ABSTRACT
How does the logic of ghostly authorship inform – or deform – not only the writing of literature but also the writing of history? As a way of approaching this question, I begin with a passage from The Comedy of Errors:
A complex interrelationship between time and deformation is clearly outlined in Egeon’s plea for recognition. For time’s hand is already deformed as well as deforming, and it is, explicitly, a writing hand. Between the “deformed hand” and the still recognizable speaking voice comes, as always, the shadow. Hand/voice; written/spoken. Here, though, that which is written is deformed, twisted out of shape, imbued with “strange defeatures.” The wonderful word defeature means both “undoing, ruin” and “disfigurement; defacement; marring of features” (OED). In The Comedy of Errors it is twice used to describe the change of appearance wrought by age upon the face, both in Egeon’s speech given above, and in Adriana’s lament for her lost beauty, its loss hastened, she thinks, by her husband’s neglect: “Then is he the ground/Of my defeatures” (2.1.97-8). It is unfortunate that “defeature” has become, as the OED points out, “obsolete,” “archaic,” “now chiefly an echo of the Shakespearean use”
because it offers a superbly concrete picture of the effects of ruin, the visible, readable consequences of being – or coming – undone.
