“Earth, the chatterer father of all speech”: From Shakespeare’s brave new world! to William Carlos Williams’ Nuevo mundo!

Abstract

America, that is I should say a place like Paterson always reminds a good deal of Shakespeare. You know how Americans are about Shakespeare: dies in 1616 or so-the pilgrims land in 1620." (SUNYBUF A298) In these notes, briefly jotted down on a rumpled prescription sheet, William Carlos Williams ironizes on the discrepancy separating his America from Shakespeare's England, only ultimately to reclaim the playwright's legacy by concluding: "he is like us". By "us," Williams refers to Americans, a people whose task is to recover an indigenous idiom, like Shakespeare in his own time and place. From Shakespeare's Tempest (1611, hereafter Tmp.) to Williams' Tempers (1913) I would like to argue that we have two instances of a common quest for, and consideration of, language. As Williams depicts the contact of Columbus' sailors or the first pilgrims with the New World, we are reminded of the shipwreck at the opening of The Tempest that leads the characters of the play to reconsider the old hierarchy, as they strive to adapt to an ever-changing ground. "They enter the new world naked" (Spring and All 95) "Nuevo Mundo!" (GAN 182) William Carlos Williams' poetry endeavours to break free from the shackles of the colonizer and the verbal and mental vassalage to the Crown that outlived 1776. After Emerson's cry for independence in The American Scholar (1837) and Whitman's "Earth, the chatterer father of all speech": From Shakespeare's brave new wor...