Pynchon, Shakespeare, Kyd

[Alan Westrope]

On Thu, 19 Jan 1995, andrew at cee.hw.ac.uk (Andrew Dinn) wrote:

> Pynchon is slightly deprecatory about literary borrowings in his intro
> to `Slow Learner'. OK, he is not actually against them per se but he
> does point out how reference to the Waste Land and a play (Hamlet, I
> think or maybe King Lear?) are irrelevant to the the story they appear
> in (A Small Rain) and hence just so much pretentious name-dropping and
> culture-checking.

This thread made me vaguely recall a Shakespearian reference to someone
at "The White Visitation" in _GR_.  I leafed through my copy over lunch
on Friday and found it about 10 pages prior to the end of "Beyond the Zero."
Thomas Gwenhidwy "is descended directly from the Welshman in _Henry V_
[ V again...:-) ] who ran around forcing people to eat his Leek."

I suspect that a writer of Pynchon's erudition would consider allusions
to Shakespeare as rather hackneyed, best left to folks writing for the
masses, e.g. Bernstein and Sondheim in "West Side Story."


Alan Westrope                  <awestrop at nyx10.cs.du.edu>
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