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Billy Budd (novella)
Encyclopedia
Billy Budd is a novella
begun in November 1888 by American
author Herman Melville
, left unfinished at his death in 1891 and not published until 1924. The work has been central to Melville scholarship since it was discovered in manuscript form among Melville's papers in 1919 by Raymond Weaver, his first biographer.
It has an ignominious editorial history, as poor transcription and misinterpretation of Melville's notes on the manuscript marred the first published editions of the text. For example, early versions gave the book's title as Billy Budd, Foretopman, while it now seems clear Melville intended Billy Budd, Sailor: (An Inside Narrative); some versions wrongly included a chapter that Melville had excised as a preface (the correct text has no preface); some versions fail to correct the name of the ship to Bellipotent (from the Latin
bellum war and potens powerful), from Indomitable, as Melville called her in an earlier draft.
into service aboard HMS Bellipotent in the year 1797, when the Royal Navy
was reeling from two major mutinies
and was threatened by the Revolutionary French Republic's military ambitions. He is impressed from another ship, The Rights of Man (named after the very topical book by Thomas Paine
of that period, leading Budd to shout as it leaves "good-by to you too, old Rights-of-Man" clearly intended to have a double meaning, and considered so by the crew who hear it).
Billy, an orphaned illegitimate child suffused with innocence, openness and natural charisma, is adored by the crew, but for unexplained reasons arouses the antagonism of the ship's Master-at-Arms
, John Claggart, who falsely accuses Billy of conspiracy to mutiny. When Claggart brings his charges to the Captain, the Hon. Edward Fairfax "Starry" Vere, Vere summons both Claggart and Billy to his cabin for a private confrontation. When, in Billy's and Vere's presence, Claggart makes his false charges, Billy is unable to find the words to respond owing to a speech impediment. Unable to express himself verbally, he strikes and accidentally kills Claggart.
Vere, an eminently thoughtful man whose name recalls the Latin words "veritas" (truth) and "vir" (man) as well as the English word "veer," then convenes a drumhead court-martial
. He acts as convening authority
, prosecutor, defense counsel and sole witness (except for Billy himself). He then intervenes in the deliberations of the court-martial panel to argue them into convicting Billy, despite their and his belief in Billy's innocence before God. (As Vere says in the moments following Claggart's death, "Struck dead by an angel of God! Yet the angel must hang!") Vere claims to be following the letter of the Mutiny Act and the Articles of War
.
Having started the process, Vere and the other officers find that their own opinion matters little. "We are not talking about justice, we are talking about the law", that is, the law dictates what must ensue, whether or not it is just. The law states that an enlisted man killing an officer during wartime (accidentally or not) must hang. Vere spells out the awful truth and explains their inability to mete out leniency.
At his insistence, the court-martial convicts Billy; Vere argues that any appearance of weakness in the officers and failure to enforce discipline could stir the already turbulent waters of mutiny throughout the British fleet. Condemned to be hanged from the ship's yardarm at dawn the morning after the killing, Billy's final words are, "God bless Captain Vere!", which is then repeated by the gathered crew in a "resonant and sympathetic echo." The story may have been based on events onboard USS Somers
, an American naval vessel; one of the defendants in the later investigation was a first cousin of Melville, Lt. Guert Gansevoort
.
The novel closes with three chapters that cloak the story with further ambiguity:
Composing was always a difficult process for the author who described his method while writing Moby-Dick as follows: "Taking a book off the brain is akin to the ticklish & dangerous business of taking an old painting off a panel—you have to scrape off the whole business in order to get at it with safety."
The "scrapings" of Billy Budd lie in the 351 page manuscript now in the Houghton Library
at Harvard. The state of this manuscript has been described as "chaotic" with a bewildering array of corrections, cancellations, cut and pasted leaves, annotations inscribed by several hands, and with at least two different attempts made at a fair copy. Nevertheless, it has been established that the composition proceeded in three general phases as shown by the work of Melville scholars Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr. who did an extensive study of the original papers from 1953 to 1962.
After Melville's death his wife Elizabeth, who had acted as his amanuensis
on other projects, scribbled notes and conjectures, corrected spelling, sorted leaves and even, in some instances, wrote over her husbands faint writing. All this was done with the best of intentions, trying to follow through on what she perceived as her husband's objectives had he lived to finish the task. Unfortunately these editorial activities introduced a measure of confusion into the efforts of the first professional editors, Weaver and Freeman, who mistook her writing for Melville's. Mrs. Melville at some point placed the manuscript in "a japanned tin box" with the author's other literary remains, where it remained undiscovered for another twenty eight years.
faculty member named Raymond M. Weaver, doing research for what would become the first biography of Melville, paid a visit to Eleanor Melville Metcalf, granddaughter of the author. She gave him access to all the surviving records of her grandfather: manuscripts, letters, journals, annotated books, photographs, and a variety of other material. Among these papers Weaver was astonished to find a substantial manuscript for an unknown prose work entitled, of course, Billy Budd. After producing a text that would later be described as "hastily transcribed", Weaver published the first edition of the work in 1924 as Volume XIII of the Standard Edition of Melville's Complete Works (London: Constable and Company
). In 1928 he published another, different version of the text which, despite numerous variations, may be considered essentially the same text.
A second text, edited on different principles by F. Barron Freeman, was published in 1948, as Melville's Billy Budd (Cambridge: Harvard University Press). This edition tried to remain closer to what Melville actually wrote but unfortunately relied on Weaver's text with all its various mistaken assumptions and textual errors. All the many subsequent reprints of Billy Budd up through the early 1960s are, strictly speaking, versions of one or the other of these two basic texts.
In 1962, Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr., established what is now considered the correct text; it was published by the University of Chicago Press
, and contains both a "reading" and a "genetic" text. Most editions printed since then follow the Hayford-Sealts text.
and John Middleton Murry
hailing it as a masterpiece, Weaver changed his mind. In the introduction to its second edition in the 1928 Shorter Novels of Herman Melville, he declared: "In Pierre, Melville had hurled himself into a fury of vituperation against the world; with Billy Budd he would justify the ways of God to man." In mid-1924 Murry orchestrated the reception of Billy Budd, Foretopman first in London, in the influential Times Literary Supplement, in an essay called "Herman Melville's Silence" (July 10, 1924), then in a reprinting of the essay, slightly expanded, in the New York Times Book Review (August 10, 1924). In relatively short order he and several other influential British literati had managed to canonize Billy Budd, placing it along side Moby-Dick
as one of the great books of Western literature. Wholly unknown to the public until 1924, Billy Budd by 1926 had joint billing with the book which had just barely been firmly established as a literary masterpiece! In its first text and subsequent texts, and as read by different audiences, the book has kept that high status ever since.
In 1990 Melville biographer and scholar Hershel Parker
pointed out that all the early estimations of Billy Budd were based on readings from the flawed transcription texts of Weaver. Some of these flaws were crucial to an understanding of Melville's intent, like the famous "coda" at the end of the chapter containing the news account of the death of the admirable John Claggart and the depraved William Budd (25 in Weaver, 29 in Hayford & Sealts reading text, 344Ba in the genetic text) :
Weaver: "Here ends a story not unwarranted by what happens in this incongruous world of ours—innocence and infirmary, spiritual depravity and fair respite."
The Ms: "Here ends a story not unwarranted by what happens in this {word undeciphered} world of ours—innocence and infamy, spiritual depravity and fair repute."
Melville had written this as an end-note after his second major revision. When he went on to enlarge the book with a third major section developing Captain Vere he canceled it entirely because it no longer applied to the expanded story. Many of the early readers, like Murry and Freeman, deemed this passage no less than a foundational statement of Melville's philosophical views on life. Parker wonders what they could possibly have understood from the passage as written.
Although Parker agrees that "masterpiece" is an appropriate description of the book, he does add a proviso. "Examining the history and reputation of Billy Budd has left me more convinced than before that it deserves high stature (although not precisely the high stature it holds, whatever that stature is) and more convinced that it is a wonderfully teachable story—as long as it is not taught as a finished, complete, coherent, and totally interpretable work of art."
or as Adam
(before the Fall), with Claggart (compared to a snake several times in the text) figured as Evil
. Part of Claggart's hatred comes because of Billy's goodness rather than in spite of it.
Claggart is also thought of as the Biblical Judas
. The act of turning an innocent man in to the authorities and the allusion of the priest kissing Billy on the cheek before he dies, just as Judas kisses Jesus on the cheek when he was betrayed, are cited in support of this reading. Vere is often associated with Pontius Pilate
. This theory stems mainly from the characteristics attributed to each man. Billy is innocent, often compared to a barbarian or a child; while Claggart is a representation of evil with a "depravity according to nature," a phrase Melville borrows from Plato
. Vere, without a doubt the most conflicted character in the novel, is torn between his compassion for the "Handsome Sailor" and his martial adherence to his own authority.
Some critics have conceptualized Billy Budd as an historical novel that attempts to evaluate man's relation to the past. Harold Schechter, a professor who has written a number of books on infamous American serial killers, has often pointed out that the author's description of Claggart could be considered to be a definition of a sociopath, although Melville was writing at a time before the word "sociopath" was used.
Thomas J. Scorza has written about the philosophical framework of the story and he understands the work as a comment on the historical feud between poets and philosophers. Melville, in this interpretation, is opposing the scientific, rational systems of thought, which Claggart's character represents, in favor of the more comprehensive poetic pursuit of knowledge embodied by Billy.
In her book Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Sedgwick, expanding on earlier interpretations of the same themes, posits that the interrelationships between Billy, Claggart and Captain Vere are representations of male homosexual desire and the mechanisms of prohibition against this desire. She points out that Claggart's "natural depravity" which is defined tautologically as "depravity according to nature" and the accumulation of equivocal terms ("phenomenal", "mystery", etc.) used in the explanation of the fault in his character are an indication of his status as the central homosexual figure in the text. She also interprets the mutiny scare aboard the Bellipotent, the political circumstances that are at the center of the events of the story, as a portrayal of homophobia.
In the 1980s, Richard Weisberg advanced a reading of the novel based on his careful research into the history of the governing law. Based on his mining of statutory law and actual practice in the Royal Navy in the era in which the book takes place, Weisberg rejects the traditional reading of Captain Vere as a good man trapped by bad law and proposes instead that Vere deliberately distorted the applicable substantive and procedural law to bring about Billy's death. The most fully worked-out version of Weisberg's argument can be found in chapters 8 and 9 of his book The Failure of the Word: The Lawyer as Protagonist in Modern Fiction [orig. ed., 1984; expanded ed., 1989]. Weisberg's close reading of the book has confirmed the central role of Billy Budd, Sailor in the emerging field of law and literature
.
H. Bruce Franklin
sees a direct connection between the hanging of Budd and the controversy around capital punishment
. While Melville was writing Billy Budd between 1886 and 1891 the public's attention was focused on the issue.
Other critics interpret Budd's character as the antithesis of Claggart, the fallen angel. Like his peers, Budd is naturally good, but also has the courage and ability to believe in his goodness to the point that it is not accessible to him as a concept. Vere represents the good man with no courage or faith in his own goodness, and is therefore susceptible to evil.
Claggart is the archetypal fallen angel, a man who has abandoned his goodness for ego, and, knowing this, i.e. his own cowardice, seeks to seduce the flawed Vere and destroy Budd.
The centrality of Billy Budd's extraordinary good looks—"the young fellow who seems so popular with the men—Billy, the Handsome Sailor" says Captain Vere—have led to interpretations of a homoerotic sensibility in the novel, as well as analysis based on Laura Mulvey
's theory of scopophilia
and masculine and feminine subjectivity/objectivity. (Quote from Billy Budd, Sailor Penguin Popular Classics, 1995, p, 54). This version tends to inform interpretations of Britten's opera, perhaps owing to the composer's own homosexuality.
The book's concluding chapters raise anew a question that is implicit throughout Melville's story: How can one know the truth? The focus of chapter 21 on the court-martial impeaches that court-martial's—or, indeed, any legal proceeding's—attempts to establish "the truth." So, too, the book's multiple endings, and the doubt and confusion pervading the "inside narrative's" account of events aboard this ship, leave one totally in doubt about whether one can ever know the truth, even from an "inside narrative."
Legal scholar Robert Cover
suggests in the prelude to his book Justice Accused: Antislavery and the Judicial Process that Captain Vere may have been modeled after Chief Justice
Lemuel Shaw
of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court
. In addition to being Melville's father-in-law, Shaw was an abolitionist who was known for strict adherence to fugitive slave laws in his decisions, in spite of his beliefs. Although Cover admits there is no direct evidence to suggest it, he points to several parallels, such as Billy's "dumbness" and the rule requiring fugitive slaves to remain "dumb" (i.e. not speak in their own defense at trial) that strongly imply this subtext was intentional.
with a score by Benjamin Britten
and a libretto by E. M. Forster
and Eric Crozier
, which follows the earlier text as prepared for publication by Raymond Weaver in 1924. The opera has become a regular production at the Metropolitan Opera house in New York City and is generally well-known. Britten's distinct style has given the opera a unique perspective on the book, and the opera takes many creative liberties on the original book's plot. Another operatic version, composed by Giorgio Ghedini and premiered in 1949, also exists. In 1951, Louis O. Coxe
and Robert Chapman's 1949 adaptation for the stage opened on Broadway.
was made (in black and white) in 1962, starring a young Terence Stamp
as Billy Budd, and a self-cast Peter Ustinov
as the entrapped Captain Vere. Ustinov also produced, directed, and worked on the script of the film. The movie also stars Robert Ryan
as Claggart and David McCallum
as Wyatt, Gunnery Officer. Claire Denis' Beau travail
is also loosely based on the novel.
presented a live telecast of Billy Budd in 1955, starring a young William Shatner
as Billy Budd, with Douglas Campbell
as Claggart, and Basil Rathbone
as Captain Vere. Britten's Four Sea Interludes was included as background music. Two productions based on the opera appeared in 1988 and 1998.
Adaptations for cinema and television: (1962) directed by Peter Ustinov
and with him as Captain Vere and Terence Stamp
as Billy Budd (1980) with Porgy Franssen (1988) with Thomas Allen (1998) with Dwayne Croft
Novella
A novella is a written, fictional, prose narrative usually longer than a novelette but shorter than a novel. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Nebula Awards for science fiction define the novella as having a word count between 17,500 and 40,000...
begun in November 1888 by American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
author Herman Melville
Herman Melville
Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet. He is best known for his novel Moby-Dick and the posthumous novella Billy Budd....
, left unfinished at his death in 1891 and not published until 1924. The work has been central to Melville scholarship since it was discovered in manuscript form among Melville's papers in 1919 by Raymond Weaver, his first biographer.
It has an ignominious editorial history, as poor transcription and misinterpretation of Melville's notes on the manuscript marred the first published editions of the text. For example, early versions gave the book's title as Billy Budd, Foretopman, while it now seems clear Melville intended Billy Budd, Sailor: (An Inside Narrative); some versions wrongly included a chapter that Melville had excised as a preface (the correct text has no preface); some versions fail to correct the name of the ship to Bellipotent (from the Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
bellum war and potens powerful), from Indomitable, as Melville called her in an earlier draft.
Plot
The plot follows Billy Budd, a seaman impressedImpressment
Impressment, colloquially, "the Press", was the act of taking men into a navy by force and without notice. It was used by the Royal Navy, beginning in 1664 and during the 18th and early 19th centuries, in wartime, as a means of crewing warships, although legal sanction for the practice goes back to...
into service aboard HMS Bellipotent in the year 1797, when the Royal Navy
Royal Navy
The Royal Navy is the naval warfare service branch of the British Armed Forces. Founded in the 16th century, it is the oldest service branch and is known as the Senior Service...
was reeling from two major mutinies
Spithead and Nore mutinies
The Spithead and Nore mutinies were two major mutinies by sailors of the Royal Navy in 1797. There were also discontent and minor incidents on ships in other locations in the same year. They were not violent insurrections, being more in the nature of strikes, demanding better pay and conditions...
and was threatened by the Revolutionary French Republic's military ambitions. He is impressed from another ship, The Rights of Man (named after the very topical book by Thomas Paine
Thomas Paine
Thomas "Tom" Paine was an English author, pamphleteer, radical, inventor, intellectual, revolutionary, and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States...
of that period, leading Budd to shout as it leaves "good-by to you too, old Rights-of-Man" clearly intended to have a double meaning, and considered so by the crew who hear it).
Billy, an orphaned illegitimate child suffused with innocence, openness and natural charisma, is adored by the crew, but for unexplained reasons arouses the antagonism of the ship's Master-at-Arms
Master-at-arms
A master-at-arms may be a naval rating responsible for discipline and law enforcement, an army officer responsible for physical training, or a member of the crew of a merchant ship responsible for security and law enforcement.-Royal Navy:The master-at-arms is a ship's senior rating, comparable in...
, John Claggart, who falsely accuses Billy of conspiracy to mutiny. When Claggart brings his charges to the Captain, the Hon. Edward Fairfax "Starry" Vere, Vere summons both Claggart and Billy to his cabin for a private confrontation. When, in Billy's and Vere's presence, Claggart makes his false charges, Billy is unable to find the words to respond owing to a speech impediment. Unable to express himself verbally, he strikes and accidentally kills Claggart.
Vere, an eminently thoughtful man whose name recalls the Latin words "veritas" (truth) and "vir" (man) as well as the English word "veer," then convenes a drumhead court-martial
Drumhead court-martial
A drumhead court-martial is a court-martial held in the field to hear urgent charges of offences committed in action. The term is said to originate from the use of a drumhead as an improvised writing table, altar for religious services, and a traditional gathering point for a regiment for orders...
. He acts as convening authority
Convening Authority
The term convening authority is used in United States military law to refer to an individual whose job includes appointing officers to play a role in a court-martial, or similar military tribunal or military commission...
, prosecutor, defense counsel and sole witness (except for Billy himself). He then intervenes in the deliberations of the court-martial panel to argue them into convicting Billy, despite their and his belief in Billy's innocence before God. (As Vere says in the moments following Claggart's death, "Struck dead by an angel of God! Yet the angel must hang!") Vere claims to be following the letter of the Mutiny Act and the Articles of War
Articles of War
The Articles of War are a set of regulations drawn up to govern the conduct of a country's military and naval forces. The phrase was first used in 1637 in Robert Monro's His expedition with the worthy Scots regiment called Mac-keyes regiment etc. and can be used to refer to military law in general...
.
Having started the process, Vere and the other officers find that their own opinion matters little. "We are not talking about justice, we are talking about the law", that is, the law dictates what must ensue, whether or not it is just. The law states that an enlisted man killing an officer during wartime (accidentally or not) must hang. Vere spells out the awful truth and explains their inability to mete out leniency.
At his insistence, the court-martial convicts Billy; Vere argues that any appearance of weakness in the officers and failure to enforce discipline could stir the already turbulent waters of mutiny throughout the British fleet. Condemned to be hanged from the ship's yardarm at dawn the morning after the killing, Billy's final words are, "God bless Captain Vere!", which is then repeated by the gathered crew in a "resonant and sympathetic echo." The story may have been based on events onboard USS Somers
USS Somers (1842)
The second USS Somers was a brig in the United States Navy during the Mexican-American War, infamous for being the only U.S. Navy ship to undergo a mutiny which led to executions....
, an American naval vessel; one of the defendants in the later investigation was a first cousin of Melville, Lt. Guert Gansevoort
Guert Gansevoort
Commodore Guert Gansevoort was an officer in the United States Navy during the Mexican-American War and the American Civil War.-Biography:...
.
The novel closes with three chapters that cloak the story with further ambiguity:
- Chapter 28 describes the death of Captain Vere. In a naval action with a French vessel named the Athée (the Atheist), Captain Vere is mortally wounded and carried below. His last words are "Billy Budd, Billy Budd."
- Chapter 29 presents an extract from an official naval gazette purporting to give the facts of the fates of John Claggart and Billy Budd aboard HMS Bellipotent — but the "facts" offered turn the facts that the reader learned from the story upside down. In the gazette article, William Budd is a seaman but a conspiring mutineer probably of foreign birth and mysterious antecedents who, when confronted by the honest John Claggart, the master-at-arms loyally enforcing the law on board one of His Majesty's ships, stabs Claggart to the heart, killing him. The gazette concludes that the manner of the crime, and the weapon used, both point to Budd's foreign birth and subversive character; it then reports that the mutineer has paid the price of his crime and nothing more is amiss aboard HMS Bellipotent.
- Chapter 30 reprints a cheaply printed ballad written by one of Billy's shipmates as a kind of elegy for the Handsome Sailor. And yet the adult, experienced man depicted by the poem is not at all the young innocent whom the reader has met in the preceding chapters.
Development history
Created slowly over the last five years of his life, the novella Billy Budd represents Melville's return to prose fiction after a full three decades where his only literary activity was writing poetry. Yet it began as a poem, a ballad entitled "Billy in the Darbies", intended for inclusion in his book John Marr and other Sailors. As he did with some other poems in the collection, Melville composed a short, prose head-note to introduce the speaker and set the scene. The Billy here was different, an older man condemned for inciting mutiny and apparently guilty as charged. The piece was eventually excluded from the published book. Instead Melville incorporated the ballad and expanded the head-note sketch into a story that eventually reached 150 manuscript pages. This was the first of what were to be three major expansions, each centering around one of the principal characters.Composing was always a difficult process for the author who described his method while writing Moby-Dick as follows: "Taking a book off the brain is akin to the ticklish & dangerous business of taking an old painting off a panel—you have to scrape off the whole business in order to get at it with safety."
The "scrapings" of Billy Budd lie in the 351 page manuscript now in the Houghton Library
Houghton Library
Houghton Library is the primary repository for rare books and manuscripts at Harvard University. It is part of the Harvard College Library within the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Houghton is located on the south side of Harvard Yard, next to Widener Library.- History :Harvard's first...
at Harvard. The state of this manuscript has been described as "chaotic" with a bewildering array of corrections, cancellations, cut and pasted leaves, annotations inscribed by several hands, and with at least two different attempts made at a fair copy. Nevertheless, it has been established that the composition proceeded in three general phases as shown by the work of Melville scholars Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr. who did an extensive study of the original papers from 1953 to 1962.
After Melville's death his wife Elizabeth, who had acted as his amanuensis
Amanuensis
Amanuensis is a Latin word adopted in various languages, including English, for certain persons performing a function by hand, either writing down the words of another or performing manual labour...
on other projects, scribbled notes and conjectures, corrected spelling, sorted leaves and even, in some instances, wrote over her husbands faint writing. All this was done with the best of intentions, trying to follow through on what she perceived as her husband's objectives had he lived to finish the task. Unfortunately these editorial activities introduced a measure of confusion into the efforts of the first professional editors, Weaver and Freeman, who mistook her writing for Melville's. Mrs. Melville at some point placed the manuscript in "a japanned tin box" with the author's other literary remains, where it remained undiscovered for another twenty eight years.
Publication history
In August 1919 a ColumbiaColumbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
faculty member named Raymond M. Weaver, doing research for what would become the first biography of Melville, paid a visit to Eleanor Melville Metcalf, granddaughter of the author. She gave him access to all the surviving records of her grandfather: manuscripts, letters, journals, annotated books, photographs, and a variety of other material. Among these papers Weaver was astonished to find a substantial manuscript for an unknown prose work entitled, of course, Billy Budd. After producing a text that would later be described as "hastily transcribed", Weaver published the first edition of the work in 1924 as Volume XIII of the Standard Edition of Melville's Complete Works (London: Constable and Company
Constable & Robinson
Constable & Robinson Ltd. is an independent British book publisher of fiction and non-fiction works. Founded in Edinburgh in 1795 by Archibald Constable as Constable & Co. it is probably the oldest independent publisher in the English-speaking world still operating under the name of its...
). In 1928 he published another, different version of the text which, despite numerous variations, may be considered essentially the same text.
A second text, edited on different principles by F. Barron Freeman, was published in 1948, as Melville's Billy Budd (Cambridge: Harvard University Press). This edition tried to remain closer to what Melville actually wrote but unfortunately relied on Weaver's text with all its various mistaken assumptions and textual errors. All the many subsequent reprints of Billy Budd up through the early 1960s are, strictly speaking, versions of one or the other of these two basic texts.
In 1962, Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr., established what is now considered the correct text; it was published by the University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press
The University of Chicago Press is the largest university press in the United States. It is operated by the University of Chicago and publishes a wide variety of academic titles, including The Chicago Manual of Style, dozens of academic journals, including Critical Inquiry, and a wide array of...
, and contains both a "reading" and a "genetic" text. Most editions printed since then follow the Hayford-Sealts text.
Literary significance and reception
The book has undergone a number of substantial, critical reevaluations in the years since its discovery. Raymond Weaver, its first editor, was initially unimpressed and described it as "not distinguished". After its publication debut in England, and with critics of such caliber as D. H. LawrenceD. H. Lawrence
David Herbert Richards Lawrence was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter who published as D. H. Lawrence. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation...
and John Middleton Murry
John Middleton Murry
John Middleton Murry was an English writer. He was prolific, producing more than 60 books and thousands of essays and reviews on literature, social issues, politics, and religion during his lifetime...
hailing it as a masterpiece, Weaver changed his mind. In the introduction to its second edition in the 1928 Shorter Novels of Herman Melville, he declared: "In Pierre, Melville had hurled himself into a fury of vituperation against the world; with Billy Budd he would justify the ways of God to man." In mid-1924 Murry orchestrated the reception of Billy Budd, Foretopman first in London, in the influential Times Literary Supplement, in an essay called "Herman Melville's Silence" (July 10, 1924), then in a reprinting of the essay, slightly expanded, in the New York Times Book Review (August 10, 1924). In relatively short order he and several other influential British literati had managed to canonize Billy Budd, placing it along side Moby-Dick
Moby-Dick
Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, was written by American author Herman Melville and first published in 1851. It is considered by some to be a Great American Novel and a treasure of world literature. The story tells the adventures of wandering sailor Ishmael, and his voyage on the whaleship Pequod,...
as one of the great books of Western literature. Wholly unknown to the public until 1924, Billy Budd by 1926 had joint billing with the book which had just barely been firmly established as a literary masterpiece! In its first text and subsequent texts, and as read by different audiences, the book has kept that high status ever since.
In 1990 Melville biographer and scholar Hershel Parker
Hershel Parker
Hershel Parker is the H. Fletcher Brown Professor Emeritus at the University of Delaware. He is co-editor with Harrison Hayford of the landmark Norton Critical Edition of Moby-Dick and Associate General Editor of The Writings of Herman Melville.Volume 1 of Parker's two-volume biography, Herman...
pointed out that all the early estimations of Billy Budd were based on readings from the flawed transcription texts of Weaver. Some of these flaws were crucial to an understanding of Melville's intent, like the famous "coda" at the end of the chapter containing the news account of the death of the admirable John Claggart and the depraved William Budd (25 in Weaver, 29 in Hayford & Sealts reading text, 344Ba in the genetic text) :
Weaver: "Here ends a story not unwarranted by what happens in this incongruous world of ours—innocence and infirmary, spiritual depravity and fair respite."
The Ms: "Here ends a story not unwarranted by what happens in this {word undeciphered} world of ours—innocence and infamy, spiritual depravity and fair repute."
Melville had written this as an end-note after his second major revision. When he went on to enlarge the book with a third major section developing Captain Vere he canceled it entirely because it no longer applied to the expanded story. Many of the early readers, like Murry and Freeman, deemed this passage no less than a foundational statement of Melville's philosophical views on life. Parker wonders what they could possibly have understood from the passage as written.
Although Parker agrees that "masterpiece" is an appropriate description of the book, he does add a proviso. "Examining the history and reputation of Billy Budd has left me more convinced than before that it deserves high stature (although not precisely the high stature it holds, whatever that stature is) and more convinced that it is a wonderfully teachable story—as long as it is not taught as a finished, complete, coherent, and totally interpretable work of art."
Analysis and interpretations
A story ultimately about good and evil, Billy Budd has often been interpreted allegorically, with Billy interpreted typologically as the ChristChrist
Christ is the English term for the Greek meaning "the anointed one". It is a translation of the Hebrew , usually transliterated into English as Messiah or Mashiach...
or as Adam
Adam and Eve
Adam and Eve were, according to the Genesis creation narratives, the first human couple to inhabit Earth, created by YHWH, the God of the ancient Hebrews...
(before the Fall), with Claggart (compared to a snake several times in the text) figured as Evil
Evil
Evil is the violation of, or intent to violate, some moral code. Evil is usually seen as the dualistic opposite of good. Definitions of evil vary along with analysis of its root motive causes, however general actions commonly considered evil include: conscious and deliberate wrongdoing,...
. Part of Claggart's hatred comes because of Billy's goodness rather than in spite of it.
Claggart is also thought of as the Biblical Judas
Judas Iscariot
Judas Iscariot was, according to the New Testament, one of the twelve disciples of Jesus. He is best known for his betrayal of Jesus to the hands of the chief priests for 30 pieces of silver.-Etymology:...
. The act of turning an innocent man in to the authorities and the allusion of the priest kissing Billy on the cheek before he dies, just as Judas kisses Jesus on the cheek when he was betrayed, are cited in support of this reading. Vere is often associated with Pontius Pilate
Pontius Pilate
Pontius Pilatus , known in the English-speaking world as Pontius Pilate , was the fifth Prefect of the Roman province of Judaea, from AD 26–36. He is best known as the judge at Jesus' trial and the man who authorized the crucifixion of Jesus...
. This theory stems mainly from the characteristics attributed to each man. Billy is innocent, often compared to a barbarian or a child; while Claggart is a representation of evil with a "depravity according to nature," a phrase Melville borrows from Plato
Plato
Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...
. Vere, without a doubt the most conflicted character in the novel, is torn between his compassion for the "Handsome Sailor" and his martial adherence to his own authority.
Some critics have conceptualized Billy Budd as an historical novel that attempts to evaluate man's relation to the past. Harold Schechter, a professor who has written a number of books on infamous American serial killers, has often pointed out that the author's description of Claggart could be considered to be a definition of a sociopath, although Melville was writing at a time before the word "sociopath" was used.
Thomas J. Scorza has written about the philosophical framework of the story and he understands the work as a comment on the historical feud between poets and philosophers. Melville, in this interpretation, is opposing the scientific, rational systems of thought, which Claggart's character represents, in favor of the more comprehensive poetic pursuit of knowledge embodied by Billy.
In her book Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Sedgwick, expanding on earlier interpretations of the same themes, posits that the interrelationships between Billy, Claggart and Captain Vere are representations of male homosexual desire and the mechanisms of prohibition against this desire. She points out that Claggart's "natural depravity" which is defined tautologically as "depravity according to nature" and the accumulation of equivocal terms ("phenomenal", "mystery", etc.) used in the explanation of the fault in his character are an indication of his status as the central homosexual figure in the text. She also interprets the mutiny scare aboard the Bellipotent, the political circumstances that are at the center of the events of the story, as a portrayal of homophobia.
In the 1980s, Richard Weisberg advanced a reading of the novel based on his careful research into the history of the governing law. Based on his mining of statutory law and actual practice in the Royal Navy in the era in which the book takes place, Weisberg rejects the traditional reading of Captain Vere as a good man trapped by bad law and proposes instead that Vere deliberately distorted the applicable substantive and procedural law to bring about Billy's death. The most fully worked-out version of Weisberg's argument can be found in chapters 8 and 9 of his book The Failure of the Word: The Lawyer as Protagonist in Modern Fiction [orig. ed., 1984; expanded ed., 1989]. Weisberg's close reading of the book has confirmed the central role of Billy Budd, Sailor in the emerging field of law and literature
Law and literature
The law and literature movement focuses on the interdisciplinary connection between law and literature. This field has roots in two major developments in the intellectual history of law -- first, the growing doubt about whether law in isolation is a source of value and meaning, or whether it must...
.
H. Bruce Franklin
H. Bruce Franklin
Howard Bruce Franklin is an American cultural historian who has authored or edited nineteen books on a range of subjects. As of 2011, he is the John Cotton Dana Professor of English and American Studies at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. He first attained prominence as a Melville scholar...
sees a direct connection between the hanging of Budd and the controversy around capital punishment
Capital punishment
Capital punishment, the death penalty, or execution is the sentence of death upon a person by the state as a punishment for an offence. Crimes that can result in a death penalty are known as capital crimes or capital offences. The term capital originates from the Latin capitalis, literally...
. While Melville was writing Billy Budd between 1886 and 1891 the public's attention was focused on the issue.
Other critics interpret Budd's character as the antithesis of Claggart, the fallen angel. Like his peers, Budd is naturally good, but also has the courage and ability to believe in his goodness to the point that it is not accessible to him as a concept. Vere represents the good man with no courage or faith in his own goodness, and is therefore susceptible to evil.
Claggart is the archetypal fallen angel, a man who has abandoned his goodness for ego, and, knowing this, i.e. his own cowardice, seeks to seduce the flawed Vere and destroy Budd.
The centrality of Billy Budd's extraordinary good looks—"the young fellow who seems so popular with the men—Billy, the Handsome Sailor" says Captain Vere—have led to interpretations of a homoerotic sensibility in the novel, as well as analysis based on Laura Mulvey
Laura Mulvey
Laura Mulvey is a British feminist film theorist. She was educated at St Hilda's College, Oxford. She is currently professor of film and media studies at Birkbeck, University of London...
's theory of scopophilia
Scopophilia
Scopophilia or scoptophilia, from Greek "love of looking", is deriving pleasure from looking. As an expression of sexuality, it refers to sexual pleasure derived from looking at erotic objects: erotic photographs, pornography, naked bodies, etc....
and masculine and feminine subjectivity/objectivity. (Quote from Billy Budd, Sailor Penguin Popular Classics, 1995, p, 54). This version tends to inform interpretations of Britten's opera, perhaps owing to the composer's own homosexuality.
The book's concluding chapters raise anew a question that is implicit throughout Melville's story: How can one know the truth? The focus of chapter 21 on the court-martial impeaches that court-martial's—or, indeed, any legal proceeding's—attempts to establish "the truth." So, too, the book's multiple endings, and the doubt and confusion pervading the "inside narrative's" account of events aboard this ship, leave one totally in doubt about whether one can ever know the truth, even from an "inside narrative."
Legal scholar Robert Cover
Robert Cover
Robert Cover was a law professor, scholar, and activist, teaching at Yale Law School from 1972 until his untimely death at age 42 in 1986. He was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1943. He attended Princeton University and Columbia Law School...
suggests in the prelude to his book Justice Accused: Antislavery and the Judicial Process that Captain Vere may have been modeled after Chief Justice
Chief Justice
The Chief Justice in many countries is the name for the presiding member of a Supreme Court in Commonwealth or other countries with an Anglo-Saxon justice system based on English common law, such as the Supreme Court of Canada, the Constitutional Court of South Africa, the Court of Final Appeal of...
Lemuel Shaw
Lemuel Shaw
Lemuel Shaw was an American jurist who served as Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court...
of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court
Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court
The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court is the highest court in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The SJC has the distinction of being the oldest continuously functioning appellate court in the Western Hemisphere.-History:...
. In addition to being Melville's father-in-law, Shaw was an abolitionist who was known for strict adherence to fugitive slave laws in his decisions, in spite of his beliefs. Although Cover admits there is no direct evidence to suggest it, he points to several parallels, such as Billy's "dumbness" and the rule requiring fugitive slaves to remain "dumb" (i.e. not speak in their own defense at trial) that strongly imply this subtext was intentional.
Adaptations in other media
The stage
The best-known adaptation is the opera, Billy BuddBilly Budd (opera)
Billy Budd is an opera by Benjamin Britten, from a libretto by E. M. Forster and Eric Crozier, was first performed at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London on 1 December 1951. It is based on the short novel Billy Budd by Herman Melville....
with a score by Benjamin Britten
Benjamin Britten
Edward Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten, OM CH was an English composer, conductor, and pianist. He showed talent from an early age, and first came to public attention with the a cappella choral work A Boy Was Born in 1934. With the premiere of his opera Peter Grimes in 1945, he leapt to...
and a libretto by E. M. Forster
E. M. Forster
Edward Morgan Forster OM, CH was an English novelist, short story writer, essayist and librettist. He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class difference and hypocrisy in early 20th-century British society...
and Eric Crozier
Eric Crozier
Eric Crozier was a British theatrical director and opera librettist, long associated with Benjamin Britten....
, which follows the earlier text as prepared for publication by Raymond Weaver in 1924. The opera has become a regular production at the Metropolitan Opera house in New York City and is generally well-known. Britten's distinct style has given the opera a unique perspective on the book, and the opera takes many creative liberties on the original book's plot. Another operatic version, composed by Giorgio Ghedini and premiered in 1949, also exists. In 1951, Louis O. Coxe
Louis O. Coxe
Louis Osborne Coxe was an American poet, playwright, essayist, and professor who was recognized by the Academy of American Poets for his "long, powerful, quiet accomplishment, largely unrecognized, in lyric poetry." He was probably best known for his dramatic adaptation of Herman Melville's Billy...
and Robert Chapman's 1949 adaptation for the stage opened on Broadway.
Film
A film versionBilly Budd (film)
Billy Budd is a 1962 film produced, directed, and co-written by Peter Ustinov. Adapted from the stage play version of Herman Melville's short novel Billy Budd, it starred Terence Stamp as Billy Budd, Robert Ryan as John Claggart, and Ustinov as Captain Vere...
was made (in black and white) in 1962, starring a young Terence Stamp
Terence Stamp
Terence Henry Stamp is an English actor. Since starting his career in 1962 he has appeared in over 60 films. His title role as Billy Budd in his film debut earned Stamp an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor and a BAFTA nomination for Best Newcomer.His other major roles include...
as Billy Budd, and a self-cast Peter Ustinov
Peter Ustinov
Peter Alexander Ustinov CBE was an English actor, writer and dramatist. He was also renowned as a filmmaker, theatre and opera director, stage designer, author, screenwriter, comedian, humourist, newspaper and magazine columnist, radio broadcaster and television presenter...
as the entrapped Captain Vere. Ustinov also produced, directed, and worked on the script of the film. The movie also stars Robert Ryan
Robert Ryan
Robert Bushnell Ryan was an American actor who often played hardened cops and ruthless villains.-Early life and career:...
as Claggart and David McCallum
David McCallum
David Keith McCallum, Jr. is a Scottish actor and musician. He is best known for his roles as Illya Kuryakin, a Russian-born secret agent, in the 1960s television series The Man from U.N.C.L.E., as interdimensional operative Steel in Sapphire & Steel, and Dr...
as Wyatt, Gunnery Officer. Claire Denis' Beau travail
Beau travail
Beau travail is a 1999 French movie directed by Claire Denis that is loosely based on Herman Melville's novella Billy Budd. However, instead of the maritime setting of the novella, the movie takes place in Djibouti where the protagonists are soldiers in the French Foreign Legion...
is also loosely based on the novel.
Television
General Motors TheatreGeneral Motors Theatre
General Motors Theatre was a Canadian television anthology series, which ran on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation under its various titles from 1953 until 1961. First transmitted under the sponsored title on October 5 1954, a new 60-minute drama would be presented each week...
presented a live telecast of Billy Budd in 1955, starring a young William Shatner
William Shatner
William Alan Shatner is a Canadian actor, musician, recording artist, and author. He gained worldwide fame and became a cultural icon for his portrayal of James T...
as Billy Budd, with Douglas Campbell
Douglas Campbell (actor)
Douglas Campbell, CM was a Canadian-based stage actor. He was born in Glasgow, Scotland.-Acting career:...
as Claggart, and Basil Rathbone
Basil Rathbone
Sir Basil Rathbone, KBE, MC, Kt was an English actor. He rose to prominence in England as a Shakespearean stage actor and went on to appear in over 70 films, primarily costume dramas, swashbucklers, and, occasionally, horror films...
as Captain Vere. Britten's Four Sea Interludes was included as background music. Two productions based on the opera appeared in 1988 and 1998.
Further reading
- Richard Weisberg (1989) The Failure of the Word: The Lawyer as Protagonist in Modern Fiction, Yale University Pres
External links
- Herman Melville's Billy Budd manuscript (complete color facsimile), from Herman Melville Papers (MS Am 188-188.6). Houghton LibraryHoughton LibraryHoughton Library is the primary repository for rare books and manuscripts at Harvard University. It is part of the Harvard College Library within the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Houghton is located on the south side of Harvard Yard, next to Widener Library.- History :Harvard's first...
, Harvard University. - Online version of Billy Budd at Bibliomania
- Billy Budd and Capital Punishment by H. Bruce Franklin
- The Language of Gesture: Melville's Imaging of Blackness and the Modernity of Billy Budd by Klaus Benesch
- Hypertext version of Freeman's 1948 text of Billy Budd
- Billy Budd study guide, themes, quotes, character analyses, teaching guide
- Billy Budd and Balzac's Séraphita
Adaptations for cinema and television: (1962) directed by Peter Ustinov
Peter Ustinov
Peter Alexander Ustinov CBE was an English actor, writer and dramatist. He was also renowned as a filmmaker, theatre and opera director, stage designer, author, screenwriter, comedian, humourist, newspaper and magazine columnist, radio broadcaster and television presenter...
and with him as Captain Vere and Terence Stamp
Terence Stamp
Terence Henry Stamp is an English actor. Since starting his career in 1962 he has appeared in over 60 films. His title role as Billy Budd in his film debut earned Stamp an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor and a BAFTA nomination for Best Newcomer.His other major roles include...
as Billy Budd (1980) with Porgy Franssen (1988) with Thomas Allen (1998) with Dwayne Croft
Dwayne Croft
Dwayne Croft is an American baritone who has sung in more than 300 performances in 25 roles at the Metropolitan Opera.He won the Richard Tucker Award in 1996....