Pynchon and Shakespeare

[LARSSON at vax1.mankato.msus.edu]

Alan Westrope writes:
"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." "

Remember that Pynchon began his writing at the tail-end of the High Modernist
era, when allusions to "classical" (I use the term loosely) lit. were all
the rage, inspired in large part by role-model T.S. Eliot and taken to the
nth degree by prof. Nabokov (check out those license plates in LOLITA!).
Sonheim was just running to catch up--but then he's always been the most
"literary" of Broadway librettists.

For a fuller account of Eliot, the Grail quest, et al. see Raymond Olderman's
BEYOND THE WASTELAND.

--Don Larsson, Mankato State U., MN