ABSTRACT
Late in Act V of Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors, Duke Solinus asks, upon seeing the twin Antipholi, “And so of these, which is the natural man, / And which the spirit? Who deciphers them?”1 In this moment of confusion and inquiry, the Duke recognizes doubleness and interpretive complexity. A man who had read the world and the law in a single-minded and inflexible fashion-“I am not partial to infringe our laws …; by law thou art condemned to die” (I, i, 4, 25)—encounters “twin-ness”—“Stay, stand apart. I know not which is which” (V, i, 365)—and mitigates his earlier harsh ruling: “Thy father hath his life” (V, i, 392). Solinus’s words are a classic case of Shakespearean paradox: that is, an astonished expression of the encounter with double or multiple perspectives that usually accompanies epistemological change in Shakespeare’s plays. This doubleness fascinated John Keats; he called it “negative capability”: “that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” This is a quality, said Keats, that “Shakespeare posessed [sic] so enormously.”2 This recognition of the paradoxical nature of the world, I would argue, is a prerequisite for cognitive growth in Shakespeare-for his characters and for his
Special thanks go to Angela Balla, Bradin Cormack, and Benedict Robinson for
suggestions and encouragement at just the right time. 1 William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors, in Stephen Greenblatt et al. (eds), The
Norton Shakespeare (New York, 1997), V, I, 334-5. All further references to the texts of Shakespeare will be taken from this edition, unless otherwise noted.
