Shakespearean Intersections: Language, Contexts, Critical Keywords. By Patricia Parker

Abstract

Addressing a BBC radio audience in 1937, Virginia Woolf imagined words as “the wildest, freest, most irresponsible, most unteachable of all things.” They live “variously and strangely, much as human beings live, by ranging hither and thither, by falling in love, and mating together.”1 What Woolf celebrates about language—their strange lives and unpredictable movements, their unexpected and promiscuous relations—Patricia Parker has devoted her distinguished career to interrogating. By honing a feminist philological practice attuned to the intersections of language, class, gender, sexuality, and race, Parker illuminates how single words and their discursive networks firm up or challenge hierarchies of self and other in early modern English culture. This book requires and rewards slow reading. Throughout six chapters, it advances an “experiment in interconnection” (28) that offers literary and cultural critics a “strategy of reading” (29) the relations between words and their discursive networks. Working across historical periods, geographies, discourses, and languages, Parker traces how single words range far afield to mate, drawing other terms into the orbit of the self-same in subtle, queer, and preposterous ways. As one has come to expect from Parker, delight is in the details. Highly filigreed arguments organized around distinct Shakespeare plays—Love’s Labor’s Lost, The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Henry V, Othello, and Cymbeline—demonstrate how single words in multiple forms (verbs, nouns, prepositions, proper and place names), as well as the discursive networks in which they circulate, illuminate contexts, subtexts, and complexities that have been critically “marginalized or have gone unnoticed by [the plays’] editors and critics” (1). Parker’s word-hoard comprises an expansive range of unexpected terms: preposterous, awkward, (in)continence, supposition, construing, occupation, cambio, cashier(ing), Ganymede, Low Countries, Brabant, quince, breeches, part, and latter ends, among others. Tracing how such words—as well as phonemes, sounds, and orthographic variants—participate in the broader scope of an early modern English cultural semantics requires Parker to attend to plays as well as to dictionaries, the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, Protestant polemics, new theories of military science, eye-witness accounts of military campaigns, works on grammar and orthography, conduct books, marriage manuals, accounting and bookkeeping manuals, the visual and textual aspects of emblem books, non-Shakespearean drama, Histories, and more.