• 1 “Shakespeare’s Language and Language in Shakespeare’s Time”, in Shakespeare Survey 50, March 1997, (...)

1At the end of the last century, in the liminary essay to a volume on Shakespeare and Language,1 Stephen Booth, with his usual incisiveness, quailed not at launching his subject with the following incipit:

• 2 Ann Lecercle and Yan Brailowsky, eds., Language and Otherness, Nanterre, Presses Universitaires de (...)

2Booth was writing in the 90’s, but his reminder is no less timely today — if anything more so, the bard being currently served up to every kind of sauce in the critical cookbook. These sauces, however, tend to be of the thinning species, unlike the recipes of Macbeth’s witches, who knew what they were talking about when they called for gruel that was “thick and slab”. Poetry, after all, is nothing if not Dichtung, thickening – Booth’s “densities”. At this interface of orality between word and food, you used, simply, to have food – or famine; now – courtesy, of such as the CEO of Titan tyres – you have not only fast-food but food-not-fast-enough. What I propose to serve you up, and what I, and by implication Booth, are invoking is slow Shakespeare – if only, in the first instance, because of what a conference of 2006 called the “otherness of language” in Shakespeare’s drama,2 otherness not only as “different from” (other exemplars) but, more importantly, language as inherently estranged from itself — not diachronically by the cutting and tailoring of subsequent centuries, but synchronically for reasons I hope to suggest.

• 3 All references will be to Troilus and Cressida, Kenneth Palmer, ed., London & N.Y., Methuen, 1982.
• 4 The RSC Shakespeare, Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, eds., London, Macmillan, 2007.
• 5  i.e. with his own surprise espousals.

3To illustrate this perspective and suggest one of the reasons, I’ll begin by taking a crux from Troilus and Cressida.3 One of the notions the playwright is visibly exploring in the years 1603-5 is a representation common, though in different guises – and indeed genres – to both his last comedy (Measure for Measure) and the Folio’s first tragedy (Troilus). In fact, at that moment in time this notion may be said to constitute the conceptual hinge between the two works. Far from being an error, this notion, via one of the hapaxes he was wont to resort to to get his “ideational densities” into the English tongue, is what Shakespeare terms “bifold authority” (Troilus, v.ii.163), under which “reason can revolt / Without perdition, and loss assume all reason / Without revolt” —a prospect, incidentally, where Angelo outdoes any Trojan. The Folio’s “by foul authority” (recently adopted by Bate and Rasmussen)4 seems to me a patent, not to say a blatant, rationalization of a signifier forged for the occasion and following directly on from “If there is rule in unity”. In fact, of course, what is being adumbrated in this signifier, even if the English language cannot say it, is what goes to the heart of Measure for Measure (hereafter MM) even more than Troilus, namely a non-existent word which would, if it could, subsume both readings: bifold authority is per se foul authority — a problematic this that goes back to the rationale behind the very first tragedy of Elizabethan England which its authors called Ferrex and Porrex (1570) and not Gorboduc, the unitary, because pirated, title of the earlier edition of 1565. Even more suggestive for MM is the semantic supplement conveyed, on first acquaintance with this alien term, by “fold”. In the first instance, the “bi-”, of course, reads as the Latin prefix for the two in “twofold”; but the strangeness then shifts and lodges in the term’s resulting hybridity (Romance/Anglo-Saxon). Moreover, because “bifold” had, and has, no established existence, on first encountering it the second syllable also comes to us afresh. So one hovers, like Macbeth’s witches, between the computational (x2) and the topographical, where “fold” is not only a suffix but a noun, problematizing, in MM’s body politic,5 the authority of a governor not only shrouded in the folds of monkish robes but replaced by a bi-nome (Angelo and Escalus). This in turn has the effect après coup on “bi-” of shifting the focus from the first (numerical) to the second (judicial) meaning of the prefix /bai/ in English, a fortiori when “authority” is the issue: namely the bye- or simply by- of “bye-law” or “byway”, those corresponding to the lesser lines and lanes of direction or governance: those privileged, respectively, by the dark corners of Vienna and the deviousness of warfare, erotic or military, at Troy. Above all, MM demonstrates how the by(e)- takes over from the bi-: for, albeit thereafter commandeered out of the blue as ducal spouse — a fate met with silence – the last words Isabella ever speaks are the following: “His act did not o’er (whore ?) take his bad intent, / And must be buried but as an intent / That perish’d by the way” (v.i.449-50; emphasis mine).

• 6 Gilles Deleuze, Logique du sens, Paris, Minuit, 1965.

5There is a problem though: Booth’s fascinating account of Shakespeare’s language resembles his investigation of what he argues to be Shakespeare’s anagrams (in this following the rather less than felicitous example of Saussure on Latin poetry): in other words, Booth’s account constitutes a cluster of brilliant illuminations of Shakespearean Dichtung – and that is what it remains: a cluster. What interests me is how Booth’s cluster of densities came to be a cluster: what is, less their common component than, the force of poetic or other gravity that brings them together, what the early Deleuze, reader of Lewis Carroll, calls “logique du sens”.6

• 7 Elizabeth Freund, “‘Ariachne’s broken woof’: the rhetoric of citation in Troilus and Cressida”, in (...)
• 8 Margreta de Grazia, Hamlet without Hamlet, Cambridge, CUP, 2007.

6This problematic is best approached through a remark in an exceptionally well written and percipient article on the rhetoric of citation in Troilus by Elizabeth Freund.7 I am thinking of the phrase Freund uses for the one, and probably the only, aporetic moment in her entire argument: when she writes of another of the play’s textual cruxes: if not a technical error, she writes, this crux must, on the poet’s part, be either a lapsus or what she calls “daring of the imagination” (p. 20). This phrase, to my ears at least, has a decidedly, not to say waywardly, romantic aura in a critique that purports to think Shakespeare “theoretically”. Margreta de Grazia has argued cogently for a Hamlet without Hamlet,8 meaning the Hamlet inherited from the Romantics: I want, for a moment, to look at Shakespeare’s language without the Romantic “daring of the imagination”. Given the time available, this agenda is most conveniently broached if one begins by looking at language itself as signifier in the canon.

• 10 Freund, op. cit., p. 21.
• 11 Troilus and Cressida, iv.vi.55-57.

9He is wrong, of course – there is always one that gets away (though in this case the exception does indeed prove the rule – to the point of constituting a blueprint of the logic I want to trace, but it occurs before the Problem Plays, so this is not the place). Freund begins by stressing what she calls the Problem Plays’ “heightened language consciousness”10 The point, though, is that this newly emergent signifier of “language” is a very particular, not to say peculiar, creation — or rather creature, those créatures that disdainful dames de la haute called the flighty young things in their domesticity: in this case Cressid – no domestic, but better and worse, being hostage to the entire Greek host. This “language”, rather than being an object of rhetoric or citation, reason or argument, is, to quote Richard III, “only half made up”, being embroiled with, and ultimately bedded in, the flesh, like the inchoate figures of natura naturans in Renaissance grottoes. Waswo speaks of “language” as denoting the extension “from a body of words to something else.” What Shakespeare gives us is an antimetabole of this: from “a-body-of-words-as-language” back to language-as-body, but not any body. For the passage Waswo refers to as constituting the very birth of “language” not only in Shakespeare but in the English language is Ulysses’ verdict on the eponymous heroine: “Fie, fie upon her! / There’s language in her eye, her cheek, her lip– / Nay, her foot speaks.”11 This is less characterization than anatomization, indeed an atomization. This may suggest a blazon; yet it is not a blowing up of a part (blasen) but the breaking down of a whole into membra disiuncta — and, by implication of its incipit, “Fie, fie”, the cry of “Maistre Fi, fi !” in Cotgrave, the latrine cleaner, not only disiuncta but disiecta held together by the tabula rasa of co-ordination, parataxis.

• 12 In Palmer’s Arden edition there is, perhaps a little surprisingly, no note on this.

10Immediately in the very next line, Shakespeare completes this Urgestalt of language as the erotically cathected membra disiecta of the female of the species in the cry that rises from the Greek host as one man: “The Trojan’s trumpet”.12 Here language is approached from its other side, i.e. applying the same logique du sens not to the signified (here the referent: eye, foot, etc.) but to the signifier in its an-atomized form: namely the letter, now litter. Nor is this any letter but that transcribing the primal sibilance of Eden conveying the irruption of lust into a landscape of Law. For when we perceive the phonetic sequence of the cry, we need, like the Cressida of legend, to squint: Do we hear the proleptic “Trojan’s trumpet” or the analeptic “Trojan strumpet”? Here indeed, fair is foul and foul is fair. The “s” is cut free to go between — and between what? On he one hand, the male emblem of martial men (the trumpet, Othello’s trump) and, on the other, the (in Ulysses’ words) “secretly open” slut or strumpet. The “s” is, as it was in Eden, the tongue of the serpent: the originary, the oral phallus.

• 13 In Tropismes, Paris, Presses Universitaires de Nanterre, n° 3, 1987, p. 33.

12Thus logically (paradox) and lexically (hapax) Shakespeare’s “orifice” is, and is not an orifice, is there and not there, in other words it is marked by what Jean-Louis Baudry (apropos oysters in Zola’s Bel Ami)13 has defined as the battement in which, in the last analysis the fantasy consists.

• 15 Sigmund Freud, “Das Unheimliche” (1919), trans. mine.

21For when the old courtier Lafew brings together maidenly medic and ailing monarch, the playwright is carrying on from Troilus — and that explicitly: “I” says Lafew “am Cressid’s uncle / That dare leave two together”; Cressid’s uncle i.e. Pandarus, unsaintly saint of pandars — interpreters “going between you and your love”. And Lafew quits the unlikely pair with “Fare you well” which, in this potently fantasmatic context, literalizes the banally figurative congé. In other words, the scene of healing by Helena, like Troilus’ bedding of Cressida, is unseen and unseeable (Lafew indeed prefaces the scene by saying “miracles are past”), so we do not get to see it. What we do get to see in its stead is the most literal rendering anywhere in the canon of interpretation in the textual sense of simultaneous translation — but an interpretation, which, like Lafew’s miracle, is impossible, for the hoodwinking language of the soldiers is nonsense. As object of textual interpretation, the soldiers’ nonsense is a screen representation for the unseen scene of thaumaturgy orchestrated by the pandar. Thus what characterizes this nonsense of the “hedge corner” — this being the otherwise unexplained site of the scene – is its Unheimlichkeit: it is both like and unlike “homely” English; and one recalls the example Freud gave on the subject, namely Eckhart’s “Alle Ecke sind mir heimlich”,15 where heimlich at the same time can mean familiar and un-heimlich (strange) — as corners can be source of exposure or concealment. This glossolalic screen configures the text as a textile (which, of course, it always was), but one with jour de Venise in it to let the light through — very like the image with which Lafew takes leave of Parolles; for this is what, in the last analysis, paroles here are: “So, my good window of lattice”, says Lafew” “fare thee well; thy casement I need not open, for I look through thee”. It is, for me, one of the most extraordinary characterizations in all Shakespeare. A “window of lattice”, to employ the parlance of the problem plays, is and is not a window – it is a window hesitating, one might say, between the bare and the barred, a window in part debarred by its multiplication as parts (I have lived with them, and know what I am talking about).

• 16 An overly exclusive restriction to the moral and biblical senses led me recently to argue for retai (...)
• 17 MM, v.i.525-526.
• 18 In “Law and Equity in MM”, Shakespeare Quarterly 13, 1962, p. 275-285, reference p. 278.

24The secrecy and mesures are the part foregrounded in Shakespeare’s last problem play16 with the fantasme as the ongoing basso continuo, this time surfacing larger than life as a character defined ab limine quite simply as “a Fantastic”; and if there then existed various acceptions of the term, the ultimate fate of the character seals the fantasy into its sense and puts its stamp on it, this character’s last words being “Marrying a punk, my lord, is pressing to death”17: eroticism and sadism not only indistinguishably but paroxystically bound up in the only form of torture existing in English law – death by torture, “pressing to death” – here torture chamber and thalamus all in one. The fantasme don’t come much better than that. Which is no doubt why W. Dunkel could write in the 1960s18 that critics were equally divided as to what exactly is to happen to this “Fantastick”. Whatever it is, it is in the run-up to this most grotesque of the dénouement’s egregious mismatches that the complexity of “measure” is configured – and the genre of comedy abandoned for good.

• 19 See Serge Leclaire, Psychanalyser, Paris, Seuil, 1968.

27What concerns me here, though, is that the topology thus ushered in by the slippage of signifiers I have traced is a topology characterized in fact by what was there in 3H6 but seemingly without relevance or import, although common to both scenarios. Both of these scenarios, in their very different ways – one, a very public, urban landscape, the other the most private of secret gardens — are predicated on the existence of a gate —and here measure again is immediately of the essence. For in neither play are we dealing with the common-and-garden species of gate; as when Alice drinks of one or other bottle, one gate is writ very large, while the other is not one big but two little ones (Q). In both cases measure as measurement is not measure as the median or middle course, but measure as démesure –that adumbrated in Henry VI’s bloody head aloft a gaping city gate by way of the phallic female that haunts the battlefield of England, indigenous cousin of Greek Ate or German Walkyrie. In a word, in Measure (b/h +ed) adumbrates the type of nom secret posited by Leclaire as the proto-linguistic crux that fixes the fantasme in form.19