The Very Large Textual Object: A Prosthetic Reading of Shakespeare Jonathan Hope and Michael Witmore (Strathclyde University and Carnegie Mellon University) jonathan.r.hope@strath.ac.uk mwitmore@andrew.cmu.edu Hope, Jonathan, and Michael Witmore. “The Very Large Textual Object: A Prosthetic Reading of Shakespeare”. Early Modern Literary Studies 9.3 / Special Issue 12 (January, 2004): 6.1-36<URL: http://purl.oclc.org/emls/09-3/hopewhit.htm >. Wond’rous machine, to thee the warbling lute, Tho’ used to conquest, must be forced to yield, With thee unable to dispute (Nicholas Brady, set by Henry Purcell, Ode For St Cecilia’s Day 1692) Ways of Reading 1. Those of us who have been trained in the western literary tradition are used to reading literary texts in particular ways (linearly, at least initially), and for particular things (somewhat vaguely, but recognisably termed ‘themes’ or ‘repeated ideas’ or perhaps ‘abouts’ - as in ‘Othello is about jealousy’). Our training teaches us to search for words or verbal patterns which are relatively rare instead of virtually omnipresent--such rarity or distinction being a likely indicator of what the text is really ‘about.’ Thus we can recognise repeated references to ‘hands’ in Macbeth (though in fact the words ‘hand’ and ‘hands’ appear only 35 times in a 2,108 line play) and then link these repetitions to what the play is ‘about’: guilt and action. 2. Judging by the amount of literary criticism published, it seems clear that this is an effective, or at least very productive, technique of reading. It is said, for example, that there are more doctoral dissertations about Hamlet than there are names in the Warsaw telephone book. Thus the pre-occupation with methodology in what Dilthey called the Geisteswissenschaften : the relative infrequency of the salient items we select in order to understand or interpret a text means that other readings (built on other groupings of salient items) will always be possible, and that it will be difficult, if not impossible, to say that one reading is preferable to another given the quantity of empirical evidence. For some critics, this freedom from quantitative falsification in literary studies has its own value, ensuring an ongoing flexibility in interpretation and the continuing relevance of particularly ‘suggestive’ texts that are capable of supporting many different readings. 3. We may read texts in this way because we are cognitively biased towards the unique in our experience. Absent a cognitive theory of reading, it is reasonable to assume that we begin filtering potentially significant elements of a text as we begin to have ideas about what they mean. Such filtering, whether hardwired or prescribed by convention, allows us to pass over certain items so that we can concentrate