alliance is over. Long live the (real) alliance, The Edgy Alliance.

According to Sean, the goofy alleged neurologist from the

first Survivor (if you ask me, anyone

who would go to Sean for a neurological consultation ought to have his head

examined), the key difference in the new Survivor

is that the show now bans alliances. Of course, I'm not sure Sean is the most

reliable source in the world about anything, but it's right there in cold type,

in one of publicity-shy Sean's gazillion or so exclusive interviews in the

run-up to the new Survivor , this one

in the Post . After crudely dissing

the looks of the women in his Survivor

group and telling us, of the women in the new

one, "They are just great looking! Great looking! I could have had a great time

with a couple of them, believe me," the super-suave Sean proceeded to drop a

bombshell about an alleged new alliance policy. One he takes credit for

himself. One so stupid , you can

almost believe him on that basis alone.

"At the end of the

taping for Survivor I ," Sean told the

Post , "the creator Mark Burnett asked

us what we would do to make the next series better …. One of the things I told them

was to ban alliances. And this time they've done that. The rules say it's

illegal to collude on a vote. That's going to add a new dimension to the

series."

Yeah, Sean-the dimension of boredom . Way to go, you neurological nitwit; way to ruin the single

most (perhaps only) interesting and novel element in the show. Hey, why not

just cut out the heart of its popularity, the only thing that gave it any

unscripted drama amidst the schlock.

What did you think was the source of the show's success,

Sean? The dumb relay races? The island-legends trivia contest? Your moronic

alphabetical voting strategy in the tribal council? No, you brain-challenged

brain doctor, it was the drama of alliance formation, the Machiavellian

scheming, the rise of Richard Hatch as a great pop-culture character archetype,

the way the alliance formation and freeze-outs tapped deep into the nation's

primal junior high school insecurity fears (primal fears that carry over into

the rest of life for many of us). The way it made human character and human

relationships the real subject of Survivor

in a brilliant, pop-novelistic way.

Jeez, banning alliances: an idea so dumb only the deeply

addled, self-infatuated Sean could have thought of it. Well, we'll see. Since

I'm writing this in advance of the first episode of the new Survivor , I'll reserve comment until the

end of this column, which I'll append after I see it.

Instead, this column will be devoted to another kind of

alliance: to The Edgy Alliance and its members, and their responses to my idea,

in the aftermath of Survivor, to form

a different kind of alliance.

As I wrote back then, I was stunned by the success of

Richard Hatch's Machiavellian scheming, stunned into re-evaluating my life and

realizing that I wanted an alliance too .

Not to win some game-show prize, but an alliance of kindred spirits,

enlightened obsessives and enthusiasts-and who better to turn to than the

readers of this column?

Thus was born The Edgy

Alliance. I provided a handy coupon-sized application form with space for readers

to make their own suggestions for topics to be treated in the column, as well

as a list of some 60 or so writers, artists, thinkers, songwriters, films,

books and music I'd previously praised, so that prospective members could see

if they felt simpatico.*

I spoke of the way I hoped the Alliance could serve not just

as solidarity for like-minded souls, but as a kind of "mobile cultural strike

force to galvanize support for deserving works of art." And cited, as

precedent, successful campaigns by this column to get the works of the

brilliant, reclusive novelist Charles Portis back in print (if you haven't read

Dog of the South yet, I'm tempted to

ban you from the Alliance), to save the smartest, funniest show on TV, Mystery Science Theater 3000 (for a couple

of seasons, anyway) and to get the new owners of the Chrysler Building to keep

its beautiful spire lit all night long instead of turning it off at 2 a.m. (If

you're out late at night and you gaze up at the spire, you have this column to

thank for the sight.)

Anyway, the response was truly gratifying. Letters began

pouring in to the postal box I'd rented (The Edgy Alliance, Box 105, 577 Second

Avenue, New York, N.Y., 10016). I was invited to appear on Christopher Lydon's

National Public Radio program, The

Connection, prompting a new wave of applications-and after one further

mention in my Jan. 8 column on Thomas Pynchon and Captain Crunch, the total is

now nearly 400 Edgy Allies. (By the way, I was pleased The Times cited my essay on Crunch in its recent profile of the

hacker legend, but a little bit dismayed that they said I characterized Crunch

as an "American anti-hero." My exact words were, "a true American hero." How does that become "anti-hero"? O.K., O.K.,

I'm edgy.)

But what was most gratifying was not the number of responses

but the range, variety and quality of the suggestions and obsessions shared.

To paraphrase Wayne and Garth in Wayne's World : I am not

worthy . The erudition, the passion, the eclectic and imaginative aesthetic

taste in your suggestions floored me. Edgy Allies don't just rock the house

down, they rock it back up again and re-arrange the porch furniture.

So I've been trying to figure out what to do with all of the suggestions, many of

which deserve an entire column in response. And I thought maybe the best thing

would be to go through the coupons and letters and select a few suggestions

this week, some just to list, some to comment briefly on-kind of an interactive

thing-hoping this will inspire more people to seek to join and send in

suggestions (did I mention the address: The Edgy Alliance, Box 105, 577 Second

Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10016).

Let me begin with:

· Oblomov , by Ivan Goncharov. No fewer

than three requests to write about

this lovely 19th-century Russian novel that is, in a way, a hymn to lassitude.

I think it's no accident that Oblomov

is such a favorite with The Edgy Alliance, because over the years I've noticed

that Oblomov enthusiasts tend to be,

like Edgy Enthusiast types, above all deeply devoted readers. The kind of

reader for whom reading is a deliriously sensual pleasure. The kind of readers

for whom Oblomovian lassitude represents a realization of their secret fantasy

of abandoning the onerous demands of the real world-going to work in the

morning and all that-and, instead, getting to stay in bed and read as long as

they want for the rest of their lives. Anyway, I know that's my alternate-life

fantasy. Well, one of them.

· "William

Empson's essay on Marvell's 'Garden,' Scrutiny

1932, pp. 236-240." What I like about this suggestion is not just the poet

(Marvell is my fave among the later metaphysical poets), not just the poem

itself. "The Garden" is a lovely pastoral in which the poet imagines himself

going into a synesthesia-like trance in a garden, annihilating all into "a

green thought in a green shade." (Interesting: another instance of sensual and

spiritual lassitude. I think there's a theme here.) And it's not just the

reference to Empson, who, as I've confessed in previous columns, is my

20th-century lit-crit hero, still a giant (you'll note the appearance of his

great work Seven Types of Ambiguity

in my original list). I'd commend to anyone who doubts the continuing relevance

of Empson the chapter on him in Jonathan Bate's valuable recent book The Genius of Shakespeare . Mr. Bate

makes a lovely analogy between Empsonian ambiguity and Heisenbergian

uncertainty, both of which intersected in Cambridge in the 1920's.

But what I particularly like about this suggestion is its

specificity. Although Empson's Marvell essay has been reprinted elsewhere, the

specificity of the citation to " Scrutiny

… pp. 236-40" suggests the reader actually has in his possession an original

copy of that legendary (in lit-crit circles, anyway) magazine edited by F.R.

Leavis. Marvell's "Garden," Empson, Scrutiny :

a trifecta of good taste!

·

Gram Parsons' "Thousand Dollar Wedding." In this case, a reader sent me an

entire essay he'd written about the version of this song on the Gram Parson

tribute album, Return of the Grievous

Angel (a duet cover version sung by Juliana Hatfield and Evan Dando), an

essay entitled "$1,000 Wedding: Gram Parson's Faulknerian Mini-Opera." It's

really smart, the essay, and it made me think again about why I'm drawn to

country music. Not only me, but a number of Edgy Allies who requested more

about both Johnny and Rosanne Cash (which led me to go buy Johnny's new album, Solitary Man . Check out his

heartbreaking version of Bono's great anthem, "One"). Maybe it's the lassitude

again, the pure lassitude of longing and sadness at the heart of every great

country song.

It also made me realize that if I got to choose another

person's life to have lived, I'd have wanted to be Gram Parsons. To have

written his songs, lived his brief tragic life, given birth to his legend and,

perhaps most of all, to have Emmylou Harris write "Boulder to Birmingham" about

my death, how they burned my body in a desert canyon near Joshua Tree.

· Here's a

multiple request that I record here for its wonderfully strange eclecticism:

the reader who wanted me to write about "Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian , Bar Kochba [the

second-century Jewish rebel], Buddy Greco, and the cello."

I'm sort of fascinated by whatever it is that links those

four, but it gives me an excuse to cite one of my favorite lines from one of my

favorite film comedies, The In-Laws ,

the cult fave scripted by Andrew Bergman. Not a Buddy Greco reference exactly,

but a Jose Greco reference.

It's in the scene in which Peter Falk, who's playing a

wacked-out rogue C.I.A. agent, not quite housebroken in polite society, arrives

for dinner at the home of his son's prospective in-laws, a suburban dentist

(played with deadpan aplomb by Alan Arkin) and his wife (Nancy Dussault). Mr.

Falk proceeds to weird them out by telling a disturbingly over-the-top story

about some operation down in Central America, a place where, he claims, the

tsetse flies were so big they carried off young children in their beaks. He

goes into an elegiac description of the flies flapping off into the sunset with

the children drooping from their jaws, and then tells the wigged-out in-laws

the name he claims the frightened native people have for the giant tsetses:

"They call them ' Los Jose Greco del Muertes '-the flamenco

dancers of death." Thank you for giving me an excuse to repeat that. You'll

see: Rent the movie, you'll thank me.

·

Ed Sanders. Yes! Great request. Here's another alternate life fantasy: If I

were a Beat, Sanders is the Beat I'd most like to have been. Virtually the only

one I really admire as a poet: his Egyptological and classical Greek learning

inflect, in a brilliant way, his vision of the East Village as a site of comic,

mythic, pornographic legends. Beatitude fused with grungitude: a sensibility

best exemplified in prose in Sanders' Tales

of Beatnik Glory and Shards of God .

Plus he wrote The Family , one of the

scariest true-crime books ever (about the Manson family) and co-founded the

Fugs with the great Tuli Kupferberg. I rest my case.

· "Joel

Carmichael's translation of Anna Karenina ."

Not familiar with it yet, although I have written in the past about the

mystical vision of the One and the Many to be found beneath the surface of

Tolstoy's opening line in Anna Karenina

("All happy families are alike ….") as an analogue to Flannery O'Connor's

mystical vision of beatitude in the title Everything

That Rises Must Converge, another true fave .

· "The Sex Life

of Krishnamurti." No comment yet, but I'll look into it.

· "The Tao of

Jackson Browne." Yes, he's very unfashionable now, but I've confessed in the

past to having a weakness for J.B.'s work, even to searching for and

celebrating "my inner Jackson Browne" every time I go to L.A. The first two

letters of lassitude are "L.A.," and Late

for the Sky -isn't that a classic of sad lassitude? And yes, it's true: My

heart still stirs in a sad, neo–Popular Front way (a "Pop Front" way?) whenever

I hear Jackson Browne's "For Every Man."

· A

thought-provoking analysis of the metrical anomalies in King Lear's

grief-stricken words ("Never, never, never, never, never") and their thematic

implications.

· On the Shoulders of Giants by Robert

Merton. Described as " Pale Fire

footnotes in non-fiction form." I'm down, dude. I once owned a secondhand copy,

but somehow lost it. Will now search for another.

· Jimi Hendrix

and Randy Rhoads. Who is Randy Rhoads again? Oh, okay-the dude who played

guitar for Ozzy Osbourne. But I will say something about Hendrix: We share the

same birthday! James Agee, too-Nov. 27. Nonetheless, apropos of Hendrix:

doesn't "Voodoo Chile" in the Mazda commercial just completely blow away

Bowie's "Changes" in the Nortel ad? "Voodoo Chile" dominates, subverts,

shatters the framework of its commercial exploitation, but "Changes" becomes,

with repetition, subservient to it. Very sad.

· "The aggressive

machiavellian alliance forming game play in King Herod," with a citation to

Josephus' Jewish Antiquities , Books

14-17. A worthy subject, but isn't Josephus a suspect  source?

· One of my

favorite requests: "Could you write about what is a liberal today? When I was

in college in 1938 I took a liberal conservative test. I scored 85% liberal 15%

conservative I dare say the questions would be somewhat different today." A

good question and I'll get to this and some others I have in hand later on. But

I think I have to stop now. Not because I've run out of great suggestions from

Edgy Allies, but because I'm running out of space.

But I kind of like this

free-associative, interactive way of responding to Edgy Alliance suggestions.

So I hope readers will continue to sign up for the Alliance and send their

suggestions for possible discussion in future columns.

And by the way, I promised an update on goofy Sean's

"alliance ban" claim about the new Survivor .

What do you know: No mention of any

rule change on the first show, and you'd certainly think they'd mention it if there was a change. Way to go, Dr. Sean! I think what we have here, with

the neurologist turned show-biz analyst, is the first case of infotainment malpractice . Still, I'll

forgive Sean, since his claim did prompt me to get around to writing about the

Alliance suggestions. I'd even let Sean join the Alliance, on one condition:

that he reveal the one remaining secret of the first Survivor -when he claimed that Colleen and Greg were "covering up for

another relationship" when they'd go off together (followed by a camera crew)

at night. What was that other

relationship, Sean? The Edgy Alliance wants to know.

*Here's the original list:

All the King's Men ,

the Cowboy Junkies, Dead Souls , Mystery Science Theater 3000 , The Long Goodbye , Peter Brook, Badlands , Smokey Robinson, Chimes at Midnight , Don DeLillo's Libra , Chrissie Hynde, Murray Kempton, Larry Sanders , the Dixie Chicks, De Rerum Natura (Lucretius), Persuasion , doo wop, Pale Fire , Brian Kulick, Sandra

Bernhardt, David Berlinski, "Shipping Out" (David Foster Wallace), Tom Petty, The Third Man , Julie Taymor's Titus , Lingua Franca , Willie Nelson, Tom Frank, the Shirelles, Eric

Ambler, Blade Runner , The Anatomy of Melancholy , Charles

Portis, Blood on the Tracks , James M.

Cain, Bruce Wagner, Rickie Lee Jones, Sam Cooke, Errol Morris, Ann Magnuson, Seven Types of Ambiguity , The Woman in White , The Simpsons , "Losing My Religion," Christopher Ricks, Renaldo and

Clara, the dream of Clarence (in Richard

III ), Edith Wharton, Jon Stewart, George Herbert, The Pat Hobby Stories , Nicholson Baker, The Crying of Lot 49 , Other

Inquisitions (Borges), Chinatown ,

Bill Murray, Rosanne Cash, Hart Crane, and Bruce Cutler, John Gotti's lawyer.

(No official Gotti endorsement implied.)

I'd been browsing in the basement of Newport Books on Bellevue Avenue, a place which, in addition to offering a serious collector's selection of antiquarian and rare volumes of forgotten lore, has a lower floor full of once-flashy 50's paperbacks. My favorite was a lurid-covered collection featuring a laughing libidinal babe in a low-cut gown on the cover, a volume called Women and Vodka , which turned out to be a collection of classic Russian short stories by Anton Chekhov, Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev, etc.. Stories that, according to the cover copy, offered "naked moments that range from the closed boudoirs of society to the tawdry excitement of back-room rendezvous." Hold me back!

So I got that, but over on another shelf I came upon another find, the one that initiated the quest this column is preoccupied by. It was a cheap paperback copy of The Comedy of Errors , cheap when it was first published (in 1963) at 50 cents, still cheap at twice the price today.

It wasn't the price that attracted me; I already have no less than four copies of The Comedy of Errors back home in various expensive editions of the complete works of Shakespeare. It wasn't that The Comedy of Errors was one of my special favorites in the canon, even among the comedies. It's widely regarded as one of the very first, if not the first, plays Shakespeare wrote, but is not otherwise highly esteemed, at best a tryout for Twelfth Night , his other twin-centered comedy. The prevailing attitude toward it can be summed up by the title of the introduction to my 50-cent Folger Library paperback edition of The Comedy of Errors : "Apprentice Work in Farce."

There was something about that condescending dismissal that suddenly precipitated for me the question about Shakespeare that had been haunting me–and suggested that the "apprentice work in farce" was the place to look for the answer.

It was a question about the nature–or the existence–of Shakespearean exceptionalism. I'm drawn to exceptionalist questions for some reason. The question at the heart of the Hitler book I spent 10 years pursuing was an exceptionalist issue: Whether Hitler's evil could be said to exist on the same continuum of human nature we all share, on the very, very extreme end of the same spectrum of motive and psychology as us, or whether–as some philosophers and theologians argue–he occupies some special category of radical evil all his own, off the chart, in another realm entirely.

The same exceptionalist question can be posed, has been posed, about Shakespeare's genius: Should we see him on the same spectrum as other great writers, or does he exist in–has he created–some other realm entirely that somehow transcends other great literature.

The entire weight of postmodern Shakespeare scholarship aims to deny the latter alternative. To situate Shakespeare in history as basically just another wordsmith who caught a wave and had his work fetishized because it reflected so well the power relations of his time and served British imperial aspirations in subsequent centuries, a writer no more special than other talented Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists such as Thomas Middleton, say (as scholar Gary Taylor argues). One whose greatness had been exalted for all the wrong reasons as "a rite of civility," as others have argued. With nothing universal or transcendent worthy of note: Whatever is idiosyncratically "Shakespearean" is an inconsequential epiphenomenon compared with the uses to which his work is put by the prevailing evil hegemony.

This ignores that close reading can find a radical subversion of the values of power and authority in Shakespeare–of all kinds of authority, not just political, but epistemological and metaphysical as well. But dismissing the anti-exceptionalist arguments still leaves open and unanswered the question of in what the exceptional quality of Shakespeare inheres if it does exist. Is there some quality that is uniquely Shakespearean; what is it that makes Shakespeare Shakespearean?

I'm of two minds on the question. I feel intuitively when immersed in his verse, with its shift from thrilling, vertiginous complexity to radiant, visionary simplicity, that I am having an experience unlike almost any other in literature, with the possible exception of the similar response I have to Vladimir Nabokov. But I resist the exceptionalist case as well: Just what does it mean to say that? Does Shakespeare represent a quantum leap, or only an incremental one from Geoffrey Chaucer or John Milton, say, in English, from Lope de Vega in Spanish, Tolstoy in Russian, Homer and Virgil in Greek and Latin?

Here's where The Comedy of Errors comes in. Can there be found, even in this "apprentice work in farce," some intimations in embryonic form of the radically transcendent complexity the exceptionalists posit in the later plays? If it's hard to imagine Hitler, say, evolving from some perfectly benign young fellow without imagining some intimations of the evil to flower later, can we find in early "apprentice" Shakespeare some sign or signature of what will soon suddenly, floridly flower into the "Shakespearean"? And just what would it be?

What I'd like to attempt in this column (and perhaps a subsequent one) is to look more closely at The Comedy of Errors for such signs, make some preliminary notes toward a conjecture about what is distinctively Shakespearean in early Shakespeare.

Let's begin with the rather remarkable transformation of the source material: Shakespeare's decision to twin the twins. You probably recall that The Comedy of Errors creates an intricate clockwork laugh-machine from the mistaken-identity encounters of two sets of twins, two twin masters and two twin servants, one pair of each separated by a shipwreck as infants.

You might also recall that Shakespeare adopted the basic separated-twins plot from The Menaechmi , by the third-century Roman playwright Plautus. There's a tendency among scholars to dismiss The Comedy of Errors as a mere imitation of The Menaechmi . No way: Check out The Menaechmi , as I did after rereading The Comedy of Errors . There's a terrifically entertaining translation by Palmer Bovie in a new four-volume edition of the complete plays of Plautus (Johns Hopkins University Press), edited by Mr. Bovie and one of my favorite Latin translators, David Slavitt (I've praised Mr. Slavitt's version of Ovid's Poems of Exile in the past). I loved reading The Menaechmi (which, interestingly, has a scene in which one of the twins craftily pretends to madness, anticipating–if it didn't explicitly suggest–Hamlet's imposture to Shakespeare).

But without taking anything away from Plautus, The Comedy of Errors is no mere imitation. Shakespeare signals that from the outset by raising the stakes of the separated-twins plot in a remarkable way. He took Plautus' already complicated single-pair-of-twins plot and doubled it up, twinned Plautus' twins into two pairs, raising it more than a multiple of two, but to a second power , to an exponentially greater level of comic complexity. Twinning the twins is the equivalent in terms of dramatic construction to shifting from two-dimensional to three-dimensional chess. It's more than a revision, it's a statement . Think about it: For 1,200 years or so, Plautus had been (along with Aristophanes) the supreme comic artist in the Western canon. When Shakespeare set out to write The Comedy of Errors , he was not much more than 25 years old, an apprentice, presumably, to an acting company, writing what might have been his very first play. He takes as his model not just one of Plautus' most famous comedies, but one of his most dizzyingly complicated ones, and signals he's going to trump it with the sublimely confident assuredness of, say, Babe Ruth at the pinnacle of his career, pointing to the stands to the precise place he's going to place his home run shot on the next swing. Or, if you find the Babe Ruth analogy too undignified, think of the sublimely casual mastery with which Nabokov linked Homer, Keats and baseball in a single couplet about an imaginary sports-page headline in Pale Fire : "Red Sox Beat Yanks 5-4/ On Chapman's Homer" (a play on Keats' sonnet "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer").

But Shakespeare does more than merely twin the twins and raise the concatenation of complications to a higher power. He also deepens in a radical way the resonance of twinship at the heart of the play. Turns the contemplation of the paradoxes of twinship into a meditation on the meaning and instability of selfhood and the ambiguities of identity. And–here's the revelation to me in rereading The Comedy of Errors this time–his fascination with the ambiguities of twinship seems a clue to, a reflection of, his fascination with the ambiguities of identity in language, in the doubled and split meanings of words.

It helps explain Shakespeare's persistent twin obsessions–with twins and with puns. Let me retrace my path to this conclusion, one that began when I was struck by a 10-line passage early in the play containing no less than three references to the experience of losing the self. It's there in the first act when one of the lost merchant twins, Antipholus of Syracuse, newly arrived in the city of Ephesus in the course of searching for his long-lost twin brother, speaks of how he wants to "go lose himself" by wandering up and down in the strange city. He compares himself to a drop of water in the ocean that seeks to find one particular other drop like himself (i.e., his twin) in the vast deep. And how, failing to do so, he "confounds himself," loses his own identity. So he goes off to lose himself, sees himself confounding himself and then, just a few lines later, laments how in his quest to find what's lost, he "loses himself."

So there is laughter over the predicaments of twinship in The Comedy of Errors ; it is a comedy, yes, but there is a recurrent, disturbing sense of loss as well, not just the loss of a twin, but the loss in being a twin. The loss of a sense of unique identity (perhaps a sense of loss as well from the fact that Shakespeare was a father of twins and father of a lost twin–Hamnet, who died in childhood).

But the loss of self can also be seen as a doubling of the self. And there's another side to the loss of self in Shakespeare, a persistent strain of imagery in which losing the self is pleasurable , in which to be "amazed" in the sense of losing one's self in a maze is a polymorphous pleasure. (See Peter G. Platt's valuable recent monograph Reason Diminished: Shakespeare & the Marvelous , University of Nebraska Press, for an elaboration on the theme of the terror and pleasure of losing the self in wonder.)

It was in thinking about the sources of Shakespeare's preoccupation with twinship and the way twinship put the self in play that it occurred to me that the preoccupation with twinship has a kinship, so to speak, with Shakespeare's preoccupation with punning, with wordplay, with putting words in play . A preoccupation that can seem labored or disagreeable to some in its obsessive, even compulsive pursuit, but which is, if labored, a labor of love for the Bard.

What is a pun but a doubled meaning, a kind of inverse twinship in which one word splits or doubles into two senses or identities while looking exactly the same on the surface. If puns are inverse twins, one could look at twins as embodied puns, puns on human identity, on individual consciousness.

But the kinship between twinship and wordplay goes deeper than punning. It goes to the nature of Shakespearean ambiguity, a more resonant ramification of wordplay than the simple pun. In which a word doesn't split so much as lose its singular identity to a coalescing of two or more shadowed significances embodied in a single word; it loses itself to gain a coexistent second self.

Shakespearean ambiguity differs from punning in that the alternate meanings are not on-and-off, black-and-white distinctions but held in equipoise, both simultaneously true. The best, most suggestive recent redefinition of Shakespearean ambiguity can be found in Jonathan Bate's essay in the Times Literary Supplement on William Empson, my lit crit hero (author of Seven Types of Ambiguity ) and still perhaps the most provocative of Shakespeare critics in this century. Mr. Bate speculates that Empson may have come to his unique apprehension of Shakespearean ambiguity from his exposure to the thinking of quantum physicists at Cambridge in the 20's and 30's, and in particular to the uncertainty principle, which Mr. Bates argues was behind Empson's distinction between "either/or ambiguity" and "both/and ambiguity."

Either/or ambiguity is the belief that one must choose between alternative meanings of an ambiguous word or phrase, separate them into correct and incorrect connotations. In both/and ambiguity, alternative meanings coexist, ramify and fructify each other, as Empson believed they characteristically did in Shakespeare. In the same sense that the quantum in the new physics was ambiguity embodied–it could partake of the qualities of both particle and wave until it was reductively measured and "collapsed" into a singularity.

We've come a long way, I know, from the edition of the "apprentice work in farce" I came upon in the used-book store basement, but I want to return to that image of the drop in the ocean seeking another drop in that 10-line passage that provoked this extended speculation. Because in the next act of The Comedy of Errors , Shakespeare returns to the image of the drop in the ocean again, the particle and wave, only gives it a new twist.

In this case, it comes up when the wife of the Ephesian Antipholus mistakes his wandering twin, the Syracusan Antipholus, for her husband and, in the confusion over his confusion, asks him, "How comes it that thou art estranged from thyself?" And then movingly invokes the dual image of the drop of water and the ocean to evoke the indivisibility of their two selves (although she means her self and the other twin's self):

"For know, my love, as easy mayst thou fall

A drop of water in the breaking gulf,

And take unmingled thence that drop again,

Without addition or diminishing,

As take from me thyself and not me too."

It's a touching image of indivisibility (dramatically ironized, of course, by the fact she's addressing it to the wrong twin), but also, I'd suggest, a meditation on exceptionalism, the question which led me to reread The Comedy of Errors . It powerfully conjures up a vision of an exceptional, indivisible self–the drop of water that can fall into the crashing surf and retain its identity undissolved–even while denying the possibility of indissolubility in reality. One hesitates to say it's the playwright's sense of his own uniqueness being invoked here intentionally. But it suggests to me something about the nature of Shakespearean exceptionalism, something akin to the duality of the particle and the wave. Shakespeare is as unique and exceptional as that particular drop in the ocean; he is the drop, yes, but he is also the ocean.