Brave New World Allusions & Cultural References

Shakespeare References

• William Shakespeare; referenced by name (3.192, 8.36, 11.65, 13.63, 16.14, 16.52, 17.3, 17.17)

• William Shakespeare, The Tempest
  "O wonder! […] How many goodly creatures there are here! How beauteous mankind is! […] O brave new world […]. O brave new world. […] O brave new world that has such people in it!" (8.84-.90, 11.40, 15.4, 15.10)
  Aside from the meaning of the quote, which we talk about in "What's Up with the Title?," the repeated occurrences of this line are a great way to trace John's evolving opinion of the World State. When he first speaks the line it is with all the awe and amazement of Miranda's original utterance. John is psyched to check this place out. Of course, the second time, he's violently retching behind the bushes with disgust. The third time he is fully aware of the irony, and "the words [mock] him derisively" as he leaves the hospital after Linda's death. Finally, though, John interprets the quote as "a challenge, a command." It is this line that spurs him to the act of throwing soma boxes out of the window.
  
  John thought it very nice. "Still," he said, "Ariel could put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes." (11.31)
  Ariel is one of two "spirits" in The Tempest who act as servants to this powerful guy Prospero (Miranda's father, if you're following along). He basically just goes around performing tasks for his master. Unfortunately, either John or Huxley got his Shakespeare mixed up, because Ariel is NOT the tricky little spirit who can put a girdle around the earth in forty minutes. In fact, this isn't even the right play. (Check out our discussion of A Midsummer Night's Dream below.)
  
  "But some kinds of baseness are nobly undergone." (12.47)
  John tries to explain to Lenina that he wants to undergo something horrible to prove himself worthy to her. He gets this idea in part from the traditions of the Reservation, but he also gets it from Shakespeare. This particular line comes from Ferdinand, who himself is undergoing "baseness," namely carrying lots of wood, to prove himself worthy of Miranda. Here are the actual words from the play: "There be some sports are painful, and their labour / Delight in them sets off: some kinds of baseness / Are nobly undergone and most poor matters / Point to rich ends."
  
  "Oh, you so perfect" (she was leaning towards him with parted lips), "so perfect and so peerless are created" (nearer and nearer) "of every creature's best." (13.41)
  John recites to Lenina the same words that Ferdinand (the young hunky man of The Tempest) recites to Miranda. This is some great role-reversal, since until now John has been equated with Miranda (he keeps repeating her line about the "brave new world," and he's the virginal one). In this dialogue, Ferdinand tells Miranda that all the women he's known until now have been seriously flawed. But she—she is just right.
  
  "If thou dost break her virgin knot before all sanctimonious ceremonies may with full and holy rite"(13.63)
  These are the lines of Prospero, who tells Ferdinand that he can marry Miranda but that he'd better not go untying her clothes or her virgin knot before they get married. John of course agrees, which is why he cites these lines as the reason for not untying (unzipping?) anything of Lenina's before marriage.
  
  "The murkiest den, the most opportune place, the strongest suggestion / our worser genius can, shall never melt mine honour into lust. Never, never!" (13.71)
  These lines (except for the "Never, never!" which is John's own embellishment) are Ferdinand's response to Prospero's request that his daughter Miranda remain a virgin until her wedding night. He basically says, "OK, sure, even if we end up trapped on an island together, and we're the last people in the universe alive, and it's our duty to populate the earth again, I won't have sex with her until we're hitched." So John is saying roughly the same thing: even if Lenina comes over to his house, declares her love for him, takes off her clothes and plasters her body against his, he won't have sex with her.
  
  "The strongest oaths are straw to the fire i' the blood. Be more abstemious, or else…" (13.77)
  This is just more of Prospero insisting that Ferdinand should not get it on with Miranda. This time, he makes the point that when you get all hot-blooded, it's quite difficult to keep your pants on. The solution, with which John wholeheartedly agrees, is to be "more abstemious," which essentially means more restrained and less self-indulgent. John trails off, apparently too horrified to repeat the rest of the line, which goes something like this: "…or else goodnight your vow" ( = or else you will break your vow).
  
  "Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments will hum about my ears and sometimes voices." (16.10)
  In the play, two characters who are plotting murder halt in their tracks when they hear strange noises in the air. The foxy little spirit encouraging murder (Caliban) tells them not to worry, since the island they're on is always full of weird sounds.

• William Shakespeare, King Lear; referenced by name (3.1.41, 17.34)"The wren goes to't and the small gilded fly does lecher in my sight." […] "The fitchew nor the soiled horse goes to't with a more ritous appetite. Down from the waist they are Centaurs, though women all above. But to the girdle do the gods inherit. Beneath is all the fiend's. There's hell, there's darkness, there is the sulphurous pit, burning scalding, stench, consumption; fie, fie, fie, pain, pain! Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary, to sweeten my imagination." (13.97)John delivers these scathing lines while Lenina is in the bathroom naked, having just been turned down for sex. Basically, Lear condemns the vagina as being the hot and sulphurous pit of hell.
  "Do you remember that bit in King Lear?" said the Savage at last. "'The gods are just and of our pleasant vices make instruments to plague us; the dark and vicious place where thee he got cost him his eyes,' and Edmund answers—you remember, he's wounded, he's dying—'Thou hast spoken right; 'tis true. The wheel has come full circle; I am here.'" (17.34-5)In King Lear, a character named Gloucester has his eyes plucked out because he chose to help the aging King instead of Lear's power-hungry daughter and her husband. Gloucester had a bastard (as in, illegitimate) son who turned out to be an evil person: Edmund. Because Edmund was in cahoots with the eye-plucking folks, these lines condemn Gloucester for committing adultery in the first place (i.e., fathering Edmund), and claim that Gloucester is now being punished for his earlier indiscretion. Edmund, the bastard who is now being punished himself for his poor decisions, agrees with this assessment. John uses this to make the point that, in the new world, man is being punished through participation in what seem to him to be "pleasant vices": easy sex, drugs, and a complete lack of suffering.
  "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport. Thunder again; words that proclaimed themselves true—truer somehow than truth itself. And yet that same Gloucester had called them ever-gentle gods." (18.69)John takes note of two contradictory statements made by Gloucester about the gods, the first that the gods are careless and play with men like toys, and the second that they are gentle. John himself is dealing with these very questions.

• William Shakespeare, Macbeth"Do you see that damned spot?" (7.42)
  John asks this in reference to the blood on the ground of the hut after the ritualistic whipping at the Savage Reservation. It's a variation of Lady Macbeth's line, "Out, damned spot! Out, I say!" in reference to the blood she imagines still stains her hands, remembering the time when she helped her husband murder the king. This is the very first Shakespeare reference we hear from John, so it sets us up for what you see is a long list that follows. Lenina's response to John's quote, "A gramme is better than a damn," is a great juxtaposition of moronic hypnopaedic sayings with the beautiful poetry of Shakespeare.
  
  "The multitudinous seas incarnadine." (7.44)
  John is still talking about blood. Big surprise from Mr. Self-flagellation. This line is from the character of Macbeth himself, when he is wracked with guilt/fear after having murdered the king. The full line is, "Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather / The multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the green one red." "Incarnadine" is just a sexy word for "turn red," so Macbeth is basically saying that even the ocean couldn't wash the blood off his hands; rather, the blood on his hands would turn the ocean red, Moses-style. John twists the message around and instead says it proudly: he would have given so much blood in self-sacrifice that it would have made the ocean red.
  
  "To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow." (8.61)
  This line comes up when John is talking about the isolation of growing up on the Reservation. Because he was always alone, he had plenty of time to explore his spirituality. (Notice that this quote is followed by the line, "He had discovered Time and Death and God.") The Shakespeare quote itself comes from Macbeth's speech shortly after his wife's death and shortly before his own. In it, Macbeth concludes that life is pretty much meaningless. Time "creeps" "from day to day." Basically, John is using Macbeth's words to express the sort of reflections that occupied his time when he was alone.
  
  "But they're… they're told by an idiot."(16.32)
  This refers to another line from that same speech of Macbeth's. The full quote from the Shakespeare is: "It is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing." The "it" in question is identified in the previous line as "life." In other words… life is meaningless. This is an interesting phrase in the context that John uses it, which is to describe the feelies. In his mind, the reality created (maybe even simulated) by the World State is in fact meaningless. John imagines his world, on the other hand—or at least the world he seeks to inhabit—as being very different. Shakespeare isn't meaningless, he insists. Shakespeare isn't told by an idiot.
  
  "And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death." (18.69)
  This is the third time John refers to Macbeth's big Act V speech. This particular line states that every day that passes brings us that much closer to death. John ponders this uplifting moment when he's digging in his garden and forcing himself to think about Linda's death. In a big way, Linda's death has a lot to do with John's own impending death. Part of the reason it's so difficult to see her die, aside from the fact that she was his mom, is that it really drives home the sense of his own mortality.

• William Shakespeare, Hamlet
  "Nay, but to live / In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed, / Stew's in corruption, honeying and making love / Over the nasty sty." (8.39)
  Hamlet speaks these lines to his mother, Queen Gertrude. He's basically chastising her for committing incest (sort of) with her dead husband's brother. Hamlet is a great first outlet for John because he reads it while in his Freudian, "I hate that my mother is having sex with all these (other) men" phase. Not that this "phase" ever goes away, come to think of it. Hamlet faces a similar "My mother is a whore!" issue, and many scholars believe this has to do with the classic Oedipus Complex, which we discuss more in John's character analysis. So while these lines are Hamlet's take on his mother's sleeping around, John appropriates them to describe his own feelings about Linda.
  
  "A man can smile and smile and be a villain. Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain." (8.41)
  John quotes this line while he's explaining his anger at Popé. These words refer to Hamlet's description of his stepfather and uncle, Claudius, or the guy sleeping with his mom. (They come from two different speeches in the play, but they're getting at pretty much the same idea.) See the connection?
  
  "When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage / Or in the incestuous pleasure of his bed." (8.44-5)
  In this quote, Hamlet wonders what would be the best way to kill his uncle. Similarly, John ponders the same about Popé. What's interesting here is that John actually gets the idea of murdering Linda's lover from reading Shakespeare. Not only does he use these plays as an outlet for his emotions, but he actually allows them to dictate his actions.
  
  "[A philosopher is] a man who dreams of fewer things than there are in heaven and earth." (17.19)
  This is actually more about comic relief than anything weighty. John is referring to Hamlet's line, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." In this instance, the young men have left their University and come home, so philosophy = the subjects that you might study in school. When Mustapha asks John if he knows what a philosopher is, he replies with this somewhat out-of-context phrase, using Hamlet's comment as a general definition of all philosophers. It's sort of cute, but it also makes some scholars think that John doesn't really "get" Shakespeare—he just knows it as one might know a hypnopaedic saying.
  
  "Whether 'tis better in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them…" (17.50)
  John quotes (roughly) a line from Hamlet's famous "To be or not to be" speech in order to make the point that the World State has just taken an easy way out. They have abolished suffering altogether, so they never need to ponder the calamities of life the way Hamlet does here. But there's a darker undertone in this allusion because the speech that's quoted essentially debates suicide. Foreshadowing, much?
  
  "A good kissing carrion." (18.69)
  Ew. (Carrion = decaying animal corpse.) John is remembering Linda's death and the image of her body in the hospital bed. That's when he refers to the following lines from Hamlet: "For if the sun breed maggots in a dead dog, being a good kissing carrion." (You will sometimes see this line as "god kissing Carrion" instead.) Now, if your first instinct (after "ew") is "What?!", then that's good. This is from the scene in Hamlet where Hamlet generally acts like a rude, crazy person. We're pretty sure the point of John's reference is to conjure the image of a gross, decaying body. Also, by using the word "carrion," Linda gets compared to a dead animal. This is fitting in a perverse way, because she wasn't really embracing her human self while taking off on flights of soma fancy. Also, as we discuss in "Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory," animal imagery is a huge deal in Brave New World.
  
  "Sleep. Perchance to dream. […] For in that sleep of death, what dreams…?" (18.69)
  In this passage, John combines a few different quotes from a few different Shakespeare plays (besides Hamlet, you've got a pinch of King Lear, a dash of Macbeth, and a sprinkling of Measure for Measure). All of the quotes have in common the themes of sleep, dreaming, and death. In this particular case, John quotes the second time from Hamlet's "To be or not to be" speech. Check out the actual Hamlet lines, from which John excises bits and pieces: "To sleep: perchance to dream:—ay, there's the rub; / For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, / When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, / Must give us pause." Hamlet compares death to a long sleep and wonders what one dreams of after death. Similarly, John is also concerned with the afterlife. After all, it is his belief in the soul that causes him to inflict so much suffering on his body.

• William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida
  "Her eyes, her hair, her cheek, her gait, her voice; / Handlest in thy discourse O! that her hand, / In whose comparison all whites are ink / Writing their own reproach; to whose soft seizure / The cygnet's down is harsh…" (9.1.29)
  This comes from a speech of Troilus's in the play when he talks about how generally fantastic Cressida is. John appropriates the words to describe Lenina.
  
  "Outliving beauty's outward with a mind that doth renew swifter than blood decays." (13.61)
  Again, John repeats Troilus's words, but this time to make a case for marriage. When two people really love each other, they can be together for all of life, even old age, because the love in their minds outlives the decay of physical beauty. Of course, this is meaningless in the new world, where there's no such thing as old age anyway.
  
  "The devil Luxury with his fat rump and potato finger" (13.107-9); "Fry, lechery, fry!" (18.95)
  OK, we'll give this to you as quickly as possible: Troilus loves Cressida, Cressida loves Troilus, and everything is great until someone tips Troilus off that, perhaps, Cressida isn't as loyal as he thinks. He goes to spy on her and indeed sees her flirting with another man, promising to see him later that night. Troilus is devastated, and the guy who is spying with him, Thersites, declares that Cressida is a big slut, essentially. He wails on and on about lechery, which is where this line here comes in. John basically feels the same way about Lenina, which is why he throws these lines about base lust at her. While John speaks these lines on two separate occasions, they are delivered together in Troilus and Cressida.
  
  "But value dwells not in particular will. It holds his estimate and dignity as well wherein 'tis precious of itself as in the prizer." (17.38)
  Oh, this is tricky. Let's start with the Shakespeare. This line comes from a conversation between Hector and Troilus, as everyone debates what to about this whole Trojan War mess. Hector argues that Helen isn't valuable enough to be worth this trouble. Troilus counters that value is subjective, and that Helen is worth as much as we think she's worth. Hector then counters with the line you see quoted here: value isn't subjective, he says, it's intrinsic. In Brave New World, John uses the same sort of argument after Mustapha says that you can pick any set of values you want by which to judge the World State. John insists this isn't true.

• William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet;referenced by name when John remembers how Helmholtz laughed at it (16.23)"On the white wonder of dear Juliet's hand, may seize / And steal immortal blessing from her lips, / Who, even in pure and vestal modesty, / Still blush, as thinking their own kisses sin." (9.1.31)These are Romeo's lines, spoken when he had just heard the news of his banishment from Verona. He laments the fact that he has to leave his lovely Juliet to go into exile and waxes poetic about her lovely virginal qualities. She's so modest, he claims here, that her lips blush when they touch each other because they think they're kissing someone, which would be immodest. In Brave New World, John is reminded of these lines when he sees flies buzzing around; that's because this quote is preceded in Romeo and Juliet by Romeo saying something like, "woe is me, I won't get to see Juliet anymore, and even all the flies buzzing around Verona get to spend more time with her than I do." The connection to John's situation is rather ironic, since he's speaking about the sleeping Lenina, who is very non-virginal indeed. Exile is also an interesting connection, since Lenina has essentially (if accidentally) been banished from her home (the World State = Verona) to a more primitive place (the Reservation = Mantua). John will end up exiled in the World State, which reverses these roles. 
  "Did he dare? Dare to profane with his unworthiest hand that… No, he didn't." (9.1.132)These lines refer to Romeo's words to Juliet when he first meets her. Just like Romeo, John wonders whether he should kiss the hands of his love, which might disrespect their virginal holiness. Again, ironic, since Lenina is nothing close to virginal.
  Upstairs in his room the Savage was reading Romeo and Juliet. (12.37)When John refuses to leave his room for Bernard's dinner party with the Arch-Community-Songster he ends up reading this play. The image is contrasted with that of Lenina leaving for the night with the Songster.
  "Oh! she doth teach the torches to burn bright. / It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night, / Like a rich jewel in an Ethiop's ear; / Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear…" (12.41)Romeo speaks these lines when he first sees Juliet, before he knows that she's a Capulet. In Brave New World, John is reading this part of the play while Lenina is getting ready to go to bed with the Songster. While Romeo doesn't know the true identity of Juliet, neither does John grasp that Lenina is inaccessible to him because she comes from a different world.
  The Savage was reading Romeo and Juliet aloud—reading (for all the time he was seeing himself as Romeo and Lenina as Juliet) with an intense and quivering passion. (12.71)Huxley gives this reference to us directly.
  "Is there no pity sitting in the clouds, / That sees into the bottom of my grief? / O sweet my mother, cast me not away: / Delay this marriage for a month, a week; / Or, if you do not, make the bridal bed / In that dim monument where Tybalt lies…" (12.72)
• In this quote, Juliet is in a tizzy. Her new secret husband Romeo has just murdered her cousin, Tybalt, and now her parents, who don't know about her secret marriage (hence it being secret in the first place), want her to marry this guy named Paris. She tells her mom that she's still grieving for her cousin, so if they insist that she marry, they'd better have her "consummate" her marriage (i.e., have sex) in Tybalt's sepulcher. As you can imagine, this is pretty intense, so Helmholtz guffawing at it is hurtful to John, especially since John identifies with the characters.

• William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra
  "Eternity was in our lips and eyes." (11.6, 18.62)
  This line belongs to Cleopatra, who hurls it angrily at Antony when he delivers the news that he's leaving Egypt to go back to Rome. She reminds him that they always thought they would have eternity together—eternity lay in each other's lips and eyes. John quotes this line twice, first in reference to soma, which the Doctor claims is a little piece of eternity, and second when he can't stop thinking about Lenina.

• William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream
  John thought it very nice. "Still," he said, "Ariel could put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes." (11.31)
  John connects the "girdle" line to The Tempest, but it actually belongs to Puck from A Midsummer Night's Dream, who is credited with this talent. We know this because Puck says, "I'll put a girdle round about the earth / In forty minutes."

• William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice
  "What's in those" (remembering The Merchant of Venice) "those caskets?" the Savage enquired when Bernard had rejoined him." (11.75)
  In The Merchant of Venice, leading lady Portia comes with a price tag: suitors who want to marry her must participate in a game where they pick one of three caskets. Picking the right one means they get the girl, and the wrong choice means the suitor has to be a bachelor forever. It's adorable that John thinks of Shakespeare when he sees the boxes. It's less adorable that what's actually in the box is drugs.

• William Shakespeare, Othello;referenced by name (11.114, 16.21, 16.23, 16.25, 16.27, 16.28, 17.48)
  John first starts reading Othello right after he sees the feely Three Weeks in a Helicopter with Lenina. The black man in the feely is exploited for his race, and the character of Othello is similarly defined by the color of his skin. John identifies with Othello because he, too, grew up in a society of people of a different race; John was the only white guy on the Savage Reservation.
  
  "Impudent strumpet!" (13.84, 18.62-64, 18.92, 13.100-7)
  In case you don't speak antiquated English, "impudent strumpet" means "disrespectful whore." John first calls Lenina by this name in the scene when she gets naked. As we discuss in John's character analysis, much of his anger at Lenina is misdirected anger at himself for wanting her so much. This allusion gets us into the guts of Othello, where the play's hero is about to kill his wife (Desdemona) because he has been convinced by the villainous Iago that she's cheating on him. John accuses Lenina of being a whore in the same language Othello uses. (Of course, Lenina, having been conditioned to sleep around, isn't really at fault here, and neither was Desdemona, who in reality was faithful to her husband.)
  
  "O thou weed, who are so lovely fair and smell'st so sweet that the sense aches at thee. […] Was this most goodly book made to write 'whore' upon? Heaven stops the nose at it." (13.99)
  Both of these lines come from the same scene in Othello as the "impudent strumpet" bit we explained above. The first one is Othello telling his wife that she's a weed who appears to be a flower. The second one compares the woman to a "goodly book" (a beautiful book) that has the word "whore" written inside it. Both lines focus on the combination of two traits that Othello thinks he sees in Desdemona: sleaziness and beauty. John is convinced he finds these qualities also in Lenina. It is this combination that so hurts John, since he is simultaneously attracted to and repelled by Lenina.
  
  "Goats and Monkeys" (16.19)
  In Othello, the bad guy Iago is the one to convince Othello that his wife is cheating on him. He does so with the help of some animal images that serve as visual aids—namely, goat and monkey sex. Iago compares the supposedly adulterous Desdemona and her alleged lover to goats and monkeys having sex. When John cites this image, he's actually talking about the gratuitous sex in the feely, but the imagery fits right in with what we've seen so far in Brave New World: people are reduced to animals in part because of their promiscuity.
  
  "If after every tempest came such calms, may the winds blow till they have wakened death." (17.48)
  OK, this one doesn't require too much scrutiny. John is always talking about how suffering is a necessary part of the human condition. This quote supports that argument, but for a slightly different reason; it's the old "the sweet ain't as sweet without the bitter" argument. We weather the storms because enduring is worth the calm that comes after.
  
  "All the tonic effects of murdering Desdemona and being murdered by Othello, without any of the inconveniences." (17.59)
  Mustapha says this to John in describing the V.P.S., or Violent Passion Surrogate. There's not much to explain here, Mustapha is just putting it in terms John can understand. As we've already mentioned, Othello murders his wife because he (wrongly) thinks she's cheating on him; this is violent passion to the extreme—lust, jealousy, love, and betrayal.

• William Shakespeare, "The Phoenix and the Turtle"
  "Property was thus appall'd, / That the self was not the same; / Single nature's double name / Neither two nor one was call'd / Reason in itself confounded / Saw division grow together…" (12.68)
  John reads this poem to Helmholtz as an example of Shakespeare's powerful language. The poem covers the love affair of a phoenix and a turtle dove, two birds who become one and then die. This got us thinking about Lenina and John being birds of a different feather.

• William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
  "If I do not usurp myself, I am." (13.17)
  This quote from Twelfth Night has a lot to do with false identities and assumed roles. John basically just takes the same line when someone on the phone asks him if he's the savage. It's a cute but not particularly important reference.

• William Shakespeare, Timon of Athens
  "For those milk-paps that through the window bars bore at men's eyes." (13.77)
  John is quoting a line where Timon accuses a woman with a nice chest of being a vile temptress.

• William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
  "Lend me your ears" (15.20)
  When John tries to get the attention of all the Deltas, he uses this line, spoken by Brutus to address the Romans after Caesar's death. (The full line is, "Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.") John imagines himself not just galvanizing the drones to want freedom and humanity, but as taking part in the great oral tradition of public speaking. He even hesitates when he first begins, lamenting that he has no experience in such arts.

• William Shakespeare, The Life and Death of King John
  "I Pandulph, of fair Milan, cardinal." (17.17)
  When Mustapha asks if John knows what a cardinal is, John responds with this line from The Life and Death of King John. Cardinal Pandulph is one of the characters in the play, so this is why John knows what Mustapha is talking about.

• William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure
  "Thy best of rest is sleep and that thou oft provok'st; yet grossly fear'st thy death which is no more." (18.69)
  This line fits into that great, reference-filled paragraph in Chapter 18 when John contemplates sleep, dreams, and death. This particular line from the play, spoken by the character of the Duke, poses this question to Claudio: you often enter sleep willingly, and death is really just sleep, so how can you fear death? That John is so preoccupied with thoughts of death is no surprise given how this final chapter plays out.

Music References 

• Gaspard Forster, a basso (11.92)
• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (11.92)
• Lucrezia Agujari (11.92): (Depending on the edition you're reading, the text may misprint the spelling as "Ajugari.") Anyway, this woman was a famous soprano singer who managed to sing the highest note ever, probably breaking about a million dollars worth of glassware in the process. The point Huxley is making here is that the scent/music organ effortlessly encompasses a range from the lowest of lows to the highest of highs. On the one hand, technology can beat humans—but on the other hand, the musical boundaries of the notes here have been established by human precedence; the notes go no lower than that of Forster, no higher than that of Lucrezia.

Literature, Philosophy, and Mythology

• Ur of the Chaldees (3.41)
• Job (3.41)
• Jesus Christ (3.41, 7.46, 8.26, 8.69, 8. 71, 18.31)
• John the Baptist (the name of John, the Savage)
• "Suffer the little children unto me" (3.241)
• "The Holy Bible" (17.5)
• Mary (18.26)
• Odysseus (3.41)
• Jupiter (3.41)
• Morgan Le Fay, a.k.a. Fata Morgana (the name of Morgana Rothschild)
• Gautama Buddha (referred to in Brave New World as "Gotama") (3.41)
• Blaise Pascal, Pensées (3.41)
• Robert Browning, Pippa Passes: "'Ford's in his flivver,' murmured the D.H.C. 'All's well with the world'"—this is actually a parody of a line from Browning's novel: "God's in his heaven—all's right with the world!"
• Puukon (written as "Pookong" in Brave New World), one of the twin war Gods of the Natives
• Americans of Malpais (7.46, 8.26, 11.54, 18.31)
• Ahaiyuta and Marsailema, the twins of War and Chance (8.26)
• Awonawilona, the creator God of the Zuñi Indians (8.26, 8.35, 18.31)
• Estsanatlehi (referred to in the text as Etsanatlehi), a creator Goddess of the Navaho (8.26): Huxley details that she is "the woman who makes herself young again," which is consistent with the myth that, as a timeless Goddess of creation, Estsanatlehi cyclically aged and then renewed her youth again and again. 
• "The Black Stone at Laguna" (8.26): Laguna is a pueblo in New Mexico built on a large mass of rock that has been smoothed out over time.
• "Our Lady of Acoma" (8.26): Acoma is a pueblo in New Mexico. We had trouble figuring out who the Lady in question was, and it sounds to us like this is a classic case of John mixing up Christianity with the religion of the Indians on the Reservation. This phrase brings to mind various Catholic icons, such as Our Lady of Guadalupe.
• "Maiden of Mátsaki" (17.48 18.61): John refers to this myth as an example of the importance of and need for suffering in proving oneself. In the tale, a man has to hoe in a garden full of stinging flies and endure the pain in order to marry what must be a highly-desirable girl. Read about it here, if you're interested.
• Ben Jonson, Cynthia's Revels: "Every few seconds a drop fell, dark, almost colourless in the dead light. Drop, drop, drop. To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow…" (8.61). This comes from John's re-telling of his childhood to Bernard. The last bit, "to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow," comes from Macbeth. But the "drop, drop, drop" comes from another Elizabethan play by Ben Jonson. Jonson's lines are as follows: "O, I could still, / Like melting snow upon some craggy hill, / Drop, drop, drop, drop, / Since nature's pride is, now, a withered daffodil." It's possible this is coincidence and not an allusion, but we thought we'd let you make that call.
• Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ (17.7)
• William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (17.9)
• Voltaire, Candide: John's garden in Chapter 18. This one isn't explicit, but the fact that John finds solace by tending his garden reminds us of Voltaire's satire. In Candide, the characters experience every misery life has to offer. Voltaire concludes at the end that the only way to live is to take a narrow solace in hard work—for example, by tending a garden. The final line of Candide is: "…let us cultivate our garden." Voltaire was probably referring to the Garden of Eden, which we think fits well here, since John is tempted by Lenina in the same way Adam was tempted by Eve.
• Cardinal Newman, Sermon No. 6 of his Plain and Parochial Sermons, Volume 5 (17.20)
• Maine de Biran, unknown text, but we're inclined to think it's Nouveaux essais d'anthropologie, since that work focuses on man's relationship to the divine, as does the long passage Mustapha reads aloud to John. (17.20)

Historical References

• Henry Ford ("Our Ford")
• Maurice Bokanovsky ("Bokanovsky's Process")
• Vladimir Lenin ("Lenina Crowne")
• John Crowne ("Lenina Crowne" and "Fanny Crowne")
• William Pilkington ("Pilkington, at Mobmassa")
• Thomas Malthus ("The Malthusian Belt")
• Leon Trotsky ("Polly Trotsky")
• Mustafa Kemal Atatürk ("Mustapha Mond")
• Alfred Mond ("Mustapha Mond")
George Bernard Shaw ("Bernard Marx" and "Dr. Shaw")
• Karl Marx ("Bernard Marx")
• Claude Bernard ("Bernard Marx")
• Fanny Brawne ("Fanny Crowne")
• H.G. Wells ("Dr. Wells")
• Hans Pfitzner ("Pfizner and Kawaguchi")
• Ekai Kawaguchi ("Pfizner and Kawaguchi")
• Benito Mussolini ("Benito Hoover")
• Herbert Hoover ("Benito Hoover")
• Hermann von Helmholtz ("Helmholtz Watson")
• John Broadus Watson ("Helmholtz Watson")
• John Calvin ("Calvin Stopes")
• Marite Stopes ("Calvin Stopes")
• Charles Bradlaugh ("Fifi Bradlaugh")
• Rudolf Diesel ("Joanna Diesel")
• Clara Ford ("Clara Deterding")
• Henry Deterding ("Clara Deterding")
• Friedrich Engels ("Sarojini Engels")
• Sarojini Naidu ("Sarojini Engels")
• Mikhail Bakunin ("Herbert Bakunin")
• George Herbert ("Herbert Bakunin")
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau ("Jean-Jacques Habibullah")
• Amir Habibullāh Ghāzī ("Jean-Jacques Habibullah")
• Popé's rebellion ("Popé")
• John Keate ("Miss Keate," the Headmistress at Eton)
• Miguel Primo de Rivera ("Primo Mellon")
• Andrew William Mellon ("Primo Mellon")
• Charles Darwin ("Darwin Bonaparte")
• Napoleon Bonaparte ("Darwin Bonaparte")
• Sigmund Freud (3.73)
• Ivan Pavlov (2.2, 3.184)
• Los Penitentes (11.54)
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