Cornfield

Read More

In act 4 scene 5 of Hamlet the maddened Ophelia visits the King and Queen, "distracted, with her hair down, playing on a lute." She sings stanzas from two or three Elizabethan ballads that have seemingly been prompted by the sudden death of her father Polonius and her sudden abandonment by prince Hamlet. The last tells the story of a young woman who loses her virginity on Saint Valentine's day. "Before you tumbled me," she says to the young man, "You promis'd me to wed." He replies, "So would I 'a' done, by yonder sun, / And thou hadst not come to my bed." Two lines are especially memorable. Ophelia sings,

Young men will do't if they come to't,
By cock, they are to blame.   (4.5.60-61)

This is one of several suggestions in Hamlet that the prince may have been sexually involved with Ophelia before casting her out of his life. Stephen turns the gender dynamics around, speaking of "a boldfaced Stratford wench who tumbles in a cornfield a lover younger than herself" before betraying him sexually. He says of Anne, who was eight years older than Shakespeare, "By cock, she was to blame." The context is much the same as in the ballad: a moment of sexual delight engenders a lifetime of regret. (The French song Plaisir d'amour memorably expresses the same thought.) But now it is a woman whose desire has unmade a man.

Stephen also says of Anne, "She put the comether on him, sweet and twentysix." The come-hither needs no glossing, but "sweet and twenty" alludes to "O Mistress Mine" in Twelfth Night, a carpe diem song performed by the clown Feste:

What is love? 'Tis not hereafter;
Present mirth hath present laughter;
What's to come is still unsure.
In delay there lies no plenty,
Then come kiss me sweet and twenty;
Youth's a stuff will not endure.   (2.3.47-52)

This song communicates the opposite of Ophelia's bitter regret, urging a young woman to enjoy the moment because love does not last, the future is "unsure," and postponing pleasure yields no "plenty." The last word may possibly suggest that pregnancy is a welcome outcome of lovemaking––an unspoken and unhappy undercurrent in Ophelia's song that Stephen may be echoing when he calls Anne's bending over Will a "prologue to the swelling act." (It is true, however, that other things do swell in the act of sex.) The children that resulted from Anne's seduction play a large part in Stephen's account of Shakespeare's life and art. Anne was 26 when she married Will. And she may have been pregnant when they married.

A third Shakespeare play is echoed when Stephen describes Anne seducing Will "in a cornfield." This carpe diem song is performed by two young attendants in the penultimate scene of As You Like It. In that scene Touchstone anticipates his coming marriage to the dullwitted but comely country lass Audrey, a union precipitated on his part solely by sexual desire. (Several of Shakespeare's works, including Hamlet, play on the sexual suggestions of "country." Joyce no doubt appreciated the pun.) The song begins,

It was a lover and his lass,
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
That o'er the green corn-field did pass,
In spring time, the only pretty ring time,
When birds do sing, hey ding a ding a ding,
Sweet lovers love the spring.

Between the acres of the rye,
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
These pretty country folks would lie,
In spring time, etc.   (5.3.16-25)

Mr. Best corrects Stephen on "cornfield," saying it should be "Ryefield." He then recites the two lines about pretty countryfolk copulating in the rye. Stephen, dogged in his determination to win over every skeptical listener, and magpie-like in his eagerness to incorporate shiny found bits into his talk, later accepts Mr. Best's emendation when he talks about the unmanning effect that Anne's seduction had on Shakespeare: "Belief in himself has been untimely killed. He was overborne in a cornfield first (ryefield, I should say) and he will never be a victor in his own eyes after nor play victoriously the game of laugh and lie down."

But the word "cornfield" in fact appears in the song's third line––and, furthermore, there is no contradiction between the two terms. Rye is one species of cereal grain, but in Elizabethan times "corn" could refer to the seeds of virtually any plant. The first meaning listed in the OED, "A grain, a seed," was in use from the time of King Ælfred until the late 19th century. People spoke of pepper-corn, barley-corn, and many other kinds, including the "Indian corn" that was grown in the New World. Only after maize was brought back to England in the 17th and 18th centuries did the word begin to refer exclusively to this one grain. For Shakespeare's audiences, rye was something that might be grown in a "cornfield." And for Shakespeare, incidentally, fields of any kind of seed crop might suggest impregnation. Enobarbus uses such a metaphor in Antony and Cleopatra: "Royal wench! / She made great Caesar lay his sword to bed; / He ploughed her, and she cropped" (2.2.226-28).

At the end of Eumaeus Stephen tells Bloom of his fondness for Elizabethan lute songs––he loves them so much that he wants to acquire an expensive instrument to play as he sings them. This passion intersects with his interest in Shakespeare, because Shakespeare featured such songs in play after play. Ulysses echoes others besides the three referenced in "tumbles," "cock," "sweet and twenty," and "cornfield." Later in Scylla and Charybdis Buck Mulligan says, "Cuckoo, cuckoo.... O word of fear!," alluding to one of two remarkable lute songs at the end of Love's Labour's Lost. In Proteus, "Full fathom five thy father lies" echoes the beautiful lute song that Ariel sings for Ferdinand's benefit in the first act of The Tempest. In Eumaeus "Tell me, where is fancy bred?," from the third act of The Merchant of Venice, becomes garbled into an ad jingle for fancy bread in Bloom's mind. These songs stamped Joyce's aural imagination as indelibly as any operatic aria or music hall ditty.