Pynchon, Shakespeare, Kyd

[Bernard F. Gilmore St John's Prep]

I once read The Crying of Lot 49 just after taking a seminar on Elizabethan
drama (non-Shakespearean) and wrote a short paper on connections I saw
between Jacobean revenge-tragedies in particular and Lot 49. I didn't find
any direct work that had been done on the connections (then again it was
over a decade ago and I didn't look that hard), but I found that an article
by Maynard Mack entitled "The Jacobean Shakespeare: Some observations on the
Construction of the Tragedies" (reprinted in Essays in Shakespearean
Criticism eds. Calderwood and Toliver) made some observations that made
general connections very clear for me.  One sentence stood out: "Whatever
the themes of individual plays, therefore, the one pervasive Jacobean theme
tends to be the working out of acts of will, and especially (in that
strangely Calvinistic age) of acts of self-will." 
	And I suppose a string of thoughts could get one from Oedipa to
Hamlet and Hamlet's father.  Oedipus's quest for knowledge leads to
unfortunate understanding of who his father was; oedipa's quest is
paralleled with Pierce as the father-figure (dead, offstage, and enigmatic).  
	I regularly teach Lot 49 after a bunch of Elizabethan plays in my
high school courses; this is one of the areas we talk about.


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>Over the weekend I was reading the `Spanish tragedy' hoping to find some 
>links with `The couriers tragedy' from CoL49. Regretably apart from a few 
>similarities in the meter of the two poems I can't say that anything in 
>Kyd reminded me of Pynchon. Has anything been written on Pynchon's 
>influences in writing Warfinger's tragedy? For the past two or so years 
>that I have been a Pynchon reader I also found it rather odd that there 
>are not any obvious (to me at least) influences from Shakespear (I know 
>it is difficult to argue why there should be any Shakesperean influences 
>in the first place but this absence makes me thing that either Pynchon 
>does not care about the distant past at all or that he never bothered 
>with Shakespear. Both these views coming from someone who liked T.S. 
>Eliot (or who was at least reading him)  strike me as being rather odd.)
>Any thoughts?
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>basil
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					B. Gilmore