All’s I-L-L That Starts “I’le”: Acrostic Space and Ludic Reading in the Margins of the Early Modern Play-Text

Abstract

aissance Drama, volum 6-3739/2020/4802-00 ew experiences are intellectuallymore exhilarating, if alsomore perilous than the apparent discovery of pattern where none was hitherto believed to exist,” writes Maren-Sofie Röstvig. “If pattern is what we want, pattern is what we are bound to find.” What then are we to make of acrostic patterns that emerge, willy-nilly, from the margins of Shakespeare’s (and others’) printed works? Are these patterns to be ascribed to the author(s), and if not, then to whom? Are they false creations, proceeding from the heat-oppressed brains of Baconian crackpots and recreational logologists, or are they ciphers awaiting decryption by the occasional scholar-sleuth? Who “speaks” the marginal acrostic—author, character, text, or reader? Might there be such a thing as an unconscious acrostic, unintended by the playwright but in some sense “really” there? Might an acrostic subliminally affect a reader who does not see it? In this essay, I do not propose definitive answers to these questions. Instead, bracketing authorial intention, I wish to highlight the readerly operation that makes such patterns visible in the first place. I map a phenomenology of ludic reading whose typographical ground is material, yet whose ontology is ultimately indeterminable. This ludic zone allows for authorial intention without being