Euphuism in Griceian Key

--- by JLS
------ for the Grice Club

this is an actual study I just retrieved by hitting "Benedick speech Gricean "Much ado"". Link below. To consider Kramer's interesting point under "Iberian Grice":

I would speculate that it's about how much work the reader who does not know the secret handshakes of the writer's social circle would have to do, i.e., how little work the "hip" reader would have to do. It's called "culturism," and it exercises (and, therefore, both asserts and tests) cultural literacy. I would expect to find this sort of thing at a time when social walls are decaying as part of an effort (perhaps unconscious) by the upper classes to remind their insecure little selves that they can do things, however inconsequential, that hoi polloi cannot

In a way this is back to the Oxford of Grice's day! He refers to Gellner, a Frenchman who had dared criticise the "linguistic botanisers" as offspring of the intelligentsia (or establishment) of stone walled corridors of power at the "Dreaming Spires" -- who were too sensitive to matters of usage as imbued into them at an early age from public school (in the English rather than American sense) making of the elite via familiarity of the classics -- the idea of Greek and Latin as THE tongues of men, and English as a mere vernacular -- or something.

I should get back to Benedick.

From an online essay on 'implicatures' in "Much ado" -- by Binder (abstract only available online -- no specimens easily recovered):

"What makes Shakespeare (to name just one example) extraordinary is the way he exploited this ordinary aspect of communication so that a single line or phrase triggers the discovery of a whole array of implicatures."

A NYT article by psychologist D. Keltner

this link below

Keltner 2008 on Grice and Shakespeare's Much Ado

manages to apply Grice to the Benedick/Beatrix repartees of the euphuistic type in "Much Ado". Keltner sums up Grice:

"On-record communication is to be taken literally and follows the rules of what the philosopher Paul Grice described as “cooperative, direct speech”: what is said should be truthful, appropriately informative, on topic and clear."

But to tease -- the topic of the essay -- is to 'implicate':

"Had I read my Shakespeare I would have known to counter with my own provocation, and my chances for requited love would have risen. Here is a first expression of love between two of literature’s great lovers, Beatrice and Benedick, from Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing”."

BEATRICE.
---- For which of my good parts did you first suffer love for me?

BENEDICK.
---- Suffer love! A good epithet!
I do suffer love indeed:
for I love thee against my will.

BEATRICE.
--- In spite of your heart, I think.
Alas, poor heart, if you spite it for my sake, I will spite it for yours, for I will never love that which my friend hates.

BENEDICK:
--- Thou and I are too wise to woo peaceably.

Keltner comments: "To tease is to woo wisely."

Keltner is interested in the erotic manoeuvres of euphuistic exchange. But we should get back to more interesting hyperbatons, since this above are not especially extraordinary. I would need to revise the text of the play (currently playing in a local theatre) for that. Etc.