Sherlock Holmes and Shakespeare

Tom Ue

->Early on in A Study in Scarlet (2003; Vol. I), Watson deftly sums up his first impression of Holmes's knowledge of literature with the word 'Nil', though, Watson allows, '[h]e appears to know every detail of every horror perpetuated in the century.' As Watson learns more about Holmes, many of his early impressions, like this, are put into question. Holmes's 'ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge' (emphasis added). He may not know the extremely influential nineteenth-century essayist, historian, novelist and social and political commentator Thomas Carlyle and his writing, yet Holmes's reading ranges widely from Petrarch's sonnets to Honoré de Balzac's and George Meredith's fiction, from miracle plays to Henry David Thoreau's journal, and from early English charters and Shakespeare's plays to criminal news, agony columns and the Newgate Calendar. Let us not forget 'Humpty Dumpty'. Holmes's reading provides a lens through which we can gain a whole new appreciation for both his stories and Conan Doyle's aesthetics, and as Tanya Agathocleous puts it,

Holmes' scientific outlook [...] is importantly allied with artistic experience – his tortured appreciation of the violin and his 'immense' knowledge of sensational literature prepare him for his crime-solving as well as, if not better than, his knowledge of either chemistry or the law.

Conan Doyle returns to Shakespeare time and again. In The Hound of the Baskervilles (2003; Vol. I), for example, the cabdriver, who carried the man dogging Sir Henry and Dr Mortimer, told the surprised Holmes and Watson that the man had given his name. 'Oh, he mentioned his name, did he? That was imprudent. What was the name that he mentioned?,' asked Holmes, as he 'cast a swift glance of triumph' at Watson. The cabman's response – that the man had claimed to be 'Mr. Sherlock Holmes' – moved the real Holmes into confessing defeat: 'A touch, Watson – an undeniable touch!' In a seemingly unrelated scene, in The Valley of Fear (Vol. II), Holmes interrupts Watson's periodic statement in which he identifies Professor Moriarty as a 'famous scientific criminal, as famous among crooks as [...] he is unknown to the public'. Although Watson's annoyed response at being interrupted for the second time that morning is not narrated to us on this occasion, it nevertheless leads Holmes to cry: 'A touch! A distinct touch! [...] You are developing a certain unexpected vein of pawky humour, Watson, against which I must learn to call myself.'

These two scenes share in common – besides Holmes's being proven wrong – a gesture to Hamlet and Laertes's fencing match in Act V Scene II of Hamlet, and a synthesis of Osric's identification of Hamlet's successful hit as 'A hit, a very palpable hit' and Laertes's of another as 'A touch, a touch, I do confess'. If, in the play, both Hamlet and Laertes fight a losing battle – Hamlet, because he little suspects that Laertes will fight with a sword that is not blunted and that he will coat it with poison; and Laertes, because he is used by Claudius – the sword touch, from Holmes's lips, is indicative of his mock and not his actual (much less mortal) defeat, as the appearance of both allusions in the early chapters of both mysteries would suggest. Holmes exaggerates his despondency and his defeat, and we are meant to respond to his comic resignation with a smile. Conan Doyle's parodies of the Danish prince here reveal a sophisticated command of his source material and the skill with which he rewrites and adapts Shakespeare freely and for different ends. The Victorians knew their Shakespeare. Conan Doyle experienced Shakespeare in a variety of formats including, quite possibly, H. M. Paget and Walter Paget's 1890 booklet Shakespeare Pictures and H. M.'s title page for The Graphic: An Illustrated Weekly Newspaper on 19 November 1892, which showed Ellen Terry as Cordelia and Henry Irving as Lear. In what follows, I will explore some of the numerous ways in which Shakespeare's writing affected Conan Doyle in his creation and writing of Sherlock Holmes and his stories. My aims are to put Conan Doyle's reading of Shakespeare at the heart of his own writing, while giving a glimpse of the literary and social debates at the turn of the nineteenth century with which he was actively engaged, and to show Conan Doyle and Holmes themselves as fans in their own right. This chapter is divided into three parts. The first examines Conan Doyle's views about the authorship question by analysing some of his nonfiction and his poetry. The second argues that drama informs both the narrative structure of Conan Doyle's short stories and Holmes's methods. The third examines how Conan Doyle rewrites Shakespeare through close readings of 'The Boscombe Valley Mystery' (Vol. I) and 'The Missing Three-Quarter'.

Conan Doyle and Shakespeare

Conan Doyle writes, in a letter to Charlotte Drummond, on 12 April 1888:

Poor old Shakespeare! I fear it is all up with him. Alas and alas for the good burghers of Stratford! Alas too and alas for the globe trotting Yankees who have come from the other end of the world to gaze upon the habitation of the man who did not write the plays! What a topsey-turveydom it is! There were many reasons before this to think that Bacon was the true author, but if the Cryptogram on being tested proves to be true it is simply conclusive. (original emphasis)

The Cryptogram refers to a system devised by Ignatius Donnelly, a Baconian whose thousand-page magnum opus The Great Cryptogram: Francis Bacon's Cipher in the So-Called Shakespeare Plays (1888) 'scores already familiar points about the illiteracy of Shakespeare and the profound learning (especially legal learning) displayed in the plays', notes Schoenbaum. More interesting is the sheer number of works that Donnelly attributes to Bacon:

This busy scribbler penned Montaigne's Essays, Burton's Anatomy, the numerous plays of Shakespeare apocrypha, a bit of Peele, and the whole Marlowe corpus. [...] [A]fter all, Donnelly calculates, if Bacon took time out from his public life and private studies to dash off a play every fortnight from 1581 to...