8 - Lope's aspectuality and performativity El castigo sin venganza (Punishment Without Revenge)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2023
Summary
Quantum Lope
Jonathan Bate, in the final chapter of The Genius of Shakespeare, discerns two laws he believes all of Shakespeare's plays obey. The first concerns “the aspectuality of truth,” the idea that “truth is not singular” (327); and the second has to do with “the performative truth of human ‘being,’ “ radically the notion that “being and acting are indivisible.” “All the world's a stage/ And all the men and women ‘wholly players’ “ is his reading of the topos (332).
Aspectuality is a key concept of diverse twentieth-century cultural fields: Albert Einstein recognized it in atomic physics; William Empson in literary criticism with his revolutionary Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930); and Ludwig Wittgenstein in his later philosophy, when he adopted a “language game” method of arguing to attend to the particular function of words and, more to the point, when he reasoned, utilizing the familiar “duck-rabbit” drawing of Gestalt psychology, that both aspects are truths but cannot be seen both at one and the same time. Shakespeare's “ambidextrous” (328) afterlife, the so-called “Shakespeare Effect” (321), Bate argues, can best be apprehended through a leap into a quantum world, where light has both wave and particle aspects, although each equation is incompatible with the other and cannot be specified at the same time. By extension, a text may have two or more contradictory meanings at once, but only one can be sensed in a given moment:
Empson is Modernism's Einstein among literary critics. His “both/and” is the twentieth century's most powerful understanding of Shakespeare because it is both a microscopic and a macroscopic way of seeing. It begins with ambiguous words and syntaxes – think of them as the wavicles which are the literary work's smallest unit of energy – but it can be extended to the work as a whole. It enabled Empson to apply an “uncertainty principle” to every aspect of Shakespeare. To a word as small as not: “Shakespeare’s use of the negative is nearly always slight and casual; he is much too interested in a word to persuade himself that it is ‘not’ there, and that one must think of the opposite main meaning”. […] To see that something is there in a play even when a speaker says that it is not and to judge a character in different ways simultaneously are to view Shakespeare under the aspect of a quantum world.
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- Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2009