"Stylistically, Melville was influenced by Sir Thomas Browne, the 17th Century writer whose prose impressed many American authors of the 19th Century. Melville also drew heavily on Shakespeare both for style and character. Pip, for example, seems to be modeled after the Fool in King Lear. Ahab defying the fire in Chapter 119 recalls Lear out in the the storm on the heath, challenging the gods in their ultimate injustice. In the great Chapter 36 where Ahab declares his purpose to the crew, he does so in creditable Shakespearean blank verse, which Melville printed as prose:
Take off thine eye! More intolerable
Than fiends' glarings is a doltish stare!
So, so; thou reddenest and palest;
My heat has melted thee to anger-glow.
But look ye, Starbuck, what is said in heat,
That thing unsays itself. There are men
From whom warm words are small indignity.
I meant not to incense thee. Let it go.
Look! see yonder Turkish cheeks of spotted tawn -
Living, breathing pictures painted by the sun.
The Pagan leopards - the unrecking and
Unworshipping things, that live; and seek, and give
No reasons for the torrid life they feel!
The crew, man, the crew! Are they not one and all
With Ahab, in this matter of the whale?
- Captain Ahab
( from Moby Dick, Chpt 36, first published 1851 )
"The more one rereads this passage, the more strikingly it reproduces the movement of the verse in Shakespeare's great tragedies, especially in King Lear,. Even the slight irregularities that appear in the first three lines above are characteristic of Shakespeare."
- Charles Child Walcutt, Moby Dick, Introduction, pg 10, Bantam Classic Books, NY, 1981
