Shakespeare’s exuberant punning has always posed something of a problem for literary critics. Critical suspicion of wordplay derives, I believe, from concerns about the dignity of literature and about the dignity of studying it for a living. In this essay I would like to demonstrate that thoughtful study of trivial punning is not only possible but essential to a full appreciation of literary art. Far from distancing myself from the potential frivolity of wordplay, I intend to embrace and celebrate it even to the point of pursuing something as odd and insubstantial as the undelivered pun.
Samuel Johnson famously lists punning as one of Shakespeare’s prime weaknesses:
A quibble is to Shakespeare, what luminous vapours are to the traveller; he follows it at all adventures, it is sure to lead him out of his way, and sure to engulf him in the mire. It has some malignant power over his mind, and its fascinations are irresistible. Whatever be the dignity or profundity of his disquisition, whether he be enlarging knowledge or exalting affection, whether he be amusing attention with incidents, or enchaining it in suspense, let but a quibble spring up before him, and he leaves his work unfinished. A quibble is the golden apple for which he will always turn aside from his career, or stoop from his elevation. A quibble, poor and barren as it is, gave him such delight, that he was content to purchase it, by the sacrifice of reason, propriety and truth. A quibble was to him the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and was content to lose it. [1]
Note that Johnson sees puns as a temptation that leads Shakespeare off track, away from the important towards the trivial. Shakespeare pursues "delight" at the expense of "reason, propriety and truth," a serious error in Johnson’s eyes. Thus for Johnson, Shakespeare’s punning exemplifies his primary defect as a writer: "He sacrifices virtue to convenience, and is so much more careful to please than to instruct, that he seems to write without any moral purpose." [2] Punning becomes a moral failing; Shakespeare wantonly neglects his moral duty to have his way with words.
While not everyone shares Johnson’s moral distaste for quibbles, most people do regard puns as trivial; consider all the essays introducing students to Shakespeare’s language that try so earnestly to convince readers that puns really can be serious. Puns seem to awake such a terror of the trivial in scholars that many choose either to ignore or casually disparage them, and even those contemporary critics who focus on wordplay usually go to extraordinary lengths to make it seem serious, dignified, and important. Patricia Parker, a vigorous defender of the importance of puns, assures us that "Shakespearean wordplay–the very feature relegated by the subsequent influence of neoclassicism to the rude and deformed as well as ornamental or trivial–provides a way into networks whose linkages expose the very orthodoxies and ideologies the plays themselves often appear simply to rehearse." [3] For Parker, puns provide a way of analyzing serious cultural and political issues and of showing how Shakespeare’s plays interact with and comment on contemporary ideology. But this strategy often tends to marginalize the very puns it claims to champion.
Consider the following passage from The Merchant of Venice:
LORENZO.
I shall answer that better to the commonwealth than you can the getting up of the Negro’s belly; the Moor is with child by you, Launcelot.
LAUNCELOT.
It is much that the Moor should be more than reason; but if she be less than an honest woman, she is indeed more than I took her for.[4]
In her analysis of these lines Parker first chastises previous critics for their careless dismissal of the punning language here and then shows how the pun touches on serious issues:
The association of "Moor" and "more," for instance, in the lines on the pregnant female Moor from The Merchant of Venice (III.v.37-42), is reduced to a mere linguistic "jingle" in the Variorum Shakespeare notes and by the Arden editor to speculation that the entire passage is introduced "simply for the sake of an elaborate pun on Moor/more." But as Kim F. Hall has observed, this reduction to mere quibble or jingle . . . makes an already invisible black female figure disappear even more effectively from these lines–a technique that parallels the effacing of any sense of coloring from Morocco’s "complexion" elsewhere in the play. The common early modern linking of Moor and more , however, is an important part of the assumption of disruptive excess behind Elizabeth’s proclamation in 1601 banishing "Negars and Blackamoors" from England on the grounds of their "great numbers" (a perception that Hall cogently argues had very little to do with their actual numbers) or the sense of sexual excess in the description of Othello as a "lascivious Moor." It involves associations still being chronicled by contemporary writers on race such as Patricia Hill Collins or Angela Davis, words powerful in their effect (or the work they do in the world) despite their contradiction by documentable facts or statistics. The more/Moor link, then–even apart from the possibility of a topical reference in these lines on a pregnant female Moor–is part of a set of associations that, far from being reducible to a trivializing sense of the merely verbal, have influenced laws and social practices.[5]
This does indeed make the Moor /more pun seem very important, but only because Parker uses it as a launching pad to get to the important topic of racism. Although she decries the trivialization of wordplay in critical discourse, Parker’s attitude toward punning here seems strangely similar to Johnson’s. Both want to get Shakespeare away from the trivial and back to important matters. Johnson sees puns as trivial and criticizes Shakespeare for his love of them; Parker sees puns as good excuses to talk about more dignified topics, like race and gender, and criticizes those who don’t do the same. In both cases, a sense of serious moral purpose triumphs over the dangerous temptations of aesthetic frivolity.
Much of our current disdain for wordplay may spring from the suspicion of formalism and close literary analysis that currently so dominates critical discourse. Before we can deal honestly with puns and wordplay, we need to rethink the purpose of close reading. I suggest that we can use the techniques of close reading in a new way, not to interpret texts but to analyze the pleasures they provide to audiences.
The most basic component of any close reading is the assumption that careful analysis can reveal multiple nuances of meaning not readily apparent to the casual reader. A critic will typically use the newly excavated meanings to provide supporting evidence for an interpretation, usually an interpretation guided by a pre-existing theoretical agenda. The plenitude of meanings that close reading reveals, however, often exceeds the needs of the particular critic. The gap between the multitude of verbal nuances and the monolithic nature of a final interpretation is a serious problem both for New Criticism and for all the subsequent critical schools that borrow its analytical techniques. As Charles Altieri points out, "The New Critics greatly expanded our sense of the semantic complexity of a text, but they did not develop adequate ways of showing how this information might be coherently processed."[6] Subsequent literary analysts have fared no better in this regard. I submit that the "semantic complexity" of cherished literary texts is not "coherently processed" by readers and audiences and that to try to provide some coherent schema for that heterogeneous complexity constitutes a denial of the very feature that makes literature appealing.
Close reading reveals an excess of possible meanings that interpretation-centered criticism has not found compelling ways to explain. Rather than trying to "interpret" verbal excess, we should try to see how it functions in our experience of the phrases, sentences, and speeches in which it occurs.
Attempts to systematize the multiple and conflicting connotations of literary language arise from the mistaken assumption that because literature is made of words, its only consequential action must be to transmit meanings. On the contrary, literary artifacts, especially those that constitute the Shakespearean canon, play with the formal properties of language in the same way musical compositions play with rhythm, melody, and harmony or the way works of visual art play with various combinations of forms, lines, and colors. Richness of connotation is one such formal property of literary language, and the patterns of potential meanings are as crucial to the experience of a work of literature as the modulations in key and rhythm in a musical composition or the patterns of shape, color, and light in a painting. In each case, the patterns are not conduits for messages but material properties of the work that engage the audience in a richly complex experience.
In short, Shakespeare does with meanings and connotations of words what a painter like Vermeer does with line, color, and shape: he organizes them into intricate and pleasing patterns. Vermeer’s Woman Pouring Milk (see Figure 1) is richly patterned in visual relationships of simultaneously similar and different objects. Edward Snow elaborates on the web of contrasts that structure the painting:
Woman Pouring Milk . . . is a melody of contrasting textures. The pair of hanging baskets provides the key: rough and smooth, hard and soft, woven and molded, curved and angular, open and shut. They even initiate opposing vectors: one tilting downward toward the footwarmer on the floor, the other jutting outward toward the pitcher pouring milk. Similar oppositions create the weave, the weft and warp, of the painting. Consider especially the shifting interplay of organic and manufactured forms (the bread and milk against containers and the table; the wicker basket against the metal one; or both baskets against the footwarmer), or the counterpoint between various states of suspension (the hanging baskets and the cradled pitcher suggest contrasting modes) and groundedness (the things on the table evoke one mood, the footwarmer another), or the downward progression through things at hand (the baskets on the wall), in hand (the pitcher pouring milk), and abandoned, out of reach or ken (the footwarmer on the floor). [7]
Figure 1 Woman Pouring Milk by Johannes Vermeer.
The network of contrasts that Snow describes coexists with a network of further similarities among dissimilar items. Consider the two baskets hanging on the wall on the left side of the painting. They are linked not only by kind but by their position in the composition; they are distinguished because one is made of wicker, the other of copper. The two wicker baskets in the painting are linked by their common material but otherwise distinguished. One is rectangular, closed, and hanging on the wall. The other is round, open, and sitting on the table. The round wicker basket holds two loaves of bread: one round, the other rectangular. These simultaneously similar and different loaves both resemble and differ from the broken pieces of bread lying on the table between the bread basket and the milk bowl. The round basket echoes the round bowl into which the woman pours milk, but one is wicker and extravagantly porous, the other solid earthen ware. Note too that the semicircular handles on the bread basket point up, while the semicircular handles on the milk bowl point to the sides. The milk bowl is made of the same material as the milk pitcher and the cup inside the footwarmer sitting in the lower right hand corner of the painting. Although all three objects are linked by their kind, they are all markedly different in size, shape, and position in the composition. The milk pitcher is similar in shape to the pitcher that sits on the table, but one is earthen ware, simple, open, and aligned on a horizontal axis while the other is metallic, more ornate, closed, and aligned on a vertical axis. The table and the footwarmer are similar in shape but very different in scale and function.
Virtually every element of the painting has a complex compositional echo; consider, for instance, the dark round space of the open milk pitcher and the dark square space of the footwarmer, or the large white window and the small black mirror on the left wall, or how the tilt of the woman’s head echoes the tilt of the hanging wicker basket, and so on. Suffice it to say that various networks of similarities and differences among compositional elements thread across the whole painting. Such networks–whether in a painting, a quartet, or a film–make the work that contains them exciting, eventful, brimming with patterns and relationships.
Close reading can reveal a similar wealth of linguistic activity in literary texts. Most critics impoverish that wealth by making it conform to the dictates of a theoretical agenda. But close readers do not have to make that assumption. Indeed, the very best close readers, I would argue, are those who can present the complexity of a text while resisting the impulse to interpretive closure. Consider William Empson’s famous analysis of line 4 of Shakespeare’s sonnet 73 ("Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang"):
the comparison holds for many reasons; because ruined monastery choirs are places in which to sing, because they involve sitting in a row, because they are made of wood, are carved into knots and so forth, because they used to be surrounded by a sheltering building crystallized out of the likeness of a forest, and coloured with stained glass and painting like flowers and leaves, because they are now abandoned by all but the grey walls coloured like the skies of winter, because the cold and Narcissistic charm suggested by choir-boys suits well with Shakespeare’s feeling for the object of the Sonnets, and for various sociological and historical reasons (the protestant destruction of monasteries; fear of puritanism), which it would be hard now to trace out in their proportions; these reasons, and many more relating the simile [sic ] to its place in the Sonnet, must all combine to give the line its beauty, and there is a sort of ambiguity in not knowing which of them to hold most clearly in mind. Clearly this is involved in all such richness and heightening of effect, and the machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry. [8]
Empson does not attempt to exclude any of the various meanings at play in these lines, nor does he try to reconcile them into a single, paradoxical statement. Empson finds lots of interconnected potential meanings and assumes that they all play some part in giving the line its impact.
The multitudinous relationships among the meanings in the line from sonnet 73 resemble the multitudinous patterns of visual relationships in Vermeer’s painting. A technique of close reading that pays full attention to richness of patterning can allow us to understand more fully the beauty of literary language rather than using such language as a pretext for talking about some other historically, politically, or philosophically solemn topic.
And now let us resume our pursuit of the luminous vapors of the pun, starting with the Moor/more pun that Parker analyzed from The Merchant of Venice. Moors appear in three of Shakespeare’s plays, and in two of them Shakespeare overtly exercises the potential for a Moor /more pun. Here is an exchange from Titus Andronicus:
NURSE.
O, tell me, did you see Aaron the Moor?
AARON.
Well, more or less, or ne’er a whit at all,
Here Aaron is, and what with Aaron now? (4.2.52-54)
In Titus Andronicus, as in The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare exploits the Moor/more pun for comic effect. The puns in these plays are overtly clever.
In contrast to the simultaneously bland and ostentatious exploitation of the potential inherent in the words "Moor" and "more," consider
how Shakespeare deals with the same potential in Othello. In Othello, Shakespeare creates an environment that brings together the elements necessary for a pun but keeps them from consummating their relationship. Instead of squandering the inherent energy of the pun, Shakespeare maintains all its unrealized potential. Consider the Duke’s advice to Brabantio: "If virtue no delighted beauty lack, / Your son-in-law is far more fair than black" (1.3.289-90). Here the word "more" appears in a context that draws attention to Othello’s race, yet Shakespeare does not permit that context to turn "more" into a pun on "Moor." The unactualized potential for a pun is inherent in these lines; Shakespeare has brought the ideas and sounds necessary for a Moor/more pun into near collision. Shakespeare plays with this linguistic potential throughout the play by putting the word "Moor" into close proximity with the word "much": "So much I challenge that I may profess / Due to the Moor my lord," "And by how much she strives to do him good, / She shall undo her credit with the Moor," "the Moor / May unfold me to him; there stand I in much peril" (1.3.188-89; 2.3.358-59; 5.1.20-21). The unrealized potential of linguistic events like the near-miss pun on Moor/more in Othello is, I believe, a primary component of Shakespeare’s appeal to the minds and ears of audiences.[9]
Analyzing puns that never actually occur may indeed seem like chasing a will-o’-the-wisp. Even a radical post-structuralist like Joel Fineman sensibly insists that a "motivated homophone," or pun, "must be noticed as such for it to work its poetic effect."[10] The very existence of "undelivered" meanings might seem too bizarre to be believable. Yet such undelivered meanings have been studied by perceptual psychologists. Some experiments indicate that people do momentarily entertain meanings for words that cannot fit logically into the clear meaning of a sentence. David Swinney, for example, presented subjects with these sentences: "Rumor has it that, for years, the government building had been plagued with problems. The man was not surprised when he found several spiders, roaches, and other bugs in the corner of his room." Swinney discovered that for a few seconds, the length of two or three syllables, a person will register not only the delivered meaning of "bug" (insect) but also the logically impossible alternative: a concealed microphone.[11] Similarly, researchers have discovered that words like "tire," that can function as either verbs or nouns, momentarily evoke both noun and verb meanings even in contexts where one meaning would be nonsensical.[12] Such research suggests that the fleeting, unharnessed meanings that I point to are not just the products of a wantonly creative mind but have a basis in empirical fact.
Moreover, a number of critics have commented on the odd occurrence of unnoticed but poetically effective puns. Christopher Ricks coined the appropriately bizarre term "anti-pun" to describe the phenomenon: "The practice is a variety of pun, but it is an anti-pun; whereas in a pun there are two senses which either get along or quarrel, in an anti-pun there is only one sense admitted but there is another sense denied admission. So the response is not ‘this means x ‘ (with the possibility even of its meaning y being no part of your response), but ‘this-means-x -and-doesn’t-mean-y ‘, all hyphenated."[13] Ricks’ comments imply that readers are consciously aware of the excluded meaning.
William Empson discusses what he calls "subdued puns"[14] in Shakespeare, but finds the subject "puzzling and hard to approach directly."[15] He suggests that the presence of such puns may spring from Shakespeare’s unique poetic gifts: "When I said that subdued puns were not the most important object of analysis, I meant that very few poets are so sensitive to the sounds of language, that very few poets can afford so to exploit their sensitivity to the sounds of language, and that perhaps no other poet had been able to concentrate, on the creative act of a moment, such a range of intellectual power."[16] Empson’s commentary on various subdued puns makes it clear that some of them are not consciously noticed by readers.
Many critics mention this curious phenomenon in passing, particularly in discussions of Shakespeare’s language. N. F. Blake notes the presence of "submerged linking": Shakespeare’s "ability to unite a passage by using words which overlap in their semantic fields, even though the primary meaning intended in the passage is not that which creates an echo with other words."[17] Randolph Quirk analyzes the "lexical congruence working through, without, or in defiance of syntactic structure" in 1 Henry VI 2.5.10-15.[18] In the Arden edition of Macbeth, Kenneth Muir notes in passing the presence, at 3.2.46-49, of a "concealed pun on seeling /sealing ."[19]
Most references to this poetic effect are incidental and brief. The one critic who has given sustained and elaborate attention to the bizarre topic of puns that aren’t quite really there is Stephen Booth. His monumental analytic commentary on Shakespeare’s Sonnets contains numerous references to the "unharnessed meanings" of words and to what he calls "ideational puns": "an interplay between an idea and a word that could–but does not–express or relate to that idea."[20] From his early work on the Sonnets to his most recent analysis of Twelfth Night , Booth has shown a consistent interest in the effect of the ideational pun. [21]
Booth is also unique among commentators on unharnessed puns in that he speculates on the aesthetic value and effect of the phenomenon. He argues that such patterns of wordplay provide a linguistic coherence that does not consist of delivered meaning. He sees ideational puns as an extension of such formal devices as rhyme, rhythm, and alliteration. All such devices give a work of literature rich, yet nonsubstantive, coherence, coherence that lies in patterns and forms that "can make an artificial construct feel almost as inevitable–as obviously a thing and not a conglomerate–as an object in nature." [22]
Undelivered puns may also enhance the experience of an audience in a way that normal puns never do. According to Booth, unharnessed puns are superior to delivered puns in much the same way that the experience of a pun maker is superior to the experience of a pun hearer:
What the pun’s audience hears is a mere gimcrack, a toy, something entirely irrelevant to the nature of things so suddenly linked. What the punster feels in the air before he/she brings it forth and exposes it for the mouse a pun inevitably turns out to be is thrilling, is a sense of a previously unsuspected new order to things. A comparable feel of limitless mental possibility, I suggest, derives to us from the presence of substantively irrelevant organizations in the literary constructs we value best and longest. [23]
Thus undelivered puns create a richer experience for audiences. Consider the common laudatory phrase "pregnant with meaning." That metaphor implies that the meanings it describes remain undelivered, potential, nascent. A delivered pun advertises its own cleverness, it requires us to acknowledge it. The raw materials for a pun that never reaches our conscious attention will have a radically different effect. The unharnessed pun creates an exciting and volatile mental environment, one that provides a vital component of the pleasure we take from Shakespearean language.
The philosopher J. F. Ross provides a vocabulary that may help clarify the nature of unharnessed meanings. As Ross points out, "Everyone who speaks one of the relevant natural languages . . . characteristically and automatically uses the same words in different meanings, sometimes related (see /light, see /point: collect /books, collect /friends, collect /debts, collect /barnacles), and sometimes unrelated (charge /enemy, charge /battery, charge /account)."[24] Ross calls this procedure "differentiation," the process by which words acquire different meanings in different contexts. He calls the linguistic and contextual forces that cause differentiation "dominance." Thus in the examples quoted above, the italicized words differentiate because their companion words dominate them.
Shakespeare skillfully manipulates linguistic dominance relationships to force words to differentiate, to assume contextually appropriate meanings. Note how Shakespeare exploits contextual signals to make "rivals" say the opposite of what it means: "If you do meet Horatio and Marcellus, / The rivals of my watch, bid them make haste" (Hamlet 1.1.12-13). The word "rivals" differentiates into the unconventional meaning "partners" because of the dominating context. Such manipulation of linguistic contexts reveals how Shakespeare employed the principles that Ross later explained.
Employing Ross’s terminology for literary analysis, Ann and John O. Thompson suggest that while linguistic dominance can ultimately rule out a word’s potential denotations, the process of differentiation may nevertheless leave traces of such discarded meanings. They assert that "readings which dominance renders ‘impossible’ can retain a ghostly life within a poem or speech. They are rejected hypotheses, but they are conceptually pertinent rejected hypotheses, and that pertinence is what makes entertaining them a proper part of the experience of reading or listening."[25] Meanings that do not fit into the clearly delivered surface meaning of a text (and that therefore do not become a part of our conscious understanding) but that do bear some conceptual pertinence to the linguistic context are unharnessed meanings.
When dominance forces a word to differentiate into two conceptually pertinent meanings, we call such an occurrence a pun. Like most other literary phenomena, puns enable readers to perceive simultaneous likeness and difference, but the similarity established by a pun is always and obviously an accidental one established by coincidental phonetic resemblance. Consider, for instance, the following pun from the opening of Julius Caesar . When asked what his trade is, the Cobbler tells Murellus that he is "a mender of bad soles" (Julius Caesar 1.1.13). The pun establishes a relationship between sole (the bottom of a shoe) and soul (the immaterial part of a human being), yet the pun also, simultaneously, advertises how tenuous and coincidental that relationship is.
Perhaps more than any other trope, puns call attention to themselves. But when they get the attention they crave, they also reveal their own insignificance. So, when the mortally wounded Mercutio tells Romeo, "Ask for me to-morrow, and you shall find me a grave man" (Romeo and Juliet 3.1.98-99), his wordplay calls attention to the wit that produced it rather than to some profound connection between tombs and dignity. Yet compare Hamlet’s words as he drags Polonius’s dead body from his mother’s room:
This counselor
Is now most still, most secret, and most grave,
Who was in life a foolish prating knave. (Hamlet 3.4.213-15)
Hamlet’s lines create the occasion for a pun on grave , one that goes unnoticed even by professional noticers like the modern editors of the play. Although the context for a pun on grave is at least as rich here as in Romeo and Juliet , that context is not harnessed to bring the potential for punning to our conscious attention. Although unobserved, I believe that such unharnessed meanings are aesthetically potent. It is a commonplace that unobtrusive rhetorical effects are more pleasing than crude, heavy-handed ones. The concept of the unharnessed pun merely presents an extension of that principle.
Unharnessed meanings can have an effect even when the delivered meanings of a passage remain obscure or incomprehensible. Consider the following lines from The Winter’s Tale :
Most dear’st! my collop! Can thy dam?–may’t be?–
Affection! thy intention stabs the centre. (1.2.137-38)
Mark Van Doren called the speech these lines initiate "the obscurest passage in Shakespeare . . . Leontes means in general that the impossible has become all too possible, but the particulars of his meaning are his own."[26] An audience might say to Leontes what Desdemona says to Othello: "I understand a fury in your words, / But not the words" (4.2.32-33). These opaque lines do not deliver precise meanings to an audience, but they do contain a number of unharnessed meanings.
In the phrase "Can thy dam?–may’t be?", for instance, unharnessed puns help relate the sounds of the words to the general topic of discussion. The potential dam /damn pun reflects and is echoed in the themes of punishment, torture, and damnation that weave through Leontes’s lines in the scene. The subliminal play on may’t /mate similarly connects to the immediate context, since Leontes is asking about his son’s mother ("thy dam") who is also his own wife or mate. And consider the phrase "thy intention stabs the center." Here the potential for a play on "in" and "to tent," a surgical term meaning "to probe," sharpens the stabbing of the center that the line presents to us. Again, although such linguistic play probably never intrudes into the conscious awareness of an audience, it nevertheless adds an extra dimension of connection among the various linguistic elements.
In several plays, Shakespeare collects the raw materials for a pun on "peer" (person of noble birth/to look at intently) without ever bothering to process them. Consider the following examples: "O King Stephano! O peer! O worthy Stephano! look what a wardrobe here is for thee!" (The Tempest 4.1.222-23); "See you, my princes and my noble peers" (Henry V 2.2.84); "KING HENRY. We do salute you, Duke of Burgundy, / And, princes French, and peers, health to you all! / FRENCH KING. Right joyous are we to behold your face" (Henry V 5.2.7-9).
Shakespeare makes similar use of the term "peerless"; although the word means "without equal," Shakespeare seems to sense its potential as a pun meaning something like "without vision" or "unseen." Consider the following lines from The Winter’s Tale:
LEONTES.
but we saw not
That which my daughter came to look upon,
The statue of her mother.
PAULINA.
As she liv’d peerless,
So her dead likeness, I do well believe,
Excels what ever yet you look’d upon. (5.3.12-16)
Here the verbs saw , look , and looked and the general topic of something not yet seen all help to form a context for a pun on peerless , but that potential pun never reaches actuality; it remains unharnessed.
Often, potential or undelivered puns will create fleeting links between certain lines. For example, look at these lines in which Macbeth speaks to the ghost of Banquo and Lady Macbeth addresses the assembled guests:
MACBETH.
Avaunt, and quit my sight! let the earth hide thee!
Thy bones are marrowless, thy blood is cold;
Thou hast no speculation in those eyes
Which thou dost glare with!
LADY MACBETH.
Think of this, good peers,
But as a thing of custom. ‘Tis no other (3.4.92-96)
The noun "peers" by which Lady Macbeth addresses the lords provides an incidental link with Macbeth’s terms "glare," "eyes," and "sight." A similar undelivered pun occurs earlier in the play. Just after Macbeth calls on the stars to hide their fires and the eye to wink at the hand, Duncan refers to him as a "peerless kinsman," providing a subliminal link to the blindness required for regicide in Macbeth’s aside (1.4.58).
Another unharnessed pun that occasionally energizes passages in Shakespeare occurs with the word "weed." Here is the beginning of Gertrude’s account of Ophelia’s suicide:
There is a willow grows askaunt the brook,
That shows his hoary leaves in the glassy stream,
Therewith fantastic garlands did she make
Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cull-cold maids do dead men’s fingers call them.
There on the pendant boughs her crownet weeds
Clamb’ring to hang, an envious sliver broke,
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide,
And mermaid-like awhile they bore her up (Hamlet 4.7.166-76)
The passage begins with a list of various plants Ophelia used to make garlands and ends with the image of her clothes floating in the water. The phrase "crownet weeds" forges a link between these otherwise unrelated topics. Here "weeds" refers to the catalogue of plants, but since "weeds" could mean "clothing" (and, in fact, here does name something to wear) it subliminally prepares the way for the reference to Ophelia’s clothes, which like her "weedy trophies" float on the surface of the water. While this connection surely never intrudes into the thoughts of an audience to the speech, it does provide an extra level of formal connection among the speeches elements. Here the undelivered pun on weeds functions like a subtle repetition of color in a painting: it provides an extra degree of coherence to the work.
Note the similar wordplay in the following passage:
Besides, they are our outward consciences
And preachers to us all, admonishing
That we should dress us fairly for our end.
Thus may we gather honey from the weed,
And make a moral of the devil himself. (Henry V 4.1.8-12)
Here the contextually unrelated words "dress" and "weed" relate to one another in the subterranean realm of undelivered meanings, once again supplying an extra-logical coherence to the passage in which they appear. Moreover, clothing becomes a focus of the scene when King Henry borrows Erpingham’s cloak.
Shakespeare’s language contains many, many similar examples of unharnessed puns, but rather than enlarge on a potentially endless list I would like to turn to two broad theoretical topics. First, I will consider how readers and playgoers might experience undelivered meanings differently. Second, I will address the concern that the potential punning I analyze was never an intentional part of the works in which it appears.
Throughout this discussion, I have made no distinction between two different kinds of audiences: readers and playgoers. A colleague has suggested that my analyses imply that every playgoer can instantly "close hear" a line in all the detail that I bring to close readings conducted at leisure. An examination of the debate between text-based and performance-based critics may help explain why I choose to ignore the distinctions between readers and playgoers.
A number of contemporary critics have taken sides in a debate about the relative authority of text-based and performance-based interpretations of Shakespearean drama. Some critics assume that anything revealed by close analysis of the text is a valid part of a play’s meaning, but performance critics argue that meaning is properly limited to what a play can communicate in the theater. Harry Berger, in a formulation as witty as it is tendentious, presents the difference between these two groups as "a contrast between the Slit-eyed Analyst and the Wide-eyed Playgoer"[27]
J. H. P. Pafford, clearly a Wide-eyed Playgoer, provides a succinct statement of the performance critic’s credo: "The play must be judged as by a spectator who is allowing himself to be caught up by it in performance and to be carried away into its illusion"; thus many things that might appear to a close reader of the text "do not worry an audience; they cannot indeed be noticed in the quick movement of the play."[28] Thus for Pafford, and for other performance-based interpreters, the performance sets the limits of interpretation.
According to Berger, a champion of the Slit-eyed Analyst, close reading can and should make manifest information unavailable to playgoers: "Decelerated microanalysis . . . enlarges and emblematically fixes features not discernible in the normal rhythm of communication," and when the text is "reaccelerated" the critic can "sense how much is withheld from an audience that can only hear and see, how much is occulted in the text they cannot read" (148-49). Thus for Berger, and for many other text-based interpreters, the text opens up realms of meaning inaccessible to playgoers.
Note that both sides of this debate are promoting methods of interpretation. They are trying to establish the procedure for understanding what Shakespeare’s plays mean. I am more interested in what the language of Shakespeare’s plays does to–or better for –an audience, whether that audience gets its Shakespeare from an Arden edition, the Shenandoah Shakespeare Express, or a hypertext web page.
According to Berger, "when Shakespeare is staged and you hear his language at performance tempo you are always haunted by the sense that you are receiving more information than you can process, and you wish you could slow the tempo down or have passages repeated or reach for a text."[29] I too believe that Shakespearean language presents us with more than we can consciously process. Unlike Berger, however, I celebrate that excess. The sense of excess does not "haunt" me, it delights me. Close reading of a text can help us analyze just exactly what has gone whizzing across our minds, but seeing all the excess more clearly after the fact does not imply that we should, or even can, make it a part of our conscious experience of the play. Knowing precisely how a particular process works does not change that process. Reading a detailed scientific analysis of how our bodies digest food will not alter our own digestive processes. Moreover, most readers are not close readers. Most readers outside the academy read plays in the same way playgoers hear them: one word at a time, at the speed of thought.
Playgoers are, perhaps, a bit more likely than readers to hear and brush from their understandings the sorts of shadow assertions that I talk about. An auditor inescapably hears each succeeding syllable as the defining one in an emerging constellation of ideas. But both the reader and the playgoer will miss, at least on the conscious level, most of the linguistic effects I point to. You need not be a close reader or a close hearer to experience a Shakespeare play fully.
A usual objection to the idea that undelivered meanings form a part of an audience’s experience is that no one can prove that they were part of the author’s design for the work in question. This is, of course, yet another version of the intentional fallacy. The idea that only intended effects are real will not stand up to serious scrutiny. If all unintentional phenomena were unreal, there would be no spelling erors. Probably some of the undelivered meanings I point to were never part of Shakespeare’s conscious design, but the connections and patterns are no less real, no less a part of our experience, for being accidental. To demonstrate this point I would like to look at two examples of unharnessed puns that could not have been intended by Shakespeare.
Consider first Caliban’s awed aside when he first sees Stephano and Trinculo: "These be fine things, and if they be not sprites. / That’s a brave god, and bears celestial liquor" (2.2.116-17). Here the play on "liquor" and "sprites" or "spirits" gives precisely the kind of extra coherence and energy to the language that I have analyzed throughout this essay. One key difference is that that potential pun was unavailable to the minds and ears of early seventeenth-century audiences to The Tempest . The word "spirits" did not come to mean an alcoholic beverage until the mid-1680s.[30] But though I can say with great certainty that Shakespeare never intended any such wordplay, I need not conclude that the undelivered pun does not play a part in a contemporary audience’s experience of the lines. The connection between spirits and liquor gives contemporary audiences a connection between two dominant topics in the scene. References to spirits on the island and to liquor run throughout this scene with Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo, and their intersection here–though clearly a historical linguistic accident–reinforces a pattern already undeniably present in the play.
Near the end of 1 Henry IV another historically impossible connection of potential meanings occurs. Standing over Hotspur’s dead body, Prince Hal declares "This earth that bears thee dead / Bears not alive so stout a gentleman" (5.4.92-93). Hal then turns his attention to the apparently dead Falstaff and declares, "What, old acquaintance! could not all this flesh / Keep in a little life?" (5.4.102-03). The description of Hotspur as "stout" makes a pleasing parallel with the recognition of Falstaff’s corpulence. However, the word "stout" did not acquire the meaning "fat" until the early 1800s. For a contemporary audience, nevertheless, the unharnessed verbal link between Hotspur and Falstaff is quite plausible because the early modern meanings of "stout" (strong, proud, bold) are virtually obsolete in modern English.
Here again, although the connection clearly results from a linguistic accident, it fits well into the patterning of the context in which it occurs. Even without the play on "stout," the lines on Hotspur and Falstaff deal with the contrasts of full and empty, living and dead, large and small. Hal’s parallel elegies to Hotspur and Falstaff implicitly contrast Hotspur’s metaphorical, martial greatness with Falstaff’s literal, fleshy greatness.
Note the striking number of verbal parallels between Hal’s two speeches:
HOTSPUR.
O, I could prophesy,
But that the earthy and cold hand of death
Lies on my tongue. No, Percy, thou art dust, And food for –Dies.
PRINCE.
For worms, brave Percy. Fare thee well, great heart!
Ill-weav’d ambition, how much art thou shrunk!
When that this body did contain a spirit,
A kingdom for it was too small a bound,
But now two paces of the vilest earth
Is room enough. This earth that bears thee dead
Bears not alive so stout a gentleman.
If thou wert sensible of courtesy,
I should not make so dear a show of zeal;
But let my favors hide thy mangled face,
And even in thy behalf I’ll thank myself
For doing these fair rites of tenderness.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
He spieth Falstaff on the ground.
What, old acquaintance! could not all this flesh
Keep in a little life? Poor Jack, farewell!
I could have better spar’d a better man.
O, I should have a heavy miss of thee
If I were much in love with vanity!
Death hath not strook so fat a deer to-day,
Though many dearer, in this bloody fray.
Embowell’d will I see thee by and by,
Till then in blood by noble Percy lie. (5.4.83-98, 102-10)
Concepts relating to food and eating weave through both passages: Hotspur is food for worms and Falstaff is a hunted deer. And the number of incidental verbal parallels is striking: "Fare thee well" / "farewell"; "Lies on my tongue" / "by noble Percy lie"; "make so dear a show of zeal" / "strook so fat a deer to-day"; "the earthy and cold hand of death" / "Death hath not strook"; and so on. All these incidental contrasting parallels subtly reinforce the play-wide series of contrasts between Hotspur and Falstaff.
Even though Shakespeare could not have made a pun, harnessed or unharnessed, on "stout," that wordplay fits beautifully into the scene’s intricate patterning. In this case, audiences today get an extra element in the lushly patterned design through a historical linguistic accident. The rich conceptual harmonies that relate these passages are the essence of the poetic richness that draws us so irresistibly to Shakespeare.
Any sustained analytical attention to wordplay is likely to make some critics fidgety. Talking about the aesthetic effect of potential wordplay probably seems even more frivolous, and asserting that undelivered meanings that could not have been a part of the original audience’s experience do have an effect on modern audiences sounds, I know, ludicrous. But if we want to focus on texts as rich and extraordinary as Shakespeare’s, we need to abandon the assumption that our investigations must lead to momentous insights. Shakespeare’s language often works in bizarre and quirky ways, and more often than not the quirks aren’t serious or important; they may be simply delightful, or curious, or lovely.
An inevitable sense of whimsy attends any analysis of something so obviously frivolous as an undelivered pun. It lacks the gravity and consequence we have grown to expect from the interpretation industry. But if we refuse to acknowledge the full reality of the texts we study, however wacky or trifling they may seem, we risk losing touch with the very power that draws us to literature in the first place. As Debra Fried reminds us, "It is dangerous to assume that the local tics of puns in lyric poems must serve a coherent reading of the poem, and that puns that do not mean anything in this sense are simply not there. Like the Augustan poetic of sound as echo to sense, this tendency toward making puns serve meaning robs them of some of their wildness and shimmering contingency."[31] Trying to tie every element of a literary text to a coherent, delivered message ignores the full extravagant beauty of poetic language.[32]
Notes
[1]Samuel Johnson, "Preface to Shakespeare," in The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, Volume VII: Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Arthur Sherbo (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 74.
[2]Johnson, "Preface to Shakespeare," 71.
[3] Patricia Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 114.
[4] All quotations from Shakespeare come from The Riverside Shakespeare, Second Edition, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997); I silently omit the brackets with which Riverside signals deviations from its chosen copy text.
[5] Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins, 4-5.
[6] Charles Altieri, Act and Quality: A Theory of Literary Meaning and Humanistic Understanding (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981), 216.
[7] Edward Snow, A Study of Vermeer: Revised and Enlarged Edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 10.
[8]William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (New York: New Directions, 1947), 2-3.
[9]Compare "whit" in the passage from Titus Andronicus quoted above for its overt pun on "more" and "Moor";"whit" opens the door to contextually pertinent play on "white" and "black," but Shakespeare’s lines hold back from entering into such play.
[10]Joel Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 70.
[11]David Swinney, "Lexical Access During Sentence Comprehension: (Re)consideration of Contextual Effects," Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 5 (1979): 219-27.
[12]See Mark Seidenberg, Michael Tanenhaus, et al., "Automatic Access of the Meanings of Words in Context: Some Limitations of Knowledge-based Processing," Cognitive Psychology 14 (1982): 489-537.
[13]Christopher Ricks, The Force of Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 265-66.
[14]References to subdued puns occur throughout Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, but the most concentrated discussion occurs during Empson’s analysis of the implications of scholarly annotation: 80-88.
[15]Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 87.
[16]Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 88.
[17]N. F. Blake, Shakespeare’s Language: An Introduction (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), 54-55. Blake cites W. Whiter’s 1794 A Specimen of a Commentary on Shakespeare and analyzes Coriolanus 2.3.220-26, noted by Whiter for its network of clothing-related words.
[18]Randolph Quirk, The Linguist and the English Language (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1974), 61-62.
[19]Macbeth, ed. Kenneth Muir (London: Methuen, 1984), 85.
[20]Stephen Booth, ed., Shakespeare’s Sonnets (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 465.
[21]Booth’s investigations of this phenomenon include: Shakespeare’s Sonnets (esp. 203, 231, 364-72); "Exit Pursued by a Gentleman Born" in Shakespeare’s Art from a Comparative Perspective, ed. W. M. Aycock (Lubbock: Texas Tech Press, 1981), 51-66; "Close Reading Without Readings," in Shakespeare Reread: The Texts in New Contexts, ed. Russ McDonald (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 42-55; "Shakespeare’s Language and the Language of Shakespeare’s Time," Shakespeare Survey 50 (1997): 1-17; and Precious Nonsense (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 194-202.
[22]Booth, Precious Nonsense, 6.
[23]Booth, "Shakespeare’s Language and the Language of Shakespeare’s Time," 12.
[24]J. F. Ross, Portraying Analogy (London: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 4.
[25]Ann and John O. Thompson, Shakespeare: Meaning and Metaphor (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1987), 159.
[26]Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare (New York: Holt, 1939), 316.
[27]Harry Berger, Jr., Imaginary Audition: Shakespeare on Stage and Page (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), xiv.
[28]J. H. P. Pafford, introduction to the Arden edition of The Winter’s Tale (London: Methuen, 1963), li-lii.
[29]Harry Berger, Jr., "Bodies and Texts," Representations 7 (1984): 146.
[30]The OED lists under definition 21b for "spirits" ("Liquid such as is obtained by distillation, spec. that which is of an alcoholic nature") a quote from Jonson’s 1610 play The Alchemist: [Have I] "Wrought thee to spirit, to quintessence, with paines / Would twise haue won me the philosophers work?" (1.1.70-71). The quote is unconvincing as evidence because "spirit" is in apposition to "quintessence" and because the context implies alchemical rather than alcoholic distillation. The next quote for this meaning comes from 1688.
[31]Debra Fried, "Rhyme Puns," in On Puns: The Foundation of Letters , ed. Jonathan Culler (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 99.
[32] For their comments and suggestions on various drafts of this essay, I would like to thank Stephen Booth, Thomas Cable, Bridgit Drinka, Leah Marcus, Mark Rasmussen, and John Rumrich.
