A History of Ambiguity 9780691188775

Citation preview

A HISTORY of

AMBIGUITY

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A HISTORY of

AMBIGUITY Anthony Ossa-­Richardson

PR I N CE TON U N IV E R S IT Y P R E S S PR I N CE TON A N D O X F O R D

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Copyright © 2019 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR press.princeton.edu All Rights Reserved LCCN 2018945209 ISBN 978-­0691-­16795-­4 British Library Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data is available Production Editorial: Debbie Tegarden Text Design: Carmina A. Alvarez Jacket Design: Carmina A. Alvarez Jacket art: François de Nomé (Monsù Desiderio, 1593–c. 1620), King Asa of Judah Destroying the Idols, early 17th century. Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, UK / Bridgeman Images Production: Jacquie Poirier Publicity: Jodi Price and Julia Hall Copyeditor: Jay Boggis This book has been composed in Charis SIL Printed on acid-­free paper. ∞ Printed in the United States of America 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

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Non deve fermarsi l’huomo in una sola cosa, perchè allora divien matto:

bisogna aver mille cose, una confusione nella testa.

—­advice given to Goethe, 1786

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Contents

Illustrations

Preface and Acknowledgements Abbreviations

A Note on Citations and Translations Introduction: A Company of Two Armies

ix xi

xiii

xv 1

Part One: Themes

25

Chapter Two: Forensic Idols

73

Chapter One: The Old Rhetoric Chapter Three: Collusion and Delusion

27 99

Chapter Four: River and Ocean

129

Part Two: Variations

237

Chapter Seven: Ambiguities of Type

284

Chapter Five: Satura Lanx185

Chapter Six: The Faultless Die

239

Chapter Eight: Adloyada306 Chapter Nine: An Equivocal Smile

326

Afterword

402

Chapter Ten: The Combination Room Bibliography Index

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364 405 455

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Illustrations

Figure 1.1. Martin Meurisse, Artificiosa totius logices ­descriptio (Paris, 1614), Brussels, Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, S. IV 86231. Detail. Courtesy of the Bibliothéque royale de Belgique, Brussels. Figure 1.2. The Augustinian Tree of Ambiguity, De dialectica, § 9–­10.

Figure 1.3. Aristotle, Sophistical Refutations, 165b23–­ 166a13, in Boethius’s translation, with scholia. British Library, MS Harley 3272 (early fourteenth century), fol. 122r.

33

40 44

Figure 3.1. Typography of Juliet’s equivocation in (a) Q1 1597, sig. G4r, (b) Q2 1599, sig. H4r, and (c) Pope’s edition of the Works, 10 vols. (London, 1728), VIII, p. 275. Courtesy of the British Library.

113

Figure 4.2. Frontispiece from Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, ed. Seraphinus Cappo a Porrecta, 5 vols (Padua, 1698), I. Courtesy of the National and University Library of Slovenia, Ljubljana.

161

Figure 5.2. Detail from Juvenal and Persius, Satyrae, ed. Thomas Farnaby (Amsterdam, 1650), title-­page. Courtesy of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the Netherlands.

222

Figure 4.1. Title page of Sefer Tehilim, Hoc est, Liber psalmorum hebraice, ed. Antonius Hulsius (Leiden, 1650). Courtesy of the University of Amsterdam, Special Collections.

142

Figure 5.1. Detail from Terence, Comoediae sex (Leiden, 1644), title-­page. Courtesy of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the Netherlands.

221

Figure 6.1. Asteristical ambiguity in Peri Bathous, in Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, Miscellanies, 4 vols (Dublin, 1728), II.1, p. 125. Courtesy of the British Liibrary.”

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262

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x  •   Ill ustrations

Figure 6.2. Pope’s annotation to [Matthew Concanen], A Supplement to the Profund (London, 1728), BL shelfmark C116b2(4), page 32; courtesy of the British Library.

Figure 7.1. William Hazlitt, Lectures on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth, 2nd ed. (London, 1821), British Library, shelfmark C.182.aa.5, p. 35, with Tieck’s annotation. Courtesy of the British Library.

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272 305

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Preface and Acknowledgements

I had the idea for this book on 9 January 2012, in the manuscripts room of the British Library, while transcribing the notebooks of Thomas Browne. Research began on 1 October, and I finished the first draft five years later to the day. The first three years were funded as an Early Career Fellowship at Queen Mary University of London by the Leverhulme Foundation, for which I am extremely grateful. A list of acknowledgements can be a pavonine affair, an excuse more to flaunt than to thank. I have tried to avoid that here. But I must thank my excellent colleagues at QMUL, especially David Colclough, Markman Ellis, Paul Hamilton, Peter Howarth, Claire Preston, and James Vigus; and at the University of Southampton, especially Jakub Boguszak, Kevin Brazil, Daniel Brown, Beth Carroll, Alireza Fakhrkonandeh, Zoe Hawkins, Sarah Hayden, Peter Middleton, Marianne O’Doherty, and Justine Pizzo. All have been tremendously welcoming, helpful, and supportive. The kindest thing you can do for someone writing a book is to read some of it in draft. Clare Bucknell, Dennis Duncan, Markman Ellis, Mordechai Feingold, Andrew Gibson, Simon Goldhill, Paul Hamilton, Kelsey Jackson Williams, Julia Jordan, Jonathan Katz, Megan Kitching, Jan Machielsen, Peter Middleton, Simon Mills, Philipp Nothaft, Nydia Pineda, Filippomaria Pontani, Ray Richardson, Christopher Stray, and Paul White dissected chapters; Reid Barbour, Stephen Clucas, Richard Oosterhoff, and Michael Wood carefully read the lot. To all of them, I am profoundly indebted. My thanks also to Vladimir Brljak, Carlos Canete, Tim Chesters, Mordechai Feingold, Barbara Fuchs, Raphaële Garrod, Guido Giglioni, Elaine Hobby, Mark Jenner, Alexandre Johnston, Felicity Loughlin, Mercedes García-­Arenal Rodríguez, J‎ ason Scott-­Warren, Andrea Selleri, Jetze Touber, Máté Vince, and Paul White for invitations to speak and collaborate over the past few years. A special impetus was given to my research when Dirk Van Miert commissioned me to write a chapter for his volume on Dutch biblical criticism; that chapter, written in the summer of 2013 and since published, laid the basis for Chapter Four of the present book.1 Al 1  Anthony Ossa-­Richardson, ‘The Naked Truth: André Rivet between Bellarmine and Grotius‘, in God’s Word Questioned: Biblical Criticism and Scriptural Authority in the Dutch Golden Age, eds Dirk van Miert, Henk Nellen, Piet Steenbakkers, and Jetze Touber (Oxford, 2017), pp. 109–­130.

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xii  •   PREFACE

Bertrand and his team at Princeton, who worked with me on both this project and the last, have been the very model of an expert, generous, and open-­minded press. In addition to the above I want to record my debt to academic friends and acquaintances from whose conversation and correspondence I have gleaned an incalculable amount: Susanna Berger, Federico Botana, Vladimir Brljak, Raphaëlle Burns, Matthew Champion, Frederick Clark, Martin Davies, Theodor Dunkelgrün, Anthony Ellis, Lily Ford, Alberto Frigo, Clément Godbarge, Cassie Gorman, Anthony Grafton, Kristine Haugen, Niall Hodson, Arnold Hunt, Michael Hunter, Kevin Killeen, Alison Knight, Jill Kraye, James Lancaster, Eric Langley, Dmitri Levitin, Michael Ledger-­ Lomas, Jan Loop, Bevil Luck, Scott Mandelbrote, Andrew McKenzie-­ McHarg, Margaret Meserve, Hannah Murphy, Kathryn Murphy, William Poole, Alex Russell, Zachary Schiffman, Richard Serjeantson, Aaron Shapiro, Chris Stamatakis, Miranda Stanyon, Daniel Stolzenberg, Paul Taylor, Steven Vanden Broecke, Chrissie and Wim Van Mierlo, Máté Vince, Joanna Weinberg, Hanna Wimmer, and Koji Yamamoto. Certain friends have played a special rôle in this book. Stephen Clucas has been a constant intellectual comrade, co-­organising with me the EMPHASIS seminar series in London, and sharing many learned pints. At other convivia, Simon Mills helped me articulate our basic critical sympathies, and Philipp Nothaft and Richard Oosterhoff pushed me continually; I wanted nothing more. Dennis Duncan exchanged and discussed numberless recondite treasures. Jan Machielsen genially asked me, at the start, ‘Does ambiguity have a history?’ I have tried to answer that below. Finally, my wife Suzanne and son Owen have kept me sane. This book, like all my work, is for them.

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Abbreviations

CEE EOO

FGW

HBOT KSA OFB PL

SCW SHK STA TP WA

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Critical Essays on William Empson, ed. John Constable (Aldershot, 1993) Desiderius Erasmus, Opera omnia (Amsterdam, 1969–­)

Sigmund Freud, Gesammelte Werke, 18 vols (London, 1948–­68)

Hebrew Bible / Old Testament, ed. Magne Sæbø, 3 vols (Göttingen, 1996–­), II

Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Ausgabe, 35 vols (Munich and Paderborn, 1958–­) Francis Bacon, Works (Oxford, 1996–­)

Patrologia latina, ed. J. P. Migne, 221 vols (Paris, 1841–­55)

William Empson, The Structure of Complex Words (1951: London, 1985)

Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hermeneutik und Kritik, ed. Friedrich Lücke [= Sämmtliche Werke, Abtheilung I, Band 7] (Berlin, 1838)

William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 3rd ed. (London, 1949) Alexander Pope, Works, Twickenham edition, 11 vols (London, 1938–­1968)

Martin Luther, Werke, Weimarer Ausgabe, 127 vols (Weimar, 1883–­1993)

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A Note on Citations and Translations

Early modern spellings have been left intact, although u/v, i/j, and the long s (albeit not the German Eszett, ‘ß’) have been modernised. Abbreviations have been silently expanded. Where a text is printed in columns but numbered by page or folio, I have included the column number as ‘a’ or ‘b’; for instance, ‘p. 408b’ would mean the right-­hand column of page 408, and ‘fol. 17va’ would mean the left-­hand column of folio 17 verso. I have avoided abbreviated, discipline-­specific citation styles, especially in the chapter on legal history, on the grounds that these are needlessly impenetrable to the lay reader; the only exception is my citation of Justinian’s Digest in the form ‘D. 26.2.30’. All translations are my own, except where indicated, for instance in Chapter Ten, where I have quoted the early translations of Sigmund Freud known to William Empson.

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A HISTORY of

AMBIGUITY

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INT RO D U CTI ON

A COMPANY OF TWO ARMIES Eine gute Vorrede muß zugleich die Wurzel und das Quadrat ihres Buchs sein. — Friedrich Schlegel, Lyceum Fragmente 8, in KSA II, p. 148.

In the beginning was the Word. No, wait—in the beginning was ho logos, the ‘word’, ‘account’, ‘reason’, ‘plan’, ‘discourse’, ‘message’, ‘rational principle’—or something. And ho logos, whatever that was, was with God, or rather, with ho theos, the god. And ho logos was theos—not ho theos, the god, but only theos, god, or a god, a divinity perhaps, or a divine spirit. Was ho theos the same as theos? Does that ho, ‘the’, matter? That is, is the god that the logos was the same as the god that the logos was with? If not, was it inferior? The text does not tell; it only speaks. Was St John writing for the unlearned, who might naturally assume the identity of theos and ho theos, or for the mice-­eyed exegetes, who knew that any distinction counted, no matter how small? Was it St John writing at all, or the spirit of God, or a god, through him? And just when was this ‘beginning’ anyway? We can barely get started in the world without being ambiguous; the six-­yarned samite of Creation is shot through with doubt, verbal, substantial. I put it this way so as to present together the two faces of the term ambiguity, which has always denoted the subjective state of doubt as well as its objective correlative in the world, or in a text, a painting, a sonata. Thus Faustus (I.1.80–2): ‘Shall I make spirits fetch me what I please / Resolve me of all ambiguities, / Perform what desperate enterprise I will?’ Those ambiguities threatened damnation, and not only on the stage. The royalist divine Richard Holdsworth, lecturing at Gresham College in the 1630s, warned that religious ambiguity, which took nothing in Scripture or Creation for certain, was the first step towards faithlessness, just as credulity was towards presumptuousness; true faith offered the golden mean between the two.1 1  Richard Holdsworth, Praelectiones theologicae habitae in Collegio Greshamensi, ed. Richard Pearson (London, 1661), p. 379 (Lectio 43).

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2   •  Introduction

infidelitas—ambiguitas—fides—credulitas—praesumptio More recent theologians, by contrast, have asked their readers to embrace the world’s ambiguity, to come to terms with their own uncertainty. This seems appropriate to our modernity, which has revelled in hesitation as it has unfastened all certainties—in physics, in warfare, in art, in philosophy—at first conceiving new certainties from its own hesitation, and finally disowning even those. But in adopting ambiguity, our theologians have had to redefine it as plurality, that is, the surfeit of human perspectives, or the ‘strange mixture of great good and frightening evil that our history reveals’.2 Over the past decade or two that plurality of perspectives has come to justify widespread political nihilism, total doubt: the truth of nothing and the permission of all, to paraphrase a line made famous by Nietzsche.3 Every action, every decision, every law, every televised utterance has seemed parsable in two ways or more, depending on one’s ideological commitments. Uncertainty appears all-­encompassing. Doubt and plurality, or plenty, are the twin poles of ambiguity as it is studied in this book. Our subject is the ambiguity not of Creation but of language, of texts—the ways it has been posited, denied, conceptualised, and argued over since Aristotle. In language, doubt and plenty are intimately joined in the act of interpretation. The perception of plenty in a word, in a line, in a poem, makes us doubt which meaning is the right one; conversely, it is when we doubt the meaning of a text that we might assert the existence of plenty in it, and not simply in us.4 Such a reciprocity is prominent in the book now most closely associated with the topic, William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), with its claim, supported by a litany of ingenious close readings, that ambiguity is intrinsic to poetry and not a fault but a virtue. The book is an extraordinary achievement, wise 2  David Tracy, Plurality and Ambiguity (Chicago, 1988), whence the quotation (p. 70); Donald Crosby, Living with Ambiguity: Religious Naturalism and the Menace of Evil (Albany, 2008). See also Adam Seligman and Robert Weller, Rethinking Pluralism: Ritual, Experience, and Ambiguity (Oxford, 2012). 3  Friedrich Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral, III.24, in his Philosophische Werke, ed. Claus-­Artur Scheier, 6 vols (Hamburg, 2013), VI, p. 154: ‘Nichts ist wahr, Alles ist erlaubt’, alluding to Joseph von Hammer, Die Geschichte der Assassinen aus morgenländischen Quellen (Stuttgart and Tübingen, 1818), p. 84, where the tag is attributed to the Ismaili revolutionary Hassan i-­Sabbah. The line has since entered popular culture via William Burroughs, Hakim Bey, and even video games; it recently furnished the title of Peter Pomerantsev’s account of postmodern Russian politics, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible. 4  This very ambiguity, which underwrites much of the present book, calls into question the usefulness (and perhaps even the validity) of the distinction between ambiguity in the production of meaning and in its reception, outlined in Susanne Winkler, ‘Exploring Ambiguity and the Ambiguity Model from a Transdisciplinary Perspective’, in Ambiguity: Language and Communication, ed. Winkler (Berlin, 2015), pp. 1–14.

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A C ompany of T wo A rmies  •  3

and learned, full of a wit recognised even by its detractors, and blessed with compelling powers of observation: under Empson’s microscope, poems come to look just as rough and complex as the seeds and needles in the images of Robert Hooke. The critic’s business is analytical: he is like the dog who relieves himself against the ‘flower of beauty’ and then scratches it up afterwards (STA, p. 9). But his manner is unlike the quasi-­scientific mode promoted by his mentor I. A. Richards, and he insists that poetry be treated with sympathy, not merely as an ‘external object for examination’ (248).5 The book’s method, despite its title, turns out to be tactical rather than strategic, arriving at insight not by systematic theorisation but haphazard, as if on the way to something else, in the course of a chat over sherry in the combination room.6 The seven types are ‘intended as advancing stages of logical disorder’ (48), but they keep bleeding into one another. In the first, most general type, ‘a word or a grammatical structure is effective in several ways at once’ (2)—Empson’s first example, ‘Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang’, soon attracted astonishment for the number of associations he was able to draw out between trees and ruined monastery choirs. In the ‘most ambiguous’ seventh type the duality of meaning in a text shows ‘a fundamental division in the writer’s mind’ (192), and the book culminates in a reading of George Herbert’s poem ‘The Sacrifice’ as the charged expression of a Christian ambivalence. But between these two extremes lies a wealth of glittering detail. For a flavour of Empson’s typical approach, consider a stanza from the Andrew Marvell lyric ‘Eyes and Tears’: What in the World most fair appears, Yea, even Laughter, turns to tears; And all the jewels which we prize Melt in these pendants of the Eyes.

Empson comments:

Melt in may mean ‘become of no account beside tears’, or ‘are made of no account by tears,’ or ‘dissolve so that they themselves become teares,’ or ‘are dissolved by tears so that the value which was before genuinely their own has now been assumed by and resides in tears.’ Tears from this become valuable in two ways, as containing

5  Contrast the observation of one admirer, Barbara Hardy, ‘William Empson and Seven Types of Ambiguity’, in The Critics Who Made Us, ed. George Core (Columbia, MI, 1993), pp. 47–58, at p. 49: ‘When one read Empson, one was reading a critic for whom the poems and plays were warmly alive, all there.’ 6  Cleanth Brooks, ‘Empson’s Criticism’ (as in n. 22 below), p. 126, notes that the book ‘reads for the most part like uncommonly good talk’; compare Denis Donoghue, Ferocious Alphabets (London, 1981), p. 72.

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4   •  Introduction

the value of the jewels (as belonging to the world of Cleopatra and hectic luxury) and as being one of those regal solvents that are competent to melt jewels (as belonging to the world of alchemists and magical power). (172)

Here doubt (‘may mean . . . or . . .’) insensibly becomes plenty (‘valuable in two ways, as . . . and as . . .’), in such a way that it is hard to know where one stops and the other begins. But the reader, whether or not she accepts the argument, is likely to come away from it thinking only of Marvell’s fulness, having forgotten Empson’s uncertainty. Empson helps her along in this regard, having already asserted that ‘I have myself usually said “either . . . or” when meaning “both . . . and” ’ (81). He confesses that the ambiguities he finds in Shakespeare are mostly copied out of Arden editions, where, in the manner of traditional philology, possible readings and interpretations are considered and dismissed, or else listed as alternatives. But, suggests Empson mischievously, ‘the nineteenth-­century editor secretly believed in a great many of his alternatives at once’ (82). How could one see all those wonderful meanings and not think they had occurred to Shakespeare? Better to see the Bard’s ‘original meaning’ as ‘of a complexity to which we must work our way back’. A writer’s intention was of great interest to Empson, unlike many of his successors; in the preface to the second edition he warns that ‘[i]f critics are not to put up some pretence of understanding the feelings of the author in hand they must condemn themselves to contempt’ (xiii–xiv). And so with ‘Eyes and Tears’ above, his discussion concludes with the insistence, forestalling objections, that he has not been making up his own poem but only ‘quoting’ Marvell, on the basis that the poet assumed in his readers a wide acquaintance with ‘conceits about tears’.7 What Empson meant by ambiguity should not be taken for granted. His infamous definition is ‘any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language’ (1).8 But this is not really a definition, as he clarifies in a footnote: it is ‘not meant to be decisive’, and ‘the question of what would be the best definition of “ambiguity” . . . crops up all through the book’.9 A few pages later he specifies both the subjective and the objective, doubt and plenty: ‘Ambiguity’ itself can mean an indecision as to what you mean, an intention to mean several things, a probability that one or other or

For instance, those detailed at STA, pp. 139–45. This definition, now usually quoted, is actually the wording of the second edition; the first draft, preserved subsequently in a footnote, finishes: ‘which adds some nuance to the direct statement of prose’. 9  Compare STA, p. 128n: ‘the problem of definition is again secondary’. 7  8 

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A C ompany of T wo A rmies  •  5

both of two things has been meant, and the fact that a statement has several meanings. (5–6)

Later critics have deplored the imprecision of Empson’s terminology, and particularly his failure to distinguish ambiguity from mere multiple meaning—one recent primer dismisses Seven Types as ‘a very confused book’10—but the foundation of his argument is his own experience of poetic language rather than any desire to clarify and classify concepts; ambiguity denotes, as we have seen above, textual items that have made Empson hesitate.11 Expressions of doubt appear throughout: ‘Not a clear example, and I am not sure that what I said is true’ (5n), ‘I am not sure how far people would be willing to accept this double meaning’ (229). This is something like a negative capability, a ‘being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts’, although paradoxically it is also an ‘irritable reaching after fact and reason’.12 ‘Ambiguity’, then, is precisely the correct word. Our estimation of the book’s value must turn not on its theoretical rigour but on Empson’s capacities as a reader, and here we are repaid by his seismographical sensitivity to words, to culture, to society. If it is a confused book, he might rejoin that it reflects a confused subject, and that, like Socrates, he has preferred aporia to false certainties. Seven Types has long been canonised as a watershed in the history of thinking about ambiguity, starting with Richards’s remark in 1936: ‘Where the old Rhetoric treated ambiguity as a fault in language, and hoped to confine or eliminate it, the new Rhetoric sees it as an inevitable consequence of the powers of language and as the indispensable means of most of our most important utterances—especially in Poetry and Religion.’13 Empson’s criticism more generally has enjoyed a revival of interest in recent decades.14 But beyond pointing to two of the book’s sources—Richards 10  Tom Furniss and Michael Bath, Reading Poetry: An Introduction (London etc., 1996), p. 210. 11  SCW, p. 103n: ‘the term Ambiguity, which I used in a book-­title and as a kind of slogan, implying that the reader is left in doubt between two readings, is more or less superseded by the idea of a double meaning which is intended to be fitted into a definite structure. You can still have a doubt as the [sic] whether one or other of two structures is meant but this is much less common and belongs rather to peculiar states of dramatic self-­conflict. However the term still seems to me the natural one to use as long as a reader is uncertain. . . .’ 12  I have taken the original definition of ‘negative capability’ from John Keats’s letter to George and Tom Keats, 21–27 Dec. 1817, in Keats, Selected Letters, ed. Grant Scott (Cambridge, MA, 2002), p. 60. 13  I. A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936: New York, 1965), p. 40. For a few subsequent examples, see M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 7th ed. (Orlando, FL, 1999), p. 11; John Sutherland, How Literature Works: 50 Key Concepts (Oxford, 2011), p. 10; Virginia Ramos, ‘Ambiguity’, in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 4th ed. (Princeton, 2012), pp. 43–5. 14  Gary Wihl, ‘Empson’s Generalized Ambiguities’, in Literature and Ethics: Essays Presented

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6   •  Introduction

and Robert Graves—few have seriously considered what preceded it, and so the nature of its achievement remains unclear. One major aim of this History is to remedy that omission, although I ought to state explicitly that the narratives traced below are not mere back-­story, and only in the final chapter do I specifically address Empson’s immediate intellectual genealogies. It is true, as Richards said, that the ‘old Rhetoric’, from Aristotle onwards, treated ambiguity as a fault, but even so, readers had praised the ambiguities of poetry for centuries before Seven Types, and this is to say nothing of the tangled histories of ambiguity in law, biblical exegesis, and philosophical hermeneutics. Each narrative will help qualify our assumptions about the profile of modernity with regards to ambiguity: again and again we find familiar questions raised in past and alien settings. Perhaps most of all, the interpretation of Scripture will acquire a special resonance with Empson’s project. It was not for nothing that Richards paired ‘Poetry and Religion’ in his line on the new rhetoric, and as Empson himself would insist in a later preface, ‘Critics have long been allowed to say that a poem may be something inspired which meant more than the poet knew’ (STA xiv, my emphasis). As we shall see, the idea of divine inspiration, which undergirded so much analysis of multiple meanings in the Bible, was a key precursor to Empson’s argument. A more detailed synopsis of the book’s chapters will be found at the end of this Introduction. Before that I want briefly to sketch the fortunes of Empson’s ambiguity as a critical concept, so as to define and illustrate the broader questions and problems explored over the rest of the monograph. to A. E. Malloch, eds Wihl and David Williams (Kingston, Ont., 1988), pp. 3–17; Paul Fry, William Empson: Prophet Against Sacrifice (London, 1991); William Empson: The Critical Achievement, eds Christopher Norris and Nigel Mapp (Cambridge, 1993); Martin Dodsworth, ‘Empson and the Trick of It’; Essays in Criticism 51 (2001), 101–118; Paul Dean, ‘Empson’s Contradictions’, The New Criterion 20 (2001), 23–30; Lisa Rodensky, ‘Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity’, Essays in Criticism 53 (2003), 54–67; John Haffenden’s masterful biography, William Empson, 2 vols (Oxford, 2005–2006), esp. I, pp. 176–229; Some Versions of Empson, ed. Matthew Bevis (Oxford, 2007); David Reid, Ambiguities: Conflict and Union of Opposites in the Robert Graves, Laura Riding, William Empson and Yvor Winters (Bethesda, MD, 2012); Donald Childs, The Birth of New Criticism: Conflict and Conciliation in the Early Work of William Empson, I. A. Richards, Robert Graves and Laura Riding (Montréal, 2013); and Michael Wood, On Empson (Princeton, 2017). There is also older literature: J. H. Willis, Jr., William Empson (New York, 1969); William Empson: The Man and His Work, ed. Roma Gill (London, 1974); and especially Christopher Norris, William Empson and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism (London, 1978), based on his doctoral thesis and including a postscript by Empson himself; and, on the Continent, Giovanni Cianci, La scuola di Cambridge: La critica letteraria di I. A. Richards, W. Empson, F. R. Leavis (Bari, 1970); and Horst Meller, Das Gedicht als Einübung: zum Dichtungsverständnis William Empsons (Heidelberg, 1974). A valuable collection of reviews is Critical Essays on William Empson, ed. John Constable (Aldershot, 1993).

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A C ompany of T wo A rmies  •  7

Minimisers a nd Maximisers It will be convenient to begin with Empson’s early readers. A few admired the book for its charm and talent at practical criticism; F. R. Leavis, for one, called its author ‘a mind that is fully alive in this age’, marvelling at his ‘sensitivity’, ‘erudition’, and ‘mastery’ of resources:15 Others expressed surprise at the idea that ambiguity might be a good thing: ‘I have regarded ambiguity in literature, and even in daily speech, as a sin or at least a great mischief. I had yet to realize that it may be almost the foundation of poetic art.’16 Probably the majority were disapproving, or downright hostile. A common complaint was that Empson had taken his passages out of context, and that his readings therefore owed more to his own ingenuity than to the actual texts themselves, as if he had lost sight of ‘the object as in itself it really is’ and thereby abandoned the office of criticism.17 John Middleton Murry concluded that ‘poetry has no particular importance to him save as an opportunity for a free exercise of his abilities’.18 The ageing gourmand Thomas Earle Welby, meanwhile, offered a caustic reductio of Empson’s approach, deploying Swinburne, one of his own specialisms: ‘Swallow, my sister, O sister swallow’ might be paraphrased, “Be a good little girl, and take your medicine.” But it could be so paraphrased only by a reader who was, to be scientific and tabular, (1) ignorant of one of the most familiar as well as poetic of ancient legends, (2) not only unacquainted with the temper of the author from previous reading of him, but utterly incapable of divining it as patent in the very first lines of the poem; (3) deaf and blind without the extenuating circumstance of being dumb.19

This criticism goes right to the heart of Empson’s technique, and represents a central concern of the present book. The assumption is that words or lines are ambiguous only when taken out of historical and textual context, and deprived of their author’s intention; Empson, for Welby, has 15  F. R. Leavis, ‘Intelligence and Sensitivity’, Cambridge Review, 16/1/1931, repr. in CEE, pp. 37–39. For a broad survey of the book’s immediate reception, see Haffenden, William Empson, I, pp. 274–86. 16  ‘John O’London’ [= Wilfred Whitten], ‘Letters to Gog and Magog: Ambiguity as Art’, John O’London’s Weekly, 20/12/1930, repr. in CEE, pp. 32–34. 17  Matthew Arnold, ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’, in his Lectures and Essays in Criticism, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor, MI, 1990), p. 261. Empson had a remarkably Arnoldian view of criticism, STA, p. 245: ‘It is the business of the critic to extract for his public what it wants; to organise, what he may indeed create, the taste of his period.’ 18  John Middleton Murry, ‘Analytical Criticism’, TLS, repr. in CEE, p. 31. 19  T. Earle Welby, ‘Time to Make a Stand’, The Weekend Review, 3/1/1931, repr. in CEE, pp. 35b–36a, here quoting Swinburne’s ‘Itylus’.

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8   •  Introduction

pressed phrases in isolation and so permitted them to mean whatever they can mean.20 The emphasis on context to resolve apparent ambiguity is almost universal in works of classical hermeneutics, for instance in theology and law.21 Unsurprisingly, then, zealous readers both before and after Empson have been accused of inattention to context, a charge encapsulated in a Russian word invoked by Vladimir Nabokov to disparage faithless translations: otsebyatina, ‘what one contributes oneself’, the meaning improperly loaded onto a text.22 Even those in favour of Seven Types saw this threat; one journalist, who called the book ‘brilliant’, also found himself ‘faced with a bewildering variety of meanings’, and noted the apparent irrelevance of the ‘intention or conscious meaning of the author’.23 That reaction is understandable but inaccurate, on both intention and context. Empson did not ignore the former, and saw clearly the dangers of formalistic exegesis, acknowledging that as we acquire a language, or come to understand a particular writer, we ‘learn to cut out the alternative meanings which are logically possible’.24 He even accepted afterwards that in the wrong hands his own method could produce a ‘shocking amount of nonsense’ (xii). But intention is not always straightforward, and in this book we will see Seven Types as the heir to a range of concepts that serve to challenge the primacy and the disambiguating simplicity of intention— above all, dramatic irony and the unconscious. Context, too, is slippery, because although in ordinary discourse it narrows down interpretive possibilities, there are certain special linguistic situations in which it actually promotes ambiguity, such as witticisms and literature, as I. A. Richards and, more recently, Erving Goffman have ob20  Ibid., p. 35b: ‘to write is not merely to work the desired association of words but to exclude the undesired’. The same point would be made by Isabel Hungerland, Poetic Discourse (1958: Westford, CT, 1977), pp. 26–27. 21  See, for instance, Chapter Three below, p. 86 on law (Bacon), and Chapter Four, p. 138 on theology (Augustine). On the history of ‘context’, and esp. on its gradual historicisation as a category, see Peter Burke, ‘Context in Context’, Common Knowledge 8 (2002), 153–77. 22  Vladimir Nabokov, Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969: London, 2012), p. 628. He had already offered a fuller discussion in an essay on translation, ‘On Translating Pushkin: Pounding the Clavichord’, NYRB, 30 April 1964, 14–16: ‘This convenient cant word consists of the words ot, meaning «from», and sebya, meaning «oneself», with a pejorative suffix, yatina, tagged on. . . . Lexically translated, it can be rendered as «come-­from-­one-­selfer» or «from one-­selfity» ’. Compare John Crowe Ransom, The New Criticism (Norfolk, CT, [1941]), p. 121, afraid that Empson’s readings might be ‘overreadings’, Cleanth Brooks, ‘Empson’s Criticism’, Accent (1944), 208–16, repr. in CEE, pp. 123–35, at pp. 128–29, and W. K. Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington, KY, 1954), p. 46, noting the ‘excessive ingenuities of Empson’. 23  J.D.C., ‘Seven Types of Ambiguity’, Revolt 8 (1930), p. 20, repr. in CEE, pp. 23–25. 24  On Empson and intention, see Wood, On Empson, pp. 1–25, and Chapter Ten below, pp. 377–80.

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served.25 As I suggest below, this might be seen as an implicit argument of Seven Types in relation to contemporary semantics.26 Context can lure us away from the usual meaning of a word in such a way as to bring both meanings into focus, or it can simply be arranged in such a way as to leave both meanings possible. Empson appreciated this fully. In fact, two of his types, the third (STA 103) and the seventh (192), are defined in terms of context, and it appears in his readings throughout the book (e.g. 55, 167, 203). The same problem had been confronted by earlier readers who posited deliberate ambiguity in poetry and in Scripture, though they did not explore the methodological question in depth.27 Empson’s taste for ambiguity suited an era of literature characterised by a shift away from realism towards other language games—distortion, obscurity, the stream of consciousness, the oblique, the difficult, the ambiguous.28 This was noted by one of his earliest acolytes, the Dublin classicist William Bedell Stanford, who, at the end of his 1939 monograph on ambiguity in ancient Greek literature, pointed to Joyce’s Work in Progress, shortly to be published in full and final form as Finnegans Wake, a book notorious for its polyglot puns and density of allusion, ambiguous in much the same way the sea is wet.29 Roland McHugh, whose volume of Annotations is known to all Wake enthusiasts, once recollected his experiences with a reading group of Joyceans including James Atherton, Clive Hart, and Fritz Senn, held in 1970–1971 at Amsterdam and Brighton. One member of the group, whose name is now less familiar in the field, was Matthew Hodgart, a historian of satire who had, among other things, composed a fifth book of Gulliver’s Travels as an allegory for the ’68 student protests he witnessed at Columbia and Berkeley. McHugh recalls: At an early stage Matthew Hodgart underlined a distinction: the maximizers, such as himself, were delighted at every additional level that could be envisaged (‘Yes, great. Hamlet, sure. Also King David’s sling.’). On the other hand minimizers such as myself tried to cut the

25  I. A. Richards, Philosophy of Rhetoric, New York, 1965, pp. 38–41; Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Harmondsworth, 1974), pp. 440–44. 26  See Chapter One below, p. 71. 27  See esp. Chapter Five below, pp. 186, on Albert Schultens, and 225 on William Baxter. 28  See R. P. Blackmur’s description of modernism, ‘Contemplation’, in his A Primer of Ignorance, ed. Joseph Frank (New York, [1967]), pp. 59–80, at p. 69: ‘the reassertion of the secret tongue, and the intense declaration of the absolute power of the word as a thing having life of its own and apart from its meaning’. For a rich analysis of ambiguity in modernist literature, see Christoph Bode, Ästhetik der Ambiguität: zu Funktion und Bedeutung von Mehrdeutigkeit in der Literature der Moderne (Tübingen, 1988). 29  William Bedell Stanford, Ambiguity in Greek Literature: Studies in Theory and Practice (Oxford, 1939), p. 95, labelling Joyce’s work ‘the ne plus ultra of verbal dexterity’ and ‘the ultima Thule of obscurity’. On Stanford see further Chapter Nine below, p. 363.

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1 0  •  I ntroduction

allusions to the smallest number which would account for all the letters in the word.30

A good Wake reading group brings to every word the struggle between the free play of the imagination and the sober attention to textual genetics, in search of Joyce’s intentions; in this respect it offers a microcosm of the controversies of literary criticism since the 1920s. But in this book we will see the same conflicts played out among traditions of readers going back to the Renaissance—between Protestants and Catholics on the Bible, between anciens and modernes on Homer, between Alexander Pope and his dunces, among readers of Horace in the eighteenth century and of Sophocles in the nineteenth. But the greatest maximising statements belong to the twentieth century. In the late 1930s, Seven Types came to the attention of the American critic Cleanth Brooks and his colleagues, who had been weaned on the work of Richards since 1929, and it was an immediate revelation. When the poet John Crowe Ransom came to define that group as the New Critics in his 1941 book of that name, he included a chapter on Richards and Empson, describing Seven Types as ‘the most imaginative account of readings ever printed’, while hesitant about some of its wilder reaches.31 Over the next ten years, Americans responded to Empson’s book in two ways: they critiqued and clarified its terminology, and they domesticated its technique, draining it of doubt and idiosyncrasy to make it more generally applicable in the classroom.32 Both Brooks and Philip Wheelwright complained that the word ambiguity was inappropriate because it denoted an either / or, rather than, as was wanted, a both / and.33 In 1948, the philosopher Abraham Kaplan and the psychoanalyst Ernst Kris collaborated on an article aiming to refine the terminology, distinguishing five types of ambiguity: (1) the disjunctive, in which we are forced to make a choice between incompatible alternatives; (2) the additive, whose various meanings closely overlap with one another, such as ‘rich’ to mean wealthy and abundant; (3) the conjunctive, whose meanings are distinct but both relevant, as in a pun; (4) the integrative, whose meanings relate to and connect with one another in complex ways; and (5) the pro30  Roland McHugh, The Finnegans Wake Experience (Berkeley, 1981), p. 67. The phrase referred to is ‘Sling Stranaslang’, FW 338.22; Leo Knuth first mentioned the ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’. 31  Ransom, The New Criticism, pp. 101–131, with the quotation at 102. 32  Norris, William Empson, pp. 23–24, reads this as a falsification of Empson’s method. 33  Philip Wheelwright, ‘The Semantics of Poetry’ (1940), repr. in Essays on the Language of Literature, ed. Seymour Chatman and Samuel Levin (Boston, 1967), pp. 250–63, at p. 252; the idea of ‘plurisignation’ is developed further in Wheelwright’s The Burning Fountain: A Study in the Language of Symbolism (Bloomington, IN, 1954), pp. 61–62, 112–117. Brooks, ‘Empson’s Criticism’, p. 126.

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jective, in which each reader must bring his own meaning to the phrase or text—this last was less an ambiguity than a vagueness or indeterminacy. Empson, they concluded, had been interested chiefly in (4), which was the true domain of poetry, and to a lesser extent in (3).34 Meanwhile, the New Critics emphasised that their concern was the plenty in Empsonian ambiguity, not the doubt. Brooks and Robert Penn Warren had ignored the topic in their seminal 1938 textbook and anthology, Understanding Poetry, but when they came to revise it in 1950, they added an entire chapter on it, containing the definition: ‘ “ambiguity” is seen to be depth and richness’.35 Wheelwright’s preferred term in 1940 had been plurisign, capturing multiplicity (pluri-­) without uncertainty.36 The strongest assertion was that of Monroe Beardsley in 1958, elevating plenty into a ‘Principle of Plenitude’: ‘All the connotations that can be found to fit are to be attributed to the poem. It means all it can mean, so to speak. . . . The very notion of critical explication seems to involve getting as much meaning out of the poem as possible, subject only to some broad control that will preserve a distinction between “getting out of” and “reading into”.’37 The dynamic modality in that ‘can mean’ and ‘as possible’ is, as we shall see, a grammatical leitmotiv of the maximiser.38 A different kind of maximising is that of the French tradition. The philosopher Richard Gaskin has recently called Empson’s criticism ‘the fons et origo of the doctrine of deconstruction’.39 This is a seriously misleading judgement, for the Francophone avant garde took little notice of Empson.40 34  Ernst Kris and Abraham Kaplan, ‘Esthetic Ambiguity’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 8 (1948), 415–35. See also Kaplan’s interesting article, ‘An Experimental Study of Ambiguity and Context’, Mechanical Translation 2 (1955), 39–46. 35  Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Understanding Poetry: An Anthology for College Students, 2nd ed. (1950: New York, 1956), pp. 571–89, with the definition at 573. My thanks to Margaret Meserve for checking the first edition at short notice. The chapter disappeared in the third (1960) and all subsequent editions. 36  Wheelwright, ‘The Semantics’. Against Wheelwright see Josephine Miles, ‘More Semantics of Poetry’ (1940), in Essays, ed. Chatman and Levin, pp. 264–68, at p. 267, stressing that ‘general language . . . being tentative, fluid, formal, unfixed, is the most plurisignative’. On the heritage of this idea, see Chapter One below, pp. 69–71. 37  Monroe Beardsley, Aesthetics, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis, 1981), p. 147. The classicist David West, Cast Out Theory: Horace Odes 1.4 and 1.7 ([Alresford], 1995), p. 13, has condemned this notion as ‘the Pansemantic Fallacy’, giving succour to legions of fogeyish critics, such as Richard Gaskin. 38  See below Chapters Four, pp. 183–84; Five, pp. 196–97; and Six, p. 253. 39  Richard Gaskin, Language, Truth, and Literature: A Defence of Literary Humanism (Oxford, 2013), p. 187. 40  Jacques Dürrenmatt, Le vertige du vague: les romantiques face à l’ambiguïté (Paris, 2001), p. 17, n. 3, laments that Seven Types is untranslatable, given its source material. Curiously, a volume entitled Sémantique de la poésie (Paris, 1979) contains a translated excerpt from The Structure of Complex Words (‘Assertions dans les mots’, pp. 27–83) alongside sections of Tzvetan Todorov, Geoffrey Hartman, and François Rigolot.

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The exception was the Belgian critic Paul de Man, who in 1956, at work on his doctoral thesis at Harvard, published an article in French against the ‘dead end’ of New Critical formalism, which had aspired to science but finished up as a lifeless traffic with mere words, with paradoxes and ambiguities that could always be neatly tied up by the critic’s business.41 From this he sought to rescue Empson, who had pointed to something deeper—to real doubt.42 Whereas Empson’s second to sixth types dealt only with ‘controlled pseudo-­ambiguity’ like that of the New Critics, the first and the last were different. The first revealed that ‘[a]ny poetic sentence, even one devoid of artifice or baroque subtlety, must, by virtue of being poetic, constitute an infinite plurality of significations all melded into a single linguistic unit’.43 The seventh, meanwhile, showed that ‘true poetic ambiguity proceeds from the deep division of Being itself, and poetry does no more than state and repeat this division’.44 De Man’s language, with its smack of infinity and its capitalised ‘Being’, reeling from Sartre and Heidegger, gestures towards the future rhetoric of deconstruction, miles from Empson’s tone of good common sense. It shares something, then, with the excitable, pseudo-­theological manner of the early Barthes, who had pronounced three years before that in modern poetry, unlike in classical poetry, the word (or Word) shines with an infinite liberty and is ready to radiate towards a thousand uncertain and possible connections. . . . Beneath each Word in modern poetry lies a sort of existential geology, in which is gathered the total content of the Name, and no longer the selected content, as in prose and classical poetry. . . . The Word is here encyclopaedic,

41  Paul de Man, ‘The Dead-­End of Formalist Criticism’ (1956), in his Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (1971: New York, 1983), pp. 229–45. For the general point, compare R. P. Blackmur, ‘A Burden for Critics’, Hudson Review 1 (1948), 170–86, at pp. 179–180. 42  This essay has been criticised—rightly, I think—for its misrepresentation of Empson: see especially Terry Eagleton, ‘The Critic as Clown’, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana, IL, 1988), pp. 619–31; and Denis Donoghue, Speaking of Beauty (New Haven, 2003), pp. 128–133. Christopher Norris, ‘Some Versions of Rhetoric: Empson and de Man’ (1984), repr. in his The Contest of Faculties: Philosophy and Theory after Deconstruction (London, 1985), pp. 70–96, at p. 90, sees that ‘de Man is constrained to read Empson according to a certain predisposed rhetoric of crisis that is by no means self-­evident in Empson’s text’, but allows, p. 95, that comparisons between the two critics are ‘to the point’. 43  De Man, ‘The Dead-­End’, p. 236. 44  Compare the later formulation of Paul Ricoeur, ‘The Problem of the Double-­Sense as Hermeneutic Problem and as Semantic Problem’, in Myths and Symbols: Studies in Honour of Mircea Eliade, ed. M. M. Kitagawa and C. H. Long (Chicago and London, 1969), pp. 63–79, at p. 68: ‘the sole philosophic interest in symbolism is that it reveals, by its structure of double-­sense, the ambiguity of being: “Being speaks in many ways.” ’

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containing simultaneously all the senses from among which a relational discourse would have made it choose . . . a Pandora’s box from which fly out all the potentialities of language.45

All this went beyond Beardsley—an infinite plenitude, with no controlling distinction between ‘getting out of’ and ‘reading into’. Maximising had different modes, then, and different means of expression, but by the 1960s it had become dominant everywhere. The Anglo-­American critics who absorbed deconstruction in the 1970s and 1980s—J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman, Christopher Norris, among others—had been brought up on New Critical ambiguity, and were liable to reinterpret Empson through the smeared lens of the new French theory, as already proposed by Paul de Man.46 At the same time, Empson’s work came under fire from two brilliant young women. One was the poet and theorist Veronica Forrest-­Thomson, who, in her monograph Poetic Artifice—published in 1978, three years after her tragic early death—rejected what she saw as the excessive rationalism of his approach, manifested in his focus on ambiguity in poetry to the exclusion of its extrasemantic effects.47 The other critique, more relevant here, was the diametric opposite, since it came from a structuralist who found Empson’s concept too vague to be scientific; this was Frank Kermode’s doctoral student Shlomith Rimmon, who completed her thesis on ambiguity in Henry James in 1974, publishing it as a monograph three 45  Roland Barthes, Le degré zéro de l’écriture (1953), in his Oeuvres complètes, ed. Éric Marty, 3 vols (Paris, 1993–95), I, p. 164: ‘le Mot . . . brille d’une liberté infinie et s’apprête à rayonner vers mille rapports incertains et possibles. . . . Ainsi sous chaque Mot de la poésie moderne gît une sorte de géologie existentielle, où se rassemble le contenu total du Nom, et non plus son contenu électif comme dans la prose et dans la poésie classique. . . . Le Mot est ici encyclopédique, il contient simultanément toutes les acceptions parmi lesquelles un discours relationnel lui aurait imposé de choisir . . . une boîte de Pandore d’où s’envolent toutes les virtualités du langage’’. Contrast Barthes’ more restrained language about ambiguity in Critique et vérité (1966), in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 2, pp. 37–44, now responding to Roman Jakobson, ‘Linguistics and Poetics’ (1960), repr. in his Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, MA, 1987), 62–94, at p. 85. 46  J. Hillis Miller, Versions of Pygmalion (Cambridge, MA, 1990), p. 95, noted of Seven Types that ‘the record of an extraordinarily innovative series of acts of reading . . . has now been assimilated into our culture’. Earlier, in Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels (Cambridge, MA, 1982), p. 234, he remarked that he had found Empson useful ‘even if sometimes only to help me work out my own different conclusions’. Compare Geoffrey Hartman, Saving the Text: Literature / Derrida / Philosophy (Baltimore, 1981), p. 23, and idem, A Scholar’s Tale: Intellectual Journey of a Displaced Child of Europe (New York, 2007), p. 137. For an example of ambiguity in use, see J. Hillis Miller, ‘Topography and Tropography in Thomas Hardy’s “In Front of the Landscape” ’ (1985), repr. in his Tropes, Parables, Performatives: Essays on Twentieth-­Century Literature (Durham, NC, 1991), pp. 195–212, at p. 206. 47  Veronica Forrrest-­Thomson, Poetic Artifice: A Theory of Twentieth-­Century Poetry (New York, 1978), esp. pp. 2–15, wrestling with his interpretation of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 94.

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years later.48 The question of ambiguity in James had by this stage a long pedigree, entirely independent of Empson. A 1934 article by Edmund Wilson argued that ambiguity—at the narrative rather than the verbal level— was a recurrent feature of the novelist’s stories; thus ‘The Turn of the Screw’, to take only the most obvious example, was predicated on an ambiguity as to whether the ghosts are real or not. The theme was picked up again in the 1960s, beginning with an article by Roger Gard (who would later examine Rimmon’s thesis), and continuing in a series of monographs on James with the word Ambiguity in the title.49 Rimmon took a theoretical approach, devoting her first chapter to the nature of ambiguity, which she treats as an objective, scientifically analysable property of a text, and which she identifies as strictly disjunctive between mutually exclusive options, that is, as Kris and Kaplan’s first type, notated in symbolic logic as AΛB (‘A or B but not both’). It has a close visual analogue, as she notes, in the ‘duck-­ rabbit’ figure made famous by Wittgenstein. Rimmon carefully distinguishes it from, on the one hand, ‘the multiplicity of subjective interpretations’, that is, ‘the ultimate subjectivity or the “unescapable ambiguity” of all art’, and, on the other, Empson’s ‘use of “ambiguity” as a blanket term for all kinds of secondary meanings’.50 In other words, she seeks to strip ambiguity of plenty and reattach it to doubt, expressed here in terms of choice: [A]n ambiguous expression calls for choice between its alternative meanings, but at the same time provides no ground for making the choice. The mutually exclusive meanings therefore coexist in spite of the either/or conflict between them. (17)

This is a minimiser’s ambiguity, severely attenuating even the doubt: as with Brooks, there is no doubt about doubt, and the uncertainty itself has become rigorously confined and articulated. Rimmon also insists on the principle of context gestured at by Empson’s first critics; only now she can articulate the point more formally by drawing on the concept of isotopy or semantic redundancy, introduced a decade before by the Lithuanian 48  On Rimmon and Kermode’s ‘London Graduate Seminar’, see Bernard Bergonzi, Exploding English: Criticism, Theory, Culture (Oxford, 1990), p. 99. 49  Edmund Wilson, ‘The Ambiguity of Henry James’, Hound and Horn 7 (April–June 1934), 385–406, repr. in his Triple Thinkers (1938), and now in A Casebook on Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw”, ed. Gerald Willen (Binghamton, NY, 1960); A. R. Gard, ‘Critics of The Golden Bowl’, Melbourne Critical Review 6 (1963), 102–109; Jean Frantz Blackall, Jamesian Ambiguity and The Sacred Fount (Ithaca, NY, 1965); Charles Thomas Samuels, The Ambiguity of Henry James (Urbana, IL, 1971); Ralf Norrman, Techniques of Ambiguity in the Fiction of Henry James (Abo, Finland, 1977); see also Dorothea Krook, The Ordeal of Consciousness in Henry James (Cambridge, 1967), pp. 228–234; and J. A. Ward, ‘The Ambiguities of Henry James’, The Sewanee Review 83 (1975), 39–60. 50  Shlomith Rimmon, The Concept of Ambiguity: The Example of James (Chicago, 1977), pp. 12 (citing Stanford, Ambiguity, p. 87) and 17.

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semiotician A. J. Greimas.51 Her example is scriptural, from Deut. 16:20, ‫ צֶ ֶדק צֶ ֶדק ִּת ְרּדֹף‬zedek, zedek tirdof, which might in isolation mean either ‘Justice, justice, shall you pursue’ or ‘Justice, justice, shall you drive away’. It is easy for her—too easy—to argue that our understanding of biblical ethics, as well as of the immediate scriptural context, points us to the correct meaning. For other readers, the lexical ambiguities of the Hebrew Bible had led to quite the reverse conclusions.52 It is worth briefly considering here the shift in academic climate between Empson and Rimmon. He had been the product of élitist centres of education where the reading and writing of poetry was part of the culture, expected even in a mathematics student like Empson. Poetry was still central to the human experience, and the purpose of writing about it was to get at that experience: what mattered was not theoretical rigour but wit, verve, sensitivity, unpredictable insight. Rimmon’s framework was much closer to that of Richards, who, unlike Empson, sought to offer something replicable: method and checkable results.53 Her world, by her own admission at odds with Kermode, was the professionalising, increasingly globalised and inclusive humanities of the 1970s, keen to sacrifice idiosyncrasy for a common, scientific standard of communicable research and theory. Such an ideal glows off the page of her natural academic home, Poetics and Theory of Literature (PTL), the flagship journal of the Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics at Tel Aviv University, one of many Israeli institutions funded by the Tesco heiress Shirley Porter, then still in the salad days of her controversial career in politics.54 The journal, edited by Benjamin Harshav (then Hrushovski), was full of work like Rimmon’s, as young scholars from around the world, inspired above all by Barthes and Jakobson, offered technical accounts of literary language and narratology, crisp with diagrams and quasi-­mathematical terminology. The first volume contained ‘The Squirm of the True’, a two-­part article on ambiguity in James by Christine Brooke-­Rose. In 1979 PTL was relaunched as Poetics Today, and its first issue carried Brooke-­Rose’s review of Rimmon’s book, cheerfully admitting its superiority to her own work. 51  On isotopy, see A. J. Greimas, Structural Semantics: An Attempt at a Method, tr. Daniele McDowell et al. (Lincoln, NE, 1983), pp. 78–115, esp. p. 112: a text seems ambiguous when we cannot identify its isotopy. 52  See Chapter Four below, pp. 149–51. 53  On Empson’s inimitability, see Wood, On Empson, p. 5: ‘I see the Macbeth passage [in Seven Types] not as a model—who could follow it?’ Compare R. P. Blackmur’s incisive remarks on Joyce in ‘Critical Prefaces of Henry James’ (1934), repr. in his Primer of Ignorance, pp. 244–245. 54  On the Tel Aviv School, see Brian McHale and Eyal Segal, ‘Small World: The Tel Aviv School of Poetics and Semiotics’, in Theoretical Schools and Circles in the Twentieth-­Century Humanities: Literary Theory, History, Philosophy, eds Marina Grishakova and Silvi Salupere (New York, 2015), pp. 196–215.

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But it was here, at home, and from a friend, that Rimmon’s neutral, logical ‘ambiguity’ encountered resistance. The third issue (1980) of Poetics Today bore an article on James’s story ‘The Figure in the Carpet’ by Hillis Miller, then at work on his monograph Fiction and Repetition (1982). Miller had read the manuscript of Rimmon’s book for Chicago University Press, and ‘disagreed with almost everything’ but nonetheless recommended publication; the mood between them was warm, and they traded drafts and offprints of their work.55 In his 1980 article he made his reservations public. Later that year Rimmon—now Rimmon-­Kenan—was given right of reply, and Miller briefly in return. Their courtly exchange reads as a sort of seduction of her ambiguity by a darker critical force. If Empson was the dog scratching up the flower of beauty, Miller saw himself as one of the little foxes that spoil the structuralist vines. In his view, her concept is too rational, too ‘canny,’ too much an attempt to reduce the mise-­ en-­abyme of any literary work, for example the novels and stories of James, to a logical scheme. The multiple ambiguous readings of James’s fictions are not merely alternative possibilities. They are intertwined with one another in a system of unreadability, each possibility generating the others in an unstilled oscillation. Rimmon’s concept of ambiguity, in spite of its linguistic sophistication, is a misleadingly logical schematization of the alogical in literature, that uncanny blind alley of unreadability encountered ultimately in the interpretation of any work.56

Here ambiguity, shorn of the doubt that defined its usage in Seven Types, has come to seem a lifeless tool. Miller’s preferred term, unreadability, sought to restore that doubt—it ‘names the presence in a text of two or more incompatible or contradictory meanings which imply one another or are intertwined with one another, but which may by no means be felt or named a unified totality . . . [it] names the discomfort of this perpetual lack of closure’ (my emphasis). It thus belongs to a group of terms like ‘indeterminacy’ which, in the critical discourse of the period, indicate that ambiguities will not be resolved by the act of interpretation, instead remaining open to unsettle the reader even after being identified.57 In practical terms this was remarkably similar to what Rimmon had said of her ambiguity, that it ‘calls for choice between its alternative meanings, but at 55  See the items in UC Irvine Special Collections, J. Hillis Miller Papers (MS.C.013), Box 60, Folder 2. My thanks to Professor Rimmon-­Kenan for her personal communication on this matter. 56  J. Hillis Miller, ‘The Figure in the Carpet’, Poetics Today 1 (1980), 107–118, at p. 112. 57  This distinction—which does not strike me as a coherent one—is laid out as plainly as possible in Timothy Bahti, ‘Ambiguity and Indeterminacy: The Juncture’, Comparative Literature 38 (1986), 209–223.

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the same time provides no ground for making the choice’, only the emphasis was now on experience, on ‘discomfort’. Just like Rimmon, Miller distinguished his idea from both ‘ambiguity in literature as plurisignificance or richness of meaning’ and ‘the perspectivism which holds that each reader bring something different to a text’. The chief difference is that for Miller all works are, in his sense of the word, unreadable. Rimmon-­Kenan noticed the similarities between the two concepts, as between their respective accounts of James. Her tongue-­in-­cheek response, ‘Deconstructive Reflections on Deconstruction’, pointed out that unreadability needed ambiguity as much as ambiguity needed unreadability, for each led to the other: Miller, by implying that his account of James was better than hers, had offered only ‘another form of decidable closure’.58 When Miller came to write his own rejoinder, he identified Rimmon-­ Kenan’s co-­opting of his deconstruction as typical of her ‘schematizing rationality devoted to intellectual mastery’; it was her scientific pretensions, and those of the Porter Institute more broadly, that he distrusted. By contrast, he himself had attempted only to express ‘the failure of an attempt at mastery’.59 He confessed his own failure, and yet that was the point: ‘Had I succeeded I would have failed.’ Miller’s tone has the arch self-­consciousness we associate with postmodern irony: Rimmon-­Kenan in her response was ‘doing it again’, just as he imagines she will conclude of his reply that ‘He’s doing it again.’60 But, as in any good comedy, his conclusion is conjugal. Miller may have been a guest in her house, Poetics Today, but now he will ‘welcome her as a guest’ in his mother’s house—the home of deconstruction—which would instruct her, or she him. It now seemed they had been doing the same thing all along, and doing it together: ‘It is now no longer, “She is doing it again,” but that she starts doing, to some degree at least, what I was doing: “She [He] is [are] doing it again.” ’61 This was all a bit silly: two friends teasing each other about their critical arsenals. If we can get anything useful out of the exchange, it is that criticism in 1980 had reached an impasse on how far doubt was to be legislated: for the Rimmons, it was the critic’s job to be certain, even when she was specifying the doubtfulness of a text, whereas for the Millers, certainty was too much to ask of the critic, whose job was not to clarify but to act out the doubt. This was the continuation of a dialogue about ambiguity given fresh impetus by Empson, but long predating him. 58  Shlomith Rimmon-­Kenan, ‘Deconstructive Reflections on Deconstruction: In Reply to Hillis Miller’, Poetics Today 2 (1980–1), 185–88, at p. 188. 59  J. Hillis Miller, ‘A Guest in the House’, Poetics Today 2 (1980–81), 189–91, at p. 189. 60  Compare Umberto Eco’s notorious formulation of the ‘postmodern attitude’, Postscript to the Name of the Rose (New York, 1984), pp. 47–48. 61  Miller, ‘A Guest’, p. 191.

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Both sides, however, had lost sight of something central to Seven Types— the poet’s intention. They had become formalists. This was no surprise, in the wake of the anti-­intentionalist manifestos of the 1950s (Wimsatt and Beardsley) and ’60s (Barthes); to legitimise the intention, it was thought, was to limit the meaning of a text to a unity achieved at the moment of production. But Empson had showed, by contrast, that intentionality was rather more complex than this suggested: it could produce ambiguity because it was divided and ambivalent. Nor was he the first to do so: several other discourses, as we shall see in this book, had discovered ambiguity in language by reconstructing its author’s intention as in some way fractured or multiple. In some instances the meaning was even allowed to change over time, or to be more fully expressed, such as the law that must continually be applied to new cases, or the Hebrew prophet whose words could finally be explained only under the dispensation of Christ. By returning to these models we will see how the supposition of ambiguity in a text, and the acceptance of uncertainty about it, could anticipate the charge of formalism—of otsebyatina. Ratio Studiorum Before I explain in more detail what this book is, I ought to say what it is not. First, it is not a history of the word ambiguity or its cognates.62 Nor is it concerned, at least until the final chapter, with non-­verbal or moral ambiguity, let alone the sort enshrined in book titles of the twentieth century, from Simone de Beauvoir onwards.63 Third, and perhaps most surprisingly, it is not a history of ambiguities, of ambiguous texts, and certainly not of canonically ambiguous texts like The Praise of Folly or Sartor Resartus. It is tempting to pit literature against literary criticism; for instance, Jacques Dürrenmatt’s 2001 study Le vertige du vague presents French Ro62  A note on word history. It is commonly assumed that the prefix ambi-­denotes duality, as in, for instance, ambivalent. But the prefix in ambiguity means ‘around, about’, and the Latin root verb ambigere (< ambi-­ agere) meant ‘to wander around’, hence ‘to waver, hesitate’; compare Gk. ἀμφι-­βάλλειν (Liddell and Scott, sense III), whence the adjective ἀμφίβολος, ‘ambiguous’; and Eng. vague, from Lat. vagus, ‘wandering’. Lat. ambiguus and ambiguitas, and their descendants, have not in usage been limited to connoting mere duality, any more than doubt (< dubitare < duo habere) or combine. However, certain scholars, reinterpreting ambi-­, have sought to impose twoness: see, e.g., the jurist Andrea Alciato, in Chapter Two below, p. 83. In English, a few neologisers have coined multiguity, meaning ‘having more than two senses’; there are many recorded examples, most of which were probably formed independently, but see for instance Philip Howard, Winged Words (London, 1988), p. 62. Sadly, or perhaps happily, multiguity has evaded the latest recension of the OED. 63  Simone de Beauvoir, Pour une morale de l’ambiguïté (Paris, 1947), where the word is a correlate of Jean-­Paul Sartre’s être-­néant, man’s dual status as free subject and factic object.

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mantic literature, such as the novels of Stendhal and Nodier, as a rebuttal to the hostility to ambiguity prevailing in neoclassical criticism and rhetoric. But if we want to write a coherent history we ought to resist that temptation, partly because such work tends to rely on an imprecise category of ambiguity, lumping it in with obscurity, irony, wit, and so on, but more pressingly because it compares past critical statements with present-­ day aesthetic judgements of past works, which threatens a serious anachronism. Likewise, a history of ambiguous works would run the risk of being merely a history of works in which we now perceive ambiguity, when that perception is precisely what we want to historicise. For the intellectual historian, ambiguity, as James Porter has said of ‘being classical’, is most usefully understood not as ‘a property an object can have’ (or is now judged to have had), but as ‘the suggestion that a given object has this kind of property, which is why one needs to determine just where in any given case the suggestion originates’.64 For that reason, the basic unit of this history is not the ambiguous phrase but the act of seeing ambiguity in a phrase. In other words, it is a history first and foremost of readers, most of whom are, and have always been, extremely obscure—anonymous ancient scholiasts, late mediaeval scholastics and glossators, Indian poeticians, Counter-­Reformation exegetes, editors, canonists, casuists, immortels, Grub Street hacks, schoolmasters, paraphrasts, cloudy German philosophers, Victorian barristers, dantisti, doctoral students and their professors, clerics, psychoanalysts, music journalists. But what to do with them all? We are faced with a problem of method. Intellectual historians have usually been tasked with capturing the ideas of past writers, such as scientists or political philosophers, and their method for the past fifty-­odd years has centred on an attempt to reconstruct the social, political, biographical, and especially the discursive contexts of the works in question.65 The same basic frame has served for reception studies that analyse the reinterpretations of older works in and for new contexts.66 As with the latter studies, we are here concerned with readers more than writers—though of course the readers must also be writers in order to transmit their ideas—but unlike those studies we are interested in reading mostly at the level of words, phrases, and sentences. And at this level we 64  James L. Porter, ‘What Is “Classical” about Classical Antiquity? Eight Propositions’, Arion, 3rd ser., 13 (2005), 27–62, at p. 30. 65  The totemic article is Quentin Skinner, ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’, History and Theory 8 (1969), 3–53. 66  I am thinking primarily of studies like James Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols (Leiden, 1991); and Sydney Anglo, Machiavelli: The First Century. Studies in Enthusiasm, Hostility, and Irrelevance (Oxford, 2009). But one might also include innovative studies of reading such as Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, ‘  “Studied for Action”: How Gabriel Harvey Read his Livy’, Past and Present, 129 (1990), 30–78.

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find an ongoing tension between, on the one hand, discursive contexts, in the form of hermeneutic rules and shared semantic, aesthetic, or theological precepts, and on the other, the brute act by which meaning, and occasionally multiple meaning, is discovered in another person’s words. The latter act is often impossible to understand by a process of historical contextualisation; it operates at the limits of reason, and in extreme cases its results appear unsayable, even unspeakable. Its eroticism should not be denied: texts seduce us to vulgar interpretive gestures, making us foolish in the eyes of others, who look on with puritan disapproval. This is surely why naughty Empson, banished from Cambridge for a condom, continues even now to receive the headmaster’s slipper for his critical transgressions.67 In this history I have privileged the individual specificity of those acts. But practice must be set off against theory, and so I have explored, alongside those acts, the aforementioned rules and shared precepts, as well as the concepts devised to make sense of ambiguity, such as the classical virtue of elegantia, the Catholic notion of the multiple literal sense of Scripture, and the post-­Romantic idea of dramatic irony. Nonetheless, since readers sometimes struggled to articulate the dissonance between their expectation of one meaning and their discovery of several, we need to recognise the limits of our reliance on their conceptual terms or ‘actors’ categories’.68 That is, it must be allowed that we can, now and then, understand past thinkers better than they did themselves, a principle of interpretation formulated by Kant and later insisted upon by Empson.69 Nor will it be improper to observe, where relevant, that readers in diverse eras and disciplines have faced similar problems and sometimes arrived at similar solutions—that certain patterns transcend individual contexts. The point is likely to appeal to those historians who resent the tyranny of contextualism.70 But the narrative of this book has another relevance to their concerns, because it offers, among other things, a genealogy of those Most recently in Gaskin, Language, Truth, pp. 186–94. The latter expression seems to have derived from Irwin Deutscher, What We Say / What We Do: Sentiments and Acts (Glenview, IL, 1973), p. 355. 69  Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, ed. Raymond Schmidt (Leipzig, [1924]), p. 396 (A314): ‘Ich merke nur an: daß es gar nichts Ungewöhnliches sei, sowohl im gemeinen Gespräche, als in Schriften, durch die Vergleichung der Gedanken, welche ein Verfasser über seinen Gegenstand äußert, ihn sogar besser zu verstehen, als er sich selbst verstand, indem er seinen Begriff nicht genugsam bestimmte, und dadurch bisweilen seiner eigenen Absicht entgegen redete oder auch dachte.’ On the subsequent history see Otto Friedrich Bollnow, ‘What Does It Mean to Understand a Writer Better than He Understood Himself?’, Philosophy Today 22 (1979), 10–22. Michael Forster, ‘Friedrich Schlegel’s Hermeneutics, in his German Philosophy of Language: From Schlegel to Hegel and Beyond (Oxford, 2011), pp. 45–80, at 57–59, considers the principle in relation to the unconscious in Schlegel, Nietzsche, and Freud. 70  See recently Peter Gordon, ‘Contextualism and Criticism in the History of Ideas’, in 67  68 

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concerns: to call a text ambiguous is another way of saying that it has been variously interpreted, and to say that its ambiguity is deliberate is therefore to suggest that more than one of those interpretations might be valid. As we shall see, this strategy is not limited to saving an eirenic attitude to Scripture. A central contention of this book is that Richards’s temporal distinction between Old and New Rhetoric should be replaced by a generic one. On one side, theorists of language in all periods, after Empson as before—writers on grammar, rhetoric, semantics, poetics, general hermeneutics—have understood ambiguity as a pernicious fault. On the other, isolated traditions have acknowledged the deliberate and beautiful ambiguity of certain privileged, exceptional texts, which before Empson fell largely into one of two groups: (a) classical poetry, above all Roman satire and Greek tragedy, and (b) the Hebrew Bible. The strategies of explaining multiple meanings in these two categories differed. Those in classical poetry were evaluated with a concept I label artificial ambiguity, emphasising a speaker’s mastery of words as a means to manage and control other persons, whether benignly as social wit or malignly in acts of deceit. Those in Scripture, by contrast, were justified by later Christian scholars as what I call inspired ambiguity, relying on the figure of the prophet exalted by God to express divine and mystical truths. Where the first reinforces the classical model of the unified subject who deploys language to express his will and exercise agency in the world, the second serves to undermine that model by positing a divided subject whose language is his own and not his own, simultaneously the product of two distinct impulses. These two terms are not actors’ categories, and cannot be found in historical sources; rather, they represent an effort to get a handle on two ways of thinking about multiplicity that can, I think, be abducted from those sources. I have used the word ambiguity here, when some the figures I am discussing, such as St Augustine, would have thought rather in terms of multiple meanings. But the two ideas are only phases of the same moon, and where one reader asserted plurality in a text, another could always denounce it as ambiguity. Empson’s term captures the threat of doubt inherent in all plenty. It should go without saying that the history of ambiguity is not only complex but extremely non-­linear, and therefore that there is no straightforward way to tell it within the confines of a linear prose narrative. Some may be surprised by the method with which I approach their disciplines, such as the history of law, or of literary criticism, which have their own etiquettes, rhythms, styles of citation, and so on. But it has been my assumption that a worm’s-­eye intellectual history of the obscure as well as Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History, eds Darrin McMahon and Samuel Moyn (Oxford, 2014), pp. 32–55.

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the famous, the scholarly communities as well as the lone geniuses, will find the common ground and narrative interconnections between apparently disparate fields and eras. I have thus tried to strike a middle path between the remorseless thick description characteristic of much history of scholarship, and what Germans call the Gipfelwanderung, ‘wandering from peak to peak’ (for instance, from Descartes to Locke to Hume to Kant) of most long-­range surveys. Instead I have pursued rivers as they roll down from peaks—from Aristotle, from Justinian, from Augustine, from Eustathius, from Bacon, from Schlegel, from Freud—into trackless valleys, into other rivers, underground. Chronological coherence has been preserved within each narrative, at the expense of a tidy sweep forward overall. The first half of the book offers a series of disciplinary parameters for thinking about ambiguity, from rhetoric and legal hermeneutics to biblical exegesis and early modern literary criticism. Chapter One is devoted to what Richards called the Old Rhetoric, sketching the long persistence in the West, from Aristotle to the early twentieth century, of a ‘single meaning model’ of language, one that takes ambiguity for granted as an obstacle to persuasive speech and clear philosophical analysis. Within this chapter I also touch on a recurrent fantasy that words ‘really’ (etymologically, or in a speaker’s mind) have only one meaning, which can be recovered by philosophical procedure. This chapter stands apart from the rest of the book, in that it is, to use Saussure’s terms, about ambiguity in langue—that is, in the structure of language, in its lexicon and syntax, not yet realised in use. The later chapters, by contrast, are about ambiguity in parole: in specific utterances, and especially in texts. Langue offers the rules within which parole operates; its ‘ambiguity’ represents the plenty from which doubt may arise on particular occasions. Chapter Two examines the rôle of ambiguity in a hermeneutic setting that sees it only as doubt and never as plenty, namely, the English common law, where discussions about the nature of ambiguity serve as a proxy for a deeper controversy about what it means to interpret a text—a will, a contract, or a statute. Chapter Three introduces the notion of artificial ambiguity, understood at the level of speech-­acts, which classical and early modern scholars usually conceived of either as puns, that is, ambiguities that are not really ambiguous, or as equivocations, ambiguities engineered to deceive; the latter category was the basis of the infamous sixteenth-­ century debate about Jesuitical equivocation. Chapter Four turns to Scripture, whose ambiguity is seen, following Augustine, both as a difficulty to shake us out of exegetical complacency, and as an inspired involution of multiple meanings on the page; these meanings are not only allegorical, mystical, or typological, but also literal, according to a widespread Catholic idea neglected by previous historians of biblical scholarship. In Chapter Five I return to artificial ambiguity, teasing out its implications for the

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early modern study of classical poetry. This encompasses commentaries on the ‘elegant’ ambiguities in particular lines as well as theoretical treatises and dialogues struggling to make sense of ambiguity as a poetic and political virtue. The second half of the book, which is more neatly chronological, contains a series of interlinked variations on the themes and ideas of the first. These might be thought of as attempts to reconcile the artificial and the inspired types of ambiguity, or as varying critical responses to the usual hermeneutic focus on the author’s intention. Against those who insist that the intention is single and so must disambiguate the text, it may be argued either that the intention is irrelevant and should be discarded, or, with greater subtlety, that intention is more complex than it looks, and can itself generate ambiguity. The major breakthrough in this respect, as also in reconciling artificial and inspired ambiguity, was the nineteenth-­century theory of dramatic irony, which is central to the narrative of the book. Chapter Six starts in the early eighteenth century with readers arguing over multiple meanings in Homer, and then turns to readers of Alexander Pope, via Pope’s own translation of the Iliad. This marks a surprising episode in the prehistory of ‘close reading’, where the poet’s imputed ambiguities become a counter of hermeneutic authority for which he vied with his hostile contemporaries. Chapter Seven, which centres on the mid-­ eighteenth-­century figures William Warburton and George Benson, considers the way in which the reading of secular poets like Homer and Vergil came to chime with an ongoing debate about the possibility of double senses (and therefore ambiguity) in Old Testament prophecy. It ends in the 1760s, when German scholars, keen readers of Benson and other English theologians, began to reach a rationalist consensus on the unitary sense of prophecy. Chapter Eight examines the reaction against this consensus and the unexpected recrudescence of an older, mystical attitude to interpretation in the work of Johann Georg Hamann, whose writings, whatever their philosophical value, had a seismic impact on the Romantic thinkers of the next generation. A key product of that impact was Friedrich Schlegel’s new notion of irony, and Chapter Nine traces the flattening of this notion into a useful philological tool—dramatic irony—by German and English scholars in the nineteenth century, a process made possible by a new attention to double meanings in Greek tragedy. The result is a kind of ambiguity that is both artificial for the playwright and inspired for the characters onstage. My final chapter returns to Empson’s Seven Types, a book about ambiguity in lyric poetry, but one that rejects the dominant concept in previous analyses of that subject, namely, artificial ambiguity. Its innovation was to adopt instead a form of inspired ambiguity, one made possible by the earlier invention of dramatic irony, and also, on another front, by the

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Freudian unconscious. To this end, Chapter Ten offers a conceptual archaeology of three keywords in Seven Types—ambivalence, primitive, and hypocrisy—an investigation that will lead us outwards, via Empson’s own ambages, to the realm of moral doubt and human understanding, in which lay his book’s greatest originality.

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PA R T O N E

Themes

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CHA PTE R ONE

THE OLD RHETORIC Vir bonus et prudens . . . parum claris lucem dare coget, arguet ambigue dictum. — Horace, Ars Poetica Errorum genetrix est aequivocatio semper. — Scholastic proverb

Western literary criticism has embraced ambiguity over the past century. But in this one respect the rest of our life has gone on unchanged: we still demand clarity and simplicity from our recipes, our bank statements, our e-­mails, our student essays, even our monographs on ambiguity. In other words, we feel much like the polymath Bernard Lamy when he opined in 1675: A discourse . . . is great when it is extraordinarily clear, without a single equivocal word or doubtful sense or ambiguous expression; when it is so well-­turned that the reader’s mind is led straight to the end by the shortest route, without any encumbrance of superfluous words.1

We think of ambiguity now, as we have always done, as an accident, a danger. It lends a comic air to misfortune, like the memorable Guardian headline that read ‘Pound vulnerable, warn senior Tories’, or the improbable case of Paul von Berge, chancellor of Anhalt-­Dessau, who in 1539 went into a coma after his apothecary misread his prescription for apium, parsley, as opium.2 Though our lives are rarely at stake, we want to avoid 1  Bernard Lamy, De l’art de parler (Paris, 1675), p. 212: ‘Un discours . . . est grand lorsqu’il est extraordinairement net, qu’il n’y a pas une parole équivoque, qu’il n’y a aucun sens suspendu, aucune expression ambiguë, quand il est bien tourné, que l’esprit du Lecteur est conduit tout droit au but par le plus court chemin, sans aucun embaras de paroles superfluës.’ Compare César Chesneau Dumarsais, Traité des tropes (1730), ed. Pierre Fontanier, 2 vols (Paris, 1818), I, pp. 326–27, weary of wordplay: ‘l’on ne regarde plus les mots que come des signes auxquels on ne s’arête que pour aler droit à ce qu’ils signifient’. 2  Johann Christoph Beckmann, Historie des Fürstenthums Anhalt, 8 vols in 3 (Zerbst,

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misunderstandings: we have a single meaning in mind, and feel that our words should get others to it as quickly and safely as possible, to which end they must be clear, or perspicuous, like a pane of glass through which to see the matter beneath. In 1985 the sociologist Donald Levine argued that such a demand for clarity was unknown to antiquity—or outside the West—originating in the seventeenth century as a product of Puritan plainness, capitalism, centralised bureaucracy, quantitative science, and Baconian philosophy.3 It is true that explicit warnings against ambiguity are found in the philosophical traditions that sprang from Bacon and Descartes, and among the rhetorics and style guides, including Lamy’s De l’art de parler, that adopted the language of those traditions. But such voices did not speak for all, and elsewhere ambiguity thrived, in witticisms, in poetry, and in mystical traditions from Thomas Browne and Claude-­François Menestrier to Jakob Boehme. Even Bacon praised and put to use the indirect language of allegory and aphorism. More to the point, the same hostility to ambiguity had been inculcated in the Western schoolroom for centuries, in textbooks derived, like so much else, from the work of Aristotle, for whom the single meaning model was already a fundamental and unquestioned premise. The aim of this chapter is to trace the chief lines of that development, starting with the logic and rhetoric of antiquity, and moving into the humanist revivals and elaborations of those topics, the place of ambiguity in the philosophical grammar of the Renaissance, and finally the Baconian tradition as it survived into the twentieth century. Beneath shifts of focus and disagreements on points of detail, we will find a lugubrious consensus reaching across ages, nations and disciplines, as Aristotle’s common-­sense notion of meaning proved almost unshakeable until the mid-­nineteenth century.4 Much of ­ ermany, 1710), VII, pp. 375a–376b, relying on oral family testimony. Dangerous prescripG tions could also be generated by mistranslation of an ambiguous word: see, e.g., Avicenna, Canon medicinae, tr. Gerardus Cremonensis, ed. Andrea Alpago, comm. Giovanni Costeo and Giovanni Paolo Mongio, 3 vols (Venice, 1595), II, p. 151a (IV.4.2.5): ‘arsenico est virtus mirabilis in omnibus, quae sunt necessaria de incarnatione, et resolutione sanguinis, et prohibitione nocumenti, quum in potu sumitur’. The annotation suggests that arsenicum is misread for arseni, i.e., black cinnamon. 3  Donald Levine, The Flight from Ambiguity: Essays in Social and Cultural Theory (Chicago, 1985), pp. 2–4, 21–28, responding to Richard McKeon, ‘The Flight from Certainty and the Quest for Precision’, Review of Metaphysics 18 (1964), 234–53; Arthur Melzer, Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing (Chicago, 2014), pp. 207–10, in debt to Levine. See also, from a different angle, Steven Shapin, Never Pure (Baltimore, 2010), pp. 315–17. 4  Nevertheless, see Gerald Bruns, Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern (New Haven, 1992), p. 87, for a dubious suggestion that the Rhetoric anticipates the insight of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Quine that ‘meaning is internal to a conceptual scheme’.

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T he O l d R hetoric  •   29

the material covered here has been studied in depth by specialists. Nonetheless, a diachronic synthesis will provide a foundation for the messier and more unexpected narratives that play out in later chapters of this book, narratives that take the model either for granted or as an explicit point of departure. Ambiguity and Obscurity In Aristotle’s works are the seeds of three closely related traditions of Western thought on ambiguity: the logico-­semantic, the rhetorical, and the hermeneutic. The first seeks to eliminate ambiguity from philosophy because it hinders a clear analysis of the world: this is the tradition of Bacon and Locke. The second seeks to eliminate ambiguity from speech because it hinders the clear and persuasive communication of argument: this is the tradition of Quintilian and George Campbell.5 The third, an extension of the second, seeks to resolve textual ambiguity because it hinders the reader’s ability to grasp the writer’s intention: this is the patrimony of all interpreters—of poetry, of legal wills and statutes, of the Bible, and so on. The three move from the abstract to the concrete, and from the words themselves to those who utter and grasp them: ambiguity is first the capacity of a word to signify more than one thing (logic), then the susceptibility of a statement to more than one construction (rhetoric), and finally the susceptibility of a particular text, with an identifiable authorial intention, to more than one interpretation (hermeneutics). This distinction is reflected in differing definitions of obscurity and its relation to ambiguity.6 The classical logician, who thinks of meaning in terms of the signifying properties of words, construes obscurity as a lack of meaning, but ambiguity as a surfeit of meaning—deviations in two directions from the norm of clarity, that is, of a single meaning. For the orator and the interpreter, by contrast, meaning is what is gleaned by the hearer or reader, and obscurity that feature which precludes such gleaning. 5  John Guillory, ‘Genesis of the Media Concept’, Critical Inquiry 36 (2010), 321–62, at p. 327, claims: ‘In antiquity language theory needed no concept of communication at all, and speech was regarded principally as a means to the end of persuasion.’ This rests on a wild overreading of Wilbur Samuel Howell, Eighteenth-­C entury British Logic and Rhetoric (Princeton, 1971), pp. 548–49. The discussions of ambiguity outlined in this chapter, above all that of Aulus Gellius, make no sense without an implicit idea of language as communication. 6  For obscurity in antiquity, see now Ineke Sluiter, ‘Obscurity’, in Canonical Texts and Scholarly Practices: A Global Comparative Approach, eds Anthony Grafton and Glenn Most (Cambridge, 2016), pp. 34–41.

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­ m­bi­guity, from this perspective, is a cause of obscurity: if a speaker says A something that might be taken in one of two ways, then his intention is obscured.7 The semantician and the rhetorician are interested in different things. The first will tell you that bank is ambiguous because it can signify either the side of a river or a place for storing money; the second will tell you that in practice the two are unlikely to be confused, and that what you should really be concerned about is whether the line about banks in your forthcoming lecture is clear to all. The semantician will carefully classify the ways in which language becomes ambiguous, just as the logician will enumerate the faulty syllogisms; the rhetorician just wants to help you be understood. But although they have different aims and interests, they share two fundamental presuppositions: first, that ambiguity is a harmful obstacle to communication—and by extension to truth (in the arena of logic) and justice (in that of forensic rhetoric)—and second, that it can be easily scraped off, because it is a property only of language, not of thought. Deliberate ambiguity occurs only as deceit or in jest—to communicate a false meaning, or wittily to evoke a secondary meaning, without a commitment of the intention.8 Most of this is already implicit in Aristotle. His analysis of ambiguity begins with his picture of meaning as something that mediates between things and thoughts: as he explains in On Interpretation, words are the symbols of mental ‘experience’ (pathēma), which is in turn an image of reality. However, there are an infinite number of things, and therefore of experiences, but only a finite number of words, and so inevitably many individual words will be used to refer to more than one thing.9 The ‘poverty of language’ compared to the plenty of things remained the default explanation of lexical ambiguity in antiquity; as later Roman writers explained, the process by which words were applied to new things occurred by resemblance, that is, essentially by metaphor, and Quintilian noted that the strength of metaphor lay in its capacity to add to the copia (abundance) of language, ensuring that there is a name for everything.10 The necessity of 7  The first is the position of Augustine, on whom see below, pp. 38–39; the second that of Quintilian, on whom, see pp. 37–38. 8  This last point is explored more fully in Chapter Three below. 9  Aristotle, On Interpretation, 16a4–7; Sophistical Refutations, 165a10–17. 10  Seneca, De beneficiis, II.34: ‘cogitaveris plures esse res quam verba’, and Epistolae, 58; Cicero, Ep. ad fam., XVI.17, in Epistulae, ed. W. S. Watt, 4 vols (Oxford, 1958–1982), I, p. 525: ‘cui verbo domicilium est proprium in officio, migrationes in alienum multae’; Aulus Gellius, Noctes atticae, XII.9; Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, VIII.6.4. George Campbell, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776, see n. 79), I, p. 318, would refer specifically to the ‘ambiguity and even penury of all languages in relation to our internal feelings’.

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such a process is obvious: to have a separate word for each thing might make communication clearer, but it would be impossibly cumbersome, and demand the memory of an Ireneo Funes.11 Nevertheless, meaning must not proliferate unduly if communication is to remain possible, as Aristotle argues in the Metaphysics: ‘not to have a single meaning is to have no meaning, and if words have no meaning, then our reasoning with one another, and indeed with ourselves, has been annihilated’.12 To be coherent we must delimit the meanings of our words, especially in philosophical debate, which requires clear definitions without ambiguous elements.13 For this reason Aristotle perceives a grave threat in eristics, that is, the art of refutation deployed by the professional disputers known as sophists, memorably spoofed in Plato’s dialogue Euthydemus. In Aristotle’s treatise On Sophistical Refutations, he sketches the tricks used by sophists to disarm their opponents on fraudulent grounds, and among these are six ‘linguistic’ fallacies, of which the first two, homonymy and amphiboly, are types of verbal ambiguity.14 This pair became canonical in the subsequent literature. The solution to both, whether their presence in a discussion is accidental or deliberate, is what Aristotle calls diairesis or distinction, that is, the explicit clarification of the different meanings involved.15 The two types apply to different semantic units—the word and the sentence. Homonymy (homōnumia, Latin aequivocatio) is the ambiguity of individual words; for instance, Greek kuōn means ‘dog’, but also ‘dog-­fish’, 11  Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Funes el memorioso’, in his Obras completas (Buenos Aires, 1974), p. 489, imagines a man blessed with perfect memory who assigns distinct names not only to every object, but to every perception in time of every object, for the purpose of absolute disambiguation—a total nominalism: ‘Resolvió reducir cada una de sus jornadas pretéritas a unos setenta mil recuerdos, que definiría luego por cifras.’ 12  Aristotle, Metaphysics, ed. W. Jaeger (Oxford, 1957), p. 68 (IV, 1006b7–9): ‘τὸ γὰρ μὴ ἓν σημαίνειν οὐθὲν σημαίνειν ἐστίν, μὴ σημαινόντων δὲ τῶν ὀνομάτων ἀνῄρηται τὸ διαλέγεσθαι πρὸς ἀλλήλους, κατὰ δὲ τὴν ἀλήθειαν καὶ πρὸς αὑτόν’. The translation is that of W. D. Ross, slightly altered for clarity. See also Metaphysics XI, 1062a12–15. 13  Aristotle, On Interpretation, 17a36, Posterior Analytics II.13, 97b25–40, Topics I.18, 108a26–37 and VI.2, 139b19–140a5. 14  Aristotle, Sophistical Refutations, 165b23–166b20, and compare Rhetoric, 1401a. On the first, see Robert Blair Edlow’s introduction to his edition of Galen, De captionibus (Leiden, 1977), pp. 17–31. On Aristotle’s influence on ancient Greek discussions of ambiguity, see Sten Ebbesen, ‘Les Grecs et l’ambiguité’, in L’ambiguïté: cinq études historiques, ed. Irène Rosier (Lille, 1988), pp. 15–32; and on the later reception of the Refutations, see Ebbesen’s monumental Commentators and Commentaries on Aristotle’s Sophistici Elenchi: A Study of Post-­ Aristotelian Ancient and Medieval Writings on Fallacies, I: The Greek Tradition (Leiden, 1981). Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, ed. Robin Robbins, 2 vols (Oxford, 1981), I, p. 22 (I.4), judges that all six fallacies may be reduced to homonymy and amphiboly. 15  Aristotle, Sophistical Refutations, 169a22–b17, 177a9–33.

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‘dog-­star’, and ‘Cynic’.16 This example we might now think of as a case of polysemy rather than homonymy, since it derives from the sense-­extension or reapplication of a single word to multiple referents, based on perceived resemblances or associations, rather than from a convergence in the morphology of different words; thus Liddell and Scott’s Greek dictionary lists these senses under one headword, not several. But Aristotle does not make this distinction. The example was evidently already a cliché, since he does not explain it, and it long remained the stock illustration in the West, due to the handy equivalence of the Latin canis.17 Thus, in a detail from an intricate 1614 print depicting logical method, homonymy is represented by a dog, a (rather badly drawn) fish, and a star.18 Aristotle’s second type of ambiguity, amphiboly (amphibolia; in Latin often amphibologia19), lies in expressions rather than in individual words.20 The most common illustrations rely on the quirk that, in Greek and Latin, oblique discourse (‘I think that X’, ‘I say that X’, etc.) puts both the subject and the object of a proposition into the accusative case, making it impossible to know by grammar alone which is which. Thus in Servius Flavium ferit, we know it is Servius striking Flavius, but Scio Servium Flavium ferire might be either ‘I know that Servius strikes Flavius’ or ‘I know that Flavius strikes Servius’. Aristotle’s example (166a7) is ‘βούλεσθαι λαβεῖν με τούς πολεμίους’, either ‘to wish that I capture the enemy’ or ‘to wish that the enemy capture me’. It is important to underline that this level of analysis is concerned only with the ways in which ambiguity occurs in the structure 16  Aristotle, Categories 1a1–12. At Metaphysics IV, 1003a33–35, Aristotle points to a special type, ‘core-­dependent’ equivocality, which he calls pros hen, ‘with respect to one’. For instance, the word ‘healthy’ can mean ‘possessing health’ (as in ‘a healthy man’) or ‘giving health’ (as in ‘a healthy meal’); the two senses do not share a class but exist ‘with respect to one’, i.e., to health. For a full account of Aristotelian homonymy, see Christopher Shields, Order in Multiplicity: Homonymy in the Philosophy of Aristotle (Oxford, 1999); and for an introduction to the complexity of the term, see Barbara Cassin and Irène Rosier-­Catach, ‘Homonym / Synonym’, in Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, gen. ed. Barbara Cassin (Princeton, 2014), pp. 450–61. 17  E.g., in Seneca, De beneficiis, II.34; and Boethius, In librum de interpretatione Aristotelis minor, II.19–20. 18  On the print, see Susanna Berger, ‘Martin Meurisse’s Garden of Logic’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 76 (2013), 203–249, and see p. 224 for a later engraving that parallels this image. 19  The solecistic form amphibologia appears in some manuscripts of Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, VII.9, as well as in Servius, e.g., at Aeneid, X.124. Despite its use by scrupulous Latinists of the Renaissance—for instance, both Erasmus and his nemesis Marius Nizolius—it was repeatedly scorned by philologists: see, e.g., Henri Estienne, De abusu linguae graecae (Paris, 1563), pp. 80–83. 20  Scott Schreiber, Aristotle and False Reasoning: Language and the World in the Sophistical Refutations (Albany, NY, 2003), pp. 25–231, cautions against understanding amphiboly as syntactic in Aristotle.

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Figure 1.1. Martin Meurisse, Artificiosa totius logices descriptio (Paris, 1614), Brussels, Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, S. IV 86231.

of a sentence, not with the reality of a reader’s doubt or the plausibility of this or that construction.21 The standard example in mediaeval Latin textbooks was an imaginary oracle mentioned by Cicero and others, ‘Aio te Aeacida, Romanos vincere posse’—in slightly artificial English, ‘I tell you, son of Aeacus, that you the Romans shall defeat’, where it is ambiguous who will defeat whom.22 Scholastic logicians constructed syllogisms to illustrate the threat that these ambiguities posed to reasoning, and after 1500 we find such syllogisms in printed commentaries on the Refutations, as for instance the following, in that of the Paduan philosopher Agostino Nifo: Major premise: Whomever I want to capture me, I want them to accept me. Minor premise (with Amphiboly): I want myself the enemy to capture. Conclusion: I want the enemy to accept me.

Here the equivocal minor premise can be read either as ‘I want myself to capture the enemy’ or ‘I want the enemy to capture me’, but the syl­ logism serves to launder out the ambiguity, producing an unequivocal but false conclusion.23 An ambiguity embedded in a logical argument thus yielded an incorrect or even absurd proposition, and it was just these 21  Similar examples of ‘theoretical’ ambiguity, not occasioning real doubt, would be found in Homer by the Alexandrian critics and grammarians; for instance, Iliad V.118, ‘δὸς δέ τέ μ’ ἄνδρα ἑλεῖν’ (‘Let me slay this man’ / ‘Let this man slay me’), mentioned by Apollonius Dyscolus, Περί συντάξεως, III.85 (243a). The triviality of such cases pushed one late antique writer to the extreme position that, against the opinion of the many, there was no ambiguity at all in the ancient poets, since one of the two constructions of a given line would necessarily be absurd: see Ps.-­Hermogenes, De methodo gravitatis, in Invention and Method: Two Rhetorical Treatises from the Hermogenic Corpus, ed. Hugo Rabe, tr. George A. Kennedy (Leiden, 2005), p. 260. On this claim, see also Michel Patillon, Théorie du discours chez Hermogène le rhéteur (Paris, 1985), p. 312. 22  On this oracle, see Anthony Ossa-­Richardson, The Devil’s Tabernacle: The Pagan Oracles in Early Modern Thought (Princeton, 2013), p. 25; and Jackie Elliott, Ennius and the Architecture of the Annales (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 328 and 373–75. 23  Agostino Nifo, Expositiones in libros de sophisticis elenchis Aristotelis (Paris, 1540), fol. 14v. The syllogism is of the first figure, in Darii, that is: Every M is P / Some S are M / Some

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strategies, as deployed by sophists to trick their opponents, against which Aristotle’s book was directed. Aristotle thus defines ambiguity, explains its origin, categorises its varieties, and cautions of its threat to sound philosophy. That threat is extended to oratory in the Rhetoric, where the third of five top tips for good style is to avoid ambiguities, the hallmark of sophists, bogus diviners, and poets with nothing to say; we shall return to this problem in Chapter Three.24 Finally, he offers some cursory remarks in the Poetics (1461a34–5) on resolving ambiguities in ancient poetry, that is, in Homer; these remarks are themselves highly ambiguous, and we shall glance briefly at them in Chapter Five.25 The upshot of Aristotle’s statements is that ambiguity is a fault for the writer or speaker to avoid, and a problem for the reader or hearer to solve. Subsequent Greek logic did not challenge these fundamental premises, but elaborated Aristotle’s typology. Most of the work in this field was undertaken by the Stoics, notably Chrysippus (279–206 BC); Catherine Atherton has studied their contributions in exhaustive detail, and I can only summarise a few strokes of her analysis here.26 A Stoic definition of ambiguity is preserved by Diogenes Laertius: ‘an utterance signifying two or even more things, linguistically, strictly, and in the same usage, so that the several things are understood simultaneously in relation to this utterance’.27 His example is aulētris peptōke, which, given that Ancient Greek did not graphically indicate accents or word-­breaks, is parsable in two ways: ‘The flute-­girl [aulētris] has fallen’, or ‘The house [aulē] has fallen three times [tris]’. The example is worth pausing on; since it represents an ambiguity not of semantic units like words and sentences, but rather of syllables, that is, phonetic and graphic units.28 In two later lists of Stoic categories, this S are P. For a slightly earlier example, see Aristotle, Libri logicorum, ed. Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples (Paris, 1503), fol. 283r. 24  Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1407a39–b2, and see also 1404b37. 25  See Chapter Five below, p. 188, with a quotation of the text, and Chapter Six, p. 250. 26  Catherine Atherton, The Stoics on Ambiguity (Cambridge, 1993); see also Edlow in Galen, De captionibus, pp. 56–68; Ebbesen, Commentators, I, pp. 30–41. Diogenes Laertius, Vitae philosophorum, VII.193, ascribes a Περὶ ἀμφιβολίας (On Amphiboly) to Chrysippus, on whom see further pp. 51–52 below. 27  Diogenes Laertius, Vitae, VII.62: ‘Ἀμφιβολία δέ ἐστι λέξις δύο ἢ καὶ πλείονα πράγματα σημαίνουσα λεκτικῶς καὶ κυρίως καὶ κατὰ τὸ αὐτὸ ἔθος, ὥσθ᾽ ἅμα τὰ πλείονα ἐκδέξασθαι κατὰ ταύτην τὴν λέξιν’. I give Atherton’s translation, slightly adapted. She discusses Diogenes’ definition at length, The Stoics, pp. 135–174. 28  Galen, De captionibus, p. 106; Aelius Theon, Progymnasmata, ed. Michel Patillon (Paris, 1997), pp. 43–45. On Theon, see Atherton, The Stoics, pp. 184–191, with a comparison to Galen at pp. 192–99. On common ambiguity, see Atherton, The Stoics, pp. 220–272, and 228–230 on the problem of speech versus writing. Ebbesen, Commentators, I, p. 184, observes that in Byzantine commentaries on Aristotle, words are considered more as written than as

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type is labelled ‘common’ (koinē) ambiguity. Its rich creative potential is seen everywhere from Sanskrit śleşa poetry to the inventions of Finnegans Wake, not to mention the innumerable quips and mondegreens of popular music.29 It also appears in classical jests, such as that of the brothers Leon and Pantaleon, whose late father’s will reads ‘ἐχέτω τὰ ἐμὰ πάντα λέων’, either ‘Let Leon inherit all [panta] my goods’, or ‘Let Pantaleon inherit my goods’.30 The Stoic typology of ambiguities, which had other peculiar features, did not garner universal support, and some, such as Galen, defended Aristotle’s original typology against it.31 The Stoic discussion remained largely theoretical, focusing on the occurrence of ambiguity in the structure of sentences. Others considered it on a practical level, addressing the conflict between individuals who disagreed on the interpretation of a text; as two rhetoricians put it, ‘controversy is born from ambiguity’.32 In antiquity, the chief setting for this question was the law. A body of legal thought known as status theory aimed to identify the points of conflict in a suit according to a series of criteria, one of which was the ambiguity of its language.33 Here the analysis of ambiguity already established in Greek logic played a decisive rôle, but now the focus had narrowed to cases of actual doubt, rather than merely theoretical examples. We have an instance of this in Hermogenes’s influential treatise On Stases, which imagines an ambiguous statute dictating spoken, and so homographs (e.g., κύων) are considered ambiguous but not homophones, e.g., καινός / κενός, or even ὄρος / ὅρος, whose breathings were written but no longer pronounced. From the point of view of this analysis, it seems extraordinary that Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures (1957: Berlin, 2002), pp. 85–87, should classify phonemic ambiguity (e.g., ‘an aim’ / ‘a name’) as ‘constructional homonymity’ alongside obviously syntactical examples, such as the famous ‘They are flying planes.’ 29  The Sanskrit genre is discussed briefly in Chapter Five below, p. 207. 30  Hermogenes, De statibus, in Opera, ed. Hugo Rabe (Leipzig, 1913), pp. 41–42 (ch. 2); Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, VII.9.6. On the name ‘Pantaleon’, see Debra Nails, The People of Plato: A Prospography of Plato and Other Socratics (Indianapolis, 2002), s.v. ‘Leon of Salamis and Athens’, p. 185. It must be remembered that word spacing did not exist in ancient texts. A similar case is given in Martianus Capella, De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, V.562. Leon and Pantaleon had a rich early modern afterlife as Leon and Cunctaleon (the latter name from Hermogenes’s translator Johannes Sturm): see, e.g., Georg Sabinus, ‘Ad affinem suum Doctorem Christophorum Ionam Regiomontanum’, in his Poemata (Leipzig, 1558), sig. T6v. 31  Galen, De captionibus, pp. 98–102; see also Ebbesen, Commentators, I, pp. 236–239. 32  Ps.-­Cicero, De ratione dicendi ad C. Herennium lib iv, ed. Friedrich Marx, rev. Winfried Trillitzsch (Leipzig, 1964), p. 16 (I.12.20): ‘Ex ambiguo controversia nascitur’. Compare the near-­identical passage in Cicero, De inventione, II.40.116. 33  Atherton, The Stoics, pp. 473–474, noting on p. 497 that some rejected ambiguity from status theory; Uwe Wesel, Rhetorische Statuslehre und Gesetzesauslegung der römischen Juristen (Cologne, 1967), pp. 73–81. On status theory more broadly, see Raymond Nadeau, ‘Classical Systems of Stases in Greek: Hermagoras to Hermogenes’, Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 2 (1959), 53–71.

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the punishment for a prostitute caught wearing pieces of jewellery. The Greek wording of the penalty is given without diacritics as ‘δημοσια εστο’— either ‘they [i.e., the pieces of jewellery] will be made public property’ (δημόσια ἕστο), or ‘she will be made public property’ (δημοσία ἕστο), that is, deprived of her liberty. A woman breaks the law and faces trial: the prosecutor favours the harsher second reading, whereas her defence favours the first. It is the judge’s duty first to identify the ambiguity, by an Aristotelian process of diairesis, and second to resolve it by trying to determine the lawgiver’s intention and by hearing both sides of the case.34 The turn to intention, taking ambiguity as the product not of deliberate sophistry but of an innocent failure of expression, marks a central difference between the eristic and legal contexts, and we shall explore the latter more fully in the next chapter. In the Latin rhetorics of the period—Cicero, Quintilian, and the pseudo-­Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium—the legal setting is paramount; ambiguity is analysed not for disarming fallacies, but almost exclusively for clarifying forensic oratory. The Rhetorica (c. 85 BC), a book over two centuries older than Hermogenes, and one that would remain the standard mediaeval reference on rhetoric, already sketches the outline of a procedure for coping with ambiguity in a written will or statute: If a text is ambiguous because it can be given two or more inter­ pretations, we ought to deal with it as follows. First we should ask if it truly is ambiguous. Then we should show how it would have been written if the writer had wanted it to be interpreted as our op­ ponents do; and then, that our own interpretation is possible, and moreover in accordance with the honourable, with the just, with the law, with custom, with nature, with the good and the fair;35 and that our opponents’ interpretation is not so; and finally that the text is not after all ambiguous, since it is understood which interpretation is correct.36 34  Hermogenes, De statibus, in Opera (as at n. 30), pp. 90–92 (ch. 12); Cicero, De inventione, II.40.118. On this see also D. A. Russell, Greek Declamation (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 69–70. 35  On the phrase ‘the good and the fair’ (bono et aequo), see Max Radin’s charming essay, ‘A Juster Justice, A More Lawful Law’, in Legal Essays in Tribute to Orrin Kip McMurray, ed. Max Radin and Alexander Marsden Kidd (Berkeley, 1935), 537–564, at pp. 547–49. 36  De ratione dicendi ad C. Herennium lib iv, p. 18 (II.11.16):

Si ambiguum esse scriptum putabitur, quod in duas aut plures sententias trahi possit, hoc modo tractandum est: primum, sitne ambiguum, quaerendum est; deinde, quomodo scriptum esset, si id, quod adversarii interpretantur, scriptor fieri voluisset, ostendendum est; deinde id, quod nos interpretemur, et fieri posse, et honeste recte lege more natura bono et aequo fieri posse; quod adversarii in-

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The author goes on to lambast the excessive analysis of ambiguity imported by some rhetoricians from Greek logic, leading to pedantry, overcautiousness, and inarticulacy. This criticism emphasises the disciplinary difference mentioned above: rhetoric deals not with structures of meaning but with practical articulacy and comprehension, and so it does not matter if canis can mean a dog or a star, because in practice these two objects would never be confused. In other words, canis may be ‘ambiguous’ from a logical point of view, but it is not from a rhetorical one, and attention to semiotics distracts us from the real business of understanding one another. It is telling that the author’s example of ambiguity is not linguistic at all— and thus not a member of any of the lists outlined above—but simply a matter of underdetermination: a will leaves the testator’s wife a ‘selected’ quantity of silver, without indicating who will select it.37 Ambiguity is merely that which begets doubt in a text. Cicero’s early De inventione, which uses the same example as the Rhetorica, reaches similar conclusions, pointing to usage, context, and counterfactual expression to identify a testator’s intentions and so to disambiguate a will.38 Cicero parts with the Rhetorica, however, in recommending the study of dialectics, either Aristotelian or Stoic, for (among other purposes) the identification and elimination of ambiguities.39 Here the methods of logic and rhetoric are perceived to work in harmony. A century later, the fullest rhetorical analysis of ambiguity would be given by Quintilian, who offers a mixed system with stock examples in the seventh book of his Institutiones oratoriae, the richest and most systematic of the classical treatises on rhetoric.40 He leaves the reader in no doubt as to the supreme stylistic virtue of perspicuity, and the corresponding vice of obscurity, of which one generator is ambiguity; he rejects grammatical ambiguities even when the sense is obvious, as in hominem librum scribentem, theoretically parsable as either ‘the man writing the book’ or ‘the book writing the man’.41 These are to be avoided because one’s attention is often distracted, especially in terpretentur, ex contrario; nec esse ambigue scriptum, cum intellegatur, utra sententia vera sit. Compare II.9.13–II.10.14 on the ascertaining of intention. 37  Ibid., I.12.20. 38  Cicero, De inventione, II.40.116–II.41.121. 39  De oratore, II.26.110–11, Brutus, 152, and Orator, XXXII.115. Compare Martianus Capella, De nuptiis, V.462, for an outline of Ciceronian status theory, and IV.327 for the connection of dialectics and ambiguity. 40  Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, VII.9. In the view of Atherton, The Stoics, pp. 478–79, this chapter ‘insert[s] a very small number of recognisably Stoic elements into a basically non-­ Stoic framework’. See also VII.6 for Quintilian’s treatment of phrasing and intention, corresponding closely to Cicero. 41  Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, VIII.2.12–22. See however his comments on wit, as dis-

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the oral setting of a court of law, and so we must remain clear at every moment of our speech (VIII.2.23).42 Unlike his forebears, Quintilian goes on to offer stylistic solutions to specific kinds of ambiguity—depending on the problem, one should change an accusative to an ablative in oblique discourse; separate, add, or transpose words; or in speech introduce pauses to indicate semantic divisions. The logical analysis of ambiguity flourished in the Latin writing of patristic era, above all in the work of its two most distinguished philosophers, St Augustine and Boethius. Augustine’s early and unfinished De dialectica, a ‘jumbling’ of Aristotelian logic and Stoic semantics from unknown sources, concludes with the most complex account of ambiguity in Latin antiquity.43 The work contains two major innovations: first, a new distinction between ambiguity and obscurity, and second, the identification of metaphor as a species of ambiguity. According to Augustine, ‘in the ambiguous, several meanings reveal themselves, and we are not sure which should be chosen, but in the obscure, little or nothing appears’.44 He compares ambiguity to a forking path in the forest, and obscurity to a fog which descends over the landscape, a distinction that corresponds to what I identified at the start of this chapter as the logico-­semantic, rather than the rhetorical picture of ambiguity. But then Augustine’s sense of the word seems to turn back to the pragmatic concerns associated with rhetoric: it becomes a state of doubt which can stem from the senses (as when we indistinctly perceive an object) or from the intellect (as when we perceive the object clearly, but due to ignorance cannot identify it). In the rest of cussed in Chapter Three below, p. 101. Cf. George Campbell, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776, see n. 79 below), II, p. 30. 42  The cognitive processing of such temporary (‘garden-­path’) ambiguities has recently been studied in a laboratory setting: see, for instance, Mara Breen and Charles Clifton, Jr., ‘Stress Matters Revisited: A Boundary Change Experiment’, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 66 (2013), 1896–1909; and Alexander Pollatsek, ‘The Role of Sound in Silent Reading’, in The Oxford Handbook of Reading, eds Pollatsek and Rebecca Treiman (Oxford, 2015), 185–201. A typical example is ‘The brilliant abstract the best ideas from the things they read’, in which most subjects initially read brilliant as an adjective and abstract as a noun. 43  Atherton, The Stoics, p. 292. Ebbesen, Commentators, I, pp. 38–39, has a more favourable assessment. 44  Augustine, De dialectica, ed. Jan Pinborg, tr. B. Darrell Jackson (Dordrecht and Boston, 1975), pp. 102–104 (§ 8): ‘Inter ambiguum et obscurum hoc interest, quod in ambiguo plura se ostendunt, quorum quid potius accipiendum sit ignoratur, in obscuro autem nihil aut parum quod adtendatur apparet.’ Manuscripts sometimes ascribed the treatise to the rhetorician Fortunatianus (see pp. 16–17 of the Pinborg edition), who is thus occasionally given as the author of the definition, as in Johannes Kahl, Lexicon juridicum juris Caesarei simul et canonici (Cologne, 1622), p. 63a, s.v. ‘ambigere’. By contrast, Fortunatianus, Ars rhetorica, in Rhetores latini minores, ed. Karl Halm (Leipzig, 1863), pp. 99–100, is a summary of ambiguity in legal status theory.

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this section (§ 9), he seems to think of ambiguity as a word or phrase uttered without context and thus able to refer to an infinite number of things. Therefore, he proceeds, ‘the logicians rightly say that every word is ambiguous’, that is, taken individually, not as elements of a coherent discourse.45 In the following section (§ 10) appears a novel typology of the ways in which a word can have two meanings, unattested elsewhere in classical sources. The most striking feature of this typology is its combination of logical and grammatical factors, since some of its ‘ambiguities’ pertain to modes of reference and others to morphology in language, with no sense of the fundamental difference between them. (By contrast, Augustine does acknowledge the separateness of graphic factors, which he classes under ‘written’ ambiguities.) Thus equivocal words are divided into the classes ab arte, ‘by art’, and ab usu, ‘by usage’ (as well as ab utroque, ‘by both’).46 The first corresponds to what has since been called autonymy or self-­referentiality—‘gold’ can refer to gold, but also to the word gold itself, hence the two types of statement, ‘gold is a metal’, and ‘gold is a mono­syllable’.47 The second class, ab usu, includes homonyms in the usual sense, when two words are unrelated (‘different origin’), and figurative sense-­extension (translatio), here chiefly metonymy and synecdoche: ‘Tullius’ referring to a person, his statue, his body, and his works, ‘verba’ meaning both words and verbs, and so on. Augustine concludes: ‘you see how much ambiguity it [i.e., translatio] causes in words.’48 Whereas autonyms and metaphors can be ambiguous because of how they refer, other ambiguities arise from coincidences of linguistic form, such as when inflected forms are the same (nominative canis and genitive canis), or when different parts of speech overlap (canis, ‘dog’, and canis, ‘you sing’). Below I indicate the latter ambiguities by underlining, although, as I have said, Augustine does not make the distinction: 45  Augustine, De dialectica, p. 106 (§ 9): ‘Itaque rectissime a dialecticis dictum est ambiguum esse omne verbum.’ On this statement, see below, p. 51. 46  The equivoca are distinguished here from the univoca (= Aristotle’s synōnyma), which are items denoted by the same word insofar as they are members of the same class: thus, for instance, both birds or rabbits may be called ‘animals’. I have excluded them from discussion because we would not normally think of them as ambiguous; they are, however, illustrated in a nearby detail of the 1614 engraving reproduced above. 47  Atherton, The Stoics, pp. 289–298; and compare Augustine, De magistro, 20: ‘nullum nos signum comperisse quod non inter cetera quae significat, se quoque significet’. It is this property that gives rise to what analytical philosophers now refer to as the ‘use-­mention’ distinction. It should also be remembered that classical scripts did not distinguish use from mention by graphic devices such as quotation marks or italics. 48  Augustine, De dialectica, pp. 116–18 (§ 10): ‘Vides ut arbitror, quam faciat in verbis ambiguitatem.’

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AMBIGUITAS SPOKEN

WRITTEN

UNIVOCAL EQUIVOCAL ‘BY ART’ [=AUTONYMY]

OF QUANTITY OF ACCENT

OF BOTH

‘BY USAGE’ BY BOTH

SAME ORIGIN [= POLYSEMY] DIFFERENT ORIGIN [=HOMONYMY] TRANSLATIO

INFLECTION

SAME DIFFERENT LANGUAGE LANGUAGE SAME PART OF SPEECH

DIFFERENT PART OF SPEECH

Figure 1.2. The Augustinian Tree of Ambiguity, De dialectica, § 9–10.

As we have seen, the notion of figurative sense-extension was implicit in the Aristotelian observation that there were necessarily fewer words than things, and Roman rhetoric made this point explicit. But De dialectica is, to my knowledge, the first extant text formally to classify figurative language as a species of ambiguity. A century later, the Roman philosopher Boethius, in his commentary on Aristotle’s Categories, widely read by students of logic throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance, would make a similar observation, using the example of the living man and his portrait: ‘whenever there isn’t a word for a given thing, and so a word is borrowed from something else, then this translatio will possess an equivocal quality’.49 Boethius asserts that Aristotle did not mention this kind of ambiguity. But later logicians connected his insight with a mysterious comment in Aristotle’s Refutations (166b), referring to ambiguity produced by ‘custom’, that is, customary usage.50 Thus ‘neck’ customarily refers to the narrow end of a bottle, and so is ambiguous in having both literal and figurative applications.51 This remained a commonplace among humanist readers of Aristotle in the sixteenth century, who could illustrate the point using 49  Boethius, In Categorias, in PL LXIV.167: ‘quoties res quidem vocabulo eget, ab alia vero re quae vocabulum sumit, tunc ista translatio aequivocationis retinet proprietatem’. On this see François Desbordes, ‘Homonymie et synonymie d’après les textes théoriques latins’, in L’Ambiguïté, ed. Rosier, 51–102, at pp. 66–67. 50  Aristotle does not give an example of this, though one would be supplied by the Byzantine commentary of Ps-­Alexander of Aphrodisias, In Aristotelis Sophisticos elenchos commentarium, ed. M. Walles (Berlin, 1898), p. 28. The text is now ascribed to Michael of Ephesus (c. 1150); see Ebbesen, Commentators, I, pp. 268–85. 51  Irène Rosier, ‘Évolution des notions d’equivocatio et univocatio au XIIe siècle’, in L’Ambiguïté, ed. Rosier, 103–66, at pp. 111–17; E. Jennifer Ashworth, ‘Being and Analogy’,

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Erasmus’s recently published Adages.52 Hobbes, later, would be much more succinct and absolute, needing no Aristotelian apparatus: ‘all metaphors are (by profession) equivocal’.53 The insight is perhaps an obvious one, and has been the basis of much juvenile comedy, from the scatologies of Till Eulenspiegel—whose jokes, as Goethe noted, often depend on its hero deliberately mistaking metaphorical requests or commands for literal ones—to the 1960s children’s series, Amelia Bedelia.54 Nonetheless, the connection is important and potentially troubling, for figurative language is the basis of poetry, and if the one is intrinsically ambiguous, then so is the other. This implication was not lost on humanists. The Parisian professor Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples, whose 1503 edition of Aristotle’s logical works was among the most widely read in the Renaissance, thought up an exchange to illustrate the problem in his commentary on Soph. El. 166a16: Are gems [gemmae] not precious stones? Yes. What—are there really precious stones on shoots? No. But Vergil writes: ‘. . . now comes the sweltering summer, / now buds [gemmae] swell on the jolly shoot’. Therefore there are precious stones on the shoot.55

Essentially the same thought motivates Empson’s definition of metaphor as ‘the simplest type of ambiguity’, a move that irritated many of his readers, such as the Marxist critic Edwin Berry Burgum, who found ‘no little pretentiousness in twisting ambiguity to mean metaphor’.56 The validity in A Companion to Walter Burley, ed. Alessandro Conti (Leiden, 2013), 135–166, at pp. 148–152. 52  Ulrich Zasius, In M. T. Ciceronis Rhetoricam ad Herennium enarratio (Basel, 1537), p. 186; Agostino Nifo, Expositiones, fol. 15v; Johannes Herbetius, De oratore libri v. (Paris, 1574), fols 28r–29r. The standard Erasmian examples were littus arare (Adage I.4.51), meaning ‘to labour in vain’, and lupus in fabula (Adage IV.5.50), meaning something like ‘Speak of the devil!’. 53  Thomas Hobbes, The Elements of Law Natural and Politic, ed. Ferdinand Tönnies (London, 1889), p. 20 (V.7). On the apparent contradiction between Hobbes’s stated hostility to metaphor and his liberal use thereof, see Bryan Garsten, Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment (Cambridge, MA, 2006), pp. 25–54. Compare Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, I, p. 24 (I.4), classing with the fallacy of ambiguity ‘all deductions from metaphors, parables, allegories, unto reall and rigid interpretations’. 54  J. W. von Goethe, Maximen und Reflexionen, in his Sämtliche Werke, 30 vols (Stuttgart and Tübingen, 1850), IV, p. 236: ‘Eulenspiegel. Alle Hauptspäße des Buches beruhen darauf, daß alle Menschen figürlich sprechen und Eulenspiegel es eigentlich nimmt.’ 55  Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples, in Aristotle, Libri logicorum, ed. Lefèvre, fol. 282r: ‘sunt ne gemme preciosi lapilli? sic. quid: nunquid in palmitibus preciosi lapilli? non. assumitur. attamen virgilius inquit. / Solsticium pecori defendite: iam venit estas / Torrida iam leto turgent in palmite gemme. Sunt igitur in palmite preciosi lapilli.’ The couplet is Eclogues VII.47–48, and the example of gemma originates with Quintilian, Inst. or., VIII.6.6. 56  STA, p. 2; Edwin Berry Burgum, ‘The Cult of the Complex in Poetry’, Science and Society 15 (1951), 31–48, at p. 33. John Crowe Ransom, The New Criticism (Norfolk, CT, [1941]), pp. 121–31, focuses on this aspect.

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of seeing metaphor as a species of ambiguity may be debated, but it was indeed a key tenet of Seven Types, and the idea goes back at least to Augustine and Boethius, perhaps even to Aristotle. De dialectica was widely read in mediaeval classrooms, and would interest early humanists in the circle of Guarino of Verona.57 Mediaeval students imbibed the Greek analysis of ambiguity via Boethius, who summarised it, with both novel and traditional illustrations, in his treatise De divisione (c. 515–520), later the object of commentaries by such stars as Peter Abelard and Albertus Magnus.58 Boethius categorises ambiguity as either aequivocatio or amphibolia, and notes procedures used to distinguish homonyms (by gender, by case and number, by accent, and by orthography) and amphibolies (restating accusative constructions). Perhaps his most important contribution is his distinction between ambiguity, in which two or more distinct meanings may be understood ‘rationally’ (rationabiliter), and vagueness, in which meaning is simply underdetermined and potentially infinite, as in the phrase da mihi: ‘When I say “give to me”, no hearer understands from the words themselves what ought to be given, for he will guess at what I did not say, rather than perceiving it clearly.’59 Subsequent logicians, armed with Augustine and Boethius, could thus distinguish ambiguity from obscurity on the one hand and from vagueness on the other, all three being distinct from clarity or simplicity, which functions as a golden mean: obscurity———clarity————ambiguity————vagueness (no meaning) (one meaning) (plural meanings) (infinite meanings) Late antiquity also offered another kind of response to ambiguity, namely, lexicography, well suited to the pedagogical setting described by Robert Kaster.60 In addition to standard word-­lists and lexica appeared alphabetical collections of homonyms and synonyms—let us call them ‘distinctionaries’—in both Greek, such as those attributed to Ammonius and John Philoponus, and Latin, in the treatise wrongly ascribed to the 57  For its reception, see the introduction in Augustine, De dialectica, pp. 6–11 and 18–22. 58  Boethius, De divisione liber, ed. John Magee (Leiden, 1998); for an extensive discussion of dating, sources (chiefly the Prolegomena to Porphyry’s commentary on Plato’s Sophist) and transmission, see the introduction. 59  Boethius, De divisione, p. 44: ‘Cum autem dico “da mihi” quid dare debeat nullus ex ipsis sermonibus rationabiliter auditor intellegit, quod enim ego non dixi ille potius suspicabitur quam aliqua ratione id quod a me prolatum non est perspicaciter videat.’ 60  Robert Kaster, Guardians of Language: The Grammarian and Society in Late Antiquity (Berkeley, 1997).

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Roman grammarian Cornelius Fronto.61 These contained groups of words of similar form or similar meaning, concisely explaining the difference between each: they were not, like Roget’s, aids to elegant variation, but prophylactics against error. The genre was not restricted to the West—the Chinese Mozi, from the fourth century BC, had opened with a similar list— and its principle could easily be applied to new contexts, as with the collection of scriptural homonyms in Moses Maimonides’s famous Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190).62 Such lists were evidently a useful resource as the simplest and least theorised defence against potential ambiguity.63 Humanism: Revi val and Survival Ambiguity was thus, by the end of antiquity, a trivial fault—a fault of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. The material covered so far has in common, besides its roots in Aristotle, an abstract approach to language, illustrating ambiguity with confected examples, or occasionally with lines from Homer shorn of context. The aim of such discussions is to warn against ambiguity, to classify it, and to offer modes of resolving it. But the classifications do scant justice to the variety and subtlety of ambiguity in actual texts, nor do such modes of resolution match the real work of interpretation. There is in this a sort of squeamishness or germophobia about language and meaning, but such models proved comforting to readers of later ages. Much of the mediaeval discourse on the subject came in the form of commentaries on Aristotle and Boethius from the twelfth century onwards, preserved 61  Ammonius, De adfinium vocabulorum differentia, ed. Klaus Nickau (Leipzig, 1966); John Philoponus, De vocabulis quae diversum significatum exhibent secundum differentiam accentus, ed. Lloyd W. Daly (Philadelphia, 1983). See also another text related to Ammonius, namely Herennius Philo, De differentia significationis, ed. Vincenzo Palmieri, Revue d’histoire des textes 11 (1981), 47–80; and, on these, Eleanor Dickey, Ancient Greek Scholarship (Oxford, 2007), pp. 94–96. [Ps.-­]Cornelius Fronto, De vocabulorum differentiis, in Reliquiae, ed. Angelo Mai et al. (Berlin, 1816), pp. 272–86. In this category we may also include the extant fragments of Orus of Alexandria’s Πέρι πολυσήμαντων λεχέων: for a specimen and discussion, see Richard Reitzenstein, Geschichte der griechischen Etymologika (Leipzig, 1897), pp. 335–48. 62  The Mozi, ed. and tr. Ian Johnston (New York, 2010), A76–B12; and on this see Joseph Needham and Christoph Harbsmeier, Science and Civilisation in China, VII.1: Language and Logic, ed. Kenneth Robinson (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 233–34; Moses Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed, tr. M. Friedlander, 2nd ed. (London, 1904), I.1–30 and I.37–45. Mediaeval grammarians continued to compile distinctionaries, often in verse: see, for instance, Serlo of Wilton, Versus de differenciis, in Tony Hunt, Teaching and Learning Latin in 13th-­Century England, I: Texts (Cambridge, 1991), 128–35; or the collections of synonyms and homonyms ascribed to John of Garland, on which see Hunt, Teaching and Learning, pp. 136–143. 63  On school usage, see, e.g., Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth-­and Sixteenth-­century Europe (London, 1986), p. 12.

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Figure 1.3. Aristotle, Sophistical Refutations, 165b23–166a13, in Boethius’s translation, with scholia. British Library, MS Harley 3272 (early fourteenth century), fol. 122r.

in manyhanded manuscripts dense with brackish glosses, scholia, and commentary (see Figure 1.3).64 Some of the scholia on the Sophistical Refutations turned out to be translated excerpts from Galen on the fallacies.65 64  On the manuscript scholia and commentaries, see Sten Ebbesen, ‘Medieval Latin Glosses and Commentaries on Aristotelian Logical Texts of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries’, in Glosses and Commentaries on Aristotelian Logical Texts, ed. Charles Burnett (London, 1993), pp. 129–73. 65  Ebbesen, Commentators, I, pp. 236–37, and III, p. 2.

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There were also innovations. For instance, mediaeval logicians devised a new vocabulary for the referential ambiguities exhibited in Augustine’s De dialectica, by distinguishing between the modes of reference in words taken individually (‘signification’) and in their use in utterances (‘supposition’). A word by itself signifies a thing directly, but the supposition of an uttered word can be ‘improper’, i.e., by what Augustine called translatio, encompassing metaphor and metonymy; ‘simple’, if it refers not to the thing but to the concept of it, as in ‘A man is a rational animal’; or ‘material’, referring to the word itself, i.e., by autonymy. In more complex logics, these modes were further subdivided.66 The humanist Renaissance turned away from such subtleties, favouring instead a return to the broad categories of the ancient language arts. There was no particular innovation in the schoolroom on ambiguity: Aristotle and Quintilian would be recycled and glossed in innumerable Latin textbooks of logic and rhetoric—by authors ranging from the prominent Lutheran theologian Philipp Melanchthon to the late Cartesian philosopher Antoine le Grand—as well as in other works of a pedagogical flavour, such as Erasmus’s Colloquies.67 The most important textbook treatment of the period, the Commentaria rhetorica of Gerardus Joannes Vossius, will be studied separately in Chapter Five.68 Most early modern analysis of ambiguity was deeply derivative. Few could be bothered even to think up new examples to illustrate the old models, but here and there are found images relevant to a Christian audience; Melanchthon, for instance, in his catechistical treatment of the Sophistical Refutations, redescribed a number of heretical doctrines as fallacious syllogisms grounded in ambiguity.69 Catholics, too, could denounce For a standard, and extremely clear, primary source, see Peter of Spain, Tractatus, ed. Lambert Marie de Rijk (Assen, 1972), pp. 79–83 (VI.1–9). For an overview, see Catarina Dutilh Novaes, ‘Medieval Theories of Supposition’, in Encyclopedia of Medieval Philosophy, ed. H. Lagerlund (Berlin, 2011), pp. 1229–36; and on the relationship between ancient fallacy theory and supposition theory, see eadem, ‘Theory of Supposition vs. Theory of Fallacies in Ockham’, Vivarium 45 (2007), 343–59. On ambiguity in mediaeval logic generally, see the chapters by Françoise Desbordes and Irène Rosier in L’ambiguïté, ed. Rosier, and the edited commentaries in ‘Texts on Equivocation, Part I: ca. 1130–ca. 1270’, ed. Sten Ebbesen, Cahiers de l’institut du moyen-­age grec et latin 67 (1997), 127–99; and ‘Part II: ca. 1250–1310’, Cahiers, 68 (1998), 99–307. 67  Petrus Mosellanus, Tabulae de schematibus et tropis (1516: Nuremberg, 1546), sigs A7v– 8r; Philipp Melanchthon, Erotemata dialectices (Frankfurt, 1547), fols 168r–176v, and his Elementa rhetorices, comm. Martin Crusius (Basel, 1582), pp. 200–203; Erasmus, ‘Convivium Poeticum’, in EOO I.3, pp. 353–356; Cyprian Soarez, De arte rhetorica libri tres (Coimbra, 1562), fol. 37v; Bartholomaeus Keckermann, Systema logicae minus succincto praeceptorum compendio tribus libris (Hanover, 1612), pp. 452–462; Antoine le Grand, Institutio philosophiae secundum principia Renati Descartes (Nuremberg, 1683), I.19.9. 68  See Chapter Five below, pp. 198–201. 69  Melanchthon, Erotemata dialectices, fol. 170v. Compare Johann Wigand, Manichaeismus renovatus (Leipzig, 1587), pp. 333–335. 66 

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sophistry among their peers. In his 1537 commentary on the Rhetorica ad Herennium, the jurist Ulrich Zasius illustrated the fallacy of equivocation with a story from Erasmus, who had heard it from John Colet. At a theological convocation, one of the severer delegates had argued for the capital punishment of heretics by pointing to Titus 3:10, ‘A man that is an heretic, after the first and second admonition, reject’—in the Vulgate, ‘haereticum hominem . . . devita’. The last word, insisted the delegate, should be read ‘de vita’, that is, ‘[remove] from life’.70 It is scarcely credible that such an argument had been made in earnest, but the anecdote, touted around Erasmus’s circle and later peddled by numberless gobbetmongers, afforded much anticlerical mirth. On a more serious note, scholars began to appreciate that political and religious authority had been cemented, and could now be contested, in the hermeneutic spaces opened up by accidental ambiguities. Nobody expressed this so forcefully, and with such startling modernity, as the royalist theologian and mathematician Isaac Barrow, in a treatise printed posthumously in 1680: Ambiguity of words (as it causeth many debates, so) yieldeth much advantage to the foundation and amplification of power: for whatever is said of it, will be interpreted in favour of it, and will afford colour to its pretences. Words innocently or carelesly used are by interpretation extended to signifie great matters, or what you please.71

In later chapters of this book we will see just how far interpretation, relying on ambiguities, served to justify claims to authority in a variety of settings, from law to theology and literature—though to see this we need only turn on the news.72 Of course, ambiguity also continued to trouble the educational settings sketched above, and here and there we find expansions and elaborations of ancient work. New systems of classification were proposed: one Leipzig disputation pamphlet runs to sixteen types of ambiguity, with examples of each.73 In a similar vein, lexicographers began to produce much richer distinctionaries than those available to antiquity. The most successful was the De differentiis verborum by the obscure Frisian classicist Ausonius (or Aesge van) Popma, first published in 1606 and reprinted continually until the nineteenth century—Giambattista Vico would recom70  Zasius, In M. T. Ciceronis Rhetoricam, pp. 186–187, probably drawing on Erasmus, Encomium Moriae, in EOO IV.3, p. 186. 71  Isaac Barrow, A Treatise of the Pope’s Supremacy (London, 1680), p. 264. 72  See, most topically, Michael Wolff, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House (London, 2018), pp. 115–16 on Steve Bannon’s agenda-­dictating hermeneutics—in the form of ‘improbably close textual analysis’—of the president’s ramblings, and compare p. 70 for Trump himself as the deranged, ambiguous Delphic oracle. 73  Gottfried Lange (pr.), Disputatio de aequivoce dictis (Leipzig, 1697), sigs B2v–C2v (§§15–30).

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mend it to students alongside the works of Valla and Vossius. The vernaculars had their own examples.74 Such books were fodder for doggerelists and punsters such as Antoine du Verdier, whose Oulipian poem Les omonimes (1572) plays restlessly with homophones (‘La mort vint par peché sur les enfans d’Adam  / Generalement nez pour soubmis estre à dam.’)75 Thomas Sheridan would later advise budding punophiles to ‘every Day of their Lives repeat six synonimous Words, or Words like in Sound, before they be allow’d to sit down to Dinner’, giving examples such as ‘Assent, Ascent’ and ‘A Lass, Alass’.76 Rhetoric, too, analysed ambiguity with increasing sophistication. Brief treatments are found in the English handbooks of the mid-­sixteenth century, largely conventional in content.77 But the problem took centre stage in the later eighteenth century, when rhetoric and prose composition enjoyed a surge of interest in England, on the back of the popularity of earlier French writers such as Nicolas Boileau, Bernard Lamy, and Dominique Bouhours.78 Ambiguity recurs as a danger of composition in all the major works of this movement: John Ward’s Gresham lectures, printed as 74  Editions of Popma’s book, printed in Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands, are too numerous to list. Giambattista Vico, Institutiones oratoriae, ed. and tr. Giuliano Crifò (Naples, 1989), p. 252, cites Popma alongside Valla’s Elegantiae and G. J. Vossius’s Etymologicon. For other early modern distinctionaries see, on Greek, Jonas Höcker, Clavis philosophica (Frankfurt am Main, 1613); on Latin, Joannes Demarethus, Paronomasia et discriminale lexicon (Paris, 1536); and Henry Edmundson, Συν Θεω: Homonyma et synonyma linguæ Latinae conjuncta et distincta (Oxford, 1661), containing ‘jocoserious epigrams’ to aid the memory; on English, Richard Hodges, A Special Help to Orthographie: Or, The True-­Writing of English (London, 1643); and T[homas] W[illis], Proteus Vinctus, sive Aequivoca sermonis anglicani ordine alphabetico digesta et Latine reddita (London, 1655), differentiating homonyms (and idiomatic usages) against Latin; and on French, Pierre de la Noue, Synonyma et aequivoca gallica (Lyon, 1618); and Hieronymus Ambrosius Langenmantel, Anatomia orthographiae linguae gallicae (Augsburg, 1668). None of these works keeps to a strict definition of the homonym or synonym. 75  Antoine du Verdier, Les omonimes: satyre des moeurs corrompues (Lyon, 1572), fol. 4r. The Victorian critic and novelist Sir Walter Besant was not impressed, asking in his The French Humourists: From the Twelfth to the Nineteenth Century (London, 1873), p. 159: ‘Could not something penal be done with writers such as these? A year’s solitary imprisonment, for instance, with Du Verdier as sole companion, would be disagreeable enough to deter from any crime.’ For an earlier example of the vers équivoques genre, see Clément Marot, ‘Petite Epistre au Roy’, in L’adolescence clémentine (Antwerp, [1536?]), fol. 41v. 76  ‘Tom Pun-­Sibi’ [= Thomas Sheridan], Ars Pun-­ica sive Flos Linguarum, 2nd ed. (Dublin, 1719), p. xiii. 77  Richard Sherry, A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes (London, 1550), sig. C1r; Thomas Wilson, The Rule of Reason, conteinyng the Arte of Logique (London, 1553), fol. 66r–v; Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (London, 1577), sig. G1r–v; George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy (1589), ed. Frank Whigham and Wayne Rebhorn (Ithaca, NY, 2007), pp. 345–46. 78  On the analysis and critique of ambiguity in French neoclassical rhetoric, see Jacques Dürrenmatt, Le vertige du vague: les romantiques face à l’ambiguïté (Paris, 2001), pp. 21–37.

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A System of Oratory, Lord Kames’s Elements of Criticism, George Campbell’s Philosophy of Rhetoric, Joseph Priestley’s Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism, Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric, and later John Quincy Adams’s Harvard Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory, Alexander Jamieson’s widely reprinted A Grammar of Rhetoric, strictly derivative of Campbell and Blair, and finally Richard Whately’s Elements of Rhetoric.79 As with the French critics before them, all began with the cardinal virtue of perspicuity: ‘If it should be doubted whether perspicuity be a positive beauty’, intoned Kames, ‘it cannot be doubted that the want of it is the greatest defect.’80 Some carefully distinguished ambiguity from obscurity, others were less fussed about it, but all, in one way or another, identified ambiguity as the prime enemy of perspicuity—that is, unintentional ambiguity, which Campbell and Blair made a special point of opposing to deliberate ‘equivocation’, a word long tainted by association with the Jesuits.81 Most maintained a division between lexical and syntactic ambiguity, and most went on to detail specific instances of ambiguous phrasing and grammar, with illustrations from literature and suggestions on how to rephrase; typical examples include ‘the love of God’82 (Rom. 8.39), conjunctive vs. disjunctive ‘or’, active vs. passive force in nouns (‘consumption’) and adjectives (‘mortal’), misplaced ‘only’, the ambiguity of pronominal reference, ‘not the least’, and poetic sequence, as in Pope’s ‘The rising tomb a lofty column bore’.83 Campbell introduced into the English tradition a new type of ambiguity taken from César Chesneau Dumarsais’s 1730 Traité des tropes: namely, the construction louche or ‘squinting construction’, in which 79  John Ward, A System of Oratory, 2 vols (London, 1759), I, pp. 327–329; Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism, 2 vols (Dublin, 1762), II, pp. 16–17, 43–46; George Campbell, Philosophy of Rhetoric, 2 vols (London, 1776), II, pp. 27–65; Joseph Priestley, A Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism (London, 1777), pp. 281–82; Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric, 3 vols (Dublin, 1783), I, pp. 238, 248–55; John Quincy Adams, Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA, 1810), II, pp. 177–79; Alexander Jamieson, A Grammar of Rhetoric (1818: New Haven, 1820), pp. 107–14; Richard Whately, Elements of Rhetoric, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1828), pp. 45–49. On this rhetorical tradition, see Howell, Eighteenth-­Century British Logic and Rhetoric. A close equivalent can be found in contemporary Germany, above all in the work of Johann Christoph Gottsched, on which see Eric Blackall, The Emergence of German as a Literary Language, 2nd ed. (Ithaca, NY, 1973), pp. 151–58. On a comparable position in eighteenth-­ century English views of painting, see John Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt: The Body of the Public (New Haven, 1986), pp. 31–32, 99–111. 80  See F. W. Bateson, English Poetry and the English Language, 3rd ed. (Oxford, 1973), pp. 42–5 on the Augustan doctrine of perspicuity in relation to the history of English literature. On seventeenth-­century France, see Alain Faudemay, Le clair et l’obscur à l’Âge classique (Geneva, 2001), pp. 121–26. 81  On the latter, see Chapter Three, pp. 116–21. 82  Long a stock example in Latin: see, e.g., Johannes Despauterius, Syntaxis, 3rd ed. (Cologne, 1527), p. 64. 83  Homer, The Odyssey, tr. Alexander Pope, XII.21, in TP IX, p. 430.

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a word or line can agree with either the preceding or the following clause.84 The examples given by Dumarsais and Campbell are tedious, but James Beattie would later find a superb specimen in Joseph Addison’s influential 1713 tragedy Cato (I.1.48–51): The ways of heaven are dark and intricate, Puzzled in mazes, and perplex’d with errors: Our understanding traces them in vain, Lost and bewilder’d in the fruitless search. . . .

The atheist Empson would have gone to town on the ambiguous agreement of the second line,85 but Beattie only complains about the punctuation—surely, he says, it is ‘our understanding’ and not the ‘ways of heaven’ that is puzzled and perplexed, and so the stop ought to go after ‘intricate’.86 We might see in the line instead an ambiguity about ambiguity itself, that is, a confusion between subject and object, corresponding to the ‘doubtful plain’ found in Pope’s contemporary Iliad.87 Other English rhetorics varied in their focus. Whately tended towards logic, with a Humean flavour to his analysis of the causal ambiguity in terms like ‘because’ and ‘therefore’. Kames took a more literary approach, listing examples from Livy, Horace, and Vergil, and concluding in a later edition: I am in greater pain about the foregoing passages than about any I have ventured to criticise, being aware that a vague or obscure expression is apt to gain favour with those who neglect to examine it with a critical eye. To some it carries the sense that they relish the most: and by suggesting various meanings at once, it is admired by others as concise and comprehensive. . . . 88

The vagueness of ‘some’ and ‘others’ is a gentlemanly discretion. Christopher Ricks, noting the passage, has imagined the existence of ‘unnamed 84  Dumarsais, Traité des tropes, ed. Fontanier, I, pp. 283–84; on equivocal constructions, see more broadly pp. 281–88, and Fontanier’s commentary at II, pp. 320–24, drawing on Nicolas Beauzée. In English see Campbell, Philosophy of Rhetoric, II, pp. 64–65. Empson treats squinting constructions (without that term) at STA, pp. 50–53. 85  Compare STA, pp. 203–4. 86  James Beattie, ‘The Theory of Language’, in his Dissertations Moral and Critical (London, 1783), p. 470. The London 1730 edition of Cato, p. 18, punctuates as Beattie wants. As this example nicely illustrates, the concept of the squinting construction is another way of talking about the ambiguity of punctuation, on which many jokes have been based: see, e.g., S. H. B., ‘A Lie and a Falsehood’, The Pocket Magazine of Classic and Polite Literature, 9 (1822), 267–274, at p. 270. Compare also the more serious dramatic example from Romeo and Juliet discussed in Chapter Three below, p. 112. 87  See Chapter Six below, pp. 258–59. 88  Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism, 2 vols, 4th ed. (Edinburgh, 1769), II, pp. 21–22.

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proto-­Empsons who praised ambiguity’; I will suggest an identification in Chapter Seven, looking not to rhetoric or literary criticism but to theology.89 Eventually, the rhetorical tradition of Kames and Campbell would lead in the late nineteenth century to popular usage manuals and style guides, and among these the crown was taken by the Fowlers’ The King’s English (1906), which, predictably enough, includes a section on the avoidance of ambiguity.90 Kingdoms prospered and fell, languages flourished and fizzled, republics became empires, God became flesh, wars unravelled the known world, paper was invented, then printing, America was discovered, the fields were enclosed, the steam engine, God died, and at the end of it the Fowlers seemed to have just the same view of meaning and ambiguity as Aristotle. What was it all for? Semantics: Paradox and Utopia Ambiguity, alas, seems to be manifested everywhere in the langue—but there, in the common early modern picture, it remains, extending neither to the will nor to the understanding, and only occasionally infecting parole. Given that our thoughts are unequivocal, if there could be a language without words, perhaps it would be unambiguous: we see this possibility, for instance, in mediaeval analyses of the ‘language’ of angels,91 and in later curiosity about expressive gesture and sign-­language.92 The demarcation of ambiguity from thought was dramatised earlier by the second-­ century Roman letterato Aulus Gellius, in a short chapter of his Attic Nights, a bowl of mixed dragées much fingered in the Renaissance.93 That chapter runs in full: 89  Christopher Ricks, ‘William Empson 1906–1984’ (obituary), in CEE, pp. 540–55, at p. 544. See Chapter Seven below, p. 301. 90  H. W. and F. G. Fowler, The King’s English (Oxford, 1906), pp. 265, 345–48. For an insightful and amusing critique of the emphasis on ‘clarity’ in modern style manuals, see Richard A. Lanham, Style: An Anti-­Textbook (1974: Philadelphia, 2007), pp. 37–69. 91  The question of the ambiguity of angelic language is admittedly difficult: see Catarina Dutilh Novaes, ‘Ockham on Supposition Theory, Mental Language, and Angelic Communication’, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 86 (2012), 415–34. The modern equivalent of unambiguous angelic language is telepathy, for which see, entertainingly, Isaac Asimov, Second Foundation (1953: New York, 2004), pp. 99–100. 92  On expressive gesture, see Nicolas Malebranche, Traité de morale, 2 vols (Rotterdam, 1684), II, pp. 184–86 (XXV.10–11), and compare Sophia Rosenfeld, A Revolution in Language: The Problem of Signs in Late Eighteenth-­Century France (Stanford, 2003), pp. 13–14, on a later philosophical romance expressing the same idea. For an interesting case-­study of ambiguity in an artificial sign-­language, see Robert Barakat, ‘On Ambiguity in the Cistercian Sign Language’, Sign Language Studies 8 (1975), 275–89. 93  For a list of editions see Leofranc Holford-­Strevens, Aulus Gellius: An Antonine Scholar and his-­Achievement (Oxford, 2003), pp. 337–40.

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That the philosopher Chrysippus says that every word is ambiguous and doubtful, whereas Diodorus, on the contrary, thinks that no word is ambiguous. Chrysippus asserts that every word is ambiguous by nature, since two or more things may be understood from the same word.94 But Diodorus Cronus says: ‘No word is ambiguous, and no one speaks or experiences a word in two senses; and it ought not to seem to be said in any other sense than that which the speaker feels that he is giving it. But,’ he says, ‘when I meant one thing and you have understood another, it may seem that I have spoken obscurely rather than ambiguously; for the nature of an ambiguous word should be such that he who speaks it expresses two or more meanings. But no man expresses two meanings who has felt that he is expressing but one.’95

Classicists have often focused on this passage as a dim witness to the great Stoic thinker Chrysippus, whose Greek they attempt to reconstruct behind the Latin, and whose view they can resituate against other fragments of his work; Diodorus, no great shakes in the canon of ancient philosophy, gets short shrift by comparison. At first glance Chrysippus seems to mean simply that words have multiple senses out of context: roughly what Cicero meant when he remarked that ‘all or most words, if considered separately by themselves, would seem ambiguous’.96 But Atherton has defended another interpretation, pointing out that although Gellius presents Diodorus as responding to Chrysippus, the latter was actually born shortly after the former’s death, and so perhaps Chrysippus was instead arguing against Diodorus. If so, he must have grasped the force of his opponent’s observation and wanted to meet it; but Diodorus, insisting on intention as the sole criterion of a word’s meaning, would not have been troubled by 94  Compare Quintilian, Institutionis oratoriae libri duodecim, ed. Michael Winterbottom, 2 vols (Oxford, 1970), II, p. 412 (VII.9.1): ‘philosophis quibusdam nullum videatur esse verbum quod non plura significet’; Martianus Capella, De nuptiis, IV.327. Atherton, The Stoics, p. 499, is critical of Cicero’s (below, n. 96) and Quintilian’s interpretation of Chrysippus on this point. 95  Aulus Gellius, Noctium Atticarum libri xx, ed. Martin Hertz, 2 vols (Leipzig, 1883–85), I, p. 74 (XI.12): ‘Quod Chrysippus philosophus omne verbum ambiguum dubiumque esse dicit, Diodorus contra nullum verbum ambiguum esse putat. Chrysippus ait, omne verbum ambiguum natura esse, quoniam ex eodem duo vel plura accipi possunt. Diodorus autem, cui Crono cognomentum fuit: “nullum”, inquit “verbum est ambiguum, nec quisquam ambiguum dicit aut sentit, nec aliud dici videri debet, quam quod se dicere sentit is, qui dicit. At cum ego”, inquit, “aliud sensi, tu aliud accepisti, obscure magis dictum videri potest quam ambigue: ambigui enim verbi natura illa esse debuit, ut qui id diceret, duo vel plura diceret; nemo autem duo vel plura dicit, qui se sensit unum dicere”.’ 96  Cicero, Rhetorici libri duo qui vocantur de inventione, ed. Eduard Stroebel (Leipzig, 1965), p. 129 (II.40.117): ‘si ipsa separatim ex se verba considerentur, omnia aut pleraque ambigua visum iri’.

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the assertion that hearers and readers can, in fact, understand more than one thing by the words they perceive. Chrysippus, then, must be arguing for an intrinsic ambiguity in words, as indicated by Gellius’s ablative natura (‘by nature’): ‘His response makes sense only if words are autonomous signifiers, both reflexively [i.e., by autonymy] and non-­reflexively. Their being linguistically significant is independent of what any given user makes of them.’97 That is, all words are ambiguous because they can refer either to an object or to themselves as words. This is a plausible construction of Chrysippus, if hypothetical—after all, we do not know that he was ex­ plicitly replying to Diodorus—and somewhat boring. But it ignores the fact that Gellius, in presenting the debate in the way he did, raised new and valid problems, and that it was in this form that readers have come to each claim. What, then, is going on the Gellian passage? The paradox arises from the confrontation between two opposing positions which are already paradoxes in themselves, for our natural assumption is that some words are ambiguous, but not all. One solution is to distinguish between two conceptions of meaning: for Chrysippus, what a hearer or reader understands, for Diodorus what the speaker or writer intends.98 This was the dominant early modern reading. In the early seventeenth century Philipp Carolus rejected both sides: ambiguity, contra Diodorus, cannot be distinguished from obscurity, and contra Chrysippus is measured by the hearer’s mind, not the speaker’s.99 His contemporary G. J. Vossius thought Chrysippus’s claim not unreasonable as a description of polysemy, whereas the polymath Caspar Schoppe was evidently so puzzled that he tried to emend it out, only to be chastised by a Leipzig proofreader a century later.100 The 97  Atherton, The Stoics, pp. 154–62, see also pp. 298–300, esp. the critique of previous explanations at p. 299, n. 71. Atherton’s reading was proposed already in 1524 by Gilles de Maizières, later rector of the University of Paris: see his notes transcribed in Aulus Gellius, Noctes atticae, ed. Jodocus Badius (Paris, 1524), fol. 76r, and compare Aulus Gellius, Noctes atticae, ed. Jacobus Proust (Paris, 1681), p. 303. Peter Struck, Birth of the Symbol: Ancient Readers at the Limits of their Texts (Princeton, 2004), pp. 131–39, proposes another interpretation of Gellius’s word natura, grounded in fragments of Stoic metaphysics; I am unconvinced, as is Robert Lamberton in his book-­review for Comparative Literature 58 (2006), 256–259. 98  See, most recently, Eric Gunderson, Nox Philologiae: Aulus Gellius and the Fantasy of the Roman Library (Madison, WI, 2009), pp. 116–18. 99  Philipp Carolus, Animadversiones historicae, philologicae et criticae in Noctes Atticas Agelli et Q. Curtii historiam (Nuremberg, 1663), p. 450: ‘Fallitque in hoc ratiuncula Diodori, quod ambiguitatem ab obscuritate genere toto distinguit, eamque a mente potius loquentis quam interpretis metitur.’ Holford-­Strevens, Aulus Gellius, p. 340, dates this commentary to before 1629. Compare Chapter Four below, p. 177 on Vázquez. 100  Gerardus Johannes Vossius, Commentariorum rhetoricorum sive oratoriarum institutionum libri sex, 4th ed., 2 vols (Leiden, 1643), II, pp. 30–31 (IV.1.10). Schoppe, ‘Conspectus notularum vel suspicionum ac variarum lectionum’, in Aulus Gellius, Noctes atticae (Leiden, 1706), p. 895a, changing the Chrysippean quoniam, ‘since’, to quando, ‘when’. The proofreader was

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paradox was also frequently discussed by jurists, who were, as Ian Maclean has shown, among the most acute and prolific semioticians in the Renaissance.101 A more surprising reuse of the Gellian chapter may be found in a humanistic treatise of seismic long-­range impact: the Minerva, seu de causis Latinae linguae commentarius, by the Salamancan professor of rhetoric Franciscus Sanctius, first published in 1587 and continuously reprinted and reedited down to the nineteenth century.102 Via its influence on the Port-­ Royal Grammar of 1660, the Minerva helped initiate the early modern development of universal grammar, in turn often cited as a precursor to the generative grammars of the 1950s.103 Sanctius’s aim was to re-­establish the grammatical rules of Latin on rational principles, and moreover to elaborate the theory of ellipsis recovered from Priscian by grammarians of the earlier sixteenth century. This theory posited that the underlying grammar of a language—Sanctius was thinking of Latin, but his arguments were easily applied to other tongues—was rational and logical, but that in its spoken and written form, it concealed certain elements of that grammar for the purpose of elegance and efficiency; nonetheless, those concealed elements were ‘subaudited’ (subaudita) or ‘subintellected’ (subintellecta), that is, silently understood as if present, by the reader or hearer. The ‘incomplete’ utterance may therefore be ambiguous, whereas, ex hypothesi, the real underlying sentence, which is strictly logical, must be unambiguous.104 It is the aim of the grammarian to reconstruct the latter from actual utterances, Enoch Christian August Otho, in Aulus Gellius, Noctes atticae, ed. Johannes Ludovicus Conradus, 2 vols (Leipzig, 1762), II, p. 82. 101  Ian Maclean, Interpretation and Meaning in the Renaissance: The Case of Law (Cambridge, 1992), p. 131. 102  I have counted seventeen editions from Salamanca 1587 to Amsterdam 1809. It is worth noting that Sanctius published a short prototype of Minerva at Lyon in 1562; this extremely rare edition was rediscovered in the library of the University of Salamanca by Jesús María Liaño in 1963, and republished as Sanctius, Minerva (1562), ed. Eduardo del Estal Fuentes (Salamanca, 1975). 103  Noam Chomsky himself, in his Cartesian Linguistics (1966), pointed to the Port-­Royal Grammar as an important predecessor of his own work. Robin Lakoff, in her review of Grammaire générale et raisonnée, ed. Herbert Brekle, Language 45 (1969), 343–364, pointed out the further debt to Sanctius, which has since become commonplace. For recent work on Sanctius, see Manuel Breva-­Claramonte, Sanctius’s Theory of Language: A Contribution to the History of Renaissance Linguistics (Amsterdam, 1983); and Joaquín Villalba Álvarez; El metalenguaje en la Minerva del Brocense (Cáceres, 2000). For a later Jesuit critique of Sanctius, see Juan García de Vargas, ‘Antibrocensis crisis, sive Iudicium de Francisci Sanchez Brocensis Minerva’, in his Elucidata grammatica latina ad strictam artem redacta (Madrid, 1711), pp. 371–424. 104  This is well expressed by Breva-­Claramonte, Sanctius’s Theory, p. 231: ‘The logical level contains no ambiguity for it includes all the information relating to the ideas the speaker wishes to express. It is at the level of the poets or of speech that thoughts are expressed obscurely.’

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just as linguists in the 1950s would seek to find the rules by which ‘deep structures’ of syntax were transformed into ‘surface structures’.105 The idea of sub­intellection would also figure occasionally in early modern rhetoric and hermeneutics.106 A parallel operation, less studied by historians of linguistics, could be undertaken on the lexis. Already the technical grammars of late antiquity had argued that words originally had a one-­to-­one relationship to the objects they signified, leaving no possibility of ambiguity. As Atherton has put it, there had once been a ‘perfect congruity of words, meaning and structures, whose pristine correctness is recoverable by application of the appropriate methods’.107 This was later expressed by the image of the lexis as a ‘mirror’ of nature, a metaphor behind the ‘speculative’ grammars of the fourteenth century. The idea has similarities—and perhaps a historical connection—to a belief in the perfection of Adam’s prelapsarian language. The ancient Jewish scholar Philo of Alexandria claimed that Adam ‘accurately named things, discerning very well what they revealed, so that their natures were at once both known and uttered by him’.108 Similarly, the eleventh-­century Muslim jurist and philosopher Ibn Hazm wrote: ‘the language that Adam originally had . . . was the most perfect of all, the clearest in its expressions, the least in ambiguity and the most powerful in its conciseness’.109 At least one Renaissance linguist denied that Hebrew 105  Robin Deirdre Smith, A Syntactic Quicksand: Ellipsis in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-­Century English Grammars (Delft, 1986); W. Keith Percival, ‘On Priscian’s Syntactic Theory: The Medieval Perspective’, in Papers in the History of Linguistics, ed. Hans Aarsleff et al. (Princeton, 1984), pp. 65–74, at pp. 70–71; idem, ‘Deep and Surface Structure Concepts in Renaissance and Mediaeval Syntactic Theory’, in History of Linguistic Thought and Contemporary Linguistics, ed. Herman Parret (Berlin, 1975), pp. 238–53, and several other papers in the same volume. Franciscus Sanctius, Minerva, seu de causis Latinae linguae commentarius, ed. Schoppe and Perizonius (Franeker, 1687), pp. 385–530, treats ellipsis as a ‘figura constructionis’ or syntactic figure; and against him, see García de Vargas, ‘Antibrocensis crisis’, pp. 416–23. 106  For rhetoric, see Chapter Three below, p. 120; for hermeneutics, see, e.g., Andreas Hyperius, De theologo (Basel, 1559 [= De recte formando theologiae studio, libri iiii, 2nd ed.]), pp. 255–58 (II.25); and James Gordon Huntley, Controversiarum epitomes, 2 vols (Poitiers, 1612–18), I, p. 17. 107  Atherton, The Stoics, pp. 491–492, and 504; Jean Lallot, ‘Apollonius Dyscole et l’ambiguité linguistique: problèmes et solutions’, in L’ambiguïté, ed. Rosier, 33–49. 108  Philo, De opificio mundi, in Opera quae supersunt, ed. Leopold Cohn, 6 vols (Berlin, 1896–1915), I, p. 52 (§ 150): ‘εὐθυβόλους ἐποιεῖτο τὰς κλήσεις, εὖ μάλα στοχαζόμενος τῶν δηλουμένων, ὥς ἅμα λεχθῆναί τε καὶ νοηθῆναι τὰς φύςεις αὐτῶν’. Atherton, The Stoics, p. 67, speculates on slender evidence that a similar view to that of Philo was held already by the Stoics. An opposite, progressive claim was put forward by Epicurus, Epistola ad Herodotum 76 (19a3), according to which natural language was later conventionalised to reduce ambiguity. Democritus, Diels fr. B26 (apud Proclus, In Platonis Cratylum commentaria, §16), invoked homonymy as evidence against the Cratylean view that real language has a natural origin. 109  Ibn Hazm, Ihkām fī usūl al ahkām, 8 vols in 2 (Cairo, 1926–1928), I, p. 31: ‘lā nadirā ayy lugha hiya alatī waqafa ādam . . .’alayha awwalan ilā annanā naqṭa’u ’alā annahā ātammu

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could be the first language, given its intolerable ambiguity.110 The notion in its basic form showed a remarkable longevity: in 1897 the philologist Michel Bréal derided his predecessor August Schleicher for holding that language had once been perfect, degenerating with the advance of culture. This view, Bréal concluded, showed the tenacity of the biblical ideas gleaned in childhood.111 Admittedly, such scriptural resonances were absent in Sanctius’s key source, Julius Caesar Scaliger’s De causis linguae latinae (1540), an attempt to redescribe Latin grammar on the principles of Aristotelian metaphysics. ‘Just as things are,’ wrote Scaliger, ‘so are the marks of things’, i.e., words— the two realms were homologous.112 The final chapter is entitled, ‘The ancients wrongly ascribed a plurality of meanings to single words’. Its thesis is that a word has only one proper meaning, its other senses being derivative: ‘familiar, secondary, or spurious’.113 Scaliger is referring to the process of sense-­extension, already noticed by ancient Roman writers, as we have seen; a similar thought lay behind Locke’s notorious claim that the original meaning of every word derived from the senses.114 It remains a principle of modern lexicography: the senses of a word are arranged al-­lughati kullihā, wa-­abyanuhā ’ibāratan, wa-­aqalluhā ishkālan, wa-­ashadduhā ikhtisāran. . . .’ I thank the inestimable Simon Mills for his transcription and translation of this passage. Breva-­Claramonte, Sanctius’s Theory, pp. 90–91, makes the connection between Sanctius and Ibn Hazm, relying on the useful account of the latter in Roger Arnaldez, Grammaire et théologie chez Ibn Hazm de Cordoue (Paris, 1956), pp. 45–46. For the context of this argument, see Miguel Asín Palacios, ‘El origen del lenguaje y problemas conexos en Algacel, Ibn Sida e Ibn Hazm’ (1939), repr. in his Ensayos sobre la filosofia en al-­Andalus, ed. Andrés Martínez Lorca (Barcelona, 1990), 286–309, at pp. 301–8. 110  Johannes Goropius Becanus, Hermathena, in Opera, ed. Laevinus Torrentius, 6 vols in 1 (Antwerp, 1580), II, p. 25: ‘nulla [sc. lingua] sit pluribus difficultatibus implicata, nulla plus habent ambiguitatis’. 111  Michel Bréal, Essai de sémantique (Paris, 1897), p. 5, adding in a footnote that ‘Schleicher avait d’abord été destiné à l’état ecclésiastique. Il avait ensuite été hégélien.’ 112  Julius Caesar Scaliger, De causis linguae latinae (1540), ed. and tr. Pedro Juan Galán Sánchez, 2 vols (Cáceres, 2004), I, p. 422 (ch. 93): ‘ut res sunt, ita notae rerum’. On this line see Kristian Jensen, Rhetorical Philosophy and Philosophical Grammar: Julius Caesar Scaliger’s Theory of Language (Munich, 1990), p. 146. Jensen does not treat the semantic paradox; nor does G. A. Padley, Grammatical Theory in Western Europe, 1500–1700: The Latin Tradition (Cambridge, 1976), pp. 58–77; nor Jean Stéfanini, ‘Aristotélisme et grammaire: le De causis latinae linguae (1540) de J. C. Scaliger’, Histoire Épistémologie Langage 4 (1982), 41–54. 113  Scaliger, De causis linguae latinae, II, p. 876 (ch. 193): ‘Non recte uni voci significatorum multitudinem a veteribus assignatam. . . . Unius nanque vocis una tantum sit significatio propria, ac princeps: caeterae aut communes aut accessoriae aut etiam spuriae.’ 114  John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter Nidditch (Oxford, 1975), p. 403 (III.1.5): ‘Spirit, in its primary signification, is Breath; Angel, a Messenger: And I doubt not, but if we could trace them to their sources, we should find, in all Languages, the names, which stand for Things that fall not under our Senses, to have had their first rise from sensible Ideas.’

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under one heading to show the stages of its semantic development, starting from a single core sense.115 As Friedrich Schleiermacher put it, ‘The primary task for dictionaries . . . is to find the true complete unity of the word.’116 And as the academic discipline of semantics crystallised in the nineteenth century, German scholars began to argue just the same as Scaliger had done, in almost the same terms: thus Heymann Steinthal asserted in 1860 that ‘a single word does not signify many things, but every word has only one meaning’.117 Scaliger’s version deploys a pair of superimposed metaphors which require some untangling. He writes: ‘one has to seek out the first [princeps] of all the senses of a word, to which to lead back [reducere] the other legions, as to a tessera and signa.’118 Each part of the image here is military. A princeps or commander stands at the head of his legions, just as the literal sense of a word functions as its ‘head’ meaning. The verb reducere means ‘to recall troops from battle’. But what of the tessera and signa—the latter plural ‘signs’ or ‘signals’, and the former a singular ‘countersign’? Sign and countersign, or a watchword, a formalised call and response, or two parts of a physical token, to indicate that two men are on the same side. Does Scaliger mean that the secondary senses of a word depend on the primary the way a sign depends on a countersign, or indeed vice versa? Or does he mean that the primary sense is a standard [signum] by which the secondary senses may be recognised as belonging to a single group? In Aeneid VI.637 we read ‘it bello tessera signum’, ‘the signal for war goes forth by a tessera’, the latter being the means by which a general could issue orders throughout his ranks. But here the troops are apparently withdrawing to their 115  The lexicographer Charles Richardson, in a letter to the editor of the Gentleman’s Magazine, n.s. 5 (1836), 372–76, would emphasise the relevance of the above passages in Scaliger and Locke to dictionary-­making. See also a footnote on the matter, crying out for the OED still a century hence, by Robert Robinson in Jean Claude, An Essay on the Composition of a Sermon, tr. Robinson, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1779), II, pp. 149–51, n. 4. 116  SHK, pp. 47–48: ‘Die ursprüngliche Aufgabe auch für die Wörterbücher . . . ist die die wahre vollkommene Einheit des Wortes zu finden’. Compare Schleiermacher’s ‘Den Aphorismen von 1805 und 1809’, in his Hermeneutik nach den Handschriften, ed. Heinz Kimmerle (Heidelberg, 1959), p. 32: ‘Eigentlich hat doch jedes Wort nur Eine Bedeutung. . . .’ See Michael Forster, After Herder: Philosophy of Language in the German Tradition (Oxford, 2010), pp. 366–367 for a recent discussion of Schleiermacher’s idea. 117  Heymann Steinthal, ‘Ueber den Wandel der Laute und des Begriffs’, Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft 1 (1860), 416–32, at p. 426: ‘bedeutet auch nicht ein Word vieles; sondern jedes Wort hat nur eine Bedeutung’. On this point see Brigitte Nerlich, Semantic Theories in Europe 1830–1930: From Etymology to Contextuality (Amsterdam, 1992), pp. 56–61. 118  Scaliger, De causis linguae latinae, II, p. 876 (ch. 192): ‘principem omnium significatum [sc. vocis] indagari oportere censeo, ad quem tanquam ad tesseram signaque caeteras reducere legiones’.

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commander. The confusion of movements in this line reflects Scaliger’s struggle to model sense-­extension, a slippery problem that continues to elude consensus. Sanctius’s Minerva makes clear its debts to Scaliger, beginning with its subtitle. In a chapter called ‘Words have only a single meaning’, Scaliger’s position is defended at length.119 The title is given as a paradox, or rather an apparent one, for it is evident both by reason and from authority that polysemy is produced by analogy (what we would now call sense-­extension), a doctrine Sanctius finds already in Categories 1a1–6. Four reasons are adduced. First, if words signified by nature, how could it be that one word would come to signify more than one thing? But if they signified by institution, the first name-­giver would have had to be mad to assign one word to more than one thing. Second, if words signified many things equally, we would constantly have to deploy distinguishing adjectives, for instance when saying canis, ‘dog’, we would be forced to specify which variety we meant. Third, Aristotle would have been negligent not to offer a rule of analogy as necessary to his syllogistic logic, but this is really what he meant when talking about homonyms in the Categories. Fourth, the idea is supported by many authorities, such as Cicero, Scaliger, the biblical critics Francisco Foreiro and Jean Mercier on the univocity of Hebrew words, Lorenzo Valla—and Aulus Gellius on Chrysippus and Diodorus, quoted in full without comment.120 Diodorus, as we have seen, argued that no word was ambiguous, on the grounds that nobody intended to say more than one thing at a time; his was a semiotic argument about intention. Sanctius, by contrast, was making a semantic argument about analogy, resolving the polysemy of a given utterance not by reference to its basis in pre-­linguistic mental experience (Aristotelian pathēma) but by rewinding the historical processes through which words accumulate secondary meanings. Diodorus’s reasoning was psychological; Sanctius’s was purely formal. Underlying his reference to Diodorus, then, must have been an assumption—one not 119  Sanctius, Minerva, ‘Unius vocis unica est significatio’, 560–82. García de Vargas, ‘Antibrocensis crisis’, p. 423. This chapter did not feature in the 1562 edition, but it did appear as the first item in Sanctius’s Paradoxa (Antwerp, 1582), pp. 5–27. 120  Lorenzo Valla, De linguae latinae elegantia libri sex (1471: Lyon, 1536), p.393 (VI.3): ‘Nam quis credat autores uni dictioni tot significata, et quidem pro se quenque nova dare voluisse, tanquam linguam ipsam confundere cuperent?’ Francisco Foreiro, Iesaiae prophetae vetus et nova ex Hebraico versio cum commentario (Venice, 1563), fol. 21r: ‘unam habere significationem verba Hebraea existimarem . . .’. Sanctius conceals Foreiro’s key disclaimer, ‘omitto ea, quae contrarias habent’, on which point, see Chapter Ten below, pp. 382–83. Jean Mercier in Santes Pagnini, Ozar leshon ha-­kodesh, hoc est, Thesaurus linguae sanctae, ed. Mercier (1575: Lyon, 1577), s.v. ‫[ אבד‬abad], col. 3. These authorities may be contrasted to later arguments that Hebrew is a particularly ambiguous language: see Chapter Four below, pp. 150–51. García de Vargas, ‘Antibrocensis crisis’, pp. 423–24, would note this discrepancy, citing Alfonso Salmerón, on whom see Chapter Four, pp. 167–69.

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stated, and perhaps not clearly grasped—that the psychological process recapitulates the historical one. So far Sanctius, like Scaliger, has restricted himself to polysemy, that is, a single word (as represented in a single dictionary lemma) with a variety of senses; he has not yet thought about homonymy, the phenomenon of two different words of the same form. The latter he handles via a series of six ‘rules’ for identifying the homonymy of a lexical pair. These involve determining of each word its: (1) undeclined form (distinguishing canis, ‘you sing’, from canis, ‘dog’) (2) original morphology (fron[d]s, ‘foliage’, from fron[t]s, ‘forehead’) (3) language (Latin ergo, ‘therefore’, from Greek ergō, the dative of ergon, ‘work’) (4) syllable lengths (pălus, ‘stake’, from pālus, ‘swamp’) and (5) accentuation (ádeo, ‘I approach’, from adéo, ‘to such an extent’).

Finally, we must (6) ascertain that a word is not being used euphemistically in the sense contrary to its proper one: thus sacer, which originally meant ‘cursed’ or ‘anathema’, has come to mean ‘sacred’. The last of these is an outlier, relating to semantics and pragmatics rather than to morphophonology. But the first five represent ways in which a language as spoken or written obscures the distinctions between separate forms, thus creating true homonyms, such as policy, ‘contractual document’ (from apodeixis), and policy, ‘principle of action’ (from politeia), homographs such as bow, ‘archery weapon’, and bow, ‘gesture of respect’, or homophones such as bow and bough.121 By resolving these superficial similarities into their underlying forms, we produce a lexis that exactly mirrors the structure of our thoughts and so of the world, one in which, as Sanctius says, no word is ambiguous. In the next chapter he returns to polysemy, demonstrating how a series of key words have accrued meaning by a process of analogy.122 Sanctius thus undertakes two operations to defend his paradox: he resolves homonyms into distinct forms, and reveals the historical structures of meaning within a single form. In doing so he relegates ambiguity to the status of something superficial, secondary, and historically late. This procedure is the only one described in the present chapter without direct precedent in Aristotle, but its frame of reference and its terminology are highly Aristotelian, and the debt is made explicit. 121 

569.

On these terms see John Lyons, Semantics, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1977), II, pp. 550–

Sanctius, Minerva, pp. 582–606.

122 

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In 1687 the brilliant young Jacob Voorbroek or Perizonius, then professor of eloquence and history at Franeker, reedited the Minerva with his annotations. He was the best kind of commentator, sympathetic to Sanctius’s project but critical of many specific claims, and his disagreements with the Spaniard’s views—and especially with his etymologies, drawing now on a century of scholarship—can run to several pages in the footnotes. He rejects euphemism from Sanctius’s list, rightly preferring to consider it a form of sense-­extension.123 And he gives a full page of attention to the passage from Gellius. Like Philipp Carolus, whose notes he knew, Perizonius qualifies both sides of the ‘debate’, drawing attention to the distinct perspectives of speaker and hearer. He deals with Diodorus first: The philosopher’s meaning ought to be that ambiguity is never in the speaker, although it often arises in the hearer. . . . For otherwise he cannot deny that there really is an ambiguity in the words under consideration, as they are conjoined in this or that way—that they may receive two different senses, both fitting the grammar and idiom of the language. Do we not call ambiguous something heard or read which can be explained in different ways according to common usage? From the lack of ambiguity in the speaker’s mind, the philosopher thus wrongly concludes that there is no ambiguity in words, that is, no capacity for them to be given two meanings by a natural and legitimate interpretation.124

As for Chrysippus, he was wrong to call ambiguity ‘natural’, for words have more than one meaning not by nature but by analogy, that is, sense-­ extension. Each of the ancients, then, in this patient and even-­handed account, had half the truth only. Perizonius’s disagreement with Sanctius is not substantive: ambiguity arises from the accidents of verbal corruption and sense-­extension, and is not essential to any intrinsic feature of the language. Scaliger, Sanctius, and Perizonius all sought to separate the pristine form of the lexis, corresponding to the clear and single thought posited Perizonius in Sanctius, Minerva, pp. 574–575n. Ibid., pp. 563–4:

123  124 

Sensus philosophi esse debet, nunquam ambiguitatem esse in dicente, licet saepe oriatur in audiente. . . . Ceteroquin enim in ipsis vocabulis, de quibus hic agitur, in hunc vel illum modum conjunctis, quam duplicem et diversum possunt recipere sensum, utrumque analogiae et genio linguae convenientem, revera inesse ambiguitatem negari nequit. Nonne ambigue est dictum, quod ita auditum vel lectum diversimode potest secundum verborum usum explicari? Quapropter ab animo dicentis non ambiguo perperam argumentatur philosophus ad tollendam verborum ambiguitatem h[oc] e[st] potestatem recipiendi usitata et legitima eorum interpretatione duplicem sensum. Perizonius cites Carolus in his note at p. 4.

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by Diodorus, from its distortion in history, exposing the hard, unambiguous skeleton beneath the soft corrupt skin. This was what Francis Bacon called the ‘philosophical’ kind of grammar, ‘examining the power and Nature of Wordes, as they are the foot-­steppes and prints of Reason’.125 A like impulse lay behind the many early modern plans for a rational language and ‘character’, plans spurred on by readers of Bacon in the 1640s. Some saw the model in Chinese, whose characters seemed to match each sign to the object it signified.126 Johann David Michaelis, who later ridiculed these projects for their impracticality, their elitism, and their incoherence, claimed that Chinese science had been stymied for generations by the encumbrances of its script.127 Paradoxically, spoken Chinese appeared to others the most ambiguous language of all. In a 1583 letter, the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci exclaimed that ‘in speaking it there is so much ambiguity that there are many words that can signify more than a thousand things’, going on to describe its profound challenges of tone.128 Sixty years later, Gottlieb Spitzel recorded the anecdote of an Italian priest who, trying to explain in Chinese that there existed in Europe ships the size of great towers, pronounced the word ‘ship’ in the wrong tone, saying instead ‘roof-­ tile’. His astonished interlocutor wondered what use such enormous tiles had, and how large were the furnaces in which they were baked. As Spitzel pointed out, this homonymy made transcribing speech very difficult even for the Chinese themselves, who had to pepper their conversation with synonyms to clarify their meaning—the phenomenon whose absence in Latin had led Sanctius to deny its ambiguity.129 Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, ed. Michael Kiernan, OFB IV, p. 121. Bacon, Advancement, p. 120: ‘it is the use of Chyna . . . to write in Characters reall, which expresse neither Letters nor words in grosse, but Things or Notions’. See David Porter, Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe (Stanford, 2001), pp. 39–41; Benjamin Demott, ‘Comenius and the Real Character in England’, in John Wilkins and 17th-­century British Linguistics, ed. Joseph Subbiondo (Amsterdam, 1992), pp. 155–68. 127  Johann David Michaelis, A Dissertation on the Influence of Opinions on Language and of Language on Opinions (1769: London, 1771), pp. 77–92. This passage is not in the original German. 128  Matteo Ricci to Martin Fornari, 13 February 1583, in Ricci’s Opere storiche, 2 vols (Macerata, 1911–1913), II, p. 27: ‘quanto al parlare è tanto equivoca che tiene molte parole che significano più di mille cose’. On this see Jonathan Spence, Matteo Ricci’s Memory Palace (London, 1988), pp. 136–137. 129  Gottlieb Spitzel, De re litteraria Sinensium commentarius (Leiden, 1661), pp. 103–105. Andreas Müller, ‘De monumento sinico commentarius novensilis’, appended to his Hebdomas Observationum de rebus Sinicis (Cologne, 1674), p. 6, identifies the ambiguous syllable as Ham. On ambiguity in Chinese, see Henry Rosemont, Jr., ‘On Representing Abstractions in Archaic Chinese’, Philosophy East and West 24 (1974), 71–88, at p. 83; Needham and Harbsmeier, Language and Logic, pp. 124–25, 145 and 336–37; and the critique of Rosemont in Robert Wardy, Aristotle in China: Language, Categories and Translation (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 6–10. 125  126 

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Many of the above threads came together in the most sophisticated early modern distinctionary, one that combined classical erudition in its entries with a theoretical nous in its preface; this was the De ambiguis, mediis et contrariis of Johann Friedrich Reitz (1695–1778). Reitz, born to a court preacher in Braunfels, western Germany, studied medicine at Utrecht on his parents’ wishes, but then abandoned it for his real passion, classical literature. He taught at a Rotterdam gymnasium for five years before returning to Utrecht in 1724, and in 1745 he took up a chair at the university.130 De ambiguis had appeared in 1736, earning favourable reviews, a place in many libraries, and, a century later, a terse recommendation from the great philologist Friedrich August Wolf.131 As a preface Reitz offers a ‘Dissertation on Ambiguity’, which begins with the Gellius locus, read through Scaliger, Sanctius, and Perizonius, in an attempt to reach the obvious middle ground that ‘some words are ambiguous, others not’.132 Only one meaning is proper to each word; the rest are given by analogy. Ambiguity can be either lexical or syntactic, and many rhetorical figures pertain to each. It is caused by the poverty of words compared to things, by the diverse qualities of signified things, and by sense development. It is the fault either of the author, either deliberately or accidentally, or of the incompetent reader—these two possibilities represent the rhetorical and the philological perspectives. In the latter case, the chief aid to resolution is context. The logical point of view, by contrast, is suppressed, following the Rhetorica ad Herennium, on the grounds that it focuses exclusively on the formal properties of a phrase at the expense of its pragmatic bearing. Ambiguity, for Reitz, must involve actual doubt. There is nothing conceptually new in Reitz’s ‘Dissertation’: what it demonstrates, rather, is how the paradoxes of ancient semantics and Renaissance grammar could be reintegrated with more traditional language arts as set out by Cicero and Quintilian in dialogue with jurisprudence. It also shows the continued survival of a common European canon of authors and questions, relying on the accumulation of standard humanist reference points instead of original analysis. But over the past century a parallel tradition had developed, starting in Britain and spreading through France 130  Bio-­bibliographisches Handbuch zur Sprachwissenschaft des 18. Jahrhunderts, ed. Herbert Brekle, 8 vols (Tübingen, 1992–2005), VII, p. 422. 131  Bibliothèque raisonnée des ouvrages des savans de l’Europe, 17 (1736), 345–69; Nova acta eruditorum, 1 (Leipzig, 1738), 109–13; Friedrich August Wolf, Vorlesung über die Encyclopädie der Alterthumswissenschaft, ed. J. D. Gürtler (Leipzig, 1831), p. 226. Edward Gibbon was less enthusiastic: see his Journal à Lausanne, 17 août 1763 – 19 avril 1764, ed. Georges Bonnard (Lausanne, 1945), p. 24. 132  Johann Friedrich Reitz, De ambiguis, mediis et contrariis, sive, De significatione verborum ac phrasium ambigua (Utrecht, 1736), p. iii: ‘quaedam verba sunt ambigua, quaedam non’.

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to the Low Countries, of considering meaning, and ambiguity, in a less humanistic fashion. Empiricism: Clarity and Distinction I have argued above that a concern for ambiguity was intrinsic to each of the language arts inherited from antiquity in early modernity. Given this, a sociological thick description seems unnecessary to account for what Levine called the ‘flight from ambiguity’ in the seventeenth century. It is nonetheless undeniable that Bacon, Descartes, and their heirs drew attention to the misuse of words in both scholastic philosophy and folk reasoning, and warned of the dangers of ambiguity. For Bacon in his 1605 Advancement of Learning, as still for an eclectic thinker like Thomas Browne in the 1640s, this warning remained embedded in a discussion of Aristotle.133 But it was Bacon’s imagery of the four ‘idols’ that set matters off on a fresh foot, even if these also had, as he admitted, a close kinship to Aristotle’s six fallacies.134 These four idols were symbolic representations of fallacies that hindered clear thought and reasoned discourse. The third were the idola fori—usually translated ‘idols of the marketplace’135—a group term for the snares and errors of language; among these the most serious were words corresponding to ‘things which do not exist’, and to ‘things which exist, but yet confused and ill-­defined, and hastily and irregularly derived from realities’.136 This turn was succinct and vivid, shifting the problem of ambiguity away from logic and grammar and towards the cognitive process. Here was the germ, furthermore, of the most important analysis of ambiguity in early modern philosophy, that of the third book of John Locke’s 1689 Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which offers a detailed account of how words are ‘hastily derived from realities’. Locke’s verdict on current philosophical disputes, which he repeats several times, may be quoted for convenience: Where shall one find any, either controversial Debate, or familiar Discourse, concerning Honour, Faith, Grace, Religion, Church, etc. wherein

133  Bacon, Advancement, p. 115: ‘the great Sophisme of all Sophismes, beeing Æquivocation or Ambiguitie of Wordes and Phrase, specially of such wordes as are most generall and interveyne in everie Enquirie’. Compare Bacon’s work on law, discussed in Chapter Two below, pp. 84–88. Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, I, p. 22 (I.4): ‘the fallacies whereby men deceive others . . . the Ancients, have divided into Verball and Reall’. 134  W. H. O’Briant, ‘The Genesis, Definition, and Classification of Bacon’s Idols’, The Southern Journal of Philosophy 13 (1975), 347–57; Perez Zagorin, ‘Francis Bacon’s Concept of Objectivity and the Idols of the Mind’, British Journal for the History of Science 34 (2001), 379–93. 135  Though see Chapter Two below, p. 97. 136  Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, Aphorisms 59–60, in OFB XI, pp. 92–94.

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it is not easy to observe the different Notions Men have of them; which is nothing but this, that they are not agreed in the signification of those Words, nor have in their minds the same complex Ideas which they make them stand for: and so all the contests that follow thereupon, are only about the meaning of a Sound.137

As Hobbes had put the matter, ‘senseless and ambiguous words are like ignes fatui;138 and reasoning upon them is wandering amongst innumerable absurdities; and their end, contention and sedition, or contempt.’139 These are pessimistic exaggerations of Aristotle’s warning against the use of ambiguous terms in debate, and of the ancient legal commonplace that ‘controversy is born from ambiguity’. But Locke arrives at this conclusion via a jettisoning of Aristotle’s theory of signification: words may be the signs of our ideas, but these ideas have no natural connection to things, and we each build complex ideas makeshift out of the simple ideas derived from sense data, with little assurance that ours are the same as those of others. Words are especially liable to mislead when they stand for complex ideas, or for ideas with ‘no certain connexion in nature’, or when the criterion (‘standard’) for their meaning is not easily known, or when their meaning is not the same as the essence of the thing signified (III.9.5). This problem is compounded by human error—words used without ‘clear and distinct ideas’, inconsistently, or even with an affected obscurity, as is especially the case of scholastics (III.10).140 While the rough and ready words with which we communicate might be good enough for mere ‘civil use’, they are too loose for ‘philosophical use’ (III.9.15), which requires precise definitions, clear ideas, lucid examples, and consistency of usage (III.11.8– 27)—this latter prescription evidently a version of the old Aristotelian diairesis (distinction). The faults with language as it stands have caused severe problems not only in philosophy, but in the ‘material truths of law and divinity’ and the ‘affairs of mankind’, as statutes and interpretations are phrased in such a way as to ‘perplex the sense’ (III.10.12). Hannah Dawson, drawing on a recent swell of interest in Locke’s philosophy of language, has provided a rich context for the above arguments, 137  Locke, Essay (as in n. 114 above), p. 480 (III.9.9); compare pp. 488–89 (III.9.21) and 510–11 (III.11.6). 138  This comparison was perennial. The poet Thomas Traherne stated in succinct self-­ contradiction that ‘Metaphores conceal, / And only Vapours prove’, on the context of which see William Dyrness, Reformed Theology and Visual Culture: The Protestant Imagination from Calvin to Edwards (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 193–94. Later Samuel Johnson, ‘Preface to Shakespeare’ (1778), in his Works (New Haven, 1955–), VII, p. 74, would famously remark that ‘A quibble is to Shakespeare, what luminous vapours are to the traveller; he follows it at all adventures; it is sure to lead him out of his way, and sure to engulf him in the mire.’ 139  Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Noel Malcolm, 3 vols (Oxford, 2012), II, p. 74 (ch. 5). 140  On the expression ‘clear and distinct’ in Descartes and Leibniz, see Faudemay, Le clair, pp. 133–45.

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and it is not my intention to repeat her results here.141 Within the broader arc of this chapter, Locke’s conclusions are less remarkable than his method, which eschews classical topoi for a chain of assertions about the process of accumulating ideas and assigning words to them. This makes his analysis sharper and more compelling than that of Aristotle, who acknowledged the dangers of accidental homonyms lurking in syllogisms but offered no analysis of how homonyms came into being, beyond the ‘poverty of language’. Locke’s achievement was thus to root ambiguity in a new and cogent epistemology, and these insights could cross-­fertilise other disciplines, as we see in Jean Le Clerc’s 1697 treatise on criticism, warning that ambiguity arises as the relations of words to things change over time.142 Locke’s basic claim, meanwhile, was self-­evident enough to persist in very different philosophical systems, such as those of David Hume and Thomas Reid in the next century; the latter even paid tribute to Locke for revealing ‘the snares of ambiguous and ill-­defined words’.143 And Locke’s project for straightening out the lexicon had already been put into practice three years before the Essay was published, in the form of Robert Boyle’s Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature. As a prolegomenon to his argument about how nature should be understood philosophically, Boyle explores the ‘great ambiguity’ of the term’s common usage, picking out eight separate senses and arguing that its multiplicity makes sound reasoning on the matter almost impossible.144 141  Hannah Dawson, Locke, Language and Early-­Modern Philosophy (Cambridge, 2007), esp. pp. 129–53. See also, on the nominalist background, Nicholas Hudson, ‘John Locke and the Tradition of Nominalism’, in Nominalism and Literary Discourse: New Perspectives, ed. Hugo Keiper et al. (Amsterdam, 1997), pp. 283–99. 142  Jean Le Clerc, Ars critica, 3rd ed., 2 vols (1697: Amsterdam, 1730), I, pp. 175–76, and see more broadly the rest of this section (II.5, pp. 175–92) on lexical ambiguity, and II.11 (pp. 264–74) on syntactic ambiguity. On Le Clerc in relation to Locke, see Nicholas Hardy, Criticism and Confession: The Bible in the Seventeenth-­Century Republic of Letters (Oxford, 2017), pp. 391–395. 143  Thomas Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785), ed. Derek Brookes (Edinburgh, 2002), p. 18 (I.1): ‘There is no greater impediment to the advancement of knowledge than the ambiguity of words.’ Compare his An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (1764), ed. Derek Brookes (Edinburgh, 1997), p. 18 (I.4). David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), ed. Stephen Buckle (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 73–74 (VIII.1.1). John Norris, An Essay Towards the Theory of the Ideal or Intelligible World, Part II (London, 1704), pp. 156–67, expressed the same sentiment, with a charming neo-­ scholastic digression on angelic language (on which compare n. 91 above), which, he said, has no need for words and therefore avoids the ‘wrangling Disputes which arise from the equivocation of words’. See also Joseph Butler, The Analogy of Religion, 2nd ed. (London, 1736), p. 259 (II.3). 144  Robert Boyle, Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature (1686), eds Edward B. Davis and Michael Hunter (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 19–24, and compare p. 27: ‘being frequently and unwarily employed, it has occasioned much darkness and confusion in many men’s writings and discourses’. For the context see Dawson, Locke, Language, p. 136. The word

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Locke’s distinction between the civil and philosophical use of words would be seized upon by Reid and other Scottish philosophers of the eighteenth century, for whom it played into an argument about the nature of perception: here a ‘common-­sense’ epistemology went together with a defence of common language. This had implications for ambiguity, too. For instance, the word ‘smell’ is ambiguous insofar as it denotes both the property of an object and the faculty of perceiving that property—whence the joke, ‘My dog has no nose. How does it smell? Terrible.’145 But Reid denied that people confused the property and the faculty on account of the word’s polysemy.146 The point would be made more acutely by Reid’s Aberdeen colleague, the professor of philosophy James Beattie, in his widely read 1771 Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth. Hume had argued that the average person is a direct realist, that is, makes no distinction between objects and perceptions.147 Beattie responded with a thought experiment that led him to another point entirely: Suppose me to address the common people in these words: ‘I see a strange sight a little way off; but my sight is weak, so that I see it imperfectly; let me go nearer, that I may have a more distinct sight of it.’ . . . Now I have proposed a sentence, in which there is a studied ambiguity of language; and yet I maintain, that every person of common sense, who understands English, will instantly, on hearing these words, perceive, that by the word sight I mean, in the first clause, the thing seen; in the second, the power, or perhaps the organ, of seeing; in the third, the perception itself, as distinguished, both from the percipient faculty, and from the visible object. . . . This only shows, that accuracy of language is not always necessary for answering the common purposes of life.148

nature (or rather, the Latin natura) had a long pedigree of open debate: see, for instance, Girolamo Lombardo, De natura libri tres (Padua, 1589), pp. 1–62. For French parallels to Boyle and Locke, see Faudemay, Le clair, pp. 189, 192–93, 199–200. 145  On this ambiguity of ‘smell’ and related words, see John Orr, ‘Some Ambivalent Words and an Etymology’, repr. in his Words and Sounds in English and French (Oxford, 1953), pp. 209–14. 146  Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind, p. 42 (II.9). See also the remark in his later Essays on the Intellectual Powers, pp. 25–26 (I.1): ‘To think, to suppose, to imagine, to conceive, to apprehend, are the words we use to express simple apprehension; but they are all frequently used to express judgment. Their ambiguity seldom occasions any inconvenience in the common affairs of life, for which language is framed. But it has perplexed philosophers. . . .’ 147  David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-­Bigge (Oxford, 1975), p. 202 (I.4.2). 148  James Beattie, Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth (London, 1771), pp. 271–74 (II.2.1).

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The principal argument here—that people do intuitively distinguish object from perception—is entirely unconvincing, and it is fair to surmise that Beattie has missed Hume’s point. But the supporting argument, which has an accidental air about it, is far more interesting: verbal ambiguity neither reflects nor engenders by any necessity a mental confusion. Ordinary people just get by in ‘civil discourse’ despite the multiple meanings of the words they use. The observation is a very simple one, and yet, notwithstanding Reid’s Lockian insistence that philosophers play a more demanding language game, it threatens to undermine the foundationalist assumption that he shares with Aristotle and Bacon, namely, that terms must be disambiguated before rational discourse can begin. This point, however, would not be fully integrated into mainstream philosophy before the twentieth century. The link between Locke and the philosophical grammars of Scaliger and Sanctius would be revealed in a treatise of 1786–1815, The Diversions of Purley, by the London scholar and politician John Horne Tooke. This book, once immensely famous and influential, delved into the inner workings of English etymology, pointing for sources both to the third book of Locke’s Essay and to Scaliger’s argument that each word had only one true meaning.149 Horne Tooke has little to say about ambiguity, but we may briefly mention a digression on the matter by one of his disciples, Edward Johnson, a surgeon with an amateur interest in philology. In his Nuces Philosophicae (1842), a work which continues Tooke’s investigations into word-­ history, Johnson rails at length against the term wit—the very archetype of Augustan linguistic playfulness a century before.150 Like Boyle on ‘nature’, Johnson sorts through the different meanings of the word given by Dr Johnson (eight), Addison, Dryden, Locke, Pope, Davenant, and Swift: ‘How can such a word be possibly understood? How can it serve to communicate ideas?’ Seeking the sense from its context, a solution suggested by a partner in the dialogue, is dismissed on several conflicting grounds: the process is inefficient, it gives the speaker licence to change his meaning after the fact, and above all it renders the word itself useless because its ‘inherent meaning’ has been dissolved, leaving it ‘a mere idle breath, a bubble, a brutum fulmen, a nutshell without a kernel’. If the semantic richness of the word was, as Empson appreciated, what made possible the endless agility of a poem like Pope’s Essay on Criticism, it was to Johnson a source of horror, and a symbol of the civil breakdown actually occasioned 149  John Horne Tooke, ΕΠΕΑ ΠΤΕΡΟΕΝΤΑ, or the Diversions of Purley (1785–1815), ed. Richard Taylor (London, 1840), pp. 15–22 on Locke, and p. 667 on Scaliger. 150  Edward Johnson, Nuces Philosophicae: Or, the Philosophy of Things as Developed from the Study of the Philosophy of Words (London, 1842), pp. 39–43. On wit, see Chapter Six below, pp. 268–69.

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by disagreement as to the meaning of key words in the law: ‘universal dissatisfaction, hostile interests, heart-­burnings, threatenings, and every species of gall, wormwood and bitterness’, in the author’s hyperbolic catalogue. This was Locke’s legacy writ large. If Locke was celebrated for his sensitivity to ambiguity, especially in the vocabulary of the mind, his readers did not hesitate to apply his concerns to his own work. Reid, for instance, pointed to the word ‘conception’, which in Locke, he said, ‘sometimes signifies the act of the mind in conceiving, sometimes the thing conceived, which is the object of that act’. He later picked up on ‘knowledge’ and ‘idea’.151 To the young Henry Crabb Robinson in 1802, Locke’s language would seem intolerably ambiguous, as his fictional Kantian mouthpiece informs a traditional British empiricist: We get no word without an idea at the same time. Our master, knowing that he had a structure to raise for use not ornament, nobly despised the little graces of a baby-­horse. In the glorious consciousness that his edifice would be lasting, he did not spare the trouble of forming an adequate scaffolding; he had thoughts which had never been thought before; and for his new coin required a new stamp. Is it an argument for your favourite writers, that thoughts, idea, notion, perception, conception, feeling, apprehension, sensation, sentiment, impression, etc. should be almost indiscriminately used to round the period with harmony?152

This is interesting because it suggests that Locke has traded precision for elegance, two different conceptions of perspicuity.153 If it is a correct analysis of Kant’s style, we might see in it a return to the artificiality of scholastic language—the very target of Locke’s scorn—which at least one historian has seen as an instrument designed to eliminate, or reduce, the ambiguity of natural language.154 151  Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers, e.g., pp. 364 (V.2) and 434–49 (VI.3); see also Thomas Brown, Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind, 3 vols (Andover, 1822), I, pp. 414–15. 152  Henry Crabb Robinson, ‘Letter from an Undergraduate at the University of Jena on the Philosophy of Kant’ (1802), in his Essays on Kant, Schelling, and German Aesthetics, ed. James Vigus (London, 2010), p. 35. Friedrich Schlegel, ‘Form der Kantischen Philosophie’, KSA XVIII:59–67, at p. 63, was more sceptical about Kant’s verbal clarity: ‘K[ants] Confusion ist im eigentl[ichen] Sinne des Worts unendlich’. 153  Compare Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge, 1996), p. 361; and Alexandre Flückiger, ‘The Ambiguous Principle of the Clarity of Law’, in Obscurity and Clarity in the Law: Prospects and Challenges, ed. Anne Wagner and Sophie Cacciaguidi-­Fahy (Aldershot, 2008), 9–24. 154  Alexander Broadie, Introduction to Medieval Logic (Oxford, 1993), pp. 199–200. Kant himself had a perfectly conventional view of ambiguity: see his Prolegomena, AA IV.269. The tradition of Continental philosophy inaugurated by Schelling and Hegel around this time had

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The linguistic empiricist will comb though the lexicon for its ambiguities, as Boyle once did with the word nature. In an appendix to his much-­ reprinted Elements of Logic (1826), the polymathic archbishop of Dublin Richard Whately listed a range of terms that were ‘peculiarly liable to be used ambiguously’, noting at the start that what distinguished them was their commonness in ordinary discourse, and their apparent simplicity.155 This would be borne out over the following decades, as a veritable hive of scientists and philosophers identified the ambiguity in this or that key term. At the end of the century, the rôle of entomologist fell to Victoria, Lady Welby (1837–1912), an autodidact biblical exegete and pioneer of what she called ‘Significs’, the science of meaning. This latter she developed as her own version of semiotics and semantics, the terms used by Charles Peirce and Michel Bréal, both of whom she read and corresponded with. In Witnesses to Ambiguity, a privately printed pamphlet of 1891, Welby collected from her forebears ‘confessions of a misleading or paralysing ambiguity in expression’: these included comments on ‘matter’, ‘spirit’, ‘mind’, ‘feeling’, ‘sensation’, ‘phenomenon’, ‘definition’, ‘personal’, ‘order’, ‘regularity’, ‘law’, ‘appetite’, ‘innate’, ‘formal’, ‘freedom’, ‘essence’, ‘necessity’, ‘common sense’, ‘experience’, ‘reality’, ‘nature’, ‘inspiration’, ‘conscience’, ‘consciousness’, ‘ob­jective’, ‘idea’, ‘holy’, ‘causation’, ‘inference’, ‘relation’, ‘family’, ‘fact’, ‘in­dividual’, ‘irony’, ‘belief’, ‘motive’, ‘concept’, ‘self’, ‘reason’, ‘appropriate’, ‘ob­ject’, ‘average’, ‘evolution’, ‘elastic’, ‘tension’, ‘instinct’, ‘intelligence’, ‘ex­pression’, and many others.156 It was words like these, she maintained, that led to so much squabbling in science and metaphysics, and the first step towards understanding in such matters must be the proper clarification of terms. At the same time, she revealed a thoroughly Victorian version of Locke’s distinction between civil and philosophical discourse, smirking in a marginalium that ‘the poor’, with their a radically different attitude to style, freely using obscurity, suggestiveness, and pregnant wordplay to break inherited habits of thought. This is encapsulated in Hegel’s infamous use of the word aufheben to mean both ‘lift up’ and ‘annul’, mentioned with admiration by Gustav Gerber, Die Sprache als Kunst, 2 vols (Bromberg, 1873), II, pp. 242–243; and discussed at length by Jean-­Luc Nancy, The Speculative Remark (One of Hegel’s Bon Mots), tr. Céline Surprenant (Stanford, 2001), esp. pp. 23–46. For a good summary of the value accorded to ambiguity in this tradition, see Hans-­Georg Gadamer, ‘The Beginning and the End of Philosophy’ (1989), in Martin Heidegger: Critical Assessments, ed. Christopher Macann, 4 vols (London, 1992), I, pp. 16–28, at p. 23: ‘The conventionally established univocity of an expression which, in itself, possesses several meanings, can let the other meanings which lurk in a word be articulated along with the former, and this can be carried so far that thinking can be thrown out of its habitual tracks.’ 155  Richard Whately, Elements of Logic (London, 1826), pp. 273–316. 156  V[ictoria] W[elby], Witnesses to Ambiguity: A Collection (Grantham, 1891). On this pamphlet, see Susan Petrilli, Signifying and Understanding: Reading the Works of Victoria Welby (Berlin, 2011), pp. 186–187.

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small vocabulary, ‘feel nothing of our cravings for the definite & for sharp precision’.157 But Locke was no longer the tutelary deity of the new semantics, which had been reaching maturity since the mid-­nineteenth century in Germany and France.158 This discipline was far more aware of ambiguity in the langue as a phenomenon of its historical development, and far more tolerant of it as necessary to that development, which it perceived, following Wilhelm von Humboldt, in organistic terms. Bréal’s 1897 Essai de sémantique insisted that polysemy—a term he recovered for linguistics—was inseparable from the process of civilisation: ‘the more a word has accumulated meanings, the more we must suppose that it represents different aspects of intellectual and social activity’.159 Lady Welby commented in the margins of her copy: ‘In which case, language must become in time ambiguous \(‘polysemic’)/ to such a degree that a man’s whole life will be spent in futile explanations & every word used will require a footnote to itself’—the old worry of Sanctius.160 Bréal’s point was emphasised further in Karl Otto Erdmann’s Die Bedeutung des Wortes (1900): If the living development of a language is associated with a constantly self-­renewing semantic change in words, then the ambiguity of linguistic expression, too, is an entirely normal and necessary state. The fact of vague boundaries, multiple depths and special meanings in words appears as an inevitable corollary of the organic life and healthy growth of a language.161

Welby expressed the same attitude in an article of 1896: ‘Ambiguity is an inherent characteristic of language as of other forms of organic function.’162 These were all observations about langue, not parole. But if the 157  Victoria Welby, annotation in Carl Abel, Linguistic Essays (London, 1882), Senate House Library, London, shelfmark [L.W.L.] Abel, p. 144. 158  Nerlich, Semantic Theories, provides a very helpful survey of this field; see pp. 87–95 on Paul, 98–103 on Erdmann, and 157–163 on Bréal. Compare also pp. 210–15 on Dugald Stewart and Benjamin Smart. 159  Bréal, Essai de sémantique, p. 155: ‘plus un terme a accumulé de significations, plus on doit supposer qu’il représente de côtés divers d’activité intellectuelle et sociale’. 160  Senate House Library, London, shelfmark [L. W. L.] Breal. 161  Karl Otto Erdmann, Die Bedeutung des Wortes (Leipzig, 1900), p. 17:

Ist aber die lebendige Entwickelung einer Sprache mit einem immer sich erneuernden Bedeutungswechsel der Worte verknüpft, dann ist auch die Vieldeutigkeit des sprachlichen Ausdrucks ein durchaus normaler und nothwendiger Zustand. Die Thatsache unklarer Grenzgebiete, vielfacher Untergrenzen und Sonderbedeutungen der Worte erscheint als unvermeidliche Begleiterscheinung für das organische Leben und das gefunde Wachsthum der Sprache. 162  Victoria Welby, ‘Sense, Meaning and Interpretation (II)’, Mind, n.s., 5 (1896), 186–202, at p. 202, and compare the similar formulation on p. 194. Later, in What Is Meaning? Studies

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langue was so ambiguous, why not also parole? How is it that we can usually understand each other’s utterances? Here the linguists expanded upon the old principles of intention and context. Hermann Paul distinguished between (a) the usuelle Bedeutung of a word, its usual dictionary meaning in the langue, and (b) its occasionelle Bedeutung, its meaning in parole, in the mind of a speaker. The first was ambiguous, the second was not.163 We are back with Chrysippus and Diodorus, only now Paul offers both a careful analysis of the way context disambiguates the occasional meaning, and an account of how language evolves via a restless dialectic between the two categories, as speakers normalise new meanings. Bréal, likewise, maintained that the polysemy of a civilised langue was constrained in parole: ‘the words are placed each time in a context that predetermines their meaning’.164 The upshot of this turn was that, while ambiguity was still harmful in parole, it was now healthy in a langue. Such ideas filtered into England via Welby and her correspondents, such as the logician Alfred Sidgwick, the Jamesian pragmatist F. C. S. Schiller, and later the undergraduate Charles Kay Ogden, who in 1911 gave a clever but pretentious lecture on Welby’s theories to his Cambridge club, the Heretics Society.165 Sidgwick—cousin of Henry, the titan of Cambridge moral philosophy—assured his readers in 1901 that a perfect definiteness in language was impossible, and that to say a word was unambiguous was merely to confess that its ambiguity had not yet been uncovered: ‘the fact . . . that a name has sufficed even in all previous cases to express assertions which are free from ambiguity does not prevent its failing on the next occasion’.166 Semantics was to became a focal interest of British philosophy. The October 1920 issue of Mind reported on a debate, entitled ‘The Meaning of Meaning’, between Schiller, in the Development of Significance (London, 1903), p. 74, she noted that the ‘ambiguity of which writer and reader are equally aware, and which is adaptive and meets new emergency (exigency), is the condition of the highest forms of expression’. The thought is not developed, but evokes two interlocutors fully alive to the nuances of their language. Susan Petrilli, Victoria Welby and the Science of Signs (New Brunswick, NJ, 2015), pp. 40–47, has discussed this topic, although she seems casually to read back into Welby later ideas about ambiguity. 163  Hermann Paul, Principien der Sprachgeschichte, 2nd ed. (Halle, 1886), pp. 67–68. 164  Bréal, Essai de sémantique, p. 156: ‘les mots sont placés chaque fois dans un milieu qui en détermine d’avance la valeur’. 165  This lecture remained in manuscript at the Mills Memorial Library, Hamilton, Canada, until it was printed in C. K. Ogden, From Significs to Orthology, ed. W. Terrence Gordon (London, 1994), pp. 1–47. On Ogden and Welby, see Victoria Welby, Significs and Language: The Articulate Form of our Expressive and Interpretative Resources (1911), ed. H. Walter Schmitz (Amsterdam, 1985), pp. clxxviii–clxxxiv, and Susan Petrilli, ‘Between Semiotics and Significs: C. K. Ogden and V. Welby’, Semiotica 105 (1995), 277–309. 166  Alfred Sidgwick, The Use of Words in Reasoning (London, 1901), p. 194. Welby’s annotated copy is at Senate House Library, London, shelfmark [L.W.L.] Sidgwick.

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Bertrand Russell, and the idealist H. H. Joachim; Schiller’s contribution shows the most obvious imprint of the new turn, referring to the ‘margin of elasticity’ around the sense of a word in the langue, and to the ‘control of verbal by personal meaning’.167 In 1923 Ogden and his Magdalene friend I. A. Richards published their seminal treatise, The Meaning of Meaning, which disambiguated sixteen different senses of ‘meaning’, just as Boyle had identified eight senses of ‘nature’ a quarter of a millennium before. This book, on which work had begun as early as 1910, cited Welby, Bréal, and Erdmann, but owed much more to them, and to the rest of the new semantics, than it was willing to admit. When Empson came to read English under Richards in the late 1920s, these ideas would have formed the backbone of any philosophy of language he acquired.168 Context was the phenomenon that mediated the ambiguity of langue and the functional clarity of parole, but the semanticians had only ever been thinking of normal communication, whether spoken or written. They were not interested, at least for these purposes, in special uses of language such as poetry. Although Empson did not himself frame it like this, one way of understanding Seven Types is to see it as showing that context did not perform the same restrictive office in poetry that it did in other settings—that in poetry all that vital ambiguity of the langue was allowed into the parole. This perspective helps to make sense of the objection voiced by early reviewers that Empson had ignored the disambiguating function of context. Moreover, another scholar, one unknown to Empson, had already, and much more explicitly, made the leap from the new semantics to literary criticism. This was the Russian formalist critic Yuri Tynianov, in his 1924 book Problema stikhotvornogo iazyka or The Problem of Poetic Language, the second chapter of which begins by exalting the word as a ‘chameleon’, constantly changing shade and colour; the first citation is of Paul and Erdmann on the ambiguity of words in the langue.169 The remainder of the chapter focuses on the special manipulations of meaning in poetry as distinguished from prose.170 Two decades later, Cleanth Brooks would be electrified by another product of the semantic turn, Wilbur Marshall Urban’s Language and Reality (1939).171 From England to Russia and 167  F. C. S. Schiller, in Schiller, Bertrand Russell, and H. H. Joachim, ‘The Meaning of Meaning’, Mind, n.s., 29 (1920), 385–414, at pp. 392, 396. 168  According to John Haffenden, William Empson, 2 vols (Oxford, 2005–2006), I, p. 184, Empson read The Meaning of Meaning as an undergraduate. 169  Yuri Tynianov, The Problem of Verse Language, tr. Michael Sosa and Brent Harvey (Ann Arbor, MI, 1981), p. 64. 170  Ibid., esp. pp. 90–97 on ‘oscillating signs’. 171  Wilbur Marshall Urban, Language and Reality: The Philosophy of Language and the Principles of Symbolism (1939: London, 2002), pp. 192–194 on the necessary ambiguity of langue. Cleanth Brooks to Allen Tate, 1 August 1945, in Cleanth Brooks and Allen Tate: Collected Letters,

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America, literary criticism was clicking with the linguists’ renewed appreciation for the creative possibilities of language. A Coda on Hermeneutics At the beginning of this chapter I stated that Aristotle contained the seeds of three Western traditions on ambiguity: the logico-­semantic, the rhetorical, and the hermeneutic. Of these the first two, which concern langue, have been outlined above, though we have also seen how developments in the first helped to cue up innovations in the third. The remainder of this book is about ambiguity in parole, mostly in the interpretation of texts. What, then, marks out the hermeneutic view of ambiguity? Hermeneutics introduces the problem of intention, as we have already begun to see. The statement (a) ‘I will put the money in the bank’ looks unambiguous, despite the polysemy of the word bank in the dictionary. But if we imagine it as a sentence uttered by a real person, it might be ambiguous after all, for instance, if uttered by someone who has agreed with a friend to use a hole dug beside a river as a dead drop. Once we add an intention to the dummy sentence (a), we shift from semantics to hermeneutics, and have to think about ambiguity in entirely different terms.172 This is the condition we are in as classical readers of texts, and in this condition, all the examples tricked up by Aristotle and all the textbooks and treatises that came after him begin to look uninteresting because meaningless: language without intention is a phantom. The interpreter’s default assumption is that the author meant something, and meant one thing only; this ‘something’ provides the limit for the potential swell of meaning in the text. As Hobbes put it succinctly, in a legal setting, ‘the significations of almost all words are either in themselves, or in the metaphoricall use of them, ambiguous; and may be drawn in argument, to make many senses; but there is onely one sense of the Law. . . . [T]he Letter, and the Sentence or intention of the Law, is all one.’173 This is the position of almost all interpreters before their texts, and from such a position there is no paradox in Gellius after all—Diodorus tells us what the process and aims of interpretation must be; Chrysippus tells us what obstacles lie in our way. 1933–1976, ed. Alphonse Vinh (Columbia, MO, 1998), p. 125, mentions Urban with admiration, noting that ‘His view of poetry is really very close to ours.’ 172  On the fundamental difference between semantic and hermeneutic meanings, see above all Mark Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 32–52. 173  Hobbes, Leviathan, II, p. 436 (ch. 26). Compare his The Elements of Law Natural and Politic, ed. Ferdinand Tönnies (London, 1889), p. 68.

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CH A PTE R TWO

FORENSIC IDOLS Let not the public mock their formal style, Vain repetitions—vulgarly called jaw; Nor clients hear, with a disdainful smile, The strange ambiguous language of the law. — ‘Carr Bunkle’, The Adventures of Mr Ambiguous Law.1

The Dissoi Logoi, a sophistical exercise from the late fifth century BC, argues that every good is also an evil, and vice versa: thus disease is an evil for the sufferer but good for the doctor whose livelihood depends on it.2 Like that doctor is the interpreter of texts, treating the malady of ambiguity and sustained professionally by his diagnoses. In recognition of this James Joyce, in a mischievous but charitable mood, declined to clarify Ulysses, assuring professors long employment arguing over what it meant.3 But while such ambiguities have provendered literature departments for decades—just as ancient critics once bickered over the puzzles in Homer— two other interpretive discourses, namely law and theology, have still richer back stories. These three fields seemed to demand the business of interpretation precisely because they were the sites of difficult, obscure, ambiguous language.4 1  ‘Carr Bunkle’ [= William Robert Shepherd], The Adventures of Mr. Ambiguous Law, an Articled Clerk (London, 1860), title-­page. The verse parodies Gray’s Elegy: ‘Let not Ambition mock their useful toil. . . .’ 2  Dissoi Logoi, ed. and tr. T. M. Robinson as Contrasting Arguments (New York, 1979), pp. 98–101 (I.2–7). 3  Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (Oxford, 1982), p. 521, quoting an interview with Jacques Benoîst-­Méchin. Compare the thought of Rabbi Yannai, quoted in the Jerusalem Talmud, Sanhedrin, 22a, in The Jerusalem Talmud: Fourth Order: Neziqin, ed. and tr. Heinrich Guggenheimer (Berlin, 2010), p. 152: ‘If the Torah been given decided, no foot could stand’—i.e., the business of interpretation would collapse. Aristotle, Athenian Constitution, IX.2, notes that, according to some, Solon deliberately made his laws unclear so as to leave the people the judge of his decisions (‘τῆς κρίσεως ὁ δῆμος κύριος’). 4  SHK, p. 30: ‘sie [i.e., hermeneutics] auch nur die schwierigen Fälle vor Augen hatte. . . . So ist die theologische und juristische entstanden’. See also Hans-­Georg Gadamer, ‘Herme-

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The insight that all language requires interpretation is generally credited to Friedrich Schleiermacher in the early nineteenth century, although most of his precepts were pre-­empted by his predecessors, such as Johann Gottfried von Herder and Friedrich Schlegel.5 The conceptual turn represented, if not initiated, by Schleiermacher has since been canonised as the foundation of a general hermeneutics, that is, a philosophy of interpretation applicable to all texts, or even all utterances.6 It might reasonably be expected that, because the remainder of this book is devoted to the place of ambiguity in various hermeneutic contexts, Schleiermacher will play a central rôle here. But ambiguity turns out not to be a key term in his thought. He regards the difference between minds as fundamental and ineradicable, and misunderstandings based on inattention and false assumptions as the norm, not the exception. Nevertheless, he mentions ambiguity only in passing as an external linguistic feature of a text;7 interpretation is conceived, by contrast, as a holistic process of mediating between an author’s words and his individual psychology, with the expectation that each aspect will gradually clarify the other. That is, by developing a sense of what sort of person an author is, we will be more certain about what he meant.8 Despite this absence, we will glimpse contemporary accounts of ambiguity in law (Franz Lieber, below) and in poetry (Philipp Buttmann, Chapter Five) that share key tenets with Schleiermacher. Of the three hermeneutic disciplines mentioned above, it seems best to begin with the law, for three reasons. First, its setting is closely bound to the rhetorical discourses we encountered in Chapter One; thus, in a move that might startle the modern reader but was quite obvious at the time, Lorenzo Valla, in his annotations on Quintilian from the 1440s–1450s, copied out parallels and illustrations from the Roman law, including on ambiguity.9 Second, legal hermeneutics stands somewhat apart from scripneutics and Historicism’ (1965), appended to his Truth and Method, tr. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall (London, 2013), p. 528. 5  On this see a number of essays by Michael Forster, collected in his After Herder: Philosophy of Language in the German Tradition (Oxford, 2010), esp. pp. 255–63, 286–332; and German Philosophy of Language: From Schlegel to Hegel and Beyond (Oxford, 2011), esp. pp. 55–90. 6  The historiography begins with the essays collected in Wilhelm Dilthey’s Hermeneutics and the Study of History (Princeton, 1985). 7  See, however, ‘Den Aphorismen von 1805 und 1809’, in his Hermeneutik nach den Handschriften, ed. Heinz Kimmerle (Heidelberg, 1959), p. 40: ‘Bei zweideutiger Beziehung. . . .’ There is somewhat more attention to ambiguity among his immediate predecessors: see, for instance, Samuel Friedrich Morus, Super hermeneutica Novi Testamenti acroases academicae, ed. Heinrich Eichstädt, 2 vols (Leipzig, 1797–1802), I, pp. 44–46, cited by Schleiermacher at ‘Aphorismen’, p. 41. 8  On this point, see especially Michael Forster, After Herder, p. 374. 9  Lorenzo Valla, Le postille all’ Institutio Oratoria di Quintiliano, eds Lucia Cesarini Martinelli and Alessandro Perosa (Padua, 1996), e.g., at pp. 165–166, drawing on Paulus, Ulpian, and

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tural and literary exegesis in that it never countenances the legitimacy of deliberate ambiguity. Third, of the three subjects law is the most essential to society. If it was important to determine the sense of a line in Horace or St John, it was far more so in a contract, for at stake there was not merely a grasp of the classics or the soul’s eternal salvation, but money. On an ambiguity—Leon, Pantaleon—could turn an inheritance, and so the machine of legal practice, of arguing and deciding cases, has always held to a rhythm of finding and resolving ambiguities; the Tudor scholar Thomas Wilson noted of lawyers that, ‘rather then faile, thei will make doubtes often tymes, where no doubt should be at all’.10 Rather than trying to cover all bases in the history of legal ambiguity, I want to approach the topic through its connection to the more fundamental hermeneutic problem of intention, one that will continue to underpin analyses of ambiguity in subsequent chapters of this book. We might start by returning to the first double issue of Poetics Today, soon to be the site of conflict between Rimmon and Hillis Miller about Henry James.11 In this issue an elegant essay by Walter Benn Michaels, ‘Against Formalism’, denies the possibility of a purely formalistic mode of interpretation—one which excludes all recourse to extrinsic evidence and focuses entirely on ‘the text itself’—because ‘the text itself’ is incoherent, and every decision about its meaning depends on prior judgements about words and facts extrinsic to it.12 Michaels’ examples are taken from two sources: critical disputes over a lyric poem, and legal exegesis. In the latter instance he points, via the jurist Arthur Corbin, to a 1960 case that turned on competing definitions of the word ‘chicken’, the one ordinary and broad, the other technical and narrow; the conclusion is that every word, even one as apparently unambiguous as ‘chicken’, could have different meanings to different users. This was not merely a reiteration of Chrysippus;13 rather, it was to observe that whether a word was clear or ambiguous depended not on any objective, formal criterion, but only on the agreement or disagreement of those who use it in a particular situation. There Celsus. On Valla and Quintilian, see Salvatore Camporeale, Lorenzo Valla: umanesimo e teologia (Florence, 1972), pp. 89–100. On Quintilian and the law more broadly in the Renaissance, see Giovanni Rossi, ‘Rhetorical Role Models for 16th to 18th Century Lawyers’, in Quintilian and the Law: The Art of Persuasion on Law and Politics, ed. Olga Tellegen-­Couperus (Leuven, 2003), pp. 81–94. 10  Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique (London, 1553), fol. 53r. 11  See the Introduction above, pp. 16–17. 12  Walter Benn Michaels, ‘Against Formalism’, Poetics Today 1 (1979), 23–34. Against Michaels, see David Couzens Hoy, ‘Intentions and the Law: Defending Hermeneutics’, in Legal Hermeneutics: History, Theory and Practice, ed. Gregory Leyh et al. (Berkeley, 1992), pp. 173–186. See further Sean Burke, The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida (Edinburgh, 1992), p. 139. 13  On whom, see Chapter One, pp. 51–52.

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are no Archimedean points in interpretation, only provisional arrays of harmony and discord.14 Michaels was writing in a tradition that stressed the primacy of a writer’s intention in interpreting a text such as a statute, a will or a contract. This had been clearly expressed, for instance, in an 1839 treatise on legal hermeneutics, the first in English, by Franz Lieber, a young jurist from Berlin who trained in the new German academic discipline and subsequently emigrated to London and then Boston in 1827.15 Lieber spells out his central tenet again and again: there is only one true sense of a text or utterance, and that is what the author intended. ‘This is the very basis of all interpretation. Interpretation without it has no meaning. . . . To have two meanings in view is equivalent to having no meaning—and amounts to an absurdity.’16 This point is classical, and its congruence with the Aristotelian notion of language outlined in Chapter One should be immediately apparent. But Lieber, like Schleiermacher, broke with the classical principle that interpretation pertained only to ambiguous texts, as embodied in the legal commonplace that Interpretatio non fit in claris, ‘Clear passages are not interpreted’.17 For Lieber, all texts require interpretation; that is, all texts are, to a greater or lesser extent, ambiguous, because ambiguity is intrinsic to the way in which language cuts up the world. There is no citation, but the point is one of Lockean epistemology in the service of Schleiermach14  One thinks here of Friedrich Nietzsche’s slogan, Der Willen zur Macht, fragment 481: ‘gerade Thatsachen giebt es nicht, nur Interpretationen’—no facts, only interpretations. 15  Lieber’s American career was varied: gymnasium administrator, translator, jurist, professor of history and diplomat. On Lieber and his hermeneutics, see John Catalano, Francis Lieber: Hermeneutics and Practical Reason (Lanham, MD, 2000). 16  Francis Lieber, Legal and Political Hermeneutics (Boston, 1837), p. 86. 17  The source of this was Cicero, De inventione, II.44.127: ‘cum et scriptum aperte sit et adversarius omnia confiteatur, tum judicem legi parere, non interpretari legem oportere’. On the history see Saverio Masuelli, ‘ ‘‘In claris non fit interpretatio”: Alle origini del brocardo’, Rivista di diritto romano 2 (2002), 401–424. Michael Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (Oxford, 1985), pp. 231–32, applies it to rabbinical law. The maxim sits awkwardly with the classical concept of epieikeia or equity (Nic. Ethics V, 1137a–1138a), the principle of natural justice or fairness to which the law is directed and which serves as a corrective to it. Given the finitude of any lawcode and the infinite number of cases it must adjudicate, there must always remain the space to interpret old laws—including ‘clear’ ones—in response to new circumstances. The classic example is the law in a city that any foreigner caught scaling the walls is to be put to death; a foreigner is visiting a friend when the city is attacked, and he mounts the walls to help repel the invaders. He thus breaks the letter of the law, but is acquitted in the interests of equity. For this example, see [Ps.‑]Andronicus Rhodius, Ethicorum Nicomacheorum paraphrasis, ed. and tr. Daniel Heinsius (Oxford, 1809), pp. 244–45 (V.16); Thomas Aquinas, Sententia libri Ethicorum, V.16, in the Leonine Opera omnia (Rome, 1882–), XLVII.2, p. 324a. On equity more generally, see Garrett Barden, ‘Aristotle’s Notion of Epieikeia’, in Creativity and Method: Essays in Honor of Bernard Lonergan, S. J., ed. Matthew Lamb (Milwaukee, 1981), pp. 353–66; and Kathy Eden, Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition: Chapters in the Ancient Legacy and Its Humanist Reception (Yale, 1997).

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erian hermeneutics.18 The important thing, in any case, was to get beyond the ‘letter’ of a document to its ‘spirit’. The spirit is the same as the intention, and it is single.19 Any interpretation which ignores the spirit for the letter is simply incoherent. A century later another great American jurist, John Henry Wigmore, would agree; to focus on the letter of legal documents represented, for him, ‘a stiff and superstitious formalism’.20 Who were these superstitious formalists, ignoring the spirit of wills and statutes? And what were their arguments? If meaning for them was not the author’s intention, what was it? Michaels pointed back to famous justices such as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and Learned Hand—oh, to be named ‘Learned Hand’!—who had insisted that the intention of the parties in a contract is, strictly speaking, irrelevant to its meaning. The present chapter sketches the back story to these thoughts, in two stages: first, and more briefly, the Roman law codified in the sixth century, and second, Francis Bacon’s legal maxims and their reception in Anglo-American common law from the late eighteenth century. In each case, a conversation about the way to resolve legal ambiguities was at heart a debate about the nature of interpretation itself. Queen and Hare In 527 AD, Justinian I acceded to the Byzantine throne, inaugurating vast cultural and political changes in the eastern empire. Perhaps the most important of his early acts was his programme of judicial reform: deeming the empire’s legal code incoherent, he commissioned his chief jurist Tribonian to draw up a collection of precepts and statutes, later known as the Corpus Juris Civilis, the ‘body of civil law’.21 Complete by 534, this book laid the foundation of law in the East, and, upon its recovery in the twelfth century, also in the West, down to the eighteenth and even the early nineteenth century in parts of Europe.22 One section of the Corpus, entitled the Lieber, Legal and Political Hermeneutics, pp. 25–26, 33–39, 48–49. Ibid., pp. 56–57. Compare Hobbes in Chapter One above, p. 72. 20  See below, p. 96. 21  The term was formalised by Denis Godefroy’s 1583 edition of the Code: see Hans Erich Troje, Graeca Leguntur: Die Aneignung des byzantinischen Rechts und die Entstehung eines humanistischen Corpus iuris civilis in der Jurisprudenz des 16. Jahrhunderts (Cologne, 1971), pp. 154– 55. My account of Roman law in this section is based largely on Reinhard Zimmermann, The Law of Obligations: Roman Foundations of the Civilian Tradition (Cape Town, 1990), pp. 621–42; and Ian Maclean, Interpretation and Meaning in the Renaissance: The Case of Law (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 125–131, 160–164, with additional reference to the primary sources. 22  Wolfgang Kunkel, An Introduction to Roman Legal and Constitutional History, tr. J. M. Kelly (Oxford, 1966), p. 157, n. 2. 18  19 

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Pandects or Digest, is a compendium of Roman legal precepts from earlier eras, organised to do away with conflicts between authorities. Many of the precepts in the Digest concern the resolution of ambiguity in legal documents; in fact, one of its sources was an entire treatise on ambiguity ascribed to Salvius Julianus.23 For some jurists, an author’s intention (mens, sententia, voluntas) was paramount: ‘what is the use of words’, asked Quintus Aelius Tubero, ‘except to indicate the wishes of the speaker?’24 The problem was how to ascertain it. A fine mixed metaphor by the sixteenth-­century scholar Angelo Matteacci captures both its elusiveness and its hermeneutic authority: ‘With all wills we must stick to the testator’s intention, like a queen which the lawyer follows, just as a hunter pursues a hare.’25 It was this very leporinity of intention that prompted other ancient jurists to focus instead on the words (verba) chosen to express it; after all, these were secure, inflexible marks of meaning, or at least should be treated as such. As Cicero put the argument, ‘it is not for us to dispute the intention of someone who has left us evidence of that intention precisely to prevent us doing so’.26 There is an important paradox here: the turn away from intention is grounded in the intention itself. The entire purpose of writing is to obviate the hunt for the hare; thus the status theorists of the first century BC maintained that words and intention were two separate things, and that a discrepancy between them was a common status or point of legal contention.27 This has implications for dealing with ambiguity. Celsus, after quoting the above line of Tubero, says he prefers instead the opinion of Servius, that because we communicate our intentions through speech alone, when a man speaks ambiguously ‘he should be considered not to have said any23  Armando Torrent, Salvius Julianus liber singularis de ambiguitatibus (Salamanca, 1971). On the authenticity, see the literature summarised in Hans Hohmann, ‘Classical Rhetoric and Roman Law: Reflections on a Debate’, Rhetorik: Ein internationales Jahrbuch 15 (1996), 15–41, at p. 29, n. 80. For a summary of the statements about ambiguity in the Digest, see Hans Erich Troje, ‘Ambiguitas contra stipulatorem’, Studia et documenta historiae et juris 27 (1961), 93– 185, at pp. 117–20. 24  Aelius Tubero, quoted in D.33.10.7.2 (Celsus): ‘nam quorsum nomina, inquit, nisi ut demonstrarent voluntatem dicentis?’ Compare D. 1.3.17 (Celsus), 50.17.96 (Maecianus). On the focus on intention in Renaissance civil law, see, e.g. Maclean, Interpretation and Meaning, pp. 95–100, 143–44, and Stéphan Geonget, La notion de perplexité à la Renaissance (Geneva, 2006), pp. 66–68. On status theory, see Chapter One above, pp. 35–36. 25  Angelo Matteacci, De via et ratione artificiosa iuris universi libri duo (Venice, 1591), fol. 77r: ‘in testamentis . . . omnibus confugiendum est ad mentem testatoris, tanquam Reginam, quam Iurisconsultus insequitur, ut venator leporem.’ Matteacci was perhaps recalling Horace’s image at Sat. I.2.105–6, borrowed from Callimachus and inspiring in turn Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, X.7.5: ‘Come segue la lepre il cacciatore’. 26  Cicero, Rhetorici libri duo qui vocantur de inventione, ed. Eduard Stroebel (Leipzig, 1965), p. 134 (II.44.128): ‘non oportere de eius voluntate nos argumentari, qui, ne id facere possemus, indicium nobis reliquerit suae voluntatis’. 27  Eden, Hermeneutics, pp. 7–10.

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thing’: the statement becomes void, no matter the intention. Paulus illustrates this with an example: There are two Titiuses, father and son, and ‘Titius’ is appointed as guardian. It is not apparent which one the testator had in mind. I ask, then, what does the law say? He replied that the Titius intended by the testator is guardian. If this is not apparent, then the law is not deficient, but only the evidence. Therefore neither is guardian.28

One key omission here, as elsewhere in similar precepts in the Digest, is any discussion of how the intention is to be ascertained, that is, what sorts of evidence may be adduced; this presumably reflects the nature of ancient Roman legal practice, and the want is not supplied in early modern commentary.29 A discussion of evidence, by contrast, would be central to the English tradition to which we will turn in the following sections. Two further groups of Roman precepts may be understood as replacing the focus on intention, or else as likely means to conjecture intention in the absence of extrinsic evidence. Ulpian remarks: ‘If someone’s language is ambiguous, or his intention is doubtful, he should be understood in that sense which is most useful to him.’30 Paulus, on the other hand, holds that ‘when the words are obscure, one ought to look to the more probable or customary sense’.31 The final group of precepts deal specifically with contracts, where the matter is complicated by the fact that they supposedly reflect more than one party’s intention, and moreover, that the interests of the two parties are in tension. In this special situation, any ambiguity is to be construed against the drafter, since he ought to have taken care to express himself more clearly. This marks the full turn away from an intentionalist hermeneutics, not ignoring but contradicting the spirit. This principle would be developed by mediaeval commentators into the general contra proferentem rule, which continues to surface in legal rulings to this day.32 The laws drawn up in the Digest thus exhibit a tension between the demands of voluntas and those of verba, between the attempt to reconstruct 28  D. 26.2.30 (Paulus): ‘Duo sunt Titii, pater et filius, datus est tutor Titius: nec apparet de quo sensit testator: quaero, quid sit juris? Respondit, is datus est, quem dare se testator sensit. Si id non apparet, non jus deficit, sed probatio, igitur neuter est tutor.’ 29  Zimmermann, The Law of Obligations, pp. 624–625. 30  D. 5.1.66 (Ulpian): ‘Si quis intentione ambigua vel oratione usus sit, id quod utilius ei est accipiendum est.’ Compare D. 8.2.23 (Pomponius), D. 34.5.12 (Justinus), and D. 50.17.192 (Marcellus). 31  D. 50.17.114 (Paulus): ‘In obscuris inspici solere, quod verisimilius est aut quod plerumque fieri solet.’ 32  D. 2.14.39 (Papinian), and compare D. 18.1.21 (Paulus). For an example of the rule’s continuing relevance, see, for instance, Mark Bentley, ‘Ambiguous Claim Terms may soon be Construed Against the Drafter’, National Law Review (Oct 1, 2013), http://www.natlawreview .com/article/ambiguous-claim-terms-may-soon-be-construed-against-drafter.

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the historical intention of a text’s author and the resolution of ambiguity by textual analysis. These two types of interpretation are sometimes labelled ‘subjective’ (aiming at the intention) and ‘objective’ (aiming at the intrinsic or ordinary sense of the words).33 For the judge seeking to apply its rules to a case, the Digest offers no clue to resolving the discrepancy: if we find an ambiguity, are we to ignore the sentence, to make a best guess, to construe it as favourably as possible to the author, or to construe it against him? One attempt at resolution was ascribed to the twelfth-­century jurist Johannes Bassianus, who ordered the precepts by normative priority: first the lawyer was to try to determine the common intention behind a contract (quid actum est, D. 34.5.11), then, failing that, to construe it so as to preserve rather than lose the property in contention (D. 34.5.12), then to construe its ‘more probable’ meaning (D. 50.17.114), and finally if all else fails to construe it against the person who wrote it.34 This ordering, transmitted through the glosses, proved deeply influential, and can be found among many early modern jurists; it has even been shown to be the ultimate source for the order of precepts on interpretation in the Napoleonic Code.35 Another means to make sense of the contrary precepts on ambiguity in the Corpus is to distinguish them as the products of different historical periods. It has been argued that the earliest, pre-­classical Roman jurisprudence was formalistic, its interpreters focusing on the words of a contract over the intention, reflecting an archaic, superstitious attachment to formulae.36 From this phase, according to Heinrich Honsell, arose the ante33  For a concise explanation and critique of this distinction, see Alf Ross, On Law and Justice (Berkeley, 1959), pp. 121–23. 34  The attribution is found in the Glossa ordinaria on the Digest ascribed to Accursius (the student of Bassianus’s student Azo), at D. 2.14.39: see Digestum seu Pandectae iuris civilis, ed. Sebastianus Nivellius, 5 vols (Paris, 1576), I, col. 297, gloss at legem: ‘Et ut omne tollas contrarium, distingue secundum Io[hannem, sc. Bassianum] cum pactio obscura vel ambigua apponitur in contractu: aut constat quod consenserunt de quo agere velint et tunc valet . . . aut certum est quod dissenserunt, et tunc nihil valet contractus. . . . Si autem dubium est, aut verbum potest interpretari secundum unum tantum: aut secundum utrumque primo casu secundum illius intellectum valet secundum quem valere potest. . . . Ultimo in hac l[ege] no[ta] arg[umentum] quod quandoque ratione ambiguitatis neutrum valet’. On this see Troje, ‘Ambiguitas contra stipulatorem’, p. 99. 35  Christoph Krampe, Die Unklarheitenregel: Bürgerliches und römiches Recht (Berlin, 1983), pp. 15, 49–57; Hervé Trofimoff, ‘Les sources doctrinales de l’ordre de présentation des articles 1156 à 1164 du Code civil sur l’interprétation des contrats’, Revue historique de droit français et étranger 72 (1994), 203–33. 36  The classic article is Gian Gualberto Archi, ‘Dal formalismo negoziale repubblicano al principio giustinianeo ‘cum sit iustum voluntates contrahentium magis quam verborum conceptionem inspicere’’, in his Scritti di diritto romano, 3 vols (Milan, 1961), I, pp. 443–79. Compare Max Weber’s notion of ‘magically conditioned formalism’ (magisch bedingte Formal-

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cedents of the contra proferentem rule, with its opposition to intention.37 That rule and the formalism behind it promoted a rigid and inflexible attitude to the letter of the law, but also a security from later efforts by authors to reinterpret their own texts, a tenet well expressed by Emer de Vattel in 1758: ‘No agreements will be certain, no concessions firm and solid, if one can make them void by subsequent limitations, which should have been spelled out in the deed if they were in the intention of the contractors.’38 As jurisprudence progressed from its archaic period, through the classical era and into the Byzantine, it became increasingly, and finally exclusively, focused on intention, at the expense of the integrity of the words; thus Justinian repeatedly relies on phrases invoking voluntas in his own laws in the Corpus. The turn promoted flexibility and equity, for which it sacrificed the security afforded by formalism; nonetheless, the Digest incorporated both types of precept, and one of its central paradoxes is that, despite its effort to rid the law of confusion through system, confusion was an inevitable product of its comprehensiveness. Such a confusion had to be resolved by further interpretive acts, whether normative (Bassianus) or historiographical (Honsell). If Justinian emphasised the priority of intention in interpreting contracts, he had a very different view of his own Digest. At the head of the work he affixed three prefaces regulating its use, and among the edicts of these prefaces is one that forbids commentary, present and future: We do not permit [jurists] to put forward any interpretations, or rather perversions, of the laws, lest their prolixity blemish our laws with confusion. . . . If anything should seem ambiguous, let it be referred by judges to the emperor, and let it be clarified by the sacred authority to which alone has been granted the establishment and interpretation of the laws.’39

ismus) in law: see his Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (1921–22), 5 vols, vol III: Recht (= Gesamt­ ausgabe, I.22.3), ed. Werner Gephart and Siegfried Hermes (Tübingen, 2010), p. 618. 37  Heinrich Honsell, ‘Ambiguitas contra stipulatorem’, in Iuris Professio: Festgabe für Max Kaser, ed. Hans-­Peter Benöhr et al. (Vienna, 1986), pp. 73–88. 38  Emer de Vattel, Le droit des gens, 2 vols (London, 1758), II, p. 462 (II.17.264): ‘Nulle Convention assurée, nulle Concession ferme et solide, si l’on peut les rendre vaines par des limitations subséquentes, qui devoient être énoncées dans l’Acte, si elles étoient dans la volonté des Contractans.’ 39  Corpus Iuris Civilis, ed. Theodor Mommsen et al., 2 vols (Berlin, 1872), I, p. xxvii (De conf. 21): ‘alias autem legum interpretationes, immo magis perversiones eos iactare non concedimus, ne verbositas eorum aliquid legibus nostris adferat ex confusione dedecus . . . si quid vero, ut supra dictum est, ambiguum fuerit visum, hoc ad imperiale culmen per judices referatur et ex auctoritate Augusta manifestetur, cui soli concessum est leges et condere et interpretari.’

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Justinian seems to have in mind not the interpretation by which a practising lawyer applies precepts to the case in hand, but more specifically the written commentary seeking to clarify the terse sentences of the Digest with a more diffuse paraphrase. This tells us something profound: interpretation was perceived to be a process that not only clarified a text but transferred its authority onto the reader, and so threatened to supplant and undermine it. Thus Christian Wolff, in his Jus naturae (1740–1749), an attempt to refound Roman law on a rational basis, would defend the maxim ‘Clear passages are not interpreted’ on the grounds that otherwise ‘human affairs would be deprived of all certainty’.40 A similar fear had prompted Catholic authorities in the Middle Ages periodically to forbid translations of the Bible, and to monitor commentary closely. The comparison is not arbitrary: Justinian’s prefaces invested his text with a sacred authority (auctoritas augusta) closely bound to his own, or to be more precise, that of his office.41 If the laws should ‘seem ambiguous’—the implication is that they cannot really be so—they may be clarified only by imperial fiat, a verbal counterpart to the immanent sense of the text. Over a millennium later, Leibniz would remark to the imperial chancellor Johann Paul Hocher that although prolix or disordered prose in a statute could be remedied by any private scholar for the benefit of all, ambiguity, which required a decision about meaning, could be solved only by the authority of the emperor.42 From one end of the Roman legal tradition to the other recurred the belief that the words of the law were not merely indices of their authors’ intentions, but had a meaning of their own, to which all but the narrowest type of interpretation posed a danger. By a kind irony, the Digest ranks among the most interpreted books in Western history.43 As with the Bible, sacrality both forbade exegesis, insisting on clarity, and necessitated it. A sequence of mediaeval schools heaped up glosses around the text, explaining, illustrating, filling in the gaps, and making it increasingly impenetrable, as readers of Rabelais will recall.44 40  Christian Wolff, Jus naturae methodo scientifica pertractum, 8 vols (Halle, 1740–49), VII, p. 591 (IV.822): ‘Standum omnino est iis, quae verbis expressis, quorum manifestus est significatus, indicata fuerant, nisi omnem a negotiis humanis certitudinem removere volueris’. 41  On the recurrent legal fantasy of the uninterpretable lawcode, see Alexandre Flückiger, ‘The Ambiguous Principle of the Clarity of Law’, in Obscurity and Clarity in the Law: Prospects and Challenges, eds Anne Wagner and Sophie Cacciaguidi-­Fahy (Aldershot, 2008), pp. 9–24. 42  G. W. Leibniz to J. P. Hocher, c. 1680, in his Allgemeiner Politischer und Historischer Briefwechsel [= Sämtliche Schriften, erste Reihe], 8 vols (Berlin, 1923–1970), II, p. 347 (# 332). 43  Maclean, Interpretation and Meaning, pp. 50–59. 44  Baldo degli Ubaldi, one of the most important commentators of the fourteenth century, notes that the word interpretatio was itself ambiguous as it could denote either declaratio (clarification, exposition) or suppletio (supplying deficiencies); see his scholium on D.

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Their discussions of ambiguity tend to be tedious quibbles over definition, typically between ambiguity and obscurity, since those terms had been listed separately in D. 2.14.39 (Papinianus); the thirteenth-­century Glossa ordinaria, for instance, influentially asserted that the two were not the same, as some thought, but that obscurity was a feature of individual words (dictio), ambiguity of syntax (oratio).45 In the sixteenth century a new strain of scholars such as Andrea Alciato and Guillaume Budé were concerned instead to understand the Corpus as a product of, and hence a key source for, ancient culture, and to these writers, Justinian’s decree annihilated the legitimacy of their forebears’ glosses.46 Nonetheless they still faced the same old problems of definition. Alciato, for one, ignored the glossatorial tradition and instead quoted Aulus Gellius on Chrysippus and Diodorus, before concluding that ambiguity involved two meanings, obscurity many.47 Within a century there were substantial treatments of ambiguity in legal interpretation, and even entire monographs, such as the 1609 Vaticanae lucubrationes of Francesco Mantica.48 But rather than examining that tradition, I want to turn instead to a concept of ambiguity in English law, one that forms the more immediate background to the concerns of Michaels and Lieber with which we began. 28.2.29.6 (‘Quid si is’), in his Commentaria in primam et secundam Infortiati partes (Lyon, 1585), fol. 63va, #2. For a late reworking, on ambiguity, see Bartolomeo Sozzini, Regule cum suis ampliationibus et fallentiis e toto iure delecte (Paris, 1515), fol. 111r–v (regula 237). 45  Digestum seu Pandectae iuris civilis, ed. Nivellius, I, col. 297 (D. 2.14.39), gloss at obscuram: ‘Quidam dicunt quod obscuritas et ambiguitas idem est. tu dic quod vertit obscuritas circa dictionem aliquam, ex eo quod multipliciter intelligi potest . . . sed ambiguitas est circa orationem’. In the fourteenth century, Albericus de Rosate, Dictionarium (Lyon, 1548), sig. b6r, s.v. ‘Ambiguitas.i.obscuritas’, asserted the exact opposite. Later again, Baldo degli Ubaldi, Commentaria in primam Digesti Veteris partem (Lyon, 1585), fol. 159va–b (at D. 2.14.39), distinguished five kinds of text that could be called obscure or ambiguous—the equivocal (either dictio or oratio), the general, the alternative, the abridged or compressed, and the indefinite. 46  Guillaume Budé, Annotationes in Pandectas, in his Opera omnia, 4 vols (Basel, 1557), III, p. 106, and see Maclean, Interpretation and Meaning, p. 55. 47  Andrea Alciato, De verborum significatione libri quatuor (Lyon, 1530), p. 179b (at 50.16.125). 48  Camillo Gallinio, De verborum significatione (Venice, 1582), fols 41v–46v (III.11–18); Matteacci, De via et ratione artificiosa, fols 76r–83r; Francesco Mantica, Vaticanae lucubrationes de tacitis et ambiguis conventionibus, 2 vols (Rome, 1609). For a helpful summary of the wranglings over definitions of ambiguity and obscurity in this period, see Juan del Castillo Sotomayor, Quotidianarum controversiarum juris tomus 4, de conjecturis et interpretatione ultimarum voluntatum (1619: Cologne, 1726), pp. 19–22 (IV.4). The material was influentially adapted for the new field of international law by Hugo Grotius, De jure belli ac pacis libri tres (1625), ed. P. C. Molhuysen (Leiden, 1919), pp. 313–327 (II.16), and perpetuated by Grotius’s heirs, e.g., Christian Thomasius, Institutiones jurisprudentiae divinae (Frankfurt and Leipzig, 1688), pp. 278–344 (II.11).

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Patent and Latent Francis Bacon’s contributions to jurisprudence rank among his most significant achievements. At twelve he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, and at fifteen he entered Gray’s Inn, before travelling in Europe on diplomatic business; in 1579, after his father’s death, he returned to chambers where his career as a barrister developed over the next decade. Following a series of professional setbacks, and an ongoing rivalry with Edward Coke, he finally achieved the position of attorney general in 1613, and lord chancellor in 1618. Over these years, the law that Bacon practised was that of the English common law, grounded then as now on case and precedent rather than on the precepts and statutes of the Roman civil law; but the latter, which remained active alongside common law in certain specialised jurisdictions, formed the basis of legal training at the universities.49 From his time at Cambridge, Bacon would have been intimately familiar not only with the Corpus Juris Civilis, but with the tradition of commentary from Bartolus to Alciato and other humanists. And it is on the Roman model that he sought in the 1590s to reform what he saw as the confused mess of English law.50 His earliest signal for this plan is recorded in a masque he wrote for the Gray’s Inn Christmas revels of 1594. Here a series of counsellors advise the prince on conduct in various fields; the fifth’s counsel is to ‘look into the State of your Laws and Justice of your Land; purge out multiplicity of Laws, clear the incertainty of them, repeal those that are snaring, and prize the execution of those that are wholesom and necessary’.51 This is an idea that would be elaborated in a section of Bacon’s De augmentis scientiarum (1623), which in a series of 97 aphorisms adopts the stance of a legislator preparing to reform the English law code, explicitly on the model of Justinian, though also critical of his effort.52 He denounces both brevity and prolixity 49  John Dawson, The Oracles of the Law (Ann Arbor, MI, 1968), pp. 100–128; John Barton, ‘The Faculty of Law’, in The History of the University of Oxford, ed. T. H. Aston, 5 vols (Oxford 1984–1992), III, pp. 267–269; Daniel R. Coquillette, ‘ “The Purer Foundations”: Bacon and Legal Education’, in Francis Bacon and the Refiguring of Early Modern Thought: Essays to Commemorate The Advancement of Learning (1605–2005), eds Julie Robin Solomon and Catherine Gimelli Martin (Aldershot, 2005), pp. 145–172. 50  Bacon’s effort was only the first of a series of such attempts; those who came immediately after him included William Fulbecke (1601), Henry Finch (1613), and Richard Zouche (1629). See William Holdsworth, A History of English Law, 12 vols (London, 1903–1938), V, pp. 397–401. Theodore Plucknett, A Concise History of the Common Law, 5th ed. (Boston, 1956), p. 283, pins the failure of these efforts on Coke and Parliamentary supremacy later in the century. For a good introduction to the background of the common law itself, see S. F. C. Milsom, Historical Foundations of the Common Law, 2nd ed. (London, 1981), pp. 1–96. 51  Francis Bacon, Orations at Graies Inne Revells, in OFB I, p. 604. 52  Francis Bacon, ‘Exemplum Tractatus de Justitia Universali, sive de fontibus juris, in uno

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as conducive to ambiguity, referring in the latter case to the ‘noise and strife of words’ (Aphorism 66–67). Aphorisms 72–93 describe five disciplinary means to resolve ambiguities: reports of judgements, established authorities, auxiliary textbooks, the answers of judges, and legal lectures. Ambiguity was thus a key subject for Bacon in law as in philosophy.53 Back in the 1590s, Bacon’s reformist aims produced a different work, The Maximes of the Lawe, dedicated to Elizabeth I but not published until 1630.54 The book contains maxims drawn up to systematise the practice and interpretation of the common law; each is given in Latin with a long gloss in English, including references to cases from the collected legal reports known as yearbooks. In the Preface, Bacon claimed that he had written 300 of these maxims, although the book contains only 25. The maxims are not intended as laws themselves, but as generalisations from existing cases and decisions, applicable to new situations. Although Bacon does not make the connection himself, many scholars have seen the maxims as playing a rôle analogous to that of ‘middle axioms’ in his philosophy of science: ‘In natural science the utility of the middle axiom is to state a rule applicable to new physical situations. In jurisprudence the utility of the maxim is similarly to provide the premises by which new cases can be decided, contradictions in existing cases erased, and analogies more safely followed out.’55 Several of the legal maxims concern interpretation, and one of them we have already met, almost verbatim, as a point of civil law: ‘Words are more strongly taken against their author [contra proferentem]’. This is immediately explained, at least in part, as a denial of the criterion of intention: [I]t is author of much quiet and certainty . . . because it makes an end of many questions and doubts about construction of words; for if the labour were only to pick out the intention of the parties, every judge would have a several sense; whereas this rule doth give them a sway to take the law more certainly one way.56

titulo, per Aphorismos’, in De augmentis scientiarum, VIII.3, in his Works, eds James Spedding, R. L. Ellis. and D. D. Heath, 14 vols (London, 1857–1874), III, pp. 135–73. 53  On the latter, see Chapter One above, p. 62. 54  Francis Bacon, The Maximes of the Lawe, first published together with The Use of the Law in The Elements of the Common Lawes of England, Branched into a Double Tract (London, 1630). Below I quote from the most recent edition, namely Francis Bacon, Maxims of the Law, in his Works, eds Spedding et al., VII, pp. 307–87. 55  Paul Kocher, ‘Francis Bacon on the Science of Jurisprudence’, in Essential Articles for the Study of Francis Bacon, ed. Brian Vickers (London, 1968), pp. 167–94, at pp. 170–71. On the backstory of the idea of a legal maxim, and its connection to the mediaeval regulae juris, see Peter Stein, Regulae Iuris: From Juristic Rules to Legal Maxims (Edinburgh, 1966), esp. pp. 155–62 and 170–76. 56  Bacon, Maxims of the Law, p. 333 (Maxim 3).

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As with the civilians following Bassianus, Bacon insists that ‘this rule is the last to be resorted to’, and gives the more equitable rules of construction which are to come first. The contra proferentem maxim and gloss thus demonstrate Bacon’s familiarity with the civil law tradition he studied at Trinity, and his ability to deploy it for the explanation of existing common law decisions. The gloss also, incidentally, brings into focus and puts to use a standard point of hermeneutics—and later a maxim of legal practice—namely, the use of context to determine the meaning of an ambiguous word or phrase: as he puts it, ‘the conjunction of words indicates that they should be taken in the same sense’.57 Another maxim, #23, has its roots in common rather than civil law: ‘Latent ambiguity of words is aided by verification, for an ambiguity that arises from the facts is removed by verification of the facts.’58 The gloss explains that there are two kinds of ambiguity, patent and latent—the terms seem not to have preceded Bacon. Patent ambiguity ‘is that which appears to be ambiguous upon the deed’, as a formal property of the contract itself. Latent ambiguity is ‘that which seemeth certain and without ambiguity, for anything that appeareth upon the deed, but there is some collateral matter out of the deed, that breedeth the ambiguity’. In other words, latent ambiguity comes ‘from the facts’ outside the document. Consider the case of two sons named John, of whom the older has been absent for many years, believed dead; their father, on his deathbed, leaves his land to ‘his son John’. But the older John is in fact alive, and the ambiguity that results in the will is latent, not patent. That imaginary scenario had come up in the decision of Lord Cheyney’s case in 1591, recorded in Coke’s Reports. The judges comment that, in the hypothetical situation, ‘the younger son may . . . alledge the devise to him, and if the same be denied, he may produce witnesses to prove his fathers intent, that he thought the other to be dead; or that he at the time of the Will made, named his younger son John, and the writer left out the addition of younger’.59 A latent ambiguity, then, may be resolved by averment, that is, by ‘parol [oral] evidence’ of the testator’s intentions beyond the text of the will itself. Bacon adds that in certain cases, averment can be given only of corollary facts, not of 57  Ibid., p. 335: ‘copulatio verborum indicat acceptionem in eodem sensu’. See further Herbert Broom, A Selection of Legal Maxims, Classified and Illustrated (London, 1845), pp. 294–98. 58  Ibid., p. 385 (here given as Maxim 25): ‘Ambiguitas verborum Latens verificatione suppletur, nam quod ex facto oritur ambiguum verificatione facti tollitur.’ 59  5 Co. Rep. 68a. I quote here and below from the first translation of the Reports (not counting the English abridgement of 1650): see Edward Coke, The Reports of Divers Resolutions and Judgements (London, 1658), p. 430. The foliation from the Law French original—for this passage, see Edward Coke, The Fift Part of the Reports (London, 1605), fol. 68r–v—runs in the margin and is now standard. On the creation of these reports, see Theodore Plucknett, ‘The Genesis of Coke’s Reports’, Cornell Law Quarterly 27 (1942), 190–213.

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the intention; the distinction is minor in the gloss but would become more significant later, as we shall see. At any rate, with a patent ambiguity, as in Sir Thomas Cheyney’s will, no averment may be had at all. Coke writes: [C]onstruction of Wills ought to be collected out of the words of the Will in writing, and not by any averrement out of it; for it shall be full of great inconvenience, that none shall know by the written words of a Will, what construction to make, or advice to give, but that it shall be controlled by collateral averrements out of the Will. . . . 60

Still earlier, the decision of Vernon’s case in 1572—the earliest reported in depth by Coke—asserted that in a bequest of estates, ‘The whole Will concerning lands . . . ought to be in writing and no averrement ought to be taken out of the Will, which cannot be collected by [collect per, i.e., understood from] the words in the Will.’61 John Henry Wigmore speculates that the disinclination to interpret wills in such cases served to benefit the heir presumptive and to protect the authority of the conveyancers.62 Many further cases in the seventeenth century rested on the same point, and subsequent editions of Coke’s Reports would cite more and more of them in the margin, just as printers of the King James Bible included cross-­ references of scriptural verses between columns.63 Bacon’s language in the Maximes is more technical, but expresses the same thought: Ambiguitas patens is never holpen [i.e., solved] by averment: and the reason is, because the law will not couple and mingle matter of specialty [i.e., a sealed contract = OED 5a], which is of the higher account, with matter of averment, which is of inferior account in law; for that were to make all deeds hollow and subject to averments, and so, in effect, that to pass without deed, which the law appointeth shall not pass but by deed.64

The gloss that follows includes generic examples of patent and latent ambiguity from Edward Altham’s case (1610), implying (if the overlap is not a coincidence) revision or expansion after the initial draft of the 1590s.65 The idea in both Cheyney’s case and Bacon’s Maximes is similar to 60  The thought and phrasing is similar to Cicero, De inventione, II.44.128: ‘multa incommoda consequi, si instituatur, ut ab scripto recedatur. Nam et eos, qui aliquid scribant, non existimaturos id, quod scripserint, ratum futurum. . . .’ 61  4 Co. Rep. 4a, in Coke, Reports (1658), p. 221. 62  Wigmore, A Treatise (1940—see below, n. 91), IX, p. 188. 63  For instance, Pacy v. Knollis (1610), in Richard Brownlow and John Goldesborough, Reports of Diverse Choice Cases in Law, 2 vols in 1 (London, 1651), I, pp. 131–32; Daniel v. Upley (1627), in John Latch, Plusieurs tresbons cases come ils estoyent adjudgees (London, 1661), p. 42, citing Cheyney’s Case. 64  Bacon, Maxims of the Law, p. 385. 65  8 Co. Rep. 155 (first pub. 1611), in Coke, Reports (1658), pp. 793–794. The example of

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the rationalisation of the contra proferentem rule, by Vattel and other later scholars, that the words of a contract must not be susceptible to later interpretation by their author (or indeed others), for the binding power of a legal document lies in its words, and parol evidence threatens to diminish that power. If wills and contracts can always be later clarified, then their meaning is constantly open to revision, which was the situation the establishment of contracts was designed to avoid. Written words are fixed, but intention is hidden and forever moving, a hare in a thicket. Parol evidence claims to represent the intention, but as the proverb had it, verba volant, scripta manent—spoken words fly away, written words remain, and for that reason the latter are ‘of the higher account’ and their authority must not be dependent on the former. In this is a vestige of the sacrality attributed to the written law by ancient Roman jurists. Bacon’s Maxim 23 thus formulated, as a rule of evidentiary procedure, a point already current in the practice of common law. His terminology was not immediately adopted; seventeenth-­century decisions referred, if at all, only to Cheyney’s case. Despite many editions of the Maximes, both individually and in collections, over a century elapsed before any concrete reference to it appeared. When it came, the context was the new literature of evidence theory inaugurated by the judge and jurist Geoffrey Gilbert in the early eighteenth century. Gilbert’s major treatise, The Law of Evidence, was written by 1710 but published only in 1754, three decades after his death.66 One manuscript of the work from 1743–1744, among Lord Hardwicke’s papers in the British Library, contains at the end six unpublished leaves ‘On General Rules of Evidence’. The fourth rule of six runs as follows: In the Scale of Evidence, Records claim the highest place, and therefore to permit Parol Evidence to contradict them would be to give fallible Evidence the preference to infallible, which would be absurd. But where there is any thing incertain in the Record, Proof by Circumstances shall be admitted to explain it. As if a Man having two Manors call’d Dale Levys a Fine of the Manor of Dale. Circum-

patent ambiguity is ‘If a man give land to I D & I S et haeredibus’ and of latent ambiguity is ‘I have the mannours both of South S. and North S.’, expanded in Coke to ‘South Soure and North Soure’. The latter example is from Halliwell v. Chiverton (1496); for the text and a commentary, see http://www.bu.edu/phpbin/lawyearbooks/display.php?id=21741. The discussion (with these same examples) in Giles Duncombe, Precedents Containing the Forms of Challenges to the Array, &c. and the Proceedings Thereupon, continuously paginated with S[amson] E[ure], Tryals per Pais, 3rd ed. (London, 1695), p. 400, is more likely based on Coke than on Bacon. 66  Columbia Law School, MS Singleton 66, is dated 1710 by the copyist: see Michael Macnair, The Law of Proof in Early Modern Equity (Berlin, 1999), p. 20. Macnair’s discussion of this material with me has been greatly illuminating.

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stances may be given in Evidence to prove which Manor he intended for that is not to contradict the Record, but to Support it.67

No reference to Bacon here; instead, a contrast between using parol evidence to contradict a written document, and using it to clarify an uncertainty, a contrast reiterated by many subsequent jurists.68 But in 1761 the six rules would be repeated in a published book entitled The Theory of Evidence, usually ascribed to the judge and future lord chancellor, Henry Bathurst.69 The example and conclusion from the manuscript are quoted near-­verbatim, here as the fifth rule, and under the heading of Bacon’s Maxim 23, quoted in the original Latin.70 This is the first published use of Bacon’s terms after the Maximes, and one that integrates them into both the flowering tradition of evidence theory and the age-­old record of common law decisions going back to Cheyney’s case, cited here as corroboration. Hardwicke himself, the lord chancellor from 1737 to 1756, seems to have supported the same principle, denying parol evidence to clarify a will in a 1745 case, ‘because it would tend to put it in the power of witnesses to make wills for testators’.71 Shortly afterwards, Bacon’s maxim began to be used in new decisions. Perhaps the first was Doe v. Fyldes (1778), turning on the bequest of an estate in Lancashire; the judge remarked that ‘Lord Bacon’s distinction between ambiguitas latens, and ambiguitas patens, is a right distinction, and ought to be adhered to.’72 The English term ‘latent ambiguity’ burgeoned in the 1780s, especially in the Court of Chancery, where the lively lord chancellor, Edward Thurlow, often had recourse to it in his comments on court decisions.73 By the nineteenth century, the maxim had become commonplace. This is neatly ­illustrated by comparing Charles Viner’s standard Abridgment (1742– 1753) of historical common law cases to the many-­handed Supplement published fifty years later (1789–1806); when Viner comes to the rules of parol evidence in clarifying wills, he cites Cheyney’s case but ignores 67  British Library, MS Add. 36090, fol. 96r. The Manor of Dale had long been a standard hypothetical in legal reasoning, already found in Coke’s Reports. 68  Already in Duncombe, Precedents, p. 400. 69  Macnair, in private communication, has articulated good reasons for doubting the attribution. 70  The Theory of Evidence (Dublin, 1761), pp. 115–17. 71  Hampshire v. Peirce (1750–1), in Francis Vezey, Cases Argued and Determined in the High Court of Chancery in the Time of Lord Chancellor Hardwicke from the Year 1746–7 to 1755, 2 vols (London, 1771), II, p. 217, citing Castleton v. Turner (1745). 72  Henry Cowper, Reports of Cases Adjudged in the Court of King’s Bench (Dublin, 1784), p. 836. 73  For instance, Shelburne v. Inchiquin (1784), in William Brown, Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the High Court of Chancery, 4 vols (London, 1785–1794), I, p. 350; Fonnereau v. Poyntz (1785), in ibid., I, p. 472; and Andrews v. Emmot (1788), in ibid., II, p. 303.

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Bacon, whereas the Supplement mentions the use of Bacon’s distinction in Doe v. Fyldes.74 The force of the maxim was established further by its inclusion in textbooks on evidence from the early nineteenth century—when English jurists were beginning to elaborate the principles of contract law—above all Samuel March Phillipps’s influential Treatise on the Law of Evidence (1814).75 And its terms recur in cases of the period, although, as their usage increased, so they came to seem less and less clearly distinguished. For instance, in Smith v. Jeffryes (1846), the defendant Samuel Jeffryes had contracted to sell the plaintiff Smith sixty tons of ‘ware potatoes’, but on receipt of these Smith was dissatisfied and took the seller to court. At trial Smith brought evidence that he had intended to purchase ‘Regent’s wares’ instead of the inferior ‘kidney wares’ supplied; the prosecutor claimed that the ambiguity of the contract was latent, since ‘wares’ could apply to two different kinds of real object, and that therefore parol evidence was admissible, and the judge, Lord Denman, instructed the jury to find for the plaintiff. However, it was subsequently decided that the ambiguity was not latent and that the parol evidence sought ‘to vary and limit the written contract’; it was therefore disallowed and moved to a new trial.76 Only two years earlier the courts had seen the curious case of Sir Gilbert East (1764–1828), which might have furnished the narrative materials of a fine Edgar Allan Poe story. East’s will, among other eccentricities, denoted each of its devisees by an initial, with a slip of paper stating that the key to the initials could be found ‘in a writing case in the drawer of his writing-­desk, on a card’. A card later produced, however, was shown not to be the original, nor even a copy of it, and the will was declared void; but there was some question among the judges as to whether, if the original card had been found, the ambiguity of the will would have been patent or latent.77 Another case later acquired a particular notoriety; this was the so-­called Peerless Case, Raffles v. Wichelhaus (1864), whose circumstances have been carefully examined by the legal historian Brian Simpson.78 The plaintiff 74  Charles Viner, A General Abridgment of Law and Equity, 23 vols (London, 1742–53), VIII, p. 194; An Abridgment of the Modern Determinations in the Courts of Law and Equity, being a Supplement to Viner’s Abridgment, 6 vols (London, 1789–1806), III, p. 251. 75  Samuel March Phillipps, A Treatise on the Law of Evidence, 2nd ed. (London, 1815), pp. 410–18; Richard Newcombe Gresley, A Treatise on the Law of Evidence in the Courts of Equity (London, 1836), pp. 198, 203. 76  Smith v. Jeffryes (1846), in R. Meeson and W. N. Welsby, Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Courts of Exchequer and Exchequer Chamber, 16 vols (London, 1837–1847), XV, pp. 561–62. 77  Clayton v. Nugent (1844), in Meeson and Welsby, Reports, XIII, pp. 200–208. 78  A. W. Brian Simpson, ‘The Beauty of Obscurity’, in his Leading Cases in the Common Law (Oxford, 1995), pp. 135–62.

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William Winter Raffles had agreed to sell the defendant Daniel Wichelhaus a quantity of Indian cotton, to be delivered from Bombay on a ship named Peerless. But as it transpired, there were two ships of that name; one arrived in October, and it was this Wichelhaus claimed to have had in mind when he made the contract. The Peerless carrying Raffles’s cotton, however, only reached England in December. Wichelhaus refused to purchase at this time, and Raffles sued for the payment. The question before the court was this: since Raffles and Wichelhaus understood different ships by the name Peerless, was their contract valid? The problem turned on an ambiguity. According to the prosecutor Milward, the delivery ship was irrelevant to the contract, and, as he said, ‘the defendant has no right to contradict by parol evidence a written contract good upon the face of it. . . . Intention is of no avail, unless stated at the time of the contract.’ That is, intention is irrelevant to the case because it is outside the contract. The defending lawyer, Mellish, had this response: There is nothing on the face of the contract to show that any particular ship called the ‘Peerless’ was meant; but the moment it appears that two ships called the ‘Peerless’ were about to sail from Bombay there is a latent ambiguity, and parol evidence may be given for the purpose of showing that the defendant meant one ‘Peerless’ and the plaintiff another. That being so, there was no consensus ad idem, and therefore no binding contract.79

The ambiguity of Peerless is not patent but latent, and so, as per Bacon, the defendant’s parol evidence is admissible. The judges, therefore, ruled in favour of Wichelhaus: the contract was void, since there was no consensus between the two parties, and Wichelhaus did not have to pay for the December delivery. The case is now found in every textbook of contract law. Bacon’s maxim thus remained in active use in English law into the second half of the nineteenth century. At the same time it had begun to come under fire, in both theory and practice, and to that artillery we now turn. Shooting at Father’s Corpse On 7 February 1828, a six-­hour speech was given in the House of Commons, the longest in its history to this day. The speaker was Henry Brougham, the Scottish-­born MP for Winchelsea and anti-­slavery campaigner, two years from being ennobled and appointed lord chancellor, six from founding the Cannes tourist industry, and ten from designing the 79  E. T. Hurlstone and F. J. Coltman, The Exchequer Reports, 4 vols (London, 1863–1868), II, pp. 906–8.

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brougham carriage. The subject of the speech was law reform; Brougham’s biographer John Campbell remarks that he traversed ‘the whole field of our jurisprudence . . . civil, criminal, and ecclesiastical—common law, equity and conveyancing—taking a survey of all our tribunals from the House of Lords to the Court of pied poudre—pointing out defects and suggesting remedies’.80 When the speech was printed later that year, one of its most disappointed readers was an elderly Jeremy Bentham, who had been corresponding with Brougham on the subject of legal reform since October; Bentham now decided that Brougham was not, as he had previously hoped, the man to bring about the sweeping changes that English law so badly needed.81 One item they did agree on, however, was the wrongness of Bacon’s Maxim 23. Almost five hours in, as the other members dozed, fidgeted, composed poems in their heads, Brougham insisted that, despite Bacon’s ‘high legal authority’, the maxim ‘tends greatly to narrow and darken the path to a correct decision’.82 A similar view had been articulated at more length in Bentham’s Rationale of Judicial Evidence, largely composed in 1802–1812 but published only in 1827, in five volumes, by the efforts of John Stuart Mill. Bentham began his discussion by noting that the parol evidence rule had been subject to continual objections, each establishing precedent, by judges who saw the injustice it caused in particular cases; the result was wretched complexity, though closer to equity than the rule on its own. He then explains the unfairness of disallowing extrinsic evidence: You are unskilled in composition: after making mention in your will of two persons, your brother and your younger son, you bequeath to him an estate: in this case it may possibly admit of dispute, to which of the two you meant to bequeath it; what, however, can admit of no dispute, is, that you meant to bequeath it to one or other of them: as, therefore, it is doubtful whether you intended that A should have it, or B, the judge will not give it to either of them, but gives it to C, the heir-­at-­law, whom it is certain you intended not to have it. Or, if he gives it to either of the two persons who, and who alone, can possibly have been meant, he gives it upon the slightest imaginable presumption from the context. There were twenty persons standing by when you executed the will, all of whom knew perfectly well, from

80  John Campbell, ‘Life of Lord Brougham’, in The Lives of the Lord Chancellors and Keepers of the Great Seal of England, ed. Mary Campbell, 10 vols (London, 1845–69), VIII, p. 358. 81  Philip Schofield, Utility and Democracy: The Political Thought of Jeremy Bentham (Oxford, 2006), pp. 316–18. 82  Henry Brougham, Present State of the Law (Philadelphia, 1828), p. 110.

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your declarations at the time, which of the two parties in question you meant, but none of whom he will suffer to be heard. And this is what lawyers call requiring the best evidence.83

Bacon’s rationale is dismissed as ‘irrational’, Hardwicke’s as ‘one which pretends to be rational’. For Bentham, then, as for Brougham, there is no good reason for the distinction of patent and latent, and extrinsic parol evidence ought to be admitted in all cases. The 1820s continued to see practising judges nibble away at the distinction; in 1821 Sir John Bayley deemed it proper to allow parol evidence to clarify patent ambiguity in a will, so long as it did not conflict with the natural meaning of the words, and in 1822 Sir Thomas Plumer, master of the rolls, noted that it was often impossible to clarify a patent ambiguity by construction, and that therefore ‘common sense, and the law of England (which are seldom at variance), warrant the departure from the general rule, and call in the light of extrinsic evidence’.84 As Bentham had suggested, rules were invoked only when justice demanded. A more subtle and complex critique of Bacon began to develop over the next few decades, among a series of young lawyers at Lincoln’s Inn. In 1831 James Wigram, a Chancery barrister trained at Trinity College, Cambridge, published a treatise on the principles of admitting extrinsic evidence in the interpretation of wills; it turned out to be highly popular and influential, going through four editions and cited into the twentieth century.85 Wigram’s discussion of patent and latent ambiguity is novel: instead of rejecting Bacon’s maxim outright like Bentham and Brougham, he reinterprets it to suit his own principles. He supplements Bacon’s distinction with two others: first, between ambiguity and mere inaccuracy, and second, picking up a minor feature of Bacon’s original gloss, between evidence of intention and evidence of corollary facts, such as the specialist usage of words. Whether a text is ambiguous—that is, unresolvable in meaning—can be determined only by a competent reader with the relevant knowledge of the subject; a judge, then, cannot assert a will to be ambiguous merely because he lacks such knowledge. When a will displays a patent inaccuracy, 83  Jeremy Bentham, Rationale of Judicial Evidence Specially Applied to English Practice, ed. J. S. Mill, 5 vols (London, 1827), V, pp. 588–89. 84  Smith v. Doe (1821), in John Bayly Moore, Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Courts of Common Pleas and Exchequer Chamber, 12 vols (London, 1817–27), V (1823), p. 407; Colpoys v. Colpoys (1822), in Edward Jacob, Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the High Courts of Chancery During the Time of Lord Chancellor Eldon: 1821, 1822 (London, 1828), pp. 463–64. 85  Henry Wigram, Examination of the Rules of Law Respecting the Admission of Extrinsic Evidence in Aid of the Interpretation of Wills (London, 1831). The book was inspired by reflections on two recent cases, Goblet v. Beechey (1826) and Page v. Broom (1830).

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the judge may hear parol and other extrinsic evidence of the circumstantial facts to determine if it really is ambiguous.86 Wigram had in mind Goblet v. Beechey, which turned on the word ‘mod.’ in the will of the renowned sculptor Joseph Nollekens: this, argued Wigram, was an inaccuracy but not an ambiguity, because every sculptor in England knew that the word was short for ‘models’, and the judge was right to receive extrinsic evidence to establish the usage. The insight—that ambiguity is not an intrinsic property of a text but relative to the interpreter—is obvious in hindsight, but its consequences were massively important. Ambiguity was no longer understood as the impetus to enquiry (as with the maxim Interpretatio non fit in claris) but as a result of it, and the use of extrinsic evidence was recognised as inevitable. Wigram’s argument would seem, at first glance, to move towards an intentionalist hermeneutics, allowing parol evidence (against the usual reading of Bacon) in some cases of apparent ambiguity so as better to glean the writer’s intentions. In fact, Wigram espouses the opposite: the aim of interpretation, he asserts, is to ascertain not what the writer meant, but rather the ‘meaning of his words’ (27) at the time of writing. He appears, that is, to hold something like the ‘original meaning’ theory of the late Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia,87 and he refuses on this account to admit parol evidence when the words of a will seem to have only their ‘strict and primary sense’, even if ‘the most conclusive evidence of intention to use them in such popular or secondary sense be tendered’ (29). It was on this very account that Wigram’s book was criticised for incoherence by a staunch intentionalist, Francis Vaughan Hawkins, another Trinity and Lincoln’s Inn barrister forty years his junior, in a paper given to the Juridical Society of London on 21 May 1860; the paper was reprinted in an 1898 textbook by the great Harvard jurist James Bradley Thayer.88 The sorts of evidence permitted by Wigram in interpretation, Hawkins argued, went to 86  Wigram, Examination, pp. 107–111. The qualification was adopted by Broom, A Selection of Legal Maxims, pp. 260–65, and directly borrowed by Simon Greenleaf, A Treatise on the Law of Evidence, 4th ed, 2 vols (Boston and London, 1848), I, pp. 387–390. 87  See Antonin Scalia, ‘Original Meaning’ (1986), in his Scalia Speaks: Reflections on Law, Faith, and Life Well Lived, ed. Christopher Scalia and Edward Whelan (New York, 2017), pp. 180–87. This legal concept is the basis for Richard Gaskin’s ‘constructive intention’, on which see Chapter Seven below, p. 289, n. 19. 88  F[rancis] V[aughan] Hawkins, ‘On the Principles of Legal Interpretation, with Reference Especially to the Interpretation of Wills’, Papers Read Before the Juridical Society 1858–65, 2 (1863), 298–330, repr. in James Bradley Thayer, A Preliminary Treatise on Evidence at the Common Law (Boston, 1898), pp. 577–605. In its latter form the paper was attacked by Thayer’s student Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., ‘The Theory of Legal Interpretation’, Harvard Law Review 12 (1899), 417–20. The Juridical Society, founded in 1855 with the solicitor general Sir Richard Bethell as its first president, remains a somewhat obscure institution; for

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clarify intention, not verbal meaning. As for Bacon, his maxim showed ‘a prudent though perhaps excessive jealousy of the inferior kinds of evidence’, and Hawkins noted that the distinction of patent and latent had been ‘gradually relaxed’ in recent law.89 Although Wigram had teased out his own stance as a construction of Bacon’s original maxim, Hawkins judged him to have sought unwisely to refound the maxim on a priori principles, departing from those of Bacon. In each case Bacon’s authority, or the appearance of it, was preserved; some months later, however, that authority went out the window. On 3 December, the Juridical Society hosted a third Lincoln’s Inn barrister, Francis Morgan Nichols, to give another paper on the interpretation of wills. Nichols, like Wigram, insisted that a document could be judged clear or ambiguous only from the perspective of its author, and made this a central point of principle: [We cannot] say with certainty whether a text is ambiguous or not, if we refuse to look at it from the same point of view from which the testator regarded it. . . . It is not a correct analysis of the process of interpretation to say that the interpreter first concludes the words to be ambiguous, and then begins to inquire into their true meaning.90

In Nichols’s view, the controversy between Wigram and Hawkins was merely theoretical: both parties, and in general both intentionalists and formalists, sought the meaning embodied by a writer in his words, that is, the sense in which the writer intended his words to be understood (354). But Nichols did, like Hawkins, lambast Wigram for the misguided implications of his formalism, such as the rule about the priority of the ‘strict and primary sense’: first, it is not always clear which are the primary and secondary senses of a phrase, and second, if we are confident that the testator had in mind a secondary sense, nothing is compromised by hearing extrinsic evidence to show it. Nichols even points back to the Digest: ‘The [usual] meaning of the words is dropped only when it is clear that the testator had another in mind’ (D. 32.3.69). No stricter formula can be adopted, he says, ‘without risking a more important principle and sacrificing the spirit to the letter’ (375). The paper closes with remarks on Bacon’s ambiguity maxim, which must be reconsidered in light of the foregoing conclusions. The correct distinction, Nichols argues, is not between latent and patent ambigua contemporary account, see ‘The Juridical Society’, The Law Magazine and Law Review, 3.5 (1857), 1–41. 89  Hawkins, ‘On the Principles’, p. 324. 90  Francis Morgan Nichols, ‘Extrinsic Evidence in the Interpretation of Wills’, Papers Read before the Juridical Society 1858–65, 2 (1863), 351–84, at pp. 370, 374.

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ity in a will, but between ambiguity known and unknown to the testator. For instance, a will leaves an estate to ‘the son of John Wood of Wood House’, but Wood has several sons. If Wood had only one son at the time of writing, or if only one of his sons was known to the testator, then the will is effectively unambiguous, and extrinsic evidence may—in fact, must—be adduced to demonstrate it. But if the testator knew that there were several sons, then the will is ambiguous, and no evidence may be adduced to show which he meant. Nichols concludes that ‘Neither the received maxim, nor Bacon’s admirable commentary on it, furnish any adequate guide to the legitimate use of extrinsic evidence in aid of interpretation.’ (384) All of the jurists discussed in this section, from Bentham and Brougham to Hawkins and Nichols, put forward arguments to weaken the idea of patent ambiguity, and by extension of intrinsic meaning. This critique would be crowned by two seminal American textbooks: first Thayer in 1898, then Wigmore in 1925 (5 vols, expanded to 10 in 1940).91 The latter’s comments are especially acerbic: the history of the law from Bacon’s era to our own, he asserts, ‘is the history of a progress from a stiff and superstitious formalism to a flexible rationalism.’92 He explains the fallacy of the former: Once freed from the primitive formalism which views the document as a self-­contained and self-­operative formula, we can fully appreciate the modern principle that the words of a document are never anything but indices to extrinsic things, and that therefore all the circumstances must be considered which go to make clear the sense of the words,—that is, their associations with things.93 Again, the formalist’s fallacy ‘consists in assuming that there is or ever can be some one real or absolute meaning. In truth, there can be only some person’s meaning, and that person, whose meaning the law is seeking, is the writer of the document.’ (IV.3480 / IX.191–192) Wigmore presents the same map of legal hermeneutics since the sixteenth century that Honsell would offer of antiquity, from magical thinking to rationalism. Bacon’s position in all this is ironic: far from being the empiricist paladin smashing scholastic idols and plotting a course for Enlightenment, in the law he stood squarely with the ‘superstition’ of Tudor practice. He had his own idola 91  Thayer, A Preliminary Treatise, pp. 410–426. John Henry Wigmore, A Treatise on the System of Evidence in Trials at Common Law, 5 vols (Boston, 1904–8), expanded as A Treatise on the Anglo-­American System of Evidence in Trials at Common Law, 10 vols (Boston, 1940). 92  Wigmore, A Treatise (1904–8), IV, p. 3476; A Treatise (1940), IX, p. 187. 93  Wigmore, A Treatise (1904–8), IV, p. 3499; A Treatise (1940), IX, p. 227.

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fori—idols not of the marketplace but of the law court94—insofar as he attributed to texts a power of speech they did not have, giving to the letter what belonged to the spirit. Even his empiricism was suspect. At the start of the Advancement of Learning he wrote: [W]e see it is accounted an errour, to commit a naturall bodie to Emperique Phisitions, which commonly have a fewe pleasing receits, whereupon they are confident and adventurous, but know neither the causes of diseases, nor the complexions of Patients, nor perill of accidents, nor the true methode of Cures; We see it is a like error to rely upon Advocates or Lawyers, which are onely men of practise, and not grounded in their Bookes, who are many times easily surprised, when matter falleth out besides their experience, to the prejudice of the causes they handle. . . . 95 Experience seemed to Bacon poor guidance without the support of learning and theory. But experience is what best shows up the problems of theory.96 This is what Bentham noticed: the distinction of latent and patent ambiguities had seemed plausible to Bacon, and to the eighteenth-­century theorists impressed with his venerable authority, but to subsequent judges coming to apply the idea to real cases before them, it seemed too rigid for equity, and ultimately incoherent. The chapters that follow will stage the conflict between hermeneutic theory and practice again and again. The charge of formalism, too, will continue to be important. Almost nobody outside the law genuinely advocated ignoring authorial intention before the twentieth century, and a formalistic approach to literary criticism, when it was advanced, was in fact grounded on intention, just as Cicero had indicated in law.97 But that did not stop the accusation being made, especially in the field of scriptural exegesis, where Protestants routinely indicted Jews and Catholics for spinning imaginary multiplicities out of the letter of the Bible, as we shall see in Chapter Four. The Catholic response was to show that authorial intention was itself more complex than had been assumed, and sometimes served to increase 94  The alternative translation is noted by Anthony Kenny, The Rise of Modern Philosophy (Oxford, 2006), p. 32. 95  Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, ed. Michael Kiernan, OFB IV, pp. 10–11. 96  As Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., The Common Law (Boston, 1881), p. 1, quotably put it: ‘The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience.’ Compare, on the empirical (Aristotelian) method of ancient Roman law, James Gordley, The Jurists: A Critical History (Oxford, 2013), pp. 12–27. 97  See my analysis of the arguments of Philipp Carl Buttmann, in Chapter Five below, p. 231.

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multiplicity rather than diminish it. Early modern readers of secular literature did not have that recourse, and so when they posited deliberate ambiguity, they relied on a relatively straightforward concept of the author’s intention. To understand that strategy, we must first examine the more basic problem of intentional ambiguity in early modern assumptions about speech acts.

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CH A PT E R THRE E

COLLUSION AND DELUSION Thus, like the formal vice, Iniquity, I moralize two meanings in one word. — Richard III

So far we have looked at philosophical, rhetorical and legal-­hermeneutic analyses of ambiguity, but we have barely mentioned the possibility that it might be deliberate. One reader of Aulus Gellius, noticing the absence of this question from his vignette on Chrysippus and Diodorus, invoked a simple thought experiment: ‘I might say that I see a lion, when in fact I see a painted one and a living one at the same time, and mean both, and yet someone listening to me will think I see only one of them.’1 This is a purposefully grey, hypothetical example, but the usual cases had a more emphatic social and moral charge—these were the pun and the deceptive equivocation, a recurrent pair. Empson gets it quickly in the first sentence of Seven Types: ‘An ambiguity, in ordinary speech, means something very pronounced, and as a rule witty or deceitful.’2 Here it marks a point of departure, as he then proposes to use the word in his own ‘extended sense’ for the rest of his book. Earlier critics, by contrast, had rested content with it. Compare, for instance, George Campbell in 1776: When the word equivocation denotes, as in common language it generally denotes, the use of an equivocal word or phrase, or other ambiguity, with an intention to deceive, it doth not differ essentially from a lie. . . . [W]hen the word denotes, as agreeably to etymology it may denote, that exercise of wit which consists in the playful use of any term or phrase in different senses, and is denominated pun, it . . . cannot be regarded a violation of the laws of perspicuity.3

1  Aulus Gellius, Noctes atticae, ed. Jodocus Badius (Paris, 1524), fol. 76r: ‘Possem tamen data opera ambigue loqui: ut dicens leonem video: dato quod simul pictum et vivum videam, et de utroque intelligam: et audiens tantum alterum me videre putet.’ 2  STA, p. 1; see also Winifred Nowottny, The Language Poets Use (London, 1962), p. 150. 3  George Campbell, Philosophy of Rhetoric, 2 vols (London, 1776), II, p. 28. Compare Moses Stuart, Hints on the Interpretation of Prophecy, 2nd ed. (Andover, 1842), p. 14: ‘[I]n no book,

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The witty ambiguity, exemplified in the puns of Cicero, seemed to such critics very different to the fraudulent ambiguity, embodied in the language of Satan, or in Jesuitical equivocation: the one was joyous and elegant, giving pleasure and reinforcing social bonds, whereas the other, undermining trust and moral security, begat sin after sin. But as I argue below, they were only ever two ends of the same wand, and their proximity could bring delight to the equivocation or discredit to the pun. This chapter explores that paradox, first modelling the ambiguity in the classical witticism and then considering its relation to the figure of the hypocrite in early modern poetry and theology. Finally, I deploy this relation to reevaluate a dispute which has excited the attention of several recent scholars, that is, the sixteenth-­century argument over the legitimacy of equivocation and mental reservation. Ambiguity wi thout Obscurity? We all love puns, even bad ones, even if we pretend to hate them: the groan, a performance of displeasure, is itself a pleasure.4 No doubt it was ever thus. The Romans had a public taste for them, exchanging gifts on feast days with tokens bearing riddles and wordplays.5 The popular Atellan farce was stuffed with such humour, often of a lewd or political nature; Caligula was so offended by one pun that he executed its author in the arena.6 (I have the same fantasy when reading a certain strain of 1980s literary criticism.) Then as now, wits prided themselves on their facility with double meanings, and chief among these was Cicero, who in exile asked a friend at Rome to ensure that only the best witticisms going about treatise, epistle, discourse, or conversation, ever written, published or addressed by any one man to his fellow beings, (unless in the way of sport, or with an intention to deceive), can a double sense be found.’ The prominent linguist Hermann Paul, Principien der Sprachgeschichte, 2nd ed. (Halle, 1886), p. 68, mentions cases ‘wo eine zweideutigkeit beabsichtigt ist, sei es um zu teuschen, sei es des witzen wegen’. For a Latin parallel see Carl Daniel Freyberg, De sermonis ambiguitate ad evitandum falsiloquium (Wittemberg, 1756), p. xv: ‘Alii enim dubie loquuntur ad monendum aliis risum, alii ad stabiliendam fraudem, alii ad evitandum falsiloquium.’ The last of these items derives, via Hugo Grotius, from the Catholic idea of equivocation, on which see below, pp. 116–21. 4  The literature on puns is not very satisfactory, but see Walter Redfern, Puns: More Senses than One, 2nd ed. (Harmondsworth, 2000); and On Puns: The Foundation of Letters, ed. Jonathan Culler (Oxford, 1988). For a charming defence of punning, very much of its time (‘Oh the jesticide—the Hilarifuge!’), see [Horatio Smith], ‘On Puns and Punsters’, in his Gaieties and Gravities, 3 vols (London, 1825), II, pp. 80–88. 5  Suetonius, Augustus, LXXV; and see H. D. Rankin, ‘Saturnalian Wordplay and Apophoreta in Satyricon 56’, Classica et Mediaevalia 23 (1962), 134–42; and the introduction to Symphosius, Aenigmata, ed. and tr. T. J. Leary (London, 2014), pp. 6–12. 6  Suetonius, Caligula, XXVII.4.

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town were attributed to him.7 Quintilian disapproved of his forebear’s taste for puns, deeming them fit for the farce, but he didn’t mind retelling a few zingers.8 Nothing kills a joke like explaining it, especially in a dead language, but since even simple examples reveal the limitations of Aristotelian semantics, it will be worth pausing on one or two. A cook’s son running for office was soliciting votes, and upon success with one floater, Cicero nearby said ‘I too will rightly support you.’ The pun lies in two words: quoque, ‘too’, was phonetically identical to the vocative coque, ‘o cook’, and jure, ‘rightly’, may also be the ablative of jus, ‘broth’. The other sense, then, is ‘I will support your place in the kitchen, o cook’, a put-­down perhaps intended less for the candidate than for Cicero’s friends, although amusement would have depended on their knowledge and political sympathies. To call quoque and jure ambiguous is to acknowledge not just that they each have two meanings in some abstract sense, but that the particular utterance shares out those meanings unevenly. A different distribution will be found in what Quintilian calls an aenigma: Of such a type is Cicero’s comment on Fonteius’s accuser Plaetorius, whose mother, he said, had kept a school while she lived, and schoolmasters after she died. But it was said that during her life women of ill repute frequented her home, and upon her death her possessions were sold. ‘School’, then, is here used as a metaphor, and ‘schoolmasters’ as an ambiguity.9

Here the joke has to be explained, and the explanation is still not clear; the eminent Dutch classicist Pieter Burman had to devote a long column of glosses to it in 1720, with parallel passages and excerpts from his predecessors, observing that magister (‘schoolmaster’) denoted also the director of an auction, and ludum (‘school’) a brothel.10 Cicero threads his own discussion of witticisms into the analysis of humour in De oratore, with several contemporary examples. Ambiguities, he says, do not on the whole make us laugh, but they add intelligence to jests, and are thus ‘praised as 7  Cicero, Ep. ad. fam. VII.32, in Epistulae, ed. W. S. Watt, 4 vols (Oxford, 1958–82), I, p. 227. See further Mary Beard, Laughter in Ancient Rome: On Joking, Tickling, and Cracking Up (Berkeley, 2014), pp. 99–105. 8  Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, VI.3.5. 9  Quintilian, Institutionis oratoriae libri duodecim, ed. Michael Winterbottom, 2 vols (Oxford, 1970), I, p. 346 (VI.3.51): ‘Pervenit res usque ad aenigma, quale est Ciceronis in Plaetorium Fontei accusatorem, cuius matrem dixit dum vixisset ludum, postquam mortua esset magistros habuisse (dicebantur autem, dum vixit, infames feminae convenire ad eam solitae, post mortem bona eius venierant): quamquam hic “ludus” per tralationem dictum est, “magistri” per ambiguitatem.’ The reference is to Marcus Plaetorius Cestianus. Despite the partial survival of Cicero’s oration Pro Fonteio (69 BC), this passage is extant only in Quintilian; see Michael Winterbottom, Problems in Quintilian ([London], 1970), p. 109. 10  Quintilian, De institutione oratoria, ed. Pieter Burman, 2 vols (Leiden, 1720), I, p. 543.

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fine and learned remarks’.11 In the next section, Cicero repeats this idea of wordplay as something added into humour, picking apart the component parts of a jest from a farce by Novius. He labels such ambiguities salsus, acutus, argutus, all translatable as ‘witty’, but having more direct connotations of sharpness, pungency, vigour: the image is of the mind alive and quick to make connections. Moreover, double meanings in Cicero’s account can produce a wit which is not comical but serious, as when Publius Licinius Varus, struggling to crown Africanus the Elder with a garland at a banquet, said, ‘No wonder it doesn’t fit, for the head is great.’12 Here the ambiguity, relieving an awkward situation with a compliment, is ‘praiseworthy and honourable’; its virtue is not formal but social, and for this purpose meaning must be suspended. Varus ‘means’ both that Africanus has a wide head and that he is a great leader, but his witticism commits him to the truth of neither statement: the meanings hang in the air merely to be enjoyed as a unit. In these instances it might be felt that there is a hierarchy of meanings: what is semantically secondary, whether by homophony (‘cook’) or analogy (‘brothel’, ‘head’), is semiotically primary.13 The Rhetorica ad Herennium supports such an intuition, noting that discourse may be embellished with an insinuated meaning ‘when a word can be taken in two or more senses, but is taken in the way that the speaker means. . . . Although we must avoid ambiguities that make our language obscure, we ought to pursue those that give a meaning of this kind, and they will be easily found if we know and pay attention to the double and multiple senses of words.’14 Many parallel passages may be adduced from later works. In the early thirteenth century Geoffrey of Vinsauf, a keen reader of the Rhetorica, noted that the word egregius (literally, ‘outstanding’), applied to a man, could mean either the best or the worst; in such ambiguities, ‘the meaning is disguised but the 11  Cicero, De oratore, ed. Kazimierz Kumaniecki (Leipzig, 1969) p. 212 (II.62.253): ‘Ambigua sunt in primis acuta atque in verbo posita, non in re; sed non saepe magnum risum movent; magis ut belle, ut litterate dicta laudantur’. 12  Ibid., p. 211 (II.61.250): ‘noli mirari . . . si non convenit; caput enim magnum est’. 13  Compare, on the pun in Sanskrit poetics, Edwin Gerow, A Glossary of Indian Figures of Speech (The Hague, 1971), p. 62: ‘one of the two meanings is generally prākaranika [‘relevant’], the other aprākaranika [‘irrelevant’]. The relevant meaning is, however, often not the obvious one.’ 14  Ps.-­Cicero, De ratione dicendi ad C. Herennium lib iv, ed. Friedrich Marx, rev. Winfried Trillitzsch (Leipzig, 1964), p. 187 (IV.53–4.67): ‘Per ambiguum, cum verbum potest in duas pluresve sententias accipi, sed accipitur tamen in eam partem, quam vult is, qui dixit . . . Ambigua quemadmodum vitanda sunt, quae obscuram reddunt orationem, item haec consequenda, quae conficiunt huiusmodi significationem. Ea reperientur facile, si noverimus et animum adverterimus verborum ancipites aut multiplices potestates.’

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joke obvious’.15 In 1475, the Italian rabbi Judah Messer Leon illustrated a similar point with a line in Jeremiah.16 Cervantes’s friend Lorenzo Ramírez de Prado, in his 1607 commentary on Martial, wrote of one obscene line that ‘the ambiguity in the word testes [‘witnesses’, ‘bollocks’] is clear, and so is the joke’.17 John Ward, lecturing on rhetoric at Gresham College in the 1720s, adduced an example from Cicero’s oration Pro Milone—an allusive double meaning that Ward admitted to be ‘a beauty, and not the fault I am cautioning against’—remarking that ‘even in such designed ambiguities, where one sense is aimed at, it ought to be sufficiently plain, otherwise they lose their intention’.18 Quintilian, meanwhile, already scorned the taste among his peers for superficially alike devices in which the concealed sense was obscure: The worst are the ‘unintelligibles’, phrases that, while plain in words, have hidden meanings, as when it is said, ‘A blind man was led to stand by the roadside’; or when someone who has gnawed his own body is said by schoolboys to have ‘lain over himself’. These ingenious phrases are thought bold and clever in their ambiguity; and many are now persuaded to consider elegant and finely said only that which requires interpretation. Some even enjoy such things, exulting and delighting to decipher them by their own lights, as if they had not heard but devised them themselves.19

15  Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Poetria Nova, in Les artes poétiques du XIIe et du XIIIe siècle, ed. Edmond Faral (Paris, 1924), 194–262, at p. 244 (lines 1545–49):

Ille vir egregius: vox haec sonat optimus. Aut vir Pessimus oblique nos respicit; hic sonat. Haec vox Transvertit visum, vel peccat visus in istis Ambiguis. Res est cooperta, et risus apertus. 16  Judah Messer Leon, The Book of the Honeycomb’s Flow (Sepher Nopheth Suphim), ed. and tr. Isaac Rabinowitz (Ithaca, NY, 1983), p. 555, citing Jer. 23:33. 17  Martial, Epigrammata, ed. Lorenzo Ramirez de Prado (Paris, 1607), p. 203 (on Ep. II.72.8): ‘perspicua est in voce testis, ambiguitas, et perspicuus lusus’. 18  John Ward, A System of Oratory, 2 vols (London, 1759), I, p. 328 (Lecture 21). 19  Quintilian, Institutionis oratoriae libri duodecim, ed. Winterbottom, II, p. 429 (VIII.2.20–21):

Pessima vero sunt adianoeta, hoc est quae verbis aperta occultos sensus habent, ut cum dictus est caecus ‘secundum viam stare’, et qui suos artus morsu lacerasse fingitur in scholis ‘supra se cubasse’. Ingeniosa haec et fortia et ex ancipiti diserta creduntur, pervasitque iam multos ista persuasio, ut id [iam] demum eleganter atque exquisite dictum putent quod interpretandum sit. Sed auditoribus etiam nonnullis grata sunt haec, quae cum intellexerunt acumine suo delectantur, et gaudent non quasi audierint sed quasi invenerint. The two examples have baffled commentators ever since.

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What unites these views is the thought that ambiguity, to be a virtue, must not be obscure: it must not be genuinely ambiguous in the normal sense of that word, with the connotation of doubt. Successful cases of wit, on this model, play with showing and revealing, ‘ambiguous’ only insofar as they provoke a moment of hesitation. And as they show and reveal, puns include and exclude: that is, they express social mastery by partitioning meanings among hearers according to their status and knowledge. Implied is a confidence that ambiguities of this sort are not likely to be confused with those that mislead, a point made by Alfred Sidgwick when he observed that the grosser homonymies did well for a pun but were not ‘effective sources of error’.20 The two types had to be kept apart. The tension inherent in the idea of an unambiguous or perspicuous ambiguity started to be exposed in the seventeenth century, when, in response to the growth all over Europe of a poetry of conceits, rhetoricians and literary theorists began to think in more depth and detail about the nature of wit.21 But most of those who discussed puns favourably, from Baltasar Gracián in 1648 down to Jean-­Paul Richter in 1804, simply glossed over the problem of ambiguity and emphasised instead the creative faculty and social stylishness of such devices.22 Likewise, when Joseph Addison execrated puns in The Spectator, he did so because they were sound without sense, and therefore false, not because they were ambiguous.23 A history of ambiguity, then, will have to come at them from another angle. Hypocrita Lector, Simiole The Ciceronian witticisms showed ambiguity as a deliberately unequal distribution of meanings between hearers. A still greater inequality characterises the ambiguity designed to deceive, that is, the equivocation, as described in the Sophistical Refutations. Here the ethical dimension is central: it is no coincidence that the discussion of deceptive ambiguities, unlike that of puns, turns not on semantics but on the figure of the equivocator, who conforms to a type despite a variety of guises. 20  Alfred Sidgwick, The Use of Words in Reasoning (London, 1901), pp. 180–181. Cf STA, p. x: ‘If a pun is quite obvious it would not ordinarily be called ambiguous, because there is no room for puzzling.’ 21  See below, pp. 110–11, on Emmanuele Tesauro, and Chapter Five, pp. 198–205, on Vossius and Bouhours. 22  Baltasar Gracián, Agudeza y arte de ingenio (1648), ed. Evaristo Correa Calderón, 2 vols (Madrid, 1969), II, pp. 53–62; Jean Paul Richter, Vorschule der Ästhetik (1804), ed. Karl-­Maria Guth (Berlin, 2013), pp. 174–178. 23  Joseph Addison, The Spectator, 10 May 1711 (no. 61) and 11 May 1711 (no. 62). This point is emphasised by Simon Alderson, ‘The Augustan Attack on the Pun’, Eighteenth Century Life 20.3 (1996), 1–19.

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His earliest guise, as in Plato and Aristotle, is that of the sophist, whose very being seemed to threaten the order of things. Sophistry trades in cheap ambiguities, but it also makes true wisdom ambiguous by offering false copies of it, so that the prospective learner cannot tell real from fake; thus Plato defines the sophist as the ‘imitator of the wise’, and classifies sophistry, in an Aristophanean nest of genitives, as ‘the imitative [mimētikon] part of the dissembling part of the conjectural part of the contradictifacient part of the fanciful part of the art of making images’.24 The ambiguity of the sophist was thus connected not only to his falsehood, but to his mimicry of the true, a mimicry akin to the mimesis of art. The sophist, however, was not the only ancient figure held to generate ambiguity: there was also the kolax—the insinuating flatterer and parasite. Just as the sophists counterfeited philosophy, so flatterers counterfeited friendship, appealing to their victim’s amour-­propre and working against his best interests for their own gain. And just as Aristotle had recommended distinction to solve sophistical ambiguity, so Plutarch drew up a series of rules to tell apart the flatterer from the friend, in an essay of much interest to the humanists of the sixteenth century, including Erasmus, who translated it into Latin for Henry VIII.25 In one image Plutarch laughs: ‘The ape is captured, so it seems, when he tries to imitate man by moving and dancing like him, whereas the kolax leads on and entraps others’.26 The flatterer is like the ape in his mimesis, but deceitful rather than innocent, and so dangerous rather than amusing. Unsurprisingly, then, the ape was also an early image of the Devil, as in the Physiologus, a collection of animal allegories from the patristic era, and this connection would be amplified in the sixteenth century, following Luther’s frequent description of Satan as Affe Göttes and simia (or simiolus) Dei, God’s little ape. As the ape parodied man, so the Devil parodied God.27 In the process of parody, appearances become deceptive, ambiguous. 24  Plato, The Sophist, 268c–d: ‘τὸ δὴ τῆς ἐναντιοποιολογικῆς εἰρωνικοῦ μέρους τῆς δοξαστικῆς μιμητικόν, τοῦ φανταστικοῦ γένους ἀπὸ τῆς εἰδωλοποιικῆς’. 25  David Colclough, Freedom of Speech in Early Stuart England (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 42–43. Francis Bacon, ‘Of Friendship’, in Essayes, ed. Michael Kiernan, in OFB XV, p. 85, offers a twist on the distinction: ‘there is no such flatterer, as is a Mans Selfe; And there is no such Remedy, against Flattery of a Mans Selfe, as the Liberty of a Frend’. Contrast the thoughts of Empson on these themes, discussed in Chapter Ten below, pp. 394–98. 26  Plutarch, How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend, in the Loeb Moralia, 15 vols (Cambridge, MA, 1927–1969), I, p. 280 (52b, §7): ‘Ὁ μὲν γὰρ πίθηκος, ὡς ἔοικε, μιμεῖσθαι τὸν ἄνθρωπον ἐπιχειρῶν ἁλίσκεται συγκινούμενος καὶ συνορχούμενος, ὁ δὲ κόλαξ αὐτὸς ἑτέρους ἐπάγεται καὶ παλεύει’. 27  Physiologus, ed. Gustav Heider (Vienna, 1851), p. 24 (VII: De onagre). Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (London, 1997), pp. 80–93; Anthony Ossa-­Richardson, The Devil’s Tabernacle: The Pagan Oracles in Early Modern Thought (Princeton, 2013), pp. 65–73.

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The Devil was not just an ape—he was also a sophist, or even, as John Strang had it, the Arch-­sophist.28 And as the Devil was a sophist, he was also a hypocrite, a word used in the early Christian tradition to denote the dissimulations of religious frauds, and one which will serve as a master-­ trope for all the figures treated in this section. The Physiologus explains that the Devil lost his head and tail for being a hypocrite, and in the seventh century, the Venerable Bede labelled Satan a hypocrite and counterfeit.29 The term had originally meant a stage actor, and this sense would be recovered in early modern English polemics to conflate the ambiguities of the theatre with the dissimulations and equivocations of the hated Catholics, each diabolical.30 Hypocrisy seemed almost invincible: Milton, after recounting Satan’s deception of the angel Uriel, calls it ‘the onely evil that walks / Invisible, except to God alone, / By his permissive will, through Heav’n and Earth’ (Paradise Lost, III.683–685). The Devil was thus the epitome not only of the world’s evil, but of its mendacity and its ambiguity; the fourth-­century patriarch St Athanasius had asserted that the Devil would even throw in a few truths to make his lies more convincing, and lead more men and women to perdition.31 (As Baudelaire would later declare, C’est le Diable qui tient les fils qui nous remuent, it’s the Devil who pulls the strings that move us.) All this theory and all these labels were neatly recapitulated in a guide to demonology, Jodocus Hocker’s Der Teufel selbs, published posthumously in 1568, and reissued the following year as the preface to the Theatrum diabolorum, a magnificent compendium edited by the Frankfurt bookseller Sigmund Feyerabend. Hocker writes: In this spirit [i.e., the Devil] is such a corruption of nature that by himself he can do nothing but lie and deceive. And so all the lies, impostures, errors, seductions that ever were in the world owe their origin to the Devil. Such is his cunning that he deceives us even by speaking the truth, which he sometimes does for no other end than to trap his victims in a net, and so that his lies might find greater faith among us.32

John Strang, De interpretatione et perfectione Scripturae (Rotterdam, 1663), p. 33. Physiologus, ed. Heider, p. 24: ‘quia ypocrita et dolosus erat intrinsecus perdidit caput, nec caudam habet’. Frederic Amory, ‘Whited Sepulchres: The Semantic History of Hypocrisy to the High Middle Ages’, Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale 53 (1986), 1–39. 30  Swapan Chakravorty, ‘Hypocrite Lecteur: Reading on the Early Modern Stage’, in Renaissance Themes: Essays Presented to Arun Kumar Das Gupta, ed. Sukanta Chaudhuri (London, 2009), pp. 33–60, at p. 33. 31  Athanasius, Commentaria in Lucam (at 4:34–5), in Patrologia graeca, ed. J. P. Migne, 161 vols (Paris, 1857–1866), 27:1397; Augustine, De divinatione daemonum, 12; Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, II.2, q. 95, art. 4. Caspar Peucer, Commentarius de praecipuis divinationum generibus (Frankfurt, 1593), p. 50 (I.9); see Ossa-­Richardson, The Devil’s Tabernacle, p. 57. 32  Jodocus Hocker and Hermann Hamelmann, ‘Der Teuffel selbs’ (1568), in Theatrum diabolorum, Das ist, ein sehr nützliches verstenndiges Buch (Frankfurt am Main, 1569), fol. 5r: 28  29 

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In his rôle as ape, flatterer, sophist, equivocator, and hypocrite, the Devil’s language was naturally ambiguous, as could be demonstrated from his recorded utterances, above all in two places: the oracles of the ancient Greeks as recounted in Herodotus and elsewhere, and the seduction of Eve at Genesis 3:4–5, which was on a Christian reading Satan’s only quoted speech to a human in the Old Testament. The ambiguity of the oracles was proverbial in antiquity. The most famous story in Herodotus concerns the Lydian king Croesus, who sent men to Delphi to ask if he should initiate war against Cyrus; the priestess replied that if he crossed the river Halys (present-­day Kızılırmak, Turkey), a great empire would fall. Assuming that this meant the Persians, Croesus crossed, only to find that the empire to fall was his own.33 The story has the character of a folk-­tale, and the oracle itself that of a literary riddle, or rather, of the dramatic irony in a Sophoclean tragedy.34 To run the point home, Croesus later petitions the oracle indignantly (I.90–91), and is told that it is his own fault for not asking enough questions in the first place: the blame is laid on the arrogant protagonist. When historians in the nineteenth century began to reevaluate the nature of their ancient sources, the oracles of Herodotus were increasingly dismissed as late inventions—essentially as witticisms.35 But long before this turn, Christian scholars made much of the oracles’ ambiguity, certain that the ‘Apollo’ or ‘Jupiter’ who delivered them had really been the Devil under another name, spreading lies, evil, and false religion to the credulous heathens.36 In contrast to the holy prophets, inspired by God and so able to predict with clarity, the Devil, lacking any true knowledge of the future, had to equivocate to disguise his ignorance. Then there was Eden. After Eve relays God’s mortal injunction against eating the fruit of knowledge, the diabolical serpent replies: ‘Ye shall not in hoc spiritu naturae corruptio, ut ex semetipso nihil aliud quam mentiri et fallere possit. Quicquid igitur mendaciorum, imposturarum utique, errorum et seductionum, in toto terrarum orbe unquam fuit, hoc omne ad Diabolum, primum authorem referri debet, Cuius ea esset astutia, ut etiam verum dicendo nos fallat: quia non alio fine aliquando verum dicit, quam ut inescatos in nassam trahat, et mendacia eius maiorem apud nos fidem inveniant. Herodotus, Histories, I.46–52. On which, see Chapter Nine below. [Smith], ‘On Puns’, pp. 84–85, groups the oracles with puns. 35  See, for instance, Karl Dietrich Hüllmann, Würdigung des delphischen Orakels (Bonn, 1837), pp. 82–92; and Jacob Geel, ‘Over het Delphische Orakel’, in his Onderzoek en phantasie (Leiden, 1838), 274–331, esp. pp. 321–331. On these see Ossa-­Richardson, The Devil’s Tabernacle, pp. 277–278. 36  Ossa-­Richardson, The Devil’s Tabernacle, pp. 13–14 and passim. See also the remarks on French literary oracles in Alain Faudemay, Le clair et l’obscur à l’Âge classique (Geneva, 2001), pp. 204–207. 33  34 

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surely die: for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.’ (Gen. 3:4–5) Dallas Denery has recently written a lucid history of the exegesis of this passage from the Fathers to the Reformation, tracing out the nuances of Satan’s lies and stratagems, their effects on Eve, and the sins of each.37 He omits, however, the interpretation offered by the prescholastic theologian Rupert of Deutz (c. 1080–1129) that the Devil’s words were not simply lies, but also true—and that therefore his aim was not merely to deceive but to equivocate. ‘Just as Delphic Apollo is said to have played with uncertain ambiguities, so now the same enemy of God and men jested. . . . He confounds and troubles all that follows by equivocating, speaking with one sense but wanting his words to be understood in another.’38 Each prediction may be read two ways. ‘Ye shall not surely die’ was true insofar as Adam and Eve did not physically die there and then; ‘your eyes shall be opened’ as the pair recognised their own impiety and confusion; ‘ye shall be as gods’ as they resembled the false gods or apostate angels in their rebellion; and ‘knowing good and evil’ as they remembered the good they had lost, and experienced the evil they had now discovered. It is a brilliant reading, alive to ingenuity, for it turns the serpent’s lies into a play of wit with a dramatic context and the irony of hindsight, rediscovering in Eve’s moral error a semantic felony, an original Sinn. The pleasure of the interpretation proved attractive: although omitted from the Glossa ordinaria, the go-­to biblical reference in the late Middle Ages, it was later revived and embraced in commentaries by Catholics and Protestants alike.39 The canonical literary portrait of the Devil’s ambiguities would be offered in Paradise Lost, whose Satan is the ‘Artificer of fraud, and was the first / That practised falsehood under saintly show’ (IV.121–122), just as his speech is described in Paradise Regained as ‘Ambiguous and with double 37  Dallas G. Denery II, The Devil Wins: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment (Princeton, 2015), pp. 21–61. 38  Rupert of Deutz, De sancta trinitate et operibus eius (1117), ed. Hrabanus Haacke, 2 vols (= CCCM XXI–XXII) (Turnhout, 1971–1972), I, p. 241 (at Gen. 3:7): ‘quemadmodum Apollo Delphicus fertur solitus fuisse incertis ludere ambagibus, sic iam nunc ludebat idem Dei et hominum inimicus . . . caetera quae sequuntur aequivocando cuncta confundit ac perturbat alio sensu loquens et alio sua dicta intelligi volens.’ When I first read this passage in the Patrologia Latina some years ago, I misread inimicus, ‘enemy’, as mimicus, ‘mimic’, which I still feel is better. On Rupert see R. W. Southern, Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe, 2 vols (Oxford, 1995), II, ch. 1. St Ambrose had an inkling of the idea, on which see Denery, The Devil Wins, p. 43. 39  Benito Pereira, Commentaria et disputationes in Genesim, 4 vols (Rome, 1589–1599), I, pp. 454–5; Cornelius a Lapide, Commentaria in scripturam sacram, ed. Augustin Crampon, 26 vols (Paris, 1891), I, p. 102; Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, ed. Robin Robbins, 2 vols (Oxford, 1981), I, p. 24 (I.4). The Presbyterian scholar George Bush, an ancestor of the presidential dynasty, repeated the idea for a new audience three centuries later: see his Notes, Critical and Practical, on the Book of Genesis, 2 vols (New York, 1868), I, p. 76.

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sense deluding’ (PR I.435). This aspect extends to his attendants, such as Belial who, like the classical sophists, ‘could make the worse appear / The better reason’ (PL II.113–114). The power of Satan’s encircling deceptions is manifested in puns, as Eve, listening to the serpent with its ‘mazy folds’ (IV.161), replies ‘not unamazed’ (IV.552), and Adam likewise, upon hearing her mortal news, ‘amazed / Astonished stood’ (XII.889–90). Stanley Fish famously argued that Milton’s aim in the poem is to put us in the affective position of Adam at the moment of the Fall, so as to recognise our own sinfulness in our sympathy for him.40 But the equivocations of Satan to Eve, for instance on ‘threat’ (IX.685–7) or ‘fear’ (IX.701–2), rely for their literary effect on the same distance between reader and victim as that in Rupert. The ambiguities from Genesis are embedded and further embroidered: So ye shall die perhaps, by putting off Human, to put on Gods; death to be wished, Though threatened, which no worse than this can bring. (IX.713–715)

Here the duality of ‘die’ is amplified by its connection to the stage vocabulary of ‘putting off’ and ‘putting on’, each of which has further meanings: Eve will seek to ‘put off human’, that is, postpone mortality, and to ‘put on gods’, counterfeit divinity, but she will succeed only in ‘putting off’ God (‘Heav’n / Now alienated’, IX.8–9) and putting on human. As the ‘death’ may be either a spiritual or a corporal one, so it is ‘threatened’ either by God’s proscription, or by the Devil’s seduction. The whole works two ways—‘A sentence’, as Feste says in Twelfth Night, ‘is but a cheveril glove to a good wit: how quickly the wrong side may be turned outward!’ Satan’s puns, however, are also Milton’s, and the poet loves to pun in his descriptions of Satan too, as at IV.181–2, ‘At one slight bound high overleaped all bound / Of hill or highest wall’, or at IX.55–56, where Satan is ‘bent / On mans destruction’. Satan’s equivocation thus forms a continuous fabric with that of the poem: the lie is saved as wit, even as literature—bad ethics redeemed as good aesthetics. Not, however, redeemed for all, for Milton’s puns offended taste in the next century. The Spectator criticised Satan’s exchange with Belial at VI.609–627 as ‘the most exceptionable [passage] in the whole poem, as being nothing else but a string of puns, and those too very indifferent’. John Oldmixon, who shared Addison’s disapproval of punning, nonetheless found it entirely appropriate to its subject here: ‘Milton, ’tis plain, thought he cou’d not make worse Devils of them, than by making them Punsters’.41 The pun was hardly less vicious than the lie. Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (New York, 1967). Joseph Addison, The Spectator, 19 Jan. 1712 (no. 279); John Oldmixon, The Arts of

40 

41 

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It could even be construed as a lie: John Dennis hissed to his friend William Wycherley, upon receiving the latter’s ‘Panegyrick upon Puns’, that ‘Falshood is base, and must shock all generous Minds, and every Equivocal is but ambiguous Falshood’.42 Over in Paris, the poet and critic Nicolas Boileau, in his satire dedicated to ‘L’équivoque’, had placed every type of ambiguity, from the humble puns of Vincent Voiture to the mendacities of Satan and the Jesuits, on a spectrum of sin, folly, and irreligion: at this level all ambiguities, accidental and deliberate alike, seemed culpable in man’s moral decline.43 The general association of joking and lying is at least as old as St Augustine, who suggested that the joke is a kind of lie insofar as it expresses an untruth, albeit not a very pernicious one because it does not deceive: ‘for the person spoken to knows it is said as a jest’.44 (It is an intuitive insight: at the age of five my son defined the lie as ‘a not-­funny joke’.) Already for Augustine, as more vividly for Boileau, the joke’s proximity to the lie stood to its discredit. But the association could work the other way, as in the Cannocchiale Aristotelico (Aristotelian Telescope, 1654), an encyclopaedic analysis of wit (argutezza) by the Torinese poet and scholar Emanuele Tesauro. Starting from a reference to eristic equivocation in the Rhetoric (1401a), Tesauro devotes a chapter to the equivoco, here classified as a species of metaphor and including not just puns and ambiguities (including Delphic responses) but many other kinds of wordplay, including anagrams and cabbalistical number games.45 He calls the equivoco ‘a very ingenious device of the human intellect, from which derives the largest share of wit’, but also acknowledges that it is, as Aristotle presents it, ‘a wittily false enthymeme’.46 In other words, Tesauro has taken a figure analysed origiLogick and Rhetorick (London, 1728), p. 18. The latter’s view of the passage in Milton would be shared by Pope, note at Iliad XVI.904, and, quoting Pope, Roger Kedington, Critical Dissertations on the Iliad of Homer (London, 1759), pp. 122–124. Contrast Coleridge’s later judgement of Milton’s demons, in his Shakespearean Criticism, ed. Thomas Middleton Raysor, 2 vols (London, 1960), I, p. 120. 42  John Dennis to William Wycherley, undated, in Dennis’s Select Works, 2 vols (London, 1718), II, p. 512. On Dennis’s screed against the ambiguities in Pope’s Homer, see Chapter Six below, pp. 272–76. 43  Christopher Braider, The Matter of Mind: Reason and Experience in the Age of Descartes (Toronto, 2012), pp. 206–242, is worth reading for its heroic defence of the poem’s value. On Voiture, see the analysis by Boileau’s great rival Dominique Bouhours, discussed in Chapter Five below, p. 202. 44  Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos, at Psalms 5:6, in PL XXXVI.66: ‘non est perniciosissimum, quia non fallit. Novit enim ille cui dicitur, joci causa est dictum’. This discussion is influentially repeated in Gratian, Decretum, II.2.14, ‘Pro temporali vita alicuius perfectus mentiri non debet’, and continued in Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, II.2, q. 110, art. 4. 45  Emanuele Tesauro, Il cannocchiale Aristotelico, o sia idea delle argutezze heroiche (Turin, 1654), pp. 358–359, with a diagram, and more fully at pp. 447–483. 46  Ibid., p. 447: ‘Equivoco: ingeniosissimo comento dell’humano intelletto: ondi si deriva

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nally as an eristic technique and recovered its pleasure for the sort of courtly wit extolled by his contemporaries. A similar recuperation is caught, albeit implicitly, in the representations of Satan offered by Rupert and Milton: in each case a mendacious ambiguity, one that deceives the hearer (Eve) by inviting her to understand a sense different from that intended by the speaker, is refigured as a witty ambiguity, one that delights the reader by allowing him to perceive both meanings simultaneously. One and the same utterance may thus be deceit to one hearer and a pun to another—the difference is merely a matter of perspective within the distribution of meanings, the gap between being in on the joke and being excluded, between collusion and delusion. Such a discrepancy had been the basis, in fact, of the archetypal pun of Western literature, which begins with Odysseus telling Polyphemus that his name is ‘Nobody’ (outis, Od. IX.366); when the cyclops informs his fellows that ‘nobody’ is trying to kill him, they reply that if ‘nobody’ (now mē tis, IX.410) is trying to kill him, he must be mad. The pun is that mē tis, or rather mētis, ‘cunning, ingenuity, wit’, is Odysseus’s signal epithet.47 Performing for his Phaeacian audience, Odysseus reinvents his own mendacity as wit, a wit which is also Homer’s; the correct response is not indignation but laughter. Renaissance literature, especially drama, is studded with similar examples, such as the letter procured by Mortimer Jr. in Marlowe’s Edward II, bidding the king’s guardians ‘Edwardum occidere nolite timere bonum est’—a squinting construction which, depending on the punctuation, may be read either as ‘Do not kill Edward, it is good to be fearful’ or ‘Do not be afraid to kill Edward, it is good’. The purpose of such ambiguity is, of course, what CIA officials would later term ‘plausible deniability’, a strategy of operative deception.48 Marlowe’s source John Stow, who ascribed the letter to Adam Orleton, bishop of Hereford, could rely on a classical equivalent, seeing in it ‘the great deceyte of Sophisters’. But if the line was deceit it was also wit, as underlined by Sir John Harington’s epigram ‘Of writing with double pointing’, which quotes Stow’s Latin and then appropriates its technique for a misogynist satire.49 A more ornate example la maggior parte delle acutezze . . . il Concetto altro non è, che un’ Entimema Urbanamente fallace’. 47  The pun is underscored four lines later at Od. IX.414: ‘my dear heart laughed that my name and noble cunning [mētis] had deceived’. See the elaboration of this theme in John Peradotto, Man in the Middle Voice: Name and Narration in the Odyssey (Princeton, 1990), pp. 143–70, and compare Chapter Eight below, pp. 323. 48  On the CIA doctrine of plausible deniability, see Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders (New York, 1976), pp. 11–12. On the squinting construction, see Chapter One above, pp. 48–49. 49  Christopher Marlowe, Edward II, V.4.8, drawing on John Stow, The Chronicles of England, from Brute unto this Present Yeare of Christ 1580 (London, 1580), p. 357; and Raphael

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from Shakespeare is ­Juliet’s response to her mother’s assurance that Romeo will be murdered in revenge for Tybalt: Indeed, I never shall be satisfied With Romeo, till I behold him—dead— Is my poor heart for a kinsman vex’d. Madam, if you could find out but a man To bear a poison, I would temper it; That Romeo should, upon receipt thereof, Soon sleep in quiet. O, how my heart abhors To hear him named, and cannot come to him. To wreak the love I bore my cousin Upon his body that slaughter’d him! (III.5.93–102)

The most obvious ambiguity here comprises a series of individual words and phrases, each with two meanings: ‘satisfied’, ‘dead’ (if we allow a sexual pun), ‘kinsman’, ‘temper’, ‘sleep in quiet’, ‘come to him’, ‘wreak the love’. But the second and third lines have a richer compression: to Lady Capulet they indicate ‘until I see Romeo dead, so vexed is my poor heart for my kinsman Tybalt’, but to Juliet herself ‘until I see Romeo, so dead is my poor heart to see my kinsman Romeo vexed’. This hinges on the place of the word ‘dead’, a splendid squint whose ambiguity further permits Romeo and Tybalt, Montague and Capulet, to be eirenically united in ‘kinsman’, and indeed in death, a fore-­echo of the play’s conclusion.50 In performance these ambiguities would be difficult to retain, just as the squint in ‘dead’ is hard to punctuate without choosing a sense—the dashes are Pope’s happy innovation (figure 3.1)—but the possibilities remain vivid in the text as it stands in both quartos and folio. The witty ambiguity, then, is the deceptive ambiguity presented at a distance, through a diegetic (narrative) frame, to a ‘third man’—the playgoer, the reader, the neutral bystander. In this it belongs to the realm of art, which by framing transfigures the ugly and vicious into the beautiful and virtuous.51 This happens in all sorts of ways, from the murder made gorgeous onstage to the satire that delights in its object, as when Rabelais cannot scorn undergraduate inkhorn and congested legal erudition but by rehearsing them for the reader’s entertainment. So it is that Plato, even before Aristotle’s Sophistical Refutations, depicts the sophists Euthydemus Holinshed, Chronicles, 2nd ed., 3 vols (London, 1587), III, p. 341b. John Harington, The Most Elegant and Witty Epigrams (London, 1625), sig. B4r (epigram I.33). 50  Catherine Belsey, Romeo and Juliet: Language and Writing (London, 2014), p. 55; Keir Elam, The Semotics of Theatre and Drama (1980: New York, 2002), p. 155, for a gloss in terms of Grice’s maxims of manner. 51  This point would be articulated by Karl Solger as ‘irony’, on which see Chapter Nine below, pp. 335–36.

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(a) (b)

(c)

Figure 3.1. Typography of Juliet’s equivocation in (a) Q1 1597, sig. G4r, (b) Q2 1599, sig. H4r, and (c) Pope’s edition of the Works, 10 vols (London, 1728), VIII, p. 275.

and Dionysodorus tripping up the helpless Cleinias with simple homonyms; the reader is to laugh with indignation at them, with pity at him, and to identify by contrast with unfooled, unfooling Socrates standing by.52 From Homer and Plato to Shakespeare and Milton, the literary turn from mendacity to wit, doubt to plenty, deprives ambiguity of its sting. If the diegetic turn could reveal deceit as a kind of delightful wit, it could also slip another layer of intention behind an apparently simple utterance. Perhaps the most sublime example of this is the prophecy of Caiaphas in the Gospel of St John.53 The Pharisees convoke a meeting (John 11:47–48) to discuss the problem of Jesus, whose miracles threaten to bring upon them the hatred of the Romans. Caiaphas, the high priest at the time, declares that it is better that one man die for the people than that the entire nation perish (11:50).54 In the next two verses, John comments to the reader: ‘And this spake he not of himself [i.e., of his own accord]: but being high priest that year, he prophesied [eprophēteusen] that Jesus should die for that nation; And not for that nation only, but that also he should gather together in one the children of God that were scattered abroad.’ (KJV) In other words, Caiaphas is not, after all, saying with his own intention that the Jews should kill Jesus to silence sedition and avoid trouble from the Romans; rather, he is saying, with another intention—God’s—that Jesus will die for the salvation of mankind. To prophesy is precisely this, to speak (phēmi) on behalf of (pro-­) God, though neither Caiaphas nor his audience 52  Euthydemus 275d–278b offers a concise walkthrough of this process, with Socrates explaining at the end. 53  The best recent discussion of this episode is Rainer Metzner, Kaiphas der Hohepriester jenes Jahres: Geschichte und Deutung (Leiden, 2010), pp. 249–56; see also C. H. Dodd, ‘The Prophecy of Caiaphas: John xi.47–53’, in his More New Testament Studies (Manchester, 1968), pp. 58–68, for the context. 54  Compare Genesis Rabbah XCIV.9.9, in Genesis Rabbah, tr. Jacob Neusner, 3 vols (Atlanta, GA, 1985), III, p. 322: ‘if [the gentiles] specified a single individual . . . [the Jews] should hand him over and not permit all of them to be killed’. Caiaphas’s words would be often parodied in the Renaissance, e.g., in Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta, I.2.98–99: ‘And better one want for a common good, / Than many perish for a private man’.

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realise it. The idea of an unconscious prophecy turning on an ambiguity amazed later readers, such as the Byzantine patriarch-­scholar Photius, who wondered if it could provide a new sort of hermeneutic model, applicable to other utterances in Scripture.55 Many Renaissance commentators took the episode simply as proving that God could ‘expresse himselfe even by the tongues of faulty instruments’ or unwilling agents, making the case of Caiaphas much like that of the reluctant prophet Balaam in the Old Testament.56 But this is to miss at least half the point. Although John tells us that Caiaphas did not speak of his own accord, we are evidently to imagine that he did—that he spoke both from himself and not from himself. Thomas Aquinas saw this very clearly: ‘the words have one meaning according to the intention of Caiaphas, and another according to the Evangelist’s exposition’.57 Caiaphas did not have a prophetic vision, and his mind and imagination remained untouched, fixed on malice, even as his tongue preached Christian salvation. Peter du Moulin, likewise, treated it as an example of the way illicit or sinful actions could also have mystical layers of meaning: Samson taking a Philistine wife, or Jacob tricking Esau.58 But there is still further dramatic significance to the Caiaphatic prophecy, in which are not simply two meanings, but two kinds of meaning, the one Jewish, the other Christian, the one vindictive, the other merciful, the one heard, the other read on the page. And the extradiegetic Christian meaning does not sit peacefully beside the intradiegetic Jewish one, but crucially critiques it, since Christ’s self-­sacrifice is understood as a repudiation of the petty calculations and self-­interest of the Jews. The two faces of the utterance, human and divine, are thus intimately connected as Old and New Testament, but also as what would later be called dramatic irony, itself related, in ways that will become apparent, to what we have presented here as wit.59 55  Photius, Amphilochia, in his Epistulae et Amphilochia, ed. B. Laourdas and L. G. Westerink, 7 vols (Leipzig, 1983–1988), VI.1, pp. 105–107. Photius’s first example of an equivalent utterance is Herod’s speech at John 11:49–52. For one eighteenth-­century response to this, see Chapter Eight below, pp. 324–325. 56  The expression is from Thomas Adams, A Commentary of Exposition upon the Divine Second Epistle Generall, Written by the Blessed Apostle Peter (London, 1633), p. 1536. 57  Thomas Aquinas, Expositio in quatuor evangelia, in Opera omnia, ed. Stanislaus Eduard Frette et al., 34 vols (Paris, 1871–80), XX, p. 168a: ‘Quae quidem verba alium intellectum habent secundum intentionem Caiphae, et alium, secundum expositionem Evangelistae.’ 58  Peter du Moulin, Ten Sermons Preached upon Several Occasions (London, 1684), p. 57. 59  The first to interpret this episode in terms of dramatic irony was Rudolf Bultmann, Das Evangelium des Johannes (1941: Göttingen, 1950), pp. 314–15: ‘dieser [i.e. Caiaphas] erscheint so im Lichte tragischer Ironie als Prophet wider Wissen und Willen’, using the more common German expression, on which see Chapter Nine below, pp. 335–338. See also the discussion at Metzner, Kaiphas, p. 254; and Tobias Nicklas, ‘Die Prophetie des Kajaphas. Im Netz johanneischer Ironie’, New Testament Studies 46 (2000), 589–594, esp. p. 593.

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A Metropolis of Lies Whether Romeo and Juliet ought to be objects of the audience’s sympathy or contempt may be endlessly debated, and the passage quoted above is unlikely to edge the question either way. No doubt the playgoer who picked up on the double meanings enjoyed the artistry of it, but equivocation in the 1590s had pejorative associations not only with Satan as we have seen, but more specifically with the Catholics, and especially the Jesuits. In the McCarthyite mood of the late Elizabethan era, a special threat was posed by recusants who practised deception to spread their religion and protect their allies. Two cases were notorious above all: the handsome young Robert Southwell in the early 1590s and his friend Henry Garnet in 1606, both Jesuits executed for treason, and each accused at trial of deceptive equivocation in relation to their faith.60 The English anxiety about Catholicism translated well into literary humour. Robert Burton’s early comedy Philosophaster, written shortly after Garnet’s trial, portrays its Jesuit protagonist Polupragmaticus as a classical sophist, deploying equivocations straight out of the Euthydemus, glossed in asides by his servant Aequivocus: Polupragmaticus. By my art I could make a mouse move What four hundred yoke of oxen could not drag. Polupistos. O renowned artificer! . . . Aequivocus (aside): My lord means painted or dead oxen.61

A few decades later, probably in the 1630s, a curious anti-­Catholic poem began making the rounds, under various titles, among those who collected verse manuscripts, before being printed in a compendium of humour from 1640, Wits Recreations: I hold as faith What Rome’s Church saith Where th’ King is head The Flocks misled

What England’s Church allows My conscience disavowes The Church can have no seame, Where the Pope’s supream

60  On Southwell’s trial, see Perez Zagorin, Ways of Lying. Dissimulation, Persecution and Conformity in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA, 1990), pp. 186–93; and on Garnet’s, see Andrew Hadfield, Lying in Early Modern English Culture: From the Oath of Supremacy to the Oath of Allegiance (Oxford, 2017), pp. 69–73. 61  Robert Burton, Philosophaster, ed. and tr. Connie McQuillen (Binghamton, NY, 1993), p. 96 (II.789–92):

Polupragmaticus. Arte mea faciam ut mus loco dimoveat Quod quadringenta boum iuga non trahant. Polupistos. O illustrem artificem! . . .  Aequivocus. Boves pictos aut mortuos herus intelligit.

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Where th’ Alter’s drest The people’s blest Hee’s but an asse Who shuns the Masse Who charity preach They heav’n soon reach On faith t’ rely Is heresy

There’s service scarce divine Where’s table bread and wine Who the Communion flyes Is Catholique and wise Their church with error’s fraught Where only faith is taught No matter for good works Make’s Christians worse then Turks.62

Read left to right, the couplets express allegiance to the Church of England and hostility to Rome; read in columns, they convey the opposite; formatted into a single column, the poem would conceal the Catholic’s true beliefs in a form affecting Protestant orthodoxy. Good, upright, straightforward Englishmen could have a lot of fun with this sort of thing without actually conveying any heresy themselves: it was the wit of a pretend deceit, one step down from Juliet’s equivocations.63 The foundation of such humour was the twin doctrine of licit equivocation and mental reservation taught by some Catholics in the late sixteenth century. This pair has received substantial attention from recent historians, and also from literary critics tracing the connotations of the word equivocator in Macbeth II.3.64 What I want to do here is clarify the principles underlying the early modern analysis of the topic by reference to the questions treated in this chapter: the controversy over equivocation and reservation, 62  Witts Recreations Selected from the Finest Fancies of Moderne Muses (London, 1640), sig. F3r (no. 209). A version in better English, and with rhyming translations into both Latin and Greek, would later turn up in The Popish Courant, attached to The Weekly Pacquet of Advice from Rome, 1.23 (16 May, 1679), p. 192. I owe the point about manuscript circulation to William Poole; some entries in the online Union First Line Index, hosted by the Folger Shakespeare Library, attribute the verse to the anti-­royalist MP William Strode (d. 1645). 63  Compare A Letter from a Jesuit: Or, The Mysterie of Equivocation ([London?], 1679), which presents an alleged Jesuit’s recommendation letter, formatted in such a way that if the page is folded in half it condemns rather than praises its bearer. An image of the letter is reproduced in Jenny Davidson, Hypocrisy and the Politics of Politeness: Manners and Morals from Locke to Austen (Cambridge, 2004), p. 124. 64  A. E. Malloch, ‘Equivocation: A Circuit of Reasons’, in Familiar Colloquy: Essays Presented to Arthur Edward Baker, ed. Patricia Bruckmann (Ontario, 1978), pp. 132–43; Johann Sommerville, ‘The “new art of lying”: Equivocation, Mental Reservation, and Casuistry’, in Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe, ed. Edmund Leites (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 159–84; Zagorin, Ways of Lying, pp. 153–85; Stefania Tutino, Shadows of Doubt: Language and Truth in Post-­Reformation Catholic Culture (Oxford, 2014), pp. 10–39; Denery, The Devil Wins, pp. 135–45; Máté Vince, From ‘Aequivocatio’ to the ‘Jesuitical Equivocation’: The Changing Concepts of Ambiguity in Early Modern England, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Warwick, 2013. My thanks to Vince for sharing his dissertation with me. For equivocation in Macbeth and Othello against the context of early modern attitudes to lying, see Hadfield, Lying in Early Modern English Culture, pp. 301–8.

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as I shall argue, turned on the contested borders between wit, deceit, and ambiguity. The original setting for the doctrine of equivocation was casuistry, the art of resolving conflicts between general rules in particular situations, as developed in commentaries on works of theology and canon law, above all Gratian’s Decretum and the Sentences of Peter Lombard. A classic case was that of a confessor asked by his superior, or by an Inquisitor, if his charge had sinned: to answer would break the bond of the confession, to refuse would be disobedient, and to lie would be a third sin. What to do? Some twelfth-­century wag suggested that the confessor equivocate by saying nescio, ‘I do not know’, meaning inwardly that he did not know for certain as he had not witnessed it, or else that he did not know ut homo, ‘as a man’, but only ut vicarius Dei, ‘as God’s deputy’. Given such an answer, the superior would take it simply that the confessor did not know at all, and thus the bond of trust would remain, but the confessor was not lying because his words were true in some narrow sense.65 The doctrine of mental reservation (restrictio mentalis) was still more inventive. This doctrine, and perhaps also the term, may have originated in a commentary on the fourth book of Peter Lombard’s Sentences by the canonist Pierre de la Palud, written up from lectures in Paris around 1315.66 The idea is that a speaker may, in certain circumstances such as that of the confessor, hold back part of his utterance in his mind, so that the unlawful 65  The idea was expounded already in the thirteenth century by Alexander of Hales (or a student), in his Summa universae theologiae, 4 vols (Venice, 1575), IV, fol. 330vb (IV.19.2.1): ‘secure [sc. sacerdos] potest dicere, nescio: nec perjurat, quia juramentum non obligat illum ad deum, nisi quod novit ut homo, non ut deus’, relying on an idea of confessorial knowledge established by Pope Eugene III, quoted in Gregory IX’s Decretales (1230), I.31.2. See also Henry of Ghent’s ninth quodlibet, dated 1286, in his Quodlibeta, ed. Jodocus Badius (Paris, 1518), fol. 390v (IX.27). For the context see Henry Charles Lea, A History of Auricular Confession and Indulgences in the Latin Church, 3 vols (London, 1896), I, pp. 425–28. A curious recent newspaper article, Ashifa Kassam, ‘Atheist pastor sparks debate by “irritating the church into the 21st century” ’, The Guardian, 24/4/16, offers a contemporary parallel from Toronto: ‘[Gretta] Vosper was ordained in 1993, during which she was asked if she believed in God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. She said yes, speaking metaphorically’. 66  Pierre de la Palud, [In quartum sententiarum Petri Lombardi] (Paris, 1514), fol. 116ra (dist. XXI, q. 3, art. 3): ‘quantacunque verba sint generalia si loquens intendat se restringere et audiens similiter debet intelligere non esse mendacium’. On the context see Jean Dunbabin, A Hound of God: Pierre de la Palud and the Fourteenth-­Century Church (Oxford, 1991), pp. 42–52. Pierre is the oldest authority cited by Théophile Raynaud, Splendor veritatis moralis (Lyon, 1627), pp. 86–87. The earliest usage I have found of the noun restrictio is in the 1432 Sentences commentary by Johannes Capreolus, Defensiones theologiae Divi Thomae Aquinatis, ed. Ceslaus Paban and Thomas Pègues, 7 vols (Turin, 1900–1908), VI, p. 433b (IV.21.2): ‘Nec obstat si additiones et restrictiones quae fiunt in mente, non exprimantur in voce: quia voces sunt ad placitum, et proferens vocem potest significare aliquid sibipsi, quod non significat nec signifcare intendit alteri.’

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questioner hears only a false incomplete part of a true complete statement. The confessor, then, may legitimately answer something like ‘I do not know’, adding in his mind, ‘such that I may tell you’.67 This apparently preposterous doctrine would be regularly taught by fifteenth-­century casuists such as Gabriel Biel, Antoninus of Florence, and Sylvester Prierias, becoming more controversial with its dissemination in the next century: the Dominican theologian Domingo de Soto, for instance, rejected it, though he allowed a limited use of equivocation. The early sources have been little studied, but the doctrine seems not to have been theorised in any depth before the Salamancan canonist Martin de Azpilcueta, Doctor Navarrus, devoted a short treatise to it in 1584, at the request of the Jesuits of Valladolid. The treatise takes the form of a commentary on a passage of Gratian’s Decretum known, after its first two words, as Humanae aures (‘Human ears’).68 But there are boxes within boxes, for the passage in Gratian is itself a commentary on St Gregory’s defence of Job from Elihu’s accusation of impiety (Job 35:2): ‘what harm is there if our words differ superficially from the rightness of truth in the judgement of men, when they are fixed to and agree with it in their heart? Human ears judge our words as they sound aloud, but divine judgement hears them as they are proferred within.’69 Gratian comments: Certainly he has understood who can explain another’s will and intention in different words, for a person ought not to pay attention to the words but to the will and intention: the intention should not be subject to the words, but the words to the intention.70 Gratian: If, therefore, divine judgement hears our words aloud as it does our internal words, and if intention should not be subject to the words but the words to the intention, then it is evident that God does not hear an oath like the person to whom it is sworn, but rather like the person who swears it.71

67  Albert Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin, The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning (Berkeley, 1988), pp. 202–203, point out a good modern parallel: the homeless man asks, ‘Do you have any change?’ and the reply given is ‘No’, meaning ‘Not for you’. This is not quite a lie, for the code is understood. 68  Martinus de Azpilcueta, Doctor Navarrus, Commentarius in cap. humanae aures xxii (Rome, 1584). On the composition circumstances of Navarrus’s commentary, see Eloy Tejero, ‘El Doctor Navarro en la historia de la doctrina canónica y moral’, in Estudios sobre el Doctor Navarro en el IV centenario de la muerte de Martin de Azpilcueta (Pamplona, 1988), pp. 125–80. 69  Gregory the Great, Moralia in Job, ed. Marcus Adriaen, 2 vols [= CCSL 143] (Turnhout, 1979–85), II, p. 1276 (XXVI.10.15, at Job 35:2): ‘quid obest si a rectitudine veritatis humano judicio verba nostra superficie tenus discrepant, quando in cordis cardine ei compaginata concordant? Humanae aures verba nostra talia judicant qualia foris sonant; divina vero judicia talia ea audiunt qualia ex intimis proferuntur.’ 70  On words and intention, see Chapter Two above, pp. 78–80. 71  Gratian, Decretum, in Corpus iuris canonici, eds Emil Ludwig Richter and Emil Friedberg,

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This is an extreme version of Diodorus’s position on ambiguity, filtered through the Christian idea of divine omniscience: the true meaning of any proposition, perceptible only to oneself and to God, lies in the mind, not in the audible words. For Navarrus it is just the ticket to defend mental reservation. There are, he asserts, four kinds of discourse (oratio), ‘as all logicians teach’: spoken, written, mental, and mixed.72 (No logician, as his critics eagerly pointed out, had ever taught this.) In a mixed discourse, a proposition may be partly spoken, partly written, and partly reserved in the mind, and it may be true even if each element is false individually. Imagine that I tell a woman I will marry her, but in fact I do not intend to; the case is brought before a judge, who asks me, ‘Did you say you would marry her?’ I say that I did not, inwardly reserving the clause, ‘in my mind’. I thus deceive the judge, but I do not deceive God, who hears the complete proposition, ‘I did not say I would marry her in my mind’. It is as if I’ve crossed my fingers behind my back. To men, the use of reservation is indistinguishable from a lie, but God discerns them: the standard of truth is removed from the capacity of ‘human ears’, civil discourse, to divinity. Here for the first time, mental reservation is distinguished from equivocation. Dallas Denery has argued that language for Navarrus is ‘liberated from theology’, becoming instead ‘part of the world’, a secular tool for dissimulation, as with the Machiavellian counsellors he studies elsewhere in his book.73 But exactly the reverse is true: Navarrus regrounds language in its relation with God and relegates the world of men to the shade. As Montaigne said of the lie, it showed a cowardice to men and a bravery to God.74 As with so many Catholic manoeuvres of the period, Navarrus’s theory is counterintuitive because it follows the implications of divine omnipotence and omniscience to their limit, implications entirely at odds with the assumptions of day-­to-­day life.75 Where did Navarrus get his idea of oratio mixta? He may have had in mind St Bonaventure, who used the phrase to mean a form of prayer that 2 vols (1879–81: Graz, 1959), I, col. 885 (II.22.5.11). ‘Certe noverit ille, qui intentionem et voluntatem alterius variis verbis explicat, quia non debet aliquis verba considerare, sed voluntatem et intentionem, quia non debet intentio verbis deservire, sed verba intentioni. Gratian: Si ergo divina judicia verba nostra talia foris audiunt, qualia ex intimis proferuntur, si intentio non debet deservire verbis, sed verba intentioni: patet, quod Deus non sic accipit juramentum, sicut ille, cui juratur, sed pocius sicut qui jurat intelligit’. On this see Vince, From ‘Aequivocatio’, pp. 61–62. The sentence before Gratian’s words is of unknown origin. 72  Navarrus, Commentarius, p. 3. 73  Denery, The Devil Wins, pp. 143–144. Tutino, Shadows of Doubt, pp. 21–23, makes an unconvincing turn to Wittgenstein in order to rescue oratio mixta as a ‘language game’ played between two human beings. 74  Michel de Montaigne, ‘Du desmentir’, in his Essais, eds Jean Balsamo et al. (Paris, 2007), p. 705. 75  Compare Chapter Four below, p. 178.

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combined spoken and silent words.76 But on the page Navarrus pointed in another direction, that is, to rhetorical tropes in which words left unexpressed are supplied by the hearer, as outlined in an influential treatise on signification by the jurist Andrea Alciato: these were the figures of aposiopesis, in which the speaker breaks off suggestively mid-­sentence; subauditio, in which a word necessary to complete the sense—usually a logical qualifier—is left unstated; and the paroemium or proverb, which captures a larger thought in a short, allusive phrase.77 In the sort of interdisciplinary move that subverts modern historiographical expectations, humanist rhetorical theory is thus brought in to justify an argument of casuistical canon law. The link to rhetoric is also provocative for it underlines the reasonable point that we often communicate more than we say: even, at times, the opposite of what we say. Moreover, as we saw in Chapter One, the notion of subauditio was key to the grammatical theory of ellipsis as developed by Franciscus Sanctius, whose career at the University of Salamanca overlapped with that of Navarrus in the 1560s and 1570s.78 One of the signal innovations of Navarrus’s work is its turn to biblical exegesis. There are verses in Scripture that look like lies: these can be explained by supposing the use of reservation, a supposition that reciprocally lends further legitimacy to the doctrine itself. For instance, when the Psalmist says that the wicked will not arise in judgement (Ps. 1:5), he must have had in mind ‘to eternal glory’, for we know (1 Cor. 15) that all men will arise on the Day of Judgement.79 Again, when Christ tells his disciples (Matt. 24:36, Mark 13:32) that he does not know when the Day of Judgement will come, for only God the Father knows, he must have reserved a clause like ‘that I might tell you’.80 This hermeneutical turn proved decisive, and in doing so, broached much deeper conceptual questions. In the decades after Navarrus published his treatise, many Catholics argued the point, tweaking, elaborating, indignantly rejecting.81 It is obvi76  St Bonaventure, In quartum Lombardi Sententiarum, XV.2.2.3 conc., in Opera, 10 vols (Quaracchi, 1882–1902), IV, p. 374b: ‘Alia [sc. oratio] est mixta, in qua scilicet orat mentaliter, et vocaliter:’ 77  Navarrus, Commentarius, p. 4. Zagorin, Ways of Lying, p. 178, misunderstands this re­ ference. Andrea Alciato, De verborum significatione libri quatuor (Lyon, 1530), pp. 79 on paroemium, 82–83 on aposiopesis or ‘reticentia’, and 85 on subauditio; see also Quintilian, Inst. or. IX.2.54–57 on reticentia. Compare [Persons], Mitigation (see below, n. 81), pp. 318–19. 78  See Chapter One above, p. 53. 79  This is directed against the Athanasian Creed, ‘Ad cuius adventum omnes homines resurgere habent cum corporibus suis’. 80  Navarrus, Commentarius, pp. 4–5. For a summary of attempts to wrestle with the paradox of this verse, see Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, III, q. 10, a. 2, response to objection 1. 81  The best account of reservation after Navarrus is now Tutino, Shadows of Doubt, pp. 25–34.

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ous why so many would object to the doctrine: in a place where equivocation and especially mental reservation were acceptable, it would be impossible to know which statements were true and which false, for any utterance could ‘mean’ something other than what it said. The doctrine of reservation also came to England, at first by word of mouth, then in the form of a 1598 treatise by Henry Garnet which, although it circulated widely, remained in manuscript until 1851, when it was published by the legal historian David Jardine.82 During his trial in 1606 Garnet defended reservation using Navarrus’s example, Christ’s apparent ignorance as to the Day of Judgement. In the aftermath of the affair, the Protestant controversialist Thomas Morton, later bishop of Durham and a patron of John Donne, attacked Garnet in print, sparking a testy exchange with the Jesuit scholar Robert Persons that lasted until the latter’s death in 1610. Here the key example was not the confessor shielding his charge, or the groom unwilling to marry, but the Catholic priest asked by a Protestant authority if he was a priest, and replying that he was not, with the mental reservation ‘such as to tell you’. Just as market competition drives up commercial quality and innovation, so intellectual competition, in this case confessional dispute, drives up the standard of argument: faced with an enemy ready to pounce on every error, the scholar has no choice but to raise his game. So it was with Morton and Persons, although Morton, like so many Protestant scholars, could filch his best arguments from earlier Catholic critics, here Juan Maldonado (‘your Jesuite’), and Cornelis Janssen, bishop of Ghent (‘your Bishop’).83 In a recent doctoral dissertation Máté Vince has provided a clear overview of their argument, and I will not unravel its windings here, focusing instead on its relevance to the history of ambiguity. One of the worst snags from Garnet’s case, and from the Catholic literature—one that makes it hard for us to appreciate the difficulty of the Protestant critique—was the battery of scriptural examples brought forth in defence of reservation: Ps. 1:5, Matt. 24:36, and many others as the controversy went on. Morton had not only to deny the validity of reservation, but also to explain Christ’s apparent lies without its help; to do this, as Vince has shown, he reinterpreted the phrases in question as verbal ambiguities whose resolution was clear from the context, and which therefore did not deceive Christ’s audi82  [Henry Garnet], A Treatise of Equivocation, ed. David Jardine (London, 1851). Jardine had already published materials on the Gunpowder Trials, with copious reference to Garnet and to equivocation, in the second volume of his Criminal Trials, 2 vols (London, 1832–35). 83  Also Domingo de Soto, whom Thomas Morton, A Full Satisfaction Concerning a Double Romish Iniquitie; Hainous Rebellion, and more than Heathenish Aequivocation, 3 vols (London, 1606), III, p. 59, confuses with the ‘subtle doctor’ Duns Scotus, although, as the mediaeval joke had gone, quid distat inter Sotum et Scotum?

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ence.84 By contrast, he identified Catholic mental reservations as mere lies; indeed, he draws an explicit parallel with the serpent’s deceits in the Garden of Eden.85 Persons’s return strategy was to minimise the distinction between verbal equivocation and mental reservation, which he also calls ‘mental equivocation’. This was in part, then, a struggle of conceptual gerrymandering, competing attempts to align reservation either with lies, or with ambiguities like those used by Christ. To see this in practice, consider the case of Mark 13.32, ‘of that day and hour knoweth no man, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but my Father only’, known to Morton from Garnet’s manuscript.86 The most straightforward reading of this line—that Christ actually does not know the Day of Judgement—is not open to Morton: as Garnet had correctly said, ‘all that treate of this texte do bring such expositions as necessarylye requier a supplye of some thinge not expressed but understoode’. Some had suggested that Christ did not know as a man. Morton’s solution is that Christ is using a figure of speech, probably with an ‘emphasis of pronunciation’ to indicate the trope: ‘though they [the Apostles] were by the sense of the speech held in ignorance not to know the day, yet they were not ignorant of the sense of the speech, which was, I may not let you know it.’87 Following Augustine, he points to other passages in which the word ‘to know’ cannot have its usual meanings, such as Deut. 13:3: ‘the Lord your God proveth you, to know whether ye love the Lord your God with all your heart’. Here, again, the words seem to mean that God will find out whether he is loved, but this must be impossible because he knows everything already, so it must mean instead that he will test the people to make them find out whether they love him. Like Navarrus and Garnet, Morton acknowledges that Christ’s words are ambiguous insofar as they require a supplied element to be rightly understood; but he differs in stating that this element must have been grasped by the disciples—that it is an idiomatic ellipsis, requiring subauditio—and therefore not ambiguous in practice. (That its ambiguity is merely logical, not rhetorical.) The Apostles knew it was not their place to know the Day of Judgement, as Christ tells them explicitly at Acts 1:7, and so ‘if that were the meaning of his wordes, they understood it, and then it was no concealed reservation’. An equivocation is not a mental reservation, then, if its hearers grasp the meaning, if it is an ambiguity without obscurity. It was impossible, Morton asserted with the force of consensus, that Christ should seek to deceive.88 Vince, From ‘Aequivocatio’, p. 136. Morton, A Full Satisfaction, III, p. 63. 86  [Garnet], A Treatise, pp. 24–25. 87  Morton, A Full Satisfaction, III, p. 74, drawing on Augustine, De Genesi contra Manichaeos, I.22 (at PL 34:189–90). Compare Henry Mason, The New Art of Lying (London, 1624), pp. 82–85. 88  Morton, A Full Satisfaction, III, p. 75 on Christ’s lies as ‘blasphemies’. 84  85 

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For Robert Persons, replying to Morton in his 1607 Treatise Tending to Mitigation, this analysis could not be correct, for three reasons. First, whether or not a sentence contains a mental reservation is not affected by whether it is understood by the person to whom it is addressed; in fact, it need not even be heard by anyone.89 Second, Morton seems to have conceded the key point that ‘there is some such hidden sense, more then is expressed in the wordes’—whatever Morton wants to call the subaudited elements, it is these that constitute the reservation.90 We may well ask by what criteria the two kinds can be distinguished. Morton insists on the hearer’s ability to guess: as he would later put it, a man ‘may sooner claspe hold of the man in the moone’ than detect a mental reservation.91 Persons’s third reason is that elsewhere the Apostles and other hearers did misconstrue Christ’s words. St John’s Gospel is especially rich in examples: at 2:19–21, Jesus speaks of ‘this temple’, meaning his body, but the Jews understand him to mean a literal temple; and at 11:11, he says to his disciples that Lazarus is ‘asleep’, meaning dead, but again they take him literally. Then there is 12:32, ‘And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself’, indicating both crucifixion and transfiguration.92 But all these are verbal equivocations, relying on spoken words and phrases with more than one sense.93 Moreover, as I noted above, the meaning of passages like these, the meaning to the reader of the Bible, is inseparable from their ambiguity: throughout John’s Gospel, Christ expresses a spiritual sense clear to the Christian reader but opaque to his Jewish audience with their temporal horizons. They are, in fact, excellent examples of deceptive ambiguities reframed as witty ones by John’s act of narration. Morton grasps only half of this when he says that Christ’s words were true but ‘the scornefull Jewes, who were now blinded with malice . . . perverted them into a sensuall Construction’. An ambiguity, he continues, is not deceitful by virtue of the ‘misconceit of incredulous hearers’.94 By 89  ‘P. R.’ [Robert Persons], A Treatise Tending to Mitigation towardes Catholicke-­Subjectes in England ([Saint-­Omer], 1607), pp. 384, 393–94. 90  [Persons], A Treatise Tending, p. 376. 91  Thomas Morton, The Encounter Against M. Parsons, 2 parts (London, 1610), II, p. 145. 92  [Persons], A Treatise Tending, pp. 315–16. 93  In John 7:8–11, Jesus tells the Apostles that he will not accompany them to the Sukkot in Jerusalem, and then does so in secret: in this case there is no verbal ambiguity, and so Persons posits reservation. Morton turns to philology to evade this charge, reading ‘not yet’ for ‘not’ at John 7:8; nonetheless, the disciples evidently misunderstood Christ here. 94  Morton, The Encounter, II, pp. 138–139. The justification is reminiscent of certain modern accounts of the Socratic method, for instance by Gregory Vlastos, Socrates, Ironist and Moral Philosopher (Ithaca, NY, 1991), p. 44: ‘Socrates could have deceived without intending to deceive. . . . If you go wrong and he sees you have gone wrong, he may not lift a finger to dispel your error, far less feel the obligation to knock it out of your head.’ For Vlastos, p. 31, Socrates deployed a ‘complex irony’ in which ‘what is said both is and isn’t what is meant: its surface content is meant to be true in one sense, false in another’. For a critique of Vlastos

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making the deception of Christ’s ambiguities unintentional—insofar as the actions of an omniscient agent can ever have unintentional effects—he deprives them of the wit they have in John’s telling, and so fails to understand the way that John, and not just Christ, creates meaning. This may be understood in terms of perspective. For Morton, the only valid perspective on a mental reservation, as on any utterance, is that of the human hearer, which is why he holds it to be indistinguishable from a lie. Persons, by contrast, posits an additional perspective, that of God, who hears our thoughts and can therefore distinguish a reservation from a lie. Occasionally Persons, like Garnet before him, suggests the frame of a man talking to himself without others present, but this is a false step, and as Morton notes, comes suspiciously close to madness: ‘such a one as being beside himselfe can best talke with himselfe’.95 In the case of Christ’s speech-­acts, there is one further perspective, that of the reader, who sometimes, like God, knows (because he is told) Christ’s private intentions, and at other times can apparently infer them from external information. Thus the reservation at Mark 13:32 is adduced because the reader knows, as his hearers did not, that Christ was omniscient. The bearing of Persons’ argument, unlike Morton’s, gives priority throughout to the reader’s quasi-­ divine perspective.96 And in this respect Persons’ manoeuvre, the redescription of deceit as reservation, is formally identical to the literary effect we studied in the previous section, which redescribed deceit as wit. Both turn on the introduction of a ‘third man’, here God or the godly reader, as the true criterion of meaning. It is clear to Persons that, contra Morton, Christ deceived his disciples and other Jews again and again: ‘in matters of religion’, he reasons, ‘it belongeth to the faith of the hearer so to believe, and to seeke out the speakers reservation for his better assurance’.97 It is illicit to lie but must be licit to equivocate, at least in some instances. Persons stipulates disingenuously that the intent in these cases is not to deceive, but rather to protect the truth from those with no right to know it: the speaker merely on this point, see Jill Gordon, ‘Against Vlastos on Complex Irony’, Classical Quarterly, n.s. 46 (1997), 131–37. The proximity of this idea to dramatic irony, which I discuss at length in Chapter Nine below, was noticed by Paula Gottlieb, ‘The Complexity of Socratic Irony: A Note on Profesor Vlastos’, Classical Quarterly, n.s. 42 (1992), 278–79. 95  [Garnet], A Treatise, p. 15; Morton, A Full Satisfaction, III, p. 69; [Persons], A Treatise Tending, p. 319. 96  Victor Houliston, Catholic Resistance in Elizabethan England: Robert Person’s Jesuit Polemic, 1580–1610 (Aldershot, 2007), p. 170; Vince, From ‘Aequivocatio’, p. 127. Compare E. M. Forster’s point in Aspects of the Novel (London, 1927), pp. 78–79 and 88–89, that the reader of a novel has a privileged view of its characters’ inner lives: ‘If God could tell the story of the Universe, the Universe would become fictitious’. 97  [Persons], A Treatise Tending, p. 454.

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allows the hearer to be deceived. He concludes that reservation is a ‘lawfull manner of evasion, by force of wit and reason’.98 The word ‘wit’ seems to strike a melody: it means something like mental agility, but suggests also— a newish sense in 1607—the wit behind a witticism, the comedy of deceit. Morton had already captured something of this in his characterisation of equivocation as a sort of horrifying diabolic wit, not so far from the attitude of Rupert of Deutz to the ambiguities of Satan: ‘you professe an intention to deceive men by true speaking, and so make truth a Seducer’.99 (A year earlier Macbeth, upon report of Malcolm’s advancing army, had decried ‘the equivocation of the fiend / That lies like truth’.) Persons, like Navarrus before him, cleaves to a radically Diodorean view of ambiguity: that there can only ever be a single sense in a speaker’s mind, and that this is the correct sense whether or not the hearer grasps it. An interesting corollary of this position is a hard line on the semantics of puns, which, like all other utterances, can have only one true sense. One example given is that of Cicero and the cook’s son; for Persons, only the unkind sense, ‘I will support your place in the kitchen’, was intended and it was therefore the true meaning.100 The hearer is eliminated from consideration. But this sits awkwardly with Persons’s attempt to classify reservations as equivocations because they are ambiguous ‘in effect’, that is, because ‘they leave a different sense in the hearer, and speaker, albeit of themselves, as I have said, they be playne, cleere, and true’.101 Moreover, both equivocation and reservation are licit only when the hearer—that is, the questioner—is unjust or incompetent. As Persons would later clarify, it is the hearer’s unjustness that rules his understanding of the utterance out of consideration.102 Morton took a different view of Persons’s philosophy: for him it seemed to lead not to Diodorus but to Chrysippus, that is, to the total ambiguity of all words, all language. This is revealed in a confused but telling passage of Morton’s final sally, The Encounter Against M. Parsons (1610), quoted by Vince and worth requoting here: Ibid., pp. 399–403. Morton, A Full Satisfaction, III, p. 58. 100  [Persons], A Treatise Tending, p. 332. Morton also compared verbal equivocation to puns, rather to the discredit of the Catholics: see Morton, A Full Satisfaction, III, pp. 48–49; Morton, The Encounter, II, pp. 127–128. 101  [Persons], A Treatise Tending, p. 447; and see also Vince, From ‘Aequivocatio’, p. 130, n. 84. 102  ‘P. R.’ [Robert Persons], A Quiet and Sober Reckoning with M. Thomas Morton ([Saint-­ Omer], 1609), pp. 102–3, drawing on Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, II.1, q. 18, art. 10: ‘Utrum aliqua circumstantia constituat actum moralem in specie boni vel mali’. See Vince, From ‘Aequivocatio’, p. 144; and Denery, The Devil Wins, p. 140: ‘Whether or not our words cause scandal or stave off evil, whether we are responding to a just or unjust judge . . . are entirely different questions from whether our responses are true or false’. 98  99 

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[S]uppose M. Parsons should have delivered this speech saying, I will as long as I live go unto the Church to pray unto God. Which in the understanding of any man of sence is sensible enough, yet the first particle is I meaning a man, and no woman: the second word will, meaning, with a resolved and not a dissembling will: 3. As long, meaning the length of time, and not the length of body: 4. As I live, meaning, a life animall in this flesh, and not Angelicall out of the body: 5. Go, meaning, by walking, and not by danceing: 6. Unto the Church, meaning of Catholikes, and not of Heretikes: 7. To pray, meaning, mediately by Saints and not immediately by my selfe: 8. unto God, meaning, the God of Christians, and not any God of the Pagans. What can be more plainely spoken then the sentence aforesaid, and yet how many meanings suppressed. . . . 103

Here was a question that would later trouble Empson as he wondered how in practice a reader filters out (‘suppresses’) the ‘irrelevant’ senses of a phrase.104 Morton is trying to show that all language becomes ambiguous when one allows the validity of mental reservation, but what he actually shows is that all language is ambiguous even if one allows only the legitimacy of verbal equivocation: each numbered item is an example of the latter, not of the former. The threat Morton sees in reservation—the destabilising of all meaning and security—is posed already by equivocation. This is a problem for two reasons. First, because he is at pains to redescribe each of Persons’ scriptural instances of reservation as examples of equivocation, albeit ones whose meaning was clear to a reasonable hearer. The second reason is perhaps more surprising: Morton allows the legitimacy of using equivocation in cases like those posited by Persons in favour of mental reservation, though not under oath: ‘We deny not but ambiguous words may sometime be used in common speech’.105 This admission is quiet in Morton’s work, but in conjunction with the Chrysippean excess to which he alludes, it is devastating. The doctrine of mental reservation remained in contention for some time after 1610, though it was more frequently and aggressively debated within the Church of Rome than across its borders. For instance, John Barnes, an English Benedictine living in France, attacked it in 1625, and the Jesuit Théophile Raynaud responded in its defence two years later. After the Restoration, English Catholics would get a boost to their cause with the patriotic story of Richard Penderell deploying reservation to protect the future Charles II from his pursuers at Boscobel, a tale which did at least 103  Morton, The Encounter, II, p. 141; I have slightly regularised the punctuation. My reading differs a little from that of Vince, From ‘Aequivocatio’, p. 149. 104  STA, p. xiii, and compare also pp. 5, 197. 105  Morton, A Full Satisfaction, III, pp. 85–86; compare Mason, The New Art, pp. 7–9.

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one Protestant critic up in knots during the king’s subsequent reign.106 Nonetheless, ‘equivocations, or mental reservations’ were still in 1665 the instincts of the English Rogue.107 The doctrine would be formally condemned by Innocent XI in 1679, as part of a sweeping rejection of probabilist moral theology, and from then on it was discussed with disgust in the Catholic textbooks; one even adduced Rupert of Deutz’s account of Satan to illustrate the diabolical illegitimacy of mental reservation.108 But in the interim it had been taken up by an entirely different tradition, that of natural law, beginning with the Arminian theologian and jurist Hugo Grotius in 1625, and flowering more fully among his eighteenth-­century heirs.109 Grotius’s analysis depended on the principle of a ‘liberty of judgement’, that is, the right of a hearer to assess the speaker’s subject accurately. This was a right infringed by lying, but it was also a right that could be suspended, either expressly, such as when we consent to hear a fiction, or tacitly—when we are a child, when we are insane, when we eavesdrop, when we are at war. In these instances, lying, and therefore equivocation, are licit. The situation of the persecuted Jesuit has been generalised. Equivocation, like all mendacious ambiguity, could be refigured as a witty ambiguity, as in Burton’s comedy or the poem from Wits Recreations. The same was not possible with reservation, although it certainly received its share of mockery, most infamously in Pascal’s ninth Lettre provinciale (1656).110 If equivocation, why not reservation? The answer is important. Reservation cannot look witty because there is nothing to see: it requires no ingenuity, for under its lights any old thing can be said silently to mean something else. The reason we cannot enjoy it as we can a verbal ambiguity is ultimately the same reason Morton and others rejected its legitimacy: it lacks precisely the quality that allowed storytellers, journalists, and exegetes to recuperate deceptive ambiguities as plays of wit. 106  See the attack on equivocation in ΑΥΤΟ-­ΚΑΤΑΚΡΙΤΟΙ, Or The Jesuits Condemned by their Own Witness (London, 1679), pp. 1–5, replying to the use of this story by the Jesuit M[artin] G[rene], An Account of the Jesuites Life and Doctrine ([London], 1661), pp. 100–104. 107  Richard Head, The English Rogue (1665), ed. Michael Shinagel (Boston, 1961), p. 7. 108  Tutino, Shadows of Doubt, pp. 35–36. For the textbook see [Gaspard Juénin], Théologie morale, 6 vols (Paris, 1761), IV, pp. 233–234, relying on Louis Thomassin, Traitez historiques et dogmatiques (Paris, 1691), pp. 204–5. 109  Hugo Grotius, De jure belli ac pacis libri tres, ed. P. C. Molhuysen (Leiden, 1919), pp. 485–86 (III.1.10.2) on equivocation and 491 (III.1.17.3) on mental reservation; Samuel Pufendorf, De jure naturae et gentium (1672), ed. Frank Böhling [= Gesammelte Werke, Band IV], 3 vols (Berlin, 1998), I, pp. 318 (IV.1.13) on equivocation and 318–19 (IV.1.14) on reservation; Christian Wolff, Jus naturae methodo scientifica pertractum, 8 vols (Halle, 1740–49), III, pp. 127–51 (III.2.§§190–221) on equivocation and 158–65 (III.2.§§231–240) on reservation; Freyberg, De sermonis ambiguitate. Peter Ekerman (pr.), De usu et abusu ironiae (Uppsala, 1749), pp. 14–18, redescribes the Grotian defence of equivocation using the language of ‘moral irony’. See Chapter Nine below, pp. 329–30, on Kierkegaard’s allusion to this tradition. 110  Blaise Pascal, Lettres écrites à un provincial, ed. Antoine Adam (Paris, 1981), p. 129.

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The witty and deceitful ambiguities covered in this chapter may be grouped together in the category of the artificial—the clever and disinterested manipulation of words for strategic or aesthetic effect, for amusement or the assertion of power over others: self-­promotion and the display of virtuosity, the giving of pleasure in exchange for social capital, the reinforcement of group boundaries, trickery for personal gain or pure malevolence, and self-­protection. Here the subject is in full command of his words, treating them as toys; his language, for all its multiplicity, has a unity of purpose, and that purpose, when concealed, poses an obvious threat. In Chapter Five we will see how this model underpinned early modern discussions of ambiguity in classical poetry. But first we turn to a rival model, that of inspired ambiguity. The two, essentially unalike, would later intersect in unpredictable ways.

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CHA PT E R FOU R

RIVER AND OCEAN And when you drank from the horn, and it seemed to drain slowly, it was truly a wonder I thought impossible: for the tip of the horn, though you saw it not, lay all the way out in the sea. — Utgarda-­Loki to Thor, Gylfaginning.1

On 23 May 1620, the Leiden professor Antonius Walaeus held a public disputation with his student Rombert Stellingwerf. On these sorts of occasions the professor would draw up a list of theses to be defended viva voce by the student against his classmates’ attacks, and the result was printed afterwards as a cheap pamphlet. It was no site for novelty: the student was expected to mobilise an arsenal of standard arguments to defend each doctrine. The pamphlet of this disputation asks, rhetorically, ‘What true father ever deliberately wrote his will in such a way that his heirs could neither read or understand it, at least in its necessary aspects?’ As we have seen, even the obscurest wills, such as that of Gilbert East in 1828, were not intentionally ambiguous. Walaeus’s subject, however, was not legal but the two biblical Testaments, and his disputation was entitled ‘On the Perspicuity and Interpretation of Holy Scripture’.2 Its central theses, with 1  Snorri Sturluson, Edda: Prologue and Gylfaginning, ed. Anthony Faulkes, 2nd ed. (London, 2005), p. 43: ‘En er þú drakt af horninu ok þótti þér seint liða—en þat veit trúa mín, at þá varð þat undr er ek munda eigi trúa at vera mætti: annarr endir hornsins var út í hafi, en þat sáttu eigi’. 2  Antonius Walaeus (pr.), ‘Disputatio de S. Scripturae perspicuitate’ (as at n.16 below), p. 136: ‘Quis enim verus pater unquam testamentum suum dedita opera ita scripsit, ut ab haeredibus suis, cum opus est, aut legi aut intelligi, saltem in necessariis, non posset?’ Compare the scholarly debate about the sense of diathēkē, ‘testament’, in Heb. 9:16. Ian Maclean has written a paper comparing early modern strategies of dealing with ambiguity in legal and biblical exegesis, ‘The Other Philology: Resolving Doubts about Textual Meaning in Early Modern Law and Theology’, in The Marriage of Philology and Scepticism: Uncertainty and Conjecture in Early Modern Scholarship and Thought, ed. Gian Mario Cao et al. (London, forthcoming). My thanks to him for sharing this essay with me.

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which every Protestant agreed, stated that the Bible’s teachings were clear to all and that its harder passages could be illuminated by perspicuous counterparts. What kind of God, indeed, would give his disciples a holy book too ambiguous for them to understand? The analogy would be elaborated in 1900 by Joseph Evans Sagebeer, a Baptist minister and budding lawyer from Philadelphia, who showed that biblical interpretation, like legal pleading, began by resolving ambiguity and reconstructing an author’s intended meaning. Whereas in court this occurs viva voce between plaintiff and defendant, with the Bible ‘the process of pleading must be carried on in the mind of the reader’, but in each instance the aim is to ensure that—to use the legal expression—‘the issue is joined’.3 Sagebeer, like the entire current of Protestant thought behind him, evinces a casual confidence that this aim can be achieved, although his star witness seems to undermine his own case. That witness is Gen. 4:7, God’s injunction to Cain after withholding favour from his sacrifice: ‘if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him’ (KJV). As Sagebeer observes, several words in this verse possess more than one meaning, and at least five legitimate substitutions may be made in the translation (here added in brackets): The whole passage, therefore, might well be rendered: ‘Although [‫ִאם‬ ym] thou art not doing well, yet a sin-­offering [‫ ַח ָּטאת‬chatat] lies meekly at the door; it is waiting for thee; go and appropriate it for thine own [‫ ְמ ָשל‬meshal].’ The idea being that although Cain was not doing well to be angry, yet God would accept him if he would go and get a sin-­offering, as Abel had done; and that although Cain was not a keeper of sheep, yet there would be no trouble to find one; the fields were full of them; he would find one before his tent, meekly waiting for him as though it wanted to be taken; and that he should master it, throw it down, and tie it.4

If the alternative interpretation suggested by Sagebeer is correct, then the minds of Moses and his English readers have not met: as in the Peerless case, there is no issue joined. How, then, are we to decide which is meant? Sagebeer can offer only traditional methods—attention to idiom, historical circumstance, and so on—but these give us, at best, a probable guess, not a certain solution. Once raised, the ambiguity of the text, with no averment to call in from outside, cannot so easily be silenced. Hebrew has long been considered an especially ambiguous language; even Empson noted that it has ‘very unreliable tenses, extraordinary idi3  Joseph Evans Sagebeer, The Bible in Court: The Method of Legal Inquiry applied to the Study of the Scriptures (Philadelphia, 1900), p. 47. 4  Ibid., pp. 44–45.

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oms, and a strong taste for puns, possess[ing] all the poetical advantages of a thorough primitive disorder’, a statement like so many others in his book with a strong eighteenth-­century flavour.5 It is undeniable that Hebrew contains some peculiar ambiguities, although these tend to be features of its script rather than of the language itself. The most obvious example is its absence of letters for vowels, except aleph (‫)א‬, yod (‫ )י‬and vav (‫)ו‬. In the Bible, the vowel sounds of words are notated as diacritical marks (niqqud) mostly below the consonants, but, as Christian scholars began to argue in the sixteenth century, this notation was not devised and applied until centuries after the composition, canonisation, and translation into Greek and Latin of the books of Scripture.6 The text was originally written without vowel-­points and therefore highly ambiguous, as if an English word had been written as ct and a reader was uncertain if it represented cat, cot, cut, or acute. Another ambiguity of the script lies in its absence of capital letters, which means that it cannot graphically distinguish names from nouns; indeed, many names in the Hebrew Bible are identified as such only by convention. In a line of gorgeous mystery, the Chorus of the Song of Songs asks, ‘What will ye see in the Shulamite? As it were the company of two armies’ (Cant. 6:13, KJV), the final phrase rendering ‫כִ ְמחֹלַ ת ַה ַמ ֲחנָ יִ ם‬, kimecholat ha-­machanayim. But machanayim, ‘armies’ or ‘camps’, is a place name, as at Gen. 32:2: ‘And Jacob went on his way, and the angels of God met him. And when Jacob saw them, he said, This is God’s host: and he called the name of that place Mahanaim.’7 And so the 1885 Revised Version gives Cant. 6:13 as ‘Why will ye look upon the Shulammite, as upon the dance of Mahanaim?’ Finally, there is a type of ambiguity specific to the Masoretic Text of the Bible, namely, the textual variants noted in the margin, where the word in the main text (ketiv) was to be read by the eye, but the variant (qere) was to be spoken aloud. It was not obvious to Christian 5  STA, p. 194. For more on the background of ‘primitive disorder’, see Chapter Ten below, pp. 380–91. Alison Knight, ‘With a Cloven Tongue: Hebrew Double Readings and Donne’s The Lamentations of Jeremy, for the Most Part According to Tremellius’, John Donne Journal 34 (2018), 193–212, explores the interest of John Donne and his predecessors in Hebrew ambiguities. 6  This ambiguity had been acknowledged already by St Jerome, Commentaria in Jeremiam prophetam, at Jer. 9:22, PL 24.745: ‘Verbum Hebraicum, quod tribus litteris scribitur daleth, beth, res [i.e., ‫( ]דבר‬vocales enim in medio non habent), pro consequentia et legentis arbitrio si legatur dabar, sermonem significat; si deber mortem; si daber, loquere.’ In the early modern period, Catholics argued (correctly) that the vowel-­pointing was added in the Middle Ages, while the Protestants mostly maintained that the points were original to the text and therefore reliable. On this, see Christian David Ginsburg, The Massoreth Ha-­Massoreth of Elias Levita (London, 1867), pp. 53–61; Stephen Burnett, From Christian Hebraism to Jewish Studies: Johannes Buxtorf (1564–1629) and Hebrew Learning in the Seventeenth Century (Leiden, 1996), pp. 203–39. 7  On the problems see, e.g., J. Cheryl Exum, Song of Songs: A Commentary (Louisville, KY, 2005), pp. 228–30.

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readers, however, which word was to be meant, and so when they came to interpret and especially to translate, they had to make a decision between alternatives, or else to conclude that each word played a rôle in the economy of Scripture.8 In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, an increasing awareness of these and other ambiguities confronted the Protestant doctrine of scriptural perspicuity. The process and results of this confrontation are integral to the history of early modern biblical exegesis, although neither have received much scholarly attention. As it stands in the traditional picture, that history has only two moments of interest—the Reformation, when Luther and Calvin abolished the superstitious mediaeval taste for allegory and replaced it with a focus on the literal sense of the text;9 and the birth of critical exegesis in the ‘early Enlightenment’, represented by Spinoza, Hobbes, and the Oratorian scholar Richard Simon. This picture is one-­sided at best and frankly erroneous at worst. In recent years it has been moderated and complemented by an attention to the incremental progress of biblical scholarship in dialogue with the study of Greek and Hebrew, patristics and rabbinics.10 This work, while salient and rigorous, has little of value to say about ambiguity, with which philology has always been im8  See, for instance, M. Swenson, ‘Psalm 22:17: Circling around the Problem Again’, Journal of Biblical Literature 123 (2004), 637–48. 9  For a prominent example, see Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 111–15. Harrison’s claim that Luther rejected allegorical senses is easily disproven, even from the contexts of the passages he himself quotes, esp. at p. 114, n. 107. For a salient critique of Harrison, see Jitse van der Meer and Richard Oosterhoff, ‘God, Scripture, and the Rise of Modern Science (1200–1700): Notes in the Margin of Harrison’s Hypothesis’, in Nature and Scripture in the Abrahamic Religions: Up to 1700, eds Van der Meer and Scott Mandelbrote, 2 vols (Leiden, 2008), II, 363–36; and for a better picture of Luther see Scott Hendrix, ‘Luther Against the Background of the History of Biblical Interpretation’, Interpretation: Journal of Bible and Theology 37 (1983), 229–39; and Siegfried Raeder, ‘The Exegetical and Hermeneutical Work of Martin Luther’, HBOT, pp. 363–406. For further correctives on Reformation exegesis, see Richard Muller, ‘Introduction’, in Biblical Interpretation in the Era of the Reformation: Essays Presented to David C. Steinmetz in Honor of his Sixtieth Birthday, eds Muller and John Thompson (Grand Rapids, MI, 1996), pp. 3–22, esp. 8–16. 10  For reasons I address at the end of the present chapter, most of the scholarship in this area has been on Protestant work. For excellent examples, see the chapters by J. C. H. Lebram and H. J. de Jonge in Leiden University in the Seventeenth Century: An Exchange of Learning, eds Th. H. Lunsingh Scheurleer and G. H. M. Posthumus Meyjes (Leiden, 1975), pp. 20–63 and 65–109; and François Laplanche’s epic L’Écriture, le sacré et l’histoire: érudits et politiques protestants devant la Bible en France au XVIIe siècle (Amsterdam and Maarssen, 1986). For greater confessional balance, see the many survey articles in HBOT, and more recently Nicholas Hardy, Criticism and Confession: The Bible in the Seventeenth-­Century Republic of Letters (Oxford, 2017). On patristics see above all Jean-­Louis Quantin, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity (Oxford, 2009).

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patient. In fact, some of the material discussed in this chapter is liable to seem ridiculous to more sober-­minded historians of scholarship, whose chief interest lies in the philological expertise and confessional politics of early modern interpreters. One of my major aims here is to recover both the historical curiosity and the enduring value of Catholic exegesis in the century after Luther, which has rarely played a rôle in the usual narrative beyond that of a vanquished foe. That exegesis, as I hope to show, contains important surprises, the most startling of which is its supposition of multiple literal senses in Scripture. I conclude this chapter with the suggestion that the early modern Catholic vision of the Bible chimes with recent portrayals of rabbinical exegesis. With some regret, I have omitted any significant consideration of the Jewish tradition itself, which is far more comfortable with ambiguity than any Christian school, but which has been well studied by a number of modern scholars.11 The other omission is the history of allegoresis, such as the famous quadriga or ‘fourfold sense’ of Scripture developed in the Middle Ages; this is partly because, again, it has received ample treatment,12 but more pertinently because the non-­literal senses of Scripture depended not on verbal polysemy but on the capacity of things themselves to signify other things. The same was true of typological readings, identifying Old Testament figures as images of figures in the New. Behind both hermeneutic approaches was a picture of world history as a book written by God: just as the poet arranged words and metaphors, so God arranged things and people in a semantic structure.13 The relation of meanings in allegory or typology is therefore wholly unlike that in an ambiguous line. For that reason, we ignore them in this chapter.14

11  Hananel Mack, ‘Torah has Seventy Aspects—The Developments of a Saying’, in Rabbi Mordechai Breuer Festschrift: Collected Papers in Jewish Studies, ed. Moshe Bar-­Asher, 2 vols (Jerusalem, 1992), II, pp. 449–62; idem, ‘The Hammer on the Rock: Polysemy and the School of Rabbi Ishmael’, Jewish Studies Quarterly 10 (2003), 1–17; David Stern, ‘Anthology and Polysemy in Classical Midrash’, in Anthology of Jewish Literature, ed. Stern (Oxford, 2004), pp. 108–39; Steven Fraade, ‘Rabbinic Polysemy and Pluralism Revisited: Between Praxis and Thematization’, AJS Review 31 (2007), 1–40. 12  The foundational work is Henri de Lubac, Exégèse médievale: les quatre sens de l’Écriture, 4 vols (Paris, 1959–64); and see also Jean Pépin, Dante et la tradition de l’allégorie (Paris, 1970). For a more recent treatment, see Christopher Ocker, Biblical Poetics Before Humanism and Reformation (Cambridge, 2002), esp. pp. 1–71. For a remarkable modern defence of the legitimacy of the fourfold sense, see David Steinmetz, ‘The Superiority of Pre-­Critical Exegesis’, Theology Today 37 (1980), 27–38. 13  On this, see Chapter Seven below, p. 287. 14  However, see Anthony Ossa-­Richardson, ‘On Allegory, Ambiguity and Accommodation’, in Allegory Studies: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Vladimir Brljak (forthcoming, 2019).

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River The clarity of a text, said Walaeus, can be considered in two ways: absolutely, in and of itself (in se), or in its relation to its readers. Being the Word of God, the Bible must be perfect in every respect and therefore perspicuous in se; the question of the disputation must rather be its relative perspicuity. Here Walaeus distinguishes (following 1 Cor. 2:14–15) the natural from the spiritual man, the former operating on his own lights, the latter endowed with understanding by divine grace. The natural man can understand the plain sense of Scripture, so long as he studies it carefully, and has some knowledge of languages and other ancillary matters; this is true above all of passages pertaining to moral behaviour and spiritual salvation. However, only the spiritual man, that is, the true Christian, can discern and understand Scripture fully. The reader must be receptive to the Word. If some parts of the Bible are more difficult and ambiguous, as St Peter admitted of Paul’s epistles (2 Pet. 3:16), it is so as to excite diligence and subdue arrogance. But God would not have commanded us to read the Bible if it were not clear in the main, and almost all obscure passages can be explained by comparing them to easier parts. Some will twist the Scripture to suit their own ends, but to no avail, for the text is ‘not something mute or dead, that cannot vindicate its own meaning from the corruptions of men’.15 Everyone has some understanding of the text, for otherwise their faith could rest on human testimony alone. Walaeus’s disputation was intended to form part of a textbook on Reformed theology for the students at Leiden, and so he expressed himself with special clarity.16 Its arguments had been commonplace for a century, deriving on this issue not from Calvin but from Luther. The clarity of Scripture had been a watchword for Luther, but trying to determine just what he meant by it is no trivial matter.17 The word clarity (Klarheit, claritas) itself contains an important ambiguity; if we tend now to think of it as denoting, like perspicuity, the transparency of glass, its earlier sense was rather a brightness and luminosity. Thus in his 1522 German translation of the New Testament, Luther used Klarheit to render the Greek doxa, the 15  Walaeus (pr.), ‘Disputatio’ (see following note), p. 140: ‘scriptura sacra non est res muta, aut mortua, aut quae sententiam suam ab hominum corruptelis vindicare non possit’. 16  This textbook was called the Synopsis purioris theologiae, published as a whole in 1625. See now the edition of Dolf te Velde, with a facing translation by Riemer Faber, 3 vols (Leiden, 2015–); to date only two volumes have appeared, including an excellent introduction. The disputation on perspicuity is at I, pp. 128–49. 17  On the subject see especially Friedrich Beisser, Claritas scripturae bei Martin Luther (Göttingen, 1966). For a modern statement, see, e.g., Robert Preus, The Inspiration of Scripture: A Study of the Theology of the Seventeenth-­Century Lutheran Dogmaticians (London, 1955), pp. 156–69.

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glow of the sun and moon, at 1 Cor. 15:41. The clarity of Scripture meant both. The Holy Spirit, he wrote, ‘is the simplest writer and orator on heaven and earth, and so his words can have only one simple sense, which we call the written or literal sense’.18 But Scripture was not passively simple, for it illuminated the reader with the divine Word; as he asserted, ‘No book written on earth is clearer than the Holy Scripture, which is to all other books as the sun is to all light.’19 One of Luther’s most forceful statements on the clarity of Scripture appears in his 1525 tract De servo arbitrio. This was aimed at Erasmus, who had written that the Bible contained ‘chambers into which God does not want us to penetrate more deeply, and if we seek to penetrate them, the deeper we go the darker it becomes, such that we must acknowledge the fathomless majesty of divine wisdom and the weakness of the human mind’.20 Luther denied this vehemently—the obscurity, he said, was not in Scripture but in us. Certain passages could be obscure because we are unfamiliar with the language, but their sense was evident and stated clearly elsewhere in the Bible.21 ‘Who would say’, he asked, ‘that a public fountain [fons] is not in the light, just because those in the alley cannot see it, when those in the town square can?’22 Again, difficulty in understanding Scripture arises ‘not from its obscurity, but from the blindness and doltishness of those who do not strive to see the clearest truth. . . . With the same blindness a man who covers his eyes or goes from the light into the dark, 18  Martin Luther, ‘Auf das überchristlich, übergeistlich und überkünstlich Buch Bocks Emsers zu Leipzig Antwort’, WA VII, p. 650: ‘Der heylig geyst ist der aller eynfeltigst schreyber und rether, der nun hymell und erden ist, drumb auch seyne wortt nit mehr denn eynen einfeltigsten synn haben kunden, wilchen wir den schrifftlichen odder buchstabischen tzungen synn nennen.’ I owe the citations of Luther here to Edward Plass’s extremely handy compendium, What Luther Says (St Louis, 1959), though the translations are my own. 19  Martin Luther, ‘Der Sechs und dreyssigist Psalm des Kuniglichen Propheten David’, WA VIII, p. 236: ‘Es ist auff erden keyn klerer buch geschrieben denn die heyligen schrifft, die ist gegen alle ander bucher gleych wie die szonne gegen alle liecht.’ 20  Erasmus, De libero arbitrio διατριβή sive Collatio, in his Opera omnia, ed. Jean Le Clerc, 10 vols (Leiden, 1703–6), IX, col. 1216: ‘Sunt enim in divinis Litteris adyta quaedam, in quae Deus noluit nos altius penetrare, et si penetrare conemur, quo fuerimus altius ingressi, hoc magis ac magis caligamus, quo vel sic agnosceremus et divinae sapientiae maiestatem impervestigabilem, et humanae mentis imbecillitatem.’ 21  Luther (like Augustine, on whom see below) focuses on the comparison of passages; see for instance, ‘Deuteronomion Mosi cum annotationibus’, in WA XIV, p. 556: ‘Sic habet universa scriptura, ut collatis undique locis velit seipsam interpretari et se sola magistra intelligi. Estque omnium tutissimus modus scrutandi sensus scripturae, si ex locorum collatione et observatione ad illum contendas.’ On the exchange, see Brian Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (Oxford, 2000), pp. 172–75. 22  Martin Luther, De servo arbitrio, in WA XVIII, p. 606: ‘Quis dicet fontem publicum non esse in luce, quod hi qui in angiporto sunt, illum non vident, cum omnes qui sunt in foro videant.’

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and hides himself away, blames the sun and daylight for being dark.’23 Luther’s attitude towards the Bible thus resembled the Delphic oracle’s defence of its own ambiguity to the petulant Croesus—it’s your own fault. The clarity of Scripture was not simply the transparency of its words to its readers, nor was it something objectively demonstrable to the impartial observer. Rather, it was a theological premise coterminous with the Bible’s divinity and divine authority, intelligible only insofar as the reader was receptive to its message, that is, was already a spiritual man. That reader stood to be ‘transformed’, as Luther put it in a much-­quoted paradox, ‘into [Scripture] and its virtues’.24 Any ‘ambiguity’ could only be the reader’s subjective doubt, and that doubt was either a corollary of his spiritual blindness, or merely an ‘ignorance of words and grammar’, on account of which passages of the Bible could seem obscure.25 Luther did value philological study, and especially the study of languages, which he promoted at Wittenberg even before his break with Rome.26 But this could lead only to ‘external’ clarity, not to the internal clarity of spiritual illumination.27 The latter was an article of faith, the primary purpose of which was to weaken the claims to exegetical authority of the Catholic Church, since it enshrined the hermeneutic priority of Scripture over any form of sanctioned commentary.28 Luther, that is, posited what Justinian had asserted of his refashioned legal code, namely, perfect clarity and self-­sufficiency, each implying the other, although the authority for that meaning came not from imperial fiat, but from Scripture itself. Erasmus was quick to reply; his rejoinder, the Hyperaspistes, appeared in 1526, only a fortnight after he read Luther’s attack.29 It helpfully illus23  Ibid., p. 607: ‘Quod vero multis multa manent abstrusa, non hoc fit scripturae obscuritate, sed illorum caecitate vel socordia, qui non agunt, ut clarissimam veritatem videant. . . . Eadem temeritate, solem obscurumque diem culparet, qui ipse sibi oculos velaret, aut a luce in tenebras iret, et sese absconderet.’ 24  Martin Luther, ‘Dictata super Psalterium’ (1513–16), WA III, p. 397: ‘Scripture virtus est hec, quod non mutatur in eum, qui eam studet, sed transmutat suum amatorem in sese ac suas virtutes.’ This line was quoted influentially in Gerhard Ebeling, Einführung in theologischer Sprachlehrer (Tübingen, 1971), p. 3. 25  Luther, De servo arbitrio, in WA XVIII, p. 606: ‘Hoc sane fateor, esse multa loca in scripturis obscura et abstrusa, non ob maiestatem rerum, sed ob ignorantiam vocabulorum et grammaticae.’ Contrast Erasmus, De libero arbitrio, col. 1217: ‘multa sunt loca in divinis Voluminibus, in quibus cum multi divinarint, nullus tamen ambiguitatem plane resecuit. . . .’ On objective vs subjective ambiguity, see the Introduction above, p. 1. 26  Martin Luther, ‘An die Ratherren aller Städte deutsches Lands, daß sie christliche Schulen aufrichten und halten sollen’ (1524), WA XV, p. 40 (on the importance of languages), and idem, ‘Von den Schlüsseln’ (1530), WA XXX.2, p. 466 (on the recourse to context in interpretation). 27  Luther, De servo arbitrio, in WA XVIII, p. 609. 28  Ibid., p. 655. 29  On this work, see Cornelis Augustijn, ‘Hyperaspistes I: La doctrine d’Erasme et de Luther

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trates how nonsensical, and how fanatical, Luther’s view must have appeared to philologists of the era; here as elsewhere, Erasmus gives us the comforts of common sense. Some parts of the Scripture were clear, he agreed, but others were plainly not, as was evident from the innumerable disputes about its meanings, and not just among the Catholics, but among the Protestants too. In fact, Luther himself had elsewhere admitted its obscurity. It was obscure because God wanted it to be—a point taken from both Augustine and Jerome, as we shall see. Nor did being a spiritual man automatically make Scripture clear, since even the biblical writers found difficulty in it (e.g., 2 Pet. 3:15–16).30 Indeed, Luther’s claim that the Bible was clear only to spiritual men begged the question: ‘If you should say that the Spirit is absent from [those who find the Bible obscure], the argument is circular, since you promised that you would prove to us you have the Spirit. But you will easily slip away if you only want to prove what you assume.’31 Erasmus was trying to make Luther’s position a falsifiable one about the clarity of biblical language, in the normal philological or rhetorical sense of not being ambiguous. But he was wasting his time. The two scholars were responding to different elements in the exegetical work of St Augustine. If the history of Western philosophy has been ‘footnotes to Plato’, in Whitehead’s famous phrase, then the history of Christian hermeneutics may not unjustly be seen as footnotes to Augustine. In 397 he completed the first three books of his treatise on reading Scripture, De doctrina christiana.32 These books combine the devotional and the philological, in that they describe the interpretation of the Bible both as a spiritual exercise (e.g., DDC I.40, II.7) and as the application of procedures to overcome the obscurities and difficulties arising from historical distance. As we saw, Augustine had already written at length about ambiguity in De dialectica, and now, in De doctrina, he applied those categories to Scripture; sur la “Claritas Scripturae” ’, Colloquia Erasmiana Turonensia, 2 vols (Paris, 1972), II, pp. 737–48. 30  I am summarising the main arguments of Erasmus, Hyperaspistes diatribae adversus servum arbitrium Martini Lutheri, in Opera omnia, ed. Jean Le Clerc, 10 vols (Leiden, 1703–1706), X, cols 1299–1310. 31  Ibid., col. 1308: ‘Si dixeris illis defuisse Spiritum, quaestio redit in orbem. Siquidem hoc pollicitus es, te probaturum nobis tuum spiritum. Sed hinc quoque facile elaberis, si modo probaris quod assumis’. 32  On this work broadly, see Darrell Jackson, ‘The Theory of Signs in Augustine’s De doctrina christiana’, in Augustine: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. R. A. Markus (New York, 1972), pp. 90–147; and Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography, 2nd ed. (Berkeley, 2000), pp. 260–66; for a reading of it as an adaptation of ancient rhetoric, see the work of Gerald Press, esp. his ‘Doctrina in Augustine’s De doctrina christiana’, Philosophy and Rhetoric 17 (1984), 98–120. The discussion of ambiguity in De doctrina in John Chamberlin, Medieval Arts Doctrines on Ambiguity and their Place in Langland’s Poetics (Montreal, 2000), pp. 31–39 is, for my tastes, too imprecise to be satisfactory.

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the work contains, in fact, the earliest extant analysis of ambiguity and its resolution in a particular text.33 Ambiguity could be caused by punctuation, as a heretical pointing of John 1:1–2 showed (DDC III.2), or by dubious pronunciation or syllabic length (III.3), or by homonyms, such as those arising from inflection (III.4).34 However, the lion’s share of Augustine’s attention went to the problem of discerning literal from figurative language, a question he influentially referred back to St Paul’s dictum that the letter kills but the spirit gives life (2 Cor. 3:6); this discussion occupies most of III.5–24, despite numerous digressions. These types of ambiguity may be solved by reference to the Hebrew or Greek sources (II.11–12),35 by context (‘praecedentis vel consequentis contextione sermonis’), by a comparison of passages, or by what Augustine calls the ‘rule of faith’36 (III.3), that is, by doctrine—if a construction of an ambiguous verse contravenes the Church, it cannot be correct. But why are there ambiguities in the Bible at all? The traditional answer, given by Jesus himself to explain his use of parables (Mark 4:11–12), and reiterated by St Jerome, was that the difficulties in Scripture were designed to protect its meaning from the ignorant laity.37 Augustine gave a different sort of answer: lest too light winning make the prize light. The ambiguity of the Bible is there to subdue pride and indolence, and to forestall contempt for the straightforward: Those who do not find what they seek go hungry; but those who do not seek at all, because they have what they need at hand, often grow weak from surfeit; in both cases, we must beware of weakness.

On the De dialectica, see Chapter One above, pp. 38–42. The heretical punctuation runs: ‘In principio erat Verbum, et Verbum erat apud Deum, et Deus erat. Verbum hoc erat in principio apud Deum.’ This obscures the identity of Christ (Verbum) and God (Deus). 35  An example of recourse to Greek, much bandied about in the Reformation, can be found in Augustine, De operibus monachorum, 5, noting the ambiguity of gunaika, ‘wife, woman’ at 2 Cor. 9:5. On the more general point, see the recent discussion in Tim Denecker, Ideas on Language in Early Latin Christianity: From Tertullian to Isidore of Seville (Leiden, 2017), pp. 175–178. 36  The Latin regula fidei renders the Greek ἀναλογία τῆς πίστεως (Rom. 12:6). 37  On the passage of Mark, see Frank Kermode’s lecture, ‘Hoti’s Business: Why Are Narratives Obscure?’, in his The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (Cambridge, MA, 1979), pp. 23–47. Jerome, In Naum 3:8–12, in PL 25.1263: ‘dicemus, ideo Scripturam sanctam his difficultatibus esse contextum, et maxime prophetas, qui aenigmatibus pleni sunt, ut difficultatem sensuum, difficultas quoque sermonis involvat: ut non facile pateat sanctum canibus, et margaritae porcis [Matt. 7:6], et profanis sancta sanctorum.’ This view was standard in the Middle Ages: see Ineke van ’t Spijker, ‘The Literal and the Spiritual: Richard of Saint-­Victor and the Multiple Meaning of Scripture’, in The Multiple Meaning of Scripture: The Role of Exegesis in Early-­Christian and Medieval Culture, ed. Van ’t Spijker (Leiden, 2009), pp. 225–47, at 234–35. Compare also the rationale given by Diogenes Laertius, Vitae philosophorum, IX.1.6, for the obscurity of Heraclitus. These themes are further discussed by George L. Kustas, Studies in Byzantine Rhetoric (Thessaloniki, 1973), pp. 63–100. 33  34 

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Therefore the Holy Spirit, with a generous care for our wellbeing, designed the Scriptures to satisfy our hunger with the plainer passages, but to ward off surfeit with the more obscure. For almost nothing is dug up from those obscure parts which is not expressed most clearly elsewhere.38

Here, then, is the seed of scriptural hermeneutics and philology as practised in the West ever since; its precepts would be endlessly recycled, often verbatim, with the same examples, down to the Renaissance.39 Augustine’s injunction to study the sacred languages—rather ironic, given his own ignorance of them40—would be taken up by humanists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. A pioneer on this front was the Florentine diplomat Gianozzo Manetti, who translated the Psalter into Latin in the 1450s, and defended his work in a separate treatise.41 After 1500 there would be many more such projects, as the study of Greek and Hebrew began to flourish across Europe, and soon there were colleges dedicated to the biblical languages: Corpus Christi College, Oxford (founded 1517), Wittenberg at around the same time, under the influence of Luther and his close associate Philipp Melanchthon, who held the chair in Greek, and the ‘Trilingual Colleges’ of Louvain (1518), Alcalá (1528) and the Collège Royal in Paris (1530).42 Lavish, manyhanded polyglot Bibles were published, starting with the Complutensian at Alcalá in 1517. Guides to the two languages were also written to help budding students; Hebrew was a particular desideratum. Among its most dedicated scholars was the Tuscan friar and preacher Santes Pagnini, who translated the entire Bible into Latin for the first time 38  Augustine, De doctrina christiana, ed. William Green [= CSEL LXXX] (Vienna, 1963), p. 37 (II.6.14–15):

Qui enim prorsus non inveniunt quod quaerunt, fame laborant; qui autem non quaerunt, quia in promptu habent, fastidio saepe marcescunt. In utroque autem languor cavendus est. Magnifice igitur et salubriter spiritus sanctus ita scripturas sanctas modificavit, ut locis apertioribus fami occurreret, obscurioribus autem fastidia detergeret. Nihil enim fere de illis obscuritatibus eruitur, quod non planissime dictum alibi repperiatur. On Augustine’s broader thoughts about the divine function of human perplexity, see Stéphan Geonget, La notion de perplexité à la Renaissance (Geneva, 2006), pp. 165–68. 39  For instance Hrabanus Maurus, De institutione clericorum (orig. 819), ed. and tr. Detlev Zimpel, 2 vols (Turnhout, 2006), II, pp. 464–469 (III.3–11) and 484–516 (III.8–15); and Santes Pagnini, Isagoge ad sacras literas (Lyon, 1536), pp. 29–30. 40  Brown, Augustine, pp. 24 on Greek and 254 on Hebrew. 41  Gianozzo Manetti, Apologeticus, ed. Myron McShane, tr. Mark Young as A Translator’s Defence (Cambridge, MA, 2016). On Manetti see Paul Botley, Latin Translation in the Renaissance: The Theory and Practice of Leonardo Bruni, Giannozo Manetti and Desiderius Erasmus (Cambridge, 2004), 99–114. 42  P. S. Allen, ‘The Trilingual Colleges of the Early Sixteenth Century’, in his Erasmus, Lectures and Wayfaring Sketches (Oxford, 1934), pp. 138–63.

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since Jerome—the work was printed in 1528, after a labour of twenty-­five years—and soon afterwards published the Thesaurus linguae sanctae (1529), a translation of a Hebrew dictionary by the mediaeval rabbi David Kimchi. All this helped later Protestants and Catholics to argue about ambiguity in the language of Scripture. An even more important biblical translation was the Latin New Testament accompanying a fresh edition of the Greek published in 1516 by Erasmus, who also began a series of paraphrases of the books of the New Testament the next year; both labours assume an original single meaning which has been obscured by poor translation and the passage of time.43 Erasmus expressed this with a very influential metaphor: in his prefatory letter to Pope Leo X, he wrote that ‘salutary teaching is sought more purely and vividly from the very veins, drunk from the very springs, than from puddles or rivulets’.44 As a river emerges from its spring, it divides and accumulates sediment, that is, it becomes both multiple and heterogeneous; to return to its sources, ad fontes, is thus to cast aside plurality and obscurity for unity and limpidity, the broad for the narrow. The idea is a version of the claim discussed earlier that languages were originally clear and unambiguous, a mirror of things, but became corrupt over time, only here the process applied to the text of the Bible. On this account, ambiguities, while real, were historically contingent, theologically peripheral, and, crucially, curable by philology, as Augustine had assumed; indeed, the very discipline of philology, as practised in early modernity and ever since, is rooted in the idea of a single correct reading and a single correct meaning, even if we doubt what that meaning is. Hence Erasmus’s approach to ambiguity in his New Testament annotations: When the variety of manuscripts or diverse punctuation or the very ambiguity of the language gives rise to various senses, we have explained them in such a way as to show which one we prefer, leaving the rest to the reader’s judgement.45

43  There is a great deal of scholarship on Erasmus and the Bible, but see especially the brilliant discussion in Botley, Latin Translation, pp. 115–63, including 144–51 on scriptural ambiguity. 44  Erasmus to Leo X, 1 February 1516 (Ep. 384), in his Opus epistolarum, ed. P. S. Allen, 12 vols (Oxford, 1906–1958), II, p. 185: ‘viderem salutarem illam doctrinam longe purius ac vividius ex ipsis peti venis, ex ipsis hauriri fontibus, quam ex lacunis aut rivulis’. Compare the image of ‘In Annotationes Novi Testamenti praefatio’ (1515), in EOO VI.5, p. 60: ‘iis qui malunt divinas literas e purissimis fontibus quam ex qualibuscumque rivulis ac lacunis haurire, toties aliunde alio transfusis, ne dicam ungulis suum et asinorum perturbatis’. See also Adagia, V.2.9, ‘Omissis fontibus consectari rivulos’, adapting Cicero, De oratore, II.27.117. 45  Erasmus, ‘In Annotationes Novi Testamenti praefatio’ (1515), in EOO VI.5, p. 56: ‘sicubi varietas exemplariorum aut diversa distinctio aut ipsa sermonis ambiguitas varios gignit sensus, sic eos aperuimus, ut ostenderemus quid nobis magis probaretur, caeterum lectori iudicium deferentes’.

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The Roman polymath Lorenzo Valla had used the image of the textual fons before Erasmus, and Robert Wakefield used it again in his 1524 inaugural oration at Cambridge in praise of Hebrew studies.46 We see it in graphic form on the title page (figure 4.1) of a 1650 Hebrew Psalter edited by the Leiden theologian Antonius Hulsius, showing the Hebrew text as the wellspring of the Greek and Latin. Likewise, Catholic theologians at the Council of Trent recommended, on the authority of Augustine and others, that the Latin Vulgate be emended by recourse to the Hebrew and Greek fontes.47 The image could also be turned polemically against Catholics who adhered slavishly to the Vulgate, as we see in a 1627 textbook on scriptural hermeneutics by André Rivet, a Huguenot professor of theology at Leiden, and a friend of both Hulsius and Walaeus. Defending the recourse of Reformed scholars to original sources against the strictures of the Catholics, Rivet thundered: What the Philistines once did to Abraham and Isaac in Gerar—blocking up their wells of living water, lest they draw and drink the water they needed—the Papists of today attempt in a much more serious way, for they want nothing so much as to block up the sources of our Holy Books, doing whatever they can to render them suspect.48

It has been noted that Luther’s spiritual vision of clarity gave way among later Protestant exegetes to a more philological picture like that of Erasmus, although the period in which this transition occurred has remained vague; one historian, for instance, ascribes the shift to the eighteenth century, the ‘era of critical studies’, with a precursor in Spinoza.49 Certainly, Walaeus in 1620, though a Calvinist, still had a strong Lutheran line on this matter. 46  Lorenzo Valla, Collatio Novi Testamenti, ed. Alessandro Perosa (Florence, 1970), p. 6: ‘si intra quadringentos omnino annos ita turbidi a fonte fluebant rivi, verisimile est post mille annos . . . hunc rivum nunquam repurgatum sordes aliqua in parte ac limum contraxisse’. See also a 1442 letter of Leonardo Bruni, quoted in Botley, Latin Translation, p. 103, and Robert Wakefield, On the Three Languages (1524), ed. and tr. G. Lloyd Jones (Binghamton, NY, 1989), p. 173. On the subject see Jerry Bentley, Humanists and Holy Writ: New Testament Scholarship in the Renaissance (Princeton, NJ, 1983), pp. 35, 134; and Arjo Vanderjagt, ‘Ad fontes! The Early Humanist Concern for the Hebraica veritas’, HBOT, pp. 154–89. 47  See, for instance, Jean Conseil, ‘De Vulgatae editionis emendatione’ (dated after 8 April 1546), in Concilium Tridentinum diariorum actorum epistularum tractatuum nova collectio, ed. Societas Goerresiana, 13 vols (Fribourg, 1901–2001), XII, p. 537. 48  André Rivet, Isagoge seu introductio generalis ad Scripturam Sacram Veteris et Novi Testamenti (Leiden, 1627), p. 102: ‘quod olim Philistaei Abrahamo et Isaaco in Gerar fecerunt, dum puteos aquae vivae occluserunt ipsis, ne possent bibere et suis aquam necessariam praebere, idem hoc tempore, in graviori causa facere conantur Pontificii, nihil enim magis in votis habent, quam ut fontes Sacrorum librorum nobis occludant, id satagentes quantum possunt, ut eos suspectos reddant.’ The reference is to Gen. 26:15–22. Compare the discussion in Noel Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford, 2002), pp. 414–422. 49  James Patrick Callahan, ‘Claritas Scripturae: The Role of Perspicuity in Protestant

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Figure 4.1. Title page of Sefer Tehilim, Hoc est, Liber psalmorum hebraice, ed. Antonius Hulsius (Leiden, 1650).

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But already by the 1550s, Lutheran theologians had become dissatisfied with their master’s view. Whereas he had stressed prayer and piety and the transformative power of Scripture, and mentioned verbal and contextual analysis in passing, they began to relegate the piety and emphasise instead types of ambiguity and the philological methods by which it might be overcome. The transition is nicely illustrated by Andreas Hyperius’s De recte formando theologiae studio (1556), the long second book of which constitutes the earliest Protestant treatise on biblical exegesis.50 Hyperius begins (II.2, pp. 82–8) by insisting on prayer and religious devotion, since, as Luther had said, the clarity of Scripture depends on the moral probity of the reader. But the remainder of the book concerns obscurity and how to overcome it. The obscurity of the Bible, writes Hyperius (II.3, pp. 88– 92), following Augustine’s lead, is caused both by our ignorance and by the text itself, which might have textual errors, mispunctuations, verbal ambiguities, tropes and unfamiliar idioms, and so on. These are solved by the usual means, with many examples given of each: by recourse ad fontes, by distinction of clauses with correct punctuation, by looking to context (orationis series), by a comparison of passages, and by better lexicography of Hebrew and Greek, distinguishing the senses of ambiguous words and recognising idioms (II.5–10, pp. 93–133).51 By the end of all this, even the most pious Lutheran reader will have forgotten that Scripture is intrinsically clear. Hyperius’s discussion of biblical exegesis was part of a broader project, realised both within De recte formando theologiae studio and in a range of other works by Protestants throughout Europe, of establishing academic manuals and textbooks in the service of religious reform.52 The students and scholars who consumed this literature needed practical advice and well-­organised precepts, on exegesis as on all other theological matters, and this is just what they received from the analyses of scriptural language that came after Hyperius, starting with the famous Clavis Scripturae Sacrae (1567) of Matthias Flacius Illyricus, which identified the density and comHermeneutics’, Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 39 (1996), 353–372, at pp. 364–65. 50  Andreas Hyperius, De recte formando theologiae studio, libri iiii (Basel, 1556). On Hyperius’s biblical exegesis, see Helmut Zedelmaier, ‘Lesetechniken: Die Praktiken der Lektüre in der Neuzeit’, in Die Praktiken der Gelehrsamkeit in der frühen Neuzeit, eds Zedelmaier and Martin Mulsow (Tübingen, 2001), pp. 11–30. 51  Interestingly, Hyperius’s examples of ambiguity are still the key cases picked out by Jean Le Clerc in his sophisticated, Lockean treatise on biblical criticism, the Ars Critica, 3rd ed., 2 vols (1697: Amsterdam, 1730); compare Hyperius, De recte, p. 101 on foedus and p. 103 on words for spirit or wind, to Le Clerc, Ars, I, pp. 181–84 and 185–92 respectively, where the words are treated with much greater critical acuity. 52  See the convenient summary in Zachary Purvis, Theology and the University in Nineteenth-­ Century Germany (Oxford, 2016), pp. 25–30.

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plexity of biblical prose with the grand style of hellenistic rhetoric, setting the tone for an entire field of sacred rhetoric in the seventeenth century.53 Similar analyses would be performed a generation later by Wolfgang Franz at Wittenberg (1619), and by Johann Gerhard (1610) and his student Salomo Glassius (1623) at Jena.54 To these we may add volumes by the Huguenots Daniel Chamier (1626) and the aforementioned Rivet. To be sure, these authors doggedly insisted that Scripture was clear, and that it illuminated the reader who approached it with prayer and piety; but their main job was to outline and solve its verbal difficulties.55 In Glassius’s Philologia sacra, perhaps the most thorough of these works, the shift away from Luther’s perspective seems still stronger. He begins with a quotation from Ovid, ‘Waters are drunk more purely from the very source’, explaining that the source of the Bible was the Hebrew and Greek texts, while the Latin translations were merely rivers and canals that could never equal the sweetness and purity of the original. The Catholics, with their reliance on the Vulgate, were responsible for misconstruing and corrupting the Word of God.56 A little later, Glassius comes to the question of scriptural clarity, and it is immediately evident that he is working with a reduced concept of clarity appropriate to critical philology; as he puts it, ‘the clarity of Scripture depends on the clarity of the words, that is, of the text’.57 As for Hyperius and all the others, words that are ambiguous on their own become perfectly clear in context, and passages that are difficult at first glance may be clarified by an inspection of the sources with a knowledge of idioms, circumstances, parallel passages, and so on—that is, by application of philological method. Any obscurity, then, must exist not 53  On this point, see Debora Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance (Princeton, 1988), pp. 73–76. For Flacius’s reliance on the hermeneutics of Hyperius, see Olivier Fatio, ‘Hyperius plagié par Flacius: La destinée d’une méthode exégétique’, Histoire de l’exégèse au XVIe siècle, eds Fatio and Pierre Fraenkel (Geneva, 1978), 362–81, and Brent Oftestad, ‘Further Development of Reformation Hermeneutics’, in HBOT, pp. 602–616. 54  This literature has been studied very little, but for a short overview see Bengt Hagglund, ‘Vorkantianische Hermeneutik’, Kerygma und Dogma: Zeitschrift für theologische Forschung und kirkliche Lehre 52 (2006), 165–81. On Glassius, see the essays collected in Hebraistik–Hermeneutik–Homiletik: die Philologia Sacra im frühneuzeitlichen Bibelstudium, eds Christoph Bultmann and Lutz Danneberg (Berlin, 2011). 55  For the retained Lutheran elements of intrinsic clarity and readerly piety, see, for instance, Johann Gerhard, Tractatus de legitima Scripturae Sacrae interpretatione (1610: Jena, 1663), pp. 21–23 (summarised on p. 28), 53; and Wolfgang Franz, Tractatus theologicus perspicuus de interpretatione Sacrarum Scripturarum maxime legitima (1619: Wittenberg, 1692), pp. 2–3, 11. 56  Salomo Glassius, Philologia sacra (Jena, 1623), p. 1 (I.1.pr), quoting Ovid, Epistulae ex ponto, III.5.18. 57  Ibid., p. 239 (I.3.1.2): ‘Scripturae enim claritas ex claritate verborum sive literaturae . . . dependet.’

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in the Bible as the work of God but rather in us as readers, insofar as we are spiritually blind and too lazy to study.58 The obscurity of the reader identified by Luther appears less a theological concept than simply a lack of scholarship. The shift in Protestant hermeneutics away from ‘luminous’ clarity towards ‘transparent’ clarity, that is, towards perspicuity as an objective property of the text alone, had nothing to do with anything that might be called ‘Enlightenment’, or any precursor to it, but was a straightforward response to the pedagogical demands of the Reformation. However, as Glassius himself stressed, the new literature was given further impetus by a sequence of Catholic assaults on the Protestant doctrine of clarity over the course of the sixteenth century, culminating in the work of two Jesuits, Robert Bellarmine and James Gordon Huntley. The doctrine as Luther had expressed it hardly admitted critique—it was circular, a point of faith—and so the Catholics instead attacked the more falsifiable claim that the words of the text were clear in the sense of being easily understood. If Luther’s position was essentially Diodorean, that Scripture was clear because its author was clear and his intention single, then the Catholic position was Chrysippean, that Scripture was ambiguous because we have no way of deciding independently what its words mean.59 To argue this, all Catholics had to do was point to the sorts of problems identified by Hyperius and his successors, but adopt a more pessimistic attitude to solving them. To this end they arrived at two different and indeed contradictory strategies, to which we now turn. Muddy Sources The first strategy was to argue that the fontes were themselves corrupt. This may be divided into two distinct claims which often appear together in Catholic polemics. The first is that the Hebrew and Greek texts had been altered by Jews and heretics, by both natural scribal error and a deliberate plan to undermine Christian doctrine, and that therefore the Latin Vulgate translation, inspired by the Holy Spirit and preserved by the continuous institution of the Roman church, was a more reliable witness to the ancient Word of God. As the Dominican scholar Melchior Cano put it, responding implicitly to Erasmus in his De locis theologicis—the first great summa of the 58  Ibid. p. 238 (I.3.1.1): ‘Voces et orationes, si quae videntur ambiguae atque obscurae, tales sunt . . . respectu hominum, qui sensum Scripturae et loquelam Dei non semper assequuntur, quod tamen non culpa ipsius Scripturae sit, sed culpa hominis natura coeci, studio pigri, hoc est, qui nec illuminationem Spiritus sancti debito modo petit, nec Scripturas debito studio legit ac meditatur’. 59  On this distinction, see Chapter One above, pp. 51–53.

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Tridentine era, published posthumously in 1562—‘The better advice is to drink clear water from purified pools than dirty water from a muddied source’.60 His reading of the wells of Gerar was very different to Rivet’s later effort, with the ad fontes humanists now in the rôle of the Philistines: [Isaac] then dug another well, about which there was no strife, and so he called it ‘Latitude’.61 In just the same way the Roman and Latin Church has dug wells of living water, albeit in a region separate from that of the Jews and the Greeks. But they strive to block up and obstruct our wells, and, still worse, they rail against us, saying ‘The water is ours. The source is ours. Whoever is not Hebrew and Greek ought not to dig in another ground.’62

The Latin path to God’s Word was, on this analogy, just as valid as the Hebrew and Greek, or rather more so, a purer wellspring. Glassius was flabbergasted: the Catholics, he railed, ‘accuse the source itself of flowing impurely, of bubbling up in a spoiled and muddy fashion’—but perversely, because it was their own rivulets that were corrupt, not the source.63 However, the Catholic suspicion of the Bible prompted a second, much deeper claim about its very status as a written document. The Reformers’ insistence on its perspicuity was swiftly and forcefully rebutted at every opportunity, as Catholic scholars pounced on its obscurity in both style and content. This line of attack appeared already in the oral disputations with Luther, but developed more systematically in the print polemics. The first monument, a decade before Trent, was a 634-­page tome entitled De ecclesiasticis scripturis et dogmatibus (1533) by Johannes Driedo, a senior professor of theology at Louvain and a supporter of its Collegium Trilingue. Much of this volume reiterates Augustine’s analysis of ambiguity, now framed as a rejection of Lutheranism and as a defence of Catholic tradition: 60  Melchior Cano, De locis theologicis (1562: Louvain, 1564), p. 120: ‘Saniorisque consilii est, limpidam aquam e lacunulis defaecatis, quam ex turbato fonte liquorem obscoenum bibere.’ At pp. 111–12 Cano argues that the Jews corrupted the text of the Hebrew Bible, relying on Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica, IV.18. 61  The Vulgate Latin ‘Latitudo’ renders the Hebrew ‫רחֹובֹות‬‎ְ , given as Rehoboth in the KJV at Gen. 26:22. The Hebrew means ‘broad places’, and the Latin retains the punning sense of ‘space for disagreement’. 62  Cano, De locis, p. 120: ‘Profectus inde fodit alium puteum: pro quo non contenderunt: itaque vocavit nomen eius Latitudo. Fodit in hunc omnino modum ecclesia Romana atque Latina puteos aquarum viventium: hoc est, sacrarum literarum: invenit autem aquam sapientiae salutaris: venas vitae (inquam) invenit: sed in aliena veluti regione Iudaeorum et Graecorum. At, illi, puteos oblimare, obstruereque nituntur. Quinetiam iurgantur contra nos, et inquiunt, Nostra est aqua: fons noster est. Qui Hebraicus Graecusque non fuerit, in alieno solo fodere non debet.’ 63  Glassius, Philologia sacra, p. 2 (I.1.pr): ‘ipsum fontem Hebraei in V. Graecique in N. T. Codicis, ut impure fluentem, ut insincere et turbide scaturientem accusant.’

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The Lutheran dogma teaches that the Holy Scripture is very true and very straightforward in itself, and its own interpreter, and therefore that the Scripture is to be learned by itself, without any need for the interpretations, glosses or commentaries of teachers or masters. But this error is manifestly confuted by the prophetic and apostolic Scriptures, which at first glance show the thickest darkness, wrapped in tropes, parables and figures, and with mystical meanings hidden tacitly under the bark of the literal story. . . . 64

Testimony after testimony to the Bible’s difficulty follows, including testimony from the Bible itself. As per Augustine, its obscurity and ambiguity was intended by the Holy Spirit to overcome our pride and keep out the heathens. In the darkling plain of skirmishes between Protestants and Catholics over the next few decades, these would be recurring points of conflict, with little advance on the earliest arguments from either side. The basic hermeneutic condition for Catholic exegetes, as we have seen for Erasmus, was a multiplicity of results: if the Bible was so clear, why were there so many differing interpretations of it?65 This condition was the starting-­point for Martín Pérez de Ayala, newly installed as the bishop of Guadix, Granada, in his 1549 De divinis apostolicis atque ecclesiasticis traditionibus, printed in both Paris and Cologne.66 There is nothing, Pérez notes, so clear in the Bible that it has not been twisted to mean a variety of things by heretics (25r). Obscure passages can sometimes be explained by clearer ones, but often there is no other passage, or the one adduced is as obscure as the one it seeks to clarify (26r). The problem was especially severe in the books of the Old Testament: ‘how many parables in them! how many enigmas! how many ambiguities!’ (16r) The Hebrew language was stuffed with ambiguity as it had so few words for things, an extreme example of the ‘poverty of language’ we saw postulated in Chapter One. Pérez quotes a line of Jerome that would become widespread in the literature: ‘you will see how great a forest of ambiguous words and nouns there is among the 64  Johannes Driedo, De ecclesiasticis scripturis et dogmatibus (Louvain, 1533) p. 129: ‘De scriptura sacra Lutheranum dogma praedicat ipsam per se esse verissimam, facillimam, sui ipsius interpretem. Et idcirco eandem scripturam addiscendam esse per seipsam, et non esse opus ullis doctorum aut magistrorum interpretationibus, glossis, aut commentariis. Sed huic errori manifestissime per se ipsas obviant scripturae propheticae et Apostolicae, quae in ipsa sui prima ostensione densissimam secum afferunt caliginem, involutae tropis, parabolis et figuris, mysticis sensibus sub cortice literalis historiae tacite insinuatis. . . .’ 65  For an example of this attack, see Johannes Eck, Enchiridion locorum communium adversus Lutherum et alios hostes ecclesiae, ed. P. Fraenkel (Münster, 1979), pp. 81–82, quoted and discussed by Susan Schreiner, Are You Alone Wise? The Search for Certainty in the Early Modern Era (Oxford, 2011), pp. 199–200. 66  Martin Pérez de Ayala, De divinis apostolicis atque ecclesiasticis traditionibus (Cologne, 1549), fol. 21r: ‘abunde nobis ex adversariorum confusis et inter se pugnantibus doctrinis, propter diversas de quibusdam scripturae locis sententias, exempla suppetant’.

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Hebrews’.67 Given this, how could any reader of the Old Testament trust himself to choose the right meaning of a given word, especially if the context permits both senses? (16v) The various strands of this argument—the intrinsic obscurity of the Bible, the corruption of the original texts, and the ambiguity of Hebrew as a language—would be repeated in various combinations ad nauseam over the following decades. All of it was to defend the necessity of a Catholic tradition with which to interpret the Scriptures, one not dependent on Hebrew, or even on writing at all. The fierce Dominican controversialist Pedro de Soto, who disputed in Germany, served briefly in Oxford under Mary I, and spent his final years at Trent, was especially clear on this point. In his 1555 Assertio Catholicae fidei, written as a rejoinder to the 1551 Württemberg Confession of the reformer Johann Brenz, he insisted that the divine commands inscribed in the hearts of the faithful were more solid than those words written ‘on vellum or tablets’.68 If the legal proverb had it that scripta manent, verba volant, Soto and his Catholic colleagues indicated the reverse: scripta volant, verba manent. Brenz mocked him in response, comparing the assertion to a nuns’ riddle in which one sister asked, ‘On what is the Christian religion established?’ and the other replied, ‘Torn rags’, alluding to the rags of papyrus cloth from which early manuscripts were made.69 Brenz also accused an unnamed associate of Soto of holding that the Scripture without the authority of the Church was worth as much as Aesop’s fables.70 Soto doubled down in return, phrasing it more politely as ‘without the authority of the Church, the Holy Scripture has no authority’—after all, the Church began before the Gospels were written, and was itself responsible for their codification.71 The line about Aesop became infamous, and many subsequent Protestants, among them Isaac Casaubon, used it as a stick to beat their confessional enemies.72 Brenz, at his end, 67  St Jerome, Apologia adversus libro Rufini, I.20, in PL 23:414: ‘videres quanta silva sit apud Hebraeos ambiguorum nominum atque verborum’. Quoted in Pérez, De divinis apostolicis, fol. 17r. On Jerome on Hebrew ambiguity, see Michael Graves, Jerome’s Hebrew Philology: A Study Based on His Commentary on Jeremiah (Leiden, 2007), pp. 37–41. 68  Pedro de Soto, Assertio Catholicae fidei (Cologne, 1555), sig. p2va: ‘solidius et firmius teneri [possunt] quae cordibus mandantur fidelium quam quae membranis aut tabulis’, citing 2 Tim. 2:2 (‘haec commenda’) and Ez. 11:19. It was an extremely sophisticated version of this thought that prompted the Oratorian scholar Richard Simon’s devastating Histoire critique du Vieux Testament (1685), which exploited scholarly doubts about the authenticity and integrity of the Old Testament to prove the necessity of relying on Church tradition. 69  Johann Brenz, In apologiam confessionis prolegomena (Frankfurt, 1556), p. 90. 70  Ibid., p. 88. 71  Pedro de Soto, Defensio Catholicae confessionis et scholiorum circa confessionem (Antwerp, 1557), fol. 173r: ‘sine auctoritate Ecclesiae Scriptura sacra auctoritatem non habet, hoc certissime fatemur’. 72  Pierre Bayle, Dictionaire historique et critique, 2nd ed., 4 vols (Rotterdam, 1702), II, s.v. ‘Hosius’, p. 1597, surveys the episode with his usual wry detachment.

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maintained that the doctrinal core of the Bible, the passages that were essential to good faith, such as the Lord’s Prayer or the Ten Commandments, were entirely straightforward; it took little effort from the Polish cardinal Stanislaus Hosius, who had stepped in to castigate Brenz, to point out all the disputes that had arisen over these passages, and even over so clear a phrase as ‘This is my body’ (Luke 22:19), which in subsequent literature would become the trophy example of a clear but disputed line.73 As lawyers then as now knew all too well, nothing is so unambiguous that it cannot give rise to controversy.74 All this was completely standard, therefore, by the 1570s, when the great Jesuit cardinal Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621) drew up his lectures on doctrinal controversy, which would provide, in printed form, the architecture of confessional dispute well into the seventeenth century.75 To his enemies he seemed to stand for the whole daunting edifice of Catholicism, and they anxiously played on his name, especially in Britain, where Bellarmine fought in print with James I himself from 1606. One called him bella, arma, minae—‘wars, arms and threats’—the very spirit of conflict; another made an anagram of his name as errorum tabens bullis, ‘rotting away in bubbles [or papal bulls] of errors’.76 He took up the question of biblical perspicuity in the first part of his lectures, printed as De verbo Dei in 1587, and rehearsed the usual arguments for obscurity, including a list of textual features that made the Bible hard to read: its apparent contradictions, its verbal ambiguities (his example was John 8:25, a traditional crux),77 sentences lacking a verb, apparent absurdities, Hebraisms, and figurative lan73  Brenz, In apologiam, pp. 127–128; Stanislaus Hosius, Confutatio prolegomenon Brentii, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1560), fols 131v–133v, 136v–137r (on ‘Hoc est corpus meum’). Compare Soto, Defensio, fols 170v–171v. For a later Lutheran view of the alleged ambiguity of this line, see Gottfried Lange (pr.), Disputatio de aequivoce dictis (Leipzig, 1697), sig. A3r–v. 74  On which see Chapter Two above, pp. 75–76. 75  Stefania Tutino, Law and Conscience: Catholicism in Early Modern England, 1570–1625 (Aldershot, 2007), pp. 139–193; Bernard Bourdin, The Theological-­Political Origins of the Modern State: The Controversy Between James I of England and Cardinal Bellarmine, tr. Susan Pickford (Washington, DC, 2010). For a bibliography of the lectures and responses to them, see Bibliothèque de la Compagnie de Jésus, eds Aloys de Backer et al., 2nd ed., 11 vols (Brussels and Paris, 1890–1932), I, cols 1156–80. 76  The first seems to have been a classroom jest before it became common in print; see, for instance, the Latin broadside Christiano propria salus fide credenda est (Cambridge, c. 1600), which relies on the reader already knowing the joke. See also the witty riposte in Jacob Gretser, Controversiarum Roberti Bellarmini defensio, 2 vols (Ingolstadt, 1607), I, sig. d2v. The anagram is in John Gordon, Antitortobellarminus, sive Refutatio calumniarum, mendaciorum et imposturarum Laico-­Cardinalis Bellarmini (London, 1610), sig. A3r. 77  The chief difficulty in this line is the peculiar accusative τήν ἁρχήν (‘the beginning’); see, for instance, Bruce Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 3rd ed. (London, 1971), pp. 223–24; Chrys Caragounis, ‘What Did Jesus Mean by τήν ἁρχήν in John 8:25?’, Novum Testamentum 49 (2007), 129–47.

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guage.78 He was pessimistic about the feasibility of comparing passages as a solution to ambiguity: Augustine had remarked in a letter that his ignorance of the Bible was greater than his knowledge of it, and Bellarmine commented further that even apparently clear passages could seem obscure to others.79 One moment in Bellarmine’s analysis is particularly revealing about the afterlife of Luther’s principle of claritas. Brenz had adduced Ps. 119:105, ‘Thy Word is a lamp unto my feet’, as a prooftext of scriptural perspicuity—if the Word was a lamp, it could not be obscure.80 Bellarmine responded that the phrase meant not that the Scriptures ‘are easily understood, but that when they are understood they light up the mind’.81 This, however, is what Luther had meant all along: the Word was clear insofar as it shone forth into the soul, transforming the reader as he grasped its message. Catholics and Protestants could agree on this point, even as the conversation about clarity had been diverted to philology. The argument about the Hebrew language would be developed most fully by Bellarmine’s almost exact contemporary, the Scottish Jesuit James Gordon Huntley (1541–1620), who taught Scripture and Hebrew at Pont-­ à-­Mousson, Lorraine, and personally debated theology with James VI in 1588.82 Stationed in Paris at the end of his life, he wrote two textbooks on controversy (1612, 1618), patterned after Bellarmine and so beginning with a book De verbo Dei, divided into the ‘written’ and ‘unwritten’ Word. This expresses the typical Catholic views of the Bible noted above: that it is obscure without the apparatus of the Church to explain it, and that the original texts have been corrupted through malice and carelessness.83 However, the seventh chapter of the book, entitled ‘The Hebrew text is highly ambiguous’, goes further than its predecessors; the Hebrew tongue, it argues, was divinely designed to prove by its very nature that the written 78  Robert Bellarmine, Disputationes de controversiis christianae fidei, 3 vols (Ingolstadt, 1587), I (De verbo Dei scripto et non scripto), pp. 202–203 (III.1). 79  Ibid., pp. 207–8 (III.2), referring to Augustine, ‘Epistola 56 to Januarius’ §21, in PL 33:222: ‘etiam in ipsis sanctis Scripturis multo nesciam plura quam sciam’. 80  De Soto, Assertio Catholicae, fol. v5v; Brenz, In apologiam, p. 130. 81  Bellarmine, Disputationes, I, p. 205: ‘dici potest. . . . Scripturas dici lucidas, immo lucem et lucernam, non quod facile intelligantur, sed quod intellecta cum fuerit, mentem illustrat.’ Compare, on the same passage, Hosius, Confutatio, fol. 135r: ‘Hic quoque sanctus David non de perplexis tractat quaestionibus, quales de scripturibus existunt non paucae, sed de praeceptis recte vivendi, quae praelucent et indicant, quid expetere, quid fugere debeamus.’ The last phrase alludes to Augustine, De doctrina, p. 37 (II.7.16): ‘Ante omnia igitur opus est dei timore converti ad cognoscendam eius voluntatem, quid nobis adpetendum fugiendumque praecipiat.’ 82  G. H. Tavard, The Seventeenth-­Century Tradition: A Study in Recusant Thought (Leiden, 1978), pp. 15–18. 83  James Gordon Huntley, Controversiarum epitomes, 2 vols (Poitiers, 1612–18), I, pp. 19–46 on the corruption of the text and pp. 101–3 on obscurity.

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word was not sufficient to establish certainty in faith; ‘for the language is so ambiguous that there are almost no sentences in it which cannot be given different, even contrary senses, unless it is accompanied by the tradition and teaching of the living voice, which shows the true and certain sense.’84 Gordon then lists eight causes of this ambiguity, gleaned from his study of Pagnini’s works on Hebrew: (1) the polysemy of almost all individual words, roots, phrases, and even letters; for instance, ‫( ו‬vav) could mean ‘and’, ‘because’, ‘or’, ‘nor’, ‘above’, ‘to’, ‘in’, ‘with’, ‘if’, ‘before’, ‘after’, ‘now’, ‘when’, ‘thus’, ‘but’, ‘although’, ‘so that’, etc.; (2) words that could mean opposite things in different conjugations; (3) words that could mean opposite things even in the same forms; (4) one and the same word-­form deriving from different roots, that is, true homonymy; (5) the graphic similarity of letters and of vowel points and other niqqud; (6) the apparently arbitrary permutation of different letters and vowel-­points in the same word; (7) the subaudition and omission of letters and words; and (8) the redundancy of letters and phrases. Gordon concludes that, due to these causes, even the clearest passage of the Old Testament can be twisted into different and potentially impious senses. To illustrate the general point he offers eight heretical ‘perversions’ of Gen. 1:1, ‘In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.’ Since ‫ֹלהים‬ ִ ‫א‬, ֱ elohim, can refer to (1) the pagan gods, as well as to (2) angels and (3) great men, the line could state that any of those created heaven and earth; since ‫ב ָרא‬, ָ bara, can mean not only ‘created’ but also (4) ‘destroyed’, (5) ‘chose’, (6) ‘divined’, and (7) ‘renewed’, the line could state that God did one of those things in the beginning; and (8) the third-­person preterite of the first conjugation can take a passive sense, and the particle ‫את‬, ֵ et, sometimes means ‘from’, so the line could mean ‘In the beginning God was created from the heavens and the earth’.85 With this experiment, Gordon went right to the heart of the hermeneutic challenge posed by verbal ambiguity; his game of substitutions resembled Sagebeer’s in 1900, only with the opposite, sceptical conclusion—in the absence of tradition there was no way to determine the correct reading from the text itself. Naturally, Protestant scholars were not about to take this lying down, and several responded in print, including sections in Franz’s Tractatus de interpretatione and Glassius’s Philologia sacra.86 It was also the sole object of critique in at least three disputations of the 1630s, two from Wittenberg and one from Helmstedt, and although these were derivative of Franz and Glassius, it will be worth discussing one of them to show how the attack 84  Gordon Huntley, Controversiarum epitomes, I, p. 15: ‘adeo enim est ambigua lingua ista, ut nulla sit fere sententia, quae non possit in diversos, imo etiam contrarios sensus verti, nisi adsit Traditio et doctrina vivae vocis, quae ostendat verum et certum sensum.’ 85  Ibid., pp. 17–19. 86  Franz, Tractatus theologicus, pp. 35–43; Glassius, Philologia sacra, pp. 241–49 (I.3.1.3).

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on Gordon, and the defence of scriptural clarity, could be mobilised at the entry level of academic theology. The Helmstedt disputation was held in 1632 by the theology professor Conrad Horn (or Horneius) with his student Johannes Homborg, later a professor of natural philosophy at the same university.87 To Horn, Gordon’s arguments reduced the Bible to the ambiguity of the Devil’s oracles,88 and Hebrew to the worst of all languages, when in fact it was the oldest and best; more fatally, the oral tradition which supposedly maintained the meaning of the Old Testament was originally Jewish and spoken in Hebrew, so if Gordon was right then the tradition itself would be just as corrupt as the text. And what good is a text that needs the living voice to interpret it? God does not act in vain. Hebrew cannot be as ambiguous as suggested, because it was widely spoken and used for business for thousands of years.89 Each specific argument about Hebrew is rebutted: Gordon has exaggerated the ambiguity of the words and letters he mentions, and, in any case, similar claims can be made about Latin—Horn cites a (= ab) as an equivalent to Gordon’s vav—and indeed any other language. Above all, Horn brings out the Chrysippean consequence of Gordon’s attitude to ambiguity: If this argument is permitted, then no utterance is certain and perspicuous, but all are entirely ambiguous and uncertain: for there are none from which you cannot carve out amazing chimaeras if you only grab its words by the scruff of their neck.90

Indeed, Horn turns Gen. 1:1 back against Gordon, demonstrating all the ways the Latin version can be heretically interpreted, starting with that Deus that, sure enough, denotes both the pagan gods and great men in classical poetry, and even in the Vulgate. With this he crisply exposes the core problem, a problem implicit in the entire century of debate since 87  Jacob Weller (pr.), Disputatio philologica de linguae hebraicae ambiguitate contra Huntlaeum (Wittenberg, 1631); Johannes Reineccius (pr.), Quod recte vertat: examen philologicum quaestionis de linguae hebreae ambiguitate Jacobo Gordono Huntlaeo . . . oppositum (Wittenberg, 1635); Conrad Horn (pr.), De sacris et divinis scripturis octava, qua de perspicuitate et obscuritate earum agitur (Helmstedt, 1632), repr. in Horn’s treatise De sacris et divinis scripturis tractatus theologicus (Helmstedt, 1632)—I quote from this last edition below. 88  On these, see Chapter Three above, p. 107. 89  Horn, De sacris, sigs B1v–3r. 90  Ibid., sig. C4v, ‘Atqui si ita argumentari licet, nullus sermo certus ac perspicuus est, sed omnis omnino ambiguus prorsus et incertus: nullus enim est, quin si obtorto quasi collo verba quo velis rapias, miras ex eo Chimaeras exsculpere possis.’ On the metaphor of exsculpere see Augustine below, p. 157, and compare STA, p. 84, arguing that to emend Shakespeare without a grasp of his thought ‘is merely to hack out of the quarry a small poem of one’s own’. For the phrase obtorto collo, see Erasmus, Adagia, IV.9.50. Horn expresses the same sentiment again a few pages later, sig. F2v: ‘si autem nihil perspicue dictum est, nisi quod a nemine perverse accipi et pravo sensu exponi potest, nihil in universum perspicue et plane dici poterit.’ Compare Weller, Disputatio, sig. A2v: ‘nullam linguam authenticam esse posse’.

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Luther: namely, what did it mean to call the Bible ambiguous? After all, everything admits of more than one interpretation—everything has several possible meanings, and the question is not only which interpretation of a text is correct, but even whether an interpretation counts as a valid possibility, that is, contributes to the text’s ambiguity. The Catholic insistence on institution solved this question by fiat, but Horn’s response showed the incapacity of that solution to cover the deeper problem of language. His own solution was little better, falling back on old Lutheran fudges. The first was the claim, here borrowed from Martin Chemnitz, that God had given only some men the capacity to interpret Scripture, and the second was the hoary notion of intrinsic clarity: ‘it can easily happen that once men have fallen into error, they wrongly interpret and explain those things [such as ‘This is my body’] that are clear enough in themselves’.91 Both ideas were useless: the first because it vitiated the critique of the Catholics’ vaunted monopoly on interpretation, and the second because it was unable to meet Catholic objections. Both offered only new fiats. The only real solution, in fact, and the one ultimately relied upon by Franz and Glassius, was to explain how we manage to understand sentences when each part is ambiguous in isolation, and the answer to this was no less applicable to Vergil than to Scripture—it was a general hermeneutics, one that turned on how context dissipates or even eliminates ambiguity, even if it did not analyse in detail how that happened. But such a recourse to context, as we have seen already, and will continue to see throughout this book, cannot do the doctrinal work Protestants demanded: it cannot solve all ambiguities, in Scripture or anywhere else. Gordon’s examples, like Shlomith Rimmon’s three centuries later, were easy to knock down by context, but others were not. Catholic and Protestant arguments over scriptural ambiguity were thus better at exposing the weakness of their opponents than at putting forward a secure explanation. The concept of intrinsic perspicuity, while attractive as a corollary of the Bible’s divine status, was untenable, as the Catholics understood; but their alternative, the hierarchical imposition of meaning, was arbitrary and obviated the very text they sought to save, as the Protestants saw. Both sides chased a phantom: an Archimedean point from which to eliminate ambiguity and therefore discord—bella, arma, and minae. Their aim was ultimately pragmatic, the gaining of advantage in war; it was a horizon that discouraged scepticism about the underlying issues. Nonetheless, we can glimpse those issues in the mêlée. Take, for instance, the 91  Ibid., sig. E3r, quoting Martin Chemnitz, Examen decretorum Concilii Tridentini (Frankfurt am Main, 1566), p. 282 (IV.2.2): ‘Deus voluit in Ecclesia donum extare interpretatione. . . .’; and sig. F2v: ‘facile enim fieri potest, ut homines semel in errorem prolapsi ea etiam mali accipiant et explicent, quae per se satis clara sunt’.

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Catholic objection to the principle of comparing passages, which merely emphasised its practical difficulty. No scholar of the era, to my knowledge, noted the more fundamental problem with the principle, namely, that to select a ‘clear’ passage to explain a given ‘obscure’ passage, one must have already decided what the latter means; the observation of a similarity between two verses—a similarity by which to construe the meaning of one of them—is already an act of interpretation. Moreover, as Schleiermacher would argue in the 1820s: ‘Every passage is an imbrication of common things and particulars, and so cannot be rightly explained by the common alone.’ An obscure verse cannot have the same meaning as a clear one, because its obscurity is part of the meaning, part of the writer’s individuality, which cannot be abstracted away.92 So much for confessional arguments over scriptural obscurity and ambiguity; the two sides at least shared one common assumption, namely that every verse of the Bible had one true literal meaning, even if they could not agree on what it was or how to determine it. Some Catholics, however, were tempted by the more outlandish possibility that the literal sense was not always single—that in some instances, no choice need be made. This gave rise to the second strategy in their campaign against Protestant hermeneutics. It promised high collateral rewards, but at a cost; common sense had to be thrown overboard. Ocean To any early modern student of the Bible, the expression ad fontes would have immediately evoked not humanist scholarship but Psalm 41, which in most sixteenth-­century editions of the Vulgate began, after its first-­line title, ‘Quemadmodum desiderat cervus ad fontes aquarum: ita desiderat anima mea ad te Deus. Sitivit in te anima mea ad Deum fontem vivum’. We may translate this as: ‘Just as the hart longs for the source of the waters, so my soul longs for you, God. In you my soul thirsted for God, the living spring.’93 The second line extends and enriches the first with an elegant metaphorical economy. But the reader who goes to the fontes of this latter line is in for a surprise: there is no fons. In both the Hebrew and the pre-­Christian Greek translation named the Septuagint, instead of 92  SHK, p. 81: ‘Jede Stelle ist ein Ineinander von Gemeinsamem und Besonderem und kann also nicht aus dem Gemeinsam allein richtig erklärt werden.’ 93  The only English version that matches the older Latin is that attributed to Wycliffe, in The Holy Bible, Containing The Old and New Testaments, tr. John Wycliffe, eds Josiah Forshall and Frederic Madden, 4 vols (Oxford, 1850), II, p. 778b: ‘As an hert desirith to the wellis of watris; so thou, God, my soule desirith to thee. Mi soule thirstide to God, that is a quik [i.e., living] welle.’

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‘God the living spring’ is ‘the mighty living God’: ‫אֹלהים לְ ֵאל ָחי‬ ִ ֵ‫ל‬, l’elohim, l’el chay, and τὸν θεὸν τὸν ἰσχυρὸν τὸν ζῶντα. Why the discrepancy? It is plausible that the Vulgate had originally read, Deum fortem vivum, ‘the mighty living God’, but, somewhere along the way, scribes accidentally changed the fortem into a fontem under the influence of the previous line. To any philologist following Augustine’s advice in De doctrina christiana, emendation was the obvious response, and this did indeed begin to occur in editions of the Vulgate in the sixteenth century, first as a variant reading given in the margin, and then as a full substitution.94 In 1590 the official, papally-­sanctioned but editorially embarrassing Sixtine Vulgate continued to read fontem, but its celebrated revision of 1592, the Sixto-­Clementine, read fortem, alongside many other emendations advocated by Robert Bellarmine. Not all Catholics accepted the change. In an effort to vindicate the Vulgate, the Franciscan Richard du Mans (Cenomanus) ingeniously posited in 1541 that ‫אל‬, ֵ el, ‘mighty’, was a corruption of ‫אד‬, ֵ ed, which the Vulgate rendered fons at Gen. 2:6.95 This, it must be stressed, was a philological solution, even if an unusual one to our eyes. Utterly different was the response of the Castilian Jesuit José de Acosta. Acosta is renowned today for his account of the New World, where he spent several decades among the Incas and Aztecs. In 1587 he returned to Rome, where he sought to publish a number of religious treatises he had written in America, the first among which was De Christo revelato, dedicated in 1588 to Cardinal Antonio Caraffa, and printed at Rome in 1590. This work, whose primary aim was to explain the ways in which Christ was revealed in the Bible, also contained much general reflection on the principles of sacred hermeneutics, and it was here that Acosta came to Psalm 41. He acknowledged the scribal mutation in the third verse, with a caveat: But the Church continues to read ‘fontem vivum’, delighting in the contemplation of Him in whom is the spring of life. This sense too is to be received as divinely provided and intended. . . . For the Holy Spirit would not have allowed the Church to approve a text or interpretation which contained any pernicious error; rather, by its great Providence, the more the divine letters are drawn forth, the more they overflow, like everlasting waters. And so whether the

94  The ‘Vatable Bible’, Biblia, with Vulgate and Zurich translations, comm. François Vatable, 5 vols (Paris, 1545), II, fol. 33r (= sig. eee1r); and Biblia ad vetustissima exemplaria nunc recens castigata, ed. Johannes Hentenius (Louvain, 1547), fol. 214v, note fortem as a variant. A rare early text to give fortem as the sole reading was the Complutensian Polyglot, ed. Diego Lopez de Zúñiga, 6 vols (Alcalá, 1514–1517), III, Psalms, sig. c4r. 95  Richard Cenomanus, Petri Lombardi sententiarum magistri in totum psalterium commentarii (Paris, 1541), fol. 92r–v. A better translation of ‫ ֵאד‬is ‘mist’ or ‘vapour’.

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sense is mystical, or literal, or accommodated, if it is true and pious and consistent with the words in question, it should be accepted with piety.96

To impose philological criteria on scriptural meaning was to deny its infinite richness, blossoming gradually in history—fontem and fortem are here not competing conjectures, but both correct because both true, and both true because the Bible and the church are themselves living springs, ever in a state of renewal. This view of meaning is thus the polar opposite of that insisted upon by humanists and Protestants. Acosta relies like Augustine on intention, but also on Providence, which threatens to collapse the distance between divine author and holy reader (or copyist), for the ingenuity of the latter will always be already legitimated by the foresight of the former. My learned colleagues smile when I recount the argument; to our ears it is absurd. But the Jesuit’s conclusion is a logical deduction from accepted premises: the multiplicity of scriptural readings, and the continued operation of Providence. Like other examples discussed here, his interpretation shows what can be derived from the system. Behind Acosta’s argument is a belief that biblical verses, in addition to having a range of spiritual senses, can have multiple literal meanings; indeed, it appears in a chapter entitled ‘There is no problem if a single verse should have plural literal senses’. Despite being common among Catholic scholars of the sixteenth century, this belief has gone unnoticed by historians of biblical criticism, even if its mediaeval antecedents have received a little attention, for instance in Henri de Lubac’s great four-­volume study of the fourfold sense.97 Where, then, did this bizarre doctrine originate? As Arthur Lovejoy demonstrated of Plato’s cosmology, a pair of opposing traditions, the company of two armies, could derive from a single individual’s thought.98 It should not unduly surprise us, then, that the alternative to Augustine’s philological approach to Scripture was first offered by Augustine: he contained multitudes.99 De doctrina christiana III.27 treats José de Acosta, De Christo revelato libri ix (Rome, 1590), p. 124:

96 

At Ecclesia pergit legere fontem vivum, delectata contemplatione illius, apud quem est fons vitae. Recipiendus est iste quoque sensus tanquam divinitus provisus atque intentus. . . . Neque enim aut interpretationem, aut scriptionem quicquam erroris perniciosi habentem Ecclesia probare a Spiritu Sancto sineretur. Sed magna illius providentia effectum est, ut divinae literae tamquam perennes aquae, quo magis tractantur, magis etiam redundent. Sive igitur mysticus, sive literalis, sive accommodatus sensus sit, si verus sit, et pius, et a proposita litera non abhorreat, cum pietate suscipiendus est. Lubac, Exégèse médievale, IV, pp. 276–85. Arthur Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, MA, 1936), pp. 24–55, with a succinct statement at p. 45. 99  On this, see most recently Jed Wyrick, The Ascension of Authorship: Attribution and 97  98 

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the possibility of philological aporia, that is, the impossibility of determining authorial intention by the usual means: When in the same words of Scripture not one, but two or more senses are perceived, even if the author’s intention is hidden, there is no danger so long as it can be shown from other passages of the Holy Scriptures that those senses align with truth. This must be the aim of the reader who searches the divine discourses for the meaning of the author through whom the Holy Spirit bestowed that Scripture, whether the reader arrives at this meaning, or carves out [exsculpat] from those words another, not opposed to right faith and witnessed elsewhere in the Bible. . . .

An important detail has long been obscured to English readers by J. F. Shaw’s 1873 translation, which misreads exsculpat as exculpat (a later mediaeval word) and so offers, ‘he is free from blame’.100 But the metaphor of a sculptor carving out his statue must be restored, because it emphasises the reader’s active engagement as he creates meaning from the raw material of Scripture, and hence gives a picture of the hermeneutic process opposite to the patient empirical approach assumed elsewhere in the book. Indeed, we have already seen Conrad Horn using the metaphor to scorn Catholic overreading. In what follows, Augustine explains his reasoning with a play on words: . . . For perhaps the author, too, saw [vidit] that meaning in the words we want to understand, and certainly the Spirit of God who bestowed them through him foresaw [praevidit] that it would occur to the reader or hearer, indeed, provided [providit] that it should do so, because it too is supported by the truth. For how could God have provided more generously and fully in the divine discourses than by allowing the same words to be understood in multiple ways, which other, no less divine passages render acceptable?101

Canon Formation in Jewish, Hellenistic, and Christian Traditions (Cambridge, MA, 2004), pp. 370–380. 100  Augustine, The Works: A New Translation, ed. Marcus Dods, 15 vols (Edinburgh, 1871– 76), IX, p. 103. However, the translation in Augustine, De doctrina christiana, ed. and tr. R. P. H. Green (Oxford, 1995), p. 169, is correct, and has begun to be quoted in recent scholarship. It should be added that exculpat is a variant reading in some manuscripts, and is found in some mediaeval works that repeat Augustine verbatim, e.g., Maurus, De institutione (as in n. 39 above), p. 514. But the grammar does not make sense with this word here. 101  Augustine, De doctrina, ed. William Green, p. 102 (III.27.84–85): Quando autem ex eisdem Scripturae verbis non unum aliquid, sed duo vel plura sentiuntur, etiam si latet quid senserit ille qui scripsit, nihil periculi est, si quodlibet eorum congruere veritati ex aliis locis sanctarum Scripturarum doceri potest; id tamen eo conante qui divina scrutatur eloquia, ut ad voluntatem perveniatur auctoris per quem Scripturam illam Sanctus operatus est Spiritus; sive hoc

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The clauses are long and unwieldy, concatenating Spirit, human author, and reader across time in a single Providential design; the paradox is now that the holy reader, even if he has carved out his own sense from the stone of Scripture, has done so with divine permission and under divine guidance. Far from labouring to decipher an ancient, obscure book, the reader is in dialogue with God. These thoughts are fleshed out further in a section of extraordinary depth towards the end (XII.23–31) of the Confessions, composed around the same time as De doctrina. Augustine here faces the variety of interpretations of Gen. 1:1, and the impossibility of knowing which of them was intended by Moses; his first response is humility with regard to his own reading, and charitableness towards those of others, for whether a given reading was that meant by Moses matters less than whether it contains the truth. Charity is what brings fellow interpreters together in the love of God: ‘let me be conjoined with them, O Lord, in you, and in you be delighted with those who graze on your truth in the latitude of charity, and let us approach as one the words of your book, and seek in them your meaning’.102 In a reverie he imagines himself as Moses, entrusted ad culmen autoritatis, to the highest authority, that is, with the expression of the divine Word, and furnished for the task with seven-­league boots of rhetoric. The fantasy serves, like the Providential argument in De doctrina, to bring together the perspectives of reader and writer, by thinking through the initial verbal conditions needed to produce the requisite salvific outcome. The Bible must, he concludes, speak to many kinds of readers: those with childish beliefs, who might be put off by an elevated theological register, but who can grasp the image of God’s voice and command, and those who have pondered Creation and hope to find their own idea of it in the short text.103 In its compression and superabundance it thus resembles a small, assequatur, sive aliam sententiam de illis verbis quae fidei rectae non refragatur exsculpat, testimonium habens a quocumque alio loco divinorum eloquiorum. Ille quippe auctor in eisdem verbis quae intellegere volumus, et ipsam sententiam forsitan vidit et certe Dei Spiritus, qui per eum haec operatus est, etiam ipsam occursuram lectori vel auditori sine dubitatione praevidit, immo ut occurreret, quia et ipsa est veritate subnixa, providit. Nam quid in divinis eloquiis largius et uberius potuit divinitus provideri, quam ut eadem verba pluribus intellegantur modis, quos alia non minus divina contestantia faciant approbari? 102  Augustine, Confessions, ed. James J. O’Donnell (Oxford, 1992), p. 177 (XII.23): ‘coniungar autem illis, domine, in te et delecter cum eis in te qui veritate tua pascuntur in latitudine caritatis, et accedamus simul ad verba libri tui, et quaeramus in eis voluntatem tuam’. 103  Compare Dio Chrysostom, Orationes, ed. Guy de Budé, 2 vols (Leipzig, 1916–19), II, p. 317 (XVIII [68].8), praising Homer for ‘παντὶ παιδὶ καὶ ἀνδρὶ καὶ γέροντι τοσοῦτον ἀφ’ αὑτοῦ διδοὺς ὅσον ἕκαστος δύναται λαβεῖν’ (‘giving to every boy, every young and old man, as much of himself as each can take’).

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rich spring from which flow a multitude of truths expressed by others at more length. In the law, as we have seen, brevity would be praised as simpler and therefore less ambiguous than prolixity; here, by contrast, brevity is lauded as pregnant, able to encompass a spectrum of truths as well as temporary accommodations, white lies on the path to truth. As Augustine summarises: Hence, when one says ‘[Moses] meant what I think’, and another, ‘No, rather what I do’, I consider myself more devout when I say: ‘Why not rather both, if both are true? And if someone should see a third truth, or a fourth, or something entirely different in these words, why not believe that Moses saw all those things? After all, through him the one God tempered the Scripture to the senses of many, who perceive in it true and different things.104

Ambiguity is here embodied not in the equivocator, like those pleasurable witticisms we explored in Chapter Three, but in the inspired prophet— not dispassionate and playful but earnest, intense, and lifted up to a condition of saying more than he knows. The ambiguity of his language, unlike that of wit and deceit, is thus not fully conscious, but the product of contrasts, inseparable from the prophet’s divided status between humanity and divinity. More important, interpretation is here not the passive reception of a fixed message, as for Aristotle, but a transaction between reader and writer, guided by Christian charity. To posit multiple meanings in Scripture is to reframe hermeneutics as a process of establishing consensus through multiple shared truths, rather than discord through contrasting explanations; the process is not just semiotic, garnering meanings, but also epistemic, gleaning knowledge, and ethical, encountering others.105 The implications of such a vision, turning the water of uncertainty into the wine of community, weak readers into strong readers, are as radical as anything found in the patristic corpus. This view of meaning is not historicist, like that found elsewhere in De doctrina, but transcendental: in Augustine’s metaphor the Word of God is a timeless, unquenchable spring (fons), consisting of only a few words 104  Augustine, Confessions, p. 182 (XII.30): ‘omnes quos in eis verbis vera cernere ac dicere fateor, diligamus nos invicem pariterque diligamus te, deum nostrum, fontem veritatis, si non vana sed ipsam sitimus’; Ibid., p. 182 (XII.31): ‘Ita cum alius dixerit, “hoc sensit quod ego”, et alius, “immo illud quod ego”, religiosius me arbitror dicere, “cur non utrumque potius, si utrumque verum est, et si quid tertium et si quid quartum et si quid omnino aliud verum quispiam in his verbis videt, cur non illa omnia vidisse credatur, per quem deus unus sacras litteras vera et diversa visuris multorum sensibus temperavit?” ’ Compare also De civitate Dei, XI.19. 105  Pamela Bright, ‘Augustine and the Ethics of Reading the Bible’, in The Reception and Interpretation of the Bible in Late Antiquity, eds Lorenzo DiTomasso and Lucian Turcescu (Leiden, 2008), pp. 55–64.

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(sermonis modulo), but always fuller than the streams that flow out of it.106 Or it is a depthless well, as the Cistercian abbot Isaac of Stella saw it in the mid-­twelfth century.107 Or, still vaster, an ocean, which, as Thor was forced to admit in the castle of Utgard, is inexhaustible—Wisdom has poured out rivers, and behold, her brook became a great river, and her river came near to a sea—All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full. ‘The Holy Scripture’, expatiated St Bonaventure in 1268, ‘may be compared to the waters of the sea on account of its multiplicity of senses. In the sea are many springs; likewise there is in Scripture a plurality of meaning in every passage.’108 These metaphors permeated one another, signifying different visions to scholars from a great variety of confessions. We find another version of the theme in Francis Bacon’s Advancement of Learning, insisting that the Bible speaks not only to its own context and era, but to all times and people: it offers, he says, ‘not onely totally, or collectively, but distributively in clauses and wordes, infinite springs and streames of doctrines, to water everie part of the Church and soules of the faithful’.109 But the richness of Augustine’s vision had to be reduced to usable quanta, as we see in the brief, clear, systematic conclusions of scholasticism, above all in the Summa theologiae of Thomas Aquinas, commonly portrayed by early modern Catholics as Augustine’s supreme interpreter. The splendid frontispiece (figure 4.2) of a 1698 edition of Thomas’s works shows the four Doctors of the Church—Augustine, Gregory, Jerome, and Ambrose—reflecting the effulgence of divinity into Thomas’s heart. ‘The mountains glittered and the sun shone’, reads the caption, abbreviating an image from 1 Maccabees of Lysias’s army in the bright dawn: ‘as the sun shone on gold and bronze shields, the mountains with them glittered, glittered like fiery torches’.110 The Doctors here are the bucklers of the Church Augustine, Confessions, p. 179 (XII.27). Isaac of Stella, Sermones, ed. Anselm Hoste et al., 3 vols (Paris, 1967–87), I, pp. 292–4, alluding to an exegesis of Cant. 4:20 attributed to Gregory the Great (in fact by Robert of Tombelaine), Expositio super Cantica canticorum, PL 79:515. On this see Alexander Fidora, “ . . . Mysteria magna delectant. . . .”: Die Exegese des Zisterzienserabtes Isaak von Stella († ca. 1178)’, in The Multiple Meaning, ed. Van ’t Spijker, pp. 273–90. 108  St Bonaventure, Collationes de septem donis Spiritus Sancti, Collatio IV, in Opera, 10 vols (Quaracchi, 1882–1902), V, 476b: ‘Secundo comparatur sacra Scriptura aquae maris propter multiformitatem sensuum. In mari sunt diversae scaturitiones; ita in sacra Scriptura in una littera est multiplex sententia.’ Many used similar images, for instance St Jerome, Commentaria in Ezechielem, at PL 25:448, referring to the description of the temple at Ez. 45 as an ‘Oceanum et mysteriorum Dei, ut sic loquar, labyrinthum’. Muslims could make use of the same metaphor to describe the inexhaustible richness of the Qur’an; see, for instance, the quotation of Ibn al-­Jazari in Thomas Bauer, Die Kultur der Ambiguität: Eine andere Geschichte des Islams (Berlin, 2011), p. 116. 109  Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, ed. Michael Kiernan, in OFB IV, p. 189. 110  Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, comm. Cajetan and Seraphinus Cappo a Porrecta, 5 vols (Padua, 1698), I, frontispiece: ‘resplenduerunt montes | et refulsit sol’, condensing 1 106  107 

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Figure 4.2. Frontispiece from Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, ed. Seraphinus Cappo a Porrecta, 5 vols (Padua, 1698), I.

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Militant, and Thomas the mountain charged with their glow. It is a suitable image, for on hermeneutics, as on other subjects, Thomas reflects Augustine’s intensity with the cool clarity of morning. Early in the Summa he offers a statement about biblical meaning that is at once in debt to the Father’s arguments and a simplification of them: ‘Since the literal sense is that which the author intends, and the author of the Holy Scripture is God, who comprehends in his intellect all things at the same time, it is not unfitting, as Augustine says in Book 12 of the Confessions, if there are many senses in one passage of Scripture according to the literal sense as well.’111 Unlike the spiritual (allegorical) senses, which come about because things can signify other things by resemblance, the plurality of the literal sense is generated by the capacity of words to signify more than one thing.112 The statement in the Summa covers only the intentions of the divine author of Scripture, not the human, but in a passage from Thomas’s Quaestiones de potentia Dei, written around the time he began the Summa, and likewise drawing on Augustine, he writes that human foreknowledge of multiplicity is ‘not inconceivable’.113 In his terminology Thomas deviated from Augustine, who did not use the phrase ‘literal sense’ in this context, and who in De doctrina used it to mean not the intended sense but rather the non-­figurative sense. For Thomas, by contrast, it was paramount to define the literal sense as that intended by the author, because this sense formed the basis of all theological argument.114 Given this shift, Augustine’s claim could be rephrased as Macc. 6:39, ‘ut refulsit sol in clypeos aureos et aereos resplenduerunt montes ab eis resplenduerunt sicut lampades ignis’. 111  Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, I, q. 1, art. 10, in the Leonine Opera omnia (Rome, 1882–), IV, p. 25b: ‘Quia vero sensus litteralis est, quem auctor intendit: auctor autem sacrae Scripturae Deus est, qui omnia simul suo intellectu comprehendit: non est inconveniens, ut dicit Augustinus XII Confessionum, si etiam secundum litteralem sensum in una littera Scripturae plures sint sensus.’ On Thomas’s support for the doctrine, see Mark Johnson, ‘Another Look at the Plurality of the Literal Sense’, Medieval Philosophy and Theology 2 (1992), 117–41, with a full list of passages in his works. For a sceptical older view, see Paul Synave, ‘La doctrine de Saint Thomas d’Aquin sur le sens littéral des Ecritures’, Révue Biblique 35 (1926), 40–65. 112  This is clearly stated by Seraphinus Cappo in his commentary at Thomas, Summa theologica (1698), I, p. 17a: ‘Multiplicitas—Causata ex eo, quod una vox aequaliter significat multa: non ex eo, quod res per voces significatae significant alias res.’ 113  Thomas Aquinas, Quaestiones de potentia Dei (1265–1266), in Quaestiones disputatae, ed. P. Bazzi et al., 2 vols (Turin, 1965), II, p. 105a (IV.1): ‘non est incredible, Moysi et aliis sacrae Scripturae auctoribus hoc divinitus esse concessum ut diversa vera, quae homines possent intelligere, ipsi cognoscerent, et ea sub una serie litterae designarent, ut sic quilibet eorum sit sensus auctoris.’ 114  Gregory the Great, Epistolae, 5.53a (= PL 75:509–16). In a famous passage, Hugh of St Victor, Didascalicon de studio legendi (1128), ed. and tr. Carmen Muñoz Gamero and Maria Luisa Arribas Hernáez (Madrid, 2011), p. 280 (VI.3), defines the literal sense as the founda-

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an assertion that one verse of Scripture had multiple literal senses, all intended by the divinity and probably also the human author. This formula underpinned all subsequent investigations. The achievement of Thomas on this front thus bears a remarkable likeness to that of the American New Critics in the 1940s: whereas Augustine and Empson wrestled with a fundamental doubt about textual meaning, their inheritors forgot the doubt and left only comforting plenty. The converso archbishop Paul of Burgos (1351–1435) was the first to reprise the matter.115 In the prolegomena to his annotations on Nicholas of Lyra’s Postillae, Paul affirms that many literal senses are possible in a single verse, before raising the objection that multiple interpretations do not entail multiple actual meanings, and that the literal sense should be identified with the author’s intention alone. This is warded off with the double shield of Augustine and Thomas: God, the author of Scripture, comprehends all things at once, and so it is fitting that the text should have more than one meaning, so long as these are not offensive to reason or to Catholic teaching.116 When the doctrine of multiple literal senses was raised again in the sixteenth century, it followed similar lines, as in the brief discussion by Johannes Driedo, for whom the diversity of Catholic interpretations ‘not only causes no trouble to the Christian religion, but rouses the studious, nourishes the hungry, and refreshes the poor and tired in the desert of this world like manna, which delighted those who ate it with a variety of pleasant flavours’.117 Only a few years earlier, the doctrine had prompted a highly revealing exchange between Erasmus and the Franciscan friar Frans Titelmans, a former student of Driedo’s at Louvain, an exchange in which Erasmus tion of a house upon which the allegorical senses constitute the walls: ‘sicut vides quod omnis aedificatio fundamento carens stabilis esse non potest, sic est etiam in doctrina. Fundamentum etiam et principium doctrinae sacrae historia est. . . . Aedificaturus ergo primum fundamentum historiae pone, deinde per significationem typicam in arcem fidei fabricam mentis erige.’ 115  Ceslaus Spicq, Esquisse d’une histoire de l’exégèse latine au moyen âge (Paris, 1944), pp. 276–78; Ryan Szpiech, ‘A Father’s Bequest: Augustinian Typology and Personal Testimony in the Conversion Narrative of Solomon Halevi / Pablo de Santa María’, in The Hebrew Bible in Fifteenth-­Century Spain: Exegesis, Literature, Philosophy and the Arts (Leiden, 2012), pp. 177–98, at p. 197, n. 27. 116  Paul of Burgos, Prolegomena ad additiones ad postillam magistri Nicolai de Lira super Biblia at PL CXIII:42. For an English summary of Paul’s discussion, see Ian Christopher Levy, ‘Nicholas of Lyra (and Paul of Burgos) on the Pauline Epistles’, in A Companion to St. Paul in the Middle Ages, ed. Steven Cartwright (Leiden, 2013), pp. 265–91, at pp. 284–88. 117  Driedo, De ecclesiasticis scripturis, p. 126: ‘Diversitas . . . non solum non turbat religionem Christianam, sed exercet studiosos, pascit famelicos, et velut manna (quod variis saporum oblectamentis delectabat edentes) reficit in deserto huius mundi fatigatos et ieiunos.’ The idea that manna tasted different to different eaters derives from its varying descriptions at Ex. 16:14 and Num. 11:7, and is expressed explicitly at Sap. 16:20–21.

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played the part, as he did against Luther, of the level-­headed moderate. In 1529 Titelmans published a critique of Erasmus’s paraphrase of St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, going through it verse by verse and finding fault with the humanist’s interpretations. Erasmus had much to say about a phrase in Rom. 1:4, in the Vulgate ‘ex resurrectione mortuorum Iesu Christi Domini nostri’ (‘by the resurrection from the dead by our Lord Jesus Christ’), noting at the start of his annotation that it could be read in many ways. He explained later in the commentary that in his paraphrase (as in his earlier translation) he had put Christ in the nominative case, ‘which does not differ from Paul’s meaning but rids us of two equally inconvenient things, linguistic ambiguity and the burden of hyperbaton’.118 In other words, ambiguity was a superficial fault of the Vulgate that obscured Paul’s single meaning. This was exactly what we would expect from a philologist like Erasmus. But Titelmans saw heresy in the paraphrase, since Erasmus’s clarification obscured the ‘fecundity’ of the original: ‘When it happens that some phrase placed in the Scriptures is ambiguous, having many senses all consonant with the matter and with truth, and above all approved by the holy teachers, we must believe that all of them proceeded from the intention of the Holy Spirit.’ To restrict such senses in paraphrase was a sin, just as it would be to block one channel of a fountain spouting sweet, healthy water in many directions.119 Titelmans, as a defender of multiple literal senses, was reappropriating Erasmus’s old metaphor. But Erasmus, who replied to Titelmans in a work of the same year, saw the ‘fecundity of Scripture’ differently, as a matter of what he called ‘accommodation’—the same phrase could be accommodated or applied to various objects (‘now to the head of the Church, now to the body’, and so on) without being ambiguous. The Fathers had approved such a copia sententiarum, but certainly not ambiguity, which begat only a confusion of senses.120 In a subsequent annotation to Rom. 8:9, he mocked Titelmans’ concerns: ‘As if the ambiguity of the text were equivalent to a fecundity of Scripture, as if this 118  Erasmus, Annotationes in Epistolam ad Romanos, in EOO VI.7, p. 46 (at Rom. 1:5): ‘Locus hic multifariam legi potest’; p. 52: ‘nihil variat Pauli sententiam et tamen effugimus duo pariter incommoda, nempe sermons ambiguitatem et hyperbati molestiam’. The paraphrase first appeared in 1517; Erasmus’s version of this verse was ‘ex eo quod resurrexit e mortuis Iesus Christus dominus noster’. 119  Franz Titelmans, Collationes quinque super Epistolam ad Romanos beati Pauli Apostoli (Antwerp, 1529), fol. 15r: ‘Cum enim orationem quamlibet in scripturis positam, ambiguam esse contingit, et plures habentem sensus, proposito et veritati bene consonos, potissimum a sanctis doctoribus probatos: credendum est, illorum quemlibet de spiritus sancti intentione procedere.’ 120  Erasmus, Responsio ad collationes (1529), in his Opera omnia, ed. Le Clerc, IX, cols 969–970. Compare the discussion in Botley, Latin Translation, p. 151. On what would be later called the ‘accommodated sense’, see Ossa-­Richardson, ‘On Allegory’.

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fecundity were not rather the product of ignorance.’121 Erasmus thus asserted doubt against plenty: the philologist’s task was not to admit any multiplicity of meaning in the Bible, but to seek the author’s intended meaning at the source. Most interest in multiple literal senses came not from Louvain, but from the contemporary revival of scholasticism at the Spanish universities of Salamanca and Alcalá. Figures trained in this milieu, such as the Franciscan Alfonso de Castro and the Dominican Melchior Cano, thus offered similar analyses, defending the possibility of multiple literal senses on the authority of Thomas and especially Augustine. Later in Rome, Bellarmine tersely permitted that such multiplicity was ‘not improbable’.122 Other statements, such as that of James Gordon Huntley, almost always invoked the Thomist principle of God’s all-­comprehending gaze, easily translated into the power to signify more than one thing—indeed, infinite things—at a time. To deny that power would be to limit God’s omnipotence.123 In 1600 the leading Jesuit scholar Juan Azor declared the doctrine the common opinion of theologians.124 At the same time the Augustinian claim became conflated with the narrower and weaker doctrine, most prominently espoused by Nicholas of Lyra, of the ‘double literal sense’, according to which the lines of the Old Testament quoted typologically in the New Testament could be construed as referring literally (and not just mystically or spiritually) to two things at once.125 Nicholas’s example was 1 Chron. 17:13, in which God says ‘I will be his father, and he shall be my son’, and which, according to this 121  Erasmus, Annotationes in Epistolam ad Romanos, in EOO VI.7, p. 198: ‘Quasi sermonis ambiguitas sit scripturae foecunditas aut quasi hanc foecunditatem non magis etiam pariat imperitia.’ 122  Alfonso de Castro, Adversus omnes haereses libri xiii (Paris, 1541), fol. 8v; Cano, De locis theologicis, p. 134; Bellarmine, Disputationes, I, p. 213 (III.3): ‘Nec est improbabile, interdum plures literales in eadem sententia reperiri’. 123  Gordon Huntley, Controversiarum epitomes, I, p. 70. 124  Juan Azor, Institutiones morales, 3 vols (Rome, 1600–1611), I, cols 930–31 (VIII.2). 125  See, for instance, James Samuel Preus, From Shadow to Promise: Old Testament Interpretation from Augustine to the Young Luther (Cambridge, MA, 1969), pp. 62–71. Catholic scholars of the mid-­twentieth century began to take a fresh interest in the idea of a double literal sense, which they referred to as the sensus plenior or ‘fuller sense’, a term coined by Andrea Fernandez in 1925. On its history, see Raymond E. Brown, ‘The History and Development of the Theory of a Sensus Plenior’, Catholic Biblical Quarterly 15 (1953), 141–62; and idem, ‘The Sensus Plenior in the Last Ten Years’, CBQ 25 (1963), 262–285. The same journal published a number of subsequent pieces on the topic, including Bruce Vawter, ‘The Fuller Sense: Some Considerations’, CBQ 26 (1964), 85–96; and James Robinson, ‘Scripture and Theological Method: A Protestant Study in Sensus Plenior’, CBQ 27 (1965), 6–27, drawing on Heidegger. Among other curious features of this literature are its use of mid-­century anti-­intentionalist literary criticism, and its reliance on the old observation about the ambiguity of Hebrew—see, e.g., Brown, ‘The History’, p. 151.

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doctrine, referred literally both to Solomon and to Christ, since it is repeated at Heb. 1:5. Whereas Augustine’s aim had been to reconcile conflicting interpretations by positing a Providential economy of divine meaning, Nicholas sought merely to recategorise existing allegorical or typological senses as literal so as better to maintain their utility in doctrinal argument. And it was this restricted claim that some Spanish theologians would warily defend, from Alfonso Tostado in the fifteenth century to Pedro Ciruelo and later Gabriel Vázquez in the sixteenth. Ciruelo, in a 1538 book of assorted Quaestiones, made this especially plain, denying the possibility of multiple literal meaning in one and the same passage—since a human author could only have one literal meaning at a time—but gladly allowing it when the same line appeared in different places, even in postbiblical sacred works.126 The occasional Protestant, such as William Whitaker at Cambridge in 1588, could accept the same picture.127 Given the concentration of interest in these topics at the Spanish universities, it should come as no surprise that, at the end of the sixteenth century, the most ardent defenders of the multiple literal sense—in its stronger, Augustinian form—should also have been Spanish. The Jesuit scholar Acosta was a case in point, quoting Augustine and then defending the doctrine at length on moral, eirenic grounds: ‘let us remember that everything is to be referred to instruction and to charity; and that we worship God not in dissent but in peace and delight in the Holy Spirit’.128 He argued, moreover, that the divine compression of multiple meanings into a single phrase was only an extension of the human capacity for pregnant speech, evident above all in the dense, quasi-­prophetic language of legislative authority: ‘it certainly belongs to the wise and great to embrace many things in a few words, and to suggest different things in different ways, if the matter requires it. What could prevent it? Why should we not attribute to God what any lawgiver wants for himself?’129 A similar analogy would be made two decades later by another Jesuit, Nicolaus Serarius, who also 126  Pedro Ciruelo, Paradoxae quaestiones numero decem (Salamanca, 1538), sigs G4r–H1r, and esp. the two conclusions at G6v (‘quod nullum dictum sacre scripture unum numero potest habere duos sensus literales’) and G7r (‘quod eadem specie autoritas sacre scripture non tantum duos sed et tres aut plures sensus literales habere potest: si a diversis autoribus sacris pluries scripta reperiatur ad diversa proposita ad diversasque intentiones.’). Compare earlier Alfonso Tostado, Commentaria in quartem partem Matthaei [= Opera, vol. XXI] (Venice, 1596), fol. 50va–b (on Matt. 13, q. 28). All use language derivative of Thomas Aquinas. 127  William Whitaker, Disputatio de Sacra Scriptura (Cambridge, 1588), pp. 302–3 (V.2). 128  Acosta, De Christo revelato, p. 122: ‘Omnia ad aedificationem, omnia ad charitatem referenda meminerimus; neque Deum nos colere dissensionis, sed pacis et dilectionis in Spiritu Sancto.’ 129  Ibid., p. 121: ‘certe sapientum est atque magnorum paucissimis verbis plurima complecti, et diversis diversa insinuare. si res ita ferat. Quid vetat? Cur hoc Deo non damus, quod sumere sibi legislator quilibet vellet?’

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compared God to a skilled craftsman who could put a small number of tools to many uses.130 A different kind of secular analogy had been offered by Domingo Báñez, a Dominican professor of theology at Alcalá and Salamanca, and one of St Teresa’s confidants, who addressed the matter in his 1584 commentary on the Summa theologiae. The treatment is scholastic: objections to the multiple literal sense—we will discuss these in the next section—are put forward and answered, with a conclusion in the affirmative. Báñez here observes: God spoke through the sacred writers in such a way that Scripture remains unresolved in certain places, so that we could understand it in multiple ways. The same commonly happens among friends, when one, sending letters to another, deliberately writes a few equivocal sentences which can be understood in various ways according to the rules of friendship, so that the recipient engages himself with them, occupied by their pleasant equivocation.131 The image introduced to clarify the doctrine only opens it to further questions. What are these ‘rules of friendship’ (leges amicitiae)?132 Did corresponding friends really test each other with ‘pleasant equivocations’, and, if so, why is there no mention of the practice in contemporary artes epistolandi? These queries aside, two points may be made. The passage as a whole, encapsulated in the word ‘pleasant’ (suavis), attempts to push scriptual polysemy back in the direction of the witty ambiguity we examined in Chapter Three: the analogy is not the dense, pregnant language of political power, as in Acosta, but the lighthearted play of friends. At the same time, the comparison stresses the ethical and sympathetic dimension of interpretation, as we saw also in Augustine: Báñez implies that to understand the levels of meaning in a correspondent’s equivocation, one must already be his friend, and have something in common with him, just as a grasp of the Bible demands correct faith. The most expansive defender of the doctrine was Alfonso Salmerón (1515–1585), one of the first and brightest students of the Colegio Trilingue founded at Alcalá in 1528, and one of the ten founding Jesuits in the circle 130  Nicolaus Serarius, Prolegomena bibliaca et commentaria in omnes epistolas canonicas (Mainz, 1612), p. 160a. 131  Domingo Báñez, Scholastica commentaria in primam partem Angelici Doctoris D. Thomae usque ad sexagesimam quartam Quaestionem complectentia (Rome, 1584), col. 106: ‘id circo taliter locutus est [sc. Deus] per scriptores sacros, ut in quibusdam locis indifferens scriptura maneret ut multipliciter posset a nobis intelligi. Id quod inter amicos usu venire solet ut amicus amico litteras mittens, aliquas ex professo aequivocas sententias scribat, quae multipliciter juxta leges amicitiae possint intelligi, ut amicus in illis sese exerceat suavi aequivocatione detentus.’ 132  The phrase is from Cicero, De amicitia, 10–13, which mentions nothing of this sort.

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of Ignatius Loyola at Paris in 1540. Salmerón’s career took him all over Italy, including an acclaimed stint at Trent; in the late 1560s he retired to Rome and began drawing up his manuscript notes of biblical commentary. A 1569 letter to the Jesuit superior general Francisco de Borja suggests that the latter was among those prompting Salmerón to polish up his writings for publication; ‘but I think it is very difficult, because they are a great sea, and they remain undigested, and nobody knows where to begin or end’.133 Likewise, he wrote to Antonio Caraffa in 1570, ‘Having abandoned myself to the deep sea of sacred and divine Scripture, I have written a wild forest of things and words, a muddle of undigested trivialities.’134 It turned out to be a forest to meet a forest, an ocean to meet an ocean. Salmerón’s commentary would not appear until after his death, and then in huge and numerous volumes, lovingly edited and revised by a team of Jesuits and dedicated to their new superior general, Claudio Acquaviva; it remains one of the great monuments of Catholic exegesis, alongside the work of Cornelius a Lapide and Benito Pereira.135 The first volume consists of 43 sizeable prolegomena on scriptural hermeneutics, the eighth of which is devoted to the plurality of literal senses.136 Salmerón was no less aware than Augustine of the reasons for obscurity in the Bible: God, he said, had made certain passages difficult so that we might find many senses in them, reflecting the ‘infinite and incomprehensible wisdom’ of the divinity. As an authority he cited Dan. 12:4: ‘But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.’137 The plurality of meaning in those passages was evident from the variety of interpretations they had received, and as Augustine had argued, it was not necessary to ascertain the human writer’s intention so long as the senses attributed were true and non-­contradictory, fit the immediate con133  Salmerón to Francisco de Borja, 3 June 1569, in Salmerón, Epistolae ex autographis vel originalibus exemplis potissimum depromptae, 2 vols (Madrid, 1906–7), II, p. 187: ‘Quanto a lo que V. P. me manda, del sacar mis escritos en limpio, lo tengo por difficillimo, porque son un grandissimo piélago, y están indigestos, y no sabe hombre por dónde començar ni salir; y después de esso, esta es cosa que requiere fuerças y ayuda de vezinos.’ 134  Salmerón to Antonio Caraffa, 9 Nov 1570, in Salmerón, Epistolae, II, p. 229: ‘Si che, allargatomi alquanto nel profondo mare delle sacre et divine scripture, ho scripto una selva incondita di cose et di parole, una farragine di cosaccie indigeste’. The word selva, ‘forest’, recalls the language of St Jerome (see n. 67 above). See William Bangert, Claude Jay and Alfonso Salmerón: Two Early Jesuits (Chicago, 1985), pp. 328–30 on Salmerón’s circumstances of writing, and 334–344 on the commentaries themselves. 135  Miguel Lop Sebastià, Alfonso Salmerón, SJ (1515–1585): Una biografía epistolar (Madrid, 2015), pp. 346–48. 136  Alfonso Salmerón, Commentarii in evangelicam historiam et in Acta Apostolorum, 12 vols (Madrid, 1598), I, pp. 99–112. 137  Ibid., p. 106a.

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text, and could be confirmed by other passages. Salmerón analysed a much greater array of examples than his contemporaries, and in more detail, but his signal contribution was to root the multiple literal sense in an argument about the ambiguous properties of Hebrew—a product of the philological study he had begun at Alcalá.138 Thus the linguistic tools provided by Pagnini and other figures of the early sixteenth century, and deployed against Protestant philology by theologians like Pérez and Gordon, are here redirected to the service of multiplicity. Compare, then, Gordon’s 1612 list of Hebrew ambiguities (above, p. 151) to Salmerón’s seven viae or ‘paths’ to the plurality of literal meaning: (1) the variant readings of qere and ketiv signified by ° in the Complutensian Polyglot; the discrepancies between (2) the Hebrew and Septuagint and (3) the Hebrew and Vulgate; (4) the intrinsic polysemy of Hebrew words; variations in (5) vowel-­pointings and (6) punctuation; (7) the poverty of words compared to things.139 All these factors, comprising the very fabric of Hebrew, make possible a multiple reading and a multiple meaning. Unlike Acosta and Báñez, Salmerón insists on the dissimilarity of scriptural multiplicity to human discourses: ‘due to their limited ability, men cannot perceive so many senses in the letter of the text, but it is otherwise with God, who excels with his infinite wisdom’.140 The argument of his prolegomenon is thus somewhat paradoxical: he defends the special and extraordinary quality of the multiple literal sense, while at the same time emphasising not the divine, Providential economy of meaning, but the basic linguistic causes of ambiguity. Salmerón’s new cartography of scriptural ambiguity evidently delighted his successors, who plundered his work for examples. In his hands the doctrine served to explain, and was in turn supported by, many existing cruces. For instance, the extraordinary prophecy of Caiaphas at John 11:50, whose ambiguity St Thomas and others had struggled to conceptualise, now became a star witness: ‘Who will not marvel’, asked the Jesuit, ‘at such different senses in these same words, consonant both with the letter itself and with the truth?’141 But the richest and most beautiful example of all was Gen. 47:31, a verse familiar to readers of Spinoza, who chose it as 138  On Salmerón’s Hebrew, see Robert Maryks, The Jesuit Order as a Synagogue of Jews: Jesuits of Jewish Ancestry and Purity-­of-­Blood Laws in the Early Society of Jesus (Leiden, 2009), p. 78. Salmerón’s use of Hebrew ambiguity here would be adopted by Serarius, Prolegomena, p. 151. 139  Salmerón, Commentarii, I, pp. 106b–110b. 140  Ibid., p. 110b: ‘homines non possunt tot sensus in litera spectare, ob eorum modicam capacitatem: secus est de Deo, qui infinita sapientia praestat’. 141  Ibid., p. 102b: ‘Quis igitur non admiretur in eisdem verbis tam diversos sensus, et ipsi literae, et veritati tam consentientes?’ Compare Serarius, Prolegomena, p. 150a. On Caiaphas see Chapter Three above, pp. 113–114.

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evidence for the corruption and unreliability of the Masoretic text.142 The scene is Jacob’s deathbed: And the time drew nigh that Israel must die: and he called his son Joseph, and said unto him, If now I have found grace in thy sight, put, I pray thee, thy hand under my thigh, and deal kindly and truly with me; bury me not, I pray thee, in Egypt: But I will lie with my fathers, and thou shalt carry me out of Egypt, and bury me in their buryingplace. And he said, I will do as thou hast said. And he said, Swear unto me. And he sware unto him. (Gen. 47:29–31, KJV)

These lines, which preface Jacob’s blessing of his children and grandchildren in Gen. 48–49, and the last days of Joseph in Gen. 50, initiate the closure of an epoch, the beginning of the end of the beginning. The weight of history, of what has come and what will follow, is borne with the gravid simplicity evoked by Erich Auerbach—by brute repetition, the patriarch is anchored in Canaan, to which his family will later return, bearing Jacob’s bones.143 But there is a curious exchange of power. In making Joseph swear to keep his promise, Jacob exerts his authority as a father; at the same time, the ailing patriarch hands over the responsibility for his body. With this ambiguity in mind, we turn to the final sentence of Gen. 47:31, and of the chapter as a whole: ‫וַ ּיִ ְשׁ ַּתחוּ יִ ְשׂ ָר ֵאל עַ ל־רֹאשׁ ַה ִּמ ָּטה‬,vayishtachu Yisrael al-­rosh ha-­mittah

The KJV reads, ‘Israel bowed himself upon the bed’s head.’ The Vulgate interprets vayishtachu as a motion not only of bending forward but of paying homage (as it evidently is at, for instance, Gen. 18:4), and interpolates the object of Jacob’s gesture: ‘adoravit Israhel Deum conversus ad lectuli caput’, that is, ‘Israel, leaning forward to the head of the bed, reverenced God’. If the two versions differed in their understanding of Jacob’s action, they at least agreed that there was a bed involved—mittah [‫]מ ָּטה‬, ִ in the Hebrew. But the Septuagint says different: προσεκύνησεν Iσραηλ ἐπὶ τὸ ἄκρον τῆς ῥάβδου αὐτοῦ, ‘Israel reverenced upon the top of his staff’. The bed has become a staff—an old man’s walking-­stick. How? 142  Benedict de Spinoza, Tractatus theologico-­politicus, in Opera, ed. Carl Gebhardt, 5 vols (Heidelberg, 1925), III, p. 108. See on this point André Malet, Le Traité Théologico-­politique de Spinoza et la pensée biblique (Paris, 1966), p. 191. A condensed summary of the textual and exegetical problems (including one or two not discussed here, with reference to the Zohar) can be found in Franciscus Georgius Venetus, In Scripturam Sacram problemata (Paris, 1574), fol. 36v (I.283); Marin Mersenne, Observationes et emendationes ad Francisci Georgii Veneti Problemata (Paris, 1623) [appended to his Quaestiones celeberrimae in Genesim, 1623], cols 338–340, offers a range of replies with reference to contemporary scholarship. 143  Jacob’s burial in the field of Machpelah, when it occurs in Gen. 50:13, closes the sentence.

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The Hebrew word for staff is ‫מ ֶטה‬, ַ matteh, sharing the same consonants (M-­T-­H) as mittah, but with different vowels. The vowel-­points, however, were not added until later, so when the Greek translators came to the line they had only the consonants to go on, and decided that matteh was more likely than mittah. If the problem had stopped here, the passage would be unimportant; Catholics and Protestants might have agreed that the Masoretic and Vulgate bed was superior to the Septuagint staff, and left it at that. But the line is quoted in the Epistle to the Hebrews, traditionally ascribed to St Paul—and quoted according to the Septuagint: Πίστει Ἰακὼβ ἀποθνῄσκων ἕκαστον τῶν υἱῶν Ἰωσὴφ εὐλόγησεν, καὶ προσεκύνησεν ἐπὶ τὸ ἄκρον τῆς ῥάβδου αὐτοῦ, ‘By faith Jacob, when he was dying, blessed both the sons of Joseph; and worshipped, leaning upon the top of his staff.’ (Heb. 11:21, KJV) To argue that ‘staff’ in Gen. 47:31 was incorrect was therefore to imply that St Paul’s reading was wrong, while to argue that ‘bed’ was incorrect was to assert both that the Vulgate was wrong, which Catholics could not countenance, and that the Greek translation was preferable to the Hebrew original, which sat ill with most Protestants. Scholars of both confessions were at an impasse. Nor could they agree whose staff it was, for matteh / rhabdos could denote not only a walking-­stick but also a royal sceptre as Joseph might have carried. The Vulgate translates Paul’s line ‘Fide Jacob, moriens, singulos filiorum Joseph benedixit: et adoravit fastigium virgae eius’, Jacob blessed each of Joseph’s sons, and reverenced the top of his—eius, Joseph’s, not suus, his own—staff. Joseph’s staff is now the object of Jacob’s reverence; transferring his political authority to his son, Jacob pays homage to the symbol of Joseph’s power. God has disappeared from the picture. This interpretation mattered to Catholics, and therefore to Protestants, for two reasons: first, because Joseph was a type of Christ, and second, because the passage had featured in Carolingian arguments over the adoration of images. Letters by Pope Adrian I to the Second Council of Nicaea (787) used it to draw an analogy between Jacob’s veneration of Joseph via his staff, and contemporary believers’ worship of Christ via the Cross; the analogy was rejected in a document of 794 attributed to Charlemagne himself, supporting the Council of Frankfurt against images.144 The conflict between Nicaea and Frankfurt became an important point of historical reference in the disputes over images and idolatry after the Reformation, and so Catholic commentaries on Gen. 47:31 and Heb. 11:21 invoked Adrian’s letters, while the Calvinist André Rivet adduced Charlemagne.145 144  Sacrorum conciliorum nova et amplissima collectio, ed. Joannes Dominicus Mansi, 54 vols (1748–52, repr. Graz, 1960), XII, Nicaea II, actio secunda, col. 1064; ‘Caroli Magni Capitulare de non adorandis imaginibus’, in Imperialia decreta de cultu imaginum in utroque imperio tam orientis quam occidentis promulgata, ed. Melchior Goldast (Frankfurt, 1608), cap. 13, p. 156. 145  Cornelius a Lapide, Commentaria in scripturam sacram, ed. Augustin Crampon, 26 vols

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So much for simplicity. The layers of complexity in the exegesis of this line give a flavour of how scholarly disputes could be maintained over many pages and many centuries—how a single sentence, in a series of vestments, could endlessly reveal further ambiguity to its readers, both in its intrinsic form and by the weight of its historical and scriptural context. To attempt the exposition of a verse in Genesis, then, was not to drain a single cup but to swig vainly at the ocean of ages. Given the questions and choices knotted into every word in each version of these two verses, we may see the attraction of a hermeneutic principle that removes the need to make decisions. If a scriptural verse can have more than one literal meaning, then ‘staff’ and ‘bed’ can both be correct, and the honour of both Paul and Jerome is saved. It is no wonder, then, that this solution was adopted by many Catholic exegetes, and above all by the Jesuits who dominated the field: Francisco Ribera, Cornelius a Lapide, Benito Pereira, and Salmerón himself.146 Instead I will quote— partly to illustrate the irrelevance of sectarian divisions on this issue—a slightly later figure, Cornelius Jansen (1585–1638), the austere bishop of Ypres and founder of the Jansenist movement, who combined the Hebrew and Greek senses with a marvellous economy: What prevents the Holy Spirit from using ambiguous Scripture with two senses when it wants to indicate both? For Jacob reverenced God, happy at his son’s oath and lying back on the head of the bed, and at the same time, leaning his body forward, reverenced the tip of Joseph’s staff, his son standing at the head of the bed and bearing in his hand his staff or sceptre as a mark of his power. Thus Jacob honoured the power in his son, and God as the creator of that power, just as he did the royal power of Christ, whose type Joseph represented.147

(Paris, 1891), XIX, p. 482b; Leonardus Marius, Biblia sacra (Cologne, 1621), p. 286a; André Rivet, Theologicae et scholasticae exercitationes cxc in Genesin, in his Opera theologica, 3 vols (Rotterdam, 1651–60), I, p. 658a (Ex. 173). 146  Lapide, Commentaria, I, pp. 386b–387a; Benito Pereira, Commentaria et disputationes in Genesim, 4 vols (Rome, 1589–99), IV, pp. 639–44 (Gen. 47, disputatio 6), first preferring the Septuagint reading on Paul’s authority, and then allowing both. Salmerón, Commentarii, I, p. 108a–b. This case was so curious that the double reading attracted even Protestants. See, for instance, Edward Wells’s paraphrase, An Help for the More Easy and Clear Understanding of the Holy Scriptures: Being the Book of Genesis . . . (Oxford, 1724), p. 260: ‘he supported himself on his Bed-­side by leaning on the top of his Staff’, with an explanatory footnote. 147  Cornelius Jansen, Pentateuchus, sive, Commentarius in quinque libros Moysis (Louvain, 1641), p. 179: Quid igitur vetat Spiritum Sanctum utendo scriptura ambigua utrumque significante, utrumque etiam indicare voluisse? . . . Iacob enim laetus de juramento filii et ad lectuli caput conversus adoravit Deum, et simul inclinatione corporis adoravit summitatem virgae Ioseph stantis ad lectuli caput et gestantis virgam seu sceptrum tamquam insigne suae potestatis in manu: hoc enim faciendo po-

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The bed expresses Jacob’s approaching quietus; the staff his relay of authority. One epoch comes to an end and sets in motion another: Jacob to Joseph, the age of Abraham to that of Moses, the Old Testament to the New. By charitable interpretation the threads of Scripture, rather than fraying off irrefragably in all directions, curl back and interlace in a single design. Paradoxically, the suggestion of multiplicity in one passage served a deeper unity in the whole structure, a feature we will also see in ironic readings of Greek tragedy by nineteenth-­century critics, and later in Empson. But although the idea was widespread among Catholics in the decades after Trent, it was far from uncontroversial: to many, it seemed like one step too far towards the toleration of ambiguity. Ambiguous Undulations On 27 September 1612, a lecture was given at the Royal Seminary at Douai by its president, the ageing Dutch theologian Gulielmus Estius (Willem Hessels van Est), who had arrived thirty years earlier from Louvain, fleeing war and plague.148 It was published with eighteen others after his death; at the front of the volume was a portrait by the local engraver Martin Baes, and three lines of verse proclaimed him Cicero, Vergil, and Thomas Aquinas in one, a hero of humanist oratory and scholastic theology.149 The lecture was a sustained critique of the doctrine of multiple literal senses, the first of its kind. Estius advanced four arguments. First, the doctrine amounts to saying that an ambiguous word or phrase should be taken in both of its meanings, which the logicians have shown to be absurd. Second, the literal sense is the foundation of the spiritual senses, and to be firm as a foundation it must be single. Third, the various senses of a passage must be ‘coordinated’, that is, they must have an order and relation to one another, like those of the fourfold sense, but this is impossible with multiple literal senses. These three arguments all derive from Thomas Aquinas’ defence of the plurality of spiritual senses, which appeared in the same passage from the Summa theologiae as his discussion of the multiple testatem honorabat in filio et Deum potestatis authorem adeoque regiam potestatem Christi cuius typum gessit Ioseph.’ 148  On Estius see T. Leuridan, ‘Les théologiens de Douai. V: Guillaume Estius’, Revue des sciences ecclésiastiques 72 (1895), 120–31, 326–240, 481–495; and Wim François, ‘Augustine and the Golden Age of Biblical Scholarship in Louvain (1550–1650)’, in Shaping the Bible: The Bible in the Reformation: Books, Scholars and Their Readers in the Sixteenth Century, eds Bruce Gordon and Matthew McLean (Leiden, 2012), pp. 235–90, at pp. 262–71. 149  Gulielmus Estius, ‘An eiusdem scriptura plures sensus literales?’, in his Orationes theologicae (Douai, 1614), 313–27.

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literal sense. Thomas had raised the objection: ‘The multiplicity of [spiritual] senses in one passage of Scripture begets confusion and deception and undermines any security in argument.’ His reply denied any confusion because these spiritual senses stem from the meaningfulness of things not words, and are subordinate to the literal sense, which is single.150 There was already in Aquinas an unresolved contradiction between the argument for multiple spiritual senses subordinated to a single literal sense, and the supposition of multiple literal senses—a tension exploited by Estius to the detriment of the latter. His fourth argument is simply that of ‘common sense’, the universal belief of interpreters who ‘seek, find, relate and narrow down one, true and relevant sense in any given passage of Scripture, intended by its author’.151 In what follows he seeks to eliminate the support of Augustine and Thomas. This is confessedly a struggle. Augustine seems to accept that all true senses occurring to a pious exegete must have been intended by Moses and the other biblical writers—and are therefore literal senses—but nobody could possibly have conceded such a thing, ‘for God did not intend that every truth was a meaning (not even a mystical one) in all the words in which that truth can be understood’.152 To grant that he did would be a burden on the text. As for Thomas, he allowed it as possible on the authority of Augustine, not wanting to deny anything to divine omnipotence, but he never invoked the principle in his own commentaries on Scripture. A speech would have been a poor occasion to analyse specific passages, but Estius did give such details in his biblical commentaries. For instance, he took up the problem of Heb. 11:21 in his volume on the Pauline epistles, objecting to Francisco Ribera’s solution—similar to Jansen’s—that it contravened the laws of hermeneutics. His own answer was that the Hebrew and Vulgate bed was correct, and the Septuagint staff an error. But what about St Paul? He advantageously chose and accommodated to his purpose what he read in the Septuagint, whether or not it agreed with the Hebrew

150  Thomas, Summa theologiae, I, q. 1, art. 10, in the Leonine Opera omnia, IV, p. 25a: ‘Multiplicitas enim sensuum in una scriptura parit confusionem et deceptionem, et tollit arguendi firmitatem’, with the response (at p. 25b): ‘multiplicitas horum sensuum non facit aequivocationem, aut aliam speciem multiplicitatis, quia . . . sensus isti non multiplicantur propter hoc quod una vox multa significet; sed quia ipsae res significatae per voces, aliarum rerum possunt esse signa.’ 151  Estius, ‘An eiusdem scriptura’, p. 320: ‘Videntur enim omnes eo animo accedere ad interpretandas et exponendas secundum literam Scripturas, ut unum aliquem sensum, verum, germanum, ab authore intentum, in unoquoque loco Scripturae quaerant, inveniant, tradant, ad unum colliment.’ 152  Ibid., p. 324: ‘Neque enim Deus voluit omnem veritatem esse sensum, ne quidem mysticum omnium verborum in quibus illa veritas intelligi possit.’

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source; because that translation was held in authority and veneration among those to whom he was writing. . . . So that this choice is not of the Scripture itself so much as of the granted subject. This could rightly happen, no doubt, and was valuable in teaching and exhorting in its own way.153

The effect of such a reading is to historicise the Epistle, that is, to transform a verse in the Bible from the timeless Word of God, of the Holy Spirit acting in all things, into a piece of rhetoric, temporal, contingent. This might be an acceptable compromise, but it demonstrates the threat posed by philology, with its idiom of error, to the absolute perfection implied by the idea of providential divinity. The multiple literal sense, by contrast, had saved the absolute at the expense of philology. Doubts had been raised about the doctrine before Estius. We have already encountered Erasmus dismissing it, if only by implication. In fact, its major Spanish proponents responded to more detailed objections in their accounts; it is plausible that these came from conversations and oral disputations at Alcalá or Salamanca, for no antagonists are named or quoted. A recurring charge was that the doctrine undermined the strength of arguments built on Scripture; as Salmerón put the case, if a passage could be legitimately interpreted in more than one way, then ‘an argument might seem to proceed, as logicians say, from a disjunctive proposition to both sides of it—a weak and feeble way of arguing—and the oracles of the Holy Spirit would become much like the oracles of Apollo Loxias, which were obscure and could be turned to either side of a contradiction’.154 Although he did not deny the charge of ambiguity, he maintained that the multiple senses were not disjunctive but conjunctive: For we do not say that the Spirit meant this or that or a third thing, but rather we assert that the Holy Spirit in this place wanted us to understand this meaning and that and the third and a fourth, and so on, so long as it is true in itself, and certain. And this is an argument

153  Gulielmus Estius, In omnes Divi Pauli Apostoli epistolas commentariorum tomus posterior (Douai, 1616), p. 579a: ‘dicamus, id quod apud LXX. legebatur, sive cum Hebraeo fonte conveniret, sive non, opportune allegasse, suoque instituto accommodasse Apostolum; quod ea versio apud eos ad quos scribebat, in authoritate esset ac veneratione . . . ut haec sit allegatio non tam scripturae, quam rei concessae. Quod sine dubio recte fieri potuit; et ad docendum atque exhortandum valet suo modo.’ 154  Salmerón, Commentarii, I, p. 99b: ‘Videri enim posset eiusmodi argumentatio procedere a disiunctive propositione ad aliquam eius partem, ut Dialectici loquuntur: quae ratio argumentandi enervis est et infirma, et oracula Spiritus sancti quam simillima redderentur oraculis Apollinis Loxiae, quae obscura erant, et in utramque contradictionis partem verti poterant, ut illud: Aio te, Eacida, Romanos vincere posse.’ On the ambiguous oracle, see Chapter One above, p. 33.

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from a conjunctive proposition to each of its parts, which is a firm inference.155

Bed and staff, that is, came together in a unified picture. For Salmerón, the doctrine of multiple literal senses did not generate ambiguity, but rather resolved it, since the reader no longer had to choose between competing alternatives. And unlike the pagan oracles, there was nothing speculative or deceitful in Scripture. Báñez also accepted ambiguity but denied that it produced confusion, for ‘each sense could give rise to a theological argument more or less certain depending on the necessity of the interpretation of the text’.156 Each justified multiplicity as productive rather than unstable. Salmerón’s position would be criticised by a fellow Jesuit, Gabriel Vázquez, then teaching theology at Alcalá. In his commentary on the Summa theologiae published in 1598, Vázquez wrestled with the question of the multiple literal sense, putting the case for and against, and concluding with a very moderate and cautious acceptance, but largely in the abstract, rejecting almost all individual cases. In fact, what he ended up with was more like the double literal sense of Nicholas of Lyra or Pedro Ciruelo. Even Augustine, the very foundation of the stronger doctrine, had erred: In this matter Augustine appears to have gone too far . . . conceding that all individual truths which anyone can understand in a text [sub una litera] pertain to the literal sense. For it seems hard to credit that God wanted to reveal so many different things to the human writer of sacred history, and to impel him to write in such a way as to signify them all at once.157

Vázquez’s sharpest attack sought to undermine, on voluntarist grounds, the Thomist argument from divine omnipotence. It was true, he said, that God comprehended all things in a single act, and so could express many 155  Ibid. p. 112b: ‘Non enim dicimus: Spiritus hoc, vel illud, vel quid aliud tertium voluit intelligere . . . sed asserimus, Spiritum sanctum hoc loco istum sensum, et illum, et tertium, et quartum intelligi a nobis voluisse; ut ita quilibet per se verus sit, et certus: estque argumentum a copulativa propositione ad quamlibet eius partem, quae firma est probandi ratio.’ In modern propositional logic this kind of inference is called ‘conjunction elimination’. For another notation of such conjunctive ambiguity in logical terms, see STA, p. 197. 156  Báñez, Scholastica commentaria, col. 105: ‘secundum utrumque sensum poterit fieri argumentum Theologicum magis aut minus certum secundum necessitatem intelligentiae litterae’. 157  Gabriel Vázquez, Commentaria ac disputationes in primam partem S. Thomae, 2 vols (Alcalá, 1598), I, pp. 108b–109b: ‘Verum enimvero in hac re nimius videtur fuisse Augustinus . . . concedens omnia, et singula vera, quae quisque posset sub una litera intelligere, ad sensum literalem pertinere. Difficile enim creditu apparet, voluisse Deum homini historiam sacram scribenti, tot tamque varia revelare, et, ut ea simul significaret, ipsum ad scribendum impulisse.’

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things in a single word, but he had no wish to do so, because he composed Scripture to communicate to men, and indeed through men, and therefore he observed human constraints: ‘Meaning should be judged not by a speaker’s expressive richness but by the capability of his audience, and in general the man who does not accommodate himself to his hearers deserves reproach.’158 It is no use being a dazzling orator in English if your audience only speaks French. In Estius and Vázquez is the revenge of an Aristotelian view of meaning and interpretation, one which argues from ancient assumptions in logic, rhetoric, and philology against the extravagance of the Augustinian picture. And this revenge would be taken up even more strongly by Protestants, whose insistence on the unity and perspicuity of Scripture the doctrine flagrantly contradicted.159 Johann Gerhard briefly dismissed it a single line, responding to Bellarmine, without bothering to make the argument.160 The earliest serious combatants on the subject were Salomo Glassius and the Montpellier minister Daniel Chamier, whose fat manual of controversial theology, the Panstratia Catholica, was written in 1606 but appeared in print only in 1626, five years after his death.161 Protestant theologians frequently capitalised on internal dissent among the Catholics. In this instance the strongest arguments honed and elaborated those of Vázquez; André Rivet even repeated the Spaniard verbatim, albeit (uncharacteristically) without attribution.162 Divine power was not 158  Ibid., p. 109b: ‘Significatio autem pensari debet non ex foecunditate loquentis, sed ex audientium capacitate, alioqui qui non se accommodaret audientibus, reprehensione dignus esset.’ On this see Michael Lapierre, The Noetical Theory of Gabriel Vasquez, Jesuit Philosopher and Theologian (1549–1604) (Lewiston, 1999), p. 32. Compare Jerome, ‘Epistola 57 ad Pammachium’, in PL XXII:568–569: ‘Legerat [sc. Paulus] enim illud Jesu: “Beatus qui in aures loquitur audientis” [Eccli 25:12]; et noverat tantum oratoris verba proficere, quantum judicis prudentia cognovisset.’ 159  Ironically, the one figure to whom literary historians—unaware of the Catholic story outlined here—have assigned a belief in multiple literal senses was in fact writing against it, as a good Protestant. This was John Donne, in his 12 Essayes in Divinity: Being Several Disquisitions Interwoven with Meditations and Prayers, ed. Anthony Raspa (Montreal, 2001), p. 46: ‘the word of God is not the word of God in any other sense then literall, and that also is not the literall, which the letter seems to present, for so to divers understandings there might be divers literal senses’. This passage has been misunderstood, e.g., by Raspa himself, at p. xxxvii, and by Anita Gilman Sherman, Skepticism and Memory in Shakespeare and Donne (New York, 2007), p. 111, as supporting ‘the multiplicity of “literal senses” ’, whereas it implies precisely the opposite—that the literal sense is not what the letter seems to mean, for if it were (‘so’) there would (‘might’) be diverse literal senses. 160  Gerhard, Tractatus, p. 58. 161  Chamier is understudied despite his colourful life, but see William Courthope, Memoir of Daniel Chamier, Minister of the Reformed Church, with Notices of his Descendants (London, 1852). The Protestant rejection of the doctrine is mentioned but not explored by Laplanche, L’Écriture, le sacré et l’histoire, p. 203. 162  Rivet, Isagoge, p. 219.

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divine will. ‘The question is not what God could do,’ wrote Chamier, ‘but what he wanted to do. . . . We are considering God’s Word not as he could have advanced it had he so wished, but as he did advance it.’163 Glassius added that the specious argument from omnipotence was typical of Catholic fancies, above all transubstantiation. As for the Word, it had to be accommodated to mortal understanding and language, and here the Protestant critics made plain their slightly different theories of signification. For Chamier, the human intellect could conceive only one thing at a time, in a single mental act, although, during the process of expressing one meaning, others could suggest themselves.164 For Glassius, by contrast, a person could conceive many things in the intellect at once; however, because a word took its meaning not from the speaker’s mind but from the thing it signified, which was single, neither man nor God could intend more than one thing at once. The unity of meaning lay in the nature of language, not of the mind.165 For Chamier, God might have intended many things in the same word, but did not, whereas for Glassius, God could not have done so even had he wanted to, because the very idea was incoherent. Chamier and Glassius put forward another argument not made by their Catholic allies: that if the doctrine was correct, it would follow that each line of the Bible expressed every truth, that when God said ‘Let there be light’ he meant the same as ‘Let the earth bring forth grass’ and even ‘Thou shalt not kill’. If God’s infinite comprehension entailed the hypothesis of multiple literal meaning, as Thomas had said, then it might as well entail the hypothesis of infinite literal meaning, which amounted to total semiotic anarchy, unbearable relativism, just as Horn found in Gordon’s argument.166 It was the same argument, in fact, as that which, centuries later, motivated 163  Daniel Chamier, Panstratia catholica, 4 vols (Geneva, 1626), I, p. 537a: ‘non quaeri quid possit Deus: sed quid voluerit . . . nos Verbum Dei consideramus, non quale Deus, si vellet, posset proferre: sed quale protulerit.’ 164  Chamier, Panstratia, I, p. 543a: ‘Potest autem humanus intellectus, etsi non uno, tamen multis actibus multa concipere. Ii autem actus successive possunt existere, dum unum prius conceptum sensum quis exprimit. Quare, dum occupatur sive lingua, sive manus in exprimendo uno sensu, alii multi possunt sese offerre.’ Compare p. 538b: ‘noster intellectus non tantum non potest simul et semel, id est, uno actu omnia comprehendere: sed ne multa quidem, nisi subalternata’. 165  Glassius, Philologia sacra, p. 344 (II.1.2.1.2): ‘Sic homo plura intellectu concipere simul potest, interim tamen, si mentis sensa vel prolatis ore verbis, vel Scriptura, in certo aliquo negocio prodit, tunc ad unum illud intellectus jam determinatus est: Ita Deus . . . etsi infinita simul concipit, non tamen nisi unum et simplicem uno verbo intendit literalem sensum.’ Compare p. 341, arguing that meaning must be single because it is the ‘form’ of language, in the Aristotelian sense, a line of attack later adopted by John Strang, De interpretatione et perfectione Scripturae (Rotterdam, 1663), p. 52. 166  Chamier, Panstratia, I, p. 538b; Glassius, Philologia sacra, p. 344 (II.1.2.1.2).

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defences of the author’s intention as a criterion of textual meaning against the assaults of late New Criticism and deconstruction.167 The doctrine of multiple literal senses thus marked yet another battleground between the company of two armies, Protestant and Catholic—barring two or three defections—in the early seventeenth century. It encapsulated a profound distinction between two views of Scripture, the one a river to be cleansed and traced to the source, the other an ocean in which to swim, even to abandon oneself, as Salmerón said to Caraffa. For the one, God’s infinite capacity went for nothing at the moment he had to communicate to men; accommodation meant self-­limitation. It also meant the liability of divine language to corruption and ambiguity, by analogy to the physical frailty of God made flesh, as John Locke would remark at the end of the century.168 For the other, the sacred author, and especially the prophet, was lifted above human capacity for the very purpose of mediating between God and men. Why, then, has this controversy been entirely ignored by scholarship? As modernity encroached, the doctrine became an embarrassment to Catholics, and in 1845 a professor of theology at Louvain, Jan-­Theodor Beelen, wrote a treatise against it, offering in the process a handy potted history, as well as a reprint of Estius’s lecture.169 Henri de Lubac was surprised in 1962 that his eminent friend Étienne Gilson still (‘even today’) accepted it.170 But there are deeper reasons for the neglect. The history of hermeneutics as written to date is more than usually Whiggish, seeking the precursors to Schleiermacher and Gadamer; the German and Lutheran back-­ story has therefore seemed inevitable, and from this perspective Catholic hermeneutics since Luther and Erasmus has been an irrelevance. Out of twenty-­nine chapters covering post-­Reformation scholarship in Magne Sæbø’s monumental edited history of Old Testament exegesis, only five are devoted to Catholic interpretation, and there exists no monograph on early modern Catholic biblical studies like Lubac’s on the Middle Ages, or François Laplanche’s 1986 anatomy of Reformed hermeneutics in the seventeenth century, L’écriture, le sacré et l’histoire. Now, as the vitality of Counter-­Reformation intellectual culture is increasingly recognised by 167  Perhaps most canonically in E. D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation (New Haven, 1967), pp. 1–4. See also the critical remarks on both parties in Richard Gaskin, Language, Truth and Literature: A Defence of Literary Humanism (Oxford, 2013), pp. 224–225. 168  John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, III.9.23. 169  Jan Theodor Beelen, Dissertatio theologica qua sententiam vulgo receptam, esse sacrae scripturae multiplicem interdum sensum litteralem, nullo fundamento satis firmo niti demonstrare conatur (Louvain, 1845). On Beelen, see Pierre Fontaine, Avant, pendant et après leur professorat au grand séminaire de Liège (19e siècle): Dictionnaire bio-­bibliographique (Brussels, 1997), pp. 11–19. 170  Lubac, Exégèse médievale, IV, p. 279, referring to Étienne Gilson, Introduction à la philosophie chrétienne (Paris, 1960), pp. 50–51.

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historians like Simon Ditchfield, Stefania Tutino, and Jan Machielsen, we can put its hermeneutics back on the map. The occlusion of the Catholic voice was attended by a narrowing of the possibilities of what biblical interpretation could be. It had to be philological, dependent on the study of language and history; it had to be intentionalist, seeking the conscious sense of the human author, understood as human, and operating under the usual rules of rational understanding; and this sense had logically to be single in each passage. In other words, the Bible was to be interpreted like any other text, different only insofar as it was, considered in absolute terms, perfect and perfectly true: a one-­way message from writer to reader, to be patiently unwrapped and decoded according to an established array of procedures. This vision of scriptural exegesis was inchoate in the manuals of Chamier, Glassius, and their Protestant contemporaries. It would be defended polemically by Spinoza.171 But perhaps its clearest, most succinct articulation can be found a century later in Johann August Ernesti’s 1761 Institutio interpretis Novi Testamenti. Ernesti had devoted much of his early career to editing classical literature; from 1742 he had taught literature and then rhetoric at Leipzig, but in 1759 he was appointed ordinary professor of theology, and his reputation in this capacity would help reconcile a young Goethe to the dreary prospect of undergraduate study at Leipzig instead of Göttingen.172 Ernesti and his colleagues were humanistic in taste, rationalist, distrustful of mystery; this mood is evident in the Institutio, which soon became the most reprinted and influential text of its kind, reedited by Christoph Friedrich Ammon in 1792 and twice translated into English in the nineteenth century. The German-­American jurist Franz Lieber would later cite it as a key source for his legal hermeneutics.173 According to Ernesti, ‘nothing can be at all certain in interpretation unless . . . there be only one sense in any given passage, and that sense be the literal one.’174 171  Spinoza, Tractatus, ch. 7, with a list of ambiguities in Hebrew and its script at pp. 105–108. 172  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Aus meinen Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit (1811), ed. Karl-­Maria Guth (Berlin, 2016), p. 199. On Ernesti, see John Sandys-­Wunsch, ‘Early Old Testament Critics on the Continent’, in HBOT, pp. 971–98, at 976–980; John Sailhamer, ‘Johann August Ernesti: The Role of History in Biblical Interpretation’, Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 44 (2001), 193–206; Michael Forster, ‘Hermeneutics’, in The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy, eds Brian Leiter and Michael Rosen (Oxford, 2007), pp. 30–74, at 31–34. 173  Johann August Ernesti, Institutio interpretis Novi Testamenti (Leipzig, 1761); idem., ed. Christoph Friedrich Ammon (Leipzig, 1792); idem, tr. Charles Terrot as Principles of Biblical Interpretation (Edinburgh, 1832); idem, tr. Moses Stuart as Elementary Principles of Interpretation (Andover, MA, 1842); Francis Lieber, Legal and Political Hermeneutics (Boston, 1837), p. 75. 174  Ernesti, Institutio (1761), p. 5: ‘Neque enim ullo modo certum esse aliquid in interpre-

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Naturally, he repudiated both the Catholic taste for allegory and those who, on the authority of Augustine, posited multiple literal senses—a false notion drawn from the ambiguity of the text and the variety of its interpretations. Such an idea, Ernesti said, rendered the whole process ‘uncertain’. He compared it to the Jewish belief, also adopted by certain Christians, that ‘the words of the holy books signify as much as they can’.175 The rabbis were notorious for their commentaries upon commentaries, their belief that the Torah’s meaning was endlessly refracted by new readers. In his own running gloss on Ernesti, Ammon illustrated the point with a line from the Talmud: ‘Just as a hammer divides into many sparks, so a passage in the holy Scripture has many meanings.’176 To establish its hegemony, the Protestant hermeneutic had to overcome its rivals, first by sustained argumentation, as in Chamier, and then by dismissive ridicule, as in Ernesti. The Catholic doctrine of multiple literal senses was an idol to be toppled, smashed, obliterated, more obscene even than the fourfold allegorical sense; it was sent to the memory hole and has never received benign attention since. The same is not true of rabbinical exegesis, which struck a chord with a generation of influential Jewish literary critics and philosophers after the Second World War, nourishing the milieu we glanced at in the Introduction; this interest can be seen, for example, in the work of Geoffrey Hartman, who in the 1970s included midrash in his class at Yale on the history of interpretation.177 In 1982 Susan Handelman, a younger scholar weaned on both rabbinics and deconstruction, would take this further, sketching a dichotomy between heroic, proto-­postmodern rabbis embracing multiplicity and logocentric Church Fathers demanding a single literal meaning at all costs.178 Indeed, tando posset, nisi . . . unus tantum verbi cuiusque, loco quoque, sensus, idemque literalis esset.’ 175  Ibid., p. 7: ‘Nec magis probari potest opinio, e Iudaeorum scholis orta, et ad Christianos inde propagata, quae tantum significare verba librorum sacrorum vult, quantum possint. . . .’ Compare Glassius’s juxtaposition of Catholic and cabbalistic modes of allegory at Philologia sacra, pp. 387–404 (II.1.2.3.6–7), and later SHK, p. 23, referring to ‘kabbalistische Auslegung, die sich mit dem Bestreben in jedem alles zu finden an die einzelnen Elemente und ihre Zeichen wendet’. 176  Babylonian Sanhedrin 34a, alluding to Jer. 23:29, ‘Is not my word like as a fire? saith the LORD; and like a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces?’ (KJV), and quoted in Azzan Yadin, Scripture as Logos: Rabbi Ishmael and the Origins of Midrash (Philadelphia, 2004), p. 70 (on which, see more broadly pp. 69–72). 177  Geoffrey Hartman, ‘Polemical Memoir’, in A Critic’s Journey: Literary Reflections, 1958– 1998 (New Haven, 1999), pp. xi–xxxi, at p. xxi; see also Hartman’s A Scholar’s Tale: Intellectual Journey of a Displaced Child of Europe (New York, 2004), pp. 4–5, 150. 178  Susan Handelman, The Slayers of Moses: The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory (Albany, 1982), based on her “On Interpreting Sacred and Secular Scripture: The Relation of Biblical Exegesis to Literary Criticism,” Ph.D. Dissertation, 1979, SUNY Buffalo.

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many passages in the Talmud and midrash support the existence of divine polysemy in the Torah, such as a commentary on Ex. 15:11 that claims, ‘The Holy One, Blessed be He, speaks two statements in a single saying, which is impossible for human beings.’179 Handelman’s account of Jewish hermeneutics has been sharply contested,180 but not her characterisation of the patristic tradition, which, as we can now see, reflects the Protestant heritage better than it does the Augustinian insight reworked for confessional ends by early modern Catholic scholarship. That insight, while not assimilable like rabbinical studies into a deeper recovery of roots by Jewish post-­war émigrés intellectuals, might have chimed at least with the literary and philosophical moment, had it been known. Ernesti’s Institutio scorned Jewish exegesis by comparing it to Catholicism; I want to close this chapter by considering a moment of counterpoint, in which Jewish exegesis was defended in terms that reversed those of Ernesti and his predecessors. This moment appears in the work not of Hartman or Handelman, but of a still more foundational figure for the critical recovery of rabbinics, the Litvak philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, who began writing while interned in a German prisoner of war camp in the early 1940s, and whose primary subjects included a rethinking of contemporary ethics and a study of the Talmud.181 In a 1979 lecture, Levinas contrasted Spinoza’s narrow philology to the methods of midrash, a practice he sought to explain by reference to new trends in philosophy represented by Paul Ricoeur. The exegesis in midrash, Levinas wrote, went beyond both the letter of the Bible and the ‘psychological intention of the writer’, aiming instead at plurality, at continual renewal by each reader in the light of new circumstances. To interpret was not to recover a dead meaning in the text but to ‘solicit’ meaning from it, a process in which the text solicited the reader in return, forcing him to confront what was radically different and unfamiliar. The polysemy of the text was therefore not merely hermeneutic but ethical, calling the reader forward; it was what the Talmud itself called ‘the hammer that strikes the rock, making innumerable sparks fly upwards’.182 The line that had served Ammon as a touch-

Yadin, Scripture as Logos, pp. 72–73. For the subsequent conversation, see the items listed above, n. 11. 181  Ethan Kleinberg, ‘The Myth of Emmanuel Levinas’, in After the Deluge: New Perspectives on the Intellectual and Cultural History of Postwar France, ed. Julian Bourg (Lanham, MD, 2004), pp. 201–26. 182  Emmanuel Levinas, ‘L’arrière-­plan de Spinoza’ (1979), in his L’Au-­delà du verset: lectures et discours talmudiques (Paris, 1982), pp. 201–6, at p. 204: ‘L’exégèse comme dépassement de la lettre est aussi dépassement de l’intention psychologique de l’écrivain. . . . Polysémie du sens: le verbe est comme “le marteau qui frappe le rocher en faisant jaillir d’innombrables étincelles”.’ 179  180 

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stone for rabbinical sottishness was now vaunted as the essence of rabbinical profundity. If Levinas inverted the old Protestant judgement of the Talmudic precept, he also inverted a key term of the Protestant argument against multiple literal senses. His seminal 1982 essay ‘De la lecture juive des Écritures’ elaborates a rabbinical conversation about legal punishment stemming from Deut. 25:2–4, showing that, for the rabbis in question, the meaning of the scriptural text was not exhausted by the original intention of Moses, nor by its early commentators: The reading processes that we have just seen at work suggest, first, that the statement commented upon exceeds what it originally wants to say, that what it is capable of saying [son pouvoir-­dire] goes beyond what it wants to say [son vouloir-­dire]; that it contains more than it contains, that a surplus of meaning which is perhaps inexhaustible remains enclosed in the syntactic structures of the sentence, in its phrases, its words, phonemes and letters, in all this materiality of speech which is virtually always still signifying.183

As Jean Greisch has argued, the distinction between pouvoir-­dire and vouloir-­dire goes right to the heart of Levinas’s hermeneutics.184 The phrases are difficult to translate: pouvoir dire is ‘to be able to say’, ‘to be capable of meaning’, whereas vouloir dire, which normally means simply ‘to mean’, is literally ‘to want to say’, emphasising the rôle of the will (vouloir) in the action of signifying, of expressing a sense.185 For Levinas this vouloir-­dire reflects intention, the narrow horizon of a text’s meaning bound by its author’s consciousness, whereas pouvoir-­dire turns away from intention towards the capacity of the words themselves to mean different things to each reader, unbound and unbounded by any single subjectivity. The distinguishing feature of the Bible is that its meaning is not limited to the original vouloir-­dire but embraces its full, ever-­expanding pouvoir-­dire.186 183  Emmanuel Levinas, ‘De la lecture juive des Écritures’, in L’Au-­delà du verset, pp. 125–42, at p. 135: ‘Les procédés de lecture que l’on vient de voir à l’oeuvre suggèrent d’abord que l’énoncé commenté excède le vouloir-­dire d’où il procède, que son pouvoir-­dire dépasse son vouloir-­dire, qu’il contient plus qu’il ne contient, qu’un surplus de sens, peut-­être inépuisable, reste enfermé dans les strucures syntaxiques de la phrase, dans ses groupes de mots, dans ses vocables, phonèmes et lettres, dans toute cette matérialité de dire, virtuellement toujours signifiant.’ My translation is adapted from Emmanuel Levinas, Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures, tr. Gary Mole (London, 1994), p. 109. 184  Jean Greisch, ‘Du vouloir-­dire au pouvoir-­dire’, in Emmanuel Lévinas, ed. Jacques Rolland (= Les Cahiers de La nuit surveillée, 3) (Verdier, 1984), pp. 211–221, at p. 220. 185  For an amusing exchange on this point, see Tom Stoppard, ‘Professional Foul: A Play for Television’, in Every Good Boy Deserves Favour and Professional Foul (London, 1978), p. 76. 186  Colin Davis, Levinas: An Introduction (Cambridge, 1996), p. 118, following Gadamer, argues that Levinas’s view of the Bible can be applied to all texts.

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Will and power are the coordinates of Levinas’s argument, as they had always been in the Protestant exegetical tradition, only now their priority is reversed. Whereas Vázquez and his Protestant readers had maintained that that divine will, not divine power, was the relevant criterion of meaning; whereas Spinoza had castigated those who ‘twist Scripture to say what it plainly does not mean [vult]’; and whereas Ernesti mocked the rabbis for thinking that the words of the Bible ‘signify as much as they can [possint]’, Levinas now reasserted the primacy of pouvoir over vouloir.187 And he insisted again on the ethical dimension; the good interpreter must not only be ‘attuned to life: the city, the street, other men’, but accept that the full sense of Scripture is inseparable from the plurality of its interpreters, for each brings part of the whole.188 Ambiguity is not a problem that keeps us from the true understanding of the Bible, but integral to its capacity to be interpreted, provoking us to open ourselves to each other, confronting difference in the process of soliciting meaning. From a starkly different philosophical framework, Levinas reached a view that Augustine, if not his early modern heirs, would have recognised. 187  Spinoza, Tractatus, p. 35: ‘verba Scripturae ita torquere conantur, ut id, quod plane non vult, dicat’. 188  Gerald Bruns, ‘The Hermeneutical Significance of Emmanuel Levinas’s Talmudic Readings’, in The Idea of Biblical Interpretation: Essays in Honor of James L. Kugel, ed. Hindy Najman and Judith Newman (Leiden, 2004), pp. 545–65; Colin Davis, Critical Excess: Overreading in Derrida, Deleuze, Levinas, Žižek and Cavell (Stanford, 2010), pp. 84–96.

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CH A PTE R FI VE

SATURA LANX Noten zu einem Gedicht, sind wie anatomische Vorlesungen über einen Braten. — A. W. Schlegel, Athenäum Fragment 40, in KSA II, p. 171.

On 15 January 1727, the Franeker professor of Hebrew, Albert Schultens, held a public disputation with his student Franz Arnold Weisse, who had come over from Gdańsk, then part of Prussia. Schultens (1686–1750) is now known by historians of scholarship chiefly for his expertise in Arabic, which he promoted from 1708 as a valuable auxiliary to the study of biblical Hebrew. In 1732 he would take up the chair of oriental languages at Leiden, later occupied by both his son and his grandson. The topic in 1727, as with Walaeus and Stellingwerf a century earlier, was biblical hermeneutics, and given the narrative sketched out in the previous chapter, we ought to expect a similar discussion, as a deep consensus persisted in Protestant exegesis from Glassius onwards. But Schultens’s text could hardly have been more different, as was evident already in its extraordinary title: ‘Dissertation Exhibiting a Sample of Passages from the Holy Scriptures in which is Revealed an Elegant and Beautiful Ambiguity’.1 It is hard to imagine the original disputation, for instead of clear theses and standard arguments there are what we would now call close readings of scriptural passages, arguing that they contain not just ambiguities but deliberate ambiguities. For instance, Hosea 4:16–17 runs, ‘For Israel slideth back as a backsliding heifer: now the Lord will feed them as a lamb in a large place. Ephraim is joined to idols: let him alone.’ (KJV) Schultens observes that ‫ ֲחבּור‬chavur, ‘joined to’, can also mean ‘marked with lines or stripes’ (e.g. at Is. 1:6); ‫ עֲ צַ ִבים‬atzabim, ‘idols’, he argues, has a root 1  Albert Schultens (pr.), Dissertatio secunda exhibens specimen locorum Sacrae Scripturae in quibus ambiguitas decens et venusta sese exerit (Franeker, 1727). This dissertation is the second of three on the subject; they are printed as a single essay as Albert Schultens, ‘Dissertatio philologica de verbis et sententiis ambigua et duplici significatione praeditis’, in his Opera minora (Leiden, 1769), pp. 365–390, from which I quote below.

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meaning of ‘nerves, chains’ or ‘a contexture of nerves’, as shown by the Arabic ‫ء‬asab.2 Given the image of the stubborn heifer, the phrase chavur atzabim suggests a wild animal marked with lines where it has been restrained by burning chains; there is thus a tension between the most natural sense of the words in isolation and the secondary sense prompted by context. Schultens concludes: Which sense do you prefer, learned reader? I suspect that you’re weighing them up, and that they seem of equal weight to you. Perhaps the second somewhat tickles you, even sways you to abandon the first. But let it not convince you to do so—for each has something beautiful, and the prophet, who must have considered each, likely wanted both to be understood, and connected the two closely congruent ideas by a grave double figure. Thus, clearly, were the Israelites ‘burnt by the marks of chains’, and by the bruises of divine injuries, because they were ‘devoted to their idols’, from which they could not suffer to be torn away.3

The subtlety of this judgement is remarkable: not only is the ambiguity deliberate, but the two senses are in dialogue with each other, condensing the argument of the passage as a whole into a single phrase. Schultens’s understanding of ambiguity was utterly unlike the doctrine of the multiple literal sense; his guiding idea was not the Augustinian vision of providential foresight but the verbal method of classical comedy. The disputation with Weisse was in fact the second in a series of three; the first, held half a year earlier with another student, had dwelled almost exclusively on Greek and Roman literature. Its title makes clear that Schultens saw his study of ambiguity as a type of philology, but it was an odd sort of philology, as may be illustrated by comparing his analysis of a passage in Aristophanes to the work of other philologists. In Equites, one of the playwright’s earliest comedies, Cleon whines to the audience about being beaten up by his conspirators. But then the Chorus berates him: Aye, with justice; since you devour the public goods before they are distributed by lot,

2  As Schultens argues, a sense-­extension of this is seen in Job 10:8, ‘Your hands shaped [‫עִ צְ בּונִ י‬, itzvuni] me’. 3  Schultens, ‘Dissertatio philologica’, p. 379: ‘Quemnam praefers, Erudite Lector? Animi pendes, credo, atque hinc et hinc paria te trahunt momenta. Forte etiam posterius illud nescio quid adblanditur, et prius missum facere suadet. Ne persuadet tamen velim; utrumque enim pulcre consistit; neque nullo pacto veri sit simile, prophetam, cuius cogitationi sese uterque sensus offere debuit, non utrumque etiam comprehensum voluisse, et gravissima figura ex Ancipiti connexuisse, quae arctissime inter se cohaerebant; quippe propterea vinculorum notis, et plagarum divinarum maculis perustus erat populus Israeliticus, quod idolis suis agglutinatus et affixus, inde sese avelli non pateretur. . . .’

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and you press and squeeze [aposukazeis piezōn] those under account, seeing which of them is green, or ripe, or not yet ripe; and if you perceive any of them to be an easy quiet man, and a gaper, you recall him from the Chersonese and seize him by the waist and lock him [ankurisas]; and then, having twisted back his shoulder, you fall heavily upon him.4

The figurative reference in this passage is unusually dense. In his 1601 notes on the play, the great French scholar Isaac Casaubon had cut up the metaphors into separate lemmata.5 ‘Just as someone who wants to eat a fig from a tree’, he wrote, ‘first tests it by pressing it to see if it is ripe or not, so Cleon, about to kill a given citizen and steal his possessions, first tests to see if he is “fit for injustice”, as Sallust would say.6 But Aristophanes very elegantly uses the word sukazein, alluding to the term sukophantian, which means to slander someone.’7 As for ankurisas (from anku-­, ‘hook’), mediaeval scholia had identified it as a wrestling term, and Casaubon ­expands: ‘This is an extended metaphor from the art of wrestling . . . 4  Aristophanes, Equites, ll 258–263, in Fabulae, ed. N. G. Wilson, 2 vols (Oxford, 2007), I, p. 79 (omitting two lines Wilson inserts after line 260):

ἐν δίκῃ γ᾽, ἐπεὶ τὰ κοινὰ πρὶν λαχεῖν κατεσθίεις, κἀποσυκάζεις πιέζων τοὺς ὑπευθύνους σκοπῶν ὅστις αὐτῶν ὠμός ἐστιν ἢ πέπων ἢ μὴ πέπων. κἄν τιν᾽ αὐτῶν γνῷς ἀπράγμον᾽ ὄντα καὶ κεχηνότα, καταγαγὼν ἐκ Χερρονήσου, διαλαβών, ἀγκυρίσας, εἶτ᾽ ἀποστρέψας τὸν ὦμον αὐτὸν ἐνεκολήβασας:. 5  These notes can be found at Paris, BNF, MS Lat. 8181, dated 11 December 1601–4 May 1602; another copy is at MS Lat. 8451. At MS Lat. 8181, fol. 5v, are the Greek lines of this passage with interlinear Latin gloss; at fol. 37r–v are the lemmata with expanded commentary. See also Casaubon’s annotations in Aristophanes, Comoediae, ed. [S. Gelenius] (Basel: Froben, 1547), British Library, shelfmark C.77.g.12, p. 203. Leonard Küster printed the notes in the variorum Notae appended, with separate pagination, to his edition of Aristophanes, Comoediae undecim (Amsterdam, 1710), pp. 76–103: see p. 79 on this passage. On the original lecture notes see Mark Pattison, Isaac Casaubon, 1559–1614 (London, 1875), p. 48. On Casaubon’s interest in the Aristophanes scholia, dating back to 1590, see Anthony Grafton and Joanna Weinberg, ‘I Have Always Loved the Holy Tongue’: Isaac Casaubon, The Jews, and a Forgotten Chapter in Renaissance Scholarship (London, 2011), pp. 16–17. 6  Bell. Jug., 20. 7  Paris, BNF, MS Lat. 8181, fol. 37r: ‘Sensus est: Quemadmodum qui ficum ex arbore cupiunt edere, prius explorant premendo, sit ne matura, an non: sic Cleon perditurus aliquem civem, ut ejus bona rapiat, prius explorat, sitne ille opportunus injuriae, ut loquitur Sallustius. Sed elegantissime utitur voce συκάζειν, alludens ad verbum συκοφαντίαν, quod est calumniari aliquem. Proprie συκοφαντίαν est deferre eum, qui ficus exportavit. Athenis enim id erat vetitum lege.’

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­ nkulizein means to beat one’s opponent’s ham swiftly and double him a over.’8 Joseph Scaliger had a slightly different take, asserting that the verb meant to suffocate the opponent in a headlock.9 This is roughly the sense reflected in W. J. Hickie’s translation given above. Casaubon and Scaliger thus broke down the whole passage into manageable pieces which they could explain individually using the vast resources of their erudition. They did not acknowledge the ambiguity, but philology like theirs was perfectly capable of doing so. In a knotty bit of his Poetics, Aristotle had advised the prospective critic not to rush to judgement on a phrase that seemed ambiguous or contradictory, but instead to weigh up its various senses. Thus at Iliad XX.272, Aeneas’s spear is eskheto by the layer of gold in Achilles’ shield; the Greek can mean either ‘impeded, checked’ or ‘held fast’, and the critic must decide which is meant.10 This has always been the usual approach of philologists. Consider a note on ankurisas from a line-­by-­line commentary on the Equites by a contemporary of Schultens, the obscure Transylvanian hellenist Stephan Bergler: The scholiast: ‘ankurisma, a wrestling metaphor’. Hesychius: ‘ankurisma is a certain type and figure in wrestling’. The same scholiast says that ankurisma also means ‘a tool with which figs are grabbed’, that is, when they are plucked. Hesychius says: ‘ankura is what figs are grasped with’, and therefore to ankurizein someone is to grab them just like figs are grabbed with that tool. The word seems to have this meaning in the present passage, since just a moment earlier the Chorus said aposukazeis, and the metaphor is sustained.11

8  Ibid., fol. 37v: ‘Allegoria est, et verba petita sunt ex arte palaestrica . . . ἀγκυλίζειν est suffragines ferire astu, ut inclinetur adversarius’. 9  Joseph Scaliger, Animadversiones in chronologica Eusebii (1606: [Amsterdam, 1658]), pp. 226–27, no. 2208: ‘Intelligit per speciem exercendi, ut solebat, collum eius brachii sui flexu Athletam implicasse, atque obtorto collo suffocasse, quod genus παλαίσματος Graeci ἀγκύρισμα, vel ἀγκυρισμὸν vocant’. 10  Aristotle, Ars Poetica, ed. R. Kassel (Oxford, 1966), p. 46 (1461a34–5): ‘δεῖ δὲ καὶ ὅταν ὄνομά τι ὑπεναντίωμά τι δοκῇ σημαίνειν, ἐπισκοπεῖν ποσαχῶς ἂν σημήνειε τοῦτο ἐν τῷ εἰρημένῳ, οἷον τῷ “τῇ ῥ’ἔσχετο χάλκεον ἔγχος” τὸ ταύτῃ κωλυθῆναι ποσαχῶς ἐνδέχεται, ὡδὶ ἢ ὡδί, ὡς μάλιστ’ἄν τις ὑπολάβοι: κατὰ τὴν καταντικρὺ ἢ ὡς Γλαύκων λέγει . . .’ Early modern editors tended to place a stop here—’ . . . ὑπολάβοι κατὰ τὴν κατ’αντικρὺ, ἢ ὡς Γλαύκων λέγει.’—thus attaching Glaucon’s view to it, and not to what follows. Thomas Twining, in Aristotle, Poetics, tr. and comm. Twining (London, 1789), p. 526, despaired of a solution to the text: ‘I do not see one clear and satisfactory sense, that can be made of the words, without conjectural emendation’. On André Dacier’s novel use of this passage for interpreting Homer, see Chapter Six below, p. 250. 11  Aristophanes, Comoediae undecim graece et latine, ed. Pieter Burmann the Younger, comm. Stephan Bergler and Karl Andreas Duker, 2 vols (Leiden, 1760), I, p. 373: ‘Scholiastes: ἀγκύρισμα εἶδος παλαίσματος. Hesychius: ἀγκύρισμα, σχῆμα τοῦ ἐν πάλῃ; Species et figura quaedam in luctu. Idem Scholiastes ἀγκύρισμα dicit etiam esse σκεῦος ἀγρευτικὸν σύκων; Instrumentum quo ficus prehendintur; nempe cum decerpuntur: Hesychius: ἄγκυρα, ἐν ἧτὰ σῦκα λαμβάνουσι;

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Bergler is aware of two competing explanations of the word from the scholia, each supported by lemmata in the sixth-­century Greek lexicon of Hesychius; given the context, he chooses the sense of grabbing figs and discards the sense from wrestling. Philology thus serves to raise and then solve ambiguity, resulting in a clear single meaning. This approach may be contrasted to that of Schultens, who treats the passage as a continuous tissue of imagery, and who, like Empson, teases out overlays of shade throughout: piezōn, he says, means both ‘squeezing’ and ‘squeezing out’, skopōn both dispiciens, ‘examining thoroughly’, and insidians, ‘lying in wait for’, and kekhēnota both ‘a fruit open before ripeness’ and ‘a man yawning with idleness’. But the chief problem is ankurisas. Given the thematic metaphor of the preceding lines, Schultens, like Bergler, draws attention to Hesychius’s lemma for ankura, a hook for getting fruit from a tree. His conclusion, however, is quite different: The order and sequence of the entire extended metaphor proves that this sense must be considered the primary one. . . . It is a suitable image for the clandestine arts by which Cleon despoiled of their goods those whom he could not destroy by open calumny and violence. And indeed it does no harm to my thesis to contend that the figure is taken from wrestling in a secondary sense: for the primary sense is that from which the secondary is called forth, and thus we perceive the word to be enriched with a double idea.12 Where Casaubon and Scaliger decided that ankurisas was a wrestling metaphor, and Bergler that it was a metaphor from hooking figs off a tree, Schultens sees that both senses are intended by the author, and therefore that it would be misguided to choose one to the exclusion of the other. This was not, to other scholars, a useful response, and so while Bergler’s view is listed and sometimes rejected in subsequent editions of Aristophanes, Schultens’s is ignored. The purpose of philology, as in classical commentaries, and as we saw with Erasmus on the Bible, was to preserve and adjudicate between conjectures—this is what Empson observed of the Arden ἄγκυρα est, qua ficus capiuntur; itaque ἀγκυρίζειν τινὰ erit prehendere aliquem, ut ficus prehendi solent illo instrumento; quae significatio hic locum habere videtur; ut persistat in metaphora; nam paulo ante dicebat ἀποσυκάζεις.’ On Bergler, see Marina Marinescu, ‘Neue Erkenntnisse über den Siebenbürgischen Humanisten Stephan Bergler (1680–1738)’, Balkan Studies 30 (1989), 221–60. 12  Schultens, ‘Dissertatio philologica’, p. 376: ‘Illum significatum hic primario esse respiciendum totius Allegoriae ratio et series pervincit. . . . Ea est commoda imago clandestinarum artium, quibus Cleon bonis evertebat eos, quos aperta calumnia et concussione destruere non valuisset. Ubi quidem mea nihil retulerit, si quis hoc secundario sensu figuram e palaestra ductam contenderit; nam primarius ille stat, unde secundarius arcessatur; atque ita duplici notione adauctum illud verbum deprehenditur’.

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Shakespeares, whose multiple suggestions he repurposed for Seven Types.13 Schultens offered a very different sort of philology, tending towards what we would now call literary criticism, with a nuanced perception of senses playing off one another under the surface of a word, a phrase; this, he implied, was how poetry worked, an operation of verbal dexterity, of wit in making meanings, but one going far beyond the classical pun. And Scripture, crucially, was just the same, or more so, for the Semitic languages had a more pronounced taste for ambiguity. Insofar as it contained multiple meanings, the Bible was not the manifestation in text of divine omnipotence, but high literature; what was needed, then, was a special hermeneutics not of Scripture but of poetry itself. The peculiarity of Schultens’s analysis seems to have been poorly grasped by his few readers. Johann August Dathe, a Hebraist at Leipzig who began editing Glassius’s Philologia sacra in the 1750s, made the link between Schultens’s ambiguitas and the trope of hypainixis (or hypainigma) discussed by Glassius, similar to the pun or syllepsis.14 A century later, in an article on Schultens’s life and works for a journal of Lutheran theology, Ferdinand Mühlau remarked that his subject had ‘explained puzzling passages of the Old Testament in three extremely interesting dissertations’.15 Both judgements are misleading: what Schultens identified were neither puns nor ‘puzzling passages’ or cruces of the sort philologists were accustomed to poring over, but intricate contextures of meaning. If Schultens’s readers could point to few antecedents, it is because there was in the West no sustained body of literature on poetic ambiguity. This mixed dish of a chapter is about what there was instead—stolen glances in essays and commentaries, the latter a genre of growing interest to historians today.16 There we find only stranded points of light: the few bright windows of a city asleep, private and momentary illuminations in the study. If readers find these discontinuities frustrating, their frustration will 13  STA, p. 81: ‘allows a structure of associated meanings to be shown in a note, but not to be admitted’. 14  Salomo Glassius, Philologia sacra, ed. Johann August Dathe, 2 vols (Leipzig, 1776), II, pp. 1324–26. For hypainixis, see the quotation of Junius at n. 37 below. 15  Ferdinand Mühlau, ‘Albert Schultens und seine Bedeutung für die hebräische Sprachwissenschaft’, Zeitschrift für die gesammte lutherische Theologie und Kirche 31 (1870), 1–21, at p. 15: ‘In drei äusserst interessanten Dissertationen . . . erklärte er räthselhafte Aussprüchte des A. T.s.’ 16  For an overview, see the Introduction to Neo-­Latin Commentaries and the Management of Knowledge in the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period (1400–1700), eds Karl Enenkel and Henk Nellen (Leuven, 2013), 1–78. See also Transformations of the Classics via Early Modern Commentaries, ed. Karl Enenkel (Leiden, 2014), with its own Introduction (1–14), as well as David Scott Wilson-­Okamura, Virgil in the Renaissance (Cambridge, 2010), and the essays in Classical Commentaries: Explorations in a Scholarly Genre, eds Christina Shuttleworth Kraus and Christopher Stray (Oxford, 2016).

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at least reflect a real absence. But it is worth persevering, because without a sense of how some critics defended ambiguity in poetry, we will struggle to understand how contemporary poets might have conceptualised their own ambiguities—ambiguities which, we have been assured since Empson, really are there in the poems. This chapter, then, offers a glimpse into a thought-­world shared broadly by Ronsard, Shakespeare, and Góngora. As a guide through the alleyways of commentary, we shall here return to the argument of Chapter Three that for early modern writers, deliberate ambiguity signalled either a joke or a lie. With that point already established, we can now demonstrate that those who perceived deliberate ambiguity in poetry explained it as witty or deceitful, or both. Elegantia Schultens himself pointed to one precedent for his analysis: the discourse on wit by Cicero and Quintilian, and the development of that discourse by the Dutch humanist Gerardus Joannes Vossius. In other words, to explain his understanding of poetry he turned to the domain of rhetoric. This may strike us as an odd move, because we have long since come to live in the shadows of Kant and Mill, who forcefully distinguished the two domains, to the detriment of rhetoric.17 But it was a move quite in keeping with the classical tradition: Cicero had called the poet the ‘neighbour’ of the orator, and Renaissance theorists routinely understood poetics as part of or just beside rhetoric.18 The early modern encounter with ambiguity in poetry, as we shall see below, likewise took its cue from rhetoric. This is important because it helps to explain why the rôle of ambiguity in poetry was so heavily circumscribed, as it had to be in rhetoric—both were held to involve the persuasive communication of ideas. We may start by considering a word that connects readings of deliberate ambiguity in witticisms and in poetry, namely elegantia, ‘elegance’. It is difficult to get the measure of this apparently simple term. Silke Diederich has argued that, whereas it meant for Cicero the quality of the Attic genus subtile, ‘precise, neat, tasteful, well-­chosen, with discreet adornments’, it came to denote for later Roman critics a refined, aristocratic mode of ex17  Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, §44; John Stuart Mill, ‘Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties’, in his Collected Works, ed. John Robson, 25 vols (Toronto, 1963–), I, p. 348: ‘eloquence is heard, poetry is overheard’. 18  Cicero, De oratore, I.16.69–70. On the proximity of poetry and rhetoric in Western thought, see T. O. Sloane and W. Jost, ‘Rhetoric and Poetry’, in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, gen. ed. Roland Greene, 4th ed. (Princeton, 2012), pp. 1175–81, and on the early modern tradition see Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols (Chicago, 1961), I, pp. 2–13.

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pression.19 Like many of our key words, elegantia itself exhibits an ambiguity, or an unresolved contradiction. The Rhetorica ad Herennium says that it consists of Latinitas, good pure Latin style, and explanatio, a slightly odd word which seems here to mean clarity; in the later tradition the division of elegance into purity and perspicuity would be commonplace.20 But Cicero applies the word elegantia to jesting and dissimulation, and Quintilian applies it, alongside the term urbanitas, taken from a treatise by Domitius Marsus, to conversational wit such as that which relies on double meanings.21 The term thus precisely describes the notion outlined in Chapter Three of perspicuous ambiguity, or ambiguity without obscurity, the double sense of a witticism.22 The same word is used to describe a deliberate ambiguity in Horace by a commentary traditionally ascribed to the second-­century grammarian Pomponius Porphyrio. This was an unusual occurrence; although ancient scholia on the poets frequently refer to ambiguity, such references tend to indicate simply a doubt as to the poet’s correct meaning, an inability to perform the office of explication.23 For instance, in the opening address of his third ode, Horace prays that Venus, the dioscuri Castor and Pollux, and Aeolus all guide his friend Vergil’s ship safely to Greece: navis, quae tibi creditum debes Vergilium finibus Atticis reddas incolumem precor (5–7) Porphyrio comments tersely: ‘It is ambiguous whether one should read debes finibus Atticis or finibus Atticis reddas’.24 In other words, the lines could mean either ‘I pray that you, ship, who owe Vergil to the shores of Attica, land him unharmed’ or ‘I pray that you, ship, who have been entrusted 19  Silke Diederich, Der Horazkommentar des Porphyrio im Rahmen der kaiserzeitlichen Schul­und Bildungstradition (Berlin, 1999), pp. 300–302. 20  Rhetorica ad Herennium, IV.12.17: ‘Elegantia . . . tribuitur in Latinitatem et explanationem’; compare Cicero, De oratore, I.32.144. For the later development see, e.g., Aldus Manutius Jr’s commentary on the Rhetorica, ad loc., in Cicero, [Opera] Mannucciorum commentariis illustratus antiquaeque lectioni restitutus, 10 vols (Venice, 1582–83), I, p. 158: ‘Elegantia est orationis εὐκοσμία, ornatus bonus, id est, puritas, et perspicuitas’. 21  Cicero, De oratore, II.59.241, II.67.270, Quintilian, Inst. or., VI.3.102. 22  See Chapter Three above, pp. 100–104. 23  E. Thomas, Servius et son commentaire sur Virgile (Paris, 1880), pp. 237–238; Richard Thomas, ‘A Trope by Any Other Name: “Polysemy,” Ambiguity, and Significatio in Virgil’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 100 (2000), 381–407; Máté Vince, From ‘Aequivocatio’ to the ‘Jesuitical Equivocation’: The Changing Concepts of Ambiguity in Early Modern England, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Warwick, 2013, pp. 15–21. 24  Scholia Horatiana quae feruntur Acronis et Porphyrionis, ed. Franz Pauly, 2 vols (Prague, 1858–1859), I, p. 20: ‘Ambiguum, utrum debes finibus Atticis, an finibus Atticis reddas accipiendum sit.’

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with Vergil, land him unharmed on the shores of Attica’. Horace meant one or the other, but we cannot be sure which.25 To give an example from another poet, Persius describes an orator as reciting poetry ‘white in new toga, at length, with a birthday [ring of] sardonyx’ (‘togaque recenti / et natalitia tandem cum sardonyche albus’, Sat. I.15–16). The scholia assert that there is an ambiguity in tandem (‘at length’) because it can apply to the act of reciting, to the possession of the ring, or to the state of whiteness; furthermore, natalitia might indicate either that the ring is a birthday gift, or that it is a ring worn only on the speaker’s birthday.26 But again, there is no suggestion that the ambiguity was intentional. The instance of elegantia recognised by Porphyrio is different. In his first satire, Horace observes that all men are unhappy with their lot and wish they had another life, but should a god offer to change it for them, they would soon realise their error. The god says: iam faciam quod voltis: eris tu qui modo miles mercator; tu consultus modo rusticus: hinc vos, vos hinc mutatis discedite partibus. (15–18)

‘Now I will make you what you want: you, the soldier, a merchant; you, the learned man, a peasant; you change parts with you, and be off!’ The metaphor is of actors switching their rôles—costumes, masks. Porphyrio remarks: ‘The ambiguity is elegantly affected. For just as Horace said before [ll. 4–10] that the merchant’s lot is praised by the soldier and the soldier’s by the merchant, and again that the peasant’s is praised by the lawyer and vice versa, so now he adds a phrase to the effect that anyone may adopt all personas.’27 The force of this observation is not perfectly clear, but it probably lies in Horace’s use of nominatives (‘miles’, ‘mercator’, ‘consultus’, ‘rusticus’) to make it ambiguous who is changing into whom, implying that all may change into all. The ambiguity is certainly deliberate, and it is also ‘elegant’, like a witticism. But what about it exactly is elegant? The word seems here to connote an economy of expression; just as a mathematician calls the Euler identity (eiπ + 1 = 0) ‘elegant’ because it fits so many basic 25  Early modern editors tended to put a comma after ‘Vergilium’ or ‘Atticis’ to make their choice of senses. Later, Wilhelm Dillenburger, Quaestionum horatianarum particula I et II (Bonn, 1841), pp. 117–118, argued that the ambiguity is deliberate, neatly combining both senses without clunky additional pronouns. 26  Persius, Satirarum liber cum scholiis antiquis, ed. Otto Jahn (Leipzig, 1843), p. 241. Isaac Casaubon, in his note at Persius, Satirarum liber, ed. Casaubon (Paris, 1605), p. 61, would point out the more interesting ambiguity in albus, which could denote either the speaker’s fear of reciting, or the colour of his toga, and if the latter, either a festive garment or that of a candidatus not yet ready for the senatorial laticlave. 27  Scholia Horatiana, II, p. 75: ‘Eleganter affectata ambiguitas; nam cum praedixerit a milite mercatoris sortem laudari et a mercatore militia, item a juris perito rustici et ab hoc illud: ita subiunxit dictionem ut cuivis liberum sit, in omnes personas sensum reducere.’

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constants and operations into a neat equation, so a pun gets you two meanings for the price of one word, and so Horace’s line, while not a pun, gets two transformations out of each pair of nouns, by analogy with the notorious ambiguity of the Latin double accusative.28 There is also what might be called the sociological aspect of the word: the beauty of the pun, like that of the Euler identity, is for connoisseurs, and its appreciation serves to reinforce shared élite tastes.29 Another word Porphyrio uses to suggest a deliberate ambiguity is the Greek dilogōs, the adverbial form of dilogia, not in the more usual rhetorical sense of a repetition (‘two words’) but instead meaning an ambiguity (‘two senses’).30 Thus Horace writes that ‘the turgid Alpinus kills Memnon’ (‘turgidus Alpinus iugulat . . . Memnona’, Sat. I.10.36).31 According to Porphyrio, this is an example of dilogia because Horace means both that Alpinus has described in a poem how the Ethiopian king Memnon was killed by Achilles, and that Alpinus himself, by his turgid style, has ‘killed’ Memnon.32 The ambiguity is patently intentional—it is a sort of jest—and, to underline the point, Porphyrio says it was done belle, beautifully. Like the previous example, it is ambiguous only in a very limited sense; a perspicuous ambiguity, like a pun. We are not accustomed to thinking of poetry, charged since the Romantic era with high gravity, as having much in common with the frivolity of a witticism, and Empson was keen to get away from puns, even as he kept coming back to them by accident.33 But at this level the poem, and perhaps especially the Horatian satire, which was supposed to be funny, is only one step away. This is as far as ancient criticism, to my knowledge, got into the poetic use of ambiguity.34 Although it considered ambiguities used to make a serious point, the connection to humour, especially via satire, remained umbilical, just as Cicero treated a ‘grave’ witticism (like that of Varus) as an On the double accusative, see Chapter One above, p. 42. As Peter Collins, Architectural Judgement (London, 1971), p. 191, puts it: ‘only a trained lawyer can really appreciate elegantia juris, and only a trained architect is really sensitive to the essential elegance of a well-­constructed and properly functioning building’. 30  This sense is defined by Pseudo-­Asconius, In M. Tullii Ciceronis prooemium primae actionis in C. Verrem, in Cicero, Quae supersunt omnia, ed. Johann Caspar Orelli, 7 vols (Zurich, 1826–1838), V.1 (Ciceronis scholiastae), p. 139: ‘Dilogia dicitur figura, cum ambiguum dictum dictas duas res significat.’ 31  ‘Alpinus’ seems to have been Marcus Furius Bibaculus; for a full discussion of the allusion and other literary effects in this line, see Horace, Satires, Book 1, ed. Emily Gowers (Cambridge, 2012), pp. 323–4. 32  Scholia Horatiana, II, p. 209: ‘belle iugulat Memnona dilogos ait; nam sub ea specie quasi dicat dum describit quemadmodum Memnon iuguletur, intellegi vult ab ipso potius iugulari dum male scripsit.’ 33  Compare also J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 1975), p. 9. 34  I leave aside here the Greek tragic scholia, on which see Chapter Nine below. 28  29 

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extension of the comic.35 Among early modern critics, the same conditions applied, even as particular readers began to develop their thoughts more fully on given lines. Individual observations of deliberate ambiguity are not the norm, but they are far from unknown. Some critics simply sneered. For instance, one of Petrarch’s sonnets contains the ingenious line, L’aura mi volve, e son pur quel ch’i m’era (‘The breeze turns me around, and I am only what I was’, but also ‘Laura turns me around, and I am only a chimera’). In 1609 Alessandro Tassoni remarked with disdain: ‘note the chimera, badly chimerified’.36 But others appreciated ambiguities of this type, and the compliment they most often used was elegantia. It could be applied to lines in Horace, as by Denys Lambin and Laevinus Torrentius, or to double meanings in the Hebrew prophets, as by Melchior Cano and Franciscus Junius.37 It appeared in the title of Schultens’s tracts in the 1720s, and three decades later one English critic reached for ‘elegant’ to describe the ambiguities of Alexander Pope; Empson, still in 1930, judged that a good pun in the eighteenth century ‘would expect admiration, and was a much more elegant affair’.38 Puns and elegantia could even enter the business of textual criticism. In a recent book Michael Fontaine has shown that the supposition of wordplay can solve a number of cruces in Plautus.39 A forebear of this method is found in a 1580 volume of variae lectiones—miscellaneous editorial conjectures— by Marc-­Antoine Muret, a prominent poet, playwright, orator, scholar, and a teacher of Montaigne at the Collège de Guyenne in Bordeaux.40 Towards the end of Plautus’s Miles gloriosus, the Athenian youth Pleusicles disguises himself as a wounded sailor to rescue his beloved from Pyrgopolynices, the braggart of the title. Upon being asked why one of his eyes is bandaged, he replies: On Varus, see Chapter Three above, p. 102. Alessandro Tassoni, Considerazioni sopra le Rime del Petrarca (Modona, 1609), p. 172: ‘nota chimera mal chimerizata’. The poem is Sonnet 88 in his edition, but #112 in modern editions. 37  Horace, Sermonum seu satyrarum seu eclogarum libri duo, ed. Denys Lambin, 2 vols (Frankfurt, 1577), II, p. 314b (on Epist. II.1.156): ‘Inest autem ambiguum non inelegans in verbo cepit’; Horace, [Carmina], ed. Laevinus Torrentius (see n. 104 below), p. 622 (on Epist. I.1.12); Melchior Cano, De locis theologicis (Louvain, 1564), p. 135 (on Jer. 1:11–12): ‘Hieremias in una significatione nomen acceperit, at Dominus ad alteram flectens, fecit ex sermonis ambiguitate concentum sententiae elegantissimum’; Franciscus Junius [Senior], Opera theologica, 2 vols (Geneva, 1608), II, col. 77 (on Ez. 7:11): ‘Hoc autem eo fit elegantius, quod Prophetica quadam ὑπαινίξεί Propheta utitur, quum vocem ambiguam adhibet ad populum Iudaeorum significandum.’ 38  On the critic of Pope, see Chapter Six below, p. 279; STA, p. 106. 39  Michael Fontaine, Funny Words in Plautine Comedy (Oxford, 2010). See also Mary Beard, Laughter in Ancient Rome: On Joking, Tickling, and Cracking Up (Berkeley, 2014), pp. 55–56. 40  John O’Brien, ‘The Humanist Tradition and Montaigne’, in The Oxford Handbook of Montaigne, ed. Philippe Desan (Oxford, 2016), 58–77, at pp. 60–61. 35  36 

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Indeed, I use one eye less because of the sea, For had I abstained from the sea [a mari], I’d be using the other just like this.41

In this couplet, Muret argues, is ‘a very elegant joke, most worthy of Plautus’s wit’, if we only emend the common reading a mari to a mare, still meaning ‘from the sea’ but now also readable as amare, giving the whole sense ‘if I had abstained from loving’. This latter meaning is heard by the audience, who know Pleusicles’s aim, and who have heard him musing on the reckless things done for love earlier in the scene; in this way, comments Muret, the youth ‘deludes [ludit] the soldier with a verbal ambiguity’.42 The meanings are shared out unequally, as with the barbed puns of Cicero, and here the editor has made it his job to restore, not to eliminate as is more often the case, the textual ambiguity. Muret’s delight and possessiveness in discovery are evident from his final observation that, although his reading is also found in Celio Secondo Curione’s 1568 Plautus, Muret had it already in 1565.43 Not all notices of deliberate ambiguity in poetry deployed elegantia, and not all were restricted to the straightforward pun. Paul White has called attention to an example which is both early and unusually sophisticated. Near the start of the commentary in his 1503 edition of Horace’s Odes, the prolific French scholar-­printer Jodocus Badius writes: Lest the multiplicity of interpretations here be attributed to the ignorance of the interpreter, the reader should know that poets favour a rich vocabulary from which multiple meanings can be drawn, which should be fully embraced and admitted as long as they are consistent with the context and the other things the poet has said.44 41  Plautus, Miles gloriosus, ll. 1307–8: ‘maris causa hercle hoc ego oculo utor minus, / nam si abstinuissem a mari, tamquam hoc uterer.’ 42  Marc-­Antoine Muret, Variae lectiones (Antwerp, 1580), p. 74: ‘iocus elegantissimus et Plautino dignissimus ingenio’, ‘ludit autem militem ambiguitate vocabuli’. To make the change, Muret has to adduce parallel uses of mare for mari, and these he finds in Ovid and Varro. For other textual suggestions here, see Charles Jastrow Mendelsohn, Studies in the Word-­Play of Plautus (Philadelphia, 1907), pp. 117–118. 43  Plautus, Comoediae viginti, ed. Johannes Sambucus, rev. Celio Curione (Basel, 1568), p. 458 [‘358’]. Muret gets in an extra pun on the Italian’s name: ‘Hoc quoque pro suo nuper edidit Coelius: sed Secundus.’ 44  Jodocus Badius, in Horace, Odae, ed. Badius (Paris, 1503), fol. 2r: ‘Verum ne multiplex interpretatio ignorantiae interpretis detur norit lector poetas studere foecundis vocabulis e quibus multiplex sensus elici potest qui omnis tunc amplectendus atque admittendus est: quando loco et caeteris poetae dictis congruit.’ I have slightly tweaked the excellent translation in Paul White, Jodocus Badius Ascensius: Commentary, Commerce and Print in the Renaissance (Oxford, 2012), p. 229.

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White reads this passage as evidence that Badius meant his commentaries not to provide ‘conclusive interpretations’, but to ‘enable readers to appreciate and imitate the author’s expressive skill’. However, Badius says nothing about the conclusiveness of interpretation: rather, he states that our reading should incorporate all that a line plausibly can mean. In other words, he advocates not the refusal to make a final decision, but the acceptance of multiplicity within that decision. It is not, I think, a gross anachronism to see in this comment an intuition like that of Beardsley’s Principle of Plenitude, an intuition perhaps engendered in each case by a reluctance to give up good meanings once patiently sniffed out.45 In this instance Badius does decide on a single sense, but the supposition of ambiguity allows him to explore in some detail the way that the language of poetry operates. The tone and context deserve careful attention. Badius is glossing Odes I.1.3–6: sunt quos curriculo pulverem Olympicum collegisse iuvat metaque fervidis evitata rotis palmaque nobilis terrarum dominos evehit ad deos;

Niall Rudd’s 2003 Loeb translation offers: ‘there are some who enjoy raising Olympic dust with their chariots (the turning post just cleared by their scorching wheels, and the palm of glory, exalt them to heaven as lords of the earth)’.46 But the last line is syntactically ambiguous, since terrarum dominos, ‘lords of the earth’, can be either the object of evehit, ‘exalt[s]’, or—as Rudd thinks—connected to deos, ‘gods’, and one’s choice must depend partly on how ironically one takes the dominos and the deos.47 Badius lists three possible readings, separated by the phrase aut sic, ‘or thus’: (1) ‘those who are lords of the earth consider themselves as gods if they obtain the palm’, (2) ‘the palm exalts men to the status of gods who rule the earth’, and (3) ‘it exalts them to the rank of ‘gods’, i.e., those Romans on the Capitol appointed as lords of the earth’. (Reading aloud, one might choose an interpretation by pronouncing deos and dominos with appropriate levels of irony.) Then comes Badius’s denial that the ambiguity is the product of ignorance—that it is a crux. The manoeuvre is defensive, denying his own incapacity as an interpreter, and yet the tone is not one of special pleading, for Badius presents his premise about the nature of poetry as something obvious, commonsensical, or at least sufficiently recognised as to need no justification. Here, however, he decides to choose one meaning, namely On which, see the Introduction above, p. 11. Horace, Odes and Epodes, tr. Niall Rudd (Cambridge, MA, 2003), p. 23. 47  Richard Bentley, at Horace, [Opera], ed. Bentley (Cambridge, 1711), p. 1, emends evehit to evehere, governed by nobilis: ‘the palm famed for exalting lords of the earth to the gods’. 45  46 

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(1), because Horace later remarks (lines 29–30) that ‘the ivy crown, prize of learned brows, joins me with the gods above’, drawing a parallel between the metaphorical apotheosis of athletes with the palm and the metaphorical apotheosis of the poet with the ivy. But as Badius notices, Horace ironises that parallel with the diminutive curriculum (‘little chariot’ or ‘little race’) and the worthless pulvis (dust) which the charioteer delights to collect as if it were gold or jewels: ‘the poet signifies the violent ambition of such men by trivialising the matter’.48 Once all these meanings and ironies are raised, Badius can hardly expect the reader to settle for one and forget the others; as so often, the spectre of ambiguity persists. If the pun or witticism formed the basis of many comments on poetic ambiguity—and we shall see some more examples in the next section—it was also the foundation of theoretical comments in the seventeenth century. This may be illustrated by two critical texts, one in the classical vein and the other offering a new approach; both make the leap from the pun to something more serious and important, but correspondingly harder to theorise. In doing so, each reveals in its own way a sort of aporia or contradiction at the heart of Western rhetoric. I will close this section by comparing the two books to an older Indian tradition of literary criticism that exhibits some of the same tensions. Of all the early modern Latin rhetorics built on a classical model, the most important and the most interesting is probably the Commentaria rhetorica sive oratoriae institutiones by the Dutch scholar Gerardus Joannes Vossius (1577–1649), a leading figure of European learning.49 When this treatise first appeared in 1606, Vossius, not yet thirty, had been serving for six years as rector of the Latin school in his hometown Dordrecht. It impressed great names: both Joseph Scaliger and Isaac Casaubon admired its erudition, as Vossius’s devoted former student Jan Rutgers informed him in a letter.50 Several further editions were printed up to 1643, and an abridgement for classroom use would be endorsed by the Dutch state in 1627 and go through thirty-­three editions.51 Vossius conceived the work as an introduction to Aristotle’s Rhetoric, a desideratum he discovered in his own teaching, but it reads less like an introduction than an exhaustive compendium on rhetoric and style, concerned above all to classify and schematise the elements of the language arts, from metaphor to elaborate literary registers. Its sources are manifold, from the classical orators, via 48  Badius, in Horace, Odae, fol. 2r: ‘Animadvertendum autem est poetam ut vehementem ambitionem talium significet rem extenuare.’ 49  On Vossius, see C. S. M. Rademaker, Life and Work of Gerardus Joannes Vossius (1577– 1649) (Assen, The Netherlands 1981), with a discussion of his Commentaria at pp. 72–81. 50  Jan Rutgers to G. J. Vossius, 30 May 1607, in British Library, Harley MS 7012, fol. 364v, quoted in Rademaker, Life and Work, pp. 75–76. 51  Thomas Conley, Rhetoric in the European Tradition (Chicago, 1990), p. 160.

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obscure grammarians of late antiquity, to scholastic jurists; its analysis of status theory is a paraphrase of Hermogenes, while its treatments of homonymy and amphiboly are built on Quintilian but incorporate a richer array of examples.52 Book IV on elocutio (delivery) begins with its foundation, elegantia (IV.1.3), which in turn consists of purity (IV.1.4–9) and perspicuity (IV.1.10–14), the first virtue of style.53 But as we have seen, elegantia was also the signature epithet of a good witticism, and Vossius’s book, which condenses an entire field between its covers, brings into focus the tension between the two ideas. Thus in addition to stating that perspicuity is essential to elegantia, he claims that elegantia should be a property of ambiguity, citing a pun from Macrobius: ‘we use an ambiguous word elegantly when it is taken in one meaning but alludes to another’.54 Again, ‘if an ambiguous phrase gives no elegance to a discourse, either it should be omitted entirely or, to remove the ambiguity, no doubt should be given to the doubtful word.’55 Given the foregoing, it might be assumed that Vossius is merely reiterating the usual classical taste for ambiguity without obscurity. But there are two problems with this. First, at the end of his analysis (VI.1.14) he makes an unexpected move, revealing that obscurity is not the enemy after all. In fact, there are two occasions that might prompt the poet to obscurity— the expression of disordered emotion, for which hyperbaton is suitable, and the delivery of a prophecy. The latter is illustrated by a perennial textual crux in the penultimate line of Vergil’s fourth Eclogue: it must be admitted, he concludes, that whichever reading we accept, the line is obscure, but Vergil rightly made it so, for a measure of obscurity is fitting to an oracle.56 And if not obscurity, why not obscure ambiguity? The question is left open. There were occasional precedents for this position; notably, Boccaccio had defended the obscurity of poets by comparison to that of the Bible, while Erasmus had suggested that enigma or obscure allegory was justifiable on the grounds that readers should be made to work for the meaning, a variant of Augustine’s defence of obscurity in Scripture.57 But 52  Gerardus Johannes Vossius, Commentariorum rhetoricorum sive oratoriarum institutionum libri sex, 4th ed., 2 vols (Leiden, 1643), I, pp. 167–169 (I.10.4) on status theory. 53  Ibid., I, p. 30 (IV.1.10): ‘summa orationis virtus’, contrast the discussion of venustas at I, pp. 501, 472–475. 54  Ibid., II, p. 30 (IV.1.10): ‘Eleganter etiam utimur voce in se ambigua, cum ita una accipitur significatione, ut ad alteram adludatur.’ 55  Ibid., II, p. 33 (IV.1.10): ‘Quod si dictio ambigua nihil elegantiae adferat orationi: vel ea abstinendum omnino erit: vel voci dubiae subijcienda est non dubia, ut ita ambiguitas tollatur.’ 56  Ibid., II, p. 39. 57  Giovanni Boccaccio, Genealogia deorum gentium, XIV.12, in his Opere, ed. and tr. Vittore Branca, 10 vols (Milan, 1998), VII/VIII.2, pp. 1430–1436. Erasmus, De duplici copia verborum

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Vossius is doing what he can within the terms of classical aesthetics, gesturing towards a value he cannot quite theorise. Second, neither Vossius’s examples nor his subsequent analysis of them are immune from obscurity and doubt. The most revealing moments in the history of thought occur when a writer struggles to reconcile two contradictory truths. One such moment is seen in Vossius’s chapter on the figure of syllepsis, ‘when a single equivocal word is used in two senses, or when many things are signified by a single ambiguous word’.58 His examples are highly heterogeneous, ranging from simple Plautine witticisms like Vorsutior es quam rota figularis, ‘You’ve been around more times than a potter’s wheel’, to John 12:32, ‘And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.’59 The biblical line is complex: Jesus, addressing the people upon his triumphal return to Jerusalem, is prophesying his imminent death, and John himself glosses the words at 12:33, ‘This he said, signifying what death he should die.’ But ‘lifted up from the earth’ may refer to either Christ’s physical crucifixion or his exaltation into heaven. Vossius comments: ‘Christ spoke of his mode of death, as the Evangelist says clearly, but the Jews accepted the word in the other sense, as is apparent enough from what follows.’60 Here again is the partitioning of audiences by ambiguity, only not for a laugh, but to show in earnest the darkac rerum commentarii duo, I.18, in EOO, I.6, p. 66, where the defence of enigma is an implicit rebuttal to Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, VIII.3.73 and VIII.6.52. On Augustine see Chapter Four above, pp. 138–138. On the defence of obscurity in poetry see further Manfred Fuhrmann, ‘Obscuritas: Das Problem der Dunkelheit in der rhetorischen und literarästhetischen Theorie der Antike’, in Immanente Ästhetik – Ästhetische Reflexion: Lyrik als Paradigma der Moderne, ed. Wolfgang Iser (Munich, 1966), pp. 47–72, at 59–69, Päivi Mehtonen, Obscure Language, Unclear Literature: Theory and Practice from Quintilian to the Enlightenment (Helsinki, 2003), pp. 116–121; and Ineke Sluiter, ‘Obscurity’, in Canonical Texts and Scholarly Practices: A Global Comparative Approach, eds Anthony Grafton and Glenn Most (Cambridge, 2016), pp. 34–41, at 48, noting ancient defences on the grounds of appropriateness to the subject. 58  Vossius, Commentariorum rhetoricorum . . . libri sex, II, p. 181 (IV.10.7): ‘σύλληψις, cum vox anceps usurpatur communiter: sive, cum verbo ambiguo res una plures significantur.’ On Vossius and syllepsis, see Garth Tissol, The Face of Nature: Wit, Narrative, and Cosmic Origins in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Princeton, 1997), p. 18 and appendices; on syllepsis as an ambiguous rhetorical category in French criticism, see Jacques Dürrenmatt, Le vertige du vague: les romantiques face à l’ambiguïté (Paris, 2001), pp. 51–54. Compare also Nicolas Caussin, De eloquentia sacra et humana libri xvi (Paris, 1643), p. 411. Syllepsis would later be sneered at by critics of Vergil and Homer, but receive a magnificent defence, with countless examples—including a line of Pope quoted as ‘Thare graet Ann somtimes counsels takes & somtimes thea’—by Jacques Philippe d’Orville in an extended note from his Animadversiones in Charitonis Aphrodisiensis, 2 vols (Amsterdam, 1750), I, pp. 394–401. Richard Hurd would rebut this in Epistola ad Augustum, on which see Chapter Seven below, p. 298. 59  Plautus, Epidicus, III.2.371. The irony of exaltation in death is heard again in Lorenzo’s comment on hanged Horatio in Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedie, II.4.61: ‘Yet is he at the highest now he is dead.’ 60  Vossius, Commentariorum rhetoricorum . . . libri sex, II, p. 182: ‘Nam de mortis genere

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ness of the unbelievers. Doubt creeps back into the figure—we have gone beyond the trivial, beyond the pun, to the ambiguity that reveals fractures and divisions in the nature of things, the ambiguity that makes truth. But the real difficulty is still to come. Vossius concludes with remarks on the special semantics of syllepsis: it is a species of synecdoche, for it holds together many meanings in a single word, just as the head may represent all the other parts of the body. Such an inclusiveness, he says, contradicts Aristotle’s dictum, quoted in both Greek and Latin, that ‘not to have a single meaning is to have no meaning’.61 At this point he is in an excellent position to rethink Aristotle’s assumptions, but instead he pulls back: syllepsis, he maintains, ‘occurs not in common usage but in witticisms [lusus ingenii], so that it is not the use of a word so much as the abuse, in which respect you might also call it a type of catachresis, in the broader sense of that term’.62 This is obviously a fudge, not because such devices are more common than Vossius credits, but because the Aristotelian claim is absolute—it does not say that language is by and large univocal, but that language to be coherent must always be univocal. Vossius’s analysis reveals an inability to extricate itself from the Aristotelian account of meaning we outlined in Chapter One, that is, to reconcile its demand for perspicuity with the pleasure of tropes like syllepsis. Ambiguity reveals itself as a sensuous, ingenious feature unassimilable to the classical—rhetorical— analysis of poetry, the jigsaw piece, like Percival Bartlebooth’s ‘W’, that has no place in the assembled puzzle. A related quandary was faced by the Jesuit critic Dominique Bouhours (1628–1702) in his 1687 book of dialogues, La manière de bien penser dans les ouvrages d’esprit. This work, appearing only forty years after the final edition of Vossius’s rhetoric, seems to come from another planet: in place of Latin is the vernacular, in place of elegantia is the new virtue of délicatesse, in place of serried authorities is a fluid prose with only occasional notes, and, most significantly, in place of the analysis of style as a fixed object is an introspection on style as affect, a turn to the mode of Montaigne.63 In the fourth and final dialogue of the book, Bouhours’s mouthpiece Eudoxe convinces his interlocutor Philanthe, a fan of baroque poetry, to abandon his taste for the obscure and over-­refined.64 Quintilian is the locutum esse Christum, clare ait Evangelista: aliter vero accepisse Judaeos, satis liquet ex iis, quae idem mox subjungit.’ 61  Metaphysics IV, 1006b6–9, on which see Chapter One above, p. 31. 62  Vossius, Commentariorum rhetoricorum . . . libri sex, II, p. 183 (IV.10.7): ‘non fit ex usu communi, sed lusu ingenii; ut non tam vocis sit usio, quam abusio: quo respectu fortasse ad κατάχρησιν etiam referre possis, significatione eius vocis paullum extensa’. 63  Victor Hamm, ‘Father Dominic Bouhours and Neo-­Classical Criticism’, in Jesuit Thinkers of the Renaissance, ed. Gerard Smith (Milwaukee, 1939), pp. 63–74. 64  The mockery of baroque poetry as obscurantist would remain a common topos: compare,

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presiding deity as Eudoxe critically surveys the features productive of obscurity, including ambiguity, with examples from Tacitus and Martial.65 Each time Philanthe expresses a liking for obscurity in some area—‘the secrets of nature demand perhaps a little mystery’—it is brusquely stamped out by Eudoxe.66 All this is conventional enough. But earlier in the book the reader has encountered something quite different, even antithetical, for the first dialogue attempts to articulate the pleasure of a good witticism, and in doing so, indirectly invokes a value perilously close to that of obscurity.67 Philanthe recalls a verse by the court poet Vincent Voiture, an apologia addressed to Cardinal Mazarin on behalf of a coachman whose reckless driving had tipped the cardinal into a pond or river: He did not think he could do any ill, For everyone says that whatever you do In war, in peace, in travels or business, You always remain on your feet.68

It would be a shame, says Philanthe, to reject such fine conceits because they were strictly false in meaning, but Eudoxe assures him that he need not, for although ‘You always remain on your feet’ is literally false, it is figuratively true: ‘Truth is here joined to falsehood, and remarkably, the false leads to the true, for one passes from the literal sense, which is the pun’s false meaning, to the figurative which is the true. . . . The first gives way all of a sudden to the second, making us accept the change pleasantly.’69 for instance, Alain-­René Lesage’s picaresque satire, Gil Blas (1724), in his Oeuvres, 4 vols (Paris, 1828), III, p. 98, where the aspiring gongorist Fabrice Nuñez declares of his own work, ‘C’est l’obscurité qui en fait tout le mérite’, and is swiftly quashed by the hero. 65  Dominique Bouhours, La maniére de bien penser dans les ouvrages d’esprit (1687: Amsterdam, 1692), pp. 337–98, esp. 381–382 on ambiguity, with the example of Tacitus, Annales XV.44, ‘odio generis humani’, meaning either the human hatred for Christians or vice versa (compare the stock example of ‘the love of God’). 66  Bouhours, La manière, p. 364: ‘les secrets de la nature demandent peut-­estre je ne sçay quoy de mystérieux’. 67  On the witty équivoque in seventeenth-­century France, see the brief remarks in Alain Faudemay, Le clair et l’obscur à l’Âge classique (Geneva, 2001), pp. 186–88. 68  Vincent Voiture, ‘LXXXVIII’, in his Poésies, ed. Henri Lafay, 2 vols (Paris, 1971), II, p. 195: Il ne crut pas versant pouvoir mal-­faire, Car chacun dit que quoy que vous faciez, En guerre, en paix, en voyage, en affaire, Vous vous trouvez tousjours dessus vos pieds. 69  Bouhours, La manière, p. 19: ‘La vérité y est jointe à la fausseté, et ce qu’il y a de remarquable, le faux y conduit au vray; car du sens propre qui est le faus sens de l’équivoque, on passe au figuré qui est le vray. . . . La premiére mene tout d’un coup à la seconde, en nous faisant prendre le change agréablement.’ A similar thought appears in the second dialogue,

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This description reflects a meditation on the phenomenology of interpreting a pun, one that comes not from a reading of classical rhetoric, but from personal experience. And it relies on a challenge to the Aristotelian dichotomy of true and false: Ernst Cassirer remarked long ago that Bouhours could escape the straitjacket of classical vocabulary only by invoking ‘falsehood’ as a component of aesthetics.70 As with Vossius, we see a straining to describe the effects of wit, to articulate an appropriate calculus of value using a limited palette of terms; a similar conflict underwrites Bouhours’s embrace of the sublime as theorised by Boileau.71 But by contrast to Vossius, the values of La manière are those of the royal court, and this is reflected in its choice of poetic examples. Echoing Cicero on Varus, Bouhours favours puns that flatter the great, such as Mazarin, and so reinforce hierarchy, over those that might subvert it. Thus he criticises an epigram by Antoine Girard de Saint-­Amant on the burning of the Palais de Justice in 1618—an epigram later recalled by Victor Hugo as he imagined the bustle of the Palais’s great hall in the first chapter of his Notre-­Dame. Saint-­Amant had joked that Dame Justice set fire to her Palais (the word also meaning ‘palate’) by eating too much espice—spice, or slang for a shifty bounder.72 Eudoxe complains that the joke doesn’t make sense, but this is hard to credit; what Bouhours really dislikes is the jest’s incendiary tone. By contrast, Eudoxe admires Martial’s witticism to Domitian: ‘The people speak in different tongues [diversa vox], but with one tongue [vox una] they call you the true father of your country’. Here Eudoxe makes his point differently: both senses of vox ‘are true in their different connections, and neither destroys the other. On the contrary, they are in agreement, and from the union of the two opposite senses comes an ingenious je ne sais quoi, founded on the equivocal word vox.’73 p. 184, where Eudoxe also compares the polysemous witticism to the hero Rinaldo, who kills more men than he deals blows (Torquato Tasso, Gerusalemme liberata, XX.55.1). 70  Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1932), trs Fritz Koelln and James Pettegrove (Princeton, 2009), pp. 301–22. 71  Richard Scholar, The Je-­Ne-­Sais-­Quoi in Early Modern Europe: Encounters with a Certain Something (Oxford, 2005), pp. 10–13. 72  Antoine Girard de Saint-­Amant, ‘LIII: Epigramme’, in Oeuvres, eds Jacques Bailbé and Jean Lagny, 4 vols (Paris, 1967–71), I, p. 296. 73  Martial, De spectaculis III.1: ‘Vox diversa sonat, populorum est vox tamen una: Cum verus patriae diceris esse pater’, discussed by Bouhours, La manière, p. 22: ‘Ils sont tous deux vrais selon leurs divers rapports, et l’un ne détruit point l’autre. Ils s’accordent au contraire ensemble, et de l’union de ces deux sens opposes il résulte je ne sçay quoy d’ingénieux qui est fondé sur le mot équivoque de vox’. See also p. 145 on the elegant syllepsis. Given this example, I cannot agree with Yves Giraud, ‘Le goût classique et la pointe’, in Le langage littéraire au XVIIe siècle: De la rhétorique à la littérature, ed. Christian Wentzlaff-­Eggebert (Tübingen, 1991), pp. 95–108, at 106, that Bouhours accepts only witticisms of sense, rather than wordplay.

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This is a notable turn, for the phrase je ne sais quoi, far from being a mere fudge, was a pet subject of Bouhours, and he had already devoted a dialogue to it in an earlier book, the 1671 Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène.74 That touching piece does not try to define the je ne sais quoi, but only considers a range of places in which it is found—in the bonds of an intimate friendship, in the striking face caught in a crowd, the charm of a courtier, the mysterious quality of urbanitas lauded by Cicero, finally in divine grace itself, supported triumphantly by a remark of Augustine’s.75 Bouhours’s je ne sais quoi is both courtly and religious, and above all affective, enticing by reserve, ‘like those veiled beauties who are the more esteemed the less they are exposed to view, and to whom something is always added by the imagination’.76 This is a key image for Bouhours, who repeats it in La manière, both in the first dialogue to describe the working of metaphor, and in the second, implied by contrast, to describe the quality of délicatesse. It is clarified, finally, in the fourth, when Eudoxe scorns literary obscurity as ‘like those women who wear masks in the street, or who hide in their hoods and want not to be known—one must let them pass without so much as a glance’.77 Philanthe is surprised, for the image is so similar to the positive one used earlier, but Eudoxe is able to make the distinction: what we want is not a mask or a thick veil that obscures entirely, but a transparent one which lets us see a little and so desire more: ‘there must be a little mystery in a delicate thought, but one must never make a mystery of one’s thoughts’.78 The association of ambiguity with desire is perennial. Montaigne had written of man’s unquenchable thirst to interpret: ‘his nourishment is wonder, the chase, ambiguity, as Apollo once made clear in speaking to us always duplicitously, obscurely and obliquely, never sating us but 74  On the complex history of the je ne sais quoi, see Suzanne Guelloux, ‘Le P. Bouhours et le je ne sais quoi’, Littératures: Annales publiées trimestriellement par la faculté des lettres et sciences humaines de Toulouse 18, n.s., 6 (1971), 3–14; Nicholas Cronk, The Classical Sublime: French Neoclassicism and the Language of Literature (Charlottesville, 2002), pp. 61–4, and esp. Richard Scholar, The Je-­ne-­sais-­quoi. 75  Dominique Bouhours, Les entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène, eds Bernard Beugnot and Gilles Declercq (Paris, 2003), pp. 279–297, citing Cicero, Brutus 171, and (at 297) Augustine, Confessions, X.40. The line about divine grace caused some religious controversy, on which see Scholar, The Je-­ne-­sais-­quoi, pp. 63–69. 76  Ibid., p. 288: ‘il est du je ne sais quoi comme de ces beautés couvertes d’un voile, qui sont d’autant plus estimées, qu’elles sont moins exposées à la vûe, et ausquelles l’imagination ajoûte toûjours quelque chose.’ 77  Bouhours, La manière, p. 16, comparing metaphors to ‘voiles transparens, qui laissent voir ce qu’ils couvrent’. See p. 159 for the heroines without veils. 78  Ibid., p. 369: ‘C’est comme ces femmes qui vont masquées par les ruës, ou qui se cachent dans leurs coëfes, et qui ne veulent pas qu’on les connoisse: il faut les laisser passer, et ne les regarder pas seulement . . . il doit y avoir un peu de mystére dans une pensée délicate; mais on ne doit jamais faire un mystére de ses pensées.’ On veils and ambiguity, see Faudemay, Le clair, pp. 211–215.

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only amusing and occupying us’.79 What Bouhours has found is a third level within Quintilian’s binary of clarity and obscurity; the category of the je ne sais quoi, captured in the image of a veiled beauty, allows him to find a place for the mysterious, for the ambiguity of a pun—and of poetry itself— within an aesthetic framework still broadly indebted to classical rhetoric. The flavour is deeply Catholic, comparable to the aesthetics of a work like Claude-­François Menestrier’s La philosophie des images énigmatiques. One cannot be surprised that it was lost on an English audience of the next century: when John Oldmixon paraphrased La manière de bien penser as The Arts of Logick and Rhetorick in 1728, he left out the allusion to je ne sais quoi and put in instead a standard-­issue Augustan rant against puns.80 The struggle to fit ambiguity into schemes of rhetorical or poetic value was not restricted to Western criticism. To see this, we may consider in parenthesis an entirely different tradition, one that exhibits some superficial similarities but no genetic connection to the Aristotelian legacy of the West: namely, the tradition of Sanskrit poetics as it evolved between the eighth and the fourteenth centuries of our era. In its development we see a shift congruent with that which occurred between Vossius and Bouhours, specifically a turn from the classification of tropes and verbal ornaments (alaṅkāras) to a system in which such devices are subordinate to a more fundamental and unanalysable value, that of rasa, literally ‘taste’ or ‘relish’, the essence of poetry as affect. Already in the alaṅkāra treatises of the early period is an essential difference from their Western counterparts, as the tropes are studied as elements not of rhetoric—clear and persuasive speech—but of poetry, with its intrinsic obliqueness (vakrokti).81 For this 79  Michel de Montaigne, ‘De l’experience’, in his Essais, eds Jean Balsamo et al. (Paris, 2007), p. 1115: ‘ses poursuites sont sans terme, et sans forme. Son aliment, c’est admiration, chasse, ambiguité: Ce que declaroit assez Apollo, parlant tousjours à nous doublement, obscurement et obliquement, ne nous repaissant pas, mais nous amusant et embesongnant.’ Compare Pierre Charron, De la sagesse livres trois (Bordeaux, 1601), p. 136 (I.16): ‘son aliment est doubte, ambiguité’. Victoria Welby would have similar thoughts in an 1897 typescript, published in Susan Petrilli, Signifying and Understanding: Reading the Works of Victoria Welby (Berlin, 2011), p. 477: ‘All expression is more or less ambiguous: and were it not for this, apathy would descend upon us; inquiry, analysis, criticism, even comparisonn, would die of inanition.’ 80  John Oldmixon, The Arts of Logick and Rhetorick (London, 1728), pp. 16–19. Only two years earlier, Daniel Defoe, The Political History of the Devil (London, 1726), p. 69, had denounced the portrayal of Christ in Paradise Lost as a ‘mere je ne scai Quoi’—the ambiguity of it held no delight. 81  For a fuller discussion of this contrast see Gerow, A Glossary, pp. 13–16. The point is central to twentieth-­century ideas of poetry, see, e.g., Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Understanding Poetry: An Anthology for College Students, 2nd ed. (1950: New York, 1956), p. 573: ‘Poetry . . . does not lead directly to its subject: it encompasses its subject.’ Michael Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry (Bloomington, IA, 1978), p. 1: ‘poetry expresses concepts and things by indirection’. R. S. Pathak, Oblique Poetry in Indian and Western Poetics (New Delhi,

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reason the figure of śleşa, the artful ambiguity, plays a much more pronounced rôle from the start.82 But it would become even more significant in later Indian systems, such as those of Rudrata and Ānandavardhana, focusing on the ideas first of rasa and then of suggestiveness (dhvani).83 To clarify that significance, let us examine the place of śleşa in the Sāhityadarpaṇa (Mirror of Composition), written in Kalinga (present-­day Orissa), eastern India, by the fourteenth-­century court scholar Viśvanātha Kavirāja; this text is analogous to Vossius’s Commentaria in being a late, composite work that synthesises a number of earlier schools.84 Viśvanātha identifies the three excellences (guṇas) of poetry as sweetness, energy, and perspicuity, and criticises ambiguity as a fault (doṣa) of the last.85 This is consistent with the orthodox mīmāṃsā schools of interpretation, according to which, as in the Aristotelian tradition, there must be a unity of sense in a text, uncoverable by contextual analysis, consideration of intention, and so on.86 But only a little later Viśvanātha explores the alaṅkāras, and among them the śleşa, to which he gives eight formal causes: coalescence of letters, of affixes, of genders, verbal stems, inflected words, inflections, numbers, and tongues. As we have seen, pre-­modern Western typologies of ambiguity, from those of Aristotle and Augustine to James Gordon Huntley’s list of the causes of ambiguity in Hebrew, are negative in character, showing the reader what to look out for; here, by contrast, we have what amounts to a playbook. And the scope of śleşa, like the Vossian syllepsis, 1988), offers a full account of vakrokti; its discussion of Western criticism before the twentieth century is unconvincing, but see pp. 93–105 for a comparison between vakrokti and the New Criticism. 82  Viśwanātha Kavirāja, The Sáhitya-­Darpana or Mirror of Composition, tr. J. R. Ballantyne and Pramadá-­Dása Mitra, 2 vols (Kolkata, 1851–75), II, pp. 339–49, beginning with a discussion of vakrokti or ‘crooked speech’, a term with a number of applications but here denoting the use of śleşa in a dramatic dialogue. Compare also p. 165 on poetic suggestion or rasa, another important feature of Sanskrit poetry. See Edwin Gerow, Indian Poetics (Wiesbaden, 1977), pp. 242–243 on śleşa, and p. 224 for vakrokti as the idea that poetry signifies differently to normal discourse. For the earlier treatments, see Dandin, Kāvya-­darśa, ed. and tr. S. K. Belvalkar (Pune, 1924), pp. 43–45, and Bhāmaha, Kāvyālaṅkāra, ed. and tr. P. V. Naganatha Sastry (Delhi, 1970), pp. 59–62; on the first important discussion of śleşa by Rudraṭa (ninth century), see K. Leela Prakash, Rudrata’s Kāvyālaṅkāra: An Estimate (Delhi, 1999), pp. 54–59 and 157–158. On alaṅkāras see S. K. De, Sanskrit Poetics as a Study of Aesthetic, ed. Edwin Gerow (Berkeley, 1963), pp. 23–32. Gerow, Glossary, pp. 39–42 and 288–306. 83  On dhvani, see V. K. Chari, ‘The Indian Theory of Suggestion (dhvani)’, Philosophy East and West, 27 (1977), 391–399, and idem, ‘Validity in Interpretation: Some Indian Views’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 36 (1978), 329–340, at pp. 336–337, with an intriguing comparison to Empson; a similar comparison is made in Gupteshwar Prasad, I. A. Richards and Indian Theory of Rasa (New Delhi, 1994), p. 192. 84  Gerow, Indian Poetics, pp. 281–2. 85  Viśwanātha, The Sáhitya-­Darpana, II, pp. 320–1 (VIII.612–13) on perspicuity, and p. 272 (VII.574) on ambiguity. 86  V. K. Chari, Sanskrit Criticism (Honolulu, 1990), pp. 176–182 and 189–194.

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goes far beyond the simple pun, as is evident from the illustrations given in Rāmacaraṇa’s commentary, which accompanies an 1875 translation of the Sāhityadarpaṇa. In one extraordinary verse, an anthology piece, a pauper addresses a monarch:87

prthukārtasvarapātram bhūşitaniḥśeşaparijanaṃ deva, vilasatkareṇugahanaṃ samprati samam āvayoḥ sadanam.87 The structure of the couplet is as follows: ‘The house of each of us, o lord [deva], is for now the same, being A, B, and C.’ A, B, and C are compound epithets, each of which can denote something splendid or something sordid, depending on the division of syllables— (A) prthukārtasvarapātram means ‘containing much gold’ [prthu-­ kārtasvara-­pātram] and ‘containing the sound of suffering children’ [prthuka-­ārta-­svara-­pātram]; (B) bhūşitaniḥśeşaparijanaṃ means ‘whose attendants are all adorned’ [bhūşita-­nihśeşa-parijanaṃ] and ‘whose whole family sits on the ground’ [bhū-­uşita-­nihśeşa-parijanaṃ]; and (C) vilasatkareṇugahanaṃ, means ‘abounding in shining elephants’ [vilasat-­karenu-­gahanam] and ‘abounding in mouse-­droppings’ [vilasatka-­reṇu-gahanaṃ].88

A rococo example of what the Stoics had called ‘common’ ambiguity, the same syllables thus describe at once the speaker’s poverty and the monarch’s opulence. It is a challenge to hold all the meanings in one’s mind at once, but the couplet is incomprehensible without them: neither triad is primary or secondary. Given that the verse is offered as an illustration of a poetic ornament, how can it be distinguished from verses which show the fault of ambiguity or obscurity? Viśvanātha gives one hint. Immediately after his discussion of faults, he mentions a number of exceptions, in which the doṣa may become a guṇa insofar as it contributes to a higher poetic virtue: obscurity is good, then, when ‘the speaker and the person spoken to are wise’, for the court savants may enjoy an ambiguity even if it is obscure to 87  Viśwanātha, Sáhitya-­Darpana, II, p. 342 (VIII.643). Also in Vidyakara, Subhāṣitaratnakoṣa, tr. Daniel Ingalls as An Anthology of Sanskrit Court Poetry (Cambridge, MA, 1965), p. 576, no. 1644. I am deeply indebted to Jonathan Katz for his transliteration and close discussion with me of this verse and of the genre. 88  Mitra translates this last clause as ‘with holes [vila] filled with [gahanaṃ] heaps of dust [reṇu]’.

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others. This is an essential point, and one not properly appreciated by Western critics in the tradition of Quintilian: the value of perspicuity, and therefore of ambiguity, is not absolute, but relative to the audience. As with the Western critics, however, the criterion of value turns not only on formal merits, but on social decorum. Viśvanātha writes that ambiguity may be a virtue if it is used for ‘artful praise’ (vyāja-­stuti), his term for a figure in which praise is disguised as blame, or blame as praise—the witty end justifies the means.89 It is at this juncture that Rāmacaraṇa points the reader ahead to the couplet quoted above as an example of ‘artful praise’. But this leaves open the question: is it praise disguised as blame, or vice versa? Are we dealing with something like Voiture’s address to Cardinal Mazarin, or its opposite, black burlesque? There is perhaps a subversive hint beneath the poem’s apparent humility, in the adverb ‘for now’ [samprati], which suggests that the current state of affairs may change, whether by the king’s generosity or by the vagaries of fortune.90 At its most baroque, this elaboration of śleşa produced entire epics telling two distinct stories at the same time, using the same syllables, a literature revealed to Western orientalists in the early nineteenth century.91 It is not surprising, then, that Viśvanātha’s analysis of ambiguity is far more nuanced than his European counterparts, incorporating a doctrine of suggestiveness (dhvani) that anticipates later Western theories of implicature, 89  Viśwanātha, Sáhitya-­Darpana, II, pp. 307–308 (VII.582, 585); on artful praise see pp. 405–406 (X.707). On ambiguity and ironic praise, see D. C. Muecke, The Compass of Irony (London, 1969), pp. 71–72. Compare also the passage of Pseudo-­Demetrius quoted below, n. 97. 90  According to Ingalls’ note in An Anthology, p. 576, Indian commentators favoured the first reading. 91  This genre has been almost entirely unstudied; there is only one, wonderful monograph, namely Yigal Bronner, Extreme Poetry: The South Asian Movement of Simultaneous Narration (New York, 2010). However, there remains no work on the reception of this literature in Europe. The signal figure in that reception was the indefatigable scholar and colonial administrator Henry Thomas Colebrooke (1765–1837), who collected and commissioned copies of the greatest of these epics, the Raghava Pandaviya, now at British Library MSS San. 974, San. 1462, and San. 898c (with marginal glosses in English). At the head of the last, fol. 1v, Colebrooke wrote, ‘A studied ambiguity runs through this poem, which may be interpreted as descriptive either of Ráma and other descendants of Dasánat’ha; or Yudhisht’hira & descendants of Pándu’. A fuller discussion appears in his article ‘On Sanscrit and Pracrit Poetry’, Asiatick Researches 10 (1811), 389–474, at 422–4, repr. in his Miscellaneous Essays, 2 vols (London, 1837), II, pp. 98–100. Most subsequent notices relied on Colebrooke: see, e.g., William Ward, A View of the History, Literature and Mythology of the Hindoos, 3 vols (London, 1822), II, pp. 394–395; Johann Gottlieb Rhode, Über religiöse Bildung, Mythologie und Philosophie der Hindus, 2 vols (Leipzig, 1827), I, p. 146; and Jean Lacroix de Marlès, Histoire générale de l’Inde ancienne et moderne, 6 vols (Paris, 1828), III, p. 68. The dominant reaction was astonishment, though now and then we hear instead contempt, e.g., in ‘Vedic India’, Calcutta Review 32 (1859), 400–36, at p. 427: ‘The men that could contrive, and the nation that could appreciate, such perverted efforts of the imagination, were worthy of each other.’

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and a debate as to whether śleşa should be considered a figure of words or of thought.92 Furthermore, śleşa, like the other figures, is for Viśvanātha subject to rasa, which he characterises, as did others, as a quasi-­religious wonder: This rasa—arising from the exaltation of purity—indivisible, self-­ manifested, made up of joy and thought, free from the contact of anything else perceived, akin to the contemplator’s perception of God, the life whereof is hyper-­physical wonder, is enjoyed . . . by the competent and receptive audience, as is the form of the Deity by the receptive contemplator.93

Daniel Ingalls has argued that rasa finds its closest Western analogue in the sublime of Longinus.94 But it more closely resembles Bouhours’s category of the je ne sais quoi, sharing both its courtly and its religious aspects, as well as its mystical air. Its function within Viśvanātha’s scheme of poetic value is equitable, mitigating minor faults in service of a greater beauty: as Rāmcarana explains, the exceptions by which a doṣa becomes a guṇa are made to the end of rasa.95 This marks a step beyond Vossius’s ad hoc exceptions to the perspicuity maxim, and reflects a culture far more attuned to the intricacies of verbal play. But at the last count it suffers the same theoretical limitation: to invoke rasa in defence of some śleşas and not others is to appeal to a criterion of value which itself must be assumed rather than argued for. It is evident that those scholars could assume that criterion among themselves, since they agreed on what rasa was and where it could be found; but the modern, Western reader is likely to find herself less certain. That is, we may have a natural sense of why one poetic ambiguity works better than another, but Viśvanātha does not provide an objective calculus—nor, perhaps, would it be possible to do so. His exceptions are more nuanced than Vossius’s, but they remain arbitrary. The Indian excursus points to the underlying difficulties in trying to square ambiguity with a system of poetic value, whether that system be anchored in elegantia or délicatesse or rasa. In the case of Vossius and Bouhours, both treated style using a conceptual vocabulary derived from Aristotle via Quintilian, and both experienced aesthetic phenomena difficult to analyse with that vocabulary. The idea of ambiguity without obscurity only went so far: in considering its effects, whether by reference to a syllepsis encompassing the simple pun and the profound, or to an affective 92  See Viśwanātha, Sáhitya-­Darpana, II, pp. 155–166 on dhvani, and II, pp. 344–345 for the debate about śleşa, on which compare Gerow, A Glossary, pp. 62–65. 93  Ibid., II, pp. 39–44 (III.32–33), at p. 40. I have gently adapted Mitra’s translation. 94  Daniel Ingalls, ‘Introduction’, in Ānandavardhana, Dhvanyāloka, and Abhinavagupta, Locana, tr. Ingalls et al. (Cambridge, MA, 1990), pp. 38–39. 95  Viśwanātha, Sáhitya-­Darpana, II, p. 304 (VII.579com).

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je ne sais quoi, each critic struggled to articulate a new sense of what the category of wit, and perhaps that of literature, might comprehend. Their efforts ended in aporia, but it was a revelatory aporia nonetheless. Persona non Rata We have considered the poetic ambiguity as a stroke of elegant wit; it remains for us to consider it as an act of deceit. The two are hard to keep apart, as we have already seen in Muret’s example from Plautus, where the ambiguity deceives Pyrgopolynices and delights the reader. The more important sort of deceit is political, veiling the critique or mockery of power.96 In antiquity this had been suggested in the rhetorical treatise Peri hermēneias (On Verbal Expression) attributed falsely to the classical Athenian orator Demetrius of Phalerum. The author explains that a ‘verbal figure’ (eschē­ matismenos en logō, V.287) can be used tactfully to criticise a friend or to censure a tyrant, for it offers a middle way between shameful flattery and dangerous reproach (V.294).97 The evident danger is that later readers could not be sure that they were interpreting correctly. On a cancelled notebook page of the 1660s, Thomas Browne opines that ‘Many things are casually or favourably superadded unto the best Authors and the lines of many made to imply \containe/ that advantageous sense and exposition which was never intended by them.’98 His example is Lucan’s line about Nero, Pharsalia I.56–7, ‘Aetheris immensi partem si presseris unam / sentiet axis onus’, ‘If you should press on one side of the immense heaven, its axis will feel the weight’.99 While this might suggest an encomium on the em96  On this see, e.g., Dustin Griffin, Satire: A Critical Reintroduction (Lexington, KY, 1994), pp. 138–141. 97  [Pseudo-­]Demetrius, On Style, ed. and tr. W. Rhys Roberts (Cambridge, 1902), p. 200: ‘Πολλαχῆ μέντοι καὶ ἐπαμφοτερίζουσιν· οἷς ἐοικέναι εἴ τις ἐθέλοι καὶ ψόγους εἰκαιοψόγους εἶναι θέλοι τις, παράδειγμα τὸ τοῦ Αἰσχίνου ἐπὶ τοῦ Τηλαυγοῦς· πᾶσα γὰρ σχεδὸν ἡ περὶ τὸν Τηλαυγῆ διήγησις ἀπορίαν παρέχοι, εἴτε θαυμασμὸς εἴτε χλευασμός ἐστι. τὸ δὲ τοιοῦτον εἶδος ἀμφίβολον, καίτοι εἰρωνεία οὐκ ὂν ἔχει τινὰ ὅμως καὶ εἰρωνείας ἔμφασιν.’ (‘But often [words] are also ambiguous; if anyone should wish likewise to make his censures appear accidental, he has the example of Aeschines on Telauges, for almost the whole narrative about Telauges will make the reader uncertain if it be great praise or mockery. This ambiguous form, although it is not irony, has the appearance of irony.’) See also the commentary on the passage in Piero Vettori, Commentarii in librum Demetrii Phalerei de elocutione (Florence, 1562), pp. 253–54. The eventual version of this idea would be that of Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates, ed. and tr. Howard and Edna Hong (Princeton, 1989), p. 249, on the pleasure of faking approval for the bad, ironically outdoing praise in such a way that nobody realises the deception. 98  British Library, MS Sloane 1879, fol. 26r, crossed out. 99  Lucan, Pharsalia I.56–57, quoted by Browne as: ‘Aetheris immensi spatium si presseris altrum / sentiet axis onus’.

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peror’s titanic influence, it might also be, in Browne’s words, ‘a close jeere at Neros fatt and swaggy belly’.100 Early modern scholars could also unravel more historically intricate recursions of political ambiguity. An interesting case is that of Aeneas, ancestor and avatar of the Augustan régime, celebrated for his familial and religious pietas. It was rumoured in antiquity that Aeneas had escaped the burning ruins of Troy only by colluding with the Greek generals, just as Antenor was said to have betrayed the Trojans in return for his life; thus, right at the start of his history of Rome, Livy pairs the two as collaborators who survived to found new cities.101 Vergil has Venus protest to Jupiter (Aen. I.229–253) at the unfair treatment of Aeneas by comparison to prosperous Antenor, who ‘escaped from among the Achaeans’ (242). In his important commentary on the Aeneid, the fourth-­century grammarian Servius noted the parallel between the two men at this passage: [Vergil] chose the character for his similarity, for Livy says that these two betrayed Troy. Vergil touches the same matter in passing when he writes that ‘[Aeneas] recognised himself as well, mixed up with the Achaean generals’ [Aen. I.488], while Horace absolves him, saying [that Aeneas passed through] ‘burning Troy sine fraude’, that is, without treachery.102

The nested reference to Vergil here is to the scene where Aeneas sees himself represented among the Greeks—rather than among the Trojans— on the murals of Juno’s temple at Carthage. In Servius’s view this is all perfectly unambiguous. But ambiguities would be sniffed out by the bishop of Antwerp, Laevinus Torrentius, who edited Horace’s works with a long commentary that appeared posthumously in 1604.103 Torrentius addressed the issue in a note on the line Servius adduced above from Horace’s Carmen saeculare, a hymn to Apollo and Diana to inaugurate a new age, commissioned by Augustus in 17 BC and performed by a public chorus. Horace mentions that Aeneas passed through Troy sine fraude, a legal formula 100  See, for instance, the annotation at Lucan, De bello civili, ed. Gregorius Bersmanus (Leipzig, 1589), p. 20: ‘cervice obesa et ventre proiecto fuisse scribit’. A nice later case of overreading-­between-­the-­lines, turning on verbal ambiguities in poetry, is that of Gabriele Rossetti (Dante Gabriel’s father), who was convinced that Dante Alighieri had been a secret Ghibelline: see his Sullo spirito antipapale che produsse la riforma . . . disquisizioni (London, 1832), p. 97, noting an alleged amphiboly in ‘il capo reo il mondo torca’ (Purg. VIII.131). 101  Meyer Reinhold, ‘The Unhero Aeneas’, Classica et Mediaevalia 27 (1966), 195–207. 102  Servius apud Aeneid I.242: ‘elegit ergo similem personam; hi enim duo Troiam prodidisse dicuntur secundum Livium, quod et Vergilius per transitum tangit, ubi ait “se quoque principibus permixtum agnovit Achivis”, et excusat Horatius dicens “ardentem sine fraude Troiam”, hoc est sine proditione’. 103  On the Horace edition, see Laevinus Torrentius, Correspondencia con Benito Arias Montano, ed. Luis Charlo Brea (Alcañiz, 2007), pp. xix–lvi. I owe this reference to Jan Machielsen.

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meaning ‘without injury’, the sense in which most readers have taken it. This, says Torrentius, is the true sense of the line, and not Servius’s interpretation of it as ‘without treachery’. It would have been neither safe nor honourable for Horace—who after all was here striving to delight Augustus in the most public setting—to allude to the rumours against Aeneas. However, he continues, ‘I would not deny that excellent poets, by using ambiguous phrases of this kind, win praise for their learnedness.’104 This he saw not in Horace but in Vergil’s line about the murals at Carthage: ‘for although the prince of poets was doubtless praising his own Aeneas for fighting among the enemy, he also wanted it to be evident that he knew the rumours of Aeneas’s treachery.’105 Torrentius thus found, in a single moment of verbal virtuosity and elegantia, an evocation of the ‘pessimistic’ reading of the Aeneid known to antiquity and taken up again in the 1960s, a reading that sees Aeneas not as a paragon of proto-­Augustan piety, but as a treacherous anti-­hero.106 If there could be deceitful political ambiguity in a verse history like Lucan’s, or a national epic like Vergil’s, it was especially prevalent in satire, which long had a reputation for stylistic variegation and obliquity. The trailblazing Florentine poet and scholar Angelo Poliziano observed, in a lecture on Persius delivered in 1485 and frequently reprinted, that the satirists used almost the same style as the ancient comic playwrights, characterised by great irregularity, obscurity, elaborateness, and affectation, with slang and vulgar language, foreign words, the well-­worn, and the obscene; ‘they say many things harshly, many things severely, many things gently and many things ambiguously and deceitfully’.107 The aesthetic valence of ambigue, ‘ambiguously’, is uncertain. It goes with subdole, ‘deceit104  Horace, [Carmina], ed. Laevinus Torrentius (Antwerp, 1608), p. 401: ‘Non negaverim tamen excellentes poetas interdum istiusmodi ambiguis locutionibus eruditionis laudem captare.’ 105  Ibid., ‘Quamquam enim haud dubie princeps poetarum Aeneam suum inter medios hostes pugnantem laudaverit, videri tamen voluit quae de proditione eius ferebantur non ignorasse.’ In this respect Torrentius saves as an intentional ambiguity what had been put forward by Servius as two possible readings (‘aut . . . aut’). 106  On this tradition of modern scholarship, see, e.g., Adam Parry, ‘The Two Voices of Virgil’s Aeneid’, Arion 2 (1963), 66–80; and Christine Perkell, ‘Ambiguity and Irony: The Last Resort?’, Helios 21 (1994), 63–74. For the ancient version see Richard Thomas, Virgil and the Augustan Reception (Cambridge, 2001), esp. pp. 71–73 and 107–8 on the passages discussed here; see also Craig Kallendorf, The Other Virgil: ‘Pessimistic’ Readings of the Aeneid in Early Modern Culture (Oxford, 2007), esp. p. 39, on early modern analogues. 107  Angelo Poliziano, ‘Praelectio in Persium’, edited as Commento inedito alle Satire di Persio, ed. Lucia Martinelli and Roberto Ricciardi (Florence, 1985), pp. 12–13: ‘Multa aspere, multa severe, multa blande multa item ambigue dicunt, et subdole.’ The lecture is reprinted, for instance, in Jodocus Badius, P. Auli Persii familiaris explanatio (Lyon, 1510), fols 6r–7r, and quoted in Philipp Camerarius, Operae horarum subsecivarum (1591: Frankfurt, 1658), p. 321; and Martin du Cygne, De arte poetica libri duo (Liège, 1664), p. 195.

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fully’ or ‘by trickery’, which in normal use is obviously negative but here prompts us to ask whom satire deceives—us, or only its intended target?— and, if the latter, whether that is not after all its proper purpose. Of the three Latin satirists, Persius was known for especial tenebrity, a quality that made him, as one Victorian critic would put it, ‘the paradise of commentators’.108 Barten Holyday, who translated Juvenal and Persius in 1673, distinguished the former’s ambiguity from the latter’s obscurity: Some passages [of Juvenal] will prove this, being lyable to a manifold, a ten-­fold Exposition; yet every one to a Reader not very Intentive very probable; that we may say, the Delphick Oracle was less Riddle. Yet I think the difficulties in Persius and Juvenal to have a difference: the trouble in Persius being to Find a meaning; in Juvenal to Choose it.109

Holyday—like Dryden, who published the first English prose treatise on classical satire in 1693—was familiar with the conversation on the subject conducted across three essays early in the century. These were by three editors, each a giant of humanist erudition: Isaac Casaubon (who edited Persius in 1605), Daniel Heinsius (Horace, 1610—the essay on satire from 1612, greatly expanded in 1629), and Nicolas Rigault (Juvenal, 1615).110 The central subject was the origin of satire, and therefore its true nature, and therefore which of the three was the best, that is, conformed most closely to that nature. Unsurprisingly, each editor chose his own poet, as Dryden drily noted.111 It was Casaubon, an inveterate mythbuster, who debunked the etymological relation of satire to the Greek satyr play, proposing instead its origin in the Latin phrase satura lanx, a mixed dish. Heinsius disagreed, pointedly calling his essay De satyra Horatiana, with a ‘y’. But all three, despite their dissensions, concurred in noting the satirists’ use of ambiguous language. Casaubon gave a number of reasons for obscurity and ambiguity in Persius. Part of it was simply historical distance—in which case, he argued like a good Protestant, the fault lay with the reader, not the author. But other obscurities were intrinsic to the satire, a result of Persius’s modesty about obscenity, of his brevity and learnedness, of his 108  John William Mackail, Latin Literature (New York, 1895), p. 179. For a long collection of similar verdicts, see Persius, Saturae, ed. and comm. Oleg Nikitinski (Munich and Leipzig, 2002), pp. 285–352. On Mackail see Chapter Nine below, p. 331. 109  Juvenal and Persius, [Satires], tr. Barten Holyday (Oxford, 1673), sig. b1r. John Dryden, ‘Essay on Satire’, in his Works (Berkeley, 1969–), IV, p. 73, quotes approvingly. 110  There has been little work on these three treatises, but see W. B. Carnochan, Lemuel Gulliver’s Mirror for Man (Berkeley, 1968), pp. 20–30; and, Ingrid de Smet, Menippean Satire and the Republic of Letters, 1581–1655 (Geneva, 1996), pp. 45–56. Casaubon’s essay has been translated by Peter Medine as ‘Isaac Casaubon’s Prolegomena to the Satires of Persius: An Introduction, Text and Translation’, English Literary Renaissance 6 (1966), 271–98. 111  Dryden, ‘Essay on Satire’, p. 50.

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taste for the sublime, and especially of his wish to disguise his seditious messages from the tyrant Nero.112 An example of Casaubon’s view of Persian ambiguity is found in the commentary at Sat. IV.49, ‘Si Puteal multa cautus vibice flagellas’, ‘if you slyly [or ‘cautiously’] whip the Forum with many a welt’.113 The verse, he said, referred either to a wicked type—sycophants, informers, abusers of magistrates (men, in other words, of a piece with Cleon in Equites 262)— who used the courts to bully the weak out of their money; or it alluded to Nero’s penchant for nocturnal robberies at the Forum, as known from Dio Cassius, Tacitus, and Suetonius.114 Casaubon was adamant that the double meaning was deliberate: Everyone has always wondered about the obscurity of this line, but it seems to me to have not so much a difficult meaning as a double meaning. And I do not think that Persius fell into this amphiboly unawares, but rather he put the ambiguity in deliberately; so that it could be very aptly understood of Nero, but also expounded conveniently of someone else.115 Just as Pleusicles meant one thing to Pyrgopolynices and another to the audience, so Persius means one thing (Nero) to a reader in on the joke, and another (not-­Nero) to Nero. But although Casaubon insists that the veiled sense is deliberate, he seems also to see it as strained, open to view only by a hermeneutic of suspicion—by Nero’s enemies, perhaps, or his zealous censors, or historians—for he introduces it with the phrase, ‘Those who want to apply [the verse] to Nero, which apparently must be done, may explain it thus’.116 In any event, the ambiguity makes the allusion plausibly deniable, a key feature of Persius’s satire as elucidated in Casaubon’s preface, and of satire in general.117 112  Casaubon, ‘In Persium Prolegomena’, in Persius, Satirarum liber, ed. Casaubon, sigs e2r–e3r. See also Pierre Bayle, Dictionaire historique et critique, 2nd ed., 4 vols (Rotterdam, 1702), III, s.v. ‘Perse’, p. 2393, n. GΔ. 113  ‘Puteal’ has been traditionally understood to refer to the Puteal Libonis in the Roman Forum, whence its common metonymic translation as ‘Forum’. See, however, Walter Kissel’s note in Persius, Satiren, ed. Kissel (Heidelberg, 1990), pp. 558–59, for other possibilities. 114  Persius, Satirarum liber, ed. Casaubon, pp. 352–54. 115  Ibid., p. 352: ‘Omnes vulgo de huius versus obscuritate queruntur: qui tamen videtur nobis non tamen difficilis sententiae quam ancipitis. neque vero imprudentem Persium in hanc ἀμφιβολίαν putamus incidisse: verum de industria ambiguum sensum posuisse: ut et de Nerone aptissime posset intelligi, et de alio item quam Nerone convenienter exponi. duas igitur expositiones afferemus.’ 116  Ibid., p. 354: ‘qui Neroni volent aptare, quod videtur necessario faciendum, ita exponant’. 117  Weinbrot, ‘Masked Men’ (as in n. 136 below), pp. 277–78.

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Heinsius agreed about the satirical use of oblique figures, comparing the Hebrew expression ‫ ְפנֵ י ַה ָד ָבר‬penei hadavar, etymologically ‘face of speech’, used to describe the cunning words of the woman of Tekoah at 2 Sam. 14:20; he also noted examples from Suetonius and Lucan’s address to Nero.118 It was Rigault, however, who offered the most interesting close reading of a deliberate ambiguity. This appears in Juvenal’s first satire, lines 15–17: ‘et nos / Consilium dedimus Sullae privatus ut altum / Dor­ miret’, ‘We too have advised Sulla to retire and have a good rest.’ The immediate picture is of a Roman schoolboy composing a rhetorical exercise (suasoria) to counsel the murderous pre-­Julian dictator Sulla to retire from public life, as he in fact had done at the end of his career.119 According to Rigault, however, another sense lurks underneath: ‘the poet adopted this astounding example of the security of a very free spirit in order to reproach the wicked idleness of the Romans, who submitted themselves to the yoke of foul servitude to such an extent that Sulla could give up his dictatorship unpunished and walk the streets a carefree private citizen’.120 Juvenal’s satires elsewhere imply that life under Domitian was even worse. In this and other examples, Rigault concludes, brave wits cursed servitude, hiding a sharp blade beneath a blunt one ‘by the ambiguity of a double meaning’. These examples have more in common than their attack on tyrants and their bovine subjects. They also show the limitations of the grammatical analysis of ambiguity which we outlined in Chapter One, and which scholars like Casaubon and Rigault imbibed at school from an early age. If Persius’s line about whipping the Forum could allude to Nero, and if Juvenal’s line about letting Sulla off the hook was a jab at Roman complacency, it was not because any individual word or sequence of syllables could have two meanings, nor because the syntax could be construed in two different ways, nor even because any noun or name could apply to two different objects, or could be taken either literally or metaphorically. None of the species of ambiguity inherited from classical theory would be able to make sense of these insights, which were of a different genus. As we have seen, the distinction had already been drawn in English law between patent ambiguity, available from mere inspection of the language, and 118  Daniel Heinsius, De satyra horatiana libri duo, appended (with new signatures and pagination) to Horace, [Opera], ed. Heinsius (Leiden, 1629), pp. 68–69. 119  Kenneth Reckford, Recognizing Persius (Princeton, 2009), p. 162. 120  Nicolas Rigault, ‘De satira Juvenalis’, in Juvenal, Satirae, ed. Rigault (Paris, 1616), sigs a2r–b6r, at a6r–v: ‘Verum subest alius praeterea sensus. nam hoc sane stupendum securitatis exemplum liberrimi spiritus poeta sumpsit, quo turpem ignaviam Romanis exprobraret, qui tam foedae servitutis jugo capita summisissent sua, ut L. Sullae . . . impune fuerit de dictatura descendere, perque urbem privato ac felici ambulare.’ Compare Quintilian’s advice at Inst. or., IX.2.67.

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latent ambiguity, evident only when the words were matched to reality.121 It is telling that this distinction arose not from a development of classical rhetoric or grammar, but from an independent reflection on actual cases at law. Theorists of language, by contrast, seemed to remain handcuffed by the terms derived from Aristotle and Quintilian, and so reached no comparable insight. Nonetheless, readers of satire, scrutinising the inaccessible, saw, or seemed to see, such verbal effects, even if they could not analyse them. The business of looking, of digesting the particular, outpaces that of theorising, which is why commentaries and specialist essays achieved insights unmatched by general works. There is one other group of features that these critics noticed as productive of ambiguity in satire, one that relates closely both to its putative origins in comedy and to its strategy of deception. Casaubon, who did not accept those origins, mentions it only offhand: satire is hard, he says, partly ‘because of the affinity it has with the plots of dramatists, made complex by changes of personae [mutatio personarum]’.122 Many satires are not monologues uttered by a single speaker, but dialogues or conversations between characters.123 Knowing who is speaking a given line is essential to knowing what it means: as computer scientists know, to interpret the data correctly, one needs the metadata. Thus prior to the ‘whip the Forum’ image in Persius’s fourth satire: When my neighbours call me outstanding, Shall I not believe them? If you blanch, wretch, at the sight of a coin, If you do to your prick whatever takes your fancy . . . 124 There are two speakers here: the Nero character speaks the line ‘When my neighbours call me . . .’ and then the satirist responds ‘If you blanch, wretch . . .’ Modern editions will punctuate with inverted commas to indicate this change of persona, but no such graphic device was available in ancient Rome, or even in early modern editions. The reader had to divine when the speaker was changing. See Chapter Two above, p. 86. Casaubon, ‘In Persium Prolegomena’, sig. e3v: ‘propter affinitatem quam habet cum dramaticorum fabulis, ipsa personarum mutatione perplexum’. 123  On which, see John Aden, ‘Pope and the Satiric Adversary’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 2 (1962), 267–86, and Clare Bucknell, ‘The Roman Adversarial Dialogue in Eighteenth-­Century Political Satire’, Translation and Literature 24 (2015), 291–318. 124  Persius, Satirae IV.46–48: 121  122 

egregium cum me vicinia dicat, non credam? viso si palles, inprobe, nummo, si facis in penem quidquid tibi venit . . .

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Casaubon did not invent the phrase mutatio personarum, nor did he take it from the realm of literary criticism. Rather, he borrowed it from St Jerome, who had used it to describe a problem in interpreting the Hebrew prophets: ‘A change of personae, especially in prophecies, makes understanding difficult.’125 The context here was Jer. 8:13–14, where Jeremiah abruptly switches in direct discourse between the voice of God (‘I will surely consume them’) and the voice of the people (‘Why do we sit still?’) For Jerome this ambiguity is, as Michael Graves has it, ‘a problem to be overcome’ by astute criticism, but it is obviously also one that reflects the intrinsic duality of the prophetic voice, at once human and divine. Graves draws attention to a secular parallel from Horace, Sat. I.9.62–63, a compressed line of dialogue about which Porphyrio remarks that the poet ‘elegantly expresses the mixup between [the speakers] and the confused discourse of asking and replying’.126 Jerome may have been adapting an observation about verse satire, but the phrase mutatio personarum was his; through the Middle Ages it stuck to the Prophets and, later, to other biblical books, notably the Song of Songs. Thus St Anselm’s student, the shadowy Honorius Augustodunensis, noted that the Song featured several changes of persona, ‘just like in the comedies of the heathens’.127 (The illustrious Breton polymath Ernest Renan would actually rewrite it as a five-­act drama in 1860.) Glassius, in his 1623 Philologia sacra, devoted a section to the same problem, based on Jerome and Augustine.128 The ambiguity of a rapidly shifting persona could be exploited for sophisticated dramatic effects, of which there are supreme examples in Shakespeare, for instance in the celebrated scene of 1 Henry IV (II.4) when Harry and Falstaff stage Harry’s future confrontation with his father. At first Harry plays himself and gives Falstaff the rôle of the king, but then he switches the parts, demoting Falstaff to the rôle of Harry and adopting the king’s part for himself. Then comes a peculiar exchange: Harry. Now, Harry, whence come you? Falstaff. My noble lord, from Eastcheap.

125  St Jerome, Commentarium in Jeremiam, PL 24:739 (at Jer. 8:14–15): ‘Personarum mutatio, et maxime in prophetis, difficilem intellectum facit.’ Compare PL 24:881 (at Jer. 31:25– 26): ‘Mutatio personarum facit obscuram intelligentiam prophetarum’, and Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos, PL 36:499 (at Ps. 45:2). 126  Graves, Jerome’s Hebrew Philology, p. 34; Diederich, Der Horazkommentar, p. 243; Scholia Horatiana, II, p. 198: ‘Eleganter mixtum inter se et confusum sermonem interrogandi ac respondendi expressit.’ 127  Honorius Augustodunensis, Expositio in cantica canticorum, PL 172:439 (at Cant. 5:9): ‘notandum quod in hoc Cantico dramatis, fit mutatio personarum, sicut in comoediis gentilium’. On this work see Valerie Flint, ‘The Commentaries of Honorius Augustodunensis on the Song of Songs’, Revue Bénédictine 84 (1974), 196–211. 128  Salomo Glassius, Philologia sacra (Jena, 1623), pp. 290–91 (I.4.1.5).

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Harry. The complaints I hear of thee are grievous. Falstaff. ’Sblood, my lord, they are false: nay, I’ll tickle ye for a young prince, i’ faith.

The personae of the last line quoted here are muddied: when Falstaff says ‘I’ll tickle ye for a young prince’, he is both Falstaff telling Harry that he will play the part convincingly, or amusingly, and Falstaff-­as-­Harry telling Harry-­as-­Henry that he will be the son and prince that his father wants him to be, an ambiguity that encapsulates both the tensions and the metadramatic pathos of the scene as a whole.129 (The latter sense is indicated especially by the ‘nay’, which gives the statement a logical connection to his previous assertion that the complaints are false.) The actor, of course, may disambiguate the line by adopting different voices for Falstaff and Falstaff-­as-­Harry, since its double meaning rests not on any semantic or syntactic ambiguity but on a duality of persona. A version of the same device motivates the ideas of dramatic irony that we shall encounter in Chapter Nine. Heinsius’s exploration of personae was wide-­ranging, as can be seen in his discussion of a curious and probably fictional trial. The ancient Athenians, according to Sopater, outlawed parodying real persons by name onstage; a playwright tried to get around the law by using lifelike masks of individuals in his comedies, and was sued for libel.130 Satire has no stage, commented Heinsius, and therefore no masks, only names. Its proper target is not the general vices of society, as Persius thought, but the individual. Persius’s names—Pedius, Vectidius, and so on—are placeholders, like ‘Joe Bloggs’ in English, while Juvenal’s are taken from earlier eras, a feature which, Heinsius remarks, ‘smacks of gloom, of the classroom’.131 Horace 129  This ambiguity does not appear to be commonly observed; for instance, David Scott Kastan, in the Arden King Henry IV Part 1 (London, 2002), p. 231, gives only the first meaning. For an overview of the scene and its broader tensions, see Paul Gottschalk, ‘Hal and the “Play Extempore” in I Henry IV’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 15 (1974), 605–14. 130  Sopater, Διαίρεσις ζητημάτων, in Rhetores Graeci, ed. Christian Walz, 8 vols (Stuttgart etc., 1832–1836), VIII, pp. 383–4. Compare the treatment of this fictitious suit in Sopater’s source, Hermogenes, De statibus, in Opera, ed. Hugo Rabe (Leipzig, 1913), p. 13; and on these see D. A. Russell, Greek Declamation (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 70–71. The law μή ὀνομαστί κωμῳδεῖν, ‘don’t ridicule by name’, may have been real; Henry Fynes Clinton, Fasti Hellenici: The Civil and Literary Chronology of Greece (Oxford, 1824), pp. xxxviii–xliv, argues that it did not forbid mentioning real persons by name onstage, but only introducing them as dramatis personae. See also C. O. Brink, Horace on Poetry: The ‘Ars Poetica’ (London, 1971), pp. 316–317, at Ars poetica 283–84. 131  Heinsius, De satyra, pp. 52–53: ‘Idem apud Juvenalem nonnunquam observes, qui aetatis alienae nomina supposuit. Id quod umbram redolet, et scholam.’ On this point, see Shadi Bartsch, Actors in the Audience: Theatricality and Doublespeak from Nero to Hadrian (Cambridge, MA, 1994), pp. 91–93.

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has individuals in mind, as evident from the line (105) in his first satire that ‘there is a point between Tanais and his father-­in-­law Visellius’. But these names must be coded; real persons must lie concealed beneath them, and in that sense they are personae after all, as Heinsius writes elsewhere. In this respect satire operates like the punning Atellan farce that jeered at the emperors, but also like tragedy, painting current politics under the sign of the old, as when Mamercus Aemilius Scaurus represented Tiberius as the bloodthirsty Atreus.132 Finally, Horatian satire deploys multiple personae to represent the author himself; just as Plato uses the ironic, dissimulating Socrates, so Horace speaks through the persona of Ofellus (Sat. II.2), introduced as rude and uncultivated.133 For Heinsius, then, the ambiguity raised by the use of personae extends from the characters within a poem to that of the authorial voice. The latter problem we now associate with an argument of twentieth-­century scholarship, which had its immediate roots in the New Critical idea of the lyric poem as a ‘little drama’, its speaker a fictional construct not to be automatically identified with the poet—a principle enshrined in the 1938 textbook Understanding Poetry by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren.134 Brooks’s Yale colleague Maynard Mack, an Alexander Pope specialist, developed the point more fully in his 1951 essay ‘The Muse of Satire’, which pressed for a sharp distinction between author and persona in Pope’s satires; the claim remained controversial for thirty years or so, by which time the Citroën DS of French theory offered a flashier getaway car from authorial murder.135 In a penetrating article of 1983, Howard Weinbrot found the 132  Heinsius, De satyra, p. 69, citing Dio Cassius, Historia romana, LVIII.24.3–4; compare Tacitus, Annales, VI.29, and on the story Bartsch, Actors, pp. 86–88. 133  Heinsius, De satyra, pp. 219–20. 134  Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Understanding Poetry: An Anthology for College Students, 1st ed. (1938: New York, 1939), p. 23: ‘all poetry, including even short lyrics or descriptive pieces, involves a dramatic organization. . . . In reading poetry it is well to remember this dramatic aspect and to be sure that one sees the part it plays in any given poem.’ This remains the same in the second edition (1950: New York, 1956), p. liv. The third edition (New York, 1960), p. 20, adds: ‘In this sense every poem can be—and in fact must be—regarded as a little drama.’ The fourth (New York, 1976), offers, pp. 13–14: ‘The poem is a response to a particular situation. It is then, a little—or sometimes a big—drama. . . . [W]e must have some sense of the identity of the speaker, that the voice of a poem is not heard in a vacuum.’ For the foundations see John Paul Russo, I. A. Richards: His Life and Work (London, 1989), pp. 547–48, and for a wonderful essay on the archaeology of these themes, see Peter Howarth, ‘Close Reading as Performance’, in Modernism and Close Reading, ed. David James (Oxford, forthcoming). Brooks and Warren had discovered Richards’ work during their stints at Oxford in the late 1920s: see Cleanth Brooks, ‘I. A. Richards and Practical Criticism’ (1981), repr. in The Critics Who Made Us: Essays from Sewanee Review, ed. George Core (Columbia, 1993), 35–46. 135  Maynard Mack, ‘The Muse of Satire’, Yale Review, 41 (1951), 80–92. On Mack’s own New Critical credentials, see Charlton Lyons, Songs I Heard My Mother Sing (Bloomington, IN,

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stirrings of Mack’s persona theory in early modern criticism itself, focusing on the English tradition that began with Dryden and culminated in Pope.136 Behind all this stood the ruminations about persona in Heinsius’s essay on satire. Early modern writers agreed that the purpose of satire was moral instruction. But the use of personae made it a funny sort of instruction, since it forced the satirist uncomfortably close to the object of his critique. This can be seen by comparing two engraved title pages of the mid-­seventeenth century.137 The first (Figure 5.1) adorns a 1644 Leiden edition of the comic playwright Terence—not a satirist, strictly speaking, but with something of the same moral purpose. The message here is obvious: the rôle of comedy is to show us the ugly truth behind the handsome but deceitful mask of society. (The angles don’t quite work, but the engraver Cornelis van Dalen has given us a consolation prize in his clever hatching of the dark mirror.) Compare this to the title page of a 1650 Amsterdam edition of Juvenal and Persius (Figure 5.2), in which a satyr and a fool hold masks—three more are on the wall behind—and between them is either a round mirror or a globe showing some sort of popular entertainment.138 The satyr stands for the wild origins of verse satire, the fool for the blunt, smiling exposure of hypocrisy, as in Shakespeare. But that hypocrisy can be exposed only by imitation: the masks are now worn not by deceptive society but by the deceptive satirist. The hypocrisy, then, is also that of the satirist himself, which is to say that his office writes large the ambivalence of the pun, with its proximity to deceit. He is the opposite of the flatterer, but intimately related to him. To see this, consider again the ambiguous Satan of mediaeval theology, dealing in double meanings to seduce humans into sin, for instance in Rupert of Deutz’s reading of Gen. 3:4–5, or in Paradise Lost.139 To Eve, Satan 2008), pp. 248–51. For critiques of his persona theory, see, for instance, Irvin Ehrenreis, ‘Personae’, in Restoration and Eighteenth-­Century Literature: Essays in Honor of Alan Dugald McKillop, ed. Carrol Camden (Chicago, 1963), pp. 25–37; and Niall Rudd, Lines of Enquiry: Studies in Latin Poetry (Cambridge, 1976), pp. 176–81. On the context, see Phillip Harth, ‘The New Criticism and Eighteenth-­Century Poetry’, Critical Inquiry, 7 (1981), 521–37. 136  Howard Weinbrot, ‘Masked Men and Satire and Pope: Towards an Historical Basis for the Eighteenth-­Century Persona’, Eighteenth-­Century Studies 16 (1983), 265–289. 137  These two title-­pages are discussed briefly and unsatisfactorily in E. M. Waith, ‘The Comic Mirror and the World of Glass’, Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama: The Report of the Modern Language Association Conference 9 (1966), 16–23. Others are mentioned by Weinbrot, ‘Masked Men’, pp. 271–72. 138  This image is an elaborated version of the title-­page of an earlier edition of 1648, featuring only the satyr and the jester. 139  See Chapter Three above, pp. 108–109.

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Figure 5.1. Detail from Terence, Comoediae sex (Leiden, 1644), title page.

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Figure 5.2. Detail from Juvenal and Persius, Satyrae, ed. Thomas Farnaby (Amsterdam, 1650), title page.

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is the flatterer; but to the Christian reader he is the satirist par excellence— the persona adopted by the divine author to open our eyes to our own evil. Early modern critics who considered persona did not often dwell on its ambiguity, but a valuable exception is found in the notes to a French translation of Horace by the Jesuit scholar Noël-­Étienne Sanadon, first published in 1727–1728 and widely read in the eighteenth century. In Odes I.34, by the most common reading, Horace professes to have abjured his Epicurean materialism and returned to the worship of Jupiter after seeing the impossible, lightning in a cloudless sky—literally a ‘bolt from the blue’.140 A series of early modern French readers, including the Saumur critic Tanneguy le Fèvre, his son-­in-­law André Dacier, and the architect (and bomb enthusiast) François Blondel, argued that the apparent conversion was just a pretence aimed at exploding the superstition of the Stoics.141 Sanadon agreed, but he nuanced the discussion by suggesting that the poem was a play with the ‘mask’ of Stoicism, one that forced the reader to suspend his understanding until the final stanza, when the mask was ripped off. The ambiguity of persona was compounded by a series of équivoques that the pious Stoics might take in their own sense but Horace really intended in an Epicurean one: thus when he referred to his old Epicureanism as sapientia, he meant it properly as wisdom but the Stoics might take it as mere discarded philosophy, and when he invoked Deus, he could be referring either to Jupiter or to material Nature.142 Sanadon’s reading, though we might find it laboured, illustrates the degree to which verbal ambiguity could be deployed to focus a more general pattern of dissimulation in the persona. A fuller critical turn to personae as a marker of ambiguity in the poetic voice would occur only in the twentieth century. But the other ambiguity of persona, that found in the names given to satirical targets, became a significant problem of eighteenth-­century scholarship on classical satire. To illustrate this we turn to an unstudied trajectory in the criticism on Horace, one in which we begin to see all those nocturnal readers leave their solitary studies and strike up conversation in the street below. 140  For a summary of (mostly modern) critical views, see N. K. Zumwalt, ‘Horace C. I.34: Poetic Change and Political Equivocation’, Transactions of the American Philological Association, 104 (1974), 435–467, at pp. 435–9; the author’s own unpersuasive reading is corrected by E. A. Fredricksmeyer, ‘Horace C. 1.34: The Conversion’, TAPA 106 (1976), 155–176. 141  Tanneguy le Fèvre to [Jean] Dupin, 8 Aug 1663, in Le Fèvre’s Epistolae, 2 vols (Saumur, 1659–1665), II, pp. 132–33; François Blondel, Comparaison de Pindare et d’Horace (1673: Amsterdam, 1693), p. 11; André Dacier, Remarques critiques sur les oeuvres d’Horace, avec une nouvelle traduction, 2 vols (Paris, 1681), I, pp. 376–85. 142  Horace, Les poésies, tr. Noël-­ Étienne Sanadon, 2 vols (Paris, 1727–28), I, pp. 126–131.

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From Dilogia to Anspielung Historians usually identify Richard Bentley’s 1711 edition of Horace, with its hundreds of conjectural emendations, as a decisive turning-­point towards a new philology.143 Eighteenth-­century readers, however, favoured a rival edition. This was the work of William Baxter (1650–1723), a London schoolmaster of Welsh origin, and the nephew and inheritor of the Puritan leader Richard Baxter. His Horace first appeared in 1701, with a second edition in 1725, finished only days before his death; it would incur praise from many voices, including Robert Lowth and the influential Nonconformist Edward Harwood, who thought it the best of its kind ever produced.144 It contained a rich running commentary in Latin, with copious references to forebears, from the ancient scholia to Renaissance critics like Laevinus Torrentius. Bentley himself praised Baxter as ‘a man of arcane learning’, but Baxter, far from returning the compliment, lambasted Bentley’s conjectures in his second edition.145 One of the most remarkable features of the commentary is Baxter’s constant attention to deliberate ambiguities in Horace’s poetry, which he denotes not with a Latin term but with the Greek dilogia and dilogωs (with that irritating omega favoured by early modern latinists) introduced by Porphyrio. The two words appear well over a hundred times, dwarfing his predecessors’ use of any equivalent terms, and often qualified by adjectives confirming the deliberate nature of the ambiguity: above all elegans, but also pulchra, bella, festiva, suavis (‘sweet’), salsa (‘witty’), scita (‘clever’), callida (‘ingenious’), consulta (‘deliberate’), emphatica, lasciva (‘licentious’), amara (‘bitter’). The term dilogia seems to apply to at least two types of textual object. The first of these is an ordinary phrase used with (a) two distinct meanings or, more often, (b) two nuances. As an example of (a) Horace concludes his satire on satire, Sat. I.10, by telling Demetrius and Tigellius to go and cry among the chairs of their female admirers. Baxter comments: ‘He uses a very witty dilogia, for they cry who teach girls to sing love-­songs in a tearful voice, and the Greeks ‘order to cry’ those on whom 143  On Bentley’s Horace, see Harold Richard Jolliffe, The Critical Methods and Influence of Bentley’s Horace (Chicago, 1939), with a list of his conjectures in the appendix; D. R. Shackleton Bailey’s connoisseurial ‘Bentley and Horace’ (1962), repr in his Profile of Horace (London, 1982), pp. 104–20; and Kristine Haugen, Richard Bentley: Poetry and Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA, 2011), pp. 130–54. 144  Edward Harwood, A View of the Various Editions of the Greek and Roman Classics, 4th ed. (London, 1790), p. 224; Joseph William Moss, A Manual of Classical Bibliography, 2 vols (London, 1825), II, pp. 18–20. A basic sketch of its printing history can be found in the Monthly Review, n.s. 25 (1798), 511–14. 145  Horace, [Opera], ed. Richard Bentley (Cambridge, 1711), p. 9a (at Odes I.3.20): ‘vir reconditae eruditionis’.

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they wish grave misfortune.’146 The sine fraude of Carm. Saec. 41 also fits this model: Baxter is explicit that the phrase has both the legal and the Servian meanings.147 As for (b), we may point to Odes I.16.24, where Horace says he was driven in youth to penning celeres iambos, rapid iambic verses. Baxter remarks simply, ‘Celeres by dilogia, meaning both rapid and angry.’148 Or again, in Odes III.24.52, Horace pleads that ‘too tender [tenerae] minds be trained in more austere pursuits’, and Baxter comments, ‘He has used tenerae by dilogia to mean both effeminate and childish, as the following words show.’149 That last clause, which he uses repeatedly, is important: where context is traditionally invoked to ‘prune out’ the wrong meanings of a given phrase, here it is deployed to enrich the meanings in which the phrase should be taken—a technique later relied on by Empson.150 In the case of (b) the context does not point to two distinct meanings, but rather lends shade and colour: the reader of Horace is likely to hold ‘rapid’ and ‘angry’, ‘effeminate’ and ‘childish’, in his mind together, perceiving each pair of notes as a single chord. The second type of device labelled dilogia is a word, line, or poem referring to two historical objects (almost always persons), or to one abstract, poetical object and one historical. In one passage Baxter glosses dilogia in this sense with another Greek term, hyponoea, classically denoting the real but hidden meaning of an allegory: thus, introducing Odes I.28, the celebrated address to Archytas of Tarentum, he writes: ‘By an ingenious dilogia or hyponoea, Horace laments the fate of Brutus, and in a simple and tearful language he grieves that the utmost virtue of that man has come to nothing.’151 At the end of the thirteenth Epode the centaur Chiron sings to Achilles, calling him invicte mortalis dea nate puer, ‘invincible, mortal, goddess-­born boy’. Baxter picks up on invicte mortalis: ‘In this oxymoron is hidden a deeper meaning, for although he is invincible in spirit, he can be 146  Horace, Eclogae, ed. William Baxter (London, 1701), p. 311, at Sat. I.10.91: ‘Jubeo plorare; salsissima Dilogia utitur: nam et plorant qui docent puellas cantiunculas amatorias flebili voce decantare; et plorare jubent Graeci quibus grave precantur infortunium, quod κλαίειν vel οἰμώζειν illi dicunt.’ 147  Ibid., p. 233, at Carm. Sec. 41: ‘Sine fraudi, eleganti Dilogia. Et sine damno et sine dolo; ut dilueret veterem Aeneiae proditionis famam: sic et Servius olim censebat’. 148  Ibid., p. 27, at Odes I.16.24: ‘Celeres per dilogiam, quasi diceret et celeres et iracundos’. See Lewis and Short, s.v. celer, sense II.B, where the connotation of Horace’s word is given rather as ‘hasty’. 149  Ibid., p. 139, at Odes III.24.52: ‘Per Dilogiam tenerae pro effoeminatae et pueriles posuit, ut ostendunt sequentia.’ See Lewis and Short, s.v. tener, senses I.A and I.B, although Horace’s line is here listed under II.A. 150  Compare ibid., p. 220, at Epodes XV.13: ‘Potest et Dilogωs accipi etiam de divitiore, ut ostendunt sequentia’, and p. 403, at Epist. I.8.3: ‘Quid agam; Dilogωs, ut valeam, et quid scribam: hoc ostendunt sequentia’. 151  Ibid., p. 41, at Odes I.28: ‘Callida Dilogia, sive Hyponoea, Bruti sui fatum deflet, flebilique et simplici sermone dolet summam virtutem tali viro nihil profuisse.’

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defeated because his body is mortal. But these words are to be understood by dilogia of Augustus, since Horace tenderly fears something might happen to him.’152 Characteristically, Baxter then criticises Bentley for punctuating the line ‘Invicte, mortalis Dea nate puer’, dividing ‘invincible’ from the ‘mortal boy’ and attaching it instead to the ‘goddess’—that is, for attempting to eliminate the paradox by editorial intervention.153 The difference between the purely verbal and the allusive dilogia thus resembles, again, the legal distinction between patent and latent ambiguity. What is not certain is the hermeneutic status of the allusive dilogia, for it seems similar to what had traditionally been called allegoria, in which there are two meanings, but only one is ‘real’. Quintilian’s example was Horace’s fourteenth ode (O navis, referent in mare te novi), which, he said, disguised a parable on the commonwealth under the image of a ship in distress—each element in the poem stood for a real fact or object, which alone constituted its meaning.154 Baxter uses the word allegoria only a few times in his commentary, including on the fourteenth ode, which nevertheless he reads differently to Quintilian; elsewhere he uses it to refer to veiled attacks.155 Given the brevity of Baxter’s explanations, it is hard to know if his dilogia is simply another term for allegoria, or if rather—precisely by virtue of being called dilogia and not allegoria—it refers properly to both objects at once. Perhaps he did not draw the distinction sharply. Unlike Bentley’s Horace, Baxter’s offers no bold technical innovation: it does nothing in any individual part which had not been done many times before. And yet it marks the point at which a quantitative change becomes a qualitative one: the sheer number of references to dilogia imply that it is 152  Ibid., p. 218, at Epodes XIII.12: ‘Invicte mortalis; in Oxymoro isto latet Emphasis; vinci scilicet posse animo invictum, cum sit corpore mortalis. Sunt autem haec per Dilogian de Augusto accipienda, cui ne quid humanitus accidat veretur.’ On the sense of emphasis as ‘deeper meaning’, see Quintilian, Inst. or., VIII.3.83. 153  Horace, [Opera], ed. Bentley, p. 201a: ‘Quo nihil hoc quidem in loco putidius ineptiusve excogitari potest. Tu vero sic divide verba et distingue, Invicte, mortalis Dea nate puer Thedite, hoc est, qui natus es mortalis matre licet immortali.’ 154  Inst. or., VIII.6.44: ‘totusque ille Horati locus, quo navem pro re publica, fluctus et tempestates pro bellis civilibus, portum pro pace atque concordia dicit’. On this ode, see Chapter Seven below, p. 299. The ship of state would become one of the most clichéd metaphors in Western letters. For a modern update, see a heartwarming exegesis of the 1997 film Titanic by the future US vice president Mike Pence, ‘Explaining Titanic’s Appeal’, at http:// web.archive.org/web/20010922014243fw_/http://www.cybertext.net/pence/titanic.html. 155  Baxter’s definition of allegoria as ‘Metaphora per integram sententiam vel etiam Orationem’ in his De analogia: Sive, arte linguae Latinae commentariolus (London, 1679), p. 162, is conventional. For allegoria as coded remark, see Baxter 1701, p. 16 (on Odes I.9.9) as veiled critique, p. 10 (on Odes I.5), as objective correlative—a very pretty example—see p. 37 (on Odes I.25.11–12), and compare Steele Commager, The Odes of Horace: A Critical Study (New Haven, 1962), p. 248.

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not an extreme or exceptional feature of Horatian poetry, but rather an integral element, part of its normal workings, to be valued as elegant or even beautiful. The same presumably extended to other satirists: the word appears on the first page of a specimen from his unpublished edition of Juvenal.156 Moreover, Baxter’s readings, unlike those of his predecessors, had a rich afterlife, especially in Germany, whose university lecture halls would be nourished for decades by his schoolroom. This was part of a broader translatio studii, as German scholars of the eighteenth century devoured British literature, criticism, and philosophy in the process of forming their own intellectual dominance from the 1760s. Baxter’s adoption occurred at Göttingen, where George II, both king of Great Britain and prince elector of Hanover, had founded first the University (1734) and then the Akademie der Wissenschaften (1751)—one of the many German academies established in that century on a French model, as Leibniz had championed.157 One of the university’s first appointments, to the chair of Poetry and Eloquence, was the renowned classicist Johann Matthias Gesner (1691–1761), who, in his capacity as professor, ‘scholar-­poet’ and librarian, reoriented the study of ancient literature with a new spirit of humanistic self-­ cultivation (Bildung), and in so doing helped lay the foundations for the fortress of German scholarship in the second half of the century.158 In 1752 Gesner published an edition of Horace dedicated to George’s adviser Friedrich Karl von Hardenberg, patron of the new Akademie. It was, in fact, a reissue of Baxter’s 1725 edition, which Gesner had long recommended to his friends for its readings and notes, but which had become hard to obtain, despite praise from the famous bibliographer Johann Albert Fabricius.159 The two editions, however, are not identical. Although Gesner, like Baxter, disapproved of Bentley’s conjectural emendations, he 156  Proposals for Printing by Subscription D. Gulielmi Baxteri Quae supersunt enarrationes et notae in D. Junii Juvenalis, ed. Moses Gulielmus (London, 1732). 157  See James McClellan III, Science Reorganized: Scientific Societies in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1985), pp. 68–71 on Leibniz, and 114–16 on Göttingen. 158  On Gesner’s life the chief primary source is Johann August Ernesti, ‘Narratio de Jo. Matthia Gesnero ad Davidem Ruhnkenium’, in his Opuscula oratoria, orationes, prolusiones et elogia (Leiden, 1762), pp. 307–42. See also Ulrich Schindel, ‘Johann Matthias Gesner, Professor der Poesie und Beredsamkeit 1734–1761’, in Die Klassische Altertumswissenschaft an der Georg August-­Universität: Eine Ringvorlesung zu ihrer Geschichte, ed. C. J. Classen (Göttingen, 1989), pp. 9–26; Michael Legaspi, The Death of Scripture and the Rise of Biblical Studies (Oxford, 2010), pp. 60–72 (whence the phrase ‘scholar-­poet’). 159  Horace, Eclogae, ed. Johann Matthias Gesner (Leipzig, 1752), sig. b1r. On this edition see Moss, A Manual of Classical Bibliography, II, p. 25. Johann Albert Fabricius, Bibliotheca Latina, 2 vols (Venice, 1728), I, p. 277, praised Baxter’s edition as ‘Insignia . . . et ad usum legentium perquam accommodata et emendata’.

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adopted some of them, occasionally leading to discrepancies between Gesner’s reading and Baxter’s retained note.160 Like Bentley, Gesner praised Baxter’s learning, but he sounded a new note of censure: Baxter, he wrote in the preface, sometimes ‘erred, or indulged his ingenuity too far, especially on those dilogias, that is, allegories, so beloved of the man’.161 To Gesner, then, allusive dilogia was tantamount to allegoria, and its frequency in Baxter’s notes was simply the product of overreading, of otsebyatina.162 Nonetheless, his answer was not to remove those notes, but to augment them with his own; again and again, Gesner’s notes, appended to the originals, flatly deny dilogia, like a grumpy uncle popping balloons at a party. Responding to Baxter’s notion of Archytas as Brutus, he scowls, ‘I must say that I find neither Brutus here, nor any other allegory or dilogia’; responding to Achilles as Augustus, he grimaces, ‘this dilogia is obviously unworthy of Horace, for the discourse does not belong to one who fears a swift death, but one who announces it’.163Although most of Gesner’s criticisms relate to the allusive dilogia, now and then he also rejects the verbal type. For instance, Epist. I.20, addressed to Horace’s own book of poems, is full of punning language: Vortumnum Ianumque, liber, spectare videris, scilicet ut prostes Sosiorum pumice mundus.

‘You seem, o liber, to be looking to Vertumnus and Janus, that you might go up for sale, polished with the pumice of the Sosii.’ The addressee is ostensibly Horace’s own book of poems (liber), but described as if it were a freed slave boy (also liber). Baxter: ‘Prostes. This is put here by dilogia, for both books and rent boys offer themselves for sale. Therefore he pointedly adds “with pumice”, for boys like this were “pale with pumice”, as Juvenal says.’ Gesner adds: ‘Boys who are naturally pale do not need pumice. It refers simply to the treatment of manuscripts. This entire dilogia displeases me.’164 160  Horace, Eclogae, ed. Gesner, sig. b2r. For instance, Gesner reads ‘Euro’ with Bentley at Odes I.25.20 (p. 55) instead of Baxter’s ‘Hebro’, without any note in the critical apparatus, but retains Baxter’s note on the dilogia of ‘Hebro’, as well as his complaint against Jan Rutgers and Bentley that ‘Euro’ lacked manuscript authority. 161  Ibid., sig. a8v: ‘errat, aut nimis indulget ingenio: id quod praecipue circa illas Dilogias i[d est] Allegorias, tantopere amatas viro, contingere observo’. 162  On otsebyatina, see the Introduction above, p. 8. 163  Ibid., p. 59: ‘Fateor, me neque Brutum hic invenire, neque aliam allegorian vel dilogian’; p. 288: ‘dilogian autem illam plane indignam videri Horatio. Est enim hic sermo non metuentis, sed celerem interitum denuntiantis.’ Compare pp. 76 (at Odes I.37.13), 181 (at Odes III.20.2), 207 (intro to Odes IV.1), 381 (at Sat. I.7.35), 389 (at Sat. I.9.44), and 563 (at Ep. I.20.2). 164  Ibid., p. 563 (at Ep. I.20.2): ‘Prostes. Dilogωs posuit: nam prostant et libri et meretricii pueri. Signate igitur subjecit pumice: nam huiusmodi pueri erant pumice leves, quod ait Juve-

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Gesner’s Horace was the one German schoolboys grew up with—it was reprinted in 1772, re-­edited again with extra notes by Johann Karl Zeune in 1788, and reissued in 1802, 1815, 1822.165 As a result, Baxter and his dilogia remained common currency among German readers of Horace well into the nineteenth century. Some shared Gesner’s attitude. No less a figure than Johann Gottfried Herder, in a discussion of Horace’s ode to Fortune (I.35), scoffed that Baxter ‘seeks in it his beloved dilogia, as usual’.166 In a later essay (1803) for his journal Adrastea, he remarked with melancholy Baxter’s ubiquity in Germany, overshadowing better editions; what was really needed was a good simple commentary to do away with all the arguments around dilogia.167 Baxter’s name and term could also be repurposed to beak other critics; thus in 1778 Christian David Jani dismissed Sanadon’s analysis of équivoques in Odes I.34 by saying that the Jesuit had ‘descended to Baxterian dilogias’.168 In his correspondence with Heinrich Karl Eichstädt from 1805, Friedrich Schleiermacher apparently detected a ‘Baxterian dilogia’ in one letter, to which Eichstädt replied in mock horror that his letters were the last place to look for such double meanings, and that he approved of dilogia ‘neither as a philologist nor as a man’.169 Others, however, were more sympathetic, such as Herder’s close friend Christoph Martin Wieland, who translated Horace’s Epistulae in 1782, echoing and praising Baxter’s dilogias in the notes, even in one place chiding Gesner for his tasteless and humourless sobriety.170 nalis [Sat. IX.95]. B. Pueri natura leves non indigent pumice. Simpliciter ad cultum voluminum respicit. Tota haec Dilogia mihi non placet. G.’ Eduard Fraenkel, Horace (Oxford, 1957), p. 357, n. 1, sides with Baxter. 165  The Zeune recension was also published in Glasgow in 1796, Edinburgh in 1806, London in 1809, Oxford in 1812, and so on. The Baxter-­Gesner notes were, moreover, incorporated into the commentary in Horace, Opera, ed. Charles Combe, 2 vols (London 1792–3). 166  Johann Gottfried Herder, Kritische Wälder (1769), in his Werke, ed. Martin Bollacher, 10 vols (Frankfurt am Main, 1985–2000), II, p. 152: ‘Baxter sucht hier, wie gewöhnlich, in ihr seine lieben Dilogien’. It should be added that Gesner fares no better here. 167  Johann Gottfried Herder, ‘Bemühungen des vergangenen Jahrhunderts in die Kritik’, in Adrastea, 5 (1803), 19–164, repr. in Werke, ed. Bollacher, X, at pp. 740–41: ‘Ohne alle Dilogien Baxters, ohn’ alle Zwischen-­und Einreden seiner Bewunderer und Freunde will man den guten Gesellen, den verständigen, klugen, sittsamen, kunst-­und lehrreichen Liebling der Grazie allein genießen und gleichsam mit ihm wohnen.’ 168  Horace, Carmina, ed. Christian David Jani, 2nd ed., 2 vols (Leipzig, 1778–82), I, p. 230: ‘Sanadonus . . . ad dilogias adeo Baxterianas descendit.’ 169  Heinrich Karl Eichstädt to Friedrich Schleiermacher, 29 March 1805, in Schleiermacher, Briefwechsel 1804–1806, ed. Andreas Arndt and Simon Gerber [= Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Abteilung V, Band 8] (Berlin, 2008), p. 174: ‘In meinen Briefen dürfen meine Freunde am wenigsten eine Baxtersche Dilogie suchen, die ich auch sonst nicht liebe, weder als Philolog noch als Mensch.’ Schleiermacher’s letter seems to be lost. 170  Horace, Briefe, ed. and tr. Christoph Martin Wieland, 2 vols (Dessau, 1782), I, pp. 77, 300–301, 303.

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Thanks to Baxter, German (and to a lesser extent English) readers of Horace in the late eighteenth century were abuzz with the poet’s possible ambiguities.171 This babble of voices culminated in a lecture delivered in 1808 to the Berlin Akademie der Wissenschaften, with which we may conclude this chapter. The speaker was Philipp Carl Buttmann (1764– 1829), a student and collaborator of F. A. Wolf, and a close associate of the luminaries Schleiermacher and Barthold Niebuhr.172 Buttmann was best known as a hellenist, especially for his Greek grammar of 1794, but his topic in 1808 was Latin—its title was ‘On the Historical Matters and Allusions [Anspielungen] in Horace’. The lecture was a tour de force, printed in 1815, translated by the Cambridge scholar Connop Thirlwall in 1832, and lauded by the classicist Eduard Fraenkel in 1957.173 Buttmann’s primary aim was an unstinting critique of the scholarship of Baxter and his German inheritors, those who sought to reveal under every name in Horace a real historical person. (We have seen that assumption already in Daniel Heinsius’s essay on Horatian satire.) As Gesner had put it, Horace ‘often alludes to stories, histories, geography, genealogies, noble persons of his age, since buried in the night of oblivion’.174 According to Buttmann, by contrast, Horace’s only purpose in writing the Odes was to fashion lyrics imitative of, and competitive with, the achievements of classical Greece: ‘to give the Greek lyre to Latium’.175 The poems 171  It is ultimately due to Baxter, then, that an entry on Dilogie by Georg Friedrich Grotefend, in five close-­set columns, appeared in the elephantine but unfinished Allgemeine Encyklopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste, eds J. S. Ersch and J. G. Gruber, 167 vols (Leipzig, 1818–1887), XXV, pp. 209–12. Grotefend (209b–10a) distinguishes dilogia both from pure ambiguity (Zweideutigkeit), which is always a fault, and from allegory, where there is only one meaning. He also (210b) partitions dilogia used out of ‘Bescheidenheit, Achtung oder Furcht’ from the more agreeable ‘scherz-­und spotthafte’ sort—a variant of the old deceit-­wit pair, on which, see Chapter Three above, p. 99. 172  Buttmann’s autobiography was published in Bildnisse jetztlebender Berliner Gelehrten mit ihren Selbst-­biographien, ed. M. S. Löwe, 3 vols (Berlin, 1806), III, fasc. 2. Schleiermacher delivered his eulogy of Buttmann to the Akademie on 8 July 1830, printed as ‘Gedächtnissrede auf Philipp Buttmann’, repr. in Akademievorträge, ed. Martin Rössler [= Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Abteilung I, Band 2] (Berlin, 2002), pp. 679–95. 173  Philipp Carl Buttmann, ‘Über das Geschichtliche und die Anspielungen im Horaz’, read to the Akademie der Wissenschaften, 30 June 1808. Printed in Abhandlungen der historisch-­ philologischen Klasse der Königlich-­Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften aus den Jahren 1804–1811 (Berlin, 1815), 21–62, repr. in his Mythologus oder gesammelte Abhandlungen über die Sagen des Alterthums, 2 vols (Berlin, 1828), I, pp. 297–346, from which I quote below. Translated as ‘On the Historical References, and the Allusions in Horace’, Philological Museum 1 (1832), 439–84. Fraenkel, Horace, pp. 208–9. 174  Horace, Eclogae, ed. Gesner (1752), sig. a7v: ‘saepe ad Fabulas, Historias, Geographiam, Genealogias, Personas sua aetate nobiles, post paullo ignorantiae quadam nocte sepultas, alludentem’. 175  Buttmann, ‘Über das Geschichtliche’, in Mythologus, I, p. 303: ‘Horazens einziger durchgehender Zweck war, die griechische Lyra dem Latium zu geben.’ This claim was evidently

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were doubtless inspired and shaped by real persons and events in his life— how could they not have been?—but in the very process of being turned to poetry, those realities were abstracted out: ‘Non-­reality belongs to the essence of the Horatian ode. . . . The reality that may have contributed to the formation [of the odes] is thoroughly reworked into the ideal.’176 This was a step beyond Aristotle’s insistence (Poetics 1451b1–8) that poetry deals with ‘things that might have happened’, or with ‘universals’, a step, perhaps, towards Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics. Buttmann further argues that Horace intended his work for posterity, and so was careful to include in each poem all the information needed to interpret it. Indeed, our loss of the poems’ historical circumstances is good fortune, for it allows us to see them ‘in the very world of their own making’, that is, in their ideal aspect.177 It was different with the satires, which had individual targets, though even here Horace had his gaze fixed upon the general principles of human nature, which needed no footnote. At first glance, we are confronted with something like the familiar formalisms of the twentieth century, but Buttmann’s justification of his view is fundamentally different from that of a Wimsatt or a Barthes, for it is grounded not in the denial but in the elevation of authorial intention as a hermeneutic criterion—it is because Horace intended to write for posterity, sub specie aeternitatis, that we need no deep knowledge of his historical circumstances. Buttmann’s attitude was therefore congruent with his friend Schleiermacher’s ‘psychological’ view of interpretation as a process of becoming acquainted with a writer’s mind;178 indeed, there is a deep harmony between their guiding assumptions, a shared response to the historicism of Herder a generation earlier. Certain observations in his lecture capture insights that are typical of Schleiermacher’s philosophy: for instance, that we cannot rely on our own ethical standards as indices of those of past cultures, or that the reader can make up the gaps in his understanding of provocative, and subsequent readers wrestled with its implications. For instance, Wilhelm Siegmund Teuffel, ‘De Horatii amoribus’, Neue Jahrbücher für Philologie und Paedagogik 6 (1840), 326–374, at p. 335, argued that if it were true then Horace could no longer be called a poet, but only a ‘geistreicher Uebersetzer’. True poetry for Teuffel, citing Goethe and Schiller, was not something carefully fabricated as for Buttmann, but the result of inspiration. 176  Buttmann, ‘Über das Geschichtliche’, in Mythologus, I, p. 316: ‘Die Nicht-­Wirklichkeit gehört zum Wesen der Horazischen Ode . . . [D]as Wirkliche, was zu ihrer Entstehung beigetragen haben kann, [ist] ganz ins Idealische gearbeitet.’ 177  Ibid., p. 304: ‘Allein so wenig fühlt man das Glück, das uns zu theil geworden, jene alten Dichter bloss in der Welt zu sehn, die sie schaffen’. 178  I leave aside here the controversy over the extent to which this description characterises Schleiermacher’s early (pre-­1819) work on hermeneutics, a dispute occasioned by Heinz Kimmerle’s 1957 publication (for his doctoral thesis under Hans-­Georg Gadamer) of Schleiermacher’s early manuscripts. On this, see Kristin Gjesdal, Gadamer and the Legacy of German Idealism (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 172–73.

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a text only insofar as his imagination ‘is more or less faithful to the poet’s’, an approximation that can never be complete.179 Schleiermacher did not attend the lecture—he was off on the island of Rügen at the time180—but it seems likely that he read it or discussed its ideas with Buttmann, given the appearance of similar themes in his own lectures. In his later manuscripts we see a resistance much like Buttmann’s to the use of biography in interpreting poetry, as he distinguishes the unimportant question ‘Under what circumstances did the author reach his decision [to write a given text in a given way]?’ from the more central ‘What is the significance of the decision to him, or what definite value does it have for him in relation to the totality of his life?’181 To be sure, the interpreter must be conscious of the historical limits imposed on the author’s mind, but the process of understanding, especially of lyric poetry, is more deeply characterised by an effort to grasp the totality and inner unity of the text: ‘The more a work has emerged from the writer’s inner nature, the more insignificant the outer circumstances are for the hermeneutic task.’182 It is telling that Schleiermacher here insists on a point also emphasised by Buttmann: that the titles of ancient poems were not part of the text, but added later by others, and so cannot serve as convenient indices of the text’s unity of meaning. Buttmann’s lecture, then, offers us something of considerable historical value—an application of Schleiermacherian hermeneutics to a group of concrete questions, both influenced by his friend’s work in its general orientation and anticipating it on specific points. His concern, however, is not, like Schleiermacher, the interpretation of the New Testament, but the tradition of Horatian criticism inspired by Baxter’s focus on dilogia. At the start of his lecture Buttmann expels dilogia for the very reason that Baxter has brought it into disrepute with his fanciful footnotes. But he cannot resist its lure, and it soon creeps back into the discussion.183 He equates dilogia with allusion, and, against Gesner, distinguishes it from allegory: the latter has only one true sense, veiled by another, whereas the former, 179  Buttmann, ‘Über das Geschichtliche’, in Mythologus, I, esp. pp. 317–18 (‘mehr oder weniger treu der dem Dichter’) and 336–37. 180  See Schleiermacher’s letters, in Briefwechsel 1808, ed. Simon Gerber and Sarah Schmidt [= Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Abteilung V, Band 10] (Berlin, 2015), pp. 160–163, addressed from Götemitz. 181  SHK, p. 156: ‘unterscheiden hier die Frage, unter welchen Umständen ist der Verfasser zu seinem Entschluß gekommen, von der, was bedeutet dieser in ihm, oder was hat er für einen bestimmten Werth in Beziehung auf die Totalitåt seines Lebens’ 182  Ibid., p. 157: ‘Je mehr ein Werk aus den inneren Wesen des Schriftstellers hervorgegangen ist, desto unbedeutender sind für die hermeneutische Aufgabe die äußeren Umstände’. 183  Indeed, Grotefend, ‘Dilogie’, Allgemeine Encyklopädie, XXV, pp. 210b and 211b, criticises Buttmann for precisely the same fault as Baxter, namely, reading dilogia into Horace where none was intended.

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found chiefly but not exclusively in comic and satirical contexts, is ‘when someone says only one thing, but means two different things at the same time’.184 The primary sense of an allusive word or name should be sufficient to understand it, so that the secondary sense is simply ‘an ingenious addition which lifts the charm of a passage or poem’.185 This can operate at the level of a single word, such as apex at Odes I.34.13, which primarily denotes the summit of power taken by Fortune from the mighty and awarded to the humble, but secondarily alludes to the Parthian crown transferred in 32 BC from Tiridates II back to the briefly deposed Phraates IV. Dilogia can also work with names, as Baxter had thought; Buttmann mentions ‘Maltinus’ (Sat. I.2.25) and ‘Licymnia’ (Sat. I.2.54) for Maecenas and his wife. These identifications, which originate in the ancient scholia, are defended on special grounds: It would entirely misconstrue the spirit of such allusions to think that they are merely a cipher for things not to be uttered aloud. Maltinus here and Licymnia there are only and entirely ideal personae, about whom the poet can say what he likes; and of whom the poet can think and communicate his thoughts as much as he believes justifiable according to the spirit of wit [Scherz] and friendship.186

The first sentence of this passage takes to task the early modern assumption of the political purpose of satirical ambiguity, which we detailed in the previous section. Dissimulation is replaced with friendship, which, as for Domingo Báñez writing about Scripture in 1584, offers a criterion of ambiguity by setting agreed boundaries within which it can flourish.187 This brings us back to the key function of artificial ambiguity, namely, the control of social relations. Horace teases and delights his patron, and so maintains his favour, by adding to his types enough echoes of reality to 184  Buttmann, ‘Über das Geschichtliche’, in Mythologus, I, p. 320: ‘die Dilogie, wenn man nur eines sagt, aber zweierlei zugleich meinet’. In distinguishing allusion from allegory, Buttmann implicitly follows Johann Christoph Adelung, Über den Deutschen Styl, 2 vols (Berlin, 1785), I, pp. 359–61, who had criticised Julius Caesar Scaliger for equating the two at Poetices libri vii (Lyon, 1561), p. 138b (III.84). 185  Ibid., p. 320: ‘wenn der Leser diesen einen nur bemerkt, ihm, dem eigentlichen Zwecke des Gedichtes gemäss, durchaus nichts abgeht’, ‘eine geistreiche Zugabe den Reiz einer Stelle oder eines Gedichtes erhöhen’. Compare STA, p. 167: ‘It is tactful, when making an obscure reference, to arrange that the verse shall be intelligible even when the reference is not understood.’ 186  Ibid., p. 342: ‘man verfehlt gänzlich den Geist aller solchen Anspielungen, wenn man denkt, sie seien nur eine Geheimschrift für nicht laut auszusprechende Sachen. Maltinus dort und Licymnia hier sind durchaus nur idealische Personen, von welchen der Dichter sagen kann, was er will: bei welchen er eben soviel noch daneben sich denken, und das gedachte so kennbar machen kann, als er glaubt vor dem Genius des Scherzes und der Freundschaft verantworten zu können.’ 187  On Báñez see Chapter Four above, p. 167.

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prompt recognition: the suggestiveness is both witty and a mark of esteem—it embodies elegantia. We can see in this passage, as in the lecture as a whole, the theoretical advantages of sustained analysis, against the limitations of the commentaries to which it reacted; the format permitted sophisticated considerations of the processes of composition and interpretation. Another example of dilogia treated by Buttmann, an isolated case of agreement with Baxter, has a similar richness. At Epist. I.19.28, Horace refers to mascula Sappho, ‘masculine Sappho’, and Porphyrio predictably spots an ambiguity: ‘either because she is famous for her devotion to poetry, which is more common among men, or because she is rumoured to have been a dyke’.188 Torrentius, likewise, saw the ambiguity, which he read as an index of Horace’s wit (ingenium), and Baxter spotted dilogia—for once, Gesner did not contradict him.189 As with Torrentius’s remarks on the treachery of Aeneas, the ambiguity of mascula encapsulated a broader debate as to whether Sappho really had been a lesbian, and it is against this background that we ought to understand the developments of the early nineteenth century.190 Baxter, said Buttmann, was not so poor a judge as to overlook so true and dependable a dilogia in Horace’s poetry: Mascula, regarded here as an epithet for the notorious lesbian love of which Sappho was accused, contradicts all standards of good taste, not because of any objection to the subject, but only because, on a purely artistic level, such an epithet would be out of place in this context. ‘Masculine’, then, is here unquestionably a term of praise for the poetical spirit with which Sappho competed with the most eminent men. But Horace could not possibly have used so poised and explicit an epithet for Sappho without thinking at the same time of that well-­known side of the poetess, and without giving rise to these thoughts in every knowledgeable reader, and in himself when he read it over again.191

188  Scholia Horatiana, II, p. 381: ‘Mascula autem Sappho, vel quia in poetica studio est inclyta, in quo saepius viri, vel quia tribas diffamatur fuisse.’ The tribas is the masculine, penetrating lesbian, hence my translation. On this phrase, see Andrea Cucchiarelli, ‘Hor. epist. I, 19, 28: pede mascula Sappho’, Hermes 127 (1999), 328–44. 189  Horace, [Carmina], ed. Torrentius, p. 711; Horace, Eclogae, ed. Baxter, p. 438: ‘Mascula Dilogωs, ob Poeticum ingenium, et amorem puellarum.’ 190  Glenn Most, ‘Reflecting Sappho’, in Re-­reading Sappho: Reception and Transmission, ed. Ellen Greene (Berkeley, 1996), 11–35. 191  Buttmann, ‘Über das Geschichtliche’, in Mythologus, I, p. 322:

Mascula hier bloss als ein solches Epitheton anzusehn, womit die berüchtige Lesbische Liebe, deren Sappho beschuldigt wird, bezeichnet würde, widerstreitet allem guten Geschmack; nicht der Widrigkeit des Gegenstandes wegen, sondern weil ein solches Epithet in diesem bloss die Kunst betreffenden Zusammenhang

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Buttmann’s Horace is in something of the same position as Augustine’s Moses, who, once he has set down the divine words, anticipates the doubt of future readers: even if he did not mean the ambiguity on first writing, he decided to retain it upon rereading. This is an important point—it grounds deliberate ambiguity in a plausible and nuanced story of authorial intention in a way no previous critic had attempted, forestalling the argument that extra meanings are always otsebyatina, read in later by the overzealous. By a careful attention to the specifics of different cases, Buttmann thus overcomes the binary of Baxter and Gesner and points beyond the standard tropes of early modern scholarship. Which is not to say it was a clean break: his reference to Horace as ‘jesting’ (scherzhafte) reinscribes the early modern association of poetic ambiguity with comic wit. At the end of his life, Buttmann changed his mind about the word mascula. The second volume (1829) of his essay collection Mythologus is prefixed with a short but extraordinary note, perhaps the last text he ever wrote for publication, apologising in heavy terms for having espied any sexual allusion in mascula, and hoping to expiate his own guilt for imputing ill to either Sappho or Horace.192 (Thirlwall, respectful of Buttmann’s change of heart, omitted the passage from his translation.193) The volte-­face had been prompted by reading Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker’s 1816 defence of Sappho’s sexual chastity, Sappho von einem herrschenden Vorurtheil befreyt, which Glenn Most has called ‘the founding text in the modern philological study of Sappho’.194 Welcker—on whom more in Chapter Nine— noted the apparent dilogia in mascula but thought Buttmann (in 1808) had it wrong, for the word before mascula in Horace is pede (the ablative of pes, ‘foot’), and therefore the allusion was rather to Sappho’s heroic leap from the high rocks at Leucas, as in Statius (Silv. V.3.155, ‘Saltusque ingressa viriles’).195 One double meaning had to be replaced with another: the pleasure of wit was too great to lose. durchaus am unrechten Ort wäre. Männlich ist also hier unstreitig ein Lob des dichterishen Geistes, wodurch Sappho mit den berühmtesten Männern wetteiferte. Aber unmöglich könnte Horaz gerade dieses so gefasste und ausgedrückte Epithet, gerade bei der Sappho gebrauchen, ohne zugleich an jene allbekannte Seite der Dichterin zu denken, ohne diesen Gedanken bei allen kundigen Lesern, und bei sich selbst, wenn er es wieder überlas, entstehn zu lassen. Buttmann, Mythologus, II, leaf after title (there is no page number or quire signature). See Thirlwall’s note, in Buttmann, ‘On the Historical References’, p. 462. 194  Most, ‘Reflecting Sappho’, p. 24; see also W. M. Calder, ‘Welcker’s Sapphobild and Its Reception in Wilamowitz’, in Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker: Werk und Wirkung, ed. Calder et al. (Stuttgart, 1988), pp. 131–56; Joan DeJean, Fictions of Sappho, 1546–1937 (Chicago, 1989), pp. 207–11. 195  Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker, Sappho von einem herrschenden Vorurtheil befreyt (Göttingen, 1816), pp. 115–17. 192 

193 

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It should be clear from this chapter that the perception of and commendation of ambiguities in poetry long preceded Empson, and long preceded those now posited as his forebears, such as Coleridge.196 But it would be a mistake to think of the readers discussed here as crude proto-­Empsons, for theirs was a much more circumscribed concept of artificial ambiguity, rooted in the twin notions of elegant wit and deceit, and usually focused in a single rhetorical device—a concetto, an équivoque, a dilogia, a quibble. If Shakespeare or Donne or Milton had been asked to explain the ambiguities in their poetry, these are the ideas they might have invoked, and when Coleridge made his very novel argument about ambiguity in Shakespeare, he still framed it in conservative terms as a defence of punning. Even as late as 1931, one of Empson’s major critics wondered if his ‘ambiguity’ was meant as merely ‘that of a literary device—of the allusion, conceit or pun, in one of their more or less conscious forms’.197 On the evidence presented so far, early modern readers lacked the conceptual resources to think of ambiguity in any psychological manner, that is, as the product or manifestation of authorial doubt, of conflict, of ambivalence. In all cases, the poet was understood as fully in command of his language, using ambiguity to delight his patrons, to show off his erudition, or to protect his critique of authority; doubt on a given topic, such as Aeneas’s political loyalty or Sappho’s sexual preferences, was only gestured at. Moreover, due to the settings in which these insights mostly appeared— the philological commentary, the rhetorical compendium, the essay on genre—they tended to stay isolated, unassimilated into any broader statement on ambiguity; attempts to theorise remained at the threshold of suggestive aporia, as in Vossius or Bouhours. What Baxter, finally, offered his readers, as Empson two centuries later did his, was the chance of a sustained conversation about poetic ambiguity, about the limits and possibilities of reading. In the next chapter we turn to two very different kinds of conversation on that subject in the early eighteenth century, the echoes of which would carry over into new, unexpected fields of English and German thought within the space of a few decades. On Coleridge as a forebear of Empson, see Chapter Ten below, pp. 364, 373. See Chapter Ten below, p. 391.

196  197 

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PA R T T W O

Variations

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CHA PTE R SI X

THE FAULTLESS DIE Quelz dez (demandoit Trinquamelle, grand Praesident d’icelle court) mon amy entendez vous? Les dez (respondit Bridoye) des jugemens, Alea judiciorum. — François Rabelais, Tiers Livre, ch. 39.

According to Graham Hough, neoclassical literary criticism ‘worked towards the idea of a single ascertainable meaning, presented to be what the author had intended to put in’.1 That is true of most critics of the eighteenth century, as more generally of philologists and scholars since the Renaissance, but not of all, as we have already seen. This chapter explores further variations on the problem in the neoclassical era. Its orbit, a peculiar ellipse, has as its foci the receptions of two great poets: the most ancient, Homer, and the most up-­to-­date, Alexander Pope. These may seem odd partners, and they are—I pair them here because both gave rise to heated quarrels in which readers were willing to say unusual things about the poets’ ambiguity. By juxtaposing the two stories, we will hear the full gamut of interpretive possibilities, not always predictable, open to literary critics of the age. Quadriga Metaphors do not die; they are only frozen in carbonite, and any future day might wake up in the dark of a strange world and find themselves thrust, disoriented, into battle. The poet Simonides sang of a man as tetragōnos aneu psogou, ‘foursquare beyond reproach’.2 Just as a pentagon is a shape with five angles, so a tetragon (tetragōnon) is one with four: in its regular form, a square. Aristotle comments (Rhetoric 1411b) that Simonides’s tetragon is a metaphor for moral perfection; elsewhere (Nic. Ethics 1  Graham Hough, ‘An Eighth Type of Ambiguity’, in his Selected Essays (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 23–45, at 33. 2  Plato, Protagoras 339a–b.

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1100b21–1100b22) he remarks that the happy man will endure life nobly ‘if he is “truly good” and tetragōnos aneu psogou’. Erasmus would revive the image in his Adagia (‘Quadratus homo’): ‘whichever way you turn this shape it looks the same, just as a wise man, whatever fortune he meets, does not change his mind’.3 Most translations of the Ethics read the tetragon as a square; Latin versions both before and after Erasmus have quadratus, and in a 1797 attempt by the Scottish classicist John Gillies, we read that the ‘good man . . . whatever may befal him, will behave gracefully; approving his conduct exact, square, and blameless’.4 Fifty years earlier, however, we find an anomaly. Edmund Pargiter, in his own version of the Ethics— aborted after the first book, 1745—compared the good man not to a square at all, but to ‘a Cube without blemish’.5 Suddenly the tetragon seems to have been less stable, more ambiguous, than anticipated. And in fact the Latin quadratus shows the same duality, attested even in antiquity with the meaning of a cube.6 Indeed, Francis Bacon, garnering titles from Erasmus and others in a youthful notebook of ‘Formularies and Elegancies’, scribbled, ‘quadratus homo a Cube’.7 The double sense of the tetragon has long been noted by Dante scholars, following its use in Paradiso XVII.23–4, ‘io mi senta / Ben tetragono ai colpi di ventura’—literally, ‘I felt myself to be entirely tetragonal against the blows of fortune’.8 Renaissance readers, assuming a sound etymological sense, tended to gloss the word straightforwardly as a square, often pointing to Aristotle. But Dante’s contemporaries had other thoughts. His son Pietro clearly understood the tetragono as a cube: ‘A tetragon is a body which, when thrown, always remains upright, like a die’.9 More equivocal was his friend the notary Andrea Lancia, in a work later known for its 3  Erasmus, Adagia, IV.8.4.5: ‘Haec autem figura in quamcumque partem volvatur, sui similis est. Ita sapiens quaecunque inciderit fortuna, non mutat animum.’ St Ambrose, De Abraham, II.9.65, at PL 14:487, glossing Gen. 15:16, presents the stability of the quaternion as a Christian mystical theme, writing that David ‘velut aptis numeris vitam istius mundi transigit quasi tetragonus et stabilis atque perfectus’. On homo quadratus and the tetragon in the Middle Ages, see Umberto Eco, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, tr. Hugh Bredin (New Haven and London, 1989), pp. 35–36. 4  Aristotle, Ethics and Politics, tr. John Gillies, 2 vols (London, 1797), I, p. 166. Compare Aristotle, De moribus ad Nicomachum, ed. Denys Lambin (Paris, 1558), fol. 12r, and Ethicorum sive de moribus ad Nicomachum libri x, tr. Joachim Perionius (Lyon, 1556), p. 19, both translating quadratus. 5  Aristotle, Of Morals to Nicomachus, Book the First, tr. Edmund Pargiter (London, 1745), p. 24. 6  Implied, e.g., at Vitruvius, De architectura, IX.8.1: ‘hemicyclium excavatum ex quadrato’; Cicero, De natura deorum, I.24: ‘vel cylindri vel quadrati vel coni vel pyramidis [sc. forma]’. 7  Francis Bacon, Promus of Formularies and Elegancies, in OFB I, p. 558 8  Guy Raffa, Divine Dialectic: Dante’s Incarnational Poetry (Toronto, 2000), pp. 164–178. 9  Pietro Alighieri, Super Dantis ipsius genitoris comoediam commentarium, ed. Vincenzo Mannucci (Florence, 1846), p. 662: ‘Dicitur tetragonum corpus alicuius rei, quod projectum,

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Tuscan polish as L’ottimo commento, ‘the best commentary’ on the Commedia. Lancia describes Dante’s tetragono first as ‘a geometrical figure with four equal right-­angles in the shape of a die □ which, however you throw it, stands firm’, and then refers to a square-­formation of Roman infantry, as used by Gaius Marius to defeat Jugurtha—just as the soldiers are ready to defend from attacks on all sides, so the poet is fortified against fortune.10 Square becomes cube becomes square. Both shapes appear in translations of the Paradiso.11 A century ago, an earlier parallel for the cubic tetragono was noticed in Thomas Aquinas’s commentary on the Ethics, wrestling with Aristotle’s Simonides: He is a ‘tetragon without reproach’, that is, as some have explained, by reason of having achieved the four cardinal virtues. But this does not seem to be Aristotle’s intention, who never made any such enumeration of the virtues. Rather, he calls ‘tetragon’ a man perfect in virtue, by his likeness to a cubical body having six square sides, since it stands well on any side. And likewise the virtuous man, no matter his fortune, maintains his composure.12

The sense in Thomas and perhaps Dante is of solidity—the cube as the most stable solid, associated with earth.13 (Leonardo, in a witty paragraph of his notebooks, points out that the tetrahedron is actually more stable, since it must be pushed further over before it topples onto another side.14) semper est erectum, ut taxillus.’ Compare the anonymous commentary of the trecento Codice Cassinese (Monte Cassino, 1865), p. 474. 10  [Andrea Lancia], L’Ottimo commento della Divina Commedia, ed. Alessandro Torri, 3 vols (Pisa, 1827), III, pp. 392–3, n. 23: ‘e questa è un’ altra figura di geometria, che ha quattro angoli retti uguali a forma del dado □ che, come che tu ‘l getti, sta fermo’. The military reference is to Sallust, Bell. Jug., 100: ‘conspectu hostium quadrato agmine’, and on this sense of tetragono, compare Liddell and Scott, s.v. τετράγωνος, A2b. 11  Dante’s earliest and freest English translator, Henry Boyd (Paradiso, 1802), renders the line ‘Virtue’s base, / On which I stand, no coming storm shall rase’. Since then, most versions that I have consulted offer a square (Cary 1814, Cayley 1851–55, Binyon 1943, Singleton 1975); some a cube (Dayman 1865, Mandelbaum 1984). 12  Thomas Aquinas, Sententia libri Ethicorum, I.16, in the Leonine Opera omnia (Rome, 1882–), XLVII.1, p. 58: ‘et est tetragonus sine vituperio, id est perfectus quatuor virtutibus cardinalibus, ut quidam exponunt: sed hoc non videtur esse secundum intentionem Aristotelis, qui numquam invenitur talem enumerationem facere; sed tetragonum nominat perfectum in virtute ad similitudinem corporis cubici habentis sex superficies quadratas, propter quod bene stat in qualibet superficie, et similiter virtuosus in qualibet fortuna bene se habet.’ The first to notice this passage was Enrico Proto, ‘Ben tetragono ai colpi di ventura’, Bullettino della Società Dantesca Italiana n.s., 19 (1912), 134–37, observing that Pietro Alighieri, in his comment on this line, quotes the old translation of Aristotle also used in Thomas’s commentary. 13  Plato, Timaeus, 55d. 14  Leonardo da Vinci, Notebooks, ed. and tr. Edward MacCurdy, 2 vols (1938: Bungay, 1954), I, p. 585. By the nineteenth century, when Leonardo’s notebooks were known, editors

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The dantisti have not identified any precursors to Thomas in reading the tetragon as a cube.15 But there may be precedent in Byzantine sources unknown to the poet. A striking passage lies deep in the Iliad commentary by the archbishop Eustathius of Thessalonica (1115–1195).16 This huge, dense work, along with its companion on the Odyssey, has been a goldmine of lore and learning for Western scholars since the Renaissance. It has never been fully translated in print.17 But for those few who could read him, Eustathius was the definitive annotator; in a 1688 forerunner of Swift’s Battle of the Books, Homer, heading the army of Greek poets, selects the archbishop as his first captain.18 And it is Eustathius who will lead us to the shocks and paradoxes of neoclassical criticism. In Iliad IV, Nestor rallies his Pylian soldiers outside Troy: cavalry at the front, trusted infantry at the back, and the cowards in the middle so they have no choice but to fight.19 He encourages the men to work as a team and not engage individually with the enemy, nor to dawdle behind. And then he issues a command: ὃς δέ κ᾽ ἀνὴρ ἀπὸ ὧν ὀχέων ἕτερ᾽ ἅρμαθ᾽ ἵκηται ἔγχει ὀρεξάσθω (Il. IV.306–307)

Already in Plutarch’s essay on poetry, the obscurity of this verse is marked out for censure.20 The basic meaning is that when a man encounters of Dante had begun to float the interpretation of his tetragono as a tetrahedron; see, for instance, La divina commedia, ed. Paolo Costa, 3 vols (Florence, 1842), III, p. 407. Proto, ‘Ben tetragono’, p. 136, points out that the ‘embryo’ of this reading can be found already in the pseudo-­Boccaccian commentary on the Commedia first published in 1848. 15  Raffa, Divine Dialectic, p. 168. 16  Spectacularly, an autograph of this commentary survives in Florence, Codex Laurentianus Plut. LIX 2, 3; this forms the basis for Eustathius, Commentarii ad Homeri Iliadem pertinentes, ed. Marchinus van der Valk, 4 vols (Leiden, 1971–87), an edition renowned for its size and its deep learning. On the autograph, see Valk’s epic Praefatio to the first volume, pp. ix–xix, while on p. cxxxix he dates the commentary to c. 1165–75. There are brief notices of Eustathius in older works such as N. G. Wilson, Scholars of Byzantium (Baltimore, 1983), pp. 196–204, but see now Reading Eustathios of Thessalonike, ed. Filippomaria Pontani et al. (Berlin, 2017). 17  The first printed edition is in four volumes (Rome, 1542–50), with an inaccurate reprint (Basel, 1559–60). A Latin translation of the first five books by Alessandro Politi, with notes by Anton Maria Salvini and an extensive index and concordance, later appeared as Παρεκβολαι εἴς τήν Ὅμηρου Ἰλιαδα, 3 vols (Florence, 1730–45). Other translations remain in manuscript, on which see Filippomaria Pontani, ‘ “Captain of Homer’s Guard”: The Reception of Eustathius in Modern Europe’, in Reading Eustathios, 199–228, at pp. 204–5. I am most grateful to Dr Pontani for sharing his article with me as I was putting the finishing touches to this book. 18  François de Callières, Histoire poëtique de la guerre nouvellement declarée entre les anciens et modernes (Amsterdam, 1688), p. 98. 19  The reason for this arrangement was already in antiquity a source of doubt; see Porphyry, Homeric Questions on the Iliad, ed. and tr. John A. MacPhail, Jr. (Berlin and New York, 2011), pp. 84–85. 20  De audiendis poetis, 28b, in Plutarch, How to Study Poetry, eds Richard Hunter and Donald Russell (Cambridge, 2011), p. 54.

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another on a chariot, ‘he’—perhaps the man, perhaps the other—should extend his spear. But Eustathius points out that the command admits of four different interpretations, all valid both as military orders and as constructions of the text. The first is that if a fighter seizes his enemy’s chariot, he should continue to fight with his spear, rather than making off with his booty there and then. The second, that if a fighter is thrown from his own chariot, a comrade should extend his spear for the first to climb up on. The third, that if a fighter is thrown, his comrades should extend their spears to prevent him from climbing up onto their chariots, lest the battle be disrupted. Let the faultless die for the good of the many. And the fourth is that a second fighter on one chariot should not attempt to steer, but only extend his spear to fight.21 From this wealth of meaning in the line, Eustathius concludes, quoting Aristotle: Note that this Homeric passage is ambiguous, for it has four proposed meanings, and all of them lie within the bounds of reason, as has been shown. But Homer equivocates [poikilletai—‘embroiders in colours’] like this in many places; even so, one may call him in these matters tetragōnon aneu psogou. For although he shifts about [meta­piptei22] this way and that with ambiguous meanings, in all his meanings he is firm and faultless.23

There is a parallel here to the Thomist gloss: no matter what meaning Homer’s words take on, he remains steadfast, more like a cube than a square. But now the quaternity of the tetragon evokes the four interpretations of the line; it is as if the tetragon has itself become a figure of ambiguity—the thrown die—as well as of steadiness. Its dual status as flat and solid is entirely apt, for under Eustathius’s paradox, Homer’s moral stability is not annulled but revealed by his ambiguity. His verb for Homer’s technique, poikilletai, recalls the shield of Achilles, on which Hephaestus poikille (Il. XVIII.590) a floor for the youths to dance in a ring like a potter testing his wheel, a Keatsian image of movement and stillness. Multiplicity, the joy of life and art, anchors the defence of Homer. And Homer, says Eustathius, equivocates like this in many places; indeed, the commentary heaves with references to the amphibolia or diploē 21  These interpretations are found already in the ancient scholia: see Scholia Graeca in Homeri Iliadem (scholia vetera), ed. Hartmut Erbse, 7 vols (Berlin, 1969–1988), I, pp. 502–3. 22  This word is used, for instance by Epictetus, Discourses I.7, with the sense of a sophistical change in lexical meaning to facilitate an argument. 23  Eustathius, Commentarii, ed. Valk, I, p. 753: ‘Καὶ σημείωσαι, ὅτι τὸ Ὁμηρικὸν τοῦτο χωρίον ἀμφιβόλως ἔχει τέσσαρας ἐννοίας προβεβλημένον, καὶ ταύτας ἀπάσας ἔσω λόγου κειμένας, ὡς δέδεικται. πολλαχοῦ δὲ Ὅμηρος καὶ οὕτω ποικίλλεται, ὡς εἶναι εἰπεῖν αὐτὸν ἐν τοῖς τοιούτοις τετράγωνον ἄνευ ψόγου. μεταπίπτει μὲν γὰρ ταῖς ἀμφιβόλοις ἐννοίαις οὕτως ἢ οὕτως; ἐν ἀπάσαις δὲ σταθερός ἐστι, καὶ ἄψογος.’

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(doubleness) of this or that line. Some of these are banal, like the ambiguous pronoun hos at Il. V.62.24 One step up from this, at Il. V.356 Eustathius detects a zeugma or syllepsis, that is, the use of a single word for two different semantic purposes. Ares’s spear and twin steeds both ekeklito (‘rested’) on a cloud: Homer’s succinctness depends on the polysemy of the verb, equivalent to ikeito (‘leaned’) with the spear, and istanto (‘stood’) with the horses.25 Empson, much later, would praise the Augustan use of the device, listed under the second type of ambiguity, as giving ‘the effect of limited comprehensiveness, of a unity in variety mirrored from the real world’.26 Another variety of ambiguity noticed by Eustathius is the diplomatic. In Il. I.31, Agamemnon, having seized the Trojan girl Chryseis as a slave, explains to her father that she will see out old age working at the loom and ‘visiting my bed’ (ἐμὸν λέχος ἀντιόωσαν).27 Aristarchus, who thought the sense sexually inappropriate, athetized.28 Eustathius is more subtle: the word antioōsan (‘visiting’) ‘is spoken nobly, but it has a certain ambiguity’.29 The king means inwardly that Chryseis will become his concubine, but the others will interpret him to mean that the girl will merely serve as chambermaid; the word thus mediates high and low with a plausible deniability like some of our examples in Chapter Three.30 A case of amphiboly or syntactic ambiguity appears at Il. V.150, where Diomedes slays two brothers, Abas and Polyidos. In Walter Leaf’s 1892 translation, with its characteristic affectation of Malory, we read: ‘Then left he there, and pursued after Abas and Polyidos, sons of old Eurydamas dreamer of dreams; yet discerned he no dreams for them when they went, but stalwart Diomedes despoiled them.’ The line I have put in italics renders the Greek ‘τοῖς οὐκ ἐρχομένοις ὃ γέρων ἐκρίνατ’ ὀνείρους’, in which, as Eustathius explains, the negative particle ouk might apply either to the father reading dreams (ekrinat’ oneirous) or to the two brothers coming home from war (tois erkhomenois).31 Leaf thus gives the alternative reading in his footnote: ‘yet Ibid., II, p. 22. Ibid., II, p. 90. 26  STA, p. 70. 27  Dio Chrysostom, Orationes, ed. Guy de Budé, 2 vols (Leipzig, 1916–19), II, p. 179 (LXI [44].14), rebukes Agamemnon for his arrogance in uttering these words. 28  Aristarchs Homerische Textkritik nach den Fragmenten des Didymos, ed. Arthur Ludwich, 2 vols (Leipzig, 1884), I, p. 176. 29  Eustathius, Commentarii, ed. Valk, I, p. 49: ‘τοῦτο δὲ εἴρηται μὲν σεμνῶς· ἔχει δέ πως μέσως κατὰ τὴν ἔννοιαν’. 30  Liddell and Scott, s.v. ἀντιάω, see the sexual sense here as a hapax legomenon. 31  Eustathius, Commentarii, ed. Valk, II, p. 43. Note that commentators still disagree as to the correct interpretation: contrast Homer, Ilias für den Schulgebrauch erklärt, ed. Karl Friedrich Ameis, 2 vols (Leipzig, 1877–87), I.2, p. 51; and The Iliad: A Commentary, ed. G. S. Kirk, 6 vols (Cambridge, 1985–1993), II, pp. 73–74. 24  25 

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came they not home for him to discern dreams for them’.32 The duality is poignant: the Trojan father’s dream-­reading and his sons’ lives are cut off in the same breath, interpretation and futurity (‘Ask for me tomorrow . . .’) perishing together. In the Renaissance, Eustathius, still only in manuscript, would be favoured by Erasmus and his circle, including Rabelais, for his expositions and modest allegorical readings.33 Later in the century, his work would be amply used by Jean de Sponde for his own commentary, published alongside a 1583 text and Latin translation of Homer’s epics. Sponde regularly discusses the texts’ ambiguities, referring to both Eustathius and recent scholarship. At Il. V.150, he notes how the two readings given by his predecessor should be punctuated differently, pointing to Estienne’s famous Iliad of 1566.34 Isaac Casaubon, who admired Eustathius as a ‘store-­keeper’ of the Greek language but deplored his prolixity, reliably picked out the ambiguities in marginalia to his copy, though he had nothing to say about their interpretation.35 In the realm of élite learning, then, Homer’s ambiguities, especially as revealed by Eustathius, were of consistent interest. In a pedagogical setting, by contrast, ambiguity was to be ignored in favour of a simple gloss. This can be seen in a little Iliad once in Dr Johnson’s library, annotated by the Milanese student Giovanni Matteo Toscano from Denys Lambin’s Paris lectures on Homer (1566–1567).36 At Il. IV.306, next to ‘ἕτερ᾽ ἅρμαθ᾽ ἵκηται’, Toscano wrote ‘adversarii’, identifying the second chariot as that of an enemy, and at line 307, ‘Let him fight with his spear 32  Homer, Iliad, tr. Andrew Lang, Walter Leaf, and Ernest Myers, rev. ed. (London, 1927), pp. 86–87. 33  See Marc Bizer, Homer and the Politics of Authority in Renaissance France (Oxford, 2011), p. 28 on Erasmus and pp. 51–53 on Rabelais and Homeric allegory. On the Renaissance reception of Eustathius see also Philip Ford, De Troie à Ithaque: réception des épopées homériques à la Renaissance (Geneva, 2007), esp. pp. 111–19; and Pontani, ‘ “Captain of Homer’s Guard” ’, pp. 200–205. 34  Homer, Opera cum Latina versione, ed. and tr. Jean de Sponde, 2 vols (Basel, 1583), I, p. 81. 35  Eustathius, Παρεκβολαι εἰς την Ὁμηρου Ἰλιαδα και Ὀδυσσειαν (Basel, 1550), British Library shelfmark C.76.H.4., pp. 23 (on Il. I.31), 361 (on IV.306–307), and 403 (on V.150). On the title-­page Casaubon has written: ‘Auctor est diligentissimus et quam possis appellare promum condum linguae Graecae. Utinam tantum loquacitate et verbositate non laboraret: quae quidem tanta est.’ 36  Homer, Ilias id est de rebus ad Troiam gestis (Paris, 1562), British Library shelfmark 834.g.29.(2), containing only the first four books of the Iliad. This volume, which also includes notes on Pindar from the lectures of Jean Dorat, has received some scholarly notice. See George Hugo Tucker, ‘Jean Dorat et Giovanni Matteo (Giovam-­Matteo) Toscano, Lecteurs des Pythiques de Pindare en 1566’, in Jean Dorat, poète humaniste de la Renaissance: actes du colloque international (Limoges, 6–8 juin 2001), eds Christine de Buzon and Jean-­Eudes Girot (Geneva, 2007), pp. 199–236, at pp. 212–216; and Ford, De Troie à Ithaque, pp. 98–99, 232–233.

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outstretched, and not try to quit the battle or disturb the ranks’, the first sense given by Eustathius. The line is not acknowledged as a crux, but simply explained—like one of the ancient scholia, only here with a military moral for the student, underscored by nearby passages.37 In all this activity was nothing charged or historically significant, only a continuation of the processes that had been going on for millennia in libraries and schools. Homeric ambiguity would not become a point of contention for another century. An Exchange of Arms In the age of lights, Eustathius found himself shaken awake and thrust into battle, for his commanding officer was a key player in the querelle of the Ancients and Moderns.38 To the Ancients, Homer was first among poets for his plain, bold style, for the bravery of his heroes, and for the universality of his learning; to the Moderns, his style was primitive, his fancies absurd, and his characters cruel and licentious. One focus for contention was the ecphrasis of Achilles’ shield in Il. XVIII.478–608, derided as impossible by Charles Perrault and others, until Jean Boivin reached an ingenious solution for its composition in 1715. Another dispute to emerge from this setting was what would later be called the ‘Homeric Question’—that is, whether Homer was a real individual, or the collective pseudonym for a host of unknown Greek bards. The abbé François d’Aubignac first advanced the latter view in his Dissertation sur l’Iliade, written in the 1660s but published only in 1715; Perrault, who had read the work in manuscript, advanced a cruder version in 1691. But the more general debate over Homer’s literary value was ancient, and had found influential participants in the two cornerstones of early modern philology, Isaac Casaubon (pro) and Julius Caesar Scaliger (contra).39 Humanists who favoured the poet, such as Tanneguy Le Fèvre, often insisted on his clarity; a little later one scholar, garbling a tradition, went so far as to claim that ‘Homer produced no ambiguity, a very rare feat’.40 37  Homer, Ilias, BL 834.g.29.(2), p. 100: ‘hasta extensa pugnet neque tentet desis[t]ere neque turbare ordines’. Above is a similar prescription: ‘ne misereatur multitudini ne turbare ordines’. 38  Douglas Lane Patey, ‘Ancients and Moderns’, in Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol. IV: The Eighteenth Century, ed. George Alexander Kennedy (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 32–71, at 52–63; Joseph Levine, The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age (Ithaca, 1991), pp. 121–147; Joan DeJean, Ancients Against Moderns: Culture Wars and the Making of a Fin de Siècle (Chicago, 1997), pp. 98–103 with a charmlessly dismissive tone. On Eustathius in this period, see Pontani, ‘ “Captain of Homer’s Guard” ’, pp. 206–19. 39  Philip Young, The Printed Homer: A 3,000 Year Publishing and Translation History of the Iliad and the Odyssey (Jefferson, NC, 2003), p. 80. 40  Tanneguy Le Fèvre, Les vies des poètes grecs (Paris, 1665), pp. 6–7: ‘Son style est plein,

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The literary culture of France around 1700, with its emphasis on perspicuity and decorum, was unlikely to find the Homeric ambiguities unearthed by Eustathius attractive. But one influential reader was open-­ minded. This was Le Fèvre’s brilliant daughter Anne Dacier (1654–1720), a committed ancienne and champion of Homer as the greatest poet of Greek antiquity.41 In 1711 she published the first French translation of the Iliad, prompting the so-­called querelle d’Homère, a spat said to have lasted until 1716 when Dacier and her chief antagonist, the Parisian belletrist and immortel Antoine Houdar de la Motte, sat down for supper at the house of Jean-­Baptiste de Valincourt and toasted Homer’s health.42 The querelle had many participants, most long-­forgotten: on Dacier’s side, Jean Boivin and François Gacon, and on La Motte’s, Jean Terrasson and Jean-­François de Pons. The Arabist Étienne Fourmount tried to adjudicate in his Examen pacifique, while Jean Hardouin, the notorious Jesuit conspiracy theorist, weighed in with his own theories and was denounced by Dacier. Dacier more than held her own in the skirmish, replying swiftly and voluminously to her critics. She was able to draw on decades of erudition and scholarly activity, having edited and translated a wealth of Greek and Roman classics, some in collaboration with her husband André Dacier; her beloved Iliad, meanwhile, had occupied over ten years. She made her version in prose with thick endnotes, giving a reason much like that offered by Nabokov for his Eugene Onegin in 1964: it was better, she said, to convey the full nuances of Homer.than to diminish them for the sake of a pretty French verse.43 The verse, she insisted, was marked out above all by the égal, et tres-­pur. . . . La clarté et la facilité y sont par tout également admirables, et l’on peut dire.’ Johann Friedrich Reitz, De ambiguis, mediis et contrariis, sive, De significatione verborum ac phrasium ambigua (Utrecht, 1736), p. xviii: ‘nullum ambiguum commiserit Homerus (quod certe opido rarum)’, citing Gerardus Johannes Vossius, Commentariorum rhetoricorum sive oratoriarum institutionum libri sex, 4th ed., 2 vols (Leiden, 1643), II, p. 34 (IV.1.11): ‘licet multi statuant ἀμφιβολίαν in multis Homeri, aliorumque locis, in nullo tamen veteri scriptore eam reperiri’, in turn paraphrasing ps-­Hermogenes, De methodo gravitatis, in his Opera, tr. Natale Conti (Basel, 1560), pp. 364–65. On the context for this position of ps-­Hermogenes, see Chapter One above, n. 21. 41  Anne Dacier, ‘Preface’, in Homer, L’Iliade, tr. Dacier, 3 vols (Paris, 1711), I, p. iii: ‘Il n’a eu personne avant lui qu’il ait pû imiter, ni personne après lui qui ait pû le suivre’, translating Velleius Paterculus, Historiae Romanae, I.5. On Dacier, see Enrica Malcovati, Madame Dacier: Una gentildonna filologa del gran secolo (Florence, 1953) and Fern Farnham, Madame Dacier: Scholar and Humanist (Monterey, CA, 1976). 42  Kirsti Simonsuuri, Homer’s Original Genius: Eighteenth-­Century Notions of the Early Greek Epic (1688–1798) (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 46–56. The outlines of the querelle have been given again and again in the scholarship, though it has rarely been traced in its intellectual details beyond the Shield of Achilles and the Homeric Question. On the translations see Richard Morton, Examining Changes in the Eighteenth-­Century French Translations of Homer’s Iliad by Anne Dacier and Houdar de la Motte (Lewiston, NY, 2003). 43  Dacier, ‘Preface’, pp. xxxviii–xli; and see Richard Morton, Examining Changes, pp. 9–13; Farnham, Madame Dacier, pp. 145–184; and Fabienne Moore, ‘Homer Revisited: Anne Le Fèvre Dacier’s Preface to her Prose Translation of the Iliad in Early Eighteenth-­Century

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clarity and force of its simple, sonorous language.44 Despite, or perhaps because of the querelle whose flames she stoked, her Iliad achieved considerable renown throughout Europe, and in 1712 it was even translated into English, with all its notes, by William Broome, William Oldsworth and the later-­duncified John Ozell. Dacier’s notes are of a judicious quantity and texture, and Eustathius, whom she read in the Roman first edition, is a frequent point of reference. Of Nestor’s command at Il. IV.306–307 she comments, ‘This line is remarkable for its ambiguity’, quoting the four interpretations in Eustathius. She embroiders his conclusion: Eustathius adds that Homer has sometimes affected to thrust multiple senses into his verses, so as to demonstrate the force of his genius and to show that even in his equivocations he is tetragōnon aneu psogou, and that however he falls, he always falls on his feet. (The cube is still more explicit here; Ozell renders the Greek phrase ‘as faultless as a Dye’.45) But he does this only where appropriate, and when it is a matter of speaking to a multitude. I bring up this remark because it seemed singular to me, and because it may serve to justify passages more important than those we read in these books.46 What benefit would not accrue to someone who could say by a single expression four different things, all very good? Men have rarely discovered this secret.47 France’, Studies in the Literary Imagination 33 (2000), 87–107. On translation, compare Vladimir Nabokov, ‘Foreword’, in Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, tr. Nabokov, 4 vols (New York, 1964), I, p. ix. 44  Dacier, ‘Preface’, p. xxxix: ‘les mots propres, qui rendent sa diction claire, lui donnent aussi très souvent autant de force et de noblesse, que les mots figurez’. 45  Homer, The Iliad, with Notes, by Madam Dacier, tr. John Ozell, 3rd ed., 5 vols (London, 1734), II, p. 26, n. z. 46  This sentence contradicts the assertion of Jacques Dürrenmatt, Le vertige du vague: les romantiques face à l’ambiguïté (Paris, 2001), p. 46, that Dacier’s insight about ambiguity ‘reste toutefois cantonnée à une soumission aux caractéristiques particulière de la language homérique’. 47  Dacier, ‘Remarques’, in Homer, L’Iliade, tr. Dacier, I, p. 423: Eustathe adjouste qu’Homere a quelque fois affecté de jetter ainsi plusieurs sens dans ses vers, pour monstrer la force de son genie et pour faire voir que mesme dans ses équivoques il est τετράγωνον ἄνευ ψόγου, et que de quelque maniere qu’il tombe, il tombe tousjours sur ses pieds. Mais il ne fait cela qu’à-­propos, et lors qu’il s’agit de parler à une multitude. J’ay rapporté cette remarque, parce qu’elle m’a paru singuliere, et qu’elle pourroit servir à justifier des endroits plus importans que ceux qu’on lit dans ces livres. Quel avantage ne seroit-­ce point de pouvoir dire par une seule expression quatre choses differentes et toutes très-­bonnes? Les hommes ont rarement trouvé ce secret.

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Dacier has pushed still further than her source, although her comments remain gnomic. Are the ‘more important’ passages those of the Bible? This was a remarkable expansion of what neoclassical criticism could say about a text; one wants to call the message subversive, but there is nothing of that in her tone—only the sharing of a ‘secret’ dug up out of Homer with the help of Eustathius.48 Of course, she had to translate the line as well, and so decide on its best meaning. She plumped for the fourth: ‘Those knocked out of their chariots should climb aboard that of a companion, not attempting to steer the horses which are unknown to them, but thinking only to fight with their spears.’49 Elsewhere, Dacier’s view on Homeric ambiguity is conventional. She denies, for instance, the ambiguity of Il. I.31 (Agamemnon and Chryseis), claiming that, although Agamemnon indeed has sexual designs, he uses antioōsan only in its innocent sense, given from Hesychius’s lexicon, of laying a bed. This should not surprise us, she continues, sounding like a 1950s housekeeping columnist, because Greek men were notorious in antiquity for being unable to make beds themselves.50 Nor does she accept the three meanings suggested by Eustathius for Il. XVIII.509 (the siege on Achilles’s shield), insisting that the poet has here spoken ‘very clearly and very naturally’, and that ‘obscurity is not Homer’s vice’.51 This view is clarified by a note to Il. XVII.611, a moment of white heat and anacoluthon which Dacier calls ‘the most troubled and obscure’ verse in the entire epic. Eustathius, she claims, has seen in the disorder of the passage—a missing verb and an unspecified subject—a deliberate echo of confusion in battle, but this she denies, ascribing the obscurity instead to historical distance.52 48  Dacier’s moment of awe, breaking the rules of criticism, may be allied to the appreciation of the ‘irreducibility of the literary experience’ discussed by Larry Norman, The Shock of the Ancient: Literature and History in Early Modern France (Chicago, 2011), pp. 3–4 and passim. Then again, her association of Homer and the Bible fits into her strategy of syncretism elsewhere, on which, see Norman, The Shock, pp. 144–49. 49  Homer, L’Iliade, tr. Dacier, I, p. 150: ‘Que ceux qui estant renversez de leurs chars, monteront sur le char de quelqu’un de leurs compagnons, n’entreprennent point de conduire des chevaux qu’ils ne connoissent pas; et qu’ils ne pensent qu’à combattre à coups de piques’. 50  Dacier, ‘Remarques’, in Homer, L’Iliade, tr. Dacier, I, pp. 280–281, citing the definition later listed as a spurious addition in Hesychius, Lexicon, ed. Moritz Schmidt (Jena, 1867), cols 167–8, apparatus ad HES. 35 (ὑποστρωννύουσαν), and Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae II.48e on Achaean bedmaking. 51  Ibid., III, p. 481: ‘je trouve que ce poëte a parlé fort clairement et fort naturellement. . . . Ce n’est pas le vice d’Homere que l’obscurité.’ 52  Ibid., III, pp. 451–2: ‘De tous les passages d’Homere, voicy le plus embarrassé et plus obscur . . . j’aime mieux croire qu’il a trouvé fort clair, ce qui nous paroist fort obscur.’ The original passage, XVII.610–13, runs:

αὐτὰρ ὃ Μηριόναο ὀπάονά θ᾽ ἡνίοχόν τε Κοίρανον, ὅς ῥ᾽ ἐκ Λύκτου ἐϋκτιμένης ἕπετ᾽ αὐτῷ:

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On another celebrated crux she agrees with Eustathius but does more than simply follow him. In Book Six, Diomedes declares a truce with the Lycian captain Glaucus, and to seal the peace they exchange arms. But the two sets differ greatly in value: those of Glaucus are gold, and those of Diomedes bronze. Homer comments of the trade, Il. VI.234, that Zeus ‘exeleto’ Glaucus’s mind. Most versions give the verb as ‘removed’ or ‘took away’: the poet is mocking Glaucus for being gulled.53 But according to the ancient critic Porphyry, exeleto can also mean ‘exalted’ or ‘increased’, and so Homer’s line might be interpreted not as scoffing at the hero, but as praising him for his generosity.54 Eustathius paid attention.55 So did Dacier’s husband, in a note to his 1692 translation of Aristotle’s Poetics, at the crux about ambiguity illustrated by eskheto in Homer.56 According to his novel interpretation, Aristotle’s point was that in case of difficulty the reader should construe the ambiguous word ‘in a sense entirely contrary to its ordinary one’.57 In light of this, Dacier rejected the usual (‘removed’) interpretation of exeleto: πεζὸς γὰρ τὰ πρῶτα λιπὼν νέας ἀμφιελίσσας ἤλυθε . . . There is no verb governing Κοίρανον, and ancient commentators disputed the subject of πεζὸς ἤλυθε, ‘went on foot’. Eustathius, Commentarii, ed. Valk, IV, p. 100, thinks it is Coeranus but does not treat the passage as ambiguous; I can find nothing in his gloss corresponding to Dacier’s summary: ‘Eustathe . . . fait entendre qu’Homere a affecté cette obscurité pour proportionner sa diction au desordre et à la confusion du combat dont il parle’. Dacier herself goes for Meriones, translating, ‘Ce jour-­la Merion avoit voulu combatter a pied. . . .’ 53  Liddell and Scott, s.v. ἐξαιρέω, sense III.3. See Homer, Iliad Book VI, eds Barbara Graziosi and Johannes Haubold (Cambridge, 2010), p. 143, for parallel passages. The bad deal became proverbial, e.g., in Plato, Symposium, 219a1; on the verse itself, see for instance Aristotle, Ethics 1136b9–14, and for a full discussion see Marta Maftei, Antike Diskussionen über die Episode von Glaukos und Diomedes im VI. Buch der Ilias (Meisenheim am Glan, 1976). William M. Calder III, ‘Gold for Bronze: Iliad 6.232–236’, in Studies Presented to Sterling Dow on his Eightieth Birthday (Durham, NC, 1984), pp. 31–35, in addition to surveying the criticism, argues that Glaucus gave the arms to show his superiority, although the gesture was later misconstrued. 54  Porphyry, Homeric Questions, p. 116: ‘τὸ γὰρ ἐξελεῖν δηλοῖ καὶ τὸ “εἰς μέγα ᾶραι καὶ αὐξῆσαι” ’. Calder, ‘Gold for Bronze’, p. 31, calls this solution ‘desperate’. 55  Eustathius, Commentarii, ed. Valk, II, p. 297: ‘ἀσφαλείας γὰρ ὅ Γλαῦκος μόνης ἐδεῖτο τῆς ἐκ τῶν ὁπλων, οὐ μὴν ὕλης τιμίας. πάντως δὲ οὐχ’ ἧττόν τι τῶν χρυσέων ἀσφαλῆ καὶ τὰ χάλκεα. διὸ καὶ φησιν ὅ ποιητῆς “ἔνθ᾽ αὖτε Γλαύκῳ Κρονίδης φρένας ἐξέλετο Ζεύς”, ὅ ἐστιν ἐξαιρέτους ἐποίησεν, ὡς τῳ Πορφυρίῳ δοκεῖ.’ See also Homer, Opera, ed. and tr. Sponde, p. 109, who gives the line as ‘Glauco Saturnides mentem extulit Iupiter’. 56  On which, see Chapter Five above, p. 188. 57  Aristotle, Poëtique, tr. André Dacier (Paris, 1692), p. 422: ‘le plus court moyen de se tirer de ces endroits, c’est de prendre le mot dans un sens tout contraire à celuy qu’on luy donne ordinairement’. Compare the version at Aristotle, De poetica liber textu Gulstoniano, ed. William Cooke (Cambridge, 1785), p. 165.

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This is too base a sentiment for an epic poem. Homer would have spoken in just this way if these princes had been merchants who sought only to gull each other. It is not possible that he described as foolish and stupid an action which was nothing but noble and praiseworthy. In translating this line it was therefore necessary to have recourse to this rule of Aristotle, and see if the word exeleto does not have a meaning contrary to that which one normally gives it.58

Porphyry’s solution is now triumphantly wheeled onstage to prove the point. His wife, who shared his view of Homer, embraced his reading, noting Eustathius’s agreement almost as an afterthought.59 The moral dimension of interpretation, and of ambiguity, is here evident: uncertainty about exeleto is created in order to offset a reading seen as unattractive on the grounds of ‘sentiment’. This element was not present in Porphyry, who had merely offered the second reading as an alternative possibility. For the Daciers it is a question of appropriateness—as the great champions of Homeric style and mores, they were compelled to read the particular line through their exalted idea of the whole. This was the hermeneutic circle in action, as Pope would formulate it: ‘You then whose judgment the right course would steer, / Know well each Ancient’s proper character.’60 But the construction of that character must be dependent on all sorts of sympathies and partialities, and so the Daciers’ ambiguous exeleto will seem to the sceptic a mere fudge, the expression of their own moral assumptions. Madame Dacier, then, although she made capital use of the Byzantine critic, was happy to reach her own judgements on significant cruces. But she stood with him on the polysemy of Nestor’s command, and took blows for him. Her Iliad was soon attacked by the Cartesian modernes in the Académie. In 1712 her first opponent, La Motte, published a heavily abridged 58  André Dacier, in Aristotle, Poëtique, tr. Dacier, p. 460: ‘C’est un sentiment trop bas pour un Poëme Epique. Homere ne parleroit pas autrement si ces Princes etoient des Marchans qui ne cherchassent qu’à se tromper. Il n’est pas possible qu’il ait traité de folie et de stupidité une action, où il n’y a rien que de grand et de loüable. En traduisant cet endroit il failloit donc necessairement avoir recours à cette Regle d’Aristote, et voir si le mot ἐξέλετο n’avoir pas une signification contraire à celle qu’on luy donne ordinairement.’ 59  Dacier, ‘Remarques’, in Homer, L’Iliade, tr. Dacier, I, pp. 502–3, noting that the usual interpretation ‘seroit indigne d’Homere’, whereas the line in her reading ‘devient fort beau’. She translates Homer’s phrase ‘esleva la courage à Glaucus’. The Porphyrian sense was defended again by Angelo Maria Ricci, Dissertationes Homericae, 3 vols (Florence, 1740–41), II, p. 190, while Johan August Ernesti would reject the interpretation shortly thereafter: see his annotation in Homer, Ilias et Odyssea, et in easdem scholia, sive interpretatio Didymi, ed. and tr. Cornelius Schrevel, 2 vols (Amsterdam, 1656), British Library shelfmark C.45.e.3., I, p. 210; and Homer, Opera omnia, ed. Samuel Clarke, rev. J. A. Ernesti, 2 vols (Leipzig, 1759–64), I, p. 279. 60  Alexander Pope, Essay on Criticism, 118–19. Compare 233–34: ‘A perfect Judge will read each work of Wit / With the same spirit that its author writ:’

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translation of the Iliad in twelve books—like the Aeneid—with a preface railing against both Homer’s barbarism and Dacier’s uncritical defence of his poetry. The poet’s appreciators, he said, could not distinguish solecisms from fine writing: ‘They constantly run the risk of taking a beauty for a fault, or a fault for a beauty.’61 An example was the dreaded exeleto of Il. VI.234, which for La Motte had only the customary sense here, though it might bear the other elsewhere; if he was wrong the ambiguity only redounded to Homer’s discredit. Next he quoted her on Nestor’s command, and retorted: On the contrary, [ambiguity] is in my opinion the greatest fault of all. Can an order given to soldiers in the camp be too clear? Can one risk throwing them into confusion with an equivocation which would cause them to act so differently from one another?62

This point was not without force: of all speech-­acts, a military order might well be thought the one least receptive to the aesthetics of ambiguity.63 Dacier seems to have anticipated the thought to her own satisfaction— ‘a matter of speaking to a multitude’—and replied again to La Motte’s charge in her 600-­page polemic Des causes de la corruption du goust, rushed out within the year. Nestor, she now claimed, had acted so appropriately that even if his soldiers had differently understood his command, no disorder could occur.64 The suggestion is perhaps that some soldiers will act one way in response, others another way, each according to his own situation in battle, and each validly—even though senses 2 and 3 are antithetical. But now Dacier’s defence amounted to no more than special pleading, and later critics repeated La Motte’s objection unswayed. Meanwhile, he turned the knife: No, although another might, I would not at all accuse Homer of such carelessness: it is far more likely that our difficulty derives from our

61  Antoine Houdar de la Motte, L’Iliade, poëme. Avec un discours sur Homère (Paris, 1714), p. cxii: ‘Ils courent risque à tout moment de prendre pour faute ce qui est beauté, et pour beauté ce qui est faute’. On La Motte, see Noémi Hepp, Homère en France au xviie siècle (Paris, 1969), pp. 661–88. 62  La Motte, L’Iliade, pp. cxiii–cxiv: ‘C’est, au contraire, à mon sens, la plus grande de toutes les fautes. Un ordre donné à des soldats dans le fort d’une action, peut-­il être trop clair; et peut-­on risquer de mettre la confusion entre eux, par une équivoque qui les feroit agir si diversement?’ 63  One need only think of the notoriously ambiguous order that precipitated the Charge of the Light Brigade, on which see, e.g., Colwyn Edward Vulliamy, Crimea: The Campaign of 1854–56 (London, 1939), p. 139. 64  Anne Dacier, Des causes de la corruption du goust (Paris, 1714), p. 255: ‘Nestor fait cela si à propos, que ses Soldats ont beau entendre cet ordre tout differement, il n’en peut arriver aucun desordre.’ On pp. 252–53 she meets his objection to her remarks on ἐξέλετο, with not much greater success.

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own ignorance of his language, which prevents us from discerning precisely what he meant to say.65

The critic’s lofty ‘our own’ was perhaps inclusive, perhaps pointed at Dacier; either way, it offered her an open goal, since she knew Greek and he did not. She could also reiterate that Eustathius, whom she was following, had rather better Greek than the pair of them.66 But we see again the contrast between pouvoir dire in Dacier (‘someone who could say’) and vouloir dire in La Motte (‘what he meant to say’), the latter focused on single intention, the former on multiplicity.67 While theologians maintained that God alone could put multiple meanings in a text, Dacier allowed Homer the same capacity. But to La Motte these meanings looked like Dacier’s own. In another passage he contends that for modern critics, in lieu of a true understanding, each phrase in Homer produces a ‘confusion of ideas’; as a result ‘they attribute to the poet every vague sense that tickles them, and so they think to see in a single word a heap of things our tongue cannot convey’.68 As before and after in our History, an outsider, here a starstruck ancienne, has projected spurious meanings onto an innocent text, an acrobacy without tact. To sustain such an attack, the critic must to be able to discern the original sense from those forced upon it, and La Motte is in no doubt about his own capacity and authority to do so, since he speaks from the high table of cultural consensus. But he does not address the specifics of Nestor’s command. That would be left to Dacier’s second opponent Jean Terrasson, a priest, speculator, literary fantasist, metaphysician, and immortel, who in 1715 published his Dissertation critique sur l’Iliade d’Homère in three large volumes. Terrasson asserts that no ancient author is as clear as Homer, though the poet sometimes lapses into obscurity by omitting important details, notably in the Shield ecphrasis.69 He rejects the Porphyrian interpretation of exeleto (Il. VI.234) as an ‘effort d’esprit’, a mere ingenuity.70 But his strongest critique of Dacier concerns Il. IV.306–307, referring by mistake to ‘Agamemnon’ instead of Nestor. He lists the four readings of the disputed command, observing of the first that it ‘can be drawn out only 65  De la Motte, L’Iliade, p. cxiv: ‘Non, quoiqu’on en dise, je n’accuserai point Homere de ces imprudences: il est bien plus vrai-­semblable que c’est nôtre ignorance de sa langue, qui fait nôtre embarras, et qui ne nous permet pas de discerner bien précisement ce qu’il a voulu dire.’ 66  Dacier, Des causes, p. 255. 67  On this distinction, see Chapter Four above, pp. 183–184. 68  De la Motte, L’Iliade, p. cxxxv: ‘ils attribuerent au poëte tout ce sens vague qui les flattoit; et ainsi ils pensoient voir dans un seul mot, un amas de choses que nôtre langue ne pouvoit rendre.’ 69  Jean Terrasson, Dissertation critique sur l’Iliade d’Homère, 3 vols (Paris, 1715), III, p. 563. 70  Ibid., pp. 569–571.

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with the aid of a commentary’, of the second that it is ‘incomparably the most reasonable of all’, of the third that it is ‘horrible, given the inhumanity of pushing away a friend’, and of the fourth that it is ‘not a translation but a new composition’.71 Whereas Dacier has followed the fourth, Terrasson picks the second, offering the peculiar additional merit that it can be rendered into Latin in the same number of words; the other meanings, on this account, are simply wrong, either linguistically or strategically. Moreover, he picks up on Dacier’s disagreement with Eustathius elsewhere. At Il. XVII.611 and XVIII.509, as we have seen, Dacier had advocated a philological view; of the latter she denied not only that it had many possible interpretations, but also that it suffered from ‘obscurity’. Terrasson drives the point home with a Diomedean vigour: ‘Madame Dacier, in defending Homer from ambiguity so as to defend him from obscurity, rightly recognises that the latter is the effect of the former.’72 The unstated consequence of this is that Nestor’s command cannot legitimately be praised as an ‘heureuse amphibologie’, because polysemy always comes at the expense of clarity, the cardinal virtue. Later French critics followed suit. The abbé Dominique Ricard in 1783 thought that Homer had simply nodded here, judging that ‘clarity was preferable to this supposed “force of genius” ’.73 Jean-­Baptiste Dugas-­ Montbel, who translated the Iliad to acclaim a century after Dacier, looked back on his predecessors’ opinions with a like sarcasm: Certainly, before Eustathius and Madame Dacier one might have thought that the quality most essential to a command was that it should be clear, precise, and without any ambiguity, lest occasion be given to someone tempted to disobey; but it seems that the two able critics shared the sentiment of a true gentleman of our own time, who holds that ‘man was given speech only to hide his thoughts’.74

Ibid., p. 566. Ibid., pp. 568–569: ‘Me D. défendant Homére de l’amphibologie pour le défendre de l’obscurité, reconnoît avec raison que la derniere est l’effet de l’autre.’ On obscurity as a result of ambiguity, see Chapter One above, p. 37–38. 73  Plutarch, Sur la maniere de lire les poëtes, in Moralia, tr. Dominique Ricard, 17 vols (Paris, 1783–1795), I, p. 145n.: ‘je croirois que la clarté seroit encore préférable à cette prétendue force de génie’. 74  Jean-­Baptiste Dugas-­Montbel, Observations sur l’Iliade d’Homère, 2 vols (Paris, 1829), I, p. 206: ‘Certes, jusqu’à Eustathe et madame Dacier, il était permis de croire que la qualité la plus essentielle à un ordre donné devait être qu’il fût clair, précis, et sans amphibologie, pour ne laisser aucun recours à celui qui serait tenté d’y désobéir; mais il parait que les deux habiles critiques partagent le sentiment d’un grand seigneur de nos jours, qui pense que la parole n’a été donnée à l’homme que pour cacher sa pensée.’ The quoted bon mot was a meme usually attributed either to the great diplomat Talleyrand, or to the Jesuit missionary Gabriel Malagrida. 71  72 

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That ironic appreciation of novelty would be heard again among Empson’s critics.75 But was Terrasson right—is obscurity the necessary corollary of ambiguity? Or, on the contrary, can a text be ambiguous and at the same time clear? That is a question to be explored in the last sections of this chapter, in which we shall turn from French readers of Madame Dacier to English readers of Alexander Pope. The conflict over the ambiguities of the Iliad was a small part of a broader reckoning of Homer, which itself was only the battle, not the war. The exchanges detailed here tell us less about the culture of Homeric scholarship than about the hermeneutic moves available to neoclassical critics with a shared canon of linguistic assumptions—a canon subtending the many differences between, say, the Ancients and Moderns. Ambiguity is here an artifice manipulated in a variety of ways to negotiate the text. In some cases, as with exeleto, reading Homer was a game of getting the desired result by the management of uncertainty. But actual uncertainty could not be legislated by critical argument: despite seeing the possibility of a second sense in exeleto, Terrasson was certain as to its true natural sense, which did the work he required of it and so invited no challenge. As for Madame Dacier, her outburst at Nestor’s command is interesting because it is so poorly integrated with the rest of her thinking, which remains conventional. Clarity is Homer’s great virtue; polysemy detracts from clarity—and yet, Nestor’s command is admirable for its polysemy. Her claim about its effect on the soldiers is unconvincing, but it is only a rationalisation: Eustathius has shown her, just this once, a magic she will not find elsewhere, and which she cannot make any better sense of than her critics. The ambiguity of this line is not a proper uncertainty, as it still was for a putative reader of the scholia, but a certainty-­in-­uncertainty, a decision that one meaning need not be chosen to the exclusion of others. This decision, underivable from the rules of criticism, had to be an expression of the critic’s will, a peculiar fiat. Eustathius pointed the way, and lent his authority to the move; but Dacier was finally on her own. The Doubtful Plain The clang and thwack of French critics over Homer, if not the clink of glasses chez Valincourt, was soon heard over the Channel.76 The major works in the debate were translated within a few years: Dacier’s Iliad itself, See the Introduction above, p. 7. Howard Weinbrot, Britannia’s Issue: The Rise of British Literature from Dryden to Ossian (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 193–236; David Hopkins, ‘Homer’, in Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature. Vol. 3: 1660–1790, eds David Hopkins and Charles Martindale (Oxford, 2012), pp. 165–195. 75  76 

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as we have noted, in 1712; La Motte’s Critical Discourse by Lewis Theobald in 1714; Hardouin’s Apology for Homer in 1717; and Terrasson’s Dissertation in 1722—though its long preface already in 1716. Even André Dacier’s notes on the Poetics were included in an English translation of the work from 1705, reprinted in 1709.77 Assumptions about Homer’s clarity were shared with Continental critics. Dr Johnson would grasp consensus later in the century: ‘it must be ascribed, that Homer has fewer passages of doubtful meaning than any other poet either in the learned or in modern languages.’78 Meanwhile, Homeric scholarship was starting to blossom on English soil. Joshua Barnes published a derivative but useful edition of the two epics with the minor scholia in 1711; this was superseded two decades later by that of Newton’s great friend, the scholar-­philosopher Samuel Clarke, whose edition, with copious critical commentary, was left unfinished at his death and completed by his son, Samuel Jr., in 1732. Clarke Sr. was perhaps the only English critic to offer an original consideration of the Nestor crux. Weighing each of the four options in turn, he prefers the third (which he gives as the fourth): if a soldier falls from his chariot, his comrades should extend their spears to ward him off, lest he disturb the battle. This best agrees with the usual meaning of enkhei orexasthai, ‘to extend the spear’, as attested in Il. II.543 and IX.851; it is also the reading most appropriate to military discipline—as he paraphrases, ‘Better for someone knocked from his chariot to perish, than for him to cause a disturbance among his comrades as they fight.’79 When it came to warfare, Clarke was more austere than Terrasson. But like the Frenchman, Clarke denied that the ambiguity was deliberate; after all, he said, Homer’s defining stylistic virtue was his perspicuity.80 77  Antoine Houdar de la Motte, A Critical Discourse upon Homer’s Iliad, tr. Lewis Theobald (London, 1714); Jean Hardouin, An Apology for Homer (London, 1717); Jean Terrasson, A Discourse of Ancient and Modern Learning, tr. [F. Brerewood] (London, 1716), and idem, A Critical Dissertation upon Homer’s Iliad, tr. [F. Brerewood] (London, 1722); Aristotle, Art of Poetry (London, 1705). 78  Samuel Johnson, ‘Pope’, in his Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, ed. Roger Lonsdale, 4 vols (Oxford, 2006), IV, p. 15. Compare Robert Wood, An Essay on the Original Genius of Homer (London, 1769), p. lxvi: ‘Homer, though the eldest, is the clearest and most intelligible of all antient writers’. A dissenting note on this matter was offered by Thomas Blackwell, on whom see Chapter Ten below, p. 378. 79  Homer, Ilias Graece et Latine, ed. and tr. Samuel Clarke, 2 vols (London, 1729–32), I, p. 122b: ‘Satius est ut pereat, qui de curru suo excussus fuerit; quam ut commilitones in pugnando interturbet.’ Johann August Ernesti, who updated Clarke’s edition in 1759–1764 and added his own notes, disagreed with Clarke on this line. For him it meant that a man thrown from his chariot, rather than trying to climb onto his comrade’s chariot, which would be an obstacle to the comrade, should instead remain on foot and fight with his spear. See Homer, Opera, ed. Clarke, rev. Ernesti (1759–64), I, pp. 185–86. 80  Samuel Clarke, ‘Praefatio’, in Homer, Ilias, ed. and tr. Clarke, I, sig. [A3v]: ‘cum Ho-

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In rejecting deliberate ambiguity, Clarke proclaimed his allegiance not directly to Terrasson or La Motte, but rather to Alexander Pope (‘Ego cum Popio potius sentio’). It was the exceptional young Pope who had done the most to shape English views of Homer with his translations of the Iliad (1715–1720) and Odyssey (1726, in collaboration). The prior circumstances and composition of Pope’s Iliad—first announced in 1713, and paid for by subscription—have been closely studied by others, and need not be rehearsed here in detail.81 For his own extensive notes he made use of Dacier, in the 1712 translation, and to a lesser extent of Eustathius, excerpts of whose commentary he commissioned from friends with better Greek: Thomas Parnell, William Broome, John Jortin, William Peche.82 Despite his engagement with Dacier’s learning, and despite much common feeling on the nature of the Homeric epics, the two critics fell into a personal skirmish later in the decade, and Dacier would include Réflexions on Pope’s Preface in the second edition of her own Iliad, 1719.83 That dispute, however, need not be read back into Pope’s note on the Nestor crux. This was by far the most likely place any English reader would stumble across the extraordinary views of Eustathius and Dacier, and when he did, he would find them cuffed and scorned in a cage welded together from scrap bits of La Motte: ‘Critics’, Pope translated, ‘to be thought learned, attribute to the Poet all the random Senses that amuse them’.84 Such a point could hardly have been less conmericae eloquentiae et perpetua et singularis virtus sit perspicuitas in carminibus orna­ tissimis tanta, quantam ne in soluto quidem scribendi genere unquam assequutus est quisquam’. 81  On the composition of Pope’s Homer, see Johnson, ‘Pope’, in Lives, ed. Lonsdale, IV, pp. 12–28; Owen Ruffhead, The Life of Alexander Pope (London, 1769), pp. 180–206; George Sherburn, The Early Career of Alexander Pope (Oxford, 1934), pp. 123–48. On the translation itself, see John Paul Russo, Alexander Pope: Tradition and Identity (Cambridge, MA, 1972), pp. 83–122; and Stuart Gillespie, ‘Translation and Commentary: Pope’s Iliad’, in Classical Commentaries: Explorations in a Scholarly Genre, eds Christina Shuttleworth Kraus and Christopher Stray (Oxford, 2016), pp. 299–317. 82  Maynard Mack, ‘Introduction’, in TP VII, p. xl, n. 5, notes that Pope relied on Ozell’s English translation of Dacier’s Iliad, correcting her on one occasion for her translator’s fault. But he also owned and annotated her original: see Maynard Mack, ‘Pope’s Books: A Biographical Survey with a Finding List’, in English Literature in the Age of Disguise, ed. Maximilian Novak (Berkeley, 1977), pp. 209–305, at 261–64. 83  On Dacier and Pope, see Howard Weinbrot, ‘ “What Must the World Think of Me?”: Pope, Madame Dacier, and Homer—The Anatomy of a Quarrel’, in Eighteenth-­Century Contexts: Historical Inquiries in Honor of Philip Harth, eds Weinbrot et al. (Madison, WI, 2001), pp. 183–206; and Éric Foulon, ‘La critique de l’Iliade d’Anne Dacier dans l’Iliade d’Alexander Pope’, Littératures classiques, 72 (2010), 157–92. 84  Alexander Pope, note at his Iliad, IV.352, in TP VII, p. 238, comprising three separate passages of La Motte stitched together without seam: the first on pp. cxiii–cxiv quoted above (see nn. 62, 65), the second on p. viii (‘Personne ne possede . . .’) and the third on p. cxxxv (‘la confusion même . . .’).

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troversial, and none of Pope’s many enemies leapt to Dacier’s defence. Her lone fight for the ‘secret’ of Homeric ambiguity was over. Pope had his own, nuanced relationship to the ambiguities of the Iliad. It has long been argued that he misses the feel and tone of Homer’s epic, and certain celebrity responses to this effect, from the dismissive (Bentley) to the thoughtful (Arnold), have become canonical.85 But one of Pope’s merits, as the New Critic Maynard Mack observed, is that he consistently brings out the poem’s double meanings, often by giving both possible senses of a phrase or line in either parataxis or hypotaxis.86 An excellent example of the former—not given by Mack—is afforded by the ambiguous ouk (‘not’) of Il. V.150, where Diomedes slays the sons of Eurydamas. In his note Pope calls this ‘as puzzling a passage for the construction as I have met with in Homer’, and proceeds to suggest not two but four possible meanings of the whole. The most ‘natural and poetical’ of these, he says, is to join the negative particle with erkhomenois, taken as the sons’ homecoming. The resultant sense of the line, as given in prose in the note, is ‘Diomed attacks the two sons of Eurydamas an old interpreter of dreams; his children not returning, the prophet sought by his dreams to know their fate; however they fall by the hands of Diomed.’ But Pope works two negatives into the translation itself: Sons of Eurydamus, who wise and old, Could Fates foresee, and mystic Dreams unfold; The Youths return’d not from the doubtful Plain, [= Sense 1, οὐκ ἐρχομένοις] And the sad Father try’d his Arts in vain; No mystic Dream could make their Fates appear, [= Sense 2, οὐκ ἐκρίνατ’ ὀνείρους] Tho’ now determin’d by Tydides’ Spear.87

Whether or not a deliberate pun, ‘doubtful plain’ is a wonderful bit of invention, projecting the seer’s uncertainty onto the landscape itself, sub85  Bentley’s verdict exists in a range of eighteenth-­century versions: see Johnson, ‘Pope’, in Lives, ed. Lonsdale, IV, p. 314, n. 285. The classic formulation appears in an editorial footnote in Samuel Johnson, Works, ed. John Hawkins, 14 vols (London, 1787–88), IV, p. 126n: ‘ “Oh,” said Bentley, “ay now I recollect—your translation:—it is a pretty poem, Mr. Pope; but you must not call it Homer.” ’ This line is now misquoted by almost all scholars as ‘a very pretty poem’. Matthew Arnold, On Translating Homer: Three Lectures Given at Oxford (London, 1861), esp. pp. 14–21, objecting to Pope’s ‘literary artificial manner’. Arnold’s critique of Pope’s couplets was anticipated by Samuel Langley, The Iliad of Homer Translated into Blank Verse (London, 1767), pp. x, xv. 86  Mack, ‘Introduction’, in TP VII, pp. xc and ci–cii, labelling these efforts ‘diplomatic renderings’: ‘it leaves us free to accept either signification, without forcing us to perceive both’. 87  Homer, Iliad, tr. Pope, V.190–95, in TP VII, pp. 275–76.

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jective ambiguity made objective. The last line is just as clever, depersonalising the young mens’ deaths with an etymological play worthy of Milton in ‘determined’. But both these lines were late solutions, as is evident from the early autograph of Pope’s translation now held at the British Library.88 In this draft he wrestles with the phrasing of Sense 2, but has not yet managed to incorporate Sense 1: Could fates foretell\see/ & mystic dreams unfold no mystic dream their helpless X [??] [??] not their unhappy Death could tell But their sad death no mystic dream could tell Whose arms despoild to great Tydides fell Whose glorious spoils to great Tydides fell.89

Another good example of Pope’s treatment of ambiguity in Homer is found in his version of Il. I.31, Agamemnon’s prediction of Chryseis’s fate. Here Pope, unlike Dacier, espied innuendo: Mine is thy Daughter, Priest, and shall remain; And Pray’rs, and Tears, and Bribes shall plead in vain; Till Time shall rifle ev’ry youthful Grace, And Age dismiss her from my cold Embrace, In daily Labours of the Loom employ’d, Or doom’d to deck the Bed she once enjoy’d.90

As in the previous case, Pope conveys the doubleness without the ambiguity, but here the two senses are hypotactic: as a girl Chryseis will ‘enjoy’ the bed, and as an older woman she will ‘deck’ it. This was a variation on Dryden, whose version (‘Till then my nuptial bed she shall attend, / And having first adorn’d it, late ascend.’) Pope barracks for its implication that Agamemnon preferred to ravish the older Chryseis than the younger.91 He also takes issue with Dacier’s naivety: ‘that Agamemnon was not studying here for civility of expression, appears from the whole tenor of his 88  British Library, Add MS 4807. The manuscript was acquired by Paul Henry Maty via Lord Bolingbroke and his lickspittle executor David Mallet. On the intricate relationship between these figures, see Isaac Disraeli, ‘Bolingbroke’s and Mallet’s Posthumous Quarrel with Pope’, in his Quarrels of Authors, 2 vols (New York, 1814), 155–188, and more recently Sandro Jung, David Mallet, Anglo-­Scot: Poetry, Patronage, and Politics in the Age of Union (Newark, 2008), ch. 5. 89  BL, Add MS 4807, fol. 57v. It appears that ‘foretell’ is changed to ‘foresee’ in order to avoid a clash of syllables with ‘could tell’. Although the latter does not make the final version, ‘foresee’ is left in. 90  Homer, Iliad, tr. Pope, I.39–44, in TP VII, p. 87. 91  John Dryden, ‘The First Book of Homer’s Ilias’, ll. 48–49, in his Poems, eds Paul Hammond and David Hopkins, 5 vols (Harlow, 1995–2005), V, p. 291, with the correct reading ‘royal bed’.

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speech’. As he observes, the king claims to prefer Chryseis to his own wife Clytaemnestra (I.113–114), and so doubtless has more in mind for her than housekeeping. The significance of this prolepsis for Pope is evident in the autograph, where he splices in the later couplet by mistake, and then corrects himself in the margin: Mine is thy Daughter, Priest, and shall remain, Nor Prayrs, nor Tears, nor Bribes shall break her chain del | Not more I prizd my Clytemnestra’s Charms, ¦ When first her blooming Beauties blest my Arms Perhaps when Time has riffled ev’ry Grace Age may dismiss her from my cloyd Embrace.92

Elsewhere, the two senses of a word or line were incompatible, as at Il. VI.234 (exeleto). Here Pope chooses the Porphyrian reading, ‘if not as the juster, as the more heroic sense, and as it has the nobler air in poetry’. But while he does not attempt two meanings of exeleto, he does expand phrenas (variously ‘mind’, ‘wits’, ‘heart’, ‘spirit’, ‘sense’, none a perfect equivalent): ‘Jove warm’d his bosom, and enlarged his mind’. The diffuse translation serves to gloss the Greek: not two distinct meanings, but at least two perspectives on one difficult word, lending semantic roundness. In these passages and many others, Pope squeezes all the meaning he can out of the original—a process not yet complete in the manuscript—in such a way that his English verse is not ambiguous. In minor instances, Pope could match Homer’s ambiguity. In 1789 the classicist Thomas Twining, of the tea-­merchant family, published a translation of Aristotle’s Poetics with rich endnotes. When he came to the eskheto crux at Il. XX.272, the lance which was either ‘held fast’ or merely ‘checked’ by Achilles’s shield, Twining pointed with approval to Pope’s version—‘There stuck the lance’— which to his ears maintained the ambiguity of the original.93 Only two years later the Edinburgh scholar Alexander Fraser Tytler, in his pioneering treatise on the art of translation, would assert that, when faced with a passage of two meanings, the translator should choose the best: ‘To imitate the obscurity or ambiguity of the original, is a fault; and it is still a greater, to give more than one meaning’.94 For censure in this regard he picks D’Alembert’s selected Tacitus of 1784. Pope’s practice, by contrast, goes 92  British Library Add MS 4807, fol. 17v. The key line is given here as ‘Condemn’d doomd t’ adorn the Bed she once enjoyd’. 93  Aristotle, Poetics, tr. and comm. Thomas Twining (London, 1789), p. 129. 94  [Alexander Fraser Tytler], Essay on the Principles of Translation (1791), 2nd ed. (London, 1797), p. 31. This resembles the approach of Erasmus in his biblical paraphrases, on which see Chapter Four above, p. 164. Johann David Michaelis, Introductory Lectures to the Sacred Books of the New Testament (London, 1761), p. 168, had taken the opposite view: ‘The same consideration obliges the translator to render all Ambiguities in the original Text, if possible,

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unnoticed; somewhat ironically, he receives repeated praise for his prettifying changes to Homer.95 Little Demons of Subtlety Behold it is my desire, that mine Adversary had written a Book. Surely I would take it on my shoulder, and bind it as a crown unto me. — Alexander Pope as Job.96

Pope had long been sensitive to obscurity and ambiguity. In his youth he had offended William Wycherley, fifty years his senior, by seeking to edit his late, dark verse into clarity.97 In the 1728 Peri Bathous, Or the Art of Sinking in Poetry, a Scriblerian pastiche of Longinus mocking the vacuous poetic efforts of the era, he would attack the actors Colley Cibber and Anne Oldfield for the bawdy ‘double Entendre’ of their parts, his prose dissolving for a moment into a lacuna of blushing asterisks, an exaggerated graphic ambiguity (see Figure 6.1). But what of his own work—his Iliad, or the rest? Does it, or did it, contain ambiguities? Empson is subtle on the matter. He had an instinct for Pope, for his bold forthrightness, his distaste for the fussy; a kinship joined them across the centuries, like the plain square houses of interwar modernism with their affinity for old plain Georgian boxes.98 Pope, indeed, is cited more than any other Augustan in Seven Types, a book that did much to rehabilitate his reputation after Victorian neglect.99 But for Empson, as for by words equally ambiguous, in order to leave to his reader the Choice of that Sense which appears to him most probable.’ On Michaelis see Chapter Seven below, p. 303–305. 95  [Tytler], Essay, e.g., p. 97. 96  Pope’s annotation, quoting Job 31.35–36, in British Library, shelf mark C.116.b.1., flyleaf. The original verse is, ‘Oh that one would hear me! behold, my desire is, that the Almighty would answer me, and that mine adversary had written a book. Surely I would take it upon my shoulder, and bind it as a crown to me.’ (KJV) 97  Edward Niles Hooker, ‘Pope on Wit: the Essay on Criticism’, in Richard Foster Jones et al., The Seventeenth Century: Studies in the History of English Thought and Literature from Bacon to Pope (Stanford and London, 1951), pp. 225–46, at pp. 241–42. 98  On the architectural point, see Steen Eiler Rasmussen, London: The Unique City (1934: Harmondsworth, 1961), pp. 186–188. For a striking example, see 13 Downshire Hill, Hampstead, a white box of 1936 that sits inconspicuously alongside the taller stuccoed cuboids of the late Georgian period. 99  On that neglect, see Clare Bucknell, ‘Satire, Morality and Criticism, 1930–65’, in The Oxford Handbook of Eighteenth-­Century Satire, ed. Paddy Bullard (Oxford, forthcoming).

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Figure 6.1. Asteristical ambiguity in Peri Bathous, in Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, Miscellanies, 4 vols (Dublin, 1728), II.1, p. 125.

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subsequent critics, Pope’s ambiguities were not really ambiguous. As he put the view, in a casual gesture towards the end of the book: [I]t would often be unprofitable to insist on the ambiguities of Pope, because he expected his readers to prune their minds of any early disorder as carefully as he had pruned his own. My eighteenth-­century examples, therefore, have to depend on variations of grammar the authors would have thought trivial, puns which they had intended and thought intelligible, and variations of sense which spring from its effective superficiality in their thought.100 Again, in his 1950 article on the word ‘wit’ in Pope’s Essay on Criticism, Empson observes, ‘Critics may naturally object that the Augustans did not deal in profound complexities, and tried to make the words as clear-­cut as possible. This is so, but it did not stop them from using double meanings intended as clear-­cut jokes’.101 More recently, Howard Weinbrot has asserted that ‘our knowledge of Pope’s real beliefs clarifies any potential ambiguity’.102 Whatever Pope says, or rather, whatever he seems to say— whichever words he uses—we can be sure of his true sense because we already know it. The poetry only feigns uncertainty: it is ‘doubtful plain’, like all those ambiguities without obscurity we mentioned in previous chapters. Empson’s favourite example is from the New Dunciad (1742), a couplet now frequently adduced to illustrate the literary pun: Where Bentley late tempestuous wont to sport In troubled waters, but now sleeps in port. In Seven Types Empson does not think this couplet needs much explanation, for it is not a proper ambiguity but ‘a simply funny pun’, playing on the accidental homonymy of port (harbour) and port (drink): not poetry but ‘wit’—Empson’s word.103 In The Structure of Complex Words (1951), Empson takes his analysis of ambiguity further by distinguishing minor (latent, secondary) from major (patent, primary) senses in a word. Turning again to this couplet, he identifies ‘harbour’ as the major sense of port, as it picks up on ‘tempestuous’ and ‘troubled waters’, and ‘drink’ as the minor, STA, p. 124. William Empson, ‘Wit in the Essay on Criticism’, The Hudson Review 2 (1950), 559–77, at p. 559. 102  Howard Weinbrot, ‘Masked Men and Satire and Pope: Towards an Historical Basis for the Eighteenth-­Century Persona’, Eighteenth-­Century Studies 16 (1983), 265–89, at p. 289. 103  STA, p. 109. Compare Van Dyke Parks’ lyric to the Brian Wilson song ‘Surf’s Up’, exploiting the same pun, among others: ‘The fullness of the wine, the dim last toasting, / While at port adieu or die.’ 100  101 

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‘intentionally hidden’ so that the reader is to ‘plume’ himself on his cleverness for getting the joke.104 But as intuitive as Empson’s reading is, he considers Pope’s verse only in isolation, cut off from both its contemporary presentation and its readership, and so fails to tell the whole story. The former is especially important in the case of the Dunciad, with its integuments of parodic footnotes, a spoof dialogue.105 From the start, Pope’s couplet about Bentley was glossed with this note, the joint work of himself and his new collaborator William Warburton: —sleeps in Port.] viz. ‘now retired into harbour, after the tempests that had long agitated his society.’ So Scriblerus. But the learned Scipio Maffei understands it of a certain Wine called Port, from Oporto, a city of Portugal, of which this Professor invited him to drink abundantly. SCIP. MAFF. de compotationibus academicis.106

How was a reader to congratulate himself for his cleverness when the joke was already explained? The note itself introduces a further jest, inventing the Rabelaisian book-­title (On Scholarly Piss-­Ups) and, crucially for its hermeneutic status, pretending to convert an intentional pun into an unintentional ambiguity, a feigned uncertainty. Even the reader who sees the pun might misconstrue the reference: one recent scholar, noting Bentley’s death in 1742, mistakes the line for a satirical elegy.107 The ambiguity is thus not a straightforward quantity, and still less so when the pun is more oblique, as in this passage from the four-­book Dunciad of 1743: What can I now? my Fletcher cast aside, Take up the Bible, once my better guide? Or tread the path by vent’rous Heroes trod, This Box my Thunder, this right hand my God? Or chair’d at White’s amidst the Doctors sit,

SCW, p. 54. On dialogue in the Dunciad, see Ian Jack, Augustan Satire: Intention and Idiom in English Poetry, 1660–1750 (Oxford, 1978), p. 122; Adam Borch, ‘Pope’s Community-­Making through The Dunciad Variorum’, in Literary Community-­Making: The Dialogicality of English Texts from the Seventeenth Century to the Present, ed. Roger Sell (Amsterdam, 2012), pp. 76–90; Moyra Haslett, From Pope to Burney, 1714–1779: Scriblerians to Bluestockings (Basingstoke, 2003), pp. 189–90. 106  Alexander Pope, The New Dunciad As it was Found in 1742 (‘London’ [Edinburgh]: Cooper, 1742), pp. 12–13. All contemporary versions include the same note. On the relevance of Maffei here, see George Dorris, Paolo Rolli and the Italian Circle in London, 1715–1744 (The Hague, 1967), pp. 232–36. 107  Charles Ludington, The Politics of Wine in Britain: A New Cultural History (New York, 2013), pp. 124–125. A mortal connotation of ‘rests in port’ is impossible, since the poem was written in 1741. But there is no reason to doubt that some contemporary readers made the same error. 104  105 

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Teach Oaths to Gamesters, and to Nobles Wit? (I.199–204)108

Line 203 gets two stages of commentary, although they do not always appear together. The Cooper-­Dodsley octavo of Pope’s Works printed in late 1743 offers one layer: These Doctors had a modest and upright appearance, and, like true Masters of Arts, were habited in black and white; they were justly styled subtiles and graves, but not always irrefregabiles, being sometimes examined, laid open, and split.109

The slightly earlier 1743 Cooper quarto of the Dunciad in Four Books, which attributes the above to ‘Scribl.’, adds another layer, a second note with no ascription: This learned Critic is to be understood allegorically: The Doctors in this place mean no more than false Dice, a Cant phrase used among Gamesters. So the meaning of these four sonorous Lines is only this, “Shall I play fair, or foul?”110

Warburton’s 1751 edition slightly expands the first note and labels it ‘Scribl. W.’, indicating his own involvement, but leaves the second half uninitialed.111 In the 1770 Works, the first is labelled ‘Scribl. *’ and the second ‘P.’, i.e., Pope himself.112 Later, Alexander Dyce’s ‘Aldine’ edition of Pope (1831) gives only the second note, unascribed, beginning ‘The doctors in this place’.113 Before we even get to interpretation, then, it must be acknowledged that the ambiguity of the apparatus—of who is explaining what—depends on which edition one is reading. The feature of satire identified by Casaubon as its characteristic ambiguity, that is, the instability of its persona, has spread to the notes supposedly elucidating Pope’s poem.114 The meaning of any given note, and the degree of its irony, is different if we think it by Pope himself, his collaborator Warburton, or a third party, such as a later editor—or one pretending to be the other. Are the two notes on ‘Doctors’ a conversation between friends, or a voice satirising itself? 108  TP V, p. 284. White’s, in Pope’s day a house for chocolate and, notoriously, gambling, was located at 69 St James’s Street; in 1755 it moved across the street to nos. 37–38, where it still exists today. 109  Alexander Pope, Works, 4 vols, III.1 (London: Dodsley and Cooper, 1743), p. 37. 110  Alexander Pope, The Dunciad in Four Books. Printed According to the Complete Copy Found in the Year 1742. With the Prolegomena of Scriblerus and Notes Variorum (London: Cooper, 1743), p. 62. 111  Alexander Pope, Works, ed. William Warburton, 9 vols (London, 1751), V, pp. 101–2. 112  Alexander Pope, Works, 6 vols (London, 1770), V, p. 113. 113  Alexander Pope, Poetical Works, ed. Alexander Dyce, 3 vols (London, 1831), III, p. 262. 114  On Casaubon, see Chapter Five above, p. 216.

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Does the second note, if it is by Pope, simply cancel the ambiguity developed by the first? If the false dice are the latent, secondary reference of ‘amidst the Doctors sit’, does the second note convert them to the patent and primary—and the academic Doctors to the latent in turn? There are no fixed answers to these questions, no Archimedean point comparable to Empson’s equations, only proliferating texts and perspectives. We may then reject James Sutherland’s complaint as typical of scholars who would save Pope from those around him, friends and foes alike: ‘Warburton’s Dunciad notes shed darkness rather than light on the text of the poem. Too often his idea of annotating the Dunciad was to use the context for a display of mock pedantry which requires annotation in its turn if it is to be made intelligible to the modern reader.’115 This may be a valid criticism of the 1751 notes added after Pope’s death, but it cannot be of the 1742–1743 notes on which Pope signed off, for the simple reason that they are part of the Dunciad itself: they no more deserve censure for failing to elucidate the poem than de Selby’s notes in The Third Policeman, or Charles Kinbote’s in Pale Fire. Beyond the constructed dialogues of the Dunciad is the question of Pope’s actual readership, and above all of his many critics. The satirist wrote in a milieu unrivalled in the history of English letters for its aggression and closeness of response; Joseph Guerinot’s 1969 descriptive bibliography of Pope’s contemporary critics lists 158 articles and pamphlets attacking his work between 1711 and 1744, the year of his death.116 Most of this assault was ad hominem, lampooning him predominantly for his Catholicism as ‘Pope Alexander’, and for his deformity as a monkey—or an ‘A—— P—E’.117 In the latter respect he was also the apish mimic of better writers: ‘emphatically a Monkey, in his awkward servile Imitations’.118 And a hypocrite, fawning on the Duke of Chandos while mocking James Sutherland, ‘Introduction’, in TP V, p. xxxvii. Joseph Guerinot, Pamphlet Attacks on Alexander Pope, 1711–1744: A Descriptive Bibliography (London, 1969), with a succinct list at pp. lxiii–lxxi. 117  See, for instance, [Jonathan Smedley], Gulliveriana: Or, A Fourth Volume of Miscellanies (London, 1728), pp. 292–93, referring also to a ‘Pantomimical APE’, and ‘Mr Gerard’ [= Eustace Budgell?], An Epistle to the Egregious Mr Pope in Which the Beauties of his MIND and BODY are amply displayed (London, 1734), p. 12. [James Ralph], Sawney: An Heroic Poem Occasion’d by the Dunciad (London, 1728), p. 15, drew the poet as ‘an hideous Statue lean, / Deform’d, compound of Man and Monkey’, and a papal variant of this image would adorn the frontispiece of [George Duckett and John Dennis], Pope Alexander’s Supremacy and Infallibility Examined (London, 1729). On Pope’s physical deformity see Helen Deutsch, ‘The “Truest Copies” and the “Mean Original”: Pope, Deformity, and the Poetics of Self-­Exposure’, Eighteenth-­Century Studies, 27 (1993), 1–26, and her Resemblance and Disgrace: Alexander Pope and the Deformation of Culture (Cambridge, MA, 1996). 118  [John Dennis], A True Character of Mr Pope (London, 1716), p. 6. The Essay on Criticism, for instance, is said to imitate the Duke of Buckingham and Lord Roscommon. ‘Gerard’, An Epistle, p. 7, would assert it to be a plagiary of Wycherley. 115  116 

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behind his back: ‘The Cudgels Strokes’, wrote one detractor in 1734, ‘shou’d cure thee of thy Sneer, / Th’ambiguous Air, and the divided Leer’.119 In other words, Pope was limned as the early modern Satan we met in Chapter Three. These productions were cheap and quick, full of memes, lies, half-­ truths, repeated so often as to inculcate a mythology, and lacking the wit and finesse of the Dunciad, which drily meted out ‘Turkish executions’ to each of his tormentors in turn.120 Pope had been collecting the dunces all along: the British Library contains four bound volumes of them in his possession, delicately annotated at crucial moments.121 His fight could hardly have been more different from the French squabble over Homer; if that had been the afternoon salon of neoclassical criticism—scholarly, polite, long-­winded—this was the alley at night, jeering and frenetic, turning anything to hand as a weapon. The revival of Pope’s critical fortunes in the mid-­twentieth century, cemented by the Twickenham edition of his Works (1938–1968), canonised a portrait of his detractors as worthless Grub Street hacks, cruel and trivial, deficient in both insight and morals. Such a view motivates Guerinot’s bibliography, an oddly assiduous work of scholarship on a subject so detested by its author.122 ‘As anyone who has ever tried to read them will surely agree,’ asserts Guerinot—a student of Maynard Mack, here evoking the consensus of a master’s circle, more pleading in tone than Empson, less assured—‘they are just what Pope said they were, thoroughly bad writers. Their real importance for the student of Pope and the Augustan Age is sociological.’ That is, they were mere petit-­bourgeois slaves of a nascent literary capitalism, bound to booksellers and churning out slop for pocket-­ money. Hostile to the old aristocratic order that their enemy seemed to represent, they took their cue instead from Defoe. This is a largely accurate picture, and a common-­sense one. Empson no doubt shared it; if his tastes were unorthodox, he did not bother with hacks, and like Mack and his disciples he had an affinity for Pope. Nonetheless, the intensity of the blaze here and there generated, if not good criticism, at least some anomalies of theoretical interest, and among them, new ways of talking about ambiguity. The Empsonian view describes well enough Pope’s intentions, but it does not account for the creative misinterpretations of his readers—as a historical category it is incomplete. The dunces did not seek to ‘prune their minds of any early disorder’, and so did not respond ‘correctly’ to Pope’s ambiguities; but even this is to say too much, for it assumes that his ambiguities were and are tangible objects, Dinge an ‘Gerard’, An Epistle, p. 5. The phrase is from Samuel Langley, The Iliad of Homer, p. x. 121  British Library, shelfmarks C.116.b.1–4. 122  Guerinot, Pamphlet Attacks, esp. pp. xxxvii–xlv. 119  120 

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sich, when in fact they might better be seen as readerly constructions, the currency of polemic and critique. Meanings could be postulated in a text against the author’s wishes so as to deny its coherence: ‘ambiguity’ thus marked an authority divided between writer and reader, or between two interested readers. Meaning was contingent, fashioned in dialogue, whether real or (as often the case) simulated; to ignore the dunces is therefore to neglect a hermeneutic arena of genuine richness. The contingency of meaning on Grub Street is neatly demonstrated by that monstrous word ‘wit’, used by Empson both as a shorthand for Augustan ambiguity and as a tool with which to explore Pope’s Essay.123 The word had been a textbook case of noxious polysemy. The surgeon-­linguist Edward Johnson marked it out in 1842 for special censure as ‘an instance of the uselessness of words when once they have lost their appropriate inherent meaning—as a proof that when they have lost that meaning, they may mean anything or nothing, and are therefore no longer capable of communicating ideas’.124 He quoted nine definitions from Samuel Johnson’s dictionary, then those of Addison, Dryden, Locke, Pope, Davenant, Swift; all different. But whereas for Johnson, as a good Lockean (and, one might add, a good lexical surgeon), such semantic variety rendered the word inert, for Pope that variety was productive. Empson has shown how many meanings the poet could get from the word in his Essay, some in mutual contradiction, others self-­satirising. But again, wit’s potential, not least as an easy-­to-­rhyme monosyllable, developed in hostile dialogue. To illustrate this we may adduce a handful of passages from 1728 (1 Anno Dunciadis) alone. In Sawney, a mock-­heroic response to the first Dunciad, James Ralph described Pope’s poem in these terms: An Heap of Personal Reflections, Puns, Conundrums, Lies, abominable Jests, Indecent Railleries, revengeful Turns, Profane Allusions, Nonsense, Fustian, Rant, Is rear’d on high, as the great Magazine, And Source of all their Wit.125

And at the end, ‘Hackney’, that is, Pope’s collaborator John Gay, ‘dies condemn’d / For Treason by the Laws of Wit’.126 Jonathan Smedley’s ‘The Devil’s Last Game’, which imagines Satan fingering Swift for his infernal devices, describes the Dean as a man ‘To whom Wit served for Reason, and 123  See also Ralph Cohen, ‘Pope’s Meanings and the Strategies of Interrelation’, in English Literature, ed. Maximilian Novak, 101–30. 124  Edward Johnson, Nuces Philosophicae: Or, The Philosophy of Things as Developed from the Study of the Philosophy of Words (London, 1842), p. 39. 125  [Ralph], Sawney, pp. 41–42. 126  Ibid., p. 45.

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Passion for Zeal’.127 A piece in The Flying Post, in answer to an ‘admirer’ of Pope’s Iliad ‘who said, There was a great deal of Wit in Homer’, retorted— ‘the Wit is English and not Greek’.128 The young Irish poet Matthew Concanen, a friend of Warburton’s, responded to Pope’s famous couplet, There are whom Heav’n has blest with store of Wit, Yet want as much again to manage it

by quoting another, allegedly from the satirist Ned Ward:

Strange that a Man so famous for his Wit, Should make his Friends his Foes for want of it.129

This, complained Concanen, was a ‘pert’ style, over-­hasty to conflate ‘wit’ with ‘judgement’, which he thought was the true referent of the second line in each distich: ‘as much [judgement] again’, ‘for want of [judgement]’. But that was the point: ‘wit’ was judgement and it was also wit. Examples, naturally, might be multiplied. But the important fact is not that ‘wit’ had more than one possible meaning; rather, it is that the argument in each of these passages is effected by a movement from one meaning to another, and that this movement occurs over an implied (and pointed) gap between authors. When Ralph refers to ‘all their Wit’, the word has at the same time a positive value, as Pope might apply to himself, and a negative value, satirising the first. The ‘great deal of Wit in Homer’ is not the same ‘Wit’ as that which is ‘English and not Greek’. And so on: the word is not just used, but ventriloquised through others within a defined group of antagonists, giving rise to a polyphony still richer than that which Empson saw in Pope’s Essay. It was this cumulative charge which gave the word its power. The process was itself wit, and so serves as an appropriate miniature of the way in which meaning and ambiguity were constituted not merely in the play of individual authors, but in dialogue, real or implied, between authors. In the examples of ambiguity to follow in this chapter, that pesky word, ‘wit’, will keep turning up at the scene, like a disguised Fantômas inspecting his own handiwork. In surveying the Popiana, we may begin with the most unambiguous ambiguity, namely, the use of initials to denote enemies, and discover in it the potential for genuine uncertainty. All relevant parties knew that L. W. (or L––– W––––, or W––––d) was Leonard Welsted, or that C. G. was Charles Gildon: such a device could shield a target’s identity only from ‘The Devil’s Last Game: A Satire’, in Gulliveriana, p. 273. Gulliveriana, p. 289; also in The Flying Post, 13 April, 1728. 129  [Matthew Concanen], A Supplement to the Profund (London, 1728), p. 11. I have been unable to find the couplet in any of Ward’s printed works. On Warburton’s possible involvement, see John Selby Watson, The Life of William Warburton, Lord Bishop of Gloucester from 1760 to 1779 (London, 1864), pp. 27–29. 127  128 

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someone well out of the fray, or an unwary historian.130 Still, it offered some measure of plausible deniability. The Peri Bathous put sequences of initials beside each of its scornful categories, as if to indicate the poets there indicted. When Aaron Hill, a major Whig rival of Pope’s in the 1720s, found the intials A. H. adjoined to a passage about ‘Flying Fishes’—those poets who escape banality only for a moment—he was incensed enough to take it up with Pope in correspondence, who disingenuously denied that the initials stood for Hill, or indeed anybody: ‘those Letters were set at Random, to occasion what they did occasion, the Suspicion of bad and jealous Writers’. Hill replied, quite reasonably, that ‘If the initial letters A. H. were not meant to stand for my name, yet they were everywhere read so’.131 Pope pleaded for his own ambiguity, but it was not his to plead for: the public sphere he did so much to feed had taken it away for him.132 The pamphlets directed against Pope, as we have said, consisted largely of personal jibes. But scattered among them are moments of textual analysis. Guerinot is just as dismissive of this material, labelling it ‘minute attention to every phrase or word . . . mere tedious quibbling’, without a view of the whole.133 This had been Pope’s own complaint: ‘The critic Eye, that microscope of Wit, / Sees hairs and pores, examines bit by bit’. But the same criticism was made of Seven Types, and as there, it is in the dunces’ hostile microscopy that ambiguity becomes a tool of critique. On this front, two productions stand out: John Dennis’s Remarks upon Mr. Pope’s Translation of Homer (1717), and Matthew Concanen’s A Supplement to the Profund (1728). The latter was written, possibly with help from a young Warburton, in response to the Peri Bathous, applying categories of bad writing to the works of Pope and Swift.134 There is even overlap with Empson’s examples. In his treatment of the ‘pert style’, Concanen alights on a couplet from the Essay on Criticism, imitating Persius via Dryden: 130  When the Dunciad was first published in 1728, contemporaries were aware of possible confusion, both in the future and in the provinces, and requested a Key to its veiled references. See Sutherland, ‘Introduction’, in TP V, pp. xxiii–xxiv. 131  Pope to Hill, 26 Jan. 1730–1731, in his Correspondence, ed. George Sherburn, 5 vols (Oxford, 1956), III, p. 165. Hill to Pope, 28 Jan. in ibid., p. 167. Peri Bathous, in Swift and Pope, Miscellanies, II (1728), 99. The exchange between Hill and Pope was rather more elaborate, and has been simplified here, though not distorted. On the context see Christine Gerrard, Aaron Hill: The Muses’ Projector, 1685–1750 (Oxford, 2003), pp. 124–129, and see also William Roscoe, ‘Life of Pope’, in Alexander Pope, Works, 10 vols (London, 1824), I, pp. 350–362. 132  There are many similar stories. For instance, when Pope poked fun at the Ciceronian prose style of Conyers Middleton in the 1738 Epilogue to the Satires (‘So Latin, and yet so English all the while’), Pope’s friend the lawyer William Murray defended him in vain in the coffee houses, claiming that it had been meant as a compliment. See Warburton to Middleton, 27 August 1738, in Egerton MS 1953, fol. 36r. 133  Guerinot, Pamphlet Attacks, p. liii. 134  On the Warburton connection, see Guerinot, Pamphlet Attacks, p. 149.

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To tell ’em, wou’d a hundred Tongues require, Or one vain Wit’s, that might a hundred tire. (44–45)135

Empson saw ambiguity in ‘vain’: does it imply that all wits are vain, like a Homeric epithet, or quite the opposite? The question is embedded in the poem as a whole.136 Concanen, by contrast, finds ambiguity in the object of ‘tire’: a hundred what? The syntax would naturally suggest ‘tongues’, though ears are a more likely part of the body for wits to tire. The ambiguity is augmented by Concanen’s introduction of reported dialogue: ‘A courteous Reader whom I mentioned this to, says, That the Poet meant only, that one Tongue might out-­talk a Hundred: Is it so indeed? why the Devil then did he not say so?’137 Here, we are told, a putative textual ambiguity has led to actual disagreement and uncertainty. Another example from the Supplement is still richer, because Pope annotates it in his own copy, creating traceable dialogue. Concanen illustrates the vice of ‘Inanity, or Nothingness’ with a passage from the English Iliad, in which, he claims, Pope endeavours ‘to inlarge his Meaning, till he quite loses it, like a Circle on the Water, the more it spreads, the less it appears’. The offending couplet is an editorial on Odysseus’s suppression of the dissenting soldier Thersites at Iliad II.276–277: Such just Examples on Offenders shown Sedition Silence, and assert the Throne.138

Concanen remarks: ‘Can any Man alive positively say, which is the Verb, and which the Noun, Silence or Sedition? is Silence seditioned, or Sedition 135  Compare Persius, Sat. V.26: ‘hic ego centenas ausim deposcere fauces’, and John Dryden, ‘The Fifth Satire’, in his Poems, eds Hammond and Hopkins, IV, p. 181: ‘For this a hundred voices I desire / To tell thee what an hundred tongues would tire.’ On the Latin phrase, see D. M. Hooley, The Knotted Thong: Structures of Mimesis in Persius (Ann Arbor, MI, 1997), pp. 68–69. 136  Empson, ‘Wit in the Essay on Criticism’, pp. 566–567. Compare Otto Jespersen, The Philosophy of Grammar (1924: Abingdon, 2007), p. 112 on the ambiguity between restrictive and non-­restrictive adjuncts: ‘The industrious Japanese will conquer in the long run: does this mean that the J. as a nation will conquer, because they are industrious, or that the industrious among the Japanese nation will conquer?’ 137  [Concanen], A Supplement, p. 11. The Norfolk clergyman Whitwell Elwin, annotating in 1871, found the second reading ‘evident’, but agreed with Concanen that the grammar was faulty. See Alexander Pope, Works, eds J. W. Croker and W. Elwin, 10 vols (London, 1871– 1889), II, p. 35, n. 1. 138  Homer, Iliad, tr. Pope, II.338–9, in TP VII, p. 143. The couplet responds to II. II.276–77: ‘οὔ θήν μιν πάλιν αὖτις ἀνήσει θυμὸς ἀγήνωρ / νεικείειν βασιλῆας ὀνειδείοις ἐπέεσσιν’, rendered by Fagles, Iliad, p. 108 (II.323–24): ‘Never again, I’d say, will our gallant comrade / risk his skin to attack the king with insults.’ On the political resonances of Pope’s couplet, see Richard Hamilton Armstrong, ‘Translating Ancient Epic’, in A Companion to Ancient Epic, ed. John Miles Foley (Malden, MA, 2005), pp. 175–95, at p. 180.

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Figure 6.2. Pope’s annotation to Concanen, A Supplement to the Profund (London, 1728), BL shelfmark C116b2(4), page 32.

silenced?’139 Pope’s marginal comment, marking the word ‘seditioned’ with a cross, is bemused: ‘Is there such a Verb?’ The one asserts an ambiguity, the other denies it; guile is met with guile. (Their subject Odysseus, paragon of guile, has here resorted to a blunt instrument.) We may well ask with Pope if there is any such verb as ‘sedition’: Johnson does not give it, nor the OED. It is a nonce-­word, albeit one of a peculiar kind, ‘discovered’ in reading but reiterated and established in writing. Indeed, to Pope’s question the devil of language might have replied, ‘There is now.’ Nobody will deny that Concanen’s reading is implausible, although to depend on a criterion of plausibility is to shut oneself off to more radical possibilities in a text. A better criticism is that it gives us little to work with, for Odysseus’s act plainly does not sedition silence. Elsewhere Concanen had written, ‘we live in an Age where Sense, good Sense, and Nothing but Sense, is required, and nothing else will be received.’140 In his gloss, by contrast, is the spectre of unreason: as a discoverer of ambiguities he has more in common with deconstruction than with the Johnsonian ‘good sense’ found in Seven Types.141 In a pretty mise-­en-­abyme, Pope’s five words make short work of the rebel. But the rebel did speak, however unpersuasively—the rest and reasonableness of Augustan poetics have been disturbed. Silence, at least here, has been seditioned. Pope’s most ardent zoilus was no doubt John Dennis, an old friend of Dryden’s whose adherence to Aristotelian unities Pope had mocked in the Essay on Criticism, and whose pomposity would later be lampooned by the Scriblerians in the shape of Sir Tremendous Longinus.142 In early 1717, [Concanen], A Supplement, p. 32. ‘W. Sharpsight’ [i.e., Matthew Concanen], ‘Of Modern Poetry’ (1725), in The Speculatist: A Collection of Letters and Essays (London, 1730), p. 41. 141  Empson, STA, p. 123, praises Dr Johnson’s ‘good sense’ as ‘a quality urgent for literary critics’. 142  The character appears in Three Hours after Marriage, performed on 16–23 January 1717; his first name echoes Pope’s portrait of Dennis (as ‘Appius’) in his Essay on Criticism, ll. 269–71. 139  140 

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Dennis published a pamphlet against Pope’s Iliad he had begun two years earlier, snorting that ‘The Trumpet of Homer, with its loud and various Notes, is dwindled in Pope’s Lips to a Jew’s-­Trump’.143 This piece, splenetic but full of nuances, contains much to delight the historian of ambiguity. In certain places, such as the speech of Agamemnon at Il. I.31, known Homeric cruces are reused to upbraid Pope. By nature an Ancient, and a rather pious one at that, Dennis sides with Dacier: the sexual antioōsan was, he said, ‘contrary to the Modesty of Homer’.144 His next move is interesting and problematic. Pope has judged the meaning of Agamemnon’s word from his ‘design’ or intention for Chryseis, as revealed by the comparison to Clytaemnestra. No inference could be more conventional in form. But Dennis wants to break that link, replying that speaking is one thing, and designing another; and let Agamemnon design Chryseis for what the Translator pleases, he speaks of her with Modesty, as may appear, not only from the Tenour of his Speech; but from the whole Tenour of the Ilias and Odysseis.145

The authority for the word’s meaning rests for Dennis not on the speaker’s intention, but on the ‘tenor’ of Agamemnon’s speech—which appears to be quite the opposite of what it was for Pope—and on the character of the epic as a whole. Homer’s diction has been conflated with Agamemnon’s. As with the Daciers’ account of Il. VI.234, the particular is read overtly through the whole, although here senses are not multiplied but cut down, uncertainty abolished. In other words, antioōsan means for Dennis the making and not the enjoying of a bed because of a shared sensibility, and in lieu of being able to legislate its meaning for Pope, he rereads Pope’s interpretation as the product of baser morals. Pope, after all, is the poet of The Rape of the Lock, and even more obscenely of the travestied First Psalm, so it is no wonder he has espied filth in Homer. As for Dennis, he goes even further than Dacier in disinfecting Agamemnon: in a postscript he argues, with a comically anachronistic view of ‘Love’, that the king’s feelings towards Chryseis are entirely chaste: ‘Homer makes him have no manner of Passion for her, but only a very high Esteem’.146 Lust is absent from mind, as it is from tongue. 143  John Dennis, Remarks on Mr. Pope’s Translation of Homer (London 1717), p. 36. Dennis had first read Pope’s version in May 1716, but was provoked to publishing his pamphlet by Lewis Theobald’s praise for the work and criticism of Dennis in The Censor, 2.33 (5 January 1717), 14–20, and by the spoof of him onstage (see preceding note). The pamphlet appeared in February. On this see Edward Niles Hooker, ‘Pope and Dennis’, English Literary History, 7 (1940), 188–98. Dennis evidently liked the trumpet image; compare his A True Character of Mr Pope and his Writings (London, 1716), p. 16. 144  Dennis, Remarks, p. 25. 145  Ibid., p. 26. 146  Dennis, Postscript, pp. 75–76.

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If Pope’s moral failings are for Dennis reflected in his ambiguous readings of Homer, his literary incompetence is revealed by the errors and ambiguities he introduces into the translation. The first volume (1715) of the first edition of his Iliad began: The wrath of Peleus’ son, the direful spring Of all the Grecian woes, O Goddess, sing . . . Dennis was not happy with ‘all’ for Homer’s muri[a], which he thought should rather be rendered ‘numerous’. The phrase ‘spring of all the Grecian woes’, he insisted, could mean (a) the spring of all the woes in Greece’s history, ‘which is monstrous’; (b) the spring of all woes at Troy, ‘which is extravagant’; (c) the spring of all the woes of which it was the spring, ‘which is ridiculous’; or (d) the spring of the woes felt during the time of action, ‘which is false’.147 Achilles’ wrath was not the sole source of Greek woe, nor even the primary source—that was rather the plague responsible for the wrath. Pope’s epithet, while metrically sound, was inaccurate and ambiguous. But Pope objected, annotating his copy of the pamphlet: ‘Why not, that it was the spring of all the woes they felt that tenth year of which only & no other before or after this poet sings? This being the only thing it could mean, the Critick must not see.’148 The demand was for hermeneutic charity: a resolution of apparent ambiguity by delimiting the possibilities in content. Nonetheless, the woes became instead ‘unnumber’d’ in later editions.149 The most memorable part of Dennis’s pamphlet concerns the translation of Il. II.209, describing Greek soldiers running, ‘ὡς ὅτε κῦμα πολυφλοίσβοιο θαλάσσης’, ‘like waves of a loud-­roaring sea’,150 that epithet later spawning a menagerie of English nonce-­sesquipedalia—‘polyphloisboian’ (1824); ‘polyphloisboioism’ (1823); ‘poluphlosboiotic’ and ‘poluphlosboiotatotic’ (both 1843—from Thackeray); and finally the portmanteau ‘polyphloisboisterous’ (1875). For Homer’s line Pope offered ‘Murmuring they move, as when old Ocean roars’.151 But wait, said Dennis: how can a murmur resemble a roar? And Dennis, Remarks, p. 20. British Library, shelf mark C.116.b.1.(2), p. 20. 149  See Guerinot, Pamphlet Attacks, pp. l–li on changes made after criticisms, and also, for comparanda, R. H. Griffith, ‘Pope Editing Pope’, University of Texas Studies in English (1944), 5–108. 150  A common trope: compare, for instance, Il. IV.476–485, or Sophocles, Antigone 129–30, describing the soldiers of Polyneices as ‘πολλῷ ῥεύματι προσνισσομένους / χρυσοῦ, καναχῇ θ᾽ ὑπερόπλους’. 151  Homer, Iliad, tr. Pope, I.249, in TP VII, p. 139. Theobald praised the line in his review 147  148 

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where did this ‘murmuring’ come from anyhow?152 In a Postscript to the pamphlet, Dennis admits that he mistook the verse Pope had been translating; nonetheless, the criticism stands. Here he does Pope’s work for him, imagining an objector on the poet’s behalf—Vergil had used murmur to mean a loud roar, as in Aeneid I.55–6, ‘Illi indignantes magno cum murmure montis / Circum claustra fremunt’ (the wrathful [winds] rage with a great roar within the walls of the mountain), and it was just as legitimate for an Englishman to borrow from Latin as it had been for the Romans to borrow from Greek. Dennis is sympathetic to the possibilities of borrowing, but disallows it here, for it would make the word ‘have a Meaning directly opposite to that which Use has given it’: loud and rough, instead of soft and gentle. To put the two senses together in a line is ‘downright Folly and Impudence’.153 What follows is extraordinary: it is an exposition of the enantiosemy, that is the coexistence of contradictory meanings, in the Latin murmur, grounded in an argument from onomatopoeia. Whenever the word ends in a consonant, as in English, or in most Latin nominal cases and verbal persons—murmur, murmuris, murmurat—the ‘Liquids and Vowels so fetter and confine one another, that they cannot expand themselves, and exert their proper Sound’. But when the word ends in a vowel, as in the Latin forms murmure and murmura, ‘both the Liquids and Vowels exert themselves, and the R particularly becomes very sonorous’.154 In the first instance the sound imitated is soft and gentle: that is, a murmur; in the second, loud and rough: that is, a roar; and several examples of each are given from the Aeneid. The connection between sound and meaning was a classic Augustan query: as Pope himself had famously intoned, ‘The Sound must seem an Eccho to the Sense’. Samuel Langley, in a note to his 1767 version of Iliad Book I, would hymn the onomatopoeia of Homer’s roaring ocean at line 34: I am particularly raptured and awed with the sonorous word πολυφλοίσβοιο, most astonishingly setting forth by its own roaring sound (by the happiest conjunction of vowels and consonants, the vowels exceeding in number) the roaring of the ocean; and θαλάσσης, such an apt hissing close, an happy concordia discors (discordant con-

(see n. 143 above), pp. 18–20. In Pope’s autograph, British Library MS 4708, fol. 32v, the final version can be seen pupating: The ships lye bare, the cloud o’erspreads the Plain \murmuring they move as when old/ nor half so loud the swelling Ocean roars 152  Dennis, Remarks, pp. 16–17. Pope’s word renders Homer’s ēkhē, ‘with noise’; see Mack, ‘Introduction’, TP VII, pp. cii–ciii for a defence of the translation. 153  Dennis, Postscript, p. 86. 154  Ibid., p. 87.

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cord) no less expresses the flashing of the sea, when the waves are retreating from the shore.155

Dr Johnson would scorn the notion, which he called ‘representative metre’, as having begotten ‘many wild conceits and imaginary beauties’, arising from ‘the ambiguity of words’, as if there were ‘some relation between a soft line and soft couch, or between hard syllables and hard fortune’.156 If Augustan thinkers disliked anything as much as ambiguity, it was the idea of a private interpretation, answerable only to the individual’s fancy; this was how all those Catholics managed to see hosts of dangerous allegorical meanings in the Bible. Much later I. A. Richards, situating himself in the tradition of Locke, expressly warned against ‘private associations’ when reading poetry, and both he and Empson attacked the ‘sound and sense’ doctrine beloved by their Aestheticist predecessors, the latter quoting Johnson on the matter, as so often elsewhere.157 But in Dennis’s disquisition, eleven pages ranged against a single word, the case is made in good Lockean fashion—publically, even empirically, with systematic reference to existing usages of murmur in its various forms. Here was no occult delight in sound, as with Langley, but a philological demonstration of ‘correct’ onomatopoeia, seeking to disambiguate the Latin and, in so doing, to hold up Pope’s murmur by contrast as equivocal. Empson’s view that Pope’s ambiguities were not ambiguous, that they were ‘clear-­cut’ and had no genuine uncertainty, while commonsensical from the perspective of the sober and sympathetic literary critic, does not reflect the way contemporary readers actually interpreted. It is not enough to say, as Guerinot does, that the dunces’ approach to literature was based ‘on schoolroom training’, still less that ‘their underlying critical assumptions and attitudes are reasonably clear’.158 The schoolroom taught its students to see classical texts as great works, to be admired, analysed, and imitated; ambiguities were ignored or contained. More advanced scholars, as we have seen, could praise the wit in a classical ambiguity, even as they Langley, Homer, p. 8n. I have silently corrected an error in punctuation. Johnson, ‘Pope’, in Lives, ed. Lonsdale, IV, pp. 69–70. Compare Samuel Johnson, The Rambler #92 (2 February1951), ‘The Accommodation of Sound to the Sense, Often Chimerical’. 157  STA, p. 12, though note SCW, pp. 101–103, falling prey to the same idea on the sound of ‘all’ in Paradise Lost. I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment (London, 1929), pp. 231–233 against significant sound, and pp. 235–54 against irrelevant associations. Simon Jarvis, ‘Why Rhyme Pleases’, Thinking Verse 1 (2011), 17–43, at pp. 37–38, has written, with reference to Johnson’s complaint, that ‘Common sense and professional literary criticism alike have often tended to operate an excluded middle between fantasy and intention. Either the poet intended an effect or readers are making it up.’ 158  Guerinot, Pamphlet Attacks, p. liii. 155  156 

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clarified its semantics: the critic was a servant, dusting his master’s picture frames.159 Pope’s enemies also had their eyes close to his text, but for contrary reasons: they looked down on him, not up to, and located (or invented) ambiguities purely to discredit him. The comments on his Iliad are most revealing, because here an ambiguity could not correspond to any uncertainty about the poet’s intention—Pope’s intention was simply Homer’s, clarifiable by the Greek, or else by other translations. As a corollary, his stylistic failings could be measured up against the original. These interpretive processes depended not on clear ‘critical assumptions’, but on a rejection of hermeneutic charity, the results limited only by ingenuity: not so much sweeping away the dust as planting evidence and then summoning the authorities. The readings of Dennis and Concanen thus represent a cynical intonation of Empson’s dictum: ‘Effects worth calling ambiguous occur when the possible alternative meanings of word or grammar are used to give alternative meanings to the sentence.’160 A Tanner’s Yard The most surprising discovery of ambiguities in Pope was still to come, and it was made not by an enemy but by a friend. In 1751, seven years after the poet’s death, an edition of his works in nine volumes appeared in London. It was funded by the Knaptons, who had also financed Clarke’s Iliad and would in 1755 pay for Johnson’s Dictionary; its editor was William Warburton (1698–1779), bishop of Gloucester and author of the infamous Divine Legation of Moses, to which we shall return in the next chapter. Warburton’s selection as literary executor was contentious, ruffling the feathers of Lord Bolingbroke, who inherited the poet’s collection of manuscripts; Isaac Disraeli, in his chronicle of their dispute, would call the pair the ‘two most arrogant geniuses who ever lived’.161 The edition came with footnotes—not the game-­playing of Warburton’s contributions to the 1742– 1743 Dunciad this time, but proper scholarly footnotes, albeit by a former comrade-­in-­arms. Not all Pope fans valued the editorial apparatus. One cynical pamphlet barked out a series of doggerel quatrains: 159  As Robert Clark puts it, Herder: His Life and Thought (Berkeley, 1955), p. 73: ‘the housemaid’s rank of commentator’. 160  STA, p. 70, emphasis mine. 161  Disraeli, Quarrels of Authors, p. 159. On the theological background to their dispute, see A. W. Evans, Warburton and the Warburtonians: A Study in Some Eighteenth-­Century Controversies (Oxford, 1932), pp. 165–70 and 177–82; B. W. Young, Religion and the Enlightenment in Eighteenth-­Century England: Theological Debate from Locke to Burke (Oxford, 1998), pp. 171–74.

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As on the margin of Thames’ silver flood Stand little, necessary piles of wood,162 So Pope’s fair page appears with notes disgrac’d; Pull down the nuisances, ye Men of Taste. Close to the Grotto of the Twickenham Bard Too close—adjoins a Tanner’s yard; So Verse and Prose are to each other tied, So Warburton and Pope allied.163

Likewise, the poet John Gilbert Cooper, who had been feuding with the bishop for two years already, wrote a hostile notice of the edition. Warburton, he noticed, had insulted him in a footnote, but it would have been better applied to Warburton himself, whom Cooper compared to a certain ugly Dutch painter who, having drawn several self-­portraits, wrote the names of his enemies beneath.164 (The analogy parodies satire’s self-­image: the poet masked as a monster to mirror and unmask monstrous mankind.) Empson, too, allowed himself a couple of chuckles at Warburton’s pedantry.165 But the bishop’s notes have much to commend historical study. For one thing, they both identify and praise ambiguities in Pope’s poetry. This was noticed in a 1967 article by Robert Ryley, who saw in Warburton’s approach an anticipation of New Critical close reading techniques, and labelled his remarks on ambiguity ‘almost Empsonian’ without further analysis.166 Ryley’s argument, however, is vitiated by an overcooked conPerhaps after The Rape of the Lock, III.2–3, ‘Where Thames with pride surveys. . . .’ Verses occasioned by Mr. Warburton’s Late Edition of Mr. Pope’s Works (London, 1751), pp. 13–14. The ‘tanner’s yard’ is often taken as literal, from serious scholarship to Anthony Beckles Willson’s pamphlet—for sale each year at the grotto’s open day under St James School, Cross Deep, Twickenham—Alexander Pope’s Grotto (London, 1998), p. 7, where the witticism is attributed, oddly, to Warburton. 164  John Gilbert Cooper, Cursory Remarks on Mr. Warburton’s New Edition of Mr. Pope’s Works (London, 1751), p. 10. The painter is not named, but the source seems to be an anecdote told of Abraham Diepraam in Jacob Campo Weyerman, De levens-­beschryvingen der Nederlandsche konst-­schilders en konst-­schilderessen, 4 vols (The Hague, 1729–1739), III, p. 100; my thanks to Paul Taylor on this point. On the Cooper dispute, see Harry Solomon, The Rise of Robert Dodsley: Creating the New Age of Print (Carbondale, IL, 1996), pp. 134–136. 165  SCW, pp. 93, 171. Empson had the example of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Shakespearean Criticism, ed. Thomas Middleton Raysor, 2 vols (London, 1960), I, p. 63, on an emendation to Macbeth: ‘Mercy on this most wilful ingenuity of blundering, which, nevertheless, was the very Warburton of Warburton—his inmost being!’ 166  Robert M. Ryley, ‘William Warburton as ‘New Critic’, in Studies in Criticism and Aesthetics, 1660–1800: Essays in Honor of Samuel Holt Monk, eds Howard Anderson and John S. Shea (Minneapolis, 1967), pp. 249–265, having in mind the American New Critics, Cleanth Brooks and William Wimsatt, Jr. Ryley argues, p. 256, that Warburton’s ‘honorific use of the term “ambiguity” and his alertness to the possibilities of intentional or unintentional equivocation represent a curious foreshadowing of twentieth-­century thought’. 162  163 

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tempt for his subject—he can barely manage two sentences without telling the reader how pompous Warburton was, or how ‘terrible’ a critic—and hamstrung by a neglect of genre and appropriate context. In fact, the parallels between Warburton and Empson are closer than Ryley acknowledges, extending to finer points of judgement; at the same time, the Augustan editor’s response is not isolated in history, but evidently evolved out of the commentaries on satire we discussed in the previous chapter. The first thing to notice is that Warburton discovers ambiguities almost exclusively in Pope’s Epistles in imitation of Horace, and in the Dialogues he appends to them in the fourth volume of his edition.167 This Horatian context is important, and reflected in Warburton’s own vocabulary: just as Porphyrio and early modern critics found elegant ambiguity in Horace’s satires, so the two recurrent epithets of ‘ambiguity’ in Warburton’s notes are ‘elegant’ and ‘satiric(al)’.168 The imitations are of especial interest because, as with the dunces on Homer, the editor could compare the original, and thus identify lines in which ambiguities have been introduced into or taken away from the English. For instance, Warburton alights on Epistles I.6.22–3, a plea for Stoic equanimity before the unexpected: Whether we joy or grieve, the same the curse, Surpriz’d at better, or surpriz’d at worse.

He comments: ‘The elegance of this is superior to the Original. The curse is the same (says he) whether we joy or grieve. Why so? Because, in either case, the man is surprized, hurried off, and led away captive. . . . This happy advantage, in the imitation, arises from the ambiguity of the word surprize.’169 The figure is an antanaclasis: the sentence itself has only one meaning, but gets its effect from a word with two, like in a syllepsis, as Eustathius discovered in Homer. Empson considered the latter figure, which he prized for its grasp of latent connections, ‘the fundamental device 167  On Pope’s imitation of Horace in the Epistles, see Frank Stack, Pope and Horace: Studies in Imitation (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 116–197; George Douglas Atkins, Quests of Difference: Reading Pope’s Poems (Lexington, KY, 1986), pp. 99–106; and William Kupersmith, English Versions of Roman Satire in the Earlier Eighteenth Century (Newark, 2007), pp. 102–142. On Pope’s Horatian satire more broadly, see Russo, Alexander Pope, pp. 199–233. 168  Pope, Works, ed. Warburton (1751), IV, p. 299, ascribing to one expression an ‘elegant and satiric ambiguity’, and adding, ‘His writings abound in them.’ James Osborn, ‘Pope, the Byzantine Empress, and Walpole’s Whore’, Review of English Studies, n.s. 6 (1955), 372–382, at p. 382, comments that: ‘Pope’s skill at the multiple keyboard of Horatian “elegant ambiguity” may be valued even more highly than his saeva indignatio.’ 169  Pope, Works, ed. Warburton (1751), IV, pp. 102–103. Horace’s original (ll. 12–14) runs:

Gaudeat, an doleat; cupiat, metuatne; quid ad rem, Si, quidquid vidit melius pejusve sua spe, Defixis oculis, animoque et corpore torpet?

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of the Augustan style’; contemporaries saw it as especially Popean.170 Elsewhere, in his editor’s estimation, Pope smudges Horace’s ambiguity. So at Epistles II.2.112–13—‘Blackmore himself, for any grand effort, / Would drink and doze at Tooting or Earl’s-­Court’—Warburton remarks: This has not the delicacy, for it wants the elegant ambiguity of Rite cliens Bacchi, somno gaudentis et umbra [Epist. II.2.78], where the intemperance of Poets is not the obvious, but the secret meaning. For Bacchus was the patron of the Drama as well as of the Bottle; and sleep was courted for inspiration, as well as to relieve a debauch.171

In other words, when Horace puts the poet under the protection of Bacchus, who ‘rejoices in sleep and shade’, the overt sense is honourable, leaving his satire latent and secondary (akin to Bentley ‘sleeping in port’), whereas Pope has made his own mockery of Richard Blackmore dully explicit. Richer examples appear elsewhere in the notes. A play on ‘wit’ occurs at Epistles II.1.177–180: When sick of Muse, our follies we deplore, And promise our best Friends to rhyme no more; We wake next morning in a raging fit, And call for pen and ink to show our wit.172

In the original lines, Horace (or his persona) had confessed his own hypocrisy, succumbing to the Augustan craze for writing poetry while claiming in public to denounce it. But Warburton finds in Pope’s version a further subtlety. He comments on the final four words above: ‘The force of this consists in the ambiguity.—To shew how constant we are to our 170  STA, p. 70, and see A Complete Key to the last new FARCE The What d’ye Call It (London, 1715), p. 22, misquoting The Rape of the Lock, II.107, ‘Or stain her honour, or her new brocade’. The authorship of the Complete Key has been disputed: Pope attributed it to Theobald and the actor Benjamin Griffin, but it may have been by Gildon, Arbuthnot, or Gay (who wrote The What d’ye Call It)—or Pope himself. 171  Pope, Works, ed. Warburton (1751), IV, pp. 170–171. Theophilus Cibber, ‘A Familiar Epistle To Master Warburton’, in his The Lives and Characters of the Most Eminent Actors and Actresses of Great Britain and Ireland from Shakespeare to the Present Time (London, 1753), p. xcvi, includes this criticism of Pope in an appendix listing Warburton’s negative remarks (‘These few may suffice, which as equally shew the Goodness of his Heart, as the Clearness of his Head’, at p. xcvii). 172  An imitation of Horace, Epistulae, II.1.111–113:

Ipse ego, qui nullos me affirmo scribere versus, Invenior Parthis mendacior, et prius orto Soli vigil, calamum et chartas et scrinia posco. Alexander Clark, Boileau and the French Classical Critics in England (1660–1830) (Paris, 1925), p. 212, finds a still closer comparison in Boileau, Second Satire, ll. 26–30.

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resolutions,—or, to shew what fine verses we can make.’173 Empson would have loved this double reading for the divergent personas opening up behind: Horace’s open, jovial hypocrite on the one hand, and, on the other, far worse, the self-­deluding hypocrite, insisting on abstemious steadfastness (‘to show how constant we are’) in a very line of poetry. The ‘force’ identified by Warburton lies in the interaction of two observations on human nature. This principle is still more explicit in a line from the first dialogue appended to the Satires: Have I, in silent wonder, seen such things As Pride in Slaves, and Avarice in Kings; And at a Peer, or Peeress, shall I fret, Who starves a Sister, or forswears a Debt? Virtue, I grant you, is an empty boast; But shall the Dignity of Vice be lost? (109–114)

On line 113 Warburton comments: ‘A satirical ambiguity—either that those starve who have it, or that those who boast of it, have it not: and both together (he insinuates) make up the present state of modern virtue.’174 Ryley, sclerotic with scorn, smirks that Warburton ‘scandalizes everybody’ with this interpretation, because ‘the context clearly rules out’ ambiguity.175 What gives him such confidence? We are back again with the mood of La Motte quoted in Pope, and Empson’s reviewers, and all the rest—with a rejection of private fancies. But it seems foolhardy to deny Warburton’s native feeling for Pope’s ironies, who not only knew him but had worked with him on the 1742–1743 Dunciad. Historical distance usually increases the ambiguity of a text, but may at times dilute it. Empson encountered this problem in Chaucer: ‘time has faded rather than enriched the original ambiguity’, preserving certain meanings of a word while cancelling others.176 However, the daring of Warburton’s ‘those starve who have it’ depends not merely on two meanings of a word, but on a dislocation of ‘empty’ from boast to boaster: just the sort of poetic licence which Guerinot damned the dunces for being unable to comprehend. Meaning is here not Lockean: Warburton has permitted it to be not only stated but ‘insinuated’. The push comes from ‘starves a Sister’ (112), which lends its meaning to ‘empty boast’ in a semi-­conscious, extra-­syntactical process. But most important in Warburton’s gloss is not the latent meaning of ‘empty stomach’ Pope, Works, ed. Warburton (1751), IV, p. 134. Alexander Pope, Works, ed. William Warburton, 2nd ed., 9 vols (London, 1757), IV, p. 229. For the pun, compare Duke Senior in As You Like It, II.7: ‘Art thou thus bolden’d, man, by thy distress, / Or else a rude despiser of good manners, / That in civility thou seem’st so empty?’ See also STA, pp. 125–7 on Pope, hunger and emptiness. 175  Ryley, ‘William Warburton’, p. 255. 176  STA, p. 59. 173  174 

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discovered behind the obvious meaning of ‘vain boast’: rather, it is the ‘both’, and above all the ‘both together’. Not only is Pope talking about both the virtuous and the vicious in the same phrase, he threatens to show why the hunger of the one is related to the vanity of the other, as products of the same corrupt society. This is the very essence of what the eighteenth century understood as satire. In the way he opens up divergent poems behind a single word or line, Warburton is building on the comments of earlier scholars on classical satire. But he goes further, able to think through the implications of counterintuitive readings for the poem as a whole, or at least for the broader argument at hand. His view of Pope’s ambiguities is at heart Horatian, the dark hiding under the light, but he conceives of them in more concretely social terms than his forebears did: as later with Empson, there is an ambiguity of self behind that of words. This is a self that Warburton recognises first-­hand in Pope’s satires, the Augustan self wearied in its social play of showing, hiding, showing hiding, and hiding hiding: the face in the glass inscribed with another’s name. As Maynard Mack observes in his Life, poetry for Pope was ‘emphatically more a social than a personal institution’.177 Graham Hough, in his analysis of Empson on Pope, points out that we need not even talk about the poet’s explicit intentions: ‘Many elements that enter into the meaning of a literary text are . . . the result of unrecognised social forces, expressing themselves in syntax and rhetorical arrangement’, and Pope’s ambiguities reveal ‘the precarious balance’ of his relation to the world around him.178 This is reflected well in Warburton’s use of the old word ‘elegant’. Johnson would soon define elegance as ‘rather soothing than striking, beauty without grandeur’, that is, a beauty avoiding offence, responding to the sentiments of others in a group. Elegance was, as we have seen again and again, the virtue of wit, and therefore of artificial ambiguity, against that of the sublime.179 An Open Work? Many excellent scholars have teased out the political, religious, and other ideological forces shaping early modern readings of literature, Homer and Pope included: complexities at every level open up behind particular interpretations.180 But the narrative above has taken us in a different direcMaynard Mack, Alexander Pope: A Life (New Haven, 1985), p. 87. Hough, ‘An Eighth Type’, p. 38. 179  For further thoughts on ambiguity against the sublime, see Chapter Nine below, pp. 361–362. 180  See, for instance, Simonsuuri, Homer’s Original Genius; Don Cameron Allen, Mysteriously Meant: The Rediscovery of Pagan Symbolism and Allegorical Interpretation in the Renaissance 177  178 

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tion. The responses quoted here are brutally simple, for there are moments in the course of reading when one is charmed by a text, and by one’s own wit in seeing meanings in it. Once a meaning is seen—sought or not—it can hardly be unseen. Such a process is intrinsically private, and few convince others that the senses they espy are indeed there: cases of persuasion, as with Eustathius upon Dacier, are usually framed by a larger intellectual bequest. Ambiguity almost always seems ridiculous from the outside, and Dacier’s critics betray with especial clarity the impulse to protect the chastity of the text. As for Pope, his poetic dice were loaded, like the doctors at White’s. (Bridoye’s dice in Rabelais were in effect the same: until he misread them, all his judgements were correct.181) The play of his language, like the toss of a false die, was itself only a pretty ritual, and seemed to carry no uncertainty, no adventure. At least, this was the ideal, and it was the old one: for if the most stable solid is the cube, the most stable cube is the loaded die. Even in equivocation, by this logic, Pope would seem faultless: however he falls, he always falls firm on his feet, a good Augustan sort of ambiguity. That was Pope’s picture of it, eagerly adopted by modern criticism. But he did not always fall firm on his feet, because the game he was playing had no rules, and his die was faultless after all. His readers, hostile and sympathetic, made it up as they went along, finding ambiguities wherever wit permitted. As with Madame Dacier’s response to Iliad IV.306–307, the possibilities of Pope’s text charmed them into ignoring critical strictures about intention and interpretation. The historian who would do justice to them as well as to Pope, therefore, must not think of all his ambiguities either as ‘clear-­cut’ Horatian witticisms or as critical cruces. His corpus was treated in a new way, not as a code to decipher and discuss with other decipherers, but as a canvas on which to write new meanings, an open work, belonging wholly neither to Pope nor to his readers. This is how modern critics would operate, and we see it in Pope’s arena for the first time. It marks the first possibility of ambiguity not as mere philological uncertainty, nor as the certainty-­in-­uncertainty of Dacier, but as a creative uncertainty disobeying common sense, an indefinite opportunity. (Baltimore, 1970), pp. 83–106; Bizer, Homer and the Politics; Jessica Wolfe, Homer and the Question of Strife from Erasmus to Hobbes (Toronto, 2015). 181  On the ambiguity of Bridoye, see Edwin Duval, ‘The Juge Bridoye, Pantagruelism, and the Unity of Rabelais’ Tiers Livre’, Études rabelaisiennes 17 (1983), 37–60.

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CH A PTE R SE VE N

AMBIGUITIES OF TYPE To-­day’s needs may be satisfied, but to-­morrow’s needs cannot be securely foretold and provided for. — Alfred Sidgwick, The Use of Words in Reasoning.1

This chapter maps the confluence of three earlier stories: the cementing of rhetorical norms in the generations after Locke, the interpretation of Old Testament prophecy, and the afterlife of the querelle d’Homère. At the juncture, ready to found a new city with German auxiliaries, stood George Benson (1699–1762), a dissenting minister of considerable scholarly influence in his own era but forgotten today. Benson emerged from a lively culture of Nonconformist learning in England, one that included Samuel Clarke, who in addition to editing the Iliad authored a potent attack on the Trinity, and Benson’s friend John Ward, whose Gresham lectures on rhetoric we have already encountered. Ward was typical in his intellectual variety: his papers teem with epigraphy in Latin and Arabic, plans of classical buildings, essays on everything from prosody to the antiquity of malt liquor, and disquisitions on passages in the Bible, some of which were printed after his death, others incorporated into Benson’s published work.2 Benson himself, raised in Cumberland and living in London from 1726 until his death, read as widely as Ward but wrote exclusively on theology, including a history of early Christianity, a defence of Arianism, and a series of paraphrases, on the model of John Locke, of the Epistles of the New Testament.3 In 1752 his versions of the Pauline Epistles were collected in a single volume with a series of dissertations; the first of these, entitled ‘An Essay Concerning the Unity of Sense’, argued that ‘every text has only one Alfred Sidgwick, The Use of Words in Reasoning (London, 1901), p. 178. For John Ward’s papers, see, e.g., British Library, Add. MSS 6210, 6211, 6269. On his Gresham lectures, see Chapter Three, p. 103. 3  Paraphrases are an important but understudied genre of eighteenth-­century English biblical criticism. For a survey, see Thomas Preston, ‘Biblical Criticism, Literature, and the Eighteenth-­Century Reader’, in Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-­Century England, ed. Isabel Rivers (Leicester, 1982), pp. 97–126. 1  2 

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meaning; which when we have found, we need enquire no further’.4 This conclusion was quite in keeping with Locke, who had warned readers of Scripture to filter out irrelevant meanings by examining each passage not in isolation but in its context. Without the constraint of context, Locke wrote, enthusiasm and ingenuity could run wild on possible ambiguities: ‘Nothing is more acceptable to Phansie than plyant Terms and Expressions that are not obstinate; in such it can find its account with Delight, and with them be illuminated, Orthodox, infallible at pleasure, and in its own way.’5 Benson, likewise, was contemptuous of divines keen to find double meanings in the Bible: Who, when they meet with a passage of scripture, which is of more difficult interpretation, and which has been interpreted in divers senses, they are ready to cry out (with Eustathius and Madam Dacier) Oh, the depth! oh, the fulnesse!6

The Homeric overreadings of Dacier and her Byzantine ally, as ridiculed by Pope and Clarke—both quoted by Benson, along with La Motte—now figure the overeager interpretations of Holy Writ. This is only one illustration of the way biblical hermeneutics in the eighteenth century were inflected by the study of the classics, as will become apparent in the present chapter. Here the appeal to Homer, and to the world of Dacier and Pope, gives Benson’s consideration of prophecy a gentlemanly air, smart clothes over the cassock, but he has a more specific point too, that interpreting the Bible is no different to interpreting the Iliad, except that it is true. As he concludes, a reader of a passage in Scripture ought to seek its single meaning, ‘as he would find out the sense of Homer’ (xlii). Benson’s dissertation would soon be translated into German with his paraphrases, and along with many other English works of theology and scholarship, helping to set the scene for several generations of revolutionary historical criticism, and, in the short term, for spectacular and profoundly influential opposition.7 But it was of no great originality: rather, it stated succinctly and defended fully a view common among Nonconformists going back to the start of the century—a position that denied the possibility of mystical senses in the Old Testament, or any kind of meaning not intended by the human writer. 4  George Benson, ‘An Essay Concerning the Unity of Sense’, in A Paraphrase and Notes on Six of the Epistles of St. Paul, 2nd ed. (London, 1752), p. xxi. The word ‘unity’ in this instance means ‘singleness’. 5  John Locke, ‘An Essay for the Understanding of St Paul’s Epistles by Consulting St Paul Himself’, in his Writings on Religion, ed. Victor Nuovo (Oxford, 2002), p. 56. 6  Benson, ‘An Essay’, p. xi. 7  On which, see Chapter Eight below.

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According to earlier Protestant scholars, every passage in the Bible must have one and only one literal sense—that intended by the writer—and some Hebrew prophecies referred literally to Jesus; but others had a literal fulfilment in the prophet’s own era, as well as a mystical sense ratified by a citation in the New Testament.8 Whereas Catholic scholars in the tradition of Nicholas of Lyra, as we have seen, described both meanings of such passages as ‘literal’, most Protestants maintained that the prophetic one was mystical or spiritual.9 As a point of methodology, this had been near-­ unanimous among Protestants, even if they disagreed on specific passages. For instance, one of the points of contention between André Rivet and Hugo Grotius in the 1640s was whether the famous prophecy at Isaiah 7:14 (‘Behold, a virgin shall conceive’), cited at Matt. 1:22, referred literally or spiritually to the birth of Jesus.10 In any event, it was precisely such additional mystical senses that set Scripture apart from other kinds of text. As the great English polymath John Selden said in his Table Talk: ‘The Scripture may have more Senses besides the Literal; because God understands all things at once; but a Man’s Writing has but one true Sense, which is that which the Author meant when he writ it.’11 The additional prophetic senses in the Old Testament, whether literal (Catholic) or mystical (Protestant), were predicated on the idea of progressive revelation, of meaning revealed by time, for they had been inaccessible 8  See, e.g., Salomo Glassius, Philologia sacra (Jena, 1623), pp. 291–293 (I.4.1.7): ‘Prophetae a typo ad antitypum saepe transeunt, et cum de aliis rebus sermo ipsis est, ad Christum Scripturae nucleum convertuntur, et de eo in sensu literali prophetant.’ with the example of Is. 7:14, and noting that ‘Calvin and others’ claim that Christ is here meant only ‘typically’ not literally; compare pp. 347–349 (II.1.2.1.2). See William Madsen, From Shadowy Types to Truth: Studies in Milton’s Symbolism (New Haven, 1968), pp. 35–38 on contemporary English counterparts. 9  See Chapter Four above, pp. 165–166. 10  Nicholas Hardy, Criticism and Confession: The Bible in the Seventeenth-­Century Republic of Letters (Oxford, 2017), pp. 211–219. Grotius’s willingness to reduce the Christian referent of this and other Hebrew prophecies from literal to mystical aroused stringent opposition among Catholics too, especially in France: see Jacques le Brun, ‘La reception de la théologie de Grotius chez les catholiques de la seconde moitié du XVIIe siècle’, in The World of Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), ed. R. Feenstra (Amsterdam and Maarssen, 1984), pp. 195–214, at 198–201; Sébastien Drouin, Théologie ou libertinage?: l’exégèse allégorique à l’âge des Lumières (Paris, 2010), pp. 99–153. Drouin’s account, while by far the longest, is vitiated by his many mistranslations of Grotius’s Latin, by his misdescription of Grotius’s doctrine as a ‘double literal sense’ of prophecy, and by his association of it with Paul Hazard’s outdated concept of a proto-­Enlightenment ‘crise de la conscience européenne’ (153). See also, on an influential Dutch response to Grotius, Ernestine van der Wall, ‘Between Grotius and Cocceius: The “Theologia Prophetica“ of Campegius Vitringa (1659–1722)’, in Hugo Grotius, Theologian: Essays in Honour of G. H. M. Posthumus Meyjes, eds Henk Nellen and Edwin Rabbie (Leiden, 1994), pp. 195–215. 11  John Selden, Table-­Talk, being the Discourses (London, 1689), p. 4. The point that God understands all things at once is Thomist: see Chapter Four above, p. 162.

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to the Hebrew prophets themselves, and understood only in retrospect by Christians, after the ministry of Jesus, as confirmations of the Gospel. This had the effect of turning biblical history into a sort of plotted narrative, and above all into a drama with its concomitant irony, the Jews in the situation of the tragic hero and the Christians in that of the audience, able to interpret words and actions in the knowledge of later events.12 Such a conception, like everything else, derived from Augustine, part of whose genius was to package a system of theology in terms familiar to a contemporary pagan audience, nourished since school on the ornaments of rhetoric and ancient poetry. Thus The City of God paints the typology of the Crucifixion as a form of elegant variation: ‘The earliest sacrifices of the holy were manifold and various signs of this true sacrifice, since this one is figured by many, just as a single thing is expressed by a range of words so as to be commended without tediousness.’ Likewise, the ills of the world are there to give harmony to the whole: ‘To say nothing of the angels, God would not even have created any men, whose evil future he foresaw, unless he also knew to what good use he would put them, and so adorn the order of history with antitheses, like the most beautiful poem.’13 The literary or dramatic quality of biblical history was rarely emphasised by early modern theologians, although we catch something of the same aesthetic feeling in Grotius as he explains the citation of Jewish prophecies by the Evangelists: To those already persuaded that Jesus was the Messiah, the Apostles wanted to show how the whole divine economy of earlier times, with its eyes fixed on Christ and his deeds as the most beautiful and complete type, wrought all other things in likeness of them. . . . Indeed, whoever believes that Jesus is the Christ clearly perceives how divine providence directed both the events and the words of the Old Covenant to Christ, as their planned subject.14

12  Compare the discussion of Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Jr., ‘ “A Poet Amongst Poets”: Milton and the Tradition of Prophecy’, in Milton and the Line of Vision, ed. Wittreich (Madison, 1975), pp. 97–142, at p. 106. 13  Augustine, De civitate Dei, ed. B. Dombart and A. Kalb, 2 vols (Stuttgart and Leipzig, 1993), I, p. 433 (X.20): ‘Huius veri sacrificii multiplicia variaque signa erant sacrificia prisca sanctorum, cum hoc unum per multa figuraretur, tamquam verbis multis res una diceretur, ut sine fastidio multum commendaretur.’ Ibid., I, p. 485 (XI.18): ‘Neque enim Deus ullum, non dico angelorum, sed vel hominum crearet, quem malum futurum esse praescisset, nisi pariter nosset quibus eos bonorum usibus commodaret atque ita ordinem saeculorum tamquam pulcherrimum carmen etiam ex quibusdam quasi antithetis honestaret.’ 14  Hugo Grotius, Annotationes in libros Evangeliorum (Amsterdam, 1641), pp. 19–22 (note at Matt. 1:22): ‘At quibus id jam persuasum erat Iesum esse illum Messiam, his simul ostensum voluerunt [sc. Apostoli] quomodo tota divina οἰκονομία priorum temporum, hunc ipsum Christum eiusque res gestas, ut pulcherrimam ac perfectissimam speciem, perpetuo velut ante oculos habens caetera omnia ad illud instar effinxerit. . . . vero credit Iesum esse Christum . . .

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Grotius’s argument is encapsulated by his Greek term oikonomia— ‘economy’, ‘ordering’, ‘arrangement’, ‘management’, even ‘contract’—here personified as the divine craftsman fashioning Old Testament history as a symbolic picture of the Christ to come, not so much a representation as a prepresentation. And that close resemblance between the two covenants and two Testaments is facilitated by a form of prophecy whose words referred initially to one thing but could be equally or better applied to another, insofar as they were, in some sense, ambiguous. This point would be underlined forty years later by the Swiss scholar Jean Le Clerc, who defended Grotius’s work—though not blindly—in debate with Richard Simon in 1685. Le Clerc wrote of Grotius: He showed that the prophets had predicted what would happen in the time of the Gospels, not always simply and directly, but most often while predicting at the same time certain contemporary events, which were like a figure of what would happen under the Messiah. He also showed that the terms they used, though equivocal, had their accomplishment in a more proper and more sublime sense under the Messiah than under the old covenant.15

Aristotle had pointed to ambiguity as a feature of bogus prophecy: those who do not know the future speak in such a way that their prediction seems correct whatever the outcome.16 Here, by contrast, prophetic ambiguity is saved by its dramatic function, for it is what makes possible the connection between the two Testaments, so integral to traditional Christian apologetics.17 But it is a function of time: as with a legal statute whose ambiguities are exposed only upon application to new cases, the Hebrew prophecies seemed straightforward to the prophets themselves. The supposition of double senses may seem an outmoded superstition, a relic of mediaeval theology with no significance for today’s reader. But it reflects an impulse not bounded by theology; whether they ought to or not, readers still love the meanings they hear in old texts, especially meanings that seem uncannily proleptic. Laurie Anderson’s peculiar 1981 song ‘O Superman’, delivered in a tone of sinister detachment, contains the lyric clare perspicit, quomodo divina providentia et res et verba antiqui federis ad Christum, tanquam ad scopum sibi propositum, certissime direxerit.’ 15  Jean Le Clerc, Sentiments de quelques théologiens de Hollande sur l’Histoire critique du Vieux Testament composée par le P. Richard Simon de l’Oratoire (Amsterdam, 1685), p. 389: ‘Il a montré que les Prophetes avoient prédit ce qui devoit arriver sous l’Evangile, non pas toûjours directement et simplement, mais le plus souvent en prédisant en même temps quelques événemens temporels, qui ont été comme la figure de ce qui devoit arriver sous le Messie: et que les terms dont ils se sont servis, quoi qu’équivoques, ont eu leur accomplissement en un sens plus propre et plus relevé sous le Messie, que sous l’ancienne Alliance.’ 16  See Chapter One above, p. 34. 17  See Chapter Nine below for a full discussion of the concept of dramatic irony.

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‘Here come the planes  / They’re American planes, made in America  / Smoking or non-­smoking?’ The other lyrics do not give these lines an obvious meaning, but vaguely evoke American military, technological, and cultural power. Twenty years after writing it, Anderson performed the song in New York in the wake of the 11 September terrorist attacks, and the shock was palpable; one journalist remarked that ‘what once seemed offhanded or oblique had turned chillingly prophetic’. Of course, that critic did not mean that Anderson had literally predicted the attacks; he meant, as a recent scholar has written of the performance, that ‘the text was no longer about the past but about the present’.18 Nonetheless, the word ‘prophetic’ captures what many spectators must have felt, whatever their religious beliefs—a disquiet and a strange pleasure, as if catastrophe had disclosed new sense in the familiar. A crucial part was played by the form of the song itself: by its aura of mystery, its alien textures, and its ‘oblique’, fragmented lyrics, apparently waiting for an event to give them meaning. The same words, encountered in a 1981 newspaper article, in a popular novel, or even in another kind of song from that era, would not provoke a like response. We know that there must have been an original context for the lyrics, and in this instance we know what it was, but the new one seems to fit better; our instincts, our desires, what we want to hear in words, tell against our reason. This is why we should be hesitant in accepting too readily the claim of certain philosophers that texts are like utterances. Richard Gaskin offers the following thought-­experiment. If a person should today look out the window and declare ‘It’s raining’, that particular utterance will always mean (i.e., have meant) that it was raining, and will never come to mean anything else, even if the word ‘raining’ should change its sense dramatically in the future. So with a text—any text—which forever means what it meant upon production.19 This picture captures our intuitions about many 18  Jon Pareles, ‘Pop Review: When Droll, Oblique Lyrics Turn Prophetic’, New York Times, 22/9/2001; Christina Ljungberg, ‘Intermediality and Performance Art’, in Handbook of Intermediality: Literature—Image—Sound—Music, ed. Gabriele Rippi (Berlin, 2015), pp. 547–561, at p. 557. The view of the song as prophetic was, and remains, widespread, though Anderson disputed it in liner notes: ‘I was singing for once about the absolute present’. For the notes see http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/music/dcohen/coremusic/site/anderson.html. The original context of the song had been the 1979–1981 Iran hostage crisis. 19  Richard Gaskin, Language, Truth, and Literaure: A Defence of Literary Humanism (Oxford, 2013), p. 179. Gaskin has a sophisticated idea of semantic intention—not the psychological, interior state of the author, but what he calls ‘constructive intention’ (defined at pp. 218–219), that which would be ascribed to the author by a fully capable contemporary reader. On the legal genealogy of this idea, see Chapter Two above, p. 94. There are problems with defining the meaning of a text in terms of its constructive intention. Robert Browning infamously used the word twats in his long poem Pippa Passes, IV.317, in Poems, eds John Woolford and Daniel Karlin (Harlow, 1991–), II, p. 103, erroneously believing that it meant ‘part of a nun’s attire’

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kinds of text, such as e-mails or newspaper articles, but it does not account for the lure of superadded meaning in certain privileged texts, or indeed utterances. It was precisely this lure, baited with the ambiguity of terse words, that tempted and took early modern Christian readers of the Hebrew prophecies. Those prophecies, too, were oblique and enigmatic, and seemed to fit Christ better than their Jewish context. Grotius’s statement about oikonomia, and his view of typology more generally, would have a surprising reception in the next century. In 1713 the Dutch Hebraist Willem Surenhusius—author of the first full Latin translation of the Jewish Mishnah—published a remarkable treatise comparing the Evangelists’ practices of citation and interpretation to those of the Talmud, Mekhilta, Mishnah, and other rabbinical works; whereas his contemporaries were troubled by the distortions and discrepancies between passages in the Old Testament and their apostolic citations, Surenhusius demonstrated that such differences were quite in line with Jewish conventions. For instance, ‘it was the custom amongst the ancient Hebrew teachers to adduce only those words that pertained to the author’s intentions, and to teach the matter in brief by abridging the words’.20 He also sought to prove, against Jewish objections, the applicability of Old Testament prophecy to Jesus, and when he arrived at Matt. 1:22, he repeated Grotius’s words on the ‘divine economy’, without citation and slightly altered, like a cunning undergraduate plagiarist, or rather, like those pesky Evangelists themselves.21 This reuse of Grotius would hardly be worth noting, had it not been redeployed eleven years later by the controversialist and self-­ styled freethinker Anthony Collins, a close associate of Locke before the latter’s death in 1704. In A Discourse of the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion (1724), Collins argues that the Hebrew prophecies applied to Jesus only in a ‘secondary, or typical, or mystical, or allegorical, or enigmatical sense, that is, in a sense different from the obvious and literal (see the editors’ note there). Gaskin is committed to holding that Browning constructively intended the word to denote the female genitalia (and that that is what the word in the poem does in fact mean)—which is fair enough, but it is also true that without a knowledge of the error we cannot fully understand Browning’s line. For a helpful survey of intentionalisms, see Paisley Livingston, ‘Authorial Intention and the Varieties of Intentionalism’, in A Companion to the Philosophy of Literature, eds Garry Hagberg and Walter Jost (Chichester, 2010), pp. 401–419. 20  Willem Surenhusius, ΒΙΒΛΟΣ ΚΑΤΑΛΛΑΓΗΣ in quo secundum veterum theologorum Hebraeorum formulas allegandi et modos interpretandi conciliantur loca ex V. in N. T. allegata (Amsterdam, 1713), p. 171: ‘priscis Hebraeorum Doctoribus in more positum fuit ea tantum verba allegare, quae ad scopum auctoris faciunt, et verba contrahendo, rem per compendium docere, quod illi dicunt ‫’לשון קצרה‬, with a reference to the exegetical canon laid out on pp. 41–43. The Hebrew lashon qetzarah means literally ‘concise language’. 21  Ibid., p. 151.

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sense, which they bear in the Old Testament’.22 Support for this point is found in Grotius among many other theologians. Then Collins turns to Surenhusius, who, he says, has revealed the ‘allegorical’ methods used by the Jews to explain Hebrew Scripture and support their own arguments. He paraphrases Surenhusius’s account of Matt. 1:22 and quotes the ‘divine economy’ passage (in his own translation) with no apparent knowledge of its origin, adding: ‘Which notion my author supposes to have prevail’d always among the Jews, and makes to be the general key, whereby to understand all the Old Testament, and especially this prophesy before us’ (63). In other words, by a deliberate or accidental misreading of Surenhusius, Collins attributes to the Jews Grotius’s explanation of Christian typology. No longer a post-­Augustinian expression of the harmony between Testaments, the thought has become the common Jewish currency of the Evangelists. This rewriting allows Collins to insist that the Evangelists had only ever intended their quotations from the Hebrew prophecies as allegorical interpretations of the originals, eschewing the prophets’ intentions; and that therefore—here he differed from Grotius and all the others—none of the prophecies referred literally to Jesus. The truth of the New Testament is thus made to rest entirely—for Collins excludes the probative value of Christ’s miracles—on allegorical or mystical interpretations of the Old Testament. He does not say that this mode of interpretation is invalid, a conclusion that would wholly undermine the Christian religion, but many took that to be his subtext, and the book provoked a swarm of replies, including one by Edward Chandler, the bishop of Lichfield, calling for state prosecution; modern historians have tended to concur in seeing the book as a howitzer aimed at Christianity itself.23 Collins gave his enemies no little ammunition: To suppose that an author has but one meaning at a time to a proposition . . . and to cite that proposition from him, and argue from it in

22  Anthony Collins, A Discourse of the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion (London, 1724), p. 40. On this see Stephen Snobelen, ‘The Argument over Prophecy: An Eighteenth-­ Century Debate between William Whiston and Anthony Collins’, Lumen 15 (1996), 195–213; James O’Higgins, Anthony Collins, the Man and his Works (The Hague, 1970), pp. 155–174, and 174–199 on contemporary responses to the work. 23  Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-­Century Hermeneutics (New Haven, 1974), pp. 66–85; Henning Graf Reventlow, The Authority of the Bible and the Rise of the Modern World, tr. John Bowden (London, 1984), pp. 362–369; Pascal Taranto, Du déisme à l’athéisme: la libre-­pensée d’Anthony Collins (Paris, 2000), pp. 80–88; Diego Lucci, Scripture and Deism: The Biblical Criticism of the Eighteenth-­Century British Deists (Bern, 2008), pp. 163–166. The sole exception, to my knowledge, is David Ruderman, Connecting the Covenants: Judaism and the Search for Christian Identity in Eighteenth-­Century England (Philadelphia, 2007), pp. 61–76, who also offers a fuller discussion of Surenhusius.

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that one meaning, is to proceed by the common rules of grammar and logick; which, being human rules, are not very difficult to be set forth and explain’d. But to suppose passages cited, explain’d, and argu’d from in any other method, seems very extraordinary and difficult to understand, and to reduce to rules. (51)

It is hardly in keeping with the spirit of Locke to accept the validity of an apostolic hermeneutics described as ‘very extraordinary and difficult to understand’, particularly when this method is compared to the means by which the ambiguous pagan oracles were interpreted (85). But it is not incoherent. After all, one of Collins’s critics, Thomas Sherlock, the dean of Chichester, insisted on the obscurity of some Hebrew prophecy, such as Is. 11:6, even after its fulfilment, which could not be literal.24 And in Collins’s next book, The Scheme of Literal Prophecy Considered (1727), written chiefly in response to Chandler’s critique, he defends Grotius in a similar manner: where Chandler accused Grotius of being ‘willing . . . to invent double meanings’, Collins argues that his approval of the secondary sense, contrary to all the usual rules of textual interpretation, showed a ‘real and just regard’ for Christ’s authority.25 Elsewhere in the book he reiterates his own support for the position, pointing to earlier arguments by Samuel White, a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.26 The real danger to Christianity, Collins asserts, lies in the claim that the Hebrew prophecies must be understood literally or not at all, a claim advanced by the Newtonian iconoclast William Whiston in 1707—White’s target—and 1722, and again by the Essex rector Arthur Ashley Sykes, in opposition to Collins, in 1724. Their argument rested on the familiar hostility to visionary enthusiasm, a version of the objection to Catholic exegesis mounted a century earlier: ‘when Prophecies have no One determinate Sense, they will be equally capable of as many Accomplishments as every Enthusiast pleases’.27 Sykes’s position was so extreme that he even denied the duality of Caiaphas’s equivocal prophecy at John 11:50, suggesting instead that the priest merely 24  Thomas Sherlock, The Use and Intent of Prophecy, in the Several Ages of the World (London, 1725), pp. 37–43. 25  Edward Chandler, A Defence of Christianity from the Prophecies of the Old Testament (London, 1725), p. 71; [Anthony Collins], The Scheme of Literal Prophecy Considered (London, 1727), pp. 388–391. 26  [Collins], The Scheme, p. 8, drawing on Samuel White, A Commentary on the Prophet Isaiah (London, 1709), pp. xxxvi–liii. 27  Arthur Ashley Sykes, An Essay upon the Truth of the Christian Religion (London, 1725), p. 178; compare William Whiston, The Accomplishment of Scripture Prophecies (Cambridge, 1708), p. 15. The printed book was based on lectures delivered the previous year. Compare the arguments of Chamier and Glassius in Chapter Four above, pp. 178–179. For another early critique of Whiston, see Nicholas Clagett, Truth Defended, and Boldness in ERROR Rebuk’d (London, 1710), responding to this argument at p. 147.

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‘spoke very agreeable to the will of God’.28 The problem for each literalist was that many of the Hebrew prophecies could not be construed as literally referring to Jesus; Whiston supposed textual corruption, a speculative and unsatisfying solution, while Sykes concluded that most citations of prophecy in the New Testament were merely rhetorical accommodations, adduced ‘only by way of illustration, analogy, and similitude’. Collins replied that if this were so, the Gospels would have just as much relation to the Aeneid as to the Hebrew Bible, and no foundation at all.29 The first two decades of the eighteenth century, then, saw a Mexican standoff between orthodox Protestants such as White and Chandler, who thought that some Hebrew prophecies had a single literal sense in Jesus and others had a double sense or a double accomplishment, Nonconformists like Whiston and Sykes who grounded all prophecy in the single literal sense, and Collins, who grounded all prophecy in the typological double sense.30 It was a poor, distant echo of the hermeneutic battles waged between Catholics and Protestants around the turn of the seventeenth century. Nonetheless, it formed Benson’s explicit points of reference in 1752: his dissertation names nobody more recent than Clarke, Sykes, and Collins. The casual reader might conclude that Benson was engaging in a debate that had long since died down, albeit one that had been more recent when he began publishing his paraphrases in 1731. In the interim, however, had appeared a notorious defence of double senses in prophecy, one still being discussed in the 1750s and surely in Benson’s thoughts. It was by William Warburton, that great, vain, understudied man of letters, whose work on Pope we explored in the previous chapter.31 On 19 January 1736, Warburton, then serving as rector of Brant Broughton, Lincolnshire, wrote to his friend Conyers Middleton in Cambridge, informing him that he was at work on ‘a project for rescuing Moses not only from the misrepresentations of his Enemys, but from the impertinen28  Arthur Ashley Sykes, The Principles and Connexion of Natural and Revealed Religion Distinctly Considered (London, 1740), p. 232. On this prophecy see Chapter Three above, pp. 113–114. 29  Sykes, An Essay upon the Truth, p. 193. [Collins], The Scheme, pp. 361–362. Snobelen, ‘The Argument over Prophecy’, pp. 206–207, misreads here. See further Sykes, An Essay, pp. 211–212, for the key statement against double prophecy, and p. 233 on true prophecy 30  O’Higgins, Anthony Collins, p. 175, lists a number of contemporary views. 31  For two recent views of Warburton, see B. W. Young, Religion and the Enlightenment in Eighteenth-­Century England: Theological Debate from Locke to Burke (Oxford, 1998), pp. 167– 212; and David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna (Princeton, 2008), pp. 25–65. For an older, belletristic work, see A. W. Evans, Warburton and the Warburtonians: A Study in Some Eighteenth-­Century Controversies (Oxford, 1932); the only modern monograph, and one not terribly sympathetic to its subject, is Robert Ryley, William Warburton (Boston, 1984), which covers the Legation at pp. 23–31.

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cies of some of his friends’.32 By October it had metastasised into what eighteenth-­century critics liked to call a ‘system’: ‘in the progress of the work, I find more & more satisfaction, by a thousand coincidencies, little suspected, that, like lines to a centre, all concur to establish this great truth. So that you may look to find, if not truth, something more extraordinary; a very strange consistent scheme, founded on a falsehood.’33 This was not so far off the later opinion of Leslie Stephen that the book was ‘an attempt to support one gigantic paradox by a whole system of affiliated paradoxes’.34 The huge first volume left the author’s hands at the end of 1737,35 and was published the following year, under the title The Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated, on the Principles of a Religious Deist, from the Omission of the Doctrine of a Future State of Reward and Punishment in the Jewish Dispensation. The even huger second volume appeared in 1741; both were repeatedly revised and expanded up to 1765.36 The book exploded upon publication, attracting fervent admirers and detractors; it has been much misunderstood since, to the point where a capable historian has attributed to it a central thesis exactly opposite its actual one.37 Its centre, the ‘gigantic paradox’, was the claim that the divinity of the Mosaic dispensation was proven by its lack of reference to the afterlife. Since the doctrine of future rewards and punishments—heaven and hell—was central, and held to be central, to all forms of ancient civil religion, it was inconceivable that Moses, the great legislator, should have omitted it from his teaching unless the Jewish dispensation was guided by extraordinary Providence.38 Above all, Jewish religion had to be understood as neither less nor more than a necessary preparation for Christianity. Warburton to Middleton, 19 January 1736, BL, MS Egerton 1953, fol. 1r. Warburton to Middleton, 5 October 1736, BL, MS Egerton 1953, fol. 6r. 34  Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1876), I, p. 355. 35  Warburton to Middleton, 23 December 1737, BL, MS Egerton 1953, fol. 22r. 36  The printing history is complex: see John Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century, 9 vols (London, 1812–15), II, pp. 120, 144, 152–153 (on the first three editions, 2 vols, 1738–1742), 268n, 286, 290–291, and 384–390 (on the fourth edition, 5 vols, 1755– 1765), with extensive quotations of Warburton’s letters to his printer William Bowyer, Nichols’s friend, master and, predecessor. To make matters more confusing, the first two editions present the work in six books; the third and fourth promise nine books, but Warburton never actually published more than six. A ‘recapitulation’ of the six books appears in Divine Legation, 4th ed., 5 vols (London, 1755–1765), V, pp. 358–406, with a plan of the final books at 406–408. Notes for the ninth book were included in Warburton’s posthumous Works, ed. Richard Hurd, 7 vols (London, 1788), III, pp. 736–779. 37  Ian Balfour, The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy (Stanford, 2002), p. 94. On the controversies about the book see Evans, Warburton, pp. 52–70 and 102–115. 38  The rudiments of this idea are adumbrated in Warburton to Middleton, 5 October 1736, BL, MS Egerton 1953, fol. 7r. For Warburton’s useful later synopsis of the argument, see Divine Legation (1755–1765), V, pp. 403–404. 32  33 

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To this plan, the details of which were filled in over thousands of pages, the notion of double senses was integral, and Warburton defended it in the long final chapter of the sixth book. The doctrine of future rewards and punishments had to exist in the Old Testament in such a way that the Jews could not understand it but the later Christians could, and this is where double senses came in, as for Grotius. In the penultimate chapter, he interprets the trial of Abraham in Gen. 22 as a special, private revelation by action of the mystery of Christ, as expressed by Christ himself at John 8:56: God, writes Warburton, ‘let Abraham feel, by Experience, what it was to lose a beloved Son’.39 In other words, God communicated not by words but by action, and this indeed was the earliest form of special expression in the Bible. Sacred ritual had its origins in the regular repetition of such actions to show the eternity of their truth; and when such rituals both signified a future event, such as the Crucifixion, and at the same time had their own moral import, they became ‘types’. With words it was the same. Some allegories had only a single hidden sense, for their literal meaning, ‘which serves only for the envelope, being of no moral import, is not to be reckoned’.40 But others had both a literal and a figurative meaning: they ‘convey[ed] Information of particular Circumstances, in two distinct Dispensations, to a people who had an equal concern in both’, and thus possessed a ‘double sense’.41 Against Origen, whose allegories he calls in a letter ‘colder than Greenland ice’, the two senses demonstrated not the essential identity of the two Testaments, which were profoundly different, but only their unity in the greater scheme of Providence.42 The secondary sense, pointing forward to Christ’s dispensation, was necessarily obscure, legible only in retrospect, for the same reason that the Jews could not be permitted to know the doctrine of future rewards and punishments. Nonetheless, the principle of double senses must be kept within reasonable bounds: Warburton is at pains to distance himself from any charge of enthusiasm, just as he rejects the view of Sykes and, he assumes, Collins, that double senses are impossible. Brian Young has called Warburton’s chapter on double senses ‘a familiar recital of the doctrine of types’.43 This judgement, however, must be qualified: while it is true, as we have seen, that the basic concepts of typology and double senses were old, Warburton’s defence of them is rather innovative, enriched by what we would now recognise as sensitive close readings of Scripture. To illustrate the semantic economy of Hebrew prophecy, Warburton examines Joel 1–2. The prophet seems to foretell a plague of Warburton, Divine Legation (1738–1741), II, p. 607. Ibid., p. 646. 41  Ibid., p. 630. 42  Warburton to Middleton, 15 January 1737, BL, MS Egerton 1953, fol. 14r. 43  Young, Religion and the Enlightenment, p. 179. 39  40 

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locusts, which he then compares to an army, which then seems to be an actual army: literal and metaphorical senses shift about unexpectedly.44 Warburton loves this, referring to the ‘fine Contexture’ of the prophecy, which he sees as alluding both to locusts and to the Assyrian army, each compared to the other in such a way that ‘renders all Chicane to evade a double Sense ineffectual’. Scholars had erred, he continued, in trying to solve the figurative peculiarity of the book, a feature which rather ‘gives the highest Elegance to the whole’.45 There was that word again—one he would later apply to the wordplay in Pope’s satires. Warburton would no doubt want to keep Joel’s sublime conflation of locust and army in a different box from that of Pope’s tricky bons mots, but both kinds of text demanded the reader’s ingenuity—his ‘wit’—to unpack and reassemble meanings. Warburton’s idea of sustained, elegant double senses was attractive enough to be adopted wholesale by the Oxford professor of poetry Robert Lowth, despite his fierce disagreement with Warburton over the interpretation of Job and other matters.46 Lowth devoted one of his seminal lectures on Hebrew poetry, delivered during the 1740s, to what he called ‘mystical allegory’; sometimes, he said, the literal sense of a line in the Old Testament was so clear and vivid as to cast any mystical meaning into the shade, and sometimes the mystical or allegorical sense shone out so as to obscure the literal. But ‘of all the modes of this figure, however many there are, the one that has the greatest elegance and beauty . . . is when the twin images, equally conspicuous, are joined in parallel, as it were, through the entire poem, openly responding to and illuminating each other’.47 Warburton could not have put it better himself. Perhaps Warburton’s most surprising move was his admission that double senses are not limited to Scripture. Sykes had denied that any words could stand for more than one idea at a time, insisting that God had to accommodate himself to the limited understanding of men if he wanted to communicate with them. Moreover, no proposition could mean more than one thing, even if we do not know what that thing is, and words thought to be ambiguous should really be understood as general terms applicable 44  For a modern account of this ambiguity, see, e.g., Raymond Dillard and Tremper Longman III, An Introduction to the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, MI, 1994), pp. 368–369. 45  Warburton, Divine Legation (1738–1741), II, p. 638. 46  Evans, Warburton, pp. 247–55; Young, Religion and the Enlightenment, pp. 91–206. 47  Robert Lowth, De sacra poesi Hebraeorum praelectiones academicae (Oxford, 1753), p. 98: ‘Is certe modus ex omnibus quotquot sunt maximam habet elegantiam et pulchritudinem, quam nos in praesenti disputatione potissimum quaerimus, cum per totum poema geminae Imagines, pariter conspicuae, ac quasi parallelae consociantur, sibi invicem aperte respondentes, seseque mutuo illustrantes.’ Robert Lowth, Isaiah: A New Translation (London, 1778), p. 187, argues for the double sense of a prophecy in Isaiah.

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to more than one particular, such as ‘dust’ meaning gold dust or dust of the earth.48 Sykes illustrated this with a mock-­heroic couplet in Vergil describing the use of dust to calm angry bees: ‘These storms of passion, these conflicts so fierce / by the tossing of a little dust are quelled and laid to rest.’49 The couplet, said Sykes, might be wittily turned to represent the cure of fever by powdered bark, but that neither makes it ambiguous nor gives it a double meaning.50 The problem with this example, in Warburton’s eyes, was that there existed no real connection between bees and fever, dust and powdered bark.51 By contrast, what underwrote the double sense of prophecy was the substantive relation between the Jewish and Christian religions; context, far from removing the double sense, revealed it. And just as Sykes had turned to Vergil to make his point, so too Warburton. The eighth book of the Aeneid culminates with Venus giving her son a set of arms, and best of all a shield to rival that of Achilles, depicting the subsequent history of Aeneas’s descendants up to Caesar’s defeat of Antony at the Battle of Actium. The ecphrasis concludes as follows, drawing the book to a close: All this he wonders at on Vulcan’s shield, his mother’s gift, and delights at the image of things he knows not, raising on his shoulder the fame and fate of all his sons.52

Of this last line Warburton explains that there are two meanings: first and more obviously, that Aeneas bears up the shield with the image of his posterity, and second, that ‘under the protection of that piece of armour he established their fame and fortunes’.53 The ambiguity comes from the metonymy by which the shield depicts, and so stands for, the descendants Sykes, The Principles and Connexion, pp. 222–225. Vergil, Georgics, IV.86–87: ‘Hi motus animorum, atque haec certamina tanta / Pulveris exigui jactu composta quiescunt.’ The translation is by H. R. Fairclough, from the 1967 Loeb edition. 50  Unbeknownst to Sykes, this point had just been beautifully illustrated in the Warburton-­ Middleton correspondence. Warburton to Middleton, 12 November 1738, BL, Egerton MS 1953, fol. 37r, offered a tobacco recipe from James Reynolds, chief baron of the exchequer, as a cure for eye disease. In reply, Middleton to Warburton, 18 November 1738, in Middleton, Miscellaneous Works, 4 vols (London, 1752), II, p. 477, hesitantly accepted the promise of, as he put it, ex fumo dare lucem, ‘light from smoke’—the phrase taken from Horace, Ars poetica, 143. 51  Compare STA, p. 102, on the two relevant but unrelated senses of a pun, combined by ‘ingenuity’. 52  Vergil, Aeneid, VIII.729–731: 48  49 

Talia per clipeum Volcani, dona parentis, miratur rerumque ignarus imagine gaudet, attollens umero famamque et fata nepotum. 53  Warburton, Divine Legation (1738–41), II, p. 644.

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of Aeneas; the hero carries the weight of both. The line already had a considerable renown: although Servius had judged it newfangled and lacking proper dignity, Addison deemed it the wittiest line in Vergil, and Joseph Trapp, lecturing on poetic style at Oxford in 1711, thought ‘nothing bolder or of greater weight could be expressed’.54 Warburton’s reading would be elaborated by his disciple Richard Hurd in a digression from his commentary on Horace’s Epistola ad Augustum (i.e., Ep. II.1), first in 1751 and then in more detail in 1757.55 Hurd’s digression is largely a critique of a passage in praise of syllepsis by the Huguenot classicist Jacques Philippe d’Orville; he judges that except in burlesque verse, playing with double meanings only detracts from the elegance and gravity of a composition—it is what Addison had damned as false wit.56 In this respect Hurd is of impeccable Augustan taste. But double meanings are legitimate, he continues, ‘when, besides the plain literal meaning, which the context demands, the mind is carried forward to some more illustrious and important object’. This is what occurs at Aeneid VIII.731 which puts the second meaning to good poetic use: We are not called off from the subject-­matter to the observation of a conceit, but to the admiration of kindred sublime conceptions. For even here, it is to be observed, there is always required some previous dependency and relationship, though not extremely obvious, in the natures of the things themselves, whereon to ground and justify the analogy.57

Moreover, Vergil is alluding to another sacred shield, the ancile said to have fallen to Rome from heaven and subsequently guarded by the Salii, who carried it and eleven replicas on their shoulders in procession.58 Aeneas’s motion of bearing up his shield aligns him with the later safeguard of Roman prosperity and places him ‘in the priestly office of Religion’: the poetic device, Hurd concludes, is not a ‘wanton play of fancy’ but a ‘fine flight of imagination’, anticipating Coleridge’s distinction.59 The conceptual 54  Joseph Addison, Poetical Miscellanies the Fifth Part (London, 1704), p. 586; Joseph Trapp, De stylo poetico, in his Praelectiones poeticae, 3 vols (Oxford, 1711–1719), I, 47–118, at p. 95: ‘Ultimo carmine nihil fortius, vel majori cum pondere, potest exprimi’. 55  On Hurd, see Evans, Warburton, pp. 185–194. 56  Richard Hurd, note in Horace, Epistola ad Augustum, ed. Hurd (London, 1751), pp. 55–63. On d’Orville’s discussion, see Chapter Five above, n. 58. On Addison, see Chapter Three above, p. 104. 57  Hurd, note in Horace, Epistola (1751), p. 59. Edward Evanson, A Letter to the Right Reverend the Lord Bishop of Litchfield and Coventry (London, 1777), p. 53, would later reprove Hurd for accepting double senses. 58  John F. Miller, ‘Virgil’s Salian Hymn to Hercules’, Classical Journal 109 (2014), 439–463, at pp. 451–452. 59  Richard Hurd, note in Horace, Epistola ad Augustum, ed. Hurd (London, 1757), p. 69.

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shift from Addison to Warburton and Hurd is important to grasp: Aeneid VIII.731 is no longer merely witty, a delightful conceit, but now something of beauty and sacred gravity, and above all it is adduced to clarify and illuminate the semantics of scriptural prophecy. Warburton’s second illustration of double senses in secular poetry was Horace’s entire fourteenth ode, ‘O ship, the waves carry you back . . .’ This poem, cited as an example of allegoria by Quintilian—the ship as the ship of state—had occasioned considerable disagreement about its meaning. Porphyrio, for instance, thought it was addressed not to the commonwealth but to Marcus Brutus, while Ps.-­Acro judged Sextus Pompeius a more likely addressee; other allegorical hypotheses would appear in early modern commentaries, but some, such as Richard Bentley, concluded that the ode referred to a literal sea-­voyage undertaken by Augustus.60 To Warburton, as apparently to none of his predecessors, the choice between literal and allegorical was a false one: [I]t is evidently both one and the other; of the Nature of the second Kind of Allegories, which have a double Sense; and this double Sense, which does not in the least obscure the Meaning, the learned Reader sees adds infinite Beauty to the Composition. Had it been purely historical, nothing had been more cold or trifling; had it been purely allegorical, nothing less gracious or more affected: But suppose it both, and that, under his immediate Concern for his Friends, he conveyed his more distant Apprehensions for the Republic, and there is so much Ease, and Art, and Dignity in every Period, as makes it the most finished Composition of Antiquity.61

Unlike Sykes’s example, the two senses of Horace’s poem have an intimate connection in the poet’s mind, and it is this that makes the double reading ‘noble and rational’. As for Empson much later, it wasn’t enough to show two unrelated meanings—the senses had to reinforce one another, to generate a third meaning in the equation of the first two. This third meaning corresponded to the fulfilment of the Old Testament in the New, a pattern pre-­established by the unity of God’s composition. Vergil and Horace were just the right notes for Warburton to strike to dampen any mood of enthusiasm and replace it with the Augustinian setting of the schoolroom, of polite, familiar, perennial tradition. The effect was to re60  Horace, Opera, ed. Tanneguy le Fèvre (Saumur, 1671), pp. 302–306; Richard Bentley, In Q. Horatium Flaccum notae et emendationes, appended to Horace, [Opera], ed. Bentley, (Cambridge, 1711), p. 30. 61  Warburton, Divine Legation (1738–17341), II, p. 646. Compare Steele Commager, The Odes of Horace: A Critical Study (New Haven, 1962), p. 166: ‘What was there to prevent Horace from felicitously combining a prayer for the safety of both [Augustus and the Ship of State] alike?’

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describe inspired ambiguity—that of the prophet carried beyond himself, raised above men—as artificial ambiguity, that of the craftsman using double meanings to impress others with his literary technique. Warburton was careful, however, not to push the analogy too far. Grotius had written, he noticed, that the Bible ought to be interpreted on the same principles as any other ancient text. This was true, but it emphatically did not mean that the Bible was itself the same as any other text, for it was of divine, not human provenance. The correct principle was to look to a text’s author and his circumstances to construe its meaning, and this was the same in each case; Grotius had erred in admitting the divinity of the prophecies and yet continuing to interpret them all as having a primary referent among the Jews. Many of the prophecies, Warburton insisted, referred only to Christ, with no secondary sense.62 In the final volume of the fourth edition (1765), Warburton expanded his thoughts on obscurity and ambiguity. In the interim, Conyers Middleton, almost with his dying breath, had put out a splenetic attack on Thomas Sherlock, whose lectures on Hebrew prophecy were reprinted in 1749; he mocked Sherlock’s admission that the prophecies were obscure, suggesting that this made them comparable to the oracles of pagan antiquity— ‘obscure, equivocal, and ambiguous’.63 To this Warburton now rejoined. Their friendship had soured already before Middleton’s death, but his tone betrays no sentiment. There was a key difference, he writes, between the obscurity of the prophets and the ambiguity of the oracles. Here ambiguity was not a type or cause of obscurity, as it had been for the rhetorical tradition, nor was it that ambiguity had multiple referents but obscurity none, as for the logical tradition.64 Rather, ambiguity was properly a verbal equivocation that ‘proceeded from ignorance of futurity’, whereas obscurity was a quality not of the words but of the things signified, and ‘proceeded from the necessity that those to whom the Prophecies were delivered should not have too full a knowledge of them’.65 Ambiguity remained the pejorative term, obscurity, by contrast, the token of divinity. Hurd was not Warburton’s only friend to adopt and defend his taste for double meanings. John Jortin, a second-­generation Huguenot cleric and scholar who, like so many names in this chapter, wrote on both sacred and secular subjects, would adduce the same Horatian ode in his own reflection on scriptural prophecy in 1751, though he gave the palm to Warburton as Warburton, Divine Legation (1738–1741), II, pp. 665–666. Conyers Middleton, An Examination of the Lord Bishop of London’s Discourses Concerning the Use and Intent of Prophecy (London, 1750), p. 89. Compare the uninspired defence of Sherlock on this point in Thomas Rutherforth, A Defence of the Lord Bishop of London’s Discourses (Cambridge, 1750), pp. 79–81. 64  See Chapter One above, pp. 29–30. 65  Warburton, Divine Legation (1755–1765), V, p. 289. 62  63 

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first discoverer.66 Five years later, after Sykes had again attacked the theory of double senses for ‘introduc[ing] such an Ambiguity, such an Uncertainty, into the sacred Writings, as no Books of even human Composition are liable to’, Warburton’s old friend John Towne leapt to his defence, denying that the doctrine gave ambiguity any purchase: ‘Every reader will allow that the ode of Horace, mentioned before is so far from being obscured and perplexed, that it receives new light, dignity, and force from the secondary sense.’67 In 1768 James Merrick compared the double senses of prophecy to social wit and dramatic allusion.68 The awareness of ambiguity was pervasive among these readers; when in 1769 Lord Kames censured unnamed critics for praising double meanings in the classics, it was surely the Warburtonians he had in mind.69 Benson and his German Readers Benson’s belief in the unity of sense was not incidental to his paraphrase of Scripture: the very project depended on it, for to paraphrase a text, even more than to translate it, assumes that it has a single meaning regrettably obscured by, but extractable from, difficult language. His dissertation began with universally accepted premises: ‘Words, without a fixed meaning, convey no doctrine, and in effect contain no revelation at all’.70 Imagination and fancy were ‘boundless’ and injurious to correct interpretation; like Sykes and Whiston, he dismissed the doctrine of double senses as enthusiastical—a category encompassing Jews and Catholics, as well as those who made biblical centos out of classical poetry, twisting hemistichs of Vergil to tell the story of Jesus. In all instances, an accommodated sense was mistaken for, or misrepresented as, a literal meaning, generating ambiguity by denying the primacy of original context.71 Benson criticised Collins and recommended Sykes, whose theoretical position he approached: 66  John Jortin, Remarks on Ecclesiastical History, 5 vols (London, 1751–73), I, pp. 194–195. In his notes on classical poets, Jortin showed the occasional favour for deliberate ambiguities: see his posthumous Tracts, Philological, Critical, and Miscellaneous, 2 vols (London, 1790), II, pp. 54 on Aristophanes, 180 on Claudian, 202 on Ovid, and 230 on Horace. 67  Arthur Ashley Sykes, A Paraphrase and Notes upon the Epistle to the Hebrews (London, 1755), p. 19, at a note on Heb. 1:14; [John Towne], A Free and Candid Examination of the Principles Advanced in the Lord Bishop of London’s Very Elegant Sermons (London, 1756), p. 148. 68  James Merrick, ‘Observations on Dr. Benson’s Essay Concerning the Unity of Sense’, appended to his Annotations on the Psalms (Reading, 1768), pp. 334–339. 69  See Chapter One above, p. 49. 70  Benson, ‘An Essay’, p. xx. 71  Ibid., pp. xviii–xix, drawing on Thomas Browne’s friend and executor John Jeffery, ‘The True Nature and Pernicious Consequences of Canting about Religion’ (1699), in his A Complete Collection of the Sermons and Tracts, 2 vols (London, 1751), I, 341–355, at pp. 342–343.

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‘every text has only one meaning; which when we have found, we need enquire no further. Literal passages ought to be interpreted literally, figurative passages, figuratively.’72 He leaned more towards orthodoxy than Sykes on particular prophecies, for instance the virgin birth of Is. 7:14, which he took to have Christ as its literal referent; but the underlying stricture against double senses was unanimous, by this point something like a standard line for Dissenters. Benson pointed to Locke and Clarke not only as pioneers of biblical paraphrase, but also as defenders of the unity of sense. Nonetheless, he reproved them both for inconsistency. Locke, despite his emphasis on reading Scripture in a properly contextualised manner, had concluded from 2 Cor. 3:6 (‘[God] hath made us able ministers of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit’) that the Old Testament must have a spiritual as well as a literal meaning. Whereas Locke had described St Paul’s train of thought as having ‘flow’d like a Torrent’, Benson now accused Locke himself of being ‘carried away with the torrent’ (xvi).73 Clarke, too, despite his hostility to Dacier’s reading of Homer, had incorporated double interpretations into his paraphrases of the Gospels. For instance, Jesus warned his disciples: ‘And ye shall hear of wars, and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet.’ (Matt. 24:6) Clarke rendered this: ‘Ye shall also hear of Wars and Tumults, Commotions, Revolutions, Terrors, and Panick Fears; But let not your Minds be disturbed at these things; For many such Calamities as these must happen, before the final and utter Destruction of the Jewish Nation: (and in like manner, before the end of the World.)’74 In the paraphrase, Jesus is referring simultaneously to the temporal ruin of the Jews under the Romans and to the Last Judgement: Clarke has taken two constructions of a prophecy and laid them alongside each other, much as Pope did with the ambiguities in the Iliad. The discrepancy between principle and practice in Clarke, if indeed it is one, is telling, for it reflects a tension we have seen throughout this book, in which the pleasure of seeing meanings—the pleasure of wit or fancy—threatens to override sober strictures on interpretation. To the straight-­edged Benson it was indefensible. Multiplicity, he insisted like Erasmus before him, was simply the wrong response to textual ambiguity: [I]f the Dr. had given two senses of any text, only where he was dubious; and left it to his reader to judge which of them was the true sense of the place, I should have had no objection. But his expressing two senses of the same passage, and contending for both of them as the

72  Ibid., p. xxii, recommending Sykes, and p. xxiii, criticising Collins on Isaiah, though not by name. 73  Locke, ‘An Essay for the Understanding’, in his Writings on Religion, ed. Nuovo, p. 63. 74  Samuel Clarke, A Paraphrase on the Gospel of St. Matthew (London, 1701), p. 306.

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true sense of the place, is, what I apprehend to be liable to very great and just exception.75

At the end of the dissertation Benson anticipates a series of objections, the last of which he regards as the most serious. This idea, which had underpinned the belief in double senses, was a standard point of orthodox Christian belief, though not dogma: namely, that the Bible speaks not only to the specific time and place of its production but to all ‘christians, in all ages, and countries’ (xxxviii).76 His response is disappointing, bluntly asserting that the books of the New Testament were written for their own time and audience and no other. This may sound eminently reasonable to the average reader today, but it would hardly have convinced a Bacon, a Selden, a Warburton, or a Lowth. The central point of disagreement between them—whether the Bible ought to be interpreted merely as any other book, or whether its divinity gave it additional layers of meaning—remained a shibboleth. It has long been held that German biblical scholarship in the second half of the eighteenth century was shaped by the English deism of the first half.77 In fact, the Germans took just as much interest, if not more, in the work of the English Dissenters—figures like Benson, Sykes, Hugh Farmer, and James Peirce, all of whom were studied and translated. The first to notice Benson was the brilliant young Johann David Michaelis. Michaelis had been raised in an orthodox Pietist household in Halle, where his father Christian Benedict held chairs in theology and oriental languages; a visit to England in 1741–1742 broadened his horizons, and after establishing himself at Göttingen in 1745, he became one of the most innovative biblical scholars in Germany, writing a guide to the study of the Scriptures, which he also translated into German, as well as editing a learned journal, organising expeditions to the Holy Land, and translating a variety of literary and scholarly works from English, including Samuel Richardson’s novel Clarissa.78 In 1747 Michaelis published a Latin version of Benson’s paraphrase of the Epistle of St James, with a preface by his old Halle teacher Siegmund Baumgarten, brother of the philosopher Alexander.79 He 75  Benson, ‘An Essay’, p. xvi. Compare Erasmus quoted in Chapter Four above, pp. 164–165. 76  See, for instance, the passage of Bacon quoted in Chapter Four above, p. 160. 77  The classic statement is Reventlow, The Authority of the Bible, pp. 411–412. 78  Michael Legaspi, The Death of Scripture and the Rise of Biblical Studies (New York, 2010) is an excellent recent monograph on Michaelis and his biblical criticism; see pp. 79–84 for an illuminating comparison to J. M. Gesner (on whom, see Chapter Five above, p. 227), and 117–121 on his visit to England. An older work of some value on Michaelis’s connections to England is Hans Hecht, T. Percy, R. Wood und J. D. Michaelis: Ein Beitrag zur Literaturgeschichte der Genieperiode (Stuttgart, 1933). 79  George Benson, Paraphrasis et notae philologicae atque exegeticae in Epistolam S. Jacobi,

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intended to translate the rest, but never got to it. That job would be taken up a decade later by the preacher Johann Peter Bamberger who, like Michaelis, visited England in the early 1750s, where he met Benson. In June 1758 he wrote to Benson to renew their acquaintance; Michaelis, he said, had ‘made the teeth of my Countrymen water’ without satisfaction, and he was now translating Benson’s paraphrases with the encouragment of his father-­in-­law August Friedrich Sack, chaplain to Friedrich II.80 The translation, including the essay on the unity of sense, appeared in 1761, with a preface by Sack.81 The unity of sense was becoming dogma among German academics; Michaelis’s own view, which he expounded in his 1765 Einleitung in die göttlichen Schriften des neuen Bundes, revised in 1788, was closer to Sykes than to Benson, though the difference was nugatory.82 He had asserted it already in a chiding note from his 1763 commentary on Lowth’s Hebrew lectures.83 The same idea was central, as we have seen, to the hermeneutics of his Leipzig contemporary J. A. Ernesti.84 Bamberger’s Benson was part of the last wave of major English imports into Germany, a process that reached saturation in the 1760s: others included Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Richardson’s Clarissa, Macpherson’s Ossian, Hume’s Treatise on Human Nature, and Robert Wood’s Essay on the Original Genius of Homer. After that, the Germans had what they needed; the intellectual momentum shifted decisively, and the next eighty years tr. Johann David Michaelis (Halle, 1746). On Baumgarten’s own support for the unity of sense in Scripture, see Lutz Danneberg, ‘Siegmund Jacob Baumgartens biblische Hermeneutic’, in Unzeitgemäße Hermeneutik: Verstehen und Interpretation im Denken der Aufklärung, ed. Axel Bühler (Frankfurt, 1994), pp. 88–157, at 133–135. 80  Bamberger to Benson, [June 1758], John Rylands Library, Manchester, UCC/2/4/299. On the peculiar idiom, see Lutz Röhrich, Lexikon der sprichwörtlichen Redensarten, 2 vols (Freiburg, 1977), II, p. 1169a. For a sketch of Bamberger and his publications, see Heinrich Döring, Die gelehrten Theologen Deutschlands im achtzehnten und neunzehnten Jahrhundert, 3 vols (Neustadt, 1831), I, pp. 41–43. A month later Bamberger wrote to Benson again, asking him to welcome Sack’s son Friedrich Samuel—later to become a mentor to the young Friedrich Schleiermacher—on his visit to England; see his letter of 12 July 1758, John Rylands Library, UCC/2/4/298, and on Friedrich’s trip to England, Mark Pockrandt, Biblische Aufklärung: Biographie und Theologie der Berliner Hofprediger August Friedrich Wilhelm Sack und Friedrich Samuel Gottfried Sack (Berlin, 2003), p. 112. 81  George Benson, Paraphrastische Erklärung und Anmerkungen über einige Bücher des Neuen Testaments, tr. Johann Peter Bamberger, 4 vols (Leipzig, 1761); the ‘Abhandlung von der Einheit des Verstandes’ is at I, pp. 1–54. Bamberger translated a suite of other English books, including Benson’s History of the First Planting of the Christian Religion (1758), begun by his friend Ludwig Samuel Noltenius and published in 1768, and, remarkably, John Nichols’s 1782 Literary Anecdotes in 2 vols (Berlin, 1786–1787). 82  Johann David Michaelis, Einleitung in die göttlichen Schriften des neuen Bundes, 2 vols (Göttingen, 1765), I, pp. 73–78; idem, 4th ed., 4 vols (Göttingen, 1788), I, pp. 233–239. 83  Robert Lowth, Praelectiones de sacra poesi Hebraeorum, ed. Johann David Michaelis, 2 vols (Göttingen, 1758), I, pp. 200, n. 54, and 202, n. 55. 84  See Chapter Four above, p. 180–181.

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would be the age of Goethe and Schiller, of Lessing and Winckelmann, of Kant and Herder, of the two Schlegels and the two Humboldts, of Fichte and Schleiermacher, of Friedrich August Wolf and Barthold Niebuhr, of Hegel and Feuerbach and David Friedrich Strauss. England, by comparison, had little to show. It is hardly a surprise that when the great Berlin playwright Ludwig Tieck came to read William Hazlitt’s lectures on Elizabethan drama (1821), he paused at the assertion that the English ‘may boast of our poets and philosophers’ and underlined ‘philosophers’, adding an incredulous query in the margin. Coleridge aside, Anglophone critics began to appreciate the German achievement in earnest only in the 1830s, starting at Cambridge.

Figure 7.1. William Hazlitt, Lectures on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth, 2nd ed. (London, 1821), British Library, shelfmark C.182.aa.5, p. 35, with Tieck’s annotation.

For all their diversity, mainstream German biblical critics of the era—up to Strauss in 1835—took for granted the hermeneutic assumptions of figures like Michaelis and Ernesti, which were, after all, only refinements of older Protestant ideas. Michaelis must have thought that he was sealing a new orthodoxy in scholarship, sophisticated and philological in orientation, watered by the new rains of oriental studies, scientific travel, textual criticism, and comparative religion. The Bible itself, by contrast, had been dried out, sobered up, locked down, shorn of mysteries. Ambiguity was for Michaelis, as for most philosophers and philologists, merely an irritant, and he took a dim view of the characteristic Semitic figure of paronomasia or playing upon names, a figure studied by his father in a dissertation of 1737.85 At any rate, the fairy stories about multiple meanings in Scripture from Lowth and Warburton, let alone the superstitious Catholic past, had surely—surely—been banished forever. 85  For Michaelis’s comments on paronomasia, see the long note to Lowth, Praelectiones, ed. Michaelis, I, pp. 290–297, n. 76. For the dissertation, see Christian Benedikt Michaelis (pr.), De paronomasia sacra (Halle, 1737). Michaelis Jr discussed the threat of verbal ambiguities to sound philosophy in his Beantwortung der Frage von dem Einfluß der Meinungen in die Sprache und der Sprache in die Meinungen, in Dissertation qui a remporté le prix proposé par l’Académie Royale des Sciences et Belles Lettres de Prusse (Berlin, 1760), pp. 44–49.

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CHA PTE R E I G HT

ADLOYADA Scriptorum chorus omnis amat nemus, et fugit urbes, Rite cliens Bacchi, somno gaudentis et umbra. — Horace, Epistulae, II.2.77–8 Said Rabha: A man is obliged to intoxicate himself on Purim, till he cannot distinguish between ‘cursed be Haman’ and ‘blessed be Mordecai’. — Babylonian Talmud, Tract Megillah, 7b, tr. Michael Rodkinson

In 1762 a volume of essays appeared at the German stalls entitled Kreuzzüge des Philologen—Crusades of the Philologist. In place of any author’s name was a figure of Pan, and the prose inside was diffident, disjointed, allusive, bilious, anacoluthic, pyrotechnical, impossible to follow. Readers were baffled; Michaelis, reviewing the book for a local journal, wrote that it had a ‘very dark and uncertain style, in which one can see that the author wants to censure, but not what he would claim himself in place of what he censures’.1 His dismay was well earned, for one essay in the volume, ‘Aesthetica in Nuce’, had virtually spat in his face: ‘Highest and Most Learned Rabbi!’, it called him scornfully, and Meister in Israel, alluding to Christ’s description of foolish old Nicodemus, didaskalos tou Israēl (John 3:10). In an epileptic address to Michaelis, the author claimed to be burning for the second volume of his translation of Lowth, and concluded, six pages later, after a tissue of lines from a verse in the Latin Anthology, with a footnote of epic length, which began as follows: 1  Johann David Michaelis, review of Kreuzzüge des Philologen, in Göttingischen Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen 68 (7 August 1762), 593–595, at p. 593: ‘Er hat eine sehr dunkele und unbestimmte Schreib-­Art, bey der man nur sehen kann, er wolle tadeln, nicht aber, was er statt des getadelten behaupte’.

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One can agree wholeheartedly with what Dr George Benson has not so much fleshed out as snatched at with little hindsight, discernment or smoothness, concerning the Unity of Sense. If he had wanted to share with us a few mundane sentences about the unity of interpretation, his thoroughness would have seemed more impressive — — One cannot leaf through the four volumes of his paraphrastic explanation without a very ambiguous smile, nor overlook the many passages where Dr Benson, with the beam of popishness in his own eye, rails against the motes of the Roman Church — and imitates our own theological councillors, who loudly applaud every rash, blind idea that honours the creature more than the Creator — — One must first ask Dr Benson whether unity cannot coexist with multiplicity? — A lover of Homer runs the same risk of losing the Unity of Sense by reading French paraphrasts like de la Motte or a profound dogmatist like Samuel Clarke — — 2

Vertiginously, we are faced with a reading of Benson reading Clarke reading Pope reading De la Motte reading Dacier reading Eustathius reading Homer—the whole sequence scumbled over with bits of Scripture, and framed by a discourse aimed ostensibly at Michaelis and, possibly, at Lowth behind him. What was going on? What sort of inebriate would write like this, and why? 2  Johann Georg Hamann, ‘Aesthetica in Nuce’, in Kreuzzüge des Philologen, repr. in his Sämtliche Werke, ed. Josef Nadler, 6 vols (Vienna, 1949–1957), II, p. 203, n. 22:

Man kann mit beyden Händen zugeben, was D. George Benson über die Einheit des Verstandes mit wenig Nachsinn, Wahl und Salbung mehr zusammengeraft als ausgearbeitet. Wenn er uns einige irrdische Sätze über die Einheit der Lesart hätte mittheilen wollen; so würde uns seine Gründlichkeit sinnlicher fallen — — Man kann ohn ein sehr zweydeutiges Lächeln die vier Bände dieser paraphrastischen Erklärung nicht durchlaufen, und die häufige Stellen verfehlen, wo D. Benson mit einem Sparren des Pabstthums in seinem eigenen Augapfel, über die Splitter der römischen Kirche eyfert — und unsere theologische Hofräthe nachahmt, welche jeden übereilten blinden Einfall laut beklatschen, durch den das Geschöpf mehr als der Schöpfer geehrt wird — — Zuförderst müste man D.George Benson fragen: ob die Einheit mit der Mannigfaltigkeit nicht bestehen könne? — Ein Liebhaber des Homers läuft gleiche Gefahr durch einen französischen Paraphrasten, wie la Motte, und durch einen tiefsinnigen Dogmatiker, wie Samuel Clarke, die Einheit des Verstandes zu verlieren — — The rendering is my own, but it is indebted (as throughout this chapter) to the complete and annotated translations in Gwen Griffith-­Dickson, Johann Georg Hamann’s Relational Metacriticism (Berlin, 1995), pp. 409–444 (with analysis at pp. 76–149) and Johann Georg Hamann, Writings on Philosophy and Language, tr. Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 60–95.

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Slurred Words The inebriate was the Sage of Königsberg, Johann Georg Hamann (1730– 1788). Toiling for most of his life in bourgeois obscurity, a customs officer in the administration of Frederick II, Hamann devoted his evenings to an extraordinary rolling burleseque on the idées fixes of his day, like the nightwatchman Kreuzgang of August Klingemann’s delirious fantasy, Nachtwachen.3 After a failed business trip to London in 1757 on behalf of his friend and employer Johann Christoph Berens, Hamann experienced a religious crisis, and, holed up in a garret, read the Bible cover to cover, before beginning to write in the difficult, densely allusive style for which he became notorious among those who did not simply ignore and then forget him. It is hard to pigeonhole Hamann’s work by its content; although he is often categorised as a philosopher of language, it is doubtful how much of substance he contributed to that tradition.4 Among his early Königsberg friends was the Magus of the North, Immanuel Kant, to whom he introduced the work of David Hume, and whose Critique of Pure Reason he would read and deconstruct before publication. He objected to Kant’s separation of sensibility and understanding, instead imagining the two faculties as the angels ascending and descending on Jacob’s ladder, the ‘two hosts of reason’ in the eternal dance of Mahanaim.5 In the 1760s he grew close to Johann Gottfried Herder, whom he tutored in English, and in the 1780s he corresponded fruitfully with F. H. Jacobi. All the while he remained hostile to ideals of the Berlin Aufklärung as represented by Frederick, Michaelis, Lessing, Friedrich Nicolai, and Moses Mendelssohn, all of whom he parodied restlessly.6 3  ‘Bonaventura’ [= August Klingemann], Nachtwachen (1804), ed. Wolfgang Paulsen (Stuttgart, 1964). 4  Michael Forster, ‘Hamann’s Seminal Importance for the Philosophy of Language?’, in his After Herder: Philosophy of Language in the German Tradition (Oxford, 2010), pp. 301–319, is astutely sceptical. 5  Johann Georg Hamann, Metakritik über den Purismum der reinen Vernunft, in his Werke, III, p. 287: ‘den Reihentanz dieser Mahanaim oder zweyer Vernunftheere’. 6  I should stipulate that by ‘the Berlin Aufklärung’ I mean a specific set of scholarly and intellectual practices, ideas, and assumptions—among them the philological attitude to Scripture and ambiguity—rather than the immense, vague and endlessly controversial Enlightenment in general. In particular, I want to avoid the contentious idea that Hamann represents the ‘Counter-­Enlightenment’, an idea with its roots in one of the first modern works of scholarship on Hamann, namely Rudolf Unger, Hamann und die Aufklärung, 2 vols (Jena, 1911), and given greater prominence by Isaiah Berlin, Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder, ed. Henry Hardy, 2nd ed. (London, 2013), pp. 320–447. For a debate about the value of Berlin’s concept, see Robert Norton, ‘The Myth of the Counter-­Enlightenment’, Journal of the History of Ideas 68 (2007), 635–58; and Steven Lestition, ‘Countering, Transposing, or Negating the Enlightenment? A Response to Robert Norton’, Journal of the History of

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It might be thought that Hamann earned his place in a history of ambiguity by his prose style. This is partly the case: few styles are so equivocal, and few have had so little precedent and so many imitators.7 But at the outset of this book I promised that it would be a history first and foremost of readers, and the purpose of this chapter is to argue that Hamann’s prose style was really a style of reading Scripture, one that looked to the past, embracing both ambiguity and what would later be theorised as irony. Long after Michaelis’s review, Hamann’s obscurity had become almost proverbial. Schopenhauer once noted in an aphorism that reading Hamann was a prompt to ‘boldness of expression and phrasemaking’, although his contemporaries, in his opinion, needed no encouragement.8 In fact, the description of bad prose in Schopenhauer’s essay on German style, despite being aimed ostensibly at the tease and doubt of Schelling, seems to skewer none so well as Hamann: The German braids [his thoughts] together in a sentence entangled and again entangled and yet again entangled. Hence, whereas he should seek to draw in and hold the reader’s attention, he demands over and beyond this that the reader, contrary to the principle that only one thing can be understood at a time, entertain three or four different thoughts at once, or, since this is impossible, alternate them in rapid succession. . . . It is evidently against all sound reason to knock one thought across another like a wooden cross. But this happens whenever a person interrupts himself to say something quite different, and so gives his reader a sentence begun but without any meaning until its completion arrives later.9

Ideas, 68 (2007), 659–81; for a sophisticated defence of the anti-­Enlightenment reading, see Robert Alan Sparling, Johann Georg Hamann and the Enlightenment Project (Toronto, 2011). 7  On Hamann’s obscurity, see most recently Eckhard Schumacher, Die Ironie der Unverständlichkeit: Johann Georg Hamann, Friedrich Schlegel, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man (Frankfurt, 2000), pp. 89–156. Gwen Griffth-­Dickson, ‘Hamann und die englischsprachige Aufklärung’, in Hamann und England: Hamann und die englischsprachige Aufklärung, ed. Bernhard Gajek (Frankfurt, 1999), pp. 71–82, argues that Hamann’s style aimed to imitate that of Swift, Pope, and Sterne, ‘die englische Schule des “gelehrten Witzes” ’. But the English writers, however much they used style to satirise contemporary values—those of the Enlightenment or otherwise—wrote to be understood, with the occasional inside joke for their peers. Hamann’s style, by contrast, is obscure both in its referents and in the rhythm of its ideas. Eric Blackall, The Emergence of German as a Literary Language, 2nd ed. (Ithaca, NY, 1973), p. 426, reads Hamann as reacting against polite wit. 8  Arthur Schopenhauer, ‘Aphorismen: Ueber Schriftstellerei und Stil’, no. 81, in his Die handschriften Nachlass, ed. Arthur Hübscher, 5 vols (Frankfurt am Main, 1966–75), III, p. 223: ‘Hamann lesen befördert die Kühnheit des Ausdrucks und der Zusammenstellung: aber heut­ zutage bedarf diese mehr der Einschränkung, als der Beförderung.’ 9  Arthur Schopenhauer, ‘Über Schriftstellerei und Stil’, §286, in his Sämtliche Werke, ed. Wolfgang von Löhneysen, 5 vols (Stuttgart, 1960–65), V, p. 645:

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This was just one of the many faults in the German catalogue, which, according to Schopenhauer, ranged from the stiff and the bombastic to the ‘forced, vague, ambiguous, nay, multiguous style’.10 All of it came from having nothing to say, just as Aristotle had asserted in the Rhetoric.11 Some critics, indeed, have thought this true of Hamann.12 He admitted the charge of obscurity in a letter, but ascribed it to the influence of Socrates: ‘Ambiguity and irony and enthusiasm cannot be imputed to me alone, since they are nothing but imitations of my hero, and of the Socratic writers, especially Bolingbroke and Shaftesbury’.13 He embraced the scorn of Michaelis and others; just as Gilbert Sorrentino would begin his 1979 metafiction Mulligan Stew with a transcript of its (quite justified) rejection letters, so Hamann republished his own bad reviews, imitated their language, and adopted phrases from them as epigraphs to later works.14 Imitation, in fact, is a key component of his register throughout his works, as he himself acknowledged—the ambiguous persona a hallmark of his satirical office.15 Another component is fragmentation, both on a prosodic level, as his senDer Deutsche hingegen flicht sie ineinander, zu einer verschränkten und abermals verschränkten und nochmals verschränkten Periode. . . . Also, während er suchten sollte, die Aufmerksamkeit seines Lesers anzulocken und festzuhalten, verlangt er vielmehr von demselben noch obendrein, daß er, obigem Gesetze der Einheit der Apprehension entgegen, drei oder vier verschiedene Gedanken zugleich oder, weil dies nicht möglich ist, in schnell vibrirender Abwechselung denke. . . . Offenbar aber ist es gegen alle gesunde Vernunft, einen Gedanken quer durch einen andern zu schlagen, wie ein hölzernes Kreuz: dies geschieht jedoch, indem man das, was man zu sagen angefangen hat, unterbricht, um etwas ganz anderes dazwischen zu sagen, und so seinem Leser eine angefangene Periode einstweilen noch ohne Sinn in Verwahrung gibt, bis die Ergänzung nachkommt. 10  Ibid., §283, in Sämtliche Werke, V, pp. 609–10: ‘geschrobenen, vagen, zweideutigen, ja vieldeutigen Stils’. On the word multiguous, see the Introduction above, n. 62. 11  On which, Chapter One above, p. 34. 12  Albert Anderson, ‘Philosophical Obscurantism: Prolegomena to Hamann’s Views on Language’, Harvard Theological Review 62 (1969), 247–74. Anderson’s analysis is too confused to be useful. 13  J. G. Hamann to J. G. Lindner, 11 September 1759, in his Briefe, eds Walther Ziesemer and Arthur Henkel (Wiesbaden, 1955–), I, p. 410: ‘Zweideutigkeit und Ironie und Schwärmerei können mir nicht selbst zur Last gelegt werden, weil sie hier nichts als Nachahmungen sind meines Helden und der sokratischen Schriftsteller [Geschichtschreiber], besonders Bolingbroke und Shaftesbury.’ On Hamann and Shaftesbury, see the essays by Horst Meyer and Christoph Deupmann gen. Frohues in Hamann und England, ed. Gajek. 14  In 1763 he printed three reviews of the Kreuzzüge together, identified as Horace’s ‘triform chimaera’ (Odes I.27.23–24), and dusted each with annotations: see Hamburgische Nachricht; Göttingische Anzeige; Berlinische Beurtheilung der Kreuzzüge des Philologen, [ed. J. G. Hamann] (Mitau, 1763), repr. in his Werke, II, pp. 241–274. 15  Hamann to Kant, 27 July 1759, in Briefe, I, p. 378, defended his stylistic mimicry: ‘In

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tences shift suddenly in cadence, cut up by dashes, with letter-­types of unequal sizes strewn across the page, and on a semantic level, juxtaposing odd thoughts and images with little to guide the reader unprepared for hours on his knees before the text, magnifying glass in one hand, biblical concordance in the other, trying in vain to reconstruct the rationales and connecting-­threads burnt away in the blaze of the prose.16 The fragmentation is also a function of the many literary and scholarly references spliced together in his work. Hamann called his ‘Aesthetica’ a ‘rhapsody in cabbalistical prose’, a rhapsody in the sense of a patchwork of ideas, quotations ripped out of context and repurposed; later critics have preferred the term cento, with a similar meaning.17 These difficulties pose a serious challenge to scholarly analysis. I have opted to go slowly, relying on close study of just two short pieces, ‘Aesthetica in Nuce’ and a letter. This would be entirely inadequate if my aim were to give an overview of Hamann’s thought, but I am seeking only to understand the way he justified his ambiguous prose style, especially since that justification brought him close to the questions of biblical and prophetic exegesis we touched on in Chapters Four and Seven above. Hamann was an outcast from the new city of Benson and Michaelis,18 preferring the shade of the dense groves beyond its walls.19 Their project of biblical paraphrase was anathema to him, for it abstracted the words of Scripture from their meaning, destroying the organic unity of the two. More broadly, he objected to the philological view of the Bible as so many dead words, and reasserted its multiplicity and living plenty.20 ‘Aesthetica in Nuce’ concerns the twin beauties of nature and Scripture, the complemenmeinem mimischen Styl herrscht eine strengere Logic und eine geleimtere Verbindung als in den Begriffen lebhafter Köpfe.’ 16  SHK, p. 108, notes that there are difficulties in Hamann’s prose caused by the suppression of the grounds for his analogies and comparisons. This explanation for obscurity had antecedents going back to the Middle Ages, on which see, e.g., Päivi Mehtonen, Obscure Language, Unclear Literature: Theory and Practice from Quintilian to the Enlightenment (Helsinki, 2003), p. 70. 17  For instance, Sven-­Aage Jørgensen, ‘Zu Hamanns Stil’ (1965), in Johann Georg Hamann, ed. Reiner Wild (Darmstadt, 1978), pp. 372–90, at pp. 380–83. On rhapsody in Hamann, see Lori Yamato, ‘Rhapsodic Dismemberment: Hamann and the Fable’, in Hamann and the Tradition, ed. Lisa Marie Anderson (Evanston, IL, 2012), pp. 125–39. 18  Rudolf Unger suggested a century ago, Hamann und die Aufklärung, II, p. 652, that it was the appearance of Michaelis’s Lowth, along with Bamberger’s version of Benson, that gave the initial spur to Hamann’s ‘Aesthetica’. Against this see Rainer Fischer, ‘Der Wahrheit ein Gesicht geben. Hamanns Streifzug gegen George Benson in den “Kreuzzügen des Philologen” ’ in Hamann und England, ed. Gajek, pp. 265–93, at p. 266, who saves Unger’s observation as ‘heuristisch’ if historically unlikely. 19  Plato, Phaedrus, 239c: ‘οὐδ᾽ ἐν ἡλίῳ καθαρῷ τεθραμμένον ἀλλὰ ὑπὸ συμμιγεῖ σκιᾷ’. 20  On deadness in Michaelis’s view of Scripture, see Michael Legaspi, The Death of Scripture and the Rise of Biblical Studies (New York, 2010), pp. 84–95.

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tary languages of God, each vivid with images to be embraced not only with reason but also with the senses and the emotions. Every intellectual pursuit is united in deciphering God’s presence in the world: ‘The ideas of the philosophers are readings of nature and the precepts of the divines are readings of Scripture. The author is the best interpreter of his own words; he may speak through Creation—through events—or through blood and fire and smoky vapour, in which the language of holiness consists.’21 Poetry, identified in a much-­quoted soundbite as the ‘mother-­tongue of the human race’, recapitulates God’s creation in its use of imagery to appeal to the emotions and senses, and this is true above all of the Old Testament. The essay itself includes lyrical vignettes: When one single truth governs like the sun, it is day. But should you behold, instead of this one, as many as the sands of the seashore, — and then a little light, brighter than that whole host of suns, it is night, beloved of poets and thieves. — — The poet at the beginning of days [2 Cor. 4:6] is the same as the thief at the end of days [Rev. 16:15].22

The combination of unity and multiplicity in this image, the one truth of the sun and the many of the stars, will be a leitmo-tiv in Hamann’s work. Here again is that note we heard in Warburton, a theological message in the language of secular poetry: Christ the moon, whose lustre lends orience to the world below, has his light from his Father, the sun and Creator ‘poet’ who, Hamann later tells us, grew tired of speaking through nature and the Hebrew prophets, and finally, short of breath, spoke at dusk through his Son.23 Given this mode of feeling, and this attitude to Scripture, we should not be surprised at Hamann’s hostility to Michaelis—all scholarship and no sympathy, the dead letter against the living spirit, the Nicodemus who cannot grasp Christ’s metaphors for spiritual rebirth. This attack is elaborated in the six-­page address which stands at the centre of the essay.24 Hamann points back to an earlier model of scriptural interpretation in 21  Hamann, ‘Aesthetica in Nuce’, in Sämtliche Werke, II, p. 204: ‘Die Meynungen der Weltweisen sind Lesarten der Natur und die Satzungen der Gottesgelehrten, Lesarten der Schrift. Der Autor ist der beste Ausleger seiner Worte; Er mag durch Geschöpfe — durch Begebenheiten — oder durch Blut und Feuer und Rauchdampf reden, worinn die Sprache des Heiligthums besteht.’ 22  Ibid., p. 206: ‘Wenn eine einzige Wahrheit gleich der Sonne herrscht; das ist Tag. Seht ihr an statt dieser einzigen so viel, als Sand am Ufer des Meeres; — hiernächst ein klein Licht das jenes ganze Sonnenheer an Glanz übertrift; das ist eine Nacht, in die sich Poeten und Diebe verlieben. — — Der Poet am Anfange der Tage ist derselbe mit dem Dieb am Ende der Tage — —’ 23  Ibid., p. 213. 24  The address takes up only two pages in the critical edition: Werke, II, pp. 201–3. Much of the humour of this passage depends on its intertext, the nocturnal dialogue with Nicodemus at John 3:1–21. For instance, Michaelis, with his taste for the natural sciences, is mocked for

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Francis Bacon’s insistence that the Bible speaks to all times and places; here as elsewhere, he ropes in Bacon as an ally against the materialism of contemporary philology.25 The complaint against Michaelis is finally encapsulated in three scattered lines from the Latin Anthology, originally referring to the burning of Vergil’s works after his death: ‘O hateful crime! Shall so rich a book be destroyed? Rather break the venerable power of the laws! Bacchus and nourishing Ceres, aid us!’26 Why Bacchus and Ceres? As the patrons of wine and bread, blood and body, or of wine and grain spirit— but most importantly of the senses and the passions, an association established earlier in the essay.27 The Bible must be read with the heart as well as the head. And here begins the footnote on George Benson quoted at the beginning of this chapter. The tone is hard to gauge, perhaps best captured by Hamann’s own phrase, ‘a very ambiguous smile’. He seems at first to ‘agree with’ Benson’s view of a single authorial meaning in the Bible, but then dismisses him as tantamount to a papist for imposing his interpretation on the text and so honouring the creature—human reason—above God. But, he asks, cannot the unity of Scripture coexist with multiplicity? There is perhaps a deliberate ambiguity in Hamann’s own repeated word Einheit, as there had been unwittingly in Benson’s word unity. As Victoria Welby would point out a century later, ‘Surely there are two kinds of One. (1) The unit. (2) Unity. Unit is barren. Unity is fruitful. The first represents singleness (or isolation); the second completeness. . . . The first exclusive; the second inclusive.’28 Benson had sought the former, single and exclusive; Hamann the latter, inclusive of multiplicity.29 The implications of this turn are developed as the footnote continues: The literal or grammatical sense, the corporeal or dialectical sense, and the Capernaitic or historical sense are all mystical at the highest level, and depend on circumstances and conditions so fleeting, ethe-

not knowing that ‘the wind blows where it lists’, a figure for the mysterious operation of the Holy Spirit at John 3:8. 25  Sven-­Aage Jørgensen, ‘Hamann, Bacon, and Tradition’, Orbis litterarum 16 (1961), 48– 73; idem, ‘Hamann, Bacon und die Hermeneutik’, in Hamann und England, ed. Gajek, pp. 131–41. 26  Hamann, ‘Aesthetica in Nuce’, in Sämtliche Werke, II, p. 203: ‘Ah scelus indignum! solvetur litera dives? / Frangatur potius legum veneranda potestas. / Liber et alma Ceres succurrite!’ 27  Ibid., p. 201. 28  Victoria Welby [as Welby-­Gregory], Links and Clues, 2nd ed. (London, 1883), p. 260. 29  Volker Hoffmann, Johann Georg Hamanns Philologie: Hamanns Philologie zwischen enzyklopädischer Mikrologie und Hermeneutik (Stuttgart, 1972), p. 189, makes the related observation that ‘Der hier sich herausschälende Gegensatz [between Hamann and Michaelis] liegt . . . in der verschiedenen Konzeption der Einheit und des Weges, zu ihr zu gelangen’.

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real and arbitrary that one cannot grasp the key to their knowledge without ascending to heaven, and must recoil from no journey overseas or to the land of such shades as have believed, spoken, suffered since yesterday or the day before, or for a hundred or a thousand years — mysteries! — of whom the entire history of the world can give us less knowledge than the space of the smallest tombstone, or than Echo, the nymph with the laconic memory, can retain at once. — — He must surely have the keys to heaven and hell who would entrust to us the schemes forged in a critical place, by writers rich in ideas, for the conversion of their faithless brethren. — — Since Moses placed life in the blood, all the baptized rabbis abhor the spirit and life of the prophets, through which the literal understanding is in a parable sacrificed as a favourite child, and the streams of Eastern wisdom turned to blood. — — The application of these stifled thoughts is not for delicate stomachs.30 In a perceptive article Rainer Fischer has traced out the allusions compacted into this note, and we will not repeat his work here.31 As he remarks, the ‘circumstances and conditions’ invoked above are central to Hamann’s critique of Benson’s intentionalist hermeneutics: any number of intangible factors determine an author’s intentions, and without access to the one we have no hope of ascertaining the other. To seek the intention thus amounts to a nekyia, a descent to the underworld (‘the land of such shades’) in search of ‘mysteries’, leaving the letter of the text for dead. Hamann collapses the Hamann, ‘Aesthetica in Nuce’, in Sämtliche Werke, II, pp. 203–4, n. 23:

30 

Der buchstäbliche oder grammatische, der fleischliche oder dialektische, der kapernaitische oder historische Sinn sind im höchsten Grade mystisch, und hängen von solchen augenblicklichen, spirituosen, willkührlichen Nebenbestimmungen und Umständen ab, daß man ohne hinauf gen Himmel zu fahren, die Schlüssel ihrer Erkenntnis nicht herabholen kann, und keine Reise über das Meer noch in die Gegenden solcher Schatten scheuen muß, die seit gestern oder vorgestern, seit hundert oder tausend Jahren — Geheimnisse! — geglaubt, geredt, gelitten haben, von denen uns die allgemeine Weltgeschichte kaum so viel Nachricht giebt, als auf dem schmallsten Leichenstein Raum hat, oder als Echo, die Nymphe vom lakonischen Gedächtnisse, auf einmal behalten kann. — — Derjenige muß freylich die Schlüssel des Himmels und der Hölle haben, der uns die Projecte vertrauen will, die Gedankenreiche Schriftsteller an einem kritischen Ort zur Bekehrung ihrer ungläubigen Brüder schmieden. — — Weil Moses das Leben im Blute setzt, so gräuelt allen getauften Rabbinen vor den Propheten Geist und Leben, wodurch der Wortverstand, als ein einzig Schooskind εν παραβολῃ aufgeopfert, und die Bäche morgenländischer Weisheit in Blue verwandelt werden. — — Die Anwendung dieser erstickten Gedanken gehört für keinen verwöhnten Magen. Fischer, ‘Der Wahrheit ein Gesicht geben’, pp. 280–81.

31 

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distinction between literal and mystical senses, and between interpretation and ‘application’; far more important than philology are the ‘spirit and life of the prophets’ which embrace all the senses together. If this looks like a return to traditional typological hermeneutics, it is. Hamann urges the philologists, those ‘baptized rabbis’, Pharisees and Sadducees, to rediscover the Christian truth in the Hebrew prophecies. He quotes the ‘Punic Church Father’, St Augustine: ‘Read the prophetic books without CHRIST in mind, and how insipid and fatuous you will find them! But understand CHRIST there, and not only will your reading be full of flavour, it will even make you drunk.’32 The lines are from an allegorical exposition of John 2:6–9, Christ turning water to wine at Cana, which Augustine reads as the drawing out of Christian doctrine from the Old Testament, heady wine from the tasteless water in which it lies hidden.33 In the Latin original is a pun obscured by English translation: sapere, ‘to be full of flavour’, is etymologically the opposite of insipidus, ‘insipid’, but it also means ‘to be wise, to understand’. The Christian interpretation of the prophets thus gives them both zest and wisdom, and intoxicates the reader with their depths of meaning. A footnote at the word ‘Punic’ points to Michaelis’s 1759 prize essay on language, where Augustine is derided as African and therefore barbarous, not Western—a benighted fantasist incapable of philology and so reliant on allegory, on the ‘lively and enthusiastic power of his imagination’.34 For Hamann, what Michaelis fails to appreciate is precisely the multiplicity of meaning that Augustine perceived; it is thus Michaelis who has a ‘half-­enthusiastic, half-­scholastic power of imagination’, too ignorant to grasp the divine operation of metaphor, and it is Michaelis, not Augustine, whose work is a tasteless ‘Jinggling upon Words’—an Ars Punica, a pamphlet Hamann owned, and from which he copies out a few early passages.35 32  Hamann, ‘Aesthetica in nuce’, in Sämtliche Werke, II, pp. 212–13: ‘ “Lege libros propheticos non intellecto CHRISTO, sagt der punische Kirchenvater, quid tam insipidum et fatuum invenies? Intellige ibi CHRISTUM, non solum sapit, quod legis, sed etiam inebriat.” ’ See Martin Luther, De servo arbitrio, in WA XVIII, p. 606: ‘Tolle Christum e Scripturis, quid amplius in illis invenies?’ 33  Augustine, In Johannis Evangelium tractatus CXXIV, IX.3, PL 35:1459: ‘Lege libros omnes propheticos . . .’. Inebriation was a common Jewish figure for mystical experience: on this see, for instance, April De Conick, Seek to See Him: Ascent and Vision Mysticism in the Gospel of Thomas (Leiden, 1996), pp. 110–12. 34  [Johann David Michaelis], Beantwortung der Frage von dem Einfluß der Meinungen in die Sprache und der Sprache in die Meinungen, in Dissertation qui a remporté le prix proposé par l’Académie Royale des Sciences et Belles Lettres de Prusse (Berlin, 1760), p. 67: ‘beide [i.e., Augustine and Muhammad] waren Leute von lebhafter und fast enthusiastischer Einbildungs-­ Kraft, beide von Natur Liebhaber der Poesie’. 35  Hamann, ‘Aesthetica in nuce’, in Sämtliche Werke, II, p. 212, n. 54: ‘einem amphibologischen Liebhaber der Poesie von halb enthusiastischer halb scholastischer Einbildungskraft’. Michaelis mentioned this witticism with amusement in his review (as at n. 1 above), p. 594.

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The overwhelming intoxication of meaning in the prophets, however, is not suitable for all palates: the message requires readiness. To his quotation from Augustine, Hamann juxtaposes a line from Luther which concludes: ‘beware of drinking wine while you are still a nursling; every teaching has its proper degree, time, and age.’36 A few lines earlier Hamann described the ‘fine wine’ of the Hebrew prophecies as ‘strengthening the stomach’, alluding to 1 Tim. 5:23 but also calling back to his own words, ‘The application of these stifled thoughts is not for delicate stomachs.’ The ambiguity of prophecy reflects its withholding of mysteries, and its capacity to speak sense even to the uninitiated. Seeing Double Beneath his vivid wordplay, Hamann seems to be rehearsing something familiar, a hermeneutics of typology and progressive revelation. But he suggests something more interesting, more individual, in a letter of 1759 to his close friend Johann Gotthelf Lindner, a philosopher who taught at the cathedral school in Riga.37 Hamann here glumly surveys his recent reading from the works of the Erlangen theologian Johann Martin Chladenius: the Einleitung zur richtigen Auslegung vernunftiger Reden und Schriften (1742)—a key early text of general hermeneutics—the Logica sacra (1745), and several others. But he has almost nothing to say about any of them, focusing his attention instead on an opuscule on Augustine’s Confessions, XII.23–31, the notorious passage about the ambiguity of Gen. 1:1.38 The Father had imagined Moses appointed ad culmen autoritatis, to the highest authority, to compose his account of Creation, and endowed by God with the capacity to temper his words in such a way that each pious reader could find in them his own meaning and his own truth.39 This was the sort of thing that Michaelis would have pounced on as credulous poppycock. But it will be instructive to see just how Chladenius and Hamann try to make sense of Augustine’s paradoxical ruminations, which were turned every 36  Ibid., p. 213: ‘ “siehe dich für, daß du nicht Wein trinkst, wenn du noch ein Sängling bist; eine jegliche Lehre hat ihre Maße, Zeit und Alter.” ’ 37  Hamann to J. G. Lindner, 1 June 1759, in Briefe, I, pp. 334–36. On this letter see Hoffmann, Hamanns Philologie, pp. 154–61; Blackall, The Emergence, pp. 446–47; and Timothy Beech, Hamann’s Prophetic Mission: A Genetic Study of Three Late Works against the Enlightenment (London, 2010), pp. 33–35. It was first published in Johann Georg Hamann, Schriften, ed. Friedrich Roth, 8 vols (Berlin, 1821–1843), I, pp. 385–90. 38  Johann Martin Chladenius, ‘Sententia D. Augustini de stilo Scripturae S. praesertim in historia creationis Confess. Lib. XII. c. XXVI’, in his Opuscula academica, 2 vols (Leipzig, 1750), II, 3–34. 39  See Chapter Four above, pp. 158–159.

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which way to suit later beliefs, no less than the Mosaical picture of Creation itself. The old professor reads the passage from the perspective of classical rhetoric, a familiarising move that we will recognise from the theologians of the previous chapter: a writer must delight as well as enlighten his audience, and so Augustine praised Moses for seeking both aims with two very different groups of readers, namely, the ignorant and the learned. As a parallel, Chladenius adduces a quotation of the satirist Lucilius in Cicero’s De oratore: Lucilius had wished to be read by neither the most ignorant nor the most learned, since the former would understand nothing, the latter more than himself; Cicero added that he would prefer not to be understood by the former than to be reproved by the latter.40 Chladenius now maps these two groups onto Augustine’s distinction, arguing that Moses reconciles the ignorant and the learned, rather than fearing or scorning them. Had Moses offered a full natural history of Creation, the ignorant would struggle to understand it and be put off, and the learned would contest its details; as it stands, the ignorant will be persuaded by the majestic simplicity of his style, and the learned will venerate his account for having divinely anticipated their own opinions.41 For Chladenius, however, these anticipated ‘opinions’ cannot be interpretations of Genesis, but only ‘those thoughts that Moses’s words excite in his readers’.42 The process of excitement is inevitable, for, as he explains, when we read a book, if our mind is enriched by learning, we turn from an intellection of the words in sequence to a free contemplation of the matter.43 We assume that our thoughts 40  Chladenius, ‘Sententia’, p. 22, citing Cicero, De oratore II.6.25, drawing on Lucilius, Satires XXVI.1.632–34: ‘ea quae scriberet, neque ab indoctissimis, neque a doctissimis, legi velle, quod alteri nihil intelligerent, alteri plus fortasse, quam ipse’. Compare Friedrich Nietzsche’s infamous remark, Jenseits von Gut und Böse, aph. 290, in his Philosophische Werke, ed. Claus-­Artur Scheier, 6 vols (Hamburg, 2013), I, p. 222: ‘Jeder tiefe Denker fürchtet mehr das Verstanden-­werden, als das Missverstanden-­werden.’ 41  Ibid., p. 31: ‘gravissimam hanc olim stili Mosaici legem sancitam putavit, ut divinus scriptor ista profunditate sua perinde apud doctos suam semper autoritatem tueretur, quemadmodum simplicis suae dictionis maiestate rudioribus ipsis, nullo non tempore, veram esset creationis historiam facile persuasurus’. 42  Ibid., p. 27: ‘de illis cogitationibus agit [sc. Augustinus], quae in lectoribus Geneseos per verba Mosis excitantur’. 43  A similar idea is exquisitely extrapolated by a character in Italo Calvino, Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore (Turin, 1979), p. 256:

Se un libro m’inte­ressa veramente, non riesco a seguirlo per piú di poche ri­ghe senza che la mia mente, captato un pensiero che il testo le propone, o un sentimento, o un interrogativo, o un’immagine, non parta per la tangente e rimbalzi di pen­siero in pensiero, d’immagine in immagine, in un itinera­rio di ragionamenti e fantasie che sento il bisogno di per­correre fino in fondo, allontanandomi dal libro fino a perderlo di vista. (If a book truly interests me, I’m unable to fol-

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are those of the author, but the careful interpreter will ensure that his reading derives from the text in a clear and open manner, so that others can see his views in the author’s words. Augustine’s point, then, is not that Moses’s words really did signify every truth, but rather that his divine rhetoric will persuade all kinds of readers that his account of the Creation is true, no matter what their individual beliefs may be. Such is Chladenius’s account of the matter in his opuscule, and it makes Augustine sound highly reasonable. But we ought to ask just what was at stake here for the professor. Volker Hoffmann has argued that the opuscule reflects a hermeneutics much like that of Michaelis, emphasising ‘the single genuine sense of the text’ identifiable with the author’s intention.44 This view is not unfounded, although it overlooks key nuances so as to draw as sharp a difference as possible between Chladenius and Hamann. In fact, as Peter Szondi has shown in a lucid account of the 1742 Einleitung, the professor’s hermeneutics are not quite so straightforward as Hoffmann suggests.45 In that 600-­page tome, whose complexities Hamann is likely to have overlooked out of boredom if nothing else, Chladenius distinguishes between the objective ‘immediate sense’ of a text, upon which author and reader must agree,46 and the subjective ‘mediate sense’ in which the reader brings his own learning and perspective to bear on the text. The mediate sense, also called the ‘application’ (Anwendung), occurs in all acts of interpretation: it ‘does not have to do with the words of the passage directly, but is dependent on the use of our various faculties, by means of which we bring forth out of the immediate sense all manner of other concepts and impulses’.47 We will now recognise this mediate sense in the opuscule’s low it for more than a few lines before my mind—seizing on a thought the text has offered, or a feeling, a question, an image—goes off on a tangent, bouncing from thought to thought, image to image, on a journey of reasoning and fantasy that must persevere to the bottom, distancing me from the book until I’ve lost sight of it.) 44  Hoffmann, Hamanns Philologie, p. 157, drawing for comparanda chiefly on the professor’s treatise on the philosophy of history, the Allgemeine Geschichtswissenschaft (1752): ‘Chladenius steht damit im Zusammenhang mit jenen Auslegungslehren, die durch die Betonung des einen genuinen Textsinnes. . . .’ 45  Peter Szondi, An Introduction to Literary Hermeneutics (1975), tr. Martha Woodmansee (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 14–66, esp. 34–39. 46  Johann Martin Chladenius, Einleitung zur richtigen Auslegung vernünftiger Reden und Schriften, ed. Lutz Geldsetzer (Düsseldorf, 1969), p. 522 (§677): ‘Der unmittelbare Verstand ist dasjenige, worinnen der Verfasser der Stelle, mit allen seinen Lesern, die die Stelle verstehen, überein kommon muß.’ At pp. 587–88 (§742), Chladenius acknowledges that verbal ambiguity may preclude the certainty of the immediate sense, but suggests that a good author will be able to overcome such a fault. 47  Ibid., p. 529 (§684): ‘so hat der mittelbare Verstand einer Stelle nicht mehr mit den Worten derselben zu thun, sondern es dependiret derselbe von dem Gebrauch unserer

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reference to ‘those thoughts that Moses’s words excite in his readers’, quoted above. The crucial question is whether or not the mediate sense is part of the text’s complete meaning, and on this Chladenius is equivocal.48 He cannot quite decide, in other words, if the meaning of a text is bound by its author’s intentions, as traditional hermeneutics dictates, or enriched by later interpretations, as a consideration of the reader’s psychology might suggest. There is in Szondi’s phrase an ‘opposition between an empirical methodology based on observation and a normative one determined by postulates’—between the theory and the practice of reading. This has been the problem of ambiguity all through our History: we saw it, for instance, in the paradoxes of Vossius and Bouhours.49 Augustine himself, as we found, exhibited the same ambivalence, divided between philology and transcendence, river and ocean. Hamann’s letter responding to Chladenius’s analysis is as dense a pemmican as any of his published tracts. As one might expect, he finds the passage in Augustine a revelation—außerordentlich, in his own phrase to Lindner. Chladenius, he thinks, has not really grasped its meaning, and the parallel to Lucilius is misplaced, for Augustine is talking not about persuasion but about truth. ‘The idea assumed by Augustine’, writes Hamann, ‘contradicts as it were the fundamental law of good style generally assumed among us: he assumes that the truth can coexist with the greatest multiplicity of meanings about one and the same thing’.50 A Cartesian and a Newtonian may read the same few words of Moses and each find the traces of their own understanding. Hamann proceeds: Truth is like a seed to which a man gives a body as he sees fit; and through its expression this body of truth receives in turn an apparel [Kleid] according to each person’s taste, or according to the laws of fashion. One can think of countless events that could give new impetus to a style.51

Gemüths-­Kräffte, durch die wie aus dem unmittelbaren Verstande allerhand andere Begriffe und Triebe bey uns hervorbringen’. 48  For the mediate sense as part of the text’s meaning, see Chladenius, Einleitung, §§156, 576, 674; against this, see §§691 and 707. 49  Szondi, An Introduction, p. 38. On Vossius and Bouhours, see Chapter Three, pp. 198–201 and 201–205. 50  Hamann to Lindner, in Briefe, I, p. 335: ‘Die Begriffe die Augustinus annimmt wiedersprechen gewißermaaßen den ersten Grundgesetzen, die wir von einer guten Schreibart anzunehmen gewohnt sind. Er nimmt an, daß die Wahrheit bestehen könne mit der grösten Mannigfaltigkeit der Meynungen über eine einzige und dieselbe Sache’. 51  Ibid., p. 335: ‘Die Wahrheit ist also einem Saamenkorn gleich, dem der Mensch einem Leib giebt wie er will; und dieser Leib der Wahrheit bekommt wiederum durch den Ausdruck ein Kleid nach eines jeden Geschmack, oder nach den Gesetzen der Mode. Es ließen sich unzähliche Fälle erdichten, die einen neuen Schwung der Schreibart bestimmen könnten.’

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The plenitude of meaning in Scripture is here, as Hoffmann paraphrases it, ‘the way in which truth is embodied’.52 Truths are not only expressed variously by people, they are themselves different; the same words may express a variety of truths, so that unity and multiplicity can coexist, the solar day and the astral night. Hamann proceeds, and the gloom deepens: Thus a diplomatic or pragmatic writer, should he write likewise ad culmen autoritatis,53 will stick to the words of deeds and warrants, give Gothic and runic letters their due, and not speak according to Donatus but like his Emperor say ‘schismam’. A similar pressure will afflict an author who writes in a language no longer spoken as it is dead. He will distrust his contemporaries as falsifiers, reject the spirit of the living mother tongue he has learnt, and be able to show the learned nothing but his familiarity with the ancients and his judgement and felicity in applying and sticking together their formulas. If such a mannered Roman were to say of an honourable man who presided over the public weal that ‘He perceives the matter excellently but he is hurting the Republic, for he speaks his mind as if he were in Plato’s Republic rather than the dregs of Romulus’ (or: ‘of the age’), — would we find something to carp at in this style, and reprove the letter-­writer for having deprived Cato of due praise and so excused a fool about whom no Roman had ever thought in his familiar letters?54

Pity poor Lindner, who received floods of these letters and must have scrambled to decipher them. Who is the ‘diplomatic writer’, and who the distrustful ‘author’? Is Hamann for or against them? The first seems to be 52  Hoffmann, Hamanns Philologie, p. 159: ‘Die Mannigfaltigkeit der Meinungen ist . . . die Weise, wie sich Wahrheit verkörpert’. 53  The phrase is from Augustine, on which see Chapter Four above, p. 158. 54  Hamann to Lindner, in Briefe, I, pp. 335–36:

Eben so wird ein diplomatischer oder pragmatischer Schriftsteller, der gleichfalls gewißermaaßen ad culmen autoritatis schreibt, sich an die Worte der Urkunden und Vollmachten halten, Mönchsschrift und Runische Buchstaben in ihrem Werth laßen, und nicht mit dem Donat sondern mit seinem Kayser Schismam reden. Unter eben so einem Zwange befindet sich ein Autor der in einer Sprache schreibt, die nicht mehr geredt wird, weil sie tod ist. Er wird seinen Zeitverwandten als Verfälschern nicht trauen, den genium seiner Muttersprache oder der lebenden, die er gelernt hätte, verleugnen, und nichts als seine Bekanntschaft mit den Alten, seine Urtheil und sein Glück ihre Formeln anzubringen und zusammenzuleimen den Kennern zeigen können. Wenn ein solcher gekünstelter Römer von einem ehrl. Mann sagen wollte, der den öffentl. Besten vorstünde: ‘Optime sentit, sed nocet interdum Reipublicae; loquitur enim, tanquam in republica Platonis, nec tanquam in faece Romuli’ oder ‘Saeculi’. Würde man an dieser Schreibart etwas auszusetzen finden, und dem Briefsteller vorrücken, daß er dem Cato sein Lob gestolen, und dadurch einen Narren entschuldigte, an den kein einziger Römer in seinem epistolis familiaribus gedacht hätte?

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in the situation of Moses, which makes him diplomatic in the sense of negotiating the demands of rival interpreters; but also in that he practises diplomatics, the art of reading old documents—‘deeds and warrants’, ‘Gothic and runic letters’, dead languages. He is also careless of grammatical rules, like the Holy Roman Emperor, Sigismund of Luxemburg, whom at a church council asserted his imperial right to say schismam instead of the correct schisma; Hamann had the anecdote from Luther, who used it to justify the autonomy of the Spirit over the laws of language.55 At first glance, Chladenius is a good candidate for the author who writes in a dead language—Latin—and the insult aimed at his dry erudition seems to fit Hamann’s hostility towards the professor. But another candidate materialises in what follows. The quotation of the ‘mannered Roman’ is a paraphrase of Cicero by Francis Bacon—an argument erected in Latin on reused classical formulas.56 Cicero complained in a letter that Cato the Younger applied his moral strictures as if he lived in an ideal state rather than the filth of contemporary Rome. Bacon paraphrased the line as he unpacked the fable of Cassandra in his De sapientia veterum, warning against the ‘untimely admonitions’ of those who are ‘overweened with the sharpnesse and dexteritie of their owne wit and capacity’ and who therefore fail to take into account the readiness of their audience for their message. Cato is a case in point: although he ‘as an Oracle long foretold the approaching ruine of his Countrey’, he lacked the shrewdness to alleviate the situation, preferring to rail and castigate from on high than to work with the state as it was. As David Colclough has remarked, the Baconian passage ‘draws attention to the potential threat of inappropriate and untranslatable advice. . . . Counsel, for Bacon, should be pragmatic rather than idealistic’.57 Cato’s words are ineffective because his audience is unripe and unreceptive. 55  There are many versions of the anecdote in Luther’s Table Talk, but see WA, Tischreden IV, pp. 132, 133 (no. 4094, dated 10 November 1538). Likewise, Luther, In epistolam S. Pauli ad Galatas commentarius (1535), in WA XL.1, pp. 243–44, referring to a Hebraism at Gal. 2:16, remarks: ‘Spiritussanctus non servat illum rigorem grammatices’. Compare also Hamann, ‘Erste Brief’ (1759), in ‘Kleeblatt hellenistischer Briefe’, in Kreuzzüge des Philologen, in Sämtliche Werke, II, p. 171: ‘Der Kayser spricht Schismam und die Götter der Erden bekümmern sich selten darum, Sprachmeister zu seyn. — Das Erhabene in Cäsars Schreibart ist ihre Nachläßigkeit.’ On these points, see Betz, After Enlightenment, pp. 117–23. 56  Cicero, Ep. ad Att., II.1, in Epistulae, ed. W. S. Watt, 4 vols (Oxford, 1958–1982), II, p. 49: ‘ille [i.e., Cato the Younger] optimo animo utens et summa fide nocet interdum rei publicae; dicit enim tamquam in Platonis πολιτείᾳ, non tamquam in Romuli faece sententiam.’ The paraphrase appears both in Bacon’s Advancement of Learning, in OFB IV, p. 17, and in his De sapientia veterum, s.v. ‘Cassandra’. 57  David Colclough, Freedom of Speech in Early Stuart England (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 61–62. The focus on pragmatism is typically humanistic: compare, for instance, More’s speech at Thomas More, Utopia, ed. George Logan et al., tr. Robert Adams (Cambridge, 1995), p. 96 (Eng. 97), and on this see Quentin Skinner, ‘Sir Thomas More’s Utopia and the Language of

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Pragmatism is clearly central to Hamann’s letter, and ripeness is all. This is the nutshell of what would later be played out in ‘Aesthetica in Nuce’, with the image of the wine not fit for young stomachs. But in the letter it assumes a deeper significance for the ‘writer’, the ‘author’—a figure to whom Hamann seems to have some sympathy after all, likening him to both Moses and Cicero, and whom we might perhaps identify at the last count with Hamann himself, for it is he who distrusts his contemporaries as counterfeit, and he whose style, ironically, has a ‘felicity in applying and sticking together’ ancient passages.58 If he gives runic letters their due, it is perhaps because he recognises the significance, the place in the whole design, of the old and unruly alongside the regular legal tender of the language, perhaps because their meaning will be, or has already been, brought out by the fulness of time. Words can always be reinterpreted as appropriate in the future, as fits the moment: this reads as a justification of his own rhapsodic mode, and stands as a counter to Benson’s critique of biblical centos, the patchworks of Vergil made up to tell another story.59 This is a crucial point for our History—Hamann’s mode of writing is at the same time a mode of reading, his style underwritten by a position on the exegesis of Scripture. And the point is driven home in what follows: According to Augustine’s thoughts about style, a man should see the grossest errors transformed into something beautiful, and clarity into an indefinite multiplicity of meaning. . . . If one can promise only the contorted application of clear truths, then prudence [Klugheit] demands that one cover up [einkleiden] instead, and like Tamar employ the veil of falsehood at the expense of one’s honour, and subsequently take revenge that much more forcefully, at the expense of one’s honour-­loving judge.60

Tamar was the widow of Er, son of Judah, and briefly the levirate lover of his brother Onan, struck dead for spilling his seed on the ground—for Renaissance Humanism’, in The Languages of Political Theory in Early-­Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Pagden (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 123–157, esp. pp. 132–135. 58  This identification is made by Knut Martin Stünkel, ‘Biblisches Formular und soziologische Wirklichkeit—Elemente einer Hamannschen Soziologie’ in Johann Georg Hamann: Religion und Gesellschaft, eds Manfred Beetz and Andre Rudolph (Berlin, 2012), pp. 72–94, at p. 91. 59  See Chapter Seven above, p. 301. 60  Hamann to Lindner, in Briefe, I, p. 336: ‘Nach den Gedanken des Augustinus von der Schreibart, sollte man den grösten Fehler in eine Schönheit verwandelt sehen; die Klarheit in einen unbestimmten vieldeutigen Sinn . . . Wenn man also sich nicht anders als eine verkehrte Anwendung deutl. Wahrheiten versprechen kann, so erfordert es die Klugheit sie lieber einzukleiden, und den Schleyer der Falscheit wie Thamar auf Unkosten seiner Ehre zu brauchen und sie mit der Zeit desto nachdrücklicher zu rächen, auf Unkosten seiner Ehrlieb­ enden Richter.’

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failing to give it a body.61 In Gen. 38:14–18, desiring children, she dons a veil and tricks Judah into thinking her a prostitute, taking for a pledge of later payment his signet ring, bracelets, and staff. When she conceives twins, Pharez and Zarah, she is accused of harlotry, and Judah, not realising his own complicity, orders her to be burned to death, whereupon she presents the ring, bracelets, and staff, and Judah, now recognising his own guilt, pardons her. Through Pharez she is the ancestor of David and so of Jesus; the story fits a pattern (with, for instance, Jacob and Isaac) of trickery committed in the service of a royal bloodline, another variant on the theme of hiding truth until the time is ready, while also recalling the integumentum or veil, a traditional metaphor of allegorical encoding. But Hamann’s word Klugheit, ‘prudence’ or ‘cunning’, brings us back to mētis, the defining virtue of his avatars Odysseus and Socrates, and one of the key terms of artificial ambiguity as we sketched the concept in Chapter Three.62 Whereas William Warburton reached for the elegance of classical poetry to explain double senses in prophecy, Hamann reaches for deceit and equivocation. The contrast is instructive as two very different ways of bridging the ideas of artificial and inspired ambiguity, and for very different purposes: the one to evade the charge of enthusiasm by appeal to the classics, the other to offer an oblique defence of obscurity in his own prose composition. But Hamann points forward in a still more surprising manner. He is careful to present Augustine’s manoeuvre as retroactive and recuperative, changing what first appeared clear but naïve—the image of God speaking, creating the world over a period of days, like a gifted craftsman—into something beautiful and rich with meaning. This operation bears a remarkable resemblance to Heinrich Heine’s satirical account of the birth of irony. In the old days, Heine explains, people who said stupid things had no choice but to be thought stupid, a particular issue in Berlin with its surfeit of public idiocy. ‘It was a serious problem, until finally a retroactive means was discovered whereby one could as it were undo every foolishness and transform it into wisdom.’ All a man had to do was to claim that his words had been meant ironically, and madness became humour, ignorance bril61  Tamar is not here, contra Beech, Hamann’s Prophetic Mission, p. 34, the daughter of David whose story is told in 2 Samuel 13. 62  See Chapter Two above, p. 111. Hamann’s identification with Socrates is found throughout his writings, from the title of his first published work, Sokratische Denkwürdigkeiten, onwards. For Odysseus, see for instance ‘Kleeblatt’, in Werke, II, p. 178, speaking of Sophocles’s portrait of Odysseus in Ajax: ‘Der Charakter, den er dem Ulysses giebt, ist ­ehrwürdig, heilig, geheim; daher dem griechischen Pöbel verhaßt und wunderlich, das mit Euripide [in Hecuba] einen klugen Mann lieber für einen Betrüger und Schwärmer verleumden mag.’ Immediately before this, Hamann identifies Homer’s Odysseus as embodying the virtue of ‘Klugheit’.

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liant wit.63 It is a view we can all recognise. In framing the Augustinian thought in such a way, Hamann emphasises the dimension of time in the perception and manifestation of ambiguity, and so gestures towards the body of ideas theorised as irony at the end of the century, a theme we shall pick up in the next chapter. An important corollary of this emphasis on time is an acknowledgement that the meanings we have now are provisional. For Hamann the signal model is the Jewish high priest Caiaphas, who, as we have seen, unwittingly prophesied the salvation of humanity through the death of Christ.64 Critics have noted Hamann’s interest in Caiaphas, and correctly related it to his intuition that all things in Creation reveal Christ and his teachings— that God not only is in, but is meant by, every part of the world.65 This is, again, how unity and multiplicity not only coexist but illuminate one another: it is a vision of meaning like that of the solipsistic monarch of Pointland in Edwin Abbott’s 1881 fantasy Flatland, absorbing as his own all the words and thoughts of others, even those expressed to disparage him.66 But those critics have appreciated neither the verbal ambiguity of Caiaphas’s prophecy nor the temporal aspect of its exposition by John: it is we Christian readers who see in retrospect both the equivocation and the truer, spiritual meaning of the priest’s words. This point is central to what Hamann says about the prophecy. In ‘Aesthetica in Nuce’, Voltaire, the ‘high priest in the temple of taste’, is compared to Caiaphas and Herod; the footnote cites Photius’s extension of unwilling prophecy to Herod in the Amphilochia, and concludes that ‘a great many derisive and futile ideas . . . would take on a wholly different light for us if we could only remember to ask ourselves: if they speak solely on their own behalf, or must be understood as prophetic?’67 In other words, for Hamann all utterances are potentially Caiaphatic, in that time may disclose in them another, truer sense. 63  Heinrich Heine, Italien (1828), in his Reisebilder III / IV, ed. Alfred Opitz [= Historisch-­ kritische Gesamtausgabe der Werke, Band VII], 2 vols (Hamburg, 1986), I, p. 20: ‘die Noth war groß, bis endlich ein rückwirkendes Mittel erfunden ward, wodurch man jede Dummheit gleichsam ungeschehen machen und sogar in Weisheit umgestalten kann. Dieses Mittel ist ganz einfach, und besteht darin, daß man erklärt, man habe jene Dummheit bloß aus Ironie begangen oder gesprochen.’ 64  See Chapter Three above, pp. 113–114. 65  This is emphasised by Betz, After Enlightenment, pp. 48, 59. 66  ‘A Square’ [E. A. Abbott], Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1881: Oxford, 1944), p. 93. 67  Hamann, ‘Aesthetica in nuce’, in Sämtliche Werke, II, p. 205, n. 30: ‘Sehr viele hämische und unnütze Einfälle . . . würden ein ganz ander Licht für uns gewinnen, wenn wir uns bisweilen erinnern möchten: ob sie von sich selbst reden oder weissagend verstanden werden müssen?’ The two phrases emphasised both here and in the original printed text (but not, for some reason, in Nadler’s edition) mirror the Greek of John 11:51, aph’ heautou and eprophēteusen. As a citation makes clear, Hamann knew the passage of Photius from the publication of excerpts from the Amphilochia with a facing Latin translation, as an appendix to

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To believe this is to imagine the world as a Greek drama, whose personae are unaware, until too late, of the full meaning of their words. It is a drama in which Hamann claims a privileged position, insofar as he appoints himself to the same status as Augustine’s Moses, ad culmen autoritatis—charged with ‘prophetic mission’ and granted suitably ambiguous words. If a certain strain of European philosophy has since emphasised the contingency of meaning, the unsteadiness of a stance in the face of history, and the necessity of continual reappropriation, here, in the glance of a thought on unwilling prophecy, is the condition of its possibility. Katzenjammer The letter to Lindner, read alongside ‘Aesthetica in Nuce’, shows us how Hamann rationalised his obscure style. It seems an awful way around the houses to two ideas: that the ambiguity of prophecy is a pragmatic ambiguity of deceit, and that all meaning is provisional. But paraphrase implies that the content of a text can be extracted from its form without irreparable damage, and such a supposition is just what Hamann objected to in Benson and Michaelis.68 The spectacle of his style served to dramatise his argument: to read it was to experience a new sort of disorientation, to lose one’s hermeneutic certainty. His reader was put on the back foot: as Michaelis said, it was obvious that the author was hostile to existing positions, but not what his own was. This had an ancient precedent in Socrates, but no closer model, and its effect on certain readers was incalculable, the sharpest possible rebuke to eighteenth-­century norms of clarity. A generation later, Hamann’s seed would bear fruit. Johann Christopher Wolf, Curae philologicae et criticae, 2nd ed., 4 vols (Hamburg, 1732–35), IV, pp. 697–99. 68  Beech, Hamann’s Prophetic Mission, p. 6, remarks: that ‘just as the scholarship [Hamann] attacked in Aesthetica treats scripture as a set of human documents, “a book like any other”, rather than a vehicle for religious truth, the Germanist must try to read Hamann himself disinterestedly—something it was his whole purpose to prevent’. Compare Hoffmann, Hamanns Philologie, pp. 158–59, on the individuality of a person’s truth, in the tradition of Schleiermacher on the biblical writers, on which see Chapter Four above, p. 154.

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CH A P TE R NI NE

AN EQUIVOCAL SMILE per chiare parole e con preciso latin rispuose quello amor paterno, chiuso e parvente del suo proprio riso — Paradiso, XVII.34–36

It is a cliché of rock music history that few saw the Velvet Underground play live, or bought their incantatory first LP, but those who did all started bands.1 A similar aura seems to have surrounded Hamann, whose baffling, oracular tracts inspired a coterie of disciples in the latter decades of the eighteenth century; he became, as we might now put it, a cult writer. Chief among these disciples were the so-­called Jena Romantics, a circle of poets, playwrights, critics, and philosophers who came together for a few years in 1798—among others Friedrich and August Schlegel, Novalis, Schleiermacher, and Ludwig Tieck. When Schleiermacher put literary discourse on a spectrum between the ‘classical’ and the ‘original’, he chose Cicero as the archetype of the first and Hamann as that of the second.2 Friedrich Schlegel would publish Hamann’s early work to save it from oblivion; in an accompanying essay he wrote that Hamann had been ‘one of the most profound and erudite’ philosophers of the previous century, even if his works ‘here and there seem dark due to the fullness of his learning and wit, and their deep meaning’.3 The Schlegels had revealed their debt to Hamann already in their first literary journal, the Athenaeum, published in Berlin from 1798 and containing essays, poems, fragments, aphorisms, translations, book reviews, and other orts and ends from Jena. These items, like the works of The claim originated with Brian Eno in an interview with Kristine McKenna, ‘Eno: Voyages in Time and Perception’, Musician (Oct 1982), 64–69, at p. 69. 2  SHK, pp. 18–19. 3  Friedrich Schlegel, ‘Hamann als Philosoph’, Deutsches Museum 3 (1813), 33–52, quoted in John Betz, After Enlightenment: The Vision of J. G. Hamann (Chichester, 2012), pp. 13–14; compare Schlegel’s ‘Geschichte der alten und neuen Literatur’, ed. Hans Eichner (Paderborn, 1961 = KSA VI.1), p. 378. 1 

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Hamann, were criticised for their obscurity, and in response Friedrich concluded the final issue (1800) with a satirical essay on that very subject, ‘Über die Unverständlichkeit’ or ‘On Incomprehensibility’.4 If the essay lacked Hamann’s density of reference, the influence is obvious in its flippant aggression and its restlessness of style and focus; the author even described it, as his predecessor might have done, as a ‘fugue of irony’ in which an earlier essay had been ‘chopped up like mincemeat’.5 Like Hamann before him, Schlegel aimed to own the charge of incomprehensibility and to defend its value: if everything were comprehensible, he asserts, nations and families would fall apart. The effect of this argument is a Nietzschean Umwertung: obscurity, the failure to communicate, is no longer the ultimate linguistic evil but a principal good, for language is no longer understood to behave as it had done in the eighteenth century, as a mere vessel of the intentions.6 As Schlegel insists, ‘words often understand themselves better than do those who use them’.7 The turn in the essay is part of a deeper movement in Romantic philosophy, criticism, and literature towards a new aesthetics of obscurity, of the riddle, the hieroglyph, and the pleasures of aporia and wonder—a turn owing something to the earlier Catholic taste for wit and enigma, and effected again in various currents of German and French thought in the twentieth century.8 For Schlegel this turn was encapsulated above all in an old word that he made fully his own. ‘A greater part of the incomprehensibility of the Athenaeum’, he writes, ‘is unquestionably due to the irony that to a greater or lesser extent is to be found everywhere in it.’9 Schlegel seems to be doing the Friedrich Schlegel, ‘Über die Unverständlichkeit’, in Charakteristiken und Kritiken I: (1796–1801), ed. Hans Eichner (Munich, 1967 = KSA II), pp. 363–72. The essay seems to have been written in response especially to [Daniel Jenisch], ‘Das Athenäum: Ein Fragment’, Berlinisches Archiv der Zeit (June–January 1799), 44–47; on this see Dominic Berlemann, Wertvolle Werke: Reputation im Literatursystem (Bielefeld, 2009), pp. 349–50. 5  Friedrich Schlegel to Dorothea Veit, 27 June 1800, in Höhepunkt und Zerfall der romantischen Schule (1799–1802), ed. Hermann Patsch (Paderborn, 2009 = KSA XXV), p. 130: ‘Der alte Essay über die Unverständlichkeit ist in dieser Fuge von Ironie so ziemlich in Kochstückchen zerhackt’. 6  Marike Finlay, The Romantic Irony of Semiotics: Friedrich Schlegel and the Crisis of Representation (Berlin, 1988), 183–259; Sebastian Matzner, ‘The Collapse of a Classical Tradition? “The End of Rhetoric” in Germany around 1800: Gottsched, Kant, Schlegel’, Publications of the English Goethe Society 82 (2013), 104–23. Manuel Bauer, Schlegel und Schleiermacher: Frühromantische Kunstkritik und Hermeneutik (Paderborn, 2011), pp. 108–26, locates Schlegel’s turn within the tradition of hermeneutics represented by Schleiermacher. 7  Schlegel, ‘Über die Unverständlichkeit’, p. 364: ‘die Worte sich selbst oft besser verstehen, als diejenigen von denen sie gebraucht werden’. 8  The literature on the Romantic turn is large, but see the (ironically) lucid outline in Brian Tucker, Reading Riddles: Rhetorics of Obscurity from Romanticism to Freud (Lewisburg, NY, 2011), esp. pp. 32–77. 9  Schlegel, ‘Über die Unverständlichkeit’, p. 368: ‘Ein großer Teil von der Unverständlich4 

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very thing Heine would accuse Berliners of doing in 1829, namely, covering his arse by maintaining that what had appeared merely idiotic, or in this case incomprehensible, was in fact deliberate and ironic. But what does Schlegel mean by irony? The question is difficult to answer, not because he fails to discuss irony but because he discusses it so much, here and elsewhere, in a tone at once lofty and elusive.10 Its defining avatar for Schlegel, as for Hamann, was Socrates, and he had already waxed lyrical in an earlier fragment, requoted in the 1800 essay: Socratic irony is the only involuntary and yet completely deliberate dissimulation. It is equally impossible to feign it or divulge it. To a person who hasn’t got it, it will remain a riddle even after it is openly confessed. . . . Everything in it should be playful and serious, guilelessly open and deeply hidden. . . . It contains and arouses a feeling of insoluble antagonism between the absolute and the relative, between the impossibility and the necessity of complete communication. It is the freest of all licences, for by its means one transcends oneself, and yet it is also the most lawful, for it is absolutely necessary.11 keit des Athenaeums liegt unstreitig in der Ironie, die sich mehr oder minder überall darin äußert.’ On this point, see Eckhard Schumacher, Die Ironie der Unverständlichkeit: Johann Georg Hamann, Friedrich Schlegel, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man (Frankfurt, 2000), esp. pp. 182–207. 10  René Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism, 1750–1950, 8 vols (New Haven, 1955–92), II, p. 16, notes that ‘Friedrich Schlegel introduced the term irony into modern literary discussion. Before, there are only adumbrations in Hamann.’ On Schlegel’s irony, see Gary Handwerk, Irony and Ethics in Narrative: From Schlegel to Lacan (New Haven, 1985), pp. 18–43, and Ernst Behler, Ironie und literarische Moderne (Paderborn, 1997), pp. 92–104. On Romantic irony more generally, see Douglas Colin Muecke, The Compass of Irony (London, 1969), pp. 181–204, esp. 187–92; Helmut Prang, Die romantische Ironie (Darmstadt, 1972); Ingrid Strohschneider-­Kohrs, Die romantische Ironie in Theorie und Gestaltung (Tübingen, 1977), Ernst Behler, ‘The Theory of Irony in German Romanticism’, in Romantic Irony, ed. Frederick Gerber (Amsterdam, 1988), pp. 43–81; Joseph Dane, The Critical Mythology of Irony (Athens, GA, 1991), pp. 73–118. For Enlightenment back stories to Schlegel, see Anne Mellor, English Romantic Irony (Cambridge, MA, 1980), pp. 27–30, and Lilian Furst, Fictions of Romantic Irony in European Narrative, 1760–1857 (London, 1984), pp. 23–48. 11  Lyceum Fragmente 108, in KSA II, p. 160, quoted in ‘Über die Unverständlichkeit’, p. 368: Die sokratische Ironie ist die einzige durchaus unwillkührliche und durchaus besonnene Verstellung. Es ist gleich unmöglich sie zu erkünsteln und sie zu verraten. Wer sie nicht hat, dem bleibt sie auch nach dem offensten Geständnis ein Rätsel . . . In ihr soll alles Scherz und alles Ernst sein, alles treuherzig offen und alles tief versteckt. . . . Sie enthält und erregt ein Gefühl von dem unauflöslichen Widerstreit des Unbedingten und des Bedingten, der Unmöglichkeit und Notwendigkeit einer vollständigen Mitteilung. Sie ist die freieste aller Lizenzen, denn durch sie setzt man sich über sich selbst weg; und doch auch die gesetzlichste, denn sie ist unbedingt notwendig.

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Socratic irony is here a sort of total ambiguity standing for a total liberty of the subject, as claimed for the author.12 But to the reader of Hamann all this will seem familiar; it is as if Schlegel, despite the new, post-­Kantian framework on which he relied, is trying to focus upon a word the purpose and pleasure of the style he has received from his master. And though the term is single its meanings are not. Schlegel goes on to list all the other versions of irony: not only the old-­fashioned rhetorical irony, where the words are contrary to the intent, but also a sort of irony in the world, ‘in the real nature of things’, as well as ‘the irony of irony’, in which the speaker can no longer disentangle himself from irony, as in the very essay itself. The word keeps bending and twisting out of the reader’s grasp, and this process would continue in Schlegel’s subsequent work.13 Just as wit had assumed a polyvalence in Pope’s milieu, allowing writers to exploit secret connections between the apparently dissimilar, so the new irony would mutate endlessly in Romantic thought about language.14 And as with wit before and ambiguity after, so irony is used in Schlegel’s original essay to articulate the complexity of great literature, of the ‘endlessly many depths, tricks and intentions’ of Shakespearean drama.15 Such irony may seem to have little in common with the artificial ambiguity we sketched in previous chapters, but both lie at the nexus of wordplay and power, and the similarities were evident to Søren Kierkegaard, who clarified Schlegel’s idea before rejecting it in his 1841 master’s thesis, On the Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates.16 Irony, he 12  Compare Adam Müller, ‘Ironie, Lustspiel, Aristophanes’ (1808), in his Kritische, ästhetische und philosophische Schriften, eds Walter Schroeder and Werner Siebert, 2 vols (Berlin, 1967), I, p. 234, defining irony as ‘Öffenbarung der Freiheit des Künstlers oder des Menschens.’ 13  Johann Eduard Erdmann, Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie, 2 vols (Berlin, 1866), II, p. 462, noted that Schlegel’s use of the word in his late lectures was entirely opposite to that of his early fragments. 14  Mellor, English Romantic Irony, p. 9. Schlegel himself admired the English wit (Witz) of the eighteenth century: see Lyceum Fragmente 67 (KSA II, p. 155), and also Athenäum Fragmente 120 (KSA II, p. 184). 15  Schlegel, ‘Über die Unverständlichkeit’, p. 370: ‘unendlich viele Tiefen, Tücken, und Absichten’. On Shakespeare, compare Athenäum Fragmente 247 (KSA II, p. 206) and esp. 253 (KSA II, p. 208). 16  Søren Kierkegaard, Om Begrebet Ironi med stadigt Hensyn til Socrates, in his Samlede vaerker, ed. A. B. Drachmann et al., 15 vols (Copenhagen, 1901–36), XIII, pp. 101–428, at pp. 345–58. I have quoted in the main text from The Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates, ed. and tr. Howard and Edna Hong (Princeton, 1989) [= Writings, vol. II], pp. 249–58. Joel Rasmussen, Between Irony and Witness: Kierkegaard’s Poetics of Faith, Hope and Love (New York, 2005), pp. 20–7, reads the argument here as a dry run for the later Either / Or. On Kierkegaard’s critique of Schlegel, see K. Brian Soderquist, The Isolated Self: Truth and Untruth in Søren Kierkegaard’s On the Concept of Irony (Copenhagen, 2013), pp. 139–71, demonstrating the philosopher’s reliance on the work of Hegel and of his own teacher Poul Martin Møller.

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writes, is a contrast between essence and phenomenon; unlike the classical figure of speech, however, it is not a simple opposite from which the truth can be read off, but a complete alienation of being and appearance, an ‘absolute negativity’ (257). In this respect it is close to ‘dissimulation’ (Forstillelse) or ‘Jesuitism’, with the key difference that the latter is conducted for the purpose of manipulation or self-­protection, whereas irony is indulged purely for the pleasure and joy of it—the joy of the ‘inner infinity that desires to emancipate its creation from every finite relation to itself’.17 Irony is an expression of the transcendental Fichtean subject, a denial of the constraints levied upon us by the social norms of communication; it seeks—though Kierkegaard thinks it cannot truly attain—a power more profound than that sought by the Jesuit with his equivocations. It is again to be distinguished from ‘hypocrisy’ (Hykleri), the merely moral fault of evil feigning goodness; the ironist is just as likely to feign evil, although in fact the moral categories are ill-­equipped to comprehend his actions. The early modern ambiguist, with his weapons of wit, sophistry, and mental reservation, begins to look like a petty, predictable character compared to the aristocratic ironist, who stands back from the world in order to see it and scorn it better. The ironist ‘continually wants to get outside the object, and he achieves this by realizing at every moment that the object has no reality’ (257); he ‘looks down pitying from this high position’, experiencing ‘a certain superiority’ (248).18 He thus resembles the ‘intellectual courtier’ with his ‘equivocally divulging smile’.19 Kierkegaard’s association of irony with a high, distanced perspective is perfectly in tune with German thought of the early nineteenth century; Hegel, for instance, spoke of the ironist as having a standpoint of ‘godlike geniality’ from which he ‘looks down loftily on all other men’.20 The same idea informed another use of the word ‘irony’, one which forms the central subject of this chapter—its application to drama, and particularly to tragedy. It was in this arena that the Schlegelian turn had its most far-­reaching effects, transforming the European notion of tragedy, even beyond aca17  Kierkegaard, Om Begrebet, p. 352 (Eng. 252): ‘en vis indre Uendelighed, der ønsker at frigjøre sit Vaerk fra ethvert endeligt Forhold til sig selv’. 18  Kierkegaard, Om Begrebet, p. 357 (Eng. 257): ‘I Ironien vil Subjectet bestandig ud af Gjenstanden, hvilket han opnaaer derved, at han i ethvert Øieblik bliver sig bevidst, at Gjenstanden ingen Realitet har.’ Ibid., p. 348: ‘den [sc. ironiske Talefigur, ‘the ironic figure of speech’] . . . seer fra dette høie Stade medlidende ned’. 19  Ibid., p. 345 (Eng. 246): ‘Man traeffer endnu stundom en eller anden Repraesentant for denne svundne Tid, der har conserveret dette fine, betydningsfulde, tvetydigt saa Meget forraadende Smiil, denne aandelige Hofmandstone’. 20  G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, 3 vols [= Werke, vols XIII–XV] (Suhrkamp, 1970), I, p. 95: ‘Wer auf solchem Standpunkte göttlicher Genialität steht, blickt dann vornehm auf alle übrige Menschen nieder’. On this see Muecke, The Compass of Irony, pp. 216–32, and Dane, The Critical Mythology, pp. 88–92.

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demic circles, within a few decades. As a central component of that process, irony became closely attached to verbal ambiguity. Consider, looking far forward for a moment, a passage by John William Mackail, friend and biographer to William Morris, son-­in-­law to Edward Burne-­Jones, and committed socialist, who in 1906 took over from A. C. Bradley as the Oxford Professor of Poetry. In one lecture at that post he marvelled at the depth of meaning attained by Sophocles: With the exquisite sense of the power and strangeness of language is connected another feature . . . that of using the same words to mean many different things. He always deals with language as something complete and organic, like life; the ‘little word’ has many meanings. It means different things in the mouth of each one who uses it, and to the apprehension of each one who hears it. It is no mere token passed from hand to hand, but a live element, almost itself a person. This is what lies at the foundation of the celebrated Sophoclean irony. The word spoken is more than the expression of the speaker’s meaning. He made it, but once made, it is a living thing, carrying in it, it may be, the issues of life and death.21 This passage, with all the earnestness and floridity of the late nineteenth century, makes a nice contrast to Richards and Empson, with their tone of cool analysis, a lumen siccum breaking with the old.22 Still, Mackail’s reverie at the lectern must not be scorned, for it took him to a position wholly destructive of the linguistics we outlined in Chapter One: ‘The word spoken is more than the expression of the speaker’s meaning’, as if in distant echo of Schlegel’s pronouncement that our words understand themselves better than we do. For Mackail, the foundation of Sophoclean irony was ambiguity, considered neither as a condition of verbal uncertainty, nor merely as a targeted arrangement of meanings, but as a sort of infinite semantic capacity, a living being with its own expressiveness. This vitalistic note resonates with the strain of semantics we heard at the end of Chapter One.23 But Mackail found the living word not in language as a whole, but in the artistic language of tragedy. 21  J. W. Mackail, Lectures on Greek Poetry (London, 1910), p. 153. Mackail’s commonplace book, Oxford, Balliol College Library, MS419b, p. 83, gives the date for this lecture as 9 May 1908. 22  The difference can be heard in the comment on Mackail in C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Source of Symbolism (London, 1923), pp. 256–57. In a similar vein Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise (1938: Chicago, 2008), p. 48, refers to Mackail, along with Logan Pearsall-­Smith, as ‘the last of the old Mandarins, of the men of the eighties’. 23  See p. 69.

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Over the following decade, the expression ‘dramatic irony’ came to predominate, and in 1913 Garnett Gladwin Sedgewick completed his doctorate on the subject at Harvard, supervised by the Shakespearean and folklorist G. L. Kittredge. A version of the thesis was later delivered as the Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto, and subsequently published as Of Irony, Especially in Drama, the first monograph on the topic.24 Sedgewick denounced Mackail’s analysis as a superstitious attachment to language rather than to the drama that gave that language meaning: ‘something other than double-­dealing in words gives the episode its great dramatic effectiveness; something, indeed, of which these ambiguities are merely the audible sign, and to which they owe their power.’25 This argument is one example—Wigmore on Bacon is another—of a reaction against formalism typical of the period.26 Sedgewick defines dramatic irony, much as we do today, as the effect by which the spectator of a play perceives in an action or discourse something different from, and especially something more than, the characters conducting it.27 We have seen in earlier chapters that a homologous narrative structure, albeit in an inchoate form, is found in the Gospels, such as the mystical gloss on the prophecy of Caiaphas at John 11:50, and in later biblical exegesis, for instance in Rupert of Deutz’s reading of Satan’s language at Gen. 3:4–5.28 I call these cases homologous because in each instance the two meanings come from two ‘voices’ or signifying intelligences, and are picked up by two receivers; one voice-­receiver pair is within the narrative (‘intradiegetic’) and the other outside the narrative (‘extradiegetic’). What this fails to capture, however, is the privilege of the extradiegetic receiver, for whom the full effect depends not on the extradiegetic message alone, but rather on the perception of its distance from the intradiegetic. It is thus integral to the Christian meaning of John 11:50 that the Pharisees do not grasp it, and of Gen. 3:4–5 that Eve does not grasp it; so also on the ancient stage. Indeed, the audience’s privileged capacity to resolve the ‘constitutively ambiguous nature of Greek tragedy’ would later provide a 24  Garnet Gladwin Sedgewick, Dramatic Irony: Studies in its History, its Definition, and its Use, Especially in Shakespeare and Sophocles, Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1913; idem, Of Irony, Especially in Drama (Toronto, 1935). The preface to the dissertation makes clear its interdisciplinary background, benefiting from the expertise of the philosopher Jacob Loewenberg and the classicist Chandler R. Post. 25  Sedgewick, Of Irony, p. 32, adapting idem, Dramatic Irony, p. 284. 26  See Chapter Two above, p. 96. Sedgewick’s hostility to Mackail chimed with the ­conventional philosophy of language expounded by his supervisor, for instance in G. L. Kittredge and James Greenough, Words and their Ways in English Speech (New York, 1901), pp. 219–33. 27  Sedgewick, Of Irony, pp. 43–4. Compare idem, Dramatic Irony, p. 61: ‘The spectator knows the facts, the character in the play does not.’ 28  See above, Chapter Three, pp. 113–114 and p. 108.

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Table 9.1. The Divided Voice Intradiegetic Voice

Extradiegetic Voice

Intradiegetic Receiver

Extradiegetic Receiver

John 11:50

Caiaphas

God

Pharisees

Christians

Gen. 3:4–­5

serpent (Satan) Holy Spirit

Eve

Christians

Greek tragedy

character

characters

audience

playwright

powerful model for Roland Barthes’s notion of the ‘death of the author’, inspired by the work of the classicist Jean-­Pierre Vernant.29 Nevertheless, dramatic irony originally meant something quite different, hinging not on the audience at all, but on the playwright, and the goal of the present chapter is to explain how this change came about—how, that is, irony evolved from Schlegel and Kierkegaard on the one hand, to Mackail and Barthes on the other. The Irony of Sophocles Scholars have traditionally accorded a prominent place in the early history of dramatic irony to an essay entitled ‘On the Irony of Sophocles’, published in the second (1833) volume of the Philological Museum; its author was the journal’s editor Connop Thirlwall (1797–1875), then assistant college tutor at Trinity College, Cambridge, subsequently bishop of St David’s in Pembrokeshire.30 Thirlwall belonged to an élite circle at Trinity 29  Roland Barthes, ‘La mort de l’auteur’ (1968), in his Oeuvres complètes, ed. Éric Marty, 3 vols (Paris, 1993–95), II, p. 495: ‘la nature constitutivement ambiguë de la tragédie grecque’. The view of Greek tragedy articulated here responds to Jean-­Pierre Vernant, ‘La tragédie grecque: problèmes d’interprétation’, a paper delivered at the major symposium on structuralism held at Johns Hopkins University, 18–21 Oct, 1966, which Barthes also attended: see the translation published in The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, eds Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato, 3rd ed. (1970: Baltimore, 2007), pp. 273–89, with a transcript of discussion at 289–95, including a droll exchange with Derrida at 294. See also Vernant’s subsequent ‘Ambiguité et renversement: sur la structure énigmatique d’Oedipe-­Roi’, in Échanges et communications: mélanges offerts à Claude Lévi-­Strauss à l’occasion de son soixantième anniversaire, eds Jean Pouillon and Pierra Maranda, 2 vols (Paris, 1970), II, pp. 1253–73. The expression ‘constitutivement ambiguë’ perhaps derives from Jacques Lacan, ‘Au-­delà du principe de réalité’, L’Évolution psychiatrique, 3 (1936), 67–86, at p. 82: ‘le langage, d’être abordé par sa fonction d’expression sociale, révèle à la fois son unité significative dans l’intention, et son ambiguïté constitutive comme expression subjective, avouant contre la pensée’ (emphasis mine). 30  C[onnop] T[hirlwall], ‘On the Irony of Sophocles’, Philological Museum 2 (1833), 483–

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deeply engaged with contemporary German scholarship, an effort to overcome seven decades of sclerosis in the English humanities; other members included Thirlwall’s co-­editor Julius Charles Hare, with whom he also translated Barthold Niebuhr’s Römische Geschichte in 1828, and John William Donaldson, whom we shall meet below. The first volume of the Museum had included a translation of Buttmann’s 1808 lecture on Horace that we encountered earlier.31 Like Seven Types a century later, ‘On the Irony of Sophocles’ is elegantly written and dense with interpretive insight, but lacking in theoretical clarity.32 It opens with a priamel distinguishing its subject from the more traditional variety of irony, namely the ‘verbal irony’ familiar to rhetoric, the ‘figure’ of saying one thing and meaning the opposite. By contrast, the Sophoclean type, which Thirlwall calls ‘practical irony’, is not a verbal figure at all: it is performative rather than rhetorical, manifested in the actions and words of human beings, but not expressed by them. He imagines the disinterest with which our mortal coil is observed by a loftier being, whether man himself in a position of authority—the judge before two earnest litigants—or God. It appears whenever fate seems to mock our efforts, revealing as worthless that which we long sought; and when we consider such instances in retrospect, ‘we can scarcely refrain from a melancholy smile’ (487). That smile, kindred perhaps to that of Kierkegaard, conveys a rueful amusement at what might be understood as a cosmic wit. It is ‘the look which a superior intelligence . . . capable of surveying all our relations, and foreseeing the consequences of all our actions, would at the time have cast upon the tumultuous workings of our blind ambition and our groundless apprehensions’.33 At this juncture in Thirlwall’s essay, irony is translated to the theatre: ‘The dramatic poet is the creator of a little world, in which he rules with absolute sway . . .’ (490).34 Sophocles had sought to imitate the nature of divine justice, the irony of fate, in the com537. On this see Sedgewick, Of Irony, pp. 7–27; A. R. Thompson, The Dry Mock: A Study of Irony in Drama (Berkeley, 1948), pp. 143–49; Dane, The Critical Mythology, pp. 121–36; Simon Goldhill, Sophocles and the Language of Tragedy (Oxford, 2012), pp. 253–56; Christoph Menke, ‘The Aesthetics of Tragedy: Romantic Perspectives’, in Tragedy and the Idea of Modernity, ed. Joshua Billings and Miriam Leonard (Oxford, 2015), pp. 42–58. 31  See Chapter Five above, pp. 230–235. 32  Menke, ‘The Aesthetics of Tragedy’, pp. 45–47. 33  Although Thirlwall does not mention it, God had in fact revealed an amusement of this kind at Gen. 3:22, when in the aftermath of the Fall he exclaimed ‘Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil’ (KJV)—a line that long troubled exegetes as an apparent expression of divine sarcasm. 34  Compare William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespear’s Plays (London, 1817), p. 90: ‘He saw both sides of a question, the different views taken of it according to the different interests of the parties concerned’.

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pass of his own narratives, ‘consider[ing] his own most important function to be that of interpreting [God’s] decrees’. This concept of practical irony, both in fate and in drama, has been incalculably influential. It stands in the same relation to the old rhetorical irony as inspired ambiguity stands to artificial ambiguity: in each case the agent of the effect is unconscious of it, and in each case it communicates a higher, divine or quasi-­divine truth to an audience of whom the agent is unaware. But just as the irony of fate looks like cosmic wit, so the irony of drama—dramatic irony—looks like witty, artificial ambiguity, to those playgoers who feel they are sharing a joke with the author at the characters’ expense. When we come to examine examples of Sophoclean irony revealed in verbal ambiguities, we will see that they share in both the inspired and the artificial types; in fact, a perfect fusion of the two categories. Thirlwall’s irony would have been impossible without that of Schlegel, but the two are not the same; a series of important steps separate them. It was obvious to English contemporaries that the sources for his ideas were German, though they could not specify any names. In 1865 the historian of drama Julius Leopold Klein would posit the influence on Thirlwall of two philosophers—Friedrich Schleiermacher and Karl Solger—without further precision.35 Thirlwall’s knowledge of the former cannot be doubted, but Schleiermacher was not known for his work on irony.36 Solger, by contrast, was a major Romantic theorist of irony, and his impact on Thirlwall is sometimes reiterated by modern scholars.37 Solger’s first publication in 1808 was a translation of Sophocles, with a preface explaining tragedy in conventional terms as the culmination of Greek literary form after epic and lyric; but there was not yet any perceived link between tragedy and irony, and so we find no mention of it. Over the next decade, however, Solger developed his idea of irony with Sophocles as star witness, along with Shakespeare, who had been Schlegel’s candidate.38 Irony, for Solger, 35  Julius Leopold Klein, Geschichte des griechischen und römischen Drama’s, 2 vols (Leipzig, 1865), I, pp. 318–19. For Klein, the concept of tragic irony ‘der Grösse der Tragödie wenig frommt, ihre Erschütterungs-­und Läuterungskraft vielmehr nur schwächen, und über das Herz einen erkaltenden Hauch wehen muss’. 36  Though see Strohschneider-­Kohrs, Die romantische Ironie, pp. 97–100. Sedgewick, Dramatic Irony, pp. 237–40, suggests the influence of Tieck and Schleiermacher, though without detailed analysis. 37  Muecke, Irony and the Ironic (London, 1982), p. 28; Behler, Ironie, p. 243. Thirlwall’s only direct reference to Solger is in ‘On a Passage of the Philoctetes of Sophocles’, Philological Museum 2 (1833), 468–72, at p. 469, criticising a line in Solger’s translation of the play. On Solger’s irony, see Prang, Die romantische Ironie, pp. 22–26, Strohschneider-­Kohrs, Die romantische Ironie, pp. 185–214, and Dane, The Critical Mythology, pp. 93–9, with some confusion. 38  Karl Solger, Erwin: Vier Gespräche über das Schöne und die Kunst (Berlin, 1815), p. 282; idem, ‘Beurtheilung der Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur’ (1819), in Nachgelassene Schriften und Briefwechsel, ed. Ludwig Tieck and Friedrich von Raumer, 2 vols

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contains ‘the true centre of the entire dramatic art’; it is the objectifying quality of drama that makes tragic bitterness and comic ferocity bearable to us, for it ‘raises us up over everything’.39 As with Schlegel, it is that which ‘perfectly unites freedom with necessity and contemplation with wit’, an aspect of God himself, and so also an ‘imitation’ of his actions.40 And as with Schlegel, Solger is vague on specifics: irony is a central feature of drama, but his examples extend only to the level of authors or plays (he mentions Oedipus at Colonus), and he feels no need to offer any analysis of narrative, character, or language. Given Solger’s association of irony with drama, and in particular with Sophocles, he would seem a plausible candidate as a source for Thirlwall. But Thirlwall never mentions him, nor Schlegel or any of the other Romantic theorists in his essay. The Germans whose work he knew and admired, in fact, inhabited a different world, that of classical philology, or more broadly the disciplines gathered under the aegis of Altertumswissenschaft. All over the country, both in the universities and in the advanced, classics-­ teaching gymnasiums, scholars of every stripe were making the continent of antiquity their own, and Greek poetry, regarded as the zenith of human literary achievement, enjoyed special favour. Sophocles excited the most interest of all; in 1855 Hermann Bonitz, a hellenist of some renown, remarked that no other Greek poet had been given so much attention over the past five decades, noting both editions and a growing corpus of monographs.41 The swell of such interest led to a seminal performance of the Antigone for Friedrich Wilhelm III in 1841, on which the philologist August Böckh collaborated with an ageing Ludwig Tieck, with music by Felix Mendelssohn.42 At the same time, Romantic ideas about irony were diffused among a wider array of German intellectuals, and it was one of these, the prominent judge and playwright Karl Immermann, through whom the new irony came to Thirlwall, as a footnote in the essay makes plain. In 1827 Immermann, then based at Düsseldorf, published a study (Leipzig, 1826), II, 493–628, at pp. 513–14; idem, Vorlesungen über Aesthetik, ed. K. W. L. Heyse (Leipzig, 1829), pp. 243, 248. Compare Friedrich Schlegel, Literarische Notizen 1797– 1801, ed. Hans Eichner (Frankfurt, 1980), p. 231 (from 1797–98). 39  Solger, ‘Beurtheilung’, p. 514: ‘die Ironie uns über alles erhöbe’, ‘Ironie, in welcher er den wahren Mittelpunct der ganzen dramatischen Kunst erkennt’. 40  Solger, Erwin, p. 284: ‘vollkommenste die Freiheit mit der Nothwendigkeit, und mit dem Witze die Betrachtung vereinen’. 41  Hermann Bonitz, ‘Beiträge zur Erklärung des Sophokles’, Sitzungsberichte der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften: Philosophisch-­Historische Classe 17 (1855), 395–480, at p. 395. 42  Jason Geary, The Politics of Appropriation: German Romantic Music and the Ancient Greek Legacy (Oxford, 2014), pp. 28–78. See Edith Hall and Fiona Macintosh, Greek Tragedy and the British Theatre 1660–1914 (Oxford, 2005), pp. 316–32 on British performances of the new version.

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of the Ajax.43 In a chapter on ‘tragic irony’, he applied Solger’s abstract dicta to capsule readings of Sophocles and Shakespeare.44 ‘Irony’, he wrote, ‘is among the means by which the representation is separated from that which it represents, and by which the form is distinguished as an artform.’45 The playwright distances himself from his object so as to see and understand it more clearly, and extends this view also to us: The poet wants to give us the higher perspective of truth, from which Ajax appears as an ordinary person and his case as a problematic event that can be interpreted in two ways. We have often said that this treatment of the matter is ironic. The appearance of opposites is represented by the poet, and as he unfolds them ever more by dialectic, the real truth emerges at the outermost point. In imitating the laws of nature, the tragic art adopts this method as soon as it represents the coincidence of human destinies.46

So far, so Solgerian; but Immermann goes into further detail about exactly what is ironic in these plays. For instance, in Oedipus Rex the protagonist, for whom no riddle is too hard, is himself a riddle, and as he strives to solve it, he gets only nearer to catastrophe. But in suffering such a catastrophe he serves to glorify the sacred laws it manifests. The higher vision 43  Karl Immermann, Über den rasenden Ajax des Sophocles: eine ästhetische Abhandlung (Magdeburg, 1826), cited by Thirlwall at ‘On the Irony’, p. 535, n. 29; in the 1851 German translation of his essay (see n. 19 below) the footnote is eliminated, obscuring Thirlwall’s debt. 44  Immermann, Über den rasenden Ajax, pp. 68–73. On Immermann’s concept of irony, see Dieter Büter, Karl L. Immermann: Die Entwicklung seines literartheoretischen Denkens im Spiegel der kritischen und theoretischen Schriften (Cologne, 1978), pp. 52–57, and on his admiration for Solger, see Henrik Karge, ‘ “Denn die Kunst ist selbst nicht Absolutes . . .”: Karl Immermann, Karl Schnaase und die Theorie der Düsseldorfer Malerschule’, in Epigonentum und Originalität, ed. Peter Hasubek (Frankfurt, 1997), pp. 111–140, at 126–27. Immermann’s notion of tragic irony would be mocked as a Solgerian fad by Friedrich Wilhelm Genthe, Aesthetische Abhandlung über den Kyklops des Euripides, affixed to Euripides, Cyclops, ed. Genthe (Halle, 1836), pp. 89–90. 45  Immermann, Über den rasenden Ajax, p. 70: ‘Die Ironie gehört zu den Mitteln, wodurch die Darstellung von dem Dargestellten gesondert, und die Form als Kunstform ausgeprägt wird.’ 46  Ibid., pp. 69–70:

Der Dichter will uns also eigentlich auf einem höhern Standpunkte der Wahrheit orientiren, von welchem herab Ajax als ein gewöhnlicher Mensch, und sein Fall als ein problematisches, doppelt zu deuten-­des Ereigniß erscheint. Wir haben zu öftern gesagt, daß diese Behandlung des Stoffs ironisch sey. Der Schein des Entgegengesetzten wird vom Dichter dargestellt, und indem er diesen dialektisch immer mehr entfaltet, tritt auf dem äußersten Punkte die Wirklichkeit hervor. Die tragische Kunst nimmt, in Nachahmung der Naturgesetzte, diese Behandlungsweise in sich auf, sobald sie die Verknüpfung der Menschenschicksale darstellt.

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afforded by his apotheosis in Oedipus at Colonus reveals that his accidental crimes, however terrible, are only part of his humanity and, as such, annihilated in his death. Shakespeare’s Juliet, so proficient at deceiving her parents, accidentally deceives Romeo; it is only by the lovers’ death that the family feud which killed them can be resolved. In each case, irony is a dramatic manifestation of the fatal coincidence of opposites; it is identifiable neither in language nor in particular scenes, but rather at the level of the plot as a whole. The turn from Schlegel to Solger to Immermann was a movement towards the particular: from irony as a general feature of poetry, to irony embodied in Sophocles, to irony manifested in specific narratives. In the last is found the essence of Thirlwall’s concept. It is evident that the Cambridge critic’s taste never extended to the speculative excesses of Schlegel, Solger, or others such as Adam Müller; he dispensed with abstraction and expressed his theory in a style that, given its wellspring, is impressively familiar and concrete. Moreover, unlike the philosophers, Thirlwall was most interested in details, and the remainder of his essay, a sequence of close readings of Sophoclean tragedies, succeeds magnificently where none before him, even Immermann, had even tried: the theory of irony is made usable in the explanation of individual passages, which in turn are granted a greater meaning and significance by being placed in dialogue with a conception of the whole play, the whole art. We may give two examples. The first case, and to us the most obvious, is Oedipus Rex, whose plot Thirlwall gives in detail (494–498). A key feature of the narrative, for Thirlwall, is that the progressive revelations of Oedipus’s guilt emerge from actions that reflect his self-­confidence. This is especially true of the climactic scene, related by a messenger, in which the protagonist laments his fate and plucks out his own eyes. The irony is that his literal vision had been accompanied by a figurative blindness, whereas now his literal blindness goes with a figurative clarity: The feeling by which he is urged . . . to verify the seer’s prediction, is not the horror of the light and of all the objects it can present to him, but indignation at his own previous blindness. The eyes which have served him so ill, which have seen without discerning what it was most important for him to know, shall be for ever extinguished. (499) Thirlwall’s philological orientation is here keenly evident, for his reading of the messenger’s paraphrase of Oedipus depends on an unorthodox emendation by Bonitz’s old teacher, the revered Leipzig scholar Gottfried Hermann. The common version of the lines runs: He struck his own eyeballs, proclaiming that they would never see [opsointo]

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such evils as he had suffered or done, but would see in darkness those whom they should not have seen, and not know those whom he desired to know.47 (1270–1274)

As the great classicist Richard Claverhouse Jebb would later explain, those whom Oedipus should not have seen are Jocasta and their children, while those whom he desired to know are his parents.48 Hermann, in his 1823 edition of Oedipus, substituted for the future opsointo the archaic (and indeed unattested) aorist opsainto, ‘they had seen’, despite no manuscript witness, on the principle of lectio difficilior.49 This change altered the entire tenor of the speech, which was now as follows: He struck his own eyeballs, proclaiming that, as they had never seen such evils as he had suffered or done, at least they would see in darkness those whom they should not have seen, and not know those whom he desired to know.

Hermann’s version not only makes Oedipus’s rationale more explicit—he ‘gives, as he ought to give, the reason why he has blinded himself’50—but from Thirlwall’s perspective it also delivers the whole ironic meaning of the speech, and of the play as a whole, namely, ‘the contrast between the appearance of good and the reality of evil’ (500). This is typical of his technique: again and again, he mobilises cutting-­edge philological observations in the service of a broader interpretation of Sophocles’s dramatic art. The whole and the part are in constant conversation. Thirlwall’s next case of Sophoclean irony, from the Electra, is similar. The old Tutor arrives with news that Orestes has been killed in a chariot accident; Clytaemnestra declares that justice has been done for turning Sophocles, Fabulae, ed. H. Lloyd-­Jones and N. G. Wilson (Oxford, 1990), p. 170:

47 

. . . ἔπαισεν ἄρθρα τῶν αὑτοῦ κύκλων, αὐδῶν τοιαῦθ᾽, ὁθούνεκ᾽ οὐκ ὄψοιντό νιν οὔθ᾽ οἷ᾽ ἔπασχεν οὔθ᾽ ὁποῖ᾽ ἔδρα κακά, ἀλλ᾽ ἐν σκότῳ τὸ λοιπὸν οὓς μὲν οὐκ ἔδει ὀψοίαθ᾽, οὓς δ᾽ ἔχρῃζεν οὐ γνωσοίατο. 48  Sophocles, The Plays and Fragments, ed. Richard Claverhouse Jebb, 7 vols (Cambridge, 1883–96), I, p. 231n. 49  Sophocles, Tragoediae, eds C. G. A. Erfurdt and J. G. J. Hermann, 2nd ed., 6 vols (Leipzig, 1823–25), II, pp. 230–231. Hermann’s emendation would be followed by a number of editors, mostly German, and then forgotten; Frederick Blaydes, in his edition of Sophocles, 2 vols (London, 1859–60), I, p. 172, commented dismissively that Hermann and his acolytes ‘seem to have misunderstood the sense of the passage’. 50  Ibid., p. 231n: ‘rationem reddit et debebat reddere Oedipus, cur in oculos saeviret’.

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against her, and taunts Electra, who threatens her in return. Neither knows what the Tutor and the audience do, that Orestes is in fact still alive: Electra. Now your misfortune is to be lamented, Orestes, when, being as you are, you are mocked by your mother. Is it not well, indeed? Clytaemnestra. Not with you; but as he is, he is well. Electra. Hear, Nemesis of the newly dead! Clytaemnestra. She who ought to be heard has heard, and has ordained well. Electra. You may well mock us, for fortune is now on your side! Clytaemnestra. Will you and Orestes not stop me, then?51 (788– 795)

Mackail in 1908 chose this exchange to illustrate polysemous Sophoclean irony: ‘Not a word that any one of the three [characters] says but means something different to the speaker, to each of the two hearers, and to us. For dramatic complexity and compression this scene is all but unequalled. One feels as though in an electric storm, played about by a hundred lightnings.’52 The perspective of this account is that of the dazzled playgoer seeing that those onstage are not aware of all relevant facts, and so of all meanings: the audience knows that Orestes is ‘well’, in spite of his mother’s sarcasm, and that he and his sister will stop her. Moreover, the repeated ‘well’ (kalōs) and ‘hear’ (akouein) are examples of the ‘live element’, of the ‘little word’ that ‘means different things in the mouth of each one who uses it’. Thirlwall noticed the same basic quality in the exchange as Mackail, but his analysis of it is different, and we must be wary of reading the later idea back into his essay. For Thirlwall, this scene, like that in Oedipus Rex, emphasises the contrast between appearance (the triumph of Clytaemnestra over Orestes and Electra) and reality (their triumph over her), heightened by the mother’s heedless taunting: ‘Clytemnestra’s sophistical vindication of her own conduct also assumes a tone of self mockery, which is deeply tragical, when we remember that, while she is pleading, her doom is sealed, Sophocles, Fabulae, ed. Lloyd-­Jones and Wilson, pp. 90–91:

51 

Ἠ. νῦν γὰρ οἰμῶξαι πάρα, Ὀρέστα, τὴν σὴν ξυμφοράν, ὅθ᾽ ὧδ᾽ ἔχων πρὸς τῆσδ᾽ ὑβρίζῃ μητρός. ἆρ᾽ ἔχει [pro ἔχω] καλῶς; Κ. οὔτοι σύ· κεῖνος δ᾽ ὡς ἔχει καλῶς ἔχει. Ἠ. ἄκουε, Νέμεσι τοῦ θανόντος ἀρτίως. Κ. ἤκουσεν ὧν δεῖ κἀπεκύρωσεν καλῶς. Ἠ. ὕβριζε· νῦν γὰρ εὐτυχοῦσα τυγχάνεις. Κ. οὔκουν Ὀρέστης καὶ σὺ παύσετον τάδε; Mackail, Lectures on Greek Poetry, p. 153.

52 

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and that the hand which is about to execute it is already lifted above her head.’ Moreover, the scene ‘affords a very happy illustration of the difference between practical and verbal irony. The poet makes Clytaemnestra use what she conceives to be language of bitter irony, while she is really uttering simple truth’ (504). Here the focus is not on the spectator, as with Mackail, but on the playwright; Thirlwall mentions ‘language’ but not specific verbal features, nor the audience’s awareness that the women’s words are truer than they realise, but only the ironic effect of localising a deep, fatal contrast within a single exchange. Thirlwall, then, does not straightforwardly give us the concept of dramatic irony with which we are familiar today; its elements are present but not foregrounded. Most of all, his concept, unlike ours, is rooted in the experience not of the spectators but of the poet. How, then, did we get from Thirlwall to Mackail, from ‘practical irony’, still grounded in a Romantic vision of the playwright as god, to our dramatic irony, an affective category deeply concerned with double meanings? The discrepancy was noted already by Sedgewick in 1913, but he did not trace the development from one to the other.53 In the final section of this chapter, I sketch the transition in greater detail. But Thirlwall’s theory, as I have suggested above, was indebted less to philosophy than to contemporary philology, and that philology was increasingly concerned with just the sorts of ambiguities and double meanings that Mackail would see in the Electra. To fully understand the 1833 essay, then, we need to examine how earlier critics had conceptualised the effects Thirlwall would theorise as ‘irony’. Iron Dippings The ancient scholiasts already noticed the perspectival duality of tragic action and language we now call dramatic irony.54 A disapproving scholium at OT 264 admitted that the effect ‘moved the audience’ but found it incompatible with semnotēs, the piety or solemnity suitable to tragedy, and noted that it was prevalent in Euripides but only occasional in Sophocles.55 53  Sedgewick, Dramatic Irony, pp. 59–90, 251. The discrepancy is also noted in Dane, The Critical Mythology, p. 122, and again at p. 133, asserting that although ‘it may well be impossible to date the origin’ of the modern notion of dramatic irony, it is ‘essentially a twentieth-­ century one’. This is incorrect, as I will show below. 54  Stanford, Ambiguity, p. 24; Sedgewick, Of Irony, p. 50. 55  Scholia in Sophoclis tragoedias vetera, ed. Petrus Papageorgius (Leipzig, 1888), p. 178: ‘αἵ τοιαῦται ἔννοιαι οὐκ ἔχονται μέν τοῦ σεμνοῦ κινητικαί δέ εἰσι τοῦ θεάτρου· αἷς καί πλεονάζει Εὐριπίδης, ὁ δέ Σοφοκλῆς πρός βραχύ μόνον αὑτῶν ἅπτεται πρός τό κινῆσαι τό θέατρον.’ For the background, see Marco Fantuzzi, ‘Tragic Smiles: When Tragedy Gets Too Comic for Aristotle and later Hellenistic Readers’, in Hellenistic Studies at a Crossroads: Exploring Texts, Contexts and Metatexts, ed. Richard Hunter et al. (Berlin, 2014), pp. 215–33.

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The linguistic aspect became increasingly the object of commentary with the growth of tragic criticism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. A fine instance may be seen in an 1808 article by the London-­ based Welsh classicist John Jones (1766–1827) for John Aikin’s literary journal—not to be confused with that of the Schlegels—the Athenaeum. The article concerns neither Sophocles nor Euripides, but Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, a play that the humanist titan Claude Saumaise had once deemed more obscure than anything in the Bible.56 In an established crux, Clytaemnestra delivers a speech before the Herald and Chorus, professing her love for her absent husband: Let him come with all speed, his country’s fond desire, come to find at home his wife faithful, even as he left her, a watchdog of his house, loyal to him, a foe to those who wish him ill; yes, for the rest, unchanged in every part; in all this length of time never having broken any seal. Of pleasure from any other man or one of scandalous repute I know no more than of bronze dippings [khalkou baphas].57 (605–612, tr. Herbert Weir Smyth, adapted)

It is the last phrase, khalkou baphas, literally the dippings of bronze— although khalkos can denote other metals too—that occasions mystery. The scholiast paraphrases the couplet: ‘I know not the dipping of iron, nor such pleasure of another man’, suggesting that it refers to the quenching of iron (not bronze) in water, with sexual overtones.58 Thomas Stanley, who published the first critical edition of Aeschylus and scholia in 1663, followed suit by rendering khalkou as ferri, ‘iron’.59 Still, the allusion is obscure, and 56  Claude Saumaise, De hellenistica commentarius (Leiden, 1643), p. 37. On ambiguities in the Agamemnon, see Sedgewick, Of Irony, pp. 54–59, Stanford, Ambiguity, pp. 137–62. 57  Aeschylus, Tragoediae, ed. Martin West (Stuttgart, 1998), pp. 221–2:

ἥκειν ὅπως τάχιστ᾽ ἐράσμιον πόλει: γυναῖκα πιστὴν δ᾽ ἐν δόμοις εὕροι μολὼν οἵαν περ οὖν ἔλειπε, δωμάτων κύνα ἐσθλὴν ἐκείνῳ, πολεμίαν τοῖς δύσφροσιν, καὶ τἄλλ᾽ ὁμοίαν πάντα, σημαντήριον οὐδὲν διαφθείρασαν ἐν μήκει χρόνου. οὐδ᾽ οἶδα τέρψιν οὐδ᾽ ἐπίψογον φάτιν ἄλλου πρὸς ἀνδρὸς μᾶλλον ἢ χαλκοῦ βαφάς. 58  Scholia Graeca in Aeschylum quae exstant omnia, ed. O. L. Smith, 2 vols (Leipzig, 1976), I, p. 149: ‘Ὥσπερ οὐκ οἶδα τάς βαφὰς του σιδήρου, οὐδέ ἡδονὴν ἑτέρου ἀνδρός’. On the scholia see Eleanor Dickey, Ancient Greek Scholarship (Oxford, 2007), pp. 35–38. 59  Aeschylus, Tragoediae septem cum scholiis graecis omnibus, ed. Thomas Stanley (London, 1663), p. 341: ‘Haud novi voluptatem, neque inhonestum sermonem / Ab alio viro magis quam ferri tincturam.’

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after Stanley, commentators—mostly English amateurs and German academics, an illustrative professional contrast—struggled with it: Friedrich Ludwig Abresch, Jan Cornelis de Pauw (who wanted to emend), Benjamin Heath (who slapped down Pauw’s emendation), Robert Potter, Christian Gottfried Schütz, and Samuel Butler Sr all produced varying interpretations, or admitted bafflement.60 Jones’s approach to the line was different. Like Schütz the following year, he thought the image was primarily a metaphor for the wound of a blade, and paraphrases: ‘I knew no pleasure with any man, and felt no more the sting of calumny than the point of steel.’ However, this is only the sentiment that Clytaemnestra conveys to the Herald, for her ‘language is studiously equivocal: and in this peculiarity at once consisted the skill and the obscurity of it’. The phrase allou pros andros, ‘by another man’, is a squinting construction: it may agree (as all had assumed) with ‘pleasure’, giving the sense above, or with khalkou baphas, in which case the sense is ‘I know no greater pleasure, though no report more disgraceful, than the steel plunged in him by another man’. As the audience knows, this is just what will happen to Agamemnon.61 Indeed, when she leaves the room the Chorus indicate (615–616) the disjunct between the Herald’s understanding of the words and their own. Jones also sees revelation in the tone of the phrase, which in the first sense ‘is too violent for the simplicity of the sentiment’, whereas in the second ‘it exacts the dark ambiguity of prophetic language; and the boldness of it comes up to that vehemence and glow of pleasure with which she anticipated the plunging of the weapon in the bosom of the husband.’62 Two elements of this reading deserve notice. First, its allusion to prophecy marks a recurrent and extremely important connection: the same link had been made two centuries earlier by Vossius, but in the 60  Friedrich Ludwig Abresch, Animadversionum ad Aeschylum libri duo, 2 vols (Middelburg, 1743), I, pp. 320–21, Aeschylus, Tragoediae superstites, tr. Thomas Stanley, ed. Johan Cornelis de Pauw, 2 vols (Hague, 1745), II, p. 982, Benjamin Heath, Notae sive lectiones ad tragicorum Graecorum veterum quae supersunt dramata (Oxford, 1772), p. 73, Aeschylus, Tragedies, tr. Robert Potter, 2nd ed., 2 vols (London, 1779), II, pp. 52–53, Aeschylus, Tragoediae quae supersunt ac deperditarum fragmenta, ed. Christian Gottfried Schütz, 5 vols (Halle, 1809), II, p. 239, Samuel Butler, ‘In Agamemnon notae variorum et criticae’, in Aeschylus, Tragoediae superstites, ed. Butler, 4 vols (Cambridge, 1809–16), II, p. 41 (sig. Zzzr). For a handy summary of these views, see Aeschylus, Agamemnon, tr. John Symmons (London, 1824), pp. 56–57. On the context see M. L. Clarke, Greek Studies in England, 1700–1830 (Cambridge, 1945). 61  Moreover, not only does the ‘dipping of steel’ suggest a stab-­wound, but the image of dipping in water also seems to allude to Agamemnon’s fatal bath. For another reading, see Philip Wheelwright, The Burning Fountain: A Study in the Language of Symbolism (Bloomington, IA, 1954), pp. 235–8. 62  John Jones, ‘Passage in Aeschylus Explained’, The Athenaeum 3 (January to June 1808), 221–22. The double meaning is also in the most appropriate part of the line, namely the end, as if the punchline of a joke. If this is correct, the delivery would ideally pause here for emphasis: ‘I know no more than of—bronze dippings’.

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meantime, as we have seen, it had acquired a particular resonance in Christian discussions about the Old Testament.63 Second, the ambiguity reflects both Clytaemnestra’s ‘pleasure’ and her and Aeschylus’s verbal ‘skill’, two key components of the ingenuity with which we have associated ambiguous language throughout this book. The skill and the pleasure, as always, belonged also to the reader, whose detection of double meaning served a critical purpose: not only did it solve the mystery, it explained the reason for the mystery in the first place, and its explanation was not mere chance or infelicity, but a deliberate device which served to unify disparate scenes and contrasting messages (her marital devotion to Agamemnon and the threat of his murder) in a single design. Thirlwall would have seen practical irony in the fatal contrast; we are more inclined to discern the dramatic irony by which the playgoer and the Herald onstage understand the same words differently. Jones was delighted enough with his solution to incorporate it into an article on ‘Greek Language’ for the Cyclopaedia edited by his father-­in-­law Abraham Rees.64 To turn from London to a German example, tragic ambiguity is a recurrent feature in the critical footnotes of Gottfried Hermann’s editions of Sophocles. That Hermann should have been interested in wordplay ought not to surprise us, for he was known at the time for his devotion, against the school of his contemporary August Böckh, to the minute grammatical study of ancient languages.65 A century later, in a department of English literature, he would have been a New Critic. His taste for ambiguity may be seen most crisply in the notes to his two editions (1819 and 1825) of the Electra. At lines 1324–1325 (in modern lineation) Electra, plotting with Orestes, who is thought dead, refers to ‘a thing that nobody could turn away from the house or be glad to receive’; Hermann sees here ‘the ambiguity commonly used by the tragedians, for the servants must understand these words to refer to the ashes of the dead Orestes, but she herself means the living man’.66 In the final scene, the exchange between Electra and Aegisthus, newly returned home and shortly to be offed, is rife with ambiOn Vossius, see Chapter Five above, p. 199, and on Warburton see Chapter Seven, p.

63 

300.

64  [John Jones], ‘Greek Language’, in Cyclopaedia, ed. Abraham Rees, 39 vols (London, 1819), XVI, sig. 4Y2r–v. 65  J. E. Sandys, A History of Classical Scholarship, 3 vols (Cambridge, 1906–8), III, pp. 89–92. 66  Sophocles, Fabulae, ed. Lloyd-­Jones and Wilson, p. 111: ‘ἄλλως τε καὶ φέροντες οἷ᾽ ἂν οὔτε τις / δόμων ἀπώσαιτ᾽ οὔτ᾽ ἂν ἡσθείη λαβών’. Sophocles, Electra, ed. Gottfried Hermann (Leipzig, 1819), p. 154 at (his) 1315: ‘Ea res movet Electram, ut ea respondeat, quae sine periculo audire possint domestici. In quibus notanda usitata tragicis ambiguitas. Nam domesticos haec de cinere mortui Orestis intelligere necesse est: ipsa de vivo intelligit, qui acceptus amicis, metuendus hostibus redierit.’ Eduard Wunder, in his edition of Sophocles, Tragoediae, 2 vols (Gotha, 1844), I, p. 135, sees a slightly different ambiguity in this passage.

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guities. At first he interrogates her as to the whereabouts of the foreigners who supposedly brought news of Orestes’s death; she replies that she knows, for otherwise ‘συμφορᾶς . . . ἔξωθεν εἴην τῶν ἐμῶν γε φιλτάτων [or τῆς φιλτάτης]’ (1448–1449). In 1819, Hermann read the first—meaning ‘I would be unaware of the fortune of those I hold dearest’—and saw ambiguity in sumphoras, ‘fortune’, referring either sincerely to her own good fortunes, or, as Aegisthus would take it, ironically to the (imagined) misfortunes of Orestes.67 But by 1825 he had changed his mind, preferring the singular tēs philtatēs, ‘dearest’, attested in other manuscripts. This created a further ambiguity, for it permitted ‘dearest’ to be construed with ‘fortunes’, with the overall sense, ‘I would be unaware of the fortunes of my own, about which I am very glad’. Glad because, unbeknownst to Aegisthus, Orestes is well and revenge is imminent.68 Further pregnant double meanings ensue between Electra and Aegisthus, and Hermann continues to comment; we need not list them all.69 It is striking how untheoretical his notes are, closely fixated on textual problems and, while keenly aware that ambiguity is a common and potent technique in tragic drama, reluctant to situate the device within any broader consideration of dramatic art. With this in mind, his analysis of Electra 1448–1449 may be contrasted to another written in the immediate wake of Thirlwall’s essay. This appears in the 1837 edition of the play by the American scholar Theodore Dwight Woolsey, who studied Greek at Leipzig under Hermann before taking the chair of Greek Language and Literature at Yale College in 1831; he was subsequently elected college president.70 His notes make frequent reference to Hermann’s, including to the latter’s analysis of ambiguity, but at 1448–1449 he takes a step further than his former mentor, perhaps without quite realising it: This is the first of a number of passages containing a double sense, in which divine justice, by the mouth of Electra, scoffs at the miserable man, and shows most fearfully with what entire security and raised hope he is rushing upon his destruction. The sense conveyed to Aegisthus was: For I should be a stranger to a calamity of my friends that most intimately concerns me. But Electra really meant: For I should be a

Sophocles, Electra, ed. Hermann (1819), p. 168, at (his) 1441. Sophocles, Electra, ed. Gottfried Hermann, 2nd ed. (Leipzig, 1825), pp. 208–9, at (his) 1441. 69  Notably, at Electra 1451 (his 1443), missed in Hermann 1819 but analysed in Hermann 1825, p. 210, and at 1464 (his 1456), on which see both Hermann 1819, p. 171, and Hermann 1825, p. 212. 70  On Woolsey and his American contemporaries at Leipzig, including remarks on Hermann, see Anja Werner, The Transatlantic World of Higher Education: Americans at German Universities, 1776–1914 (New York, 2013), pp. 114–19. 67  68 

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stranger to an event the most dear among events that have occurred to me, i.e. the most welcome.71

Hermann’s observation has here been infused with the spirit of Thirlwall’s ‘practical irony’, if not ornamented with that term. That it is ‘divine justice’ speaking through Electra’s mouth is not only a marvellously biblical picture—and this from an ordained minister, whose papers are awash with scriptural hermeneutics72—it is precisely the conception of the Trinity scholar, especially when coupled with an appreciation of the pathetic contrast between Aegisthus’s ‘security and hope’ on the one hand, and his imminent destruction on the other. In Woolsey’s remark is a perfect example of how Thirlwall’s theory could lend additional force and colour to an older grammatical insight.73 For the remainder of this section I turn to one of the most complex and well-­studied cases of ambiguity in Greek tragedy, from Sophocles’s Ajax; here we will be able to perceive Thirlwall’s relation to his predecessors most vividly. In the first half of the play, the hero, incensed at the Achaean leaders’ decision to award Achilles’s arms to his rival Odysseus, vows a revenge of murder and torture, but is tricked by Athena into slaughtering instead a flock of sheep and cattle. Realising the deception, he now swears suicide at the shame, scorning the entreaties of his concubine Tecmessa. Ajax enters his tent, and, after the Chorus sings a lament, emerges with sword in hand to deliver a long speech—Tecmessa silent onstage—in which he appears to have softened in mood: I who before was so terribly obdurate, Like iron dipped, now soften at the edge Before this woman: I am sorry to leave her A widow, among enemies, with orphaned child.74 (ll. 650–653)

He then declares he will bury his sword, a gift from Hector that has caused him so much pain, and purify himself at the seashore. Tecmessa is gladdened, and the Chorus sings a song of joy. But it is in vain; Ajax goes to the shore, plants the sword in the ground with its blade up, and falls Sophocles, Electra, ed. T. D. Woolsey (Boston, 1837), p. 124. Yale University, Sterling Memorial Library, MS 562, series II, folders 57–119. 73  Compare Thirlwall’s own brief remark, ‘On the Irony’, p. 504, on the conclusion of the play, without any analysis of its verbal ambiguities: ‘Finally, it is in the moment of their highest exultation and confidence, that each of the offenders discovers the inevitable certainty of their impending ruin.’ 74  Sophocles, Fabulae, ed. Lloyd-­Jones and Wilson, p. 27: 71  72 

κἀγὼ γάρ, ὃς τὰ δείν᾽ ἐκαρτέρουν τότε, βαφῇ σίδηρος ὣς, ἐθηλύνθην στόμα πρὸς τῆσδε τῆς γυναικός· οἰκτίρω δέ νιν χήραν παρ᾽ ἐχθροῖς παῖδά τ᾽ ὀρφανὸν λιπεῖν.

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upon it, swearing fresh vengeance on the Achaeans. How to explain his speech, with its complex language and imagery of sublime nature? The intent appears to be mere deception, a counterfeited metanoia before the act of suicide, and hence the speech came to be known at the end of the nineteenth century as the Trugrede.75 This had already been the conclusion of the scholiast, who describes Ajax as ‘charming’ Tecmessa into thinking that he will not commit suicide.76 The end of the speech is more subtle: I am going whither one must go. But do as I tell you, and soon, perhaps, You’ll learn that, though I am now unlucky, I have been saved.77 (ll. 690–692) The scholiast had noticed that ‘the intention to commit suicide is clear to the spectator, but hidden from the Chorus’, and that while the Chorus thinks Ajax means a liberation from illness, he really meant a liberation from the evils of life.78 The hero’s last words, then, offer us not only a deception but an equivocation. This double view remained default in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with much reiteration of the scholia in Latin, English, and German.79 When dealing with lyric poetry, the line-­by-­line critical approach had worked well for centuries in spotting and explaining ambiguities. It was different with drama, in which many double meanings depend on earlier and later events, and so it was only with a fully rounded consideration of the play as a whole—of narrative and its interrelation with character—that critics began to see with clarity the ambiguities of individual words and 75  John Moore, ‘The Dissembling-­Speech of Ajax’, Yale Classical Studies 25 (1977), 47–66, at pp. 49–50. Michael Vickers, Sophocles and Alcibiades: Athenian Politics in Ancient Greek Literature (London, 2014), p. 54, reads Ajax’s deceitfulness as standing in for the character of Alcibiades. 76  Τά ἀρχαῖα σχόλια εἰς Αἴαντα του Σοφοκλέους, ed. Georgios Andreou Christodoulou (Athens, 1977), p. 151 (at line 646). 77  Sophocles, Fabulae, ed. Lloyd-­Jones and Wilson, pp. 28–29:

ἐγὼ γὰρ εἶμ᾽ ἐκεῖσ᾽ ὅποι πορευτέον: ὑμεῖς δ᾽ ἃ φράζω δρᾶτε, καὶ τάχ᾽ ἄν μ᾽ ἴσως πύθοισθε, κεἰ νῦν δυστυχῶ, σεσωσμένον. 78  Τά ἀρχαῖα σχόλια, ed. Christodoulou, p. 158 (at line 687): ‘τά μέν τῆς ἀναιρέσεως δῆλα τῷ θεατή, ἀγνοεῖ δέ ὅ χορός’; p. 159 (at 691): ‘ὅ μέν χορός ἀπαλλάττεσθαι νομίζει λέγειν τῆς νόσου· ὅ δέ αἰνίττεται τῶν κακῶν τοῦ βίου’. 79  For instance, Balthasar Stolberg, Notae historico-­philologicae in Sophoclis tragici Aiacem (Frankfurt an der Oder, 1702), pp. 179, 186–87; Sophocles, Tragedies, tr. Thomas Francklin (London, 1793), p. 29n; Johann Gottlieb Jäger, Annotationes ad Sophoclis Aiacem (Altona, 1811), pp. 90, 96; Sophocles, Tragoedien, ed. Gottlieb Schneider, III: Aias (Weimar, 1825), pp. 89–90.

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sentences.80 This type of consideration was best captured by a different genre of scholarship: the essay. A number of essays of the early to mid-­ nineteenth century grappled in more depth with the Trugrede, and in doing so, they not only enriched the appreciation of Sophocles’s dramatic art, but developed the broader understanding of ambiguity in relation to irony. The first of these, and the most influential, was a piece by the respected Bonn classicist and archaeologist Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker in the Rheinisches Museum (1829), reprinted the same year as a standalone booklet. According to Welcker, it was in keeping neither with Ajax’s character nor with the dramatic grandeur of the scene that he should intentionally deceive Tecmessa and the Chorus: However eloquent [the speech] may be if we read into it the intention to deceive, and a sustained pretence, it will doubtless appear still more beautiful within if we see in it only the truest and sincerest expression of his sentiments, and understand that the suicidal plan is neither gainsaid nor hidden, but simply expressed with not enough clarity for those who fail to grasp the speaker’s implied true feelings, or who would be astounded at such a meaning.81

Ajax speaks a ‘veiled language’ (Welcker paraphrases kekrummenēn baxin, Electra 638) with words that correctly express his feelings, so that the blame for misunderstanding lies with his hearers, who are either heedless (the Chorus) or eager for untruth (Tecmessa). Indeed, Tecmessa later (967) acknowledges that she understands Ajax’s words at last—a good example of how the essay as a form is able to look backwards and especially forwards to make full sense of any given line. When Ajax declares that he is ‘loath’ to leave his wife and child, he is not saying that he will not do so, merely expressing regret; when he announces that he will bury his sword and purify himself, ‘his words contain nothing untrue, for his death by the shore is itself an “atonement-­bath” ’, and Ajax will indeed ‘bury his sword in a secret place, but only to fall upon its tip’.82 Deception was never in the 80  The synoptic approach to the language of plays went hand-­in-­hand with a taste for reading them rather than watching them onstage; on this point, see M. M. Badawi, Coleridge, Critic of Shakespeare (London, 1973), pp. 74–77, and Younglim Ham, Romantic Shakespeare: From Stage to Page (Cranbury, NJ, 2001), p. 16. See also STA, p. 45: ‘Shakespeare . . . gives ironies for the pleasure rather of commentators than of first-­night audiences.’ 81  F. G. Welcker, Über den Aias des Sophokles (Bonn, 1829), p. 108: ‘Wie beredt sie auch immer seyn möge, wenn man die Absicht zu täuschen und durchgängige Verstellung darin liest; so erscheint sie doch in ihrem Innern ohne Zweifel noch weit schöner, wenn man nur den ernstesten und wahrsten Ausdruck der Gesinnung erblickt, und einsicht, daß das Vorhaben des Selbstmords nicht geläugnet noch verhehlt, sondern nur für diejenigen, welche das angedeutete wahre Gefühl des Sprechenden nicht recht faßten oder durch solchen Sinn zu sehr überrascht wurden, nicht klar genug ausgedrückt ist.’ 82  Welcker, Über den Aias, pp. 109–110: ‘enthalten die Worte nichts unwahres: denn der

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hero’s mind; if it had been he could have lied much more straightforwardly. But Sophocles needed the other characters to be fooled for dramatic effect; ambiguity, then, was his solution, a device that allowed both Ajax to be honest and the others to be deceived, despite the slight implausibility for the playgoers. It was also, crucially, a species of wit, with its connotations of delight: as Richard Jebb put it in 1896, the speech must have given playgoers ‘the kind of pleasure which is felt in guessing a riddle’.83 Such ambiguities, once seen, were hard to unsee, even by critics who disagreed as to their significance. Welcker’s supposition served to recuperate deceit—the key manoeuvre we explored in Chapter Three. His innovation was like that of early modern theologians glossing Christ’s deceptions as equivocations.84 But his argument is more sophisticated than theirs, and deserves to be known beyond the realm of Trugrede criticism. In its holistic consideration of language, narrative, and characterisation, it offers the reader a much richer grasp of dramatic meaning, since the agency of Ajax’s speech is no longer a function of his intention as a speaking subject, but spread out over Sophocles’s design for the play as a whole. Welcker thus saves in Ajax the quality Simon Goldhill has seen as ‘integral to the model of tragedy within German idealist thinking’, namely a simplicity and moral strength in the face of catastrophe, but does so by separating Ajax’s meaning from the meaning of his words, reading against the character’s intention, contra proferentem.85 This fracture, a fundamental challenge to the classical picture of intentionality, is the essence of what Thirlwall would call practical irony. Four years later, Thirlwall made his debt to Welcker explicit; he praised it as ‘one of the most valuable contributions that have yet been made to the study of the Greek drama’ (515), and elaborated upon its conclusions, interrogating Ajax’s ambiguity in terms of motivation and circumstance.86 The irony in the Trugrede, he said, was not intentional and rhetorical—the speech itself should not be ‘considered as ironical’ (514)—but practical: Tod selbst am Strande sollte das Bad der Sühne seyn, wodurch er sich von seiner Schuld gegen Athene reinigen wollte; das Schwert wurde wirklich von Ajas an heimlichem Ort eingegraben, aber um in die Spitze desselben sich zu stürzen’. Again, Tecmessa reveals the ambiguity retrospectively in her line at 899: ‘Here lies our Ajax, freshly slain, wrapped around his sword, burying [κρυφαίῳ] it.’ 83  Sophocles, The Plays, ed. Jebb (as at n. 48 above), VII, p. xxxv. Compare Gustav Wolff’s much-­quoted remark in his school edition of the Ajax (Leipzig, 1858), p. 65, n. at line 646, that ambiguity ‘die Athener gern hörten, weil das Durchschauen des αἰνίττεσθαι ein müheloser Triumph ihrer Eitelkeit war’, citing the savage condemnation of sophistical rhetoric at Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, III.38. 84  See Chapter Three above, pp. 120, 122–124. 85  Goldhill, Sophocles, p. 217. On the legal term, see Chapter Two above, pp. 79, 85. 86  The only critic to spot Thirlwall’s dependence on Welcker, to my knowledge, is Behler, Ironie, pp. 222–223.

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Ajax’s words unwittingly revealed the irony of his situation.87 But if the hero did not intend to deceive, how could he describe his planned suicide as a ‘burying’ of the sword? Ajax, argues Thirlwall, had at the forefront of his mind not ‘the fatality of the weapon’ but rather its status as ‘once the object of his pride, a tribute of respect to his valour from a respected enemy, and afterward the instrument of his shame’. The hero’s talk of hiding his sword then becomes a natural, and indeed an ‘emphatic’ description of his final action, ‘when he sheathed it in his own body’. The ambiguity is not only a narrative device, but also tells us something crucial about Ajax’s thoughts.88 Finally, Thirlwall parts gently from Welcker, allowing that Ajax ‘perceived’ the ambiguity of his words while also insisting that ‘he is throughout and thoroughly in earnest’ (520). As with the Oedipus, the irony lies in a coincidence of opposites, and especially in a moment of self-­realisation, for the suicidal anguish of Ajax is also that which cures and purifies him, and just when he is most hardened in his determination he is overcome with concern for others, a concern that unconsciously softens his words before Tecmessa. Again, it is deeply ironic that at the very instant Tecmessa’s fears are relieved by his speech, they are realised by his actions. Welcker’s earlier observation of verbal ambiguity is what allows Thirlwall to maintain his ironic reading of the speech and of the play. Thirlwall’s achievement has hitherto been obscured by a reluctance to read his acknowledged sources: rather than inventing dramatic irony, he deployed an existing conceptual apparatus to unify, and to theorise, a body of existing observations. Solger and Immermann did not have double meanings in mind when they wrote about irony, and Hermann and Welcker did not refer to irony in their analysis of double meanings: it was Thirlwall who brought the two together, positing ambiguity as one of the means to reveal the ironic dissonance between reality and appearance. In Germany, Welcker’s essay was the focus of discussion on the Trugrede for the next two decades, although most rejected his interpretation and its moral assumptions. His friend Ludwig Döderlein at Erlangen saw in the speech dissimulation, bitter irony—in the older rhetorical sense, not the new philosophical one—and finally ‘mental reservation, clear to those who know [Ajax’s] intentions’, underlining the resonance of this discussion with the themes we examined in Chapter Three.89 Just as Thomas Morton accused 87  This sentence represents Thirlwall’s view, but others have thought the speech to contain ironies of the older sort. For instance, the scholiast, Τά ἀρχαῖα σχόλια, ed. Christodoulou, p. 155, sees irony (εἰρωνεία) in the peculiar inversion of verbs at 666–67. 88  R. C. Jebb, in Sophocles, The Plays, ed. Jebb, VII, pp. xxxiv–xxxv, n. 3, rejects this as implausible. 89  Johann Christoph Wilhelm Ludwig Döderlein, ‘De Sophoclis Ajace’, Abhandlung der Philosophisch-­Philolog[isch] Classe der königlich Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (1837), II.1, 107–30, at p. 122: ‘Extrema orationis pars reservationis mentalis, ut ajunt, plena est,

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Jesuits of seeking ‘to deceive men by true speaking, and so make truth a Seducer’, so a critic in 1958 could articulate a position like Döderlein’s by arguing that the ‘oracular manner’ of Ajax’s speech ‘deceives through truth’.90 A similar view was taken by Ludwig Benloew at Göttingen, and by Karl Weismann, who taught at the Fulda gymnasium; the latter added a number of valuable observations, above all that deception was so inimical to Ajax’s nature that ‘as he progresses through his speech, he involuntarily allows the truth to shine through ever more clearly’.91 Here the tragic ‘double voice’ of character and playwright, speaking to characters and audience respectively, has been refashioned into a double voice within Ajax’s psyche. For Weismann, moreover, Welcker and Thirlwall had erred in assuming that the hero’s character must accord with the poet’s moral and religious convictions, and that his behaviour must be exemplary—an error that betrayed modern Christian prejudices. Here was a break from the idealist tradition outlined by Goldhill: the tragic hero was now no longer simple and noble, but cunning and ambivalent. It was only by an analysis of language, of ambiguity, that critics could challenge the profounder concept of tragic character. The same development may be perceived in Thirlwall’s British successors. We may mention two here: Lewis Campbell, Professor of Greek at the University of St Andrews, who wrote a short essay rejecting the use of the term ‘irony’ in Thirlwall’s sense, and Richard Claverhouse Jebb, perhaps the foremost classicist of the late Victorian period, who embraced the term in a lecture given at Dublin.92 Despite their disagreements about Thirlwall’s essay, they had a congruent view of the ambiguities in the Trugrede. Campbell commented on the speech in his 1881 edition of the Ajax. Like Döderlein and others, he took its ambiguities as deliberate equivocations, and even noticed a new and more decisive example. At 651, ethēlunthēn stoma, translated above as ‘I grow soft at the edge’, he comments: ‘stoma, as Ajax gnaris sua sponte dilucidae’. The currency of the term ‘mental reservation’ in Döderlein’s era is unclear to me, though it does appear in Jean Paul Richter’s widely-­read Vorschule der Ästhetik (1804), ed. Karl-­Maria Guth (Berlin, 2013), p. 173 (IX.48). 90  Richmond Lattimore, The Poetry of Greek Tragedy (Baltimore, 1958), p. 71. 91  Ludwig Benloew, De Sophoclis Ajace dissertatio inauguralis (Göttingen, 1839), pp. 15–23; Karl Weismann, Ueber Sophokles Aias (Fulda, 1852), p. 41: ‘Man sieht, Lüge und Verstellung sind seiner Natur so fremd, dass er unwillkürlich deutlich und immer deutlicher, je weiter er in seiner Rede vorschreitet, die Wahrheit durchblicken lässt.’ In the latter we seem to hear an echo of Schlegel: ‘Socratic irony is the only involuntary and yet completely deliberate dissimulation.’ A fuller list of German work on the Ajax, 1800–1850, can be found in Carl Wilhelm Piderit, Scenische Analyse des Sophokleischen Dramas Ajas Mastigophoros (Hersfeld, 1850), p. 2, n. 2. 92  Lewis Campbell, ‘On the So-­Called Irony of Sophocles’, in Sophocles, The Plays and Fragments, ed. Campbell, 2 vols (Oxford, 1871–81), I, pp. 112–18; Richard Claverhouse Jebb, ‘The Genius of Sophocles’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 157 (Nov 1872), 1–15.

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intends his speech to be apprehended, can only mean “edge”, i.e. “resolution”, although by a mental reservation he may understand himself to mean “my speech (only) is softened”.’ That is, Ajax may be stating that his words have changed but not his intention.93 As with the later Germans, Campbell sees the ambiguity as a marker of emotional turbulence, of ‘an actual change of mood—a new phase in the progress of mental recovery’. He agrees with Welcker that deception is not in Ajax’s nature, but this very incongruity ‘only renders the tragic contrast between his nature and his circumstances more complete’, a contrast that Thirlwall would happily have called ironic. In other words, the ambiguities stand as an ‘expression’ of the emotional conflict brought about by fortune.94 Fifteen years Jebb would put forward a similar perspective on the speech, which he regarded as ‘of the first importance’ for understanding the play as a whole. The mistake of previous commentators, in his rather anachronistic judgement, was to have assumed that ‘every part of the speech must bear a similar relation to the real thoughts of Ajax’. Rather, it contained ‘three distinct threads’: sincere and direct expressions, irony without intent to mislead, and ‘artifice of language so elaborate as necessarily to imply such an intention, at any rate when addressed to simple hearers’.95 This division—the effect of which is a sort of second-­order ambiguity about ambiguity, a continual uncertainty as to the protagonist’s sincerity during his speech— can only reflect the complexity of his thoughts, as he maintains his old purpose with new understanding and a new mood of sympathetic piety. All things considered, the subsequent conversation on the Trugrede offered little innovation.96 From the perspective of the history of literary criticism, it is remarkable how far an analysis of ambiguity helped nineteenth-­century scholars to develop a grasp of complex dramatic intention, that is, of the emotional and intellectual division in the mind of a character; echoes of this process can still be seen in the post-­Freudian criticism of the 1920s.97 Two further, divergent narratives remain to be charted: the English reception of Thirlwall’s concept of irony, and the development in Germany of a systematic analysis of dramatic ambiguity. We may first conclude this section with a brief comment in retrospect. At 650–651, Ajax Sophocles, The Plays and Fragments, ed. Campbell, II, pp. 63–64. Sophocles, The Plays, ed. Campbell, II, p. 62, n. at line 646. 95  Sophocles, The Plays, ed. Jebb, III, pp. xxxiii–xxxviii. 96  See esp. Karl Reinhardt, Sophokles (Frankfurt, 1933), p. 31; Bernard Knox, ‘The Ajax of Sophocles’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 65 (1961), 1–37; Moore, ‘The Dissembling-­ Speech of Ajax’; M. Sicherl, ‘The Tragic Issue in Sophocles’ Ajax’, YCS 25 (1977), 67–95; P. T. Stevens, ‘Ajax in the Trugrede’, Classical Quarterly 36 (1986), 327–36; J. C. Kamerbeek, The Plays of Sophocles: Commentaries, Part I: The Ajax, tr. H. Schreuder, rev. A. Parker (Leiden, 1953), pp. 133–45. 97  On which, see Chapter Ten below, pp. 371–380. 93  94 

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declares: ‘I who before was so terribly obdurate, / Like iron dipped, now soften at the edge’. A scholium remarks that ‘the dipping of iron is double: for if it is desired to be soft, it is dipped in oil, if hard, in water.’98 The implication is that the clause ‘like iron dipped’ squints, going either with ‘late so strong’ (if the dipping is in water) or with ‘now grow soft at the edge’ (if in oil).99 Dipped iron, at once soft and hard, turns out to have been the ideal emblem for our divided subject. The Death of the Author Contemporary responses to Thirlwall’s essay were mixed. Non-­academics tended to distrust its foreign heritage—the cleric R. A. Willmott, for instance, was generally approving but said it showed ‘too confident a reliance upon the dancing lights of German criticism’, while the classicist George Burges, in an essay rebuking English scholars for their attachment to Germany, commented that if Thirlwall’s Cambridge lectures were anything like his essay on irony, ‘the fellows came for some other purpose than to be instructed’.100 It is clear from these comments that German work had the same aura in the 1830s as French poststructuralism had among conservative Anglo-­American scholars during the ‘Theory Wars’ of the 1980s. The same mood underpins an 1848 essay by Thomas Dyer, bracketing Thirlwall and Adolf Schöll as newfangled critics who sought to explain classical drama by ideas ‘totally unknown to the Greeks themselves’. In Dyer’s Aristotelian view, the purpose of tragedy was purely to excite the audience’s sympathy; irony, a weapon of philosophical ridicule, was therefore incidental to its effects, and indeed, ‘no tone of mind can be more alien to tragedy, as a whole’.101 98  Τά ἀρχαῖα σχόλια, ed. Christodoulou, p. 154: ‘δισσῶς βάπτεται ὁ σίδηρος· εἰ μέν γάρ μαλθακόν βούλονται αὐτόν εἶναι, ἐλαίῳ βάπτουσιν, εἰ δέ σκιρόν, ὕδατι’. See Pliny the Elder, Natural History, XXXIV.41.146 on tempering with oil. 99  Most scholars have preferred a water-­dipping, but see, for instance, the influential commentary of F. W. Schneidewin in his edition of Sophocles, Tragoediae, 6 vols (Leipzig, 1849– 1864), I, p. 58. 100  [Robert Aris Willmott], ‘One or Two Guesses at One or Two Truths’, Fraser’s Magazine 19 (May 1839), 529–42, at p. 536. [George Burges], ‘English Scholarship: Its Rise, Progress, and Decay’, Church of England Quarterly Review 4 (1838), 91–124, at p 113n. For the attribution of this essay, see Sophocles, Aias, tr. George Burges (London, 1849), p. ii. 101  Thomas Dyer, ‘Sophocles, and his Dramatic Art’, Classical Museum 5 (1848), 65–99, at pp. 65, 73. See also Dyer’s review essay, ‘The Antigone of Sophocles’, Classical Museum 2 (1845), 69–93, at pp. 73–75; the reactionary understanding of Greek tragedy expressed in this review would be pilloried by the renowned Germanist George Henry Lewes, ‘Antigone and its Critics’, Foreign Quarterly Review 35 (1845), 56–74.

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Academic voices were sympathetic, even as they began to boil Thirlwall’s essay down to the simpler idea more familiar to us today. The origin of this process can be attributed to a single individual—Thirlwall’s Trinity colleague John William Donaldson, a brilliant scholar said by one obituarist to have died of overwork, and whose voluminous output spanned technical grammar and comparative philology, theology and biblical exegesis, archaeology and pedagogics.102 Among his earliest interests was the history of Greek literature, and in the mid-­1830s he started to re-­edit The Theatre of the Greeks, an existing anthology of primary and secondary texts for undergraduate use; with each new edition he added more of his own work to the mix. To his first recension of 1836 he added an essay ‘A Treatise on the History and Exhibition of the Greek Drama’, and here we find the very first published reference to Thirlwall’s piece. Donaldson observes that what most distinguishes Greek tragedy from its modern counterpart is ‘the necessity for a previous acquaintance on the part of the audience with the plot . . . and to this is owing the poetical irony with which the poet and the spectators handled or looked upon the characters in the piece’. A footnote makes plain the intellectual debt.103 It is evident that Donaldson has something like the modern idea of dramatic irony already in mind, but he would be much more explicit in his final edition of The Theatre of the Greeks (1860): This irony consists in the contrast, which the spectator, well acquainted with the legendary basis of the tragedy, is enabled to draw between the real state of the case and the conceptions supposed to be entertained by the person represented on the stage.104

The crucial perspective is no longer that of the poet, as for Thirlwall, but that of the spectator; a century before Barthes, the author is dead. In both definitions, the audience’s familiarity with the plot—noted obiter by Thirlwall, without emphasis—is key, and this would remain a central premise in future discussions.105 Thousands read the textbook for their classics degrees at Cambridge or Oxford; it remained the standard introduction to the subject for a generation. And it was this work which set the seal on the modern notion of dramatic irony, or rather, which affixed to the word irony an insight had by countless earlier readers of Greek drama. But such a transition occurred only with the 1860 edition, and it is noticeable that 102  For the obituary see A. W. Ward, ‘The Late Dr. Donaldson’, The Museum, 1 (1861–2), 200–8. 103  John William Donaldson, ‘A Treatise on the History and Exhibition of the Greek Drama’, in The Theatre of the Greeks, ed. Donaldson (Cambridge, 1836), p. 53. 104  John William Donaldson, ‘A Treatise on the History and Exhibition of the Greek Drama’, in The Theatre of the Greeks, ed. Donaldson (Cambridge, 1860), p. 127. 105  For instance, Sedgewick, Of Irony, p. 53.

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English accounts before this date do not focus on the spectator. George Henry Lewes’s 1844 review essay of new Sophocles translations sees the ‘subtle irony’ of Oedipus in the fact that the protagonist, the cause of the city’s ills, is the very man its citizens implored to save them—a Thirlwallian but not a Donaldsonian angle.106 More clearly still, Frederick Blaydes, in the notes to his 1859 Oedipus, identifies ‘what is commonly called the irony of Sophocles’ as ‘consisting partly in giving words or sentences a designedly ambiguous import; partly in giving a fair colouring and appearance to things that are of an opposite character, and raising by way of contrast views and expectations that are inconsistent with the reality of the case, and destined to be dissipated by the rays of approaching truth’. This particoloured definition captures the multiplicity of Thirlwall’s essay, ignoring the rôle of the spectator and giving central place to the verbal ambiguities of plays like Ajax and Oedipus.107 By contrast, the 1860s saw repeated use of Donaldson’s narrower definition, even when inflected by the ideas of Thirlwall’s original.108 At the same time, that original grew increasingly remote, buried as it was in a small journal thirty years prior. An anonymous writer in the Saturday Review (1862) lamented that the article was hard to obtain, and summarised its contents for new readers; the original would be reprinted in Thirlwall’s 1878 collected works.109 Those who did read the essay could use its ideas to make new kinds of judgements. At Trinity, Edward Meredith Cope criticised Donaldson’s translation of a line in Oedipus in Colonus on the grounds [George Henry Lewes], ‘Article XI’, Foreign Quarterly Review 33 (1844), 459–77, at p.

106 

470.

107  Sophocles, [Tragedies], ed. Blaydes (as at n. 49 above), I, p. 9. At p. 33, commenting on OT 138, Blaydes refers again to ‘a certain happy vein of irony or ambiguity of expression’. 108  ‘The Greek Tragedians, III: Sophocles’, The Month 4 (Jan–June 1866), 574–91, at p. 576: ‘almost the most special characteristic of Sophocles is what is rightly called his irony . . . [this] appears in various passages of our poet, where he puts into the mouth of his characters sentiments highly inconsistent with their real position, and such as make those spectators who have some idea of the terrible doom impending over them feel a senes of awe at their utter unconsciousness of it . . . the action of the irony is divided, as it were, between two persons—the actor and his spectator.’ William Trevor Kenyon, ‘A Criticism of the Oedipus Tyrannus’, in Prolusiones praemiis anniversariis dignatae et in auditorio recitatae Scholae Harroviensis (Harrow, 28 June 1866), 43–70, at p. 53: ‘The Sophoclean irony consists in the contrasts between the view which the characters upon the stage take of events and the view which the spectators know beforehand is the true one—the contrast between expressions used by the actors, and the meaning which an all-­seeing Deity might put upon them.’ See also the definitions of tragic irony by John Addington Symonds, Studies of the Greek Poets, 2 vols (London, 1873), II, pp. 288–289, and, in France, Émile Burnouf, Histoire de la littérature grecque, 2 vols (Paris, 1869), I, pp. 372–73. 109  Anonymous, ‘Irony’, Saturday Review (13 Dec, 1862), 704–5; Connop Thirlwall, Remains Literary and Theological, ed. J. J. Stewart Perowne, 3 vols (London 1878), III, 1–57.

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that it did ill justice to the protagonist’s ironic melancholy, as outlined by Thirlwall.110 The notion could also be applied to new contexts, and above all to the Bible, as a pair of journal articles demonstrated a few years later.111 But for others, the shift in focus from poet to spectator embodied in Donaldson’s work seemed retrospectively fatal to the original idea: it is telling that when, in 1871, Lewis Campbell rebuked Thirlwall’s essay for its incoherence, his central argument was that the effects it articulated belonged to the spectator, not the poet. At the same time he noted that a fundamental aspect of Thirlwall’s concept was ambiguity, or rather, ‘litotes, double meanings, and suggestions of the truth’, whose presence in Sophoclean drama he did not deny.112 As we have seen, John William Mackail would emphasise the same connection in 1906. In Germany, meanwhile, Solger remained the more usual name associated with tragic irony, and Thirlwall’s idea never became as familiar as it did in England.113 Nonetheless, among some scholars, his debts were paid back with considerable interest. Welcker returned the compliment in 1839 by citing his essay in a survey of Greek tragedy, and contributed an effulgent foreword to a translation of Thirlwall’s History of Greece, claiming that the scholar’s ‘acuity and erudition’ had been known in Germany for a decade.114 Karl Otfried Müller, the formidable Göttingen historian and archaeologist shortly to succumb to fever during a dig at Delphi, called Thirlwall’s piece ‘one of the finest contributions the present age has made to the deeper understanding of this poet, and especially of Oedipus Rex’.115 In a passage of his final work, Geschichte der griechischen Litteratur, published posthuPlato, Gorgias, tr. Edward Meredith Cope (Cambridge, 1864), p. 140, n. 1. ‘Notes on “Irony” ’, Christian Observer, n.s. 376 (Apr 1869), 285–293; Edward Hayes Plumptre, ‘The Irony of Christ’, The Sunday Magazine, 7 (1871), 155–159. Plumptre had published a translation of Sophocles in 1867. 112  Campbell, ‘On the So-­Called Irony’, in Sophocles, The Plays, ed. Campbell, I, p. 117. 113  Thus, for instance, Wilhelm Hebenstreit, Wissenschaftlich-­literarische Encyklopädie der Aesthetik (Vienna, 1843), s.v. ‘Tragische Ironie’, pp. 808–809. Hebenstreit’s article borrows verbatim from the critique of Solger by Friedrich Theodor von Vischer, Ueber das Erhabene und Komische, ein Beitrag zu der Philosophie des Schönen (Stuttgart, 1837), pp. 142–5. On the broader reception history, see Wolfhart Henckmann, ‘Ironie in der Frührezeption Solgers’, Grundzüge der Philosophie K. W. F. Solgers, eds Anne Baillot and Mildred Galland-­Szymkowiak (Zurich, 2014), pp. 101–56. 114  F. G. Welcker, Die Griechischen Tragodien mit Rücksicht auf den epischen Cyclus, 3 vols (Bonn, 1839–1841), I, p. 137; idem, ‘Vorworte’, in Connop Thirlwall, Geschichte von Griechenland, tr. L. Haymann, 2 vols (Bonn, 1839), I, p. v: ‘der Scharfsinn und die Gelehrsamkeit’, naming also their mutual friend at Trinity, Julius Charles Hare, with whom Thirlwall had translated Niebuhr’s Römische Geschichte in 1828. 115  K[arl] O[tfried] M[üller], review essay, Göttingische gelehrte Anzeigen unter der Aufsicht der Königlich Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften 182–183 (Nov 1836), 1809–1821, at p. 1821: ‘einen der schönsten Beyträge, den die neueste Zeit zum tieferen Verständniß dieses Dichters, und namentlich des Königs Oedipus, geliefert hat’. 110  111 

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mously in 1841, Müller paid the essay the still higher compliment of reiterating its idea in his own words, referring to ‘that sublime irony which, in drawing contrasts between reality and man’s view of it, expresses [Sophocles’] pain for the blinkeredness of human existence’. In Oedipus, he continued, ‘the theme of the whole is man’s blindness about his own fate, and it is echoed even in the idioms and expression throughout’.116 A few pages later he noted that an essential part of the effect lay in the playwright’s language, with its peculiar ‘pregnancy and gravity’, especially when a character speaks the truth without knowing it.117 Müller had close links to English scholarship, corresponding since 1828 with George Cornewall Lewis, who co-­translated his Geschichte with Donaldson. And it was above all through Müller, and after his death through his colleagues and students at Göttingen, that Thirlwall’s idea entered the bloodstream of German criticism. In 1842 Wilhelm Roscher, later known as a historian of economics, compared the irony of verbal ambiguities in Sophocles to that of the speeches in Thucydides, footnoting Thirlwall.118 Nine years later, in his journal Philologus, founded in Müller’s memory, F. W. Schneidewin published a German translation of Thirlwall’s essay by a ‘skilful young friend’, granting it a new generation of readers.119 The notes to his own edition of Sophocles (1849–1864) abound with Thirlwallian irony, wedded to specific readings of ambiguity. Commenting on Electra 988–985, he notes, as Mackail would later, that ‘Clytaemnestra twists Electra’s word’, and ‘Again Clytaemnestra avails herself of the word in another sense’, adding that in the mother’s derision ‘lies the cutting irony that the Nemesis of the dead hears Electra’s prayer and makes use of the supposed dead [i.e., Orestes] as an avenger.’120 Schneidewin’s volumes were reviewed in a series of articles (1855– 1857) by Hermann Bonitz, who praised the editor for having gathered the 116  Karl Otfried Müller, Geschichte der griechischen Literatur bis auf das Zeitalter Alexanders, rev. Eduard Müller, 2 vols (Breslau, 1857), II, p. 127: ‘jene erhabne Ironie . . . die ihren Schmerz über die Beschränkheit des menschlichen Daseins in schneidenden Contrasten zwischen der Wirklichkeit und den Vorstellungen der Menschen ausdrückt’ . . .’da die Verblendung des Menschen über sein eignes Schicksal das Thema des Ganzen ist, und hier selbst in Ausdrücken und Redewendung vielfach wiederklingt.’ Gottfried Bernhardy, Grundriss der Griechischen Litteratur mit einem vergleichenden Ueberblick der Römischen, 2 vols (Halle, 1859), II.2, p. 326, would upbraid Müller’s definition as ‘mit hohlen Phrasen zu spielen’. 117  Ibid., p. 139. 118  Wilhelm Roscher, Leben, Werk und Zeitalter des Thukydides (Göttingen, 1842), p. 170. 119  Connop Thirlwall, ‘Ueber die ironie des Sophokles’, Philologus 6 (1851), 81–104 and 254–277. Schneidewin had himself been intending to translate the essay in abridged form, and was glad to be spared the bother. 120  Sophocles, Tragoediae, ed. Schneidewin, II, p. 99, n. at 791: ‘Klyt., jetzt erbittert, verdreht Elektras Wort’; and at 793: ‘Wiederum macht Klyt. das Wort in anderem Sinne sich zu Nutze’, adding (p. 100) that ‘In diesem Hohn liegt eine schneidende Ironie, da die Nemesis des Todten das Gebet der El. hört und sich des vermeintlichen Todten als Rächers bedient.’

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fruits of many individual studies, and for his wealth of valuable remarks— and then spent over a hundred pages quibbling with particular interpretations. Among these were the numerous observations of ambiguity and tragic irony, a term that Bonitz declined to use, presumably seeing in it the taint of modern philosophy. He disagreed with Schneidewin’s linguistic focus, arguing that the effect was caused not by varying interpretations of a word, but by the different states of knowledge which its hearers brought to bear on it: to borrow the legal terms, he saw in Sophocles latent rather than patent ambiguity.121 Where Schneidewin held that a double interpretation (Doppeldeutigkeit) was caused by a verbal ambiguity, Bonitz professed to admire his ‘ingenuity and wit’ (Scharfsinn und Witz), but judged that he had simply read too much into the phrases taken on their own, when they were clearly disambiguated by context. For instance, at OT 813–15, Oedipus, having recounted his killing of a stranger and his men at the crossroads, asks who would be more wretched than himself if there was any kinship between this stranger (tō xenō toutō) and his own father Laius. Schneidewin comments: ‘Oedipus shies away from suggesting that the stranger was Laius, since even the less dreadful possibility makes him shudder. But unconsciously he arrives at the truth, if one only reads ‘this stranger’ as Oedipus himself.’ To Bonitz this was unacceptable: “this stranger” could, in context, denote only the dead man, and if Sophocles really had written in such a way that the phrase could denote Oedipus, and was therefore ambiguous, it would have stood to his detriment.122 Bonitz’s response to Schneidewin might seem like an obscure footnote, but in fact it was widely read by specialists, and subsequent analyses of tragic ambiguity explicitly took its arguments on board. It marks yet another chapter in the recurrent conflict between minimisers and maximisers, those who look to context and those who indulge their ‘ingenuity’—that perennial word. Finally, and most interestingly, it points up an important contrast between the conversations going on in England and Germany. At stake in England was the introduction of a word (irony) to describe a range 121  On patent and latent ambiguity, see Chapter Two above, p. 86. A similar point was made against Empson by Edwin Berry Burgum, ‘The Cult of the Complex in Poetry’, Science and Society 15 (1951), 31–48, at p. 43. 122  Hermann Bonitz, review of Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannos, ed. Schneidewin (2nd ed., 1853), Zeitschrift für die österreichischen Gymnasien 17 (1856), 633–662, at pp. 634–635. His quotation from Schneidewin’s note, which I have translated above, runs: ‘Ödipus scheut es auch nur auszusprechen, wenn der Fremde Laios war, weil schon jener minder grässliche Fall ihn schaudern macht. Unbewusst trifft auch hier Ödipus die Wahrheit, wenn man τῷ ξένῳ τούτῳ an ihn selbst bezieht.’ I have been unable to consult the second edition from which Bonitz claims to quote; oddly, the note in both the first edition (1851), pp. 98–99, and the third (1856), p. 99, contains only the first sentence, not the second to which Bonitz objected. Assuming Bonitz’s honesty, the offending sentence must have been suggested and then retracted, perhaps in shame at Bonitz’s very review.

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of dramatic features, both linguistic and extra-­linguistic, on whose existence everyone agreed; in Germany—where the term Ironie was perceived as a philosophical one, and hence less useful to the business of criticism— scholarly debate after Schneidewin focused instead on the more substantive matter of how double meanings actually worked. If in English literary criticism the concept of ambiguity was eclipsed by that of irony until 1930, German scholarship on tragedy, itself shading into literary criticism and close reading, examined the relation of Ironie to Doppelsinn and Amphibolie with some care. With this in mind, we should not be surprised that German philology in the decades after Schneidewin approached the kind of analysis—though not the tone or ingenuity—offered by Empson in 1930. This is seen first in an 1872 article, also in the journal Philologus, on double meanings in Oedipus Rex, by the Zurich professor Arnold Hug, who had studied under Welcker at Bonn.123 The points of reference here are Thirlwall, Müller, and Schneidewin. Hug begins by reiterating the association of ambiguity with joking (Spiel) and lying (Täuschung)—the former found in comedy, and in stichomythic witplay such as at Electra 610, the latter in the Trugrede.124 But the educated Athenians enjoyed a good puzzle and so demanded wordplay even from tragedy. In Sophocles the ambiguity stands in service of the ‘so-­called tragic irony’, whereby the secondary meaning of a word or phrase is comprehended only by the audience who know the story already. As the ‘linguistic application’ of tragic irony, this technique may be called ‘tragic ambiguity’, and achieves perfect form in Oedipus, where the poet conducts a ‘silent formal dialogue with the spectator, unsuspected by Oedipus, Jocasta and the Chorus, although it is spoken through their own mouths’.125 In this witty and paradoxical formulation, Hug comes closest to the Caiaphatic model, inspiration at odds with the human subject. The majority of the article contains a list of the ambiguities in the play, fifty in total, and it concludes with a classification of those ambiguities into types—not seven but five—the first of its kind in the West. All five were to be distinguished from the mere ‘tragic irony of contraries’, which had no special linguistic connotations: ambiguity is closely related to irony, but has its own domain. The first type might best be described as vagueness (‘sehr allgemeine vieldeutige Ausdrücke’). The second is when a speaker’s words in context mean only one thing, but an initiate (Eingeweihte) refers them to a second ‘sphere of ideas’ (Ideenkreis); in norMenke, ‘The Aesthetics of Tragedy’, pp. 48–52; Sandys, A History, III, pp. 160–61. Arnold Hug, ‘Der doppelsinn in Sophokles Oedipus könig’, Philologus 31 (1872), 66–84, at pp. 66–67. 125  Hug, ‘Der doppelsinn’, p. 68: ‘hat er ein förmliches zwiegespräch, von Oedipus, der Iokaste und dem chor nicht geahnt, und doch durch ihren eigenen mund ausgesprochen . . . mit dem zuschauer in stillen geführt.’ 123  124 

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mal ambiguity, for instance in puns, the initiate is the speaker himself, but in tragic ambiguity it is the audience, who understand what the speaker does not. For instance, at OT 241–242, when Oedipus declares that ‘this is our defilement’, ‘this’ (toud[e]) refers in context to his father’s murderer, but is also a poetic substitute for egō, ‘I’. One might call this the quintessential species of tragic ambiguity—the ambiguity manifesting tragic irony—as exemplified by Oedipus. The third type is a play on the multiple senses, especially etymological senses, of individual words, beyond standard usage. The fourth is syntactic ambiguity. And the fifth is when phrases are torn from context to produce an ‘ominous allusion’, as at OT 928, when the Chorus says of Jocasta, ‘This woman is the mother of his [Oedipus’s] children’, putting together gunē de mētēr to intimate that the king’s gunē (woman, wife) is also his mētēr (mother). Hug concludes by noting that the third and fourth types, that is, homonymy and amphiboly, match those found in the eristics of the Athenian sophists, as shown in Plato’s Euthydemus. There is no value judgement expressed in the last observation, but it is striking again how close the verbal methods of poetry are perceived to come to those of deceit.126 In place of profundity, Hug’s article offers tangible results: an array of checkable passages, a typology, and an explanation. A paradigm of German philology, it has the systematic and unspeculative character of criticism aspiring to Wissenschaft, and in this respect could hardly be less like the unpredictable and pseudo-­systematic Seven Types. Moreover, its defined disciplinary context prompted its method to be replicated and its results extended, as we see in an 1884 essay on Aeschylus and Sophocles by the Moravian gymnasium teacher Josef Pokorný, and an 1895 doctoral thesis on Euripides by Paul Masqueray, subsequently known for his 1922 translation of Sophocles, used by Yeats.127 By 1900, the student of Greek literature had a catalogue of ambiguities for each of the tragedians; he could refer also to similar work on Aristophanes and Homer. In 1907 he got something much more interesting: a doctoral thesis on tragic ambiguity (Amphibolie) by Ludwig Trautner at Erlangen. Despite its flaccid, overstuffed sentences, redolent of the tyro aspiring to academic dignity, Trautner’s argument shows a critical depth lacking in his predecessors. The first half of his thesis offers an improved classification, distinguishing the ‘rhetorical’ ambiguity of puns from the artistic device (Kunstmittel) of dramatic ambiguity, which could either be deliberate on the character’s part, as in the Trugrede, or apparent only to 126  Ibid., p. 84, citing the list of eristic devices (paralogismoi) in Martin Schanz, Beiträge zur vorsokratischen Philosophie aus Plato (Göttingen, 1867), pp. 87–92. 127  Joseph Pokornỳ, Die Amphibolie bei Aeschylos und Sophokles (Uherské Hradiště, 1884– 85); Paul Masqueray, De tragica ambiguitate apud Euripidem (Paris, 1895).

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the audience; this last had sometimes been called ‘tragic irony’, but that term was itself equivocal and failed to capture the linguistic aspect represented by ‘ambiguity’ (3–4). Both kinds of dramatic ambiguity contribute to what Aristotle (Poetics 1450a) called the systasis tōn pragmatōn or arrangement of action (15). Trautner follows Bonitz in stating that dramatic ambiguity usually derives not from a conflicting interpretation of individual words, but from the different states of knowledge brought to the situation by the characters and audience (2, 10, 94–95). If the first half marks a development on the specialist literature it cites— Schneidewin, Bonitz, Hug, Pokorný, Masqueray—the second provides a novel analysis of ambiguity in relation to a broader account of Greek aesthetics, and the points of reference here, apart from Trautner’s professor Adolf Römer, are the giants of nineteenth-­century Altertumswissenschaft: Erwin Rohde, Jacob Burckhardt, Wilamowitz, Nietzsche. Trautner’s analysis centres on the scholion at OT 264, which, as we saw, criticised dramatic irony for violating the principle of semnotēs, solemnity, and attributed it to Euripides above all. The ancient comment chimed very well in his view with Nietzsche’s notorious insistence that Euripides had offered only an eviscerated, rationalistic counterfeit of tragedy, characterised by ‘a truly sophistic dialectic’, that is, by ‘the craftiest sophistications’—the long word exposed by its etymology.128 Trautner (117) quotes a long chunk from Die Geburt der Tragödie (§11) on Euripides bringing the spectator onstage, and connects it to the scholiast‘s view of tragic irony as ‘moving the audience’, an effect necessitated by the spectator‘s over-­familiarity with plots from earlier plays by Aeschylus and Sophocles. Through the lens of Trautner, Nietzsche‘s pair of ‘sophistic’ and ‘sophistication’ appears as the uncanny meeting of elegantia and Hamann‘s Klügheit: all four terms evoke the quest for social power through the elaboration of language, a process embodied by ambiguity in public life—‘in the assembly, in the courtroom, or in the theatre’ (110). Ambiguity is thus for Trautner a device with its own dramatic merits, but fatal to the true tragic sublime: Ambiguity in particular is an element whose introduction into the style of serious tragedy obliged poets to abandon the restraints that stylistic considerations put upon their choice of theatrical devices, for it fully revealed their aim of momentarily exciting the audience. But it was this very element which displeased and was felt as vexing and discordant. It may be in the nature of ambiguity to enhance the

128  Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik, in his Philosophische Werke, ed. Claus-­Artur Scheier, 6 vols (Hamburg, 2013), I, p. 304 (§10): ‘spitze und feile dir für die Reden deiner Helden eine sophistische Dialektik zurecht—auch deine Helden haben nur nachgeahmte maskirte Leidenschaften und sprechen nur nachgeahmte maskirte Reden’; p. 306 (§11): ‘den schlausten Sophisticationen’.

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spectator’s alert participation and conscious involvement in the artwork,129 by lighting up in a flash the tragic plot [systasis] and bringing it very vividly to his awareness; nonetheless, as a stimulant applied by the poet with conscious technical intent, it had to distract attention away from the piece itself and onto his own momentary, pricking whims. In some cases—that is, when tragic irony was frequently applied—it was bound to check and dampen any train of thought directed to the sublime.130

Here, clumsily expressed, is high critical passion and excitement, a drama of its own. At stake, as with Schlegel at the start of this chapter, is freedom, the shucking off of restraints, but also harmony; ambiguity and tragic irony represent the sacrifice of longlasting power for short-­term pleasure, a degeneration from Aeschylean sublimity to Euripidean cleverness, from pathos to mere shock. Trautner thus inserts ambiguity and irony into the story of the death of tragedy, but unlike in Nietzsche that story is an ambivalent one, for, as the first half of his dissertation attests, the affective force of ambiguity cannot be denied. In this respect he is closer to one of Nietzsche’s key sources, Schiller’s 1796 essay on the naïve and sentimental in poetry, which acknowledged both the freedom and the alienation of the late, urbane mode, typified by Euripides.131 With Trautner, 129  This expression (‘eine Steigerung der lebendigen Beteiligung des Zuschauers und seiner bewußten Teilnahme am Kunstwerk’) is borrowed almost verbatim, without citation, from Alfred Schöne, Über die Ironie in der griechischen Dichtung, insbesondere bei Homer, Aeschylus und Sophokles (Kiel, 1897), p. 11, where the process is explicitly connected to the spectator’s identification with the deceiver over the deceived. 130  Ludwig Trautner, Die Amphibolien bei den drei griechischen Tragikern und ihre Beurteilung durch die antike Ästhetik (Nuremberg, 1907), pp. 105–106

Nun ist aber gerade die Amphibolie ein Element, dessen Einführung in den ernsten Tragödienstil die Dichter nötigte, aus der ihnen durch stilistische Erwägungen gebotenen Zurückhaltung in der Wahl ihrer theatralischen Mittel herauszutreten, indem es ihre auf die momentane Erregung des Publikums abzielende Absicht ganz unverhüllt zutage treten lassen mußte. Das aber war es, was verstimmte, was als störend und disharmonisch empfunden wurde. Denn wenn es auch in dem Wesen der Amphibolie begründet ist durch ihre die tragische Systasis oft gleichsam blitzartig erhellende und dem Bewußtsein besonders eindringlich vermittelnde Wirkung eine Steigerung der lebendigen Beteiligung des Zuschauers und seiner bewußten Teilnahme am Kunstwerk zu erzielen, so mußte sie doch andererseits als ein vom Dichter mit bewußter technischer Absicht angewandtes Reizmittel das Interesse von dem Stücke selbst auf die momentanen prickelnden Einfàlle des Dichters ablenken, ja unter Umständen, namentlich durch eine gehäufte Anwendung der tragischen Ironie, den auf das Erhabene gerichteten Flug der Gedanken hemmen und niederdrücken. 131  Friedrich Schiller, Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, ed. W. F. Mainland (Oxford, 1951), p. 18.

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ambiguity is no longer just a trope, a category of formal analysis, as with Hug—it now marks a watershed of literary history. Again and again in this book, we have seen that innovative arguments and syntheses appear in the most obscure places. Very few read Trautner, to be sure. One who did was the young hellenist William Bedell Stanford at Trinity College Dublin, whose monograph on ambiguity in Greek literature appeared in 1939, a year before he was appointed Regius Professor of Greek.132 Stanford cites (fleetingly) Hug, Pokorný, and Trautner—it must have been difficult to procure these recondite pamphlets at the time, and there remains no copy of Pokorný in a British university library—but also Joyce’s Work in Progress, soon to be complete, and Empson, whose method ‘considerably influenced’ him, to the point of over-­stating, by his own later admission, the amount of ambiguity found in Greek texts.133 By this point the fire was dead again; Stanford goes through the same motions as his sources, empirical and perceptive, but without deep purpose. He marks the first Anglophone point of contact with a continuous tradition of scholarship in over a century, a tradition stretching from Schlegel, through Solger, Immermann, Welcker, Thirlwall, Müller, and Schneidewin, to Hug and the cataloguers. In this diadoche, ambiguity and irony ducked around each other, helping critics achieve a variety of ends: the defence of tragic decorum in Welcker, the articulation of divided character in Weismann, the taxonomy of wit in Hug, the critique of Euripides in Trautner. The relation between the two terms was symbiotic: ambiguity brought specificity, an attention to the minutiae of dramatic language in conveying emotion and constructing character, and irony in return brought philosophical richness, the whole that gave its parts meaning. The critical history of the one cannot be understood apart from that of the other. 132  On Stanford’s life, see his own Stanford: Regius Professor of Greek, 1940–80, Trinity College, Dublin: Memoirs (Dublin, 2001). 133  William Bedell Stanford, Ambiguity in Greek Literature: Studies in Theory and Practice (Oxford, 1939), p. 91; idem, Enemies of Poetry (London, 1980), p. 115.

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CH A P TE R TE N

THE COMBINATION ROOM There is a war, a chaos of the mind, When all its elements convuls’d—combined— Lie dark and jarring with perturbed force — Lord Byron, The Corsair, II.933

In histories of criticism, William Empson usually plays the rôle of pioneer or eccentric forerunner of modernity; here, by contrast, he will bring our narrative to a close. The purpose of this final chapter is not to undermine his originality by pointing to all that came before, but rather to emphasise just how much he differed from his predecessors, and why. Seven Types confronts us immediately with a new mood. Empson’s bright, fresh world— the world of combination rooms and clever young men in ties, the world of Eng. Lit. as it was coming into being, of I. A. Richards, F. R. Leavis, Christopher Ricks—seems far from the tulgey forests of classical philology, German philosophy, and biblical criticism, and those who have sought antecedents to Empsonian ambiguity have naturally looked to homelier pastures. A few suggestions have been made, of which the most ambitious and least convincing was that of Stanley Edgar Hyman, who summoned a line in Pseudo-­Demetrius about poetic language coiling up like a beast ready to attack.1 Cleanth Brooks adduced a suggestive remark by Coleridge about a couplet in Venus and Adonis, which Empson might possibly have known and which Richards also discussed with approval a few years later; but it is only a suggestive remark.2 More recently, John Paul Russo argued 1  Stanley Edgar Hyman, The Armed Vision: A Study in the Methods of Literary Criticism (1948: New York, 1952), p. 272, referring to [Pseudo-­]Demetrius, On Style, ed. and tr. W. Rhys Roberts (Cambridge, 1902), p. 73, a judgement not about ambiguity at all, but about forceful brevity. 2  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Shakespearean Criticism, ed. Thomas Middleton Raysor, 2 vols (London, 1960), I, p. 189, commenting on Venus and Adonis, ll. 815–16: ‘How many images and feelings are here brought together without effort and without discord—the beauty of Adonis—the rapidity of his flight—the yearning yet hopelessness of the enamoured gazer— and a shadowy ideal character is thrown over the whole.’ This passage is from a notebook draft for his 1808 lectures on Shakespeare, first published by his nephew in 1836. Coleridge

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that Empson’s idea had already been espoused by Richards, but this has been persuasively refuted by John Haffenden.3 Nicholas Shrimpton has pointed to brief comments by Ruskin, Alexandra Orr, and A. C. Bradley; none is especially germane or close to what Empson was doing.4 As long as we are casting around for mere antecedents, the later German work of our previous chapter is much closer in spirit—analytical, unsentimental, focused on verbal textures. But that work cannot be understood as a source, since Empson clearly had no knowledge of it. He himself noted the influence of three figures: his Cambridge tutor Richards, Sigmund Freud, and Robert Graves. According to the canonical etiology of Seven Types, the undergraduate Empson came to a tutorial one day with a passage from A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927) by Graves and Laura Riding, analysing the ambiguities in a Shakespeare sonnet; impressed by its method, and urged on by Richards, he went off and bashed out 15,000 words on the same theme within a fortnight. A year later he had plans to submit the short manuscript, which he called (à la Wittgenstein) a ‘logico-­grammatico-­ critical essay’, to the Hogarth Press.5 But he was expelled from Cambridge after a bedder found a ‘French letter’ in his room, and he retired to his family home in the Yorkshire countryside to write the book up.6 By the usual narrative, then, a short section of A Survey sowed the seed of Seven Types. Only recently has Donald Childs revealed the full extent of Empson’s debt to a series of works written by Graves in the mid-­1920s, before his collaboration with Riding, works that Empson later admitted to having read.7 Childs has further demonstrated Graves’s reliance on another book, The Poetic Mind (1922) by Frederick Clarke Prescott, a professor at Cornell University who taught Riding and corresponded with Graves.8 subsequently remarks, p. 192: ‘Activity of thought in the play of words.’ In his Biographia Literaria (1817), ed. James Engell and Walter Jackson Bate, 2 vols (Princeton, 1983), I, p. 25, Coleridge observes of the verse: ‘the poet gives us the liveliest image of succession with the feeling of simultaneousness’. The parallel to Empson is found in Cleanth Brooks, ‘Empson’s Criticism’ (1944), in CEE, pp. 123–135, at p. 124n, referring also to I. A. Richards, Coleridge on Imagination (London, 1934), pp. 82–83. Hyman, The Armed Vision, p. 293, seconds Brooks’s suggestion. A. H. Tak, Coleridge and Modern Criticism (Delhi, 1985), pp. 77–100, is fuller but less persuasive on the parallel with Empson. See also Stephen Prickett, Coleridge and Wordsworth: The Poetry of Growth (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 100–1. 3  John Paul Russo, I. A. Richards: His Life and Work (London, 1989), pp. 277–83 and 525–28, John Haffenden, William Empson, 2 vols (Oxford, 2005–2006), I, pp. 200–5. 4  Nicholas Shrimpton, ‘The Empson Version’, Areté 18 (2005), 132–40, at pp. 137–38. 5  Empson to Ian Parsons, early June 1929, in his Selected Letters, ed. John Haffenden (Oxford, 2006), pp. 6–7. 6  Haffenden, William Empson, I, pp. 230–73. 7  Donald Childs, The Birth of the New Criticism: Conflict and Conciliation in the Early Work of William Empson, I. A. Richards, Laura Riding, and Robert Graves (Montréal, 2013), pp. 34–189. 8  Childs, The Birth, pp. 74–84. The first to notice Prescott’s ‘anticipation’ of Empson was,

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Prescott had arrived at Cornell in 1897, and soon began teaching a course on the theme of inspiration; in 1912 he published a pamphlet suggesting some ways in which Freud’s methods of dream-­interpretation might be applied to the study of poetry.9 These suggestions would be elaborated at impressive length in The Poetic Mind. Prescott was extremely proud of this work, sending copies to illustrious scholars all over America, and typing up highlights both from their polite replies and from its many published reviews.10 (Graves wrote: ‘I am delighted to think . . . that my whimsical and somewhat sibylline utterances have the support of a Professor of English.’ A. A. Brill considered it ‘a very excellent work’. Morris Croll found it ‘admirably philosophical as well as scientific’.) One chapter deals with the operation of the poetic imagination with explicit reference to the two processes Freud posited as central to the ‘dream-­work’—condensation and displacement. It is the first that concerns us here. Freud argued that the unconscious thoughts behind a dream are much more copious than its images, and that therefore each image represents a combination or ‘condensation’ (Verdichtung) of multiple thoughts.11 Interestingly, he adopted a position of radical uncertainty on the results of interpretation, gesturing towards a principle of plenitude: We have already mentioned that one is really never sure of having interpreted a dream completely; even if the solution seems satisfying and flawless, it still always remains possible that there is a further meaning which is manifested by the same dream. Thus the amount of condensation is—strictly speaking—indeterminable.12

again, Hyman, The Armed Vision, p. 157; the suggestion would be taken up by William Van O’Connor, ‘Ambiguity’, in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetics, 1st ed., ed. Alex Preminger (1965: Princeton, 1972), pp. 18–19, where Childs came across it. But to Childs belongs the credit for showing, based on both extrinsic and intrinsic evidence, Graves’s direct (and thereby Empson’s indirect) reliance on Prescott’s work. 9  Frederick Clarke Prescott, Poetry and Dreams (Boston, 1912), esp. p. 41. Graham Franklin, Freud’s Literary Culture (New York, 2000), pp. 117–47, reads Freud’s exegesis itself as literary in inspiration. 10  Prescott’s archive, at Cornell University Library, #14/12/555, contains replies to his letters as well as the typescripts of review highlights. I owe great thanks to my wife Suzanne for making a research trip on my behalf to this archive, 31 August 2017. For a printed review by a psychoanalyst (L[ouis] C[harles] M[artin]), see Imago: Zeitschrift für Anwendung der Psychoanalyse auf die Geisteswissenschaften 9 (1925), p. 509. 11  Sigmund Freud, Die Traumdeutung, in FGW II/III, pp. 284–310. I use ‘condensation’ here for the sake of tradition, but it is not a happy translation, evoking the fog on a bathroom mirror; better is ‘compression’. 12  Ibid., p. 285: ‘Wir haben bereits anführen müssen, daß man eigentlich niemals sicher ist, einen Traum vollständig gedeutet zu haben; selbst wenn die Auflösung befriedigend und lückenlos erscheint, bleibt es doch immer möglich, daß sich noch ein anderer Sinn durch denselben Traum kundgibt. Die Verdichtungsquote ist also—streng genommen—unbestimmbar.’ The translation is from Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, tr. A. A. Brill (1913:

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According to Prescott, it was the same in poetry: since each image in a poem goes back to multiple original thoughts and feelings, ‘each word will be apt to have two, three, or even many meanings or implications, corresponding to the multiple imagery which it represents’, and therefore a poem ‘will be “poetical” or “imaginative” in proportion as its language is thus overcharged with meanings’.13 Critics wrongly argue over single senses when they should embrace many. For instance, when Keats describes Madeline as ‘Clasp’d like a missal where swart paynims pray’, Leigh Hunt interprets ‘Clasp’d’ to mean clutched tightly, whereas Richard Garnett reads it as ‘fastened with a clasp’; Hunt thinks the pagans are practising their own religion in their own land, while ‘another’ suggests that converted pagans are represented on the missal’s cover.14 Prescott comments: I should think most if not all of the puzzled annotators were right, including the last. At least the line has all the meanings that an intelligent and imaginative reader, if not a puzzled annotator, will attach to it. . . . [W]hereas in true prose words should have one meaning and one meaning only, in true poetry they should have as many meanings as possible, and the more the better, as long as these are true to the images in the poet’s mind.15

We see in this response all the hallmarks of the maximiser: the reconciliation of critical controversy, making an and of ors, and the explicit principle of plenitude. This was Augustine’s attitude to the exegesis of Gen. 1:1— even the caveat that the meanings be true to the poet’s mind recalls the Father’s insistence that readings be true to God’s Word—and it will be Empson’s attitude to the disjunctions of the Arden Shakespeares. As with Augustine, there must be a sympathy between writer and reader, insofar as they share a lively ‘imagination’; Prescott writes of a phrase in Hamlet London and New York, 1923), p. 261. Throughout this chapter I have made silent use of the standard (Hogarth) edition of the English Freud, gen. ed. James Strachey and Anna Freud, 24 vols (London, 1953–74), and especially its magnificent indexes—among the best I have ever seen. However, I have chosen to cite and quote from the earlier translations by Brill, on the grounds that these are the ones Empson read. As for the German, I have used the Gesammelte Werke (1948–1968), which are shelved at floor level (DAC 160) in the Warburg Institute, forcing the browser to crouch down in the dust and dirt, where he belongs. 13  Frederick Clarke Prescott, The Poetic Mind (New York, 1922), p. 171. 14  Leigh Hunt, The Seer: Or, Common-­Places, Refreshed, 2 vols (London, 1840–41), II, p. 16b; Richard Garnett, letter to the editor, 10 December 1905, The Nation: A Weekly Journal Devoted to Politics, Literature, Science and Art 81 (Jul–Dec 1905), p. 502a–b. Prescott’s unnamed ‘another’ is whoever annotated Keats’s line in Century Readings for a Course in English Literature, ed. J. W. Cunliffe et al. (New York, 1911), p. 1096b, note ad loc. A similar array of conjectures are presented disjunctively in English Poetry and Prose of the Romantic Movement, ed. George Benjamin Woods (Chicago and New York, 1916), p. 1292n, perhaps a source for Prescott. 15  Prescott, The Poetic Mind, pp. 172–73.

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that it ‘will not bother any reader whose imagination has not been awakened by the context. To such a reader the line is alive with meaning; it is not made up of dead or inert words, with definite and exclusive denotations.’ The vitalist picture of language recalls J. W. Mackail and Victoria Welby.16 Further examples follow, but it was Prescott’s analysis of the Keats line that would be repeated very closely by Graves in 1926, on a page later quoted by Empson in a letter to Laura Riding to prove Graves had the idea of ambiguity before her.17 Graves’s own thoughts about mental conflict and its expression in ambiguous poetry, articulated in On English Poetry (1922), Poetic Unreason (1925), and Impenetrability (1927), were inspired not by Freud directly, but by the psychiatrist W. H. R. Rivers, a close friend of Graves’s who modified Freud’s theories of dream psychology, of mental conflict, and of the unconscious itself.18 Graves gave the kick in turn to other critics before Empson, such as George Rylands, whose 1928 monograph Words and Poetry makes tentative assertions of the virtue of ambiguity; Empson reviewed it coolly upon arrival.19 Empson’s own use of Freud is not in doubt: Seven Types deploys Freudian terms throughout, from ‘Narcissistic’ (3) and ‘transference’ (162) to ‘condensation’ (193), as well as referring to Freud’s essay on the antithetical meaning of primitive words (194), and to his work on the infantile pleasures of defecation (224).20 In his preface to the second edition of the book (written in 1946), Empson expressed his ‘regret’ about relying so much on Freud (viii–ix); but his many psychological analyses could hardly have been sustained without the basic apparatus of a Freudian unconscious. Instead of seeing Empson in isolation, then, we ought to think of him as the most brilliant and the most influential—thanks to his rediscovery by Brooks and Warren a decade later—of a group of 1920s critics kindled by Freud. The overwhelming importance of Freud, indeed, might seem to have See Chapter One above, p. 69, and Chapter Nine, p. 331. See also Prescott, The Poetic Mind, p. 231 on the ambiguity of state in the last line of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29: ‘That then I scorn to change my state with kings’. 18  On the personal connection with Rivers, see Richard Perceval Graves, Robert Graves: The Assault Heroic, 1895–1926 (London, 1986), pp. 266, 273, noting that Graves dedicated On English Poetry to Rivers. I am inclined to pass over Graves’s work on ambiguity here because it has been discussed at such length by Childs (see n. 7 above) and by David Reid, Ambiguities: Conflict and Union of Opposites in the Robert Graves, Laura Riding, William Empson and Yvor Winters (Bethesda, 2012), pp. 27–38, 52–58. 19  George Rylands, Words and Poetry (London, 1928); on ambiguity see for instance p. 18, stating that the first line of Keats’s ‘Endymion’—i.e., ‘A thing of beauty is a joy for ever’—is ‘so much better’ than its earlier draft because whereas the draft ‘expresses one thought’ the final version ‘expresses two’. On Empson’s review, labelling Rylands as part of the ‘ “Robert Graves” school of criticism’, see the editorial note in Empson, Selected Letters, p. 431, n. 10, and Haffenden, William Empson, I, p. 17. 20  To these can be added the expression ‘compensation mechanism’ (182), ultimately from Adler or Jung. 16  17 

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overdetermined Empson’s method, who got it both from the source and via intermediaries. One of the great virtues of this link is that it brings into focus Empson’s relations to the ideas about ambiguity I have treated so far in this book. As we have seen, Western criticism exhibits two kinds of thought about intentional ambiguity: the artificial and the inspired. The first considers ambiguity as a kind of elegant wit and as a means of deceit; both are conscious, dispassionate manoeuvres aiming to increase and maintain individual power in a public setting. The second casts ambiguity in Scripture as a function of its divine origin and office: God appoints Moses and other inspired writers to a position of authority in relaying his Word to men, and in doing so imbues their language with a multiplicity of meanings of which they are only half-­conscious, but which become more fully apparent to future readers. The aim of artificial ambiguity is manipulation, that of inspired ambiguity the expression of hidden truth. The two are finally united in the most intimate synthesis in the tragic use of ambiguity to convey the irony of fate. There are reflexes of both traditions in Freud. The plainest connection is seen in Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten (1905), which emphasises the pleasure-­giving and social nature of verbal witticisms.21 His work on dreams, too, exploits the metaphor of the censor whose watchful eye forces the dreaming unconscious to express itself ambiguously: deceit and evasion rather than wit.22 But Freud’s dream-­theory, adapted by Prescott, Graves, and Empson for the interpretation of poetry, is more profoundly indebted to the idea of inspired ambiguity. For Augustine, meanings in Scripture came from something greater, deeper, more obscure than, but not independent of, the writer’s conscious mind—they came from God. For the Freudian critics, meanings in poetry came from something greater, deeper, more obscure than, but not independent of, the writer’s conscious mind—they came from the unconscious. And just as the prophecy of Caiaphas showed that the Holy Spirit could convey a meaning counter to the human sense in the same words, so Empson could point to lines of verse that expressed two contrary thoughts or feelings, a tension between conscious and unconscious. Interpretation had to be making claims about the author’s intention—otherwise it was nothing but the indulgence of a 21  Sigmund Freud, Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten, in FGW VI, pp. 131–177, and Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious, tr. A. A. Brill (London, 1916), pp. 214–45. Freud’s analysis of ambiguity in wordplay, at pp. 35–43 (Eng. pp. 40–48), draws on Kuno Fischer, Ueber die Entstehung und die Entwicklungsformen des Witzes (Heidelberg, 1871), pp. 53–58, which distinguishes between the Doppelsinn or simple pun and the Zweideutigkeit, in which one meaning is concealed behind the other, like a face behind a mask. This latter image suggests an affinity between Fischer’s distinction and my own in Chapter Five between wordplay as wit and as deceit, but the analogy should I think not be pressed too far. 22  The metaphor is introduced at Die Traumdeutung, in FGW II/III, pp. 147–50.

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critic’s fantasy—but that intention was now much more complex and difficult to ascertain, as it had been for the Augustinian reader who sought the divine as well as the human intention in lines of Scripture.23 And the new literary critics, like the old Catholic exegetes, were revealing dark truths to the laity. A governing premise of this final chapter, then, is that Empson, like Prescott and Graves, was working with a structural analogue of inspired ambiguity, in which the two voices in a verse are not God and man but conscious and unconscious, or else conflicting desires or ‘forces’ in the author’s mind. And the type of verbal criticism he fathered looked to one early reader much like that which Augustine had applied to the Bible. In his manifesto ‘A Burden for Critics’ (1948), the great Princeton mandarin R. P. Blackmur surveyed the New Criticism, and the modern ‘school of Donne’ he imagined it had been created to describe, with a certain melancholy: Why do we treat poetry, and gain by doing so, after much the same fashion as Augustine treated the scriptures in the fifth century? Why do we make of our criticism an essay in the understanding of words and bend upon that essay exclusively every tool of insight and analysis we possess? . . . Do we, like Augustine, live in an interregnum, after a certainty, anticipating a synthesis? If so, unlike Augustine, we lack a special revelation . . . 24

Blackmur was searching for a more engaged, holistic, and dialogical form of criticism than he found among his peers; what he was looking for, in fact, seems exactly what has been lost from the modern academic study of literature, which has been transformed, for better or worse, into historical scholarship, surfeited with evidence and footnotes. In this respect he was living, as he suspected, in an interregnum between Victorian certainty and the interdisciplinary syntheses and white gloves of today, a hiatus in which Empsonian ambiguity, with its peculiar mixture of doubt and humanistic confidence, could flourish. As Blackmur suggests, the same combination can be heard in Augustine. Getting Empson back to Freud is a decent start, but not enough. This chapter considers in fuller detail three structuring concepts in Seven Types, embodied in three key words, each related to an idea that extends back 23  This point was made expressly by Hamann, on which see Chapter Eight above, p. 314. For a strong statement against anti-­intentionalism, see William Empson, Using Biography (London, 1984), p. 104: ‘the effort to ignore the author’s Intention makes the critic impute to him some wrong Intention’. 24  R. P. Blackmur, ‘A Burden for Critics’, Hudson Review 1 (1948), 170–186, at p. 174. Roger Lapointe, Les trois dimensions de l’herméneutique (Paris, 1967), p. 33, noted drily that the Church Fathers ‘n’avaient pas attendu que W. Empson leur définisse les différentes sortes d’ambïguités qui émaillent les ouvrages poétiques’.

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through and beyond Freud. The first, ambivalence, is psychological; the second, primitive, is anthropological; and the third, hypocrisy, is ethical. All three are closely related, and by triangulating them we may see with greater clarity what Empson brought to the traditions he inherited. One Auspicious and One Dropping Eye Empson’s early thinking about ambiguity is evident from a letter of 4 Sept 1928 to Elsie Phare, future mother of the eminent Shakespeare scholar Katherine Duncan-­Jones. He wanted to print a piece she had submitted to the undergraduate journal Experiment he co-­edited with Jacob Bronowski and others.25 The little essay sought to contrast Gerard Manley Hopkins to Paul Valéry, the first a poet of movement and dynamism, the second of stasis; it concluded that Hopkins’s sonnet ‘The Windhover’ contained an ‘antinomy . . . very closely connected with the antithesis here in question’.26 Empson saw a similar antithesis in the poem—in his later words, ‘the life strung to activity, the life broken and made static’27—and in his letter he sketched what would soon become familiar arguments: Commentators on Shakespeare will imply ‘the man is being obscure again’, and give three things in the notes, some one of which they think the word ‘means’; usually the effect of the passage involves the word meaning all three and more. Passages in The Windhover in the same way mean both the opposites created by their context, it seems plain. . . . It is a trick often used in poetry, and always in jokes, to express two systems of values, an agony or indecision of judgement. Freud and Ambivalence, in fact, I wish you had driven that home.28

Here already we have the explicit refiguring of variants from the Arden Shakespeare, as well as the uneasy proximity of poetry to jokes that Empson had from the tradition sketched in Chapter Five. But it is the phrase ‘Freud and Ambivalence’ that really sets out his stall for the book in progress; the latter word perhaps even predates ‘ambiguity’, which Empson is not recorded using before 20 Jan 1929, when he gave a talk on the subject at Cambridge.29 It is easy to see why Empson, with his taste for the vocabulary of science, would have been attracted to the word ambivalence, which 25  On the journal, see Haffenden, William Empson, I, pp. 151–175, and Benjamin Kohlmann, Committed Styles: Modernism, Politics, and Left-­Wing Literature in the 1930s (Oxford, 2014), pp. 36–37. 26  Elsie Phare, ‘Valéry and Gerard Hopkins’, Experiment 1 (Nov 1928), 19–23, at p. 23. 27  Empson to Elsie Phare, 7 October 1928, in Selected Letters, p. 5. 28  Empson to Elsie Phare, 4 September 1928, in Selected Letters, pp. 3–4. 29  Haffenden, William Empson, I, p. 202.

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was still in the late twenties perceived as a newfangled technical term in the field of psychology. It is less obvious what precisely Empson meant by the word in the letter, despite his glosses in the previous sentence, and despite his elaboration to Phare in a subsequent letter of 7 October. But its importance for his thought on ambiguity is fundamental, and we ought to sketch its short history. In a treatise written in 1908 and published in 1911, the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler coined the term Schizophrenia to describe a new category of neurosis, roughly corresponding to what had previously been called dementia praecox. He christened one of its symptoms Ambivalenz, which he divided into the affective (a conflict of emotions), the volitional (of the will), and the cognitive (of belief).30 Schizophrenic ambivalence was an exaggeration of common mental experience; in healthy individuals, positive and negative feelings mitigated each other, achieving resolution, whereas in the schizophrenic they existed side by side, exacerbating one another. The phenomenon was also relevant in the explanation of sexuality, of the language of children, and of dreams, following Freud.31 In 1914 Bleuler added the category of literature, seeing in ambivalence—as Graves 30  Eugen Bleuler, Dementia praecox oder Gruppe der Schizophrenien, in Handbuch der Psychiatrie, ed. G. von Aschaffenburg, IV.1 (Leipzig, 1911), pp. 43–44, 305–6. In the same year Bleuler’s assistant Franz Riklin published a report of his lecture on the subject, delivered 26 November 1910: see ‘Vortrag über Ambivalenz’, Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse 1 (1910–11), 266–68. See also Bleuler, ‘Die Ambivalenz’, The Psychoanalytic Review 2 (1915), 466, and idem, Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie (Berlin, 1916), pp. 92, 285. For a fuller account of Bleuler and his concept see Gabriele Stotz-­Ingenlath, ‘Epistemological Aspects of Eugen Bleuler’s Conception of Schizophrenia in 1911’, Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy: A European Journal 3 (2000), 153–59, and Walter Dietrich et al., Ambivalenzen erkennen, aushalten und gestalten: Eine neue interdisziplinäre Perspektive für theologisches und kirchliches Arbeiten (Zurich, 2009), pp. 18–23. 31  Later work explored the ambiguous language exhibited by certain schizophrenics. Antonio Ferreira, ‘The Semantics and the Context of the Schizophrenic’s Language’, Archives of General Psychiatry 3 (1960), 128–38, found that such patients created a private, ambiguous idiom so as to express their fears and desires without repercussion, just as Freud had suggested of dreamers. In the same year R. D. Laing, The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness (London, 1960), p. 223, recorded one of his own patients, a 26-­year old schizophrenic named Julie: ‘I’m an in-­divide-­you-­all, I’m a no un’. The last phrase he glossed ‘a nun: a noun: no one single person’, adding that ‘[b]eing a nun had very many meanings’. He called it ‘schizophrenese’, and said it was ‘the result of a number of quasi-­autonomous systems striving to give expression to themselves out of the same mouth at the same time’—a Caiaphatic formula. Anthony Wilden, ‘Lacan and the Discourse of the Other’, in his The Language of the Self (Baltimore, 1968), pp. 159–311, at p. 222, referred to Julie’s words as ‘the poetry of schizophrenia’, arranging them as verse on the page; Norman O. Brown likewise quoted them in his cento Love’s Body (New York, 1966), p. 62, with the note ‘The language of Finnegans Wake’. Unwary readers of Brown, such as Victor Vitanza, ‘An Open Letter to my “Colligs”: On Paraethics, Pararhetorics, and the Hysterical Turn’, Pre/Text 11 (1990), 238–87, at p. 246, have mistaken the words for Joyce’s own. Ambiguity reigns.

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would later—‘one of the most important mainsprings of poetry’, and remarking that dramatists and novelists expressed their inner conflicts in literary ‘complexes’ that in turn stirred their readers’ emotions.32 The idea of ambivalence, broadly speaking, was of course hardly new. The cognitive variety had been an important feature of ancient Greek scepticism, which promoted the state of perfect calm (ataraxia) achieved by perceiving the equal strength (isostheneia) of positions for and against a doctrine.33 Coleridge, meanwhile, articulated a notion of unconscious cognitive ambivalence—what we might call cognitive dissonance—in his description of the ‘bull’, which ‘consists in the bringing together two incompatible thoughts, with the sensation, but without the sense, of their connection’.34 As for the divided will, it can be found right at the head of the European literary tradition, in the first book of the Iliad, where we read that Achilles’ ‘heart hesitated between two choices’ (‘ἦτορ . . . διάνδιχα μερμήριξεν’, Il. I.188–189), whether he should slay Agamemnon with his sword, or curb his own anger. Coleridge, again, had a keen sensitivity to affective ambivalence, justifying the dark wordplay in Hamlet as a product of forces in conflict: ‘the language of suppressed passion, especially of hardly smothered dislike’.35 This judgement, in parallel with others in his notebooks,36 is an early turn away from the view of a pun as an artificial ambiguity, seeing it not as dispassionate, but as potentially tense and unstable, as well as mimetic of emotional disorder, just as John Ruskin would posit of the ‘pathetic fallacy’ some decades later.37 In this respect it is a step towards the psychologisation of ambiguity in Freud and Empson, although the psychology is that of character, not yet of author. The success of Bleuler’s term can no doubt be attributed to its early adoption by Freud. The two had met in 1904 and corresponded since 1905; 32  Eugen Bleuler, ‘Die Ambivalenz’, in Festgabe zur Einweihung der Neubauten [der Universität Zürich], 18 April 1914, 6 parts in 1 (Zurich, 1914), Part III, pp. 95–106, at 102: ‘Die Ambivalenz ist eine der wichtigsten Triebfedern der Dichtung’. 33  Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, I.8. 34  Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. Engell and Bate, I, p. 72. 35  Coleridge, Shakespearean Criticism, ed. Raysor, I, p. 120. On this see M. M. Badawi, Coleridge, Critic of Shakespeare (London, 1973), p. 175, which also quotes an unpublished marginalium that ‘vindictive anger striving to ease itself by contempt [is] the most frequent origin of Puns’; and more recently Ewan James Jones, Coleridge and the Philosophy of Poetic Form (Cambridge, 2014), pp. 107–45. Compare the analysis of the ambiguities in Ajax by Karl Weismann in 1852, discussed in Chapter Nine above, p. 351. 36  For instance, the analysis of paronomasia or playing on names in Richard II as ‘a sort of irresistible impulse’: see Coleridge, Shakespearean Criticism, ed. Raysor, I, p. 138 (notes for an 1813 lecture in Bristol), and II, p. 144 (John Payne Collier’s report from an 1812 lecture in London on Shakespeare and Milton). 37  Related is the idea, already in classical rhetoric—as epitomised, e.g., by G. J. Vossius, on which see Chapter Five above, p. 199—that a derangement of syntax (hyperbaton) can express disordered emotion.

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Bleuler deeply admired Freud’s work on dreams and in 1910 compared his discoveries to those of Darwin and Copernicus, but later grew distant from the movement, and in 1925 Freud remarked sardonically that ‘ambivalence’ was just the word to characterise Bleuler’s attitude to psychoanalysis.38 Even before Bleuler, Freud had been describing neurotic symptoms caused by a repressed affective ambivalence, without having the term to hand. For instance, a child of five would alternately hit his father and kiss the place he had hit, about which Freud commented that ‘The emotional life of man is in general made up of pairs of contraries such as these. Indeed, if it were not so, repressions and neuroses would perhaps never come about.’39 An interesting case for our purposes, given the relevance of inspiration, is that of a neurotic, around the same time as the five-­year-­old, who expressed an unconscious ambivalence towards God: At the time of the revival of his piety he used to make up prayers for himself, which took up more and more time and eventually lasted for an hour and a half. The reason for this was that he found, like an inverted Balaam, that something always inserted itself into his pious phrases and turned them into their opposite. For instance, if he said, ‘May God protect him’, an evil spirit would hurriedly insinuate a ‘not’.40

Empson would later devote several pages (206–213) to ambivalent nots insinuated into English poetry. Once Freud had Bleuler’s term, he applied it liberally in new ways, even when he acknowledged the inventor by name.41 Ambivalence in Freud seems rarely to be cognitive, much more 38  Mikkel Borch-­Jacobsen and Sonu Shamdasani, The Freud Files: An Inquiry into the History of Psychoanalysis (Cambridge, 2012), pp. 58–9 on the correspondence, 6 on the comparison to Darwin and Copernicus, and 94–8 on the later distance. On their encounter, see also Ernst Falzeder, ‘The Story of an Ambivalent Relationship: Sigmund Freud and Eugen Bleuler’, Journal of Analytical Psychology 52 (2007), 343–368. 39  Sigmund Freud, ‘Analyse der Phobie eines fünfjährigen Knaben’ (1909), in FGW VII, p. 347: ‘aus solchen Gegensatzpaaren ist das Gefühlsleben der Menschen überhaupt zusammengesetzt; ja, es käme vielleicht nicht zur Verdrängung und zur Neurose, wenn es anders wäre’. Translation from ‘Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-­Year-­Old Boy’, in Sigmund Freud, Collected Papers, 5 vols ([London], 1925–50), III, pp. 149–287, at p. 254. 40  Sigmund Freud, ‘Bemerkungen über einen Fall von Zwangsneurose’ (1909), in FGW VII, p. 415: ‘Zur Zeit seiner wiedererwachenden Frömmigkeit richtete er sich Gebete ein, die allmählich bis zu 1½ Stunden in Anspruch nahmen, weil sich ihm—ein umgekehrter Bileam— in die frommen Formeln immer etwas einmengte, was sie ins Gegenteil verkehrte. Sagte er z. B. “Gott schütze ihn”—so gab der böse Geist schnell ein “nicht” dazu.’ The translation is from ‘Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis’, in Collected Papers, III, pp. 293–383, at pp. 330–331. 41  As he did, for instance, in ‘Zur Dynamik der Übertragung’ (1912), in FGW VIII, pp. 372 (Eng. in Collected Papers, II, p. 320); and ‘Triebe und Triebschicksale’ (1915), in FGW X, p.

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usually affective and volitional, denoting, for instance, a neurotic’s combination of negative and positive transference towards the same person, or the coexistence of active and passive instincts on a single subject, such as loving feelings and the self-­preservative interests of the ego. Most commonly of all, it meant both love and hatred, affection and jealousy, for the father—one of the central themes of psychoanalysis. Before Empson, uses of the words ambivalence and ambivalent in English appear almost exclusively in specialist psychological literature, or in criticism explicitly applying a psychological framework, such as an article by Herbert Ellsworth Cory in 1927, distinguishing the sublime as that which ‘involves an oscillation of negative and positive impulses and feelings’, that is, ‘stir[s] us to moods which Bleuler and Freud like to call ambivalent’.42 In other words, although scholars were starting to extend the applications of the term, flattening out its original precision, it still had the ring of the technical when Empson deployed it in his letter to Phare, and it still evoked neurosis, disorder, extremes of intensity, and, by extension, dreams and poetry.43 The ‘trick’ of ambiguity, Empson wrote in his letter, is used in poetry ‘to express two systems of values, an agony or indecision of judgement’. Words like ‘values’ and ‘judgement’ make this paraphrase hard to categorise in Bleuler’s scheme: he appears to be describing an ambivalence at once affective (‘agony’), cognitive (‘systems of values’), and volitional (‘indecision’—a favourite word in the book). He elaborates in Seven Types: ‘Confronted suddenly with the active physical beauty of the bird, [Hopkins] conceives it as the opposite of his patient spiritual renunciation; the statements of the poem appear to insist that his own life is superior, but he cannot decisively judge between them, and holds both with agony in his mind.’ It is thus only natural that the three kinds of ambivalence should be united in Hopkins; his putative emotions of longing, of regret, of determination and spiritual satisfaction reflect conflicts of belief prompted by the demands of religious obedience, and in turn provoke contrasting impulses, towards the world and away. This tripartite ambivalence is brought into focus by particular words. The first three lines of the sonnet’s sestet run: 224 (Eng. in Collected Papers, IV, p. 74). For a survey of Freud’s uses of the word, see Jean Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse (Paris, 1967), pp. 19–25. On the relation between ambivalence and ambiguity in Freud and other psychoanalysts, see José Bleger, Symbiosis and Ambiguity: A Psychoanalytic Study, ed. John Churcher and Leopoldo Bleger, tr. Susan Rogers et al. (Hove, 2013), pp. 245–83. 42  Herbert Ellsworth Cory, ‘The Sublime, the Beautiful, and the Good’, International Journal of Ethics 37 (1927), 159–72, at pp. 170, 168. 43  Paul Fry, William Empson: Prophet Against Sacrifice (London, 1991), p. 55, notes the pathological metaphor in Empson’s description of his book’s organisation into ‘stages of advancing logical disorder’ (STA, p. 48).

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Brute beauty and valour and act, oh air, pride, plume, here Buckle; AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion Times told lovelier, more dangerous, oh my chevalier.

Empson observes, as he did in the letter, that ‘Buckle’ means either ‘fasten like a belt’ or ‘break down’, and that ‘here’ refers either to the bird or to Hopkins; he now adds that ‘chevalier’ refers either to Christ, to whose service the Jesuit poet had devoted himself, or to the windhover. He concludes: we seem to have a clear case of the Freudian use of opposites, where two things thought of as incompatible, but desired intensely by different systems of judgments, are spoken of simultaneously by words applying to both; both desires are thus given a transient and exhausting satisfaction, and the two systems of judgment are forced into open conflict before the reader. Such a process, one might imagine, could pierce to regions that underlie the whole structure of our thought; could tap the energies of the very depths of the mind. (225–226)

In the expression ‘spoken of simultaneously by words applying to both’ is a clear structural parallel to the Caiaphatic model of prophet and spirit in conflict, only now the emphasis is placed on the temporary ‘satisfaction’ of desire, without any conceptual resolution; the force of the term ambivalence, which is only implicit in this passage of the book, lies precisely in this unresolved intensity—the legacy of Freud, of neurosis. The word itself appears only five times in the book, but the concept appears throughout, and not just, as might be expected, in the seventh type: in Ilse Bindseil’s neat formulation, ambiguity is for Empson ‘the descriptive form of ambivalence’.44 Thus Synge’s Naisi agrees ‘at the back of his mind’ with Deirdre that his own optimism is vain (42); the Fool in Lear is a ‘hallucination’, ‘a divided personality externalised from the King’, who can thus express the contrary of Lear’s conscious meaning (46); Donne’s ‘Valediction of Weeping’ ‘is ambiguous because his feelings were painfully mixed’ (145); the mind of Othello in the act of murder is ‘baffled by its own agonies’ (185); in Richard Crashaw’s ‘Hymn to Sainte Teresa’, ‘two opposed judgments are being held together and allowed to reconcile themselves’ (218). After analysing at length (133–139) all the possibilities offered by the word-­choice and syntax in a Shakespeare sonnet, Empson admits doubt on its verbal ambiguities but insists that ‘the feeling behind the poem is 44  Ilse Bindseil, Ambiguität und Ambivalenz: über einige Prinzipien literaturwissenschaftlicher und psychoanalytischer Begriffsbildung (Kronberg, 1976), p. 34: ‘Ambiguität, so könnte in einem ersten Anlauf, hypothetisch, formuliert werden, ist die deskriptive Form der Ambivalenz.’ See also Fry, William Empson, p. 8.

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ambivalent’, that is, both affectively in Shakespeare’s conflicting emotions towards W. H., and volitionally in the different ends the poet has in writing the sonnet. It is unsurprising that a full analysis is given, under the seventh type, of a poem actually about ambivalence, namely Keats’s ‘Ode on Melancholy’. The very concept of melancholy is with Keats, as it had not been in the Renaissance but is still today, a sort of ambivalence, a pleasure taken in sadness. The first stanza, in Empson’s reading, rests on no verbal ambiguity, but only inscribes the paradox. Ambiguities begin to appear in the second, where Empson punctiliously annotates possibilities according to his usual procedure, but the rub of it is left to the final stanza: Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine, Though seen of none save him whose strenuous  tongue Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine; His soul shalt taste the sadness of her might, And be among her cloudy trophies hung.

Melancholy is veiled because ‘only in the mystery of her ambivalence is true joy to be found’ (216). Ambiguity appears throughout the stanza, but is concentrated especially in the pronoun her in the final two lines. To read this as unambiguously denoting Melancholy would give us the unsatisfactory ‘tautology’ that melancholy is sad; rather, it denotes both Melancholy and Joy, and indeed ‘thy mistress’ (line 18), encoding both the ambivalence intrinsic to melancholy and the sexual dimension of Romantic passion. As Empson concludes, ‘what is accepted as intelligible poetry may be considered as an association of opposites such as would interest the psycho-­analyst’ (217). That last sentence only makes explicit what could be inferred from the exegesis here and elsewhere in the book, namely, that Empson sees his criticism as akin to psychoanalysis, in that it seeks to uncover conflicts and divisions in the author’s mind, whether conscious, unconscious, or both. It is this aspect that is completely absent from, and indeed antithetical to, the pre-­Freudian tradition of finding artificial ambiguities, glorified witticisms, in poetry; the closest forebears, Coleridge and the German drama critics of the nineteenth century, had said only that ambiguity manifests the ambivalence in a character’s mind. Empson enjoyed wit but found it essentially unlike poetry: ‘Wit is employed [in the eighteenth century] because the poet is faced with a subject which it is difficult to conceive poetically’ (109). Even in Shakespeare it was suspect, demonstrating ‘a feminine pleasure in yielding to the mesmerism of language, in getting one’s way, if at all, by deceit and flattery’ (87)—Empson’s language rein-

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scribing the old association of wit and deceit while conveying an almost Addisonian hostility to wordplay. His own idea was rather nearer, as I have already indicated, to the concept of inspired ambiguity, a parallel underwritten by the ancient picture of the poet as prophet, each with his divine madness and obscure idiom.45 Earlier scholars had occasionally drawn the same connection. For instance, the Aberdeen classicist Thomas Blackwell, in a 1735 essay on Homer that had a huge impact on his contemporaries, offered an astounding evocation of the poet’s oracular frenzy: The Torrent of the Poetick Passion is too rapid to suffer Consideration, and drawing of Consequences; If the Images are but strong, and have a happy Collusion, the Mind joins them together with inconceivable Avidity, and feels the Joy of the Discharge, like throwing off a Burthen or Deliverance from a Pressure. But at the same time, this Force and Collusion of Imagery is susceptible of very different Meanings, and may be viewed in various, and even opposite Lights: It often takes its Rise from a Likeness which hardly occurs to a cool Imagination; and which we are apt to take for downright Nonsense, when we are able to find no Connexion between what went before, and the strange Comparison that follows. It is in reality the next thing to Madness; Obscure and ambiguous, with intermixed Flashes of Truth, and Intervals of Sense and Design.46

In a similar vein, Empson would picture Shakespeare in Miltonish terms as a ‘Child of Nature’ hardly pausing to consider his images, putting down a phrase ‘because it was the first word he could drag out by the heels out of an intense and elaborate speech-­situation’ (84).47 Another example is much more famous: Ruskin, in his discourse on the pathetic fallacy, ranked poets on a spectrum with prophets, each seeing ‘untruly’, their cognitive 45  The loci classici are Plato, Phaedrus, 244c–245a, and Ion, 533e–534b. Compare Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd, rev. R. W. Maslen (Manchester, 2002), pp. 83–84, on vates meaning both poet and prophet. For obscurity in poetry and prophecy, see Plutarch, De oraculis, 409c–d, and the commentary in Peter Struck, Birth of the Symbol: Ancient Readers at the Limits of their Texts (Princeton, 2004), pp. 180–82. 46  Thomas Blackwell, An Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (London, 1735), pp. 151–52. 47  Blackwell, An Enquiry, p. 310, describes metaphor as ‘a general Pattern, which may be applied to many Particulars’, and which ‘is susceptible of an infinite number of Meanings; and reaches far because of its Ambiguity’. Compare STA, p. xv: ‘there is always in great poetry a feeling of generalisation from a case which has been presented definitely’; and 120: ‘it is an absurd stretching of the idea of ambiguity to call a generalisation ambiguous because it has several particular cases, and in so far as the poem is read in this way its ambiguity, at any rate, lies deep within the obscurity of the first type.’ On Blackwell see Donald Foerster, Homer in English Criticism: The Historical Approach in the Eighteenth Century (New Haven, 1947), pp. 26–40.

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weakness exposed by high passion, or by divinity.48 Empson emphasised the idea in his preface to the second edition: ‘Critics have long been allowed to say that a poem may be something inspired which meant more than the poet knew’ (xiv). In that word inspired is the whole heritage of Empson’s concept.49 And at the end of the book he distinguishes it still more explicitly from the deliberate artificial sort of ambiguity: An ambiguity, then, is not satisfying in itself, nor is it, considered as a device on its own, a thing to be attempted; it must in each case arise from, and be justified by, the peculiar requirements of the situation. . . . Thus the practice of ‘trying not to be ambiguous’ has a great deal to be said for it, and I suppose was followed by most of the poets I have considered. It is likely to lead to results more direct, more communicable, and hence more durable; it is a necessary safeguard against being ambiguous without proper occasion, and it leads to more serious ambiguities when such occasions arise. (235)50

The manoeuvre is remarkably similar to one made in 1794 by the eccentric, inventive literary critic Walter Whiter, who spent the twentieth century being continually rediscovered and then forgotten again.51 Whiter was keen to defend Shakespeare from Johnson’s charge of loving puns too much, and he did so with Locke’s doctrine, elaborated by David Hartley, of the association of ideas in the imagination, by which ‘combinations were not formed by the invention, but forced on the fancy of the poet’, for instance by images seen casually in everyday life.52 Whereas his predecessors had traced what they took to be Shakespeare’s conscious puns and allusions, they had ignored his unconscious, indirect references and plays on words. Certain equivocal words will ‘often serve to introduce other words 48  John Ruskin, Modern Painters (1856), in his Complete Works, eds E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols (London, 1903–12), V, p. 209. 49  Fry, William Empson, p. 5, backdates the point about ‘something inspired’ to Schleiermacher, though, as we have seen, the theme of inspiration had already been fundamental to Western readings of Scripture for centuries. 50  Empson, no hypocrite, claimed to follow these precepts in his own poetry, insisting on a postcard to the critic and editor John Hayward, 16 December 1940, that ‘the whole labour is to make the thing quite clear’. The postcard is quoted in William Empson, The Complete Poems, ed. John Haffenden (London, 2000), p. lxiv, at which point it belonged to Eric Homberger. It is now in the possession of Arnold Hunt, who kindly showed it to me. 51  See, e.g., Barbara Hardy, ‘Walter Whiter and Shakespeare’, Notes and Queries 198 (1953), 50–54, Sailendra Kumar Sen, ‘A Neglected Critic of Shakespeare: Walter Whiter’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 13 (1962), 173–85, and the long introduction to Walter Whiter, A Specimen of a Commentary on Shakespeare, eds Alan Over and Mary Bell (London, 1967). 52  Walter Whiter, ‘An Attempt to Explain and Illustrate Various Passages in Shakspeare, on a New Principle of Criticism Derived from Mr. Locke’s Doctrine of the Association of Ideas’, in his A Specimen, p. 64.

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and expressions of a similar nature’, turning from one image to another without the poet’s full awareness.53 Jaques says (As You Like It, II.7) that he wants a ‘motley coat’, adding that ‘It is my only suit / Provided that you weed your better judgments. . . .’ George Steevens found a quibble in suit (‘petition’, ‘clothes’); Whiter thinks rather that Shakespeare meant only ‘petition’, but that he was led to it unawares by the homonymy, and thence to weed (‘clothes’, ‘purify’). It was not a deliberate quibble but a pardonable ‘involuntary association’.54 Shakespeare’s honour was defended by transforming, via close verbal analysis, his artificial ambiguities into unconscious ones. So, much more fully, with Empson. The biographical element to this, aiming to diagnose ambivalence in the mind of the historical writer, seems irreducible, but Empson is evasive on the point. It is not just that he ‘pays much more attention’ to the verbal than to the biographical’:55 it is that he asserts the inadequacy of biography to explain a poem, declaring finally that he has been ‘talking less about the minds of poets than about the mode of action of poetry’ (243). He aspires, that is, not to historical claims but to an objective statement about the nature of poetry itself. This stands at variance with his way of speaking earlier in the book: with the ‘complexity’ of Shakespeare’s ‘original meaning’ to which the critic must work back (82), and with the ‘fundamental division in the writer’s mind’ exposed in the seventh type (192). It is difficult to know how to resolve this. Perhaps we must suppose a fundamental division in Empson’s mind. The Mind’s Construction One of the more striking features of the climactic seventh chapter of Seven Types is that, as ambiguity becomes most psychological, it also becomes depersonalised, a trait of language or culture rather than of the individual. This is an ambivalent movement that mirrors Empson’s indecision about the poet’s intention. The opening of this chapter (192–198) is one of his finest stretches of prose, pirouetting through modernist architecture, the symbolism of the Cross, Sumerian art, heraldry, stereophony and stereoscopy, the Freudian interpretation of dreams, German metaphysics, Buddhism, the early modern study of Hebrew, Arabic polysemy, hieroglyphics, formal logic, and the human condition, before finally settling down with a jolly bit of Dryden. Along the way he confides: 53  Ibid., p. 64. There is some similarity to what Freud would call ‘switch words’ or Wortbrücke in dreams. 54  Ibid., pp. 72–73. 55  Childs, The Birth, p. 122.

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I have been searching the sources of the Nile less to explain English verse than to cast upon the reader something of the awe and horror which were felt by Dante arriving finally at the most centrique part of earth, of Satan, and of hell. . . . We too must now stand upon our heads, and are approaching the secret places of the Muse. (196)

The nod to Donne’s eighteenth elegy (‘we love the centrique part’, connoting both earth and vagina) underscores the distinction between this chapter and the less important previous ones, but also evokes the interior of the mind and its ‘fundamental division’. And yet the division seems prior to any given mind. Immediately before, he had been musing on the phenomenon of enantiosemeia, the capacity of certain words (sometimes now labelled ‘antagonyms’) to denote one thing and its opposite. The traditional example in English is let, meaning ‘allow’ (the sole current sense) or ‘hinder’, in Latin altus, ‘high’ or ‘deep’; both are cited here.56 Empson knew an essay by Freud on this subject—it is one of the very few non-­literary texts he cites in the book—which was based in turn on a piece from 1882 by the journalist and amateur philologist Karl Abel.57 Abel’s essay argued that ancient Egyptian, as a language more primitive than Greek and Latin, was riddled with homonyms, words that meant large numbers of very different things, such as Ab, meaning ‘to dance’, ‘heart’, ‘calf’, ‘wall’, ‘to proceed’, ‘demand’, ‘left hand’, ‘figure’, and so on; he noted, however, that some of these depended on regional and chronological variation.58 He concluded that Egyptian must have been supplemented by disambiguating gestures and hieroglyphics; thus a single symbol could denote either ‘old man’ or ‘baby’ depending on the symbol placed next to it. But the tongue progressed to clarity over time: ‘as the mind advanced, as conceptions became better defined and sounds were more accurately distinguished, before the force of those enlightening agencies most homonyms had to vanish’.59 The 56  Empson cites one double word in Egyptian, namely nekht, for ‘dead white’ and ‘dead black’, in E. A. Wallis Budge, An Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary (London, 1920), p. 389a. For a pretty essay on the theme in English, see David-­Antoine Williams, ‘Poetic Antagonyms’, The Comparatist 37 (2013), 169–85. On the competing modern explanations of enantiosemy, see Jordan Finkin, ‘Enantiodrama: Enantiosemia in Arabic and Beyond’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 68 (2005), 369–86. 57  Sigmund Freud, ‘Über den Gegensinn der Urworte’ (1910), published in English as ‘The Antithetical Sense of Primal Words’, in Collected Papers, IV, pp. 184–91. Abel’s essay was read as a lecture to the Royal Asiatic Society of London in 1880, and published as a chapter in English, ‘The Origin of Language’, in his Linguistic Essays (London, 1882), pp. 225–42, and then in German as a separate pamphlet, Über den Gegensinn der Urworte (Leipzig, 1884), which Freud read. 58  The idea of homonyms or homophones in Egyptian went back to Champollion, on which see Erik Iversen, The Myth of Egypt and its Hieroglyphs in European Tradition (Copenhagen, 1961), pp. 141–44. 59  Abel, ‘The Origin’, p. 233.

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language, Abel claimed, also contained many antagonyms, which, unlike the homonyms, were not a primitive accident, but a reflex of the original identity of opposites in the mind. The idea of strength was first learned by distinguishing it from weakness, light from dark, just as schoolchildren are still taught what an obtuse angle is by distinguishing it from right and acute: ‘Egyptian takes us back into the childhood of mankind, when the most elementary notions had to be struggled for after this laborious method.’60 (237–38) Abel’s idea has long been debunked, and in fact was taken seriously by few of his contemporaries; it rested on faulty data and misinterpretation to fit an idée fixe.61 It also relied on unscientific and morally questionable notions of languages, and peoples, as primitive or advanced. Moreover, if Egyptian did require disambiguating symbols to resolve homonyms or antagonyms, it was perfectly conventional: after all, to take only one example of many, the English symbol scend can mean either of the contraries ‘to go up’ or ‘to go down’, depending on whether it is prefixed with the symbols a or de. As Giulio Lepschy has shown, and as we have already noted in passing, Abel’s idea of enantiosemy had a long prehistory in the West, chiefly among biblical scholars who found it in the Old Testament; a notorious example was ‫ ָב ֵרְך‬barek, meaning either ‘curse’ or ‘bless’, as in the speech of Job’s wife (Job 2:9), later the subject of a famous sermon by Frank Kermode.62 The problem was still more pronounced in Arabic; Edward Pococke, one of the foremost orientalists of the seventeenth century, listed a whole page of Arabic antagonyms—hamim, for hot or cold water, alakammo, for black or white, and so on.63 Centuries earlier, Arabic grammarians and exegetes 60  Ibid., pp. 237–238. The idea of learning by contraries was, of course, entirely traditional; as Chaucer had expressed it, Troilus and Criseyde I.637–39, ‘By his contrarie is every thing declared.  / For how might ever sweetnesse have be knowe  / To him that never tasted bitternesse?’ 61  For a contemporary critique, see, e.g., Friedrich Giese, Untersuchungen über die ‘Addâd auf Grund von Stellen in altarabischen Dichtern (Berlin, 1894). 62  Frank Kermode, ‘The Uses of Error’ (1986), in his The Uses of Error (London, 1991), pp. 425–32. Giulio Lepschy, ‘Freud, Abel e gli opposti’ in La communicazione spiritosa: il motto di spirito de Freud a oggi, ed. Franco Fornari (Florence, 1989), pp. 41–68, at pp. 60–61. Outside biblical scholarship, Aulus Gellius, Noctes atticae XII.9, noted that among older writers words like valitudo and facinus could be taken in either a positive or a negative sense. In the Renaissance, Marc-­Antoine Muret, Variarum lectionum libri XV (Antwerp, 1580), pp. 146–47, explored parallel cases in Greek. 63  Edward Pococke, Appendix notarum miscellanea (Oxford, 1654), appended to his Porta Mosis (Oxford, 1655), pp. 14–29, with the Arabic list at 22–23, drawing also on the work of Jalāl al-­Dīn al-­Suyūtī, Ibn Fāris, and Abu Nasr Isma’il ibn Hammad al-­Jawharī. Pococke also notes parallels in other languages, including English to let and to skin, i.e. to remove or to cover with skin.

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of the Qur’an had discussed the same notion, which they called addad, at length; in the tenth century Abu Bakr ibn al-­Anbari, in his Kitab al-­addad, had defended Arabic from the charge of ambiguity on this account, on the grounds that context disambiguates the term in practice, and that in each case, one sense is the original and the other a sense-­extension—a similar set of considerations to those offered by Sanctius on Latin in the sixteenth century.64 The republication of al-­Anbari’s treatise in 1881 by Martijn Theodoor Houtsma, a young professor of oriental languages at Utrecht, may have been known to Abel when he came to publish his lecture. What was new to the discourse of the nineteenth century, following the development of anthropology and comparative linguistics, was the idea of primitive races and languages, the ‘childhood of mankind’.65 It was this identification that prompted philologists and psychologists to extrapolate from observations of child behaviour to theories about language formation, and to argue that the earliest stages of a language were the most indistinct and ambiguous. In the 1760s, before the shift, the classicist Robert Wood had maintained that Homer’s ancient dialect was the clearest, because ambiguity and obscurity were the products of civilisation, of ‘Science’ and ‘Philosophy’.66 But a century later the celebrity comparatist Friedrich Max Müller, in his lecture series on ‘The Science of Language’, contended: ‘Most roots that have yet been discovered, had originally a material meaning, and a meaning so general and comprehensive that they could easily be applied to many special objects.’67 For Müller, this justified the ancient idea that language develops by a process of metaphorical or analogical sense-­extension, such that words are applied to new objects due to the perception of resemblance between them.68 For others, on the On Sanctius, see Chapter One above, pp. 57–58. On addad in the mediaeval Arabic tradition, see the various essays in L’ambivalence dans la culture arabe, ed. Jean-­Paul Charnay (Paris, 1967), esp. the first chapter by David Cohen, and, more recently, Ramzi Baalbaki, The Arabic Lexicographical Tradition: From the 2nd/8th to the 12th/18th Century (Leiden, 2014), pp. 188– 98. On the theological context for the study of language in this era, see L. Kopf, ‘Religious Influences on Medieval Arabic Philology’, Studia Islamica 5 (1956), 33–59. On ambiguity in tenth-­century Arabic logic, see Peter Adamson and Alexander Key, ‘Philosophy of Language in the Medieval Arabic Tradition’, in Linguistic Content: New Essays on the History of the Philosophy of Language, eds Margaret Cameron and Robert Stainton (Oxford, 2015), pp. 74–99, and on ambiguity in mediaeval Arabic thought more broadly, see Alexander Key, A Linguistic Frame of Mind: ar-­Rāġib al-­Isfahānī and What It Meant to be Ambiguous, Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 2012. 65  Maurice Olender, The Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion and Philology in the Nineteenth Century, tr. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA, 1992). 66  Robert Wood, An Essay on the Original Genius of Homer (London, 1769), p. lxvi. 67  [Friedrich] Max Müller, Lectures on the Science of Language, Delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, 2nd series (London, 1864), pp. 352–53. 68  See Chapter One above, pp. 32, 39. 64 

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contrary, the primitive mind, like the child’s mind, perceived not resemblance at all, but identity. As the American folklorist Francis Gummere put it in 1886: The imagination of primitive man was not analytic. He did not watch some ship ride the waves, and muse: ‘How like yon craft is to a fiery steed! I liken it to a fiery steed. In fact, I shall save time by calling it a fiery steed.’ His restless eye, subject to no fine tutorings of reason, saw an actual horse bound over the ‘foaming fields’. . . . This immediate vision is revived by true poets,—by Wolfram, say, in his dawn-­ figure: Sîne Klâwen durh die Wolken sint geslagen (Lieder, II.).69 Wolfram saw the huge bird.70

Child—savage—poet. Ambiguity reigns in the imagination, and metaphor, far from being, as classical rhetoric saw it, a mere ornament, is in fact a relic of the primitive mind. Remember, again, Blackwell and Ruskin, and compare the observation of Ogden and Richards in 1923: ‘The whole human race has been so impressed by the properties of words as instruments for the control of objects, that in every age it has attributed to them occult powers. Between the attitude of the early Egyptian and that of the modern poet, there would appear at first sight to be but little difference.’71 Prescott, too, likened the punning in Shakespeare to the ‘free imaginative play of the minds of boys and savages’.72 The same associations made possible Abel’s judgements on Egyptian homonymy and enantiosemy.73 And they chimed very naturally with the conceptual apparatus of Freud, for whom Abel’s lecture elicited a flash of recognition. Most of his short essay is just a summary of the original, framed by the suggestion that the features Abel found in primitive languages are the same as those exhibited by dreams, in which ‘ “No” seems not to exist’ and thoughts are represented by contrary images. This point Freud discovered in ancient oneirocritical manuals, and it had long been folk-­wisdom; in one Irish joke recorded by 1803, a general asks a beggar-­ That is, of daylight, ‘It slashed its claws through the clouds’. Francis Gummere, ‘Metaphor and Poetry’, Modern Language Notes 1 (1886), 83–84, at p. 84; compare Gertrude Buck, The Metaphor: A Study in the Psychology of Rhetoric (Ann Arbor, MI, [1899]), pp. 6–18. 71  C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Source of Symbolism (London, 1923), p. 32. 72  Prescott, The Poetic Mind, p. 178. 73  This can be neatly seen by contrasting Abel’s essay to a discussion of the same subject in Nicolas-­Sylvestre Bergier, Les élémens primitifs des langues (Paris, 1764), pp. 32–38; here the phenomenon is posited in all languages, and explained not as the childish identity of opposites preserved in a primitive tongue, but (in classical terms) as a product of the poverty of a language in its early state, and of analogical sense-­extension. 69  70 

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woman, ‘do you not know, that dreams always go by the rule of contrary?’74 A decade later, the physician and arcanist Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert, in his treatise Die Symbolik des Traumes (1814)—known both to Freud and to Schubert’s great-­great-­grandson Robert Graves75—grouped the language of dreams, of prophecy, and of poetry together as exhibiting the play of contraries, a feature he labelled ‘irony’.76 (He also found such irony in Nature herself, who ‘lets her doleful lament be heard at the marriage bed, and miraculously in this way joins sorrow with delight, joy with grief, just like that voice of nature, the windmusic in Ceylon, which, in a heartrending tone of deep lamentation, sings dreadfully joyful minuets’.77) Freud’s understanding of opposition in dreams, then, was overdetermined by his sources, but reading Abel made him see in the phenomenon ‘the regressive, archaic character of the expression of thoughts in dreams’. Enantiosemy, the conflation of contraries, ambiguity—all were identified with the archaic, with the primitive, with childhood, with dreams. The associations mounted. And just as Freud found a parallel in Abel for his interpretation of dreams, so Empson, inheriting the same ideas, found in Freud a parallel for his interpretation of poetry. As it turns out, Empson does not simplistically identify either enantiosemy or poetic ambiguity as primitive, as one might expect.78 He refers in his second chapter to the difficulty of being ambiguous ‘in the sophisticated tongues of many savage tribes’ (70) because they draw so many distinctions in their grammar and vocabulary;79 again, in his seventh chapRichard Lovell and Maria Edgeworth, Essay on Irish Bulls (New York, 1803), p. 140. On Freud and Schubert, see Henri Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (London, 1994), pp. 205–6, and Brian Tucker, Reading Riddles: Rhetorics of Obscurity from Romanticism to Freud (Lewisburg, NY, 2011), pp. 112–15; for Graves on Schubert, see James Jensen, ‘The Construction of Seven Types of Ambiguity’, in CEE, pp. 414–29, at p. 426. For the Graves family tree, see Graves, Robert Graves, pp. [x–xv]. 76  Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert, Die Symbolik des Traumes (Bamberg, 1814), pp. 18–19. 77  Ibid., p. 30: ‘sie . . . an Hochzeitbetten ihre Trauerklagen hören lässet, und auf diese Weise Klage mit Lust, Fröhlichkeit mit Trauer wunderlicht paart, gleich jener Naturstimme, der Luftmusik auf Ceilon, welche im Tone einer tiefklagenden, herzzerschneidenden Stimme, furchtbare lustige Menuetten singt.’ Schubert had earlier, Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft (Dresden, 1808), p. 64, referred to this phenomenon as the ‘Devil’s voice’ (Teufelsstimme) of Ceylon. This followed a longstanding tradition, for which see, e.g., Robert Knox, An Historical Religion of the Island Ceylon in the East-­Indies (London, 1681), p. 78. 78  See Fry, William Empson, pp. 105–6, on Empson’s later hostility to patronising views on the primitive. 79  Compare A. H. Sayce, Introduction to the Science of Language, 2 vols (London, 1880), p. 5: ‘the Mohicans have words for cutting various objects, but none to signify cutting simply’, and Wilbur Marshall Urban, Language and Reality: The Philosophy of Language and the Principles of Symbolism (1939: London, 2002), p. 118, referring to ‘the over-­concrete and unbearably cumbersome speech-­habits of primitive races’. 74 

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ter, he suggests that antagonyms may be used to resolve conflict and therefore reflect the tact of a refined civilisation (194), and observes that ‘the identity of opposites is not at all what one would expect from other properties of primitive languages’, as mentioned before. But at the same time, both here and in later parts of the chapter, Empson draws a line from ambiguity to the primitive. The Egyptian enantiosemy described by Freud shows a primitive ‘weakness of hold on external truth’ and an ‘honesty in voicing desires’ (194), and early on in the book he opines that ‘one would expect language in poetry to retain its primitive uses more than elsewhere’ (9). Given that all good poetry is ambiguous (xv), it is no surprise that ambiguity should be a natural corollary of the primitive, as in a couplet by Crashaw, on Christ: ‘Hee’l have his Teat e’re long (a bloody one) / The Mother then must suck the Son.’ Empson swoons: a wide variety of sexual perversions can be included in the notion of sucking a long bloody teat which is also a deep wound. The sacrificial idea is aligned with incest, the infantile pleasures, and cannibalism; we contemplate the god with a sort of savage chuckle; he is made to flower, a monstrous hermaphrodite deity, in the glare of a short-­ circuiting of the human order. Those African carvings, and the more lurid forms of Limerick, inhabit the same world. (221)

Betrayed here is the delighted disgust he evidently felt for the obscenities of Christianity. Primitivism is both cultural and sexual, in an obviously Freudian sense given away by the triad ‘incest, the infantile pleasures, and cannibalism’, and by the theme of sacrifice. What comes next indicates a tight bond between the primitive and ambivalence. Here, too, Empson follows Germanic precedent. When Bleuler lectured on ambivalence to the Association of Swiss Psychiatrists at Bern in 1910, his junior colleague Carl Gustav Jung praised the usefulness of his concept but considered it less a driving force (Treibende) in the mind than a formal device found everywhere in human culture: in Freud’s essay on enantiosemy published that year, in dreams, in mythology (Indra as fertility god and destroyer), in erotic wit such as that of Apuleius, in mystical language, and in the Christian religion itself, insofar as mankind receives eternal life in the death of Christ.80 Ambivalence was for Jung cultural as well as psychological. Empson had his version of this instead from Freud, whose development of a similar thought appears most forcibly in two works of 1913: his article ‘Das Motiv der Kästchenwahl’ on the casket scene in The Merchant of Venice, and his monograph Totem und Tabu. In the first, Freud traces the setup of the three caskets—a common device of folk-­literature, as he acknowl80  This comment is recorded by Riklin in his report ‘Vortrag über Ambivalenz’ (as in n. 30 above).

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edges—to a choice of three women, since a box is a typical dream symbol for the female genitals. Bassanio attributes to the third casket a leaden ‘paleness’, mirroring for Freud the dumbness of Cordelia, the third daughter of Lear, and these two qualities represent death. The third woman, then, is in origin Death herself, and the three as a whole are the Moirai or Fates. Since it must be recognised, however, that in Shakespeare, as in other versions, the third woman is not Death at all but the fairest—perhaps rather Love—Freud postulates that the happier form is the product of a ‘reaction formation’ (Reaktionsbildung), a euphemistic, unconscious refashioning of the feared as the desired: The third of the sisters is no longer Death, she is the fairest, best, most desirable and the most lovable among women. Nor was this substitution in any way difficult: it was prepared for by an ancient ambivalence [eine alte Ambivalenz], it fulfilled itself along the lines of an ancient context which could at that time not long have been forgotten.81

The essential thing to note here is the use of ‘ambivalence’ to denote a conflict, or rather a conflation, not in any particular mind, such as that of the neurotic, but in the collective primitive (uralt) mind, in the culture itself. Ambivalence, that is, has been hauled over from the realm of psychology to that of anthropology, a move that allows Freud to retool his analysis of dreams as an analysis of folklore. And this is writ large in the great treatise Totem und Tabu, where the term ‘ambivalence’ occurs again and again to explain cultural taboos. Primitive ceremony, as Freud read about it in Frazer’s The Golden Bough, ‘reveals its double meaning and its origin from ambivalent tendencies’—that is, tendencies of the whole culture, or as he elsewhere writes, the ‘ambivalence which is characteristic of religion’.82 Again, ‘taboo has grown out of the soil of an ambivalent emotional attitude’ towards the dead, and we can assume ‘a similar high degree of ambivalence in the emotional life of primitive races such as psychoanalysis ascribes to persons suffering from compulsion neurosis’.83 All the as81  Sigmund Freud, ‘Das Motiv der Kästchenwahl’, in FGW X, p. 34: ‘Die dritte der Schwestern ist nicht mehr der Tod, sie ist die schönste, beste, begehrenswerteste, liebenswerteste der Frauen. Und diese Ersetzung war technisch keineswegs schwer; sie war durch eine alte Ambivalenz vorbereitet, sie vollzog sich längs eines uralten Zusammenhanges, der noch nicht lange vergessen sein konnte.’ For the English, see Collected Papers, IV, p. 253. 82  Sigmund Freud, Totem and Tabu, in FGW IX, p. 65: ‘Dieses Zeremoniell trägt seinen Doppelsinn und seine Herkunft von ambivalenten Tendenzen unverkennbar zur Schau’; p. 182: ‘jener Ambivalenz, welche für die Religion charakteristisch bleibt’. The translation is from Totem and Taboo: Resemblances between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics, tr. A. A. Brill (London, 1919), pp. 86, 250. 83  Ibid., pp. 77–8 (Eng. 104): ‘Wir finden so wiederum, daß das Tabu auf dem Boden einer ambivalenten Gefühlseinstellung erwachsen ist’; p. 77 (103): ‘dem Gefühlsleben der Primi-

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sociations from earlier, finally, are folded in together: ‘the same feeling of ambivalence is responsible for the fact that the dreamer, the child, and the savage all have the same attitude towards the dead’.84 In fact, as Freud explains, taboo ‘is itself an ambivalent word’, that is, an antagonym meaning both ‘holy’ and ‘unclean’, like Latin sacer—and he points back to his earlier essay on Abel.85 Everything combines. Seven Types alludes to both works by Freud; Wordsworth, we are told, used mountains ‘as a totem or father-­substitute’ (20), while the lead casket in Shakespeare stands for ‘a fundamental mere humanity, eventual death’ (44). Empson must have come away from reading Freud with an idea of ambivalence as both subjective and objective, psychological and anthropological, a condition in a single individual as well as in an entire culture.86 The latter construction begins to appear especially towards the end of the seventh type, with the religious poetry of the seventeenth century. Empson takes a quatrain from Crashaw’s Dies Irae, addressed to Christ: O let thine own soft bowels pay Thy self; And so discharge that day. If sin can sigh, love can forgive. O say the word my Soul shall live.

The question is whether the direct object of ‘discharge’ is ‘that day’, as first appears—‘free me from the punishments of the Day of Judgement’—or ‘soft bowels’, with ‘that day’ understood as ‘on that day’. In the latter instance, Christ is defecating in payment, sympathy, or contempt; Empson refers to the image as ‘a brave use of that Biblical [i.e., Old Testament] metaphor or physiological truth, according to which the bowels are made active by sympathy and are the seat of compassion’ (223).87 He goes on to raise Freud’s analysis of the anal stage (‘a deep-­seated conflict in the child between an infantile pleasure in defecating and the need to learn more adult pleasures’), implicitly identifying the biblical with the infantile. The tiven ein ähnlich hohes Maß von Ambivalenz zukomme, wie wir es nach den Ergebnissen der Psychoanalyse den Zwangskranken zuschreiben’. 84  Ibid., p. 78 (Eng. 105): ‘wird beim Träumer, beim Kind und beim Wilden die volle Übereinstimmung im Verhalten gegen den Toten, gegründet auf die nämliche Gefühlsambivalenz, feststellen können’. 85  Ibid., p. 84 (Eng. 118): ‘Tabu ist selbst ein ambivalentes Wort’. 86  As Empson, ‘Communication: George Herbert and Miss Tuve’ (1950), repr. in CEE, pp. 246–50, at p. 248, later admitted to Rosemond Tuve, with regard to his reading of Herbert, he had been ‘[i]nterested in Freud and Frazer, in traces of the primitive and all that . . .’. 87  As usual, Empson gives no references, but see, e.g., Gen. 43:30: ‘Joseph made haste; for his bowels did yearn upon his brother’; 1 Kings 3:27: ‘her bowels yearned upon her son’; Cant. 5:4: ‘my bowels were moved for him’; and Jer. 31:20: ‘since I spake against him, I do earnestly remember him still: therefore my bowels are troubled for him’. At 1 Sam. 6:17 we read of the ‘golden haemorrhoids’ supposedly used as idols by the Philistines.

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critic’s pen thus turns the couplet into a pointed expression of the nexus between child sexuality, Christianity, poetry, ambivalence, and the primitive: I call it ambiguous, not from any verbal ingenuity of its own, but because it draws its strength from a primitive system of ideas in which the uniting of opposites (of saviour and criminal, for instance) is of peculiar importance. Of course, you may as well say it is ambiguous to use any idea which involves fundamental antinomies. . . . (222–223)

For once, ‘you’ are not contradicted. To ram the thought home he adds, ‘I find it difficult to have any clear reaction to this other than “what fun, all the Freudian stuff”; but there seems to be no doubt that it involves a curious ambivalence of feeling’—as with Shakespeare’s sonnet, Empson is more certain of the ambivalence than of the ambiguity. But the assumption throughout is that the ambivalence at play in Crashaw’s image is properly anthropological, reflecting not so much the poet’s unconscious desires as those of the ‘primitive system of ideas’ he has inherited from Scripture. And this notion is played out at even greater length in the book’s climactic example, George Herbert’s ‘The Sacrifice’. As Empson would say in his later preface, this example ‘was not concerned with neurotic disunion but with a fully public theological poem’ (viii). The poem tables ‘the various sets of conflicts in the Christian doctrine of the Sacrifice’, a subject so important to the atheist Empson that it is tempting to read the entire book as leading up to it, as if his very notion of ambiguity were as much theological as psychological by inspiration; as he puts it here, ‘the theological system is accepted so completely that the poet is only its mouthpiece’ (226).88 Empson takes us through the ‘successive fireworks of contradiction’ in Herbert’s poem, stanza by stanza, up to the final couplet, ‘Only let others say, when I am dead / Never was grief like mine.’ The observation is simple but brilliant: ‘mine’ refers both to Christ himself and to the ‘others’ (228), because he wishes that no man suffer what he has suffered, because he wants his Church to remember his suffering, because, on the contrary, he wants others to suffer still worse in retribution than he has. In a single ambiguity is thus captured both ‘the revengeful power of Jehovah’ and ‘the merciful power of Jesus’. Freud is present in the reading of other stanzas; ‘Man stole the fruit, but I must climb the tree’ evokes a son stealing from his father’s orchard—‘a symbol of incest’—so that ‘in the person of the 88  Empson later wrote, Argufying: Essays on Literature and Culture (London, 1987), p. 257, that he had put Herbert last ‘to stand for the most extreme kind of ambiguity, because it presents Jesus as at the time forgiving his torturers and condemning them to eternal torture’. Fry, William Empson, p. 3, reads this as disingenuous revisionism; I am less sceptical.

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Christ the supreme act of sin is combined with the supreme act of virtue’ (232).89 The poem thus encapsulates the irreconcilable paradoxes of Christianity: Christ as all human and all divine, sacrificial victim and bloodthirsty avenger. To run these ambiguities as a psychoanalysis of Herbert, a merely private matter, would have drained them of force.90 Ambiguity is here an atavism, a return of the repressed; to be ambiguous is to be most uncultivated, closest to bare humanity. Such a state is not unambiguously positive. At moments Empson seems to hear an older voice in his head: Dryden, he remarks, ‘was anxious to keep English syntax out of its natural condition of ambiguity and squalor’ (75). You can say that he is joking here, but a few pages later he demands respect for eighteenth-­ century editors of Shakespeare, who eschewed ambiguity and sought to ‘restore the text to a rational and shipshape condition’ (82). This is the Empson who wants to be Dr Johnson, and he has but an uneasy alliance with the Empson who insists on all the talk of shit, blood, and incense lest his scholarly readers fall into polite somnolence and pedantry.91 The roots of Seven Types, as I have suggested above, do not stop with Freud and Graves, but stretch back into the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries, through early modernity, to antiquity. Nonetheless, Freud, as a folklorist as well as a psychoanalyst, synthesising the interior and the archaic, was where these roots converged. When Empson talked about poetic ambiguity, he found himself both delving into the poet’s unconscious and reaching back to early cultures, grasping at once the individual and the uncreated conscience of his race. This double movement not only transvalued ambiguity; it reconfigured what it meant to interpret poetry in the first place, moving it closer to the privilege enjoyed formerly by biblical exegesis. Blackmur was right to compare the two occupations, but for almost exactly the wrong reasons. Neither was, as he said, ‘an essay in the under89  This last point formed the spine of contention, amid an array of ribs and lesser ossicles, in the dispute between Empson and Rosemond Tuve ignited by the latter’s ‘On Herbert’s Sacrifice’, Kenyon Review 12 (1950), 51–75, repr. in CEE, pp. 221–45. On this dispute see Haffenden, William Empson, II, pp. 434–5; on Empson’s side, Philip Hobsbaum, A Theory of Communication (London, 1970), pp. 131–34, and on Tuve’s side, Stanley Stewart, ‘ “New” Guides to the Historically Perplexed’, in Neo-­Historicism, eds Robin Headlam Wells et al. (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 48–68, legitimately objecting to Empson’s theoretical anachronism but oddly lumping him in with the New Historicists, and written with an unearned sneer. 90  This is not to deny that Empson attributed the ambiguities to Herbert’s unconscious: that he did was made plain in a draft essay sent to Tuve in 1953, in Empson, Letters, p. 194: ‘I claim to know not only the traditional background of Herbert’s poem (roughly but well enough) but also what was going on in Herbert’s mind while he wrote it, without his knowledge and against his intention’. The point is that they are not only Herbert’s. 91  The first may be that ‘eighteenth-­century country gentleman’ described by Muriel Bradbrook in her portrait of the critic, ‘The Ambiguity of William Empson’, in William Empson: The Man and his Work, ed. Roma Gill (London, 1974), pp. 2–12, at pp. 9–10.

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standing of words’; each, rather, was an attempt to comprehend, through words, the foundation of life—for Augustine, man’s relation to God, for Empson, man’s rôle in society. To the latter we now turn. An Unkind Self Of all the reviews of Seven Types, the one Empson thought the most highly of was an ambivalent notice in the Criterion by James Smith, an undergraduate at Trinity College a few years before him. Smith complained that Empson had casually combined examples from lyric poetry and drama—as if Empson were already on the track of Cleanth Brooks, who would deliberately conflate those two genres—and that he had ‘frequently refer[red] beyond the ambiguities of drama to those of life itself’.92 It was obvious to Smith that life is ‘two-­faced’: he quotes Seneca’s dictum that gratissima poma cum fugiunt, fruits are sweetest as they fall.93 Likewise, the student of drama ‘records that situations are treacherous, that men are consciously or unconsciously hypocritical, to such or such a degree’. Smith has evidently approached the book from a nineteenth-­century angle, having in mind not ambiguity but irony—that is, dramatic irony and the irony of fate. (As I shall argue in a moment, that angle was far from being misguided or inappropriate. But it was itself ironic, in that Thirlwall’s own early readers, as we have seen, censured his novel use of the word irony.) In Smith’s eyes, then, the only conceptual possibilities are irony on the one hand, and the old artificial ambiguity on the other: Is the ambiguity referred to that of life—is it a bundle of diverse forces, bound together only by their co-­existence? Or is it that of a literary device—of the allusion, conceit or pun, in one of their more or less conscious forms? If the first, Mr. Empson’s thesis is wholly mistaken: for a poem is not a mere fragment of life, it is a fragment that has been detached, considered and judged by a mind. A poem is a noumenon rather than a phenomenon. If the second, then at least we can say that Mr. Empson’s thesis is exaggerated.

Life is radically ambiguous but poetry is not, because in the very process of turning life into poetry, phenomena into noumena, we filter out the contradictions to produce something harmonious.94 To the extent that po92  James Smith, ‘On William Empson’s “Seven Types of Ambiguity” ’ (1931), in his Shakespearian and Other Essays (Cambridge, 1974), pp. 338–42, at, p. 340. On Brooks and his heirs, see Chapter Five above, p. 219. 93  Epistulae, I.12. The context is a melancholic evocation of old age and its ambivalent pleasures. 94  Compare Philipp Carl Buttmann’s arguments, discussed in Chapter Five above, p. 231.

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etry contains ambiguities, they are only superficial, witty adornments. Needless to say, this was a classicising, pre-­modernist view of the matter, more comfortable with Tennyson and Millais than with Eliot and Picasso. It shows us what Seven Types was up against. For Empson, the very strength of poetry was its expression of the complexities and contradictions of life, an aspect for which ‘ambiguity’ was convenient shorthand. Replying to Smith in the preface to the second edition of his book, he turned again to Graves’s idea about the ‘background of conflict’ behind good poetry, insisting that the critic can both penetrate a poem’s ambiguities to the poet’s ambivalence beneath, and legitimately see more in a work than its author did (xiii–xiv). Contra Smith, then, the ambiguities of poetry were contiguous with those outside poetry, with the ironies of life and drama. This vignette, and others we have already encountered, ought to make us think twice about the recurrent attempt to make a postmodernist of Empson. A recent book review in the TLS, for instance, finds ‘philosophical convergences between Derridean différance and Empsonian ambiguity’, glossing the Frenchman’s theory in the following terms: ‘Linguistic meaning, and therefore experience itself, is consequently conceived as inherently plural, undecidable or, as Empson put it, ambiguous.’95 I do not know whether this is an accurate summary of Derrida; but on the evidence it is not of Empson. He does not endorse the view that all language is ambiguous, except in an ‘irrelevant’ sense (1–2), and his exchange with Smith suggests that the notion of an ‘inherently plural’ world of experience, far from being a philosophical novelty, was decidedly old hat—background to the argument, not the startling fizgigs of its conclusion. Whereas today’s reviewer reasons from ‘linguistic meaning’ to ‘experience’, Smith went the other way, and went concessively: although experience is radically ambiguous, poetry is not. The dispute that mattered to Empson, then, was not about ‘the linguistically mediated nature of experience’, but, if anything, about the experientially mediated nature of poetic language. In other words, it was not that experience is ambiguous because constituted by ambiguous language, but rather that poetry is ambiguous because it expresses ambiguous experience—both that of culture as a whole, as we have seen, and that of social relations, the drama of family, friendship, love. To make the latter connection, Empson reached for a word also used by Smith: hypocrisy. His thoughts on this subject are articulated in an ‘annex’ on dramatic irony (38–47), a section central to the moral world of the book, and one that underlines the significance to his work of the nineteenth-­ century narrative sketched in Chapter Nine above. The concept of dramatic Fry, Empson, p. 5, argues that the New Critics are closer to Smith than to Empson on this point. 95  David Hawkes, ‘Style from Despair’, TLS, 8 August 2017, 3–5.

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irony had long been domesticated: already by 1880 Arthur Gilkes, the under-­master at Shrewsbury School, could breezily apply the term to both Sophocles and Macbeth.96 This was typical of the way in which the study of English literature piggybacked on the apparatus of classical criticism, partly for the expediency of having to hand an array of useful tools, and partly for the conferred dignity.97 Shakespeare was the most obvious beneficiary, especially since comparing his work to that of Sophocles had been a cottage industry in both England and Germany for over a century.98 Lewis Campbell, so scornful of Thirlwall’s term in 1871, saw the same features in Cymbeline; he developed the comparison in a 1904 monograph, his last, on Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Shakespeare. Richard Moulton, a Cambridge critic with a keen interest in Sophocles, deployed the term liberally in a popular book on Shakespeare’s dramatic art, which went through eight editions (1885–1929) and inspired the young G. G. Sedgewick to pursue his own thesis on irony around 1910.99 It is no surprise, then, that Empson should rely on Shakespeare in his treatment of the subject. In The Merchant of Venice, Portia (or a maid) sings as Bassanio contemplates his choice of caskets, and her end-­rhymes apparently indicate the correct choice: ‘Tell me where is fancy bred, / Or in the heart, or in the head? / How begot, how nourishèd?’ (III.2.63–5) This would seem to undermine both her father’s trial and her own honesty. Empson calls it a case of ‘dramatic ambiguity of judgment’. The problem had come up before. The amiable Boston pastor John Weiss had suggested in 1876 that Portia’s song offered Bassanio a ‘clew to bliss’ not in its rhyme but in its message—fancy, outward show, lives and dies in the eyes, and so he ought to look beyond appearances—and a few years later his fellow Bostonian, the editor Henry Norman Hudson, reached a 96  A. H. Gilkes, School Lectures on the Electra of Sophocles and Macbeth (London, 1880), pp. 58–60, 103, 111; see Simon Goldhill, Sophocles and the Language of Tragedy (Oxford, 2012), pp. 202–17, on the social context. 97  The debt was well repaid: see R. G. M. Nisbet, Collected Papers on Latin Literature, ed. S. J. Harrison (Oxford, 1995), pp. 414–30, at 428–29, on the corruption of classics by English literary criticism. 98  For older examples of the genre, see Thomas Schacht, Über die Tragödie Antigone nebst einem vergleichenden Blick auf Sofokles und Shakspeare (Darmstadt, 1842); John Robert Seeley, ‘A Parallel between Shakespeare’s Tragedy of King Lear and the Oedipus in Colono of Sophocles’, in Three Essays on Shakespeare’s Tragedy of King Lear by Pupils of the City of London School (London, 1851), 1–51; Hermann Buechler, Shakespeare’s Dramen in ihrem Verhältnisse zur griechischen Tragödie (Nuremberg, 1856). 99  Lewis Campbell, ‘On the So-­Called Irony of Sophocles’, in Sophocles, The Plays and Fragments, ed. Campbell, 2 vols (Oxford, 1871–81), I, p. 116; idem, Tragic Drama in Aeschylus, Sophocles and Shakespeare: An Essay ([London?], 1904), pp. 169–72. Richard Moulton, Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1888), pp. 137–42 and 288–9. See also Lionel Horton-­Smith, Ars tragica Sophoclea cum Shaksperiana comparata: An Essay on the Tragic Art of Sophocles and Shakspere (Cambridge, 1896), pp. 78–83.

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similar judgement. The rhyme itself was noticed independently by readers of Weiss in 1918 and 1927, the latter in Modern Language Notes where Empson may have stumbled on it, if he did not simply make the same observation on his own.100 I want here to draw attention to the reasons for which the idea has been attacked, because they bring us close to Empson’s insight but from the other direction. In the first Arden edition of 1905, Charles Knox Pooler rejected Weiss’s original claim on moral and formal grounds, commenting that it was ‘a charge against Portia’s good faith’ and ‘inconsistent’ with both the stage-­directions and her own earlier framing of the challenge; the revised Arden of 1955 retained this critique and now included the point about the rhyme.101 More recently, Lawrence Danson has argued that it undermines both Portia’s honesty and ‘Bassanio’s fitness as Portia’s lover’, as well as our narrative expectations of the scene, and by extension the romantic rhythms of the play as a whole. Most spectacularly, Joseph Pearce has railed against the claim as a ‘sinful perversion of the truth’, which denies Portia’s ‘obvious and transparent honesty’ and so ‘removes the whole Christian heart of the drama’.102 These are extrapolations of the very paradox on which Empson’s argument rests, only his response, characteristically, is not to deny its existence but to find in it a deeper dramatic function: The audience is not really meant to think she is telling him the answer, but it is not posed as a moral problem, and seems a natural enough thing to do; she might well do it in the belief that he would not hear; the song is explaining to them the point about the lead casket, may be taken to represent the fact that Bassanio understands it. (43–44) A consideration of this problem leads Empson onto the further, more general point that folklore and literature encode paradoxes in the way human beings understand each other, an argument expressed in one of his most unexpected reveries: Portia’s song is not more inconsistent than the sorrow of Helen that she has brought death to so many brave men, and the pride with 100  John Weiss, Wit, Humor, and Shakespeare: Twelve Essays (Boston, 1876), p. 313; William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, ed. Henry Norman Hudson (Boston, 1885), pp. 140–1n; Clark Northup, Review Essay, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 17 (1918), 309–22, at p. 318, n. 9; Austin Gray, ‘The Song in The Merchant of Venice’, Modern Language Notes 42 (1927), 458–59. 101  William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, ed. Charles Knox Pooler (London, 1905), p. 103, n. 63. 102  Lawrence Danson, The Harmonies of The Merchant of Venice (New Haven, 1978), pp. 117–18; Joseph Pearce, Through Shakespeare’s Eyes: Seeing the Catholic Presence in the Plays (San Francisco, 2011), pp. 63–5.

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which she is first found making tapestries of them;103 than the courage of Achilles, which none will question, ‘in his impregnable armour with his invulnerable skin underneath it’;104 than the sleepers in Gethsemane, who, St. Luke says, were sleeping for sorrow; than the way Thesée (in Racine), by the use of a deity, at once kills and does not kill Hippolyte. This sort of contradiction is at once understood in literature, because the process of understanding one’s friends must always be riddled with such indecisions and the machinery of such hypocrisy; people, often, cannot have done both of two things, but they must have been in some way prepared to have done either; whichever they did, they will have still lingering in their minds the way they would have preserved their self-­respect if they had acted differently; they are only to be understood by bearing both possibilities in mind. (44)

Spellbinding here is not only the undergraduate’s airy erudition, but still more the intuitive flash, the intimation of a lofty, ironic gaze. The passage is an impossible object whose parts cannot all be fadged up into one coherent argument—a poem of ideas. It has caused me no end of perplexity, and Il. III.125. Empson is misquoting Charles Lamb, ‘On the Tragedies of Shakspeare, Considered with Reference to their Fitness for Stage Representation’, in his Works, 2 vols (London, 1818), II, p. 31: ‘the impenetrable skin of Achilles with his impenetrable armour over it’, paraphrasing in turn Thomas Brown, ‘Observationes quaedam in Virgilium, Ovidium, Homer, etc.’, in his Works, ed. James Drake, 2 vols (London, 1707), I, p. 105: ‘Homer not only makes Achilles invulnerable every where but his Heel, but likewise bestows a Suit of impenetrable Armour upon this invulnerable Body. Bully Dawson would have Fought the Devil with those advantages.’ As Richard Gaskin, Language, Truth, and Literaure: A Defence of Literary Humanism (Oxford, 2013), p. 192, correctly observes against Empson, and as Empson knew well, Homer’s hero is not invincible, and even in the subsequent tradition his invulnerability stops short at the ankle or heel, on which see Timothy Gantz, Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources, 2 vols (Baltimore, 1993), I, pp. 625–8. But the heel of Achilles is really a symbolic loophole whose only purpose is to be exploited for narrative effect, making his invulnerability rather like the ‘impossible’ task accomplished by a folk heroine’s ingenuity. In any event, the paradox had long been traditional among literate readers who learnt Greek mythology as children; for instance, Jean-­Jacques Rousseau alludes to the problem in his Émile, in Oeuvres complètes, eds Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, 5 vols (Paris, 1959– 95), IV, p. 270, arriving at a point similar to Brown. Hegel, too, discussed the question in his lectures on aesthetics, delivered in 1815. His concern was that invincibility reduced the heroism of Achilles to something merely physical; but he decided against it, on the grounds that ‘in solchen Zügen läßt sich . . . das poetische Verhältnis der Götter und Menschen bewahren’. See his Vorlesungen über die Aesthetik, in Werke, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, 20 vols (Frankfurt am Main, 1969–71), XIII, pp. 294–5 (I.3.B.II.3b). That is, Achilles’ invincibility is a representation of his courage. Such a view of the supernatural was tremendously influential: both Empson (via Bradley) and Gaskin rely on it. The point here is that the conversation being conducted by Empson and his predecessors was different in kind from that of the source-hunting philologists, and should be taken on its own terms. 103  104 

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I have struggled for years to pass it, like a stubborn endoscopy capsule. The language is ambiguous, even evasive: is it really, as the grammar indicates, the process of our understanding that is ‘riddled with indecisions’, or is it, as seems more natural, our friends’ behaviour? Or is our understanding ‘riddled’ in a different sense—not permeated with, but confounded by? And what is that ‘because’ doing? Richard Gaskin, in the course of his cri de coeur against fashionable literary criticism, complains that Empson here misused the word ‘contradiction’, and wastes three erudite pages proving that none of the examples adduced are contradictions in the Aristotelian sense.105 That much is obvious, but it leaves open the question of what they do have in common. We might classify some of the items, depending on how we interpret them, as examples of ‘hypocrisy’: perhaps Portia is hypocritical in feigning honesty in her test, Helen in feigning sorrow for the dead, the Apostles in feigning sympathy for Christ. But on the other hand these might look more like moral weakness, which, as Hazlitt famously argued, is not hypocrisy.106 Or the hypocrite might be Bassanio: Empson doubts his affection for Portia, since he ‘is more frankly marrying for money’ than the other suitors. But then, ‘Shakespeare loved his arrivistes for their success, their shamelessness and their self-­deception, and Bassanio is justified by the song which leads him to choose rightly’ (44). Bassanio’s self-­deception—about what? His motive for marriage? But then it is not ‘frank’ after all. Some light is shed by a passage in Empson’s second book, Some Versions of Pastoral (1935), in which he explains the praise of the Fair Youth’s ‘hypocrisy’ in Sonnet 94 by asserting that the Youth ‘is loved as an arriviste, for an impudent worldliness that Shakespeare finds shocking and delightful’.107 Bassanio is like the Youth, then, an arriviste, with his worldliness passing into hypocrisy, debonair dissimulation, about which we are to feel an ‘ambivalence’. This brings us back to Chapter Three, to our admiration of Odysseus, of Satan, of Juliet, for their devious wit. Ambivalence and ‘hypocrisy’, in Empson’s sense, go together. Portia, Bassanio, Helen, Achilles, the Apostles, and Thesée are people about whom we are invited to feel in quite different ways. This is what Empson means by ‘contradiction’, whether we condone his usage or not. But after ‘hypocrisy’ comes a semi-­colon—the friend ready to act in each of two ways, Gaskin, Language, Truth, pp. 191–3. William Hazlitt, ‘On Cant and Hypocrisy’, in his Sketches and Essays (London, 1834), pp. 26–44, and before him Samuel Johnson, The Idler #27 (21 Oct, 1758), repr. in Essays from the Rambler, Adventurer and Idler, ed. W. J. Bate (New Haven and London, 1968), p. 286. Gaskin, Language, Truth, p. 192, and earlier, ‘Do Homeric Heroes Make Real Decisions?’, Classical Quarterly 40 (1990), 1–15, is I think correct to identify Helen’s fault as moral weakness or akrasia. 107  William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (London, 1935), pp. 91–2. 105  106 

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even if he can choose but one. The process of decision in such a picture is a testing out of possible selves, or a continual recalibration of self and action; the actor hesitates, doubts, is ambiguous, both subjectively and objectively. Empson calls this hypocrisy apparently by extension, insofar as it prompts ambivalence in social interpreters; as in the hypocritical act, one motive contains within it another. Hypocrisy denotes any state in which we are something and are not, are in one way, from one point of view, and in another, from another, are not. Examples are found throughout the book, none better than Shakespeare’s Cressida, whose ‘unkinde self’ is and is not the same as itself, resides and does not reside with Troilus, will and will not ‘be anothers foole’ (178–179). The absent, archetypal hypocrite is Oedipus. Empson’s thoughts on hypocrisy are expounded in a section explicitly devoted to dramatic irony, and that concept provides the frame for his portrait of the ambiguities of social experience; he even glosses as ‘irony’ that ‘generous scepticism which can believe at once that people are and are not guilty’ (44). Dramatic irony, as we found in the previous chapter, acts as an interface between verbal effects, the ethics of individual characters, and the tragic narrative: it redistributes the agency of language away from each speaker to the play as a whole. Empson grasps this precisely when he suggests that Portia’s ‘song is explaining to [the audience] the point about the lead casket, may be taken to represent the fact that Bassanio understands it’, and in a different way when he observes that, by the operation of irony, ‘the reader can be reminded of the rest of a play while he is reading a single part of it’ (45). So we see two sides of a dramatic phrase or action because we recognise that one belongs to the character in his world, and the other to the godlike playwright in ours. When Empson says that we understand this because we have it in life, it is as if he imagines society as a tragic performance governed by decisions beyond our world, for instance by God. That we have already seen in the Christian picture of Caiaphas’s prophecy, and of Old Testament deceits justified (but not justified) by the grand design. Empson is not going that way, even as his words mutter and grumble in the ranks; nobody likes misdirection. Rather, we are hypocritical for the same reason our poetry is ambiguous (semblable—frère): because we are acting under the impulses of contradictory forces that lie both in the recesses of our minds and among the roots of our inherited culture. It is significant that Empson refers here to friendship. This connection had come up before, in Domingo Báñez’s allusion to friends exchanging pleasantly equivocal letters, and in Philipp Carl Buttmann’s evocation of Horace teasing Maecenas with ambiguous pen-­sketches. Empson is less optimistic. He knows the bitter ambiguity of friendship, of all that is thought but not said, said but not understood, understood but not con-

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firmed; the misread word or gesture, the array of guessed intentions, grinding at the conscience as sleep refuses to set in. We all know this. Friendship is, to use Donne’s word, an interinanimation of selves and personas, tentative, provisional, painful—less an opportunity for controlled ambiguities than an ocean of doubt. The only sane response is the irony of that ‘generous scepticism’, which, insofar as it is generous, is like the hermeneutic charity preached by Augustine; and insofar as it is scepticism, like the ataraxia preached by Sextus Empiricus, attained in perceiving with equal clarity both sides of an argument. This is, Empson assures us, a ‘very normal and essential method’. A full analysis of the situation, of the action with all its shadow-­actions and alternatives, will dissuade us from coming down finally on one side or the other; hypocrisies, like the ambiguities in poetry, will in this way be justified, a moral word central to Seven Types. We have seen how many scholars construed their manoeuvres as a means to justify a poet’s ambiguity. For Empson it was about putting oneself in the writer’s position, taking on his words in an act of critical empathy, ‘constructing his poems in one’s own mind’ (62).108 Empson’s social view of criticism has been noticed by many readers. Paul Fry, for instance, has pointed to his repeated use of the word tact: ‘reading [Herbert] is thus made into a social situation calling for some tact and delicacy’ (130), and, still more crisply in the 1946 preface, ‘My attitude in writing [Seven Types] was that an honest man erected the ignoring of “tact” into a point of honour.’ (vii) The word has an oddly negative valence: as Fry puts it, ‘a kind of self-­inhibiting, veiled insinuation meant to cushion the potential shock of what one has to say’.109 Or more simply a habitual dissimulation that provokes hermeneutic anxiety: ‘Does she truly respect me, or is she only being tactful?’ The virtue of the Empsonian scalpel is that it does not stop when it reaches live tissue; it keeps probing, lest any secret infection stay buried. It hurts in the short term—ambiguity always hurts, or it is not ambiguity—but comforts in the long. Indeed, much of the final chapter of Seven Types, which flits in and out of cogency, is taken up with the idea of critic as comforter. At the very end Empson finds unease in a modernist moment whose public has accepted a variety of styles in poetry and, lacking any consensus about taste, needs a new, flexible approach to appreciation: The result is a certain lack of positive satisfaction in the reading of any poetry; doubt becomes a permanent background of the mind, both

108  On this, see especially Christopher Norris, ‘Empson as Literary Theorist: From Ambiguity to Complex Words and Beyond’, in William Empson: The Critical Achievement, eds Norris and Nigel Mapp (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 1–120, at p. 13. 109  Fry, William Empson, p. 31. On this point see further Matthew Creasy, ‘Empson’s Tact’, in Some Versions of Empson, ed. Matthew Bevis (Oxford, 2007), pp. 182–200.

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as to whether the thing is being interpreted rightly and as to whether, if it is, one ought to allow oneself to feel pleased. (255) Criticism is therefore to offer ‘reassurance’ in the form of a method, a strategy, rather than a dogma or canon of taste: a set of tools rather than a single end to which they must be put. But reassurance in life can come in the form of anxiety shared, without the presence or even the promise of solution: ‘I too find this confusing—you are not stupid to wonder at it.’ And so we find throughout Seven Types the articulation of uncertainty. As I argued in the Introduction, Empson’s ambiguity cannot simply be identified with plurality; his ors do not neatly become ands. Doubt haunts the scene. And his correlation between the moral, the affective, and the cognitive anticipates the work of psychologists who, two decades later, would find just such a link between a subject’s ‘tolerance of ambiguity’ in cognitive acts and his readiness to admit and accept his own ambivalences.110 If we find the world increasingly ambiguous today, it is paradoxically because that tolerance has declined in public life: on every issue, no matter how grounded in facts and data, we seem to be pulled in multiple directions by those who permit neither ambivalence nor hesitation. Likewise, it is Empson’s tolerance, his negative capability in criticism, that scholarly authoritarians like Gaskin have been unwilling to abide, dismissing him as careless and unrigorous. Take four lines by Richard Lovelace: Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage; Minds innocent and quiet take That for a hermitage. Empson gives just over a page (210–211) to the ambiguities here, playing with the referent of that and the sense of take to open up a series of different statements in the second couplet, and, behind them, an array of divergent moods and personas. If singular that refers to ‘the fact that they do not make a prison’, then the minds are comforted by their inner freedom; if it refers to the prison, then we are reminded that, despite their freedom, the minds are still in prison anyway. But the tone of this reminder depends on how we hear take: does it mean ‘passively accept’, or ‘actively reach for’, that is, seek out an escape from the complex pleasures of life? Or does it mean ‘mistake’, and, if so, is the poet’s attitude towards the errant innocence of mind mocking or reverential? 110  This empirical research followed the lead of Else Frenkel-­Brunswik, ‘Intolerance of Ambiguity as an Emotional and Psychological Variable’, Journal of Personality 18 (1949), 108–43, and Theodor Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality (New York, 1950), pp. 461–64, 479–82.

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Gaskin rules that these ‘alleged ambiguities’ are ‘not there’, and that the referent of ‘That’ which Empson ‘rules out as impossible’ is in fact correct—namely, the plural ‘walls’ and ‘bars’. He then quotes Vergil to show that it is perfectly classical to use a singular pronoun (hoc, that) with multiple referents when they are felt as a unit: ‘a reasonable knowledge of classical poetry . . . could have helped Empson’.111 But Empson did not rule this out as impossible: ‘looking back to that’, he concludes, ‘it may after all refer to walls and bars’. The ‘after all’ reflects the return to an original assumption, the most natural one; the entirety of his reading, of Lovelace as of other poems in the book, gets its effect by the tension between this natural sense and other possibilities that crowd themselves in on the reader. In such a tension we, as sensitive, Empsonian readers, are held, and stretched beyond ourselves, to imagine worlds; if stone walls do not make a prison, neither do the edges of a poet’s page. This is not unlicensed freedom. It is the discomfort of being pulled in two directions at once—a loss of innocence and quiet. Gaskin, by contrast, prefers his hermitage, with its one true meaning, safely locked up with his classical key. The problem with his response is quite simply that the existence of one solution does not preclude others. As Empson writes of Shakespeare (81–82), if we can hear the possibilities, there is no reason to assume that Lovelace’s original readers, and Lovelace himself, could not already hear them. Facts are not going to adjudicate between the two. Either you think of a poem as a pretty utterance to unravel and have done with it, or you find that it expands into the mind like the blood of a wound slowly soaking a staunching cloth. If the latter, you may feel one murders to dissect, or you may think that analysis puts it on the road to health, even if it can claim no final victory. This last was the attitude of Empson.112 We need not credit all his particular readings to embrace it; we need only share his belief that the ‘act of communication’ is ‘something very extraordinary’ (243), that the poet’s words—like those of Moses, of Caiaphas, of the tragic hero, and of the Freudian schizophrenic—are both his own and not his own, and that our response to such words ought to combine confidence and doubt. To believe this is not to collapse into ambiguities, but it is to see that the old, Aristotelian model of meaning, of the unified subject with his single intention, as invoked by Diodorus, is liable to rupture. I have tried above to suggest some of the ways in which Seven Types can be put into dialogue with the history of ambiguity as it has been sketched in this book. Empson was the heir to a conversation, or a profusion of them, Gaskin, Language, Truth, p. 190. STA, p. 15: ‘It is true that no explanation can be adequate, but, on the other hand, any one valid reason that can be found is worth giving; the more one understands one’s own reactions the less one is at their mercy.’ 111  112 

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even as he gave rise to new ones—worlds as vast as the whole inheritance of humanity, as intimate as quiet legions of readers at their desks. His work, then, can be savoured on its own terms, but also as a microcosm of the tradition, from the ancient to the newfangled: of ideas about the creation and study of poetry, about Christian doctrine, about language itself, civilisation. Despite the disorder and the contradictions in that tradition, it illuminates Empson’s encounters with poetry in a way only gestured at by Prescott and Graves, and all but absent from literary commentaries before Freud. Simply to see the extra meanings in a line, and to like them, and to deem them in some sense real, as critics long had done, was not to find in them the penetralia of human experience.

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AFTERWORD

It might be objected to this book that I have not defined ambiguity and so cannot have written a cogent history of it. I am not sure definition is in fact possible: all definitions only raise further questions. ‘A word or phrase that can be interpreted in more than one way.’ What, then, does ‘can’ mean? I can interpret any sentence to mean anything I want: no officer will raid my study at dawn. I shall tell you that every line in Sidney’s Arcadia is about the tidal patterns in Arkhangelsk, and it will be a less dull book. Well, then. ‘A word or phrase that can plausibly be interpreted in more than one way.’ But is plausibility a yes-­or-­no matter? Who is to be its arbiter? What factors does it depend on? Should we take the phrase in its natural meaning, or as the context seems to imply, and if the latter, what sort of context, and who is to judge where it begins and ends? These are all questions that have come up in the crevices of our narrative. It is not the historian’s task to answer them, and not his task to define ambiguity; to do so would impose a false coherence on a slovenly profusion of conversations. It is his job to trace out the possibilities of such questions, not to foreclose them in advance. To misquote Nietzsche: The general history of ambiguity to date, the history of its exploitation for the most varied ends, crystallises at last into a kind of unity which is hard to dissolve, hard to analyse, and, as we must stress, well and truly indefinable. (It is today impossible to say precisely why a reader actually sees ambiguity: all concepts in which an entire process is recapitulated by signs elude definition. The only thing that can be defined is that which has no history.)1

Friedrich Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral, II.13, in his Philosophische Werke, ed. Claus-­Artur Scheier, 6 vols (Hamburg, 2013), VI, p. 73: ‘die bisherige Geschichte der Strafe überhaupt, die Geschichte ihrer Ausnützung zu den verschiedensten Zwecken, krystallisirt sich zuletzt in eine Art von Einheit, welche schwer löslich, schwer zu analysiren und, was man hervorheben muss, ganz und gar undefinirbar ist. (Es ist heute unmöglich, bestimmt zu sagen, warum eigentlich gestraft wird: alle Begriffe, in denen sich ein ganzer Prozess semiotisch zusammenfasst, entziehen sich der Definition; definirbar ist nur Das, was keine Geschichte hat.)’ 1 

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Ambiguity not only has a history, it is inseparable from history, makes history possible: it lies in the gulf that separates poet from critic, legislator from barrister, tragic hero from playgoer, prophet from Church Father, friend from friend, self from self, historian from exasperated reader. And yet there need be no anguish in this division. We make up stories to fill the gap, to go on. We say that God is with us as we read, that we are together, already there in the text, that we each have to explain it for ourselves, that the words do not matter after all because we know what the writer wanted to say, that the writer has no say in it, that it must be this, because of that, that it might as well be both this and that, that he meant this but we, in hindsight, or from the stalls, know it really means that, that we cannot be sure if it means this or that but it is alright not to know, that it is better not to know, that not knowing was provided for, that although it is agony not to know we can at least, by sharing our doubt, begin to make community among ourselves here and now. That not knowing is, in the end, a kind of knowing. The history of ambiguity, as recounted in this book, is not a history of progress or decline, not a record of pathology and delusion, and not a romance of liberation from classical strictures. It is the history of a mind that has found too many past answers and will not choose between them.

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Bibliography

NB. Since it is impossible, in a history of reading and criticism, to draw sharp conceptual boundaries between primary and secondary sources, I have chosen instead to divide the bibliography into works first written up to 1930 (the date of Seven Types of Ambiguity), and works written there­ after. Pseudonymous works are listed under the name of the real author, where known, but anonymous works are collected at the beginning. Bibles are under B, ordered by date. Manuscript Sources British Library, Sloane MS 1879: Thomas Browne’s commonplace book British Library, Egerton MS 1953: Correspondence between William Warburton and Conyers Middleton British Library, Add. MS 4807: Autograph of Alexander Pope’s Iliad British Library, Add. MSS 6210, 6211, 6269: Papers of John Ward British Library, Add. MS 36090: ‘On General Rules of Evidence’ British Library San. MSS 974, San. 1462, and San. 898c: Copies of Raghava Pandaviya owned by Henry Thomas Colebrooke Oxford, Balliol College Library, MS419b: J. W. Mackail’s commonplace book Manchester, John Rylands Library, UCC/2/4/298–299: Correspondence between Johann Peter Bamberger and George Benson Paris, BNF, MS Lat. 8181 and 8451: Isaac Casaubon’s notes on Aristophanes (consulted at gallica.net) University of California, Irvine, Special Collections, MS.C.013: Papers of J. Hillis Miller Cornell University Library, #14/12/555: Papers of F. C. Prescott Yale University, Sterling Memorial Library, MS 562, series II, folders 57–119: Papers of Theodore Dwight Woolsey

Printed Works, written up to and including 1930 Anonymous. Christiano propria salus fide credenda est. Cambridge, c. 1600 ———. Witts Recreations Selected from the Finest Fancies of Moderne Muses. London, 1640.

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———. A Letter from a Jesuit: Or, The Mysterie of Equivocation. [London?], 1679. Anonymous. ‘The Jesuits Double-­fac’d Creed’. The Popish Courant, attached to The Weekly Pacquet of Advice from Rome, 1.23 (16 May, 1679), p. 192. ———. A Complete Key to the last new FARCE The What d’ye Call It. London, 1715. ———. Verses occasioned by Mr. Warburton’s Late Edition of Mr. Pope’s Works. London, 1751. ———. An Abridgment of the Modern Determinations in the Courts of Law and Equity, being a Supplement to Viner’s Abridgment, 6 vols. London, 1789–1806. ———. ‘The Juridical Society’, The Law Magazine and Law Review, 3.5 (1857), 1– 41. ———. ‘Vedic India’. Calcutta Review 32 (1859), 400–436. ———. ‘Irony’. Saturday Review (13 Dec. 1862), 704–705. ———. ‘The Greek Tragedians, III: Sophocles’. The Month 4 (Jan.–June 1866), 574–591. ———. ‘Notes on “Irony” ’. Christian Observer, n.s. 376 (Apr 1869), 285–293. ———. Codice Cassinese. Monte Cassino, 1865. [Abbott, E. A.]. Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. Oxford, 1944. Abel, Karl. Linguistic Essays. London, 1882. ———. Über den Gegensinn der Urworte. Leipzig, 1884. Abresch, Friedrich Ludwig. Animadversionum ad Aeschylum libri duo, 2 vols. Middelburg, 1743. Acosta, José. de. De Christo revelato libri ix. Rome, 1590. Adams, John Quincy. Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory, 2 vols. Cambridge, MA, 1810. Adams, Thomas. A Commentary of Exposition upon the Divine Second Epistle Generall, Written by the Blessed Apostle Peter. London, 1633. Addison, Joseph. Poetical Miscellanies the Fifth Part. London, 1704. Adelung, Johann Christoph. Über den Deutschen Styl, 2 vols. Berlin, 1785. Aeschylus. Tragoediae septem cum scholiis graecis omnibus, ed. Thomas Stanley. London, 1663. ———. Tragoediae superstites, tr. Thomas Stanley, ed. J. C. de Pauw, 2 vols. Hague, 1745. ———. Tragedies, tr. Robert Potter, 2nd ed., 2 vols. London, 1779. ———. Tragoediae quae supersunt ac deperditarum fragmenta, ed. Christian Gottfried Schütz, 5 vols. Halle, 1809. ———. Tragoediae superstites, ed. Samuel Butler, 4 vols. Cambridge, 1809–16. ———. Agamemnon, tr. John Symmons. London, 1824. ———. Aeschylus. Tragoediae, ed. Martin West. Stuttgart, 1998. Albericus de Rosate. Dictionarium. Lyon, 1548. Alciato, Andrea. De verborum significatione libri quatuor. Lyon, 1530. Alexander of Aphrodisias [Ps-­]. In Aristotelis Sophisticos elenchos commentarium, ed. M. Walles. Berlin, 1898. Alexander of Hales. Summa universae theologiae, 4 vols. Venice, 1575. Alighieri, Pietro. Super Dantis ipsius genitoris comoediam commentarium, ed. Vincenzo Mannucci. Florence, 1846. Ammonius. De adfinium vocabulorum differentia, ed. Klaus Nickau. Leipzig, 1966. Ānandavardhana. Dhvanyāloka, and Abhinavagupta, Locana, tr. Daniel Ingalls et al. Cambridge, MA, 1990.

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Index

Abel, Karl, on primitive homonymy and enantiosemy: 381–382 accommodated sense (hermeneutics): 164, 293, 297, 301 accommodation, divine: 159, 178–179, 296; rhetorical: 174–175, 177 Achilles, hesitation of: 373; invulnerability of: 395 Acosta, José de, on the multiple literal sense of Scripture: 155–156, 166 Addad. See enantiosemy Addison, Joseph, on Aeneas’s shield: 298; on Milton’s puns: 109; on puns as false wit: 104; squinting construction in: 49 Aeneas, shield of: 297–299; treachery of: 211–212 aenigma (obscure wit or metaphor): 101, 199 Aeschylus, Agamemnon, ambiguity in: 342–344 Ajax, dissembling-­speech of: 346–353 Alciato, Andrea, on legal ambiguity: 83; on rhetorical figures: 120 Alexander of Hales, on licit equivocation: 117 n. 65 allegoresis (allegorical interpretation of Scripture), allegedly rejected by Luther: 132; by Augustine: 315; combined with literal interpretation: 295–296, 299; compared to cabbala: 181 n. 175; imputed to the Evangelists: 290–292; by Origen: 295; structure of meaning in: 132 allegoria (extended metaphor), in Aristophanes: 188–189; in relation to dilogia in Horace: 225–226, 228, 232–233; in relation to the literal sense: 299. See also aenigma, hyponoea, metaphor allegorical senses in Scripture, in relation to

Ossa-Richardson.indb 455

literal sense: 162 n. 114, 295–296; re­ categorised as literal: 165–166 ambiguity, in the ancient language arts: 29–43; ‘common’ (syllabic): 34–35; compared to unreadability: 16; in Chinese: 60; diplomatic: 244, 320–321; doubt (‘or’) vs plenty (‘and’) in: 2–4, 10–11, 163, 175–176; in dreams: 366, 369; in friendship: 397–398; ‘garden–path’ (temporary): 38 n. 42; in Hebrew: 130–132, 147–153, 169; in hermeneutics: 72; in langue and parole: 69–71; in law: 73–96; logical and rhetorical: 29–30; in medicine: 28; in metaphor: 39–42, 45, 72; ­minimisers and maximisers of: 7–18, 224–229, 248–255, 357–358; patent and latent: 86–96, 215–216, 226, 358; in ‘primitive’ languages: 381–382; of pronouns: 171, 242–243, 244, 377, 400; in punctuation: 49 n. 50, 112–113, 138; in relation to dramatic irony: 350, 363; of restrictive adjuncts: 271 n. 136; in Sanskrit: 205–209; in Scripture: 1, 120–124, 138–139, 145–154, 185–186; subjective and objective: 1; unconscious: 111, 335, 350, 358, 366, 368–370, 374–380, 390; will vs power in: 183–184, 196–197, 253; in wit and deceit: 99–100; compared to wit and irony: 329. See also ambivalence, amphiboly, dilogia, enantiosemy, equivocation, homonymy, literal sense, obscurity, polysemy, puns, śleşa, squinting construction ambiguity, artificial, in speech–acts: 99– 128; in classical poetry, 185–236; compared to inspired ambiguity: 299–300, 323; definition of: 128; in dramatic irony: 335

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4 5 6   •  I ndex

ambiguity, inspired, compared to artificial ambiguity: 299–300, 323; definition of: 159; in dramatic irony: 335; as inheritance of Empson: 369–370, 378– 379 ambiguity, types of: five: 10–11, 359; eight: 151, seven: 3, 169; 206; six: 58; sixteen: 46; ten: 39; two: 31 ambivalence, cultural: 386–390; in literary characters: 351, 352; psychological: 371– 380; in relation to hypocrisy: 396 Ammon, Christoph Friedrich, edition of J. A. Ernesti by: 180–181 Ammonius, distinctionary of: 42 amphiboly, defined: 32; postulated in Dante: 211 n. 100; in Homer: 242–244; in Oedipus Rex: 360; resolution of in Boethius: 42; in syllogisms: 33 Anderson, Laurie, ‘O Superman’: 288–289 angelic language: 50 antagonyms. See enantiosemy antanaclasis: 279 ape, Alexander Pope as: 266; Satan as: 105–106 aposiopesis: 120 Archimedean point in interpretation, impossibility of: 76, 153, 266 Aristophanes, ambiguity in: 186–189 Aristotle, on ambiguity in philosophy: 30– 34; on ambiguity in rhetoric: 34; on ambiguity in poetry: 188, 250; on tetragonal virtue: 239–240 Atellan farce: 100 Athanasius, St, on the Devil: 106 Augustine, St, on ambiguity in general: 38– 42; on biblical typology: 287; on interpreting Scripture: 137–139, 156–160; on joking and lying: 110; on the reason for scriptural ambiguity: 138; tree of ambiguity in: 40 Aulus Gellius, on Chrysippus and Diodorus: 50–53, 99 autonymy, in Chrysippus: 52; defined: 39; in supposition theory: 45 Azor, Juan, on the multiple literal sense of Scripture: 165 Azpilcueta, Martin de. See Navarrus, Doctor

Ossa-Richardson.indb 456

Bacon, Francis, on ambiguity in law, 84–88; on the four idols: 62; on philosophical grammar: 60; on political pragmatism: 32; reception of views on law: 88–97; on Scripture: 160 Badius, Jodocus, on ambiguity in Horace: 196–198; on deliberate ambiguity: 99 Balaam, prophecy of: 114, 374 Baldi degli Ubaldi: on ambiguity of the word interpretatio: 82 n. 44 Báñez, Domingo, on the multiple literal sense of scripture: 167 Barnes, John, on mental reservation: 126 Barrow, Isaac, on ambiguity and power: 46 Barthes, Roland, on the ‘death of the author’: 332–333; on the polysemy of poetic language: 12–13 Bassianus, Johannes, on legal interpretation: 80 Bathurst, Henry, on evidence theory: 89 Baudelaire, Charles, on the Devil: 106 Baxter, William, on dilogia (ambiguity) in Horace: 224–227; reception in Germany of: 227–235 Beardsley, Monroe, on the Principle of Plenitude: 11 Beattie, James, on an ambiguity in Addison: 49; on ambiguity in civil discourse: 65–66 Bede, on the Devil: 106 Bedelia, Amelia: 41 Beelen, Jan-­Theodor, on the multiple literal sense of Scripture: 179 Bellarmine, Robert, on the multiple literal sense of Scripture: 165; on scriptural ambiguity and obscurity: 149–150 Benloew, Ludwig, on Ajax: 351 Benson, George, reception of in Germany: 303–304, 307; on the unity of sense in Scripture: 284–285, 293, 301–303 Bentham, Jeremy, critique of Bacon by: 92–93 Bentley, Richard, edition of Horace by: 224; parody by Alexander Pope of: 263–264 Berge, Paul von, as victim of ambiguous handwriting: 27

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Index  •  457

Bergier, Nicolas-­Sylvestre, on enantiosemy: 384 n. 73 Bergler, Stephan, on ambiguity in Aristophanes: 188–189 Bible. See ambiguity, in Scripture Blackmore, Richard, ridicule of by Alexander Pope: 280 Blackmur, R. P., contradicted: 390–391; on the literary influence of James Joyce: 15 n. 53; on modernism: 9 n. 28; on the New Criticism: 370; Blackwell, Thomas, on poetic inspiration and ambiguity: 378 Blaydes, Frederick, on the irony of Sophocles: 355 Bleuler, Eugen, on ambivalence: 372–373; relationship with Freud: 373–374 Boccaccio, Giovanni, on obscurity in poetry: 199 Boethius, commentary on Aristotle’s Categories: 40; De divisione: 42–43 Boileau, Nicolas, on equivocation: 110 Bonaventure, St; on the multiplicity of meaning in Scripture: 160; on oratio mixta: 119–120 Bonitz, Hermann, on the popularity of Sophocles: 336; on F. W. Schneidewin’s edition of Sophocles: 357–358 Bouhours, Dominique, on ambiguity and the je ne sais quoi: 201–205 Boyle, Robert, on the word nature: 64 Bréal, Michel, on August Schleicher: 55; on polysemy: 69–70 Brenz, Johann, controversy of with Pedro de Soto on the authority of Scripture: 148–149 Brooke-­Rose, Christine, on Henry James: 15 Brooks, Cleanth, on Coleridge: 364; on Empson: 3 n. 6, 8 n. 22, 10; response to new semantics of: 71 Brooks, Cleanth, Understanding Poetry (with Robert Penn Warren), on obliquity of poetry: 205 n. 81; on the persona in poetry: 219; on ambiguity as plenty: 11 Brougham, Henry, six-­hour speech by: 91–92

Ossa-Richardson.indb 457

Browne, Thomas, on an ambiguity in Lucan: 210–211 Browning, Robert, misuse of the word twats by: 290 n. 19 Burges, George, on Connop Thirlwall’s concept of irony: 353 Burgum, Edwin Berry, criticism of Empson by: 41 Burman, Pieter, on a Ciceronian aenigma: 101 Burton, Robert, parody of Jesuit equivocation by: 115 Buttmann, Philipp Carl, on ambiguity and allusion in Horace: 230–235; compared to Schleiermacher on interpretation: 231–232 Caiaphas, Johann Georg Hamann on: 324; prophecy of: 113–114; Alsonfo Salmerón on: 169; Arthur Ashley Sykes on: 292–293 Caiaphatic model of language: 114, 324, 332–333, 345–346, 359, 372 n. 31, 376, 400 Calvino, Italo, on the best way to read: 317 n. 43 Campbell, George, on wit and deceit: 99 Campbell, Lewis, on Ajax: 351–352; on Sophocles and Shakespeare: 393; on Connop Thirlwall’s concept of irony: 356 Cano, Melchior, on biblical exegesis: 145–146 Carolus, Philipp, on Aulus Gellius: 52 Casaubon, Isaac, on Aristophanes: 187–188; on Eustathius and Homer: 245; on Persius: 193n, 214; on persona in satire: 216; on G. J. Vossius: 198 Cassirer, Ernst, on Dominique Bouhours: 203 Celsus (jurist), on legal interpretation: 78–79 Cenomanus, Richard. See Du Mans, Richard Chamier, Daniel, on the multiple literal sense of Scripture: 177–179 Chandler, Edward, attack on Anthony Collins by: 291

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4 5 8   •  I ndex

charity, hermeneutic: 157–159, 166, 173, 398; rejected: 271–274, 277. See also epieikeia Cheyney’s case: 86–87 Chinese, ambiguity in: 60 Chladenius, Johann Martin, on Augustine on Moses: 316–318; hermeneutics of: 316–319 Chrysippus, on ambiguity: 51–53 Cicero, on Aio te oracle, 33; on Cato the Younger: 321; on elegantia: 192; on one’s ideal readers: 317; witticisms of: 100– 102; on words and intention: 78 Ciruelo, Pedro, on the double literal sense of Scripture: 166 clarity, scriptural: 134–137, 141, 144–145, 150; two meanings of: 134–135. See also perspicuity Clarke, Samuel, on ambiguity in Homer: 256 Colebrooke, Henry Thomas, on Indian poetry: 208 n. 91 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor: on ambivalent wordplay in Hamlet: 373; as antecedent for Empson: 364; anticipated by Richard Hurd: 298; on bulls (cognitive dissonance): 373; on Venus and Adonis: 364; on William Warburton as editor: 278 n. 165 collatio locorum, as solution to scriptural ambiguity: 135 n. 21, 138, 142; problems with: 153–154 Collins, Anthony, on Hebrew prophecy: 290–293 comparison of passages: see collatio locorum Concanen, Matthew, on Alexander Pope: 269, 270–272 construction louche. See squinting construction context, disambiguating, in biblical exegesis: 136 n. 26, 138, 143–144, 153, 285: in law: 37, 86; in literary criticism: 7, 14–15, 206, 281, 358; in semantics: 66, 70, 383 context, not disambiguating: 8–9, 71, 186, 196, 225, 297–298, 360, 371 contextualism in intellectual history: 19–21

Ossa-Richardson.indb 458

contra proferentem (legal principle): 79, 85– 86, 349 Cooper, John Gilbert, criticism of William Warburton by: 278 Cope, Edward Meredith, on the irony of Sophocles: 355–356 Corpus Juris Civilis: 77 Cory, Herbert Ellsworth, on ambivalence: 375 Crabb Robinson, Henry, on Locke and Kant: 67 Crashaw, Richard, ‘Blessed be the Paps’: 386; Dies Irae: 388–389 Croesus, ambiguous oracle of: 107 Dacier, André, on ambiguity in Homer: 250–251 Dacier, Anne, argument with modernes: 251–254; on Homer’s secret of ambiguity: 248; translation of Homer by: 247–251 Dante Alighieri, ambiguity in: 211 n. 100, 240–241 Dathe, Johann August, on scriptural ambiguity: 190 De Man, Paul, on Empson: 12 Demetrius, Pseudo-­, on ambiguous figures of speech: 210; on language as a coiled beast: 365 Dennis, John, on ambiguity in Alexander Pope: 272–276; on puns: 110 Devil, as archetype of ambiguity: 105–110; oracles of: 107; seduction of Eve by: 107–108 Digest (legal compendium): 78 dilogia, defined: 194; in Horace: 194, 224–235 Diodorus Cronus, on ambiguity: 51–53 Dissoi Logoi: 73 distinctionaries: 42–43, 46–47 Döderlein, Ludwig, on Ajax: 350 Donaldson, John William, on dramatic irony: 354–355 Donne, John, on the literal sense of Scripture: 177 n. 159; ‘Valediction of Weeping’: 376 dramatic irony. See irony, dramatic

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Index  •  459

dreams, ambiguity in: 366, 369; contraries in: 384–385; ‘switch words’ in: 380 n. 53 Driedo, Johannes, on the multiple literal sense of Scripture: 163; on scriptural ambiguity: 146–147 Du Mans, Richard, on emending Scripture: 155 Du Moulin, Peter, on the prophecy of Caiaphas: 114 Dugas-­Montbel, Jean-­Baptiste, on ambiguity in Homer: 253 Dumarsais, César Chesneau, on the squinting construction: 48–49; on the virtue of clarity: 27 n. 1 dunces. See Pope, Alexander Dyer, Thomas, on Connop Thirlwall’s concept of irony: 353 East, Gilbert, peculiar will of: 90 Edda. See Sturluson, Snorri egestas sermonis. See poverty of language elegantia (elegance) in ambiguity: 191–201, 279–280, 282, 296 empiricism, 96–97; approach to ambiguity of: 62–72 Empson, William, clarity in poetry of: 379 n. 50; correspondence with Elsie Phare: 371–372; early misfortunes of: 365; as eighteenth-­century gentleman: 390 n. 91; on the Fair Youth: 396; on William Warburton: 278; on wit and ambiguity in Alexander Pope: 261–264, 271 Empson, William, Seven Types of Ambiguity: on ambiguity and time: 281; on ambivalence: 375–380, 388–390; on the ambiguity of Hebrew: 130–131; on Augustan syllepsis: 244, 279–280; on the consolations of criticism: 398–399; critique of by Richard Gaskin: 395 n. 104, 396, 399– 400; definition of ambiguity in: 4–5; on enantiosemy: 381; on filtering out irrelevant meanings: 126; Freudian sources of: 365–370, 373–375, 384–385, 386–388; genesis of: 365; on George Herbert: 389– 390; on G. M. Hopkins: 375–376; on hypocrisy and dramatic irony: 391-­399; on the invulnerability of Achilles: 395; on

Ossa-Richardson.indb 459

Keats: 377; on Richard Lovelace: 399– 400; on Marvell: 3–4; on metaphor: 41– 42; on the poet’s intention: 8, 18, 369– 370, 379–380; on the primitive: 380–391; reception of: 5, 7–15; in relation to new semantics: 71; relevance of inspired ambiguity to: 369–370, 378– 379; review of by James Smith: 391–392; on Shakespeare: 4, 393–394, 396–397; against sound symbolism: 276; style and structure of: 2–4; on tact: 398; use of Freudian terminology in: 368; on wit: 377–378 enantiosemy: 57 n. 120, 151, 275, 381– 384, 386 epieikeia: 76 n. 17; contravened by legal formalism: 92–97 equity (law). See epieikeia equivocation, as deception by truth: 125, 351; contrasted to mental reservation: 127; contrasted to Romantic irony: 329– 330; by early modern Catholics: 115– 127; by Shakespeare’s Juliet: 112 equivoque. See puns Erasmus, on avoiding ambiguity: 45; controversy with Frans Titelmans about the multiple literal sense of Scripture: 163– 165; debate with Luther on the clarity of Scripture: 135–137; edition and translation of New Testament by: 140; on obscurity in poetry: 199; on scriptural ambiguity: 140; on the tetragon: 240; translation of Plutarch by: 105 Erdmann, Karl Otto, on ambiguity in langue: 69 Ernesti, Johann August, on biblical exegesis: 180–181 Estius, Gulielmus, on the multiple literal sense of Scripture: 173–175 Euler identity: 193–194 Euripides, ambiguity in: 360; dramatic irony in: 361–362 Eustathius of Thessalonica, on ambiguity in Homer: 242–245; reception of: 245, 248– 251, 257 Euthydemus, sophistical equivocation of: 113

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4 6 0   •  I ndex

Eve, Satan’s seduction of: 107–108 evidence theory (law): 88–96 exegesis, biblical, compared to legal: 129– 130; compared to study of classical poetry: 285, 296–301 Fischer, Kuno, on ambiguity and wit: 369 n. 21 Flacius Illyricus, Matthias, on scriptural ambiguity: 143–144 fontes, as scriptural metaphor: 140–141, 145–146, 154–156, 159–160 formalism (mode of interpretation): 75–77, 92–97, 230–231, 332 Forrest-­Thomson, Veronica, critique of Empson by: 13 fourfold sense of Scripture: 133 Fowler, H. W. and F. G., on avoiding ambiguity: 50 Franz, Wolfgang, critique of James Gordon Huntley by: 151 Frazer, James, The Golden Bough: 387 freedom. See liberty Frenkel-­Brunswik, Else, on the tolerance of ambiguity: 399 n. 110 Freud, Sigmund, on cultural ambivalence: 386–388; direct influence on Empson: 368–370, 371, 376, 388–390; on dreams: 366, 369; on enantiosemy: 384–385; impact on literary critics before Empson: 366–368; on psychological ambivalence: 374–375; relationship to Eugen Bleuler: 373–374; on witticisms: 369 friendship, in relation to ambiguity: 167, 233–234, 397–398 Fronto, Cornelius, distinctionary of: 43 Frühromantik. See Jena Romanticism Funes, Ireneo, extraordinary memory of: 31 Gadamer, Hans-­Georg, on Continental philosophy: 68, n. 155 Galen, on types of ambiguity: 35 Garnet, Henry, execution of: 115; on mental reservation: 121, 122 Gaskin, Richard, on ‘constructive intention’: 290 n. 19; criticism of Empson by: 395 n. 104, 396, 399–400; on Empson and

Ossa-Richardson.indb 460

deconstruction: 11; on texts as utterances: 289–290 Geoffrey of Vinsauf, on witticisms: 102–103 Gerhard, Johann, on the multiple literal sense of Scripture: 177 Gesner, Johann Matthias, edition of Horace by: 227–228 Gilbert, Geoffrey, The Law of Evidence: 88 Gipfelwanderung, dangers of: 22 Glassius, Salomo, on scriptural ambiguity: 144–146; on James Gordon Huntley: 151; on the multiple literal sense of Scripture: 177–179 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, on Johann August Ernesti: 180; on Till Eulenspiegel: 41 Gordon Huntley, James, on the multiple literal sense of Scripture: 165; Protestant response to: 151–153; on scriptural ambiguity: 150–151 Göttingen, scholarly circles in: 227, 303, 356–357 Gratian, commentary on Gregory the Great by: 118–119 Graves, Robert, on ambiguity in poetry: 365, 368; on F. C. Prescott: 366 Gregory the Great, on Job: 118 Greimas, A. J., on semantic isotopy: 14 Grotius, Hugo, on ambiguity in law: 83 n. 48; on Hebrew prophecy: 286–288; on mental reservation: 127; reception of in eighteenth-­century theology: 290–292, 300 Gummere, Francis, on the primitive mind: 384 Hamann, Johann Georg, ambiguous style of: 309–311; on Augustine on Moses: 319–324; background of: 308; on J. M. Chladenius: 316, 319; correspondence with J. G. Lindner: 316; friendship with Kant of: 308; on Klugheit (cunning) and prophetic meaning: 322–323; on Hebrew prophecy: 315–316; on J. D. Michaelis, George Benson and biblical philology: 306–307, 311–315; on prophecy of Caiaphas: 324–325; purported stylistic models

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Index  •  461

of: 310; Romantic reception of: 326–329; Schopenhauer on: 309–310 Handelman, Susan, on rabbinic exegesis: 181–182 Harington, John, Epigrams: 111 Harshav, Benjamin. See Hrushovski, Benjamin Hawkins, Francis Vaughan, on legal ambiguity: 94–95 Hebrew prophecy: see prophecy, in the Hebrew Bible Hebrew, ambiguity of: 130–132, 147–153, 169; Renaissance study of: 139–140 Hegel, G. W. F., use of aufheben by: 68, n. 155; on the invulnerability of Achilles: 395 n. 104; on Romantic irony: 330 Heine, Heinrich, on the birth of irony: 323–324 Heinsius, Daniel, on ambiguity in satire: 215 Henry of Ghent, on licit equivocation: 117 n. 65 Herbert, George, ‘The Sacrifice’: 389–390 Herder, Johann Gottfried, on dilogia in Horace: 229 Hermann, Gottfried, on ambiguity in Electra: 344–345; emendation of Oedipus Rex by: 338–339 hermeneutics, approach to ambiguity of: 72 Hermogenes, pseudo-­: 33, n. 21 Hermogenes, on ambiguity in law: 35–36 Hesychius, lexicon of: 188–189, 249 Hill, Aaron, ridicule of by Alexander Pope: 270 Hillis Miller, Joseph, exchange with Shlomith Rimmon: 16–17 Hobbes, Thomas, on ambiguity: 63, 72; on metaphor: 41 Hocker, Jodocus, on the Devil: 106 Hodgart, Matthew, maximising of: 9 Holdsworth, Richard, on religious doubt: 1–2 Holyday, Barten, on Juvenal and Persius: 213 Homer, ambiguity in: 242–261; archetypal pun in: 111; clarity of: 246, 256, 383; quarrel over: 247, 251–256; translation

Ossa-Richardson.indb 461

of by Anne Dacier: 247–251; translation of by Walter Leaf: 244; translation of by Alexander Pope: 257–261 Homeric Question: 246 homonymy: in ancient Egyptian: 381; in Augustine’s typology: 39–40; as basis of puns: 104, 263; in Chinese: 60; defined, 31–32; in distinctionaries: 42–43, 47; as evidence for the natural origin of language: 54 n. 108; in Hebrew: 151; illustrated: 33; in Oedipus Rex: 360; origin of according to J. C. Scaliger: 58; in Scripture: 138; in Shakespeare: 380; in sophistry: 113 homophones, in poetry: 47 Honorius Augustodunensis, on the Song of Songs: 217 Honsell, Heinrich, on legal formalism: 80–81 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, ‘The Windhover’: 371, 375–376 Horace, ambiguity in: 192–194, 196–198, 211–212, 218–219, 223–235, 299; imitation of by Alexander Pope: 279–282 Horn, Conrad, critique of James Gordon Huntley by: 152–153 Horne Tooke, John, on John Locke and J. C. Scaliger: 66 Hosius, Stanislaus, on scriptural ambiguity: 149 Houtsma, Martijn Theodoor, on addad: 383 Hrushovski, Benjamin, editorship of PTL by: 15 Hudson, Henry Norman, on Shakespeare: 393–394 Hug, Arnold, on tragic irony and ambiguity in Sophocles: 359–360 Hume, David, on direct realism: 65 Hurd, Richard, on double senses: 298 Hyperius, Andreas, on biblical exegesis: 143 hypocrisy, defined: 106–107; in drama: 391–397; in friendship: 395–398; of ­Alexander Pope: 266–267; contrasted ­ to Romantic irony: 330; related to am­ bivalence: 396; in satire: 220, 280–281 hyponoea, compared to dilogia: 225

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4 6 2   •  I ndex

Ibn Hazm, on Adam’s language: 54 Immermann, Karl, on tragic irony: 336–338 Innocent XI, Pope, condemnation of mental reservation by: 127 intention (linguistic): angels’ direct perception of: 50, 64 n. 143; anxiety about: 398; as basis for disambiguating legal texts: 78–80; as basis for disambiguating speech-­acts: 51–53; as basis of formalism: 78, 231; ‘constructive’: 290 n. 19; deliberate neglect of: 79, 271–277, 282–283, 349; as dispersed in Greek tragedy: 349; duality or multiplicity of: 113–114, 156– 159, 234–235, 329, 352, 371–380, 400; God’s direct perception of: 118–119; importance to Empson of: 8, 18, 369–370, 379–380; impossibility of determining: 314; of Jesus Christ: 124; in translation: 277. See also literal sense (intended) irony, dramatic: in ancient scholia: 342, 347; in the Bible: 114, 356; contrasted to Empsonian ambiguity: 391; contrasted to equivocation: 349–350; as model for ‘death of the author’: 332–333; modern definition of: 332; origin of modern notion of: 354–356; in relation to the sublime in tragedy: 361–362; in Shakespeare: 391–395; as source for Empsonian ambiguity: 397 irony, contrasted to equivocation: 329–330; ‘moral’: 127 n 109; in nature: 385; origin of: 323–324; postmodern: 17; ‘practical’: 334–335; in praise and blame: 208, 210 n. 97; rhetorical: 197–198, 329, 334, 350 n. 87; Romantic: 327–330; as scepticism: 397–398; Socratic: 123 n. 98, 219, 328–329 Isaac of Stella, on Scripture as a depthless well: 160 Jacob, blessing of Joseph by: 170 James, Henry, narrative ambiguity in: 13–16 Jani, Christian David, on dilogia in Horace: 229 Jansen, Cornelius (1510–1576), cited by Thomas Morton on equivocation: 121

Ossa-Richardson.indb 462

Jansen, Cornelius (1585–1638), on the multiple literal sense of Scripture: 172 je ne sais quoi: 203–205 Jebb, Richard Claverhouse, on Ajax: 352; on Oedipus Rex: 339; on wit in Greek tragedy: 349 Jena Romanticism: 326–329 Jerome, St, on the ambiguity of Hebrew: 147–148; on changes of persona: 217 Jesuits: reputation of in Renaissance England: 115–116 Jesus Christ, ambiguous depiction of by Milton: 205 n. 60; ambivalence of: 389– 390; defecation of: 388; equivocation of: 120–124, 200; Isaac as type of: 295; Joseph as type of: 171–172 Johnson, Edward, on the word wit: 66, 268 Johnson, Samuel, on elegance: 282; Empson’s attitude to: 390; on Homer’s clarity: 256; on quibbles in Shakespeare: 63 n. 168, on representative metre: 276 Jones, John, on ambiguity in Aeschylus: 342–344 Jortin, John, on double senses: 300–301 Joyce, James, Finnegans Wake: 9–10, 372 n. 31; generosity of: 73 Julianus, Salvius, on legal ambiguity: 78 Jung, Carl Gustav, on cultural ambivalence: 386 Justinian, codification of Roman law by: 77; hostility to interpretation of: 81–82 Juvenal, ambiguity in: 215; contrasted to Persius: 213 Kames, Henry Home, Lord, on proto-­ Empsons: 49–50, 301 Kant, Immanuel, contrasted to Locke: 67; critique of by J. G. Hamann: 308; on interpretation: 20; on rhetoric and poetry: 191 Kaplan, Abraham (with Ernst Kris), on five types of ambiguity: 10 Keats, John, ‘Endymion’: 368 n. 19; ‘The Eve of St Agnes’: 367–368; on negative capability: 5; ‘Ode on Melancholy’: 377 Kermode, Frank, as doctoral supervisor to

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Index  •  463

Shlomith Rimmon: 13; on Hebrew enantiosemy: 382 Kierkegaard, Søren, on ironic praise: 210 n. 97; on Romantic irony: 329–330 kolax (parasite): 105 Kris, Ernst (with Abraham Kaplan), on five types of ambiguity: 10 La Motte, Antoine Houdar de, critique of Anne Dacier by: 251–253 Laing, R. D., on schizophrenic language: 372 n. 31 Lamb, Charles, on the invulnerability of Achilles: 395 n. 104 Lamy, Bernard, on the virtue of perspicuity: 27 Lancia, Andrea, on Dante: 241 Langley, Samuel, on onomatopoeia in Homer: 275–276 Langue. See ambiguity, in langue and parole latent ambiguity. See ambiguity, patent and latent laughter: as not caused by ambiguity: 101; as correct response to equivocation: 111, 113 law, common, ambiguity in: 84–97 law, Roman, ambiguity in: 77–83 Le Clerc, Jean, on Hebrew prophecy: 288 Leaf, Walter, translation of Homer by: 244 Leavis, F. R., on Empson: 7 Lefèvre d’Etaples, Jacques, on equivocal syllogisms: 41 Leibniz, G. W. von, on ambiguity in law: 82 Leon, Judah Messer, on witticisms in Jeremiah: 103 Leonardo da Vinci, on cube and tetrahedron: 241 Levinas, Emmanuel, on rabbinic exegesis: 182–184 Levine, Donald, on the ‘flight from ambiguity’: 28 Lewes, George Henry, on the irony of Sophocles: 355 liberty, of interpretation: 402; of judgement (libertas judicandi): 127; in relation to ambiguity: 12, 362, 399–400; in relation to Romantic irony: 328–330, 336

Ossa-Richardson.indb 463

Lieber, Franz (or Francis), on legal hermeneutics: 76–77 literal sense (intended), duality of: 165– 166, 286–301; multiplicity of: 162–181; Thomist definition of: 162; unity of: 72, 135, 180, 284–293, 301–304. See also intention (linguistic) literal sense (non-­figurative): ambiguity about: 40–41, 299; in punning: 202. See also metaphor Locke, John: 62–64; on corruptibility of Scripture: 179; subsequent reception: 64–67 logic, approach to ambiguity in: 38, 45 Lovelace, Richard, ‘To Althea, from Prison’: 399–400 Lowth, Robert, on Hebrew prophecy: 296 Lubac, Henri de, on the multiple literal sense of Scripture: 179 Luther, Martin, debate with Erasmus on the clarity of Scripture: 135–137; on the grammar of the Holy Spirit: 321 Mack, Maynard, on author and persona: 219; on ‘diplomatic renderings’ in Pope’s Iliad: 258; on the nature of Pope’s poetry: 292 Mackail, John William, critique of by G. G. Sedgewick: 332; on Persius’s obscurity: 213; on Sophoclean irony: 331, 340 Maimonides, Moses, on homonyms: 43 Manetti, Gianozzo, translation of Psalter by: 139 Mantica, Francesco, on legal ambiguity: 83 Marlowe, Christopher: Doctor Faustus: 1; Edward II: 111; Jew of Malta: 113 n. 54 Martial, witticisms of: 103, 203 Marvell, Andrew, ‘Eyes and Tears’: 3–4 masks, in satire: 218, 220–223, 278. See also persona Matteacci, Angelo, on words and intention: 78 McHugh, Roland, on Finnegans Wake reading groups: 9–10 melancholy, ambivalence of: 377 Melanchthon, Philipp, on heresy as equivocation: 45

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4 6 4   •  I ndex

mens auctoris. See intention mental reservation, Catholic doctrine of: 117–127; in Greek tragedy: 350 Merrick, James, on double senses: 301 metaphor, dangers of: 63 n. 138; as generalisation: 378 n. 47; misunderstanding of: 123, 312, 315; persistence of: 239; in sense-­extension: 30, 383; as relic of the primitive: 384; as a species of ambiguity: 39–42, 45, 72; as a veil: 204, 323. See also allegoria (extended metaphor) Michaelis, Johann David, on biblical philology: 303–304; ridicule of by Johann Georg Hamann: 307–308, 312–313, 315 Michaels, Walter Benn, against formalism: 75–76 microscopy, literary criticism as: 3, 270 Middleton, Conyers, correspondence with William Warburton: 293–294, 297 n. 50; on Hebrew prophecy: 300 Milton, John, on hypocrisy: 106; Paradise Lost: 108–109 Montaigne, Michel de, on ambiguity and desire: 204–205; on lying: 119 Morton, Thomas, controversy with Robert Persons: 121–126 Moses, inspiration of: 158–159 Moulton, Richard, on dramatic irony in Shakespeare: 393 Mozi, on homonyms: 43 Mühlau, Ferdinand, on Albert Schultens: 190 Müller, Friedrich Max, on primitive language: 383 Müller, Karl Otfried, on Connop Thirlwall’s concept of irony: 356–357 multiple literal sense of Scripture. See literal sense (intended), multiplicity of Muret, Marc-­Antoine, on ambiguity in Plautus: 195–196 Murry, John Middleton, on Seven Types of Ambiguity: 7 Nabokov, Vladimir, on otsebyatina: 8; translation of Eugene Onegin by: 247 Navarrus, Doctor, on equivocation and mental reservation: 118–120

Ossa-Richardson.indb 464

negative capability, defined: 5; in William Empson: 5, 399 Nero, satire on: 210–211, 214, 216 Nestor, ambiguous command of: 242–243, 248–249, 256 Nicholas of Lyra, on the double literal sense of Scripture: 165–166 Nichols, Francis Morgan, on legal interpretation: 95–96 Nietzsche, Friedrich, on Euripides: 361; on facts and interpretations: 76 n. 14; on readers: 317 n. 40; on truth and freedom: 2; on the value of intellectual history: 402 Nifo, Agostino, on equivocal syllogisms: 33 Nollekens, Joseph, ambiguous will of: 94 obscurity, in law: 83; in poetry: 199; in prophecy: 199, 300; in Scripture: 134– 137, 139, 143–150, 154; virtues of: 327 obscurity (in relation to ambiguity), in logic (a. the opposite of o.): 29; in rhetoric (a. one cause of o.): 29–30; in witticisms (a. without o.): 100–104 Odysseus, mētis (wit) of: 111 Ogden, Charles Kay, The Meaning of Meaning (with I. A. Richards): 71, 384; on Lady Welby’s significs: 70 Oldmixon, John, on Milton’s puns: 109; paraphrase of Dominique Bouhours by: 205 omniscience, divine, in relation to ambiguity: 118–119, 124 onomatopoeia: 274–276 oracles, ambiguity of: 107; contrasted to Scripture: 175–176 oratio mixta: 119–120 Origen, allegories of: 295 Orleton, Adam, equivocation of: 111 otsebyatina (overreading), defined: 8 Pagnini, Santes, Hebrew scholarship of: 139–140 Pandects (Pandectae). See Digest parasite. See kolax parole: see ambiguity, in langue and parole paronomasia (playing on names), in Hebrew: 305

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Index  •  465

Pascal, Blaise, critique of mental reservation by: 127 patent ambiguity: see ambiguity, patent and latent Paul of Burgos, on the multiple literal sense of Scripture: 163 Paul, Hermann, on ambiguity in langue: 70 Paulus (jurist), on legal interpretation: 79 Peerless Case: 90–91 Pence, Mike, review of Titanic by: 226 n. 154 Penderell, Richard, use of mental reservation by: 126–127 Pérez de Ayala, Martín, on scriptural ambiguity: 147 Perizonius, Jacob, on Chrysippus and Diodorus: 59 Persius, ambiguity in: 193, 213–214, 216; contrasted to Juvenal: 213; Pope’s imitation of: 270–271 persona, ambiguity of in literature: 216– 223, 282 Persons, Robert, controversy with Thomas Morton: 121–126 perspicuity, scriptural: 129–130, 134 Petrarch, ambiguity in: 195 Phare, Elsie, correspondence with Empson: 271–272 Phillipps, Samuel March, on legal interpretation: 90 Philo of Alexandria, on Adam’s language: 54 philology, approach to ambiguity of in Shakespeare: 4; in classical satire: 186– 189; in Greek tragedy: 338–339, 341– 353, 359–363; in Scripture: 129n, 140– 145, 155, 180–181, 303–305 Philoponus, John, distinctionary of: 42 Photius, on the prophecy of Caiaphas: 114 Physiologus, on the Devil-­ape: 105–106 Pierre de la Palud, on mental reservation: 117 Plato, Euthydemus: 112–113, 380; on poetry and prophecy: 378 n. 45; Republic of: 320; Sophist: 105; use of Socrates as persona by: 219 plausible deniability: 111, 214, 244, 270

Ossa-Richardson.indb 465

Plautus, ambiguity in: 195–196 Plutarch: on the ambiguity of the kolax: 105 Pococke, Edward, on Arabic enantiosemy: 382 Poetics Today (journal): 15–17, 75. See also PTL Poliziano, Angelo, on ambiguity in satire: 212–213 polysemy, in Augustine’s typology: 40; distinguished from homonymy: 32; Franciscus Sanctius on: 57–58; in Hebrew: 151, 169; in new semantics: 69–70 Pooler, Charles Knox, on Shakespeare: 394 Pope, Alexander, analysis of by William Empson: 261–264; Dunciad: 263–266; contemporary responses to: 266–282; knowledge of Eustathius: 257; punctuation of Romeo and Juliet by: 112–113; relations with William Wycherley: 261; translation of Iliad by: 257–261, 271–276 Popma, Ausonius, distinctionary of: 46 Porphyrio, Pomponius, on ambiguity in Horace: 192–194 Porter, Shirley, patronage of Israeli poetics by: 15 Portia (Shakespeare), apparent hypocrisy of: 393–394, 396 poverty of language, as aetiology of ambiguity: 30–31 Prescott, Frederick Clarke, on ambiguity in poetry: 365–368, 384 prophecy, of Balaam: 114, 374; of Caiaphas: 113–114; deliberately ambiguous: 34, 107–108; in the Hebrew Bible: 165– 166, 284–303 PTL. See Poetics Today puns: 100–104; Dominique Bouhours on: 202–203; defence of by Coleridge: 236, 373 n. 35; elegance of: 193–196, 199; as false wit: 104, 109–110, 205, 377–378; Kuno Fischer on: 369 n. 21; in the Odyssey: 111; Robert Persons on: 125; in Paradise Lost: 109; in Alexander Pope: 263– 265; in Shakespeare: 384; Thomas Sheridan on: 47; as witty falsehood: 110– 111. See also paronomasia

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4 6 6   •  I ndex

querelle d’Homère. See Homer, quarrel over querelle des anciens et modernes: 246 Quintilian, on aenigma: 101; on allegoria in Horace: 226; on ambiguity in oratory: 37–38; on Cicero’s witticisms: 101; on elegantia in witticisms: 192; on metaphor: 30; on unintelligible witticisms: 103; Lorenzo Valla’s annotations on: 74 Raghava Pandaviya: 208 n. 91 Ralph, James, on Alexander Pope: 268 Ramírez de Prado, Lorenzo, on witticisms in Martial: 103 Ransom, John Crowe, on Empson: 10 rasa, in Sanskrit poetics: 209 Raynaud, Théophile, on mental reservation: 126 Reid, Thomas, on John Locke: 64 Reitz, Johann Friedrich, on ambiguity: 61; on ambiguity in Homer: 247 restrictio mentalis. See mental reservation reticentia. See aposiopesis rhetoric, approach to ambiguity: 36–38, 47–50; in relation to poetry: 191 Rhetorica ad Herennium: on deliberate ambiguity, 102; on elegantia: 192 Ricard, Dominique, on ambiguity in Homer: 253 Ricci, Matteo, on Chinese ambiguity: 60 Richards, I. A., The Meaning of Meaning (with C. K. Ogden): 71, 384; on ‘old Rhetoric’: 5–6; putative anticipation of Empson by: 364–365; against sound symbolism: 276 Rigault, Nicolas, on ambiguity in Juvenal: 215 Rimmon (Rimmon-­Kenan), Shlomith, on ambiguity: 13–15; exchange with Joseph Hillis Miller: 16–17 Rivet, André, on the multiple literal sense of Scripture: 177; on use of scriptural sources: 141 Roscher, Wilhelm, on Connop Thirlwall’s concept of irony: 357 Rossetti, Gabriele, on ambiguity in Dante: 211 n. 100

Ossa-Richardson.indb 466

Rousseau, Jean-­Jacques, on the invulnerability of Achilles: 395 n. 104 Rupert of Deutz, on Satan’s language: 108 Ruskin, John, on the pathetic fallacy: 373; on poets and prophets: 378–379 Rylands, George, on ambiguity in poetry: 368 Sagebeer, Joseph Evans, on biblical and legal exegesis: 130 Salmerón, Alfonso, on the ambiguity of Hebrew: 169; career of: 167–168; on the multiple literal sense of scripture: 168– 169, 175–176 Sanadon, Noël–Étienne, on ambiguity in Horace: 223 Sanctius, Franciscus, on the unity of meaning: 53–58 Sanskrit poetics, treatment of śleşa (artful ambiguity) in: 205–209 Sappho, sexual orientation of: 234–235 Satan. See Devil satire, ambiguity of: 212–223, 279–282 Scalia, Antonin, legal hermeneutics of: 94 Scaliger, Joseph, on Aristophanes: 188 Scaliger, Julius Caesar, on resolving ambiguity: 55–57 scepticism: 373 Schiller, F. C. S., on ambiguity in langue: 71 Schiller, Friedrich, on Euripides: 362 schizophrenia, as characterised by ambiguous language: 372 n. 31; origin of: 372 Schlegel, August Wilhelm, on analysing poetry: 185 Schlegel, Friedrich, on incomprehensibility and irony: 327–329; on J. G. Hamann: 326; on Kant’s clarity: 67 n. 152; on prefaces: 1; on Shakespeare: 329 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, on ambiguity: 74; comparison to Buttmann on interpreting poetry: 231–232; critique of collatio locorum by: 154; eulogy of P. C. Buttmann by: 230 n. 172; on J. G. Hamann: 326; on lexicography: 56; on the necessity of interpretation: 74; use of term dilogia by: 229

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Index  •  467

Schneidewin, F. W., edition of Sophocles by: 357 Schoppe, Caspar, on Aulus Gellius: 52 Schubert, Gotthilf Heinrich von, on the play of contraries: 385 Schultens, Albert, on ambiguity in classical literature: 189–90; on scriptural ambiguity: 185–186 Scripture. See ambiguity, in Scripture Sedgewick, Garnett Gladwin, on dramatic irony: 332 Selden, John, on the literal sense of a text: 286 semantics: 69–71; in relation to literary criticism: 71–72 sense-­extension: 55–57, 383 sententia auctoris. See intention Serarius, Nicolaus, on the multiple literal sense of scripture: 166–167 Servius, on Aeneas and Antenor: 211 Shakespeare, William, Arden editions of: 4; Coleridge on: 236, 364, 373; Empson on: 4, 371, 376–378, 390, 393–394; Hazlitt on: 334 n. 34; 1 Henry IV: 217–218; Karl Immermann on: 337–338; Samuel Johnson on: 63 n. 138; King Lear: 376; Macbeth: 125; The Merchant of Venice: 386– 388, 393–394, 396; F. C. Prescott on: 368 n. 17, 384; Richard III: 99; Romeo and Juliet: 112; Schlegel on: 329; compared to Sophocles: 393; Twelfth Night: 109; Walter Whiter on: 377–380 Shepherd, William Robert, on legal jargon: 73 Sheridan, Thomas, on punning: 47 Sherlock, Thomas, on Hebrew prophecy: 292 Sidgwick, Alfred, on ambiguity in langue: 70; on puns, 104 Sidney, Philip, An Apology for Poetry, on the poet as prophet: 378 n. 45; Arcadia, real meaning of: 402 Simonides, on tetragonal virtue: 239 śleşa (artful ambiguity): 206–209 Smedley, Jonathan, on Jonathan Swift: 268–269

Ossa-Richardson.indb 467

smiles, disdainful: 73; equivocal: 307, 326, 330; incredulous: 156; melancholy: 334 Smith, James, on William Empson: 391–392 Socrates, influence on Johann Georg Hamann: 310, 323; irony of: 113, 123 n. 94, 219; Friedrich Schlegel on: 328 Solger, Karl, on tragic irony: 335–336 sophistry: 105–106, 112–113; in Euripidean tragedy: 361 Sophocles, irony of: 333–341, 346, 349– 350, 355–363; modern performance of: 336; ambiguity in: 344–353, 357–363; compared to Shakespeare: 393 Soto, Pedro de, on the authority of Scripture: 148–149 sources. See fontes Southwell, Robert, execution of: 115 speech-­acts, deliberate ambiguity in: 100–128 Spitzel, Gottlieb, on Chinese ambiguity: 60 Sponde, Jean de, translation of Homer: 245 squinting construction (or squint), in ­Aeschylus: 343; defined: 48–49; in Marlowe’s Edward II: 111; in Romeo and ­Juliet: 112; in Sophocles: 353 in twentieth-­century literary criticism Stanford, William Bedell, on ambiguity in Greek tragedy: 363 status theory (law): 35–36 Steinthal, Heymann, on the unity of meaning: 56 Stephen, Leslie, on Warburton’s Divine Legation of Moses: 294 Stoics, on ambiguity: 34–35. See also Chrysippus Stow, John, on Adam Orleton’s equivocation: 111 Sturluson, Snorri, Edda: 129 subauditio: in Christ’s speech-­acts: 122–123; in Hebrew: 151; in philosophical grammar: 58, in rhetoric: 120 subjective and objective legal interpretation: 80 sublime, contrasted to ambiguity: 282, 361–362

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4 6 8   •  I ndex

supposition theory: 45 Surenhusius, Willem, on Hebrew prophecy: 290–291 Sykes, Arthur Ashley, on the accommodated sense: 296–297; on Hebrew prophecy: 292–293 syllepsis: 200 n. 58, 244 Tassoni, Alessandro, on Petrarch’s ambiguity: 195 Tel Aviv School of Poetics: 15 Terrasson, Jean, critique of Anne Dacier by: 253–254 Tesauro, Emanuele, on wit: 110–111 tetragon, ambiguity of: 239–243 Thirlwall, Connop, translation of P. C. Buttmann by: 230, 235 Thirlwall, Connop, ‘On the Irony of Sophocles’: 333–341, 349–350; German translation of: 357; reception of: 345–346, 353– 360; sources for: 335–338, 348–349 Thomas Aquinas, St, on moral action: 125 n. 102; on the multiple literal sense of Scripture: 160–163; on the prophecy of Caiaphas: 114; as supreme interpreter of Augustine: 161; on the tetragon: 241 Thor: 129, 160 Thurlow, Edward, on ambiguity in law: 89 Tieck, Ludwig, contribution to 1841 Antigone of: 336; incredulity of about English philosophy: 305 Till Eulenspiegel: 41 Titelmans, Frans, controversy with Erasmus about the multiple literal sense of Scripture: 163–165 tobacco, as cure for blindness: 297 n. 50 Torrentius, Laevinus, on Aeneas’s treachery: 211–212 Toscano, Giovanni Matteo, comments on Homer by: 245–246 Towne, John, on double senses: 301 Trapp, Joseph, on Vergil: 298 Trautner, Ludwig, on tragic irony and ambiguity: 360–363 Trugrede. See Ajax Trump, Donald, ambiguity of: 46 n. 72

Ossa-Richardson.indb 468

Tubero, Quintus Aelius, on words and intention: 78 Tuve, Rosemond, controversy with William Empson: 390 n. 89; exchange with, 390 n. 89–90 Twining, Thomas, on Aristotle’s Poetics: 260 Tynianov, Yuri, on poetic language: 71 typology, biblical: 165–166, 286–290 Tytler, Alexander Fraser, on ambiguity in translation: 260–261 Ulpian, on legal interpretation: 79 unconscious. See ambiguity, unconscious vagueness, in relation to ambiguity: 10–11, 42, 359 Valla, Lorenzo, annotations on Quintilian by: 74 Varus, Publius Licinius, witticism of: 102 Vattel, Emer de, on legal interpretation: 81 Vázquez, Gabriel, on the multiple literal sense of Scripture: 176–177 Velvet Underground, The, influence of: 326 Verdier, Antoine du, Les omonimes: 47 Vergil, Aeneid, ambiguity in: 211–212, 297–299 Vernant, Jean-­Pierre, on dramatic irony: 333 Vernon’s case: 87 Viśvanātha Kavirāja, on śleşa (artful ambiguity) and rasa: 206–209 Voiture, Vincent, wit of: 202 voluntas auctoris. See intention Vossius, Gerardus Joannes: on Aulus Gellius: 52; on elegantia and ambiguity: 198–201 Walaeus, Antonius, on scriptural perspicuity: 129–130, 134 Warburton, William, on ambiguity in Pope’s satires: 278–282; correspondence with Conyers Middleton: 293–294; edition of Pope’s works by: 277–278; involvement in Alexander Pope’s Dunciad: 264–266 Warburton, William, Divine Legation of Moses: 293–300; on double meanings in

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Index  •  469

classical poetry: 296–300; reception of: 300–301 Ward, John, friendship with George Benson: 285; on witticisms in Cicero: 103 Warren, Robert Penn. See Brooks, Cleanth Weismann, Karl, on Ajax: 351 Weiss, John, on Shakespeare: 393 Welby, Lady Victoria, on ambiguous words: 68–69; on unit and unity: 313 Welby, Thomas Earle, on Empson: 7–8 Welcker, Friedrich Gottlieb, on Connop Thirlwall: 356; on Sappho: 235; on Sophocles: 348–349 Whateley, Richard, on ambiguous terms: 68; on causal ambiguity: 49 Wheelwright, Philip, on Agamemnon: 343 n. 61; on Empson: 10; on plurisignation: 11 Whiston, William, on Hebrew prophecy: 292–293 Whitaker, William, on the double literal sense of Scripture: 166 White, Samuel, on Hebrew prophecy: 292 Whiter, Walter, on Shakespeare’s unconscious puns: 379–380

Ossa-Richardson.indb 469

Wieland, Christoph Martin, on dilogia in Horace: 229 Wigmore, John Henry, against formalism: 77, 96 Wigram, James, on legal interpretation: 93–94 Willmott, R. A., on Connop Thirlwall’s concept of irony: 353 Wilson, Edmund, on narrative ambiguity in Henry James: 14 Wilson, Thomas, on ambiguity in law: 75 wit, in Augustan letters: 268–269; problem of defining: 66; in Emmanuele Tesauro: 110–111 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, duck-­rabbit figure of: 14 Wood, Robert, on Homer’s clarity: 383 Woolsey, Theodore Dwight, on Electra: 345–346 Wycherley, William, irritation at Alexander Pope of: 261 Zasius, Ulrich, on equivocation: 46 Zeune, Johann Karl, edition of Horace by: 229

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