Fórmula cálculo muestral

We saw in chapter three that in The Comedy of Errors wandering precipitates a loss of identity. An equivalent argument can be made here about MSND. Character identity is relational and losing one’s way in the wood becomes a further loss of the self. Here we find a further extension of the methodology of metaphor, where it is the identity of individuals that digresses in the wood.

Titania describes the wood thus: ‘the quaint mazes in the wanton green | For lack of tread are undistinguishable’ (II.1.99-100). The wood is a place in which

59 _{For further discussion of this idea see Docherty, On Modern Authority, pp. 90-128. King Lear}

dominates the plot through the enormity of his character that in its inhumanity verges on the

monstrous. In comparison with MSND, the level of the characters’ determination over the play-world

distinctions are lost. Getting lost and being mistaken are synonymous in the wood; existence in the green world is a confused ‘misprision’. When Puck meddles in the desires of the wrong couple, Oberon accuses him: ‘Of thy misprision must perforce ensue | Some true love turn’d and not a false turn’d true’ (III.2.90). The four

characters are all often lost and mistaken, one being a signifier of the other.

Wandering precipitates a kind of self-mistaking, further exaggerated by the similarity between the couples as they slip in and out of each other’s identity. Being lost in the wood makes them forget who they are—Hermia asks ‘Am not I Hermia? are not you Lysander?’—and who they are in love with: Lysander says to Demetrius ‘you love Hermia; this you know I know’ (III.2.163). Love, or more accurately desire, is itself conceived of as a wandering journey by Demetrius: ‘My heart to her but as guest- wise sojourn’d, | And now to Helen is it home return’d’ (III.2.171-2). Shakespeare plays with a loss of direction and self, soliciting the figure of a woman to signify the return home.60 It is not important to end up with the ‘right’ partner, the point is that they partner. As long as the pairings take place, there is no ‘right’ partner because they can always try again with someone else. It gives us an idea of eros as error, the kind of eros that has the potential to go spectacularly wrong in Othello. Yet this slippage between the four lovers is mocked by Shakespeare: ‘Yet but three? Come one more; | Two of both kinds make up four’ (III.2.437). They are identity-less; it is simply a kind of numerical balancing. Wandering destabilises identity in other ways. Hermia admits ‘I can no further crawl, no further go; my legs can keep no pace with my desires’ (III.2.445). If wandering is a metaphor for the loss and discovery of identity, then here the self fragments along with the body with the feet and head desiring both rest and movement.

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A discourse of wandering is also transferred to the meaning of language: Lysander says to Hermia, ‘Fair love, you faint with wandering in the wood; | And to speak troth, I have forgot our way’ (II.2.35). Speaking the truth is evoked in relation to wandering and finding ‘the way’ in the ‘wanton green’. The idea of plain speaking is challenged through the location of the wood and the action of wandering. In trying to reject her, Demetrius says to Helena ‘Do I entice you? Do I speak you fair? | Or rather do I not in plainest truth | Tell you I do not [nor] I cannot love you?’ (II.2.199- 200). The wanderings and misunderstandings constantly refute the idea of ‘plain’ language and ‘plain’ truth, compounded by Helena’s answer ‘And even for that do I love you the more’ (II.2.202). This is a perverse world where the opposite of what is said becomes true; those who speak plainly say complex things.

Following Puck’s voice, Lysander is further misled. The rhetoric of plainness intersects with metaphors of movement: ‘I will be with thee straight’, says Lysander (III.2.403). Plain talking of taking the straightest, most direct route, is echoed in Puck’s retort ‘follow me then to plainer ground’, tempting him to step out of the confusion, the ‘ground’ being the ‘field’ of discourse as well as the wood floor (III.2.404). But we know that such a hope is impossible, given the world of the play and the deceit behind the promise: Lysander believes he is chasing Demetrius, not Puck. Lysander says, ‘When I come where he calls, then he is gone…That fallen am I in dark uneven way’ (III.2.414, 417). In the darkest scene of the play suddenly we are given a sense of the night—darkness and danger is an undercurrent of the play just as it is a subtext of the title. The wood quickly changes from the potentially pleasant experience of meandering to the frightening experience of losing one’s way and one’s self.