Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Shakespeare's presence and Cavendish's absence in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

2015; Routledge; Volume: 11; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/17450918.2015.1012553

1745-0926

Delilah Bermudez Brataas,

Narrative Theory and Analysis

AbstractShakespeare and his characters appear in Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen to offer readers recognisable figures to which Moore can connect a variety of fluidly recreated historical and fictional characters. The result is a multi-modal virtual space where literary figures coexist in a utopia of literature built from Margaret Cavendish's ground-breaking Blazing World. However, the cost of Shakespeare's required presence is Cavendish's telling absence. In this article, I demonstrate how Shakespeare, as the icon of “original” literature, anchors the fluidity of the League's many worlds, thus allowing the fictionality of familiar literature to fade as readers enter the particularly creative simulacrum of Moore's concluding Black Dossier.Keywords: Alan MooreKevin O'NeillBlazing WorldBlack Dossiergraphic novelsscience fictionutopiaadaptationappropriation AcknowledgementsMy sincere gratitude to Knockabout Comics (London, UK) for their kind permission to include images from Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's graphic novels in this article. I am thankful for their willingness to support my endeavour.Notes1. Central to Nuttall's argument is how elements common to early modern literature appear in The Tempest, but with a difference suggestive of science fiction. For example, Ariel is the familiar trickster, but is different in that “[…] we do not know what he is. He is that thing that becomes normal in science fiction, a vividly imagined being for which no covering concept is readily available” (361). Similarly, Prospero is a magician, but demonstrates the shift from alchemy to science because he is “a fashionable, dangerous figure” reminiscent of Elizabeth I's court alchemist, John Dee. Nutall's reading fits with John Dee's appearance as Prospero in Moore's series much like how the play's island is at once locatable and unknowable as “a place-that-cannot-be-placed” is indicative of science fiction's debt to utopias and dystopias, which The Tempest and Moore both explore.2. Cavendish was one of the first writers, man or woman, to write a literary analysis of Shakespeare's works. In letter 162 of her Sociable Letters she names him as one of the three men she admires most (173), and in letter 123, celebrates his characterizations and defends him against claims that his plays are “made up onely with Clowns, Fools, Watchmen, and the like” (130). Specifically, she marvels at Shakespeare's ability to imagine a variety of characters by noting how he can “express naturally” all sorts of people so as to “deliver to posterity” an “infinite variety of beings” (130–31).3. The earliest critical writings on comics considered whether they could, or should, be termed “hybrid” in the context of whether they were “a single, integrated system of signification” or “made up of the separate elements of painting and writing” (Varnum and Gibbons xi). McCloud's Understanding Comics, an intriguing critical text that is itself written and illustrated as a comic, offers an in-depth study of whether comics are “a hybrid or integral medium”. Varnum and Gibbons argue that McCloud does not resolve the question, and further, suggest that we must ask how comics can simultaneously reflect “a partnership of separate elements” and “a unique language”. However, perhaps the inability to resolve the question itself indicates its essential hybridity.4. As McCloud succinctly put it, they have been unfairly considered “cheap, disposable, kiddie fare” to which I would add, “read only by boys and young men” (3).5. I borrow the concept from Umberto Eco's On Literature, in which he argues: “the world of literature is a universe in which it is possible to establish whether a reader has a sense of reality or is the victim of his own hallucinations. Characters migrate. We can make true statements about literary characters because what happens to them is recorded in a text […] But certain literary characters […] leave the text that gave birth to them and migrate to a zone in the universe we find very difficult to delimit” (8).6. For good or ill, and appropriately contradictory, Jameson's list of “newer postmodernisms” includes “paraliteratures with its airport paperback categories of the gothic, and the romance, the popular biography, the murder mystery and the science fiction and fantasy novel” (112). Whether this diminishes or adds to these genres is uncertain given how the graphic novel has admirably completed the project of eroding the distinctions “between high culture and so-called mass or popular culture” with the current mainstreaming of this “fringe” genre.7. The story continues in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume III: Century (2009–2012).8. The first illustrated edition of Shakespeare's plays, edited by Nicholas Rowe and published by Jacob Tonson, appeared in 1709. O'Neill's rendering is closer to the first folios in colour and typography than the first illustrated editions, but includes images in the early modern woodcut style rather than the detailed engravings of the elaborate 1786 Boydell edition, for instance, or the ornately illustrated Victorian volumes that followed.9. Nonsuch Palace was Henry VIII's most ambitious building project, and was so named because there was to be no such palace like it in the world. It was completed in 1538 and, after his death, passed to and from royal ownership until 1682 when it was demolished. Nothing remains of the palace and few contemporary images survive.10. Aleister Crowley wrote a critique of The Magician under the pseudonym Oliver Haddo in a 1908 Vanity Fair article accusing Maugham of plagiarism. We cannot be sure of pseudonym, author, or character, nor can we be sure which text belongs to whom.11. As described in his Monas Hieroglyphica.12. The number and symbol are suggestive of “007” and are assigned in the presence of Gloriana's royal spy, Sir Basildon Bond.13. Blazing World's narrative includes a vivid discussion between the Empress and Duchess about the creative potential of challenging conventions of genre and form even as Cavendish challenged those forms in the text containing that discussion.14. Stephen Greenblatt's term “self-fashioning”, from his Renaissance Self-Fashioning, was an established critical reading for much of early modern literature by the time Moore's League appeared.15. “[…] without any consideration of the Empress's soul, [the Duchess] left her aerial vehicle, and entered into her lord. The Empress's soul perceiving this, did the like: and then the Duke had three souls in one body; and had there been by some such souls more, the Duke would have been like the Grand Signior in his seraglio, only it would have been a platonic seraglio” (194).16. Prospero doubts the fidelity of his nameless wife in The Tempest by questioning Miranda's parentage (1.2.55–59).17. In 2004, Jess Nevins wrote a second unofficial companion to the League that catalogues the series' countless references. Nevins acknowledges Cavendish as its author, but her world becomes his book's title to evoke a similar utopic space celebrating Moore and O'Neill's League.