Courier's Tragedy vs. Hamlet

[Stanley Kozikowski]

Heather, I think that your question has value.  The fact that several 
Jacobean `revenge tragedy' writers seem to have `influenced' Pynchon's 
"Courier's Tragedy" might well suggest the Grandaddy Of Them All may 
well have had some ghostly presence in Pynchon's small big book.

We should probably begin with the basic frame:  Obviously, Angelo the Evil 
Duke has killed the Good Duke of Squamuglia as did Claudius kill King 
Hamlet--and with poison, too, leaving, as well, a Good Son, to deal with the 
whole royal mess.  Pynchon, we know, might well have liked to name his 
bad duke "Angelo," who is pretty much the basic bad guy of Shakespeare's 
"Measure for Measure," which was probably the first note Pynchon struck 
from the Shakespearean Rag in his story "Mortality and Mercy in Vienna." 
Assuming, now, for purposes purely theoretical, that we then have 
stylistically an `Included Middle,' Pynchon's play within the novel ends 
with the arrival--now that everyone else who counts is virtually dead in 
both Shakespeare's play and Pynchon's play--on the scene of that lonely 
fellow, "the colorless 
administrator Gennaro." (PL75)  Gennaro's a dead ringer for Fortinbras, 
arguably Shakespeare's most colorless a administrator, who some new and 
old historicists would identify as James VI of Scotland succeeding 
Elizabeth (who has all the character of Claudius to Shakespeare's mind.  
Read his Sonnet #107 welcoming Southampton back from the Elizabethan 
dead.)  Meanwhile, forward in 1965 Pynchon may have, like the Bard, 
played with political allegory himself--Kennedy=Good Duke and 
Nixon/Hoffa=Bad Duke.  

   
You may have the start--I don't think end--of something here.  Whatever, 
I am not satisfied with anybody's reading of "The Courier's Tragedy," 
which contains some major intratextual allusions to so much in TP's 
splendid work.

On Wed, 16 Oct 1996, Heather Lewis wrote:

> Has anyone noticed (besides myself) any similarities or connections 
> between Pynchon's "Courier's Tragedy" in COL 49 and Shakespeare's 
> "Hamlet"?  Just a thought! Comments?
> 
> Heather
>