Discoveries: Archives: Notes

James S. Baumlin. "A Note on Yeats, Harold Bloom, and Hamlet's 'Heart's Core' (3.2.68)." Discoveries 22.1 (2005). 14 May 2005 <http://www.scrc.us.com/discoveries/archives/ 221/jbaumlin221pf.htm>

In a letter of 30 November 1922, William Butler Yeats recalls “walking through Fleet Street very homesick”:

I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop-window which balanced a little ball upon its jet, and began to remember lake water. From the sudden remembrance came my poem Innisfree my first lyric with anything in its rhythm of my own music. (qtd in Jeffares 30)

While Yeatsian in its music, evidently the poem’s famous ending — “I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; / While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray, / I hear it in the deep heart’s core” (10-12) — recalls more than “lake water lapping.” A reflection of Yeats’s literary memory, the phrase “heart’s core” offers, as A. Norman Jeffares suggests, “perhaps an echo of Shelley’s Adonais” (31), specifically its stanza 22:

He will awake no more, oh, never more!

“Wake thou,” cried Misery, “childless Mother, rise

Out of thy sleep, and slake, in thy heart’s core,

A wound more fierce than his with tears and sighs.” (190-93)

Perhaps, though one might add that Shelley himself seems to echo John Keats’s Lamia:

Ah, happy Lycius! — for she was a maid

More beautiful than ever twisted braid, . . .
A virgin purest lipp’d, yet in the lore

Of love deep learned to the red heart’s core. (185-90)

Even as it falls short of Yeats’s poetic economy, the Keatsian “deep . . . heart’s core” more nearly approaches the Irish poet than does Shelley’s phrasing. Still, Keats himself — and, I suspect, Yeats as well — looks to Shakespeare as to his original.

In a meditative moment prior to the “Mousetrap” or play-within, Hamlet declares to Horatio,

Give me that man

That is not passion’s slave, and I will wear him

In my heart’s core, ay, in my heart of heart,

As I do thee. (3.2.66-69)

Thus the Danish prince pledges faith in his friend’s Stoic character. While the phrase, “heart’s core,” suggests the interiority of the heart’s chambers (the “cockles,” as it were, of one’s heart), one might also hear in “core” the Latin cor (that is, “heart”), whose pronunciation remains roughly homophonic with Shakespeare’s English.¹ Hamlet calls attention to his own, sudden apprehension of wordplay — that is, of an audial pun that he did not consciously intend but, rather, overheard within his own speaking. In a sort of macaronic repetition or “cuckowspell” (211), as George Puttenham names the figure epizeuxis, Hamlet’s immediate elaboration— “ay, in my heart of heart” — translates quite literally his “heart’s core,” in effect, his “heart’s heart.”² Among Shakespeare’s modern editors, Susanne L. Wofford offers the clichéd “heart of my heart” (88) as a gloss; otherwise, editors leave “heart’s core” unexplained and its Latinate pun unacknowledged.³

In his occasionally quirky and contentious Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Harold Bloom asserts that “the internalization of the self is one of Shakespeare’s greatest inventions, particularly because it came before anyone else was ready for it. There is a growing inner self in Protestantism, but nothing in Luther prepares us for Hamlet’s mystery; his real interiority will abide” (413). Indeed, Hamlet’s “world is the growing inner self” (409), whose capacities for “self-revision” (412) rest upon a continuous linguistic self-reflection. Thus Bloom notes “the varied and perpetual ways in which Hamlet keeps overhearing himself speak. This is not just a question of rhetoricity or word consciousness; it is the essence of Shakespeare’s greatest originalities in the representation of character, of thinking, and of personality. Ethos, Logos, Pathos . . . all bewilder us in Hamlet, because he changes with every self-overhearing” (428).

Though a minor instance of such “self-overhearing,” the Shakespearian passage above offers witty corroboration of Bloom’s thesis. It should not surprise that Hamlet hears more, in effect reads more, into his own language than do his editors and poetic imitators — than even such masters of language as Keats, Shelley, and Yeats, who echo Shakespeare’s phrasing while remaining deaf to its wit. Should it surprise that such a pun has languished virtually unheard for so long after Hamlet’s speaking? There is, doubtless, more wordplay to be recovered. After all, Hamlet speaks to himself as much as to others, and his linguistic practice is radically private, a deliberately closed circle: witness his baffling, “mad” words to Polonius, to Rozencrantz and Guildenstern, even to Horatio— his non sequiturs, his handsaws and fishmongers and pajocks, words that tease while withholding their meaning, resisting communication. Much of Hamlet’s speech remains, in effect, a series of more or less private jokes that continue to tease and baffle readers. It is not surprising, then, that within the “world [of] the growing inner self,” as Bloom puts it, the prince’s habit of “self-overhearing” transforms Hamlet into his own shrewdest, most conscious, most fascinated, most appreciative, most knowing audience.

Notes

1. Note, too, the English word’s typographic resemblance to the Italian core (in literary Tuscan, cuore), as reflected elsewhere in Petruchio’s speech (Shrew 1.2.24).

2. Or perhaps a different figure applies: as Puttenham writes, “when so euer we multiply our speech by many words or clauses of one sence, the Greekes call it sinonimia, as who would say, like or consenting names” (223). Again, we must note the macaronic nature of Hamlet’s verbal repetitions.

3. C. T. Onions’ 1911 publication, A Shakespeare Glossary (47), and the 1888 NED (later, OED), upon which Onions’ glossary is based, offer the only recognition that I have found of the cor/core pun (see OED “core,” 14.b). The fourth editor of the magisterial OED, Onions (1873-1965) terms his Glossary “an analysis of Shakespeare’s vocabulary conducted in the light of the results published in the Dictionary” (Preface iii).

Editions that I have checked include Bevington, Edwards, Evans, Furness, Harrison, Hibbard, Jenkins, Raffel, Rowse, and Wofford. I might add that works such as Alexander Schmidt’s Shakespeare Lexicon and Hilda Hulme’s Explorations in Shakespeare’s Language also leave the pun unnoted.

Works Cited

Bevington, David, ed. The Complete Works of Shakespeare. 4th ed. New York: HarperCollins, 1992.

Edwards, Philip, ed. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003.

Evans, G. Blakemore, ed. The Riverside Shakespeare. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974.

Furness, Horace Howard, ed. Hamlet. A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare. Supplementary Bibliography by Louis Marder. 2 vols. New York: American Scholar, 1965.

Harrison, G. B., ed. Shakespeare: The Complete Works. New York: Harcourt, 1968.

Hibbard, G. R., ed. Hamlet. The Oxford Shakespeare. Oxford: Clarendon, 1987.

Hulme, Hilda M. Explorations in Shakespeare’s Language. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1963.

Jeffares, A. Norman. A New Commentary on the Poems of W. B. Yeats. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1984.

Jenkins, Harold, ed. Hamlet. The Arden Edition of the Works of William Shakespeare. London: Methuen, 1982.

Keats, John. The Poems of John Keats. Ed. Jack Stillinger. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1978.

Onions, C. T. A Shakespeare Glossary. Rev. Robert D. Eagleson. Oxford: Clarendon, 1986.

Puttenham, George. The Arte of English Poesie (1589). Ed. Baxter Hathaway. Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 1970.

Raffel, Burton, ed. Hamlet. New Haven: Yale UP, 2003.

Rowse, A. L. ed., The Annotated Shakespeare. New York: Crown, 1978.

Schmidt, Alexander. Shakespeare Lexicon and Quotation Dictionary. 3^rd ed. 2 vols. New York: Dover, 1971.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. Adonais: A Critical Edition. Ed. Anthony D. Knerr. New York: Columbia, 1984.

Wofford, Susanne L, ed. William Shakespeare: Hamlet. New York: Bedford, 1994.

Yeats, William Butler. Selected Poems and Two Plays of William Butler Yeats. Ed. M. L. Rosenthal. New York: Collier, 1962.