Chapter 3 launches with Pseudolus’ opening scene which revolves around a letter. I explore Phoenicium’s epistle to discern how it determines Pseudolus’ comic course as well as audience expectations about what lies ahead, and consider what a letter composed by a meretrix reveals about literacy and the symbolism of writing on the Plautine stage. Next is the play’s protracted indeterminacy, which flies in the face of its textual exposition. Why is Pseudolus uncertain about how to proceed when he himself recites the letter that so clearly sets out the comic plot? The answer lies in this comedy’s claim to dramatic innovation. Pseudolus tells us that its epistolary interception is new to the comic stage, a nova res which inspires in the schemer a novum consilium that neither he nor we expect. But the play repeatedly undercuts its own novelty, a paradox reified in the element around which its innovation revolves – the stolen letter. I perform a close analysis of the false delivery scene in which this text is put into action, reading for its epistolarity but also laying bare the internal replication it effects and the resultant mise-en-abyme.

By dating two newly discovered Conrad drawings, Chapter 3 connects Conrad’s unfinished novel about a painter – The Sisters – to his interest in drawing. The Sisters is a much more complicated fragment than hitherto acknowledged. The text relates to contemporary debates, Conrad’s life and many of his works, both visual and verbal. Written during the advent of modern visual art, The Sisters is of further interest in its portrayal of Stephen as a modern artist. The metaphors on painting Conrad used in the Preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ relate to this discussion: they contextualize and oppose Stephen’s thoughts about what it means to be an artist, and delimit the extent to which Conrad embraced all notions of modernity and the so-called “end of art.”

The chapter explores why there are symbolic depictions of space from above – maps of the fictional environment – in many of Conrad’s manuscripts. I suggest that Conrad constructed and used hand-drawn maps as part of his creative writing process, as if he needed a map to navigate his own fictional world. Three of Conrad’s manuscript maps are linked to passages in his fiction that contain factual mistakes; it is unclear whether the maps led him astray or whether he produced the maps because of the complicated geography. The maps’ existence can be attributed to more than attempts at understanding the coordinates of the fictional environment. Among twentieth-century writers, Conrad was one of the artists most involved with maps and charts, both in his literary and especially in his professional life. However, although Conrad needed maps to write, it is not apparent that we need them to read – unless we seek to better understand the genealogy of the text and the creative process.

This chapter connects Conrad’s delayed decoding with Russell’s logical atomism, arguing that what the latter sought to do for philosophy, the former attempted to do in literature. Both delayed decoding and logical atomism communicate elementary sense-impressions; they construct a truth hierarchy where the particular is above the abstract. The chapter analyses how the language use of each concept corresponds to a host of assumptions about how we experience reality and what constitutes truth, assumptions that aid in explaining their extraordinary friendship. The chapter continues by explicitly calling into question Ian Watt’s concept of delayed decoding using my category, “delayed miscoding.” The chapter contains a lengthy demonstration showing that the most quoted example used to illustrate this hallmark of Conrad scholarship is inconsistent. My reading is not an attempt to discard Watt’s delayed decoding but an attempt to show that there is a discrepancy between what it names and what it explains. Delayed decoding’s binary structure and bivalent logic are limited ways for analyzing a text that is paradigmatically ambiguous.

This chapter undertakes a corpus linguistic exploration of the royal correspondence material, following the scribal/holograph division of the previous chapter. Using keyword analysis and lexical bundles, the analysis identifies features that firstly, differentiate royal correspondence from its non-royal counterpart; and secondly, differentiate scribal and holograph royal letters. The evidence correlates with the material analysis in Chapter 2, with formulaicity and consistency key elements of scribal letters which may have indexed a more overt and institutionalised royal power. Holograph letters, on the other hand, show a more variable and idiosyncratic make-up, providing a more personal frame to the epistolary interaction with a letter's recipient.

Chapter 3 looks at three pragmatic properties of royal correspondence: metacommunication, self-reference and regulative speech acts. Each feature reflects how royal correspondence constructs the relationship between sovereign and subject, and the extralinguistic context in which the letters operate. The evidence for metacommunication indicates that royal correspondence draw attention to their processes of composition, their material worth, and the intended nature of their reception. Scribal letters foregrounded their legal legitimacy, whereas holograph documents point to the personal investment of the author. Self-reference highlights the pragmatic affordances of royal we as a distinctive pronominal option of royal correspondence, particularly in scribal letters. The discussion of regulative speech acts, such as directives, illustrates the formulaicity of these pragmatic acts, with different degrees of directness operating in scribal and holograph letter types.

Chapter 2 explores the material properties of royal correspondence, focussing on evidence that correlates with the scribal/holograph provenance of the texts. Five features are examined in a corpus of over 100 royal letters issued by the Tudor monarchs: material provenance markers, handwriting, page orientation, signature placement, and signature style. The chapter finds that royal scribal letters have distinctive material features that make their royal source explicit, with these characteristics used very consistently throughout the Tudor period. Holograph royal letters show a reduced propensity to follow these material codes, and instead show a greater individuality more typical of non-royal letter-writing in the period. The differences are proposed to arise from the different production processes of the letter types, affecting the degree of institutionalised power presented to the letter's recipient. Elizabeth's correspondence shows a wider variation in material choices than that of her predecessors, potentially indicative of shifts in how correspondence was utilised, and the values placed on holograph writing by the end of the sixteenth century.