To the interpreter, texts often appear as images of time; to the makers of texts, however, they are the very events of time and history itself.

—Jerome McGann, The Textual Condition

I begin this concluding section with the above quotation in part because it strikes me as an apt characterization of the various ways in which the relationship between texts and history is frequently construed: for some readers and critics, texts often are imagined as fully self-present representations of the past, while for their creators texts simply are, one might say, "the stuff of history." In criticism texts are typically implicated in history only to the extent that they either 1) represent (embody) a particular historical moment, or 2) can themselves stand as historical fields. The latter is precisely what happens in traditional textual criticism that posits the eclectic text as its interpretive paradigm. The model of the eclectic text (the text produced historically) construes the text as a historical field, the place of history, and, moreover, as the site of historical evolution and progress—that "homogeneous, empty time" Benjamin identifies as the "foundational" conceit so much in need of what we might today call deconstruction.

To imagine the text not in time but as time; this is the tendency of traditional textual criticism, powered, as it is, by an underlying Hegelian conception of history as the gradual exfoliation of a master-narrative. Thus traditional editorial practice emerges as a kind of historiography predicated upon an essentially teleological model of progress. For Dover Wilson, it is the progressive narrative of an aristocratic or monarchical political and class conservatism that seeks in archaic forms of absolutism the redemption of traditional aesthetic and national value against the threat of proletarian political struggle and revolution. Wilson's is a redemptive vision of the social place of high literary culture: it is in this high literary culture, Wilson suggests, that we can find transcendent liberation and salvation.

The appeal to these putative redemptive and salvational powers has been characteristic of our cultural appropriation of Shakespeare, and literary and aesthetic "genius" more generally. But if it is true that texts do not necessarily embody or imply a politics of redemption or liberation, what, then, can texts be said to embody?

In truth, this is a misleading question. Since embodiment as a textual property depends on the manifestly untenable hope of presence-in-writing, we cannot legitimately say that texts embody anything. We can say, however, that texts occur, and as such they stand not as objects but rather as events. As McGann suggests, "Properly understood … every text is unique and original to itself when we consider it not as an object but as an action."³⁸ Texts happen in a way analogous to the happening of events (historical, social, political, accidental) outside our anachronistically imposed narratives of authorship, textuality, causality, diachronicity, history, nationalism, liberation, and so on. This is a way of reading that goes entirely against the grain of a play such as Merchant, which articulates the very faith in and philosophy of presence-in-writing and embodiment I have tried to critique here. In place of this theory of reading predicated upon the metaphysics of presence, let us put in place a non-appropriative theory and practice of reading and historiography that allows the texts to exist more purely in history, rather than as latter-day reconstructions of our own self-interested narratives.

And what of accidents?

To the extraordinary extent that they are routinely subjected to narrative strategies dedicated to the explanation or discovery of meaning (the establishment of chronology, the articulation of significance—in short, the demonstration of absolute causality and accountability), textual and historical accidents (the two seem almost indistinguishable) have always been subjected to a reactive practice of over-writing. Corrected, emended, or re-defined out of existence, accidents have almost universally been construed as sites for the contestation of the subject (the author, or—more likely—the critic) against error, confusion, and meaninglessness, and seldom as mere instances of the uncaused—that great bugbear to systems of the production of meaning. Accidents are important precisely because as accidents they mark eruptions of phenomena for which we simply cannot account. It is the accident that gives the very notion of causality the lie, and as such accidents can be said to delimit the domain of agency. Traditional textual criticism (like most other forms of historiography) is motivated by a relentless desire to articulate—in some instances, to manufacture—causality, and as such is dedicated to the description and, more importantly, the extension of the domain of agency. We can see this is the paradigm of the eclectic text in which every word is entirely caused, and in which nothing is allowed to remain accidental. To clean up accidents in a text is to construct a narrativized world of total causality and accountability, a purely rational world in which everything is under control. This is Dover Wilson's practice, for example, in his construction of a wholly meaningful text of Merchant, or in his meaningful description of Russian absolutism. And there are accidents within the narrative of Merchant that the play clearly attempts to over-write: the "accident" of a Jew's domination of a Christian that Portia overwrites, for example, or the accident of the loss of Antonio's merchant ships which is redeemed through the mystification of the letter. And there are legion over-writings of accidents in criticism of the play—whether textual or interpretive in nature.

The three Sallies, then, are certainly part of the play. Or, to be more precise, the multiple Sallies are all of them part of the play: the quartos and Folio present, Wilson remarks, not only Salerio, Solanio, and Salarino, but "Salerino," "Salari," and "Saleri," and Mahood lists the cornucopic variety of textual incarnations of these "characters": Salaryno, Salino, Slarino, Salerino, Sala, Salan, Salanio, Salarino, Salanio, Salar, Sola, Sal, Solanio, Salari, Saleri, Sol.³⁹

Mahood's list of the Sallie "characters" is emblematic not only of the radical instability of the text, or the proliferation of accidents in that text, but also of our sheer inability to account for these "characters," our inability to construct a narrative (of a story or of a text) in which they all have a truly meaningful place. Unediting, then, of the most radical sort—unediting, that is, dedicated to the domains of both agency and non-agency—returns the text more fully to history, and at the same time understands texts as more fully historical, and as such demonstrates the limits of agency. In spite of our collective insatiability for meaning, there is, as it happens, a world apart—an accidental world.

Notes

¹ Jerome McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1991): "Both the practice and the study of human culture comprise a network of symbolic exchanges. Because human beings are not angels, these exchanges always involve material negotiations. Even in their most complex and advanced forms—when the negotiations are carried out as textual events—the intercourse that is being human is materially executed: as spoken texts or scripted forms. To participate in these exchanges is to have entered what 1 wish to call here 'the textual condition'" (3).

² Jerome McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Chicago and Charlottesville: Univ. of Chicago Press and Univ. of Virginia Press, 1992), 11.

³ McGann (note 2), 8.

⁴ The growing list of such works is extensive; what follows is not intended to be exhaustive, but rather suggestive of the range and depth of this work. Margreta De Grazia and Peter Stallybrass, "The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text," Shakespeare Quarterly 44 (1993): 255-83; Stephen Orgel, "The Poetics of Incomprehensibility," Shakespeare Quarterly 42 (1991): 431-37; Leah S. Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988); Paul Werstine, "Narratives About Printed Shakespearean Texts: 'Foul Papers' and 'Bad' Quartos," Shakespeare Quarterly 41 (1990): 65-86; Marion Trousdale, "A Second Look at Critical Bibliography and the Acting of Plays," Shakespeare Quarterly 41 (1990): 87-96; Randall McLeod (Random Cloud), '"The very names of the Persons': Editing and the Invention of Dramatik Character," in Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, ed. David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass (New York: Routledge, 1991), 88-96; Margreta De Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). See also

⁵ For theoretical and practical discussions of "unediting," see Randall McLeod, "UnEditing Shakespeare," SubStance 33/34 (1982): 26-55 and Leah Marcus, "Textual Indeterminacy and Ideological Difference: The Case of Doctor Faustus," Renaissance Drama n.s. 20 (1989): 1-29.

⁶ Marcus, "Textual Indeterminacy" (note 5), 3.

⁷ Marcus, 24.

⁸ Marcus, 12. Marcus also notes, "The A text could be described as more nationalist and more Calvinist, Puritan, or ultra-Protestant, the B text as more internationalist, imperial, and Anglican, or Anglo-Catholic—but each version places the magician at the extreme edge of transgression in terms of its own implied system of values" (5).

⁹ Marcus discusses these revisions: "The 1602 revisions worked to keep Doctor Faustus on the thrilling/unnerving edge of transgression by inscribing the play with a new set of national priorities and anxieties. A theatrical company and its hired 'hack' writers transformed what was then extant as 'Marlowe' in order to keep the 'Marlowe effect' alive, to keep Marlowe sounding like himself even decades after his physical demise. In the curious case of Doctor Faustus, nonauthorial revision functioned to heighten, not to destroy, an aura of authorial 'authenticity' in the theater" (15).

¹⁰ Jonathan Goldberg, "Textual Properties," Shakespeare Quarterly 37 (1986): 214. Goldberg continues, "the historicity of the text means that there is no text itself; it means that a text cannot be fixed in terms of original or final intentions. At best, Shakespearean practice authorizes the dispersal of authorial intention" (214). De Grazia and Stallybrass (note 4) also discuss the illusory nature of the "original": "Return to the early texts provides no access to a privileged 'original'; on the contrary, for the modern reader it bars access. The features that modernization and emendation smooth away remain stubbornly in place to block the illusion of transparency—the impression that there is some ideal 'original' behind the text" (256).

¹¹ Goldberg, "Textual Properties" (note 10), 214; The Division of the Kingdom: Shakespeare's Two Versions of King Lear, ed. Gary Taylor and Michael Warren (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983).

¹² Goldberg, 215.

¹³ Goldberg, 216.

¹⁴ Goldberg discusses the Shakespearean text in which, now, "no word … is sacred." Moreover, he continues, with this "radical instability" of the Shakespearean text, "all criticism that has based itself on the text, all forms of formalism, all close reading, is given the lie" (215).

¹⁵ McGann, A Critique (note 2), 24.

¹⁶ McGann, 93-94.

¹⁷ McGann, 119.

¹⁸ Goldberg, "Textual Properties" (note 10), 217.

¹⁹The Merchant of Venice, ed. John Russell Brown (London: Methuen, 1955), 3.2.314-20. All references are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in text by act, scene and line.

²⁰ Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1990), 78.

²¹The Merchant of Venice, ed. John Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1926), 97. Subsequent references to Wilson appear parenthetically in the text in the text and are cited by W.

²²The Merchant of Venice, 1600, Shakespeare Quarto Facsimiles (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957).

²³ There are two further differences between the modern and the Quarto versions of the letter and its physical/material presentation. In our modern editions we are accustomed to the addition of two linguistic items not found in the Quarto text: the parentheses around "since in paying it, it is impossible I should live," and the insertion of a comma after the phrase "all debts are cleared between you and I." In the first instance, the addition of the parentheses serves to make Antonio's recognition of the cost of the forfeiture subordinate to the act of forgiveness within which it occurs, a highly intrusive editorial decision that alters the sense of the passage. As punctuated in the Quarto, the passage makes perfect sense, though not the sense we have ascribed to it (or to Antonio, for that matter) in our modern editions. The letter may well want to register linguistically the equivalence of Antonio's death and Bassanio's debts; the subordinating effect of the parentheses suppresses such a reading. In the second instance—the instance of the comma—the Quarto's syntax makes rather explicit that there is a causal relationship between the forgiveness of the debt and Bassanio's appearance at Antonio's death: the former is more explicitly conditional upon the latter. The editorial addition of the comma serves to mitigate the force of Antonio's determination. Again, such an editorial decision is intrusive and in a way revises the sense of the letter.

²⁴ Jonathan Goldberg, "Hamlet's Hand," Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (1988), 324.

²⁵ This is the same faith that can be said to underwrite drama as a genre: a belief in presence-in-writing is given the extraordinary dimension and expression in the representational embodiments of characters in the figures of the actors who portray them on stage before our very eyes. Drama is, perhaps, the expression of the metaphysics of writing par excellence.

²⁶ Freud's essay begins by reading the caskets as symbols for women: if the scene of the three caskets from Merchant appeared in a dream, Freud says, "it would at once occur to us that caskets are also women, symbols of the essential thing in woman, and therefore of a woman herself, like boxes, large or small, baskets, and so on" ("The Theme of the Three Caskets," in Sigmund Freud: The Collected Papers, ed. Joan Riviere, 5 vols. [New York: Basic Books, 1959], 4:245-56). Then, by way of a circuitous path through various national mythologies, folk-tales, and King Lear, Freud arrives at his perhaps predictable conclusion that the theme of the three caskets allegorically represents "the three inevitable relations man has with woman": "That with the mother who bears him, with the companion of his bed and board, and with the destroyer. Or it is the three forms taken on by the figure of the mother as life proceeds: the mother herself, the beloved who is chosen after her pattern, and finally the Mother Earth who receives him again" (256).

²⁷ In a discussion of letters and their circulation in Shakespearean texts, "Shakespearean Inscriptions: The Voicing of Power" [in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York: Methuen, 1985), 116-137], Jonathan Goldberg argues that Portia's position in court and her ultimate success there—and in the fifth act drama of the ring—depend upon the sheer impossibility of the "selfsameness" of the letter: "The 'turn' that Portia takes calls into question the differences upon which the play rests, male and female, Jew and Christian, letter and spirit, for the lewdness of the play that she initiates—sending the letter and donning the disguise (the device)—rests upon equivocations within the letter, differences within the self-same. Portia's 'whole device' involves filling a place—the place of Bellario, the place of the law—through an act of replacement that calls into question the possibility of duplication (the repeatability and self-sameness upon which the law rests)" (122).

²⁸ This reversal also manifests the play's fundamental dependence upon Christian historiography that posits two related phases of post-lapsarian history—the Mosaic or Old Testament articulation of life under the law, and the New Testament life of the spirit. In this vision of history, the Christian progresses from the first phase to the second in a movement that is suggested by Christ's example and guaranteed by virtue of the spirit's redemption of the law and its letter. Portia leads the Christians of the play in this progress toward redemption and salvation; Shylock, on the other hand, is its clear victim.

²⁹ Portia's and Nerissa's taunting of Bassanio and Gratiano over the matter of the rings has special significance as well, in part because their laughter—and their husbands' initial consternation—are explicitly linked to the politics of embodiment and textuality. Portia can assure Bassanio that she will welcome the doctor to her bed ("Know him I shall, I am well sure of it" [5.1.229]) because of her embodiment as both "herself" and as "the doctor." In fact, the moment Portia produces the ring—"I had it of him: pardon me Bassanio, / For by this ring the doctor lay with me" (5.1.258-59)—she stands, as it were, as both herself and the doctor. This crisis is averted not simply with Portia's announcement that she was the doctor and Nerissa the clerk, but only when she produces the letter as evidence:

        you are all amaz'd;
Here is a letter, read it at your leisure,—
It comes from Padua from Bellario,—

There you shall find that Portia was the
  doctor,
Nerissa there the clerk.
                                        (5.1.266-70)

³⁰The Merchant of Venice, ed. M. M. Mahood (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987), 56. Subsequent references to Mahood occur parenthetically in text and are cited by M.

³¹ Jonathan Goldberg discusses a similar manifestation of logocentrism in Shakespeare's second tetralogy: "The subsequent plays are haunted too by what is put on deposit in the deposition scene [of Richard II]: the alliance of kingship with the repression of textuality, and the ways in which the play both supports that logocentrism and undermines it." ("Rebel Letters: Postal Effects from Richard II to Henry IV," Renaissance Drama n.s. 19 [1988]: 10).

³² It is interesting to note that in the 1939 Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge (later published as The Editorial Problem in Shakespeare: A Survey of the Foundations of the Text, 2d ed. [Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1951]), Greg rejects both the conclusions drawn by Dover Wilson on the textual genealogy of Merchant and its production from assembled prompt-book, and his own evident participation in the argument: "I do not regard the presentation of the prompt-book for registration [in the Stationers' Register] as involving its use as copy. Like Chambers 'I see no clear reason why the copy used … should not have been in Shakespeare's hand'—and foul papers at that, at least in the technical sense, for the text itself is remarkably good … . A prompt copy would surely have straightened out the tangle of ambiguous prefixes that according to Wilson led to the creation of a ghost character in Salarino. It appears that I once argued that a passage at the foot of sig. 12 was an insertion probably written on a separate piece of paper. Wilson and Chambers allow the possibility: but the addition might have been made in foul papers as easily as in the prompt-book" (123; emphasis added).

³³ In Goldberg's discussion of the important textual crux in 1 Henry IV regarding the identity of the character that actually reads aloud the paper taken from the sleeping Falstaff's pocket, he discerns a similar classbased agenda on the part of traditional textual critics: "Dover Wilson and Bowers indulge fantasies about restoring Shakespeare's lost original text … . Bower's elaborate argument about stage history and its role in shaping Ql is quite clearly bent on saving Hal from being sullied with low companions like Peto … . The Petos of the world, Bowers insists, cannot read without being risible. Shakespeare cannot originally have wanted the Prince to have ended the scene in his company. Modern editors, on the whole, are willing enough to leave Peto there, and reading, as he does in F1 ; but they, too, share similar suppositions. The Prince must not read. And perhaps the editorial emendation in Fl is a result of the ideological construction of scenes of reading in the play; rebels read, but royalty do not" ("Rebel Letters" [note 31], 23).

³⁴ Hawkes identifies Dover Wilson's political conservatism in his renunciation of the Bolsheviks and his explicit endorsement of Tsarism in the article, "Russia and Her Ideals," in which he writes: "[Autocracy] still has a long life before it and much work to perform in Russia. It is therefore wiser to face the facts and to recognize that the Tsardom is after all Russia's form of democracy … . it is the kind of government the people understand and reverence, and it is their only protection against the tyranny of an aristocratic clique … . when the will of the autocrat is clearly and unmistakably expressed, it has always been found to correspond with the needs of the people" (quoted in Hawkes, "Telmah" [note 27], 323).

³⁵ Hawkes, 324.

³⁶ Hawkes discusses Dover Wilson's participation in this pedagogic regime as it was articulated in the famous Newbolt Report of 1921 (The Teaching of English in England). Wilson's contribution falls into the category of "Literature and the nation," asserting, Hawkes suggests, that "teaching literature to the working class is a kind of 'missionary work' whose aim is to stem the tide of that class's by then evident disaffection." In this manifestly political vision, "literature is offered as an instrument for promoting social cohesion in place of division": "The specter of a working class, demanding material goods with menaces, losing its national mind, besmirching its national character, clearly had a growing capacity to disturb after the events of 1917, particularly if that class, as Dover Wilson writes in the Newbolt Report, sees education 'mainly as something to equip them to fight their capitalistic enemies.' … To Dover Wilson … the solution lay quite clearly in the sort of nourishment that English literature offered: the snap, crackle and pop of its roughage as purgative force of considerable political power" (Hawkes, 326-27).

³⁷ Hawkes, 311-12. Hawkes offers the curtain call—"that complex of revisionary ironies"—as yet another theatrical practice that marks the emergence of the counter-current of recursive movement: "Here [in the curtain call] … any apparent movement in one direction of the play halts, and it begins to roll decisively in the opposite direction (if only towards the next performance, when its 'beginning' will emerge from these smiling actors). In short, the sense of straight, purposive, linear motion forward through the play—the sense required by most 'interpretations' of it—evaporates at the curtain call, and we sense an opposing current" (313).

³⁸ McGann, The Textual Condition (note 1), 183.

³⁹ Mahood (note 29), 180-81.

Source: "(Dis)embodied Letters and The Merchant of Venice," in ELH, Vol. 62, No. 2, Summer, 1995, pp. 237-65.