Intro
If you read the New Critics, you're bound to read about Shakespeare. In William Empson's 7 Types of Ambiguity, he's on the hunt for complex language to scrutinize under his Close Read-a-Scope. And as he writes, "It is impossible to avoid Shakespeare in these matters; partly because his use of language is of unparalleled richness and partly because it has received so much attention already."
Shakespeare is kind of their main man. Given that he was kind of the man, and all.
The New Critics came up with tons of examples of Shakespeare's rhetorical sophistication and ambiguity… as if we needed more proof of just how awesome Shakespeare was. But Empson is a true master of unraveling a text to discover all of its hidden meanings.
So, let's follow him down the rabbit hole with these three lines from Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well.
Quote
But we are old, and on our quick'st decrees
Th' inaudible, and noiseless foot of time
Steals, ere we can effect them. (All's Well, v. iii. 40.)
Analysis
Empson's pretty much got microscopes for eyes. He notes this second line, which describes time's foot as both "inaudible" and "noiseless." And then he gets to thinking: What's with these adjectives? They seem like synonyms (or words that mean the same thing).
But are they actually pulling the reader in different directions?
Okay, time to hand the baton over to Empson and his fancy analytic footwork:
These two adjectives [inaudible and noiseless] might seem to be used as synonyms, from a dictionary interest only, with no stress on their difference. The first is from Latin (external and generalized), the second, native (with immediate gusto and a sense of textures); in English this difference is often fruitful; but here it is overshadowed by negation and they take effect as the same sort of word.
And yet, rather as two forces almost in the same line may have a small resultant in quite another direction, so the slight difference between the meanings of inaudible and noiseless points towards curious places, and is accepted as evidence of the fantastic broodings of melancholy. 'Not only can nobody hear the foot of time, but it actually never makes a sound; even when safely alone, like a clock in an empty room, even at its headquarters, it is silent; you might be hearing in a different way sounds outside the human range, and yet this all-important reality, this devouring giant, would make no sound.' Certainly this implication is very far in the background, but I think it was because Shakespeare was ready to use such differences that he was ready to use two contiguous synonyms… (7 Types of Ambiguity, Chapter 2)
On a quick read, "inaudible" and "noiseless" seem like two words that mean the same thing. But when we look at them through a New Critic's close reading, things get more complicated. The words have different roots ("audible" being from Latin, and "noise" going back to middle English), and they mean slightly different things.
If something is inaudible, it might make a noise that we just can't hear. But if something is noiseless, then it doesn't make any sound to begin with. This is starting to sound like the puzzle about a tree falling in the forest: Does it make a sound that no one hears, or is it noiseless?
And just as Empson can zoom way in on these lines to dig into their nuances, he can also zoom way out to situate them in Shakespeare's broader writing style. He says that Shakespeare's "fondness for such pairs of words is fundamental to his method."
Tricky, tricky synonyms. Now in the Shakespeare plays being assigned in an English class near you.