespeare's songs "translations." Quite conscious of the changes that he made to the text, he refers to his process as a "turning" (Corres., 2: 813). Hopkins undertook the ambitious project of creating something new out of Shakespeare, heightening the motion and emotion conveyed in Shakespeare's underthought and clarifying the multiple voices in the songs.

When encountering genius, Hopkins expresses a desire to invent as a response to the experience. The act of composing "That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire" is described in just such terms: "I must read something of Greek and Latin letters and lately I sent you [Bridges] a sonnet, on the Heraclitean Fire, in which a great deal of early Greek speculati philosophical thought was distilled; but the liquor of the distillation did not taste very Greek, did it? The effect of studying masterpieces is to make me admire and do otherwise. So it must be on every original artist to some degree, [begin strikethrough] to [end strikethrough] ^on^ me to a marked degree" (Corres., 2: 963). Hopkins insists that in the attempt to "re-present" the thought of Heraclitus, he feels compelled to change its form and sense. Inspired by Heraclitus's theory of perpetual change, Hopkins does not merely translate Heraclitus's philosophical explanations. "Doing otherwise" is the way Hopkins engages with the pre-Socratic philosopher's thought. Similarly, it is worth comparing Hopkins's translated adaptations of Shakespeare's songs to elucidate what "doing otherwise" looked like for Hopkins as he modified the verses to fit Greek and Latin structures and meters. Hopkins's classical inventions offer insight into Victorian interactions with Shakespeare, especially with regard to the liberties Hopkins took with the folk songs he reset in classical forms. The rewriting of "Tell me where is Fancy bred" from The Merchant of Venice proves particularly useful for examining Hopkins's adaptations in rhetoric and form because Hopkins created both Latin ("Rogo vos Amor") and Greek ("Tis erotos") versions. (18) Like the source text, (19) both variants examine the origin of Fancy (in the heart or in the head), imagine its demise, and express grief because of its loss:

   "Tell me where is Fancy bred" (Latin)
   Rogo vos Amor unde sit, Camenae.
   Quis ilium genuit? quis educavit?
   Qua vel parte oriundus ille nostra
   Sit frontis mage pectorisne alumnus
   Consultae memorabitis, sorores.
   Amorem teneri creant ocelli;
   Pascunt qui peperere; mox eumdem
   Aversi patiuntur interire,
   Nam cunas abiisse ita in feretrum!
   Amorem tamen efferamus omnes,
   Quem salvere jubemus et valere
   Sic, O vos pueri atque vos puellae:
   Eheu heu, Amor, ilicet, valeto.
   Eheu heu, Amor, ilicet, valeto. (Poems, p. 172)

Hopkins's Greek variant of "Tell me where is Fancy bred" tells the same narrative in six voices, identified by the right bracket:

[phrase omitted] (Poems, p. 173)

In act 3, scene 1, of The Merchant of Venice, "Tell me where is Fancy bred" is sung in the background while Bassanio chooses among caskets of gold, silver, and lead to find the portrait of Portia and ensure he receives permission to marry her. Throughout the scene, Portia endeavors to slow Bassanio down, lest he choose too hastily and she lose her favorite suitor. While Bassanio examines the caskets, the song describes the stages of love, explaining that while the eyes beget desire, the eye eventually consumes the affection it has produced, thereby killing love. This review of love from its inception to its end raises at least three questions about the relationship between the song and the sense and plot of the scene: How does the song participate in Portia's desire to delay Bassanio as he makes his choice? How does a song on the death of love comment on the nascent feelings between Portia and Bassanio? And how does the interruption "Reply, reply" shape the song and the scene as a whole? Hopkins's Latin adaptation offers answers to the first two questions, while his Greek adaptation addresses the third.

Bassanio is eager to locate the portrait of his beloved and complains that Portia wastes time in her repeated entreaties that he consider his choice carefully. Shakespeare's musical interlude by an unnamed singer delays the action still further, prolonging the scene's suspense. Hopkins's Latin adaptation of "Tell me where is Fancy bred" similarly extends the lines of the song, dramatizing the delay in the song while simultaneously extending the meditation on the grief experienced at the death of Love. In the Latin variant "Rogo vos amor," Hopkins converts Shakespeare's eight lines of iambic tetrameter into fourteen lines of hendecasyllabic verse. The first nine lines in the Latin verse mimic Shakespeare's text rather closely. Hopkins's adaptation, however, lengthens the song at two levels: first he adds an extra four to five lines of farewells at the end, changing his audience from the Muses invoked at the beginning of the song to the "boys" and "girls" whom the speaker has summoned to carry out the corpse of Love. The speaker then bids these lads and lasses farewell, along with Love. By using a hendecasyllabic line with its eleven syllables instead of iambic tetrameter, Hopkins also gains five extra syllables per line. The song sung rather quickly in Merchant takes considerably longer in Hopkins's variant. By extending the song's length, Hopkins poetically performs the same kind of delay that Bassanio has protested against in the scene.

Incidentally, Hopkins's invented stanza also brings Shakespeare's verse to fourteen lines--sonnet length. Although the modified translation is not a sonnet, a volta-like shift now occurs roughly where Hopkins has added a new series of refrains. In addition to extending the song's delay, Hopkins's additional words also intensify the poem's elegiac tone, underscoring the irony of Love's untimely death, both in the song's own narrative and in the narrative of The Merchant of Venice. Shakespeare had described Fancy dying in its cradle, but Hopkins converts the cradle into the "bier": "you see the cradle has become a bier" (PW, p. 467). Shakespeare's conclusion ends with the comedic choral call and response, "Ding, dong, bell / Ding, dong, bell," a nursery-rhyme refrain dating back to the 1580s. (20) Hopkins's lines, however, eschew the humor and conclude by repeatedly crying out as series of "farewells": "salvere," "valere," "valeto"--along with the stock phrases of grief: "Eheu, heu," "Alas, alas." Thus Hopkins removes the sing-song quality of the verse and gives his lines an elegiac ethos.

This elegiac tone extends through his other modified translations as well: with the exception of Hopkins's unfinished version of "When icicles hang by the wall" from Love's Labour's Lost, all of the songs from Shakespeare that Hopkins adapted to classical forms describe or anticipate death. (21) Although classical elegiac verse did not require a theme of loss and grief, Hopkins imbues his compositions with a decidedly mournful quality, making classical elegiac forms additionally "elegiac" in the modern sense of the word "elegy." Hopkins's songs serve as elegies, both classical and modern, by their meter and subject matter.

In choosing to turn Shakespeare's folksy ditty on the death of Fancy or Love into a somber, extended mourning for Amor or Eros, Hopkins certainly heightens the irony of the song within the scene. At Bassanio's moment of decision, death surrounds the would-be lovers: Portia's image is hidden in a funerary casket, and Bassanio and Portia must complete this courtly pantomime only because her father has died. The love between Portia and Bassanio is actually the only thing that death has not yet touched in the scene. Nevertheless, the song reminds the audience that their Fancy will soon die too. Shakespeare's song introduces the idea of Fancy's death, but Hopkins's adaptation carries the notion further, making the funerary chorus almost absurd with a third and fourth line of farewells to Amor. The reader feels the inappropriateness of the song's narrative: this song about the loss of love is not a love song fit for a courtship scene. Although Hopkins does not connect his adaptation of the song to the larger themes of The Merchant of Venice in his correspondence or his journal, his hendecasyllabic version of the casket song clarifies the irony of bemoaning the death of love at love's inception. Hopkins heightens the song's misplaced mournful sense.

Hopkins's variations, however, do more than merely offer an indirect commentary on The Merchant of Venice or its casket scene. His adaptive Greek translation also treats the ambiguous, multiple voices unstated or understated in Shakespeare's Folio text, formalizing and performing the implicit dialogue in the song. In "Tis erotos," Hopkins certainly extends Love's death as the chorus chief and hemichorus echo their grief back and forth, but the Greek variation of the casket song also provides a structural clarification for the ambiguity in the line "Reply, reply." At first glance, the original casket song appears to be sung by a singular voice. It is not until after the song concludes that "All" join the chorus, "Ding, dong, bell." Despite the appearance of unity in the song, the third line suffers an odd break. After the principal singer asks where fancy originates, the text of the First Folio (1623) includes a "Replie, replie" justified to the far right. (22) In the same place, Shakespeare breaks the poetic meter. If "Reply, reply" is added to the line "How begot, how nourished," the "Reply, reply" makes the line pentameter. If "Reply, reply" is counted as its own line, "Reply, reply" would be a short line of dimeter interrupting the tetrameter lines.

The interruption of "Reply, reply" allows for at least two possibilities. First, the "Reply" could be a command from the principal singer: he has asked a question and now exhorts his audience to reply. This reading, however, leaves the speaker of the second half of the song ambiguous. The answer to the question may come from "the others," but the song shows no breaks to indicate that a second voice ever interrupts it. If a second voice does not respond, then the command "Reply" is merely a request that goes unanswered, and the principal singer must answer the question himself. "Reply, reply" may also introduce the second voice, but in that instance "Reply" would be a noun instead of a verb. In this case, Voice A asks Voice B, "Where is Fancy bred?" And B responds, "Reply: the eyes!" This reading, however, does not explain why the text explicitly names an "All" to sing the echo "Ding, dong, bell" but does not explicitly give the "Reply, reply" to that "All." The song does not demand the intrusion of a second voice, but it certainly appears to suggest the earlier introduction of a second or even third voice.

Because Shakespeare leaves the number of participating voices ambiguous in the song, various editions of Shakespeare have endeavored to clarify the voice of the "Reply, reply." Charles Knight, in his 1843 pictorial edition of Shakespeare, traces the history of editorial decisions in his footnote to the line "Reply, reply." Because Samuel Johnson considered the line a marginal direction, Knight explains, "all of those following Johnson, except Capell and Malone, removed the line entirely." (23) Knight is convinced that the words are "unquestionably part of the song" and represent "probably ... a second voice"; consequently, he complains that "the mutilation of the song, in the belief that the words were a stage direction, is certainly one of the most tasteless corruptions of the many for which the editors of Shakspere are answerable" (p. 425). Knight insists that Shakespeare's "Reply, reply" introduces the second voice, and he concludes that the words belong in the mouth of the second singer. He even shows the possibility of a second singer in the shape of the text on the page where the "Reply, reply" ends the first verse; accordingly, in his edition Knight opens the second verse with a paragraph break

Although Hopkins probably did not have access to Knight's edition in Dublin, his mother owned the eight volumes of Knight's pictorial Shakespeare, and Hopkins used Knight's edition as an Oxford student and had commented on some of Knight's notes to Shakespeare's text in his diary (Diaries, p. 124). (24) Hopkins's Greek version of the casket song can be read as a dramatization of Knight's footnote. In his Greek adaptation, Hopkins creates a second speaker in the song and divides the lyric between the strophe sung by Chorus-leader A and the antistrophe sung by Chorus-leader B. Although Eros never speaks, Chorus-leader A personifies Eros by asking his nation of origin and whether gods or men sired him. After finishing his question, Hopkins's Chorus-leader A explains that he does not "know where to place it and hit the mark." Chorus-leader B then offers the answer: Eros originates with "quick-glancing eyes" but must grow in "the spectacular performances of the mask" before it dies (PW p. 467). Hopkins thus dramatizes the song as a conversation between two parties just as Knight had demanded in his note. Hopkins's creation of two distinct voices pairs nicely with the casket scene since Portia has asked Bassanio where her portrait hides, and she must now wait for his "Reply, reply" as he chooses a casket; the casket scene demands a call and response between Portia and her suitor while their attendants look on.

Hopkins ends his adaptation by adding new voices in an epode: the chorus chief and the half choruses and the chorus, mourning the death of Eros. Shakespeare's "All" becomes the call and response of four concluding choral voices. In the manuscript Hopkins explains that the verse's rhythm was to be "freely syncopated, as in drama," (25) and indeed Hopkins turned Shakespeare's simple song into a miniature play within a play. By employing the form of strophe, antistrophe, and epode from Greek tragedy, Hopkins recognizes a turn and stand in Shakespeare (as Knight did), and he uses it as the foundation of his Greek adaptation, formalizing the song's mournful quality by mimicking the movements from a classical tragedy's choral scene.

Although it is true that Hopkins carefully and critically engaged with Knight's annotations of Shakespeare's works, Hopkins's decision to use multiple, distinct voices in the casket song need not solely depend on Knight. Composers and vocal arrangers who set Shakespeare's songs to music also demonstrate the keenest interest in the polyphonic and polyglossic possibilities of these songs. In 1884, just two years before Hopkins published his first modified translations in The Irish Monthly, Fredrick Furnivall, together with J. Greenhill and the Reverend W. A. Harrison, compiled and published an index of the songs of Shakespeare that had been put to music, detailing the parts and voices in the musical arrangements. (26) Of the twelve arrangements that Furnivall lists for "Tell me where is Fancy bred," only one is a solo arrangement. (27) Other than T. A. Arne's 1741 arrangement, which was actually sung for a performance of Twelfth Night rather than The Merchant of Venice (Furnivall, p. 28), the other musical variants of "Tell me where is Fancy bred" are composed with multiple voices: duets, duettinos, part songs, and even a round. (28) Many also include an explicit chorus, demonstrating the multiple voices that the arrangers identified within the song.

Alfred Roffe's Handbook of Shakespeare Music (1878), like Furnivall's List (1884), catalogues various arrangements of the lyrics that, like Hopkins's own modified translation, divided the songs of Shakespeare into multiple voices. Roffe's catalogue, however, contains more commentary than Furnivall's index does; Roffe includes textual history of the Folio that inspired trends for musical arrangements of the songs of Shakespeare. In his notes on the casket song from Merchant, Roffe quotes the entirety of Charles Knight's footnote on the line "Reply, reply." Affirming Knight's reading of two call-and-response voices, Roffe continues to pay attention to the ways different composers have distinguished the voices in the song.

Hopkins also composed a handful of musical arrangements for Shakespeare's songs alongside his modified translations. Although Hopkins did not create a setting for the casket song, he wrote music for "Done to Death by Slanderous Tongues" from Much Ado about Nothing and "Get you Hence for I must Go" from The Winter's Tale. (29) In 1886, Hopkins also composed a musical arrangement for Shakespeare's "Who is Sylvia" from Two Gentlemen of Verona, when he was writing his Greek and Latin variants to the songs of Shakespeare (Gutman, p. 13). For "Orpheus with his lute," Hopkins produced an arrangement late in 1887 and into 1888, less than two years after he had created modified translations in both Greek and Latin for that song (Corres., 2:914). Although this arrangement has been lost, Hopkins commented to Bridges about the care he took in composing it: "I shall not hurry with it" (Corres., 2: 914). Hopkins's translation of "Orpheus with his lute" also experiments with multiple voices. His Greek rendering of "Logos Orpheos luran" has both a named strophe and antistrophe, much like his Greek variant of "Tell me where is Fancy bred." Although it is outside the scope of this essay to perform a close comparison of Hopkins's musical experiments with Shakespeare's songs alongside his modified translations, both express Hopkins's experiments with dialogic verse. Musical arrangements and classical verse offer Hopkins a similar range of poetic exploration in meter, form, and voice. It is no surprise that he experimented with the two modes simultaneously. (30)

Hopkins's adaptations also allow him to demonstrate the degree to which he mastered technical and complicated Dorian rhythm and rare dialect form. He acknowledged the difficulties of such composition while studying theology at St. Beuno's: Hopkins describes Welsh poetry to Alexander Mowbray Baillie as being "quite as hard as the choruses in a Gk. play" (Corres., 1: 258). When comparing Hopkins's Greek modification with Shakespeare's original, Norman MacKenzie refers to the former as "a bold experiment" for using the "very different and complex form of the Greek chorus" (PW, p. 468). Although it was not unusual for Victorians to translate Shakespeare into Greek and Latin, MacKenzie notes how rare it was even for classical scholars to attempt to compose in the poetic form of the Greek chorus (PW, p. 467).

In the drafted octave of Hopkins's unfinished poem "Shakspere" (1865), he considers the interaction between Shakespeare's fame, genius, and mortality. Because none appreciate Shakespeare as they ought, according to Hopkins, God alone "[s]ees what his [Shakespeare's] place is" in the expanse of his genius (PW, p. 83). In his modified translations, however, Hopkins honors Shakespeare's place by identifying further rhetorical possibilities in his songs. By turning his songs into Greek and Latin verse, Hopkins offers Shakespeare's songs a new afterlife, independent of their original setting, metrics, and linguistic boundaries. By adapting Shakespearian songs to classical modes, Hopkins explores forms, rhythms, and vocabularies fit to the task of mourning while he distinguishes the veiled voices in the dirge. Reimaging the funeral of Fancy, Hopkins keeps on ringing Fancy's knell, extending the song's longevity in his poetic experimentation as he further establishes his credibility for his appointment in classics.

[Please note: Some non-Latin characters were omitted from this article]

Notes

(1) See Richard Cronin, "Victorian Poetry and Translation," in Reading Victorian Poetry (London: Wiley, 2012), pp. 114-140.

(2) Lesley Higgins and Noel Barber, S.J., "'If You Knew the World I Live In!': Hopkins and University College," Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 103, no. 412 (2014): 467.

(3) See Annmarie Drury, Translation as Transformation in Victorian Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2015).

(4) See John Nist, "Gerard Manley Hopkins and Textural Intensity: A Linguistic Analysis," College English 22, no. 7 (1961): 497-500.

(5) For a survey of Hopkins's tutors, see Lesley Higgins, "Introduction: Notes on Hopkins's Tutors," in Ox. Ess., pp. 50-64

(6) Gerald F. Lahey, S.J., Gerard Manley Hopkins (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1930), p. 139.

(7) Paul Mariani, Commentary on the Complete Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1970), p. 215. Hopkins graded a vast range of examinations (firsts, seconds, honors, BA, MA, etc.) for a variety of purposes: matriculation, scholarship, and graduation at RUI. See Higgins and Suarez, introduction to DN, pp. xvi-xviii. The number of exams varied between 1,300 and 1,800 per year. See Higgins and Barber, "If You Knew," p. 467.

(8) An example of Hopkins's grading marks on the scholarship exams of 1885 can be found on fol. 22'. See DN, p. 141.

(9) See Hopkins to Baillie, 11 February 1886 (Corres., 2: 758); and from Newman to Hopkins, 25 February 1886 (Corres., 2: 760).

(10) "These verses cannot appear in Hermathena, which admits no translations," Hopkins explains to Bridges. "Mr. Tyrrell said he liked them very much, but he did not himself approve of my Catullian rhythms" (Corres., 2: 816).

(11) See Hopkins's references to particular texts in his letters to Baillie, 11 February 1886 (Corres., 2: 758) and 23 March 1886 (Corres., 2: 760-762).

(12) W. H. Gardner, Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Select Prose (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1966), p. xxxiv.

(13) Kumiko Tanabe, Gerard Manley Hopkins and His Poetics of Fancy (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge Scholars, 2015), p. 96.

(14) The list includes As You Like It, Cymbeline, Hamlet, Henry IV, Henry VIII, King Lear, Love's Labour's Lost, Macbeth, Measure for Measure, The Merchant of Venice, Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, The Tempest, Twelfth Night, and The Winter's Tale. See Corres., 2:1048.

(15) Dante Gabriel Rossetti, preface to The Early Italian Poets (London: Smith, Elder, 1861), p. xiii.

(16) The modified translations include songs from The Tempest, The Merchant of Venice, King Henry VIII, and Love's Labour's Lost. This spelling of Shakespeare is the same one that Charles Knight uses, which Hopkins had used as a student, as opposed to Alexander Chalmer's spelling of Shakespeare in his edition of The Plays of William Shakespeare (1826), an edition of Shakespeare that Hopkins also used during his Oxford years.

(17) See Gerard Manley Hopkins, "Songs from Shakespeare in Latin," The Irish Monthly 14, no. 161 (1886): 628; and also "Songs from Shakespeare in Latin," The Irish Monthly 15, no. 164 (1887): 92.

(18) There are technically two Greek variants, but the changes between the two manuscripts are not significant for the purposes of this article. For the English translations of both variants by Colin Hardie and Ross Kilpatrick, see PW, p. 467.

(19) "Tell me where is Fancy bred, / Or in the heart, or in the head? / How begot, how nourished? / Reply, reply. / It is engender'd in the eyes, / With gazing fed; and Fancy dies I In the cradle where it lies. / Let us all ring Fancy's knell: / I'll begin it,--Ding, dong, bell."

(20) Iona Opie and Peter Opie, The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997), p. 149.

(21) In addition to The Merchant of Venice, Hopkins translates songs from The Tempest, Henry VIII, and Love's Labour's Lost. Hopkins makes Ariel's song from The Tempest 1.2 into two separate songs: "Ocius, O Flavas" and "Occidit, O Juvenis." Together they describe Ferdinand's landing on the beach of Prospero's island and Ariel's song to the young Ferdinand, suggesting that his father has drowned at sea. "Vos dum stertitis" from The Tempest 2.1 is Ariel's song to warn and wake Gonzalo lest the group of men perish and Prospero's plan "die" (2.1.1042). Finally "Orpheus with his lute made trees" from Henry VIII describes Orpheus's power as a grieving musician to make all things live but also the power to kill grief itself with his song.

(22) For the layout of the Folio text, see William Shakespeare, Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies: A Facsimile Edition, ed. Helge Hokeritz (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1954), p. 174.

(23) William Shakespeare, The Pictorial Edition of the Works of Shakspere: Comedies, vol. 1, ed. Charles Knight (London: Charles Knight, 1843), p. 425. https://babel .hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433074971460;view=lup;seq=669.

(24) Madeline House, "Books Belonging to Hopkins and his Family," The Hopkins Research Bulletin, no. 5 (1974): 36.

(25) Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Later Poetic Manuscripts of Gerard Manley Hopkins (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 294; emphasis added.

(26) Fredrick Furnivall, ed., A List of All the Songs & Passages in Shakspere Which Have Been Set to Music (London: N. Triibner, 1884), p. 28.

(27) Furnivall lists John Hatton's 1855 arrangement as a solo with a chorus, but Alfred Roffe goes to great lengths in The Handbook of Shakespeare Music (1878) to clarify that this particular arrangement contained two separate solo voices with a chorus. See Alfred Roffe, ed., The Handbook of Shakespeare Music, Being an Account of Three Hundred and Fifty Pieces of Music Set to Words Taken from the Plays and Poems of Shakespeare, the Compositions Ranging from the Elizabethan Age to the Present Time (London: Chatto and Windus, 1878), p. 46.

(28) For the sheet music to a J. Stevenson's relatively well-known duet arrangement of the song, see Tell me where is Fancy bred! A Duett, Sung by Mrs. Holman & Mr. A. Taylor: With an Accompanyment for the Piano Forte or Harp (New York: W. Dubois, 1821).

(29) Laura Gutman, "Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Music of Poetry" (PhD diss., University of St. Andrews, 1988), https://research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk /handle/10023/2625, p. 430.

(30) Hopkins also composed musical arrangements for classical poetry, including melodies for Sapphic and Pindaric odes and a no-longer-extant arrangement for Eros anikate machan, a chorus from Sophocles's Antigone, which he describes to Bridges at the same time that he gives Bridges the opening lines of his translation of "Ocius O flavas" from The Tempest. See Hopkins to Bridges, 21-22 October 1886 (Corres., 2: 818).

Article Details

Printer friendly Cite/link Email Feedback
Title Annotation:	Gerard Manley Hopkins; variations of song from William Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice"
Author:	Howard, Elizabeth
Publication:	Victorian Poetry
Article Type:	Critical essay
Geographic Code:	4EUUK
Date:	Jun 22, 2018
Words:	6229
Previous Article:	Hopkins's Material Poetics: Sense and the Inscapes of Speech.
Next Article:	"Felix Randal the farrier": Visiting the Sick.
Topics:	Dramatists Works Playwrights Works Poetry Poets Criticism and interpretation Translators (Persons) Criticism and interpretation