Literary Imagination Advance Access published online on October 7, 2009
Literary Imagination, doi:10.1093/litimag/imp073
© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. All rights reserved. For permissions please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Shakespeare in Syllabics: J.V. Cunningham's "To What Strangers, What Welcome"
*John Baxter, English Department, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, B3H 4P9. E-mail: jbaxter@dal.ca
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The title of Cunningham's poetic sequence "To What Strangers, What Welcome" clearly alludes to a famous exchange between Hamlet and Horatio.1 Hamlet, flush from his momentous interview with the Ghost, is full of "wild and whirling words" and manic behavior. Horatio is baffled: "O day and night but this is wondrous strange!" Hamlet replies with an admonition and a comment: "And therefore as a stranger give it welcome. / There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in our philosophy."2 The final comment, of course, is what is most often quoted, but the preceding remark, with its incitement to action, is the more mysterious. Why should we be welcoming to what is beyond our philosophy? One of the ancient rules of hospitality is to welcome strangers, a principle all the more important given that mysterious strangers in myth and legend often turn out to