O good Horatio, what a wounded name,
Things standing thus unknown, shall live behind me!
If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart
Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
To tell my story. . .

—’Hamlet’ Act V Scene 2.

Literary reviews have limitations, depending on their purpose. If they are to alert potential readers to the desirability (or not) of engaging with a text then they should tease without revealing too much, persuade without committing the unforgivable sin of introducing spoilers. A statement like “The butler did it” is a crime punishable by death.

Unless, of course, the text is a classic, its theme and plot already known, its significance wholly in the public domain. Jack kills the Giant. Galahad achieves the Grail. The Mountie gets his man. You get the idea. Even then the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ may require a bit of circumspection in a review.

But there’s also those who are neither au fait with the text nor interested in reading it, so may skip the review or any related discussion, and that’s just fine – I’m not judging! But then if you love literature, or don’t mind spoilers, or indeed enjoy my literary ramblings here, then you may get something out of Part One of my further musings on Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince after my review here. And yes, there’ll be spoilers galore!

PART 1/2

Relationships
A brief synopsis first: Bradley Pearson – for convenience, BP from now on – is an author with writer’s block who is constantly interrupted whenever he determines to go away and begin his fourth book in almost four decades. His ex brother-in-law Francis, his ex-wife Chris, and his sister Priscilla sort of form his family, while his former protégé and now very successful writer Arnold, Arnold’s wife Rachel and their daughter Julian make up a trio of close friends. With BP central to this sextet the plot hinges both on his indecision and the different demands he feels is made on him by each individual.

I suspect that, like many a playwright, Murdoch makes her Dramatis Personae work to justify their inclusion, and that each one’s role is to not only establish a relationship with the principal character – the prime mover, as it were – but to confuse matters by forming certain relationships with the rest of the cast.

In A Fairly Honourable Defeat the mover and shaker was a certain Julian, intentionally manipulating the rest of the cast; in A Severed Head (reviewed here) Martin appears the catalyst for pairs to swap allegiances and partners.

In the present novel though we apparently observe – and it’s important to recognise that virtually nothing in it is absolutely certain – many such swaps and disentanglements; these include divorce, affairs, incarceration, suicide, murder and estrangement. We are also meant to impute the kinds of motivations that precipitate ruptures, among them rivalry, latent homosexuality, hero worship, professional disdain and utter despair.

‘Must get back to Shakespeare.’
It’s frequently noted that in the four years leading up to the 1970 publication of A Fairly Honourable Defeat (reviewed here) Murdoch set herself to reread all Shakespeare’s plays and poems; one of her notebooks actually includes the reminder to herself, ‘Must get back to Shakespeare.’ Her indebtedness to his dramas is especially evident not only in A Fairly Honourable Defeat (which includes the influence of Much Ado About Nothing) but also in The Sea, the Sea (from 1978, riffing on The Tempest) and of course, so very obviously in The Black Prince, with Hamlet: the Baffins’ daughter Julian actually asks BP to tutor her on the tragedy.

As with Hamlet, tragedy stalks the novel. In the play Polonius is killed, Ophelia commits suicide, and Laertes, Gertrude, Claudius, Hamlet and even Hamlet’s father all die either by poison or the sword, or even both. Though less bloodthirsty, Murdoch’s tragicomedy includes reference to Priscilla’s suicide, Arnold’s murder and Bradley’s death in prison, plus – offstage, as it were – Bradley’s parents. While the correspondences are never literal there are enough echoes from the play to know Murdoch wants us to associate the novel with it.

“… All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts …”

— Jacques, ‘As You Like It’, Act II, Scene 7: 139–42.

All the principal characters in The Black Prince (and even some of the secondary characters) play many parts from Hamlet. Clearly BP, with his shilly-shallying and self-depiction as tragic hero is the Prince of Denmark, as emphasised by his initials corresponding to the Black Prince of the title. But he’s not the only player to act Hamlet: when he first sees Julian he mistakes her for a slim male, and she later confesses she’s played Hamlet in a school production; she insists on Bradley tutoring her on Hamlet, and for much of the rest of the novel keeps quoting choice bits from the play.

Only when she herself dresses as the black prince in Tudor costume is BP able to violently make love to her in an almost frenzied attack. Doubtless Francis Marloe would put a Freudian spin on this, but in any case being gay himself he’d recognise in BP’s actions a latent homosexuality, unsubtly referencing Bradley’s supposed obsession with London’s Post Office Tower.

Meanwhile, despite her male-presenting name (she’d been christened with it after the medieval female mystic Julian of Norwich) Julian also presents as Ophelia for, when BP first sees her in the street, she’s scattering what he at first takes for flower petals rather than the scraps of notepaper they really are.

[Ophelia sings:]
“White his shroud as the mountain snow
Larded all with sweet flowers;
Which bewept to the grave did not go
With true-love showers.”

— Act IV, Scene 5.

If she’s Ophelia, then Arnold Baffin could represent her father Polonius, his succession of novels standing in for Polonius’s clichéd aphorisms in the play, though in most respects Arnold – formerly BP’s literary protégé – originally acted as a Horatio figure to BP’s Hamlet. Incidentally, it’s been pointed out that the novelist and critic A S Byatt, who was Murdoch’s junior and made a study of Murdoch’s early novels, happens (as Antonia Byatt) to share the same initials as Arnold Baffin, which may or may not be significant.¹

But Arnold – who, like many another character here, plays many parts – isn’t only a Horatio or a Polonius figure but also a Claudius: he has a status in the literary world which BP must feel should be his by right, much as Hamlet felt Claudius had usurped his right to the throne of Denmark.

Then there’s Rachel Baffin, Arnold’s unhappy wife, who has a couple of sordid scenes with BP, which to me are a faintly reminiscent of Hamlet remonstrating with his mother Gertrude. Meanwhile BP’s tragic sister Priscilla takes over Ophelia’s role from Julian by becoming more and more distracted becore committing suicide. Also, BP’s earlier abortive mission to Priscilla’s estranged husband Roger in Bristol faintly parallels Hamlet being sent westward on a dangerous mission to the King of England and encountering pirates: Murdoch may reference the ‘thieves of mercy’ in Hamlet by Priscilla’s husband being literally a ‘jolly Roger’, having sold off most of Priscilla’s clothes and jewellery.

Then there are the two siblings from BP’s past: his former wife Christian – another female with a male name, hers a joke by her secular Jewish parents – and her brother Francis, who’s been struck off as a medical doctor for malpractice. They appear out of the blue in BP’s life just like Hamlet’s former school friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. As it happens, Christian’s maiden name (which of course is also her brother’s) is Marloe, so as ‘Christian Marloe’ she already recalls Shakespeare’s younger rival Christopher Marlowe. But Murdoch may also have had in mind the shadowy figure of Christian Rosenkreuz, reputed founder of the mystical sect of Rosicrucians, whose surname is very close in sound to Rosencrantz.

Apollo Loxias?
We can spend a lot of time playing Murdoch’s game of Find the Equivalent. Is Oscar Belling, the young man whom Julian eventually married, a stand-in for the foppish Osric? Is there a figure equivalent to Laertes present in the novel? Is BP’s former colleague Hartbourne, who later becomes Christian’s third husband, the counterpart of Fortinbras? Or is it “P Loxias”, the supposed editor of BP’s last ever novel, whom we have to imagine as the deus ex machina who steps in at the last moment and puts everything right?

In the next (and last) part, appearing imminently, I intend discussing P Loxias and his remit from Bradley to, like Horatio for Hamlet, “tell my story” despite any sadness he might feel (“absent thee from felicity awhile”); also the Four Humours or Temperaments that once purported to explain human psychology; plus Murdoch’s seeming ability to provide at the drop of a hat aphorisms as good as any of Wilde’s epigrams. And to all that I’ll add anything else that might occur to me to include about this tricksy novel, particularly about Art, and about Truth.

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A first follow-up to my review of The Black Prince for Kim and Cathy’s year-long event, A Year with Iris Murdoch. Part 2/2 should appear here soon.

¹ Miles Leeson. ‘How The Black Prince reveals the two sides of Iris Murdoch’. The Booker Prizes, 6th November, 2023. https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/features/how-the-black-prince-reveals-the-two-sides-of-iris-murdoch