While it is almost impossible to find a literary work that does not reference another literary work, it is not always easy to know why such references are included. Sometimes they foreshadow important plot points, sometimes they help characterize a person in the narrative, and sometimes, we’re convinced, they’re just included to make the author sound smart. The really good ones, however, work on multiple levels, the most important of which is furthering the overall message of the story. Oh yes, and to make us laugh. Observed.
Two of the most memorable allusions in literature have to be Shakespeare’s screams in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. After getting involved with two con artists claiming to be a king and a duke, Huck and runaway slave Jim help put on a production of selected scenes from “Romeo and Juliet” and “Hamlet” as a scheme to make money in a local area. rural. Missouri. As you can imagine, the result is not pretty.
In Romeo and Juliet, the bearded old duke dons a stolen nightgown and is courted by the king in the play’s immortal balcony scene; in Hamlet, the Duke performs a magnificently sloppy version of Hamlet’s soliloquy that includes the lines “To be or not to be; that is the naked awl” and “But gentle you, fair Ophelia: open not your heavy, marble jaws.” “As an uneducated thirteen-year-old, Huck doesn’t appreciate the hilarity of the situation, but unlike the duke and king, he at least has the excuse of inexperience.
Although these scenes are typical of Twain because they are enormously entertaining, they also work on several deeper levels. On the one hand, it stands to reason that Huckleberry Finn, often considered the seminal American novel, would take its hat off to its European predecessors and, at the same time, herald its departure from the literary tradition. Not to mention that including a stage production within the novel is a huge nod to the whole play-within-a-play thing.
In fact, the play within Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” is particularly important because it confirms what Hamlet already suspects: that King Claudius is guilty of the murder of Hamlet’s father. Similarly, although the reader already knows that the King and the Duke are phonies, the brazenness of his theatrical swindle alerts us that things are going to get worse.
When it comes down to it, however, Twain’s allusions to Shakespeare have a far more important role to play in furthering the theme of the art of high and low; after all, it’s not often that a country’s greatest literary work is told from the perspective of an ignorant teenager speaking in rural jargon. What’s really cool about this is that it ditches the notion that high art should only be accessible to the upper echelons of society. Some works of art are only exhibited in museums and palaces; some literature is only intelligible to multilinguals with a background in the classics; Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is accessible to anyone who wants a laugh and an outsider’s perspective on society.
Twain’s juxtaposition of high and low art reminds us that literature in its purest form is meant to be democratic. And what screams “seminal American novel” louder than a democratizing adventure story about overcoming institutionalized racism?