Scioppius' Pen against the English King's Sword

WINFRIED SCHLEINER H..amlet engages a Clown (the Gravedigger) in skirmish of wit with word-play on "lie," "quick," "man," "woman," etc. until the young prince retreats from the fray by saying to his noble companion (Horatio): "How absolute the knave is! we must speak by the card [i.e., punctiliously], or equivocation will undo us" (V.i. . "Us" here designates princes or at least nobles, as the subsequent reference to courtier versus peasant make clear. Although Shakespeare usually has noblemen win duels of word-play with the lower classes, there is in Hamlet's remark at least a touch of unease about the potential function of ambiguity and double meaning in destabilizing society. In the present essay, while I use the expression 'wordplay' or play on words, I am not focusing on playfulness or innocent fun in twisting words around, what one might consider the activity of homo ludens loquens (to adapt Huizinga's famous term). Rather, encouraged by what has been called 'new historicism' (such as the work of Jonathan Goldberg, Louis Montrose, and Stephen Greenblatt, focusing on the relationship of literature to power and disregarding a presumed division between literary and non- literary texts), I would like to study the political implications of ambiguity and double meaning, primarily through the work of the person who in the early seventeenth century was feared and hated as the most biting controver- sialist and satirist of all, Kaspar Schoppe (or Scioppius), one of whose main targets was King James I. But while, as James Holstun has said, most recent North American studies in this field have not been concerned with open resistance to power not with violence and struggle but with subtle forms of subversion that ultimately fail to subvert,^my subject does lead at times to violence: for ambiguity and double meaning as practiced by one of the

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