At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean

by Steve Mentz, Ewan Fernie (Series Editor), Simon Palfrey (Series Editor)

We need a poetic history of the ocean, and Shakespeare can help us find one. There's more real salt in the plays than we might expect. Shakespeare's dramatic ocean spans the God-sea of the ancient world and the immense blue vistas that early modern mariners navigated. Throughout his career, from the opening shipwrecks of The Comedy of Errors through The Tempest, Shakespeare's plays figure the ocean as shocking physical reality and mind-twisting symbol of change and instability. To fathom Shakespeare's ocean - to go down to its bottom - this book's chapters focus on different things that humans do with and in and near the fathoming, keeping watch, swimming, beachcombing, fishing, and drowning.
Mentz also sets Shakespeare's sea-poetry against modern literary sea-scapes, including the vast Pacific of Moby-Dick, the rocky coast of Charles Olson's Maximus Poems, and the lyrical waters of the postcolonial Caribbean. Uncovering the depths of Shakespeare's maritime world, this book draws out the centrality of the sea in our literary culture.

Genres: Criticism, Nonfiction

136 pages, Paperback

First published October 10, 2009

Reviews

[Ryan Denson]

"Poetry that contains the sea leaves a taste in the mouth, a sharp tang of nonhuman immensity. When we taste salt, we recognize instantly that this water isn't good to drink, but we also know that its bitterness flavors our world. The taste turns up in odd corners of Shakespeare's plays."

"During the early modern period, the sea's ancient status as alien God-space was rearticulated so that it also became a symbol of freedom. Once the Atlantic was crossed, and brave new worlds found in the Americas and around Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope, the sea was no longer just forbidding and alien, but also transformative and liberating."

Despite its miniscule size, Mentz' book offers a profoundly insightful manner to examine the plays of Shakespeare and potentially other works of literature. With an eye for all things marine, this study surveys the underlying significance of such references to the sea and ocean, as well as the implicit nature of water itself, juxtaposed with the normally terrestrial existence of humans. Mentz further argues that the plays of Shakespeare were written at a pivotal moment in European history when the sea was becoming imbued with new associations as a result of the growing transoceanic travels and communication.

This book covers many of the more obvious connections to the sea, such as various shipwrecks, Ariel's "sea-change," and Marina's water-infused nature. Mentz though also shows a great aptitude for thorough research in supplying historical details about the maritime vocabulary of Shakespeare's time. Thus, Ariel's famed "full fathom five" can be considered to convey a greater sense of alterity than is usually appreciated. Iago's constant use of marine terminology can further be analyzed to reveal something about his character, particularly when contrasted against Othello. In tandem with the thorough historical background of this study, Mentz also artfully embeds the text with details from other literary works that deal with the sea, both before and after Shakespeare. The most prominent of these are Herman Melville's Moby-Dick and an assortment of Caribbean sea poets. These literary additions further build upon the readability of the work, and function masterfully to both elucidate some of the author's points concerning Shakespearean depictions of the sea while also supplying a plurality of perspectives on the sea.

Mentz closes with a tiny, though profound, section that serves to remind the reader of the significant role that the seas and oceans plays in human lives, despite it being largely downplayed in the modern world. Anthropocentric views tend to conceptualize our planet as a (mostly) vibrant green marble, whose conditions we can contrast with the inhospitability of outer space and deem it as an ideal oasis for humankind. Yet, in reality, the Earth is a mostly blue world, blue with waters that we cannot drink, nor can we live within. Although the oceans are the source of all life on Earth, it is a watery element that is profoundly hostile to humans, and (perhaps a more worrying thought) these two-thirds of the world are also uncontrollable. The looming threat of climate change, then, portends another manner in which humans are (frequently unwittingly) affected by the marine world; for it cannot be denied that the it is the oceanic currents and temperatures that exert a substantial impact on the global climate. Returning to literary studies, the book closes with the suggestion of creating a "blue cultural studies," as an ecocritical-like way of examining works of literature from a similar type of marine perspective to elucidate a new depth of meaning. Overall, it is an ideal book for anyone interested in the sea from any literary or historical perspective.

[Simon Stegall]

Garbage academic writing with a fraying thread of a premise.

[w3rmo]

boring but true

[munnarum]

Mentz perspective on Shakespeare is invaluable. His poetry is also very good

[Karl Steel]

Cthulhu fhtagn.

For an excellent review, not by me, see here.

I'm glad I read this. Complaints first: Mentz's approach to Shakespeare is through Shakespeare rather than (very much) from the cultural surround. It's too easy to forget in reading his book that the plays were plays, performances, full of sound and fury for a time and then gone again (like a storm at sea?); likewise it's easy to forget that many other writers, not all of them writing in English, were thinking seas at this time (or that the Odyssey was raising its shaggy head once again), and that the seas are home to beings (becomings, critters, actants, even creatures: choose your ontological/ontotheological poison) other than human. For more on what I mean, look to the essay on Perceforest's fish knights Peggy McCracken and I drew out for Postmedieval 3. The big question, perhaps never answered, is: Why Shakespeare? (Because he is what he is; and because the "SHAKESPEARE NOW" series is what it is). But Shakespeare's perhaps NOT the most aqueous of writers, now or even then (I await PHINEAS FLETCHER NOW or WILLIAM DIAPER NOW). Shakespeare may be to blame, in fact, for Mentz's general anthropocentrism (as the book concerns the sea's interactions with "human bodies").

Mentz is essential, though, for his pages of bibliographic review on "The New Thalessology" (Gk: thalossos, sea) especially for those of us--like me!--expected to produce 8 or so thousand words on "the abyss" a year or so from now. And he should be given to students as a model of how to think poetically with Shakespeare: he writes beautifully, everywhere and especially in the material between his chapters, where for a time he sets himself free of the plays, or lets himself be washed over by them. I'll quote a bit:

What pain is it, to go down, like Jonah, all the way? What do the waters want? What's at the bottom?

At the surface the world breaks. Columns of air shatter into devilish brilliance and beauty. You're out, then you're in: no middle ground.

First the riches of upper ocean, boundless fields of ripe and golden wheat. Everything we love is here, swimming, flashing, tumbling, cradling bodies, and refracting light. Here Noah's flood never subsides, here is world without end or limit. All subtle and submarine. Look into the fish's eyes, and you see -- nothing. No strange analogy for something in yourself.

Passing five full fathoms colors darken and grow heavy. The ribs and terrors of the whale press down. Monsters swim, fast and fearful. No place to stay.

Keep going. Read it. And read past it by thinking of the immensity of what we will never see of our home. If Mentz is in the ocean, he is still on the surface, like all of us, barely able to imagine the igneous solidity of the great molten core of this earth.

What can we ever think of the fire so far beneath our feet?

[Phillip]

Mentz's book is an interesting and important first step in building a blue Shakespearean ecocriticism. Like many others in the emerging field of blue ecocriticism (including Dan Brayton, whose book I am about to review next) Mentz has identified a space full of cultural resonances in both modern and Early Modern culture, but largely ignored or treated uncritically. Mentz tries to put the salt back in our reading of Shakespeare, a playwright who wrote often of the seas. He examines several different plays, considering their different evocations of the ocean as a force that is simultaneously threatening or destructive, liberating, transformative, and generative. Mentz' conceptualization of the ocean is devotional, but he also spends a good bit of time reasserting the destructive inhospitability of the ocean in ways that risk perpetuating an ecophobic terrestrial bias.

[Leslie Mae]

Blue studies/oceanic studies = a dark ecological vision - leaning towards deep ecology with a reading of Shakespeare thrown in for good measure. I sound flippant, but this book was amazing.