âerrors are volitional and are the portals of discoveryâ1James JoyceâWe have art in order not to die of the truthâ2Friedrich Nietzsche
The traditional view that reveres the excellency of Shakespeareâs language and idealises his drama as the perfection of English literature is alive and well today. This is an effect of the canonisation of his works from the eighteenth century, where Shakespeare has become a measure of the English language, âthe exemplary author of the English canonâ, and owner of the vernacular.3 Coleridge famously approached him as a god-like creator of language, the burning genius of the heavens: âHe goes on kindling like a meteor through the dark atmosphere; yet, when the creation in its outline is once perfect, then he seems to rest from his labour, and to smile upon his work, and tell himself that it is very goodâ.4 Subsequent centuries of laudation have been conceived as the âShakespeare mythâ, that âpowerful cultural institution, constructed around the figure of Shakespeare, that [can] be analysed to some degree separately from the person of the Elizabethan dramatist, and the texts of his worksâ.5 Its ideological force shows little sign of diminishing as it is remodelled in response to changes in politics, aesthetics, technology, and contemporary cultural forms.
These entrenched attitudes to Shakespeare prevent us from seeing the actual substance of the text. That substance contains error, is sometimes constrained by it, is sometimes even constituted by it. Error in Shakespeare: Shakespeare in Error proposes, instead, to see Shakespeare as a maker of words marked by error, challenging his cultural hegemony entailed by his perceived linguistic excellence. There has been no study of error, mistake or failure in Shakespeare, or early modern literature, and this monograph fills this critical gap.6 It proposes attention to error as a methodology for interpreting his disputed material text, political-dramatic interventions and famous literariness.
In this context, error is not always wrong; and, indeed, historically, error was a key route to the good and the beautiful. Writing in praise of error, Paul de Man recognises that there is sometimes truth in mistake, âas the sun lies hidden within a shadow, or truth within errorâ.7 De Man argues, with the help of his mistranslation of Nietzsche, that error is the basis of knowledge: âIntelligence can only exist in a world in which mistakes occur, in which error reignsâ. 8 Error is not something that needs always to be corrected. This follows from the historical sense of error, accounting for the now attenuated early modern meaning of error from errare as âwanderingâ as well as mistake, which revalues error and suspends the consequent moral judgement of wrongness. In some instances, error should be celebrated, for it reveals not just the unconscious of a writer like Shakespeare but also the historical unconscious of the time: error exposes what the world takes for granted, revealing something of the political unconscious of a moment, how a society orders the world according to right and wrong, and assigns or withholds equivalent value.
The marginalisation of error can be explained through its association with âaccidentâ, in that an âerrorâ is an accidental accompaniment or an accessory.9 It is something to be corrected or ignored and therefore questions about its status, function and politics in literature have been mainly unasked. The consequences of ignoring it are all the more significant in the study of Shakespeare, where the energy that comes from its rebellious, marginal, unexpected or digressive potential is mobilised in the creation of literary drama. This book finds that the workings of error are most significant in four areas of Shakespeare: the literary error within figurative language (Chapter 2); political error that challenges the association between error with women (Chapter 3) and foreigners (Chapter 4); and textual error in the transmission and editing of the earliest texts (Chapter 5).
Shakespeareâs use and exploration of literary error conflicts with contemporary theories of language from Renaissance rhetoric, which provided correct rules for usage. The rhetorical training outlined in handbooks such as De duplici copia rerum ac verborum commentarii duo (1512), A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes (1550), The Garden of Eloquence (1577), The Arte of English Poesy (1589) and others, defined thinking about language in the sixteenth century.10 As Peter Mack demonstrates, these ideas flourished between 1460 and 1620 as more than 800 editions of these rhetorical texts were printed all over Europe.11 Renaissance rhetoricians dealt continually with the paradox that figuration was essential to eloquence yet at the same time it was a âfaultâ of speech.12 Whereas rhetoric aimed to set limits to the faults of language, Shakespeare pushes language further into this type of error, and it is this that makes him one of the most figurative dramatic writers. Shakespeare transgresses rules from Renaissance rhetoric, which sought to regulate language and lead to truth, in his propensity to let error flourish.13 One of the main arguments of this book is that error is not just a signifier of mistake but is rather to be located in the fertile zone between fault and creativity.
Not only does Shakespeare resist the strictures of rhetoric, but also more broadly the Renaissance is marked by an attitude to error and correction which he did not share. It is a period identified by Antony Grafton as being a âculture of correctionâ.14 Erasmus, for example, held high standards of linguistic rectitude and famously complained of the sloppy work and ill-education of those at work in printersâ shops. He declared that books are
published to the world by men so ill-educated that they cannot so much as read, so idle that they are not prepared to read over what they print, and so mercenary that they would rather see a good book filled with thousands of mistakes than spend a few paltry gold pieces on hiring someone to supervise the proof-correcting. And none make such grand promises on the title-page as those who are most shameless in corrupting everything.15
Erasmus, however, demanded standards of rectitude impossible of an early modern print shop, a place David McKitterick describes as a âhouse of errorâ.16 In the first century of printing, a Humanist attention to correct texts established an attitude towards error which was threatened by the ability of the printing press to multiply error more quickly than ever before. For Henry Barrow, in 1591, print and moral error were intimate...