“A Lady's ‘Verily’ Is as Potent as a Lord's”: Women, Word and Witchcraft in The Winter's Tale (original) (raw)

1992, English Literary Renaissance

Is as Potent as a Lord's'': Women, Word and Witchcraj in The Winter's Tale e are indebted to Jacques Derrida for the concept of the "transcendental signified."' It has a paradoxical status, since it was invoked by Derrida as part of a project to show that it isn't-that it never was and never shall be. It is a chimera, both the enabling force and the elusive quest of what Derrida has called "logocentrism": a sign that marks the end of interpretation, one that affirms truth, restores order, and by transcending the contingencies of place and time, regulates the play of signification. Although the concept, as Derrida uses it, has a negative import, it is a useful analytical tool to explore signification in Shakespearean tragedy and comedy. If the tragedies owe their being to the process of semiotic displacement that, Derrida has argued, marks the nature of the sign itself,2 comedy as a genre trades on a promise that somewhere interpretation (and therefore the possibility of doubt and uncertainty) stops. This is what makes the essential moment of comic unugnorisis possible. Some revelation, cast in signs that transcend present time and place-literally outside and beyond interpretation-is necessary for the renewal that defines Shakespearean comedy. I. This article arose out of a series of seminars on the politics of Shakespearean comedy given at the University of Cape Town. I wish to register my debt to my students, whose many remarks, critical comments, and suggestions lie imbedded, as quasi-direct discourse, in its text. 2. Thus the dramatic movement of Macbeth, King Lear, Othello, and Hamlet stems from contingency and equivocality of signs: the witches' pronouncements, Macbeth's behavior; the declarations of love in Lear; discourse itself in both Othello and Hamlet. The plots often turn on the propensity of signs to be mistaken and misread. The handkerchief from Othello is a signal instance, but one could include the apparently transcendental figure of the ghost in Hamlet and the straying of the letter that might have restored all in Lear.