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Prufrock's consciousness is peopled by heroic exemplars who when alluded to only deepen our sense of his timidity and paralyzing weakness of will. When weighed in the scales against Dante, Michelangelo, John the Baptist, the speaker of Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress," Lazarus, and Hamlet, Prufrock is found wanting. Prufrock's ironic relation to Shakespeare's Prince Hal, however, has to my knowledge gone unnoticed. A verbal echo as well as parallel imagery from Prince Hal's famous speech at the close of the first tavern scene in 1 Henry IV invites the reader familiar with Hal's words to see in Prufrock an ironic contrast to the companion of Falstaff and eventual king.
After Falstaff and Poins have left the stage, Prince Hal remains to comment on his associates and contemplate his future:
To my ear, Prufrock's reiterated phrase "I have known them all... known them all" (49,55,62) echoes Hal's assertion, "I know you all" (189). It may be objected that this echo is faint, the verbal similarity slight, but as Alan Brimer writes in "Shakespeare in the Poetry of T. S. Eliot," while Eliot's "uses of Shakespeare are often overt, taking the form of quotation, parody, pastiche or allusion ... they can also be less obvious, taking the form of evocation by a key word or phrase of an attitude analogous to Shakespeare's" (1-2). If it is granted that Prufrock' s words call the opening of the prince's soliloquy to mind, a field of ironic contrasts between himself and Prince Hal opens before the reader. In 1 Henry IV, the young prince moves back and forth between the court and the seedy, darkened world of roadhouses and taverns that recall the "halfdeserted streets, / The muttering retreats / Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels" (4-6), the "sawdust restaurants" (7) and drawing rooms through which Prufrock travels. But Shakespeare's London underworld offers...