"Out on thee, seeming!": Fashioning Plots in "Much Ado About Nothing"

One of the main difficulties of literary stylistics is disentangling the stylistician’s “subjective” stance from the “objective” methods of linguistic research. Geoffrey Leech and Mick Short defined the question by making reference to Spitzer’s Zirkel im Verstehen, or “philological circle”, as they called it: the researcher’s insight is guided by linguistic observation, but the latter depends on the researcher’s habits and prejudices. Spitzer (1962: 19), Leech and Short (2007: 12) actually regarded the circle as virtuous, a method for guiding and enhancing the analyst’s intuitions: but the stylistician can also be seen as trapped into a vicious circle of understanding, unable to find anything that he/she did not set out looking for in the beginning (Morini 2009: 62). This is all the more true in relation to Shakespeare, for two reasons related to the massive weight of previous scholarship. On the one hand, the abundance of studies on every portion of the Shakespearean canon limits the stylistician’s insight even more: if the topic of one’s article is the centrality of appearances in Much Ado About Nothing, it becomes all but impossible to ignore the works that have been written on the subject (Lewalski 1968; Henze 1971; Dawson 1982; Dobranski 1998). On the other hand, and conversely, that abundance of studies will force him/her to choose a limited, previously unexplored linguistic aspect of the work under scrutiny: in the present case, the distribution of words of perception like “seem” and “appear” in Much Ado About Nothing. Guided and limited in this way, the analyst will end up demonstrating very little that was not inscribed in the terms of his/her research: words of perception, he/she will inevitably conclude, are crucial to the linguistic texture of the play.