QUESTENBERG. Why? What is it? OCTAVIO. Come! I must immediately follow the unlucky trail, must see with my own eyes--come----(_Wishes to lead him away._) QUESTENBERG. What is the matter? Where? OCTAVIO (_urging_). To _her_! QUESTENBERG. To----? OCTAVIO (_corrects himself_). To the duke! Let us go, etc. The slight speech-blunder _to her_ in place of _to him_ is meant to betray to us the fact that the father has seen through his son’s motive for espousing the other cause, while the courtier complains that “he speaks to him altogether in riddles.” Another example wherein a poet makes use of a speech-blunder was discovered by Otto Rank in Shakespeare. I quote Rank’s report from the _Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse_, I. 3. “A poetic speech-blunder, very delicately motivated and technically remarkably well utilized, which, like the one pointed out by Freud in Wallenstein (_Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens_, 2nd Edition, p. 48), not only shows that poets knew the mechanism and sense of this error, but also presupposes an understanding of it on the part of the hearer, can be found in Shakespeare’s _Merchant of Venice_ (Act III, Scene 2). By the will of her father, Portia was bound to select a husband through a lottery. She escaped all her distasteful suitors by lucky chance. When she finally found in Bassanio the suitor after her own heart, she had cause to fear lest he, too, should draw the unlucky lottery. In the scene she would like to tell him that even if he chose the wrong casket, he might, nevertheless, be sure of her love. But she is hampered by her vow. In this mental conflict the poet puts these words in her mouth, which were directed to the welcome suitor:-- “There is something tells me (but it is not love), I would not lose you; and you know yourself Hate counsels not in such a quality. But lest you should not understand me well (And yet a maiden hath no tongue but thought), I would detain you here some month or two, Before you venture for me. I could teach you How to choose right, but then I am forsworn; So will I never be; so may you miss me; But if you do, you’ll make me wish a sin, That I had been forsworn. Beshrew your eyes, They have o’erlooked me, and divided me: _One half of me is yours, the other half yours_-- _Mine own, I would say_; but if mine, then yours-- And so all yours.” “Just the very thing which she would like to hint to him gently, because really she should keep it from him, namely, that even before the choice she is wholly his--that she loves him, the poet, with admirable psychologic sensitiveness, allows to come to the surface in the speech-blunder. It is through this artifice that he manages to allay the intolerable uncertainty of the lover as well as the like tension of the hearer concerning the outcome of the choice.”