1. This Eliotian line gives the title to a recent essay, and volume, by Terence Hawkes, That Shakespeherian Rag: Essays on a Critical Process (London: Methuen, 1986). Drawing on Barthes's notions of textual jouissance and Bakhtin's theories of dialogism, Hawkes uses Eliot's line as a filter through which to rehear Shakespearean dramatic poetry as a "play-text" full of "paralinguistic" signals that depend upon "the manner of their voicing , over and above their overt meaning" (p. 79). The quasi-musical power of the Shakespearean text, as hinted by Eliot, is designed to invoke our articulatory investment in a manner that, Hawkes closes his essay by stressing, "turns us, even as we read, from spectators into participants" (p. 90). Though his emphasis is on the performance text, his generalizations about literary language at large bear directly on the work of my opening chapter: "As the site of competition between different ways of reading, the play-text stands, not as a different kind of text, but as the occasion which calls into question some of our presuppositions concerning the activity of reading all texts. That is its value" (p. 77).

2. Stephen Booth, An Essay on Shakespeare's Sonnets (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1969), pp. 174-86, cited hereafter as ESS, and Stephen Booth, ed., Shakespeare's Sonnets (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977), pp. 155-58. Subsequent quotations from the sonnets are from this edition; Booth's commentary on the sonnets is cited hereafter, by page number, as SS .

3. Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in "Paradise Lost" (London: Macmillan, 1967).

4. Booth is harking back here to Roman Jakobson and Lawrence G. Jones, Shakespeare's Verbal Art in "Th' Expence of Spirit" (The Hague: Mouton, 1970), where the authors borrow the phrase "figure of sound" from the journals of Gerard Manley Hopkins to account for the way in which "perjured" in the first quatrain of sonnet 129 chimes against "purpose" in the second, "proposed" in the third (p. 304). Booth takes comparable note in sonnet 15 of the echoes "among When, When, and Then, among consider, perceive, conceit, and con-, con-, and incon- " (p. 157).

5. Jakobson, "Linguistics and Poetics," in Essays on the Language of Literature, ed. Seymour Chatman and Samuel R. Levin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967), p. 303.

6. Booth has also taken counsel in this vein from David I. Masson, "Free Phonetic Patterns in Shakespeare's Sonnets," Neophilologus 37 (October 1954): 277-89 (quoted in SS, p. 193). For other essays by Masson, see below, Chapter 2, n. 12. break

7. See Michael Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), and Text Production, trans. Terese Lyons (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); hereafter cited, as TP, in the text.

8. See Chapter 3, n. 8.

9. See Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry, chap. 3, with its subsections "Expansion" and "Conversion," pp. 47-80.

10. Paul de Man, "Hypogram and Inscription: Michael Riffaterre's Poetics of Reading," Diacritics 11 (Winter 1981): 17-35.

11. Geoffrey H. Hartman, "The Voice of the Shuttle: Language from the Point of View of Literature," in Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays, 1958-1970 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1970), pp. 337-55. "Reading a poem is like walking on silence" (p. 342), writes Hartman, and this leads him to consider various eruptions of semantic value out of the most silent of all components in the textual membrane, the nonce value of juncture: "Juncture is simply a space, a breathing space: phonetically it has zero value, like a caesura. But precisely because it is such a mini-phenomenon, it dramatizes the differential or, as de Saussure calls it, diacritical relation of sound to meaning" (p. 341). Within three pages, however, Hartman has moved on to another figure not so directly bound up with a strictly linguistic silence of diacritical opposition: "From juncture, usually represented by a slash, it is only a step to the grammatical figure of tmesis, best represented by a dash" (p. 344). I assume it to be quite in the spirit of Hartman's pathbreaking essay not necessarily to follow him in taking such a "step" until the full suggestiveness of junctural "micropoetics" itself has been exhausted. Similarly, in his book-length meditation on Derrida, Saving the Text: Literature/Derrida/Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), Hartman singles out, within the whole range of ambiguity, the way in which "Derrida relies heavily on one device of coupure, that of tmesis or variable juncture" (p. 22). Indeed, in precisely the mode of Hartman's analyses in "The Voice of the Shuttle" (its title alluded to on the penultimate page of Saving the Text ), a reading of Donne's lines about the debated moment of death--where some lookers-on say "now, and some say no,"--is used as an instance of Derridean "thanatopraxis," whereby the "mere breathing space between 'now' and 'no' is the economy of death as a principle of phonemics, the subtlest 'glas' [death knell]" (p. 26).

12. In The Force of Poetry (New York: Oxford, 1984), Ricks borrows the term "flicker of hesitation" (p. 98) from Donald Davie to describe the passing ambivalence of certain enjambed lines, but he then applies the notion far more widely to those "intended flickers of warring possibilities" (269) that animate the "potent absences" (p. 268) of the "anti-pun."

13. Jan G. Kooij, Ambiguity in Natural Language: An Investigation of Certain Problems in Linguistic Description (Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Co., 1971), p. 19; see also my discussion of related matters concerning phonetic "fusion" at the start of Chapter 3. break

14. Jakobson, Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning, trans. John Mapham (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1978), p. 11.

15. Henry Fielding, A Journey from This World to the Next, vol. 5 of Works (London: John Bumpus, 1822), p. 39.

16. All quotations from Shakespeare's plays are from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974); citations are to scene, line, and act.

17. Dell Hymes, "Phonological Aspects of Style: Some English Sonnets," in Essays on the Language of Literature (see n. 5 above), pp. 33-53.

18. According to Booth in one of his glosses on the sonnets, the negative connotation of censure --meaning, to judge unfavorably --was "only just emerging in Shakespeare's time," which might mean that Hamlet's pun has a neutral as well as an ironically antonymic face. Booth would perhaps be more likely than elsewhere to credit such an example of segmental sleight, since he himself indulges in a nonetymological dissection of the verb's appearance in sonnet 148: "Note the accidental presence in censures of the sounds of two words generally pertinent to the sonnet's topic: 'sense' and 'sure'" ( SS, p. 520). The instance in Hamlet goes one step further by rendering the punning matrix grammatical. A similar homophonic interplay between two words and one is taken up, though as an isolated instance, by Margaret W. Ferguson in " Hamlet: Letters and Spirits," in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York: Methuen, 1985), when she turns to the editorially vexed response of Laertes to Claudius after the latter's description of the "gentleman of Normandy" (4.7.81)--Laertes' exclamation, "Upon my life, Lamord" (4.7.91). Erupting here is a proper name (Lamond in the second quarto) which Ferguson follows Harold Jenkins (the Arden editor) and Harry Levin in reading as a pun on la Mort (p. 301)--thus personifying death, and doing so through what I would call a transegmental disengagement of monosyllabic integers. She even suggests that the utterance doubles as well for l'amour, a transformation which would involve the standard French variety of those elisions elsewhere on view in the English lexical displacements of Shakespearean verse.

19. See Chapter 4, p. 158, for Keats's allusive revision of these lines.

20. Fausto Cercignani's Shakespeare's Works and Elizabethan Pronunciation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981) is the first definitive advance over Helge Kökeritz's Shakespeare's Pronunciation (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1953). On the basis of Cercignani's findings, it does seem probable that such modern English rhymes as Keats's of "adieu" with "songs forever new" ("Ode on a Grecian Urn") or Tennyson's of "adieu" with "true" ( In Memoriam ) would have been less likely in Elizabethan English than Shakespeare's own "adieu"/"Montague" from 3 Henry VI (4.8.29), derived more directly from the word's French origin. Cercignani attempts to correct the tendency in Kökeritz to place undue weight on internal echoes rather than on rhymes as philological evidence, precisely because paronomastic effects are often more continue

effective--and hence more likely--when subtle and inexact. This logic, provided with the specific evidence about "adieu" as "adyew," may militate against a perfect pun in the line. But the same logic would argue all the more in favor of a homophonic slippage: the wavering relevance of an anti-pun comparable to a collapsed or superimposed paronomasia. In the present case, therefore, of "into a dew" (as a possible supralexical play on "adieu"), whatever a philological reconstruction takes away from this line of the play conceived as performance text, it gives back to a subsequent moment. Quoting the ghost's last admonition, Hamlet enjoins himself: "Now to my word: / It is 'Adieu, adieu, remember me'" (1.5.110-11). Given the received philological wisdom about "adieu" rhyming with "Montague" or "due" (rather than with dew ), the comma in "adieu, remember" is likely to give way to the supralexical shadow of a doubt: "adieu, a- d'you remember me (?)." In general, though, Cercignani's explicit discussion is aimed at disproving certain previously assumed puns, including at one point a segmental wordplay that must be disallowed because of too great a difference between the sounds transcribed by o: "As for common-come on 1.1.57-9, it cannot be accepted as an actually intended jingle" (p. 121). The same applies (though without specific mention) to wordplay I had always assumed to be operating (as it does in any modern production) in Hamlet's first encounter with the ghost: "Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damned, / Bring with thee airs from heaven or blast from hell " (1.4.40-41). To the modern ear, the opening phrase would thus, in a vanishing moment--the split second of a splintered lexeme--name by homophone the antithetical possibility of origin here under inquiry: "spirit of hell." Yet Cercignani's researches suggest that the Shakespearean, or late Middle English, vowel sound in "health" was related more to the long e of "heal."

21. It was Karen Cunningham who first called my attention to this sibilant anti-pun.

22. Cercignani, Shakespeare's Works and Elizabethan Pronunciation , p. 61.

23. James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Random House, 1961), p. 191.

24. Pun intended, this line happened to provide the title for an historicist lecture by Lisa Jardine at Princeton University (Spring 1988) on Othello and Elizabethan adultery laws. She opened by noting that this salacious aside in Othello , unlike its counterpart in Troilus , is never glossed in editions of the text.

25. In Godard's 1987 King Lear the disjoint play of sound against visual track helps foreground the explicitly vexed distinction between "image" and a narrower sense of analogy, and this as indirectly related to the play's own thematics of withheld speech. The "violent silence" of Cordelia (so described in Godard's own English-speaking voice-over) is contrasted with the sovereignty of a king named (in intertitle) "1-E-A-R." This is arguably Shakespeare's own pun, aural as well as graphic, since Lear is first addressed by name in the play during Kent's attempt to check his rash plan for the division of continue

the kingdom; once rebuffed, Kent tries again for a hearing from the "Roya l L ear" (1.1.139; emphasis added). In Godard's film, a further route into the text's metalinguistic density is opened up in a later intertitle playing both typographically (again) and also phonemically this time on the transegmental drift of "King Lear: a cLEARing" (with the velar / h / becoming /k/). Finally, the sound track itself engages a transegmental ambiguity in its summary account of the nonrepresentational "image" confined neither to mimesis nor to metaphor: "An image is true only because it is born outside of all limitation and all resemblance." Hearing this voice-over as a strictly oral text, we know that what we may well alternatively have heard is "all imitation" rather than "all limitation," the two negatively interchangeable in their supposed transcendence by "image."

26. See Anthony Easthope, Poetry as Discourse (London: Methuen, 1983), a study which resembles Foucault's broad periodizing of discourse. Designated by Easthope as a founding moment for subjectivity in the lyric, Shakespeare also marks an early stage on the road toward modernism. Similarly Joel Fineman, in Shakespeare's Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), sees the constitution of subjectivity as a verbal field negotiated in the development of the sonnets from a specular to a linguistic paradigm or, in other words, from presentation to representation.