"How Every Fool Can Play Upon the Word": Allegories of Reading in "The Merchant of Venice" and "Pericles."

Author/Editor
Newlin, James.

Title
"How Every Fool Can Play Upon the Word": Allegories of Reading in "The Merchant of Venice" and "Pericles."

Published
In New Readings of The Merchant of Venice, ed. Horacio Sierra (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2013), pp. 109-30.

Review
Newlin is exclusively concerned with Gower the character in Shakespeare's "Pericles." "Pericles," he argues, is a kind of sequel to "The Merchant of Venice," with Gower's speeches offering "not only a manual of sorts" for reading both plays, but a "frame . . . for reading any" Shakespeare play (111). Newlin starts off by addressing the perennial view of a literary text as a box with an inside and an outside, a form and a meaning--or is it the other way around? As a basis for reading a text, this image lends itself to an endless succession of readings, each "itself a new text to be read . . . [never] finished"(109), with language itself exposed as "open-ended . . . aporetic" (114). In "The Merchant of Venice," Shakespeare addressed this "unceasing deconstruction" (111) through the Christian interpretive device of allegory by figuration, for example, by repeating the equation of Portia/Balthasar with the Old Testament figure of Daniel (120). Like caskets, women, and gold, textual "meaning" itself has a monetary value defined by the Christian patriarch, and all are objects of exchange (118). "Recalling "Merchant'"s many prefigurations . . . the central structural device that drives "Pericles" is its repetitions" (123). This device is not limited to the recurrences driving its tripartite plot, but includes verbal repetitions often ascribed to textual corruption, but more likely "genetic" and "intentional" (124, 125). Passages of bad writing, "weak text," may also be strategic in their "literary power" (122). It is the choric Gower, especially in his closing speech, who explains how a dubious ancient text may be read as "evermore" providing "new joy," with no final "ending," as author and new readers collaborate to make this "our play" (126). Thus, today, Shakespeare's text can be liberated from a "heterosexist" reading (217). [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 40.2.]

Date
2013

Gower Subjects
Influence and Later Allusion