Editing Moby-Dick (section)

===Assimilation of Shakespeare===
[[F. O. Matthiessen]], in 1941, declared that Melville's "possession by Shakespeare went far beyond all other influences" in that it made Melville discover his own full strength "through the challenge of the most abundant imagination in history".<ref name="Matthiessen 1941, 424">Matthiessen (1941), 424</ref> This insight was then reinforced by the study of Melville's annotatations in his reading copy of Shakespeare, which show that he immersed himself in Shakespeare when he was preparing for ''Moby-Dick'', especially ''[[King Lear]]'' and ''[[Macbeth]]''.<ref>Grey (2006), [https://books.google.com/books?id=l2HLCQAAQBAJ&q=Lear 253]</ref> Reading Shakespeare, Matthiessen observes, was "a catalytic agent", one that transformed his writing "from limited reporting to the expression of profound natural forces".<ref>Matthiessen (1941), 428</ref>

The creation of Ahab, Melville biographer Leon Howard discovered, followed an observation by Coleridge in his lecture on ''Hamlet'': "one of Shakespeare's modes of creating characters is to conceive any one intellectual or moral faculty in ''morbid'' excess, and then to place himself. ... thus ''mutilated'' or ''diseased'', under given circumstances".<ref name="Howard 1940, 232">Howard (1940), 232, italics Howard's.</ref> Coleridge's vocabulary is echoed in some phrases that describe Ahab. Ahab seemed to have "what seems a half-wilful ''over-ruling morbidness'' at the bottom of his nature", and "all men tragically great", Melville added, "are made so through a certain ''morbidness''; "all mortal greatness is but ''disease''". In addition to this, in Howard's view, the self-references of Ishmael as a "tragic dramatist", and his defense of his choice of a hero who lacked "all outward majestical trappings" is evidence that Melville "consciously thought of his protagonist as a tragic hero of the sort found in ''Hamlet'' and ''King Lear''".<ref name="Howard 1940, 232"/>

Matthiessen demonstrates the extent to which Melville was in full possession of his powers in the description of Ahab, which ends in language
<blockquote>that suggests Shakespeare's but is not an imitation of it: 'Oh, Ahab! what shall be grand in thee, it must needs be plucked from the skies and dived for in the deep, and featured in the unbodied air!' The imaginative richness of the final phrase seems particularly Shakespearean, "but its two key words appear only once each in the plays&nbsp;... and to neither of these usages is Melville indebted for his fresh combination".<ref>Matthiessen (1941), 428–429</ref></blockquote>

Melville's assimilation of Shakespeare, Matthiessen concludes, gave ''Moby-Dick'' "a kind of diction that depended upon no source",<ref>Matthiessen (1941), 429</ref> and that could, as D.H. Lawrence put it, convey something "almost superhuman or inhuman, bigger than life".<ref>Quoted in Matthiessen (1941), 429</ref> The prose is not based on anybody else's verse but on "a sense of speech rhythm".<ref name="Matthiessen 1941, 430">Matthiessen (1941), 430</ref>

Matthiessen finds debts to Shakespeare, whether hard or easy to recognize, on almost every page. He points out that the phrase "mere sounds, full of Leviathanism, but signifying nothing" at the end of "Cetology" (Ch.32) echoes the famous phrase in ''Macbeth'': "Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing."<ref name="Matthiessen 1941, 424"/> Matthiessen shows that Ahab's first extended speech to the crew, in the "Quarter-Deck" (Ch.36), is "virtually blank verse, and can be printed as such":<ref name="Matthiessen 1941, 424"/>

{{Poem quote|But look ye, Starbuck, what is said in heat,
That thing unsays itself. There are men
From whom warm words are small indignity.
I mean not to incense thee. Let it go.
Look! see yonder Turkish cheeks of spotted tawn—
Living, breathing pictures painted by the sun.
The pagan leopards—the unrecking and
Unworshipping things, that live; and seek and give
No reason for the torrid life they feel!<ref>Matthiessen (1941), 426</ref>}}

In addition to this sense of rhythm, Matthiessen shows that Melville "now mastered Shakespeare's mature secret of how to make language itself dramatic".<ref name="Matthiessen 1941, 430"/> He had learned three essential things, Matthiessen sums up:

* To rely on verbs of action, "which lend their dynamic pressure to both movement and meaning".<ref name="Matthiessen 1941, 430"/> The effective tension caused by the contrast of "thou launchest navies of full-freighted worlds" and "there's that in here that still remains indifferent" in "The Candles" (Ch. 119) makes the last clause lead to a "compulsion to strike the breast", which suggests "how thoroughly the drama has come to inhere in the words".<ref>Matthiessen (1941), 430–31</ref>
* The Shakespearean energy of verbal compounds was not lost on him ("full-freighted").
* Finally: Melville learned how to handle "the quickened sense of life that comes from making one part of speech act as another{{mdash}}for example, 'earthquake' as an adjective, or the coining of 'placeless', an adjective from a noun".<ref>Matthiessen (1941), 431</ref>