Abstract
Shakespeares 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.
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Notes
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.
Patricia Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins: language, Culture, Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 114.
Charles Altieri, Act and Quality: A Theory of Literary Meaning and Humanistic Understanding (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981), 216.
Edward Snow, A Study of Vermeer: Revised and Enlarged Edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 10.
William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (New York: New Directions, 1947), 2–3.
Joel Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 70.
David Swinney, “Lexical Access During Sentence Comprehension: (Re)consideration of Contextual Effects,” Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 5 (1979): 219–27.
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.
Christopher Ricks, The Force of Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 265–66.
N. F. Blake, Shakespeare’s Language: An Lntroduction (New York: St. Martins Press, 1983), 54–55. Blake cites W. Winter’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.
Randolph Quirk, The Linguist and the English Language (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1974), 61–62.
Stephen Booth, ed., Shakespeare’s Sonnets (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 465.
J. F. Ross, Portraying Analogy (London: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 4.
Ann and John O. Thompson, Shakespeare: Meaning and Metaphor (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1987), 159.
Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare (New York: Holt, 1939), 316.
Harry Berger, Jr., Lmaginary Audition: Shakespeare on Stage and Page (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), xiv.
J. H. P. Pafford, introduction to the Arden edition of The Winter’s Tale (London: Methuen, 1963), li–lii.
Harry Berger, Jr., “Bodies and Texts,” Representations7 (1984): 146.
Debra Fried, “Rhyme Puns,” in On Puns: The Foundation of Letters, ed. Jonathan Culler (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 99.
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© 2002 Mark David Rasmussen
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Womack, M. (2002). Undelivered Meanings. In: Rasmussen, M.D. (eds) Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-07177-4_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-07177-4_7
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