Sibling struggles in Murdoch and Shakespeare
‘Awakening, Henry had instantly become conscious of something new and wonderful about the world. Some unexpected marvel had entered his life. What was it? Oh yes, his brother Sandy was dead’ (Henry and Cato)
Princes, singing stars and media magnates populate today’s news with their squabbles, but brotherly conflict is a theme as old as Genesis itself: the struggle of Cain and Abel to gain supremacy in the eyes of God the Father, and the murder which follows, sets a dreadful precedent. Sibling rivalry is one of the great forces in the universe, as any honest parent will admit, even if murder does not generally ensue; and it is inevitably an abiding theme in literature. The relationships of siblings are frequently the main focus of the family drama which playwrights and novelists, especially perhaps Shakespeare and Murdoch, explore endlessly and profitably. However, for reasons of length, this blog will devote itself to the central pre-occupation of pairs of brothers.
Murdoch’s devotion to Shakespeare’s genius is well known and connections between her novels and his plays are frequently cited and discussed. What Germaine Greer wrote of Shakespeare: that the inclusiveness of his intelligence exploiting the ‘compendia of wisdom from all kinds of sources … made of it something remarkably exciting and alive, repaying all kinds of analysis and suggestive of all kinds of alternatives’ seems to me equally valid of Murdoch’s novels, with, ironically, the Shakespearean source as one of her most fertile, and open to ‘all kinds of alternatives’.
Yet the connections identified between the two writers most often refer to the complex double plots, comic ‘atmosphere’ or the resolutions of Murdoch’s novels: that this one has a feel of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in its magical, shape-shifting and surrealistic effects, or that one’s happy resolutions remind us of Much Ado about Nothing; or that this novel is imbued with the bittersweet valedictory mood of the late romances such as The Tempest or The Winter’s Tale. Famously, The Black Prince is, by its very title, an invitation to find within it the resonances and themes of Hamlet, whilst The Sea, the Sea allows its unreliable narrator Charles Arrowby to affect a close link with Prospero from The Tempest on the grounds of his earlier fame as a theatrical director of the play and his own acting of the part. Readers also see his magnetism, egotism and tyranny at work, even in retirement; neither has this latter-day Prospero’s self-imposed banishment dented his magisterial qualities, judging by those old thespians from his past who seek him out hopefully for welcome or benediction. Murdoch herself, always self-aware, invites much of this metatextual interrogation in that novel.
However, I find an even more specific and precise link in the characterisations of the brothers who appear in Shakespeare’s plays and those who people Murdoch’s novels. We find them warring and scheming against each other, or, perhaps more frequently, one of them suffering a profound sense of inadequacy and exclusion from the loving enclosure of parental approbation or hereditary rights to property or money; or somehow deficient in brains and talent, by comparison with the ‘other’. They are not all second children like Henry, quoted above, though ‘good wombs have borne bad sons’ as Prospero’s daughter Miranda wisely observes. Many are step-brothers, adopted children, or actually born out of wedlock, all informing Murdoch’s modern version of brotherhood.
It was certainly hard being a bastard son at the time Shakespeare was writing. To be ‘base-born’ meant exclusion from inheritance, at best disrespect, at worst scorn and exclusion from polite society. ‘The bastard, like the prostitute, thief and beggar, belongs to that motley crowd of disreputable social types which society has generally resented, always endured. He is a living symbol of social irregularity.’ (1) Some of Shakespeare’s most villainous characters, in comedies, histories and tragedies, are both bastard and malcontent as a result, whether or not they are brothers.
In Much Ado About Nothing Don John the Bastard admits that he is ‘a plain-dealing villain. I am trusted with a muzzle, and enfranchis’d with a clog, therefore I have decreed not to sing in my cage. If I had my mouth, I would bite; if I had my liberty, I would do my liking. In the meantime let me be that I am, and seek not to alter me.’ He remains unaltered, unlike many Murdoch troublemakers, but his plot is defeated, ensuring a happy comedic ending, the defeat of simple villainy by goodness, appropriate for a comedy. The well-meaning manipulations of his brother, the legitimate Don Pedro, are, meanwhile, successful in ensuring such a positive ending. More complex is the situation of Edmund in the tragedy King Lear, set against his legitimate brother Edgar from the outset, and determined to do whatever is necessary to inherit, which includes lying, false evidence and ultimately betrayal of his father, leading to the latter’s torture and banishment from the kingdom. His brother is forced to disguise himself and live like a wretched beggar. It should be admitted that Don John is a boring two-dimensional sort of fellow, whilst Edmund, like many of Murdoch’s evil characters, holds a certain fascination and is a complex enough character to show a kind of remorse in Act V: ‘Some good I mean to do, despite of mine own nature’, calling into question the roles played by nature (inherited tendencies) and nurture. But his early soliloquy underlines his over-riding ambition and readiness to use ‘invention’ to succeed:
‘Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land.
Our father's love is to the bastard Edmund
As to the legitimate: fine word, “legitimate”!
Well, my legitimate, if this letter speed
And my invention thrive, Edmund the base
Shall top th’ legitimate. I grow, I prosper:
Now, gods, stand up for bastards!’
By comparison, the brothers David and Luca in Murdoch’s The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, one Blaise’s legitimate offspring with his wife Harriet and the other the young illegitimate child of Blaise and his mistress Emily, do not prosper. They are both eventually sidelined from the family in a callous way. Unlike Edmund, Luca is not loved by his father as much as the legitimate son David is, and he meets a wretched fate finally in a special institution. (Although it could be argued that, like Gloucester in King Lear, his father is tortured, here by the dogs.) David hates the way Luca is treated by Harriet, his own mother. ‘She cared for the little boy, his foul nightmare brother … He had, even as he thrust her petulantly from him, rested too in the absolute infallible earth-guaranteeing certainty that she thought about him all the time and that he was the goal and centre of her life … Suddenly, as if by the fiat of a wicked fairy, he had been utterly dispossessed.’ Poor David – dispossessed indeed. When at the end of the novel his father remarries his mistress after Harriet’s death, Emily heartlessly disposes of the legitimate son in her mind. ‘About David, Emily had no worries at all. David was nearly grown up. She could almost cross off upon the calendar the weeks and months which must elapse before David should be grown up. And when that time came he would simply go away and not trouble them any more.’ Both of her husband’s sons have been disposed of – there is little poetic justice in this novel, unlike the ending of King Lear, where at least Edgar is triumphant and becomes king.
In contrast, Lucas, the adopted child in The Green Knight is certainly loved by his parents until their own child comes along. Driven by jealousy, he soon becomes dominant over the younger natural son Clement, bullying him, hitting him and maintaining a vicious despotism. This relationship is concealed from the other characters until the seminal moment in the novel’s action: the attempt of Lucas to murder the mild and likeable Clement, which is thwarted by the action of Peter Mir, who, like the Green Knight of the medieval tale, demands eventual retribution for the injurious blow to his head. In Lucas, a devilish figure, clever and fascinating, we see one of the most obvious heirs of Shakespeare’s Edmund the bastard son. The latter’s attraction for Lear’s wicked daughters Goneril and Regan also resembles Lucas’s interaction with Louise’s three daughters in The Green Knight. In Hamlet, somewhat similarly, Claudius has already murdered his brother, Hamlet’s father, in order to marry Hamlet’s mother Gertrude and seize the throne; and the sexual attractiveness of the sister-in-law is of course also an abiding theme in Murdoch’s treatment of brotherly rivalry. Murdoch provides us with no avenging ghosts, but memories of brothers who have died are frequently reflected upon.
In The Time of the Angels, perhaps overall Murdoch’s darkest and most terrifying novel, the territory to be fought over by the brothers is intellectual, a metaphysical one. Originally three brothers, the early death of Julian leaves the field for Carel and Marcus to slog it out, though their encounters are so unequal they are hardly a fight. Marcus is an altruist, worthy and earnest, but weak in the face of his demonic, egotistic brother, a priest of ‘no god’, viciously immoral, a ‘dark figure’ who seems always to ‘loom beside him’, ever contemptuous. Their debate about good and evil in Chapter 17 is the metaphorical equivalent of Edgar and Edmund’s trial by combat, but it does not end simply with a victory for the good. The ‘darkness and devils’ of King Lear are manifest in this novel to a disturbing degree.
Even if not intent on murder, grown up brothers are often depicted by Murdoch as determined on violent punishment of their siblings: Carel’s vicious slap across Marcus’s face in the Time of the Angels, Otto’s savage blow on Edmund’s head in The Italian Girl, for example, as well as the wanton destruction of precious property – Austin Gibson Grey for example, smashing the beautiful and priceless Chinese porcelain collection of his brother in An Accidental Man. And Nigel in Bruno’s Dream imposes various complex rituals of torture on his twin brother Will:
‘You need me. You need me as the brute needs the angel, as the tender back needs the whip and the suppliant neck the axe. Any juxtaposition of brutish material and spirit involves suffering.’
The wonderfully evocative scene by the Thames of the duel with pistols arranged by Nigel also recalls Edgar’s single combat with Edmund at the end of King Lear. However, the duel in Bruno’s Dream is not between the brothers, but arranged to punish both Will and Danby by the dominant Nigel!
The violent antipathy is not limited to ‘brothers’ of different blood. Conflict between legitimate brothers for worldly or intellectual supremacy also arises powerfully in both Shakespeare and Murdoch. One brother is always wealthier, cleverer, often more renowned in a Murdoch novel. Henry in Henry and Cato for example, beside himself with glee at the death of Sandy, reflects that ‘he had just been born a bit unreal and second rate in comparison with Sandy.’ The Shakespearean struggle for control, however, usually involves political usurpation. In the comedy As You Like It, Duke Frederick has usurped the dukedom and banished his good brother Duke Senior, who is now living in the forest of Arden, where he has a kind of court in the forest, surrounded by his loyal followers. As this is a comedy, Frederick eventually repents and the state is restored; however, Antonio, Prospero’s evil usurper brother in The Tempest, is never actually remorseful although he is defeated by Prospero’s magic. Prospero’s so-called forgiveness in Act 5 is prefaced by the address ‘you, most wicked sir, whom to call brother/Would even infect my mouth’ and Antonio is given no following dialogue in the play, not surprisingly. Duke Senior’s exile to the forest is an early foreshadowing of Prospero’s exile to the island and this has powerful similarities with Charles Arrowby’s self-imposed banishment to Shruff End in The Sea, the Sea. As with Prospero, various characters from his past appear in the course of this narrative.
Although Charles is an only child, his relationship with his first cousin James, both the only sons of brothers, is very like that of siblings. But it does not invite a simple comparison with Prospero and Antonio. They grew up together and Charles always felt inferior. His first descriptions of James in childhood are critical and envious ones. ‘The chagrin, the ferocious ambition which James, I’m sure unconsciously, prompted in me’ sets the scene for his behaviour (so counter to what the reader feels) when adult James, wise, rational and sympathetic appears at Shruff End. Another late play (The Winter’s Tale) is invoked in the presentation of Charles’s grotesque jealousy of James so like Leontes for Polixenes, when the latter had been like brothers, ‘train’d together in their childhoods’. It is only in the final phase of The Sea, the Sea that Charles can remember that James saves him from apparently certain death by drowning and that James has used a kind of super-human power, developed through his long involvement in Eastern mysticism, to do so. He can then, and only then, reflect ‘I thought of all the years I had wasted when James and I might have been friends, instead of just awkward embarrassed relatives or something almost more like enemies.’ When a little later he finds out that James has died, he is afflicted by a keen sense of loneliness, saying ‘How very much I had somehow relied upon his presence in the world, almost as if he had been my twin brother and not my cousin’. Our respect for James and his potency prompts reflection on the nature of magic in the novel. Charles has been compared with Prospero because his theatrical creations have been ‘magical’, but these are fascinating ephemeral scenes which can disappear in a moment (‘our revels now are ended….these our actors are melted into air’) and which, dependent on his magic, Prospero intends to abandon on his return to his dukedom in Milan. In fact, it is Charles’s ‘brother’ James who has the real, life-changing magical power, an irony which Murdoch must have enjoyed teasing us with at the end of the novel. James is as far from the wicked Antonio as may be imagined and Charles has not drowned his book, even if perhaps, like Prospero, ‘Every third thought shall be my grave’…
In striking contrast to the motif of two warring brothers are the few devoted siblings in Shakespeare: for example the identical twins Antipholus of Ephesus and Antipholus of Syracuse in The Comedy of Errors. They and their servants, also identical twins – Dromio of Ephesus and Dromio of Syracuse – provide an irresistible comic pattern of muddle and mistaken identity which enlivens the play and moves inescapably to one of the most life-enhancing comic endings imagined by Shakespeare. (With some skilful slight readjustment in the final scene of the play, directors are usually able to employ the same actors for each part to maintain the visual authenticity). In Twelfth Night, however, we must believe that the identical twins are male and female (Viola and Sebastian). Here there are similar comic mistaken identities but the resolution is darker and more compromised, and very much more like Murdoch’s many brother/sister relationships.
These latter are shown as so close as to be symbiotic, so loving as to be almost incestuous. In the very early novel Flight from the Enchanter, Murdoch says of Rosa’s relationship to her brother: ‘She was obscenely near to Hunter. For him she had no exterior. The shell of conventions and pretentions which enclose and define a person did not pass between Hunter and Rosa but encased the pair of them together.’ This is a defining reflection: in almost every Murdoch novel which follows we find similar pairs of siblings: Felicity/Donald Mor; Catherine/Nick Fawley; Jamesie/Violet Evercreech, Elsa/David Lyevkin; and the list goes on, a continuing source of tension and disruptive focus throughout the novels, worthy of exploration in another forum. It is, though, Viola and Sebastian to whom we turn for the basic brother/sister pattern in Shakespeare which complicates the comic plot and assures the happy ending.
However, this novelist and dramatist, in their handling of the sibling theme, remind us of the very different constraints of the dramatic and novelistic forms within their historical and philosophical context. The effects of this allow for the presentation of characters who are, in Shakespeare’s plays, more simply villainous or virtuous. In his work the villainous bastards are given soliloquies in which to express their innermost thoughts and feelings; their dialogue with others is hypocritical and full of lying misdirections (as Edmund’s with his father and brother in the early Acts of King Lear). In the novels Murdoch frequently writes dialogue between brothers which may have the stichomythic effect of dramatic dialogue, but it is often openly aggressive, with effects which may be comic as well as disturbing. Few of her characters are entirely wicked, and their multifaceted motivations, coloured by past experiences and present impulses, are teased out in fascinating and often unexpected ways, in keeping with a form developed many years after Shakespeare. Moreover, it is self-evident that both writers enhance and inform their work with richly imaginative and poetic styles in their own genres.
Ultimately though, there is a directness in Shakespeare’s unambiguous portrayal of contrasting siblings which permits us to use the word ‘villain’ of one of them and possibly even ‘hero’ of the other. Twentieth-century efforts to complicate the motives and general psychology of the stock character, of Don John or Duke Frederick or Edmund or Antonio, founder on the accepted Christian framework of an earlier society which largely believed in God and the Devil, in goodness and wickedness. The conventions of Renaissance comedy and tragedy depend on acceptance of the circumambient existence of that context even while at times challenging it. Murdoch’s interrogation of what makes human beings treat each other with hatred or contempt mingled with other regards is of the twentieth century and, more particularly, of her own philosophical bent: more complex, more nuanced, inviting us to ponder the moral implications of our behaviour towards others and our own self-awareness. In Art is the Imitation of Nature (1978), she says: ‘fictional literature has a special moral dimension because it is about people and … it is in however covert, unclear, secret, ambiguous a way, about the struggle between good and evil.’ In her presentation of sibling brothers we discern this struggle, acknowledging a debt to Shakespeare, but suggesting also a world which may challenge conventions: deficient in poetic justice and at times dark and chaotic.
1. Kingsley Davis, 'Illegitimacy and the social structure', American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 45, No. 2 (Sep. 1939)