There is no dearth of critical scholarship on Shakespeare, neither is there any dearth of scholarship on knowledge, and forms knowing related to the Shakespearean cosmovision, specifically. However, the first of the many noteworthy arguments that Blind Spots of Knowledge in Shakespeare and His World: A Conversation, edited by Subha Mukherjimakes is that despite the expansive treatment of knowledge in regards to Shakespeare and his literary legacy, much has gone unseen, and thus, much more remains to be discovered. Given the thematic compass of Shakespeare’s work, numerous critical angles have been overlooked, and entire areas of study have been systematically and historically mismanaged and misinterpreted. This is surely a point less pertinent for committed scholars of Shakespeare, yet it nonetheless indicates a helpful ingress for students or novices who may feel daunted by the volume of extant scholarly work on Shakespeare. Likewise, by addressing centuries of scholarship and reception and rendering them less definitive and daunting, the injunction to look anew, to seek new perspectives, and to find what has been overlooked, offers a type of critical encouragement that can be of immeasurable value, especially for classroom discussions of pre-modern “canonical” authors. Along with tackling a pressing set of questions that arises when considering the various modes of encountering Shakespearean texts--questions related to the processes of reading and rereading, analysis and study, discussion and teaching, for example--the ten authors Mukherji brings together in this absorbing scholarly exchange also study the ocular metaphors that proliferate throughout Shakespeare’s plays, particularly as eyes, sight, and visual references dovetail with knowledge and “the epistemic purchase of unseeing” (1).
By taking blind spots literally and metaphorically, and by analyzing them both in terms of what they lack and what affordances they provide, Mukherji’s volume offers a compelling and performative example of the inherent discursivity of reader reception theory. Although Husserl, Heidegger, Iser, and Jauss are not mentioned directly in the included essays, they could very well have found their place in the volume. Surely, their contributions, along with those of philosophers and theorists of perception like Aristotle, Barthes, Derrida, de Mann, Lacan, Marx, and Merleau-Ponty who are discussed, help better understand intromission and reception, phenomenological and hermeneutical models of perception and knowledge, perception theory, and reader response theory. As critical frameworks, these are never very far from the dynamic ways in which Mukherji’s contributors--whom she designates “blind spot spotters” (16)--parse the meaning of perception, perspective, orientation, and thresholds, in their quest to probe “the intersubjectivity of knowledge,” “the business of representation” “alternative epistemes,” and the deep “epistemic and hermeneutic purchase of unknowability” (17, 21). Many of the contributions demonstrate how Jauss’s ever-extending Erwartungshorizont twists and unfurls uniquely before different readers and practitioners, evincing how pursuing well-trodden pathways of critical analysis only reinforces familiar grooves. Familiarity can then morph into its own sort of blindness. The essays also argue that although information gets lost by “not” seeing, other senses develop; in the absence of visual input or missing photoreceptors, visual data can be supplanted by the brain for a fuller picture; by perceiving visual input in new ways, viewers can learn from the perspectival differences that contribute to more varied forms of knowledge. The vastness of this theoretical grounding allows the authors brought together in Mukherji’s volume to better explore spaces of inquiry, along with the gaps, omissions, and areas of unresolved debate that have not sufficiently been addressed by criticism, and scenes that may not have even been fully or adequately “seen” despite the unremitting scholarship resulting from centuries of engagement with Shakespeare’s plays.
Blind Spots of Knowledge is divided into eight sections. Each section is headed by a primary article followed by one or two shorter papers that provide a sprightly dialectical commentary by responding directly to the primary article. These responses are unique and valuable aids to the reader, as they support and elaborate upon the key themes put forth in the primary articles. In addition to supporting a capacious dialogue, each respondent probes and expands the commentary of the primary articles, cajoling, challenging, critiquing, and reorienting the terrain that has just been charted in creative and nuanced ways.
After an introductory analysis of blind spots by Mukherji that encourages readers to think of the volume as a “dialogue” “conversation,” and “adventure,” Adam Zucker’s essay “Baffling Terms” takes the word “baffle”--which is “both an engineering enigma and a cohesive force for propulsion and lift” (32), and which comes about twice in Twelfth Night in different contexts--to open his analysis of what is quantifiable versus unquantifiable in the play, and what provokes moments of linguistic confusion or discomfort. Using a historico-philological approach, Zucker focuses most closely on the barbs, jokes, performed humor, foreign words, and even nonsensical and fake foreign words that decorate the play, with “baffle,” “to baffle,” “bafflement,” and their lexical cognates being the terms that trickily bring together humiliation, rhetorical strategy, and wonder in their etymological invocation of barriers, regulation, and restraint. Zucker cautions that if readers and audience do not allow themselves to sit with discomfort while pushing for new interpretations and meanings, they “will miss an important chance to reflect on the historical, material contexts of our bafflement” (38). Zucker’s respondents are Stephen Spiess and Mukherji. In “Baffling Comedy, Baffling Ourselves” Spiess focuses on comedy’s generic difference from tragedy and wonders if comedy’s particular way of invoking the audience through humor, jokes, and linguistic games can be regarded as an “alternative structure for thinking through problems of knowing and ignorance” (41). Following Zucker’s discussion of barriers and the destabilization of knowledge, in “Knowing Games” Mukherji considers humiliation and the “affective cost of humor” (43) in Love’s Labour’s Lost, Cymbeline, and King Lear.
As the title suggests, the second lead article, “Shakespeare’s Nuts: The Blind Spots of the Edible Contact Zone” by Jonathan Gil Harris, offers a witty and perspicacious study of the implications of “nuttiness”--from nuts of the scatological and corporeal variety to blithe euphemisms for eccentric behavior and erratic cogitations. Harris then settles on the presence of comestible nuts in Shakespeare, for their “global valences” and attendant imbrication in colonial ideologies and “alternative universes” (50). This is an important and noteworthy contribution, as is the attention Harris draws to the Kristapurana, a lengthy epic and “real-life counter-Tempest from Shakespeare’s lifetime” (54) that has not received the critical attention it merits. In “Flying Blind, Going Nuts,” Mukherji responds to Harris’s “delightful tour de force of nutty thought” (65), to study how power, somatic agency, subaltern identity, cross-cultural literary connections shape what we know about the contact zone in Shakespeare’s plays--be it an “edible contact zone,” or any transactional area between forms of knowledge, writ large. In “Eyes Wide Shut: Seeing and Knowing in Othello,” Supriya Chaudhuri offers a deft and convincing analysis of evidence and “ocular proof” that parses the “links between spying, sexual jealousy, and theatrical spectatorship” (75). While “ocular proof” is a topic often favored in critical appreciations of Othello, Chaudhuri’s take is both innovative and rigorous, especially since she traces evidentiary proof to the “psychophysiology of the blind spot in the human eye”--and specifically to the “puntum caecum,” discovered by Edmé Mariotte in 1668, and considered at length by Merleau-Ponty and Lacan (75-77). Chaudhuri offers an excellent aperçu of visual theories, particularly as these relate to characters’ anxieties about what is seen or not seen, and concludes with an astute discussion on material and immaterial signs in Othello and Ben Jonson’s Volpone. Gil Harris and Stephen Spiess apply Chaudhuri’s insistence upon the dogged and pernicious “mis-see[ing]” at the core of Othello to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in the case of Harris’s “Seeing Blindness,” and to Barthes’s punctum, in Speiss’s “Towards an Epistemology of the Stage.”
The fourth major contribution is Aveek Sen’s “What Emilia Knew: Shakespeare Reads James,” an engaging and creative assessment of how Shakespeare’s innovative representation of knowledge, motivation, and female agency are manifested in James’s work and in his appreciation of “utmost conceivability” as a structural device within a story (102). A Jamesian lens, Sen argues, consequently spotlights what readers (and spectators) might have a tendency to overlook--or perhaps simply never see--when reading Shakespeare; likewise, by reading intertextually, James can be understood as a useful paradigm through which to consider Shakespeare anew. Tanya Pollard and Mukherji respond to these lacunae and oversights in “Minding Shakespeare’s Gaps,” and in “Darkness Visible,” respectively, with both authors treating omissions, purposeful silence, and complicity. Pollard’s article “Knowing Kin and Kind in The Winter’s Tale,” is the fifth primary article, and it focuses on familiar relationships and “familiar misrecognitions,” especially those that are parental in nature, along with the birth-related terminology and lexical blurring that revise and reshape the genealogical understandings presented in The Winter’s Tale. Zachary Lesser, in “Unknowing Kind” and Aveek Sen are shrewd respondents, for they further Pollard’s analysis by considering terminological philology and tragicomedy as a genre, in Lesser’s case, and in Sen’s “Difficult Loves,” the play’s “cognitive error[s]” and paternally grounded scenes of misrecognition. Readers are then treated to Spiess’s lively “The Epistemology of Violence in The Comedie of Errors,” which is the volume’s sixth contribution. Both of Spiess’s respondents, Chaudhuri and Zucker, merit special attention since their articles on slave epistemologies (on the knowledge slaves harness or lack) and on the connection between violence and narration, respectively, are issues that have received special critical attention of late.
In the seventh part of the volume, titled “Broken English: A Dialogue,” Michael Witmore, in “‘To sleep, maybe to dream’ and “Other Encounters with a Trained Machine,” and Jonathan Hope in “The Inheritance of Meat,” consider machine translation and various machine learning techniques that can help reveal in texts what the human eye cannot always see, but which have explicit limitations as well, particularly when an author’s work, as is the case with Shakespeare, betrays a high incidence of “poetic unpredictability” (175). Lesser’s response essay, “Conscience Doth Make Errors: The Blind Spot of Shakespearean Quotation” forges particularly innovative approaches in the field of digital humanities. Lesser uses stylometrics and analyses of occurrence to give attention to commonly quoted--or rather, misquoted--lines from Shakespeare to investigate how these oft repeated errors have subsequently taken hold in later textual citations, as well as socioculturally. His analysis makes the point that the volume has upheld throughout--that blind spots are “perspectival,” and that blind spots perpetuate themselves, creating ‘persistent’ errors. In “On Not Knowing Shakespeare,” Tanya Pollard takes two of Lesser’s textual examples, “Conscience doth make cowards of us all,” and “The lady doth protest too much, methinks,” as signs of “the impressively persistent tradition” of misquotation to consider intratextual, intertextual, and extratextual obstacles to “identifying a consistent Shakespearean voice” (198). Indeed, frequent misquotations are ultimately informative themselves, as they highlight textual alterations and variances between editions, moments of improvisation, chronological developments, and so on. Adam Zucker offers the volume’s final words, in his response to Lesser, “The Food of Points.” Framing his comments with a performative anecdote about their friendship, like Pollard, Zucker muses on misquotations of Shakespeare to challenge definitive understandings of authority and style, acknowledging the “protean” nature of facile inferences, preestablished frameworks, and other forms of blind spots.
Without wanting to sound captious, a few cavils do present themselves. In their vital contributions to the field, scholars like Dennis Britton, Kimberly Anne Coles, Peter Erickson, Ruben Espinosa, Kim Hall, Ania Loomba, Joyce MacDonald, Ayanna Thompson, Ian Smith, David Sterling Brown, just to name a few, have long shown how race is a common, recurrent, and pernicious “blind spot,” particularly as regards the performance, evaluation, and scholarship on Shakespearean and other Early Modern plays. That “race” is decidedly mentioned only a handful of times in Blind Spots of Knowledge (thrice, per my count, though it does not figure in the index) its critical absence in the conversation Mukherji facilitates, seems a glaring oversight, particularly given many of the sociopolitical imperatives of the present moment. Chaudhuri’s very worthy chapter does discuss Othello, and does touch obliquely on race in her framing of how Othello’s blackness “converts him to a specular self” (81) and causes additional moments of misrecognition and misunderstanding. However; the focus of the article is the relationship of knowledge and vision in the play. I would be remiss to suggest that the responsibility to explicitly address race is Chaudhuri’s merely because of the play in question, and certainly, Othello is not the sole Shakespearean play for which race occupies a central or determinative role. And indeed, Mukherji does mention race in “Darkness Visible,” which helpfully brings Tony Morrison’s representation of the willow scene in Desdemonainto the conversation, considering how “Morrison’s Africa becomes a photographic ‘negative’ of the original’s location,” and thus “[a] place where all things that could not be looked in the face in Venice are translated into face-to-face encounter” (118). Nevertheless, these are all relatively brief remarks offered in the shorter response essays, while race as a principal concern is left out of the primary articles. Many scholars and students would thus be rather surprised by the way the collected essays “overlook” the issue of race.
Along similar lines, a last carp is that such a focused study of blindness and literal and metaphorical oversights, or moralized moments of not seeing or sightedness, disregards physical difference and blindness as a bodily sense in Shakespeare, and does not directly consider illness, disability, and impairment. Undoubtedly, at least one contribution treating Shakespeare, vision, and blindness that explores disability and engages with the field of disability studies would certainly have its place in a volume of this nature. So doing, Blind Spots of Knowledge would also have the added benefit of confronting an issue of absolute critical importance that has long been neglected in the field of Shakespearean studies. Moreover, it would also bring into the debate key works in disability studies (like those written by Deborah Gallagher, Jonathan Hsy, Kenneth Jernigan, Jo Livingstone, Rod Michalko, Naomi Schor, Julie Singer, Susan Sontag, and Benjamin Whitburn, to name just a few), which have insightfully examined the ableist underpinnings of visual metaphors, bodily metaphors, and the terminology related to blindness for many years, particularly since blindness itself is an example of “metaphorical catachresis” (Schor). Not only does this omission seem another missed opportunity, some additional nuance and consideration of the terminology employed throughout the volume--even the term “blind spots” itself, for instance--is warranted. These issues notwithstanding,Blind Spots of Knowledge in Shakespeare and His World: A Conversation, is a rich and informative text that nimbly guides readers towards new perspectives while signaling new areas of research and study. It is an enjoyable and lively read that would likely find an eager audience of scholars and upper-level students alike.