What P. G. Wodehouse learned from Macbeth

Reading P. G. Wodehouse would be a joy even if his stories didn’t have more poetic allusions than the stars in the sky. On the latest of our many passes through The Code of the Woosters — perhaps the very best of the Jeeves and Wooster novels — we started taking inventory.

Wodehouse starts with a bit of Keats on the very first page, as Jeeves tells Bertie Wooster, “There is a fog, sir. If you will recollect, we are now in Autumn — season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.” A few pages later, Sir Watkyn Bassett, a country magistrate who has it in for Bertie, assures Roderick Spode that time in prison won’t prevent a man from “rising on stepping-stones of his dead self to higher things.” That’s from Tennyson’s “In Memoriam.”

Bertie Wooster doesn’t know as much poetry as his friends, so his allusions are often accidental, as when he tells Madeline Bassett what he thinks of Gussie Fink-Nottle’s diffident personality,

Bertie: A sensitive plant, what?
The Bassett: Exactly. You know your Shelley, Bertie.
Bertie: Oh, am I?

(The poet Shelley wrote “The Sensitive Plant.”) A Robert Browning allusion also goes over Bertie’s head. As he and Bertie arrive at Totleigh Towers, where trouble lurks, Jeeves pronounces, “Child Roland to the Dark Tower Came.” Bertie tells us, “what he meant I hadn’t an earthly.”

Robert Browning

There’s more Browning farther along in the story, as Madeline Bassett explains to Bertie why he reminds her of the hero of “Rudel to the Lady of Tripoli.” Wodehouse tosses in Longfellow, too: “I Shot an Arrow into the Air” and “The Wreck of the Hesperus” both get nods.

Like Emsworth, Bertie sometimes has trouble remembering where phrases came from. Explaining to Jeeves why Stephanie Byng is the most dangerous young woman he’s ever had to deal with, he asks, “Who was the chap lo whose name led all the rest — the bird with the angel?” “Abou ben Adhem, sir,” Jeeves reminds him. The poem was Leigh Hunt’s “Abou Ben Adhem.”

P. G. Wodehouse must have read a good deal of Rudyard Kipling in his youth

But for all his fuzziness, nearly everything reminds Bertie of something out of a poem; he tells his readers: “And then out of the night that covered me, black as the pit from pole to pole, there shone a tiny gleam of hope. I thought of Jeeves.” Somewhere, Bertie had heard someone read William Ernest Henley’s “Invictus”! Later, in low spirits, Bertie tells Jeeves, “You see before you, Jeeves, a toad beneath the harrow.” The reference was to Kipling’s “Pagett, M.P.”

And Wodehouse calls on Browning again to help close out The Code of the Woosters. His problems all neatly sorted, Bertie says, “This is the end of a perfect day, Jeeves. What’s that thing of yours about larks?” Jeeves has Browning’s lines from “Pippa Passes” on the tip of his tongue.

Those are the ones we spotted; no doubt there were more. In this one short novel Wodehouse also mentions A Tale of Two Cities, Poe’s story “The Purloined Letter,” Reginald Heber’s hymn “From Greenland’s Icy Mountains” (“Totleigh Towers might be a place where Man was vile, but undoubtedly every prospect pleased”), Robert Louis Stevenson’s story “The Cargo of Champagne,” and Gerald Fairlie’s now-forgotten 1929 novel The Muster of the Vultures (tracking that one down was no easy task!)

But of all the poets, a reader of Wodehouse is far more likely to run across Shakespeare than anyone else. In The Code of the Woosters alone, Wodehouse invokes King Lear, Macbeth, All’s Well That Ends Well, and Hamlet (three different references to lines in the “To be or not to be” soliloquy). Wodehouse even has Gussie Fink-Nottle quote Matthew Arnold’s sonnet entitled “Shakespeare.” (Calling Bertie Wooster a “muddle-headed ass” for forgetting to bring him a book, Gussie comments sarcastically, “Others abide our question, thou art free.”)

Of course, Bertie himself rarely knows what’s Shakespeare and what isn’t. In The Code of the Woosters he misattributes Sonnet 33 to his valet:

I remember Jeeves saying to me once, apropos of how you can never tell what the weather’s going to do, that full many a glorious morning had he seen flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye and then turn into a rather nasty afternoon.

And like so many people, Bertie thinks things come from Shakespeare that don’t:

Bertie: You don’t mean you have an idea?
Jeeves: Yes, sir.
Bertie: But you told me just now you hadn’t.
Jeeves: Yes, sir. But since then have been giving the matter some thought, and am now in a position to say “Eureka!”
Bertie: Say what?
Jeeves: Eureka, sir. Like Archimedes.
Bertie: Did he say Eureka? I thought it was Shakespeare.

A scene from Macbeth by the nineteenth-century British painter George Cattermole, who also illustrated Dickens

More often than not, the Shakespeare that Wodehouse pulls out of his hat is Macbeth — surely the Shakespeare play he knew best. In fact, seeing the Scottish play at the Stratford Festival (Stratford, Ontario) a couple of weeks ago (see this post), we found that we weren’t fully feeling the terror and tragedy because so many of the play’s best lines reminded us of what Wodehouse had done with them. When Lady Macbeth shooed Macbeth’s dinner guests away with “Stand not upon the order of your going,” for instance, we couldn’t help hearing Bertie Wooster’s Aunt Dahlia using the line to tell Bertie to make himself scarce.

In Macbeth, Banquo shakes his gory locks at Macbeth’s grand feast twice, then disappears for good. In the collected works of P. G. Wodehouse, Banquo materializes so often that he’s practically a regular. We think, though we’re not sure, that Banquo’s first appearance in Wodehouse was in his 1914 short story “The Man, the Maid, and the Miasma” (in The Man Upstairs). Our favorite sighting of Banquo, though, was in the 1950 short story “The Shadow Passes” (in Nothing Serious):

I don’t know if you ever came across a play of Shakespeare’s called Macbeth? If you did, you may remember this bird Macbeth bumps off another bird named Banquo and gives a big dinner to celebrate, and picture his embarrassment when about the first of the gay throng to turn up is Banquo’s ghost, all merry and bright, covered in blood. It gave him a pretty nasty start, Shakespeare does not attempt to conceal.

And Macbeth has what must have been Wodehouse’s favorite line from Shakespeare — he used it in one story after another. Early in the play, Lady Macbeth loses patience with her husband for hesitating to murder his royal guest and eggs him on to the crime:

Art thou afeard
To be the same in thine own act and valour
As thou art in desire? Wouldst thou have that
Which thou esteem’st the ornament of life,
And live a coward in thine own esteem?
Letting ‘I dare not’ wait upon ‘I would,”
Like the poor cat i’ the adage.

Macbeth, Act I, Scene 7. In The Code of the Woosters, Bertie Wooster has almost exactly the same problem as Macbeth: his Aunt Dahlia is insisting that he steal a cow-creamer from his host’s collection at Totleigh Towers. Like Macbeth, Bertie can’t steel himself to the crime:

Bertie: That is the problem which is torturing me, Jeeves. I can’t make up my mind. You remember that fellow you’ve mentioned to me once or twice, who let something wait upon something? You know who I mean — the cat chap.
Jeeves: Macbeth, sir, a character in a play of that name by the late William Shakespeare. He was described as letting ‘I dare not” wait upon ‘I would,’ like the poor cat i’ th’ adage.
Bertie: Well, that’s how it is with me. I wabble, and I vacillate — if that’s the word?
Jeeves: Perfectly correct, sir.

Not for the first or last time, Bertie Wooster was in the same pickle as Macbeth: a strong-willed woman was demanding that he do something he knew he shouldn’t. What better to fall back on than Macbeth?

See this post for Emsworth’s decidedly mixed feelings about this year’s Macbeth at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival.

Although Wodehouse clearly drew a good deal from Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (see this Emsworth post), one doesn’t find direct allusions to Wilde’s plays in Wodehouse’s stories (only to Wilde’s serious novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. Then again, why would one comic writer allude to another?

What P. G. Wodehouse owes to Oscar Wilde

Wilde

Seeing The Importance of Being Earnest at the Shaw Festival in 2004 persuaded us that P. G. Wodehouse had no greater literary influence than Oscar Wilde. How very like Wodehouse’s idle young men in spats were Algernon Moncrieff and Jack Worthing (as played by David Leyshon and Evan Buliung)! How very like the manner of Jeeves was the deadpan sarcasm of Algernon’s manservant Lane (as played by Robert Benson)! How very much like Bertie Wooster’s dragon aunts was Algernon’s aunt, Lady Bracknell!

Wodehouse

And how much do Wodehouse plots owe to The Importance of Being Earnest?  In how many Wodehouse stories do young men and women make their way into English country houses posing as tutors or gardeners or friends of friends so they can pursue forbidden romances or purloin prize pigs or play detective? Of course Wilde’s play is a story of imposters too. When he is in London, Jack adopts the identity of a fictitious brother named “Ernest” so that he can live the life of a libertine in the city (as Ernest) without tarnishing his respectable reputation back home in the country. And when Algernon wants to meet Jack’s pretty ward Cecily Cardew (who like so many Wodehouse young women cannot marry without her guardian’s permission), he goes to the country house where she is staying, posing as Jack’s much talked-about but never-seen brother “Ernest”.

Wodehouse was only an impressionable 14 years old when The Importance of Being Earnest premiered in 1895, and we think it must have influenced him powerfully.  If you took out of Wodehouse all the foppish young men, imposters, domestic blackmail, dragon aunts, butlers, and young women who need permission from guardians to marry — that is, the characters, the plot, and the comic elements of Wilde’s play — there wouldn’t be much Wodehouse left on our library shelves.

It’s easy to identify the writers who were dear to Wodehouse’s heart; his novels and stories have thousands of quotations and allusions to Keats, Tennyson, Arthur Conan Doyle, and especially Shakespeare. Nowhere, however, is Wodehouse’s delight in Oscar Wilde so transparent as in his 1952 novel Pigs Have Wings.

Galahad Threepwood in one of Wodehouse's later, lesser novels

There is, first, Lord Emsworth’s brother Gally. The now middle-aged Galahad Threepwood (a recurring Wodehouse character) has spent his life carousing in nightclubs and chasing barmaids, just as he did in the 1890s when he was a young man. (Galahad’s character is the antithesis of that of the pure knight of the Arthurian legends.) Remarkably, however, Gally’s decades of fast living have had no impact on his health or his perennially youthful appearance — no more than they did, Wodehouse gleefully tells us in Pigs Have Wings, on Dorian Gray.

Ivan Albright's alarming 1943 painting of Dorian Gray is at the Art Institute of Chicago

The chief imposter in Pigs Have Wings is the butler’s niece Maudie, formerly a barmaid, now co-proprietor of a detective agency. Gally engages her to come incognito to Blandings Castle to help foil what Gally fears to be a plot to either steal or nobble Lord Emsworth’s prize-winning fat pig — and he insists that she pose as “Mrs. Bunbury,” an old friend of one of the guests.

Brian Bedford will take the part of Lady Bracknell at the Stratford Festival in 2009

Wodehouse’s choice of “Bunbury” for Maudie is, we think, the most explicit homage to Oscar Wilde in all of Wodehouse.  The reference, of course, is to opening scene of The Importance of Being Earnest , when we learn that for some time Algernon has pretended to have a friend in the country named Bunbury whom Algernon must frequently visit because of Bunbury’s alleged ill health. Whenever Algernon wants to escape London because of inconvenient social obligations, he pleads that his friend “Bunbury” needs him and flees town.

We have tickets to see The Importance of Being Earnest again next month in Ontario, this time at the Stratford Festival. Stratford stalwart Brian Bedford will be directing and playing Lady Bracknell (in drag), but the roles of Algernon and Jack will be played by two actors that we’ve seen most often in years past at the Shaw Festival, Mike Shara and Ben Carlson.

June 2009: We liked Bedford’s production of The Importance of Being Earnest. See this post.

October 2009. We weren’t altogether satisfied with the Stratford Festival’s 2009 Macbeth, but it did remind us how Wodehouse borrowed the most famous lines in Shakespeare’s play and turned them on their heads in his comic stories. See this post.

Jeeves at Christmastime

It is our habit to re-read one of our favorite Christmas stories around Christmastime each year — aloud if anyone will listen, silently if they won’t. Often as not, it’s A Christmas Carol, which never gets old. Sometimes it’s one of Dickens’s lesser Christmas tales, sometimes O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi.” This Christmas Eve, we fell merrily back on P.G. Wodehouse’s only Christmas tale, “Jeeves and the Yule-Tide Spirit.”

I don’t suppose Wodehouse has much of a reputation as a Christmas author. Dickens does, in good part because of his affectionate account of the Cratchit family’s Christmas dinner party and the shenanigans under the mistletoe at the Wardles’ (Pickwick Papers, chapter 28) . But Bertie Wooster passes lightly over the details of the Christmas bash at Skeldings, the country home of Lady Wickham:

It being Christmas Eve, there was, as I had foreseen, a good deal of revelry and what not; so that it wasn’t till past one that I got to my room.

On with the story, Wodehouse must have thought.

Norman Rockwell's Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim

Both Wodehouse and Dickens give us their characters waking up with their servants on Christmas morning. From “Jeeves and the Yule-Tide Spirit,” a passage that reminded us of Scrooge waking up after his night with the ghosts of Christmas Past, Christmas Present, and Christmas Future:

I could have sworn I hadn’t so much as dozed off for even a minute; but apparently I had. For the curtains were drawn back and daylight was coming in through the window, and there was Jeeves with a cup of tea on a tray.

“Merry Christmas, sir!”

And from Pickwick Papers, chapter 30:

“Well, Sam,” said Mr. Pickwick as that favoured servitor entered his bed-chamber with his warm water, on the morning of Christmas Day, “still frosty?”

“Water in the wash-hand basin’s a mask o’ ice, Sir,” responded Sam.

“Severe weather, Sam,” observed Mr. Pickwick.

“Fine time for them as is well wropped up, as the Polar Bear said to himself ven he was practising his skating,” replied Mr. Weller.

P. G. Wodehouse

We candidly admit that the theme of Wodehouse’s story is not actually one of peace on earth and good-will to men, like A Christmas Carol and the passages from Pickwick. “Jeeves and the Yule-Tide Spirit” is, instead, an account of Bertie Wooster’s ill-advised infatuation with the red-headed Roberta Wickham and Bertie’s plan to revenge himself on his friend Tuppy Glossop for a practical joke.

And it’s one of the most hilarious stories Wodehouse ever wrote — in fact, one of the funniest things ever written. Jeeves has some of his best lines, especially when he’s advising his master against an alliance with Roberta Wickham:

“I would always hesitate to recommend as a life’s companion a young lady with such a vivid shade of red hair.”

Good cheer on Christmas Eve!

Reminding myself why I don’t watch television (a season of Seinfeld)

Several weeks ago, someone related by blood to Emsworth urged upon him a DVD box set of episodes of a defunct TV sitcom called Seinfeld. I had never seen the show and knew nothing about it.

But Emsworth is nothing if not open-minded, so I loaded up my DVD player and sat back in my recliner. A couple of weeks later, I had gotten through the four DVDs that contained the seventh season of Seinfeld. It seems that these were originally aired around 1996.

Midway through the fourth disc, I finally stopped asking myself why I was still watching. The answer was that this show, despite its shortcomings, owes a lot to P. G. Wodehouse.

Bertie Wooster (Hugh Laurie) and Jeeves (Stephen Fry) in the BBC series "Jeeves and Wooster"

Now a typical Wodehouse plot goes like this: One of Bertie Wooster’s domineering aunts summons Bertie, a passive and obliging character, and sends him on a simple errand, like picking up an antique brooch from a jewelry repair shop. But Bertie bungles everything and lets the brooch come into the possession of someone who will not give it back. The situation becomes hopeless, but at the last minute, through an ingenious plot twist, Bertie’s man Jeeves sets everything aright.

Then take the plot of “The Bottle Deposit,” the 21st episode of the seventh Seinfeld season. Elaine’s domineering boss gives her a simple errand: she is to go an auction and bid up to $10,000 on a set of golf clubs once used by President Kennedy.

But she bungles the job, first by rashly bidding twice as much as authorized (just the sort of thing Bertie Wooster would have done!), then by entrusting the vintage clubs to Jerry, who leaves them in the back seat of his car, which is then stolen by a crazed auto mechanic. The clubs end up mangled and bent. But in a hilarious, last-minute plot twist, Elaine’s boss jumps to the conclusion that the clubs were bent by the late President himself in moments of golfing temper, and Elaine comes up smelling like a rose.

Then there’s the gag that runs from the first to the last episodes of the seventh season: George Costanza has rashly become engaged, and, like Bertie Wooster in nearly every Jeeves and Wooster novel, he is desperate to get out of it. This too is classic Wodehouse. As Bertie Wooster said after one of his dangerously close brushes with matrimony: “I was in rare fettle and the heart had touched a new high. I don’t know anything that braces one up like finding you haven’t got to get married after all.”

Newman (Wayne Knight) in "The Bottle Deposit"

Wodehouse might have written “The Bottle Deposit” himself, and I would be very surprised to learn that Larry David, the principal writer for Seinfeld, did not know his Wodehouse. In fact, Jerry’s friends Kramer and Newman are stock Wodehouse characters, amoral ne’er-do-wells and moochers who, like Wodehouse’s Ukridge, spend all their time dreaming up easy money schemes. (I find that blogger Mark Grueter has also noted the relationship between Larry David and P. G. Wodehouse.)

So the writing in Seinfeld, grounded on the Wodehousian formula, isn’t bad. But the eight hours or so I spent on these episodes served as a bracing reminder of why I don’t watch network television shows.

Let’s start with the laugh track.  Long ago, when TV shows were filmed live, audience laughter was natural enough. But canned applause annoys me beyond words. And this show isn’t always funny. I was surprised, for example, at how little I found to laugh at in Jerry Seinfeld’s opening monologues.  But the laugh track keeps rolling, regardless.

Then there’s the debased popular culture portrayed in Seinfeld. Emsworth is no prude, but Seinfeld and his friends have the sexual morals of characters in a soft-core porn movie — not for comic purposes, but just because that’s the way they live. The essentially sluttish Elaine, for example, is ready to bed someone she has just met, but hesitates because she has only a limited number of discontinued contraceptive devices. Should she waste one on him? Elaine’s schtick over whether he was “sponge-worthy” was cringe-making.

But worst of all is the yelling. Jason Alexander is clearly a talented actor. So why does his character, George Constanza, always yell at fellow characters who are only six inches away from his face? Why don’t TV sitcom directors realize think that high-decibel discussions are only funny if they’re the exception, not the rule?