Shakespeare's Extravagancy

Abstract

Taking as its starting point an exchange in The Merchant of Venice between the Venetian master Lorenzo and the servant-clown Launcelot Gobbo this essay explores the symbolic economy of Shakespeare's linguistic “extravagancy”, including the word itself, which, as a Latinate neologism in Twelfth Night, is a nomadic stranger, like the figure who coins it, wandering across national boundaries, exemplifying the economy it names. A non-teleological economy of “language on holiday” (Wittgenstein) Shakespeare's “extravagancy” is self-consciously opposed, especially in The Merchant of Venice and Twelfth Night, to the emergent, protestant, bourgeois linguistic economy of “a plain man in his plain meaning” (Lorenzo) with its attendant ideologies of “proper” national, as well as individual, identities. Instead of this economy, in which language is instrumentalized, or, in Shakespeare's lexicon, “propertied”, as a transparent means to the end of proper meaning and exchange, and which requires a stabilization of values/identities, Shakespeare's “extravagancy” offers rather the economy of the gift, which generates surplus energy even as it traverses and undermines “proper” boundaries. It is an economy that is, moreover, assimilated to the economy of what John Calvin calls “la bonté gratuite” of an infinitely extravagant Word.