Shakespeare Unlearned Pedantry, Nonsense, and the Philology of Stupidity

Each chapter pursues a self-knowing, gently ironic study of the lexicon and scripting of words and acts related to what has been called 'stupidity' in work by Shakespeare and other authors. Each centers significant, often comic situations that emerge - on stage, in print, and in the critical and editorial tradition pertaining to the period - when rigorous scholars and teachers meet language, characters, or Descriptionlines that exceed, and at times entirely undermine, the goals and premises of scholarly rigor. Each suggests that a framing of putative 'stupidity' pursued through lexicography, editorial glossing, literary criticism, and pedagogical practice can help us put Shakespeare and semantically obscure historical literature more generally to new communal ends. Words such as 'baffle' in Twelfth Night or 'twangling' and 'jingling' in The Tempest, and characters such as Sir Andrew Aguecheek and Holofernes the pedant, might in the past have been considered unworthy of critical attention - too light or obvious to matter much for our understanding of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
Adam Zucker's meditation on the limits of learnedness and the opportunities presented by a philology of stupidity argues otherwise.