H o w t o R e a d L i t e r a t u r e1 4 2that what it means to them is not what it may have meant a few
centuries ago. But this is true of many works of literature. Nor can
the original meaning, assuming that we have access to it, always
pull rank over what the piece may come to signify later. It may
be that in some ways we can understand a work of the past better
than its contemporaries could. Modern psychoanalytic insights,
for example, might make more sense of William Blake’s ‘Songs of
Experience’ than the kind of knowledge available at the time. The
experience of twentieth- century despotism might enrich our
understanding of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. It is unlikely that the
figure of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice meant quite the same
before the Holocaust as it does after it. If Richardson’s Clarissa has
become freshly ‘readable’ again in our time, after its contemptuous
dismissal in the nineteenth century, it is partly on account of the
modern women’s movement. There is a sense in which we know
more about the past than the past did because we know what it led
to. In any case, living through a historical event is not the same as
understanding it. All the same, there are forms of historical knowl-
edge which are simply lost to us. Perhaps we will never know for
sure what the people who flocked to see Hamlet when it was first
staged thought about the morality of revenge, assuming that they
knew themselves.
Imagine that it was a convention of the nursery rhyme genre that
one should always search the work for occult meanings. Something
like this is true of the Kabbalistic tradition of biblical interpreta-
tion. One might be required to assume that there is an endless fund
of abstruse meanings in the text waiting to be dug out. Alternatively,
there might be a recommendation to read them in. It might be part
of the meaning of a nursery rhyme, rather like a Rorschach blot,
that you were allowed to make your own subjective sense of it. Or