Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

nineteenth century, many things had happened, among them the romantic movement. Moreover, England had rediscovered its Germanic roots, which it had forgotten. I thinkCarlyle, when talking about Shakespeare, calls him “our Saxon William.” This would have surprised Shakespeare, for Shakespeare never thought about England’s Saxon roots. When Shakespeare thought about England’s past, he thought instead about English history after the Norman conquest, or in England’s Celtic past. And even when he wrote
Hamlet
, he felt so distant from all of that, that except for Yorick, the jester—existing eternally in that dialogue with Hamlet and the skull—and the two courtesans, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, all of it comes from other countries. The soldiers who appear in the first scene of
Hamlet
have Spanish names, Francisco and Bernardo. Hamlet’s beloved is Ophelia; her brother is Laertes, the name of Ulysses’s father. That is, the Germanic was far away from Shakespeare. Though undoubtedly it was in his blood, and in a large part of his vocabulary, but he was not conscious of it. He found almost all his plots in Greece, Rome; for
Macbeth
, he looked to Scotland; for
Hamlet
, he found it in a Danish story. Morris, on the other hand, was very conscious of the Germanic, and above all, of the Norse aspects of the English past. And so he invented this plot. He takes the fourteenth century—Chaucer’s era—and in that era, there is a plague that is sweeping through Europe and especially through England: the Black Plague. So he imagines a group of knights who want to flee death. Among them is a Breton; there is also a Norwegian, and a German knight—though the German knight dies before the end of the adventure. These knights decide to look for the Earthly Paradise, the paradise of immortal men. The Earthly Paradise was usually situated—there is an Anglo-Saxon poem with this title—in the Orient. 3 But the Celts had situated it in the West, toward the setting sun, in the confines of the unknown seas bordering on America, which had yet to be discovered. The Celts imagined all kinds of marvels: for example, islands where bronze hounds chased deer of silver or gold; islands over which a river hung like a rainbow, a river that never emptied, with ships and fish; islands surrounded by walls of fire; and one of these islands was the Earthly Paradise.
    Those knights of the fourteenth century decide to look for the blessed islands, the islands of the Earthly Paradise, and they leave London. And when they leave London, they pass through customs, and at customs, there is a man who is writing. And we are not told his name, but we are led to understand that this man is Chaucer, who was a custom’s agent. So Chaucer appears silently in the poem, like Shakespeare, who appears and does not say a word in the novel
Orlando
, by Virginia Woolf. In that novel there is a party in a palace, and there is a man watching and observing everything and saying nothing. Both Morris and Virginia Woolf felt incapable of inventing words worthy of putting in the mouths of Chaucer or Shakespeare.
    Then the ship carrying the adventurers puts out to sea, and they pass another ship. In that ship is a king, one of the kings of England who is going to fight against France in the long Hundred Years’ War. And the king invites the knights to board his ship, where he is on deck, and he is surrounded by the knights, alone and unarmed. He asks them who they are. One says he is Breton, the other that he is Norwegian, and the king asks them what they are searching for, and they tell him they are searching for immortality. The king does not think this adventure is absurd. The king believes an Earthly Paradise might exist, but at the same time he understands that he is an old man, that his fate is not immortality but rather battle and death. And so he wishes them good luck, he tells them that their fate is better than his, that the only thing left for him is to die “within the four walls of some battlefield.” 4 He tells them to carry on. Then he thinks that although he is a king and they are strangers, they—perhaps this fits the beliefs of the time—would become immortal. “And maybe,” he says, “it could come to pass that I, a king, will be remembered for only one thing; I will be remembered because one morning, before you crossed the sea, you spoke to me.” Then he thinks that, in spite of the fact that they most probably will become immortal,