Shakespeare's Comedies of Love [1 ed.] 9781442689107, 9780802039538

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SHAKESPEARE’S COMEDIES OF LOVE ESSAYS IN HONOUR OF ALEXANDER LEGGATT

Phil Richards (Canadian, b. 1951), Portrait of Alexander Leggatt, 2001, graphite on paper, 14 u 11 inches (35.56 u 27.94 cm). University College Art Collection, University of Toronto. Donated by the artist. Used by permission.

EDITED BY KAREN BAMFORD AND RIC KNOWLES

Shakespeare’s Comedies of Love Essays in Honour of Alexander Leggatt

U N I V E R S I T Y O F T O R O N TO P R E S S Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2008 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-0-8020-3953-8

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Shakespeare’s comedies of love : essays in honour of Alexander Leggatt / edited by Karen Bamford and Ric Knowles. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8020-3953-8 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616 – Comedies. I. Bamford, Karen II. Knowles, Richard, 1950– III. Leggatt, Alexander PR2981.S497 2008

822.3c3

C2008-902852-X

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

For Sandy and for Anna

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Viola’s View for Sandy Leggatt Sheldon Zitner Just in season, nine months and a week After the feast and the long night’s hallowing – This best of nature’s gifts – My wailing duke Sebastian, my chick, Named in honour of his uncomplaining uncle; And now wailing as at disaster, screwing up his face In the guise of an old man, While I conceal a smile and pretend dismay. Wail, wail for the teat, child. You shall have it, And lullaby enough, and I have my delight. No wet nurse needed. You and I will practise tears and smiles together Till we have them perfect, And shipwrecks and disguises Have taught us harbours and recognition.

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Contents

List of Illustrations

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Acknowledgments

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Introduction xv karen bamford PART ONE: CONTEXTS FOR SHAKESPEARE’S COMEDIES OF LOVE The Comedy of Love and the London Lord Mayor’s Show anne lancashire

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A ‘Pennyworth’ of Marital Advice: Bachelors and Ballad Culture in Much Ado About Nothing 30 philip d. collington Shakespeare’s Comedies and American Club Women katherine west scheil

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PART TWO: LOVE IN SHAKESPEARE’S COMEDIES ‘Five thousand year a boy’: Love as Arrested Development john h. astington Love’s Labour’s Lost and Won david bevington

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Affecting Desire in Shakespeare’s Comedies of Love paul budra A Spirit of Giving in A Midsummer Night’s Dream alan l. ackerman, jr

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Love in the Contact Zone: Gender, Culture, and Race in The Merchant of Venice 126 suzanne westfall The Unity of Twelfth Night arthur f. kinney

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The Baby in the Handbag: ‘Family Matters’ in Shakespeare alan somerset

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PART THREE: SHAKESPEARE’S COMEDIES OF LOVE ON THE CONTEMPORARY STAGE ‘Songs of Apollo’: Love’s Labour’s Lost in 1961 r.b. parker

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Smitten: Staging Love at First Sight at The Stratford Festival c.e. mcgee Romancing The Shrew: Recuperating a Comedy of Love g.b. shand

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Love in a Naughty World: Modern Dramatic Adaptations of The Merchant of Venice 246 jill l. levenson Staging the Jew: Playing with the Text of The Merchant of Venice 262 helen ostovich Works Cited

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Contributors

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Index

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Illustrations

Paul Scofield as Armado, Kate Reid as Jaquenetta. (Peter Smith, photographer) 205 Mary Anderson as Maria, Joy Parker as the Princess, Douglas Rain as Boyet, Michael Learned as Katherine, Zoe Caldwell as Rosaline. (Peter Smith, photographer) 206

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Acknowledgments

It is a pleasure to thank some of the people who have helped to make this book: our series editor Suzanne Rancourt, associate managing editor Barbara Porter and the staff at University of Toronto Press, and copy editor James Leahy; the anonymous readers who offered detailed and thoughtful responses to the manuscript; and Emily Gordon, who assembled the Works Cited. We would also like to thank Judith Leggatt, who generously provided the image for the frontispiece; Phil Richards, who enthusiastically consented to its reproduction; and Niamh O’Laoghaire, Director of the University of Toronto Art Centre, who facilitated the process. We are particularly grateful to Sheldon Zitner, who contributed the poem that stands as an epigraph to the volume. Finally we would like to thank Sandy Leggatt for teaching us everything we know (and a great deal we no longer know). KB and RK

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Introduction kar en bamf ord

From time to time there appears a low-key, modest, unassuming book which both demonstrates, and calls out, love for Shakespeare. Such a volume is Alexander Leggatt’s Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love, which manages to give a close reading of the comedies from The Comedy of Errors to Twelfth Night without ever inducing the sinking feeling which such a phrase usually implies. The book affirms the qualities of the comedies themselves, and by being fresh in every line conveys a sense of new encounter – a rare enough quality. (David et al. 204)

Thus The Year’s Work in English Studies announced the publication in 1974 of Alexander Leggatt’s Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love. In its short title this anthology echoes and pays tribute to that volume. Excerpted twice, reissued often, translated into Japanese, and regularly plagiarized by teachers and lecturers in innumerable classrooms, it has attained the widest readership of all Leggatt’s many books and may thus act as a metonymic symbol for his distinguished career as a scholar, critic, and teacher of Renaissance drama.1 The essays gathered in the present volume aim to continue and extend the conversation about Shakespeare’s comedies to which Leggatt has made so signal a contribution. The inadequacy of criticism on the comedies was a truth frequently acknowledged by Shakespeare scholars in the middle of the last century. John Russell Brown began his study Shakespeare and His Comedies (1957) by contrasting the critical energy devoted to the early comedies with that expended on the rest of Shakespeare’s canon: the comedies, he observed, ‘can appear so light-hearted and capricious, so inconsequential, so beautiful and bawdy, so obviously pleasing courtier and ground-

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ling by turns, that the probing questions of the critic seem ludicrously inapposite. The critic is afraid of taking them too seriously’(12). Almost thirty years later when Lawrence Danson surveyed twentieth-century criticism of the comedies (1986), he affirmed the general neglect of comedy of which Brown had complained but identified Northrop Frye, G. Wilson Knight, and C.L. Barber as the key contributors to a rediscovery of the genre. Turning to the work of their successors, he declared that ‘possibly the best discussions of the individual plays are by Alexander Leggatt, in Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love (1974)’ (235). Danson praised in particular Leggatt’s ‘even-handed awareness’ of the tendencies toward ‘the formal coherence of the play’ and ‘the energies that work to subvert that coherence’ (235). Danson’s assessment confirms the judgment of the multitude who have read Leggatt’s book for profit and delight, finding in it, as Susan Snyder observes, ‘a critical approach rooted in diversity and committed to openness’ (367). Theatrically alert, learned without pedantry, and consistently insightful, the ten essays that form Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love offer an outstanding account of their subject. Above all they encourage the reader to see each play, in Leggatt’s words, as ‘a fresh beginning, an attempt to create a new world, and to see its relation to what we understand of the old one’ (265). The same decade that saw the publication of Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love, however, also saw major shifts in critical theory. Thus in his 1975 review of Leggatt’s volume Alvin Kernan complained that ‘the reading of the text as an isolated object sufficient unto itself – the type of criticism known in this country as the New Criticism, and more generally as formalism – which has dominated for the last two generations, no longer quite seems to validate literature’ (433). Remarkably Kernan constructed Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love as the epitome of New-Critical achievement: All the techniques developed with such difficulty over forty or fifty years by the new critics – e.g., the symbolism of place, the presence of opposed meanings, the existence of levels of meaning, the isolation of the object, poetic as opposed to literal truth, and the relationship of the parts to the whole – are used here so easily and naturally that they seem to be the inevitable facts of critical discourse, the only possible critical language. The painful threshings-about of G. Wilson Knight, the furrowed ambiguous brow of William Empson, the great effort with which Cleanth Brooks’s urn was well-wrought, or W.K. Wimsatt’s stern definitions of heresy, all seem to exist in some dim heroic past which has now given way to an elegant

Introduction xvii and sophisticated present in which the lessons are completely absorbed. I find myself admiring Leggatt’s writing enormously, and yet it is impossible not to sense it as the end of a tradition rather than its fruition. How many analyses of the plays will we have before the tradition collapses? (433–4)

Although Kernan admitted he found Leggatt’s readings of the comedies ‘most persuasive’ (433), he nevertheless implied their ultimate irrelevance to the real business of criticism. From the perspective of the twenty-first century, Kernan’s apocalyptic vision – the collapse of the New-Critical tradition – seems unwarranted. The last thirty years have considerably widened the range of common critical practice to include a multiplicity of methods and voices – post-structuralist, psychoanalytic, feminist, queer, cultural materialist, new historicist, post-colonial, and others – but there is no sign that the tradition represented by Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love is in danger of collapse.2 It may indeed no longer seem ‘the only possible critical language,’ but as the recent reissue of the volume attests, the language is still current and vital. Surveying the field of Shakespearean criticism in 2004, David Bevington observed that the contemporary scene frees critics ‘to be who they are and to write without paying dues to any particular affiliation. The results are refreshingly diverse’ (General Introduction cxi). The fifteen essays gathered in this volume reflect the critical freedom Bevington describes: they approach Shakespeare’s comedies from a variety of angles with results that we hope are ‘refreshingly diverse.’ One may imagine the authors as guests at a critical symposium (to borrow an image from both Plato and Ackermann’s essay below) where the genial intelligence of the guest of honour – Alexander Leggatt – stimulates good-humoured debate. Unlike its parent volume, this anthology does not offer sustained readings of each of the romantic comedies. (Admirers of The Two Gentlemen of Verona may leave disappointed.) Indeed, rather than ensuring an even-handed treatment of the plays, the editors have allowed one to predominate: three of the fifteen essays are devoted to The Merchant of Venice. While this imbalance might surprise an earlier generation of readers, for whom the play’s status as a romantic comedy was secure if not untroubled, it reflects the critical concerns of the present.3 As Paul Stevens observed recently, ‘no matter how The Merchant of Venice was received in 1600, no contemporary audience can help but find it disquieting’ (431); and this pervasive disquiet has brought the play to the fore-

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front of critical debate in the last thirty years. (On the evidence of the World Shakespeare Bibliography, of all the early comedies only A Midsummer Night’s Dream rivals The Merchant as the object of critical attention.) Since, as Suzanne Westfall notes in her essay in this volume, the problematic Merchant with which we are now familiar was signalled by Leggatt’s exploration of the play’s ‘sense of instability’ (Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love 149), it is fitting that Shakespeare’s Comedies of Love continues the exploration. We begin with three papers that contribute variously to the historicization of Shakespeare’s texts. In ‘The Comedy of Love and the London Lord Mayor’s Show,’ Anne Lancashire looks at a larger theatrical context: the civic drama written and presented annually for the new mayor of London. Largely unknown to most modern readers of Shakespeare, but a central part of the theatrical experience of his early modern London audience, this costly and elaborate processional drama schooled citizens in the implicit visual meanings of performed texts. Drawing on archival as well as print sources, Lancashire analyses the ways in which the Lord Mayor’s Shows before 1600 represented the theme of communal and political love. Her claim is not that these shows functioned as a specific source for Shakespeare’s comedies, but that the two genres, in spite of their differences, have significant stylistic and thematic similarities that are mutually illuminating. When considered together, she concludes, they ‘give us a view of overall late sixteenth-century comic/ celebratory theatrical performance as sophisticated theatre/performance which uses visual and verbal conventions of the time’ to create ‘a balanced, harmonious, and generally socially affirmative whole.’ Since 1974 feminist criticism has probed the anxieties about marriage, cuckoldry, and gender frequently voiced in Shakespeare’s comedies. In ‘A “Pennyworth” of Marital Advice: Bachelors and Ballad Culture in Much Ado About Nothing,’ Philip D. Collington uses the methods of contemporary source study4 to investigate Shakespeare’s engagement with the marriage ballads enjoyed at every level of early modern English society. For Shakespeare’s audience, Much Ado featured a network of cultural references crucial to a fuller understanding of the play: ‘Ballad references,’ Collington asserts, ‘served as mimetic and ethical markers, enabling audiences to anticipate narrative twists and turns and discern constructive sexual ideologies from destructive ones.’ Collington argues that the play challenges the wisdom of the cultural scripts ballads typically offered. Benedick comes to ignore ballad warnings

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against the dangers of marriage, while Claudio ‘slavishly adheres to their anti-feminist precepts.’ In Katherine West Scheil’s study of ‘Shakespeare’s Comedies and American Club Women,’ the concerns of feminist and materialist critics dovetail: Scheil investigates the ways in which middle- and upper-class women in nineteenth-century America used Shakespeare, and in particular, his comedies, to authorize their literary gatherings. Under the respectable guise of bardolatry, hundreds of clubwomen had temporary licence to leave their homes, engage in serious intellectual study, broach otherwise forbidden topics, and debate gender roles. Members of the elite Saturday Morning Club in the Boston area, who staged an allfemale production of The Winter’s Tale, as well as the members of more modest clubs like The Portia Reading Group of Brooklyn, clearly found in Shakespeare a source of power. The second part of this collection gathers essays that focus more closely on Shakespeare’s texts themselves. The first three – by John H. Astington, David Bevington, and Paul Budra – consider complementary aspects of erotic love in the early comedies. In ‘“Five thousand year a boy”: Love as Arrested Development,’ Astington examines the peculiar stasis of love in Shakespeare’s comedies, tracing the paradoxes of temporal and developmental regression in a state symbolized by the god whom Berowne calls ‘This wimpled, whining, purblind, wayward boy / This senior-junior, giant-dwarf, Dan Cupid’ (Love’s Labour’s Lost 3.1.179–80). Focusing especially on Love’s Labour’s Lost, where the boy Moth scourges the follies of the adult males, and Twelfth Night, in which Cesario is poised, in Malvolio’s phrase, ‘at standing water twixt boy and man’ (1.5.158–9), Astington teases out the ways in which Cupid’s surrogates – Moth, Cesario, Ganymede – variously mock us with the impossibilities of erotic desire. By contrast, in ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost and Won,’ David Bevington argues for the progressive, if unsteady, maturation of the men in Shakespeare’s comedies of the1590s. Examining the performance of male anxiety about women, he traces the male’s uneven advance from the insecurities evident in Love’s Labour’s Lost to the selfconfidence displayed by Henry V, in whom, Bevington declares, the Shakespearean male achieves ‘full manhood.’ He concludes with a glance at the problem plays, where Shakespeare returns to explore more deeply in new generic contexts the insecurities manifest by earlier protagonists like Claudio and Orsino. Paul Budra’s point of departure in ‘Affecting Desire in Shakespeare’s Comedies of Love’ is an intriguing paradox: the only successful seduc-

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tion scenes in Shakespeare’s canon, he notes, are in the history plays, not the comedies. Framing this paradox in terms of recent controversies about cultural production, Budra argues that critics such as Louis Montrose, Paul Yachnin, and Stephen Greenblatt have failed to acknowledge sufficiently the affective impact of popular culture. Budra locates both the contemporary and long-term power of Elizabethan theatre, like that of popular literature more broadly, in its capacity to generate an emotional response. He finds in seduction a model of this power: ‘Put bluntly,’ he claims, ‘seduction is popular literature distilled to its affective end.’ Shakespeare, however, never models this technique in his comedies, only in the histories, where it is heavily qualified: his comedies of love, Budra concludes, have a more complex affective agenda. In ‘A Spirit of Giving in A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ Alan L. Ackerman uses The Symposium to investigate generosity in Shakespeare’s comedy, finding in Plato’s dialogue a useful configuration of themes: old and young, parent and child, love and knowledge, passion and reason, homogeneity and distinction, pedagogy and generosity. Drawing on Marx and Mauss, however, Ackerman also contextualizes the classical humanist tradition that links Plato and Shakespeare with a historicist consideration of value and exchange. Gift giving in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he argues, must be understood in the context of contemporary mercantilism and Christian imperialism, both ‘aspects of a developing economy of exchange that inform changing personal relations.’ Shakespeare’s richly dialectical play acknowledges both the idealist and materialist positions but concludes with Puck’s plea for generosity: ‘To be generous, to imagine without actually occupying other positions, to be critical but to refrain from censure, is the necessary basis for receiving gifts in return.’ In ‘Love in the Contact Zone: Gender, Culture, and Race in The Merchant of Venice,’ Suzanne Westfall interrogates Shakespeare’s play, using Leggatt’s 1974 reading of it as a point of departure: ‘Is the ominous reading that Leggatt perceived a result of presentism, a postHolocaust, post–civil rights, post-Stonewall effect that modern audiences identify? Or is this “darker side” in The Merchant of Venice one that Shakespeare’s audiences might also have perceived?’ Such questions are now inescapable for every instructor and every director who approaches the play: how does the text prompt us to respond to the antiSemitism, heterosexism, and patriarchy it represents? To suggest some answers, Westfall borrows Marie Louise Pratt’s notion of ‘the contact zone,’ and the tools of post-colonial criticism more generally, to analyse

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the rhetoric of the play’s conflicts as ‘constructed negotiations between cultures.’ Thus Shakespeare’s Venice and Belmont become places where his culture’s anxieties about miscegenation, homosexuality, and female insubordination are explored and purged. Westfall focuses on Jessica, Shylock, Portia, Morocco, Bassanio, and Antonio as figures who in various ways attempt to negotiate the contact zones between Christian and Jew, male and female, white and black, heterosexual and homosexual love, nascent capitalism and decaying feudalism, insider and outsider, hegemonic and marginal. She concludes by contrasting the probable satisfaction Elizabethan audiences took in the safety of such contact zones with our own awareness of its costs to the play’s marginal figures. In ‘The Unity of Twelfth Night,’ Arthur F. Kinney confronts one of the central preoccupations of literary criticism, both old and new. While earlier critics have argued for a unified play, more recent critics have stressed its multiplicity and indeterminacy. Using Leggatt’s preface to Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love as his starting point, Kinney argues for a reconciliation of these emphases, reading the play as fundamentally unified through all its conflicts. Shakespeare, in this reading, initiates themes of division, frustration, and pursuit in act 1, and makes Viola, as Caesario, the play’s chief agent of reunification. The various complexities of the plot and of the play, Kinney concludes, tend toward making all one, though the final unification of desire and deed escapes the playtext. Alan Somerset’s ‘The Baby in the Handbag: “Family Matters” in Shakespeare’ appropriately concludes this section by focusing on family reunions – a romance motif that occurs repeatedly in Shakespeare’s comedies, early and late. The note of joy and wonder sounded by the Abbess in The Comedy of Errors recurs powerfully at the close of Twelfth Night and still more powerfully in the romances, Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Winter’s Tale, where the bond between couples (married or betrothed) is trumped by that of parent and child. Somerset pays most detailed attention to these late comedies, tracing their modulation between the impulses of romantic love and the romance redemption of family love. In our final section we gather several essays that examine aspects of Shakespeare’s comedies as staged. Since J.L. Styan’s ‘landmark study’ The Shakespeare Revolution: Criticism and Performance in the TwentiethCentury (1977), performance-based criticism has assumed a status equal to that of literary criticism (McDonald 729), and is now one of the most productive areas of critical inquiry. Our last five essays contribute

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diversely to this field. In ‘“Songs of Apollo”: Love’s Labour’s Lost in 1961,’ R.B. Parker recovers for the scholarly record an ‘almost perfect’ staging of Shakespeare’s early comedy, Michael Langham’s production at the Stratford Festival, Ontario. Drawing on archival records, reviews, and memoirs as well as personal recollection and correspondence, Parker reconstructs the key features of Langham’s production: its ‘theatricality, energy, and dance.’ Under the influence of Tyrone Guthrie, Langham exploited the intimacy of Stratford’s thrust stage (still avant-garde in 1961), emphasizing the non-realistic performance conventions and the play’s metatheatrical delight in performance of all kinds. With few cuts, Langham produced a fast-paced, tightly choreographed comedy, based on a rigorous study of the text. By all accounts it was a revelation of the play’s potential; Parker’s rich and lucid tribute allows us to experience some of its magic. While Parker focuses on one triumphant production at Stratford, Ontario, C.E. McGee considers several: in ‘Smitten: Staging Love at First Sight at The Stratford Festival,’ McGee looks at the ways in which some of the practical problems created by Shakespeare’s comedies have been solved, reminding us that theatre ‘magic’ is rooted in the material conditions of performance. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Bottom’s loquacity in the face of Titania’s passion is essential to the comedy of 3.1, but how can an actor with an ass’s head be audible? In As You Like It 1.2, how do actors create an intimate space in a crowd for Orlando and Rosalind to fall in love? In The Taming of the Shrew 1.1, does Bianca see Lucentio falling in love with her, and if so, does she reciprocate? McGee’s answers to these questions underline both Shakespeare’s inventiveness and the creativity of those who take up the challenges of their production and performance. Popular discomfort with The Taming of the Shrew did not begin with the second-wave feminism of the 1970s: Scheil cites Charlotte J. Bell’s 1895 assertion that some women ‘considered it an insult to be invited to see the performance of this play.’ Nevertheless, the resurgence of feminism in the 1970s and its impact on Shakespeare studies have confirmed the play’s problematic status for modern audiences (Thompson 41). If a solution to the problem of this play is possible, it can only be through performance. In ‘Romancing The Shrew: Recuperating a Comedy of Love,’ G.B. Shand addresses this possibility. Shand finds in Gregory Doran’s 2003 production at the RSC a revelation of the play’s potential to succeed as a romantic comedy of love, ‘within both the early modern terms of the text and the tolerance levels of a postmodern (and post-

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feminist) audience.’ Crucial for this production was its construction of an interiority for Petruchio as complex and sympathetic as Katherina’s. Both partners were transformed through their courtship and marriage. Shand concedes Katherina’s final speech remained problematic in Doran’s production, but argues that it made sense as an expression of her redemptive love for her husband – a motif that Shand links persuasively to Shakespeare’s ‘comedies of remarriage’: Two Gentlemen of Verona, Much Ado About Nothing, All’s Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, Cymbeline, and The Winter’s Tale. Our last two essays return to The Merchant of Venice. In ‘Love in a Naughty World: Modern Dramatic Adaptations of The Merchant of Venice,’ Jill L. Levenson observes that such adaptations, in addition to sharing a focus on Shylock or Jewish issues, have been characterized by intertextuality, multiple revisions, and marginal theatrical status. Selecting Charles Marowitz’s Variations on ‘The Merchant of Venice’ and Arnold Wesker’s The Merchant – both first staged to English-speaking audiences in 1977 – as representative adaptations, Levenson explores the ways in which both revise Shakespeare’s play in the light of Jewish history. Marowitz frames a reconstituted Shakespearean text with allusions to Palestine during the British Mandate and with a conflation of verse from Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta: this Shylock is an extreme Jewish nationalist articulating his political motivations with Marlovian rhetoric. By contrast, Wesker uses Venetian history as a way to rewrite the bond story: re-creating the position of the Ghetto Nuovo in sixteenth-century Venice with scrupulous accuracy, he reconstructs Shylock’s loan to Antonio as an act of reckless generosity that challenges the anti-Semitic Venetian laws. This Shylock loses everything through his idealism. As Levenson concludes, Wesker turns Shakespeare’s romantic comedy into a history play that transcends the periods it represents. In our final essay, ‘Staging the Jew: Playing with the Text of The Merchant of Venice,’ Helen Ostovich turns to another kind of modern dramatic adaptation: the kind that emerges in the classroom. Since the 1980s performance has become an increasingly common pedagogical tool for instructors of Shakespeare.5 In her account of a classroom exercise, Ostovich describes a single scene that, like the larger adaptations surveyed by Levenson, foregrounds Shylock through a radical reframing of Shakespeare’s play: in this case Antonio, Solario, and Solanio become members of a criminal gang in New York’s Little Italy, and Shylock the Jewish businessman they target. The audience must choose between identification with the gangsters or with the Jews. Situating the

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students’ adaptation of the text within the play’s post-Holocaust production history, Ostovich concludes that it offers a valuable alternative to the more common representation of Venetians as stand-ins for the Nazis. As Ostovich acknowledges, the student adaptation she analyses is a long way from Leggat’s reading of The Merchant of Venice in Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love. Nevertheless, Leggatt’s reading is, to use Westfall’s term, ‘ominous,’ alert to the darker side of the comedy: ‘The play as a whole,’ Leggatt observes, shows us ‘an uncomfortable world where hate breeds easily’ (143). The classroom exploration of that ‘uncomfortable world’ performed by Ostovich’s students is thus a fitting place to conclude this collection of essays. It reminds us that the conversation about Shakespeare’s comedies of love is never over and that each successive generation of readers will have much to say about them. The classroom also provides an appropriate terminus for a volume in honour of Alexander Leggatt, for he has been above all a wonderful teacher. The adjectives that critics apply to his work – ‘low-key, modest, unassuming’ (David et al.), ‘quietly sensitive’ (White 4), ‘eminently perceptive’ (Velz 287), alert ‘to the play-in-the-theatre’ (Palmer 61), ‘incisive’ (Snyder 368), ‘lively’ (Crutwell 313), ‘at once imaginative and sensible’ (Egan 420), ‘challenging’ (Foakes 113) – are true of the man as well; pre-eminently, as Alan L. Ackerman declares, Alexander Leggatt is distinguished by ‘the spirit of generosity’ and ‘a capacity for sympathy.’ The contributors to Shakespeare’s Comedies of Love offer these essays in gratitude for an exemplary teacher, colleague, and friend, and in celebration of a brilliant critic.

NOTES 1 Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love has been excerpted in anthologies by Miola (1997) and Wells (1986), and reprinted five times since its original publication (by Methuen in 1978 and 1980; by Routledge in 1987, 1999, and 2005). It appeared in Japanese as Sheikuspia, Ai no Kigeki (1995). A partial list of Leggatt’s other books appears in the Works Cited. 2 See, for example, Mark David Rasmussen’s advocacy of ‘new formalisms’ in his introduction to the essays gathered in Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements (2002). 3 In his introduction to the Arden edition (1955) of the play, John Russell Brown declared confidently that ‘The Merchant of Venice dances to its con-

Introduction xxv clusion, its many elements mingling together joyfully’ (lviii). See Coyle for a discussion of the shift in critical responses to the play since the 1970s. 4 As Leah Scragg observes, ‘contemporary source studies are ... not primarily directed to establishing the breadth and nature of the dramatist’s literary tastes. They exhibit the degree to which Shakespeare’s works are enmeshed in their own culture, contribute to the construction of meaning, and provide a means of access to the process of artistic decision-making itself’ (373). 5 Performance exercises in the classroom did not start in the 1980s, but, as Milla Cozart Riggio notes, the postmodernist criticism of that decade, with its ‘radical decentering of received authority’ (6), has produced a new emphasis on performance as a way of engaging with cultural difference, textual instability, and historicity (6–8). For a range of approaches to these issues, see the essays collected by Riggio in Teaching Shakespeare through Performance; for an application of the pedagogy of performance to Renaissance drama more generally, see Ostovich’s ‘“Our Sport Shall Be to Take What They Mistake”: Classroom Performance and Learning,’ Knowles’s ‘Teaching History, Teaching Difference, Teaching by Directing Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness,’ and Maguire’s ‘Teaching The Tragedy of Mariam through Performance.’

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PART ONE Contexts for Shakespeare’s Comedies of Love

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The Comedy of Love and the London Lord Mayor’s Show anne lancas hire

In Thomas Middleton’s 1619 London Lord Mayor’s Show, The Triumphs of Love and Antiquity, the allegorical character of Love, who speaks directly to the mayor both at the show’s beginning and at its end, in its closing speech explicitly draws attention to itself as the preoccupation and structuring focus of the entire event: I was the first, grave lord, that welcom’d thee To this day’s honour, ... And ’tis my turn again now to speak last; For love is circular, like the bright sun, And takes delight to end where it begun. (Love and Antiquity 329–30)

The Lord Mayor’s Show of 1619 was devised in celebration of the swearing into office of William Cockayne, a member of the Skinners’ Company: one of the twelve so-called Great Companies of London, the most powerful and prestigious livery companies of the city, from whose membership the mayor at this time was always chosen. Like other Lord Mayor’s Shows of the time, one of which was written and presented each year, for each new mayor, it began on the morning of 29 October (the day after the feast day of saints Simon and Jude) with speeches, music, and spectacle at the new mayor’s procession from his residence to London’s Guildhall and then to the River Thames, where he and his entourage took a boat to Westminster for the swearing of an oath of office before the king’s representatives there, the Barons of the Exchequer. It then continued, with elaborate street pageants (portable constructed displays involving largely child actors) and more speeches and music, when the mayor returned by water from Westminster and pro-

4 Anne Lancashire

cessed from the river back to the Guildhall. After a Guildhall dinner, it involved processing to St Paul’s; and it ended in the evening before the gate of the mayor’s house, at the close of the day’s events.1 Love’s morning address to the mayor, as the latter begins his river journey to Westminster, is the first speech in the printed text that has come down to us of the 1619 show; Love’s evening address to the mayor, from which the above lines are quoted, is the text’s final speech. Between the start and the end of the show the mayor, as he passes up and down the river and through the streets of the city, sees and/or is addressed by a variety of other allegorical devices and characters; but in 1619 Love – ‘the day’s love, the city’s general love,’ as it is described in the text’s opening speech (316) – is clearly given the major emphasis. Love is the show’s theme; and love begins, ends, and circumscribes the pageantry. The year 1619 comes some twenty years after the decade of the Shakespearean ‘comedy of love’ examined by Alexander Leggatt in his 1974 book of that title. But the London Lord Mayor’s Show, as a theatrical performance spectacle, was a continuing tradition going back to at least the 1550s, before Shakespeare was born.2 Although our knowledge of the show is greatest from 1609 on, since we have a surviving printed show text for all but four of the thirty-one years from 1609 to 1639, three printed texts of pre-1600 shows and some show manuscript records and pageant speeches from some other years before 1600 have also survived. The show was a continuing phenomenon with which Shakespeare would have become familiar in the late 1580s and early 1590s, once he had arrived in London, as a major public performance event each year in the London streets and on the river Thames.3 And, although the allegorical speaking character of Love itself is not a routine feature in the surviving show texts,4 love was a continuing thematic preoccupation throughout the London Lord Mayor’s Shows of the period – although love of a different kind from that dealt with in Shakespeare’s comedies. Shakespeare’s comedy of love is a comedy of romantic emotion – of characters caught up in this general and typical human passion. The London Lord Mayor’s Show – comedy in the general sense of being celebratory and life-affirming – is generally focused on sociopolitical love (‘the day’s love, the city’s general love’): on London’s various economic, social, and political communities participating together in group affirmation of specific economic, social, and political values. It portrays, and encourages, communal sociopolitical solidarity. In the 1585 show, for example, by playwright George Peele, London is featured as a ‘lovely

The Comedy of Love and the London Lord Mayor’s Show 5

Lady,’ both herself loved (by those who serve her, such as the Country, the Soldier, and the Sailor) and in turn loving her queen; and the queen has put London ‘lovingly in trust’ to the mayor, that he ‘may adde to Londons dignity,’ caring for ‘Londons welfare and her worthines.’5 In the 1591 show, foreigners with whom London trades have come ‘lovingly inflamde’ to congratulate the mayor, ‘my lovely Lord’;6 this kind of love – based on good economic relationships – is a key aspect of London’s mercantile wealth and power. I do not intend to argue that the London Lord Mayor’s Show was a direct influence upon, or source for, Shakespeare’s comedy of love. But I do suggest that these two genres, which positively focus on the affirmation of love, have a great deal in common, in aspects of style and in consistency of focus upon comic integration. Recognizing the similarities of the two genres tells us something about general modes of theatrical performance in late sixteenth-century London. In looking for the similarities, we can examine the pre-1600 shows as Leggatt examined, thirty years ago, the pre-1600 Shakespearean comedy of love: taking the genre’s consistency of subject matter – in the case of the Lord Mayor’s Show, communal and political rather than romantic love – as a useful ‘given’ in relation to which we can observe the genre’s internal, artistically ordered variety. This variety includes, for the shows, tensions, as Leggatt demonstrated for Shakespeare’s plays, presented through the interplay of different styles and through the use of conventions sometimes in unconventional ways. Stage drama and street theatre of the late sixteenth century can thus be seen to have certain important commonalities and a like sophistication, despite the former’s dependence on narrative, presented on a fixed stage, and the latter’s use of exempla, presented in a processional mode. That the elaborately spectacular post-1600 London Lord Mayor’s Show (which included, unlike the pre-1600 show, more than one land pageant)7 involves tensions in its subject matter is a truth generally accepted in early twenty-first-century scholarship. These tensions have been commonly seen as involving above all the relationship between the city and the court (the wealth and independence of London and its mayor and yet their subservience owed to the crown), although also as involving political and/or religious groups within the city. The pre-1600 Lord Mayor’s Show, however, has been largely neglected by scholars in terms of analysis of potential tensions and other complexities within its presentation. This neglect has come about in part because few pre-1600 show texts have survived (and are also short), but also because, many

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years after scholars discarded an evolutionary approach to the drama (an approach which posited the rude beginnings of drama in the medieval period, through to its earlier, sixteenth-century, somewhat more advanced development, to its full flowering with the advent of Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the late sixteenth century), the Lord Mayor’s Show has still largely been considered in terms of a primitiveto-sophisticated evolutionary model. General opinion is that the show began minimally in the mid-sixteenth century and slowly evolved, reaching true sophistication only by the end of the first decade of the seventeenth century. This sophistication has also been traditionally defined by academic scholarship in terms of the show’s use of ‘dramatic’ structure and dialogue, deemed not to be present in any pre-1600 shows. Shows have largely been seen, in short, beyond their place in theatre history, as worth complex and extensive analysis only when they become more like stage plays: a development which did not occur (judging, at least, by the few extant texts we have before 1609) until around 1611–12.8 Recently London street pageantry in general, as a theatrical genre distinct from stage drama – and not necessarily to be judged therefore in terms of elements such as ‘dramatic’ structure – has been receiving increased scholarly attention. Lawrence Manley, for example, has written persuasively (214–21) on the general nature of London Lord Mayor’s Shows as, unlike (narrative) plays, ceremonial spectacles, the whole purpose of which was to suspend, for the time of the show itself, everyday norms of tension and rivalry between city and crown in order to achieve a sense of an inclusive social collectivity. And James Knowles, also considering the shows as ceremonies rather than as dramas, has pointed out (157–89) the very partial view of civic shows that we arrive at when we consider them largely or only in terms of their constructed pageants and speeches (the potentially ‘dramatic’ elements) rather than seeing the pageants and speeches functioning within the context of the processions and other ceremonial rituals surrounding them.9 Again, however, detailed critical attention to specific shows has focused on the period after 1600.10 The time is thus ripe for a new look at pre-1600 Lord Mayor’s Shows, not only in relation to Shakespeare’s comedy of love but also in relation to new scholarship on pageantry. We might, after all, expect them to be sophisticated pieces of theatrical performance. First, the pre-1600 shows were written, where we know their authors, by intellectuals and/or practising stage playwrights, such as (in 1568) Richard Mulcaster, first headmaster of the academically elite Merchant Taylors’ School,11 and

The Comedy of Love and the London Lord Mayor’s Show 7

George Peele (certainly in 1585, 1588 [text lost], and 1591, and perhaps in some other years as well), an Oxford graduate and both court and public theatre playwright.12 Second, commissioned by the livery companies, the shows involved, as processional participants, the occupants of the highest political and financial offices in the city. Third, they were aimed at the same broad audience as were Shakespeare’s plays: a London public ranging from the lowest social classes through to the middle classes, foreign visitors and ambassadors, and members of the aristocracy as well.13 Before turning to the specific extant texts of pre-1600 Lord Mayor’s Shows, I should briefly note that the dominant presentation mode of the London Lord Mayor’s Show involves – as with 1619’s Love – emblems, personifications, and allegory, in a sophisticated visual presentation tradition extending, as David Bergeron (Pageantry [1971] 7–8), Richard Dutton (12), and others have noted, from the Shakespearean period far back into the Middle Ages. The speakers in George Peele’s 1585 show, for example, a minimal printed text of which has come down to us, include London, Magnanimity, Loyalty, the Country, the Thames, the Soldier, the Sailor, Science (i.e., Knowledge, Learning), along with – incongruously, it may at first seem – four nymphs. Two major visual devices in Peele’s printed 1591 show include a fountain (traditionally emblematic of life/fertility and/or of purity) and Time’s wheel. A longstanding tradition of allegorical and emblematic performance continued in the streets of London in the late sixteenth century. And, though the period’s popular stage plays were increasingly becoming focused on ‘real,’ individual human characters with individual names (Petrucchio, Portia, Hermia), the emblematic and allegorical tradition continued not only in the streets but also on the playhouse stage, both on and below the surface of the text/performance, in the work of many pre1600 dramatists. Marlowe’s Tamburlaine (1587), for example, presents a type of warrior hero whose beloved Zenocrate ‘is’ in part the abstract ‘beauty’ upon which he muses. Lyly’s Gallathea (1585) provides us with two attitudes towards sexual love through the characters of the classical goddesses Venus and Diana. Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (1593) gives us Tamora and her two sons literally ‘disguised’ (5.2) and labelled as the qualities their characters represent on a presentational level, Revenge, Rape, and Murder; while the deposition scene in Shakespeare’s Richard II (1595) focuses on the crown as emblematic of monarchy/power.14 The emblematic and allegorical tradition is not as obviously used in Shakespeare’s comedy of love as it is in his early tragedies and histories or as it is in the plays of his contemporaries such as Robert

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Wilson (author of, for example, Three Ladies of London, 1581) and Lyly, but it is nevertheless present. A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s Bottom (1595), as visually a combined man and ass, is emblematically the monstrosity produced by unadorned or inappropriate sexual desire. Old Adam in As You Like It (1599) is a Time figure reminding us of human age and death. Shylock’s scales in The Merchant of Venice (1596) ironically allude to the emblematic scales of justice. Shakespeare’s audiences easily read the visually implicit meanings of his performed texts in part because such texts were part of a living theatrical tradition, still flourishing not only on the court and popular stages but also in the streets of London every year for the Lord Mayor’s Show (Dutton 12–13). The 1590 show gives us, for example (see below), a combined man–fish monstrosity (a merman), with emblematic meaning; Time appears as a speaking reminder of mortality in the shows of both 1590 and 1591; and scales are an emblematic property in the 1584 show (though otherwise we know very little about show content in 1584).15 What, then, do we find when we look closely at the theatrical elements and meanings of pre-1600 Lord Mayor’s Shows? How, as in Shakespeare’s comedy of love, do the shows use common elements such as visual emblems and verse forms to achieve internal variety and tensions and yet to create with them an aesthetic order? We have, as already noted, the surviving printed pageant texts of only three of such shows (from 1585, 1590, and 1591), although we have written speeches in manuscript for two others (from 1561 and 1568) and manuscript records of still more. Also, with the three printed shows, we do not know whether we have a full pageant text in each case or are missing one or more parts of the whole. By 1609–15, for example, it seems to have been normal for a Lord Mayor’s Show to begin with a display – which could involve one or more speaking characters – on the water when the mayor set out on the river, in the morning, going from the city to Westminster. Peele’s 1591 show, Descensus Astraeae (the only one of the three extant printed pre-1600 shows to have an actual title), includes at its close ‘A speech on the water delivered in the morning at my Lord Maiors going to Westminster’ (lines 117.1–2). Since the printed text includes speeches only (except for a few brief lines of pageant description), and since Peele’s show seems to include this water speech only as a kind of afterthought (the title page reads ‘The Device of a Pageant, ... Wherevnto is annexed A Speech deliuered by one clad like a Sea Nymph ... to the Lord Maior, at the time he tooke Barge to go to Westminster’ [page 156]), and since, in the Jacobean period with its more extensive and descriptive show

The Comedy of Love and the London Lord Mayor’s Show 9

texts, there are two notable examples of a printed show text deliberately excluding the visuals and/or speeches of the (acknowledged) water show with which the day’s proceedings began (in both cases it was not by the same author/designer as the land show),16 it is reasonable to wonder whether the 1585 and 1590 shows may not also have begun with their own particular water pageantry, as in 1591, which was not included in their printed texts. The exclusion might have been because the water display did not involve speeches, or because it was not devised by the same person who wrote the land show. Such wondering seems especially appropriate in relation to Thomas Nelson’s 1590 show, the printed text of which begins with a speech by ‘him that rideth on the Merman’ (lines 1–2).17 In Jacobean shows, characters and devices appropriate to the water – whales, mermaids and mermen, islands, and the like – often appear in opening water shows and subsequently move onto the land, joining the procession through the streets from the waterside to the Guildhall and eventually on to St Paul’s and the mayor’s residence. And certainly there was at least water display of decorated barges, a foist (a vessel with guns firing), and musicians playing on barges in Lord Mayor’s Shows from the mid-1550s on.18 The merman, however, as a figure appearing (along with a mermaid) as a supporter of the coat of arms of the Fishmongers’ Company (Herbert 2: 3–5) – the company to which the incoming mayor in 1590 belonged – was appropriate for the 1590 show whether initially on the water or not. And with all extant pre-1600 shows, we can examine only what has actually survived, while acknowledging that the pre-1600 texts, with (unlike the seventeenth-century show texts) almost no descriptive content outside the pageant speeches themselves, are a bare-bones version of the shows which they record. As is not the case with later show texts, there is little printed explanation in the pre-1600 texts of how the speeches relate to visual displays or to the various stages of the mayoral procession. If we leave aside, for the present, pre-1600 shows for which we have records but no texts, what happens when we look to the characters, devices, and speeches of the five existing texts (three in print and two in manuscript) of pre-1600 shows for the kinds of varied and ordered tensions – stylistic, thematic, and convention-associated – that exist in the comedy of love, and for those tensions that are also now commonly accepted as presented and resolved in the shows of the Jacobean and Caroline periods? James Knowles, as previously noted, has pointed out that aspects of the shows not normally included in their printed texts or

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in our consideration of them today – such as the ordering of the nonpageant parts (city officers, livery company members, musicians, and so forth) of the overall mayoral procession – are important to an understanding of the overall complexity and purpose of the shows: for example, the ceremonial integration and ranking, through processional order, of potentially conflicting social groups. Also the detailed social, political, and economic circumstances of the incoming mayor and of his livery company, in the year of each show, will presumably relate significantly to each show’s total meaning.19 Given the context of this paper, however, my main focus, as with Leggatt’s in relation to the comedy of love, is on show pageant characters, speeches, action, and properties, although with some brief consideration of their contexts (social, political, and material). And examination of the surviving five pageant texts reveals that the varied presentation and ordering of tensions/differences would seem to be as characteristic of civic pageantry in this period as of public stage comedy. It makes sense, for two reasons, to look first at the latest of the extant show texts, that of the 1591 show, and then to move chronologically backwards through 1590 and 1585 to the 1560s. First, this discourages the assumption of an evolutionary movement from the primitive to the sophisticated. Second, since later printed show texts are more detailed than earlier ones, the later ones may help to illuminate the earlier ones. Peele’s 1591 Descensus Astraeae, a show designed (as the printed title page in part indicates) to celebrate the inauguration as mayor of William Webbe, a member of the Salters’ Company (Beaven 2: 41), is clearly divided into two sections, each balanced carefully against the other. First in the show (although at the end of the extant printed text) is the morning water display when the mayor processes from the Guildhall to the Thames to take a barge to Westminster for his oath there. A sea nymph speaks at the waterside, presenting to the mayor ‘a Pinesse on the water brauely rigd and mand’ (page 156), which does not appear to be the by-now-obligatory foist which shoots off guns as the mayor moves up and then back down the river but, rather, a separate pageant vessel ‘Laden with treasure and with precious ore’ (line 122), from exotic southern lands associated with gold (‘From where in Tellus veynes the parching sunne, / Doth gold and glittering munerals create’ [lines 123– 4]). It also carries ‘strangers lovingly inflamde / To gratulate ‘ (lines 125– 6) the mayor, and to accompany him by ship to and from Westminster. (‘So with these friendly strangers, man by man / Passe with advisement to receive thy othe’ [lines 139–40].) Anthony Munday’s 1611 Lord

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Mayor’s Show water pageant, which featured ships presented to the mayor in the morning, as though returning laden with gold from Indian mines, carrying a golden king and queen and engaging in sea fights to and from Westminster, seems to have been in part an elaboration of Peele’s show in 1591.20 The ‘strangers’ in the 1591 pinnace were probably dark skinned (given their stated origins), as were traders and merchants from exotic foreign lands in other similar Lord Mayor’s Show water displays of the Jacobean period.21 This portion of Descensus Astraeae was thus focused almost entirely on London’s mercantile trading wealth, on simultaneous difference (as exemplified in skin colour) and harmony between English and foreign merchants,22 on the mayor himself (‘my lovely Lord’) as the object of the day’s celebrations, and on the built urbanscape surrounding the show, to which the nymph’s speech refers (‘the beauteous verge of Troynovant [London] / That deckes this Thamesis on eyther side’ [lines 129–30]; ‘The morter of these walles tempered in peace, / Yet holdes the building sure’ [lines 134–5; a reference both metaphoric and literal]). Two lines only (141–2) in this section of the show refer to the queen, under whose sovereign rule the mayor is to preserve London. The textual and visual effects, combined, are thus London-centric, but balance is provided by the fact that the water journey itself is to and from royal Westminster for the mayor’s oath to the crown. The land pageant, featured in the procession from the Thames to Guildhall after the mayor’s return from Westminster, balances the water show by focusing not on the mayor but – now that his oath to her has been taken – on the queen, and on a conventional, courtly pastoral presentation rather than on a mercantile one. As described by a presenter (lines 14–53), the goddess Astraea – who also represents the queen, Peele thus merging, as was common at this time, the classical past and the political present, in a standard compliment to Elizabeth23 – stands with a sheephook on the constructed pageant, probably of a pastoral landscape, which also features a ‘pure’ fountain and the classical Graces. The presenter eulogizes Astraea (‘Celestiall sacred Nymph’ [line 20]), with only brief references to the mayor (as serving Astraea). Significantly, however, the mayor and Astraea not only are explicitly linked but also are implicitly paralleled, in that while the mayor serves Astraea, as a ‘worthie governor for Londons good’ (line 7), she ‘tendes her flocke’ (line 20), that is, looks after her people; rule in both cases is depicted as public service. Also, just as the basic geographical and genre elements of the water show and the land show – water and land, mer-

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cantilism and courtly pastoralism – are carefully balanced against one another, and the mayoral emphasis of the water show is balanced by the Westminster purpose of the water journey, reflecting the importance both of merchant London and of Elizabeth’s court, the land pageant presenter’s spoken praise of Astraea/Elizabeth is balanced visually by the material impressiveness of the city, as London literally surrounds and also supports (via the show’s porters, who convey the constructed pageants in the procession) the pastoral Astraea. The material streets of the city provide the golden-age courtly pageant with a constant London urban context. Moreover, while the Astraea pageant itself is focused almost entirely on the queen, the mayor and other major city officers and citizens are also all visually present, as part of the procession which the pageant speakers address and which the pageant (conveyed by its porters) joins. London urbanism and courtly pastoralism, city officers and queen, present and mythological past, are balanced in verbal and visual tension against one another and simultaneously are integrated/ harmonized within the context of the overall show. Pageant speeches are linear in presentation; pageant visuals are all simultaneously present. The Astraea pageant, separated from its overall show and from its material context, also involves balanced tension, and a sophisticated repetition-based structure which, as we will see, is typical of all three pre-1600 printed show texts. First, the parallels drawn by the presenter between Elizabeth and various mythological and historical figures – Astraea, Pandora, Pompey, Caesar, Alexander, Hector – are not without tension/complication. Astraea is a goddess, and Pompey, Caesar, Alexander, and Hector were all great military leaders, but the mythological Pandora is a figure of ambiguity and in part serves to qualify Elizabeth as an Astraea figure. Pandora – a classical Eve – is known mythologically not only for her great beauty and other gifts of nature (given to her by the gods) but also for her box, or jar (also from the gods), which served to punish mankind. Pandora could not resist opening it (the metaphor is in part sexual), and evil was thereby unleashed upon the world. The Pandora reference thus contains within itself associative tensions, which qualify its use as a means of praise, and the verbal reference to Pandora thus stands in part in tension against the Elizabeth/Astraea association. In John Lyly’s late sixteenth-century play Woman in the Moon, for example, Pandora – beautiful and fickle, loving and vengeful, true and inconstant – is the central figure, and the play may be read as criticizing Elizabeth as Pandora, a beautiful but changeable woman, or

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as praising Elizabeth as not-Pandora, beyond the frailties of typical womanhood.24 Second, in relation to structure, the presenter describes how, within the pageant landscape, Astraea prevents ‘superstitious ignorance’ (line 24) from corrupting the spring, and refers to the Graces, Virtues, Honour, and Astraea’s Champion, the last ready to ‘chastise Malecontentes’ (line 32). Then the pageant figures of Superstition and Ignorance (a friar and a priest, i.e., Roman Catholicism) speak themselves, attempting to poison the fountain and finding that Astraea, fixed on ‘The holy law’ (line 64), renders them helpless in their attempt. Subsequently two generalized Malcontents try to threaten Astraea/Elizabeth and likewise find themselves helpless to do her harm: ‘She is preserved by myracle belike’ (line 109; perhaps still an associative reference, three years later, to the nation’s escape from the Spanish Armada of 1588).25 The danger to Protestant England posed by Roman Catholicism and its plotters is first specifically shown, through the visually clear figures of friar and priest, and then generalized into a (repeated) helplessness of any of Astraea/Elizabeth’s enemies (malcontents). The Astraea pageant thus moves overall from description (by the presenter) to speeches and ‘action,’ and in the speeches and action it moves, through repetition with variation, from the particular to the general, from specific historical circumstances to non-specific political morality, although all figures and action are also visually present in the pageant throughout, and all meanings of the pageant, both specific and general, are seen simultaneously both during the pageant’s initial presentation (with speeches) and subsequently as the pageant moves into and with the mayoral procession after its ‘speaking’ presentation.26 The visuals of the pageant provide a constant balancing and integration of the pageant’s various elements, against and with one another.27 In its final speech by Time, the 1591 Astraea pageant also focuses on the particular, but simultaneously sets it within the general. At the back of the constructed pageant, the brief (non-spoken) written description in the printed text tells us, the figure of Nature winds a web, passing through the hand of Fortune and gathered up by Time; and Time speaks four lines referring to his wheel and to the web. This is indeed a pun on the name of the new mayor, William Webbe, as has long been recognized, and scholars generally have seen the reference as simple and even comic; but the pun is a serious one. Assuming, given the text we have, that Time’s speech ends the pageant’s formal ‘speaking’ presentation, here at the presentation’s conclusion the newly sworn mayor is

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both referred to and seen, in his office, as transitory – just as, in the opening lines of the printed text, the presenter calls attention to the mayoral year as a product of the turning of Time’s wheel. The opening and closing Astraea pageant speeches, and the attention they direct to the visuals – both of the pageant itself, with Nature and Time’s web, and of the mayoral procession in which the outgoing mayor rides with the new, incoming mayor – thus begin and end with ever-moving Time, decreasing the importance of the mayor as an individual by placing him in the continuum of the mayoral office. Even Astraea/Elizabeth is recognized as mortal; Charity, earlier in the pageant text (line 83), has referred to national anxieties in this respect (‘With hir lives wane done Englands joyes decrease’), while praying for her ‘princely daies’ (line 84) to be as immortal as her virtues.28 The final structural effect is of an overall show text balanced in two ways: designed both to be presented in two complementary parts with differing emphases, one on the water and one on the land, and also to have within the land pageant text varied structural repetitions which set beside one another, and bring together, the specific and the general, the classical and the Christian, the time-bound and the eternal. The tensions of difference and the complementarities of those differences are harmonized into a collectively accepted order, paralleling the differences yet order of the various social and political groups within the mayoral procession and among the spectators watching it; at the same time, tensions remain, as with the queen, depicted as both Astraea and Pandora, and as both mortal and immortal. And finally, with Time’s wheel, the 1591 show text is also – like 1619’s – ultimately circular, turning back, like the all-day mayoral procession itself (beginning and ending at the mayor’s house), to where it began. Peele’s 1591 show is thus constructed with considerable sophistication and subtlety, in a presentation mode not only working to create order through balanced differences in its subject matter but also taking into account the linear nature of the spoken text set against the continually present costumed and constructed visuals. Peele uses a variety of tensions, balancing and combining opposites in an artistic resolution that expresses the wished-for social/political resolution. Conventions such as the emblematic fountain, the pastoral genre, and Time’s wheel are used with care and subtlety, and move through London streets, which provide a material contrast with them. The emblematic pageant fountain, for example, both parallels and contrasts with the constructed water fountains of material London, especially the Little Conduit in

The Comedy of Love and the London Lord Mayor’s Show 15

Cheapside, to the north of St Paul’s, on the show’s processional route. Furthermore Peele uses varied verse forms to emphasize pageant structure. The presenters both for water and for land use blank verse (although ending their speeches with a rhyming couplet), while the other speaking characters within the presentation (except for Honour, who also uses blank verse and a final couplet) speak in verse stanzas largely rhyming ababcc or forming rhyming couplets. The presenters’ speeches are thus set off from what is presented and are thematically linked with Honour, while the stanzas of the other speakers further the general pageant aim of turning disparate elements into an artistically ordered whole.29 Thomas Nelson’s 1590 Lord Mayor’s Show for John Allott, Fishmonger, comes only two years after England’s defeat of the Spanish Armada and is about national peace, largely through the celebration of London’s mayor as an enforcer of peace within the nation through his defence of the crown.30 The show may or may not, as suggested above, have included a water show featuring in part a merman; what has come down to us is the text only of a land pageant. We have therefore a more limited text to consider than for the 1591 show, but the 1590 land pageant can nevertheless be seen to be elaborately constructed to provide, as in Peele’s 1591 land pageant, balanced tensions which simultaneously both are resolved and continue, through speeches, visuals, and structural organization. John Meagher, in his 1973 edition of Nelson’s show, has pointed out many of the subtler aspects of Nelson’s work, but given Nelson’s status as a minor writer of the period, and the generally accepted evolutionary notion of Lord Mayor’s Show development, Meagher’s work has not had the attention it deserves. The surviving 1590 land pageant text begins with two riders on constructed pageant animals – one on a merman (a merman, as previously noted, being one of the two supporters, along with a mermaid, of the coat of arms of the Fishmongers’ Company), and one on a unicorn (two unicorns support the Goldsmiths’ arms [Herbert 2: 121–2]). A special ‘amity’ had for some time existed between the Fishmongers’ Company and the Goldsmiths’ Company,31 so the land pageant presenters visually demonstrate, on their heraldic beasts, the difference yet harmony between the two London Great Companies. Simultaneously, however, as the opening speech of the rider on the merman makes clear, monstrousness is here presented, in the form of the man–fish merman himself. The rider on the merman complains – in fourteeners, a by now old-fashioned verse form in the popular theatre – about religious

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dietary customs (fish days and flesh days) no longer observed by the nation, to the detriment of both the people at large and the fishmongers. ‘This shape so strange [i.e., the merman], shew they are strange, & do digres from reason / That shun in eating fish and flesh, to keepe both time and season’ (lines 17–18). This is a highly unconventional way for a company to present an image associated with its coat of arms; and perhaps the pageant merman was a visual distortion in some way of the company’s normal arms-supporter merman;32 but with or without visual distortion, a tension-producing combination of both positive and negative associations is created.33 The rider on the unicorn – a mythological as well as heraldic beast – is visually balanced against the rider on the merman, and in more common stanzaic verse offers general praise of London, her magistrates, and the queen, provides several lines describing part of the following pageant, notes the Goldsmiths’ special friendship with the Fishmongers, and offers help and protection to the mayor. The unconventional and the conventional are thus set in tension against each other, but their difference is also in part simultaneously resolved in the visual paralleling of the two riders on two emblematic company beasts and in the historical amity between the two companies thus represented. As in 1591, the ‘action’ and speeches of the land pageant, following the riders’ presentation, fall into two parts, the second of which repeats, with variation, the first. But whereas in 1591 the specific (Superstition and Ignorance) is followed by the general (two Malcontents), in 1590 the general is followed by the specific. In the first part of the pageant’s speeches and action, as verbally presented, the personified Peace of England – also, like Astraea in 1591, figuring the queen (lines 51–6; and see also Meagher’s note to 50–6) – is trumpeted (literally) by Fame (who also speaks), and is upheld by the speaking characters of Wisdom and Policy, accompanied by God’s Truth and Plenty. Other speakers are Commonwealth and two allegorical pairings: Loyalty and Concord, Science (i.e., Knowledge, Wisdom) and Labour. The antagonistic force is Ambition, who announces that he ‘Doth dailie seeke to worke sweete Englands fall’ (line 102) into civil strife leading to foreign triumphs, and is said by Commonwealth to be repelled by ‘Our Senates graue and worthie magistrates’ (line 108), that is, by London’s governors (see also Meagher’s note to lines 107–13). This first allegorical part of the presentation is very general but by its end has narrowed down to a focus on London, whose civic officers work to uphold queen and nation ‘By banishing ambition from our gates’ (line 110); and the second part of the

The Comedy of Love and the London Lord Mayor’s Show 17

pageant then provides, as Meagher pointed out in 1973 (note to lines 124–43), a specific historical example of a London magistrate, at the request of a king in need, defeating (ambitious) civil strife: the defeat of Jack Straw (standing for the rebels in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381) by London’s then mayor William Walworth (also a Fishmonger mayor), who historically struck down rebel leader Wat Tyler in support of Richard II. (Straw was historically another leader in the Peasants’ Revolt and by this period had become an icon of popular rebellion; hence apparently the use here of Straw rather than Tyler.)34 In this historical exemplum, as presented in the 1590 pageant, Richard II, Walworth, and Jack Straw all speak (the king to Walworth, who is represented by Commonwealth, and Straw and Walworth/Commonwealth to the spectators), telling the story; and Walworth/Commonwealth (Walworth as mayor and Commonwealth being thus positioned as one of a temporally continuous stream of London magistrates representing the city/state in general) moves to end the pageant presentation with the ‘Fame’ which began it, speaking of how ‘Fame her selfe still laudeth me therefore’ (line 143).35 Walworth thus also implicitly parallels himself with the monarch, one of the objects of Fame’s pageant-opening praise.36 The presented text in this way ends with an emphasis on Walworth’s fame – and by extension on the fame of all London mayors (routinely knighted since Walworth) and of the city itself – and the showing (as the text reports) of the arms of the city, the arms of the Fishmongers’ Company, and the arms of Walworth.37 The balancing of the general and the specific is thus achieved, as in 1591, but with a reversed presentation order (first general, then specific); and both pageant presentations end with a focus upon the figure of a London mayor. Time also speaks the final four lines of both pageant shows – with his 1590 lines, ‘We craue your patience, / for the time is past’ (154–5), suggesting the inevitable joining, in (historical) time, of Allott (whose pageant presentation here ends) as 1590–1 mayor with Walworth: as part of the continuum of civic and national history. Versification is also used in the 1590 pageant, as in 1591’s, for structural and thematic effect. Like the rider on the monstrous merman, Jack Straw – a historical monster, as it were – speaks in fourteeners; and the first rider’s complaints about people not obeying dietary laws are thus linked with past popular rebellion, in both cases involving the Fishmongers. Peele’s 1591 land pageant seems in part deliberately to refer to the 1590 pageant, in working with and off the design of its immediate pre-

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decessor.38 Unfortunately, when we turn to the printed pageant text of 1585, for Skinner mayor Wolstan Dixi and written (like the 1591 show’s water and land pageants) by George Peele, we have no immediately preceding or following extant show texts with which to compare it; nevertheless the 1585 text can be seen to follow somewhat the same pattern as the 1591 and 1590 land pageant texts. The opening presentation speech for the 1585 land pageant – a construction featuring the personification of London herself, accompanied by various elements such as the Thames and Loyalty39 – is by a Moor riding on a lynx, the latter being one of the two supporters of the Skinners’ Company’s coat of arms.40 The initial speech, therefore, which praises ‘lovely London riche and fortunate’ (line 9) and the contributions made to her by magistrates, farmers from the country (bringing corn), the river Thames, soldiers, sailors, and the like, has as a part of its visual context an emphasis specifically on the Skinners and, through the Moor (as in 1591), on London’s non-European trade, which is not mentioned verbally in the speech. Balanced difference thus exists between the verbal and the visual aspects of the presentation. Recitations of speeches by allegorical and representative characters then divide the land pageant presentation, as in both 1590 and 1591, into two different parts which are nevertheless harmonized with one another. In the first part, the figures of Magnanimity, Loyalty, the Country, the Thames, the Soldier, the Sailor, and Science all speak in support and praise of London. In the second part, four nymphs give praise to the queen. Unlike the 1590 and 1591 land pageants, 1585’s contains no adversarial elements (no Superstition and Ignorance, no Malcontents, no Ambition, no Jack Straw); and although the 1585 presenter speaks blank verse and the characters in the pageant speak in varied rhyming stanzas, there is no matching of verse forms to characters, as in the fourteeners given in the 1590 pageant text to both the rider on the merman and Jack Straw. Still, the two-part structure of the land pageant, the balanced difference between the presenter’s blank verse and the stanzas of the rest of the pageant speakers, and the balance already noted between the specific visuals of the Skinners’ Company and the generalized visual representations of England’s characteristics and people, are typical of the ways in which both the 1590 and 1591 pageants present and attempt to resolve tensions, verbally and visually; and of course, as in 1591, the nymphs praising the queen do so within the material context of London’s streets and of a procession featuring civic officers and citizens. In all cases as well, as James Knowles probably would note, the overall shows, as ceremonies, har-

The Comedy of Love and the London Lord Mayor’s Show 19

monize tensions through their ritualistic sameness of overall occasion (mayoral inauguration), processional order, presentational and declamatory style, and processional route (by water and by land). Company records of other aspects of the shows between 1553 and 1600, along with the descriptions of 1550s shows by Londoner Henry Machyn in his diary, also show other recurring show aspects which likewise served both to provide a common background against which pageant variations would stand out (for spectators presumably remembered pageant effects, devices, and characters from one year to the next) and to pull together such variations into a single ritualized form. Such aspects included marching musicians, livery company members in full livery dress, costumed wild men (‘woodwards’) with clubs and/or squibs of fire to clear the processional route, and the occasional devil also with squibs (see Robertson and Gordon 38–57; and Machyn passim). What about the two pre-1580s pageant texts which have survived only in manuscript? We have some production details of the 1556, 1561, and 1568 shows (including wild men, squibs, and musicians), and a short text for both the 1561 and 1568 shows, from a rough manuscript of the Merchant Taylors’ Company which appears to have been a working document kept by the Bachelors group within the Merchant Taylors: that is, by an internal group of Merchant Taylors just below the level of liveried status.41 The Bachelors in any Great Company with a mayor coming into office was the group largely responsible for inauguration day pageantry, and Bachelors’ records, where surviving, provide us with significant information about specific Lord Mayor’s Shows. The 1556/1561/1568 rough manuscript tells us nothing about the form or text of the 1556 show’s pageant, although it does include the information that children from St Anthony’s school sang and played on instruments in the pageant,42 that the pageant included a ‘maid,’ and that there was also a rider on a hired camel (Robertson and Gordon 39– 40). (Two camels were the supporters of the Merchant Taylors’ coat of arms [Herbert 2: 383–4].) The 1561 show pageant, however, is recorded in more detail (see Robertson and Gordon 41–4) and seems to have been a musical tour de force, riffing on the name of incoming mayor William Harper by bringing together notable harpers from biblical history (King David), classical mythology (Orpheus, Amphion, Arion), and romance (Topas) into a literally harmonious whole. Harps are hired; speeches about the harp and the power of its music are recited; and the verses of the 150th psalm (which in the bible include, for example, ‘Praise the Lord! ... praise him with lute and harp!’) are painted on the constructed

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pageant, which is surmounted by the arms of Harper himself – thus placed in a long temporal line of famous harpers – and of the Merchant Taylors’ Company. Significantly, although positive and collaborative in content and in tone, the 1561 pageant text nevertheless refers throughout, with religious and political emphasis in David’s speeches, to stern authority and to nature as tempered/harmonized by mild ‘harpers.’ Political, religious, and natural tensions, resolved through aesthetic (standing for political) performance, are thus central to the pageant, which also exhibits the same pattern of structural repetition and variation as do the later show pageant texts already examined, and the same purposeful variation of verse forms. The pageant’s verbal presentation begins with David (the only politically authoritative harper of the five); and the five historical and mythological harpers, with David as the lead, speak four hexametre lines each, in rhyming couplets (or eight trimeter lines with lines 2 and 4, and 6 and 8, rhyming, if one were to divide these initial lines as the later ones in the manuscript text are divided).43 Each speaker tells how in the past his harp playing solved a problem or created harmony/joy. Then the first three harpers speak again, in the same order, but with the two other than David given only half as many lines as previously (that is, four trimetre lines each, with lines 2 and 4 in each speech rhyming, while David has eight trimetre lines). Finally David has the closing (just as he had the opening) speech, with the same number of lines as he has previously had but – perhaps for concluding emphasis – in a somewhat different verse form: eight lines alternating between tetrametre and trimeter, with the trimeter lines rhyming as before. There is simultaneously ordered repetition, variation within the repetition, and a circular structural effect through a beginning and an ending with a focus on the same speaking figure, who consistently emphasizes religious and political authority and its tempering through (performing) harpers. The records also show David as visually the central pageant figure (Robertson and Gordon 44). Moreover the biblical, mythological, and fictional pasts are brought to bear on, and harmonized with, the present not only through the speeches themselves, including David’s closing references to 1561’s actual (William) Harper, but also through the pageant’s material and political context of the contemporary London streets through which it is carried and the contemporary London officers and citizens – including Harper – riding in the show procession. The 1568 pageant text (by Richard Mulcaster, as noted above) is the least affirmative or celebratory of the five surviving pre-1600 show pag-

The Comedy of Love and the London Lord Mayor’s Show 21

eant texts, and so the least comparable with the Shakespearean comedy of love. In the 1568 text, however, we still find variety and ordered tensions, although for these the pageant largely depends on its description of the incoming mayor, Merchant Taylor Thomas Rowe. The 1568 pageant also seems structurally to be the least carefully balanced and ordered of the five. The central verbal part of the pageant involves three boy actors, each speaking two stanzas describing the roe (a deer: a pun on Rowe’s name)44 and, likened to the roe, the mayor; and tensions are brought together and resolved. The roe and/or the mayor is swift yet stops to listen, is wild yet mild, excels in sight and so can help those ‘suche as see not well’ (Robertson and Gordon 49). A fourth boy then speaks three stanzas, linking the queen, St John Baptist (the patron saint of the Merchant Taylors), and Rowe (God has set the queen in place so that ‘Iohn maye preache’ and ‘Roe maye heare’ [49]), and balancing past with present, and preaching with hearing. The opening speech of this land pageant, however, is a stern call for repentance and reform (‘Amende your Lyves’ [48]), delivered to the audience by St John Baptist. It forms a fiercely hortatory beginning to the presentation (much more so than does the opening complaint of the 1590 text, by the merman, concerning fish, flesh, and dietary customs); and the rest of the written text seems to accept, as its ideological foundation, John’s teachings as necessary for Rowe’s mayoral government. The perspective is religious, and the aim is reform. (‘The Axe alreadie is in hande, / To hew downe eu’y tree’ [48].) The pageant does provide ordered variety in its structure/composition, using one stanza form throughout, but placing one three-stanza speech by St John Baptist, and one three-stanza speech by the fourth boy, around three two-stanza speeches which form the pageant’s centre. The fourth boy, however, is just that, unless unspecified visuals created a marked difference between him and the other three boys, giving him significant weight, as a closing figure, in relation to the pageant-opening saint. A change in pageant design, as planning/ construction progressed, is indicated in the 1568 show records. Verses or precepts (‘ffeare God,’ ‘be wyse,’ ‘be true,’ ‘accepte no bribes,’ and eight related verse lines addressed to Rowe) were to have been written around the constructed pageant (‘if it shalbe thoughte good’), in what would presumably have been a constant visual emphasis – along with the pageant figure of the saint himself – on John’s stern preachings (49– 50); and in the end, the records tell us (50), they were (wholly or largely) not provided.45 We do not know whether this was a deliberate aesthetic/political choice or whether those constructing the pageant sim-

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ply ran out of time. Did this omission of the written verses/precepts create more room for pageant balance and the resolution of tensions, or did it damage the ordered design of the not-so-celebratory pageant? (The verses did promise Rowe a successful mayoralty if their advice was followed.) The 1568 show and its immediate political context deserve more detailed study. Beyond the five at least partially surviving show pageant texts from before 1600, we also have a surviving diary, by Londoner and Merchant Taylor Henry Machyn, which provides us with a glimpse of a few other shows of the period, including one inevitably involving, because of its subject matter, major tensions. In 1553, when the Catholic Mary had come to the throne only three months before, Machyn records (48) the Merchant Taylors’ presentation of a show land pageant of ‘sant John Baptyst gorgyusly, with goodly speches.’ Although John the Baptist was the Merchant Taylor’s patron saint, various kinds of images of saints – in stone, in stained glass, and in other forms as well – had been destroyed during the reign of Mary’s predecessor on the throne, the Protestant-minded Edward VI;46 and the appearance therefore of St John in 1553 in a London mayoral show would almost certainly have had considerable political/religious impact, creating tensions which it is doubtful the show could have harmonized with entire success into an expression of collective sociopolitical identity and purpose. Did this St John Baptist also speak, as in 1568, about repentance (perhaps here in relation to Protestantism)? St John Baptist appeared again in 1554’s show, with a lion (the incoming mayor being John Lyon, Grocer); but Machyn (72–3) does not tell us whether the saint was part of the constructed pageant or was a separate figure, and we know little more about this pageant other than that it also featured a griffin (a heraldic supporter of the Grocers’ Company’s coat of arms [Herbert 1: 297–8], as previously noted) with a child ‘lyung in harnes’ (Machyn 73). Other surviving records of mayoral shows from 1553 to 1600 also do not tell us enough about constructed pageants and speeches to allow analysis of them. We know that Peele wrote show speeches again in 1588 (see above); and we know that in 1584 the land pageant resembled a house with a pointed roof painted in blue and gold and decorated with garlands, with young girls seated and holding emblematic objects such as a book, a pair of scales, and a sceptre (Coleman 176). We also know that, as mentioned above, the processional order and route remained more or less constant throughout the period, with a water journey fea-

The Comedy of Love and the London Lord Mayor’s Show 23

turing a foist (shooting off celebratory guns), and with musicians, processing livery company members, wild men, and so forth. So we can say, at least, that the records show a continual and consistent show presentation, beyond the land pageant itself, of tensions involving potentially disruptive elements – such as guns and wild men – deliberately displayed and ordered within the overall ceremonial procession.47 From the five texts that we do have, however, we can see that the pre1600 Lord Mayor’s Show pageant was no simple, primitive piece of unthoughtful visual display and verbal recitation. As in Shakespeare’s comedy of love, conventions of presentation (such as, in the shows’ pageants, heraldic animals, speeches in verse, use of emblematic and allegorical characters and objects, and structural repetition) are normally varied in a complex binding together of tensions and sometimes opposites – temporal, social, political, stylistic – which creates temporary meaning/order out of potential disharmony or miscellany. The reformoriented 1568 show pageant is a partial exception to the norm. The pageants furthermore are only parts of the larger, ritualized shows, which work as organized and balanced wholes – like the comedies of love – to create meaning/order and community affirmation: though the shows, unlike the plays, are engaged overtly with social politics, and use the presentation of exempla, in a processional mode, rather than narrative plot lines presented on a fixed stage. The shows of 1553–1600 and Shakespeare’s comedies of love, when considered together, give us a view of overall late sixteenth-century comic/celebratory theatrical performance as sophisticated theatre/performance which uses visual and verbal conventions of the time, in a variety of ways, to bring together apparently differing elements of both fictional and mythological creations and historical realities into a balanced, harmonious, and generally socially affirmative whole.

NOTES 1 For the standard processional route (and other generally standard details) of the Lord Mayor’s Show, see ‘The Order observed’ (1568) 94–5, Smyth’s ‘A breffe description’ (1575) 95–6, and Bradbrook 95–6 (although she is too sceptical, I believe, about the ability of audiences to hear show speeches). 2 For a recent history of the Lord Mayor’s Show see Lancashire, London Civic Theatre 171–84. Pageant display may have begun in the show as early as the

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5 6 7

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Anne Lancashire late fifteenth century, but it was then prohibited in 1481 and cannot be said with certainty to have begun again until the early 1550s. See, e.g., Dutton 7–8. London civic pageants were ‘the one form of drama which we know must have been familiar to all the citizens of London,’ and were ‘at least as influential – arguably more so – than ... public theatre [plays].’ According to T. Berger et al.’s Index of Characters, checked against the texts specified, Love appears in the shows as a speaking character only in 1619 and 1635 (Venus) – and, I would add, in 1591 (as Charity) – although as a non-speaking figure in several other shows (1613, 1617, 1633, 1638). The MS texts (see below) of the 1561 and 1568 shows have also been checked. Peele’s ‘The Device of the Pageant Borne before Wolstan Dixi’; quotations are from lines 45, 47–8, 53. Peele’s ‘Descensus Astraeae’; quotations are from lines 125–6. Current evidence indicates that before 1600 each show featured only one large constructed land pageant, along with other display elements such as wild men, emblematic animals, and devils. See, e.g., Robertson and Gordon xxvii and 37–57. For past evaluation of shows in relation to criteria used for plays, see below, note 10. Pre-1600 shows have not been ignored, but they have not been much valued and analysed, with the partial exception of 1591’s ‘Descensus Astraeae,’ which has received significant attention because of George Peele’s authorship, the show’s praise of Elizabeth I, and the length of the surviving text (greater than that of other pre-1600 shows). A decade earlier Theodore Leinwand had suggested (139) that the shows should be evaluated in terms of their social and political contexts rather than in terms of dramatic action and speech. David Bergeron in his pioneering first edition of English Civic Pageantry (ECP) (1971) drew attention to London civic shows as theatrical performances worthy of serious and extensive scholarly attention. Bergeron, however, though writing to some extent on pre-1600 as well as post-1600 pageantry, like most scholars has focused on the post-1600 period – where also we have much more surviving pageantry information than before 1600. He has also tended, as have many other scholars, to judge pageants by the standards of stage plays, in 1971 considering the best Lord Mayor’s shows to be those that provided play-like dramatic unity and conflict (e.g., 4–5 and 124). In his recent second edition of ECP (2003), he has somewhat modified his views. Cf. the introductions of the two editions, but see also the repetition of ECP (1971) 124 in ECP (2003) 127 on dramatic action, speech, and conflict. James Knowles’s statement that ‘civic ceremony seeks to embody

The Comedy of Love and the London Lord Mayor’s Show 25

11 12

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15 16

reconciliation and inculcate order’ (182) may be taken as indicating that dramatic conflict is in opposition to the raison d’être of civic pageantry – hence the inappropriateness of using the presence of such conflict as an indicator of civic pageant quality. Lobanov-Rostrovsky (879–98) has argued that the dramatic development we see in the 1612 and 1613 shows – generally agreed to be the most ‘play-like’ of the extant pre-1640 shows – was subsequently abandoned because such shows made the mayor seem too much of an ‘actor’ in a play. But since the monarch in a royal entry – similar to the mayor (the monarch’s representative) in his show – was typically regarded, non-pejoratively, as an actor upon the stage of London (e.g., in Richard Mulcaster’s 1559 The Queen’s Majesty’s Passage), it seems likely that the dramatic conflicts found in the 1612 and 1613 shows instead do not reappear because oppositions requiring victory/defeat were seldom appropriate within an integrative theatrical form. For the relevant material in Mulcaster’s Passage, see Kinney’s edition, lines 51–7. For the mayor as the monarch’s agent/substitute, see Bergeron, ‘Pageants, Politics, and Patrons’ 139–52. See Robertson and Gordon 47 and xxxiv (where it is suggested that Mulcaster may also have written the speeches for the 1561 show). See the chronology in Braunmuller’s George Peele. Braunmuller suggests that Peele also wrote the shows for 1581, 1584, 1586, 1587, and 1595. For Peele’s authorship of the lost 1588 show, see Arber 504. Peele’s 1585 and 1591 shows are discussed below. Another possible intellectual author of pre-1600 shows is Nicholas Grimald (of Christ’s College, Cambridge; poet, Latin dramatist, and translator), who may be the Mr ‘Grimbald’ who wrote the (non-extant) 1556 show pageant speeches; see Robertson and Gordon 39–40. The guests at the Guildhall banquet midway through the show in 1554 included, e.g., the lord chancellor of England, members of the nobility, Spaniards in England (Philip II of Spain had married Queen Mary and made a formal entry into London in summer 1554), judges, and other learned men; see Machyn 73. Here and below, play dates are taken from Harbage’s Annals, checked against and revised for Titus Andronicus in accordance with The Norton Shakespeare 3374–81. A translation of a description, by a visitor to England, of the 1584 show is reproduced by Coleman 176. For the description, see below. In 1612 pageant author Thomas Dekker refused to include any water show description in his printed text (‘Troia-Nova Triumphans’) of the land pageantry, dismissing the water show as mere ‘Powder and Smoake’ with ‘Apollo hauing no hand’ in it (Dekker 3: 247). In 1623, when Thomas Middleton

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Anne Lancashire wrote the land show (The Triumphs of Integrity) and Anthony Munday the water show (The Triumphs of the Golden Fleece), the two shows were published separately. All quotations from and references to Thomas Nelson’s ‘The Device of the Pageant ... for ... John Allot’ here and below are from the edition by Meagher in English Literary Renaissance. For the relevant records see Robertson and Gordon, from 38, and also Machyn passim. Manley, e.g., points out (269) the major international trading connections of the various mayors of the 1580s. Detailed historical consideration of each show in terms of such factors remains a neglected area of London pageant scholarship. The sea skirmishes of the 1611 water show, however, participated in a long tradition of mock sea battles on the Thames (see, e.g., Machyn’s reference [196] to a mock battle on the Thames as a 1559 Maying entertainment), and may also have been indebted to the sea battle in a 1610 water show celebrating the creation of Prince Henry as Prince of Wales. See Munday’s ‘Londons Love, to the Royal Prince Henrie’ 43–4. See, e.g., the mayoral water shows of 1613, 1617, and 1622. S. Williams has noted (5) the prevalence of Moorish characters in the visual theatre of the period (Aaron in Titus Andronicus, Othello, and Portia’s Moorish suitor in The Merchant of Venice come in part from this tradition); such characters appear also to have been a notable element in earlier civic water shows. A ‘Moorish’ diver was featured, e.g., in the city’s 1533 water pageant for the royal entry of Anne Boleyn; see Furnivall 373 and 380 (from British Library Royal MS 18 A.lxiv). Manley argues (283) that the water show of the period is rough and chaotic, incorporating primitive, pre-Christian forces, while the land show incorporates cultivated, Christian ones (284–7); trade, however, is a civilizing activity (286). By this theory, the primitive foreign elements here (in the 1591 water show) are tamed, and harmonized with civilized English ones, through trade: and the result then is order, contrary to Manley’s view of the water show as chaotic. For a full description of the association between Elizabeth and Astraea, see Yates 29–87. Braunmuller (24–5) discusses the figure of Astraea in ‘Descensus Astraeae.’ See Lancashire, ‘John Lyly’ 36–8, 45–7. Braunmuller (25) gives another example of political/religious references in the 1591 show. It is sometimes argued that any elaborate or sophisticated structure of a

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Lord Mayor’s Show would be perceived only by those in the mayoral procession itself, since audience members lining the streets would see and hear only the parts of the pageantry presented at their particular locations (see, e.g., Lobanov-Rostrovsky 881). The visuals of a located pageant, however, as Manley has pointed out (259), moved into the procession once the pageant had been initially presented (on water or on land), and the visuals could be designed to suggest, on their own, the tensions and complexities also verbalized in the speeches. Mayoral shows were in this respect unlike royal entries, in which the various street pageants, on their fixed stages along the processional route, did not move. (Also, in Lord Mayor’s Shows, between the time of the early morning water show and the time of the later land procession from the Thames to the Guildhall, water show audiences had plenty of time – while the mayor took his oath at Westminster – to move into different viewing positions for the land show; and similar gaps in processional time, for spectators who wished to move, occurred during the Guildhall dinner and during the religious services at St Paul’s.) Also, among the speaking Christian virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity, Charity integrates the Old Testament with the New by appealing (line 81) to ‘Israels God.’ Inga-Stina Ewbank believes (134), however, that Nature and Time at the show’s end contrast with Elizabeth/Astraea’s divine immortality. It has been pointed out (e.g., Bradbrook 96) that the noise of the crowds watching a show might well drown out the pageant speakers for most spectators. But the speeches were doubtless nevertheless an important aspect of the pageantry for those who could hear them, while for those who could not, the emblematic nature of the ever-present visuals conveyed the ideas in any case, and also the tensions resolved into pictorial order. For information on Nelson – a minor writer and publisher of the period – see Meagher 95 and also McKerrow 198 s.v. Nelson, Thomas. This amity was considerably older than the late sixteenth century; see, e.g., Reddaway 190 and 206n110: a reference to the Goldsmiths’ liverymen paying for hoods given to the wardens of the Fishmongers, from the Goldsmiths’ early MS Minute Book A (covering [343] the mid-fifteenth to the early sixteenth century). The incoming mayor in 1590, Allott, also seems to have resided while mayor in a house within the control of the Goldsmiths; see Prideaux 1: 105. For example, the merman supporting the Fishmongers’ coat of arms was himself armed; no reference to arms for the pageant merman is included within the pageant text, although perhaps such arms would be taken for granted. The merman and the mermaid had been added to the Fishmon-

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Anne Lancashire gers’ coat of arms only fifteen years earlier, in 1575 (see Herbert 2: 3); perhaps, therefore, historical reverence was not their due. It is also possible that a cartoon-like artistry was not uncommon in depicting this kind of figure and that a comic effect was partly intended; see some of the surviving drawings of the pageants in Anthony Munday’s 1616 show, Chrysanaleia (also for a Fishmonger mayor), as reproduced (see especially plates 2 and 12) in Nichols’s edition. Plate 11 shows a merman and a mermaid. (The originals are in Fishmongers’ Hall, London.) Meagher declares (97, note to lines 1–20) that ‘the later canons of unity and consistency had not yet established themselves in the hierarchy of values’; but more likely a deliberate tension is being produced. For some historical confusions about Straw and Tyler, see, e.g., Stow 1: 215 and 2: 312. For a historical account of the Peasants’ Revolt which includes both Straw and Tyler, see Bourchier’s translation (258–61) of The Chronicles of Froissart. Meagher suggests (note to lines 124–43) that Straw is represented by the earlier-appearing general character of Ambition: generalized Ambition and Commonwealth thus both becoming specifically represented in the Straw versus Walworth action. Bergeron, ‘Pageants, Politics, and Patrons,’ refers (147–8) to the Walworth story in Munday’s Chrysanaleia (1616) as showing the city’s power over the king/court. For a useful note on the city’s coat of arms in relation to the text of the pageant here, see Withington 10. One difference: there is apparently no heraldic animal being ridden in the 1591 show (there is a presenter not specified as a rider), although a heraldic animal from the coat of arms of the incoming mayor’s livery company may have been a normal component of show pageantry at this time (see Robertson and Gordon 38–57 and Machyn passim). It may be, however, that a heraldic animal was used in 1591 but is simply not referred to in the text we have. Two otters were the supporters of the arms of the Salters (Herbert 2: 555–6), the company of the 1591 mayor. An eyewitness account describes the pageant as resembling a summerhouse in a pleasure garden covered with roses and flowers and containing twelve boys and girls splendidly dressed; see Robertson 5–6. See Herbert 2: 299–300 (a ‘lucern’ is a lynx). One of our first definite records of a sixteenth-century Lord Mayor’s Show includes a Moor leading a lynx in a show (1551) for a Skinner mayor: see Robertson and Gordon 38, and the Skinners’ Company’s MS Court Book 1551–1617 (Guildhall Library, London, MS 30708: on deposit from the Company) f. 6v. A lynx was also

The Comedy of Love and the London Lord Mayor’s Show 29

41

42

43

44

45

46

47

ordered for the Skinners’ 1597 show (Robertson and Gordon 56). A griffin – two of which supported the Grocers’ Company’s arms (see Herbert 1: 297– 8) – appeared in the 1554 show for a Grocer mayor (see below). Interestingly, the eyewitness account of the 1585 show, noted above, reports (Robertson 6) the appearance not of a lynx but of a camel. Had there been a processional substitution? For any given show, there is no guarantee that the printed (or MS) text accurately reflects the actual presentation. On companies’ Bachelors groups see Thrupp 13 and Rappaport 226. The Merchant Taylors’ manuscript has been transcribed and edited by Sayle 20–58 and is also partly calendared and partly transcribed in Robertson and Gordon 39–44, 47–50. Children (usually boys) were normally used as pageant actors, not only because they were lighter than adults to be transported on a pageant stage but also because, hired from grammar schools and choir schools, they had been trained in public speaking and/or in musical performance. For such school sources for the child performers, see e.g. Robertson and Gordon 40 (St Anthony’s school), 44 and 46 (children of Westminster). Robertson and Gordon reproduce the actual manuscript lineation of the pageant speeches (from what is now Guildhall Library [London] MS 34105: on deposit from the Merchant Taylors’ Company). Bradbrook suggests (97) that Rowe thus becomes equated with the lion (on the shield) and camels (supporters) of the Merchant Taylors’ Company’s coat of arms, or with the holy lamb of their crest, i.e., that he becomes depersonalized, and emblematic of his company. The verses, at least, ‘were not written aboute the pageant nor in no other place elles / at that tyme’ (Robertson and Gordon 50); this presumably included the four short non-verse orders, but the explanatory wording of the text at this point is not wholly clear. See, e.g., Haigh 168–70. Saints were even suppressed in the MS records of the period; e.g., in a MS of the Goldsmiths’ Company (MS 1524, in Goldsmiths’ Hall, London) the company’s accounts running from 1542–3 to 1556–7 are dated from one feast of St Dunstan (19 May) to the next until the accession of Edward VI, then from after one feast of the Trinity (a movable May/June feast) to the next. In discussing the water show as primitive and chaotic, and the land show as Christian and cultivated, Lawrence Manley (284–7, as indicated above, note 22) seemingly ignores the ordered, sophisticated elements of a water show such as 1591’s, with its trader-strangers lovingly escorting the mayor, and the primitive and chaotic elements on land such as wildmen and devils. For descriptions, e.g., of the latter, see Machyn 47, 73, and 96.

A ‘Pennyworth’ of Marital Advice: Bachelors and Ballad Culture in Much Ado About Nothing p hi l i p d. c o l l i n gt o n

Domestic cares afflict the husband’s bed, Or pains his head. Those that live single take it for a curse, Or do things worse. Some would have children; those that have them none, Or wish them gone. What is it then to have or have no wife, But single thraldom, or a double strife? – Francis Bacon, ‘The Life of Man’ (ll. 17–24)

To marry or not to marry? That was the question confronting young adults in early modern England, and there was no shortage of answers. In his Discourse of Marriage and Wiving, Alexander Niccholes warned of the high stakes of selecting a spouse in an era without divorce: ‘Marriage of all the humane actions of a mans life, is one of the greatest weight and consequence, as thereon depending the future good, or euill, of a mans whole aftertime and daies; that Gordian knot once fastned not to be vnloosed but by death ... [is] not to be danced into lightly or vnadvisedly.’1 In the opening scene of Much Ado About Nothing, Shakespeare’s outspoken bachelor Benedick protests that he, for one, is not prepared to take such a risk. He challenges his friends: ‘Prove that ever I lose more blood with love than I will get again with drinking, [and you can] pick out mine eyes with a ballad-maker’s pen and hang me up at the door of a brothel house for the sign of blind Cupid.’2 Benedick’s quip underscores the prominence of ballads in English culture and how a cluster of associations – love, marriage, ballads, and public humiliation – loomed large in the imaginations of those about to tie the Gordian knot.

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Sold on the streets for a penny, ballads were large folio sheets with printed lyrics, a specified melody (‘sung to the tune of ...’), and an accompanying woodcut picture. Ballads were hung as decorations in homes, alehouses, and brothels; sold as souvenirs at public executions; even laid as memorials on tombstones. It is estimated that during the period between three and four million ballad sheets were sold in England, only a fraction of which survive today (Watt 11). While their subject matter ranged widely, perhaps the largest recognizable subgenre was the ‘love ballad’ targeting consumers hungry for relationship advice similar to that found in modern magazines like GQ, Men’s Health, Glamour, and Cosmopolitan.3 For example, ‘The Virgin’s A, B, C’ provided an alphabetized list of practical tips, like ‘Chuse ... a modest carriage,’ ‘Offend not with a foule and slandrous tongue,’ ‘Paint not your beauty,’and ‘Yeeld not to others, when you are wed, / The pleasures of your lawful husband’s bed.’4 Ballads provided love tips for men as well: ‘Good Counsell for Young Wooers’ promised to show ‘the Way, the Meanes, and the Skill / To wooe any Woman, be she what she will’ (RB 1.422–7, 422); ‘Household Talke, or; Good Councell for a Married Man’ provided practical tips on household management (RB 1.441–6); and ‘Cuckold’s Haven, or, The Married Man’s Miserie’ warned of the perils of making the wrong choice in marriage (RB 1.148–53). George Puttenham dismissed such songs as mere doggerel entertainments, limited to ‘recreation of the common people at Cristmasse diners and brideales, and in tauernes and alehouses and such other places of base resort’ (96– 7). Indeed, by 1591 they had become so ubiquitous that Robert Greene complained that theatre revenues were being diverted by ballad sellers’ ‘vnsufferable loytring qualitie, in singing of Ballets and songs at the doores of such houses where plaies are vsed.’5 This last comment seems misplaced and hypocritical, for ballads were often featured inside the theatres as well. While a number of Shakespeare’s plays contain references to ballads, Much Ado is especially allusive, mentioning at least half a dozen extant songs recently compiled in Ross W. Duffin’s magnificent collection, Shakespeare’s Songbook, including ‘King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid’ (235–40), ‘Hey Ho, for a Husband’ (194–6), ‘The God of Love’ (173–5), ‘Light o’ Love’ (253–5), ‘Sick, Sick’ (366–70), and ‘Troilus’ (409–11). That more than half of the 160 entries in Duffin’s anthology are narrative street songs attests to the facts that ‘Shakespeare’s audience, from the lowliest groundling to the highest noble, knew these tunes and the ballads that were set to them ... [and that what] for us may seem like obscure allusions were for them

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clear, obvious references to universally recognized artifacts of popular culture’ (16–17). The obscurity today of what were once ‘obvious references’ has in turn concealed the extent to which Much Ado draws on the richly allusive world of ballad culture in thematically significant ways. Prompted by the play’s rarefied setting in faraway Messina, by its dazzling prince, lords, and wealthy governor, and by its sparkling wit contests and practical jokes, critics tend to characterize Much Ado as quintessentially upper-class, emphasizing its political ‘decadence,’ the social ‘isolation’ of its ruling elite, and ‘upper-class affinities [in] the play’s wit and brittleness.’6 Yet there is nothing isolated or effete in Beatrice’s homey reference to the crowd-pleaser ‘Light o’ Love,’ or Benedick’s invocation of the usual suspects from ballads (blind Cupid, swimming Leander, and the horned husband). Messina’s cultural elite share a decidedly plebeian taste in music. What one ballad, ‘The Cuckoo’s Comendation,’ says about this avian symbol of marital infidelity was also true of the common balladeer: ‘Hee’l sing vnto the Courtier, / as well as to the Clowne, / He spareth not his musicke, / in City nor in Towne.’7 In what follows, I will argue that Shakespeare’s witty courtship comedy is both a product of, and a participant in, England’s ballad culture. I use the phrase ‘ballad culture’ instead of ‘popular culture’ to emphasize the inclusiveness of a musical form that permeated all levels of English society and its entertainment industry. Ballads provide fascinating glimpses of cultural phenomena and sexual mores, and the study of these intersections is currently enjoying a kind of renaissance among social and literary historians.8 To Patrick Collinson, such cultural ‘ephemera’ provide us with ‘valuable evidence’ of early modern social practices – a ‘worm’s eye view’ of lived English experience and attitudes (71, 77). Ken Stahl argues that in addition to their utility as descriptive documents, ballads represented ‘the first mass medium in English history,’ and that they functioned as prescriptive documents produced by dominant cultures intent on reinforcing gender stereotypes and the status quo: ‘Broadsides tell us not so much about what people actually thought ... but about what they were supposed to think’ (3, 6). I will qualify this last observation by showing how Much Ado repeatedly invokes ballad culture in order to reject many of its frequently espoused tenets; in the process, the play radically questions the wisdom of blindly accepting musical entertainments as prescriptive tools of acculturation. Ballads may in part have functioned like modern how-to guides – as a

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kind of ‘courtship for dummies’ or ‘idiot’s guide to selecting a spouse’ – yet one important issue raised in Much Ado is whether impressionable young consumers should heed what ballads have to say in response to Bacon’s query, ‘What is it then to have or have no wife?’ 1. ‘Enter ... Iacke Wilson’ The youthful glitterati depicted in Much Ado frequently refer to ballads, raising several related questions: What did ballads have to say on the subject of marriage? How might playgoers have responded to onstage allusions to ballads? And why have so few modern scholars explored this aspect of the play? In expressing contempt for the lowly ballad seller in one scene (1.1) then drawing on his brothel-decorating wares to inspire a love poem in another (5.2), Benedick typifies his culture’s ‘ambivalence’ towards the genre.9 Jibes at ballads in plays prompted a generation of modern scholars to mistakenly infer a deep cultural divide between elite and popular forms of entertainment; for example, according to John H. Long, street ballads were the purview of ‘clowns, knaves, rustics, and tradesmen’ (12).10 Yet following Peter Burke’s reevaluation of the separation of ‘great’ and ‘little’ traditions (23–9, 58– 64), scholars now recognize the extent to which England’s ‘learned’ elite participated in ballad culture. Tessa Watt writes that ‘it would be misleading to describe this as “popular” printed culture, if “popular” is taken to imply something exclusive to a specific social group. Ballads were hawked in the alehouses and markets, but in the same period they were sung by minstrels in the households of the nobility and gentry, who copied them carefully into manuscripts’ (1). Even the stanza form in my epigraph from Bacon can be found in extant ballads, suggesting commonalities between popular and elite poetic forms; according to one early observer, ‘baudy balades of lecherous loue ... commonly are indited and s[u]ng of idle courtyers in princes and noble mens houses,’ and there is much evidence of their popularity among women of diverse social classes.11 Yet the cultural divide persists in the consistent downplaying of the significance of ballads in Much Ado. Arden editor A.R. Humphreys may be taken as representative in this regard; on the question of the ladies’ mention of ‘Light o’ Love’ (at 3.4.40–3), he states that ‘since the ditty is merely referred to, not sung, no musicological finesse is called for’ (236). When allusions or excerpts are examined, ballads tend to be dismissed (in Louis B. Wright’s unforgettable phrase) as

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‘extraneous songs,’ ones merely ‘inserted by the dramatist or the players for the sheer amusement of the audience.’12 Nowhere is the critical aversion to the lowly ballad more apparent than in the debate about the mysterious Folio stage direction at 2.3.37: ‘Enter ... Iacke Wilson’ (Hinman 125 [line 868]). The Folio’s substitution of a musician’s name for a character’s (i.e., Balthasar) was likely a mistranscription from a theatrical prompt book, and modern editors tend to identify the heading with John Wilson (1596–1674), the Oxford professor, royal lutenist, and guest at Edward Alleyn’s anniversary dinner in 1623.13 The extreme youth of Wilson during early productions of Much Ado has not deterred his supporters; after all, he later composed a setting for ‘Take, O, Take Those Lips Away’ from Measure for Measure.14 The fact that a second Wilson, one Jack Wilson (?1585–?1641), son of Nicholas Wilson of St Bartholomew parish, and member of a ‘band of public musicians who played for entertainments in the city of London,’ seems chronologically more likely to have appeared on stage has not deterred his detractors.15 Alan and Veronica Palmer note that the royal lutenist was a ‘great practical joker’ (270–1); and Duffin documents his dabbling in popular forms (324–5, 414) – the implication being that ‘Jack’ was merely John slumming, that the two were the same person. Long proposes that Balthasar would have been seen by playgoers as an aspiring ‘noble dilettante-musician’ and that his entrance ‘with music’ (as the Quarto stage direction at 2.3.43 indicates) signals him carrying, as a prop, ‘a song which he has recently written and which he is carrying around, possibly in hopes that he will be requested to sing it’ (Long 127–8). That this sheet could be a printed ballad is not considered. The editorial effacement of popular Jack, the minstrel and piper residing near the Bear-Garden, by elite John, the royal lutenist and learned doctor of music, is symptomatic of attitudes towards musical intertexts in Much Ado. The significance of its ballad references goes unremarked, and the extent to which the play’s thematic preoccupations derive from ballad culture remains ignored.16 Stephen Orgel refers to songs with narrative or thematic significance as ‘mimetic’ music, as distinguished from ‘non-mimetic’ songs and dances inserted during scene changes, or the jigs that would follow a play (Foreword 11). Mimetic songs can function to portray character, establish setting, create mood, foreshadow events, and indicate the passage of time (cf. Long 8–10). I propose that Much Ado’s incorporation of ballad culture is profoundly mimetic and is no mere thematic non sequitur or musical diversion. As Duffin points

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out, by evoking ballads through allusions or excerpts, mimetic music adds ‘some extra layer of meaning or expectation ... for his audience’ (18) – layers that I believe have gone the way of Jack Wilson. 2. ‘We’ll Fit the [K]id Fox with a Pennyworth’ Before Balthasar’s song in the first eavesdropping scene, Claudio relishes the opportunity to trick Benedick into falling in love, especially after the latter’s rakish boasts of amatory conquests (‘I am loved of all ladies’ [1.1.121]) and anti-matrimonial outbursts (‘Shall I never see a bachelor of three-score again?’ [line 193]). ‘The music ended,’ Claudio promises, ‘We’ll fit the [k]id fox with a pennyworth’ (2.3.42–3). F.H. Mares notes that ‘“Kid-fox” has not been satisfactorily explained’ (83 note); and Sheldon P. Zitner changes ‘kid’ (found in both the Quarto and Folio editions) to ‘hid’ fox, on the grounds that a purported error in typography is obscuring an allusion to the children’s game of hide-andseek, one which Benedick is about to recreate by hiding in the bower. Zitner then glosses ‘pennyworth’ as to give someone their money’s worth (130–1 note). Yet as Gordon Williams documents, foxes were commonly associated with sexual potency, adultery, and especially lechery – particularly that of aging bachelors, referred to in plays as ‘old foxes’ (538). In this context, a lusty young bachelor might be termed a ‘kid-fox.’ Moreover, with the price of broadsides being one penny, the phrase ‘a pennyworth’ may allude to the tongue-in-cheek advice found in ballads such as ‘Half a Dozen of Good Wives: All for a Penny,’ which addresses bachelors considering matrimony: ‘If you want a good penny-worth, come buy it of me; / Sixe Wives for a penny, a young one or old, / A cleanely good huswife, a Slut or a Scold’ (RB 1.451–6, headnote). Likewise, ‘A Penny-Worth of Good Counsell. To Widdowes, and to Maides’ recommends that ladies ‘looke before they leape, / Or that they married be’ (RB 2.295–9, headnote). If the musician who entered after Claudio’s quip was in fact Jack Wilson, the significance would have been obvious to playgoers: a kid-fox bachelor is about to get a pennyworth of ballad advice on love. Concerning the play’s two original songs, ‘Sigh No More, Ladies’ and ‘Pardon, Goddess of the Night,’ the musical genres are generally taken to be lyrical and upscale (befitting a royal lutenist), rather than narrative and homespun (befitting a balladeer).17 Yet I will argue the contrary, that they incorporate tropes, conventions, and associations from ballad culture. ‘Sigh No More, Ladies’ may begin like a refined Campion-style

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lament about the deceptions of men, but its singalong refrain is decidedly down-market: Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more. Men were deceivers ever, One foot in sea, and one on shore, To one thing constant never. Then sigh not so, but let them go, And be you blithe and bonny, Converting all your sounds of woe Into hey nonny, nonny ... (2.3.63–70)

As Peter J. Seng documents, ‘hey nonny’ was used in songs as a euphemism to mask indelicate allusions, such as to sexual activities or to a woman’s genitals; though in the case of Much Ado, Seng insists, ‘they [i.e., the nonnies] are surely nothing but an innocent and meaningless burden’ (57–8).18 Yet this song’s purported innocence and meaninglessness disappear if we consider that, although initially sung for Benedick, Claudio is also listening. Is the latter’s ill-fated interpretation of Hero fuelled by the song’s underlying message – namely, that if a lady is sexually precocious or unhappy with a suitor, she can console herself with a premarital fling? This is certainly the message espoused in ‘The Maid’s Comfort’ (RB 2 [supplement] 1–4), in which a lady expresses fears of dying a maid, that is until a passing bachelor offers his services to alleviate her suffering: ‘Then sigh no more, but wipe thy watry eyes; / Be not perplext, my Honey, at the heart: / Thy beautie doth my heart and thoughts surprise; / Then yeeld me loue, to end my burning smart’ (lines 19–22; emphasis added). In yielding to her seducer, the ballad’s maiden does just that, converting her sounds of woe into hey nonny nonny. The cultural precedent whereby impatient or dissatisfied ladies are shown to take a sexual initiative both contextualizes (for playgoers) and enables (in a characterological sense) Claudio’s motives for trusting the improbable slander that Hero satisfied her insatiable desire ‘a thousand times in secret’ before her wedding day (4.1.94). The motif recurs in Beatrice’s evocation of a similar ballad, ‘Hey Ho, for a Husband,’ first at the initial arrangement of Hero’s wedding (‘Thus goes everyone to the world but I ... I may sit in a corner and cry “Heigh-ho for a husband”’ [2.1.315–17]), and later more intensely during final preparations (‘By my troth, I am exceeding ill. Heigh-ho!’ [3.4.50–1]). The ballad in question

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describes a teenager so desperate to experience the ‘sport and play’ of marriage that she weds the first man to pass her door, only to lament after a year’s marriage that ‘the old man [who] lay by her side, / could nought but sigh and groan.’ The song ends with the unhappy wife’s ominous lines, ‘I mean to go and try my skill / and find some remedy’ (in Duffin 194–5). As with ‘hey nonny,’ ‘hey ho’ both generates new fears in men and confirms existing ones that women are lusty and willing to initiate extramarital sex. For Hero, references to ‘Hey Ho, for a Husband’ may function as an ominous warning. Just as the performance of ‘Sigh No More’ cautioned Claudio to be careful a few scenes earlier, here his bride is enjoined to exercise similar care in the selection of her spouse. In the earlier scene, Benedick quips, ‘I pray God his bad voice bode no mischief,’ in anticipation of the singing of ‘Sigh No More’; and Don Pedro engages the singer to ‘get us some excellent music’ to be sung under Hero’s chamber window later (2.3.85–9; emphasis added). Zitner perceives in Don Pedro’s line a veiled ‘rebuke’ for Balthasar’s poor musicianship (45); I suspect Don Pedro also objects to the content of the song.19 Whether the play’s ‘Sigh No More’ and ‘Hey Ho’ are informed by ballads (detailing women’s sexual independence) or sung like ballads (in a coarse manner), neither seems an appropriate choice for performance before an innocent bride-to-be or her increasingly suspicious groom. Ballad culture informs the play’s most sombre moment as well, illustrating the extent to which narrative songs provided cultural scripts and a creative outlet for Elizabethans dealing with unfamiliar situations, such as the apprehension of marriage or grief following a loved one’s death. As cited earlier, Stahl argues that ballads shaped contemporary mores; but Much Ado dramatizes the reciprocal manner in which Shakespeare’s contemporaries shaped ballad culture. The events following Hero’s purported ‘death’ at the altar illustrate what Zitner refers to as the ‘intensely participatory popular musical culture’ of the day (205) – participatory not only in the sense that characters sing and allude to portions of existing ballads, but also in the sense that they try their own hands at composing and disseminating new ones. When the slander is made public in the church, Claudio inveighs against tainted brides, a common topic in cautionary ballads: ‘Out on thy seeming! I will write against it’ (4.1.56). He has read or heard about tainted brides before (‘This is an accident of hourly proof’ [2.1.182]); now he will pen his own testimonial on the subject. Hero’s father bemoans the ensuing stain on her reputation using images also taken

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from print culture: ‘O she is fallen / Into a pit of ink, that the wide sea / Hath drops too few to wash her clean again’ (4.1.139–41). After Claudio’s departure, however, those remaining with Hero agree to launch a counter-offensive to disseminate the truth about her wrongful accusation: ‘[She shall] be lamented, pitied, and excused / Of every hearer’ (lines 216–17). While the form of this campaign is not specified (pamphlet? ballad? public notice?), the proposal that they shame perpetrators by publicizing their error is significant. Sandra Clark notes that ballads were used by government leaders as propaganda (73–4), and Adam Fox documents the common practice of individuals penning ‘home-made ballads’ to spread or dispel rumours at a more local level (‘Ballads’ 47–83; quotation on 51). Such are the terms implied in Claudio’s subsequent repentance, as Leonato instructs him to restore Hero’s reputation: Possess the people in Messina here How innocent she died. And if your love Can labour aught in sad invention, Hang her an epitaph upon her tomb And sing it to her bones; sing it tonight. (5.1.275–9; emphasis added)

To my knowledge, no attempt has been made to situate the commission of this epitaph and its performance at Hero’s monument within the context of English ballad culture, yet these two scenes depict the conception and dissemination of a common ballad sub-genre. In the resulting song, ‘Pardon, Goddess of the Night’ (5.3.12–21), Claudio’s emphasis on the victim’s purity and innocence (the slain ‘virgin knight’), on the extreme pathos of her death (‘Help us to sigh and groan’), and an adverbial refrain (‘Heavily, heavily’) all point to common features found in extant funereal ballads: Pardon, goddess of the night, Those that slew thy virgin knight, For the which with songs of woe Round about her tomb they go. Midnight, assist our moan, Help us to sigh and groan, Heavily, heavily ... (5.3.12–18)

In a similar manner, ‘The Bride’s Buriall’ (RB 1.186–9) tells, from a dis-

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consolate groom’s point of view, the tale of a bride who inexplicably dies at the altar from a sudden ‘chilling cold’ (line 42). Like Hero, this bride is idealized for her extraordinary beauty and chastity: ‘like Flora in her pride, / As faire as braue Dianae’s Nimphs – / So lookt my louely Bride’ (lines 34–6). Likewise, in ‘The Obsequy of Faire Phillida’ (RB 2.345–7), a bereaved shepherd laments that his beloved died a virgin (and hence, like slandered Hero, undeservedly): ‘The blinded boy his arrowes / And darts were vainely spent; / Her heart, alas! / Impenetrable was, / And to love would nere assent’ (lines 54–8). By calling Hero his virgin knight, Claudio also evokes for playgoers public outpourings of grief resulting from the death of a public figure. Following the execution of Robert Devereux in 1601, ‘A Lamentable New Ballad Upon the Earle of Essex his Death’ (RB 1.571–5) echoed Claudio’s wording by stating that ‘our Jewel is from us gone, / the valiant Knight of Chivalry’ (lines 3–4); and ‘A Lamentable Ditty Composed Upon the Death of Robert Lord Devereux’ (RB 1.564–70) illustrates the typical adverbial refrain in such lines as ‘welladay! welladay,’ ‘mournefully, mournefully,’ and ‘gallantly, gallantly.’ It has been suggested that the sentiments expressed in ‘Pardon, Goddess of the Night’ are excessive, even comic, because Christian characters direct their prayers to Artemis, goddess of Night and protectress of virgins: ‘Such an address by such people at once lends an air of insincerity to the whole’ (Seng 66–7; cf. Duffin 302). Long also doubts Claudio’s sincerity on the grounds that he has someone else (e.g., Balthasar [=Jack Wilson?]) sing the song (130– 4). Yet the producers of ballads often enlisted third parties to perform and disseminate them. Moreover, the preceding scene in which Benedick composes a love ballad to Beatrice strongly suggests, by dramatic parallel, that Claudio is the composer of the funereal song. Finally, ‘Pardon, Goddess of the Night’ contains mythological references and adverbial refrains typical of funereal ballads, and its resulting sentiments are as sincere as conventions permit. Considered as a lyric, Claudio’s song may lack refinement and seem maudlin, but as a ballad it faithfully replicates the content and spirit of this widely accessible form of commemorative verse. With respect to Benedick’s parallel composition in 5.2, I propose that the ‘halting sonnet of his own pure brain, / Fashioned to Beatrice’ (as Claudio terms the discovered sheet of paper at 5.4.87–8) need not necessarily be the familiar fourteen-line form produced by learned poets like Sidney, Spenser, and Wroth, among others. Benedick seems at least as likely to attempt the free-flowing form of the ballad, particularly its

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sub-genre complaint about an unresponsive lover. After all, in As You Like It, Jaques’s dejected lover composes a woeful ‘ballad,’ not a fourteen-line sonnet, to his mistress’s eyebrow (2.7.147–9). But in fact, the terms could be used interchangeably; The Oxford English Dictionary includes a definition of ‘sonnet’ (sb.2) as a short piece of verse of a lyrical or amatory character (and cites as an instance the title of the 1599 collection, Sonnets. To Sundrie Notes of Musicke). The word ‘sonnet’ frequently appears in the titles of broadside ballads, such as in ‘An Excellent Sonnet; or, The Swaine’s Complaint’ (RB 1.337–41), ‘The Lover’s Delight; or, A Pleasant Pastorall Sonnet’ (RB 1.611–16), and ‘A Yong-Man’s Most Earnest Affection to his Sweet-Heart. Exprest in a Dainty Courtly Sonnet’ (RB 3.14–17). That Benedick is composing a ballad is further suggested when he sings lines from William Elderton’s popular 1562 ballad ‘The God of Love’ (5.2.26–9). Playgoers familiar with the text of Elderton’s song (in Duffin 173–5) must have been struck by Benedick’s choice of a ballad detailing a contrite narrator’s wish to patch up quarrels and win his beloved’s hand: ‘That every brawl may turn to bliss / to joy, with all that joyful is; / Do this, my dear, and bind me / for ever and ever your own’ (stanza 1). The invocation of this ballad, and its implied use as a model for Benedick’s own romantic composition, signals to playgoers that he is a genuine convert to love. His sarcasm in the ensuing prose soliloquy stems as much from frustration at his inability to compose a sonnet as from contempt for the genre in general: ‘Leander the good swimmer, Troilus the first employer of panders, and a whole book full of these quondam carpet-mongers whose names yet run smoothly in the even road of a blank verse – why they were never so truly turned over and over as my poor self in love’ (5.2.30–5). Benedick’s mention of blank verse and books notwithstanding, characters from myth and legend were common features in ballads. ‘The Constant Lover’ (RB 1.213–16) is typical in this regard; its narrator vows ‘I, to her, will be like Leander / if Hero-like shee’le prove to me’ (lines 49–50), before boasting that the day he breaks his faith to his love, ‘Penelope shall be unconstant, / and Diana prove unchaste, / Venus to Vulcan shall be constant, / and Mars farre from her shall be plac’t’ (lines 57–60). As Duffin points out, ‘most Elizabethans knew about Dido, Diana, and Daphne through ballads rather than through Virgil and Ovid’ (20). From Benedick’s earlier comments, we may infer that he has learned more about Venus and Cupid from brothel decorations than from a gentleman’s library. Moreover, his rejection of hackneyed endrhymes – ‘I can find out no rhyme to “lady” but “baby” – an innocent

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rhyme; for “scorn” “horn” – a hard rhyme’ (5.2.36–8) – points to their overuse in the doggerel verse of ballad culture rather than in the more refined lines of manuscript sonnets. Where else but in a ballad would one find the following couplet: ‘Let every man who keepes a bride / take heed hee be not hornify’d’?20 Benedick wants to do better, but cannot; for unlike professional ballad writers, who were notoriously prolific, Benedick was not born ‘under a rhyming planet’ (5.2.40). Even so, this limitation does not stop him (or Beatrice, we later discover) from penning a sonnet. The play’s most enthusiastic consumers of ballads are, to their great embarrassment, revealed to have produced dreadful love poetry of their own. Channelling amorous energies into popular poetic forms is not restricted to Benedick and Beatrice. As Claudio’s proxy wooer, the prince prefaces his private conference with Hero during the masked ball with lines that represent either an allusion to an existing ballad stanza or the spontaneous composition of a new one. Equally adept at recognizing cultural cues, Hero joins in: don pedro. My visor is Philemon’s roof. Within the house is Jove. hero. Why, then, your visor should be thatched. don pedro. Speak low if you speak love. (2.1.94–7)

Editorial glosses suggest that these lines, rearranged, would resemble the heptameter couplets of Arthur Golding’s translation of the Metamorphoses (e.g., its line describing Baucis and Philemon’s cottage, ‘The roofe thereof was thatched all with straw and fennish reede’).21 Other than the word ‘thatched,’ however, there is nothing in these lines pointing exclusively to Golding’s bumpy fourteeners. Indeed, left as they are, the alternation of tetrameter and trimeter lines replicates the common ballad stanza form (B. Smith, Acoustic World 174). Considering that this masked-ball scene is punctuated by references to other popular forms of music (e.g., Beatrice’s witticism about jigs and cinquepaces [lines 70–7]) and literature (e.g., her reference to A Hundred Merry Tales [130]), Hero’s and Don Pedro’s extempore rhyme seems a plausible nod to ballad culture, supporting Duffin’s claim that as many playgoers learned myths from ballads as from Ovid. Perhaps even the ‘nothing’ in the play’s title owes something to ballad culture. In addition to familiar explanations that ‘nothing’ capitalizes on a contemporary trend towards ‘throwaway titles’ in comedies (e.g., As

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You Like It), and that it may pun variously on ‘noting’ (i.e., eavesdropping), ‘notes’ (i.e., in music), and ‘nothing’ (a euphemism for female genitalia) (see Zitner 14–15; Humphreys 4–5), I propose that the term also evokes a common subject in broadside ballads. For example, ‘A Song Made of Nothing’ (RB 2.480–5) presents a series of moralizing precepts about amending one’s faults (e.g., gambling, idleness, drinking, cursing) before the sinner comes, literally, to nothing (i.e., death). On the subject of marriage, the song offers such platitudes as ‘He that is maried unto a good wife / Shall live in content all the dayes of his life; / But if man and woman be given to strife, / They’ll fall out for nothing’ (lines 29–32). As commonplace as this may seem, Shakespeare’s comedy likewise portrays a combative relationship in a couple who use this keyword in their declaration of love: benedick. I do love nothing in the world so well as you. Is not that strange? BEATRICE. As strange as the thing I know not. It were as possible for me to say I loved nothing so well as you. But believe me not, and yet I lie not. I confess nothing nor I deny nothing ... (4.1.267–72)

Another ballad, ‘The Praise of Nothing’ (RB 2.340–4), likewise begins with a litany of contemptus mundi platitudes about human mortality and how ‘all must turne to Nothing’ (line 8), but the ballad also touches on more immediate concerns for young Elizabethans: ‘Nothing in all the world we finde / With sorrow more perplexed / Th[a]n he that with a scolding wife / Eternally is vexed’ (lines 17–20). Although life itself is not permanent, marriage represents one state within its short confines that is; and the ballad issues a stern warning to ‘unmarried lads’ to ‘prove’ their partner’s virtue before marrying: ‘For Nothing can againe unwed, / Nor cure a cuckold’s aking head; / Besides, once lost, a maiden-head / Can be recal’d by Nothing’ (lines 41–8). The underlying sentiments of this ballad recur incessantly at the close of Much Ado: in Claudio’s nervous jokes about how his friend ‘thinks upon the savage bull’ (5.4.43–4), in Hero’s insistence that ‘surely as I live, I am a maid’ (line 64), and in Benedick’s late rejoinder that ‘There is no staff more reverend than one tipped with horn’ (lines 123–4). Benedick’s decision to marry is taken in spite of the warnings extended by a culture saturated with anti-feminist and anti-matrimonial stereotypes. ‘Since I do purpose to marry,’ he concludes, ‘I will think nothing to any purpose that the world can say against it.’ (lines 104–6; emphasis added). Ballads said

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much against marriage; but herein lies the difference between Benedick and Claudio: one comes to ignore such warnings, while the other slavishly adheres to their anti-feminist precepts. 3. To ‘Scape a Predestinate Scratched Face’ Because such a large proportion of broadside ballads have been lost, searching for specific allusions can prove something of a mug’s game. Does Benedick’s sarcastic blazon of Hero in the opening scene (‘methinks she’s too low for a high praise, too brown for a fair praise’ [1.1.166–7]) recall a popular ballad of the day, such as ‘The Praise of a Pretty Lasse’ (RB 2.285–89), whose titular beauty is blazoned as ‘not blacke, nor yet is she browne’ and ‘not great, nor yet very small’ (lines 7, 12)? Does Benedick’s obscure jest about Cupid the ‘hare-finder’ and Vulcan the ‘rare carpenter’ allude to a song, now lost, as the bachelor seems eager to lead a singalong: ‘Come, in what key shall a man take you to go in the song?’ (1.1.179–81)? Does Beatrice’s quip about not going mad ’til a hot January’ (1.1.90) allude to a nonsense ballad like ‘Impossibilities’ (RB 1.493–8) in which coaches pull horses, the sun shines at midnight, and ‘little children, yet unborne, / ... say that many weares the horne’ (lines 35–6)? And does Beatrice’s witticism about accosting the Devil ‘like an old cuckold with horns on his head’ only to be sent to heaven to be merry with the bachelors (2.1.42–8) allude to a comic ballad like ‘The Devil and the Scold’ (RB 2.367–71), in which a husband summons the Devil to take his shrewish wife to hell, only to have her returned to him after she slits her captor’s ear with a knife (‘“Here take her!,” quoth the Devill, / “to keep her here be bold; / For hell will not be troubled / with such an earthly scold”’ [lines 128–32])?22 We may never know for sure, but we can say that a vibrant ballad culture informed the play’s thematic preoccupations, characterization, and narrative situations. For example, what Shakespeare intended by having Margaret and Beatrice allude to the ballad ‘Light o’ Love’ (at 3.4.42–6) – and how playgoers may have responded to this allusion – can only be inferred today. But the availability of a full-text version of this ballad (in Duffin 253–5) allows our inferences to probe more deeply than simply to gloss the term ‘light’ as ‘wanton’ or ‘promiscuous’ and leave it at that (Zitner 156 note). It hardly seems coincidental that a ballad in which a bachelor complains of ladies who deceive suitors – ‘With Dian so chaste you seem to compare, / when Helen’s you be, and hang on her train’ –

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should be invoked onstage before a disastrous ceremony in which the groom will accuse his bride of ‘seeming’ to be Diana, but being ‘intemperate’ as sensual Venus (4.1.56–61). Such an allusion is truly mimetic, in that familiarity with the ballad likely generated suspense, even dread, among playgoers watching Hero dress for her wedding. It also creates dramatic irony in that, the more beautiful she appears, the more this will simply confirm the alarmist sentiment found in the ballad: ‘Deceit is not dainty, it comes at each dish, / fraud goes a fishing with friendly looks’ (Duffin 254). The ballad context contributes to Claudio’s characterization by motivating his response and by providing him with a script of misogynous adages from which to draw during his tirade. The ballad warns ‘that poison doth lurk oftentime / in shape of sugar’ (254), a sentiment echoed in Claudio’s metaphor of Hero as a ‘rotten orange,’ and his complaint: ‘O, what authority and show of truth / Can cunning sin cover itself withal!’ (4.1.32–6). His anger is spectacular, but his words are quite conventional. Such intertexts illustrate how Shakespeare’s play is replete with conflicting gender ideologies cribbed from street ballads and how these ideologies influence the different courtship experiences of its two young couples: the cynical merry-war of wits of Benedick and Beatrice, and overwrought tragicomedy of Claudio and Hero. Through these couples, Shakespeare evokes four discernible sub-categories of ballads which I propose and will situate along a spectrum ranging from misogynous contempt of women’s purported defects at one extreme, to impossible idealization of their attributed virtues at the other. CONTEMPT


IDEALIZATION Husband’s complaint about his wife __|

Advice to bachelors to be cautious in their choice |__

Claudio

Wronged virgin funereal ballad __|

Much Ado dramatizes a test case in which Benedick initially espouses the advice featured in the anti-matrimonial warning, while Claudio adheres to the advice to be cautious ballad. In the end, Benedick reconciles himself to imperfections detailed in the husband’s complaint, whereas Claudio persists in an idealization of women found in the wronged virgin funereal ballad.

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Long before the wedding ceremony, Claudio exercises extreme caution in his courtship of Hero, and these careful preparations fuel his anger when he thinks she was unfaithful. In the first scene Benedick mocks his friend’s tentative queries about Hero’s marital, moral, and financial situations (is she a maid? is she modest? an only child?) by quipping: ‘Would you buy her, that you inquire after her?’ (1.1.74–5). Claudio’s caution in this scene could stem from over-exposure to advice to be cautious ballads. In ‘Advice to Batchelors; or, A Caution to be Careful in their Choice’ (RB 3.373–5), young suitors are urged to select a bride who is ‘modest [and] discreet in her ways’ (line 7), who doesn’t ‘thunder’ or brawl’ (line 26), and who is neither a wanton nor a shrew (line 28). Like ‘Light o’ Love’ (discussed above), ‘The Revolted Lover’ (RB 2.404–8) tells the sad tale of a young man duped by Cupid into marrying a woman who seems chaste as Diana, but turns out to be lusty and false. ‘The Merry Carelesse Lover’ (RB 2.105–10) even provides a useful statistic for bachelors seeking a wife: ‘Scarce one in twenty loyall prove’ (line 36). ‘Come, Buy this New Ballad’ (RB 1.116–21) also proffers advice about deceptive appearances: ‘There be many women / that seeme very pure; / A kisse from a stranger / they’l hardly endure. / They are like Lucretia– / modest in show; / I will accuse none, / But I know [what I know]’ (lines 73–80). The worst-case scenario is unwittingly to wed a wanton who has either lost her virginity, or worse; in ‘Joy and Sorrow Mixt Together’ (RB 1.509–14), a groom discovers his bride to be with child by another man: ‘My Wife’s not what I thought she was,– / the more is my grief and my care; / She proves to me but a crackt glasse; / alas! I am catcht in a snare’ (lines 89–92). In the all-or-nothing universe of the advice to be cautious ballads, women are either perfectly virtuous or irrevocably lascivious. Between virgin and whore there is no middle ground – hence the need for caution in discerning which is which: don pedro. Amen, if you love her, for the lady is very well worthy. claudio. You speak this to fetch me in, my lord. don pedro. By my troth, I speak my thought ... That she is worthy, I know. (1.1.213–21)

Claudio never deviates from his learned pattern of sexual paranoia. He loves Hero when she is unassailably virtuous, spurns her at the slightest whiff of suspicion. When in the final scene he agrees to wed her supposed cousin, Hero asserts her new identity by laying to rest the stories

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of a tainted bride: ‘Nothing certainer. / One Hero died defiled, but I do live, / And surely as I live, I am a maid’ (5.4.62–4). Hero is only halfright: her identity is ‘certain,’ but for a husband indoctrinated into the advice to be cautious culture of suspicion, her worth will never be so. When Leonato reassures the groom – ‘She died, my lord, but whiles her slander lived’ (line 66) – onlookers know that her physical death was a fraud; but the death of their relationship was real. Claudio is treated to a fantasy solution to every ballad duped-groom’s predicament: he was caught in an apparent snare, yet miraculously wriggles free with his reputation, and his bride, intact. Only inasmuch as Hero conforms to the high standard of female virtue exemplified in the wronged virgin ballads, as articulated in his idealizing ‘virgin knight’ funereal song (5.3.13), will Claudio experience marriage as anything other than a trap, and his bride as anything other than a rotten orange baiting a poisoned hook. In contrast to Claudio, Benedick starts the play committed to a carefree bachelor lifestyle, one in which he has ‘every moment a new sworn brother’ (1.1.69) and would walk with his fellows ‘ten mile afoot to see a good armour’ (2.3.16–17). The accompanying anti-feminist posturing that becomes his trademark is reminiscent of countless anti-matrimonial warning ballads. For example, just as Benedick vows ‘I will live a bachelor’ in order to ‘scape a predestinate scratched face’ (1.1.237, 130–1), the narrator in ‘The Batchelor’s Triumph; or The Single Man’s Happiness’ (RB 3.427–9) boasts that ‘we will live a single life / ... free from care and strife’ (lines 7–8). The alternative, marriage, is presented as a kind of slavery: ‘what is man confin’d / Unto a woman kind / But a slave, cuckold and drudge’ (lines 1–3). Likewise, Benedick’s reasoning for staying single, ‘Because I will not do [women] the wrong to mistrust any, I will do myself the right to trust none’ (1.1.234–6), seems a logical response to the recommendations contained in this same ballad: ‘We live free from those cares / That a husband still fears’ (lines 64–5). The sentiment is reiterated in ‘Advice to Batchelors; or, The Married Man’s Lamentation’ (RB 3.376–9): ‘You batchelors that single are / may lead a happy life; / For married men are full of care, / and women oft breed strife’ (lines 1– 4). The automatic equations of love with suspicion, and marriage with cuckoldom, are espoused in Benedick’s witticism about the yoke of marriage: ‘if ever the sensible Benedick bear it, pluck off the bull’s horns and set them in my forehead’ (1.1.252–4). Claudio fears being duped into marrying, but Benedick fears marriage itself, for according to the knee-jerk logic of anti-matrimonial warning ballads, to be in love is to live in a state of constant suspicion; to be a husband is to be a cuckold.23

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What has charmed audiences and readers for centuries about Benedick and Beatrice is their stunning about-face, following the bower tricks, in which they repent waging a protracted ‘merry war’ with Cupid and each other. His conversion is remarkable in that, unlike Claudio’s shrill insistence that Hero be irreproachable and their life free from all suspicion, Benedick embraces the imperfections of women and accepts the perils of married life so often featured in ballad culture: ‘Shall quips and sentences and these paper bullets of the brain awe a man from the career of his humour? No. The world must be peopled’ (2.3.237–9). His pun on ‘bullets’ / ‘ballets’ (i.e., ballads) suggests that, in spite of the dire musical warnings about unfaithful brides, marauding seducers, shrewish wives, and the general drudgery of connubial life, he will join the ranks of those who ultimately set aside their fears and enter the fray. For the unhappily married, there existed that halfjoking, half-consolatory ballad sub-genre the husband’s complaint, which – underneath hackneyed jokes about horns and shrews – proffered such practical advice as ‘no spouse is above reproach’ or ‘no relationship is perfect.’ ‘The Catalogue of Contented Cuckolds’ (RB 3.481–3) depicts marriage as a kind of guild in which men admitted to the ‘Brethren of the forked Order’ meet their fellows for regular drinks and support sessions; and the upshot of their meetings is that ‘He’s a fool that will weep for the sins of his wife. / Let us tipple canary, and never complain; / There is better than we that are cuckolds in grain’ (lines 70–2). Likewise, despite its ominous-sounding title, ‘The Lamentation of a New-Married Man’ (RB 2.34–41) is optimistic about the new social status a bachelor acquires in marrying: ‘A wife hath won you credit; / A wife makes you esteem’d; / An honest man, through marriage, / Now are you surely deem’d’ (lines 141–4). This is the sentiment behind Benedick’s closing advice to Don Pedro to get a wife for ‘[t]here is no staff more reverend than one tipped with horn’ (5.4.122–4). Marriage is a gamble, to be sure; but the benefits (e.g., certain status) outweigh the risks (e.g., possible infidelity). Above all, the husband’s complaint ballad preaches tolerance as the key to survival as a couple. Even the much-abused wittol in ‘The Merry Cuckold’ (RB 2 [supplement] 5–7), while a gross caricature of most real-life husbands, nonetheless provides a practical message embraced by Benedick but entirely lost on Claudio: ‘Learn, as I do, to beare with your wiues; / All you that doe so, shall liue merry lives’ (lines 3–4).24 Claudio inhabits a stark ballad landscape peopled by Griselda, Thisbe, and Diana – paragons of inimitable fidelity and virtue; Benedick rather imagines a world populated by Peggy, Nan, and Joan –

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imperfect women, to be sure, but vibrant and somehow more real. Benedick learns from the precepts in ‘Sigh No More, Ladies,’ and from the practice of undoing Don John’s slander, that men are also capable of deception – a signal discovery that alters his view of women, love, and marriage: ‘man is a giddy thing,’ he declares, ‘and this is my conclusion’ (5.4.107–8). 4. ‘Clap [Us] into “Light o’ Love”’ In resolving their differences and agreeing to wed, Benedick and Beatrice recall one of the most enduring character-sets found in ballad culture: the ‘mad couple.’ In the first scene, Leonato scoffs that ‘if they were but a week married they would talk themselves mad’ (2.1.349–50), but as anyone familiar with ‘mad couple’ ballads would have known, such partnerships endure the stresses of marriage with surprising aplomb. In ‘A Mad Kind of Wooing’ (RB 2.121–6), Will and Nan trade barbs worthy of Shakespeare’s couple (Nan mocks Will’s rustic speech, just as Beatrice calls Benedick a dull fool; Will counters that Nan is cruel, just as Benedick complains that Beatrice’s every word stabs). Predictably, however, the ballad couple agrees to wed in the end: ‘Clap hands, be bold, say and hold, / Let us make quick dispatch: / If thou love me as I love thee, / Wee’ll straight make up the match’ (lines 105–8). Likewise, in ‘John and Joan: or, A Mad Couple Well Met’ (RB 1.504–8) a ‘mad phantastick couple’ exhibit an equally combative relationship: ‘They both had imperfections, / which might have causèd strife; / the man would sweare / and domeneere– / so also would his wife’ (lines 21–5). Eventually exhausted by their quarrelling, they too achieve a kind of lasting peace: ‘So, leaving those mad humors / which them before possest, / both man and wife / doe lead a life / in plenty peace and rest’ (lines 121–5). In these ballads, merry wars usually end in a truce; and mad couples live happily ever after.25 In Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love, Alexander Leggatt argues that Claudio and Hero represent the play’s more orthodox couple, one whose narrative antecedents have been traced to a number of different literary sources. Beatrice and Benedick, on the other hand, seem unorthodox and original – that is, until one recognizes the degree to which their own interpersonal difficulties are resolved in a conventional manner (i.e., in marriage) (151–83). In support of his general observation, I propose that the play’s intertextual matrix of ballad references further contributes to Much Ado’s elusive balance of elements which Leggatt terms ‘pure con-

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vention’ and ‘striking naturalism’ (183). Although the comedy depicts upper-class characters in a faraway Italian city-state, the play’s cultural references and sexual mores reflect the ballad culture shared by an urban English audience of diverse social ranks.26 To be sure, the Claudio/Hero plot’s emphasis on dowries and marital fidelity, while noble in origins, also reflected the more mundane concerns of marriageable women and men from a broad spectrum of English society. But what is unusual about the latter couple’s predicament is the groom’s unwillingness to compromise – a position discouraged by more conciliatory ballad forms espoused by Benedick. The highly idealized language of Claudio’s musical tribute to Hero suggests that he never really moves beyond the virgin/whore dichotomy of the advice to be cautious ballads or the unreal standards articulated in his wronged virgin epitaph. He marries ‘another Hero’ at play’s end, not because he has relaxed his standards of womanly perfection, but because she is proven to meet his exacting criteria. The flurry of cuckold jokes in this final scene indicate that the anxieties engendered by ballads are still present, but the play hints that Benedick and Beatrice may weather such storms and enjoy a more harmonious marriage because they understand interpersonal negotiation and the inevitability of spousal imperfection.27 For playgoers in early seventeenth-century England, Much Ado About Nothing featured a rich network of cultural references crucial to a fuller understanding of Shakespeare’s plot, characters, and themes. In his new Arden Critical Companion, Shakespeare and Music, David Lindley points out that ‘references to ballads imply a knowledge shared between audience and stage characters’ (144), bridging the gap between the two worlds. But Lindley then seems to discourage interpretive extrapolation from such ‘intertextual dialogues’ for two reasons: first, ‘the fact that many ballads have been lost means that we cannot be sure whether what appears to be a citation or quotation of a popular song is not in fact an impromptu invention (or, conversely, be confident that we have not missed an allusion altogether),’ and second, ‘the textual and musical malleability of ballads means that it is important not to treat recollections or citations of them in the same way as ... references to stable classical texts’ (145). Methodologically speaking, is the glass half-empty or half-full? To be sure, scores of ballads are lost, surviving texts may be corrupt, and allusions undoubtedly go unnoticed. But I would counter that in light of many surviving ballads such as those surveyed in this paper, vestiges of early playgoers’ ‘shared knowledge’ – however fragmentary or incomplete – can be compiled to partly reconstruct a given

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play’s intertextual medley. If this process is applied to Much Ado, we may better appreciate how ballad references served as mimetic and ethical markers, enabling audiences to anticipate narrative twists and turns and to discern constructive sexual ideologies from destructive ones. A rousing chorus of ‘Light o’ Love’ prompted by Margaret’s invitation ‘Clap’s into “Light o’ love” ... Do you sing it, and I’ll dance it’ (3.4.42–3), whether sung on the spot or during the entr’acte between acts 3 and 4, may have prepared audiences for the shocking turn of events in the church repudiation scene and for the content of Claudio’s brutal invective. W.J. Lawrence points out that short songs were commonly performed during entr’actes at both public and private theatres (81–4),28 and John Stevens adds that audiences would frequently shout out requests to musicians on stage (10–13). Again, Lindley cautions that ‘it is not always explicit whether ballad-fragments are intended to be sung or spoken’ (145), but what if he is asking the wrong question? I think we should concern ourselves with what was sung or spoken (or remembered) during these crucial moments. Likewise, playgoers prompted by Hero’s quip to Beatrice, ‘Do you speak in the sick tune?’ (3.4.40), may have requested an entr’acte performance of the ballad ‘Sick, Sick, and Too, Too Sick’ (in Duffin 366–8), or they may simply have recollected this ballad’s story. Either way, the content of the ballad would have provided them with considerable insight into dramatic events to come. Told from a grieving husband’s perspective, the ballad recounts a sad tale of a lady besieged in a castle during his absence. When during a parley the marauding general offers to spare its inhabitants if the wife agrees to ‘lie in [his] arms,’ she responds by shooting a volley of bullets out the window, killing several soldiers. The narrator’s beloved is then burned to death, along with their children, on this ‘The sickest night that ever I abode’ (refrain). This intertext depicting a paragon of marital fidelity and selfless sacrifice would underscore the gross error of Claudio’s knee-jerk assumptions concerning Hero. ‘Talk with a man out at a window,’ Beatrice bitterly observes; ‘a proper saying!’ (4.1.309–10). Shakespeare’s Hero, too, would sooner shoot than surrender. Participatory moments facilitated by ballad fragments performed, spoken, or simply invoked on stage provided playgoers, actors, and musicians with the pleasure of a shared experience, but I would add that at the same time these moments confronted all involved with their shared complicity in the perpetuation of damaging gender stereotypes. As we have seen, Benedick tries his hand at composition but can find no rhyme for scorn but horn – ‘a hard rhyme ... Very ominous endings’

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(5.2.38–9). By juxtaposing his scurrilous doggerel with Claudio’s grieving ballad on his slandered bride (5.3), the play’s final act presents a kind of symbolic before-and-after, or cause-and-effect; demonstrating that it is not so much the slavish imitation of hackneyed rhymes or unthinking perpetuation of sexist stereotypes in art that proves dangerous as it is the unbending adherence to such misogynous precepts in life. Benedick earlier rejected ‘paper bullets’ (2.3.237–9), and in this final scene he reiterates his position: ‘since I do purpose to marry, I will think nothing to any purpose that the world can say against it’ (5.4.104–6). Claudio, on the other hand, takes what the world says far too seriously. Thus when Benedick calls for music, what more relevant song than a reprise of ‘Light o’ Love’ – a bawdy ballad about sexual promiscuity now heard in the context of renewed trust and forgiveness – to undo past injuries and close the show? ‘Come, come, we are friends,’ invites the groom; ‘Let’s have a dance ere we are married, that we may lighten our own hearts and our wives’ heels’ (5.4.117–19; emphasis added). By preparing bachelors for the worst, the grossly exaggerated narratives in love ballads may have helped newlyweds deal with minor insecurities and more mundane disappointments. Living in a world somewhere in between ballad culture’s extremes of perfect chastity and nightmarish promiscuity, new husbands entered an uncertain state of relative conjugal happiness like that embraced by only one couple dancing on stage at the end of Much Ado but doubtless familiar to many playgoers who clapped or sang along.

NOTES An early version of this paper was presented at the 2001 meeting of the Northeast Modern Language Association in Hartford, CT. I would like to acknowledge financial support provided by the Niagara University Research Council and the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. I would also like to thank Alexander Leggatt for conducting such a delightful seminar on Shakespearean comedy at the University of Toronto in 1992–3, for supervising my PhD dissertation on Shakespearean cuckoldry, and for tirelessly providing professional support and disciplinary inspiration ever since. 1 Niccholes, A Discourse of Marriage and Wiving 4. Despite the universalizing masculine pronoun, much of the advice found in the manual is ‘Pertinent to both Sexes’ (title page).

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2 Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, ed. Sheldon P. Zitner, The Oxford Shakespeare, 1.1.240–4. All citations are taken from this edition and will be noted parenthetically in my text. I have also consulted the notes and editorial apparatus in other editions of Much Ado: A.R. Humphreys’s Arden Shakespeare edition; F.H. Mares’s New Cambridge edition; and Horace Howard Furness’s New Variorum edition. Citations from ballads are taken from The Roxburghe Ballads, ed. William Chappell and Woodfall J. Ebsworth, cited parenthetically as RB followed by volume and page numbers. 3 As early as 1570, commentators divided ballads into three rough categories: (1) news ballads, (2) scandal ballads, and (3) ‘balades of loue’; see the comments of R.B., qtd. in B. Smith, Acoustic World 178–9. The best introduction to ballads remains Rollins, ‘The Black-Letter Broadside Ballad’ 258–339. On their place in popular culture, see Achinstein 311–26; B. Smith, Acoustic World 168–205; and Würzbach. 4 ‘The Virgin’s A, B, C; Or, An Alphabet of Vertuous Admonitions for a Chaste, Modest, and Well-Governed Maid’ (RB 2.651–4). Ballads also presented ladies with advice in narrative form, such as in cautionary tales about abandonment (e.g., ‘The Maiden’s Complaint of her Love’s Inconstancie’ [RB 2.96–100]), biblical exempla of pre-marital chastity (e.g., ‘The Constancy of Susanna’ [RB 1.190–6]), and folk tales illustrating the perils of domestic abuse (e.g., ‘A Most Pleasant Ballad of Patient Grissell’ [RB 2.269–74]). 5 Greene, The Second Part of Conny-Catching (1592), qtd. in Würzbach 259–60. 6 See Zitner’s introduction, 77 and sources cited there. John H. Long argues that the play’s ‘courtly’ and ‘noble’ music creates an atmosphere of ‘stately revelry’ (122). 7 In Rollins, ed., The Pepys Ballads, vol. 1: 97–101, stanza 5. A similar ballad, ‘The Cuckoo of the Times,’ also asserts that the fear of cuckoldry (and, I would add, listening to ballads about cuckoldry) represents a kind of lowest common denominator in English society: ‘Both rich and poor, both high and low, / All sorts the Cuckoo’s note do know, / gentry and commons too’ (RB 3.511–14, lines 37–9). 8 Recent studies which incorporate evidence from ballad culture include Wiltenburg; A. Fletcher; Foyster; Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England; and Clark. 9 For a discussion of the English culture’s ‘ambivalence’ towards ballads as evinced in a wide range of Renaissance plays, see Lindley 142–68. 10 Samples of critical snobbery can be found in Louis B. Wright’s pioneering chapter on ‘Ephemeral Reading,’ which dismisses ballads as ‘unsophisticated,’ ‘trifling,’ ‘naive,’ and ‘dreadful,’ with only ‘the saving grace of brevity’ to redeem them (Middle-Class Culture 418–64; quotations on 418–19).

Bachelors and Ballad Culture in Much Ado About Nothing 53 11 William Baldwin, The Canticles or Balades of Salomon 1549; qtd. in Würzbach 253. On women as a market for ballads, see P. Brown 21–6; and B. Smith, Acoustic World 180–8, 200–1.The form of Bacon’s epitaph recalls the alternating long and short lines of ‘The Forlorne Traveller’ (RB 3.274–9), and his moralizing content recalls ‘The Life of Man’ (RB 1.142–7). 12 Long 11, citing Wright’s 1927 article ‘Extraneous Song in Elizabethan Drama.’ Long states that ‘Sigh No More, Ladies’ ‘serves no dramatic function’ other than to contribute to the humorous spirit of the scene (125). 13 See Seng 58; Humphreys 133 note; Zitner 204. 14 Seng 59; Furness 109 note; Duffin 379. 15 See the entries on the two Wilsons in Campbell (949–50, quotation on 949), Humphreys 133 note; and Furness 109–10 note. 16 Much Ado’s many ballad references are overlooked in Seng 56–69; and Long 120–38. Lindley cites Benedick’s contempt for ballads at 1.1.240–4 (page 143) but does not include Much Ado in his discussion of ‘five plays where their function is particularly significant’ (146ff.). Rochelle Smith’s otherwise fascinating dissertation mentions the play only in the context of its dances (79, 107). 17 To Long, the first is a delicate lyric reminiscent of the lute song ‘Heart’s Ease’ (129), and the latter ‘doleful hymn’ is a ‘complex ayre’ best sung in the style of John Dowland (134–5, 120). 18 For examples of ‘hey nonny’ used as a refrain in bawdy ballads, see ‘The Politick Maid; Or, A Dainty New Ditty,’ in which a drunken knight attempts to seduce a ‘bonny lasse’ when ‘he found she was not coy’ (RB 2.281–4, lines 14–15); and ‘A Proper New Ballad, Shewing a Merrie Iest of One Ieamie of Woodicock Hill,’ in which a man pimps his wife out for five pounds an encounter: ‘That for lucre of money contented was he, / To put up Cuckold: it made me to laugh / so I took up my pen, and wrote hei nonnie nonnie’ (qtd. in Panek 73). 19 Contemporaries excoriated ballad singers for both their loose morals and rude voices (see Rollins, ‘Black-Letter’ 306–10, Würzbach 253–84, and sources cited in both). 20 In ‘Cuckold’s Haven; or, The Marry’d Man’s Miserie,’ RB 1.148–53, lines 5–6. 21 E.g., Zitner 116 note; Humphreys 115 note. For Golding’s line, see Nims 8.805–6. 22 Ernest Kuhl has proposed a ballad subtext excoriating unchastity in Beatrice’s mention of leading apes in hell in this same speech (461–2). 23 English youths were exposed to this negative ballad stereotype from a very

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26

27

28

Philip D. Collington early age; for details, see Collington, ‘“Like One that Fears Robbing,”’ 245–69, esp. 250–8. For a study of the figure of the contented cuckold in ballads and drama, see Panek 66–92. See also the resolution of the ballad ‘Robin and Kate: or, A Bad Husband Converted by a Good Wife’ (RB 2.414–16), in which a husband reassures his jealous wife that his frequent absences are for drinking, not extramarital adventures: ‘A pipe of tobacco, a pot, or a jugg, / These are the sweet honies that I kisse and hugg’ (lines 45–6). By 1640, the crowd-pleasing capacity of its quarrelling ‘mad couple’ had become legendary, prompting one observer to write, ‘let but Beatrice/ And Benedicke be seene, loe in a trice/ The Cockpit, Galleries, Boxes, all are full’ (qtd. in Zitner 58–9). For further comparison of Claudio’s unbending exactitude in relationships and Benedick’s evolving spirit of compromise and imperfection, see Collington, ‘“Stuffed with All Honourable Virtues”’ 281–312. See William Prynne’s complaint in Histriomastix (1633) that ‘obscene lascivious love-songs [are] melodiously chanted out upon the stage between each several action; both to supply that chasme or vacant interim which the tyring-house takes up in changing the actors’ robes ... as likewise to please the itching eares, if not to inflame the outrageous lusts, of lewde spectators’ (qtd. in Lawrence 82).

Shakespeare’s Comedies and American Club Women kat he r i n e w e s t s c he i l

Shakespeare’s comedies have had a long and complex rapport with women readers and writers.1 Indeed, before the end of the nineteenth century several women had already paved the way for specific female interpretations of the comic heroines. Anna Jameson’s Characteristics of Women (1832 and reprinted through the century), Mary Cowden Clarke’s The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines (1850–2), and Helena Faucit Martin’s On Some of Shakespeare’s Female Characters (1880–4) established Shakespeare as acceptable subject matter for women’s scholarly pursuits.2 Shakespeare offered crucial material for intellectual development at a time when women began to organize in groups for study and sociability in small towns and in metropolitan areas across America. In particular, Shakespeare’s comedies opened up topics for discussion under the guise of ‘hero worship’ – the female characters were ripe for debate, and the bawdy humour often present in the comedies allowed women to voice opinions about otherwise taboo topics. Shakespeare’s comic heroines were especially amenable to women club members, but their reactions to these characters and their plays did not always encompass unconditional support. As we shall see, Shakespeare’s comic women served as both role models and as objects of critique for late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American club women. Although others have looked at women’s clubs in general, and at women as readers of Shakespeare, this essay is part of a larger project examining the importance and influence of women’s reading groups of Shakespeare in America. The intersection of club structure with Shakespeare’s comic material resulted in a unique environment for study, exploration, and at times dissent. The evolution of Shakespeare clubs is closely connected with the

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development of clubs in America, particularly for women, and both began to spring up across the country in the second half of the nineteenth century.3 For many American women, the Shakespeare Club was a crucial juncture for intellectual growth and independence.4 Karen J. Blair writes that clubwomen ‘began to acquire the speaking, organizational, and leadership skills that enabled them to develop and express their ideas.’ The clubs ‘gave participants important skills that would enable them to grow out of their self-consciousness and isolation ... to share news and companionship with women like themselves.’ These clubs took on the difficult task of ‘freeing women from inhibitions about speaking publicly’ (66–7). Shakespeare’s plays provided the perfect opportunity for this – members could read parts aloud and then discuss the plays, while remaining within ‘safe’ material. For women unfamiliar with the comedies, or in need of additional assistance, Elizabeth Wormeley Latimer published her Familiar Talks on Some of Shakspeare’s Comedies, designed for the non-specialist reader.5 Already a novelist, translator, and historian, Latimer initially began her volume as a series of ‘Parlor Lectures’ to a women’s group in Baltimore, Maryland, but soon realized its use for a growing audience of women readers of the comedies. Her goal was to ‘do for each play as a whole what Mrs. Jameson and Lady Martin have done for its heroine.’ Latimer sketches out a particular agenda for acceptable feminine discourse on the comedies, leaving ‘all points of what is called Shakspearian Criticism’ to the ‘erudite who write for University men.’ She examined ‘great masses of Shakspearian criticism’ in preparing her volume, including Anna Jameson’s Characteristics of Women. Her aim was to make Shakespearean analysis more accessible for readers without resources, to open the ‘“mighty book” for those who have not time or facilities for searching out what I have done from various sources’ (v–vi). Latimer’s work suggests that there was a female audience for an alternative mode of education, designed specifically for readers other than ‘University men.’ In addition, Latimer seems to address the educational needs and desires of a wider social class of women here, rather than the typical upper-class club members. If we examine how representative clubs actually studied Shakespeare, we find that many women readers subjected the plays to serious analysis and that Shakespeare offered material for intellectual development outside the boundaries of male-centred academia.6 For example, The Locke Richardson Shakespeare Club of Oakland, California, began its first year with a focus on the comedies, reading The Merchant of Ven-

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ice, As You Like It, and The Tempest, though they moved on to a more surprising choice of King John the next year. The club read only one scene per evening, with two goals: ‘a firm basis of knowledge of the play itself in all the features of its embodiment – historical, textual, and linguistic’ and ‘a knowledge of its art, its purpose, and its power.’ The group paused mid-scene for ‘a general interchange of question and answer, comment, criticism, and suggestion, the discussion thus started, often widening in its scope till it touches the deeper questions of soul and art.’ At the end of their study, members had to complete a quiz for ‘reinforcing and strengthening the individual hold upon all the points developed during the study of the play’ (Shakespeariana 4: 177–8). For women like those in Oakland, California, studying Shakespeare’s comic material served as an alternative to the formal educational system of ‘University men,’ a unique outlet for women to develop their ideas, engage in literary analysis, and achieve intellectual goals under the guise of ‘club work.’ Similarly, the women in the Lebanon (Missouri) Shakespeare Club mimicked a college-level course in their treatment of Shakespeare. Originating with a mother and daughter, the club grew to eighteen women, from ages fifteen to sixty, with one woman acting as critic each Saturday afternoon. The group focused on ‘language and sentiment,’ making sure that ‘every reference to mythology, science, botany, and historical events is carefully investigated, not neglecting the geography of all places mentioned’ (Shakespeariana 2: 48–9). This club had ambitious goals for their weekly reading, and it is easy to see how such groups solidified Shakespeare’s position in American cultural life, as a bastion of knowledge and a treasure trove of obscure references waiting for elucidation. The process of reading, researching, and discussing Shakespeare’s comedies among fellow women offered a safe haven for women to carry out studious activities while remaining within acceptable bounds. Some American club women believed that they had a proprietary claim on Shakespeare and felt threatened by the invasion of men into their ‘private space.’ In fact, at times women became protective about their relationship with Shakespeare and even went so far as to prohibit men from even viewing their productions. The Saturday Morning Club, ‘composed of leading society women’ in the Boston area, put on an allfemale production of The Winter’s Tale in Copley Hall, with the caveat ‘No men need apply’ even in the audience, and ‘any presumptuous male who had the temerity to ask for admission was promptly denied’ (The Fortnightly Shakespeare 1: 2).

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Many Shakespeare clubs, however, involved both men and women, and the opportunities for women within these organizations were important in allowing for exchange of ideas and establishing outlets for women to interpret Shakespeare’s comedies. A typical example is the Avon Shakespeare Club of Topeka, Kansas. Founded in 1869, with forty to fifty members of both sexes, they met every other Monday from October to April. Papers presented in 1883 included ‘Sources of the Subjects of the Comedies’ and ‘Shakespeare’s Heroines.’ Evenings were devoted to study of The Taming of the Shrew and The Merchant of Venice, among other plays (Shakespeariana 1: 29). This large group provided occasions for male and female members to hone their public speaking skills around Shakespeare’s comedies, an opportunity especially important for women in the club. The Fortnightly Shakespeare Club of New York City offered similar possibilities for female members. The co-ed club was started in 1874 by Anna Randall-Diehl, who began the club ‘at a time when cynics and pessimists were declaring that the Shakespearean drama had outlived its usefulness and was a thing of the past’ (Hamm 318).7 Randall-Diehl and her cohorts intended the society to be ‘an educational and literary institution for the benefit of its members, as a conservator of interest in the Elizabethan period and its literature and ... as a practical protest against the spirit of the time’ (Hamm 318). In addition to Anna RandallDiehl, the matriarch and founder, women were the majority of contributors to their journal The American Shakespeare Magazine and held most offices in the club. The Fortnightly Shakespeare Club dispels the notion that these clubs were bastions of women who crumpled in the presence of men, and the club provided a space for women’s leadership in intellectual pursuits within a co-ed environment. It is significant that women were leaders and organizers not in a club of only women, but in a club where men were present as well.8 This combination of reading groups and intensive study of Shakespeare often produced curious and surprising results. With the comedies in particular, the bawdy humour allowed women to broach matters of sexuality within safe territory and to venture into otherwise unacceptable topics of conversation in a co-ed environment. Amateur Shakespearean scholar Joseph Crosby describes the sort of exchange that must have frequently occurred when the comedies were analysed in depth. In a series of letters, he relates two anecdotes from meetings of the Shakespeare Club of Zanesville, Ohio:

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Sometimes a funny circumstance occurs. Not long ago, while reading Rich. II (II,I,237), an unmarried lady, of some 30 or 32 summers, and one of the keenest, knowingest, sharpest, of the ‘club,’ was reading the line ‘Bereft and gelded of his patrimony.’ She read it, & then looking me right in the eye, asked, ‘Mr Crosby, what is “gelded”?’ Fortunately I never smiled or showed any embarrassment, but I just quietly said ‘O, it is an old Saxon word, meaning deprived.’ Now, I am well convinced that she, of all others (her name is Miss Emma Allen) knew just as well as I did what gelded meant; for she prides herself on her fine education, and powers of sarcasm & satire in conversation.9

The ladies of Zanesville, Ohio, found an unexpected freedom when discussing Shakespeare’s comedies and enjoyed broaching risqué subjects couched as genuine interpretive questions. Crosby relates a second such incident: Last night a married lady was reading the line in Much Ado (III, iii,146), ‘like the shaven Hercules in the smirched, worm-eaten tapestry, where his codpiece seems as massy as his club.’ She read it, & looked up with – ‘Mr Crosby, what is “his codpiece”? is it his head?’ But I was so busy explaining by a drawing I was trying to make of the watchman’s bills of old times, that I did not hear her, i.e. she thought I did not, and I went on with my picture of the ‘bill,’ talking fast of the poet’s quibbles on these bills and the promissory notes that ‘commodities’ were ‘taken up’ on; & she sensibly forgot to repeat her question.

It is especially important to note here that Crosby had previously given his club explicit instructions to avoid such indelicate topics. He writes: ‘I told the members at the beginning, that I had not enough of expurgated editions to go round; & if I had, they were not expurgated alike; so we use the regular full, best editions; and whenever a reader comes across a word or passage that she or he thinks too broad to be read out loud, they just quietly pass over it. I would not allow any substitution of more modern or presentable words to be read at all. Aut Shakespeare, aut nullus.’ The women in this club were clearly going against club protocol by raising taboo subjects under the guise of ‘interpreting Shakespeare.’ In small-town America, such incidents must have been rare occasions for women to reach beyond the bounds of acceptable conversation while remaining within the ‘safety net’ of studying Shakespeare.

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Many clubs required members to be familiar with all of the words, phrases, and meanings in Shakespeare, so explications of bawdy passages were bound to have occurred more often than they are formally documented. For example, a typical club such as the Shakespeare Club of West Philadelphia must have had such occasions. The twenty-three ladies met each week for two hours, except during Christmas and the summer months. A ‘Critic’ was appointed for each play, and women were assigned parts to read. The club even had a library of books for women to consult when preparing their material. Their analysis was demanding: ‘At the end of each scene, the Critic takes charge, requiring of each lady explanation of any obscure passages, mythological or historical allusions occurring in her part, and in the event of her failure to do so, must be prepared with such explanation herself’ (Shakespeariana 3: 367). Because they were explicating passages from Shakespeare, these clubs could safely venture into discussion of a ‘codpiece’ or other similarly risqué topics. Understandably, few of these discussions have survived in official club records, but any group who subjected Shakespeare’s plays to such intense linguistic scrutiny must have entertained discussions similar to the ones Joseph Crosby records in his private letters. Just as the bawdy passages in the comedies offered unique material for women to study and explicate, so did Shakespeare’s comic heroines. In an 1884 essay in The Manhattan magazine, Josephine Heard Cutter, the founder of the Worcester Shakespeare Club, argued that ‘women in Shakespeare’s plays were the noteworthy characters; they provided the evidence that Shakespeare saw and admired the searching and subtle mental powers of women. These were the characters who could inspire women in the United States to cope with masculine minds, to dare to seek the vote, and even to aspire to the presidency itself’ (Heventhal 6). Women club members like Cutter were often inspired to articulate their support for Shakespeare’s women, or in turn to voice their dissatisfaction with the plight of women in the comedies. As we shall see, such discussions often led to debate about the status of contemporary women and their proper place in society. Adulation of Shakespeare’s heroines often began at a young age. The ‘Shakespeare’s Amateurs’ Club of New York recognized the importance of Shakespeare’s heroines as role models for young women. Organized in 1889, this group of twelve-year-olds began by reading Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare. They also consulted ‘essays on the plays themselves, their individual merits, critical studies of the characters, sketches of the

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places in which the scenes are laid, and of the times which they delineate.’ The ‘character test’ encompassed another club activity. In this exercise, ‘the name of a character from Shakespeare was given to each girl, and she was required to tell in what play it was found’ (Croly 913). These women readers were rewarded for their ability to recognize Shakespeare’s heroines as appropriate material for women to commit to memory. Perhaps no character or situation in the comedies rivals that of Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew for stirring emotions and eliciting responses from women. The first issue of the Fortnightly Shakespeare magazine addresses this very subject, and the variety of reactions gives us a cross-section of possible responses to this play (2–3). Petruchio was extolled by women such as Mrs C.B. Bishop, who submitted a poem in his honour, praising his ‘love’ and ‘wisdom’ in taming Katherina, and recommending that his tactics ‘Might be happily copied / By husbands to-day.’ Others added their support to Petruchio; Mary C. Morford viewed the play as ‘the old, old story of the redeeming influence of love.’ In the course of the play, Kate ‘learned what love means, notwithstanding all of Petruchio’s mad-cap tricks and ways, and gradually she yielded to the divine passion. She was his wife, the magnetism of his personal presence began to work its charms, she began to think of some one else and their will instead of her own.’ In contrast, other women in the journal resisted this interpretation in favour of defending Kate. Nettie Arthur Brown described her as ‘a Shakespearian prophecy of the “new woman,” irresistible, irrepressible, and not too easily tamed.’ After Kate is tamed, she becomes ‘so uninteresting that if the twentieth century girl should become so insipid, there would be many a Petruchio investing his substance in horsewhips, for the purpose of making her more spirited.’ Charlotte J. Bell’s essay ‘Shakespeare’s Women’ proclaims a similar dissatisfaction with Kate: ‘Did the woman ever live who would have yielded to her husband thus, unless he was a madman and she was obliged to humor him?’ Bell claims to have ‘heard ladies say that they considered it an insult to be invited to see the performance of this play’ (The Fortnightly Shakespeare 1: 2–3). For women readers within the bounds of a club journal, Shakespeare’s Kate provided an acceptable outlet for voicing concerns about women’s place in marriage and the relationship between husband and wife. The Taming of the Shrew also seemed to be of particular interest for club performances. In fact, The Fortnightly Shakespeare Club chose this play for one of their annual performances. An account in their journal reports

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that ‘“The Taming of the Shrew” was recently acted by members of the Fortnightly Shakespeare Club, at Maspeth, Long Island, for the benefit of the Home for Blind Women. The representation took place on the beautiful grounds of the “home,” where the smell of clover had not quite died out, and the breath of the honeysuckle mingled with the odor of grapes and other ripening fruits.’ The irony of the play choice and setting seems lost on the writer describing the performance (The Fortnightly Shakespeare 1: 1). Club president Anna Randall-Diehl’s husband Robert played Petruchio in the production; one wonders what sort of exchange occurred between the aggressive, independent-minded Diehl (president of her club, editor of her journal, public speaker, and advocate for women’s rights) and her husband (playing a shrew-taming character). Just as Kate in The Taming of the Shrew elicited praise and condemnation, so did Portia from The Merchant of Venice. Shakespeare’s famous heroine was often lauded as an example for progressive nineteenthcentury women.10 The Portia Reading Group of Brooklyn, founded in 1879, clearly voiced their support for this character. The club was limited to fifteen women, with meetings every two weeks from October to June held at members’ houses. Each woman wrote an essay on one of Shakespeare’s comedies, and meetings entailed reading these essays, discussing the play, and reading selections from it (The Fortnightly Shakespeare 1: 1.) For this group of women, Shakespeare’s comedies were the obvious study material to meet their needs, and their choice of Portia as their titular model signals her importance for their liberal agenda. Portia also served as the inspiration for a paper read in 1890 at the board meeting of the State Federation of Literary Clubs by Mrs Lauch Maclaurin, a member of the Shakespeare Club of Dallas.11 Maclaurin entitled her talk ‘The Woman Whom Shakespeare Did not Contemplate,’ and she uses Portia as an example of Shakespeare’s neglect of businesswomen in his plays. Maclaurin criticizes Portia for not earning the money which attracted her suitors, for inheriting Belmont from her father and not purchasing it herself, and for not being independent in her choice of a husband. Criticism of Shakespeare’s female character thus leads to Maclaurin’s discussion of the virtues of a businesswoman: practicality, thoroughness, common sense, and sagacity. Maclaurin laments the position of Shakespeare’s comic heroines: ‘Alas, poor girls! There was no business for them but love-making, and no bargain but the “world without end” bargain’ (The American Shakespeare Magazine 3: 334). For Maclaurin and her audience, Portia is admirable because she is ‘a beautiful, clever, kind lady of quality,’ but she lacks the progressive

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qualities of the businesswoman. Here, Shakespeare’s comic heroine provides an opportunity for criticism and articulation of an alternative for women outside the domestic sphere, couched within the confines of ‘Shakespeare criticism.’ Shakespeare’s comic heroines could also serve more underhanded agendas. In a lecture given before the Twentieth-Century Woman’s Club, Priscilla Leonard seems to challenge the adulation of Shakespeare’s women in her talk ‘The Mistaken Vocation of Shakespeare’s Heroines.’ She introduces her subject as ‘one which women alone can fully appreciate’ and clearly articulates her position as a ‘loud and convincing protest from the progressive Womanhood of this new era against Shakespeare’s attitude with respect to his heroines.’ Leonard then accuses Shakespeare of ‘criminal injustice in placing his heroines in every play at a disadvantage.’ She aims to prove that ‘the whole structure of Shakespeare’s dramas rests upon the disfranchisement [sic] of those heroines whom he is falsely supposed to idealize.’ After describing the unfavourable situations for Shakespeare’s heroines, Leonard urges her audience to see Shakespeare as ‘well-meaning, but inadequate – blind to the true powers of Woman and the illimitable wideness of her sphere.’ Leonard recounts that ‘here the lecture concluded amid continued feminine applause, and cries of “Down with Shakespeare!”’ (The American Shakespeare Magazine 3: 369–72). This incident becomes more complex when we consider that Priscilla Leonard was a pseudonym for Emily Bissell, a prominent Delaware anti-suffragette figure (who incidentally started the practice of Christmas Seals in America). Her antiShakespearean rhetoric was actually a pose for her anti-suffragette views; Bissell constructs a fake denouncement of Shakespeare to encourage her audience to defend Shakespeare, and to endorse a more conservative view of women.12 In the long history of women’s reactions to Shakespeare’s comedies, we can trace the development of a discourse of engagement, a meeting of the minds so to speak. For women in Shakespeare reading groups, the comedies in particular provided a safe space for female interpretation. Whether they held up Kate, Portia, and Beatrice for emulation or critique, women club members found much in Shakespeare’s comedies to talk about.

NOTES 1 As Juliet Fleming puts it, ‘women have regularly taken pleasure in, and

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2 3

4 5

6 7 8

9

10

11 12

Katherine West Scheil understood the contemporary material benefits of, the enterprise of arguing the case for women’s special relation to England’s national poet’ (4). See also the collections edited by Marianne Novy. See Fleming for discussion of Clarke’s work in particular. Several historians have charted the rise and progress of women’s clubs. See Gere, Martin, and Blair. Jane Cunningham Croly’s The History of the Woman’s Club Movement in America remains the main source of information on women’s clubs. Gere explores some of the links between these study groups and the professionalization of the study of English (212, 217–19). Latimer’s other works include the novel Our Cousin Veronica: or, Scenes and Adventures over the Blue Ridge (1856), translations from French and Italian, and histories, including France in the Nineteenth Century, England in the Nineteenth Century, Europe in Africa in the Nineteenth Century, Italy in the Nineteenth Century. Gerald Graff discusses the role of campus literary societies in college life in Professing Literature: An Institutional History, 44–51. See also the excellent collection Women Reading Shakespeare 1660–1900: An Anthology of Criticism, ed. Thompson and Roberts, 240. Blair asserts that in clubs, ‘the male presence intimidated women and hampered them from acquiring the public speaking skills they desired’ (69), but this was clearly not the case with this club. 230 b1–3 letter of 8 January 1878. I quote from the collection of Crosby’s letters held by the Folger Shakespeare Library. The following quotations are from this source. Georgiana Ziegler writes: ‘It is surely no accident that Queen Victoria’s reign, 1837–1901, corresponded to a heightened cult of womanhood which revealed itself in a focus on the heroines of that other idol of the period, Shakespeare.’ (11). See also Hankey. The paper was subsequently published in The American Shakespeare Magazine 3 (November 1897): 331–5. Thompson and Roberts point this out in Women Reading Shakespeare, 232.

PART TWO Love in Shakespeare’s Comedies

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‘Five thousand year a boy’: Love as Arrested Development j o h n h . a s ti ng t o n

Towards the end of his book on the comedies Alexander Leggatt, speaking of Twelfth Night, turns to the question of erotic experience in time. He writes of a tension between time the untangler of difficulties, friend of lovers and their meetings, and time the destroyer, of illusions as well as of physical bodies and the sensibilities they have contained (Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love 251–3). Time the destroyer is also, at the other end of each individual lifespan, time the maturer, and modern parents might have particular sympathy with the Shepherd’s complaint in The Winter’s Tale: ‘I would that there were no age between ten and threeand-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest, for there is nothing in between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting –’ (3.3.58–62).1 Love in youth is impulsive and irresponsible. To contemplate the significance of any individual experience within the large sweep of time, even within the relatively brief span of human history, is sobering rather than exhilarating, but an awareness of the movement of time is a thoroughgoing part of Shakespeare’s artistic apprehension of love, as any reading of the Sonnets will confirm. The contemporaneous production of the poems collected in the publication of 1609 with the stage plays written during the preceding fifteen years or so is always worth bearing in mind, conventionally separated as the poems and the plays habitually are, in the organizational divisions of the academy as much as anywhere else. In the Sonnets the mood is frequently elegiac: the present will not endure, physically, sensually, or emotionally, and, beyond genetic inheritance in the beauty of one’s children, the only remedy is the intellectual continuity of the art of language. In comedy too much insistence on memento mori is out of place, save in satire. Age in love loves not to have years told; Falstaff thinks that considerations of heaven are inappropriate in the mouth of his lady

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of the night: ‘Peace, good Doll, do not speak like a death’s-head, do not bid me remember mine end’ (Henry 4 Pt. 2 2.4.233–4). At the very last moments of Twelfth Night the chilling vacancies of time and space are set against the humane necessity to get on with things, to cope with ‘the present time.’ ‘A great while ago the world begun,’ Feste sings, in a verse which might lead on to the world’s imagined end, either in the great doom or the physical changes of the sun; ‘But that’s all one’ follows, as a demotic shrug – ‘What can you do?’ is the contemporary equivalent – ‘our play is done’: we’re only actors, and we’re at your service any time you feel inclined to be entertained. Thoughts of human significance within the flux of time and the universe as far as we are able to understand it can, in certain moods, lead one to inertia; mais il faut cultiver notre jardin. As it’s been put in a comedy more recent than Twelfth Night: ‘Listen, live in the present, what are you worrying about? I mean, don’t forget the earth’s about five thousand million years old, at least. Who can afford to live in the past?’ (Pinter 50). Or the future. Comedy is a world of the present. Yet love does have a beginning, a middle, and an end. The end, in dramatic comedy, is usually marriage, and the middle the comic plot, full of crosses, obstructions, and difficulties in the smooth course of love’s progress.2 Of these, paradoxically, a chief block is love itself, or at least its conventional furniture, accoutrements, emblems, and attitudes. By falling in love with love one may leave behind the everyday human world and its temporality, simultaneously exalted and imprisoned. When Orlando, reacting to the hypothetical world of pretended wooing he has been drawn into in the forest, realizes that he ‘can live no longer by thinking’ (As You Like It 5.2.49), he has reached a maturity that Rosalind sanctions by freeing him from his apprenticeship. ‘Thinking’ suggests that loving from a distance is a world of contemplation, while to engage one’s lover in marriage is to enter the active life, the medieval alternative to a path of withdrawal from the world. The wish for retirement and contemplation is a Shakespearean motif; the troubled English medieval kings dream of it, as does King Lear; the dukes Vincentio and Prospero attempt it, Jaques seeks it. Love’s Labour’s Lost presents us with yet another monarch and his leading nobles giving up the affairs of the world for the life of the mind. Navarre’s ‘academy’ is to be something of a university (complete with a funny pedantic foreigner to entertain the high table), something of a ‘spiritual’ resort for the well-off, and something of a monastery. We never really see it in operation since it collapses in the planning stages. Forced to involve

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himself in the business of state diplomacy and foreign negotiations over territories and debts (the hard world of Hamlet briefly showing itself in this light-hearted play), the king falls in love, as, simultaneously, do all his fellow academicians. The project henceforth transmutes itself, first secretly and then openly, into an academy of love. The general point of the comedy is that the second version of Navarre’s institution is not notably more grounded than the first. Navarre wishes for his court to be ‘Still and contemplative in living art’ (1.1.14), the first word suggesting both permanence and quiet, but the fifth, ‘living,’ that what it produces is to be part of life and to contribute to life. Berowne, the critic, rather sees life itself as enlightenment, and study as barren, particularly when, in grown men involved in the world, ‘now it is too late’ (1.1.108). Study, like any other human activity, has no special status outside time, and the ‘authority’ gained ‘from others’ books’ is merely ‘base’ (1.1.87). True study for young men at the end of their raw youth is to be made in (young) women’s eyes: ‘They are the books, the arts, the academes, / That show, contain, and nourish all the world’ (4.3.326–7). The transformation of the academy, then, is on the one hand a positive exchange of false and dead learning for the true and living, but on the other simply the replacement of one kind of attitudinizing for another, underlined by the cumbersome literary and courtly styles in which the lovemaking is carried on: the lovers remain academic, doing it by the book. If we leave aside the unpretentious Costard, who knows that it is nature that makes men follow women but does nothing so highfalutin as falling in love, the wordily performative Armado is the first to be transformed. In asking for suitable precedents and models of great men who have been in love he seeks to set himself within a pattern of human history: to remove himself from a particular place and time, and universalizes his experience, sharing in a continued, timeless myth of human history. Moth offers him Hercules and Samson, suitably heroic models to flatter the unheroic circumstance of Armado’s infatuation with a down-to-earth country girl. Hercules, as a Worthy, turns up later in the play, represented by Moth himself in a suitably symbolic reduction of the legendary hero. Samson, the biblical strong man, was frequently paired with Hercules in sixteenth-century mythography; one central emblematic point about both of them is that they were fools for love, a point Moth does not labour (Krouse 44–5), but which Armado recognizes when alone, adding a third precedent: ‘Yet was Samson so tempted, and he had an excellent strength; yet was Solomon so seduced,

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and he had a very good wit. Cupid’s butt shaft is too hard for Hercules’ club’ (1.2.167–70). The limitations of Solomon the wise man, still proverbial in Brecht’s lyrics (Brecht, ‘Salomon-Song’ 79–81), offer comfort in suggesting that human nature never changes and even the eminent have their weaknesses. A great while ago the world begun, but the patterns of men’s behaviour remain as they always have been, rather like the moon in Dull’s riddle (see 4.2.34–40). The power of Cupid, acknowledged by Armado, is to reduce the highest achievements of human consciousness to folly: Oh what a scene of foolery have I seen, Of sighs, of groans, of sorrow, and of teen! Oh me, with what strict patience have I sat, To see a king transformèd to a gnat! To see great Hercules whipping a gig, And profound Solomon to tune a jig, And Nestor play at pushpin with the boys, And critic Timon laugh at idle toys! (4.3.159–66)

The final rhyme, reminiscent of the infantile obsessions of twenty-firstcentury manhood, underlines a pattern of temporal and developmental regression in love ruled over by a mythic boy, ‘This wimpled, whining, purblind, wayward boy / This Senior Junior, giant dwarf, Dan Cupid,’ as Berowne characterizes him (3.1.177–8). To match these paradoxes the play’s actual boy, Moth, is one of its sharpest observers and critics, while the adults play games and the play’s schoolmaster is a prolix fool. If Shakespeare’s comedy generally can be said to be about the educative and humanizing power of love, then, the play in which the analogy between loving and schooling is most obviously marked demonstrates that love’s education is a paradoxical, unpredictable, and ramshackle enterprise, producing as much regress as progress, leading away from wisdom at least as much as increasing it. The boy love, playful and wilful, presides over a realm of human experience marked by a constant recurrence of folly. Cupid has been, says Rosaline, ‘five thousand year a boy’ (5.2.11), that is to say, from the beginning of human history as commonly understood in the sixteenth century. Over that time even the greatest men have been reduced to boyishness by love’s power; Armado’s search for precedents is to comfort himself that he is in distinguished company and to share rather complacently in their legendary status. Losing one’s power of rational judgment has a great tradition

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and thus deserves its own kind of honour. Armado’s vanity is a comic version of what T.S. Eliot called the hero cheering himself up,3 regarding one’s own folly in the flattering light of legend and myth, and adding dignity to something less than dignified. The show of the Nine Worthies towards the end of the play demonstrates the gap between aspiration and inadequate reality, model and copy. Although the Worthies were a well-tested theme for entertainments and shows of one kind and another from the later Middle Ages onwards they seem an odd choice to pay courtly honour to a visiting princess. While the traditional Worthies (made up of three classical figures, three Jews, and three Christians) were famed for valour, courage, and wisdom, they include no women, and no famous lovers, with the possible exception of King Arthur, who goes unmentioned in the somewhat revised team fielded by Armado and Holofernes. Hercules is a Shakespearean substitution – infantilized, as I have noted – and the other is Pompey, possibly because Shakespeare was thinking of a conflict with Caesar, rather than Hector, as it turns out, or perhaps just because he liked the comic sound of the name, which he used again in Measure for Measure for mock-heroic comedy. (The Pompey who appears in Antony and Cleopatra is Sextus Pompeius, son of Pompey the Great, Costard’s role.) Like Love’s Labour’s Lost itself, the show of the Nine Worthies is a fractured entertainment. When it is first discussed in 5.1 four parts are cast; as presented, five Worthies are shown, with somewhat different actors from those nominated earlier; only Costard as Pompey completes his speech (and Moth as Hercules his dumb show, to the accompaniment of Holofernes’s verses), since the others succumb to vigorous heckling and interruption from the audience. Costard’s speech is very much what one might have expected from any Elizabethan schoolmaster charged with creating a local show for Queen Elizabeth on progress in the provinces. The Worthies will defer to a fame even greater than their own and transfer their warrior virtues to Gloriana. The presentation of arms – Pompey lays down his sword and shield before the Princess, in tribute and submission – was a feature of the gorgeous Accession Day tilts at Whitehall from at least the early 1580s onwards (Young 128). The awkward lines Costard has learned comically physicalize this ritual presentation of ancient male to modern female virtue: And traveling along this coast, I here am come by chance, And lay my arms before the legs of this sweet lass of France. (5.2.550–1)

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The ‘arms’ joke, inadvertently arising from context, is that cracked by the Gravedigger in Hamlet; but heroes should not remind princesses, especially on public occasions, that they have legs. This may be taken as another of Costard’s little faults – the inoffensive, conventional, and less markedly anatomical word should be ‘feet’ – were it not that the line as a whole bears the stamp of Holofernes’s affecting the letter (see 4.2.55– 61), and when one extracts the alliterating trio – ‘lay,’ ‘legs,’ ‘lass’ – the greasiness becomes even more apparent. The play is full of bad attempts at poetry, in one style and another; the puerility of Costard’s line is also marked by an undertone of rather grubby, schoolboyish obsession with physical sex. The Worthies are both living ghosts (‘When in the world I lived, I was the world’s commander’ [5.2.565]) and too much their present contingent selves – ‘a foolish mild man’ in Nathaniel’s case – and despite Armado’s attempt to remind his irreverent audience of the respect due to symbolic action, the theatre audience does not much feel that the Worthies are being given a harder time than they deserve. When the boundary between past and present collapses, and Pompey/Costard accuses Hector/Armado of impregnating Jaquenetta, the ennobling effect of the legendary past drops away entirely. A more immediate death than that of Hector finally sobers the mood of the play and ushers in new talk about time. In the long fourth and fifth acts of the play particularly the jests and pastimes have unfolded without any compelling pressure or logic. Once the delusion of the men’s academy has been revealed, the sports and entertainments of love might be carried on for as long as the holiday mood might last, ‘As bombast and as lining to the time,’ as the Princess puts it (5.2.777). This time is ended by the news brought by Marcade, and in response to the King’s request that ‘at the latest minute of the hour’ the ladies consent to the lords’ wooing, the famous reply is: A time, methinks, too short To make a world-without-end bargain in. (5.2.785–6)

This adult realism points forward into the indefinite future and to a commitment made before quite another god than the blind bow-boy, whose rule recedes into the indefinite past and is marked by temporal suspension or recession. Breaking with the past, in fact, becomes a central commitment for the male lovers, including the important condition of keeping their oaths in

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the future. Berowne receives the hardest charge, in being ordered to test his wit on the sick and dying; this might seem an inappropriately heavy burden to lay on one of the sharpest judgments of the play, but it is to be curative, if it can rid him of ‘a gibing spirit’ and ‘idle scorns’ (my emphasis). The deferral of the comic marriages is to give time for mourning, contemplation, and sober commitment, to which the conventions of the ‘old play’ – including perhaps those of A Midsummer Night’s Dream – have allowed too little attention.4 ‘Love in idleness’ figures in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: it is one name for the flower Oberon employs for his magical transformation of vision; it has been touched by ‘Cupid’s fiery shaft’ (see 2.1.148–72). The play also features a crucial analysis of love’s childishness, in Helena’s examination of the emblematic significance of Cupid and his attributes: Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind; And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind. Nor hath Love’s mind of any judgement taste; Wings and no eyes figure unheedy haste; And therefore is Love said to be a child, Because in choice he is so oft beguiled. As waggish boys in game themselves forswear, So the boy Love is perjured everywhere. (1.1.234–41)

The Fool in King Lear proclaims that ‘He’s mad that trusts in the tameness of a wolf, a horse’s health, a boy’s love, or a whore’s oath’ (3.6.18– 19). Lucius in Cymbeline, apparently abandoned by his page Fidele, the disguised Imogen, is of the same mind: ‘Briefly die their joys / That place them on the truth of girls and boys’ (5.5.107–8). The boy in Love’s Labour’s Lost is not eroticized, at least by the text, but serves as an acerbic critic of the follies of the adults, a miniature version of love’s whip. In turning herself into a rather older youth, Viola in Twelfth Night attracts attention to her physical presence and her erotic power, as does the disguised Rosalind in As You Like It. Ganymede is deliberately rather more of a ‘waggish boy’ than is Cesario, but in disguising themselves so, the women take on a human shape renowned for fickleness and untrustworthiness. Viola’s initial plan to become ‘an eunuch’ is dropped somewhere between her first scene and her second, in which Orsino describes her, correctly, in terms of the circumstances we know and he does not, as a ‘lad’ who looks and sounds more like a woman than a man. Malvolio’s description is rather more suggestive:

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The metaphors have different force: Malvolio’s analogy to fruition suggests that maturation is under way, but ‘standing water’ speaks of stasis and suspension. As with tidal movement, the still water is bound to be temporary, but since there are two moments at which the tide turns, the odd logic of Malvolio’s figure is that both progress and regress, flow and ebb, are possibilities, forward to manhood or backward to boyhood. As it happens, Viola is capable of neither; only the arrival of her twin brother can allow the expectations of Cesario’s manhood to move forward and allow Viola to retreat from her epicene persona. But insofar as Cesario serves as a screen on which the desires of others are reflected, Malvolio’s description of the exotic youth has considerable point. Viola waits for time to turn the tide, as the water she is standing in gets hotter. Her account of her father’s daughter who loved a man, told to Orsino as an instance of the strength of women’s love (2.4.89–121), is both a ‘blank’ – a history without a history – and a strange confusion of times: told in the past tense about a hypothetical future predicated on present experience. Like ‘Patience on a monument,’ the imagined woman, outside nature, laments for natural loss, outside time, almost like Keats’s lovers on the sculpted urn, though on the brink of death rather than a kiss. Searching for the end of the story, Orsino is given a paradox: Cesario is the only possible daughter of his father, but he does not know if his father’s daughter died of love. Time, for this story, is suspended, even as Malvolio is about to be caught up in time’s whirligig. The most profound effect of Viola’s youthful beauty and force of character is on Olivia, and consequently on the whole pattern of relationships in the comedy. Cesario himself, frozen in false boyhood/manhood as he is, is in fact a blocking character, refusing love and unable to declare it, but he is also a ‘dream’ version of Sebastian, who takes up a cooperative part in Olivia’s affections and allows her to become the active liberator of the play’s puzzles. While Cesario is the man, however, Olivia is in love with a monster, as is Titania in her play. The riddles of love presented to Malvolio and his mistress are untangled by time, and Shakespeare chooses to mark the peak of Olivia’s frustration with the chiming of a clock (3.1.129). The striking of the hour also more or less divides in two the second chief encounter between the two leading female characters. Rebuked by time, she imagines, Olivia dismisses

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Cesario with a return to Malvolio’s initial figures of unripeness and immaturity, abandoning him to time: when wit and youth is come to harvest Your wife is like to reap a proper man. (3.1.132–3)

Yet the present remains more compelling than the future, and the dismissal is cancelled with the imperative monosyllable ‘Stay,’ a word which might be addressed to time as much as to Cesario. There follows one of the densest exchanges of the play, in which the language shifts into a patterned formality which compels close attention both from its speakers and its listeners. It begins with Olivia’s attempt at simplicity and frankness: ‘I prithee, tell me what thou think’st of me,’ only to become entangled in Viola’s distinctions between thinking and being, and Olivia’s futher distinctions about what is and what might be. The repeated rhetorical play of simple pronouns and verbs – ‘I,’ ‘me,’ ‘thou,’ ‘you,’ ‘think’st,’ ‘think,’ ‘are,’ ‘am,’ ‘would,’ ‘were’ – conducted over the course of six stichomythic lines is followed by further rhetorical formality, as the scene plays itself out in rhymed couplets, the artificial, witty medium of the rather earlier comedies, and speech of a deliberately fragile fixity. Viola’s reply to Olivia’s confession of love is, on the one hand, another deferred, paradoxical history (as she is a man): By innocence I swear, and by my youth, I have one heart, one bosom, and one truth, And that no woman has, nor never none Shall mistress be of it save I alone. (3.1.157–60)

On the other hand, as she is a woman, her claim is true in the present and will remain so. Insofar as the Cesario persona does not have one heart and one bosom, but two, however, the indivisible truth of Cesario’s words becomes questionable as his identity becomes trickier. Viola attempts to dispel some of the ambiguity which surrounds her by negative definition, so to speak. The insistent ‘never none’ of her refusal of a woman’s love is followed by an attempt at absolute finality in her role as go-between: And so adieu, good madam. Never more Will I my master’s tears to you deplore. (3.1.161–2)

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Olivia refuses the fatal raven’s word, herself retreating, she says, from the position that her answer to Orsino’s wooing is and always will be negative: ‘Yet come again.’ In comedy refusal of further change cannot take hold in the third act, other than as a gesture likely to be mocked by subsequent events. To use the terms of Malvolio’s initial assessment of Cesario, Viola here attempts to ebb into boyhood, while Olivia awaits the tide to turn in the other direction. Standing water, dramatically speaking, continues. By act 5, caught between the claims of Olivia and Orsino, Cesario must be lying to someone. Olivia revives the language of their exchange in act 3 (‘Be that thou know’st thou art’ [5.1.147]), whereas Orsino places Cesario’s immaturity in a new light and sees his appearance, presciently, as thoroughly false: O thou dissembling cub! What wilt thou be When time hath sowed a grizzle on thy case? Or will not else thy craft so quickly grow That thine own trip shall be thy overthrow? (5.1.162–5)

What ‘he’ will be, still in the future at the end of the play, is Orsino’s mistress, freed from dissembling by Sebastian’s arrival. If ‘overthrow’ has some hint of sexual meaning about it, Orsino is further prescient. In the dramatic present moment, standing between two frustrated lovers at the final crisis of the play, the immature boy, incapable of manhood, acts as an emblem of the impossibilities of desire. We understand why Shakespeare began with the proposed disguise of a eunuch. As the twin brother enters, the various impossible subsequent histories of Cesario, concluding with that quoted immediately above, dissolve, and ‘golden time’ is to begin with Viola’s resumption of her own identity. Shakespeare’s female characters who disguise themselves as boys or men do so in response to some problem or difficulty. For both Julia, in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and Imogen, in Cymbeline, the problems originate with love – not the case with Viola in Twelfth Night or Rosalind in As You Like It. The disguises of Portia and Nerissa in The Merchant of Venice are rather different, in being an independent rather than a compelled enterprise, a problem-solving intervention executed entirely as planned, rather than improvised, as are the open-ended adventures of the other characters. Both Rosalind’s and Viola’s disguises complicate rather than alleviate their circumstances: ‘Alas the day, what shall I do with my doublet and hose?’ (As You Like It 3.2.216–17) is a moment com-

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parable to Viola’s recognition that she has become a ‘poor monster’ (2.2.34). The general point is that however anguished these sentiments may be from the individual character’s perspective (and each is marked with some irony), for the audience they are, and should be, funny. The play has led us into an absurd situation, and the leading characters now confide in us about their preposterous fix. If we couldn’t exactly see it coming we all have some structural expectations about comic complication which are satisfied by the piling up of difficulties; the very structure of jokes depends on seemingly irresolvable paradoxes and puzzles. Jokes also depend on the expectation of resolution: the odd or puzzling premises will be resolved in some clever or unexpected way, and we will be released from our engagement to answer for ourselves, lighter, in both senses. In the theatre we do not expect to intervene but to wait in the expectation that intervention will take place, on our behalf, as it were. Something, at some point, will happen which will change the direction of comic complications and misunderstandings towards explication and resolution. One expectation of cross-dressed disguise is precisely that it will be temporary: it is a secret waiting to be found out. Female Shakespearean characters regard wearing male clothing variously as amusing, daring, and somewhat indecent. Whatever frisson it may have given to English audiences of the late sixteenth century it was also a preposterous joke, an aspect of the ancient carnival motif of the world turned upside down. But discovery is built into the mechanics of any disguise, and Feste hints that he has his suspicions about the exotic youth in 3.1 of Twelfth Night (although he is not so perceptive as to spot the difference in Sebastian). Cesario, an incomplete man, but full of great promise, has a corresponding structural function in the play. The proposition of the ‘dear lad’ involves engagement of expectation and a deferral of the necessary moment of discovery or revelation. Viola’s disguise both changes things and impedes progress; her ‘boyishness’ is a torment to Olivia, while her ‘concealment’ restrains her declaration to Orsino. As a device of comic complication Cesario is both dynamic and static, introducing change but then holding it back. The time between Viola’s change of clothes and persona and her reunion with Sebastian can hardly be described as standing water, but it is an interim in her identity, and in the relationships with those around her, before things can move forward on the basis of true understanding. A test of ‘manliness,’ in fact, provides the fulcrum on which the comic

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balance of the play begins to shift from bafflement to resolution. Its mechanics rely on the confused identity of twins, a device Shakespeare had explored early in his comic writing. The newly arrived Sebastian steps into the situations in which Cesario has become engaged, first invited by Feste to visit Olivia again, and then assaulted by Andrew, who has been convinced that he is dealing with a ‘very dishonest paltry boy,’ as an aftermath of the absurd duel, and, as Sebastian is defending himself, finally swept up by the solicitous Olivia (4.1). The boy has now become the man; his advent, and his role, have been contemplated by Viola in the preceding scene as she tries to make sense of the claims made on her by Antonio, whom she has never seen before: He named Sebastian. I my brother know Yet living in my glass; even such and so In favor was my brother, and he went Still in this fashion, color, ornament, For him I imitate. (3.4.381–5)

The final half-line gives a purpose to Viola’s involvement in Illyria as a man: it has been a performance for and on behalf of her brother. Despite her defensive and guarded attitude to Olivia, she has presented Sebastian with a wife. Twelfth Night ends with the recounting of a kind of male history, lived in the wind and rain rather than golden time, and moving rapidly from boyhood to man’s estate. The play itself slows down this transition and concentrates its attention on the transitional position of youth, between boyhood and manhood, growth and maturity, servant and master, lover and husband, and, as embodied by the puzzling Cesario, between woman and man. Theories of comedy which lay stress on holiday and carnival might claim Cesario as a figure of festive freedom, though Viola’s chief experience in the role is tension and anxiety; circumspection and precision govern her speech and action, and androgyny is not her end. The ‘natural perspective’ created when Cesario and Sebastian, dressed identically, appear on stage together is equally unnatural, and a moment which marks separation as well as reunion; the youth of both figures comes to an end, and the suspended history of Viola resumes, or promises to do so. Unlike Rosalind, Viola is not allowed to free herself from her doublet and hose, and the ghost of Cesario lingers on stage until the general exit. The knavish lad Cupid is an inauspicious sign for mature and con-

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stant love. In Romeo and Juliet Benvolio regards festival Cupids as both old hat and too uncouth for the masked entry his companions plan for the Capulets’ feast: We’ll have no Cupid hoodwinked with a scarf, Bearing a Tartar’s painted bow of lath, Scaring the ladies like a crowkeeper. (1.4.4–6)

Cupid’s presence in Shakespeare’s plays is always reported rather than embodied. Frequently he is treated satirically, as an emblem of love’s attitudinizing: so Mercutio speaks of his influence over Romeo, for example (2.1.10–14). The boy Love may be alluded to more elegantly by simply featuring a boy as presenter of the disguised masquers, as Navarre and his lords attempt to do with Moth in Love’s Labour’s Lost. The boy as an object of love, a player in love’s game, is a further displacement, and sophistication, of an ancient icon. He remains invested with the uncertainties and ambiguities of his original, and as represented by Cesario and Ganymede as thoroughly a theatrical creation as Benvolio’s Cupid, if of far richer theatrical meaning and consequence.

NOTES 1 References to Shakespeare, by act, scene, and line number, are to The Riverside Shakespeare. 2 The exception, in Shakespeare’s comedies, is The Taming of the Shrew, in which the conventions of wooing are bypassed for a preposterous course of wiving. The absurd marriage ceremony occurs slightly past the midpoint of the play. 3 In Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca, first published in 1927, qtd. in Ridler 213–14. 4 The significant textual overlap is made in Berowne’s line ‘Jack hath not Jill’ (5.2.865), which directly echoes, or prefigures, Puck’s ‘Jack shall have Jill’ (A Midsummer Night’s Dream 3.2.461). The uncertainties of dating the composition and performance of either play make it impossible to say with confidence which line is an answer to the other.

Love’s Labour’s Lost and Won davi d bevington

This essay proposes to look at the performance of male anxiety about women in some of Shakespeare’s comedies, and at the male’s unsteady progression from the self-abasements of Love’s Labour’s Lost to the selfassured success of the protagonist of Henry V. The journey is an unsteady one, to be sure, and in good part because early male ‘successes’ like those registered in The Taming of the Shrew and A Midsummer Night’s Dream are achieved at the cost of an unbalanced relationship with the male in a dominating position. Those costs are not explicitly registered when those early successes occur but appear nonetheless to be defects in the overall context of Shakespeare’s ongoing dramatic presentation of courtship. Nor is the end of the journey an entirely reassuring one. The seeming resolution in Henry V is quickly undone by the broaching of newer and ever more agonizing difficulties in All’s Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, and Troilus and Cressida. The overall impression is one of a continuing debate, somewhat in the vein of what G.L. Kittredge labelled the ‘marriage group’ in The Canterbury Tales (185–210). In both Shakespeare and Chaucer, puzzles are more germane to the artist than answers, for both are dramatists. The young men in Love’s Labour’s Lost are as naive about women as they are about their own desires.1 A good production, like that at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater in 2002, can make comic capital out of their lack of self-awareness from the very first scene. Their speeches of protestation, in which they vow to ‘war against [their] own affections / And the huge army of the world’s desires’ (1.1.9–10),2 lose their potential tediousness as soon as Berowne punctures their posturing with his refreshing scepticism. Shakespeare’s artful use of figures of speech turns Berowne’s reply to his comrades into a display of verbal wit well

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suited to his disarming candour. With mocking choric repetition he raises objections to the stipulations that they see no women in all their three years, ‘Which I hope well is not enrollèd there,’ that they survive on a fasting diet, ‘The which I hope is not enrollèd there,’ and that they sleep only three hours a night, ‘Which I hope well is not enrollèd there’ (1.1.38–46). His gymnastic verbal inversions underscore by their ingeniousness what is so absurd in their well-meant but impractical vows: .

And then to sleep but three hours in the night, And not be seen to wink of all the day – When I was wont to think no harm all night, And make a dark night too of half the day. (1.1.42–5)

Berowne’s ironic awareness of the absurd invites the actor to exploit the comic business of signing oaths. Once the others have quickly signed, Berowne plays out the comic tension in the scene by proposing counter-oaths of studying feminine beauty and feasting, by exploring paradoxes of seeking the light of truth only to find the darkness of failing eyesight, and by appearing to be on the verge of leaving, only to take the paper at last. Here, in the Chicago production, Tim Gregory poised his pen to commit the fatal signature only to draw back repeatedly as he read the troublesome articles about not having any connection with woman, prompting him to point out to his companions the unavoidable difficulty of the impending visit of the Princess of France. Only at last did he sign, having made abundantly clear his thesis that the signing was destined to be abrogated by ‘mere necessity’ (1.1.153). Berowne’s signing, then, establishes his intellectual superiority among the young men through his acknowledgment of what they do not yet know about themselves, that they are frail and unselfknowing in matters of courtship. Yet Berowne’s self-awareness does nothing to prevent his own discomfiture. The comedy here follows the pattern of ‘the bigger they are, the harder they fall.’ He is clever enough to outmanoeuvre his comrades in the game of spying on each other’s private confessions of love, coming last in the sequence and very nearly succeeding in shaming them all as perjurors, but of course such hypocrisy deserves its own punishment. His posturing is soon undone by Jaquenetta and Costard’s arrival with a misdirected letter written by Berowne himself to Rosaline. He is publicly shamed, of course, but the experience is also one of relief. Misery loves company; the young men are all comforted in their embarrassment by knowing that they are not alone in suffering

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love’s pangs. They see that they are helpless in the face of erotic necessity: ‘We cannot cross the cause why we were born’ (4.3.214). To be human and male is to be driven by the mating impulse, to be enslaved to the regimen of Dan Cupid, ‘to be a corporal of his field / And wear his colors like a tumbler’s hoop’ (3.1.185–6). Male anxiety takes the form in this play first of the dawning realization that one is destined to worship a fellow-creature who is unworthy of that enslavement – ‘A woman, that is like a German clock, / Still arepairing, ever out of frame, / And never going aright, being a watch, / But being watched that it may still go right’ (3.1.188–91). The fear is that such a woman will need watching lest she wander in search of another mate, and that the watching will be of no avail. She is ‘one that will do the deed / Though Argus were her eunuch and her guard’ (3.1.196–7). The fact that the young women of this play betray no such unfaithful desires merely accentuates the acuteness of male misapprehension. This is the ‘plague / That Cupid will impose’ for men’s neglect of his ‘dreadful little might’ (3.1.199–201). The anxiety also manifests itself in an uncomfortable awakening curiosity about the female body. When Berowne imagines a street paved with men’s eyes on which the women might daintily walk, Dumaine retorts in mock horror, ‘Oh, vile! Then, as she goes, what upward lies / The street should see as she walked overhead’ (4.3.276–7). A voyeuristic longing to gaze upon the concealed feminine anatomy is immediately countered with moral disapproval of such a wish. No image could convey more artfully the vulnerability of the male as a result of his immaturity and lack of selfconfidence. Further unpleasant surprises are in store for the males of this play, not least of all Berowne. Once the relief of confession and the discovery of fellow-suffering have freed them to turn wooers in earnest, they quickly encounter difficulties that their inexperience has left them unable to anticipate. Self-abasement gives way to euphoria, worship of the desired object, and confidence of success. ‘Have at you, then, Affection’s men-at-arms!’ proclaims Berowne. ‘Advance your standards, and upon them, lords’ (4.3.286, 341). Their strategy is to ‘get the sun’ of the young women, that is, gain superior tactical advantage and also beget male heirs (4.3.343). Yet the phallic eagerness of such over-responses positively begs reprisal. The women, far more knowledgeable in the ways of courtship than the young men, are adept at ‘mock for mock’ and ‘sport by sport o’erthrown’ (5.2.140; 153), so that, when the young men come to them disguised as Muscovites, the women are forewarned

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and are thus in a position to exchange love tokens, prodding the young men into swearing perjured oaths to the wrong lady. Berowne sees the cosmic justice of it all: ‘Thus pour the stars down plagues for perjury’ (5.2.395). His saving grace is his belated willingness to learn that he must espouse ‘Honest plain words’ (5.2.749) in place of ‘Three-piled hyperboles’ and ‘maggot ostentation’ (5.2.408, 410) and must acknowledge that the ladies’ beauty ‘Hath much deformed us, fashioning our humors / Even to the opposèd end of our intents,’ making the men appear ‘ridiculous’ and thus without hope unless they can obtain the ladies’ pardon (5.2.753–5). Yet the process of education is left incomplete, as though to underscore how much it is that men have to learn still about themselves and about women. The famous unresolved ending is a theatrical exploration of male indeterminacy. The women have long known who they are; the men still do not. This dramatic portrait of male immaturity is all the more compelling through the play’s use of contrastive portraits. Armado is a comic exaggeration of the young men’s insecurities, as he berates himself for worshiping a dairymaid and conceals his enervation in gestures of bravado. Costard, on the other hand, is as self-assured as one could wish. Never one to be deterred by legalisms, he pursues his amorous desires and is unrepentant when apprehended. ‘Sir, I confess the wench,’ he answers the King’s accusation of his having violated an oath he never endorsed. When confronted with various legal euphemisms for ‘wench,’ such as ‘damsel,’ ‘virgin,’ and ‘maid,’ Costard has a pert answer in each case. ‘I deny her virginity,’ he declares, and then, when the King insists that the evasion of ‘maid’ will not serve his turn, Costard knows what he thinks about that: ‘This maid will serve my turn, sir’ (1.1.275–90). The line invariably gets a laugh in the theatre today, and indeed Costard struts before us as the sublimely confident male. He is no more consciencestricken about his copulating than is Caliban. His self-confidence in the staging of the Nine Worthies is no less endearing. This is not to say that Costard is right and the young men wrong, but rather that the play sets up a series of debates about male anxiety and for the most part finds it very funny. In The Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare obviously takes a different tack in the success story of Petruchio’s wooing of Kate, and yet the play’s exploration of male anxiety suggests a continuity as well. Before Petruchio makes his entrance, the stage is populated with males who are petrified at the prospect of marrying Katharina. ‘She’s too rough for me,’ avers Gremio, deferring in this matter to Hortensio, who is of a

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similar mind. ‘No mates for you,’ he lectures Kate, ‘Unless you were of gentler, milder mold.’ ‘From all such devils, good Lord deliver us!’ Tranio, in an aside to his master Lucentio, concludes that Kate must be ‘stark mad or wonderful forward,’ and indeed Lucentio has eyes only for Bianca (1.1.55–69). Gremio, rather than marry Kate, would prefer ‘to be whipped at the high cross every morning.’ Hortensio readily agrees: ‘Faith, as you say, there’s small choice in rotten apples’ (1.1.133–6). Baptista’s unhappiness about the shrewishness of his elder daughter manifests itself in his determination not to allow Bianca to marry ‘Before I have a husband for the elder’ (1.1.51) and in his sad certainty that no man, not even Petruchio, will in fact have her (2.1.62–3). Petruchio is the seeming opposite to the other potential wooers in his resolution to subdue Kate as his wife, and yet even he subscribes to the agreed-upon view that without a handsome dowry Kate is a downright bad bargain. The male anxiety is of course about shrewishness, that use of the tongue as a weapon no less devouring and threatening than another unmentioned aperture of the female body. ‘Katherine the curst! / A title for a maid of all titles the worst’ (1.2.127–8). Kate is what we today would call a castrating female. A splendid commedia dell’arte production of the play on video by the American Repertory Theatre of San Francisco (1976) makes the point by the repeated male gesture of protecting the private parts from physical assault. The more broad the use of stage gesture and action, the more hilarious can be the sense of courting as a swift game of one-upmanship. Of course the combat can be refined as well; the courtship of Kate by Petruchio can work wonderfully if done as a Noël Coward comedy of manners with suavely dressed combatants sipping martinis. The point is that the successful conquest of Kate by Petruchio is made funny by its having to do battle with the comic stereotype of the shrew and the easily daunted male. Petruchio is ready for anything: Be she as foul as was Florentius’ love, As old as Sibyl, and as curst and shrewd As Socrates’ Xanthippe, or a worse, She moves me not, or not removes, at least, Affection’s edge in me, were she as rough As are the swelling Adriatic seas. (1.2.68–73)

These stereotypes are to be dispelled in the course of the play, to be sure, but they are plentifully displayed in the outset – not just in stereo-

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typical male attitudes but in Kate’s own stage presence in act 1, which seems to confirm all that the men are worried about. An interesting failure in the enacting of Petruchio is that of John Cleese in the BBC televised version of the play (1980).3 Cleese is unsurpassed as a comic actor, but he has developed a certain style of comic bravado that comes with him as the baggage of his theatrical fame. His usual stint, whether in Monty Python skits or in Fawlty Towers, is that of the fussy and self-important male who gets taken apart by an array of women, especially his shrewish wife. Knowing how to fix everything, he strides boldly into one hilarious disaster after another. He might be terrific as Berowne in Love’s Labour’s Lost, but as Petruchio he is in the wrong pew. One can see why he was cast in the part, since his persona is that of the henpecked husband, but in his usual roles he is funny as a dotty failure. In the BBC television production he seems assured as Petruchio that he cannot fail, and we laugh because we know ahead of time that he is about to trip all over his own ungainly legs. This expectation is, however, wrong for Petruchio, since Petruchio knows exactly where he is going and proceeds to act accordingly. Petruchio’s bold success as a wooer is best portrayed, perhaps, as a bit of theatrical derring-do, his answer to a challenge in which Kate is a worthy opponent if only because of her towering reputation as a shrew. The hyperbole of the encounter is anticipated by Petruchio as he pumps himself up for the battle: I tell you, father, I am as peremptory as she is proud-minded; And where two raging fires meet together, They do consume the thing that feeds their fury. Though little fire grows great with little wind, Yet extreme gusts will blow out fire and all. (2.1.130–5)

The elemental character of this analogy indulges delightfully in the mock epic. Petruchio and Kate are like the aspiring elements of fire and air, choleric and volatile, in cosmic conflict like water and earth when the sea pounds at the shore. Their first big encounter is both physical and verbal as they vie with each other in dominating the conversation and in answering quip with quip. Petruchio’s emergence as the winner in this contest is also mock-epic in its studied ironies: ’Twas told me you were rough, and coy, and sullen,

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Petruchio’s outdoing Kate, or at least wearing her down, in the battle of wits is anticipatory of the play’s resolution. He shows her an instructive representation of her shrewishness both in this scene and later at his house, after the marriage, when he throws the food at his servants and scolds a tailor out of the room. He is the teacher, finally, and she accepts his teaching, however willingly or unwillingly or with private reservations. He wins the day, in the play’s terms, because he professes to know more than she about what constitutes domestic contentment and because he makes his case so manfully. Here then is an exact reversal of the comedy in Love’s Labour’s Lost, where the men were all at sea. The Taming of the Shrew gives us plenty of male anxiety about female shrewishness, but it also proposes an antidote that is, in theatrical terms at least, successful. The debate continues in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where contrastive pairs of lovers fill a spectrum of solutions to the war of the sexes (see Garner; Leggatt, English Stage Comedy 87–90). Theseus is the confident male ruler, triumphant in war as in wooing, able indeed to combine these attributes in his subduing of the Amazonian Hippolyta. Like Petruchio, he is magnanimous in victory: Hippolyta, I wooed thee with my sword, And won thy love doing thee injuries; But I will wed thee in another key, With pomp, with triumph, and with reveling. (1.1.16–19)

Like Petruchio, again, Theseus speaks of winning as a way of achieving the woman’s love, not simply her surrender. Whether she sees the matter this way or not is a matter of interpretation, by the reader and onstage (as also with Kate). Increasingly today, the tendency is to see elements of resistance in her lack of eagerness to have the four days pass until the wedding is completed, and in her differing with Theseus in their responses to the lovers’ stories of adventures in the woods: he is sceptical while she is more attuned to a story of transfiguration that ‘More witnesseth than fancy’s images, / And grows to something of great constancy, / But, howsoever, strange and admirable’ (5.1.24–7). Certainly his way of celebrating his victory over her is thoroughly pub-

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lic and ceremonial, in a festival conceived as self-glorification. He seems untouched by the magic of the forest and is sardonic in his view of both poetry and romantic infatuation as species of lunacy. The confident male ruler, then, seems lacking in imagination. It is as though his own elevated status isolates him from the rewards and the perils of euphoria in love. Perhaps we can say the same of Petruchio, that he never experiences the excitement and the agony of falling in love. The four lovers of Midsummer more than make up for that lack in Theseus (or Petruchio). They reject worldly advancement for their passionate loves, elope, pursue one another, radically change affections, find themselves deserted, collapse in self-hatred and self-pity, quarrel in a frenzy of jealousy, and awaken to the morning as though from a dream. Their tribulations differ according to their gender, to be sure. The women are constant in their attachments and victimized by desertion, with the result that they become openly envious of each other and (especially in Helena’s case) prone to feelings of persecution by an imagined conspiracy to humiliate her. They speak longingly of a time when same-sex friendship offered the comforts of a companionship now seemingly lost in the warfare of the mating ritual. The men are more inconstant, like Proteus in The Two Gentlemen of Verona; even if the love-juice is partly to blame, the dramatic presentation is one of unstable affections. When these young men suddenly shift the object of their devotion, they respond grandiloquently by deifying the new loved person and by instantly hating the woman they have loved until this moment. The two men are also physically competitive and even murderous in their intent; Puck’s manipulations are needed to prevent mayhem. They are unwilling to tolerate rivals. Their anxiety as lovers takes the form of possessiveness and fratricidal rivalry. They seem at times more concerned with that rivalry than with the rewards of love itself. Yet in their awakening the four lovers are equalized. Their paranoia seems to them a nightmare, an instructive passage through unhappiness to self-understanding, and especially to an awareness that their feelings of self-pity and internecine rivalry were chimeras of their own imaginations. The men have learned to eschew rivalry and the quest for male domination in the interests of harmonious reconciliation. Helena, who followed Demetrius into the forest as his spaniel, begging to be spurned and struck, now will need to humiliate herself no longer, for Demetrius has awakened from his nightmare to an awareness that his position as male does not entitle him to do any such thing. In the fairy world, we are offered a fantastic reworking of the motif

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of male domination, one in which Oberon teaches Titania a lesson in obedience. Titania is given the chance to defy Oberon in a way that Hippolyta is not, other than in a retrospective vision of her military resistance to Theseus before the play began. Titania gives as good as she gets in her first confrontation with Oberon. When he challenges her with ‘Tarry, rash wanton. Am not I thy lord?’ she has her telling riposte: ‘Then I must be thy lady’ (2.1.63–4). She accuses him of inconstant affections and denies his insinuations that she too has had mortal lovers; ‘These are the forgeries of jealousy’ (2.1.81). Her first phrase for him is ‘jealous Oberon’ (61), as though the two words were inseparable, a term of poetic diction. And indeed he is jealous – not perhaps of her imagined infidelities so much as of her independent spirit that deprives him of his male prerogative. Surely it is for this reason that he insists on taking away from her the changeling boy that she so cherishes. In Titania’s lovely account of that boy’s mother and of the maternal bond between her and Titania at the time of that woman’s pregnancy we see what it is that Oberon finds intolerable: he cannot abide being shut out of a sisterhood among women centred around pregnancy and birth, the elements of human life that he can never know at first hand. His response is to seek to ‘torment’ her for this ‘injury’ (147). Puck devises the means, but the intent of punishment devised as a kind of revenge seems unmistakable. As in the case of Petruchio, the punishment will also have the instructive effect, from the male perspective, of enforcing the presumed benefits of wifely obedience, but the desire to hurt is made more clear in the case of Oberon. Certainly Titania is given no opportunity to complain. When she awakens from her dream and is shown the monstrous creature she has doted upon, her only response is to exclaim, ‘How came these things to pass? / Oh, how mine eyes do loathe his visage now!’ (4.1.77–8). In the theatre today, her first sentence here is seen as a clue to look intently at Puck in recognition of how her humiliation has been engineered and by whom, but she is given ne’er a word of recrimination directed at her husband. The male triumph is complete. At the same time it seems presented as an unfair victory achieved by cunning at the expense of an innocent, and prompted by male anxiety about the woman’s sphere where men may not enter. The pairing and contrasting of the two sets of lovers in Much Ado About Nothing seems as though intended as a replay of earlier courtships, especially that of Petruchio and Kate.4 Benedick and Beatrice are like their earlier counterparts in being the wittiest young persons on the

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scene and thus destined for each other, and yet at odds with each other to such an extent that the obstacles seem initially insuperable. Yet the resemblances point chiefly to differences, for Beatrice and Benedick achieve a kind of equality that is lacking in the earlier courtship. Benedick has to earn Beatrice’s affection by agreeing to do what she demands of him – ‘kill Claudio’ – even if the machinery of comic plotting makes the fulfillment of that unpleasant task finally unnecessary.5 Benedick has much to learn about himself in the world of courtship. He has to unlearn his devotion to bachelorhood and submit himself to the good-natured jeering of his compatriots, who are not about to let him forget that he has set himself up to be ‘a professed tyrant to their sex’ (1.1.161–2). He must hear himself censured for hard-heartedness and take that advice to his bosom. ‘Happy are they that hear their detractions and can put them to mending,’ he declares in soliloquy at the end of the overhearing scene in which his friends have pictured him as scornful and of ‘contemptible spirit’ toward Beatrice (2.3.182, 221–6). The hilarity with which he is tricked in this scene does nothing to lessen the deep truth of his self-discovery, for he has indeed come to realize that his defensive anxiety about Beatrice has denied him the happiness that the best part of him longs for. The very qualities that he would need to find in a wife – wealth, intelligence, chaste virtuousness, mildness of temper, good discourse, musical accomplishment – all fit Beatrice to the last detail except for the seeming difficulty of her shrewish temper, and here Benedick is now man enough to admit that the duelling of wits in which they have long engaged is at least as much his fault as hers. Benedick wins Beatrice not by masculine duress but by his openness to criticism and self-examination. In that he is profoundly unlike Petruchio or Oberon. Beatrice traverses a similar journey of enlightenment. She enjoys her triumphs over Benedick in the masked ball of act 2, all the more so because she beats Benedick at his own game: seeing through his disguise and his pretense to be an unknown dancing partner who can tell Beatrice that she is famed for being disdainful and having her wit ‘out of the Hundred Merry Tales’ (2.1.124), Beatrice retaliates by telling the supposed stranger what she ‘really’ thinks of Benedick as ‘the Prince’s jester, a very dull fool’ (131). She has pierced his disguise; he has been taken in by her seeming plainness and is truly hurt, since he now knows, or thinks he knows, what her candid opinion of him is. Yet the victory is a hollow one for her, in that she has wounded the man for whom she has a genuine admiration and even fondness if only she

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could trust in his affection for her. The relief of her confessional, once she is tricked into believing that Benedick is likely to ‘Consume away in sighs’ and ‘waste inwardly’ for unrequited love of her, is heartfelt: What fire is in mine ears? Can this be true? Stand I condemned for pride and scorn so much? Contempt, farewell, and maiden pride, adieu! No glory lives behind the back of such. (3.1.107–10)

Beatrice thereby becomes the perfect partner for Benedick, and on an equal footing, for both are duped and both are willing to admit their mistakes. Their love is based on generosity and mutual self-candour. Conversely, Claudio is poor at learning what a man has to learn about himself and about women. Whereas Benedick endures the ribbing of his friends as a necessary purgatory, Claudio is altogether too sensitive to the opinions of his comrades. He is in such a need to know whether Benedick approves of Hero as a suitable young lady that his questions betray a lack of confidence in his own judgment. ‘Is she not a modest young lady?’ he asks. ‘I pray thee, tell me truly how thou lik’st her.’ Benedick’s comic exasperation at these interrogations suggests his own impatience with Claudio’s acquisitive approach to courtship. ‘Would you buy her, that you inquire after her?’ he asks (1.1.158–73). When Claudio approaches Don Pedro with a request for help in the wooing, the young man similarly betrays an unselfexamined attitude. He is concerned with Hero’s chaste reputation, her family connections, and her prospects of a good dowry. ‘Hath Leonato any son, my lord?’ he asks his superior officer, and Don Pedro at once sees the point: ‘No child but Hero; she’s his only heir’ (282–3). Claudio is of course also carried away by the sensations of falling in love, but as he describes those sensations they are too routinely stereotypical to represent any serious self-reflection. Having gone to war and earned his spurs, he now perceives that the time has arrived for him to yoke himself in the blissful state of matrimony: ‘war thoughts / Have left their places vacant,’ and ‘in their rooms / Come thronging soft and delicate desires, / All prompting me how fair young Hero is’ (289–93). Claudio knows that he is an eligible bachelor and sees that his place in the scheme of things now calls on him to marry. He measures Hero’s suitability only by externals, since he has scarcely spoken to her. It is this superficial acquaintance, together with Claudio’s frail sense of his own manhood, that makes him so vulnerable to Don John’s insin-

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uations. The deception occurs twice and is so repetitive in its pattern that we see Claudio’s slowness in learning. He immediately accepts the proposition during the masked ball that Don Pedro is wooing Hero for himself rather than for Claudio, as he agreed to do. ‘The Prince woos for himself. / Friendship is constant in all other things / Save in the office and affairs of love.’ Beauty is ‘a witch / Against whose charms faith melteth into blood’ (2.1.168–74). His thinking is a congeries of platitudes: all’s fair in love and war, cherchez la femme, cosi fan tutte. He makes no attempt to test the fairness of the accusation because something within him tells him immediately that the truth is plain for him to see: he has been rejected by a false friend and a false beauty. This deep male anxiety is not easily cured and leads him once again into accepting a more serious charge, that Hero is sleeping with another man on the very night before her intended wedding. The fact that Don Pedro also accepts the accusation of Don John, based as it is on the seeming evidence of witnessing from afar an encounter at Hero’s window, merely underscores our uncomfortable awareness that male anxiety about women is virtually universal. It infects Hero’s father as well; Leonato at once believes the public indictment of her to be true (Neely 42–3). Men are shown to be vulnerable to such self-wounding beliefs because the accusation of female infidelity hits at the men themselves. It seems to show them to be incapable of controlling and satisfying a woman, and it results in the worst sort of humiliation: that of being scorned and pitied by one’s friends as a cuckold, that most terrifying of labels. All the more admirable, then, is Benedick’s self-education, for it obliges him to take sides in the public humiliation of Hero against the accusations of his best friend and his commanding officer. Benedick’s response on this horrendous occasion is cautious, sceptical; he is not sure what he should think. Yet he sees that there is something fishy about the whole thing and intelligently suspects that Don John is at the bottom of it all. He is of course reluctant to challenge Claudio to a duel at the behest of Beatrice and certainly does not want to do so as the infatuated male servant of a domineering mistress; at the same time he sees that there is a real problem and that Beatrice is right to put him to the test. ‘Manhood’ is thus redefined in a way that casts off the stereotypes of which Claudio is so lamentably guilty. In As You Like It and Twelfth Night, Shakespeare lays stress on the role of the heroine in educating the young hero, as he had done also in Romeo and Juliet and The Merchant of Venice. The young men have much to learn.

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Orlando’s lack of a proper education, which he deplores and blames on his churlish older brother, takes the particular form of his not knowing how to woo a lady. He reproaches himself for being so tongue-tied, like a ‘quintain’ or a ‘mere lifeless block’ (1.2.241), when Rosalind compliments him on his winning at wrestling in such a coming-on disposition that he sees that he has been invited to make the next move. His discomfiture and inexperience turn him sonneteer in the forest of Arden, where the apparent absence of Rosalind leaves him free to rhapsodize in trite Petrarchan metaphors. His verses, hung and carved on every tree, get from Touchstone the satiric send-up that they deserve. His fantasies are like those of Romeo, high above the fruit-tree tops and needing to be brought back to earth. Rosalind’s adopted guise of Ganymede offers her the means of intervening, of reminding Orlando that in all human history ‘there was not any man died in his own person, videlicet, in a love cause.’ ‘Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love’ (4.1.91–102). Rosalind wants Orlando to know that real women can be jealous, shrewish, gossipy, giddy in desires, and contrary in mood, since marriage has to be based on reality and not fantasy. She does not mention the notion that women might be unfaithful as well, and she herself is not shrewish. She does talk of wives who may prove to be ‘more clamorous than a parrot against rain’ (144), but her own pert volubility does not take the turn of scolding. Indeed, in the last of Shakespeare’s romantic comedies of the 1590s, the dramatist chooses to step away from the confrontations of men and women that have marked his earlier comedies. Rosalind is everything a man like Orlando might desire to have and to cherish. She is Beatrice in wit without the sharp edges. She plays games of pretense with Orlando, and delays revealing her identity when that revelation might well end the story, but she seems to do so by way of gentle and loving instruction. She never torments Orlando the way that the Princess and her ladies do the men in Love’s Labour’s Lost, or that Phoebe does to Silvius in As You Like It; indeed, Rosalind has very sharp words for Phoebe’s posturing as the unattainable scornful beauty. Rosalind is no Katharina, constructing an armoury around herself of defensive scorn and hostility. Shakespeare’s approach to male anxiety in these late and ‘mature’ comedies is to idealize the young heroine and thereby minimize the causes of anxiety that have driven Claudio into a stereotypical and nearly disastrous male response. Orlando need not face the macho pressure of male friends that prompts Romeo to bring down tragedy

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upon himself and Juliet. Orlando has it easy. He need only submit himself to the witty counselling of Ganymede – that is, to a person who appears to be a young male, a companion who is in no way challenging to Orlando’s sense of maleness. Only in the play’s final moments does Orlando learn that his teacher has been his Rosalind – a Rosalind who is now willing, having made her point, to submit herself dutifully to her husband as did Portia in The Merchant of Venice. A consequence of Shakespeare’s idealizing the heroines of these ‘mature’ comedies is that the blame for inadequacy and the need for self-improvement are thereby highlighted in the young men. They are given no good reason for being as immature as they are. What is it that prompts Orsino in Twelfth Night to be so self-infatuated, so seemingly content with his own misery as the perennially unfulfilled wooer? Orsino is not even a particularly interesting or dominant character in this play; his role is topped in terms of amount of time onstage by Viola, Malvolio, Sir Toby, Sir Andrew, Feste, and Olivia, despite Orsino’s lengthy presence onstage in act 5, when he has relatively little to say much of the time.6 He is, moreover, seriously in need of instruction about wooing. He is getting nowhere with the Countess Olivia, and yet he regards himself as wise enough about men and women to offer a lecture on the subject to Viola in her disguise as Cesario. His advice on the subject is predictably unselfaware and contradictory. On the one hand he concedes to Cesario that men are emotionally unstable compared with women: Our fancies are more giddy and unfirm, More longing, wavering, sooner lost and worn, Than women’s are. (2.4.33–5)

At the same time he assures her that men are the stronger sex, at least in their capacity for depth and intensity of feeling: There is no woman’s sides Can bide the beating of so strong a passion As love doth give my heart; no woman’s heart So big, to hold so much. They lack retention. Alas, their love may be called appetite, No motion of the liver, but the palate, That suffer surfeit, cloyment, and revolt. (2.4.93–9)

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Viola listens solemnly, and does not disagree, but the very steadiness of her presence gives the lie to Orsino’s defamation of women. Orsino’s lack of self-awareness is perhaps most keenly displayed in the final act, when he thinks he learns that young Cesario has twotimed him by marrying the Countess Olivia. What is it that makes him so angry? To him, it appears to be the betrayal and hence the loss to him of Olivia, whom he has courted for so long even if at long distance. But is it not the loss of Cesario that hurts him more personally and deeply? Current stage productions sometimes see him as torn between Cesario and Olivia, as though sexual indeterminacy left him with an interesting choice. In either case, the desertion proves illusory, and Orsino presumably achieves an emotional wholeness at the very end, even if we perceive that it comes about more through stage trickery than through increased wisdom on his part. Yet he does also learn through it all, by means of Viola’s patience. She plays to him the part of a young male friend in whom he can trustingly confide, and allows that relationship to ripen. When the time is right, she reveals her sexual identity. Presumably that revelation would have been premature if introduced at an earlier stage; Orsino, for all his preening himself on his wisdom in matters of courtship, appears to be daunted by sexual difference. Only when he is led by imperceptible degrees through an apparent same-sex friendship into love and emotional dependency, and only when that loving friendship has been tested by the appearance of disloyalty, is Orsino ready for heterosexual completeness. The hesitant wooings of Orlando and Orsino offer an instructive contrast to that of King Henry V when he enters on the great reward of his victory at Agincourt by courting Katharine of France. Henry V is more or less contemporary with As You Like It and Twelfth Night; all were composed at the end of the 1590s and the first years of the next century, and together they represent the culmination of Shakespeare’s decadelong exploration of the concurrent genres of romantic comedy and English history play. Katharine (of Valois) is the given historical name of his heroine in Henry V; it is also a name to conjure with, recalling as it does Katharine the curst in The Taming of the Shrew and Hotspur’s spirited wife in 1 Henry IV (a name that was not historical; Hotspur’s wife was named Elizabeth, and nowhere does Holinshed show the least interest in her as a character). Henry repeatedly addresses his wife-tobe as ‘Kate’ in their wooing scene, practically from the start; he refers to her as ‘Katharine’ only thrice before changing his style (5.2.95–104) and returns to ‘Katharine’ thereafter only rarely, as in his grandiloquent

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attempt at French (‘la plus belle Katharine du monde,’ [217; see also 115 and 246]). Presumably this form of address marks his easy informality, while also recalling earlier Kates in Shakespearean comedy. The courtship of Henry and Kate, albeit in an English history play rather than a romantic comedy, serves as a kind of culmination of the dramatic motif we have been discussing. Kate is spirited, realistic, cautious, interested. She has been learning English; Shakespeare never spells out the reasons for her doing so, allowing us instead to infer that this young woman sees the writing on the wall and wishes to be prepared. Her English is, as Henry says, ‘broken,’ and yet at least as good as Henry’s halting French. Her role, as Shakespeare writes it for her, affords rich opportunities for an actress to see wariness and even resistance at first. Emma Thompson, playing opposite Kenneth Branagh in Branagh’s 1989 film, displays convincing touches of a modern woman who, at first, certainly needs to be convinced that she can live with Henry; he is on his mettle and needs to be truly charming. Henry of course dominates the discourse, but Kate’s spare answers are full of inner strength. ‘Is it possible dat I sould love de ennemi of France?’ she inquires (5.2.170–1). When asked if she can love Henry, her reply is that ‘I cannot tell’ (196). To his further proposal that they come together to produce a boy-soldier, her response is appropriately guarded: ‘I do not know dat’ (212). She fends off his stab at French suavity with ‘Your Majestee ’ave fausse French enough to deceive de most sage demoiselle dat is en France’ (220). Her consent to his proposal is decorous to the point of self-erasure: ‘Dat is as it shall please de roi mon père’ (248). Kate is something of a mystery; we cannot be sure as to whether she is won by Henry or simply bows to the inevitable. Only when Henry proposes to kiss her does she become suddenly voluble, retreating into French as the language in which she can best express her truest feelings. A young princess may be obliged to accept the political necessity of reconciling two warring kingdoms by means of a state marriage, but kissing before marriage? One must draw the line somewhere. Of course Kate is forced to retreat on this front as well, but at least she has put up a determined show of resistance. A crucial difference between Henry as assured male wooer and the line he inherits from Berowne, Petruchio, Theseus, Oberon, Bassanio, Romeo, Orlando, Orsino, and the rest is that Henry goes through no observable growth toward sexual and emotional maturity. The Henriad cycle of plays is fascinated throughout with his maturity as a warrior, statesman, and public relations expert but sidesteps the question of

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amorous pursuit. We never see him with women other than Mistress Quickly or Doll Tearsheet, and plainly they are not for him. We do not know if he has ever felt the tug at his heartstrings of falling in love with a young lady, or whether he has even had some kind of fling. He emerges at the end of Henry V, surprisingly, as full-blown, wittily resourceful in his conversation with Kate, armed with every trick of wooing imaginable, and successful as a lover. His success is, to be sure, guaranteed by political necessity, just as his own commitment to this venture of marriage is for him a matter of political necessity. Yet the dramatic impression of him as a conquering male is depicted in its full dimensions. He is a fantasy, if you like, of the male as conquering hero. That achievement is of course ironized by the surrounding realities, but it is still complete and perfect in itself. The Shakespearean male has arrived at the full of manhood. Perhaps we need glance only briefly at the so-called problem plays to make the point that the education of the male in Shakespearean comedy of the 1590s is anything but stable in its afterlife. The young male protagonists in the problem plays are no more secure in their masculinity than was Claudio or Orsino. The main difference is that Shakespeare explores more relentlessly, in newly experimental generic contexts, the implications of their failures as men. Bertram in All’s Well That Ends Well is as reluctant to marry as he is eager to spill his seed in sexual conquest. Only Helena’s bed-trick, with all its ethical complexities, can bring this young man to face the consequences of his rutting and to accept the responsibilities of husbanding and parenthood. Angelo in Measure for Measure, similarly, holds himself off from marriage with the patiently adoring Mariana and pursues instead a lust that he knows to be perversely self-destructive as well as morally opprobrious. The problematic ending is anything but neatly resolved, because the enormity of Angelo’s crime is so great that only a theatrical trompe l’oeil can rescue him from his uncontrollable desires and their frightening consequences. Troilus is like Bertram and Angelo in his pursuit of a sexual conquest which, when finally achieved, lessens the intensity of his longing; Cressida knows only too well that ‘Men prize the thing ungained more than it is’ and that ‘Achievement is command; ungained, beseech’ (1.2.291–5). Abandoning her caution at last, she yields to Troilus only to learn from him the very next day that she is to be traded to the Greeks. He is distraught at this, and yet he assents; he sends her away, just as she feared he would eventually. And, whereas All’s Well and Measure for Measure do at least tie some kind of imperfect

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knot in a moment of comic resolution, Troilus and Cressida is as openended as a historical play should be. Troilus, embittered, has learned nothing other than heartache and self-pity; he continues to blame the woman for his own failures in love. Shakespeare has opened the Pandora’s box that will ripen into his greatest tragedies.

NOTES 1 See Bevington, ‘Jack’; Dusinberre 159–72; Erickson 9–10, 16–21; Rose 35–42; Leggatt, Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love 63–88; and Kahn, Man’s Estate. 2 Citations of Shakespeare are from The Complete Works, ed. Bevington, 2003. 3 For contrasting views, see the reviews of this production listed by Bulman and Coursen 266–8. On performing marriages in The Taming of the Shrew and Fletcher’s The Woman’s Prize, see Leggatt, English Stage Comedy 118–23. 4 See Harry Berger; Cook; Friedman, ‘Male Bonds’; Hays; and Leggatt, Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love 151–83. 5 Jennifer Low makes the point that ‘by making a challenge in defense of Hero’s honor, Benedick consciously undertakes the role of the Christian knight – what we may read generically as the romance hero’ (27). 6 Approximate length of time onstage in terms of line numbers: Orsino 583, Viola 1219, Malvolio 636, Sir Toby 959, Sir Andrew 654, Feste 848, and Olivia 681. See Lewalski; Salingar; and Shannon.

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Two recent books describe how Shakespeare’s language may be used as a tool of seduction: Seduction by Shakespeare: Advice, Observations, and Quotes on Love, Lust, Beauty and Desire, by A.K. Crump, and Shakespeare and the Art of Verbal Seduction, by Wayne F. Hill and Cynthia J. Ottchen. Both of these books are collections of passages from Shakespeare’s plays and poetry. The authors tout them as seduction primers, how-to manuals for those who took Cole Porter’s advice in Kiss Me Kate seriously: ‘Brush up your Shakespeare, / Start quoting him now, / Brush up your Shakespeare / And the women you will wow’ (qtd. in Richards 343). However romantic Shakespeare’s language may be out of context, reading his plays for instruction on the techniques of seduction makes about as much sense as reading them as manuals of successful business management, for the truth of the matter is there are very few true seductions in Shakespeare’s plays and none in his comedies of love. By ‘true seduction’ I mean an encounter in which one person convinces another, initially uninterested or hostile, to agree to a sexual relationship in or out of marriage. I include ‘uninterested or hostile’ here because if the second person also desires the first then no seduction is necessary. All that is needed is occasion and privacy. And so Romeo does not truly seduce Juliet any more than Ferdinand seduces Miranda; both sets of lovers are immediately smitten with each other. I use the word ‘convince’ here to distinguish seduction from blackmail, when one person is compelled to deliver sexual favours. Angelo is unable to seduce Isabella, so he coerces her. I hope it also precludes procurement, when one person pays for the acquiescence of the other. And I use the term ‘sexual’ here to bracket off the metaphoric use of the word seduction, as in ‘Iago seduces Othello to jealousy.’

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Shakespeare’s plays contain few true seductions, but his comedies do contain seduction scenes. This is hardly surprising. As Alexander Leggatt reminds us, these plays ‘begin by examining romantic love’ (Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love xiii), and romantic love and seduction would seem to be natural plot partners. But in the vast majority of these seduction scenes some ploy is used to undercut the efficacy of the seduction. So, for example, in All’s Well That Ends Well Bertram seduces Diana. She agrees to have sex with him. But since she does so at the behest of Helena, who is going to play a bed-trick on her caddish husband, it is not a true seduction; it is a set-up. As Diana makes clear as soon as Bertram leaves the stage, she was not seduced for a second: ‘I’ll lie with him / When I am buried’ (4.2.72–3).1 Then there is the misdirected seduction. In Twelfth Night Viola undertakes to seduce Olivia for Duke Orsino. In Viola’s compliments and complaints we get a neat epitome of Renaissance seduction literature, complete with Petrarchan-style lists of the lover’s pains and a catalogue of the excesses of love. But Olivia is not moved to Orsino. Instead she falls for Viola and we appreciate the humour of the gender-twisting conundrum in which this places them. But was it Viola’s words of love that moved Olivia in the first place or her physical presence? After Olivia first meets Viola she recounts his attributes and their effect on her: Thy tongue, thy face, thy limbs, actions, and spirit Do give thee fivefold blazon. Not too fast! Soft, soft! Unless the master were the man. How now? Even so quickly may one catch the plague? Methinks I feel this youth’s perfections With an invisible and subtle stealth To creep in at mine eyes. (1.5.287–93)

While Olivia acknowledges Viola’s way with words, she dwells on her appearance. Desire creeps in her eyes, not her ears, and such love at first sight is, as Maurice Charney reminds us, always sexual in Shakespeare (13). More often Shakespeare puts the seduction scene out of hearing or in the past. In Much Ado About Nothing Claudio sends Don Pedro to woo Hero. We are not given the content of that ‘seduction’; we just find out that it was successful. Bassanio does not have to seduce Portia in The Merchant of Venice – the casket test and Portia’s own interest in him

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make it unnecessary – but we do find out that Gratiano seduced Nerissa and proposed marriage. We are not shown the process, however, just briefly told about it after the fact: For wooing here until I sweat again, And swearing till my very roof was dry With oaths of love, at last, if promise last, I got promise of this fair one here To have her love. (3.2.203–7)

Similarly in A Midsummer Night’s Dream we are told about Lysander’s wooing of Hermia after it has occurred and through the unreliable source of Egeus: ‘Thou hast by moonlight at her window sung / With feigning voice verses of feigning love’ (1.1.30–1). The subsequent attention paid to Helena by both Lysander and Demetrius has nothing to do with seduction because each is compelled to declare his love for her by the drug and their protestations fall on deaf ears. Another recounting of a past seduction occurs in a tragedy of love, Othello. Othello tells the Venetian council that Desdemona fell in love with him because of the stories he told of his past life: ‘She loved me for the dangers I had passed, / And I loved her that she did pity them’ (1.3.169–70). The process was obviously more involved than that as Othello told Cassio about his wooing of Desdemona ‘from first to last’ (3.3.104). But what this entailed, we do not know. There are other variations in the comedies. Titania dotes on Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and may even sleep with him, but he seems oblivious to all but the material comforts that she offers. In As You Like It Orlando woos Rosalind while she is in the guise of Ganymede ostensibly to cure him of his love. We see little of that rehearsed seduction, but in a subplot Touchstone successfully seduces Audrey: she agrees to a clandestine marriage. We never see the process that brought her to acquiescence. We do see Silvius courting Phoebe but she rejects him and is smitten by Ganymede, who makes no attempt to seduce her. Other failed seductions include Falstaff’s attempts to seduce both Mistresses Page and Ford in The Merry Wives of Windsor. His love letters are comically inept, his direct protestations of love perfunctory: ‘What made me love thee? Let that persuade thee there’s something extraordinary in thee’ (3.3.61–2). His failure is pre-ordained. Proteus’s attempt to seduce Sylvia in Two Gentlemen of Verona (4.2.82ff.) is an abject failure, and so he attempts to rape her later in the play. Love’s Labour’s Lost

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presents a series of seduction techniques. We are given Armado’s hyperbolic love letter – ‘More fairer than fair, beautiful than beauteous, truer than truth itself’ (4.1.63–4) – and Berowne’s more poetic missive (4.2.104–17). We hear Dumaine’s sonnet (4.3.97–116) and watch the men give the women gifts. We see the men humiliate themselves in a masque. But it is all for naught. The Princess’s father dies and the women have to leave, some, like Katharine, with pointedly ambiguous exchanges of romantic intent. As Berowne says, ‘Our wooing doth not end like an old play; / Jack hath not Jill’ (5.2.864–5). Then there is seduction by proxy, a device that Shakespeare uses in several plays, only one of them a comedy of love: Don Pedro woos Hero for Claudio in Much Ado About Nothing. In Troilus and Cressida Pandarus acts as a go-between for the eponymous would-be lovers. He inflames Troilus’s passion for Cressida and attempts to do the same in Cressida for Troilus. Cressida, however, is too smart for that game. She has already lost her heart to Troilus; she just has to decide whether she will consummate the relation sexually. Has anyone here truly been seduced? Cressida’s later attempt to play with Diomedes backfires. He is simply not interested in the seduction game. He will have sex or not, but he will not be strung along: ‘I do not like this fooling’ (5.2.104). A more successful seduction by proxy occurs in Henry VI, Part 1 when Suffolk convinces King Henry to marry Margaret of Anjou sight unseen. But Suffolk is putting Margaret forth so that she will be near him. He fell in love with her at first sight: ‘I have no power to let her pass; / My hand would free her, but my heart says no’ (5.3.60–1). It is only in the history plays that Shakespeare gives us successful seductions. In 3.2 of Henry VI, Part 3, King Edward is smitten with Lady Grey. His seduction of her is so ham-fisted that Clarence remarks in an aside, ‘He is the bluntest wooer in Christendom’ (83). Lady Grey refuses Edward’s advances, even though they are made the condition for retaining her late husband’s lands, so the King offers to marry her. We are not shown her accepting the proposal – the seduction scene is left hanging – but she does become his queen. Similarly in Henry VIII Anne becomes Henry’s second wife after swearing that she would not be queen ‘for all the riches under heaven’ (2.3.35), but we get little of the process. In Henry V Henry woos Katharine in a long scene full of his blunt self-depreciation and her charming French. Is it a true seduction? The conclusion of this courtship is predetermined by Henry’s military victory over the French. Katherine says she will marry if her father allows, but Henry, as he well knows, pulls the father’s strings. Henry

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does successfully solicit a kiss from Katherine, but she gives it reluctantly and never speaks again in the play. The only unqualified successful seduction in all of Shakespeare’s plays occurs in Richard III when Richard stops the funeral procession of Henry VI to seduce his mortal enemy Lady Anne. She is overtly hostile to him, with good reason, yet by the end of the scene she has softened to him to the extent that he can crow, as soon as she leaves the stage, ‘Was ever woman in this humor wooed? / Was ever woman in this humor won?’ (1.2.230–1). It is a bravura performance. Why are there so few successful seductions represented in Shakespeare’s plays and none in his comedies of love? Why are the majority of the ones that do exist in his canon in the history plays? I would like to suggest that this question is bound up with the question of affect in Shakespeare’s plays and in popular culture in general. To explain this, I will have to digress briefly into some critical controversies surrounding cultural production and emotion. There have been some fine studies of the affective power of Elizabethan public theatre, such as T.G. Bishop’s Shakespeare and the Theatre of Wonder, but in general the affective potential of Shakespeare and his contemporaries’ drama is remarkably absent from recent discussions of the cultural and political impact of Shakespearean theatre in its time. Critics who believe Elizabethan theatre was a politically significant institution, such as Louis Montrose, and those who think it was powerless, such as Paul Yachnin, raise their questions of power and subversion within structures of cognition, articulated in language, reified in representation, and framed by cultural practice.2 Literary criticism since the early 1980s has examined this popular art as a complex intellectual engagement between author, theatrical institution, audience, and state. Even T.G. Bishop continually brings the emotion of wonder, as generated by Shakespeare’s plays, back to questions of cognition and knowledge, describing a ‘complex calculus between emotional and intellectual response’ (177). There is little recognition in these critics that popular culture, even bad popular culture, can be a focus for emotional energy and that emotional energy can itself have political implication. Why this absence in the discussions of early modern theatre? Partly it may be a projection backwards of the postmodern theorists’ distrust of affect, a distrust articulated by critics such as Fredric Jameson and Lawrence Grossberg.3 It is also true that ‘good art, from the start of the field of aesthetics, whether one points to Kant or Joseph Addison, or Philip Sidney, was held to appeal to intellect and erudition and bad art

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to emotions and pleasure’ (Nehring 34) and Shakespeare’s plays, whatever their popular status in their time, are held to be good art. Even Stephen Greenblatt, one of the most eloquent Shakespeare critics of the late twentieth century and the inadvertent founder of the New Historicist movement, has elided emotion from most of his discussions. So, in Shakespearean Negotiations Greenblatt approaches the question of the endurance of Shakespeare’s work by first suggesting that ‘we begin by taking seriously the collective production of literary pleasure and interest’ (4). Proposing a ‘poetics of culture’ to explain how ‘cultural objects, expressions, and practices ... acquired compelling force’ (5), he examines the ‘social energy’ that was circulated by and through the Shakespearean theatre. This energy included the emotional responses of ‘sexual excitement ... wonder, desire, anxiety, religious awe, freefloating intensities of experience’ (19). But when Greenblatt begins his application of this process the affective potential of the theatre is forgotten before the examination of layers of power, ambiguity, and appropriation that elucidate, for him and other culture-theory-driven critics, the complexities of the phenomenon that was Shakespeare in his time. As Lawrence Manley has put it, ‘the New Historicism, with its anecdotal manner and its dialectic of subversion and containment, has usefully estranged the culture of the early modern period, but at the cost of failing to account for the long-term changes that cultural activity effects’ (13). To account for those changes we have to acknowledge the affective impact of popular culture and to recognize that emotion is not necessarily tied to cognition or even rationality. The language of psychology is helpful here. Silvan S. Tomkins distinguishes between ideo-affective postures, ideological postures, and ideo-affective resonance. Ideo-affective postures are ‘loosely organized set[s] of feelings and ideas about feelings’; ideological postures are ‘highly organized and articulate set[s] of ideas about anything’; and ideo-affective resonance is the engagement of ideo-affective postures with ideological postures, that is, when the set of feelings is similar enough to the set of ideas that they re-enforce each other (74). Tomkins notes that ‘all individuals have ideo-affective postures, but not all attain an organized ideological posture’ (74). This is very important. A person may feel strongly, may be moved to feel strongly, without having a clear, rational set of ideas about the object or even specific direction of his passion. So an audience can emerge from an engagement with a popular fiction angry, melancholy, or disgusted but without a referent object or idea at which to direct those emotions.

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Literature’s primary technology for generating such affect is narrative. Aristotle reminds us of this repeatedly in The Poetics: ‘tragedy is an imitation, not of men, but of actions’ (231); ‘tragedy is an imitation, not only of a complete action, but also of an action exciting terror and pity’ (235); and the question of the affective potency of fictive narrative remains at the forefront of theories of emotional responses to literature.4 We should remember, too, that the narratives in question do not require great verisimilitude or even have to be particularly well crafted to be efficacious. ‘Certain pop-culture formulas can be astonishingly effective in evoking predictable patterns of feeling, even (perhaps especially) when their origins are the very antithesis of authenticity’ (Warhol xvi). Literature also uses language for affective currency, and here the Elizabethan drama had the advantage that so many of its playwrights were consummate poets. And theatre, of course, uses spectacle – costume, pageantry, emblem, but above all the human body – for affective impact. What emotions was comedy thought to affect in Shakespeare’s time? To answer this let us turn to the Renaissance anti-theatrical polemicist Phillip Stubbes, who famously condemned playing in his The Anatomy of Abuses (1583). Contemporary critics are fond of quoting his opinions as proof of Elizabethan theatre’s perceived cultural agency, but few have noted his distinct criticisms of different dramatic genres. In general, Stubbes believes that ‘plays were first invented by the devil, practiced by the heathen Gentiles, and dedicated to their false idols, gods and goddesses’ (qtd. in Pollard 120). But he goes on to specify what the different dramatic genres represent: ‘the arguments of tragedies, is anger, wrath, impunity, cruelty, injury, incest, murder, and such like: the persons or actors are gods, goddesses, furies, fiends, hags, Kings, queens, or potentates. Of comedies, the matter and ground is love, bawdry, cozenage, flattery, whoredom, adultery; the persons or agents, whores, queans, bawds, scullions, knaves, courtesans, lecherous old men, amorous young men, with such like of infinite variety’ (120). He expands on this distinction when he relates what might be learned in the theatres: ‘if you will learn to become a bawd, unclean, and to divirginate maids, to deflower honest wives; if you will learn to murder, slay, kill, pick, steal, rob and rove’ (121). Tragedy, it seems, leads to disrespect of authority, rebellion, and cruelty, but comedy leads to lust. Stubbes concludes, in his most quoted assertion, that at the end of a play ‘every mate sorts to his mate, every one brings another homeward of their way very friendly, and in their secret conclaves (couertly)

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they play the sodomites, or worse’ (121). The inspiration for this lust is ‘plays and interludes, where such wanton gestures, such bawdy speeches, such laughing and fleering, such kissing and bussing, such clipping and culling, such winking and glancing of wanton eyes, and the like is used, as is wonderful to behold’ (121). In other words, comedies. Stubbes imagines that comedy creates an affective community of sexual excitement, that it seduces audiences.5 Which brings us back to where we began. Seduction is about creating sexual excitement. In a successful seduction two things can happen. First, the seducee may simply acquiesce to the seducer’s advances, as does Lady Grey in Henry VI, Part 3. This is compliance or resignation, and Shakespeare is right not to stage it; it is not engaging except as a comment on the politics of gender relations. Second, the seducee will also become sexually excited. Now this is interesting. In such a case the language or devices of the seducer affects desire in the object of his or her attention. An emotional state that did not exist initially is created by technique. This, I would argue, is a model of the largely ignored function of popular literature in general: to create specific emotional states, to inspire ideo-affective postures.6 Put bluntly, seduction is popular literature distilled to its affective end. It can also use similar techniques: the lover weaves a narrative of his infatuation with the beloved; the seducer adorns his vocabulary with beautiful words, even if they do not say very much (hence books like Seduction by Shakespeare); and the swain may bare his chest, show off his legs, or perform some act of derring-do to make a spectacle of his desire and attractiveness. We can see all of these devices at work in Richard III’s seduction of Lady Anne. We begin by recognizing that it takes place against impossible odds. Richard is deformed; he cannot rely on ‘His archèd brows, his hawking eye, his curls’ (All’s Well That Ends Well 1.1.96) to attract Anne’s attention. More importantly, he is responsible for the murder of both Anne’s husband and father-in-law. Indeed, Richard approaches Anne while she walks beside the coffin of her father-in-law and just after she has cursed ‘that hated wretch’ and wished that ‘If ever he have wife, let her be made / More miserable by the life of him / Than I am made by my young lord and thee [Henry]’ (1.2.26–8). But by the end of the scene Anne is being coy with this monster and she will go on to marry him. What does he do to affect her desire? He tells her a story of blind passion and repentance. He claims that it was love of her that drove him to murder and her beauty that has made him ‘blind with weeping’ (169). He dazzles her with language, complimenting her effu-

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sively as a ‘divine perfection of a woman’ (75). Finally he makes a spectacle of his love, dropping to his knees and baring his chest to her blade even as he confesses his crimes: Nay, do not pause; for I did kill King Henry – But ’twas thy beauty that provokèd me Nay, now dispatch; ’twas I that stabbed young Edward – But ’twas thy heavenly face that set me on. (182–5)

Instead of stabbing him, she drops the sword she is holding. Instead of cursing Richard, she begins to play the language games that we associate with Shakespeare’s lovers and accepts a ring from him. Her line, ‘I would I knew thy heart’ (195) suggests the beginning of erotic fascination. She has been seduced by narrative, language, and spectacle. But Shakespeare never models such technique in his comedies. That is not to say that Shakespeare avoids representing desire in his comedies of love or that his plays are empty of erotically charged moments. Far from it. Desire is represented through significant silences, bawdy puns,7 or through what René Girard has called ‘mimetic desire’ (200). We see a model of this device in Two Gentlemen of Verona. Proteus falls in love with Silvia largely, it seems, because of Valentine’s desire for her. Proteus himself seems unable to distinguish true desire from mimetic desire: Is it mine eye, or Valentine’s praise, Her true perfection, or my false transgression That makes me, reasonless, to reason thus? (2.4.193–5)

This technique can be turned on the audience. When two stage lovers are infatuated with each other and sing each other’s praises the audience is led to recognize and be sympathetic to the intensity of the attraction of the two. The characters say they desire each other; within the fictive world of the play and the theatrical conventions of the Shakespearean theatre this is enough for the audience to accept the illusion of sexual attraction and, perhaps, be themselves moved by it. If the actors playing the characters in question are themselves attractive and adept at portraying sexual intensity, the theatre can become quite steamy. But seduction, that distillation of the affective potential of popular theatre, is kept out of the comedies. It may be that Shakespeare wanted to avoid the potential confusions, both theatrical and cultural, that the

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transvestite theatre posed and therefore undermined seduction scenes so that the techniques for generating sexual desire are misdirected, confused, or frustrated.8 I do not wish to enter the long critical tradition of deconstructing the implications of theatrical cross-dressing at this point but merely to suggest that, whatever those implications to the politics of gender construction, the sexual desire created by this theatrical practice was potentially complicated.9 More significantly, this avoidance of representing seduction in comedy, the genre associated in the anti-theatrical imagination with sexual desire, is an acknowledgment that the theatre’s potential subversiveness lay not in its critique of the sexual norms of Elizabethan England – what Valerie Traub has called ‘the gender asymmetry of patriarchal representation’ (6) – but in its affective potential. The theatre was not, in Yachnin’s term, powerless. Its power lay in the ability to generate affect, and this was a power that Shakespeare wielded carefully, never modelling its reduction without qualification. This is not, I think, because Shakespeare was self-censoring to defuse the arguments of critics like Phillip Stubbes. Rather, this omission is tied to the affective agenda of the plays. Mary Beth Rose has argued that ‘Elizabethan romantic comedy is traditionally regarded as a dramatic form that can be distinguished as a generic celebration of marriage’ (12). The very title of Leggatt’s important study argues something similar: Shakespeare’s Comedies of Love, not lust. These plays contain many erotic complexities, but that eroticism is independent of the desire affected by the techniques of seduction. As Kathleen McLuskie has shown, there were other plays that dealt with that subject: mainly domestic tragedies or satiric comedies of the private theatres.10 It is, instead, a complex circulation of desire and erotic potential driven by the ineffable – romantic love – and culminating in the social: marriage. Shakespeare’s comedies of love capture ‘a burgeoning awareness of a more complex, problematic moral and emotional reality ... and it is in this changing moral atmosphere that romantic comedy, with its celebration of married love, comes into its own as a dramatic form’ (Rose 21–2). The affect produced by this dramatic form is more nuanced than can be inspired by the spectacle of a brilliant seducer’s machismo of technique, and so the attractive young characters of Shakespeare’s comedies fall in love, marry, but they are not allowed to mechanically affect desire in each other, to push each other’s desire button. That technique is the providence of villains, rakes, whores, and pornographers. So it is no coincidence that Shakespeare’s only truly successful

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seducer is physically repulsive and morally bereft – is, in fact, the monster of Tudor myth – and that he appears in a history play, a genre not associated with love. Richard’s seduction technique, his performance, marks him as manipulative and dangerous, all the more so for his energy and wit. Wielding the affective devices of popular theatre as a weapon, he creates sexual excitement in the least likely of people, but the improbability of his success, combined with the play’s focus on dynastic struggle, contextualizes the techniques, bracketing them off from the shifting concerns with eroticism, romantic love, and ultimately marriage that inform the comedies of love. He creates lust in Anne and, if the famous anecdote of a young woman arranging an assignation with Richard Burbage after a performance of Richard III is to be believed, in members of the audience also.11 But that desire is not the affective end of the play, which is, instead, the creation of the emotional nexus of patriotism; it is, rather, part of what marks Richard as a dangerous character. It is also no coincidence that the comedies (and romances) are never the audience-seducing lust machines that Stubbes imagined. Even the apparently blatant invitation to heterosexual desire that Iachimo’s voyeuristic description of the sleeping body of Imogen in Cymbeline 2.2 suggests is mediated: the character who is affecting this desire is a villain, and his evil intent mitigates the potential eroticism of the description.12 Further, he begins his recitation of Imogen’s physical attributes with a telling allusion – ‘Our Tarquin thus / Did softly press the rushes ere he wakened / The chastity he wounded’ (2.2.12–14) – and ends it with a portentous irony: ‘Though this a heavenly angel, hell is here’ (50). The long-term change that the cultural activity of Elizabethan romantic drama has generated is the establishment of potent affective paradigms, epitomized in the resonant articulations of Shakespeare’s plays, that continue to be associated with popular representations of romantic love.13 Thomas Heywood understood this. In his An Apology for Actors (1612) he argued that ‘so bewitching a thing is lively and well spirited action, that it hath power to new mold the hearts of spectators and fashion them to the shape of any noble and notable attempt’ (qtd. in Pollard 221). It is the heart that is moulded, not the mind. Shakespeare’s comedies of love have made us part of an affective community bound by feelings more noble and notable than the spectacle of seduction can inspire or stories of ‘whores, queans, bawds, scullions, knaves, courtesans, lecherous old men, [or] amorous young men’ can affect.

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NOTES 1 All Shakespeare quotations are from The Complete Works, ed. Bevington (1992). 2 See, for example, Montrose, The Purpose of Playing 86, and Yachnin 3. 3 See Jameson 68, and Grossberg 105. For an excellent summary of both critics’ theories of affect see Nehring 23ff. 4 For a good summary of the theoretical questions surrounding emotional responses to fiction, see Levinson 21–7. 5 Thomas Heywood inadvertently agrees. While arguing in his An Apology for Actors (1612) that comedy has a socially redeeming didactic function, he reveals its erotic content. A typical comedy, apparently, ‘entreats of love, deriding foolish inamorates who spend their ages, their spirits, nay themselves, in the servile and ridiculous employments of their mistresses ... sometimes of courtesans, to divulge their subtleties and snares, in which young men may be entangled, showing them the means to avoid them’ (qtd. in Pollard 242). 6 This is the reason why so many contemporary popular literary genres – romance, thriller, horror – are named after the affect they promise to produce. 7 See John Russell Brown, ‘Representing Sexuality’ 169–74 for examples of both. 8 Or not: see Bruce Smith for a summary of witnesses of the transvestite theatre. ‘Every one of these informants writes about the fictional female characters he saw as if those female characters were female persons’ (‘Making a Difference’ 29), not cross-dressed boys. 9 For a good summary of the theorizing of theatrical cross-dressing, see Sedinger 64–8. For its relationship to anti-theatricality, see Levine 10–25. 10 See McLuskie 113–22. 11 Tellingly the woman requested Burbage to announce himself at her house as Richard III. The anecdote is from the diary of John Maningham, qtd. in Rowse 130. 12 In the only professional production of Cymbeline that I have seen this speech drew laughter from the audience. Iachimo’s desire was comically pathetic rather than titillating. 13 Warhol’s study is largely an examination of the affective power of romantic narratives in this tradition, even on consumers informed by feminist theory.

A Spirit of Giving in A Midsummer Night’s Dream alan l. ackerman, jr

How I wish, said Socrates, taking his place as he was desired, that wisdom could be infused through the medium of touch, out of the full into the empty man ... For you would have filled me full of gifts and wisdom, plenteous and fair, in comparison of which my own is of a very mean and questionable sort, no better than a dream. Plato, The Symposium (32)

The vexation of Egeus in the first scene of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is expressed in a list of those items that Lysander has given to his daughter: ‘bracelets of thy hair, rings, gawds, conceits, / Knacks, trifles, nosegays, sweetmeats’ (1.1.33–4).1 The objects in themselves are insignificant or, at least, interchangeable, homogeneous in value, and to those who consider passionate love for another person qualitatively special and hence incommensurable, such a list of ‘knacks’ and ‘trifles’ may appear trivializing if not degrading. But the angry father considers the objects to be messengers of strong prevailment. And the speech introduces a crucial theme, that of giving and taking, and associates the play’s most prominent figure of fatherhood (and only biological parent) not simply with a rigid and old-fashioned rule of law but also with stinginess. In the face of the parent’s example, the child too refuses to be generous. ‘My soul consents not to give sovereignty’ (82; emphasis added), Hermia says. Everyone begins the play more interested in taking than in giving. I have chosen the topic of parental generosity in A Midsummer Night’s Dream not only to clarify an important idea in the play but also to pay tribute to the intellectual generosity of one of our most important schol-

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ars and teachers of Shakespeare, Professor Alexander Leggatt. As this play and Professor Leggatt’s career amply show, the spirit of generosity is deeply related to a capacity for sympathy and specifically to the way in which a sympathetic disposition enables one to see, to know, and to understand. The importance of sympathetic understanding is introduced when Hermia says simply and poignantly, ‘I would my father look’d but with my eyes’ (1.1.56). Yet sympathetic understanding and generosity cannot be reduced simply to looking with another’s eyes, and the play represents an extremely complex and richly dialectical ethical reality, one that privileges neither the perspective of Egeus nor that of Hermia. The irony of Hermia’s wish is exposed in the radically changeable (irrational and manipulable) nature of young lovers’ eyes. Later in the same scene, Helena goes so far as to say, ‘Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind’ (1.1.234). It would be absurd to imagine that anyone, let alone Egeus, ought to look with Hermia’s eyes, much as she wishes it. As Marcilio Ficino wrote in a text Shakespeare was likely to have known, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love (c. 1474), ‘Sight is midway between intellect and touch; hence the soul of the lover is always being pulled in opposite directions, and thrown alternately backwards and forwards’ (125). A sympathetic understanding does not require direct identification. As the Scottish philosopher Adam Smith wrote a century and a half later: ‘The compassion of the spectator must arise ... from the consideration of what he himself would feel if he was reduced to the same unhappy situation, and ... was at the same time able to regard it with his present judgment’ (8). For Smith, whose economic and moral thought defines and extends the socioeconomic concerns beginning to arise in early modern Europe, the loss of reason is the most dreadful calamity that can happen to a person. From A Midsummer Night’s Dream to Timon of Athens, Shakespeare’s dramas continually interrogate a tension between the impulse toward spontaneous generosity and rational (often proto-capitalist) considerations. The former is not rational in itself and so, in Smith’s view, is always already removed from marketplace considerations. An interest in the happiness of others gives happiness to a spectator, Smith notes, ‘though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it’ (3). The gifts of a lover such as Lysander are, of course, not given in this spirit. Like all lovers, he expects a return. He gives because he wants (i.e., lacks) love. To render sympathy, that combination of feeling and judgment, is to imagine a relationship not of lovers (or at least not the kind of lovers we find in this play) but

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a relation of spectator to actor. It is no mere coincidence that, for the eighteenth-century theorists of sympathy, theatre is a central metaphor. To be magnanimous is to give only when one has imagined the position of the one to whom one gives, to allow for various forms of reception, and to grant that to which one gives birth a life of its own. The critical, like the poetic imagination, ‘gives to aery nothing / A local habitation and a name’ (5.1.16–17; emphasis added). And the verb to give accumulates power over the course of the play. A seemingly more generous Theseus explains in the end that the onstage audience will be kinder ‘to give’ the rude mechanicals ‘thanks for nothing’ (5.1.89). The play itself, as Philostrate tells Theseus, is ‘nothing, nothing in the world; / Unless you can find sport in their intents, / Extremely stretched and conn’d with cruel pain, / To do you service’ (5.1.78–81). But what the actors themselves have given is only nothing in that richly complex sense of the word that Shakespeare explores most notably in Hamlet. It is a thing of nothing. After all, the rude mechanicals are those who appear to have least to give. Yet in giving a performance they give most of themselves. There is an important truth in the Prologue’s remark, ‘by their show, / You shall know all, that you are like to know’ (5.1.116–17). In short, this essay assumes that there is a kind of knowledge that is accessible through dialogue and inseparable from a particular structure of theatrical performance, that such a structure has analogies in the classroom, and that the knowledge in question is both ethical and metaphysical. These assumptions are inseparable from the tradition of classical humanism that deeply informed the thinking of Shakespeare’s day. As Oscar Wilde imagines, through his own portrayal of passion and intellectual generosity in ‘The Portrait of Mr. W.H.,’ one can discover in Shakespeare’s plays an extension of Plato’s rich meditations on creativity and love: In 1492 appeared Marsilio Ficino’s translation of the ‘Symposium’ of Plato, and his wonderful dialogue, of all the Platonic dialogues perhaps the most perfect, as it is the most poetical, began to exercise a strange influence over men, and to colour their words and thoughts, and manner of living ... In the curious analogies it draws between intellectual enthusiasm and the physical passion of love, in its dream of the incarnation of the idea in a beautiful and living form, and of a real spiritual conception with a travail and a bringing to birth, there was something that fascinated the poets and scholars of the sixteenth century. Shakespeare, certainly, was fascinated by it, and had read the dialogue ... Beauty is the goddess who

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presides over birth, and draws into the light of day the dim conceptions of the soul. (324–5)

Plato’s Symposium provides a foundation for the present essay not simply on account of Wilde’s brilliant (yet coyly fictional) hypothesis about Shakespeare’s debt to the dialogue, nor because of the numerous figural coincidences between it and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In The Symposium, Pausanias discusses the relationship of love to tyranny and notes the complete unreliability of the lover’s oath. Eryximachus, the physician, talks about the universal quality of love, whose empire includes plants and animals, and claims that the wantonness of an overbearing love can affect the seasons and is ‘a great injurer and destroyer, and is the source of pestilence’ (48). Rather than being interested in noting parallels, I am drawn to The Symposium in this case because it presents us, and perhaps presented Shakespeare, with an enduring configuration of terms and thematic concerns. These include relations of old and young, of parents and offspring both biological and philosophical, of love and knowledge, of passion and reason, of homogeneity and distinction, of the commensurable and the infinite, of pedagogy and generosity. As Martha Nussbaum writes, ‘The Symposium recognizes, and shows, that human beings often lead disorderly and unsatisfactory lives because of the extent to which they are motivated by passionate love’ (114). But, she goes on, the dialogue offers a ‘particular kind of teaching about the objects of love’ whereby the lover begins to see a similarity between the value of a love object and other comparable values. Then, ‘he decides that it is prudent to consider these related beauties to be “one and the same,” that is, not just qualitatively close, but qualitatively homogeneous, interchangeable instances of some one inclusive value’ (114; emphasis in original). Claudius gives Hamlet just such ‘prudent’ advice when he identifies Hamlet’s excessive grief/love for his father as irrational, disorderly, and more than usually unhappy. For Hamlet to single out his father as more deserving of such emotion than other fathers is ‘To reason most absurd, whose common theme / Is death of fathers’ (1.2.103–5). King Lear also begins with the problem of measuring love. Lear assumes that it is measurable and plans to make gifts accordingly. And so does Cordelia. She works fractions on love. But the process is corrupted when, for instance, Goneril tells her father, ‘Sir I love you more than words can wield the matter’ (1.1.55). In short, both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ characters in Shakespeare assume that love can be

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measured, just as both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ characters assume that love is incommensurable. What is at stake in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is another version of the problem of the commensurability of love that arises when individuals perceive heterogeneity and when irrationality (which depends upon the perception of heterogeneity) characterizes their behaviour. When Bottom says, ‘reason and love keep little company together now-a-days’ (3.2.143–4), he implies that they are not necessarily incompatible. When we say that a value (of love or of grief) is commensurable, we mean that it can be measured by a common standard, known, and managed (in emotional and financial senses – not only controlled but also directed). It enters into an economy of exchange, though not necessarily market, or capitalist, exchange. During the rise of capitalism, however, as Annette Weiner comments, ‘the give and take of reciprocity took on an almost magical, sacred power among Western economists’ (2). Marx’s critique of ‘the fetishism of the commodity’ in capitalism, which depends on the observation that various objects exchanged in the capitalist marketplace assume homogeneous value, may in this context be regarded also as a response to neo-Platonic, idealist metaphysics. ‘A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing,’ Marx comments. But, he adds playfully, ‘its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties’ (163). Marx perceives that products of labour are not special as objects when exchanged on the market. ‘It is only by being exchanged,’ he writes, ‘that the products of labour acquire a socially uniform objectivity of values, which is distinct from their sensuously varied objectivity as articles of utility’ (166). Imagining gifts as Marx imagines commodities, Marcel Mauss argues that in pre-capitalist societies things-as-gifts are not ‘indifferent things’ (22) but take on a life of their own. Mauss assumes, like Marx, that gifts (commodities) represent social relationships. Commodities and gifts can assume symbolic, mystical, pseudo-metaphysical, and thus incommensurable value when they are removed from the marketplace. Socrates’ argument in The Symposium, on the other hand, assumes an absolute commensurability of value. Shakespeare’s plays set these positions in dialogue with each other. In Twelfth Night, Olivia quips glibly that her beauty can be ‘inventoried’ (1.5.246). While she may be facetious, in plays and sonnets Shakespeare commonly examines just what, if anything, the objects of love add up to. In this particular case Viola replies that in spite of Olivia’s sarcasm

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and pride, Orsino’s love for her could, in fact, be ‘recompens’d, though you were crown’d / The nonpareil of beauty’ (1.5.252–3). This form of knowing is specific and limiting. It is opposed to the Dionysian vitality of Sir Toby Belch, who will not ‘confine [himself] within the modest limits of order’ (1.3.8–9). And the problem of defining the limits of desire assumes a special resonance when considered in light of the entrepreneurial energy and acquisitive spirit of English merchants and adventurers in the Renaissance. Irrational desire depends upon the perception of difference, of qualitative heterogeneity. It is precisely this impression of heterogeneity in their own eyes that distinguishes the lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream from each other. As students commonly remark, it is difficult to tell the young Athenians apart. ‘Through Athens,’ Helena says, ‘I am thought as fair as she [Hermia]’ (1.1.227). But ‘Things base and vile, holding no quantity, / Love can transpose to form and dignity’ (1.1.233– 4). Without being a lover – that is, overcome by a desire to possess – one cannot perceive qualitative difference. On the other hand, without perceiving difference, one will not be overcome by desire. Which comes first, passionate desire or the perception of difference? Many critics have recognized in the play an irresolvable dialecticalism. Louis Montrose has written of the double sense of creation within the play: A Midsummer Night’s Dream ‘creates the culture by which it is created, shapes the fantasies by which it is shaped, begets that by which it is begotten’ (‘Shaping Fantasies’ 56). As for seeing what is different between these lovers, Puck’s failure to see what is special in them as individuals is, of course, the central twist of the plot. Lysander and Demetrius are not even distinguishable by their ‘Athenian garments.’ The former is regarded by Puck simply as ‘the youth ... / Pleading for a lover’s fee’ (3.2.112–13). And Puck’s homogenizing claim, ‘what fools these mortals be’ (3.2.115), speaks directly to the ethical difference between himself and them. But would anyone say that Puck is ethically superior to the lovers whom he manipulates? ‘Those things do best please me,’ he says, ‘That befall prepost’rously’ (3.2.120–1). To imagine the commensurability of love is clearly not altogether to the good. To limit the spirit of love by assuming material equivalence, as Shylock appears to equate his daughter and his ducats, may damage love. To ask if A Midsummer Night’s Dream advocates the Socratic position that love ought to be commensurable and homogeneous or that such a rational position degrades the spirit of love is to forget that it is not a treatise but an exceptionally self-con-

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scious work of theatre. The play continually interrogates the interactions between actors and audience members. The important question of measuring ethical values is central to the Western philosophical tradition, from Plato to Mill. Socrates asks if love is the love of something or of nothing. From the prophetess Diotima, he learns that love is not itself a good but of the good. Bertolt Brecht would later exploit a similar pun in German, focusing on the figure of the prostitute who sells ‘love’ as a ‘good,’ not just good but the goods, in Die Ware Liebe (the good [commodity] love), which became Der gute Mensch von Sezuan (the good person of Sezuan).2 And if, since ancient Rome, actors have been identified with prostitutes, it is partly a sign of how their occupation combines the roles of servant and lover, both of whom give but expect something in return. Yet the question of love’s commensurability and the trope of giving are also historically specific. The giving of gifts in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as elsewhere in Shakespeare, must be understood in the context of early modern economics, the growing importance of capital and the anxiety it produced. John Donne speaks of bargaining with the ‘Usurious God of Love’ in ‘Love’s Usury’ and, in ‘Lovers infinitenesse,’ the poet is torn between whether love can be purchased or given. This tension is also informed by a Christian (as opposed to, say, a Pythagorean) rhetoric of incarnation and redemption (also both a theological and economic term commonly employed by Donne). Mercantilism, according to which accumulation is associated with paternalistic authority, and Christian imperialism are, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, perhaps even more significant than anxiety about capital as aspects of a developing economy of exchange that inform changing personal relations. As Greenblatt has written, ‘the whole achievement of the discourse of Christian imperialism is to represent desires as convertible and in a constant process of exchange’ (Marvelous Possessions 71; emphasis in original). This logic accounts for the rhetorical paradoxes in Columbus’s encounter with the Indians whereby he imagines that taking absolute possession is at the same time to make an absolute gift. It is a similar absoluteness of both generosity and taking possession that characterizes Titania’s treatment of another Indian princess, the nameless and now-dead mother who (like Lysander to Hermia) gained her love by fetching trifles. Titania’s keeping of the child is paradoxically an act of both possessiveness and generosity. Titania lovingly recalls how the woman would ‘fetch me trifles, and return again, / As from a voyage, rich with merchandise’ (2.1.133–4).

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The spontaneous generosity exhibited by the vot’ress of her order is not the same as Titania’s sense of responsibility. Greenblatt describes an almost identical disparity in terms of generosity in the encounter of the Spanish and the inhabitants of the New World: The spirit of gift-giving, as Columbus understands it, is not reciprocal: the Indians give out of an unconstrained openness of heart that is a marvel; the Spanish in return give out of a sense of what is right, a sense of obligation bound up with the conviction that the Indians have already become the Christian subjects of the sovereigns of Castile. (Marvelous Possessions 77; emphasis in original)

This sort of romantic imagining of the Indian was most influentially articulated in the sixteenth century by Montaigne, who regarded New World peoples as ‘close to their original simplicity’ and ‘governed by natural laws’ (109). These natural and disinterested peoples, according to Montaigne, ‘are still at the happy stage of desiring no more than their simple appetites demand,’ and the women are immune to jealousy (114, 117). Titania’s sense of obligation to her Indian vot’ress, on the other hand, cannot be attributed to sisterly devotion. Theirs is not a relationship, as Louis Montrose suggests, analogous to the intimate bond between Hermia and Helena (‘Shaping Fantasies’ 41). The very term ‘a vot’ress of my order,’ suggests that the Indian maid is not a kindly friend or helper involved in reciprocal exchange but a devotee bound up by vows to live a life of religious worship or service; she is a mortal and Titania a god. The Europeans imagined themselves in just such a relation to the inhabitants of the New World. And from Puck we have learned that, in fact, even after the mother’s death the child was not parentless because the lovely boy was ‘stolen from an Indian king’ (2.1.22). This boy, who may be given or withheld by the fairy queen and king, is a human commodity of Empire. As Greenblatt puts it, ‘the conversion of commodities into gold slides liquidly into the conversion and hence salvation of souls’ (Marvelous Possessions 71). It is with precisely this paradoxical rhetoric of taking and giving that Theseus first addresses his own New World princess in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.3 To Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, he says, ‘I woo’d thee with my sword, / And won thy love doing thee injuries’ (1.1.16–17), to which she remains, significantly, silent. Consummated love implies possession, but it is possession of a paradoxical sort. As Helena remarks, ‘I have found Demetrius like a jewel, /

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Mine own, and yet not mine own’ (4.1.192–3). It is not difficult to hear in this rhetoric that of European adventurers confronted by the riches of the rest of the world. But it is qualified here by the important sense that Socrates addresses at length in The Symposium, that to love is to have not: ‘He who desires something is in want of something’ (64). Love, always caught between having and wanting, is according to a Greek parable the child of Plenty and Poverty. If to love is to want, once you have got love, what do you have? The answer, suggests Diotima through Socrates, is that homogeneous value the good. However, the consummation of love in the characteristic idiom of the Renaissance is to die. We speak of love and of generosity, therefore, not just in material terms but as spirit because to do so implies a structure of mediation, even of liminality. In The Symposium Socrates reports that the prophetess Diotima speaks of this betweenness as an operation between men and gods. That is the basis for defining love in terms of both the transaction of giving (men give prayers and sacrifices to the gods, and the gods give commands and rewards to men) and of spirit: ‘What then is love?’ I asked; ‘Is he mortal?’ ‘No.’ ‘What then?’ ‘As in the former instance, he is neither mortal nor immortal, but in a mean between them.’ What is he then Diotima?’ ‘He is a great spirit, and like all that is spiritual he is intermediate between the divine and the mortal.’ ‘And what is the nature of this spiritual power?’ I said. ‘This is the power,’ she said, ‘which interprets and conveys to the gods the prayers and sacrifices of men, and to men the commands and rewards of the gods.’ (68; emphasis added)

Love, Diotima convinces Socrates, is neither fair nor good, but neither is it foul or evil. Love ‘spans the chasm which divides [men and gods], and in this all is bound together.’ The chasm is a metaphor that Shakespeare expands in Theseus’s famous speech about the poet and the lover, who ‘glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven’ and whose imaginations body forth the ‘forms of things unknown’ (5.1.14– 15). The power of love is poetic, in the Greek sense of the term (to make) a power ‘which interprets and conveys’; it is creative. As Ficino comments, ‘it was for this reason that Diotima ... called love a daemon. Because, just as the daemons are midway between heavenly things and earthly things, so love occupies the middle ground between formlessness and form’ (109).

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For Diotima, the understanding of love is not (exclusively) empirical or material but spiritual, largely because love itself is always a mean between two terms: good and evil, fair and foul, knowledge and ignorance, plenty and poverty, having and wanting, giving and taking. Love, though not itself good, she explains, desires possession of the good. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream it is clear from the beginning that love is not inherently generous. On the contrary, love tends to be possessive, greedy, and exclusionary. When Helena first enters, she immediately proposes a gift with one crucial reservation: ‘Were the world mine, Demetrius being bated, / The rest I’ll give to be to you translated’ (1.1.190–1). But the exception of Demetrius is the key point. And why would Helena give anything, let alone the world, to Hermia? The only object of such giving is to gain her one desire, a painful if understandable perversion of generosity. ‘My legs,’ laments the long-limbed Helena, ‘can keep no pace with my desires’ (3.2.445). Similarly, Titania’s possessive love leads her to complain that Oberon has only turned up since Theseus is to be wedded to Hippolyta, ‘To give their bed joy and prosperity’ (2.1.73). What can be wrong with exercising this generous impulse? The problem is that Titania is jealous and wants Oberon to give to no woman but herself. When giving must be governed by such rigid policies of exclusion it can hardly be said to be generous. Generosity and Desire are here mutually constitutive or, in the language of literary theory, supplementary terms. And the opening scene of the play is quick to establish this playfully binary structure. Those who have most to give, the paternalistic Egeus and Theseus, are riven by selfish desire. Theseus declares that his ‘desires’ have become vexing rather than happy because he has had to wait so long to be given what he wants, his nuptial hour with Hippolyta. And who in his view is the stingy one, depriving him of pleasure? It is Nature herself refusing to give. The old moon keeps him waiting, ‘Like to a step-dame, or a dowager / Long withering out a young man’s revenue’ (1.1.5–6). He instructs Hermia to ‘question your desires’ (1.1.67) but does not question his own. As the older men exit, Egeus oddly declares that he follows Theseus not just with duty but also with ‘desire’ (1.1.127). They do not set a good example for their charges who are greedy for love. The figurative dowager, the moon of which Theseus complains, also finds a more concrete echo in the opening scene. This ‘dowager / Of great revenue’ (1.1.157–8) is crucial to the plot, as Lysander explains to Hermia that his widow aunt who plans to give him everything has a place seven leagues from Athens where they can rendezvous.

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What is especially striking in the references to dowagers and the dependence not only of Lysander but also of Theseus upon the ‘will’ of even a mythical woman is that the idea of an unmarried woman, possessing disposable property, according to English common law, would have been an anomaly. Who is a woman of power and great revenue who hath no child, whose home, secure from Athenian law, will protect the young and persecuted? It will not tax the imagination to suppose that one model for such a childless, powerful, and potentially generous woman is the ultimate patron of The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, Queen Elizabeth herself. The paradoxical status of the female monarch in a patriarchal culture is rendered in starkest relief in the first scene of the play in terms of giving and waiting to be given. The ability of women to dispense gifts within a patrilineal system leads not only to the problematic question of ownership but also, as The Symposium shows, to the gendered nature of both love and generosity. One of the most remarkable features of that complex dialogue is that, deeply embedded within the Chinese boxes of narrative, it is the female Diotima, not the phallogocentric Socrates, who is the source of wisdom on this subject. In Shakespeare’s social reality, the tension engendered by the paradoxical need, not just the expectation, for women (the moon, the dowager aunt, Titania, the Queen, Shakespeare’s daughter Susanna Hall), who are commonly expected to be given (in marriage), to give to men is dramatic, for it embodies a vital conflict. ‘The movements of persons and possessions through time and space,’ writes Weiner, ‘are bound by, and to, the temporality of birth and death as well as production and decay’ (15). This temporal experience tends to challenge ‘convictions that a woman’s sexuality and her role in reproduction make her into a property that must be exchanged and controlled by men’ (15). In 1596, when A Midsummer Night’s Dream is supposed to have been written, Shakespeare’s son Hamnet died. As Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass have shown, the famous provision in Shakespeare’s own will by which he left his second-best bed to his wife belies the fact that his best bed would have gone to his son Hamnet if he had lived. But, they point out, given the absence of a male heir, the bed, together with the Stratford house itself, went to his daughter Susanna Hall and to ‘her heirs forever’ ... More striking and unusual is the emphatic expression of the intent to take back the property from the female heirs and give it to the male heir. The will goes to extraordinary lengths to insist upon male inheritance. (263)

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If A Midsummer Night’s Dream is haunted by a stolen boy, it is also informed by the related problem of men giving to women who, it is hoped, will give (if not be given) back to men. This play and others by Shakespeare begins by assuming a rigidly closed social and legal structure within which only a specific form of giving literally makes sense. And the social construction of the very idea of generosity is a thread that binds together several plays that might otherwise seem formally and thematically diverse. Timon of Athens begins with a scene that mirrors the opening of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in just this way. An Old Athenian father, like Egeus, approaches Lord Timon to request help in the giving of his daughter: One only daughter have I, no kind else, On only whom I may confer what I have got. The maid is fair, a’ th’ youngest for a bride, And I have bred her at my dearest cost In qualities of the best. This man of thine Attempts her love. I prithee, noble lord, Join with me to forbid him her resort, Myself have spoke in vain. (1.1.121–8)

The father’s anxiety is that he will lose control over his personal property, that it will no longer be his to give, that the very capacity of giving will be stolen from him by a female will. The daughter is dear in a financial sense; she can be inventoried. Her ‘qualities of the best’ are vague enough to be accessible to anyone with a like store of ducats. Timon solves the marital problem simply, recognizing that the father seeks a suitor for his daughter distinguished not by quality but by quantity of love (i.e., money). He gives his servant the means to marry the old man’s daughter. In the end, the tragedy of Timon, whose very name (from the Greek timos) means ‘value,’ is a chiasmic reflection of the comedic resolution, with lovers’ nuptials, of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The instigating problem of both plays is the relation between love and generosity. The action in both moves from Athens to the woods before returning to Athens. Ultimately, both show it is not what is or is not given that is important but the spirit in which it is given. As in King Lear, a parent can give his children an entire kingdom but not give well. If Timon’s fall is tragic it is because, as he ruefully remarks, ‘Unwisely, not ignobly have I

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given’ (2.2.174). Timon, like so many of Shakespeare’s lovers, gives ‘trifles’ of his love, but it is even such trifles that are his undoing. Shakespeare’s Athenians are governed by self-interest. Timon naively supposes himself above marketplace considerations: ‘I gave it [my love] freely ever, and there’s none / Can truly say he gives if he receives’ (1.2.10–11). And the angry bewilderment that he expresses once he realizes that he has behaved according to an entirely different set of economic assumptions than the rest of his society is extreme and selfdestructive. ‘Cut my heart in sums’ (3.4.92), he laments, having learned that love itself is subject to calculation. If Timon bears a resemblance to Theseus (even presiding over a feast at which appears a masque of Amazons), there is also a direct link to that nameless, spontaneously generous Indian vot’ress, who fetched trifles for Titania but died so far from Athens. After his fall, Timon, disdaining humanity, digs for roots in the woods and, in one of the play’s cruellest ironies, discovers gold. But he is the anti-adventurer, not the conquistador but the conquered. Timon will never go back on his oath to abjure society. ‘I am no idle votarist,’ he declares (4.3.27). Yet the misanthropy to which Timon descends upon losing everything, retreating to the woods, is an extreme and untenable position. The fact that Timon of Athens and A Midsummer Night’s Dream are both set in the Athens of antiquity lends power and immediacy to the sense that the plays speak to each other. Alcibiades, the last character to enter the feast in The Symposium, also attends Timon’s feast and remains one of his most faithful friends. Shakespeare, who would have learned of Alcibiades from Plutarch’s Lives if not from The Symposium, would also have known that it was by Lysander, the Spartan commander, that this follower of Socrates, the General Alcibiades, was defeated at Notium in 406 bce and at whose behest he was murdered two years later. If the figure of Alcibiades provides a convenient linchpin for these three texts, he also enables this essay to return to its occasion in praise of Alexander Leggatt. Arriving at the end of a long night, the drunk Alcibiades plops down and discovers himself seated next to the master. ‘By Heracles,’ Alcibiades exclaims, ‘What is this? Here is Socrates always lying in wait for me, and always, as his way is, coming out at all sorts of unsuspected places’ (82). Socrates turns to Agathon and begs his protection. But Alcibiades crowns Socrates with ribands and declares that, if he is to join the party, for his part he will praise not Love but Socrates. The appropriateness of this shift in subject, from Love to the figure of Socrates, in The Symposium may be discovered in the deep relationship

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between Love and the critical imagination. Once she has enabled Socrates to see that all men desire the good and that the possession of the good leads inevitably to happiness, Diotima explains that men only appear to love different things because one part of love is separated off and receives the name of the whole. In fact, ‘the beauty in every form is one and the same!’ (78). People tend to think in terms of different kinds of love, but, in fact, all forms of love are ultimately of that homogeneous value, the good. Moreover, true love is an intellectual activity that Diotima likens to poetry or making, for love is not only of beauty but also of the birth of beauty. It is through birth of beautiful children and of art that ‘the mortal nature is seeking as far as is possible to be everlasting and immortal’ or, in other words, through which humanity realizes itself. As B. Jowett eloquently summarizes the dialogue: Love is another aspect of philosophy. The same want in the human soul which is satisfied in the vulgar by the procreation of children, may become the highest aspiration of intellectual desire ... the absorption and annihilation of all other loves and desires in the love of knowledge ... To most men reason and passion appear to be antagonistic both in idea and fact ... Yet this ‘passion of the reason’ is the theme of the Symposium of Plato. (20)

A Midsummer Night’s Dream concludes with speeches on making art (‘First, rehearse your song by rote, / To each word a warbling note’ [5.1.397–8]) and beautiful children (‘And the blots of Nature’s hand / Shall not in their issue stand’ [409–10]) before Puck delivers his famous, final address to the audience. Underscoring the relations between culture and nature, intellectual creativity and procreation, love and generosity, they evoke and reply to the concerns of Egeus’s early speech on love tokens. In opening this essay with the list of items that Lysander is alleged to have given Hermia, I was not precisely accurate, for the first ‘love token’ of which Egeus complains is not a concrete object but poetry. ‘Thou hast given her rhymes’ (1.1.28), he begins, as if art tops all ‘lovetokens,’ as in this play it does. Audaciously Lysander has ‘sung’ to his lady. And this kind of ‘giving,’ Egeus explains in a peculiar twist, is a form of taking, even of stealing: Thou hast by moonlight at her window sung With faining voice verses of faining love, And stol’n the impression of her fantasy,

124 Alan L. Ackerman, Jr With bracelets of thy hair, rings, gauds, conceits, Knacks, trifles, nosegays, sweetmeats – messengers Of strong prevailment in unhardened youth. (1.1.28–35)

The gauds themselves are not substantial but are valuable, like verses, largely for the spirit in which they are given and received. The word itself comes from the Latin gaudere (to delight in), signifying the importance of the temporal experience of the object rather than the thing itself. Indicating the lack of special value in the gauds themselves at the end of the play, Demetrius comments, on awakening to a renewed love of Helena, that his ‘melted’ love to Hermia now seems as ‘the remembrance of an idle gaud’ (4.1.167; emphasis added). Here, perhaps anticipating the ‘remembrances’ that Ophelia ‘re-delivers’ to Hamlet, the fact that the love tokens amount to nothing in themselves is enabling rather than disabling. They are the transitory forms through which an idealist spirit or essence of love (or beauty or the good) has been inventoried and expressed. In the same sense, the play of the rude mechanicals in the otherwise anticlimactic fifth act brings the central trope of giving trifles to a climax that enables the audience of lovers to manifest their love by giving trifles (‘thanks for nothing,’ i.e., applause) in return. ‘The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them’ (5.1.211–12), says Theseus, who, like Hamlet, now appreciates the value of giving to players who give so little of substance in return. Hamlet’s instinctive appreciation of the importance of being generous to actors is one of his most attractive and ennobling traits. Actors, he knows, like the Ghost of his father, give everything and nothing, something of themselves but a thing upon which one cannot lay a hand. Generosity to the player, one hopes, will be repaid by generosity in kind. To Polonius, who plans to use the players according to their desert, Hamlet explains, ‘The less they deserve, the more merit is in your bounty’ (2.2.536). A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which begins with a denunciation of giving, ends with a plea to be generous and a double image of giving. Puck speaks these last lines: ‘Give me your hands, if we be friends, / And Robin shall restore amends’ (5.1.437–8). To give one’s hands is to give nothing, or at least to give what one also still retains. To be generous, to imagine without actually occupying other positions, to be critical but to refrain from censure, is the necessary basis for receiving gifts in turn. As Olivia instructs Malvolio in Twelfth Night, ‘To be generous,

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guiltless, and of free disposition, is to take those things for bird-bolts that you deem cannon-bullets’ (1.1.91–3). Generosity informs perception. Yet the logic of A Midsummer Night’s Dream extends further; the spirit of generosity expects a return but nothing more than a dream may yield. Professor Leggatt writes in his chapter on this play: ‘The audience has the most important role of all. It must, by its own response, give value to things that might otherwise be trivial. If it is to take the illusion of art as a kind of reality, then its perceptions must be, like those of a lover, generous to the point of irrationality’ (Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love 113–14). Allowing for the irrational, however, Professor Leggatt’s criticism is not itself irrational. Like the audience and the lover, the teacher-critic receives most when he is kindest, though what he gives be nothing greater than a dream. As Ficino wrote of Socrates: ‘So the teacher is a helper rather than a master. That is why ... Socrates declares he is the son of a midwife and most like a midwife in that he does not stuff knowledge into people when he teaches them, but rather elicits it, just as midwives deliver babies who have already been conceived.’4

NOTES 1 All Shakespeare quotations are from The Riverside Shakespeare (1974). 2 See Hayman 219. 3 While a Princess of the Amazons may have resided near the Black Sea for the Greeks, for Elizabethans, at least by 1596, when A Midsummer Night’s Dream was first performed and Walter Raleigh published his creative travelogue Discovery of Guiana, the Amazon would have been understood to have referred to the New World of South America, just as the wood outside of Athens was also very much an English space. Montaigne makes this connection between ancient conquest of the ‘new world’ surrounding the Black Sea and sixteenth-century imperialism across the Atlantic in his 1580 Essays (105–7). The habit of thought that Montaigne, Raleigh, and others exhibit collapses the New World into the classical past. 4 ‘Unde qui docet, minister est potius quàm magister. Quapropter Socrates apud Platonem in libro de scientia The´teto inquit se filium obstretricis esse, & obstetrici persimilem: utpote qui in erudiendis hominibus non inducat scientiam, sed educat, ficut obstetrices conceptos iam fœtus educunt’ (Theologica Platonica XIV 180; trans. Alan Ackerman).

Love in the Contact Zone: Gender, Culture, and Race in The Merchant of Venice suz a n n e we s tfall

When Alexander Leggatt published Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love in 1974, he began to explore several issues that continue to be important critical controversies. In reference to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he states, ‘the secure harmony ... is not achieved without some sacrifice. The play itself acknowledges the existence of a darker side of life that has been omitted in order to create a purely comic world’ (117–40). Some of this effect, he goes on to note, is present in The Merchant of Venice as well. Is the ominous reading that Leggatt perceived a result of presentism, a post-Holocaust, post–civil rights, post-Stonewall effect that modern audiences identify? Or is this ‘darker side’ in The Merchant of Venice one that Shakespeare’s audiences might also have perceived? The competition between Portia and Antonio for Bassanio’s love, the exclusion of several characters in the harmony of the final act (the untidy ‘loose ends’ of plots), the dislocation and destruction of romantic love, the commodification of women, anti-Semitism – all these ideas enter into Leggatt’s analysis, and all these ideas remain compelling today. In the following pages I will discuss The Merchant of Venice in terms of what Mary Louise Pratt calls ‘contact zones,’ areas where cultures meet to negotiate power and to express, in rhetorical structures, the various tensions that inform relationships between genders, between generations, between religions, and between ethnicities. By examining the convergence, collisions, and transformations that occur as these diverse characters slouch toward their act 5 denouement, I hope to show how seventeenth-century concerns about miscegenation, feminism, and homoeroticism continue to preoccupy performers and audiences today. This play, perhaps more than Shakespeare’s other comedies, explores such transculturations and foregrounds issues of sexuality and culture

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that have become increasingly sensitive after the civil and gay rights movements, after the various genocides that have haunted the twentieth-century world. Indeed, The Merchant of Venice tests the boundaries of its comic structure with content that has become, in today’s stagings, quite problematic. Some have gone so far as to suggest that it cannot and should not be performed in a post-Holocaust world.1 Traditional scholarship and, indeed, traditional productions have hailed Shakespeare as ahead of his time in his sympathies with the disenfranchised and his portraits of diversity. Many believe that Shylock’s monologue ‘Hath not a Jew eyes?’ demonstrates Shakespeare’s compassion for the disempowered Jews; others remark that the bloodthirsty bargain demonstrates Shakespeare’s bigotry. To further muddy the waters, Solanio’s reportage of Shylock’s contradictory response ‘O my ducats! O my daughter!’ once again shifts audience sympathies (even though Solanio is not the most trustworthy of interlocutors).2 For centuries many seemed unbothered by Portia’s racism toward Morocco in the casket scene and her anti-Semitism – she repeatedly calls Shylock ‘Jew’ – in the trial scene. On a subtler, more interpretive matter, directors and audiences have danced around the exact nature of the relationship between Antonio and Bassanio. Friends? A father/son relationship? Homosexual lovers? Unrequited love? While Shakespeare’s text may imply all these things, individual actors and directors must select which concepts to foreground for their audiences.3 While Victorian reviews frequently discuss Jewishness, I have found no evidence in reviews of an audience questioning Bassanio’s sexuality or motive for courtship, or Portia’s xenophobic (and imperialistic?) dismissal of her various suitors. Yet in the theatre today, all these issues build to create that ‘darker side’ to which Leggatt alludes, the floating signifiers to which we constantly attach new meanings. While we may not have A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s out-and-out combat in the supernatural kingdoms, we do have combat in historicities – in the changing readings of viewers of the play. In both comedies we have conflict in generational and sexual power. By looking at the rhetoric of these cultural conflicts in The Merchant of Venice, I suggest, we can see these discourses as carefully constructed negotiations between cultures, performed in what Mary Louise Pratt calls the ‘contact zone.’ The rhetorical structures and semantics of Shakespeare’s text model the linguistics of Pratt’s contact zone. I take my title, and my approach, from Pratt’s well known ‘Arts of the Contact Zone,’ which first appeared in 1990.4 In this landmark essay,

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Pratt argues that, for the reader (or in this case the spectator), travel writing produced rather than reflected foreign worlds, an observation we might well apply to Shakespeare’s plays; many in the audience no doubt acquired much of their ‘knowledge’ of foreigners and of foreign lands from characters and events on the public stage, in popular pamphlets, and in print translations of foreign texts (just as Shakespeare himself did) rather than from first-hand experience. Such ‘imagined communities’ to use Benedict Anderson’s term, made it easy for the English to share values, and consequently identify, with the Christian, white European aristocracy of Malta or Venice or Belmont while marginalizing the alien ‘others’ – blacks, homosexuals, and Jews. Such identification with the power group, I would argue, allowed the British to explore their fears of miscegenation and homosexuality from the comfort of a land that had already criminalized sodomy and expelled blacks by 1596, just two years before The Merchant of Venice was performed (Bray 38–42; B. Smith, Homosexual Desire 47–52; Dollimore). By 1275, almost three centuries earlier, Edward I had outlawed Jewish moneylending, while holding three thousand Jews for ransom to make up for the fiscal loss. ‘Imagined communities’ are safe places from which to confront, conquer, and purge such anxieties; indeed, we might say that this is one of the functions of literature. Navigating these contact zones, however, proves a bit more difficult. Pratt explores the contact zones not specifically as places of binary oppositions – Christian/Jew, White/Black, Male/Female, Domestic/Alien, and Public/Private – but as places where these relationships are negotiated, ‘interactive,’ and ‘improvisational’ – terms that are, interestingly, theatrical. So, while the contact zones certainly ‘involve conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict,’ they also explore ‘copresence, interaction, [and] interlocking understandings and practices’ (6–7). The fifth act of Merchant has always struck me (and indeed my students and many critics) as a most unhappy happy ending. While I am sure that the Elizabethan audience would have had little problem with the celebration of upper-class, white, Christian, heterosexual closure, postmodern, post-Holocaust, post-feminist, post-Marxist audiences certainly do, which has made staging the play a tricky proposition for many directors. Although the history of Jews in England and the production history of The Merchant of Venice are far beyond the scope of my study here, let me suggest the complex trajectories that its construction of Jewishness in general and Shylock in particular have undergone.

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Many critics over the years have noted that most Englishmen had never seen a practising Jew, since they had been legally expelled in 1280 and were not to be readmitted (technically at least) until the interregnum (J. Shapiro 46–60). Consequently the English person’s perception of Jewish culture was formed by anti-Semitic folklore, literature like Chaucer’s The Prioress’s Tale (in the unironic reading at least), and plays such as the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, and The Merchant of Venice. To be sure, murranos (Jews who had, at least for public purposes, converted to Christianity) continued to live and work in England, including even the Queen’s physician, Dr Roderigo Lopez, whose grisly execution in 1594 inspired revivals of both Merchant of Venice and Marlowe’s Jew of Malta.5 The timing of these revivals suggests that sixteenth-century performances of Shylock were designed to exploit audience prejudice and hatred rather than to soothe their fear and loathing. But the fact remains that we have no evidence about performance style or audience reception for either The Jew of Malta or The Merchant of Venice, beyond references to large noses in the former. Certainly the location of the theatres – on the south bank and thus geographically estranged from the city – make the idea of marginalization exceptionally concrete. Many have assumed that the actor playing Shylock wore a red wig and false beard, to connect visually to Judas, traditionally thought to have had red hair (a practice that Henry Irving recalls in his memoirs [Hatton 232]). Stephen Orgel notes the similarity, both in character and function, between Shylock and Pantelone, the enraged father and blocking figure of the commedia dell’arte (Imagining Shakespeare 156– 7). We do not know whether the role of Shylock was played by Richard Burbage, the leading tragedian, or Will Kempe, the leading clown, which leads us into the conundrum that would inform the role for the next three centuries. Do actors play Shylock as a vengeful father who is crushed, or a ridiculous alien who is put in his place?6 And how do these choices contribute to the interaction and co-presence of two conflicting populations, one in power, one marginalized? Indeed the dominant early eighteenth-century performance, when the play finally came back into the repertoire after an absence of fifty years, was unequivocally comic, played by Thomas Dogget in George Granville’s 1701 ‘adaptation’ The Jew of Venice: A Comedy, in which Shylock becomes the focal character (Orgel, Imagining Shakespeare 145; Spencer 135). Available previously only to readers (quarto editions issued in 1637 and 1652, the folios in 1663 and 1685), Shakespeare’s

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original play took a back seat to Granville’s for the next forty years. Granville’s prologue makes clear the performance’s intent: ‘Tonight we punish a stock-jobbing Jew. /A piece of justice, terrible and strange.’ Certainly making Shylock comic disempowers him in the conventional way that dominant cultures have always infantilized threatening aliens (or even women). But Jews were not the only aliens negotiating power in the eighteenth-century British Empire. As Michael Ragussis notes: Perhaps the most noteworthy feature of the Georgian stage ... was the development and multiplication of ethnic, colonial, and provincial character types: Jews, Scots, Irish, Welsh, blacks, West Indians, nabobs, and Yorkshiremen paraded on the London stage. These domestic and colonial others showcased London and, more generally, England as the center of an increasingly complex and culturally mixed nation and empire, and in this way functioned to explore the emerging and shifting identity of the recently invented Great Britain. (774)

Shortly after Granville’s comic adaptation, Nicholas Rowe’s print edition of Shakespeare evokes the second major interpretation of Shylock: ... though we have seen that play received and acted as a comedy and the part of the Jew performed by an excellent comedian, yet I cannot but think it was designed tragically by the author. There appears in it such a deadly spirit of revenge, such a savage fierceness and fellness, and such a bloody designation of cruelty and mischief, as cannot agree either with the style or characters of comedy. (Gross 110)

Here, in yet another conventional rhetoric, the alien is rendered ‘savage’ and ‘fell’ – a word that suggests demonic power – as indeed Lancelot Gobbo asserts. This vacillation between two negative portraits of the alien – the villain and the clown – continued to share the stage well into the twentieth century. Charles Macklin in 1741 is credited with presenting an ‘historically accurate’ character, supposedly prompting Alexander Pope to opine ‘This is the Jew / That Shakespeare drew’ (Gross 111–12; Orgel, Imagining Shakespeare 145–6). Thereafter, Edmund Kean played a tragic Shylock, while William Charles Macready restored the ‘balance’ between the ‘gay [in its non-homosexual denotation] Christian world’ and the ‘dark Jewish’ (Page 116; Gross 135), evoking a binary that

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again suggests the power rhetoric of the dominant group. Henry Irving has been credited with the first ‘sympathetic’ portrait of Shylock, but even here we find the language of the contact zone qualifying that sentiment. Starting the theatrical tradition of orientalizing Shylock (which foregrounds the character’s alienation from Venetian society in strikingly visual terms), Irving recorded his own approach to the role: I look on Shylock ... as the type of a persecuted race; almost the only gentleman in the play, and the most ill-used ... there is nothing in his language, at any time, that indicates the snuffling usurer which some persons regard him, and certainly nothing to justify the use the early actors made of the part for the low comedian. (Hatton 265–6)

Irving’s portrait was uniquely understated, revolutionary enough to provoke audience and critical surprise. He continues: Now, you say that some of my critics evidently look for more fire in the delivery of the speeches to Solanio, and I have heard friends say, that John Kemble and the Keans brought down the house for the way they thundered out the threats against Antonio, and the defence [sic] of the Jewish race. (Hatton 269)

Even though Irving’s words indicate his sympathies toward the character, once again we see the language of the hegemony about subjugated and separate populations. A critic for the Chicago Daily Tribune puts it succinctly: ‘In the new dawning the Art [sic] of today looks back upon outraged Israel, and Shylock becomes no longer a caricature, but a type’ (Tribune 11 Jan. 1884: 5). We may well wonder whether the critic’s intuited improvement is actually progress. In the nineteenth century, both Junius Brutus Booth and his son Edwin (like the father/son acting dynasty of Edmund and Charles Kean) attempted the role. Junius, according to Thomas Gould, ‘embodied all the gloomy grandeur of position, this merciless absoluteness of will ... He made it the representative Hebrew: the type of a race as old as the world’ (emphasis in original), though Walt Whitman wrote in the Boston Herald that Booth was ‘inflated, stagey, and antiquated’ (Lelyveld 64–5). Edwin Booth’s Shylock shook the rafters, prompting one critic to find it ‘impossible to reconcile Mr. Booth’s Shylock with the Jew of Shakespeare’ since the ‘fierce malignity and noise of his speech would consign him inevitably to the Station house ... In the early days of Venice

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he would have been tossed from the Rialto ... There were moments ... when Mr. Booth positively ranted’ (New York Times 4 Feb. 1867: 4). And indeed, in Michael Radford’s 2004 film, Jews are tossed from the ponte into the Grand Canal. During Booth’s tour to the Winter Gardens in Chicago, the reviewer noted that the audience laughed during the trial scene, and contributed his interpretation about Shakespeare’s ‘intent’: All commentators, I believe, have decided that Shakespeare bore no malice in his heart toward Jews, but that he alone in his generation endeavored to stem the current of popular prejudice by this very creation of Shylock, giving to him Christian passions. (Chicago Tribune 24 Feb. 1867: 2)

Once again we see the pernicious language of power negotiation here; in order to make Shylock heroic or even sympathetic, let alone tragic, he – like Bottom – must be translated. Thus the critic echoes the xenophobic judgment of Portia. Similarly, a New York production in 1875 prompted this transformational observation, putting Shakespeare back in the company of anti-Semites and once again dehumanizing Shylock: Our modern Jews are not such bearish savages as Shakespeare painted Shylock, and it was thought to be a good idea to give the Jews a lift, and to exhibit Shylock disguised as a gentleman. (New York Times 4 May 1875: 1; emphasis added)

Later the same year, The Times critic summed up the late nineteenthcentury parade of Shylocks: For years the part of Shylock was played as low comedy. Ingoldsby made fun of him. Frank Talfourd burlesqued him; and the late Mr. Robson gave Olympic [Theater] audiences a Jew who made their flesh creep in one mood before they had well done laughing at him in another. And oh! the ‘great tragedians’ who have torn him to bits! (New York Times 19 Sept. 1875: 3).

Talfourd’s burlesque, called Shylock: or the Merchant of Venice Preserved (A Jerusalem Hearty-Joke), starred Frederick Robson as a Shylock who ‘does not on this occasion conduct himself as a Gentile-man’ (Lelyveld 117). Other such burlesques and ‘adaptations’ continued to use puns to indicate the doubleness of white mainstream reactions to Shylock; these titles include: The Peddler of Very Nice, Much Ado About a Merchant

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of Venice, The Merry Merchant of Venice: A Peep at Shakespeare Through the Venetians, Petruchio’s Widow (about Jessica after Lorenzo’s death), The (Old Clothes) Merchant of Venice; or The Young Judge and Old Jewry. In The Merchant of Venice Act VI, Shylock and Antonio become partners, Jessica leaves Lorenzo, and Shylock tries to persuade Tubal to convert to Christianity, as he has done (Lelyveld 117–23). The character of Shylock began to fare a bit better toward the turn of the century, beginning with a German production that omitted the conventional denouement of comedy, concluding instead after the trial scene (New York Times 31 Dec. 1887: 4). Ellis Glickman, the first Jewish actor to play the role in the United States, performed at his own Desplaines Street Theater, and asked in an interview: Is it not possible that a man of wealth and refinement, such as Shylock, undoubtedly was at that period in Venice, should have been respectable and honorable – a man of affairs? Why, then, portray him as a miserable and contemptible creature, cringing, crouching, miserly – a thing to be hated?

In order to create his sympathetic portrait, however, Glickman, like others before and after him, had to interpolate scenes into Shakespeare’s play, including one in which Shylock explains to Jessica that her mother had died defending her child from ‘riotous young nobles engaged in Jew baiting’ (Chicago Daily Tribune 13 Feb. 1903: 7). Even such a positive production, however, inspired a condescending headline: ‘Hail the Good Shylock: Stage Novelty introduced by the Yiddish Company’ (Chicago Daily Tribune 13 Feb. 1903: 7). Michael Radford’s 2004 film of The Merchant of Venice also interpolated scenes in order to increase audience sympathy for the Jewish characters. As Herbert Beerbohm Tree had first done in 1916 (Chicago Daily Tribune 21 May 1916: G1), Radford includes scenes of devout Jews at worship to balance dialogue that demonizes Jews. Another interpolation, the establishing sequences include a crawl that describes Renaissance abuse of Jews and an introductory montage that presents a scene of violence on the Ponte Rialto against Jewish men. Action that is diagetic for a reader (reported by Shylock himself in 1.3.110)7 becomes mimetic for the viewer: we actually see Antonio spitting on Shylock, which not only generates audience antipathy toward Antonio from the film’s onset but also predisposes the audience to empathize with the persecuted minority.

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Directorial concepts that increase audience sympathy for Shylock seem to have increased markedly after the turn of the twentieth century, when public outcry against Jewish stereotyping began to emerge, and certainly after the Second World War, when the Holocaust forever changed the historicity of The Merchant of Venice. As early as 1907, the Chicago Daily Tribune proclaimed in a headline ‘Shylock Not for Children,’ encouraging its removal from schools on the grounds that ‘“the Jew that Shakespeare drew” is happily not the Jew as we have come to know him’ (10 Mar. 1907: B4). By the following year, the Milwaukee Lutheran clergy called the play ‘unchristianlike’ and ‘demoralizing,’ among other things (Chicago Daily Tribune 7 Feb. 1908: 8), and in 1911 the Central Conference of American Rabbis, ‘advised the abolition of the caricature of the Jew upon the stage,’ and ‘the doing away with the “Merchant of Venice” from the public school course’ (Chicago Daily Tribune 5 July 1911: 7). Thereafter, every director who mounts Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and every spectator who views it have to choose an interpretation that acknowledges power negotiations between dominant and subjugated populations.8 In addition to the intercultural binary, The Merchant of Venice also foregrounds interracial and homoerotic situations, in both rhetorical and visual terms. These displacements affect the ways both the characters and the audiences traverse these ‘contact zones.’ As ‘social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power’ (Pratt 4), few places would better suit the term ‘contact zone’ than Venice in the Elizabethan era – whether the real or the imagined. The powerful and wealthy city-state where east meets west, the centre of trade and finance, the land of courtesans and art, the eastern front of the Christian empires, Venice had long fascinated the English as an exotic locale that remained within the boundaries of Christian Europe. And surely Jessica is an important traveller in this geography of the imagination. A traditional reading of the play (and, I am sure, the Elizabethan reading) is that the Jewess is redeemed, so to speak, by her abandonment of her father and her marriage to an upstanding Christian gentleman. But a closer look at Jessica’s relationship with her own culture and her husband reveals that her moral trajectory is not necessarily an ascension, since her transculturation is accomplished through deception and theft. In an era when art is inordinately concerned with the dangers of female behaviour, and in particular with daughterly obedience to the father (viz. Lear, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, and later The Changeling, ’Tis Pity

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She’s a Whore, and so forth), Jessica’s revolt must be judged in balance with her conversion. Which is more important: patriarchy or religion? In addition, Lorenzo, while not perhaps obviously coercive or exploitative, clearly sees more than just romantic love in his conquest of Jessica. Which is more important: love or money? In both these matters, the subplots comment interestingly on the main plot. We first meet Jessica in 2.3, when she in her first lines equates her home with hell and Lancelot with a ‘merry devil.’ Already we are in undiscovered country, since hell is a Christian rather than a Jewish concept, and Lancelot is a descendant of the vice figure from medieval drama, someone of whom we should be suspicious. In addition, the previous scene has set an expectation horizon that is continually in movement. Lancelot begins 2.2 with an imaginary dialogue between himself and ‘the fiend’; this sort of linguistic formation is, as Pratt notes, quite typical of autoethnographic production, in which transculturation is enacted through parody and collaboration (6). In these sorts of monologues, miscomprehension inevitably accrues, as we see in the comic malapropisms of Lancelot and old Gobbo. By the end of the monologue, Lancelot has revealed his own cultural vacillation: To be ruled by my conscience, I should stay with the Jew my master, who, God bless the mark, is a kind of devil; and to run away from the Jew, I should be ruled by the fiend, who, saving your reverence, is the devil himself. Certainly the Jew is the very devil incarnation; and, in my conscience, my conscience is but a kind of hard conscience to offer to counsel me to stay with the Jew. The fiend gives the more friendly counsel. I will run, fiend. (2.2.20–8)

So we have a devil running from a devil on the advice of a devil, leaving the poor clown to choose between two bad bargains. As a floating signifier, the demonic continually changes shape and venue but nevertheless builds up an oxymoronic chaos. Gobbo echoes his son in joining the words ‘master’ and ‘Jew.’ Like Portia, who calls Shylock by name only twice, neither will use the man’s given name. Lancelot’s betrayal of his master and his deception of his father suggest Judas, while his quip ‘your boy that was, your son that is, your child that shall be’ (2.2.81–2) suggests the trinity (as we hear in the Vespers prayer ‘Glory be to the father, the son, and the holy spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end’). In addition, his comment ‘I am a Jew if I serve the Jew any longer’ (2.2.107) both prefigures

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the conversion of Jessica and, through the conditional ‘if,’ prevents his own heresy. As Lancelot sues to join Bassanio’s household, culture and capital create still more dissonance when Bassanio points out that it is a questionable preferment ‘To leave a rich Jew’s service to become / The follower of so poor a gentleman’ (2.2. 139–40). Here the audience finds, in a parody of biblical language, that it is better to ‘follow’ poverty than to ‘serve’ riches. In this transformation, bankrupt Christianity is privileged over wealthy Judaism; religion trumps riches. Stepping into this landscape and continuing the conflicted mode is Jessica, who will even the balance by enriching the Christian and bankrupting the Jew. Lancelot delivers still more oxymorons to confuse the issues – ‘Most beautiful pagan, most sweet Jew! If a Christian do not play the knave and get thee, I am much deceived’ (2.3.10–12). In this case, religion trumps legitimacy. Jessica herself acknowledges, in blank verse to provide gender and class contrast with Lancelot’s prose, that she feels the strife, the ‘heinous sin ... / To be ashamed to be my father’s child’ (2.3.16–17). Ironically, she proposes to solve the problem by becoming a Christian, at the same time acknowledging that she is a daughter by nature (‘blood’) not by culture (‘manners’), one of the most fundamental binaries (Lévi-Strauss). Jessica’s complaint that her house is ‘hell’ seems to stem from her rebellion at the strict control of her body by her father. She is forbidden the subversive carnival of a masque and ordered to ‘stop my house’s ears,’ which indicates male control not only over the subject daughter but also over the property, certainly an accepted practice both in Elizabethan society and in the world of the play. Portia obeys her late father’s wishes and is rewarded. Jessica disobeys her living father’s wishes and is ... rewarded? This is a conundrum in the traditional reading and staging of the fifth act.9 These father–daughter dynamics sharply foreground the intersecting contact zones of patriarchy and religion found throughout the play. A dead Christian father clearly commands more obedience than a living Jewish one. Further examination of Jessica’s flight reveals that her ‘conversion’ is problematic from both the Jewish and the Christian perspectives. Ania Loomba has noted that the theatre involves ‘the impersonation of outsiders by insiders,’ and characters who become insiders by ‘changing their political allegiance or faith,’ or, I might add, gender. So we have a non-Jewish male performing the role of a Jewish female convert to Christianity, a fact that foregrounds the shifting boundaries of gender

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and culture. Loomba goes on to point out the ambiguity of this performance: But representations of outsiders who willingly or forcibly mould themselves in the image of the dominant culture are much more than shorthand for an emerging ‘modern’ preoccupation with self-fashioning and mobility. They testify to the fact that the very concepts of social mobility and self-fashioning, indeed modernity itself, were profoundly shaped by encounters with outsiders, at home and abroad. (18)

I would add that these representations do more than prophesy modernity; they also foreground anxiety. As I have discussed elsewhere, many Tudor interludes, notably Fulgens and Lucrece, Mundus et Infans, and Youth, are concerned with the dangers of social mobility and ‘new’ wealth (Westfall). Indeed, Shakespeare’s own All’s Well That Ends Well meditates upon this theme. And while real-world encounters with outsiders certainly shaped modernity, literary and theatrical encounters were surely more common and as influential. Leggatt has noted the ‘unsympathetic context for elopement’ (126) for Jessica and Lorenzo, quoting Gratiano’s complaint: How like a younger or a prodigal The scarfèd bark puts from her native bay, Hugged and embracèd by the strumpet wind! How like the prodigal doth she return, With overweathered ribs and ragged sails, Lean, rent, and beggared by the strumpet wind! (2.6.15–20)

Clearly Gratiano is speaking metaphorically here, but, nevertheless, his language is inordinately anti-feminist. Twice he refers to the ‘strumpet’ wind, and twice he calls the female ‘bark’ a prodigal, which, indeed Jessica turns out to be, as reflected in an extravagant spending spree, culminating in her trading of her mother’s ring for a monkey. More evidence for disaster comes from Jessica’s own words: I am glad ’tis night, you do not look on me, For I am much ashamed of my exchange. But love is blind, and lovers cannot see The pretty follies that themselves commit. (2.6.35–8)

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In the context, Jessica is obviously referring to her adoption of male dress, but her language here is polyvalent, her double entendre almost equivalent to the bilingualism endemic to Pratt’s contact zones. Jessica is exchanging her Jewish culture for a Christian one, the power of one man over her for that of another, and to this folly she confesses she is yet blind. Moreover, she deepens her transgression by ‘gilding’ herself with further theft, in an ironic echo of Bassanio’s allusion to Portia as a ‘golden fleece.’ Such language also reveals that Jessica has internalized the ethnic self-hatred that hegemonies usually inflict upon subject populations. In fact, after this scene, we see no more of Jessica until her arrival in Belmont, but we hear a great deal of troubling information about her journey thither. Transculturation is also obvious in Shylock’s famous ‘hath not a Jew eyes’ speech (3.1.55–69), in which he adopts language typical of the contact zone autoethnographies, using rhetorical questions and hegemonic concepts to ‘educate’ his oppressors. According to Pratt, in such autoethnographies colonized subjects undertake to describe themselves in ways that engage with the colonizer’s own terms. If ethnographic texts are a means by which Europeans represent to themselves their (usually subjugated) others, autoethnographic texts are those the others construct in response to or in dialogue with those metropolitan representations ... Autoethnography involves partial collaboration with and appropriation of the idioms of the conqueror ... merged or infiltrated to varying degrees with indigenous modes. (7; emphasis in original)

Pratt also mentions that such autoethnographies frequently employ the ‘mock interview’ by which the subjugated speaker attempts to educate the conqueror through somewhat rhetorical questions and answers, to ‘describe themselves in ways that engage with representations others have made of them’ (7). As Shylock attempts to ‘educate’ Salerio and Solanio about their community and common humanity, he clearly resorts to this rhetorical strategy. First, he appears to adopt the hegemonic assumption that Jews are not human, an assumption reflected in the pre-Renaissance case of Parisian Johannes Alardus, who was burned with his Jewish mistress ‘since coition with a Jewess is precisely the same as if a man should copulate with a dog.’10 By continually ‘asking’ whether the non-human Jew resembles the human Christian in anatomy, physiology, passion,

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and action, Shylock demonstrates that he is not, really, alien, and that he is as capable of ‘the villainy you teach me’ (not, significantly, the villainy I learn) as the Italians who consider him their inferior. It is perhaps significant that this most important speech, like the entire scene, transpires in prose, the language not of privilege but of the outsider. By setting himself up as the pupil of the power elite, Shylock enacts the transculturation of which Pratt speaks, negotiating the cultural boundaries to ‘teach’ the ‘teacher.’ As James Shapiro has put it: Shylock’s insistence on the similarity of Jews and Christians is mirrored in the proverb’s [‘I am a Jew else’] double message, one that can be traced back to Paul’s epistles: a Christian is the antithesis of a Jew and yet, in certain circumstances, is potentially indistinguishable from one. (8)

Shylock’s ‘Hath not a Jew eyes’ speech in many ways forms a microcosm of the trial scene to come, where Shylock once again attempts to identify himself with the power elite and demonstrates that he has successfully ‘learned’ the values of the Christians. Not only does he claim the rights of law, to which the Venetians are bound, but to further emphasize the identification, he also adapts the abusive language – albeit in the safer mode of the conditional and the metaphor rather than in the explicit terms the Christians are permitted to use – with which Antonio and Gratiano have in the past and will in future taunt him: What if my house be troubled with a rat, And I be pleased to give ten thousand ducats To have it baned? What, are you answered yet? Some men there are love not a gaping pig. (4.1.44–7)

Shylock further solidifies his identification with the Venetians by likening his bond to their practice of keeping slaves as unprivileged aliens, refused marriage rights and property, both crucial ingredients in the stew of the play (4.1.90–8). And it is this very traversing of the boundaries of the contact zone that will, ultimately, prove his downfall; Shylock strives through the rhetoric of argument to become an insider, yet it is as outsider that he is trapped, and he himself provides the linguistic suggestion that allows Portia’s loophole. After successfully insinuating himself into the power structure of Christian Venice, he retreats to his cultural origin:

140 Suzanne Westfall These be the Christian husbands! I have a daughter; Would any of the stock of Barabbas Had been her husband, rather than a Christian! (4.1.293–5)

By reminding the audience and the Venetian court not only of his Jewishness but also of the prevalent anti-Semitic mythos of the Jews as Christ-killers who chose to free a murderer rather than the messiah, Shylock destroys whatever cultural cachet he has accrued and provides Portia with the hint she needs to condemn him not only for shedding a drop of Christian blood but also for being ‘an alien / That by direct or indirect attempts / ... seek[s] the life of any citizen’ (4.1.347–9). So perhaps Portia is not the brilliant (and quick-study!) lawyer she has been portrayed as, but rather Shylock outsmarts himself, and illustrates Pratt’s conclusion that the subject outsider may be allowed only so much entrance into the power elite before being forcibly reminded of his subservience. Thus, one of the ways we might view the trial scene is as a tug-of-war between ethnic identities. It is perhaps significant that Shylock’s language also breaks down when he is strained beyond his tethers by his daughter’s profligacy and desertion. Earlier in the play the evocative ‘a wilderness of monkeys’ that marks his despair is certainly not the language of the hegemony, but rather a metaphor whose elusive exoticism snaps us back to an awareness of Shylock’s otherness. In act 5, after what Northrop Frye might call the ‘blocking character,’ Shylock, has been defeated, we should expect a return to the festival mood of comedy. The scene begins in what may be read as a moonlit scene of passion between Lorenzo and Jessica, filled with legendary and romantic references to what has happened ‘on such a night as this.’ But on closer examination, the dialogue is ominous. Each reference in the scene evokes cross-cultural disasters that occur when men and women refuse to observe political and ethnic boundaries. Lorenzo and Jessica invoke and identify with Troilus and Cressida, Pyramus and Thisby, Aeneas and Dido, and Jason and Medea as romantic icons. In all these cases, however, lovers cross cultural boundaries, disobeying the strictures of parents, of nations, and of religions. And all these relationships bring death to one or both parties, as well as destruction to the societies they represent. In this sad company stand Lorenzo and Jessica, sharing dialogue that has generally been read as ironic and teasing, but may certainly be interpreted as frank and bitter:

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lorenzo. In such a night Did Jessica steal from the wealthy Jew And with an unthrift love did run from Venice As far as Belmont. jessica. In such a night Did Lorenzo swear he loved her well, Stealing her soul with many vows of faith, And ne’er a true one. lorenzo: In such a night Did pretty Jessica, like a little shrew, Slander her love, and he forgave it her. (5.1.14–22)

Again we have the language of commodity – ‘steal,’ ‘unthrift,’ ‘stealing,’ and the language of treachery – untrue vows and ‘slander.’ Even more significantly, Lorenzo steals Jessica’s ‘soul’ with ‘vows of faith,’ rather than stealing her heart with vows of love. Moments later, and far from the end of the play, Jessica delivers her enigmatic final line: ‘I am never merry when I hear sweet music’ (5.1.69), quite a change from the love-struck girl sneaking off in disguise from a strict house to celebrate a masque. The final act presents problems both for the actor playing Jessica and for the director. After this point, Jessica is not warmly greeted by the returning Portia or the newly arrived Bassanio and Antonio; she remains onstage silent (if indeed she remains onstage at all), and seems pointedly excluded from the celebrations, encouraging some directors to portray Jessica mourning her abandonment of her faith, father, and culture in the final tableau. We should recall Lancelot’s jokes in 3.5 that Jessica, despite her marriage to a Christian, cannot be saved from her heritage, and that the ‘making of Christians’ by marriage serves only to ‘raise the price of hogs’ (3.5.21–2), yet another connection between capital and culture. Jessica has been rendered textually invisible, as most subject populations are in imperialistic societies. Radford’s 2004 film, in order to undercut the Christian victory of act 5, ends with a scene showing an isolated and mournful Jessica, embracing her mother’s ring, which she has not traded for a monkey (another diagetic moment made mimetic, since Tubal reported the incident in 3.1, and we receive no corroboration or visual scene confirming the charge). This tension between conversion and ethnic purity seems to reflect an English fear of miscegenation, no less than the racial interbreeding

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threatened by the suit of Morocco and achieved by Lancelot and his pregnant Moorish mistress – both Negro and Islamic, as Loomba points out (46). This fertile exotic materializes abruptly and briefly (Leggatt wittily quips, ‘and where did she come from, by the way?’ [140]), but she never truly becomes material onstage; she never actually appears. As textually invisible as Jessica at the end of the play, the woman is easily overlooked. If, however, we see the worlds of Venice and Belmont as contact zones, Lancelot’s ‘tawny’ mistress makes perfect sense: the comic subplot demonstrates very vividly the dangers of miscegenation. Lancelot’s pregnant Moor remains invisible offstage partially to prevent the audience from imagining a Portia pregnant by Morocco, certainly a ‘danger’ in which she stands if his suit proves successful. Could their child ever stand as heir to the kingdom of Morocco and the magical island of Belmont? But not to worry. As Auden notes, the paradigms of fairy tales (even to the law of triads – the third attempt, the third suitor always succeeds) and patterns of comedy have already predetermined that we will not take Morocco’s suit seriously, that the charming white prince of act 1 will shortly arrive to scatter the aliens (228–9). The fertile interracial couple, whose contact zone has proved a melting pot, will be excluded from the final dance. The clown is beyond boundaries in so many ways; already identified with the devil and the Jew, he consorts with an infidel, abjures marriage (with which the main plot is certainly concerned), and produces a bi-racial child, but all diagetically, safe from prying audience eyes. The English fear of miscegenation, which Loomba discusses at length, is reflected in Shylock’s reference to Laban’s sheep, which suggests the Elizabethan notion that a woman’s imagination could change the racial profile of her fetus. In addition, Loomba invokes Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland to show how the British considered the Spanish ‘most mingled and most uncertain’ due to their long co-existence with the Moors (136–9). Thus the British were able to connect their fear and loathing of Catholic Spanish with their rejection of non-white and non-Christian cultures, making Portia’s rejection of the Prince of Aragon (an allusion perhaps to Catherine of Aragon, mother of the leader of the counter-reformation Queen Mary?) as inevitable and as theatrically satisfying as her dismissal of Morocco. It is no accident, as Kim Hall observes, that British fears of miscegenation and heresy are linked to commerce and feminine power. Crosscultural interactions invariably involve economics, kinship, and mar-

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riage, which are the foundations of any culture. Alliances between nations had for centuries involved transfer of properties, from Eleanor’s Aquitaine to King Philip’s assumption of British sovereignty when he married Mary Tudor, from which he had to be forcibly disabused. Thus English imperialism is a double-edged sword: Extolling the homogenising influence of trade suggests that English trade will turn a world of difference into a world of Protestant similitude. However, it leaves unspoken the more threatening possibility – that English identity will be subsumed under foreign difference. (93)

Portia’s racism and xenophobia, ignored for so long, are now commonplace in literary criticism, driven by her own lines – ‘Let all of his complexion choose me so’ (2.7.79).11 These characteristics, however, still do not prevent readers and viewers from accepting her as the protagonist and the play as a comedy. Most readers and viewers, who, frankly, share Portia’s cultural values, do not sense the hegemonic voice with which she speaks. Instead of focusing on Portia’s insensitive language, spectators concentrate on Morocco’s pride, characterizing him as a braggart unworthy of the golden prize. His language seems to reflect this: By this scimitar That slew the Sophy and a Persian prince That won three fields of Sultan Solyman, I would o’erstare the sternest eyes that look, Outbrave the heart most daring on the earth, Pluck the young sucking cubs from the she-bear Yea, mock the lion when ’a roars for prey, To win thee, lady. But alas the while! If Hercules and Lichas play at dice Which is the better man, the greater throw May turn by fortune from the weaker hand. So is Alcides beaten by his page, And so may I, blind Fortune leading me, Miss that which one unworthier may attain, And die with grieving. (2.1.24–38)

At first glance the language certainly appears to be that of a braggart warrior, but compare this with the speech of that other Venetian, Othello:

144 Suzanne Westfall My services which I have done the seigniory Shall out-tongue his complaints. ’Tis yet to know – Which, when I know that boasting is an honor I shall promulgate – I fetch my life and being From men of royal siege, and my demerits May speak unbonneted to as proud a fortune As this that I have reached. (1.2.18–24)

Morocco and Othello sound alike, but context makes one a proud threat and the other a noble general; Morocco is utterly alien, attempting to join the privileged culture, whereas Othello has already begun his transculturation, impelled by the signiory’s need for his military skill and his marriage to Desdemona. More important in the context of this discussion is the cultural dissonance of Morocco as he distances himself from his own heritage. First, he uses a weapon associated with Islam (the scimitar) to slay Islamic rulers; then, by using classical allusions to Hercules, Lichas, and Fortune, he muddies the religious waters still further. If we have any further doubt about the confused boundaries of race and culture, we have only to look at Morocco’s very first words to Portia: Mislike me not for my complexion, The shadowed livery of the burnished sun, To whom I am a neighbor and near bred. Bring me the fairest creature northward born, Where Phoebus’ fire scarce thaws the icicles, And let us make incision for your love To prove whose blood is reddest, his or mine. (2.1.1–7)

As this autoethnography begins, Morocco has already portrayed himself as both an insider and an outsider, as part of Portia’s community by accepting the hegemonic view – by internalizing self-hatred – that dark complexion (in this instance definitely NOT glossed as ‘personality’) is repulsive, and is, somehow, an aberration of whiteness caused by the direct sun of hot climes. Yet he also mitigates the offence of his outward appearance by referring, just as Shylock does, to the inward, to the blood. His reference to Phoebus continues the blurring of the cultural identification with Islam. This rhetoric of negotiation makes Morocco a barely acceptable candidate for white Christian Portia’s hand, allowing the spectators to reject the Prince as a fool and a braggart rather than fearing the potential misogyny he represents.12

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In addition, Portia’s cooperation with his suit demonstrates vividly how utterly obedient Portia is to her dead father’s contract – obedient to the point of risking despair and pollution – and just how dangerous such contracts can be. In a further irony, Portia herself is unable to distinguish appearance from reality, the external from the internal, although the casket contract itself has been designed to do exactly that: to separate the ‘real’ suitors from the fortune hunters. Even before she lays eyes on Morocco, she says, ‘If he have the condition of a saint and the complexion of a devil, I had rather he should shrive me than wive me’ (1.2.127–9). This comment comes directly after Nerissa and Portia had been remembering Bassanio’s previous visit, when Nerissa’s ‘foolish eyes’ thought him a fitting beau, judging no doubt from his appearance. And Portia makes sure that she can continue the performance of the obedient daughter even while manipulating Bassanio’s choice in the casket scene; during his choice, the song, through its lead-rhyming lines, gives the game away: Tell me where is fancy bred, Or in the heart, or in the head? How begot, how nourishèd? (3.2.63–5)

Consequently, Bassanio may well be all show and no substance. In any case, in contrast to Jessica’s match, here patriarchy trumps culture. Bassanio himself is another traveller. Not only does he journey from Venice to Belmont; he also journeys from Antonio’s love to Portia’s, thus negotiating various contact zones between the shores of friendship and marriage, of city and country, of capitalist commerce and feudal land ownership, and perhaps of homoerotic and heterosexual love. Ever since Auden’s essay ‘Brothers and Others’ (229–31) and Tillyard’s The Nature of Comedy and Shakespeare, critics have remarked the unusual relationship between Antonio and Bassanio. The childless, spouseless, and seemingly elder merchant surrounds himself with unmarried young men, seems particularly attached to Bassanio, and reacts defensively and quickly – ‘Fie, fie!’ (1.1.47) – to Solanio’s suggestion that he is in love. Nevertheless, all the attendant bachelors are quick to leave Antonio and Bassanio alone (both Solanio and Lorenzo draw specific attention to this within ten lines of each other), where Antonio can tell Bassanio to ‘be assured / My purse, my person, my extremest means / Lie all unlocked to your occasions’ (1.1.137–9; emphasis added). To further complicate Antonio’s sexual identity, he refers to himself in the trial scene as a ‘tainted wether’ (4.1.114), a castrated ram. James

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Shapiro further reminds us that the pound of flesh in Shylock’s contract suggests more sexual intimacy than the emotional allusion to Antonio’s heart. Just two years before the production of The Merchant of Venice, the Jew in Alexander Silvayn’s The Orator (which Shapiro contends is a source for the Shylock plot) says ‘What a matter were it then if I should cut of his privy members, supposing that the same would altogether weigh a just pound?’ (113, 121–5). This threat of castration, therefore, calls attention not just to Antonio’s sexuality but also to the prevalent anti-Semitic anxieties about circumcision. If, indeed, the pound of ‘fair flesh’ was originally to have been cut from a place lower down than the merchant’s heart, the threat draws compelling attention to cultural and sexual alienation. Many Elizabethan and modern spectators do not perceive Antonio as any kind of outsider for a variety of reasons. He does represent the power elite, and he does represent ‘good’ in opposition to Shylock’s ‘evil’ in the binary paradigm of protagonist/antagonist that Western drama has taught us all to accept as ‘natural.’ And very possibly, as many scholars maintain, same-sex love of various degrees was far more accepted in the seventeenth century than it is in the twenty-first. Even if we choose not to read Antonio as a man obsessed with his love for another man, the merchant is, nevertheless, an oddity. As Elizabethan England made the slow and painful shift from bastard feudalism to proto-capitalism, as it became an imperial and colonial power, hierarchies and political relationships were in flux. In an era when family formed the fundamental political and economic unit, as Lawrence Stone has repeatedly and convincingly demonstrated, why would a man with the wealth and power of Antonio remain unmarried and childless? To whom would he leave his property? On what would he spend his fortune? With what other men would he form alliances, and without daughters and sons to barter, how would he cement those contracts? In 1598, when The Merchant of Venice was likely performed, these questions were foremost in the minds of audiences. The Virgin Queen, aged sixty-five, on the throne for forty years, had amassed enormous wealth and power and had no family left. Her parents long dead, her siblings childless and gone, her closest relative Queen Mary of Scotland beheaded in 1587, Elizabeth was left only with an alien heir – the twenty-one-year-old Scottish King James, a resident of one of the most dangerous contact zones England had ever known. In addition, James was apparently bisexual; even though he and his wife had seven children, a popular seventeenth-century proverb commented on both Eliz-

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abeth and James as unusual in their sexuality: ‘Rex fuit Elizabeth: nunc est regina Jacobus.’13 Critics, readers, audiences, and directors have disagreed widely on how to read the relationship between Antonio and Bassanio. The interpretation of Antonio as gay is certainly nothing new,14 nor is the contemplation of the degree to which Shakespeare is portraying same-sex love. To be sure, the words ‘love’ and ‘lover’ had many meanings to the Elizabethans, ranging from a close friendship (perhaps what Ben Jonson had in mind when signing his letters ‘your lover’) to sexual intimacy. To many, the Antonio/Bassanio relationship echoes the relationship of the speaker of the Sonnets to the young gentleman, ranging from homoerotics to exhortations to marry and produce legitimate heirs. In many of Shakespeare’s own plays we have such examples of male comradeship (what Eve Sedgwick calls ‘male homosocial desire’) that outweighs heterosexual love: Hamlet confides more in Horatio than he does in Ophelia; Valentine gives his love Silvia to his friend Proteus; Palamon and Arcite agonize over Emelia; the gentlemen in the forest of Arden and in Love’s Labour’s Lost are, at least initially, perfectly content without female company; Benedick must choose between Beatrice and Claudio; and Sebastian seems more attached to Antonio than to Olivia, marriage notwithstanding.15 In acts 1 and 2 Bassanio gives no indication through his language that he is responding to Antonio’s professions of love, which has led some audiences and directors to lean toward the portrayal of Bassanio as either naive or Machiavellian, using Antonio’s affection for him to procure the cash to pursue his ‘golden fleece’ in the person of Portia. Radford’s film, placing 1.2 in Antonio’s bedchamber and finally in his bed, with physical intimacy and kissing included, seems to suggest that the twenty-first-century Merchant has fully acknowledged the sexual politics that Shakespeare’s play merely alludes to. Joseph Fiennes’s Bassanio, however, continues to play the homoeroticism both ways, so audiences can continue to see the young fortune hunter as a manipulative toy-boy. Bassanio suggests to me the ‘metrosexual’ lately in fashion – a gentleman whose sexual orientation is less important than his extravagance. The repeated metaphor of the golden fleece should also remind us that Jason’s capture of his treasure led, in the end, to tragedy caused by his crossing and then retreating from cultural boundaries: the alien Medea eventually slaughtered their children when the fickle Jason decided that he could make a more lucrative marriage within his own culture.

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Yet by 3.2, when Bassanio has secured his fortune, when he might well sever his financial and emotional bonds to Antonio, he finally begins to speak more intimately of his friend. We might say that Bassanio has ‘gone native’ when he enters the new world of Belmont; he has been embraced by its inhabitants and converted to the heterosexual world of conjugal (and therefore reproductive) love. Indeed, his lines reflect his change, for the ‘golden fleece’ itself has changed: So are those crispèd snaky, golden locks, Which maketh such wanton gambols with the wind Upon supposèd fairness, often known To be the dowry of a second head, The skull that bred them in the sepulcher. Thus ornament is but the guilèd shore To a most dangerous sea, the beauteous scarf Veiling an Indian beauty; in a word, The seeming truth which cunning times put on To entrap the wisest. Therefore, thou gaudy gold, Hard food for Midas, I will none of thee; Nor one of thee, thou pale and common drudge ’Tween man and man. (3.2.92–104)

After a brief time in the foreign land of Belmont, under the tutelage of Portia (we have no idea just how long he has been there), Bassanio has not only realized the falseness of the golden fleece he sought, he has also come to appreciate an alien Indian (tawny?) beauty and to spurn also silver, as a bond between men. Elizabethan culture had great tolerance for journeys like Bassanio’s, with young gentlemen forming intimate friendships of varying physical degrees at the same time as they actively pursued heiresses with whom to form political and commercial alliances that would establish and develop family alliances (Sinfield 167–77). Nevertheless, once Bassanio has formed such an alliance, the jesses of Antonio’s love draw him back to Venice, out of the foreign land. ‘The dearest friend’ requests his presence at his death, inflicting guilt while seeming to leave him an escape: ‘If your love do not persuade you to come, let not my letter’ (3.2.320–2). But of course Bassanio’s love does indeed send him packing, with his wife’s blessing, back to his native soil. Portia herself uses the language of the dominant gender to validate her new husband’s behaviour, in language remarkably like Sonnet 42’s ‘My friend and I are one’:

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I never did repent for doing good, Nor shall not now; for in companions That do converse and waste the time together, Whose souls do bear an equal yoke of love, There must be needs a like proportion Of lineaments, of manners, and of spirit; Which makes me think that this Antonio, Being the bosom lover of my lord, Must needs be like my lord. (3.4.10–18)

After this admission, she herself begins her journey to new contact zones, cross-dressing to enter the alien world of masculine Venice. By act 4, Bassanio’s professions of love and loyalty to Antonio become more and more overt. He offers his ‘flesh, blood, bones, and all’ for Antonio (4.1.112), to ‘forfeit of my hands, my head, my heart’ (4.1.210). The trial comes to a climax, at least as far as the relationship between the two men is concerned, with Antonio’s explicit declaration: Say how I loved you, speak me fair in death; And, when the tale is told, bid her be judge Whether Bassanio had not once a love. (4.1.273–5)

To which Bassanio replies, with no less passion: Antonio, I am married to a wife Which is as dear to me as life itself; But life itself, my wife, and all the world Are not with me esteemed above thy life. I would lose all, ay, sacrifice them all Here to this devil, to deliver you. (4.1.280–5)

Portia’s aside, immediately following this interchange, leaves little doubt that she, and the audience, would read this as a troublesome declaration, a withdrawal of loyalty from the female to the male, symbolizing Bassanio’s retreat across the gender boundaries. Further evidence of Antonio’s power comes when the disguised Portia demands her ring, for it is Antonio who facilitates the deceitful gift: My lord Bassanio, let him have the ring. Let his deservings and my love withal Be valued ’gainst your wife’s commandement. (4.1.447–9)

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On Venetian soil, therefore, in the urban world of masculinity, commerce, and law, Bassanio clearly allies himself with the power elite. When he voyages to Belmont, however, he shifts this alliance, taking on the romantic language and behaviour of the feminine, pastoral, and fairy-tale Belmont. When he returns to Venice, he is once more firmly in the comradery of the insiders, and when he returns to Belmont he vacillates once more to embrace the values of Belmont. Certainly Bassanio, more than perhaps anyone in the play, has been negotiating the contact zone. The power struggle between Portia and Antonio for Bassanio’s love is finally played out in Belmont, where, for the first time, Antonio is the outsider, bereft of love, of riches, and even of homeland.16 Portia represents not capitalist commerce and the contracts and bonds through which it operates, but rather the more feudal land-based system (rather like primal societies in the New Worlds of Africa and America) where contracts cannot remain unbroken; her breaking of Shylock’s bond and her shenanigans with the ring contract demonstrate the strength of more fundamental contracts of loyalty and mercy over the legal contracts of commodity. Indeed, Pequigney maintains that ‘in this comedy the breaking of contracts, when higher principles intervene, is commendable’ (214), although the definition of ‘higher principles’ may change depending on which cultural paradigm is in focus. It also significant, in a New Historical sense, that Belmont represents the past, the fairy tale, the feminine, for surely England in the late sixteenth century was moving inexorably away from such a fabled ‘golden age.’ Here, on her own turf, Portia makes it quite clear that Antonio is not entirely welcome. When Bassanio bids her welcome his dearest friend, she replies ‘You should in all sense be much bound to him, / For, as I hear, he was much bound for you’ (5.1.136–7; emphasis added), following this with ‘scant’ courtesy. Even when Portia threatens infidelity (a ubiquitous male fear in the plays of the period) in the denouement of the ring subplot, she is not fully sure of her conquest of Bassanio. Not until Antonio ‘marries’ them is she sure to which country, gender, and culture Bassanio will pledge his allegiance. Pequigney sees Antonio’s actions in act 5 as yet another fairy tale or Christian trinity – Antonio contentedly cedes his interest in Bassanio to Portia, recovers his wealth, joins his friends in celebrating the nuptial dance, and indeed becomes part of the ‘family.’ Yet in most fairy-tale endings (and indeed in many of Shakespeare’s plays) the two bosom friends celebrate a double wedding; according to this structure, Antonio rather than Gratiano should marry Nerissa. But act 5 plays out in a very different pattern.

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The final scene is full of ambiguous emotions, disrupted dramatic patterns, and isolated characters, part of what makes this play, in my view, more a problem play than a comedy. For example, Antonio actually ‘gives away’ the groom and performs the marriage, so to speak: antonio. I dare be bound again, My soul upon the forfeit, that your lord Will nevermore break faith advisedly. portia. Then you shall be his surety. Give him this, And bid him keep it better than the other. antonio. Here, Lord Bassanio. Swear to keep this ring. (5.1.251–5)

Portia completes her triumph by returning Antonio’s wealth to him, since it is through her intercession that his life has been spared and the news of his argosies is delivered (in fact, she knows the content of a sealed letter). Antonio replies ‘I am dumb’ (5.1.279) when he reads the joyful contents of the letter to the company. Portia, however, does not even congratulate him. Dramatically (and almost rudely) turning the focus from Antonio’s fortune with ‘How now, Lorenzo,’ she succeeds in foregrounding the victory of conjugal over homosocial love, of romance over commerce, of herself over Antonio. Bassanio travels between contact zones of country and gender in both of which Antonio has power. But ultimately in Belmont, it appears that Antonio is left the outsider, without a bride. Ultimately, the ambiguity of Antonio’s position may well be further evidence of the ‘copresence, interaction, [and] interlocking understandings and practices’ that Pratt tells us are endemic to the contact zone. As I have said above, The Merchant of Venice, if it did not start out as a problem play, has surely become one in the twenty-first century. Certainly history has complicated the dialectics, and our awareness of how cultures speak to one another has made us, as spectators in modern performances, see shades of grey where formerly we might have assumed black and white. The various contact zones represented in the play form a mobile and diverse kinship system, in which a character may belong to many families. Shylock and Portia’s father, for example, belong to the group of patriarchs while they are utterly foreign to each other’s cultures, a concept that subverts the importance of paternity. Similarly, Shylock and Antonio are both merchants, but of different religions and with different attitudes toward family. Antonio may represent the elite of Venice in financial and racial terms but is anomalous in his marital status. It is, finally, difficult to tell the outsiders from the

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insiders; as contexts change, as various contact zones come into proximity, the dialogue changes. On occasion outsiders, such as the females, appear to triumph over the male insiders. At times aliens like Jessica appear to be absorbed into the dominant cultural system, only to be marginalized again. But, of course, the hegemony is still exclusive – Jews, homosexuals, interracial couples need not apply. Mary Louise Pratt recognizes the need for ‘safe houses,’ places of ‘cultural mediation,’ where groups can form social and intellectual space for trust and mutual understanding – surely the denouement that the structure of comedy should lead us to. While Belmont may have represented such a space for white Elizabethans, for twenty-first-century readers and audiences, Belmont is hardly safe for those who negotiate the boundaries of intercultural, interracial, inter-religious, and inter-gender love.

NOTES 1 Rabbi Leon Klenicki, Director of Jewish-Christian Relations for the AntiDefamation League, made such a suggestion after viewing The Merchant of Venice at the Hartford Stage Company in 1993 (R. King, ‘Shylock’ 59). Harvey Greenberg voiced similar concerns after hearing the audience at the restored Globe Theatre applaud the downfall of a ‘hook-nosed Shylock’ in 1998 (61). Many other critics have discussed the play’s anti-Semitism. See, for example, J. Shapiro, Cohen, and Warren D. Smith. 2 Avraham Oz discusses identity, power, and ideology in The Merchant of Venice in The Yoke of Love. 3 Speaking with the cast of Loveday Ingram’s 2001 Royal Shakespeare Company production of Merchant demonstrated to me how confusing not making these choices clear might be. Paul Hickey, who played Bassanio, was stunned that my students thought him a fortune hunter with no love for Portia; students pointed to 3.2.298–300, in which Portia offers at least twelve thousand ducats to redeem Antonio, of which Bassanio offers to part with only six thousand in 4.1.84. Hickey was also surprised to hear that the students clearly saw that Antonio was in love with him, and downright stunned when Ian Gelder, who played Antonio, confessed that unbeknownst to Hickey, this was indeed his character interpretation. The entire discussion was evidence of poor director/actor communication and of the multiplicity of interpretations allowed by the multivalence of the script. 4 The essay appeared first as a lecture, the keynote at the MLA Literacy Conference. It was subsequently printed as the introduction to Imperial Eyes:

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Studies in Travel Writing and Transculturation, and yet again as the centerpiece for Professing in the Contact Zone: Bringing Theory and Practice Together, ed. Janice M. Wolff (Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2002). All references to Pratt are drawn from Imperial Eyes. See Orgel, Imagining Shakespeare 149–52; Lelyveld 3–7; Spencer 77–83; Gross 31–5; and Meyers 32–7. John Gross in Shylock: A Legend and Its Legacy provides a detailed overview of the actors who have played the part for the last three centuries. His tracing of performance styles, chiefly through reviews, indicates that the part of Shylock has attracted leading actors but that their interpretations remained generally racist, whether they approached the character with some sympathy or not. Toby Lelyveld provides a similar historical review of performances. Even the best-intentioned served the structure of the play, which demands that Shylock be stopped and punished. Citations of Shakespeare are from The Complete Works, ed. Bevington. Herbert Bronstein examines this continuing artistic tension, quoting the late Walter Kerr to make the point: ‘The most striking tribute we pay [Shakespeare] today is in continuing to produce The Merchant of Venice. Each production is, really, an act of faith, made in the face of the evidence. Every time anyone decides to mount the play he is saying, in effect, that Shakespeare cannot possibly have meant what he seems to mean, that the humane and penetrating intelligence we have come to know so well in the thirty-six other plays could never have been capable of the unthinking, unfeeling anti-Semitism that poisons the portrait of Shylock’ (Horizon, January 1960; qtd. in Bronstein 3). In the Ingram RSC production the actress playing Jessica was directed to grimace and mouth Shylock’s words behind his back during the scene. No doubt this bit was designed to make us sympathize with Jessica’s despair at her captivity, but the result for the audience was quite the opposite. There was an audible groan at her cruelty and disrespect for her father, which immediately set the audience against her, making the subsequent scene of her theft and abandonment decidedly negative. This derogatory stereotype has had a very long shelf life; almost 500 years later Heinrich Himmler said: ‘They [Jews] do not belong to the same species but only imitate humans ... they are as far removed from us as animals are from humans’ (Lutzer 94). Indeed, Hitler himself equated the Jews with vermin and said, ‘The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but they are not human,’ a quotation that forms the epigraph for Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize–winning graphic novel Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. See also Kleinberg 121.

154 Suzanne Westfall 11 Indeed, in his edition of The Merchant of Venice, A.R. Braunmuller glosses ‘complexion’ in a secondary meaning of ‘temperament, personality.’ This is certainly an accurate definition for the time period, but the connection between colour and unacceptable behaviour is yet another example of stereotyping and racism. 12 While the theatre has also become a contact zone of cross-cultural casting, this can complicate racial issues. The 2000 New York City Cocteau Repertory production of The Merchant of Venice featured a black actor as Bassanio, making rather a hash of Portia’s complexion problems. Similarly, a black Juliet in the London Globe Theatre’s June 2004 Romeo and Juliet was jarringly compared with ‘a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear.’ 13 While earlier biographies of King James tend to avoid discussing his sexuality altogether, more recently scholars have begun to explore the matter, most concluding that there is no concrete evidence for his homosexuality, although his behaviour with various favourites suggests otherwise. Antonia Fraser’s biography, in particular, accepts James’s homosexuality or bisexuality, but does not stress its effect on his statesmanship beyond suggesting that his intimates were often poor counsellors. Suggestive letters between James and his favourite, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, written from 1620–3, appear in Norton. In the letters James addresses Villiers as his ‘sweet child and wife,’ while Villiers writes, ‘I naturally so love your person, and adore all your other parts, which are more than ever one man had’ and ‘I desire only to live in the world for your sake.’ Such language seems suggestive to the modern ear but could also be understood as merely hyperbolic in the seventeenth century, rather like the language Shakespeare used in the sonnets concerning W.H. 14 For a convenient review of the literature on this critical approach, see Alan Sinfield, ‘How to Read The Merchant of Venice without Being Heterosexist.’ 15 The extremes of the positions on Antonio’s homosexuality are conveniently represented by Joseph Pequigney, and Coppélia Kahn (‘Cuckoo’s Note’). Pequigney strongly denies that there is any textual evidence (like many literary critics he ignores the effects of staging) for the gay reading of Antonio, while Kahn suggests that Portia must win her husband from the homoerotic demands of Antonio. 16 Critical opinion has long been divided about how we should read the power relationship between Portia and Antonio. See Rabkin and Levin.

The Unity of Twelfth Night arthur f. kinney

I ‘Dealing with Shakespeare’s comedies,’ Alexander Leggatt writes in the Preface to Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love, ‘there is a ... danger insidious and ... serious: the normal, understandable desire of the critic to seek the inner unity of a work of art.’ The observation seems timely, even prophetic, in the Foucauldian age of postmodernism in which he was writing, and it is reiterated as the fundamental premise of his study: This aim, reasonable in itself, can have unfortunate effects. ‘Unity’ can be too narrowly defined, and when everything is seen as contributing to a central idea, a single pattern of images, or a particular kind of story, then individual scenes or characters may be understood from that point of view alone, and thus denied their full life.

Therefore, he continues, ‘the critic must be always alert, always prepared to change his line of inquiry ... Even within particular plays the ground keeps changing.’ He concludes: ‘The criticism that tries to make a work of art stand still will be in serious difficulties here’ (xi–xii). Not only is Professor Leggatt speaking out of his own cultural and critical moment, but, more importantly, he is redressing a long, influential tradition that saw – and emphasized – unity in a play such as Twelfth Night. A.W. Schlegel’s provocative comment in 1811 that the play ‘treats love more as an affair of the imagination than of the heart’ remains searching and telling (378), and it can embrace both the overplot, with Orsino’s love-weariness, Olivia’s self-indulgent mourning, and Viola/Cesario’s internal struggles with them both; and the under-

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plot with the imaginative foolery of Maria, the imaginative courtships of Sir Andrew Aguecheek and Malvolio, and the imaginary innocent appetites of Sir Toby Belch; and, responding to both, the songs and satirical remarks of Feste which pull both groups together in an awareness of the shortcomings of fantasies and the recognition of reality, of the wind and the rain, of death. This is a complex and encompassing singularity, to be sure, but when Schlegel wrote, it was the unity underlying such concerns that he sought. And he was not alone. F. Kreyssig in 1862 sought moral instruction in the play promulgated through a deliberate dramatic design, seeing beneath various gradations of ‘amorous folly or foolish amorousness’ that ‘we do not fail to hear the lovely ground-tone, which at first softly sounding, at last rises triumphant above the chaos of clashing tones, and in the most delightful way harmonises all discords; I mean the portrayal of deep and true love in sound healthy natures’ (381). This has a certain Victorian air about it, but Kreyssig, like Schlegel, was attempting to see underlying connections of presentation and purpose that were multiple and yet, finally, singular. So too was H.J. Ruggles, who in 1870 contrasted the perfection in Viola against the gross imperfection in Sir Toby and Malvolio, and subtle imperfection in Orsino and Olivia – essentially an unacknowledged class argument – while in 1867 E. Montégut emphasized festival and ambiguity. ‘The difference’ in these views, the Arden editors argue, ‘is one of focus rather than of interpretation’ (liii). Unity remains a chief concern of the twentieth-century critical tradition of Twelfth Night, too – and not a unity that omits characters or motifs or varying images, but a unity that makes a point of inclusiveness. Frank Kermode sees the play as ‘a comedy of identity, set on the borders of wonder and madness’ (227). G. Wilson Knight sees a pattern in ‘music, love, and precious stones, threaded by the sombre strands of a sea-tempest and a sea-flight’ (1v). Northrop Frye urges us to see the play as an example of the triumph of life and vitality over an initial wasteland, while C.L. Barber famously argues for the necessity of licence in a highly regulated society. J.W. Draper, meantime, turns such concerns into another direction, proposing that all the characters, more or less aware of social position and social possibility in a regulated and stratified society, are concerned with their own sense of social security (1v1). It would be a mistake, I think, to label these critics as satisfied to seek out the play’s unification by eliminating or ignoring evidence. They are more expansive and democratic than that. Unity, for them, is a hardwon struggle to approach and appreciate the play on its own terms. So

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much of recent criticism which applauds multiplicity and indeterminacy is not so much in opposition to these earlier viewpoints, but, rather, a reproportioning and refocusing of them. What Professor Leggatt seeks, then, is a similar outcome that does not dismiss the complexities and even the irregularities and conflicts of such a play as Twelfth Night. In what follows, I want to suggest that I think this is still possible. II ‘In Twelfth Night each set of characters has a plot to tend to, and is largely kept within the confines of that plot,’ we are told in the chapter of Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love that addresses this play; ‘each individual is locked in his own private understanding, and his ability to escape from himself and share experiences with others is limited’ (222). What we observe in the play’s arrangement, however, seems at least to mitigate that, for Shakespeare is at pains to establish linkages throughout his fictional Illyria: ‘Viola pursues Orsino who pursues Olivia who pursues both Viola and Sebastian, who is pursued by Antonio’ (232), while in a deeply analogous plot, Sir Andrew and Malvolio pursue the same Olivia while, more subtly but just as surely, Maria and Sir Toby pursue each other, while Fabian as witness and Feste as commentator stand by to testify and comment on such a study of entangling dreams and alliances. Shakespeare would seem very clear about this. In 1.1, Orsino’s frustrations in courting Olivia and in 1.3 Sir Andrew’s proposed courtship of Olivia surround 1.2, where a separation sets in motion division, frustration, and pursuit in every quarter. viola. What country, friends, is this? captain. This is Illyria, lady. viola. And what should I do in Illyria? My brother he is in Elysium. Perchance he is not drown’d: what think you, sailors? captain. It is perchance that you yourself were sav’d. (1.2.1–6)1

Viola is quite clear here: she will take the opportunity to hope her twin brother is not drowned ‘perchance,’ and her desire to reunite with him, to re-establish a long-lasting bond, is made a possible outcome in the Captain’s agreeable response that virtually echoes her own line. It is customary with Shakespeare to begin his plays with separate groups of characters, usually in separate scenes, who speak about analogous con-

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cerns; what is unusual here is that 1.2 and 1.3 do not build on 1.1, but instead 1.1 and 1.3 are made to represent analogous panels to 1.2. This central panel, though, is not merely the grounding of the plot but its own agency (as well as suggested conclusion): Viola in 1.2 will see it as her function to reunite not only herself and her brother, but the twin households of Duke Orsino and Lady Olivia. Shakespeare, then, not only aligns rediscovery with unification, but he sets up Viola, the in-between character in 1.2, as Cesario, the play’s agency for the rest of the comedy. The first act of Twelfth Night sets up divided locations with the implicit theme of unification, ‘perchance’; but likely Viola has hope at the start, and her plans – to serve Olivia and then, at the counsel of the Captain, to serve the Duke – maintain a gendered in-between position too: I prithee (and I’ll pay thee bounteously) Conceal me what I am, and be my aid For such disguise as haply shall become The form of my intent. I’ll serve this duke; Thou shalt present me as an eunuch to him (1.2.52–6)

She renders herself a kind of blank slate so that, as Shakespeare plays out the scenes to follow, her agency is inscribed by others: by the Duke, by Olivia, by Sir Andrew (at Sir Toby’s instigation), and by Sebastian. Her mere twinless presence, furthermore, suggests that the play will search out completions in terms of partnerships, reunions, parts made whole. The coast of Ilyria, bounded by the sea of fortune that has separated Viola and Sebastian, will find a happier outcome on the more solid land itself. This is the force of the three various settings in the first three scenes. But the outcome may not be as promising, nor as secure, as Viola first hopes. The complacent Captain, quickly enough her accomplice, nevertheless rings a dissonance in the scene’s final couplet that anticipates the failures of some of the best intentions and some of the best-laid plans, so that this play will couple accomplishment and disappointment: Be you his eunuch, and your mute I’ll be: When my tongue blabs, then let mine eyes not see. (62–3)

What characters say and see, then, is what must keep us most alert. We must care about the congruence of sight and sound, aligning Orsino’s grievous words with the sight of Olivia, Maria’s false note with Malvolio’s crossed garters, and Sebastian’s wondrous appearance with the

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words of its significance from Olivia, Cesario, and Antonio. Still, ‘perchance’: things may go awry with the best of actions, understandings, and intentions; and Feste’s running commentary on the play’s actions keeps that other possibility grimly in place. Just as Twelfth Night itself combines both the governance of the Lord of Misrule (call him Sir Toby or Maria) and epiphany (call it the reappearance of Sebastian to fight Sir Andrew and wed Olivia), so the Captain, illustrating the play’s title in this fulcrum scene, allows one situation two outcomes, what is and what is not when one conceals who one is. Strands of this tangled web of a play are in both side panels too. Orsino’s opening lines, and the opening lines of the play, associate union and death, his commentary on music fully anticipating the final lines of the play sung by Feste. Orsino says: If music be the food of love, play on, Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken, and so die (1.1.1–3)

while Feste will combine ‘hey, ho’ with ‘the wind and the rain,’ and force their essential combination, ‘But that’s all one,’ which is the play’s point, for then ‘our play is done’ (5.1.405–6). Orsino’s opening speech concludes with the wisdom of Feste’s last lines: ‘So full of shapes is fancy, / That it alone is high fantastical’ (1.1.14–15). As if to illustrate what he means, he transforms the invitation from Curio to hunt into the pursuit of a woman in which he becomes the classical Actaeon to her Diana (21–3) before commenting on Olivia’s loss of a brother (34). The observation resonates. It repeats the notion of love and death that he has pronounced and Feste will sing about later on (‘Come away, come away death’ [2.4.51–66]) – ‘Love-thoughts lie rich when canopied with bowers’ (1.1.41) – while within a heartbeat it will introduce the other loss of a brother, Viola of Sebastian, and mark his excessive grief with her apparently defective sorrow, dismissing the loss of her twin for an immediate plan of action for her survival in Illyria. Orsino’s double-edged sense of love as fulfillment and loss will dominate the play thematically but it will not, I think, reduce the plot, the characters, or the images. As if to guarantee that we see these concerns as themselves united and central, the other side panel, at the household of Olivia, confirms them: sir toby. What a plague means my niece to take the death of her brother thus? I am sure care’s an enemy to life.

160 Arthur F. Kinney maria. By my troth, Sir Toby, you must come in earlier o’nights: your cousin, my lady, takes great exceptions to your ill hours. sir toby. Why, let her except, before excepted. maria. Ay, but you must confine yourself within the modest limits of order. (1.3.1–9)

The liberty of self-expression and the limitations of action exist only in relationship to each other (as Orsino’s self-expression to Cesario has its limitations and as Olivia’s self-expression has its limitations to Cesario and as Sir Toby’s free expression has its limited action to Maria). Language must coincide with, not conflict with, action. ‘Confine? I’ll confine myself no finer than I am,’ Sir Toby retorts (1.3.10), but Malvolio and then Olivia will show him that he must confine his ‘high fantastical’ desires, just as Olivia and Orsino must learn to find liberty when confining their griefs. Mary Thomas Crane has acutely seen what confinement can mean, too: The enclosed space that Olivia initially attempts to use to close out desire, however, becomes a private space that encourages desire once she has fallen in love with the Duke’s messenger ... Peter Thomson notes that when Olivia gives that order to close the garden gate [3.1.94–5] and create a private space for herself and Viola, ‘the Folio carries no stage direction for the exit of Sir Toby, Sir Andrew, and Maria,’ who also were previously onstage. He argues that Olivia’s request causes the space to be ‘transformed from public to private, from generalized “platea” to specific “locus,” by the shutting of the stage door ... Rather than moving Olivia and Viola to a private place, Shakespeare has moved a private place to them.’ This ‘private’ place is doubly illusory since it is located on the open stage ... [But] In fact, Olivia’s ability to manage her household must, to some extent, be questioned. Although Sebastian is reassured of her sanity by her ability to ‘sway her house, command her followers, Take and give back affairs and their dispatch, With such a smooth, discrete, and stable bearing’ (4.3.17–19), in fact her household is not at all orderly. Sir Toby’s freedom with Olivia’s food and drink at all hours is behavior explicitly at odds with contemporary ideas about the containment functions of a well-regulated household. (104–5)

Crane’s remarks roam well beyond the play’s first scenes in their illustration, but not in the threads she is following. They are all there in 1.3,

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preparing us for what is to follow. Sir Toby maintains his position in his argument with Maria and yet he ends it this way: With drinking healths to my niece: I’ll drink to her as long as there is a passage in my throat, and drink in Illyria: he’s a coward and a coistrel that will not drink to my niece till his brains turn o’ th’ toe, like a parish top. What, wench! (1.3.38–42)

His liberty is redefined within his allegiance to his niece and his recognition of his relationship to her, and he will, moreover, defend his position against anyone in Illyria (anticipating not only Malvolio but Cesario too). This sense of liberty straining against confinement in Olivia’s household plays off against Orsino’s sense of confined grief seeking an outlet, such as music or hunting, and the two panels, 1.1 and 1.3, end in the need to consolidate both forces, to unify them. These panels surround 1.2, in which Viola mourns the loss of her brother while setting out in Illyria to seek a new position for herself, withholding her grief, seeking free expression, as a eunuch and in disguise. Such counterforces cry for a more permanent resolution in these opening scenes, but that too reflects the play’s end: ‘Hey, ho’ and ‘the wind and the rain’ in the long run, like life and death, escape happy resolution, and the play ends before reaching them. ‘The whirligig of time’ that ‘brings in his revenges’ (5.1.375–6) may bring them in, but it will not conclude them: Malvolio’s revenge, if he ever gets it, lies beyond the edges, the confines, of this play. That final unification of desire and deed, of imagination and accomplishment, of word and action, escapes the playtext and its performance. It may be a final resolution, or unity, we long for but are cheated out of. If so, unity is what we seek too. But at the same time it not only lends a sense of unification to what we do have but makes that unification the play’s chief object. To unify the play is to replicate the characters – all of them – and, by extension, the playwright. III This straining for freedom with its resharpened sense of confinement catches exactly the complexities of Twelfth Night itself – not only a time of misrule and topsyturveydom, but a time of revels and disguising. Such disguisings may be joyous celebrations commemorating the end of the twelve days of Christmas; as a comedy Twelfth Night catches the spirit of the New Dispensation, when the Nativity on the Christian cal-

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endar turned a secular world sacred, and we see it in the madcap folly of Sir Toby, the foolishness of Sir Andrew, and even the biting jokes of Feste. But Christmas, and the twelve days ending on 6 January, are serious times of re-examination, too. The disguising of Viola allows her to seek out a social and gendered place of her own in Illyria; the disguising of Malvolio reprimands him by showing him the order that, at bottom, must be obeyed. Both are in keeping with the season, while the very sense of season keeps the temporal limitations before us: and such temporal conditions as hunger, marriage, and mortality. At the same time on that same Christian calendar, England (and the world) commemorate the arrival of the three Magi at the humble stable in Bethlehem, the meeting of the high and the lowly, in a miracle of gift-giving and wonder. The epiphany of such a moment marks the Epiphany of biblical history, the world somehow righted, set off on a new path, newly fortified. Shakespeare uses both sides of Twelfth Night celebration, for the disguisings of Viola and Malvolio are revealed when the wondrous arrival of Sebastian brings its own magical and promising presence to Illyria. It promises a kind of new start, too. The need to be secret and the act of exposure thus occur side by side as the ground plan of Twelfth Night, conflicting forces once more unified in a secular and sacred holiday (holy day) which honours the confinement of disguise with the reward of the liberty of new beginnings, freeing the characters from their pasts and rewarding them with new alignments. The unity of Twelfth Night, or of Epiphany, is also part of Shakespeare’s plan for the unity of his play. This contrast between spirited revels and wondrous appearances – the last seen in a secular Malvolio in yellow stockings before a more saving and giving Sebastian fighting for Viola – is seen from the play’s beginning, too. There is Orsino’s excessive lovesickness, which, dispensed with, allows him to open a space for a more realistic partnership. There is Olivia’s excessive mourning for a lost brother corrected by the appearance of the other sister who lost hers. Like Sir Toby’s and Sir Andrew’s ‘caterwauling’ (2.3.73) and Maria’s excessive punishment of Malvolio (‘I will drop in his way some obscure epistles of love’ [2.3.155– 6]), such opening postures of unrestricted freedom and self-indulgence, like the revels of Twelfth Night, are what permits the sobering instruction of what follows, and what allows an appreciation, for most of the cast, of the unexpected turn of events suddenly loosened in act 5. This double movement is also forewarned even before the beginning of the first three arranged scenes in the only Shakespearean play with a double

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title: Twelfth Night, or What You Will. The title is itself double, both a sign for those who need some pointing and a joke for those who sense the pun. In Shakespeare’s time, as well as our own, ‘will’ could mean intention, desire, volition, moral choice, direction; but it can also mean domination, force, and, more perniciously in 1600, carnal desire or even, Walter N. King contends, by extension, ‘the genitals – male or female’ (9). The Oxford English Dictionary records a similar range: will as ‘natural disposition to do something, and hence habitual action’ (1.8); ‘carnal desire or appetite’ (1.2). Viola personifies this doubling of natural disposition and habitual action in her seeking audience with Orsino, her practice in courtship with Orsino’s messages to Olivia muddled by her own more personal responses, and her attractiveness to the Duke: Dear lad, believe it; For they shall yet belie thy happy years, That say thou art a man; Diana’s lip Is not more smooth and rubious: thy small pipe Is as the maiden’s organ, shrill and sound, And all is semblative a woman’s part. (1.4.29–34)

The Duke is equally muddled when he confesses to Cesario the existence of feelings he has attempted to deny within himself: Come hither, boy. If ever thou shalt love, In the sweet pangs of it remember me: For such as I am, all true lovers are, Unstaid and skittish in all motions else, Save in the constant image of the creature That is belov’d. (2.4.15–20)

Cesario’s disguise and deception before Olivia only result in Olivia’s own fantastical deception in return when she instructs Malvolio to Run after that same peevish messenger The County’s man: he left this ring behind him, Would I or not; tell him, I’ll none of it. Desire him not to flatter with his lord, Nor hold him up with hopes: I am not for him. If that the youth will come this way to-morrow, I’ll give him reasons for’t. Hie thee, Malvolio. (1.5.304–10)

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In all three instances, there is a growing division between the inner sense of things and the outer portrayal of them, much as the revels of Twelfth Night anticipate the revelation that will follow. The postures, like the characters, are relational; but they are not disunified. Sir Andrew is another clear case in point: his very relationships to the other characters – both real, in revelling with Toby and unreal in courting Olivia – are established through the situational fantasizing of Toby himself, playing on the will, both disposition and desire, of Sir Andrew for Olivia. (That Sir Toby is pimping for her by taking Sir Andrew’s money for the trade seems to escape them both.) Maria’s trick with Malvolio, then, comes only after Sir Toby sets his trick with Sir Andrew into operation; together, they are schemers at once separated by the means of the deceptions they establish and united in using others to satisfy their own desires, their own wills. ‘When it comes to will,’ Bruce R. Smith contends, Twelfth Night seems almost as audacious as sonnets 135 and 136. For ... the play offers plenty of choices as to what one would: in sequential order a member of the audience gets to witness Orsino’s passion for Olivia, Sir Andrew’s mercenary pursuit of Olivia, Sir Toby’s knowing ways with Maria, Orsino’s familiarity with ‘Cesario,’ Olivia’s flirtation with ‘Cesario,’ Antonio’s declaration of love for Sebastian, Malvolio’s wanton daydreams about Olivia, even the thriftless marriage of Feste’s final song. (Introduction 13–14)

Yet it is important to realize that this strong exercise of wills by many of the characters is precisely what results in overreaching and so exposes their folly and opens them up, from knowing privately to admitting publicly, the fantasies not only permitting, but in the end necessitating, the wondrous realities of all of act 5. In her essay on Twelfth Night, Karin S. Coddon has measured such thoughts and situations that we find in the play with the cultural moment in which it occurred. She cites as one instance Sir John Harington’s notorious remarks on the scandalous excesses that for him marked the Jacobean court, where those, whom I never could get to taste good liquor, now follow the fashion and wallow in beastly delights. The Ladies abandon their sobriety, and are seen to roll about in intoxication ... I do often say (but not aloud) that the Danes have again conquered the Britains, for I see no man, or woman either, that can now command himself or herself. (qtd. in Coddon 312)

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She comments on this passage that ‘the court of James Stuart hardly introduced excess into the early modern English aristocracy. Twelfth Night, with its elaborate imagery of appetite and satiety, seems to draw upon contemporary notions, by no means hyperbolic, about the consumption habits of an aristocratic household’ as well, and she quotes Lawrence Stone: The 363 pounds [Burghley] spent on a feast to the French Commissioners in 1581 might perhaps be explained on grounds of public policy. But what are we to make of the 629 pounds spent in three days’ junketing at the marriage of his daughter a year later? At this vast party there were consumed, among other things, about 1,000 gallons of wine, 6 veals, 26 deer, 15 pigs, 14 sheep, 16 lambs, 4 kids, 6 hares, 36 swans, 2 storks, 41 turkeys, over 370 poultry, 49 curlews, 135 mallards, 354 teals, 1,049 plovers, 124 knotts, 280 stints, 109 pheasants, 277 partridges, 615 cocks, 485 snipe, 840 larks, 21 gulls, 71 rabbits, 21 pigeons, and 2 sturgeons. (qtd. in Coddon 313)

Coddon adds, pointedly, ‘If music be the food of love, play on, indeed’ (313). Burghley’s extravagance cited here is nearly three decades before Shakespeare’s play, but it measures the extravagance of Elizabeth’s court which Shakespeare, as one of her liveried servants, would have himself witnessed. So Feste’s remarks might resonate well beyond the stage and the playhouse. But in a play which continually challenges excess and duplicity through Feste’s witty remarks, we may be unprepared, as surely he is, at his own victimization to the same desires. His behaviour, too, is excessive, when he joins the world of disguisings as Sir Topas perhaps to punish, but more surely to revel in, Malvolio’s disgrace. malvolio. Sir Topas, never was man thus wronged. Good Sir Topas, do not think I am mad. They have laid me here in hideous darkness. clown. Fie, thou dishonest Satan! (I call thee by the most modest terms, for I am one of those gentle ones that will use the devil himself with courtesy.) Say’st thou that house is dark? malvolio. As hell, Sir Topas. clown. Why, it hath bay-windows transparent as barricadoes, and the clerestories toward the south-north are as lustrous as ebony: and yet complainest thou of obstruction? malvolio. I am not mad, Sir Topas. I say to you, this house is dark. clown. Madman, thou errest. I say there is no darkness but ignorance, in which thou art more puzzled than the Egyptians in their fog.

166 Arthur F. Kinney malvolio. I say this house is as dark as ignorance, though ignorance were as dark as hell; and I say there was never man thus abused. I am no more mad than you are. (4.2.29–49)

Malvolio’s determination undermines Feste’s joke; one fool in Olivia’s household corrects the other, and Feste as the wise fool finds his original role usurped in the enactment of his disguise. If like Feste we side with this act of comeuppance of Malvolio – whom Olivia will soon find ‘hath been most notoriously abus’d’ (5.1.378) – then we share in Feste’s mad revelry, and, by extension, in the work of Sir Toby and Maria, and it will not be, in due course, where we will want our own alliances to lie. Like the trio of schemers, we submit to a kind of revelry that is mad because it is unnecessarily reckless and abusive. Shakespeare seems to have recognized this effect, for Sir Toby and Maria do not appear again while Feste and Fabian do reappear, in order to clarify their situation. The very excessiveness of Feste’s behaviour here – to reread the note of mockery that Maria has written to dupe Malvolio, ‘Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrown upon them’ (5.1.639–70) – results only in the admonishments of Malvolio, Olivia, and Orsino in turn, ending the play with a reprimand to Feste. We know he is chastened, for the song he sings after their departure exposes his inner sense of self in outward song that is plaintive. The madness of one fool merges with the madness of the other in Olivia’s employ, and the result is an uneasy resolution in which ‘hey, ho’ and ‘the wind and the rain’ become the complex but unifying vision that sends the playgoers home: But that’s all one, our play is done, And we’ll strive to please you ever day. (5.1.406–7)

It is as if Feste has had his own (and the last) epiphany, and at the joint hands of Malvolio, Olivia, and Orsino, now at one in their agreement. Just as the appearance of the Magi gave significance to the Nativity, so the reappearance of Malvolio gives new, mournful understanding to Feste. All really is one. IV Breaking down authority and breaking up convention – the revels of Twelfth Night – allow the play to offer the hijinks of comedy and to re-

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establish such authority, to test political, social, and religious structures while commenting critically on them. In this way, too, the play separates and reunifies its chief concerns. The play offers many discrete yet correlated centres of such concerns: in Olivia’s resistance to her Duke; in Viola’s resistance to exposing her natural gender; in Maria’s script which runs deeply counter to sumptuary laws. As Dympna Callaghan has it, ‘“degrees” and “callings” ordained by God’ are temporarily overturned for examination (‘“And All Is Semblative a Women’s Part”’ 5). The very figurations in the play, with its dreams, fantasies, plots, and counterplots, call up, hearken back to, such literal regulations as those of dress and such literal interpretations of behaviour as the Homily Against Excess of Apparell. The excessive acts of the imagination which Twelfth Night builds on are deflated by such confinements. Eric S. Mallin has perceptively allied such language to church practices: In 1573, Bishop Edwin Sandys wrote to Lords Leicester and Burghley, complaining about a truculent preacher, ‘one Mr. Wake, of Christs Churche in Oxforde, who this last yeare made a good sermon at the Crosse [Paul’s Cross in London, the open-air pulpit under the control of the Bishop of London],’ but who, more recently, ‘beinge sett on and provoked thereunto ... by such as are authors and maynteynors of theise newe and seditious fansies, his whole sermon was consumed in raylinge against this present state ... Such men must be restrained if the state shall stand saffe.’ (188)

Sandys locates as a cause just the ‘high fantastical’ that infects the characters of Twelfth Night with widespread contagion: Suche as preached discretelie the last yeare now labour by raylinge to feede the fansies of the people. Selfe likinge hath intoxicated them, and the flatterie of the fantasticall people hath bewitched them. Bothe seeke dangerous alteration, thinking that their state cannot be impaired, hopinge that it may be betared. (188)

What allowed Elizabethan Puritans to avoid such dangers of fancy was the practice of literal reading of Scriptures and, by extension, the literal reading of words as of the Word. Most obviously – and in the play most extensively – Malvolio is the one most literal-minded. Maria recognizes this when she calls him ‘a kind of Puritan’ (2.3.140), her sense of his shortcomings (because of the

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direction of his mind) clearly more incisive than that of Sir Toby, whose best rebuttal is that ‘thou think because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale’ (2.3.114–15). It is just this Puritan habit of literal reading of Scripture that prompts Malvolio to read literally Maria’s false note from Olivia: If this fall into thy hand, revolve. In my stars I am above thee, but be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust vpon ’em.2 Thy fates open their hands, let thy blood and spirit embrace them, and to inure thyself to what thou art like to be, cast thy humble slough, and appear fresh. Be opposite with a kinsman, surly with servants. Let thy tongue tang arguments of state; put thyself into the trick of singularity. She thus advises thee, that sighs for thee. Remember who commended thy yellow stockings, and wished to see thee ever cross-gartered: I say, remember. Go to, thou art made, if thou desir’st to be so. If not, let me see thee a steward still, the fellow of servants, and not worthy to touch Fortune’s fingers. (2.5.143–57)

Malvolio’s fanciful hope for advancement – a fairly common practice in noble households as well as at the Court at the time – causes this literalminded man, who holds strictly to regulation and convention, to read precisely on the event. That may be his initial error, although one far more serious is to displace God’s Word with his mistress’s apparent work, and His authority with hers. Mallin cites the Puritano-papismus of Oliver Ormerod (1605) as one who attacks those who ‘worshippe their owne opinions, conceits and fancies, and yeelde not to the truth, though neuer so plainly demonstrated’ and are thus ‘idolators’ (sig. P2; qtd. p. 182). Ormerod goes on to say that it is Idolatrie to worshippe a mans owne opinions, and not to yeelde to truth: I prooue it by this speech of the Apostle: ‘couetousnes is idolatrie.[’] From which saying of his, I dispute thus: If the Apostle held those to bee idolaters, that did set their hearts upon their ritches, and were so wedded vnto them, as that no perswasion could bring them from the loue of them: the consequence is not to be rebuked that we inferred vpon it; that we may as well tearme them idolaters, that doe set their hearts vppon their opinions. (sig. P2; qtd. p. 182)

The idolatry of Olivia that Malvolio practises, then, is a misconstrual or forgetting of God’s Word because of individual human covetousness. This is surely more strict in its application here, but not unrelated to

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Viola’s covetous reading of signs of Orsino’s fancy; of Olivia’s reading of Cesario’s fundamental attractiveness; or of Sir Toby’s covetous desire to second Maria’s revenge on Malvolio. The kind of Puritanical bearing which Maria assigns to Malvolio, that is, can carry over into our sense of other characters in the play, including Sir Toby and Maria herself, and, rather than isolate him, bring him more centrally into Shakespeare’s design. So too Mallin, who also sees an accumulation of attitudes and events coalescing the whole work: ‘I cannot help thinking that the so-called festive community of Illyria, especially the other members of Olivia’s house, comprises an aggregate of corrosive individuals whose sincere dedication to producing nothing itself undermines the ... enterprise’ (263n36). But this is too singular a view of Malvolio – both as character and as representative of the community of Illyria – and Maria herself knows that. Immediately after calling Malvolio a Puritan she cites her own reservations: The devil a Puritan that he is, or anything constantly, but a time-pleaser, an affectioned ass, that cons state without book, and utters it by great swarths: the best persuaded of himself, so crammed (as he thinks) with excellencies, that it is his grounds of faith that all that look on him love him: and on that vice in him will my revenge find notable cause to work. (2.3.146–53)

He is a ‘time-pleaser,’ that is, one who will please those in authority rather than vow Catholicism or Protestantism. His religion, then, is not a set of convictions but a set of assumptions. And his reading of the Word is, at first, anyway, not literal, but interpretive. Analogous to excess and defect, revels and epiphany, Malvolio’s behaviour combines outside authority – the Word of Olivia, as he supposes the letter to be, and his interpretation of the text, as he wishes it to be. It is this very different kind of letter that Maria begins to write, before the strict instructions of his dress and behaviour. The letter first works its way on Malvolio because the evidence appears tested and trustworthy: malvolio. [Taking up the letter] By my life, this is my lady’s hand: these be her very C’s, her U’s, and her T’s, and thus makes she her great P’s. It is in contempt of question her hand. (2.5.87–90)

But he moves away sharply from such literal reading when he responds to ‘the unknown beloved, this, and my good wishes’ with ‘Her very phrases!’

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(2.5.92–4). His curiosity forces him speedily ahead, but it does not rob this time-pleaser entirely of his ability to reflect and cogitate: ‘M.O.A.I. doth sway my life.’ – Nay, but first let me see, let me see, let me see ... ‘I may command where I adore.’ Why, she may command me: I serve her, she is my lady. Why, this is evident to any formal capacity. There is no obstruction in this. And the end: what should that alphabetical position portend? If I could make that resemble something in me! Softly! ‘M.O.A.I.’– ... ‘M’ – ’Malvolio! ‘M’! Why that begins my name! ... ‘M’ – But then there is no constancy in the sequel; that suffers under probation: ‘A’ should follow, but ‘O’ does ... And then ‘I’ comes behind ... ‘M.O.A.I.’ This simulation is not as the former: and yet, to crush this a little, it would bow to me, for every one of these letters are in my name. (2.5.112–41)

Malvolio has, in fairly swift succession, moved from a rational review of the evidence to a superimposition of his fancy on the text. The movement of his mind, that is, parallels precisely Viola’s, when she moves from dressing as a eunuch to playing the part before Orsino as she falls in love, and Olivia’s from her initial attraction to Cesario to her attempt to ensnare him with a ring trick. Malvolio’s thought processes are more condensed than those of his fellow characters, but Maria can predictably track them in composing her two-part letter of conundrum and literal direction and, in this sense, anticipates Feste’s communal condemnation of Malvolio followed by his own more fanciful exorcism disguised as Sir Topas. Again, the various complexities of the plot, and of the play, tend towards making all one. V At one point in his brief Preface to his Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Comedy, Alexander Leggatt recalls ‘the old story of the actor on his deathbed who, when asked how he felt, replied, “Dying is easy; comedy is hard”’ (xvi). Twelfth Night’s comedy is certainly hard for Viola. No matter how easily she may slip into the costume of a eunuch and appear before Orsino’s court, her appearance before Olivia, her anagrammatic opposite, is difficult: viola. The honorable lady of the house, which is she? olivia. Speak to me, I shall answer for her. Your will? viola. Most radiant, exquisite, and unmatchable beauty – I pray you tell

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me if this be the lady of the house, for I never saw her. I would be loath to cast away my speech: for besides that it is excellently well penned, I have taken great pains to con it. Good beauties, let me sustain no scorn; I am very comptible, even to the least sinister usage. olivia. Whence came you, sir? viola. I can say little more than I have studied, and that question’s out of my part. Good gentle one, give me modest assurance if you be the lady of the house, that I may proceed in my speech. olivia. Are you a comedian? viola. No, my profound heart: and yet, by the very fangs of malice I swear, I am not that I play. Are you the lady of the house? olivia. If I do not usurp myself, I am. viola. Most certain, if you are she, you do usurp yourself: for what is yours to bestow is not yours to reserve. But this is from my commission. I will on with my speech in your praise, and then show you the heart of my message. olivia. Come to what is important in’t: I forgive you the praise. viola. Alas, I took great pains to study it, and ’tis poetical. olivia. It is the more like to be feigned; I pray you keep it in. (1.5.169–98)

What is poetical is like to be made up: like so much in this play – and in Shakespeare generally – there is much to unpack in such transparent dialogue. It is more than a turn in the plot, where Olivia’s admiration, and adoration, turns to Viola as Cesario, for it is a study in play-acting in which Viola is too self-conscious of pretending to be Cesario and Olivia, teasing her at first, turns more and more to instructing Cesario to speak plainly and to tell the truth. Feigning is neither truthful nor deceptive. She wants (and enlists) the meaning beneath the facade. Then, after Maria and her attendants depart, there is a sudden switching of roles. Now it is Cesario who demands the truth and the end of pretending: ‘Good madam, let me see your face’ (1.5.233). Asked to reveal it, Olivia will find herself truly if disconcertedly attracted to Cesario so that in the end she will resort to another cover – the ring trick, rather than a veil – to make herself the conveyor of poetical invention that was not at the first in her (self-conceived) commission. It is with such play-acting set alongside authenticity – revelry against revelation – that Twelfth Night keeps unifying what at first appears to be oppositional. Just a few lines later, for instance, Cesario’s ability to fuse her passion for Orsino with her interview with Olivia results in a particularly moving scene:

172 Arthur F. Kinney viola. If I did love you in my master’s flame, With such a suff’ring, such a deadly life, In your denial I would find no sense, I would not understand it. olivia. Why, what would you? viola. Make me a willow cabin at your gate, And call upon my soul within the house; Write loyal cantons of contemned love, And sing them loud even in the dead of night; Halloo your name to the reverberate hills, And make the babbling gossip of the air Cry out ‘Olivia!’ O, you should not rest Between the elements of air and earth, But you should pity me. (1.5.268–80)

Now Cesario has become truly poetical, and Olivia recognizes it: ‘You might do much,’ she replies (1.5.280). Such resolution within Viola/ Cesario prompts her to find a way in which poetical invention and what is not like to be feigned can be unified. Viola learns quickly in this play, and she finds a moment for such unity in her very next scene with Orsino: viola. My father had a daughter lov’d a man, As it might be perhaps, were I a woman, I should your lordship. duke. And what’s her history? viola. A blank, my lord: she never told her love, But let concealment like a worm i’ th’ bud Feed on her damask cheek: she pin’d in thought, And with a green and yellow melancholy She sat like Patience on a monument, Smiling at grief. Was this not love indeed? We men say more, swear more, but indeed Our shows are more than will: for still we prove Much in our vows, but little in our love. duke. But died thy sister of her love, my boy? viola. I am all the daughters of my father’s house, And all the brothers too: and yet I know not. (2.4.108–22)

‘Our shows are more than will’: disguisings are more than naked will

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because they cover up the will, but they also test it, just as this dialogue tests the strength of Cesario’s ability to keep up her feigning by seeming to relinquish it. The scene teeters on the brink of revelry turned to revelation. Shakespeare’s playgoers had seen this precise scene a year or so earlier in As You Like It; as that title suggests, it is not clear, in that play, just when Orlando sees through Rosalind’s disguise as Ganymede. It is not clear here, since Orsino leads Cesario on by extending this scene, whether or not he sees Viola beneath. From now on, his inability to see through this disguise may be his own feigning. He may sense Cesario’s true identity just as much as Olivia may in courting him – or he may see deeper yet, in courting her. In setting up such possibilities, Shakespeare not only sets up the situation for the final resolution in 5.1; he also anticipates in the countermovement of the underplot the abtuseness of Sir Toby, Sir Andrew, Maria, and Feste in not recognizing from nearly the first how gulling Malvolio in their little enactment (with the letter) and disguisement (as Sir Topas) can come to rebound on them. What appears at first oppositional can, in the end, be resolved into unity. Such matters are embodied once more in the priest of 5.1 who, having wed Olivia and Sebastian in sacred ceremony, is clearly meant to respond to the disguised priest, Sir Topas, in the revels of 4.2: olivia. O welcome, father! Father, I charge thee by thy reverence Here to unfold – though lately we intended To keep in darkness what occasion now Reveals before ’tis ripe – what thou dost know Hath newly pass’d between this youth and me. priest. A contract of eternal bond of love, Confirm’d by mutual joinder of your hands, Attested by the holy close of lips, Strenghten’d by interchangement of your rings, And all the ceremony of this compact Seal’d in my function, by my testimony. (5.1.148–59)

Such ‘contract’ing together sharply recalls and offsets the exorcism dividing the victimized Malvolio from the secular Sir Topas. It overcomes the uncontrolled, uncontrollable ‘whirligig of time’ (5.1.375) with a solemn contract that will be mirrored in the ‘golden time convents’ in which the Duke and Viola will make ‘A solemn combination ... Of our dear souls’ (5.1.381–3). Antonio’s superficial cry to Sebastian –

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‘How have you made division of yourself?’ (5.1.220) – finds its response not in division but in unification: ‘One face, one voice, one habit, and two persons! / A natural perspective that is, and is not!’ (5.1.214–15). The broken world of Illyria, like the broken vows of Orsino, Olivia, Cesario, Sebastian, Sir Toby and Sir Andrew, Malvolio and Feste, are reinscribed in the twinning of Viola and Sebastian. Cesario is permitted to recover her identity as Viola because Sebastian is present; Sebastian, arrested as Cesario, is freed only when Viola appears. All matters seem to draw together in Illyria. Ill-yria is transformed into I-lyria. The magical land of revel and revelation harbours a division that can be healed, oppositions that eventuate in the concurrence of unity. Or so it might seem. There is still the absence of Sir Toby and Maria, the unrequited plans of Sir Andrew, and the frustration and anger of an unsatisfied Malvolio. Unity means nothing unless it has such various constituents. But the priest that has brought Olivia and Sebastian together into holy matrimony knows the cost of such contracts. ‘All the ceremony of this compact Seal’d in my function, by my testimony,’ he says in reverence, ‘Since when, my watch hath told me, toward my grave I have travell’d but two hours’ (5.1.158–61). We know the eternity of the ‘eternal bond of love’ (5.1.154) because we also know mortality, our steady journey ‘toward [the] grave’ (5.1.160). The cruelty of a false exorcism teaches Malvolio and Feste alike the limitations and vulnerabilities of the human condition. If the thought that ‘I’ll be reveng’d on the whole pack of you!’ is divisive in Malvolio’s final threat, it leads to the healing command of the Duke: ‘Pursue him, and entreat him to a peace’ (5.1.377, 379). Like the sobering wind and rain, Feste is left to contemplate overreaching – his revelry turned into his self-revelation. And when that happens, in this fundamentally unified play, ‘that’s all one, our play is done, / And we’ll strive to please you every day’ (5.1.406–7).

NOTES 1 Textual citations are from Twelfth Night, ed. J.M. Lothian and T.W. Craik. 2 Feste’s later faulty reading – ‘some have greatness thrown upon them’ (5.1.370) – suggests his faltering at the end of the play.

The Baby in the Handbag: ‘Family Matters’ in Shakespeare alan somers et

My title recalls The Importance of Being Earnest, probably Alexander Leggatt’s favourite play, and links it to the punning title of Rohinton Mistry’s award-winning novel. I do this because I propose, in this essay, to look at an aspect of Shakespearean and Elizabethan comedy that deals, if not with babies and handbags, with reunions like that of Ernest Worthing and his lost family. Family does ‘matter’ in Shakespeare, in a way that seems to set him apart from his contemporaries, both fellow-dramatists and writers (or translators) of sources. Writers on Shakespeare’s comedies have for years devoted much attention to the love that results, at the end of many plays, between the youthful hero(es) and heroine(s); ‘the norm is clear: genuine love is fulfilled’ (Creaser 84). However, increasingly of late critics have wondered whether to see romantic love as being endorsed by the plays’ endings (played ‘straight’) or to suggest that such love relationships are questionable or even ridiculous (played for irony). Apparently, endings suggesting such fulfillment make some of us uncomfortable. In Twelfth Night, Olivia’s troth plight with Sebastian, a man she has known for less than an hour and whose identity she mistakes, is a good example; some writers have refused to accept this ‘love’ as a comic convention and have instead argued that such a union of unknowns is not built to last. Mistaking the appearance of an identical twin is perhaps understandable, but Olivia mistakes more, failing to notice that Sebastian’s personality is unlike Viola’s, being more direct and commanding. And Olivia has, of course, been in love throughout the play with a woman, Viola, not a man. There is a suggestion of venturing for financial advantage about some of the male lovers in the comedies. Critics note that Sebastian’s

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motives mingle his appreciation for Olivia’s wealth (in which, ironically, he resembles Malvolio) with his appreciation of her person (which Malvolio does not share). Similarly Petruchio vows to ‘wive it wealthily’ in The Taming of the Shrew (1.2.75),1 and Bassanio, who realizes that there is ‘a lady richly left’ in The Merchant of Venice (1.1.161), invests his friend Antonio’s three thousand ducats to achieve success, announced by Gratiano in these terms: ‘We are the Jasons, we have won the fleece’ (3.2.241). And we remember that Claudio, in Much Ado About Nothing, inquires very carefully into Hero’s financial prospects, just as later he is assured, before committing himself, that his ‘second’ bride will be richer than Hero, being heir to both Leonato and his brother (5.1.288–90). In whatever light such unions are constructed by critics, undeniably the urge towards ‘good’ marriages looms large in Shakespeare’s comedies, as it does in the city comedies by contemporaries such as Middleton and Dekker. It is also undeniable, as argued by many writers, that in reality such a ‘love conquers all’ world was a fantasy; as George Hibbard has suggested, the only people who married for love were those so poor that they had nothing else to give or receive (‘Love, Marriage, and Money’ 134–5). There was, we realize, a gulf between play-world fantasy and real-world society. Alexander Leggatt’s second published essay, ‘Shakespeare and the Borderlines of Comedy,’ proposes a view of Shakespeare as an experimental writer, constantly pushing the envelope by taking his comic complications and comic resolutions into new areas of experience (121– 32). The idea that comedy tends to question itself has been a recurrent one in his writings (see Leggatt, English Stage Comedy 136–57). Comedies can spring surprises, not only on their characters but upon their audiences, and Shakespeare supplies examples from every stage of his career. Something about an ending may go beyond surprise and actually shock us, as at the end of Measure for Measure where the Duke splices together two couples, although the grooms in both cases (Angelo and Lucio) are unwilling to wed; following these weddings without rejoicings, the Duke next proposes, for himself, a match with an apparently unwilling bride; at least Isabella, hearing the Duke’s proposal three times during his long series of speeches, is seemingly so flabbergasted that she is unable, or perhaps unwilling, to reply. The director of a production has to find a way to resolve this, and different solutions are possible (if all, in different ways, somewhat unsatisfactory). The finale is disturbingly discordant, like that of All’s Well That Ends Well (Creaser 96). In that play the wedding of the unwilling Ber-

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tram to Helena has occurred some time previously, but the rejoicing has yet to commence – the strongest gloss that the King of France can put upon events, in his closing couplet, is to say ‘All yet seems well, and if it end so meet / The bitter past, more welcome is the sweet’ (5.3.333–4). The ‘if’ matches Bertram’s ‘if’ a few lines earlier, where he places a condition on his pledge to love: ‘If she, my liege, can make me know this clearly.’ This in turn is countered by an answering ‘if’ from Helena: ‘If it appear not plain and prove untrue, / Deadly divorce step between me and you!’ (5.3.315–18). Perhaps Touchstone is right – ‘much virtue in If’ (As You Like It 5.4.103). In Greg Doran’s recent Royal Shakespeare Theatre production, the King and the Countess Rousillion (played by Dame Judi Dench) exited upon the King’s final couplet, leaving Bertram and Helena alone downstage, facing each other, at a distance of about three metres. The shrewd boggler confronted by his trickster ‘wife.’ Silent pause. Fade to black. When the cast entered to take their bows, Bertram and Helena were still distanced, separated by the King, the Countess, and LaFew. Does all end well? We wonder about, rather than wonder at, the relationships that conclude these plays. Shakespeare denies our generic expectations of comedy even more disturbingly, very early in his career, when in Love’s Labour’s Lost the ending dashes our natural hopes for concluding a courtship comedy in the usual destination, the marriage bed: berowne. Our wooing doth not end like an old play; Jack hath not Gill. These ladies’ courtesy Might well have made our sport a comedy. king. Come, sir, it wants a twelvemonth an’ a day, And then ’twill end. berowne. That’s too long for a play. (5.2.874–8)

Here the love talk, the mass wooing, yields to news of a father’s death, which quickly makes the scene begin to cloud and shocks the audience into a larger perspective about human relationships. Why, one wonders, a father’s death? We cannot tell if this is suggested or mandated by the source because the ‘source-hunter has little to offer. No one story has been found to cover the plot’ (Bullough 1: 426). We have earlier encountered intimations of the king of France’s mortality, of course, reminding us of the inscription on Spike Milligan’s gravestone (‘I told you I was feeling ill’); because he is feeble and bed-ridden, the king has dispatched his daughter on the embassy to Aragon that underlies the

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play. But it still seems shocking to encounter a family death amidst jollity, at the end of a comedy. I suggest that it marks a deliberate choice, on the evidence of another play where a shocking death of a loved family member intrudes to destroy any hope of success. The horrifying entrance of Lear, ‘great thing of us forgot,’ renders impossible anything but general woe as we witness him carrying Cordelia’s corpse: ‘Howl, howl, howl, howl.’ Shakespeare here departs from his sources and doubtless surprised audiences who were familiar with the Lear story from Holinshed or from the old play, The True Chronicle History of King Leir (1594). Samuel Johnson’s dismay still reverberates: ‘Shakespeare has suffered the virtue of Cordelia to perish in a just cause, contrary to the natural ideas of justice, to the hope of the reader, and, what is yet more strange, to the faith of the chronicles’ (222). It seems to me strange to explain away this shock, as some modern critics have done, by pointing to the ‘realities’ of our times: drive-by shootings, terrorist attacks, political assassinations, Holocaust, Hiroshima (Foakes, Lear 74; Halio, Lear 26). Hardened by today’s news, do we find ourselves unable to experience the shock, the horror, of Lear’s loss? Do we just shrug, just move on? Johnson’s response seems more adequate: family matters. And it did to Nahum Tate, who presumably thought he was restoring the original ending when, in his adaptation of 1681, he eliminated Cordelia’s disturbing death. His version held the stage for 150 years. While these deaths within families distress and move us, I am interested in exploring the opposite situation (far more frequent in Shakespeare, particularly in the late plays): the joy of family reunion. The endings of a good number of Shakespeare’s comedies and romances, early and late, present us with situations in which the romantic love situation pales beside familial reunions. In The Comedy of Errors, possibly Shakespeare’s first play, we see this at work among the stuff of which Shakespeare habitually constructs his comic perplexities. As John Creaser points out, the two forces that most often propel Shakespeare’s plots are conflicts between law and justice, and the arrival into the world of the play of one or more ‘strangers’ – travellers whose situations are troubled or insecure (84). Shakespeare adds characters and situations to the farcical source play, to augment comic confusions and invite ‘compassion, a measure of sympathy, and a deeper response to the disruption of social and family relationships’ (Foakes, Errors l). The two visitors to Ephesus have a common purpose: to find themselves by rediscovering family. Antipholus of Syracuse seeks his brother and his

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mother (the latter added to the source, but kept as a surprise), while an older Syracusan merchant, Egeon (another Shakespearean addition) travels in quest of his son (Antipholus). The twin servants added by Shakespeare to his source are each unaware of the other’s existence and repeatedly face perplexity from mistaken identities. A third addition, Luciana, sister to Adriana, adds a romantic complication when Antipholus of Syracuse falls for her. At the play’s end, brothers find brothers, and (a surprise to the audience) Egeon and his wife are reunited; while there is a promise of further wooing of Luciana, it seems to me that the emotional impact rests with the wondering words of the Abbess, Aemilia, the long-lost mother: Thirty-three years have I but gone in travail Of you, my sons, and till this present hour My heavy burden [ne’er] delivered. The Duke, my husband, and my children both And you the calendars of their nativity, Go to a gossips’ feast, and go with me – After so long grief, such nativity! (5.1.401–7)

Among later comedies, the reunion of Sebastian and Viola in Twelfth Night carries, at least for me, more emotional impact than any of the marriages patched together at the ending, while in Measure for Measure Claudio’s restoration to Isabella and to Juliet delights us, while the Duke’s marriage proposal, repeatedly attempted, merely surprises us as it does Isabella, and Lucio’s match with Kate Keepdown stirs us not at all. In the late romances the drive to family reunion becomes a remarkable feature, between parents and castaway or lost daughters. In Pericles, a deeper and more complex use of the adventure story that underlines Egeon’s wanderings in The Comedy of Errors is presented to us, because the element of parental culpability (or at least neglect or stupidity) becomes a factor, and the wanderings are more filled with suffering. Egeon and Aemilia lost their children, and each other, by the chance of shipwreck and sea-borne enmity (Corinth vs. Epidamnum). Pericles loses his wife and daughter because of too-hasty decisions. Thaisa is cast overboard in a storm to assuage the sailors’ superstition that a corpse on board is causing the tempest, but Pericles acts overhastily; as Cerimon says, reviving her with considerable ease, ‘They were too rough / That threw her in the sea’ (3.2.79–80). And what do

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we make of Pericles’s abandonment of his infant daughter Marina? Here the sources offer contradictory explanations. In Gower’s Confessio Amantis, Appolinus (Pericles) leaves Thaise (Marina) in Tarsus for no explicable reason: ‘My doughter Thaise by your leve / I thynke I shall with you bileve / As for a time’ (1303–5; Bullough 1: 403). He then returns to his own kingdom, Tyre, having vowed that he will not shave his beard until he has beset his daughter unto marriage. In Laurence Twine’s The Pattern of Painful Adventures (1594?), Appollonius (Pericles) leaves his daughter Tharsia (Marina) for a more explicable reason: ‘while I go about to recover my kingdome which is reserved for me. For I will not returne backe againe unto king Altistrates my father-in-law ... meaning rather to exercise the trade of merchandize’ (Bullough 1: 451). He undertakes not to shave his beard, cut his hair, or trim his nails until he has married his daughter. Why, one wonders, does Shakespeare choose the less explicable option, having Pericles leave Marina in others’ care while he returns to Tyre, his own kingdom, which stands in ‘a litigious peace’ (3.3.3)? He restricts himself to not cutting his hair until she is married. All three accounts share the idea of sartorial neglect, and two of them, Shakespeare’s and Gower’s, leave us wondering why Pericles would abandon his daughter on the way home. It seems just carelessness, recalling handbags and railway stations. We are left searching for a motive, as we must similarly seek a motive for the sudden onset of Leontes’ jealousy in The Winter’s Tale. Perhaps a hint is offered by the vows taken by Pericles, in all three accounts, to neglect his appearance, to make himself ugly, until his daughter is married. Could it be that he is perhaps wary that he might become, in time, to Marina, what Antiochus became to his superficially beautiful, but morally monstrous, daughter? (‘He’s father, son, and husband mild; / I mother, wife – and yet his child’ [1.1.68–9].) Perhaps he fears his own weakness, but he comes to suffer when he hears the false news of Marina’s death; he is plunged into grievous mourning – silent, fasting, and totally negligent about his appearance. This lays the groundwork for the wondrous reunion of daughter and father, a scene which is the more wonderful because it begins with Pericles repelling Marina again, physically abusing her, a slight that she objects to with stout self-assurance but quickly forgives, claiming a kinship with Pericles in sorrow: I am a maid, My lord, that ne’er before invited eyes, But have been gaz’d on like a comet. She speaks,

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My lord, that, may be, hath endur’d a grief Might equal yours, if both were justly weighed. (5.1.84–8)

Her insistence that she be spared violence, as a maid (virgin), is quickly followed by her invitation, in the following line – ‘look at me, at my invitation. See me for what I am.’ Her account of her sorrows and trials, an implicit accusation of neglect, is quickly enveloped within Pericles’ growing awakening wonder, through his increasingly excited questions, that this could be, not some fairy, but his living daughter. One of my more cynical students admitted, after a performance of the 2003 season production at Stratford, Ontario: ‘It was a five-hanky scene.’ Pericles’ vision of Diana is immediately followed by the reunion of Pericles, Thaisa, and Marina at Ephesus. This is more quickly handled (Shakespeare downplays it to avoid the double climax, which he omits altogether in The Winter’s Tale), and here it is Thaisa who awakens from a faint and has two reunions to rejoice in at once. Marina here expresses, however briefly, her joy (having remained silent throughout the raptures of Pericles in the preceding scene): ‘My heart / Leaps to be gone into my mother’s bosom’ (5.3.44–5). Notably, these scenes belong to the parents, not the child. What do we make of the relationship of Marina and Lysimachus? From the moment of her arrival at Mytilene, Marina is remarkable for defending her virginity, refusing the brothel life of diseased sexuality, like St Agnes, whose legend is an analogue, or perhaps a source, for this part of the story. In these scenes lurks the deserving governor of Mytilene, Lysimachus, who first visits the brothel as a client but leaves as a convert, protesting his innocent intentions and showering Marina with gold (4.6). Marina is freed from her prospective career as a whore by Boult, however, not by Lysimachus. The governor next appears on Pericles’ ship, promoting the idea that Marina’s beauty and talents would penetrate Pericles’ melancholy silence: ‘She questionless with her sweet harmony, / And other chosen attractions, would allure / And make a batt’ry though his [deafen’d] parts’ (5.1.45–7). She is urged to perform, and promised rewards for success: ‘If that thy prosperous and artificial [feat] / Can draw him but to answer thee in aught, / Thy sacred physic shall receive such pay / As thy desires can wish’ (72–5). While not prostitution, this is a commercial arrangement at best; it is linked to Lysimachus’s confession that he would happily wed her if assured that she ‘came of a gentle kind and noble stock’ (68) – a distressingly self-regarding consideration. His interest is quickened when

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her royal identity is revealed, and Lysimachus applies to Pericles, who replies ‘You shall prevail, / Were it to woo my daughter, for it seems / You have been noble towards her’ (5.1.261–3). Nobody has asked Marina yet, we notice; as well, in the final scene the ‘wooing’ appears to have been skipped when Pericles introduces Lysimachus to Thaisa: ‘This prince, the fair-betrothed of your daughter / Shall marry her at Pentapolis’ (5.3.71–2). Marina’s silence, here, is perhaps as eloquent as Isabella’s at the end of Measure for Measure. The point is, Marina’s betrothal to Lysimachus is a thing of nothing beside the reunion of father and daughter, husband and wife, mother and daughter. Shakespeare’s next play, Cymbeline, continues his experiments with mingling familial ties with romantic interests, and it presents actions that inflict more damage, incurring greater guiltiness. Posthumus and Imogen, married at the play’s outset, come under the external pressures of her father and stepmother’s displeasure and the clownish Cloten’s oafish attempts to woo her; as well, they are afflicted from within by Posthumus’s foolish offer to wager on his wife’s honour, and his tooready willingness to believe that he has lost the wager, has been cuckolded. Reacting to this belief, Posthumus, like Leontes in The Winter’s Tale, responds with childish misogyny and murderous impulses to revenge. Another independent plot deals with Belarius and Arviragus, Imogen’s long-lost brothers, stolen from their beds in infancy, brought up as wild woodmen, and emerging finally to prove themselves the princes they are. It amazes us how little of the play deals with its eponymous hero, the king of Britain, whose problem is that he is too easily influenced, too easily fooled. ‘The Trials of Imogen’ might be a better title, since so much of the play deals with her troubles, and her resolute independence in facing them, even death. Led into the Welsh wilderness by her husband’s false letter promising to meet her at Milford Haven, Imogen is presented instead with a second missive from Posthumus that orders Pisanio, his servant, to kill her – a threat of death that makes her wish for death indeed and then to look beyond death, to disguise and flight. Death does intrude into the lives of many of the characters in strange and surprising ways, and their resiliency and sensitivity in coping are what distinguishes their nobility. I am thinking of the series of scenes near Belarius’s cave that confront death in many grim visages, the first of which is comedy and surprise when Cloten meets his end. He little thought to be beheaded by a rude rustic! The grotesquery that follows (Cloten’s clotpoll thrown into a river, and his headless body laid out) along with Guiderius’s insouciant

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tones of contempt respond perfectly to Cloten’s conduct when alive. Do you get the death you deserve? Immediately afterwards, the discovery of the ‘lifeless’ body of Imogen/Fidele, borne in Arviragus’s arms (like Cordelia in Lear’s), gives rise to a contradictory rush of emotions. Arviragus lyricizes about fairest flowers, while Guiderius, more practical, chides him: ‘And do not play in wench-like words with that / Which is so serious. Let us bury him, / And not protract with admiration what / Is now due debt’ (4.2. 230–3). But it is not serious, because, as we know, Imogen is alive! The brothers’ song over her ‘corpse’ reflects on life as fearful, because subject to change; it is so, but it is also wonderful, because subject to change. Cloten’s corpse, laid by her side clothed in the garments of Posthumus, completes Cloten’s wildest hope – he wished to lie with her, ‘die’ with her, but in another sense – and ushers in a second and even more wondrous response to death. Imogen awakes, slowly comes to her senses, and realizes that she lies next to a headless corpse, whom she comically and sadly mistakes, bathing herself in his blood: A headless man? The garments of Posthumus? I know the shape of’s leg; this is his hand, His foot Mercurial, his Martial thigh; The brawns of Hercules; but his Jovial face – Murther in heaven? How? ’Tis gone. (4.2.308–12)

Are all lovers the same, in the dark? Or when their heads are off? Again, the scene is serious, but not, because we know the corpse to be real, its identity mistaken. Imogen’s over-particular anatomizing creates some amusement, particularly when we remember that ‘brawns’ could refer to ‘buttocks’ (adjacent to thighs). As well, Imogen’s grief is real, but recoverable – unlike Juliet, she does not seek the nearest way to die, but picks herself up and gets on with living. All this prepares us for the repentance of Posthumus – he still believes Imogen unfaithful, but the (false) news of her ‘death’ brings him no relief, only a conviction of his own guiltiness, and the need to forgive, not punish, wrongdoings. The vision of Jupiter, surely the most amazing coup de théâtre in all of Shakespeare, prepares us for the astonishing final scene of the play, which leads from surprise to surprise until, finally, ‘pardon’s the word to all’ (5.5.422). It counterpoises irremediable family breaches (the deaths of Cloten and the Queen) with wondrous family matters of reunion and rejoining. And it begins, as in

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Pericles, with physical violence when Posthumus strikes Imogen down, not realizing who she is; her response, forgiveness, stands for all his previous wrongdoings as well: ‘Why did you throw your wedded lady [from] you? / Think that you are upon a rock, and now / Throw me again’ (5.5.261–3). Cymbeline is restored to Imogen, who simply asks him his blessing in spite of all the injuries he has attempted to inflict on her. Finally, and most wonderfully, Cymbeline is restored to his sons after he is finally bereft of his bluster and threats – although his comment to Imogen, and her response, indicate that he has not lost (and will not lose) his habit of reckoning the price of everything, the value of nothing: cymbeline. O, what, am I A mother to the birth of three? Ne’er mother Rejoic’d deliverance more. Blest pray you be, That after this strange starting from your orbs, You may reign in them now! O Imogen, Thou hast lost by this a kingdom. imogen. No, my lord; I have got two worlds by ’t. O my gentle brothers, Have we thus met? (5.5.368–75)

There is always an element that makes these reunions human, because they are never perfect. In The Winter’s Tale, we meet with things dying, things new born, a baby in a fardel not a handbag, unquestioningly taken up for pity by a shepherd but rejected by her father. Shakespeare balances guiltiness and forgiveness, romantic and familial love, loss and reunion in ways that make the play’s ending seem neither over-wondrously magical, nor (as Yogi Berra might put it) ‘déjà vu all over again.’ I want to concentrate on the second half of the action, occurring after the sixteenyear gap of time, to show how it (and particularly Perdita) convinces us of a new beginning, not just the growth of a new generation poised to repeat the mistakes and failures of their elders. This time gap is, of course, balanced by the one discussed in the play’s first scene, in which the over-idealized nostalgia about twinn’d lambs frisking in the sun is countered by the confession of failure – time has passed, maturity has effaced youth, ‘temptations’ have destroyed innocence, and the sickest of sexual fantasies, jealousy, destroys love. How are children like their parents, and how different? Paulina

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invites us to ask when she presents Perdita to Leontes, noting physical similarities of ‘eye, nose, lip’ but praying that similarities end there: And thou, good goddess Nature, which hast made it So like to him that got it, if thou hast The ordering of the mind too, ’mongst all colors No yellow in’t, lest she suspect, as he does, Her children not her husband’s! (2.3.104–8)

The old Shepherd’s complaint about ‘teenagers’ – ‘I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest’ (3.3.59–61) – expresses the exasperation felt, I imagine, by anyone who has had children. It finds its match in Polixenes’ fussy worrying about Florizel’s absence from court, which he fears is prompted by sexual desire (4.2.45–50). Clearly the generations have a lot of answering back and forth to do. Between the anxieties of Shepherd and King, the notion of generation succeeding generation, alike but different, although all in time grow old and die, is powerfully evoked by Time, the Chorus, who concludes: ‘A shepherd’s daughter, / And what to her adheres, which follows after, / Is th’ argument of Time’ (4.1.27– 9). Perdita wonderfully exhibits traits that we remember from her ‘dead’ mother Hermione, particularly her independence of spirit (she knows her own mind) and her courage (she is not afraid to express, and defend, her opinions). But we are first bowled over, as Florizel is, by her playfulness, as she exhorts from Florizel ever more fervent expressions of his love, concluding with: Or I’ll be thine, my fair Or not my father’s; for I cannot be Mine own, nor any thing to any, if I be not thine. To this I am most constant, Though destiny say no. Be merry, gentle! (4.4.42–6)

We remember how Hermione, earlier, tried to tease a compliment out of Leontes: ‘What? have I twice said well? When was’t before? / I prithee tell me; cram’s with praise, and make’s / As fat as tame things’ (1.2.90– 1). However, she has a different audience in Leontes. The contrast between Leontes and Perdita everywhere obtrudes. His first words to Hermione? A reproach, a rebuke: ‘Tongue-tied, our

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queen? Speak you’ (1.2.28). His response to her request for a compliment, recalling when last she spoke well? A back-handed compliment that recalls their days of wooing, in negative and strained language: Why, that was when Three crabbed months had sour’d themselves to death, Ere I could make thee open thy white hand, [And] clap thyself my love; then did’st thou utter, ‘I am yours for ever.’ (1.2.101–5)

I doubt that many happily married men, recalling their own days of wooing, would load their memories with negatives like ‘crabbed’ and ‘sour’d’ – at least, speaking personally, I would not! As well, notice how his ‘then did’st thou utter’ carries with it the implication that her vow, made then, is no longer valid. There is a hint of sex loathing in these lines that bursts its bounds in the jealous imaginings that soon follow: ‘But to be paddling palms and pinching fingers / As now they are, and making practic’d smiles, / As in a looking-glass’ (1.2.115–17). (Significantly, the only other occurrence of ‘paddling’ is Hamlet’s: ‘And let him, for a pair of reechy kisses, / Or paddling in your neck with his damn’d fingers, / Make you to ravel all this matter out’ [3.4.184–6]). Contrast this with Perdita’s expression of what loving can be, should be: O, these I lack, To make you garlands of, and my sweet friend, To strew him o’er and o’er! florizel. What? like a corse? perdita. No, like a bank, for love to lie and play on; Not like a corse; or if – not to be buried, But quick and in mine arms. (4.4.127–32)

I especially like her frankly sexy pun on ‘quick.’ Small wonder that Florizel resorts to her sheepcote so frequently, and that it took Hermione three months to make up her mind to marry Leontes. The next generation, we see, is not just a reprint of the last, and this is apparent also in Florizel, who withstands the heavy wrath of his father (unlike Hermione, who cannot withstand the heavy wrath of Leontes). Florizel’s courageous realization, that his vow is a vow,

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unbreakable, is the engine that drives the plot forward to reconciliation and family reunion, as the lovers prepare to flee rather than submit: Camillo, Not for Bohemia, nor the pomp that may Be thereat gleaned, for all the sun sees, or The close earth wombs, or the profound seas hides In unknown fadoms, will I break my oath To this my fair belov’d. (4.4.487–92)

Again, the antitype is Leontes, whose doubt about Hermione’s vow led him to break his own marriage vows by doubting her faithfulness. With young love clearly in focus, and clearly contrasted to old distrust, the scene shifts to Sicilia, to resolution and reunion – and to the greatest surprise that Shakespeare ever sprang upon his audience! I imagine that London theatregoers in 1610–11 must have been saying, ‘Don’t give away the ending!’ just as moviegoers in 1992 tried to keep secret the end of Neil Jordan’s film The Crying Game. To bring about his miracle Shakespeare had to make a number of changes to his source, Robert Greene’s Pandosto: The Triumph of Time (1588), aside from his restoration of Hermione to life. Greene’s Pandosto (Leontes) claps Dorastus (Florizel) into prison and, after a brief tussle with his conscience, sets about to seduce Fawnia (Perdita) to be his lover. When his entreaties are fruitless he swears to ‘compel her to graunt by rigour’ (Bullough 8: 196). Next, Fawnia’s identity is revealed by the old shepherd Porrus, and there is a joyful reunion of father and daughter, after which Dorastus and Fawnia, accompanied by Pandosto, return to Dorastus’s father Egistus (Polixenes), where the young lovers are married. Pandosto, overcome by guilt at his crimes (including his intended crimes of rape and incest), commits suicide to end the story. Clearly, Greene excites little sympathy for Pandosto. Shakespeare brings about a far more complex and complete reunion whose climax is, of course, the reunion of mother and daughter, in wondrous questioning about how this moment could possibly have become reality: [paulina.] Please you to interpose, fair madam, kneel, And pray your mother’s blessing. Turn, good lady, Our Perdita is found.

188 Alan Somerset hermione. You gods, look down And from your sacred vials pour your graces Upon my daughter’s head! Tell me, mine own, Where hast thou been preserv’d? where liv’d? how found Thy father’s court? (5.3.119–25)

Often critics have pointed out that this climax is achieved by depriving us of another: ‘We are, of course, cheated of the scene we were expecting, the discovery of Perdita and her recognition by Leontes, and instead learn of their meeting in a scene of exposition’ (O’Connell 225). This is undeniable, but I think that there is another impulse that lies behind Shakespeare’s decisions in these scenes: the relegation of Leontes to a secondary role. The meeting of father and daughter is the most wonderful miracle ever to have happened, as the Second Gentleman relates: ‘Nothing but bonfires. The oracle is fulfill’d; the King’s daughter is found. Such a deal of wonder is broken out within this hour that ballad-makers cannot be able to express it’ (5.2.22–5). (We may recall, ironically, Autolycus’s pack of incredible ballads.) But however wonderful the moment, Leontes is denied expression here; in fact it is Perdita’s ‘other’ family (might we call them her ‘real’ family?), the Shepherd and the Clown, who are given the opportunity to express their wonder at events and their meaning: as the old Shepherd insists, ‘we must be gentle, now we are gentlemen’ (5.2.152–3). A lesson Leontes might, years earlier, have taken to heart. Just as it is Perdita’s impulse to see the statue of her dead mother that brings us to the final scene, within that scene it is the daughter, not the husband, who first wishes Hermione alive: perdita. And give me leave, And do not say ’tis superstition, that I kneel, and then implore her blessing. Lady, Dear queen, that ended when I but began, Give me that hand of yours to kiss. (5.3.42–6)

When the moment comes, the statue moves and descends. Husband and wife are first reunited, but this is accomplished without speech – it is related to us through the comments of Polixenes and Camillo. Leontes is denied expression: polixines. She embraces him. camillo. She hangs about his neck.

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If she pertain to life let her speak too. (5.3.111–13)

What do we make of this embedded stage direction? How does she hang about his neck? Why does Hermione not speak to Leontes here, or indeed not at all until the end of the play? My view is that Shakespeare wishes no easy indulgence in ‘kiss and make up’ sentimentality – Leontes is guilty of high wrongs, and there is much expiation yet to occur. I think that Hermione might well be seen to hang about Leontes’ neck with her arms straight, giving him a long look, before she turns to the joy of verbal and physical reunion with her daughter. Leontes, of course, has the last word in the play, a speech of twenty lines that makes me think (paraphrasing Gertrude) ‘the gentleman doth protest too much methinks’ – Leontes seems to want to fill the space with talk. Some of his comments seem comically inept, such as his finding Paulina an honourable husband (she just found out the manner of her former husband’s death). It is a nice human touch – Leontes’ mind is much upon matches here, as he also introduces Florizel, troth plight to Perdita, to Hermione. After all, he has just been re-blessed with a marriage that he had no right to expect. The Winter’s Tale, it seems to me, achieves a fine balance between the impulses of romantic love, and that love which is everyone’s first experience: the love of family.

NOTE 1 Quotations from Shakespeare’s plays are from The Riverside Shakespeare (1974).

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PART THREE Shakespeare’s Comedies of Love on the Contemporary Stage

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‘Songs of Apollo’: Love’s Labour’s Lost in 1961 r. b . park e r

I The standard stage history of Love’s Labour’s Lost (Gilbert, Shakespeare in Performance) does not even mention it, but Michael Langham’s 1961 production at the Stratford Festival in Ontario was nothing less than an epiphany for those of us fortunate enough to have seen it: an almost perfect production of a text regarded only too often as impossibly stilted, dated, difficult, and self-indulgent. The doyen of American Shakespeare scholars of that time, Alfred Harbage of Harvard, who had just laboriously edited the play, proclaimed rapturously, ‘I have been living with Love’s Labour’s Lost for many months, but I had no idea that that play was there,’ and John Crow, the English scholar who provided the Encyclopedia Brittanica’s entry for Shakespeare, affirmed: ‘I have been seeing Shakespeare plays for forty-five years, in England, in Germany, and the United States, and I am absolutely convinced that the best Shakespeare production I have ever seen was the Love’s Labour’s Lost I saw Monday’ (Pettigrew and Portman 155), an opinion he maintained for the rest of his life. It was also this production that inspired Alexander Leggatt to devote much of his academic career to the study of Shakespeare’s comedy and its performance. The production played only one season at the Festival, but when the company was invited to England in 1964 to celebrate Shakespeare’s quatercentenary (along with the Comédie Française, the Moscow Art Theatre, and Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble), Langham chose Love’s Labour’s Lost as one of three productions to take along, the others being his Timon of Athens (in a controversially contemporary setting)1 and Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme directed by Jean Gascon. The RSC invited them

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to use their London theatre at the Aldwych, but Langham chose instead the Festival Theatre at Chichester because its stage had been adapted from the Guthrie-Moiseiwitsch theatre in Ontario and his friend Sir Laurence Olivier had not yet managed to master it successfully in the two seasons that the theatre had been open. One of the aims of the visit, in Langham’s mind (‘This Other Stratford’), was to spread the gospel of the open (or thrust) stage, which was still a new and contentious concept at that time. And in this the production succeeded admirably. There were two initial difficulties, however (besides the perennial problem of inadequate rehearsal time). The play had to be considerably recast, partly because some people were no longer available, partly because the actors on the trip had to overlap with roles in the other two plays the Festival was bringing over. Thus, the Princess and her ladies were all new, as were Dumain and Longaville, Costard, Dull, Armado, Moth, Jaquenetta, Boyet, Holofernes, and Sir Nathaniel: almost a complete sweep. Langham was concerned that with so many changes of personnel, performances might lose coherence and their sense of spontaneity, but his worry proved unfounded: the interpretation was so precise that it easily overcame the cast changes (and, in some cases, may even have been improved by them). A second problem was that the Chichester stage possessed serious defects, which Langham had one of his designers, Desmond Heeley, correct to bring it more closely into line with its Canadian prototype. Because the Chichester platform was very wide and its auditorium only shallowly raked, Langham added several levels to the stage to reduce the impression of empty space and provide better sightlines. The back wall was brought forward, with side and centre entrances, to throw action closer to the audience. And the stage balcony was modified by adding three extra pillars to make it more like Stratford’s. Nothing could be done with the ‘vomitories,’ however. In Ontario, these are ramped tunnels debouching onto the stage down-left and down-right from under the audience. In Chichester, they were used also as audience entrances, and to reach the stage from them actors had to climb up steps, considerably reducing the speed of movement (which is one of Stratford’s major assets) and making the surprise of Marcade’s appearance at the climax of Love’s Labour’s Lost more difficult to achieve. To provide an audience for the dress rehearsal, four hundred theatre people came down from London, led by Dame Sybil Thorndike, who made a rousing speech of welcome. The opening night that followed was a huge success, with cheering, a standing ovation, and six curtain

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calls. And the English reviewers went wild, with such comments as: ‘Never was Love’s Labour’s Lost less of a duty, a production more ecstatically received, or the open stage more triumphantly vindicated’ (Driver); ‘their interpretation is flawless, and they play their instrument like a Stradivarius’ (Bryden); ‘It would be difficult to overpraise Michael Langham’s direction of this difficult play ... the end was a stunning climax to a marvellous evening’ (Davenport); and ‘The general level and style of speech in such unregarded matters as rhythm, enunciation, and pronunciation was a lot higher than in most English companies’ (Fay).2 In short, it was a triumph. Ten years later, Langham was to mount the production again at the Tyrone Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, another clone (with differences) of the Moiseiwitsch stage, which Langham tells me may even have been better and certainly popularized the open-stage concept throughout America (Telephone). And later he also directed a production for his students at the Juilliard School in New York. Then in 1983 he was invited by Stratford’s artistic director, John Hirsch, to mount a production for the theatre’s Young Company on a new Third Stage (since named the Tom Patterson Theatre) that had been designed by Desmond Heeley, the same person who had earlier modified the Chichester stage. It was set in the period before the First World War by the designer John Pennoyer, and four established actors played Armado, Navarre, Boyet, and Holofernes (with John Neville particularly brilliant as Armado). Most of the other players were apprentices, however; so, though the production was certainly successful, it never approached the giddy perfection of the 1961 version. And when it was transferred to the main stage for the next season, 1984, and name actors took over the clown roles, they completely swamped the less-experienced lovers and distorted the production badly. It is to the 1961 production, then, and its redactions in 1964 and 1974, that we shall direct our attention, with reference to the later interpretations only occasionally for emphasis or contrast. II In his chapter on the play in Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love, Sandy Leggatt suggests that the essence of Love’s Labour’s Lost is performance: a delight in, but also a mockery of, performative conventions at many levels, verbal, social, and theatrical. There are many play-within-theplay situations and competitive elaborations of language, whose irony

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is deflected metatheatrically onto Shakespeare’s own comedy by such remarks as Berowne’s wry comment at the end, ‘Our wooing doth not end like an old play; Jack hath not Jill’ (5.2.851), followed by ‘That’s too long for a play’ (855) when he is told that he can return to wooing in a year’s time.3 And earlier Berowne had compared the symmetrical eavesdropping scene of the four rhyming lovers to ‘an old infant play’ (4.3.73), like the work of Shakespeare’s predecessor John Lyly for the choirboy companies of the Chapel Royal at Westminster and St Paul’s cathedral.4 This emphasis on what the reviewer for the New York Herald Tribune, Walter Kerr, called the production’s ‘performative humour’ is the central key to Langham’s achievement, which presented the play’s sexual cavortings and extravagancies of language as part of the euphoria of youth, that golden time we all remember (at least vaguely) when energy seems endless and love and talk are perpetual high-spirited improvisations. If one were to summarize the effect in a single word, it would be theatricality; if two words were allowed, theatricality and energy; if three words, theatricality, energy, and dance. Langham’s theatricality was much influenced by Tyrone Guthrie, the founding director of the Stratford Festival who had personally chosen Langham for his successor as ‘the one undoubted genius of the next lot’ (Cushman 29). Guthrie’s main tenet (and delight) was to emphasize performance as performance, exploiting the non-realistic conventions of staging as a sort of game, or even a joke, between the actors and the audience (Guthrie passim). For Guthrie, who had intended to have a career as a singer, theatre was always much closer to music than to politics or psychology; interestingly this is also how in 1961 Langham saw Love’s Labour’s Lost. In an essay written for the program of the 1984 revival, Langham says: When I first produced Love’s Labour’s Lost, I was impressed by its musicality, even though the play is loaded with linguistic inebriation and euphuistic excesses. I realized that it could work if rendered as a piece of music. The play is structured like a musical composition, full of repetition and artifice. And the form Shakespeare uses in many of the long speeches is like that of a musical composer: they begin with a statement of theme, move to rhythmic variations on that theme and then end with a summing up. (‘A Sense of Direction’ 24)

Though Langham says in this same essay that the first Love’s Labour’s

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Lost he saw on stage was Peter Brook’s celebrated production at the Memorial Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1946 (in which Langham’s wife Helen Burns played Rosaline and Paul Scofield first created his memorable interpretation of Don Armado), many of Brooks’s effects had already been pioneered by Guthrie ten years earlier in a production at London’s Old Vic Theatre (Williamson 57ff.). In particular, Guthrie had introduced balanced scenic minimalism (though both he and Brook were working with sets on proscenium stages); energetically formal choreography for the aristocratic lovers contrasting with much looser blocking for the clowns; the casting of Moth as a young choirboy (instead of by a woman, as was then normal); bouffant dresses in pastel colours for the women; and, especially, so complete a transformation of mood at the conclusion by Marcade’s unexpected appearance and the bittersweet of the final songs that it converted the Cambridge editor, John Dover Wilson, from disdain for the play to admiration. As he explained later in Shakespeare’s Happy Comedies: The extraordinary impression left upon the audience by the entrance of the black-clad messenger upon the court revels was the greatest lesson I took away with me from the Guthrie production. It made me see two things – (a) that however gay, however riotous a Shakespeare comedy may be, tragedy is always there, felt, if not seen; (b) that for all its surface lightness and frivolity, the play has behind it a serious mind at work, with a purpose. (73)

Guthrie’s more direct influence on Langham’s production, however, was the stage itself that he and Tanya Moiseiwitsch had designed for Stratford specifically to encourage, indeed require, Guthrie’s emphasis on theatricality. Combining features from the Elizabethans and the Greeks, the main stage thrusts right out into the auditorium with spectators on three sides, none further than sixty feet from the actors. This platform is surrounded by three shallow steps and a narrow corridor around the periphery that the company calls the ‘gutter.’ In the centre of the back wall a balcony juts out which then had eight slender pillars to support it,5 with entrances above and below and steps down on each side of it to the main stage. In addition, the back wall has entrances on either wing that face the vomitories emerging from under the audience so that blocking is dominated by the diagonal paths between them, which Langham learned to loop and curve for more varied effects. Because spectators on three sides have to be given equal attention, the

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actors must be constantly aware of their responsibility to the sides, often crossing and swivelling at forty-five-degree angles to address a new section of the audience with what we then called the ‘Stratford kick’ as they back-heel their long trains and cloaks behind them. Such kinetic liveliness is ideal for comedy, with a crowded stage dominated by the point of the balcony above the central pillar (known to us irreverently as ‘William’s Pole,’ in memory of that nineteenth-century pioneer of a return to Elizabethan staging, William Poel),6 and the downstage area at the lip of the thrust platform providing an ideal spot for direct communication between actors – especially comics – and the audience.7 Such a stage demands a totally different approach from the proscenium stages which by then had been the norm for several centuries, and Langham has stated that it was only with Love’s Labour’s Lost, three years into his mandate as artistic director, that he felt that he had at last mastered its exciting but different dynamics: ‘I guess [my breakthrough] came with Love’s Labour’s Lost, when I really began to feel that I could meld [the stage] to my own purposes and realized really that it would serve me, it would serve what I wanted to do. And from then on I enjoyed it’ (Ouzounian 91). Love’s Labour’s Lost, Langham attested, was the first play of Shakespeare’s that I directed ever, where I felt I could hear, genuinely hear, the voice of the author. And felt I was able to hear it in the production I was putting on ... The play and the production were much loved by all of us and it made a world of difference to my confidence. And that was a turning point. After that, things changed and it became a glorious place to work in. (93)

III In keeping with its aim to recover Elizabethan staging, the open-stage aesthetic puts great emphasis on sumptuous costumes (such as can be found in Henslowe’s Diary) but eschews scenery and uses only such properties as are necessary or germane, never adding anything for decoration that might divert attention from the actors and the script. Peter Brook had created a sensation in 1946 by having his actors costumed in the beautiful, slightly languid styles of the early eighteenth-century French painter Jean-Antoine Watteau, and Tanya Moiseiwitsch took a hint from this to dress Langham’s actors in the comparable but more

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robust ‘Cavalier’ period of mid-seventeenth-century England, associated with the paintings of Van Dyck and Peter Lely. Thus, the men were clad in rich velvety materials of various subdued tones, with long hair, beards, and moustaches, elaborate lace on cuffs and turned-down collars, riding boots, embroidered cloaks, and broadbrimmed hats with ostrich plumes, doffed in unison with sweeping bows. They tried on academic gowns as they signed their initial oath to study, but quickly shed them; and in their disguise as ‘Muscovites’ were given long robes of patterned orange and gold, bearskin shakos, curved scimitars, and beaky, mustachioed halfmasks that made them look like a quartet of Joseph Stalins. Berowne’s assurance that they intended ‘Nothing but peace, and gentle visitation’ (5.2.180) – spoken with a heavy Russian accent that Boyet, repeating the message, maliciously mimicked – always provoked a laugh because this was still the period of the Cold War between the United States and the USSR. The Princess and her ladies were straight out of Sir Peter Lely, with great plumed hats, elaborate lace collars and cuffs, and panniered gowns of different pastel hues that made glistening pools around them over the stage whenever they sat down. They wore different shades of green for the hunting scene at the beginning of act 4, but their most spectacular appearance came when they entered act 5 in ballooning evening gowns of satin in subtly different shades of oyster, light beige, white, and off-white, moving with the stately beauty of great swans. Their masks during the Muscovite incursion were held on sticks (affording no ‘realistic’ concealment), which they sometimes used like rapiers to keep their suitors at bay. And when the moment of parting came, the lords helped the ladies with cloaks of subtly varied shades – maroon, purple, dark blue, and grey – through which the off-white gowns still glimmered in the slowly dying light: a marvellous visualization of Berowne’s ‘the scene begins to cloud’ (5.2.704). No scenery was used except for a few green leaves around the upstage steps and balcony to establish a ‘country’ setting and suggest that the balcony was a ‘tree’ from which Berowne could spy upon his fellows. At the foot of the central pillar and downstage right and left at the lip in front of the vomitories were low benches, scarcely noticeable when not in use because they were of the same wood as the stage.8 Besides such necessary props as books, pen and ink, letters, Armado’s sword (which he pretended was a gun to propel Moth at ‘I shoot thee at the swain’ [3.1.56]), Holoferne’s schoolmaster’s switch, and long bows

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for the ladies in the hunt scene, there were occasional extra props for humour. For instance, when Navarre apologized, ‘You may not come, fair princess, within my gates’ (2.1.170), two yokels crossed the stage carrying a large folded tent topped with a makeshift fleur de lys, raising their hats to the aghast Princess. The pageant of the Nine Worthies was introduced by Constable Dull as a hilarious one-man band, not only playing a drum and pipe like Shakespeare’s clown Will Kempe, but also cymbals attached to his knees. He began with the anthem of Navarre, for which everyone stood, and then, as they began to sit, piped up with the French national anthem, for which of course they had to stand again, with only the Princess significantly remaining seated. This was especially amusing for a Canadian audience, which at this time could never be sure whether ‘God Save the Queen’ would be followed or not by their own ‘O Canada.’ With appropriate amateur enthusiasm, the comics enacting the Nine Worthies went in for elaborately improbable props: the visor of Costard’s helmet seemed to have a life of its own, and Armado’s long white chiffon scarf kept getting entangled with his legs and sword and was particularly unhelpful during his fisticuffs with Costard. Langham took great care that appropriate ‘favours’ be designed for each lady and helpfully distinguished the many letters in the play. Illustrating the director’s ‘incredible head for detail,’ Desmond Heeley reports: In Love’s Labour’s Lost there is a series of letters, a lot of letters, and they’re very confusing. So Michael wrote this paper called ‘Postal Congestion in Navarre,’ describing all the letters in detail. ‘This letter,’ he wrote, ‘should be small, badly written, much folded, tear-stained. The next one very flowery, open, petals should fall out, perhaps ribbons.’ And so on. It was a lovely paper to read, a wonderful one to keep, heaven for the actors and terrific for props. Details like that are very special. (Ouzounian 128)

Langham, of course, was distinguishing between Armado’s letter to Jaquenetta and Berowne’s to Rosaline, which get mixed up in the play, but what is especially striking about Heeley’s comment is the way it bears witness to a high-spirited sense of play in the production. Similarly, when Maria complained of Longaville’s letter –This ‘is too long by half a mile’ (5.2.54) – she threw an end of it to the ground that unfolded several feet across the stage. (In the 1983 production she threw one end across two of the other ladies to have it caught on the fly by the third at least six feet away.)

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IV The same theatrical playfulness and inventive high spirits could be seen in blocking that exploited the non-realism of the Stratford stage. The most obvious example was the eavesdropping scene of 4.3, in which Berowne concealed himself in the ‘tree’ to spy on Navarre reading out his sonnet. Then Navarre hid behind one of the downstage benches to spy on Longaville, scuttled crab-wise along the ‘gutter’ to the other bench as Longaville took the first to spy on Dumain, and tried to hide behind one of the slender balcony pillars when Longaville had to switch from the first bench to the second. This hilarious round-robin of inadequate concealments was, of course, wholly visible to everyone, the lords themselves, the audience, and Berowne, who commented on them with stage directions from on high. At ‘Now in thy likeness one more fool appear’ (4.3.41), for example, his hand gesture seemed literally to conjure up Longaville. Similarly, in 5.2 when Boyet had to convey messages between the ladies and the Muscovites, who were standing only a few feet apart, he invented an elaborately wandering path, doubling the distance for his subtle diplomacy, while he panted and seemed about to collapse with the exhaustion of such a long journey – thus parodying the ‘Russians’’ claim to have ‘measured many a mile ... by weary steps’ (5.2.185, 193), for which Rosaline, disguised as the Princess, mocks them. Even the curtain calls had this playful, patterning effect: ‘The players surge in and out of the exits in a laughing confusion that resolves into a design, breaks, resolves again, and with this purely physical ingenuity crowns the evening’ (Boothroyd). Recurrent adjectives in reviews of the production stress that it was ‘balletic,’ like ‘a country dance,’ a ‘madrigal’ or ‘gavotte’; and Langham took full advantage of the play’s balance of characters to provide dancelike, musical effects. The program credits Blanche and Alan Lund with choreography, but Langham says that the only section worked on by the Lunds was the masque of Muscovites (Telephone). After Moth’s abortive prologue, the disguised lords advanced shoulder to shoulder in a long diagonal from up-right towards the ladies ranged in a line to receive them down-left. The men performed an energetic, cossack-like dance, with much knee-bendings, stamping feet, concerted cries of ‘Hah,’ and symmetrical flourishes of their scimitars, with the ladies first facing away (as they had to put Moth out of countenance), then turning around while the men infiltrated between them. Then the men backed off discomfited; after which they split up into four couples (mis-

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matched, of course, because the ladies had mischievously exchanged favours), spread around the stage so each could seem to talk ‘privately.’ Such effects were especially appropriate to a sequence describing itself as a ‘masque,’ but there was similar dance-like blocking throughout, conceived by Langham himself, whom Heeley describes as ‘the best choreographer I’ve ever come across’ (Ouzounian 128). This is not easy to convey in prose (‘the words of Mercury,’ indeed) because its effects are mainly visual and depend on split-second timing, but a few examples can give a general sense of what was achieved. In the first scene, the lords, having signed their pact to study, at last settled down to read after Berowne, thoughtfully weighing two books and pointedly choosing the lighter, has said ‘I am the last that will last keep his oath’ (1.1.158). Within moments, however, all were restive and distracted, each furtively raising his head in sequence to steal glances at the others, like four clocks striking the hour irregularly, till Berowne’s next plaintive line, ‘But is there no quick recreation granted?’ allowed them to break their study and joke about Armado. Another balanced visual effect occurred in 4.1, with the ladies sitting on stage with their dresses pooling about them, around Boyet, seated on the down-left stool to read out Don Armado’s letter, with the girls laughingly chiming in with answers to the Spaniard’s rhetorical questions (and the Princess betraying her feelings at one point by volunteering ‘the King’ too quickly). The appearance of two antiphonal choirs to sing the owl and cuckoo songs at the conclusion had a similar balance; one striking use of such visual formalism came at the beginning of 4.1, when, moralizing over her wanton killing of a deer, the Princess generalizes: And, out of question, so it is sometimes, Glory grows guilty of detested crimes, When for fame’s sake, for praise, an outward part, We bend to that the working of the heart. (30–3)

This was pointed by freezing action and having the Princess and her ladies all face meaningfully out towards the audience, emphasizing the comment as an important interpretative point. The reason the ladies are chary of believing the young men’s protestations of love is, of course, that their vows seem as self-regarding and performative as their bouts of wit. Berowne in particular – played by John Colicos with almost explosive energy – was constantly in motion and delivered his jokes with brio and pace. His sense of confident

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aggression produced one of the few substantial cuts in the text, so that act 4 could end with his ‘Advance your standards, and upon them, lords. / Pell-mell, down with them’ (4.3.341–2) as the other lovers bounded offstage after him like hunters in pursuit of prey, initiating the production’s single intermission. This was just an extreme case of the fast pace of the whole, however, driven, Langham says, by the rhymes and stichomythia of the text. The prompt book shows that Langham divided the text into nine sections, each timed so exactly that the whole show took less than two and a half hours, intermission included: a speed possible because of the stripped down flexibility of the stage and a stopwatch precision of timing by Langham himself that is reflected in the actors’ scripts by such directions as ‘Go up step,’ ‘Draw sword,’ ‘Down step,’ ‘Kneel,’ etc., rehearsed over and over again (Hagon). This raises the question, of course, of how language could be delivered at such a tempo in a text notorious for its obscure allusions and outof-fashion wordplay. One of the remarkable things about Langham’s production (in which he was superior to both Guthrie and Brook, not to speak of John Barton later),9 is that its text is cut extraordinarily little. Some archaisms are modernized, a few of the more obscure jokes and wordplays are removed, as are sections that everyone agrees to be mistaken printings of passages that Shakespeare had rewritten (4.3.291.1– 23, 5.2.798.1–6); but the only major cut besides the one already mentioned at the conclusion of act 4 is a curious deletion of dialogue between Armado and Moth at the beginning of act 3.1.3–50, which the 1961 prompt book crosses out then marks with the direction ‘stet.’ The explanation of this contradiction, Langham informs me, is that the lines were initially cut to introduce a song for Moth at this point, instead of the puzzling single word ‘Colcinel’ (which no scholar has yet fathomed). The song chosen was the ballad of ‘King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid’ that Armado had called for earlier at 1.2.99–111 and then mentions again in his letter at 4.1.63–5. As Moth sang it, Armado was directed silently to weep: a subtle, moving touch. However, the boy actor cast originally as Moth proved to be no singer – indeed, his voice was so weak that one reviewer said that he must have taken to heart the adage that small boys should be seen but not heard (Evans) – so the song was removed and the lines restored until the actor had been coached, when the song was brought back in again. Langham’s solution for obscure wordplay and jokes was to theatricalize them. He was a stickler for intensive study of the text, not only spending weeks understanding every line of a play himself, but also

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insisting that his actors do the same, so that they could deliver the jokes in character as jokes with the proper timing and emphases. When this was combined with the fast pace, the result was fascinating. The audience realized a joke was being made and laughed without necessarily understanding the point: ‘Some of the jokes are hard to see,’ confessed the Punch reviewer Basil Boothroyd, ‘but we laugh all the same.’ Colicos was criticized occasionally for taking the pace too fast, but this created a sense of ebullient wordplay for the speaker’s own personal satisfaction, which, as another reviewer pointed out, was carried along by the vigorous action: ‘The conceits were not lingered over but quickly uttered as an accompaniment to the ingenious movement’ (Davenport). Instead of action illustrating text, in other words, the language often seemed to accompany the energetic choreography like a comic obbligato: entirely in keeping with the ‘performance’ impression of the whole production. V Langham constantly used the Lyly-like balance of the lovers for visual quartets, trios, and duets, but, by dint of clever casting, quite distinguishable characters emerged without any concern for subtext or directions about individual motive. Royalty was distinguished by its dignity: Leo Ciceri played Navarre as essentially thoughtful, courteous, ponderously witty, and grave to the point of sententiousness (just the opposite of the reading in John Barton’s interpretation later); while Paul Scofield’s wife, Joy Parker, gave the Princess a pleasantly aloof authority and a bell-like clarity of enunciation so like the Queen Mother’s that it quite unnerved the reviewer for the Shakespeare Quarterly. Among their followers, John Colicos’s Berowne and Zoe Caldwell’s Rosaline stood out as inveterate individualists, the former remarkable for his literally dashing physicality and intense dark eyes, communing directly with the audience from the lip of the stage about the ignominies of love but getting quite carried away enumerating female charms at 4.3.179ff. As Rosaline, Zoe Caldwell used an extraordinarily wide vocal range to give edge to her remarks, cooing seductively one moment, then dropping almost to a baritone to drive home a cutting retort (‘There, then, that vizard, that superfluous case’ [5.2.387]). Katharine, with grief about her sister and the short spat with Rosaline, was the staidest of the waiting ladies but was matched, of course, with Dumaine, the most schoolboyish of the lovers (he delivered his foolish joke about looking

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Paul Scofield as Armado and Kate Reid as Jacquenetta, in Michale Langham’s Stratford Festival Production of Love’s Labour’s Lost (Peter Smith, photographer).

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Mary Anderson as Maria, Joy Parker as the Princess, Douglas Rain as Boyet, Michael Learned as Katherine, Zoe Caldwell as Rosaline (Peter Smith, photographer).

up ladies’ skirts while lying on the stage on his back). And Langham contrived a similar spice of incongruity by having a small, merry-faced, distinctly pert Maria paired with a Longaville who was taller and noticeably less quickwitted than his fellows, spreading the many drafts of his abortive poem around him on the stage and producing a ludicrously long letter. Boyet, the Princess’s major domo, dressed all in pink and silver, was played by Douglas Rain as an aging ‘squire of dames’ with a touch of rouged effeminacy. When the lords realized in 5.2 that it was he who had betrayed their disguise as Muscovites (‘Some carrytale, some please-man’ [463]), Boyet, who was watching nervously from the balcony, tried to hide behind its inadequate rim, only to be captured by Longaville and Dumaine, marching in unison up the steps on either side to bring him down to the main stage to face Berowne’s contempt. So later we were not surprised to find him joining in their baiting of the Nine Worthies with a sycophant’s eagerness.

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Among the comics, Holofernes and Sir Nathaniel were played straightforwardly as pedants, though Holofernes also had a nice line in lewd doubletakes (when it is suggested that parishioners’ ‘daughters profit very greatly under’ him, for instance, or when Armado brags that Navarre has dallied with his ‘excrement’), and Nathaniel was so embarrassed to find himself cast in the role of Alexander the Great that he positively limped. Costard and Jaquenetta, on the other hand, seemed to have been influenced by their counterparts in As You Like It. Though Costard is called ‘swain’ and ‘hind,’ both terms used for a rustic, Eric Christmas played him, like Touchstone, as a disaffected Londoner, a cockney costermonger. He threw down his hat at 1.1.282 when told that Armado, of all people, was to be his gaoler (thus neatly cuing Berowne’s next lines, ‘I’ll lay my head to any good man’s hat, / These oaths and laws will prove an idle scorn’ [286–7]), and made great play from the lip of the stage with indignation that the fancy term ‘renumeration’ amounted only to three farthings (3.1.125ff.), disappearing down a vomitory at 3.1.157 with a final contemptuous blast of the word. (Robert Cushman suggested to Leggatt that the academic equivalent must be ‘honorarium’ [Leggatt, Letter].) Jaquenetta, in turn, was played by Kate Reid like a slatternly, doltish Audrey whose sexual availability was her only attraction, delivering such jokes as her put-down of Armado, ‘with that face!’ with flat matter-of-factness – an approach that worked better with Constable Dull, a Victorian copper in a ruff, whose ‘Nor understood none neither’ (5.1.128) seemed all the funnier for having no inflection of either satisfaction or regret about it. A better reading was provided on the 1964 tour by Helen Burns, whose ‘adorable little Jaquenetta’ was praised by the critic J.C. Trewin (twice) and made much more understandable Armado’s helpless infatuation for her. Scofield’s Don Quixote–like Armado was the most striking piece of characterization in the production. (One of the anomalies of literary history is that this role actually predates Cervantes’ great novel.) He had invented the interpretation for Brook in 1946, but writes me that, while his black-clad Armado was introverted, melancholy, and brooding at Stratford-upon-Avon, the sheer playfulness of the Langham production produced a more flamboyant, fantastical reading. Peter Smith describes him vividly as a figure made of dust, whose gray and olive costume seemed to have been woven by a spider; one strong wind and he would disappear. This monument of decayed delicacy was in fact a miracle of impersonation by Paul

208 R.B. Parker Scofield. His craggy features that made so striking a Coriolanus were here hidden under an enormous ostrich-feathered hat and Quixotic make-up, the natural vitality of his movements gave way to the pace of a refined snail, and the strong and vibrant voice was discarded for a frail and tremulous sigh that grew strong only in exasperation or, with a delicious absurdity, in ardor. ‘Warble, boy, make passionate my sense of hearing,’ was a sound few lovers of the spoken word will easily forget. (‘Sharp Wit and Noble Scenes’ 72)

He walked slowly, almost gingerly on tiptoe (as though he lacked socks as well as a shirt), gazed sadly into far distances like someone from another place or time, and treated his diminutive page with all the exquisite courtesy due to another grandee.10 VI This truly great piece of imaginative acting raises one last aspect of Langham’s production that deserves special consideration, what, to maintain the musical metaphor, may be termed its skill in modulating from romance to farce, melancholy to brilliant wit, all culminating in the crucial change from Ver to Hiems, spring to winter, that Robert Cushman calls ‘the most audacious and most moving’ conclusion in the canon (41). This modulation built, of course, on Langham’s models: Guthrie, as was mentioned earlier, and Peter Brook, who had elaborated the fracas between Costard and Armado to mask and make more shocking the unexpected appearance of Marcade, death’s sudden irruption into a festive world. The non-realistic nature of the Stratford stage, however, and the strong performative link that had already been established with the audience, enabled Langham to take his predecessors’ insights a step further. Egged on by Berowne and Boyet, Costard and Armado squared up to fight, with Costard swinging wildly, Armado hindered by his ludicrously long white scarf, and the spectators shouting and pounding the stage for maximum noise and excitement. While all this was engaging the audience’s attention, Marcade came up one of the tunnels, dressed entirely in black. The noise gradually died down as he was noticed (a woman behind Leggatt whispered ‘O, my God!’). Garrick Hagon, who played the role, reports: Marcade was dressed in one of Tanya’s most beautiful costumes, all black of course, with a velvet cape and a large plumed hat. I remember walking

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slowly up the stairs from the ramp, and approaching the Princess with great solemnity. Gradually each member of the happy crew saw me and retreated down the stairs one by one into the gutter, leaving Joy Parker and myself alone centre stage for my interrupted three lines – Shakespeare punctuating the emotion exactly right. (Hagon)

Marcade’s blackness at the centre of the others’ spread-out colour was like canker in the heart of a flower; and when he delivered his sad news, the men slowly doffed their hats. The theatre gradually began to darken almost imperceptibly as each lady in turn sentenced her admirer to the penance of a year’s delay; and the final songs of Spring and Winter, in exquisite settings by John Cook, were sung by servants and rustics (including some professional singers) grouped on the balcony and down the stairs to either side. As the Princess said ‘so I take my leave’ (5.2.849), attendants brought dark mantles for the women to don, and the lovers paraded for the last time hand-in-hand, as the men heard their sentences and the song of Spring was sung. On ‘When icicles hang by the wall,’ begun slowly by a solo voice then taken up by the chorus, the lords kissed the ladies’ hands in farewell, and the women left slowly down a tunnel, looking back. Next, Michael Langham records in a letter to me, as the second winter stanza began, the lords slowly left the scene upstage through the pillars, in their turn also looking back. Then the singers, huddling together for warmth, came onto the main stage to cluster under the balcony as the song ended. In the silence that followed Armado stepped forward to condole the audience with ‘The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo. You that way; we this way.’ Then, to a quiet reprise of the final verse, the singers drifted away and Armado, still striving to match the nobility, kissed both Jaquenetta’s hands in elaborate farewell, and gazed upon her departure. He turned to find himself alone and, feeling the chill of an early winter gust, sought shelter down a tunnel. As he goes, some leaves fall. Silence. Darkness.

Of all the reviews, Peter Smith’s account catches the magic of these moments most vividly: From that moment [of Marcade’s appearance] the play simply dissolved and Berowne’s ‘Worthies, away; the scene begins to cloud’ never had greater poignancy. This was the point to which everything had led. It at once startled and fulfilled the movement of the production. The serious-

210 R.B. Parker ness underlying the gaiety, which had had its focus in Armado, now took over; a winter of penance, of ‘frosts and fasts,’ had to succeed the hot spring of courtship. The theatre darkened as the lovers exchanged their vows and we noticed that the ladies’ cloaks were darker shades of red or purple or blue than we had thought; the haunting setting of the songs of Spring and Winter saw the actors slowly disperse until Armado alone was left. And his words were addressed not to his fellow actors but to us: ‘You that way; we this way,’ as he himself left the stage. He wound his cloak about him, looked back over his shoulder at the leaves falling sadly on to the stage and, with a shudder of a gesture that said all there is to say about the inhospitable world of winter, disappeared, taking enchantment with him. (73)11

Armado’s last line occurs only in the Folio text, where it is attributed to ‘Brag[gart].’ It has been given to different characters in other productions – to the Princess by Brook, to Boyet by Barton – and has been interpreted to divide men from women or nobility from commoners on stage. But Langham was surely right to follow Guthrie in giving it to Armado and using it to emphasize the ephemerality of theatrical performance that had been a major leitmotif of his whole production. As Guthrie would have put it, magic spread throughout the theatre like warm strawberry jam (he at one time had contemplated opening a jam factory in Ireland).12 The effect was bittersweet; like Caliban in the last great comedy, we ‘cried to dream again,’ not wanting the performance to end. It was one of those moments, wrote Christopher Dafoe in The Manchester Guardian, ‘when the theatre, the audience, the makeup faded away and we saw, for an instant, things that happened in a blaze of light for the first time. These moments are rare in the theatre, and we should cherish them when they are given us.’ And the reviewer for the New York Times, Brooks Atkinson, who was about to retire, wrote to Langham thanking him ‘for restoring my faith that actors are golden people’ (Langham letter). Fashions change in theatre as in everything else. In the early 1960s, the thrust stage’s concentration on words and acting was still avantgarde for mainstream theatres and exciting because new. Nowadays, they can seem like orthodoxy, and modern taste leans more to deconstructions of the text; and for audiences sated with visual imagery far beyond their skill as listeners, the move is once again to heavily decorated stages. (Moiseiwitsch’s elegant bare platform sometimes resem-

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bles nothing so much as a theme park.) Yet ‘what goes around, comes around,’ and it seems likely that Langham’s style of staging Shakespeare will reappear before long. And even if this does not happen, it is still absurd that a production praised so highly on both sides of the Atlantic, which had so much influence in the middle of the last century, should not be included in the play’s stage history. Work that could prompt an actor of the stature of Paul Scofield to call Love’s Labour’s Lost ‘the most elegant and witty of Shakespeare’s comedies’ and bring us the criticism of Alexander Leggatt has surely earned its place in the story. Personally (to outcrow Crow), I think it was the best Shakespeare I saw in over fifty-five years of playgoing: a labour of love that it would be downright folly to lose.

NOTES I would like to thank Jane Edmonds and Ellen Charendoff, archivists of the Festival Theatre, for their kind assistance; Michael Langham, Paul Scofield, Peter Smith, Garrick Hagon, and Sandy Leggatt himself for sharing their memories of the production and performance; and my wife and Dr Irene Morra for assistance with my research. 1 Langham originally intended Love’s Labour’s Lost to have a contemporary setting, too, but Paul Scofield said he would prefer not to perform in a second updated production that season (he also played the main role in Coriolanus). 2 Quotations from reviews are from the Festival Theatre’s clipping books, which do not always record page numbers or titles. 3 Citations of the text of Love’s Labours Lost are from the Norton Shakespeare. Langham’s text was G.B. Harrison’s Penguin edition. 4 Alfred Harbage even argues that, though the play was certainly revised in the 1590s, it was originally written by Shakespeare to be performed by Children of the Chapel Royal at some nobleman’s house in the 1580s (‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’). 5 The next season Langham and Moiseiwitsch reduced the pillars to five more substantial supports, making room to bring on properties centrally and giving the balcony a less ornamental appearance, more suited to the tragedies and history plays. Langham called it a ‘sex change.’ 6 Knowledge of the ‘Stratford kick’ and ‘William’s Pole’ are based on the author’s personal recollections.

212 R.B. Parker 7 Guthrie also had actors process down the aisles and speak from the auditorium, procedures Langham rarely used, and certainly not in the 1961 Love’s Labour’s Lost. 8 In the 1983–4 productions they were decorated more realistically to resemble a tree bole and two pollarded stumps. 9 Langham tells me that he learned to pay detailed attention to Shakespeare’s own wording and punctuation from John Barton, who was his assistant director for The Merchant of Venice at Stratford-upon-Avon; but when Barton came to direct Love’s Labour’s Lost himself for the RSC twice in the 1970s, he cut and transposed the text considerably. 10 In 1964 William Hutt kept the same interpretation but with his viola-like voice made it seem more ‘silvery’ and mellow; and in the 1983–4 productions John Neville found yet further nuances in what was basically the same reading. 11 Falling leaves had been introduced in Hugh Hunt’s 1947 Love’s Labour’s Lost at the Old Vic. For Langham’s production they were kept backstage in a bag labelled ‘Love’s Labour’s Leaves’ (Taubman). 12 Author’s personal recollection.

Smitten: Staging Love at First Sight at The Stratford Festival c. e . m c g e e

In Shakespeare’s comedies of love, love at first sight is ubiquitous and protean. Such love is sometimes part of the past that is prologue to the action of a play, as Orsino’s obsession with Olivia is, or the incipient love interest of Portia and Bassanio, or that of the ladies of France encamped outside the King of Navarre’s gates. In other cases, characters are smitten during the unfolding present of the story, but offstage: hence Gratiano reports on his new love for Nerissa, as Valentine does for Silvia, Oliver for Aliena, and Don Adriano de Armado for Jaquenetta. Trapped by her disguise as Cesario, Viola reveals her desire for Orsino, but only to the audience. Antipholus of Syracuse, on the other hand, has the unusual opportunity to tell Luciana herself that he loves her even as together they recall the intimate dinner at which he fell for her, when his ‘looks at board’ (3.2.18)1 communicated enough to leave his ‘wife’ in tears and his ‘sister-in-law’ trying ‘to make the best of a difficult situation’ (Leggatt, Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love 11). When Antipholus first speaks in this scene, he admits that he does not know the identity of the woman who has become the object of his desire. He calls Luciana ‘Sweet mistress’ because ‘what your name is else I know not’ (3.2.29). Despite their time dining together, he never learned her name. But why would he? Why would he need to be introduced to his own ‘sister-in-law’? The revelation of identity can seriously complicate love stories, of course, as it obviously would in Romeo and Juliet (hence, the servant in Q2 and F1 who, curiously, does not know who Juliet is either), but it can also enhance the comedy of a moment in a play about mistaken identity. Anonymity is also instructive with respect to love at first sight. Luciana’s anonymity suggests that physical attraction is absolutely crucial to that experience. Physical attractiveness depends

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in part upon the actor’s body, as, presumably, Luciana’s did, given her radiant eyes and ‘golden hairs’ (3.2.48). Her identity and beauty, however, would also be coded by her comportment, attire, style of language, place at the table, and relationships with others – all of which aspects of her physical presence bespeak her social status and enhance her appeal. In Twelfth Night Olivia clearly links together her new love for Cesario, his physique, and their shared social values when she says that she can swear that he (whose name she does not know) is ‘a gentleman.’ Their first meeting has given her ‘five-fold blazon’ of it in his ‘tongue, [his] face, [his] limbs, actions and spirit’ (1.5.261–2). It is difficult to overstate the importance of anonymity and its implications in Shakespeare’s representation of love at first sight: Orlando, Aliena, Bottom, Pericles, Ferdinand, Miranda, Romeo, Juliet, Cesario, Bianca in Shrew, and Maria, Catherine, and Rosaline in Love’s Labour’s Lost are all objects of others’ desire before their names are known. All the reports of love at first sight establish at least the fact that certain characters have fallen in love. Some of the accounts go further, sketching the process by which love blossomed, as when Orlando asks Oliver, incredulously, ‘Is’t possible that on so little acquaintance you should like her? That but seeing, you should love her? And loving, woo? And wooing, she should grant? And will you persevere to enjoy her?’ (5.2.1–4), and all of these questions, unlike Rosalind’s in 3.2, can be answered ‘in one word’ (204): yes. Some reports on falling in love at first sight also clarify what it feels like to do so: for Orsino, it is to be hounded by desire; for Viola, it is a ‘barful strife’ (1.4.40); for Gratiano good fortune that ‘stood upon the caskets’ (3.2.201) no less than Bassanio’s fortune did; for Don Adriano de Armado a great soldier’s debasement. His occupation, he feels, is gone: ‘Adieu, valour; rust, rapier; be still, drum: for your manager is in love; yea, he loveth’ (1.2.160–2). Reports of love at first sight, whether they happen before the start of the story or offstage during it, provide glimpses of the variables that Shakespeare played with in his exploration of that experience. These variables, registered on the page and developed on the stage, are the main concern of this paper. Just the reports of love at first sight establish that some couples fall in love when alone, others when in the midst of a group, and others (as we shall see) when in a crowd. Some characters experience love as a painful pleasure, others as the happy consequence of hard but hasty wooing. Some suffer in silence because they cannot speak their love; others opt for rhymes and sonnets, indeed ‘for whole volumes, in folio’ (LLL 1.2.163–4). But Shakespeare’s early comedies,

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every one except Errors, also include scenes that call for the direct enactment of love at first sight. To understand the variety and complexity of Shakespeare’s exploration of love at first sight these scenes are invaluable. They not only increase the range of variables that need to be considered when analysing Shakespeare’s representation of love at first sight, but also remind us of the relevance of performance to the analysis of that material. Consider Claudio’s case in Much Ado About Nothing. His experience suggests that romantic love may occur not, strictly speaking, at first sight, but at second. When he first looked upon Hero, he did so ‘with a soldier’s eye, / That liked, but had a rougher task in hand’ (1.1.246–7). Orlando’s case in As You Like It seems the same: he has noticed the ‘fair eyes’ of the ‘fair and excellent ladies’ (1.2.153–4) Celia and Rosalind, but before the latter can throw him emotionally, he must first face the challenger Charles. Claudio, having returned from a successful campaign, however, finds that ‘war-thoughts / Have left their places vacant’ and into those empty rooms ‘Come thronging soft and delicate desires’ (249–51). His state of mind is a crucial variable, as the perceiving sensibilities of Benedick and Beatrice are in their eavesdropping scenes, in a play in which characters condition in various ways what others are to see. Without saying a word, Claudio is smitten as he gazes across a crowded room at the equally silent figure of Hero so that she becomes, as he says later to Benedick, ‘In mine eye ... the sweetest lady that ever I looked on’ (1.1.151–2). To say that Claudio is silent in this scene is to say that the text is silent. In performance, however, actors make the open silence speak; just by insistently looking at Hero, they communicate what is happening to Claudio and, by that action, provide the pretext for the conversations with Benedick and Don Pedro that follow. In Boyet’s terms, the ‘still rhetoric’ of Claudio’s heart may be ‘disclosèd’ in his eyes (LLL 2.1.228). The enactment of falling in love in this scene depends upon the ‘extra dimension’ of performance, upon a deliberate tension ‘between what is heard and what is seen’ (Leggatt, ‘Extra Dimension’ 39), or, in this case, between what is not said but seen. In contrast to speechless Claudio, the King of Navarre in Love’s Labour’s Lost has lots to say. He falls in love with the Princess of France while he reads an official missive from the French king and responds to its demands with an extended diplomatic rejection. In his words there are a few hints, but only a few, that he may be concerned with more than politics: he calls her ‘Dear Princess’ (148), notes that her ‘fair self’ (149) might prompt

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some compromise, and hopes (given the terrible awkwardness of the situation, one increasingly more awkward because of his increasing desire) that she will ‘deem [herself] lodged in [his] heart, / Though so denied fair harbour in [his] house’ (172–3). Navarre has lots to say, though little about love. But if Boyet is to be believed, Navarre’s looks made manifest another line of action: Why, all his behaviours did make their retire To the court of his eye, peeping thorough desire. His heart like an agate with your print impressed, Proud with his form, in his eye pride expressed. ... His face’s own margin did quote such amazes That all eyes saw his eyes enchanted with gazes. (233–6, 245–6)

As with Claudio, so with the King of Navarre, the representation of love at first sight often has less to do with what is said than with what is seen. The challenge for the actor in this case is to engage in the public discourse of international diplomacy, as the script requires, while making perceptible through his looks that he has been secretly smitten by the princess. In looking at these last two scenes, I have been discussing playable possibilities of scenes that enact love at first sight. While keeping the focus on such scenes (that is, those that enact love at first sight), I want to turn to a few of them as realized and elaborated in performances at the Stratford Festival, Ontario. If we examine the archival records there of all the productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, and The Taming of the Shrew in the fifty-four years of the festival, we find brief theatrical story lines that extend over several productions, fragments of theatre history that clarify various questions about Shakespeare’s portrayal of love at first sight, specifically these: Are lovers articulate? Can they be intimate? And do those they love reciprocate? I. Making Asses Speak To release the dark energies lurking beneath the surface of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Jan Kott has to silence Bottom. Doing so is consistent with the role Bottom plays in Kott’s reading of the play, the role of a ‘monstrous ass ... raped by the poetic Titania’ (119). To establish her aggressivity, Kott privileges her flowery speeches and never quotes Bottom.

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As a result, Bottom is always an object of Kott’s gaze, a construct of his visual imagination. The fourth section of ‘Titania and the Ass’s Head’ makes this most explicit, for here he adverts to Chagall’s depiction of ‘Titania caressing the ass,’ an ass that is ‘sad, white, and affectionate’ (119), only to suggest its inadequacy. More relevant are the ‘fearful visions of Bosch,’ ‘the grotesque of the surrealists,’ and the Caprichos of Goya, ‘whose fantasies penetrated even further than Shakespeare’s the dark sphere of bestiality’ (120). Painters inspire, shape, and confirm his interpretation of the encounter between Titania and Bottom: Titania has embraced the ass’s head and traces his hairy hoofs with her fingers. She is strikingly white. She has thrown her shawl on the grass, taken the tortoise-shell comb out of her fine coiffure, and let her hair loose. The ass’s hoofs are entwining her more and more strongly. He has put his head on her breasts. The ass’s head is heavy and hairy ... Titania has closed her eyes: she is dreaming about pure animality. (123)

The hooved Bottom of the painting Kott describes resembles the Bottom of Peter Brook’s famous production of the play, a Bottom who is held down and shoed by the fairies before Titania awakes (Loney 39a), but both go beyond Shakespeare’s script, in which ‘Bottom’s transformation is only from the neck up’ (Leggatt, Renaissance Comedy 59). Describing artists’ visions and his own re-visions of the love scenes of Titania and Bottom, Kott does what Titania commands: ‘Tie up my love’s tongue; bring him silently’ (3.1.182). Productions of Dream at the Stratford Festival have, in a literal sense, done the same, but to a radically different end. Paradoxically, Bottom is tongue-tied in order to help him speak. Orlando could not respond to Rosalind because some ‘passion’ had hung ‘weights upon [his] tongue’ (AYL 1.2.224); Bottom as an ass could speak, or seem to speak, because the props makers really did hang weights upon his tongue. For the evidence of that we must we look inside asses’ heads. Besides Juliet’s dresses and Portia’s caskets, the asses’ heads made for successive Dreams make up one of the special collections in the archives of the Stratford Festival. Although the ass’s head made for the 1960 production has not been preserved, those from the one worn by Douglas Rain in 1968 to the one made for Brian Bedford in 1999 tell the story of the Stratford Festival’s effort to create an ass’s head that operates naturalistically in that its jaw, mouth, and tongue move in synch with the actor’s delivery of Bottom’s lines.

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The ass’s head in the 1968 Dream represents a crude but ingenious attempt to this end. A metal framework, with strips one centimetre wide in the ears and three centimetres wide along the jaw line, was attached to a hard plastic helmet (resembling a cheap batter’s helmet). Foam rubber padding fleshed out the cheeks, and the entire headpiece was covered in a greyish-brown, furry synthetic fabric to which a mane of hemp was attached as were pieces of leatherette where an ass’s head would be hairless. Most important, wire pullies ran down behind the ass’s long neck piece and Bottom’s apron so that the actor could control the movement of his ears, eyes, and large lower jaw. While these cables allowed Rain to open the ass’s mouth, thick semi-circles of heavy wire to which large nuts were crudely taped served as counterweights so that Bottom’s ass’s mouth closed automatically. In effect, Douglas Rain’s Bottom spoke with his hands. The large white ass’s head worn by Hume Cronyn in 1976 was a transitional piece. It worked in the same way as Rain’s, but the use of plastic mesh made it much lighter and cooler, and the use of plastic covered cables with neat wooden handles simplified the mechanics of the device. By 1999, even this neat machinery had been removed from the innards of the ass’s head. This head, made by Ken Dubblestyne for Brian Bedford, was a quarter of the size of that made for Rain in 1968 and about an eighth of the weight. The basic structure consisted of a plastic mesh headpiece attached to a plastic mesh skullcap. There was brown fur at the back of the sides of the face and up to the ears, but on the snout itself hairs were individually knotted to the mesh. Thread controlled the movement of the ears, a plastic coil (the technology of bendable straws) formed the lower lip, and – again most important – the lower jaw, loosely hinged with cord, had a cup fitted to the actor’s chin. When Bottom spoke, the jaw of the ass’s head moved in perfect synchronization with the delivery of the lines, so that Bedford’s native Yorkshire accent came trippingly off Bottom’s asinine tongue. The availability of new materials for making masks and the claustrophobia of Brian Bedford probably had more to do with the development of the asses’ heads than did sensitivity to the character of Bottom. But Bottom does have the gift of the gab. Although he defers to Peter Quince as the better wordsmith when it comes to composing prologues or turning marvellous dreams into ballads, Bottom has speeches that he knows by heart to illustrate ‘a tyrant’s vein’ (1.2.33), and variants with which to nuance the introduction of a lion into the presence of ladies (3.1.34–7), and songs to make it clear that he is not afraid when abandoned at night in the forest outside of Athens (3.1.108–9).

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An ass that can speak ‘with no sense whatever of incongruity or awkwardness’ (Hibbard, Making 148) enhances the comedy of this scene, for it arises in part from the discrepancy between how monstrously Bottom has been changed and how decidedly he remains the same. His status as a lover suddenly caught up in a relationship with Titania also depends upon his way with words. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, one constant characterizes love at first sight: it gives lovers the power of speech. Awakening under the influence of love-in-idleness, both Lysander and Demetrius launch into their professions of love for Helena. The former awakes halfway through a sentence and a couplet, both of which he completes with his first line, ‘And run through fire I will for thy sweet sake’ (2.2.109). The latter rockets from rest to high rhetoric: ‘O Helen, goddess, nymph, perfect, divine! / To what, my love, shall I compare thine eyne?’ (3.2.138–9). Helena is no less articulate than Lysander and Demetrius in resisting their protestations of love, nor does Bottom miss a beat when the fairy queen makes her adoring advances. Indeed he engages her in a discussion about love at first sight, talking about it rather than succumbing to it. Unlike Lysander, who argues irrationally that his new love for Helena is truly reasonable, Bottom counters Titania’s professions of love with an affirmation that she has little reason ‘on first view, to say, to swear’ (3.1.125) that she loves him. He responds to Titania’s passion with ‘cheerful philosophizing’ (Leggatt, Comedy of Love 89). Reminding her that ‘reason and love keep little company together nowadays’ (127–8), he talks with the queen of the fairies (whose identity he does not know either) as if she ‘can be engaged in ordinary, natural conversation’ (89) – and more natural, it will seem, if the ass’s mouth moves in synch with the mechanical’s mind. II. Intimacies of Crowds One fascinating variable in the representation of love at first sight is the social context in which it occurs. Titania, Lysander, and Demetrius have not only the power to speak their love but also the liberty to do so. Presumably this is in part a consequence of the drug applied to their eyes when they were asleep, for only Titania is alone with the ‘gentle mortal’ (3.1.121) on whom she dotes. When Lysander falls for Helena, the woman he is about to abandon is sleeping nearby;2 when Demetrius does the same, his rival is at hand. In both cases, love triangles instantly complicate the dramatic tensions of the moment. Implicit in these observations is the assumption (inculcated by the ideology of romantic love) that true love requires, if it is to flourish, a ‘fine and private place,’

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such as Titania’s bower with all her attendant fairies ‘gone’ and ‘all ways away’ (4.1.38). What is needed is intimacy, such as Cesario demands and finally obtains when he comes a-wooing on Orsino’s behalf. Impelled by Cesario’s insistence that his message is for Olivia’s ears only, she removes the several barriers that might have prevented him from seeing her closely and alone. She calls off Sir Toby (1.5.92), accepts Malvolio’s capitulation (145), admits that she is the lady of the house (166), dismisses Maria from their presence (192), draws aside the veil that hides her face (206), and, finally, allows Cesario to get close enough to see that her beauty is natural, not cosmetic (209–10). What Cesario says and the intensity with which he argues the case undoubtedly arouse Olivia’s love, but so too do the spatial poetics of the scene. Securing privacy and closing the physical space between Olivia and himself, Cesario creates the conditions conducive to love, and so ‘the youth’s perfections ... creep in at [Olivia’s] eyes’ (266–8). In scenes of love at first sight, few of Shakespeare’s characters enjoy the intimacy and isolation that Titania and Bottom begin with or that Cesario and Olivia have by the end of their first encounter. The challenge that Shakespeare’s scripts normally throw down is how to create an intimate space for lovers within a large public gathering. Solving this problem is easier on screen than on the stage. While the soundtrack reminds us that, say, the Capulet party is still in full swing, the camera isolates Romeo and Juliet looking through an aquarium into each other’s eyes. If more intimacy is in order, they can find it behind the closed doors of an elevator. But on the stage, it is obviously more difficult to split off two lovers from the group of which they are a part so that one or both can reveal their intimate feelings. Act 1, scene 2 of As You Like It presents this challenge: the wrestling match draws a crowd in the midst of which Rosalind and Orlando have to fall in love. The Festival Theatre stage makes that challenge greater because Tanya Moiseiwitsch designed it in ways that would help Tyrone Guthrie seize the opportunities for pageantry and spectacle that he regularly found in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. She imagined large groups of characters fanning out from under the balcony to fill the platform and produced this effect by including a centre column to support the upper stage, a column that ‘forces the stream of traffic to fan out taking the whole house into its span’ (qtd. in Aikens 5). When Robin Phillips took up the challenge of directing As You Like It in 1977 (a show remounted a year later), he also took advantage of this potentiality of Moiseiwitsch’s stage. When the characters arrived to

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watch the wrestling, they quickly filled the stage: one group arrived by coach from beneath the balcony; several couples processed in from upstage left; and others entered from an upstage door and the downstage vomitorium. Impressively gathering a crowd in this way, Phillips established both the condition for the more difficult theatrical problem – how to carve out within that crowd a space for love and lovers – and, as it turned out, the means of its solution. Phillips made a virtue of necessity by using the rich, elegant lords and ladies of Duke Frederick’s court to sharpen the focus on the meeting of Rosalind, Celia, and Orlando. While Orlando attended ‘with all respect and duty’ upon Rosalind and Celia (1.2.138), other couples and small groups turned in toward one another. Phillips directed them to talk among themselves, quietly and, because of the way it affects comportment, in verse. Actors who moved were to do so in slow motion: one stepped up onto the platform upstage right; another moved to the very centre of the stage at the back; another slowly walked straight downstage, turned and went back. Instead of drawing the eye away from Rosalind and Orlando, as one might expect such movement to do (see Richard Paul Knowles, ‘Shakespeare’ 43), the blocking in this case narrowed the visual frame around them so as to keep them in focus. The cumulative effect of all this business was to establish an array of characters, most anonymous, engaged by their personal thoughts or private conversations, of which the interaction between Orlando, Rosalind, and Celia was one (the most important one, of course, being the only one heard). In contrast to this part of the scene, the assembled group gave their complete attention to the wrestling match, during which no one moved except Orlando and Charles. When Phillips returned to the Stratford Festival in 1987 to direct the Young Company in As You Like It, he again carefully created a space within the crowd for Rosalind and Orlando, but he reversed the order of movement and stillness. During the wrestling in this show, male characters moved closer to all four sides of the platform on which the match was fought (the much narrower platform of the Tom Patterson Theatre stage), fictively to get a better view of the action, practically to prevent the actors playing Charles and Orlando from tumbling off and sustaining an injury. But when Rosalind, Celia, and Orlando chatted prior to the bout, individual characters, couples, and small groups situated around the stage, looking at one another or offstage, stayed silent and still. While in both productions Robin Phillips’s blocking created a space

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within a crowd for love at first sight, Maggie Smith, Rosalind in the 1978 show, took the quest for intimacy even further and made it her own, in two ways. First, during Celia’s speech urging Orlando not to fight Charles (‘Young gentleman, your spirits are too bold for your years’ [143–8]), Rosalind slowly walked in a tight circle around Orlando, indulging herself in looking at him. The text does not require this action, but it is consistent with Rosalind’s language, which ‘makes it clear that the practical, physical side’ of her love for Orlando ‘is never far from her mind’ (Leggatt, ‘Actor’s Body’ 99). She does not yet know who the young man is, but his physique (increasingly visible and impressive as the wrestling proceeds) she liked. Secondly, Maggie Smith (and Nancy Palk, who played Rosalind in Phillips’s 1987 production) managed her final exit and that of Celia at the end of the scene so as to steal a moment alone with Orlando. Rosalind initiated their exit with ‘Shall we go, coz?’ and Celia did, exiting upstage right. Rosalind, however, doubled back to a position upstage left from which she called out to Celia, loudly, self-servingly, and with comic effect, ‘He calls us back’ (218). She waved ambiguously at Celia to come back, then decisively not to do so. Again Celia did as directed, with the crucial result that Rosalind got her most intimate moment with Orlando – a moment completely alone with him for her most direct expression of her feelings: ‘Sir, you have wrestled well, and overthrown / More than your enemies’ (220–1). In these Stratford Festival productions of As You Like It 2.1, author, director, and actors all proceed as if true love really needs a private, intimate place. Even when alone with Orlando, Rosalind nuances her expression of her love by metaphorical implication. So too in Twelfth Night, Olivia’s understated ‘You might do much’ (1.5.246) reveals everything to the audience, almost nothing, for the moment, to Cesario. If love is hard to express even when the characters do create a situation in which they are alone together, how much more difficult it must be when they are constrained by the company of others or the protocols of public occasions. In Shakespeare’s plays, they usually are, so that the arousal of passionate feelings and their repression is part of the dramatic tension. Representing love at first sight in this way reinforces the ideological split between private and public selves, a split that makes personal, individual emotions such as love the ground of authenticity. This is especially powerful and useful for the construction of social order where love is established as the proper foundation for the institution of marriage and when love at first sight is requited by the object of one’s desire. In such a culture, as Dympna Callaghan has argued, ‘the

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mutuality of mirrored passion,’ such as Romeo and Juliet’s or Rosalind and Orlando’s, ‘fosters the notion that one’s authentic identity is revealed in romantic love’ (‘Ideology’ 81). III. Banking on Bianca The ‘mutuality of passion’ is not a constant, but a variable in the representation of love at first sight. Orlando falls for Rosalind, but the text does not make it clear when he first saw her with a lover’s eyes, just as we do not know exactly when Juliet first saw Romeo. Perhaps we should not expect such precision. The timing of the requital of love may be a secondary matter compared with the question of whether love is reciprocated at all. Did Bottom fall for Titania? The silence of the text and the character’s aplomb make it difficult to tell. Of the nine actors who have played Bottom at the Stratford Festival, only Keith Dinicol decided the issue. He found in the role a man as smitten by Titania as she was by him, a character caught up in romance but capable of repressing what he felt. Dinicol gestured toward his head when he recalled what he thought he was (4.1.202). However, when he recalled what he thought he had (203), he crossed his arms over this chest as if tenderly embracing the fairy queen. Being loved by Titania and loving her in return seemed this Bottom’s most precious memory. Whether or not love at first sight is reciprocated is crucial to the reinterpretation of the role of Bianca in The Taming of the Shrew in Stratford Festival productions. Carol Rutter sums up Bianca’s story on stage as one that began in the 1950s and 1960s with ‘trivialization and marginalization,’ then went on in the 1970s and 1980s (when the role of Katherina was problematized) to ‘a gradual hardening of “sweet Bianca … delectable Bianca,”’ and achieved a breakthrough with the performance in 1992 of Rebecca Saire, who found in the role ‘a Bianca whose marriage projects might seriously disrupt society, might, indeed, bring down the whole patriarchal house of cards’ (‘Kate’ 198–9). Although Stratford Festival productions of The Taming of the Shrew have not yet produced a Bianca ‘capable of initiating her own secret play’ (Rutter, ‘Kate’ 201), the Biancas there have developed along a similar trajectory. That development depends upon love at first sight – Lucentio’s, only Lucentio’s – and the response (or, rather, the lack of response) on the part of Bianca. In early productions of Shrew at the Festival, Tranio and Lucentio stood aside to watch Baptista reiterate to Gremio, Hortensio, Bianca, and Katherina the terms on which his daughters shall be married off. In

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these early shows, no silent, or singing, or dancing, or selling, or praying extras occupied the stage. In recent productions, however, influenced perhaps by Zeffirelli’s film, this business has occurred in the context of a crowded civic parade. As Zeffirelli ‘recruited the fashionably disaffected adolescents of Rome’ (Holderness 55) for his boisterous opening, so both Richard Monette in 1993 and Richard Rose in 1999 filled the Festival Theatre stage with actors. In the midst of busy, festive street scenes, Lucentio fell for Bianca. Smitten, his case is almost textbook love at first sight: he sees her, he hears her, he idealizes her silence and modesty, and, if he were not so thoroughly infatuated, he might have closed the space between himself and her (or have noticed at least that Baptista had made it difficult to do so; for such practicalities, however, Lucentio needs Tranio). Richard Rose emphasized the extremity of Lucentio’s case by situating him on the upper stage, from which vantage point he gazed steadily at Bianca. When she moved upstage, he lay along the upper-stage railing to watch her. When she exited, he came down the stairs to that exit, took out his binoculars, and watched her disappear into the distance, as Innogen would have watched Posthumus melt ‘from / The smallness of a gnat to air’ (Cym 1.3.20–1). Everything Lucentio did contributed to the performance of his looking. Rose then further emphasized the emotional impact Bianca had on Lucentio by providing a visual correlative for what he says later: Tranio, I burn, I pine, I perish, Tranio, If I achieve not this young modest girl. (1.1.149–50)

As Lucentio spoke, Bianca reappeared on the upper stage, in a flirtatious pose, a spotlight, and stage smoke. Stage manager Brian Scott noted in his copy of the script: ‘through the ghost/image of Bianca – Lucentio is transformed for the rest of the show.’ In short, he was smitten. But was Bianca? Did she reciprocate? Did she even see Lucentio? She certainly did in the earliest Stratford Festival productions of the Shrew for which we have archival videotapes. In 1973, seeing one another, Bianca and Lucentio started to close the space that separated them; she leaned toward him and he took a step towards her. Likewise in 1981, having spotted Lucentio downstage left, Bianca made a point of looking around others in order to get a better look at him. In both productions, Lucentio engaged Bianca’s interest so as to change the spatial poetics of the scenes, but this did not keep her from flirting with Hortensio and Gremio and, more importantly, from taking the presents they offered. Mutual attraction, however, was evident from the very start.

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The result of this staging was to confine Bianca to a conventional role in a conventional romantic comedy, one in which she follows her ‘natural’ desire, outwits ‘the old pantaloon’ (3.1.35–6), her father, and marries the man of her choice. Katherina’s story can be simplified, that is romanticized and (from some points of view) de-problematized, in the same way, ‘by letting Petruchio and Kate fancy each other from the word go.’3 In recent years, however, more crassly materialistic Shrews have become the norm at the Stratford Festival even as it has grown more commercial and profitable. In these productions the role of Bianca is deromanticized from the beginning, for while Lucentio falls for Bianca, she does not reciprocate. Neither in Richard Monette’s Shrew (1993) nor in that of Richard Rose (1999) did Bianca pay any attention to Lucentio in 1.1, let alone reveal her desire for him or make a move to close the space separating them. In the latter show, Bianca, carefully blocked by Rose so that her eyes never met Lucentio’s unwavering gaze, was obviously a wealthy, materialistic, flirtatious, self-absorbed product of a New York convent school – she first entered in conversation with three nuns in 1.1 and they, waiting for her upstage left, accompanied her off. When Baptista outlined the terms on which his daughters would be married off, Bianca came downstage centre, where she primmed, posed, and preened like the starlet she was in her father’s eyes or the commodity that should, if properly displayed, fetch a higher price. Love at first sight occurred in this Shrew, but only in Lucentio, and his infatuation made him an easy mark for a smart young woman like Bianca who could (and would) capitalize on their match. The text of The Taming of the Shrew does not require that Bianca find Lucentio desirable from the start. If she does, what the audience sees, not what it hears, is the reason. In Richard Rose’s production, she did not. As a result, the show opened the door for a Bianca who was driven by radical self-interest and for a story in which commercial interests could thrive. Those of Petruchio and Katherina certainly did in Rose’s production, which ended with the couple together in bed on the upper stage showering themselves with the cash that he had won by shrewdly betting on his wife’s, to use Bianca’s word, ‘duty’ (5.2.133). Was this business also a comment on the astonishing financial success of the Stratford Festival itself during the 1990s (the money he had made for the show included obviously fake American currency, in high denominations, bearing the pictures of Tom Patterson, Tyrone Guthrie, and William Shakespeare)? Perhaps, but few in the audience would have known. Rose’s Shrew was, however, certainly a critique of North American capitalism and materialism at the end of the millennium, when

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money is what counts and only a fool could believe that ‘Love wrought these miracles’ (5.1.105) – and ‘the more fool’ Lucentio (5.2.133), as Bianca finally calls him, for banking on her. In this paper I have attempted to establish some of the variables with which Shakespeare played in his representation of love at first sight. He may have inherited a conventional protocol that involved sensory experience (especially seeing), physical attraction, and idealization of the beloved, all prompting a quest for proximity and intimacy, but Shakespeare never routinely reproduced the conventional scenario. All of his early comedies include instances of love at first sight, and, as a result, these works illustrate the variety and complexity of his exploration of the topic. Many of the variables that come into play are explicit in the texts: characters are smitten when alone or with others, some instantly, others gradually; when smitten, some are articulate, others (for public or for private reasons) tongue-tied; some speak their love to their love, others to a trusted servant like Lucetta, a good friend like Celia, a traitrous friend like Proteus, a bright page like Mote, or a prince like Don Pedro who has offered to woo on another’s behalf. Other variables come more clearly into view through performance: Is love at first sight requited or not? Do lovers who cannot and do not speak communicate nonetheless? And how physical is the attractiveness of the other and the feeling of love itself? Physical attraction and sexual desire are never far beneath the surface in Shakespeare’s scenes of love at first sight, but just as that emotion almost immediately triggers idealization of the object of one’s desire, so it almost always projects that satisfaction will be found in marriage. In their representation of love at first sight, Shakespeare’s plays contribute to that ideological and social project whether or not he was an artist dedicated to experimenting with a romantic topos he had inherited or a person sustaining ‘a compelling dream of pleasure,’ a dream ‘of intense courting and pleading and longing,’ which was ‘one of the things he understood and expressed more profoundly than almost anyone in the world’ (Greenblatt, Will in the World 119).

NOTES I am very grateful to the Archives of The Stratford Festival for the opportunity to work with the materials in their keeping, and especially to Jane Edmonds both for her assistance as archivist there and for her information about the

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1978 As You Like It in which she played one of the ladies of Duke Frederick’s court. 1 All Shakespeare quotations are from The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (1977). 2 That this arrangement of characters can add emphasis to Lysander’s ‘betrayal and desertion’ of Hermia, see Leggatt’s account (‘Extra Dimension’ 42–3) of this scene in Robin Phillips’s production at the Stratford Festival in 1976. 3 Robert Robinson, in a review of the Burton-Taylor Shrew (Sunday Telegraph 5 Mar. 1967; qtd. Holderness 69). See also Shand, ‘Teaching’ 63, who argues that playing Katherina and Petruchio in this way is one of the ‘recuperative strategies for interpretation’ that ‘contrive to make the play coherent and palatable for contemporary students and audiences by rendering its controversial gender politics more or less invisible.’ As scripted, Katherina’s role ‘reveals no direct and irrefutable evidence of desire for Petruchio’ at all.

Romancing The Shrew: Recuperating a Comedy of Love g. b . s ha n d

In the past year and a half, I have been experiencing a change of heart regarding The Taming of the Shrew. Not so long ago, I found it well-nigh impossible to conceive of the play as anything but distasteful, a patriarchal manifesto in which a woman’s humiliation is insidiously cloaked in brilliant but callous farce. The play was genially cruel, a comedy of love in form, perhaps, but not in spirit, despite Alexander Leggatt’s judicious treatment of it in Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love as a positive instance of character newly transformed by and for a love relationship. My own inclination was to read Shrew resistantly and to mistrust Katherina’s transformation, understanding her less as Leggatt’s confidently reformed player of creative domestic games (59–62); less as the similarly spirited and accommodating wife whose newfound subjectivity was celebrated by the earliest feminist readers (see Neely 30–1 and note 12); and more as the ‘tragic Katherina’ chronicled by Elizabeth Schafer (38–41), a classic instance of the abused and defeated victim of systemic domestic oppression (Werner 74–5). In the classroom, I paired the play with Titus Andronicus, treating Katherina and Lavinia as flip sides of the same set of patriarchal assumptions. I savoured my imaginings of Yücel Erten’s 1986 Turkish adaptation, tantalizingly and all too briefly reported in the West (Elsom 75; Bate and Jackson 164–5). In that version, as Katherina came to the end of her great final speech, she sank to the floor, and her shawl slipped from her shoulders and arms, revealing that she had slit her wrists. And she died, her suicide mutely excoriating the patriarchy, the play, even the treacherous genre which had sought unsuccessfully to sugar-coat her dismal history. But the play drives, on the page and especially in performance, toward a festive romantic conclusion that Shakespeare does not seem

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moved to challenge, and factors both theatrical and critical have been leading me recently toward partial reconciliation with that comic ending and the troubling surge of (incorrect) pleasure it can produce. Helped along by Gregory Doran’s 2003 production at the RSC, and by revisiting the play’s possible kinship with Shakespeare’s other remarriage plays, I have begun to look at Shrew’s performative options anew, seeing not only the familiar shades of resistant meaning the play so understandably generates, but also the makings of a theatrically and culturally viable comedy of love. This latter reading falls into line with what I take to be a post-feminist relaxation of attitudes to gender politics, where ‘post-feminist’ as I understand it describes a progressive position that takes active account of the issues and concerns of feminist commentary and seeks to move them toward a positive world view that is egalitarian and partnership-oriented rather than confrontational or adversarial. Riane Eisler’s admittedly utopian The Chalice and the Blade (1987) is one of the earliest popular articulations of this ethos (also see Gamble 44–5). In the summer of 2003 I had the opportunity to see several performances each of three very different mainstage productions of Shrew: Miles Potter’s wild west Commedia farce at Stratford, Ontario; Phyllida Lloyd’s genial all-female critique at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London; and Gregory Doran’s buoyantly romantic RSC version in Stratford-upon-Avon. I have dealt elsewhere with the Globe production (featuring Kathryn Hunter and Janet McTeer), so I will pass quickly over it here. Its all-woman company and its quasi-authentic venue made it more interesting from a purely material standpoint than the other two productions. It provided an exuberant evening in the theatre. But while it sought to tell a conventionally resistant version of Katherina’s career, positioning her in the end as a figure of unruly (and unruled) domestic force, its benign cross-dressed ribbing of the patriarchy (then and now) seemed ultimately to dilute its acts of resistance, rendering ineffectual its challenges to oppressive masculinity. And it ended by contriving a loud and stormy Mediterranean image of wedded life, signalling an unresolved and ongoing battle of the sexes rather than any recognizably romantic new world (see Shand, ‘Guying’ 550–63). The most conventional of the summer’s offerings, Miles Potter’s classic North American take on the play, read Katherina and Petruchio as the unexplained but all-too-familiar social misfits who find each other, and in so doing it stood a step closer to reading the play as romantic comedy. But Potter’s determined emphasis on farce ultimately ren-

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dered their relationship arbitrary and automatic rather than organic. Schafer (34) points to the U.S. popularity of cowboy Shrews, and Canada’s Stratford seems to be following suit.1 Studiously decorated with inventive lazzi, and studiously taciturn on the troubled gender politics of the play, Potter’s production presented an almost cartoon-like spaghetti-western world, with more than a soupçon of the Three Stooges. The setting was the American frontier in the 1880s. Lucentio was a scholarly dude (old city-slicker sense) from the east, inexplicably attended by a swaggering Mexican Tranio. Graham Abbey’s Petruchio was a riff on Clint Eastwood’s early made-in-Italy gunslingers.2 His first entry was in an ankle-length cattlecoat, saddle in hand, cigarette in the corner of his mouth, dusty hat pulled low over his eyes, six-shooter at his hip. He was ominously accompanied by his signature music, the patented bass guitar sting and that warning buzz that says ‘rattlesnake.’ His sidekick Grumio (Wayne Best) was a bizarre blend of Gabby Hayes and Walter Brennan, impossibly bow-legged, his tongue flicking out constantly to test the air like a desert lizard. This was a farcical world of harmless slapstick violence, of broad accents and broader gags. Occasionally, the gags came in the form of critical in-jokes, mostly incomprehensible to the majority of the audience, I would imagine. For instance, just as the moment arrived (4.5.60ff.)3 for Petruchio to tell the real Vincentio news of his son’s secret marriage to Bianca, news (we are told by anxious realists) that Petruchio has no way of knowing, there was a prolonged pause for the sound of hoofbeats galloping across the theatre’s speakers. These came eventually to a halt, and a breathless Pony Express rider rushed up from the vomitorium to deliver the mail. He rushed out again, and the hoofbeats clattered off in the opposite direction as Petruchio read his mail and a bemused Katherina shrugged to an equally bemused audience – whereupon, at last, Vincentio was told the news. All this playful attention to a minor critical quibble upstaged both Hortensio’s potential shock at discovering the real identity of his wooing competitor and Vincentio’s potential outrage at learning of his son’s deceptions. The so-called Induction was cut here (as from both the other 2003 productions), perhaps owing as much to economics as to interpretation, although Potter says, ‘By choosing to present it as a western, I’ve already framed the play. I can’t double-frame it’ (Taming, Stratford Program [2003] 10). In fact, the distancing effect of the production’s cartoon-cowboy quality did partly compensate for the absence of the Sly-

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frame by conferring a kind of self-consciously contrived and stagey safety on the play’s brutalities.4 But this distance did not extend to the central couple. Instead, threaded through all the contrivance, and almost as if from another planet, there grew a love relationship between Seana McKenna’s Katherina (a splendidly intense Elizabethan Annie Oakley) and Graham Abbey’s Petruchio. The action was propelled toward an inescapable happy ending which quite inexplicably banished farce, as Katherina offered herself whole-heartedly to Petruchio, and he embraced her with a sense of wonder and gratitude for the miracle that love (and genre) hath wrought – and romance, mysteriously and arbitrarily, conquered all. Happy trails to you. In its silence on the earlier brutality of Katherina’s ‘taming,’ the happy ending of Potter’s production actually foregrounded the conflicted condition that makes Shrew a problem play. The piece is, after all, both hugely entertaining and deeply troubling – troubling precisely because it is so entertaining. Productions such as Lloyd’s all-female outing at the Globe may seek understandably to interrogate or challenge the happy ending,5 but there are disturbingly few textual clues to suggest that the play’s conclusion is not as uncomplicatedly pleasing for Katherina (and for Shakespeare) as it is for Petruchio. Potter chose to ‘let Shakespeare speak for himself’ (Taming, Stratford Program [2003] 10). The disquieting result was an implicit but unexplored assumption (Shakespeare’s? ours?) that the genial end justifies the brutal means. In some ways, this was not so far from what was claimed by Gregory Doran’s RSC production, except that there the means were anchored in actorly choices regarding character and motive of a sort made impossible, or at least extremely improbable, by Potter’s gestural Commedia approach. So it seemed to me that Gregory Doran’s timely RSC Shrew was the most interpretively satisfying and substantial of the 2003 productions.6 Doran is reported to have observed in conversation that Shrew is such a difficult play because it either collapses into gags or into significance (by which I assume he meant into shallow farce or into solemn feminist resistance).7 The triumph of his production was that it seemed to sidestep this binary. Instead, the production invited its actors to fresh exploration of the interior possibilities of their roles, and the outcome, which seems to have come as something of a surprise, was a richly untroubled happy ending. The startling implication was that the play’s final celebration might actually grow organically and laudably from the personal and transformative journeys of both its main characters rather

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than being, of necessity, either a mindlessly jolly romp or a disquieting aberration crying out for resistance and rejection. The theatre program accompanying Doran’s production did not shrink from the fact that Shrew in our time, except in the hands of the most unreconstructed or blinkered of directors, has become a problem play. That program featured an array of excerpted critical comments, some of them conceding the play’s theatrical vivaciousness and popularity, but almost all of them presenting variations on the theme of Shrew’s ‘breathtakingly misogynist tale of a woman who is starved and terrorised into submission by a husband who has married her for her money’ (Doughty, RSC [2003]). Also included were Michael Billington’s famous (if short-lived) call in 1978 for a moratorium on further productions and a 2001 Guardian observation from Alfred Hickling to the effect that most thoughtful modern productions actually ‘construct elaborate apologies’ for the play. One would have imagined that several decades of this brand of objection, coupled with several decades of feminist-inflected reading and playing, would have disabled any serious attempt to play The Taming of the Shrew as a romantic celebration of liberated marital playfulness. Laurie Maguire is representatively firm on the subject: Katherina in The Shrew is the most obvious Shakespeare example of an abused woman. Although New Criticism may interpret Petruccio’s contradictions ... as a game, a loving tease with the positive psychological aim of behavior modification ... in the twenty-first century it is difficult to find the subjugation of a woman a suitable subject for comic treatment. (Studying Shakespeare 78)

But credible comic and romantic treatment is what Doran accomplished, in my view, and he did so within both the early modern terms of the text and the tolerance levels of a postmodern (and post-feminist) audience.8 The purpose of the program quotes was, of course, to mark out a playing field for Doran’s production, to foreground the challenge it issued to resistant views of the play. His strategy, as far as it may be reconstructed from the staged product, was to scrutinize anew the performative potential of the text (Folio as well as modern editions), raising fresh questions about its possibilities and allowing his players to ask the actorly ‘What if?’ What if Petruchio’s recent bereavement is taken seriously, and he enters the action as an inconsolable youth dis-

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oriented by profound loss, seeking subconsciously to fill the emotional gap? What if his wooing behaviour is in a kindly style to which a funstarved Katherina (and he himself) may respond positively? What if marriage with a soulmate has all along been Katherina’s most cherished dream, a dream daily dashed by Padua’s dismal manhood, and daily thrown back in her face by her flashy younger sister? What if the bereaved Petruchio’s ‘taming’ project is entered on as an enormous but necessary gamble, undertaken with a sharp and explicit sense that by embarking on it he risks another devastating personal loss? What if, simultaneously, Katherina undertakes a transformative project of her own, the rescue of an emotionally wounded Petruchio? And what if, on another front altogether, Bianca is much more taken with Tranio’s false Lucentio than with Lucentio’s real one but marries the rich prize nonetheless? And so on. The results were revelatory. Although both criticism and performance have traditionally focused intensely on Katherina, seeking to make interpretive sense of her experience, the RSC’s first performative contribution to reclaiming Shrew for romantic comedy seems actually to have been the discovery or the construction of a credible and sympathetic interiority for Petruchio. The task was to look beyond the surface of his scripted motive, which is simply to wive it wealthily and quietly in Padua, and beyond the swashbuckling shell of masculinity who frequents the fully farcical versions of the play, from Douglas Fairbanks to Richard Burton and right up to 2003’s Graham Abbey and Janet McTeer. As Leggatt puts it, this surface reading of Petruchio and his project ‘is not an adequate account of the play. Something more intangible has to be reckoned with: the spirit in which Petruchio goes to work’ (Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love 54). So here, in its exploration of Petruchio’s interiority and motivation, lay the first great success of Doran’s production. At the outset, Jasper Britton’s Petruchio was clearly floundering in an uncharted sea of grief over the loss of his father. He was dishevelled, unkempt, in dire need of a wash and a shave. His clothes were similarly unattended to, and he was drinking, secretly and steadily. This condition defined the starting point of a journey for the character, so that the taming process was overlaid with another, Petruchio’s personal development from the aimless self-destruction of intense grief toward the reassuring wholeness of a new love relationship. He appeared to clean up his act as the action moved forward: newly combed hair, shaven face, clean shirt. His omnipresent hip-flask disappeared. Spectators, as well as Katherina herself, might well have

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seen a connection between this series of changes and his growing relationship with her. Essential to this interior journey was his early discovery of Katherina as a potential soulmate, a discovery quickly made in the course of their so-called wooing (2.1), where they sparred with few of the overtones of coercive brutality that have (understandably) marked many productions of the past thirty years.9 That she was legitimately attracted to him was clear very early in the scene, and it was all in the acting, as Britton and Gilbreath played a bout of mutually pleasurable discovery. To enable this, specific reactions were revisited, and the general roughness of the wooing was softened into something more like rough-housing, that affectionate ‘violence’ that one sees (usually) when parents and children play-fight. A key moment was Gilbreath’s reaction to Petruchio’s tongue-in-tail riposte (212). Schafer notes (137–8) that earlier productions cut the moment ‘for obscurity and indecency’; nowadays ‘when uncut, most Katherinas express shock at Petruchio’s crudity,’ from which shock follows her slap at 213. But rather than playing the standard beat of prudish offence, Gilbreath’s Katherina, who had been about to exit, stopped short and laughed with startled pleasure, finding Petruchio witty, a little outrageous, delightful. It is a smart choice, for it forges a link with the audience by asking why, when everyone else in the theatre finds the line funny, she cannot do so as well. So the wasp exchange became a moment of promise, defining Katherina’s sexy playfulness not only for the audience, but for Petruchio himself. Her subsequent slap was thus transformed from reaction to initiation: it became her next move in their testing bout. Before long, she was laughing uncontrollably as Petruchio pinned her down, removed a shoe, and tickled her foot, a choice that goes back at least to Raul Julia and Meryl Streep in 1978 (Schafer 139). She even laughed when Petruchio smacked her bottom with the stolen shoe. He was able, it seemed, to play in a knockabout style she instinctively thrived upon, quite unlike her sister, who, at the beginning of 2.1, was clearly unable or disinclined to join in. (This contrast with Petruchio is surely a strong dramaturgic reason for beginning the scene with the baiting of Bianca.) And this off-the-wall capacity for play made him absolutely unlike the only other ‘suitors’ on the Paduan front – the dried-up Gremio and the nerdishly eager Hortensio (whose long-standing friendship with Petruchio remains one of the play’s great mysteries). Their mutual enjoyment was emphasized by two false exits from the wooing scene. In the first, Petruchio headed to one of the many free-

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standing doors, and rather than gladly seeing the back of him, Katherina promptly stepped in to block his exit. In the second, they both made to leave by separate doors, actually stomping out and closing them, only to turn instantly and come back in simultaneously because evidently their tilting match was not over and neither of them wanted it to be. And then came a defining moment, which Jasper Britton is reported to have brought into the production. To begin with, the re-entry of Baptista, Tranio/Lucentio, and Gremio was placed where the Folio places it, three lines earlier than its usual position in modern editions (that is, after 264 rather than 267). The Folio arrangement is as follows: Thou must be married to no man but me, Enter Baptista, Gremio and Tranio For I am he am born to tame you, Kate, And bring you from a wild Kate to a Kate Conformable as other household Kates. (264–7)

Britton noticed that the three lines spoken to her by Petruchio after the Folio-inspired re-entry are marked by a pronoun shift from the new intimacy of ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ back to the more distant and even stern ‘you,’ so he took advantage of the earlier re-entry to turn that shift into an exaggerated resumption of his bullying act, performed solely for the benefit of the onstage audience of male observers. It was a deception in which Katherina seemed immediately and instinctively complicit, and it contributed directly to the partnership reading. In fact, Gregory Doran said (Q&A) that going back to the Folio’s placement of the direction changed the whole shape of the play – Katherina, he said, was now ready to say ‘yes’ when the men came in and Petruchio went back into his macho act.10 Moments later, she wept with quiet but hesitant joy at her father’s ‘give me your hands’ (307), taking great time with the gesture, but finally joining hands willingly with Petruchio – the gesture stated both her positive attraction and her almost disbelieving sense of this as a moment she had feared would never be hers. She did retain a taste of the old Katherina at Petruchio’s ‘kiss me Kate’ (313), surreptitiously biting his wrist rather than kissing it, but this stated something of her almost childish inability, yet, to be simply compliant, rather than suggesting any underlying resistant intention to hurt and reject. It also served as a premonition of the unruly Katherina who, in the future,

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lacking self-control, might actually sabotage the very relationship she so clearly wanted. But it was clear, as Petruchio went off to Venice to prepare for the wedding day, that she was in the midst of a dream come true, though concealing this from the Paduan men around her. Doran’s production, then, appeared to be laying the groundwork for a humane partnership vision of the relationship between these two ‘adversaries’ in the war of the sexes, a vision that might reach beyond earlier ameliorative feminist readings (Boose, ‘Scolding Brides’ 132) by conferring equal subjectivity, equal interiority, on Petruchio. It was a post-feminist vision that might co-exist comfortably with Eisler’s gender utopianism (185–203), a vision of partnership in which, as Carol Rutter suggests in private correspondence, what is wanted, by men just as much as by women, is ‘affection, kind-ness ... relatedness.’ Her use of ‘kind-ness’ brings to mind Peter Saccio’s wise discussion of Shrew as ‘kindly farce’ (1984). Petruchio’s deceased father came to play a major explanatory, even mentoring, role in Doran’s retelling of the taming. In Petruchio’s house (4.1) there was a crêpe-hung portrait of the father, treated with mourning respect by the servants. It depicted old Antonio with a falcon on his wrist, and at the end of the scene, when Petruchio spoke his falcontaming speech (159–82), he did so with the portrait propped companionably, even reassuringly, on a chair beside him. In other hands this might have spoken simply of patriarchal complicity, but in context here it became a compelling image not merely of the taming strategy but of emotional continuity from the lost father to the new wife. The falcon image was newly complicated, not merely a figure of masculine domination but also of Petruchio’s personal quest to heal a lost love with a new love. And even here, as he improvised his strategy, Petruchio seemed attractively daunted by his task – partly, it was clear, because he now had so much of himself invested in its success. Like Katherina, he too had found the love of his life. So the taming, as Britton played it, was not merely about a quiet life (indeed, at the end of the play he mocked the line about ‘awful rule and right supremacy’ [5.2.109]) – it was about a gamble which would either cement a potentially deep and fulfilling love relationship or permanently disable it. And now, unlike the Ontario and Globe productions, the RSC took its interval at the end of 4.1, throwing the emphasis onto the rationale and the risk, and resisting the temptation to go out on a merely theatrical high at the end of the wedding scene (3.2).11 If enormous risk was central to Britton’s reading of the taming, a

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comparable fear of loss informed Alexandra Gilbreath’s Katherina and made it possible for an audience to care about her.12 As the wooing scene (2.1) had come to its close, it was very clear that she was at the intersection of dream and reality, her partnership dream about to come true. The apparent shattering of that dream was what gave the wedding scene its special poignancy. Katherina’s problem, as played by Gilbreath, was much less the public exposure and comeuppance of an arrogant shrew than it was the acute and tearful pain – the classic pain – of being left waiting at the altar by the man she had finally dared to hope for. That pain was increased immeasurably by the production’s decision to bring her back onstage, eager but unacknowledged, upon the arrival of Biondello (3.2.29.1) with his news of Petruchio’s approach, at which point she was hit with the description of Petruchio’s elaborately outrageous apparel, the uncertainty of his ever coming at all, and the resultant merriment (at her expense) of all those assembled guests who never did seem to notice her presence. This moment ended with her creeping miserably, almost invisibly, back offstage without waiting to hear the end of Biondello’s bravura performance. The church wedding achieved, and Petruchio’s project well under way, some spectators began to be aware that his was not the only transformational project in hand. As Michael Billington put it (‘Tamer Tamed’), ‘in place of an offensive comedy about “curative” wifetaming, we see Kate trying to rescue a madman she genuinely loves.’ This, it seemed, was a logical actorly outgrowth of their wooing scene: Katherina had met a life companion in that scene, and she now witnessed him committing acts that seemed somehow aberrant, the excesses of a mind unsettled by grief. That she might be misreading the source of his behaviour was not relevant. The point was that she looked through it to the man she wanted, and she both endured it and watched for a way to modify it, the way that Hortensio finally impressed on her in 4.5: ‘Say as he says, or we shall never go’ (11). At this point, both their projects seemed to dovetail at last, and for many observers the production was firmly set on its path to comedy of love. A key moment in the RSC taming came near the end of the tailor scene (4.3). Katherina was left, as in some previous productions, sitting on the stage amidst the torn fragments of her new gown, taking in the tatters of Petruchio’s latest mad outburst. As she sadly and distractedly picked them up and fingered them (something like Eeyore with the rag of broken balloon that is Piglet’s birthday gift), Petruchio assured her that they would go back to her father’s home: ‘Even in these honest

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mean habiliments. / Our purses shall be proud, our garments poor’ (164–5). And then, having created what educators might call a teachable moment, he sat down on the stage beside her: What, is the jay more precious than the lark Because his feathers are more beautiful? Or is the adder better than the eel Because his painted skin contents the eye? O no, good Kate; neither art thou the worse For this poor furniture and mean array. If thou account’st it shame, lay it on me, And therefore frolic! (169–76)

At the RSC this was taken much more seriously than at either the Globe or Stratford, Ontario. The anti-finery motif went straight back to Petruchio’s bizarre wedding costume and his strong rebuke to Tranio and Baptista: ‘To me she’s married, not unto my clothes’ (3.2.107). It might even have brought back to mind Katherina’s own singularly inappropriate wedding getup, a seeming reminiscence of Marcus Gheeraerts’s 1592 ‘Ditchley Portrait’ that betrayed both her eagerness and her complete lack of modishness. Intriguingly, throughout the tailor scene Katherina wore an oversized grey cardigan with a telling theatrical history of its own. It had previously been worn at the RSC by Estelle Kohler’s Paulina in the final scene of Gregory Doran’s Winter’s Tale (1999; Gilbreath had played Hermione) and originally by Peggy Ashcroft in her final RSC appearance, as the Countess of Rousillion in All’s Well (1981).13 It was plain, rural, anything but modish, and it was in tune with exactly the self-effacing attitude to dress that Petruchio was advocating. Thus Petruchio’s excessive act was lent a kind of weight that Katherina was able to absorb and make use of later. In the final scene, therefore, in contrast with Bianca’s festive bridal finery, Katherina wore, contentedly and confidently, a version of exactly the ‘mean array’ praised by her husband in 4.3: the costume, a tuckedup underdress over travelling trousers, topped by a very casual coat, was functional and understated, a logical move on from the plain grey cardigan of the Tailor scene. This was very unlike Stratford, Ontario, where it seems that the design department, as it has done in at least the last four productions of Shrew, takes the finale as an opportunity for Katherina and Petruchio to play dress-up, trotting out extravagant gowns that run quite counter to one of the most compelling threads in

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the play.14 The Ontario design department is clearly not alone: Elizabeth Schafer speaks of the fast turn-around from 5.1 to 5.2 as creating ‘a challenge for designers wanting Katherina to turn up in a magnificent frock for her final scene’ (219). And even Bill Alexander’s 1992 RSC production, which first brought Katherina on ‘bedraggled and in rags,’ used her exit and re-entry (48 and 98) as the occasion for her to don ‘her smart clothes’ (Schafer 225). Doran’s explicit rejection of these tempting options lent a hugely useful measure of integrity and consistency to Katherina and Petruchio in their final scene. It invited us to take the couple seriously. Katherina’s last speech remains problematic, of course. It both grows out of and defines the preceding action, and it is the moment that every production must solve, a prism that reflects the multiple and conflicting possibilities of both role and play. It has been played, with attendant shades of irony, as the voice of the power behind the throne. It has been played as if spoken by the subject of a brainwashing, as if Petruchio were a ventriloquist, Katherina his speaking puppet. It has been played totally straight with the unshakably earnest certainty of the recent convert, the voice of Real Women. It has been played as her loving gift to the husband she has come to adore. It has been played as if that adoration were the product of something like Stockholm syndrome. It has been played as if to placate a madman. It has been played as a crushed admission of total defeat. And it has been played, as at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2003, with a possessed fervour suggesting that Petruchio has inadvertently created a household monster and unleashed her on the world (and on himself). Gilbreath’s Katherina played it as a loving gift, and yet she found what seemed fresh facets in it. Bianca’s story was central to this recuperation of the speech. Throughout the action, Eve Myles’s Bianca had played a complete lack of love interest in Daniel Hawksford’s stolid Lucentio (although she did fake it, sometimes quite vivaciously). She wrinkled her face in private distaste at his kisses in 4.2, wiping one disgustedly off her hand, another off her lips. When Rory Kinnear’s dashing Tranio approached her in the same scene, however, she not only allowed his hand on her thigh (she had earlier pointedly removed Lucentio’s), but covered it intimately with her own hand. And when Tranio kissed her hand, there was no sign of distaste whatsoever – quite the opposite. So when she married Lucentio it was evidently a calculated materialistic choice made for money and status, with no trace of romantic attraction. Indeed, in the final scene, there was a sense of both present loss and

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future possibility between her and Tranio. Her obvious lack of steadfastness was seen clearly by her sister. Katherina’s speech had begun as scripted, soundly chastising the disobedient Widow. But Bianca could not keep her eyes off Tranio, and at ‘Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper’ (5.2.146) Katherina actually took Bianca’s chin and gently but firmly turned her face away from Tranio, back toward Lucentio. It was a telling comment, louder than words, on the duties of marriage and on the contrast between Bianca’s marriage and Katherina’s. That said, the speech remains troublingly silent concerning Petruchio’s mistreatment of her. Gilbreath’s line through the action, however – what Billington termed her ‘rescue’ of Petruchio – enabled her to play the speech as a sincere gift and helped me see more clearly the possible place of this play among a subset of the comedies of love, a group of plays that might usefully be classed as comedies of remarriage. I want to turn finally to this possibility.15 A striking thing about this play is that its most important wedding ceremony, the formal union of Katherina and Petruchio, does not end the action but rather is solemnized (if that word may be used of the groom’s mad-brained excesses) at the geographical midpoint (3.2). The marriages celebrated in the play’s last scene are, at first glance, those of Lucentio and Bianca, and Hortensio and his unnamed widow. But Lynda Boose’s work makes room for the thought that the real marriage of Katherina and Petruchio is not the church fiasco of the third act but rather the moment in the last act when Katherina gives herself fully and submissively to her husband (‘Scolding Brides’ 133; ‘Good Husbandry’ 195). After forty lines of what often seems ventriloquized patriarchal claptrap, Katherina suddenly makes a gesture of her own. She has already said everything she was commanded to say, winning Petruchio’s wager resoundingly. Surely it is time for her to stop. But now she goes beyond her assigned task, independently adding the image and the offer that so distress modern audiences and critics: Then vail your stomachs, for it is no boot, And place your hands below your husband’s foot. In token of which duty, if he please, My hand is ready, may it do him ease. (5.2.176–9)

Intriguingly, as Boose points out, variations of the gesture she offers were actually performed in many European and British wedding ceremonies before 1549:

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Kate’s actions essentially replicate the script that appears in the Sarum, the York, the (Scottish) Rathen, and the (French) Martène manuals for the actions that the bride was to perform upon receipt of the wedding ring and her husband’s accompanying vow of endowment. Following his pledge of worldly goods, the bride is directed to fall prostrate at the bridegroom’s feet, and ... the rite then directs that she is to ‘courtesy’ his foot in gratitude before he stoops to raise her up into her new status as wife. (‘Good Husbandry’ 195)

Shrew at the end may be nostalgic for this old rite. More immediately pertinent is the simple fact that Katherina’s gesture brings to the fore a recognizable new solemnizing of the marriage between her and Petruchio. And this marital act is of her offering, her initiative. Why might she make such an offer? My response is less actorly, more theoretical. I think it may anticipate a process which features prominently in a number of later plays, but in which Shakespeare has already begun to be interested, a process that depends partly upon Petruchio’s earlier mistreatment of her. Now many of Shakespeare’s happy endings, in plays later than Shrew, feature disreputable, mean-spirited, uncaring betrothed or married men who have behaved abominably toward virtuous and long-suffering women, women who ultimately forgive all and enter into new or renewed matrimony, redeeming and rehabilitating their worse-than-errant partners. One thinks of Two Gentlemen of Verona, Much Ado About Nothing, All’s Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale. Proteus (in lighter fashion), and then Claudio, Bertram, and Angelo respectively, are cruel and slanderous male chauvinist swine before they are forgiven and redeemed, in renewed unions, by the generous and long-suffering Julia, Hero, Helena, and Mariana.16 (The Merchant of Venice offers a more playful version of the pattern of infidelity and restoration.) And then Cymbeline’s Imogen, awfully humiliated and well-nigh murdered by the schemes of her deluded husband, cuts through his jealous confusion and takes him back at the end of the play. Similarly The Winter’s Tale’s Leontes viciously, even murderously, slanders his chaste wife Hermione, whereupon she and Paulina charitably devote themselves, over the next more than sixteen years, to working his miraculous redemption. (What makes Othello so devastating, as Susan Snyder suggested in 1979, is its establishing and then dashing our expectation of yet another such action.) All these plays might loosely be described as comedies of remarriage, where a flawed, or burlesque, or false, or insincere early contract

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is violated or abused or rejected by a male partner whose scandalous behaviour is then made good by real marriage. Each of these remarriages turns on an act of forgiveness performed by a deeply wronged woman.17 Shrew, it seems to me, may anticipate this pattern that so interested Shakespeare through much of the rest of his career. There are striking differences, of course. The early placement of the church wedding, for instance, is subject to a different kind of dramatic necessity than in the other plays, for it is that wedding that gives Petruchio control, converting Katherina into his goods, his chattels (3.2.219), explicitly authorizing him to mistreat her as he chooses. But this is mistreatment with a difference. Unlike his later male counterparts, Petruchio neither slanders nor abandons Katherina. However an audience might object, his actions are presented (by the perpetrator and by the play) as benevolent, therapeutic. And where the redeemed figure in all other examples is the husband, here the nominally reformed character is Katherina herself, and not Petruchio. The consistent later pattern (errant man, wronged yet forgiving woman) has not yet been fully worked out. Nonetheless, and particularly in Doran’s ameliorative production, Katherina’s last words seemed to me an embryonic instance of the later pattern of redemptive women. It’s instinctive in the structure, rather than explicit in the language of The Taming of the Shrew, but when Alexandra Gilbreath’s Katherina played the speech not simply as an admission (and application) of her own humbled status, but as a recuperating and generous act implying partnership, she was performing an act by means of which Petruchio, yet another apparently undeserving exemplar of inconsiderate patriarchal power and arrogance, was endowed with worthiness, with the manliness (for want of a word) that Bernard Shaw found lacking in him (Aspinall 29). Already rendered sympathetic, to at least some of the audience, Britton’s Petruchio seemed now to be both forgiven and validated, as redeemed to a companionate world of marital loving-kindness as was Katherina herself. It was a heartening take on the ending. One could almost have wished, fancifully, that Peggy Ashcroft’s cardigan had been brought on again for Petruchio’s rehabilitation, having already witnessed comparable stagings of the recuperations of both Bertram and Leontes. The most attractive part of all this, to my way of thinking, is that it helps me understand Katherina’s final condition as active rather than passive, helps me read her last speech as something positive that she is doing to and for Petruchio rather than as something strictly negative that has been done to her. So The Taming of the Shrew may not be so egre-

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gious an instance of Shakespeare’s romantic comic art as has sometimes been thought, and Katherina’s final speech may be at least as comprehensible an act as those performed in the end by Julia, Hero, Helena, Mariana, Imogen, even Hermione. How Katherina arrives at this domestic sainthood is another matter. Shakespeare, like life itself, does not ordinarily expend energy accounting for why women love the men they do. Gregory Doran’s production, however, addressed exactly this question and, in answering it, went some distance toward persuading me that to play The Taming of the Shrew as a legitimate instance of Shakespeare’s festive comedies of love and forgiveness need not be so complacently unreconstructed an act as I would once have thought.

NOTES Barbara Hodgdon, Carol Rutter, and Patricia Shand have been in on this conversation from the start, kindly and generously. Jonathan Bate, Miriam Gilbert, and Elizabeth Schafer have given helpful answers to my queries. And Sandy Leggatt’s graceful and considerate critical presence, on page and in person, has set us all an admired example for more than three decades. 1 Carol Rutter reports (‘Kate, Bianca, Ruth, and Sarah,’ 178, 180) that the cowboy take actually has English origins: it first cropped up in Stratford-uponAvon in 1948 and was elaborated by Trevor Nunn’s 1967 staging, set in ‘Padua, Arizona.’ 2 As, for instance, in Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (1964). 3 I refer throughout to Schafer’s edition, Cambridge 2002. 4 Shakespeare’s Globe achieved comparable distancing by its use of the allwoman company. 5 Carol Rutter (Clamorous Voices 1–25 and ‘Kate, Bianca, Ruth, and Sarah’) and Elizabeth Schafer (‘Introduction’ 34–44) record and explore a number of such resistant challenges. 6 He paired the production with Fletcher’s The Tamer Tamed, using the same basic cast. In a Q&A at the August 2003 meetings of the British Shakespeare Association (Leicester, August 30), Doran indicated that this pairing had not worked out quite as anticipated, because while Fletcher’s play speaks to the masculinist Shrew he initially anticipated, the rehearsal process for Shrew had actually produced something quite different. 7 Comment to Carol Rutter, Stratford-upon-Avon, 7 April 2003. Cited with permission.

244 G.B. Shand 8 Naturally, not all informed observers were in agreement about Doran’s achievement. Elizabeth Schafer, in email conversation with Barbara Hodgdon, was particularly unconvinced by Doran’s sentimental treatment of Petruchio’s grief and by his abandoning the Sly-perspective (private communication, 9 July 2003; I am grateful to Professor Schafer for permission to refer to it). 9 I think always of Burton’s semi-drunken Petruchio (Zeffirelli 1967), immediately following the Kate-on-a-hot-tile-roof chase, sprawled in the woolbin atop Taylor’s Katherina, a jagged shard of broken railing ominously near her throat, as he informs her, ‘will you, nill you, I will marry you’ (2.1.260). 10 For Elizabeth Schafer, this was perhaps the greatest failing of the production. In her view, the taming process was basically complete at the end of 2.1, leaving the play nowhere to go (private communication to Barbara Hodgdon, 9 July 2003). 11 This also avoided the huge difficulty of starting the production’s second act with Grumio and Curtis and the stove, a scene which the Globe solved wonderfully, but which, at Stratford, Ontario, was reduced to the more usual desperate quest for cheap laughs. 12 Fastidious critics point out that the person of the actor is naturally inseparable from this response (see for example Rayner 31). Gilbreath brought an undeniably infectious charm, an instinct for joy, well in excess of the scripted role, but apparent even at her shrew’s most shrewish moments. Similarly, she had many moments of genial collusion with the audience: her ‘so-so’ hand gesture when, after the kiss in the street (5.1.124), Petruchio asked ‘Is not this well?’ like a boy seeking praise for his first sexual performance; her comic ‘uh-oh’ out to the house when, after she offered to place her hand beneath his foot, Britton’s Petruchio finessed her, raising his boot off the floor and wonderfully rereading the second half of line 180 so that ‘Come on and kiss me, Kate’ became ‘Come on!,’ a challenge that hovered in the air until he set it aside with ‘and kiss me, Kate.’ 13 I am greatly indebted to Miriam Gilbert and Barbara Hodgdon for these details regarding the history of Katherina’s cardigan, which has come to be known as ‘The Peggy.’ 14 M.J. Kidnie privately observes that at Ontario’s Stratford ‘the default mode is always towards increased spectacle’ – when in doubt, bring on the show. 15 The term ‘comedy of remarriage’ originates with Stanley Cavell and has been suggestively deployed with reference to Shrew by Barbara Hodgdon (354). 16 In Jamie Glover’s performance, Gregory Doran’s 2003 Swan production of

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All’s Well went some distance toward excusing Bertram by underlining the breathtaking early immaturity from which time and experience may have begun to rescue him over the course of the action. The ending was still intriguingly tentative, but one wondered whether Doran has embarked on a project dedicated to seeing the worth in all these wayward men. 17 Significantly, one might almost be describing the table of contents for R.G. Hunter’s Shakespeare and the Comedy of Forgiveness (1965). Even more significantly, for this essay, the possibility of female forgiveness in Shrew is unsuspected by Hunter – the play receives absolutely no mention in his study. And while Shrew does appear briefly in Michael D. Friedman’s ‘The World Must Be Peopled’: Shakespeare’s Comedies of Forgiveness, it is treated there as an anticipator of character types rather than an action with its own potential for forgiveness.

Love in a Naughty World: Modern Dramatic Adaptations of The Merchant of Venice jill l. levens on

I In Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love, Alexander Leggatt tracks the genre chronologically to show how each new version reacts against the preceding one. Despite such obvious continuities as the theme of romantic love, unpredictability characterizes not only the sequence but also individual plays (xi–xiii). As Leggatt analyses the series, some texts prove more unpredictable than others. Clearly The Merchant of Venice, interpreted after Love’s Labour’s Lost and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, seems uncomfortable at significant moments in its comic format: ‘It is a dramatic experiment of considerable daring, and not all the risks come off’ (121). Specifically, the ending of this comedy does not achieve conventional and satisfying closure as it winds down into the ring episode. It marginalizes Antonio, and, of course, it excludes Shylock (149). Finally this romantic comedy barely contains the vengefulness of its complex alien figure. His intensity destabilizes generic norms and edges The Merchant of Venice beyond the limits of comedy. More recent studies of this experimental drama often take its peculiar edginess as a point of departure. For example, James C. Bulman begins his book on the text’s performance history with this speculation: ‘The Merchant is a play whose potential to be various things at once – allegory and folk tale, romantic comedy and problem play – may have been realisable only on the Elizabethan stage’ (6). His account of performances and adaptations from the beginning of the eighteenth century to the end of the twentieth century follows variations on Shakespeare’s script that shift it from genre to genre: George Granville’s The Jew of Venice (1701), a decorous comedy; Henry Irving’s production (1879), inflected by Vic-

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torian historicism towards tragedy; post-Holocaust versions, shaped by modern history as tragedy or profoundly troubling political theatre. Frequently the changes in generic timbre depend on the treatment of Shylock. According to Bulman, The Merchant of Venice has invited more revision than any of Shakespeare’s other plays (27). Usually the position of Shylock in the resulting version – caricature of a miser or Jew, tragic victim – determines the dominant impression of genre. Bulman’s point about revision leads to a related fact about the play’s performance history. During the era of modern drama, which began in the mid-nineteenth century,1 The Merchant of Venice has attracted more serious adaptation than Shakespeare’s other comedies. Despite a few creative appropriations in Europe and Asia, revivals displaying the host cultures’ performance conventions or ideologies, most modern reconstructions of Shakespearean comedies are what adapter Charles Marowitz would call ‘riffs on their originals’ (Marowitz Shakespeare 9). Like The Donkey Show, a successful version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that had a long run in New York beginning in 1999, this relatively small group of plays adds song, dance, or up-to-date comedy to generate popular musicals from early modern texts. ‘Riffs’ vary in length and in the proportions of their component parts. Exceptions to the rule are those romantic comedies with disturbing features that unsettle the familiar generic patterns associated with love. Although The Taming of the Shrew belongs to this category, The Merchant of Venice occupies more space: modern dramatists have rewritten the later comedy, often repeatedly, to explore or challenge its treatment of Jewish history. Modern rewritings have taken a number of different forms, but they have always been shaped by the issue of anti-Semitism and the history and post-history of the Holocaust. As a result, Shylock inevitably dominates these adaptations of the play. II Early in this period the American Yiddish theatre adapted The Merchant of Venice, along with four Shakespearean tragedies, for its repertory. Frequently productions edited the script, cutting or rewriting passages to soften the impression of Shylock. As Joel Berkowitz explains, the great actors who played Shylock on these stages and the audiences who watched them found in the role a compelling subject: the Jew’s place in the Diaspora (172–3). But these productions continued to display the outline of Shakespeare’s narrative; they did not constitute reconstruc-

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tions of his text. Even the extracting of scenes from the play on the vaudeville circuit hardly counted as reconstruction, since the scenes referred for their context to the original script. The first full-scale reinvention of The Merchant of Venice in this theatre occurred after the Second World War, when the established actor and director Maurice Schwartz based his play Shylock and His Daughter (also titled Shylock’s Daughter) on a contemporary Hebrew novel contesting the historical accuracy with which Shakespeare presented a Jewish usurer. Like the novelist Ari Ibn Zahav, Schwartz historicized events as part of a chronicle about anti-Semitism: he set the play in the Venetian ghetto during 1559 and showed a wide range of relationships among Jews and Christians. In the process he reflected not only on the Holocaust but also on contemporary events in the Middle East, two subjects which immediately resonated with his audiences (Berkowitz 198–205). Opening at New York’s Yiddish Art Theatre on 29 September 1947, this production had a successful run for most of the 1947–8 season. During the later aftermath of the Holocaust, other kinds of appropriations have appeared more than once. Some focus on the implication of The Merchant of Venice in unspeakable events of the twentieth century: German director George Tabori set Shakespeare’s comedy as a playwithin-a-play performed for Nazi soldiers by the inmates of a German concentration camp; and Tibor Egervari, a director born in Hungary and now working in Canada, created Shakespeare’s ‘The Merchant of Venice’ in Auschwitz. Directly or indirectly, the two reconstructions allude to Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade (1964); and Egervari reflects the writings of Primo Levi, as well as incorporating a short story by Elie Wiesel. In both cases the adaptations went through revisions. Tabori’s, originally performed in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, in 1966, was restaged twelve years later in Germany. By 1978 the political content of the play had become both more specific and more devastating: the anonymous camp was identified as Dachau, and thirteen inmates shared Shylock’s role. This version reminded viewers most pointedly of the play’s use in Nazi Germany as propaganda and therefore of the anti-Semitism, apparently endorsed by Shakespeare’s text, which marked Germany’s past (Bulman, Shakespeare 150–2). Egervari’s work originated in the mid-1970s, and the title page of the copy published online in 1999 states: ‘This is the third version of the play.’ From accounts of his adaptation by Egervari and others, it seems that he wrote it to counteract difficulties he had trying to direct Shakespeare’s comedy.2 He wanted to focus on the roles of women and

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money in The Merchant of Venice, but the character of Shylock blocked his view. Rendered in three languages – French, English, and Hungarian – the texts have received both full-scale productions and readings in Montreal and Ottawa. Like many Shakespearean adaptations, however, this one has had limited exposure on stage. Yet its staging, comparable to that of Tabori’s play, generates a powerful interpretation of the early modern text. Cages stand on three sides of the platform, with a ‘dressing room’ above each. When the curtain rises, the audience views a tableau within this set which embodies the grotesque relationships that run the course of the play: From stage-right, in the Jews’ cage, we see Antonio, Gratiano and Bassanio watching the scene, while Lorenzo is withdrawn in a position we could imagine akin to prayer, although he is not kneeling. In the middle cage, Lancelot Gobbo is watching Tubal’s actions with the discreet admiration of the connoisseur. Portia, in the cage stage-left, hides her face. All these characters are in the prisoner’s uniform. (4)

As Egervari’s appropriation reached its published form, another type of play derived from The Merchant of Venice appeared on stage: the oneman show centred on Shylock. Mark Leiren-Young’s Shylock: A Play had become a cinematic project before the release of Michael Radford’s film with Al Pacino in 2004; but it was first produced by the company Savage God at Vancouver’s Bard on the Beach Shakespeare Festival, 5 August 1996. Before its performance and publication it went through much rewriting, and the author still considers it a work in progress.3 A Canadian performer, playwright, and journalist, Leiren-Young fixes the audience’s attention not on the character of Shylock, but on a Jewish actor, Jon Davies, whose portrayal of him in a North American repertory production leads to cancellation: the community abhors his rendering of Shylock as a villain. Throughout the monologue, as Davies argues for the authenticity of his performance as an evil Shylock, he continues to remove his makeup, a kind of dismantling that signals a journey towards some kind of truth. At the end, when ‘he takes a bow, smiles, salutes and exits – proudly’ (37), he leaves the impression of an artist who has faced and resisted, at personal cost, the limits at times imposed by his craft. Gareth Armstrong, actor and director, wrote his solo play Shylock in 1997.4 Since then it has undergone many revisions on its continuing tour through more than thirty countries. Armstrong tells Shylock’s

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story in what he conceives as the voice of Tubal, setting the passages from Shakespeare’s play against the larger narrative of anti-Semitism in Europe. As he constructs the larger narrative, he uses both fact and legend and incorporates information about The Merchant of Venice in performance. He gives a sympathetic portrayal of Shylock, although he does not avoid intimations of anti-Semitism in the original text. When he delivers the famous ‘Hath not a Jew eyes?’ speech, for example, he subverts it with a swift modulation at ‘shall we not revenge?’ (3.1.55– 69).5 Until that point he appears as a Jewish stereotype might have looked to Shakespeare’s audience, wearing a grotesque nose and wig. I get a few nervous laughs at my pantomime display, but just before I speak the word ‘revenge,’ I whip off the nose and wig and assume my natural voice register to finish the speech as my Shylock. (A Case 199)

Armstrong’s phrase ‘my Shylock’ leads to an obvious conclusion about this scattered group of plays: they all ring variations on the primary genre of romantic comedy in The Merchant of Venice by assertively foregrounding either Shylock or the Jewish issues he has come to represent. What else do these modern dramas have in common? First, all display intertextual relationships linking them with compositions ranging from fiction to theatrical performances to documents witnessing the experiences of Holocaust survivors. Second, except for the Yiddish appropriation, all went through numerous revisions, as if their authors had difficulty articulating what they wanted to say through Shakespeare’s text. Third, none has had serious impact on the theatre history of the play in its original or adapted states; they have not affected the mainstream or one another. Moreover, none can be considered representative, even those which come in pairs. Together they probably constitute only a fraction of the modern plays which have attempted to rewrite The Merchant of Venice. In this brief survey I have deliberately omitted three adaptations on record which seem especially minor or short-lived: an early Japanese version (1885); St John Ervine’s sequel, The Lady of Belmont (1924); and Ed Dixon’s musical Shylock, performed by the York Theatre Company (1987).6 It is noteworthy, however, that even the slighter appropriations revamp genre: the Kabuki adaptation emphasizes the attributes of Western economic systems, and the English-language versions try to rehabilitate Shylock. Outside of these three and the texts by Charles Marowitz and Arnold Wesker, saved for closer examination in the fol-

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lowing pages, the survey includes all the modern appropriations I could find to date. But there may be many others now invisible in the annals of contemporary theatre history. As the sketchiest overview shows, the subject of Shakespeare and modern drama draws from evidence spread far and wide. Its topography extends, more or less, into every continent; and it covers a period over 150 years long. Substantial data, such as published scripts and theatre reviews, indicate that it contains hundreds of modern plays related to Shakespeare. Should our calculations include ephemeral productions, the kinds produced by amateur groups and local theatre festivals, the number might increase to thousands. This context makes generalizing about part of the whole difficult, although a few observations about this small collection of plays seem reasonable. For instance, the position of Shylock in the narrative appears crucial in determining the genre of any rewriting, especially versions of The Merchant of Venice since the Second World War. Even if an appropriation decentralizes the character, it makes a statement on the issues he embodies. Moreover, the intertextuality displayed by this little group of texts can be viewed as representative, because the strategy has become a commonplace of all Shakespearean adaptation. In a development which began early, modern dramatists have crossed Shakespeare with other texts in both their art and their thinking. But they have not necessarily revised their work again and again; and appropriations by playwrights from Chekhov to Stoppard have certainly affected the life of Shakespeare on the stage. Consequently, the struggle to articulate a meaningful new vision seems particular to adapters of The Merchant of Venice, as does the failure to attract the attention of an appreciative audience. Two such adapters have documented their work at some length: Charles Marowitz, director and critic, and Arnold Wesker, actor, dramatist, and creative writer. At different points in 1977 Marowitz’s Variations on ‘The Merchant of Venice’ and Wesker’s The Merchant (later retitled Shylock) both reached the English-speaking stage.7 Neither writer makes reference to the other’s play, although they are contemporaries and evidence indicates that they knew each other’s dramatic work.8 At roughly the same time they produced their appropriations without cross-reference. Marowitz has acknowledged the difficulties of his project, remaining philosophical about them. For the most part he expresses concerns about aesthetic and practical matters, such as the application of collage, his favoured technique, to a Shakespearean com-

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edy. Wesker’s rewriting, by contrast, has remained a source of conflict in his life for decades. More than satisfied with his version, he cannot manage to provide it with a mainstream production that would reach a wide audience.9 III Marowitz’s Variations on ‘The Merchant of Venice’ belongs to a series of experiments he performed on Shakespearean plays over a decade beginning in the mid-1960s. In the Introduction to The Marowitz Shakespeare, his edition of five published scripts, he describes the effect that venues had on his productions and others like them: My experiments have been conducted in a very small arena (usually a London theatre seating a maximum of 200 persons) and ... most of the other classical innovations have likewise been directed to a very small public, so that whatever ‘tendency’ is being delineated here, it affects only very slightly the ways in which the majority of theatregoers receive the works of Shakespeare. (11)

For Variations on ‘The Merchant of Venice’ Marowitz used the Open Space Theatre in London, where he served as director for ten years. By the time he rewrote The Merchant of Venice, Marowitz had already adapted Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, The Taming of the Shrew, and Measure for Measure. From his account, the two comedies of love gave him the most trouble, requiring more revision and self-doubt than the others. He determined, in the end successfully, to turn The Taming of the Shrew into a Gothic tragedy dealing with the moral values that destroy relationships in modern society (Marowitz Shakespeare 15–20). Predictably, Variations on ‘The Merchant of Venice’ also centres on moral values, but its trial scene led Marowitz to politicize it more specifically. Ultimately its genre eludes definition, as it tilts away from comedy towards a highly stylized history play. Marowitz came of age artistically during the 1960s, when he worked with Peter Brook and located his own dramatic theory and practice among the latest formulations of theatre by Bertolt Brecht, Antonin Artaud, and Jerzy Grotowski. At that time he became interested in the processes of adaptation, and decades later he has continued to ponder them: ‘Retrofitting Coriolanus,’ an essay published in 2001, compares appropriations including both Brecht’s and Günter Grass’s (Roar 119–

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29).10 The experiments with Shakespearean collage resulted from these influences. In retrospect Marowitz has said, ‘Our job is to retrace, rediscover, reconsider and re-angle the classics – not simply regurgitate them’ (Roar 172). Initially his love–hate relationship with a number of old plays led him repeatedly to Shakespeare’s (Marowitz Shakespeare 11), an attraction he would describe long after the fact as the result of contradiction in what he conceives as the most problematic of the texts: That may well be the underlying raison d’être of all revisionist Shakespeare productions. Paradoxically, it is the plays’ deeply embedded imperfections that are responsible for some of the most imaginative productions of them that we occasionally see. (Roar 56)

Reviewing his own adaptations of Shakespeare, Marowitz defines the three requirements which shaped them. First, the director-adapter must have ‘a quite specific and original message,’ that is, a political message. Second, the original text needs enough flexibility ‘to bend in the desired direction.’ Third, such a project demands the courage of conviction: When the ideas generated by the given material are not reconcilable with the work as it stands, it is politic to change the original rather than, out of respect or timidity, produce a set of clanging incompatibles ... The resolution of what appear to be antithetical elements is often the first step towards the creation of a viable new form. (Marowitz Shakespeare 24)

For Marowitz the third requirement generated theatrical collage, a form connected in the 1960s with other arts such as fiction and music. He defines collage as a combination of ‘speed, discontinuity and dramatic juxtaposition’ (Recycling 32). Together these features deliver an economical and dynamic rendition of experience which allows each spectator to determine its meaning as if evaluating a surreal work of art. In using these techniques to reorder a classic, the adapter must use special care when incorporating what Marowitz calls ‘alien or tenuously related material’: ‘The freer the adaptor ranges in appropriating new material, the greater his difficulty in integrating it into the work’ (Recycling 34). Yet elsewhere he implies that modifications which defamiliarize a Shakespearean text also renew it, an inference which echoes Brecht’s theory (Roar 179). Variations on ‘The Merchant of Venice’ – the text as well as the author’s

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published comments on it – demonstrates how Marowitz applied theory to practice. Clearly this Shakespearean play invited his adaptation with its ‘deeply embedded imperfections.’ In content, recent Jewish history had made the anti-Semitism of the original conspicuous. In style of composition, three genres co-exist awkwardly: romance (the Bassanio/ Portia/Antonio triangle); comedy (the stereotyped Shylock and the casket test); and tragedy (the trial scene). According to Marowitz, tragedy overwhelms the other genres, upsetting the comic resolution of the romantic fifth act with an image of the defeated Shylock from the end of the fourth (Roar 53–5). To fix these problems Marowitz employed the toolbox he had assembled for collage. He deconstructed Shakespeare’s play and rearranged selected parts in unpredictable order. For this version lights signal the changing of scenes: they come up, fade, black out. As the sequence of events moves swiftly forward, bits of act 5 scene 1 follow part of act 1 scene 1; an array of episodes from acts 2 and 3 centre the dramatic narrative; and the new version ends with the court scene from act 4 and the ‘Hath not a Jew eyes?’ speech from act 3 scene 1, an allusion to the nineteenth-century theatrical practice of omitting act 5.11 Marowitz places this reconstituted Merchant of Venice within two frames of reference that appear prominently at the opening and close of his version. With these devices he incorporates ‘alien or tenuously related material’ that immediately defamiliarizes the Shakespearean text. The collage starts with anachronistic and disorienting effects: Sound of explosion followed by pandemonium. voice over. (Slides illustrating events:) Jerusalem, July 22nd, 1946. At 12.30 p.m. today a tremendous explosion ripped off an entire wing of the King David Hotel destroying seven floors and 25 rooms occupied by the Secretariat of the Palestine Government and the Defence Security office of British Military Headquarters. (227)

If the first frame derives from history, the second traces its descent from a stranger place. Lights come up on a group of Jews mourning a dead body; and the character of Shylock delivers a ten-line conflation of curse and lament in verse from Christopher Marlowe’s play The Jew of Malta, circa 1589–90 (1.2.163–73).12 ‘After silent prayer,’ Shylock’s first words sound like this: The plagues of Egypt and the curse of heaven,

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Earth’s barrenness, and all men’s hatred Inflict upon them, thou great Primus Motor. (228)

The rest of Marowitz’s scene borrows its dialogue from act 1 scene 2 and act 2 scene 3 of Marlowe’s play, itself a mix of tragedy and farce. As the adaptation concludes, dialogue in the court episode modulates from Shakespeare’s text to Marlowe’s, finally cut off as Jewish guerrillas assassinate British officers and the Voice Over resumes its account, with slides, of violence at the King David Hotel. Marowitz had specific historical parallels in mind. Setting the dramatic narrative in Palestine during the British mandate, he identified Antonio with Ernest Bevin, foreign secretary at that time and the embodiment of Clement Atlee’s cruel immigration policies: restricted access to Jerusalem forced escaping Jews back to Europe and concentration camps. In this scenario Shylock lines up with more extreme nationalist groups like the Irgun (Marowitz Shakespeare 22–3). He collaborates with his fellow Jews to repay the British colonialists in kind for their treachery. In the portions of the collage borrowed from Shakespeare, he acts the stereotyped Jew before the British to advance the deceit. With the Marlovian speeches, he articulates his motivations. In an assessment of this adaptation, Marowitz expresses misgivings about the two frames. He worries about combining Marlowe’s style with Shakespeare’s and about the sensational close reducing the political implications of his work. Whatever his intentions and concerns, Variations on ‘The Merchant of Venice’ accomplishes the goals he identifies for collage. The deconstruction and relocating of Shakespeare’s text make it new, emphasizing those elements most disturbing to a modern audience. At the same time the Marlovian dialogue makes it distant and unfamiliar: a contemporary audience hearing its artifice might not recognize the source but would certainly feel audile jolts as diction and rhythm change more or less abruptly from the Voice Over to Marlovian to Shakespearean speech. Those changes signal other kinds of shifts, not only between moral perspectives on the action but also among genres. Consequently Marowitz enhances the ambivalence of Shylock, rationalizing his violence even as he makes it more incendiary, and he extends that ambivalence through his entire reworking of Shakespeare’s play. Of course the erraticism of generic signals intensifies all of these complexities, as history frames the original three genres, the love stories become politicized, and alien material from English Renaissance drama and modern media disrupts all norms.

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IV While Marowitz came to Shakespeare through his efforts to ‘re-angle the classics,’ Wesker took a different route.13 By the time he began to compose The Merchant, Wesker had already written a dozen plays, as well as film and television scripts, short stories, poetry, articles, and essays. The plays that launched his reputation as a dramatist portrayed Jewish working-class life, especially in London’s East End, Wesker’s own background. Written in the mid- to late 1950s, The Wesker Trilogy (Chicken Soup with Barley, Roots, and I’m Talking about Jerusalem) won awards, enjoyed successful productions, and sold a quarter of a million copies in the Penguin edition by 1976 (Leeming ix). Later plays originating in the same community, such as The Friends (1967) and The Old Ones (1970), had less impact. Notwithstanding, they show Wesker continuing to explore the realities of contemporary Jewish life, the subject matter of Yiddish theatre, which he both particularized and extended. In each of these plays he reveals how the characters’ Jewish heritage determines the secular values which govern their lives (Schiff chaps. 5 and 8). Wesker wrote The Merchant in response to Jonathan Miller’s famous production with Laurence Olivier as Shylock, performed at the National Theatre in 1970 and televised worldwide in 1973–4. As he has said more than once, Wesker found especially offensive Olivier’s interpretation of Shylock and Miller’s contextualization of the role: Disappointingly the great actor offered an ‘oi-yoi-yoi’ Jew, a racial caricature, and I was powerfully reminded of the play’s anti-Semitic impact. Miller’s production, setting the play at the height of Victorian capitalism, attempted to create sympathy for Shylock by showing him to be a banker like any other. (Birth of ‘Shylock’ xv)

Shylock’s ‘Hath not a Jew eyes?’ speech, powerfully delivered, intensified this sympathy and, according to Wesker, allowed the audience to forget temporarily their own underlying prejudices: the stereotype of the evil Jew became forgivably human for a moment, yet no less a caricature. ‘I recognized no Jew I knew,’ Wesker writes in the Introduction to his book-length history of The Merchant: ‘The real Shylock would not have torn his hair and raged for being denied his gruesome prize but would have said, “Thank God!” Thank God to have been relieved of the burden of taking a life’ (Birth of ‘Shylock’ xvi).

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In 1974 Wesker set about writing a play in which Shylock could utter this cry of relief. He knew from the start that such a project would demand a rethinking of the bond story, an explanation of Shylock’s harrowing commitment. By the summer he found his answer in accounts of Venetian history. Teaching a five-week course on contemporary British drama at the University of Colorado, he shared his plans for the new play with his students. At this point he had decided to make Shylock and Antonio friends with complementary character notes; and he saw Portia as a young Renaissance woman whose father, a muddled philosopher, had left her estate impoverished. Wesker’s assignments encouraged the class to evaluate the plausibility of his plan, a task which led one student, Lois Bueler, to investigate historical sources. Among her discoveries, a single fact gave Wesker the basis for a real Shylock and a revision of the bond story: ‘Venetian law demanded that no citizen could have dealings with a Jew unless a contract existed. Gentlemen’s agreements were unacceptable – the Jew was no gentleman’ (Wesker, Birth of ‘Shylock’ xvii). As Wesker’s almost four-hundred-page account relates, The Merchant underwent constant revisions over the next four years, particularly in the months leading to its New York opening. Nevertheless, the historical setting remained a constant. The play begins in the Ghetto Nuovo, Venice, 1563, ten years after the burning of Hebrew books that led Wesker’s Shylock to hide his library. Now Hebrew publishing has resumed, an event that deepens the significance of the first scene as Shylock and Antonio catalogue Shylock’s books. Throughout his narrative Wesker adds historical data that replace Shakespeare’s sources for Shylock and the lovers with non-fiction. Shylock’s home becomes a refuge for Jews escaping prosecution in other parts of Europe; he plays host to Jewish artists, intellectuals, and activists named in sixteenthcentury annals. With scrupulous attention to detail, Wesker re-creates the position of the Ghetto Nuovo in the larger society of Venice.14 Against this background the explanation for Shylock’s bond unfolds. When his old friend Antonio, a merchant, needs to borrow three thousand ducats, Shylock, ‘a “loan-banker”’ (189), chooses to mock Venetian law by entering into a bond rather than a contract.15 Their dialogue spells out the distinctions between the legal and illegal arrangements as Wesker dramatized them: shylock. ... I follow my heart, my laws ... The Deuteronomic Code says ‘Thou shalt not lend upon usury to thy brother.’ Let us interpret that

258 Jill L. Levenson law as free men, neither Christian nor Jew. I love you, therefore you are my brother. And since you are my brother my laws say I may not lend upon usury to you. Take the ducats. antonio. But law in Venice is sacrosanct, dear Shylock, dear brother. shylock. My dealings with you are sacrosanct. antonio. The city’s reputation thrives on its laws being trusted. shylock. I thrive on my reputation being trusted. (212)

Wesker’s Venice is the Renaissance financial hub, a state which controlled its economy through contracts. In the end, his Shylock loses everything because he has challenged that system. Both Antonio and Shylock’s sister, Rivka, a character invented by Wesker, warn him of the danger. When Antonio cannot repay the loan, Venetian law must honour the bond as a contract. If it bent the rules for these dealings between a Christian and a Jew, it would establish a precedent for bending rules arbitrarily in the future. The Jews of the Ghetto would suffer the consequences, Rivka argues, and ‘we’ll live in even greater uncertainties than before’ (239). During Wesker’s court scene Shylock pays the price for his interpretation of the law when he draws a knife and states, ‘I’ll have my pound of flesh and not feel obliged to explain my whys and wherefores’ (255). A stage direction glosses this speech: ‘Though no Jew must take another’s life yet Shylock has made the decision to damn his soul for the community which he feels is threatened’ (255). As in Shakespeare’s play, Portia saves Shylock from death by her reading of the contract, although she appears in her own person as an interested spectator who claims she knows ‘nothing of the law’ (256). But she cannot save Shylock’s property. The presiding Doge cites ‘an old Venetian law [which] condemns to death and confiscation of his goods the alien who plots against the life of a citizen of Venice’ (257). While mercy lifts the sentence of death, the state demands Shylock’s goods: ‘The people of Venice would not understand it if the law exacted no punishment at all for such a bond’ (257). History furnishes not only the backdrop and rationale for Wesker’s Shylock but also a preoccupation which helps to define the character. An autodidact and a humanist, Shylock believes that books reveal patterns in history. The subject of these patterns becomes central to act 1 scene 7, when Shylock argues passionately for his belief with the callow young guests invited for dinner at Antonio’s house: Bassanio, Lorenzo, and Graziano. As the scene ends, Shylock’s argument reaches a crescendo in his demonstration of ‘a scheme of things much grander’ than

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the others perceive that manifests itself in Italian history (226). Wesker instructs the actor in a stage direction to project the intensity of these lengthy speeches: Then Shylock tells his story with mounting excitement and theatricality, using whatever is around him for props, moving furniture, food, perhaps even people, like men on his chessboard of history.

Intoxicated by his beliefs, Shylock describes knowledge and the patterns it discloses as sources of comfort, or hope, to people identifiable with his own Jewish community: ‘Bubbling! For dying men to drink, for survivors from dark and terrible times. I love it!’ (229). While he speaks these lines the curfew bell rings and Antonio gives him his yellow hat, signals that Shylock must return to the Ghetto as an alien despite the progress of history. This kind of irony shapes the whole dramatic narrative: the idealist Shylock loses everything, including his books, for an act of generosity. After he leaves the stage defeated, ‘a bitter man’ (259), a scene in Belmont closes the play with the image of a world depleted and the legacy of humanist values tenuously represented by Shylock’s spiritual heirs: Portia and Antonio move away to different corners of the garden. They, with Jessica, are three lonely points of a triangle which encircles the grating sounds of an inane conversation. (261)

The tableau rearranges the ending of Shakespeare’s play, clearly disrupting the symmetry imposed on its last scene. Despite such evidence, Wesker has always thought of The Merchant/ Shylock as an original work rather than an adaptation. Before the opening in New York, for example, he remembers: ‘About one thing I was adamant – it wasn’t a rewrite of Shakespeare and mustn’t be offered as one’ (Birth of ‘Shylock’ 61). Certainly the sequence of events differs from Shakespeare’s. Wesker concentrates on telling Shylock’s story according to ‘a sense, an instinct’ of ‘what event is to follow after what other’: ‘it must be in the right place from the point of view of the narrative, it must be musically correct, it must be poetically correct, and so on’ (Wesker, ‘A Sense’ 24). Moreover, Wesker created an idiom for the dialogue which sounds neither Shakespearean nor modern but Victorian, the result perhaps of his reading Ruskin and the Victorian novelists at the time of composition (Wesker, ‘A Sense’ 22, 24). Regardless of innovations, how-

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ever, Wesker did not conceive of The Merchant as an experiment: ‘I’m not motivated by a wish to explore or prove theories about theatre or styles of acting or design.’ ‘I only wish to organise the chaos of my experience,’ he told John Dexter, director of the New York production, ‘and it’s the material which dictates the form’ (Birth of ‘Shylock’ 266). Wesker’s claims to invention seem contradictory: The Merchant would not exist without The Merchant of Venice as its frame of reference. In relating its narrative, the modern play revises characters and plot devices from Shakespeare’s. It borrows only one speech – ‘Hath not a Jew eyes?’ – giving it to Lorenzo with an ironic twist at the end of the play (254); but it echoes words and phrases from the beginning and throughout the text. ‘Antonio! You look sad,’ observes Shylock in the first scene, and Antonio replies, ‘Sad?’ (190). All in all, The Merchant, or Shylock, is both a thoughtful and an impassioned reconsideration of The Merchant of Venice. Imbued with information about the past and Wesker’s knowledge of contemporary Jewish life, the modern drama turns the unstable romantic comedy into a kind of history play. Like the best history plays, this one transcends the periods it represents to tell a more comprehensive story. Wesker’s Shylock, in his struggle and his legacy, becomes a compelling embodiment of alien experience, particularly Jewish experience. In this light perhaps Wesker’s adaptation qualifies as comedy of love in a new form: it relates the continuing narrative of a people and its culture with the compassion of empathy.

NOTES 1 Specialists set the chronology of modern drama between 1850 and the present, starting with plays created by important dramatists of the nineteenth century who lived into the twentieth century. By ‘specialists’ I mean such guides to the field as the editors of and contributors to the international quarterly journal Modern Drama, published since 1958, and Myron Matlaw, who compiled Modern World Drama: An Encyclopedia (New York: Dutton, 1972). 2 See, for example, the National Film Board of Canada documentary Shylock (1999), directed by Pierre Lasry and produced by Kenneth Hirsh. In addition, the online anthology which publishes Egervari’s play also includes valuable background material, such as an interview with the playwright and an introduction to the text by Daniel Fischlin.

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3 In the published version of his play, Leiren-Young writes: ‘if you’re reading, directing or acting this play feel free to decide what you think it’s “about”’ (viii). 4 See his book-length account of his play’s creation and performance history, A Case for Shylock. The play has been published: Shylock (London: Players’ Account, 1999). 5 Citations of Shakespeare’s text come from the Oxford edition by Jay L. Halio. 6 Perhaps a fourth item should be listed here, a ‘riff’ difficult to classify which opened off-Broadway on 2 October 2005. In its fall preview issue, 12 September 2005, New York magazine gives this summary of A Woman of Will: ‘When a writer is hired to do the lyrics for a Broadway-bound Merchant of Venice, she consults the Bard’s female characters for guidance. They sing a lot’ (70). 7 Wesker’s play had premiered in 1976 at Stockholm Royal Dramaten. 8 Marowitz (b. 1934) edited Encore publications in the mid-1960s and later that include references to and reviews of Wesker and an item by Wesker (b. 1932). 9 For Wesker’s sense of achievement in this play, see Wilcher 119. Wesker himself gives the fullest account of his disappointments in mounting his version in his published diary, The Birth of ‘Shylock’. 10 Marowitz’s Recycling Shakespeare and Roar of the Canon, collections of essays, each contain reprinted material. I cite them for the most recent versions of Marowitz’s publications. 11 In his article on modern adaptations, Bulman claims that Marowitz found a model for the court episode in the twelfth scene of Brecht’s Galileo (67–8). Auberlen also sees connections between the two plays (243). 12 Citations of Marowitz’s text come from the edition in The Marowitz Shakespeare 226–83; citations from Marlowe are from the Revels edition by N.W. Bawcutt. 13 Wesker’s only other appropriation of a Shakespeare play would happen more than a decade after The Merchant. Lady Othello, written in 1987, had not yet been performed when it was published in ‘Lady Othello’ and Other Plays (London: Penguin, 1990) 189–258. 14 For the historical background of Wesker’s play, see Alter, Auberlen, Sicher, and Wilcher. Hedbäck finds in Wesker’s use of history correspondences with Brecht’s principles. 15 Citations of Wesker’s text come from the edition in his ‘Shylock’ and Other Plays 171–261.

Staging the Jew: Playing with the Text of The Merchant of Venice helen ostovi ch

Just before Christmas break in 1999, a group of four students put on a scene from The Merchant of Venice to fulfill their third-year Shakespeare course’s performance requirement. The students had no experience in performance or with this particular play or its issues, beyond the two weeks we had spent on the play during the fall term. During that twoweek period of lectures and discussion, I had shown the class parallel scenes from two film versions of The Merchant of Venice, one directed by Jonathan Miller and the other by Jack Gold. Although we had been concerned to uncover post-Holocaust discomfort with the play, we were not prepared for the imaginatively subversive treatment of 3.1 that emerged in this classroom performance. The object of the performance was to unsettle the text and disrupt audience expectations about the Jew as villain by exposing the anti-Semitism of the script and choosing to play against it. The actors managed to invert our understanding of class, nationality, and gender by making every choice strange, forcing the audience into the frightening foreign space inhabited by the characters. The shockingly clever collaboration produced a version of The Merchant of Venice as seen by the marginalized members of a criminal underworld trying to take over the legitimate businesses of the Rialto in order to launder dirty money. ‘Jews’ became another word for the ‘Haves’ of society, and Venetians were the ‘Have nots’ determined to get their share by any means available – so far a not unfamiliar echo of Third Reich scapegoating. But this production resisted the specificity of a Nazi framework or the grotesque vision of, say, Brecht’s Roundheads and Peakheads, by offering the audience a view of contemporary social conditions in which we must choose between being gangsters or being Jews. Instead of a simple binary of ‘Them’ or ‘Us,’ the audience must choose between ‘Them’ or ‘Them’: which group approximates more closely the

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‘Us’ that assumes the pervasive assimilated Western-world identity, promoted by advertising, as being by and large the middle-class, literate, well-behaved majority that watches television, reads the news, has a business or professional life, and expects democratic rule by law? The performance, needless to say, had no contact with the view of the play as a ‘comedy of love’ other than to pose the question of how to identify or isolate ‘a good deed in a naughty world’ if that world is divided by criminality and intolerance. The reconstructed scene begins with Solanio and Salarino, dressed in choric black, watch-caps covering their hair, directly addressing the audience by reciting slowly and firmly, each syllable distinct, faces blank and bodies stiff, all the antiSemitic name-calling and biased argument spouted in the play. As the working script reveals, the lines come from all over the text: salarino and solanio enter and stand side by side, about a metre apart, staring into the audience, arms at their sides. salarino. The devil can cite scripture for his purpose. And evil soul producing holy witness Is like a villain with a smiling cheek, A goodly apple rotten at the heart’ Oh what a goodly outside falsehood hath. solanio. Misbeliever. Cut-throat dog. salarino. Stranger cur. solanio. Dog. salarino. Villain Jew. solanio. Dog Jew. salarino. Devil ... in the likeness of a Jew. solanio. Old carrion. salarino. So keen and greedy to confound a man. solanio. The most impenetrable cur That ever kept with men. salarino. A stony adversary, an inhuman wretch Uncapable of pity, void and empty From any dram of mercy. solanio. Unfeeling man. salarino. Harsh Jew. solanio. Inexecrable dog. salarino. Wolvish, bloody, starved, and ravenous. solanio. Cruel devil. salarino. Currish Jew. solanio. Infidel. Exeunt.

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The effect of this recitation of hatred was chilling in performance. Out of context, the words are even more jarring than they are when they appear in context; the point here is to focus the audience on the prejudice that discriminates against Shylock and predicts his downfall by announcing the community’s hatred openly, before there is any reason to attack him. In this representation of Venice, anti-Semitism is not hypocritically disguised; it is a fact of life. Another unsettling feature of the performance was that the choric figures were female actors, both small-boned, but with their femaleness disguised, so that they seemed to be slight, wiry, oddly rounded men. After a brief blackout pause, Salarino returns to the stage area, this time in character as a tough swaggerer, still wearing black as before. He sets the scene by littering the performance space with old newspapers, pop and beer cans, empty liquor bottles, urban garbage of various kinds. The street sign tells us we are in Little Italy, New York; another sign says Our Synagogue Mortgages and Loans. The only furniture is a bench. Solanio arrives and greets Salarino with formal, apparently ritual, cheek-kissing. They begin with a truncated 2.8, sharing information aggressively as though competing for points. Antonio is at the centre of this concern, but the pauses around references to Antonio suggest fear and the struggle for non-self-incriminating vocabulary: salarino. I thought upon ... Antonio ... when he told me, And wished in silence that it were not ... his. solanio. You were best to tell ... Antonio ... what you hear; Yet do not suddenly, for it may ... grieve him. (2.8.31–4)1

Their tension wrests Salarino’s response, ‘A kinder gentleman treads not the earth’ (1. 35), into its opposite meaning, and by the end of the scene, the dread of what Antonio might do should anything happen to Bassanio seems to shake them: solanio. I think he only loves the world for him. I pray thee let us go and find him out And quicken his embraced heaviness With some delight or other. salarino. Do we so. (50–3)

But, nervously eyeing each other and checking the street for anyone watching or listening, they do not leave. At the end of 2.8, Salarino

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kicks some of the newspapers by the bench, wanders to pick some up, reads a few items, makes a few grunts, and the scene continues with 3.1, as Solanio asks, ‘Now, what news on the Rialto?’ Throughout their exchanges in both scenes, the tone has been hostile: jarring laughter accompanies the descriptions of Shylock’s grief over the loss of his ducats and his daughter, and clearly Jew-baiting seems a welcome relief from thinking too much about Antonio. The pauses around the mentions of Antonio suggest another sort of hostility, or perhaps fear – ‘respect’ of an exaggerated kind. It is clear that these two men are Mafia underlings, that Antonio is a godfather, and that Shylock has been doing business, willingly or unwillingly, with the mob. With the entrance of Shylock, the strangeness of the scene shifts into another dimension. Whereas the Venetians are played as gangland punks, getting their semi-literate opinions from the gutter-press debris scattered on the ground, Shylock is represented as a clean, well-dressed, soft-spoken, middle-class businessman. He enters in business dress and coat, with briefcase and gym bag, and, unlike the small dark Venetians, he is large, fair-haired, and genuinely male (the only male actor in the group). He seems athletic and oddly clean, as though he has just finished working out and has taken a shower. Unlike Solanio and Salarino, he is out of place on the dirty streets of Little Italy. Although he is clearly upset, he exercises control over his body language and his voice, but along with his distress he too communicates fear, as if uncertain whether his daughter’s flight is her idea of rebellion or whether the mob has arranged it as a threat against himself for trying to collect on his loan before Antonio is ready to pay up. The notion of actually pursuing his bond seems to come gradually: at first, like Olivier under Miller’s direction, he pauses on his anger at Antonio, who ‘was used to come so smug upon the mart,’ before testing gang reaction with the threat, ‘Let him look to his bond’ (3.1.46–7). His ‘I am a Jew’ speech is continued testing, most of it spoken as if arguing with himself, because Solanio and Salarino are bored by the verbiage, sneer at him, roll their eyes, look away. They do not see Shylock as someone who can ‘better the instruction’ (69). Their exit has a kind of grim comedy when Antonio’s man arrives with a summons from his master. Salarino’s final line – ‘We have been up and down to seek him’ (72) – is a self-defensive lie, and Solanio’s gibe at Tubal, entering as they leave, seems to be face-saving, implying that they are at least superior to this ‘tribe’ of Jews, even though they do not rank highly in their own tribe. Tubal is a seedy little man – also played by a female actor – and the

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role is not (as usual) another moneylender, but a private detective. He seems to be in the converso position, neither fully Venetian nor fully Jewish.2 When Shylock asks ‘What news from Genoa? Hast thou found my daughter?’ there is a pause while Tubal holds out his hand for the fee before delivering information. Tubal’s unsympathetic report balancing good news about Antonio’s losses with bad news about Jessica’s squandering pushes Shylock to an explosion of anguish over the lost turquoise ring, exchanged for a monkey. More money changes hands with the order at the end of the scene, ‘fee me an officer,’ and now the determination to challenge Antonio, to ‘have the heart of him if he forfeit’ (119–20), is set. Shylock exits in one direction, to his office, ‘Our Synagogue,’ and Tubal exits in another. But the scene does not end yet. After a blackout, suggesting ‘later that night,’ Tubal returns with a flashlight, searches through the street garbage as if hunting for evidence, then sees a letter, picks it up, opens it, and reads: ‘Sweet Bassanio, my ships have all miscarried, my creditors grow cruel, my estate is very low, my bond to the Jew is forfeit; and since in paying it, it is impossible I should live, all debts are cleared between you and I, if I might but see you at my death. Notwithstanding, use your pleasure. If your love do not persuade you to come, let not my letter.’ (3.2.313–19)

Tubal tucks it in his coat and exits with a mischievous smirk on his face. The implications are astonishing: either (a) the letter was not delivered, Bassanio will not hear the news until it is too late, Portia will not act as judge, and the couple will enjoy their honeymoon undisturbed; or (b) Bassanio has read and discarded the letter, either by accident or out of indifference, but Shylock might pay to see this evidence that Antonio can safely be taken to court. Either case suggests the callousness of Venetian attitudes, even toward one of their own, and loyalties shaped only by money. More recently at least two professional productions have experimented with unsettling revisions of Shylock’s place in an alienated and alienating community. In The Maori Merchant of Venice, a Maorilanguage film subtitled in English, directed by Don C. Selwyn and released in 2002, Maoris played almost all the roles. Although the film begins and ends with the voice-over ‘Hath not a Jew eyes?’ speech, the Shylock part of the script focuses on the trial scene; as the website synopsis (2005) indicates, the bias favours Shylock, who is ‘heartbroken’ at the elopement of his daughter and, ‘standing on principle, is not

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interested in the money. He wants utu (revenge).’ As more than one reviewer points out, the play is no longer about Christian loathing of Jews, but ‘a Maori play about oppression, prejudice, and the pursuit of bloody revenge, all fiercely contested at court. Suddenly it seems quite apt’ (Lamb); the substitution of traditional Maori merchant for Jew, pitted against Maori Christians, ‘shows the arbitrariness of prejudice’ (Mathews), what another reviewer remarks on as the ‘unexpected synergy’ of Jews represented by the Maori oppressed (Lamb). This factor is particularly striking when, after the verdict, the courtroom audience of non-Christian Maori Shylock supporters groans in despair. Another reviewer praised the film as ‘an educational, even motivational tool for particularly young Maori adults’ (Simmons-Donaldson). Race and ethnicity spin into political gender wars in the 2001 Valencia stage production of El Mercader de Venecia presented by la Compañía Teatro de la Abadía, directed by Hans-Günther Heyme, during the Seventh World Shakespeare Congress in Valencia in April 2001. In this translation, set in a men’s room, Venetians are homosexual men costumed in ankle-length sarongs, and the play’s Jew wears a conventional white linen suit, out of place in both the conventionality of his garb and the suburban straightness of his manners. From the audience point of view, however, Shylock is familiar, and the Venetians are bizarrely foreign, whether effeminate (Bassanio), violent (Lorenzo), or grotesque (the duke), proclaiming their difference at every turn. The men who marry do so only for money, certainly not for love – as Portia discovers during the trial scene, when she sees her husband weeping in Antonio’s arms, or as Jessica discovers when, money spent, Lorenzo gets sadistic pleasure out of pinching and twisting her arm, threatening other abuse, while sniggering with his male companions. Both the Maori and the Spanish productions depended on the same rationale of inverting the preconceptions of the other that my students chose for their classroom staging. The students’ decision to play the scene within the cinema-generated construct of organized crime is unique, although the concept of reframing the play within modern history or contemporary setting, of course, is not. George Tabori’s production at the Stockbridge (Massachusetts) Playhouse in 1966 was, in James Bulman’s description, ‘revisionary’ because ‘it devastatingly indicted the play as a weapon used by hegemonic societies against the Jews’: Tabori staged The Merchant as a play within a play, performed by the inmates of a German concentration camp before an audience of Nazi sol-

268 Helen Ostovich diers for whom the play presumably provided good anti-Semitic entertainment. As Shylock, Alvin Epstein wore the false nose and red beard that characterised the devilish Jew of Mystery plays and stage Shylocks of the Third Reich. According to one reviewer, however, ‘the role was conceived with a double edge: on the surface, Epstein was a craven caricature of the Jew as comic villain, complete with whining accent and exaggerated hand gestures ... but just beneath the top layer of this Jewish Uncle Tom was a hostile inmate of a prison camp desperately seeking revenge’ (Isaac 463). At certain moments, Epstein would remove the nose, drop the accent, and begin in his own persona, that of inmate, to address Shakespeare’s lines antagonistically to the Nazi officers who had been strategically placed on stage and among the audience. ‘When it became apparent that the nameless inmate playing Shylock was ready to go at the German guards with his bare hands the rest of the acting company had to ... restrain him’ (Isaac 464) – a disturbing image of Jews suppressing Jews. Such violation of theatrical decorum reached a climax during the trial scene, when Shylock, suddenly discovered to be wielding a real knife, assaulted a prison guard: in the ensuing scuffle, he was pinned down by the guards and killed – the probable fate, audiences were well aware, of all the inmates performing the play. (Shakespeare in Performance 151)

Tabori’s play ended hastily, before the end of act 4. After quoting extensively from Isaac’s review, Michael Shapiro concludes that ‘Tabori created a world and radically altered the text in order to highlight the potential Holocaust lurking at the heart of the play’ (7). As Bulman points out, this truncated version of the play ‘focused exclusively on the degradation to which Jews were subjected in being forced to perform a play that, as an artifact of historical anti-Semitism, may have contributed to their present victimization. The actors thus became victims of both Shakespeare’s play and the Aryan oppressors who watched it’ (Shakespeare in Performance 151). Tabori’s concept is strikingly like Der Kaiser von Atlantis (The Emperor of Atlantis) by Victor Ulmann, an opera written and performed by Jewish musicans in Teresienstat, the Nazis’ ‘model’ concentration camp; its North American premiere at the Canadian Opera Company’s Imperial Oil Opera Theatre in 1997 imitated the same doubleness of performance and prisonguard presence as would have registered in the original and, like Tabori’s Merchant, pushed the audience into horrified identification with the oppressed. This focus on Holocaust anti-Semitism is quite different from the

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focus chosen by my students, although the starting point was the play’s ‘74 direct uses of Jew and unambiguously related words’ (Cohen 106), but not for the purposes of creating a Shylock wholly antipathetic to values of generosity and compasssion that many critics see the play as celebrating.3 The classroom Shylock is one of ‘Us,’ not one of ‘Them.’ The audience is expected to identify with him because he is a white-collar working man on the side of law and equity, reluctant to threaten revenge, embarrassed at flinging back the abuses he himself had suffered, even for his own protection. This Shylock does not look Jewish, like Olivier’s Disraeli-esque facial features in the Jonathan Miller film, or Warren Mitchell’s ‘Jewish gabardine’ in Jack Gold’s BBC film. The strangest thing about him is that he does not look strange or different; he is Everyman. He is the grieving widower, the loving father, the successful businessman, the staunch member of his religious community. The Venetians, on the other hand, are insensitive mudslingers, small in more ways than mere size, dark in more ways than mere colouring. Shylock’s fear of organized crime, his fear that society is being taken over and criminalized by mean-minded thugs who infiltrate and eat away at tolerant institutions, becomes what the audience may recognize as the fear of creeping conspiracy riddling even the highest levels of government and business as reported nightly on television, a model of the citizen paranoia engendered by amoral power seekers in giant bureaucracies. In that sense, the classroom Merchant world does not simply echo the pro-Semitism represented in pre- and post-Holocaust apologetic stagings in Germany, like the 1927 Berlin production in which the reviewer argued that ‘the only possible approach to this drama is to stage its inversion’ or the one in 1955 Stuttgart that ‘nearly reversed Shakespeare’s original meaning in that the victors now had become the moral losers of the play’ (Verch 87). In the classroom Merchant, the epithet Jew represents not simply anti-Semitism; it is anti-success, anti-education, anti-middle-class, and anti-legitimacy. It is anti-comfort for people who enjoy the rewards of their own valid investment in the social process; anti-comfort for people who believe they have earned their privileges, not stolen them. It is class and race hatred taken to a higher level. Shylock’s size, healthy maleness, establishment dress, and polite manner are all against him, from the Venetian point of view. The gangsters’ smallness, indeterminate and inescapable effeminacy, and uniform darkness of dress and mind are all part of a larcenous and resentful underclass that intends to take over the world and destroy its Shylocks,

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that is, destroy ‘Us.’ The irony of the gangsters’ bodies on stage is that they echo the physical caricatures of Jews over centuries of anti-Semitic propaganda, but this time valorizing the dwarfed criminal body as the ultimate winner over the assimilated Aryanized body of the Jew. Like Peter Sellars’s multiracial Goodman Theatre (Chicago) production of 1994, which pitted an African-American Shylock against a Latino Antonio within the events surrounding the Rodney King trial, the classroom Merchant had, in a smaller way, ‘seized the opportunity to examine the play’s controversial subject matter, not just in terms of anti-Semitism, but using it to examine bias against race, class, gender, and sexual orientation as well’ (Hannaham 26). More specifically, as W.B. Worthen said about this same Sellars production, the casting of Shylock and the Venetians across gender and type gave ‘a contemporary, accessible shape to the visceral hostilities animating The Merchant of Venice’ (81) The warrant for this subversive examination of built-in bias and hostilities may be as old as the play itself. That is, history tells us that we should not assume that all Jews were unanimously reviled in 1590s London or treated unfairly in law. Richard Popkin points out that Dr Lopez, the converso executed in 1594 London for attempting to poison the queen, was not the only Jew in town who had a brush with the law. If, as some scholars maintain, Lopez was defended by some members of parliament and even by the queen, then he may have been a victim of egregious injustice, but apparently as an isolated case, possibly having more to do with fear of doctors than fear of Jews. Jay Halio cites Sisson, among others, as pointing out that ‘far from being oppressed, the Marranos in Shakespeare’s London ... reaped the rewards of compromise and submission to law, carrying on trade or entering professions, so long as they did not flaunt their real nonconformity’ (General Introduction 4). Abraham Cohen de Herrera was a Jewish merchant from Venice who was held captive in England between 1596 and 1600 as one of Essex’s hostages from Cadiz. A scholar and a gentleman, with influential friends in London as well as commercial contacts, Herrera argued in a letter addressed to Essex, but copied to the queen and to the Sultan of Morocco, that he was falsely imprisoned as a Spaniard, since he was in fact born in Tuscany and later moved with his family to Venice. He had only been in Cadiz on business. He was released and returned to the Continent, where he eventually settled in Amsterdam to write philosophical works on the Cabbala (Popkin 330). Charles Edelman argues that the clownish stage Jew was understood by early modern audiences as simply that, a stage convention that did not reflect Jews living in Lon-

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don, none of whom were in fact recorded moneylenders, a job on- and offstage attributed to Christian merchants. He cites Gerontus, in Three Ladies of London, to show that ‘single instance or not, even if there was a stereotypical stage Jew, the Elizabethan theatre was capable of accommodating alternative portrayals’ of the Jew as honourable and generous (Edelman 100–2), despite the conflicting literary evidence of other texts – Chaucer’s Prioress’ Tale, the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveller, Greene’s Selimus, and Marlowe’s Jew of Malta. One might make the same argument about wife-tamers: Fletcher’s The Woman’s Prize demonstrates that not all audiences approved of Petruchio’s crushing of Kate and that some wanted to enjoy a table-turning. In this case, too, the stage accommodated an alternative portrayal. In the classroom Merchant, the alternative portrayal resisted the play’s apparent anti-Semitism by showing that anti-Semitism, like any other commodity, can manipulate the market and may facilitate a mob takeover of legitimate businesses or courtrooms. Solanio, Salarino, and even Tubal may have no deep emotional investment in Shylock; they simply have other loyalties that allow them to treat Shylock’s gains or losses expediently. Anti-Semitism gives them the excuse they need for the behaviour they have chosen to identify with. In general terms, the choices made by the actors reflect the experience of post-Holocaust performance: ‘Seeking to make this play less offensive to current sensibilities, productions now tend to present Shylock more as victim than as villain and to treat the Christians as harshly as they have treated the Jew’ (Perrett 145). Melia Bensussen, director of the 1993 North Carolina Shakespeare Festival production, states in her program notes: ‘Shylock does not behave as he does because he is a Jew, he behaves as he does because the world in which he lives has pushed him to the brink’ (qtd. in Londré 90). Because the classroom Merchant consisted of just one scene, we can only speculate about how it might project its indictment of bigotry and insider-outsider tensions in a full production. But it seems to me that it offers an alternative to the more common Venetians-as-Nazis concept when it speculates on Venetians-as-mobsters in a community within a community, parasites on the social body supported by assimilated, hard-working foreigners like Shylock. Whoever is not in the Venetian mob explicitly may nevertheless be harnessed by mob influence, wittingly or unwittingly: the duke, Portia, Jessica, and how many silent others? We know whose side they ended up on. Does the mobster concept contain society’s bigotry within a criminal minority, thus margin-

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alizing anti-Semitism as a hate crime practised by a few transplanted Italian ‘families,’ or does it criminalize the majority, who use and then expel the stranger? If the former, then perhaps we are safe provided we can maintain the distinction between the criminal and the legitimate; if the latter, then the threat of another Holocaust looms. The classroom Merchant tried to be loyal to Shakespeare’s lines, although the actors discarded Shakespeare’s frame of reference by substituting a modern context familiar through film and television. The result was a stimulating revision of Shylock. It is a long way from Leggatt’s pro-Portia argument that places Portia closer to heaven and Shylock as ‘resolutely a creature of the earth’ marked by ‘copulating rams’ and the physical grounding of ‘If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh?’ (Leggatt, Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love 137). If it is true, on the other hand, as another critic put it, that Shylock is, unlike the other characters in the play, ‘a representational void, or an absence’ because he has no ‘personal biography’ beyond the ‘cultural construct of the Jew’ (Oz, ‘Which Is the Merchant Here?’ 160), then he becomes in the classroom production a disjunctive union of, on the one hand, cultural and tribal hatreds, as expressed by the opening chorus, and, on the other hand, a dramatic construct of the middle-class ‘Us,’ as shown in 3.1, the one in whom we recognize our own personal biographies. The deployment of a typecasting that reverses the Shakespearean original establishes a new dialectic between the play’s lines and the concretized gangsterism, racism, and cutthroat economics represented as the chief features of contemporary society.

NOTES My paper is dedicated to the undergraduate actors of McMaster University’s Shakespeare 3K06-03, whose hard work created the 1999 classroom Merchant: Abby Colamartini, Chris Coupland, Sarah Davies, and Amber Lyons. 1 All citations from the play are from the Oxford edition, edited by Jay Halio. 2 James Shapiro offers a history of the conversos, also called Marranos, the apparently converted Jews of Spain, and their reputation in early modern England in the first two chapters of Shakespeare and the Jews. 3 See, for example, Martin Yaffe’s discussion of Shylock as a bad Jew rather than a victim of socially and legally supported anti-Semitism of the Christian majority.

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Watt, Tessa. Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640. 1991. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. Weiner, Annette B. Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving. Berkeley: U of California P, 1992. Wells, Stanley. Twelfth Night: Critical Essays. New York: Garland, 1986. Werner, Sarah. Shakespeare and Feminist Performance: Ideology On Stage. London: Routledge, 2001. Wesker, Arnold. The Birth of ‘Shylock’ and the Death of Zero Mostel. London: Quartet, 1997. – ‘A Sense of What Should Follow: Detailed Discussion of the Plays from The Friends to The Merchant.’ Theatre Quarterly 7 (1977–8): 5–24. – ‘Shylock’ and Other Plays. London: Penguin, 1990. Westfall, Suzanne. Patrons and Performance. Oxford: Clarendon, 1990. White, R.S. ‘Criticism of the Comedies Up to “The Merchant of Venice”: 1953– 82.’ The Shakespeare Survey 37 (1982): 1–11. ‘Whitewashing Shylock.’ New York Times 19 September 1875: 3. Wilcher, Robert. Understanding Arnold Wesker. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1991. Wilde, Oscar. Collins Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. New York: HarperCollins, 1999. Williams, Gordon. A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature. 3 vols. London: Athlone, 1994. Williams, Sheila. ‘The Lord Mayor’s Show in Tudor and Stuart Times.’ Guildhall Miscellany 1.10 (1959): 3–18. Williamson, Audrey. Old Vic Drama. London: J.G. Miller, 1948. Wilson, John Dover. Shakespeare’s Happy Comedies. London: Faber, 1962. Wiltenburg, Joy. Disorderly Women and Female Power in the Street Literature of Early Modern England and Germany. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1992. Withington, Robert. ‘The Lord Mayor’s Show for 1590.’ Modern Language Notes 33 (1918): 8–13. Worthen, W B. Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Wright, L.B. ‘Extraneous Song in Elizabethan Drama after the Advent of Shakespeare.’ Studies in Philology 24 (1927): 261–74. – Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1935. Würzbach, Natascha. The Rise of the English Street Ballad, 1550–1650. Trans. Gayna Walls. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990. Yachnin, Paul. Stage-Wrights: Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, and the Making of Theatrical Value. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1997.

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Contributors

Alan L. Ackerman, Jr, is associate professor in the English Department and University College Drama Program, University of Toronto. He is the author of The Portable Theater: American Literature and the NineteenthCentury Stage (1999), and, with Martin Pucher, co-editor of Against Theater: Creative Destructions on the Modernist Stage (2006). He has published widely on American drama and edits the journal Modern Drama. John Astington is professor at the Graduate Centre for Study of Drama, University of Toronto. Recent publications include English Court Theatre, 1558–1642 (1999); ‘Elizabethanism in Verona: Giorgio Strehler’s 1 Henry IV,’ Shakespeare and the Mediterranean: The Proceedings of the Seventh World Shakespeare Congress, ed. Tom Clayton et al., (2003); ‘Malvolio and the Dark House,’ The Cambridge Shakespeare Library (2003); ‘The Career of Andrew Cane, Citizen, Goldsmith, and Player,’ Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 16 (2003); and ‘John Rhodes: Draper, Bookseller, and Man of the Theatre,’ Theatre Notebook 57 (2003). Karen Bamford is associate professor of English at Mount Allison University and the author of Sexual Violence on the Jacobean Stage (2000). With Alexander Leggatt, she is co-editor of Approaches to Teaching English Renaissance Drama (2002), and, with Mary Ellen Lamb, co-editor of Oral Traditions and Gender in English Literary Texts: 1500–1700 (2008). David Bevington is the Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Service Professor in the Humanities at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 1967. His studies include From ‘Mankind’ to Marlowe (1962), Tudor Drama and Politics (1968), Action Is Eloquence: Shakespeare's Lan-

296 Contributors

guage of Gesture (1985), Shakespeare: The Seven Ages of Human Experience (2nd ed., 2005), and This Wide and Universal Theater: Shakespeare in Performance, Then and Now (2007). He is also the editor of Medieval Drama (1975); The Bantam Shakespeare, in twenty-nine paperback volumes (1988); and The Complete Works of Shakespeare (1992; updated, 1997); as well as the Oxford 1 Henry IV (1987), the Cambridge Antony and Cleopatra (1990), and the Arden 3 Troilus and Cressida (1998). He is the senior editor of the Revels Student Editions and is a senior editor of the Revels Plays and of the forthcoming Cambridge edition of the works of Ben Jonson. He is senior editor of the Norton Anthology of Renaissance Drama (2002). With Peter Holbrook he has edited a collection of essays on The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque (1998). Paul Budra is associate professor of English at Simon Fraser University. He is the author of A Mirror for Magistrates and the de casibus Tradition (2000). With Betty A. Schellenberg, he is co-editor of Part Two: Reflections on the Sequel (1998), and, with Michael Zeitlin, co-editor of Soldier Talk: The Vietnam War in Oral Narrative (2004). Philip D. Collington is associate professor of English at Niagara University. His publications include ‘Pent-Up Emotions: Pity and the Imprisonment of Women in Renaissance Drama,’ Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 16 (2003); ‘“Graze, As You Find Pasture”: Nebuchadnezzar and the Fate of Cymbeline’s Prisoners,’ Shakespeare Quarterly 53 (2002); ‘“Like One That Fears Robbing”: Cuckoldry Anxiety and The Two Gentlemen of Verona,’ The Premodern Teenager: Youth in Society 1150–1650, ed. Konrad Eisenbichler (2002); ‘Self-Discovery in Montaigne’s “Of Solitarinesse” and King Lear.’ Comparative Drama 35 (2001–2); and ‘“I Would Thy Husband Were Dead”: The Merry Wives of Windsor as Mock Domestic Tragedy,’ English Literary Renaissance 30 (2000). Arthur F. Kinney is Thomas W. Copeland Professor of Literary History and director, Massachusetts Center for Renaissance Studies, at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is the editor of The Witch of Edmonton for the New Mermaids and of Arden of Faversham and other plays in Renaissance Drama: An Anthology of Plays and Entertainments (Blackwell, 1999). He has written widely on drama, including essays on teaching Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and The Tempest for volumes in the Approaches to Teaching series. He is the author of Lies Like Truth: Shake-

Contributors

297

speare, Macbeth, and the Cultural Moment (2001), editor of Hamlet: New Critical Essays (2001), The Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1500–1600 (2000), and co-editor of Tudor England: An Encyclopedia (2000). Ric Knowles is professor of theatre studies at the University of Guelph. He is editor of the journals Canadian Theatre Review and (from 1999 to 2005) Modern Drama, and of the collections Theatre in Atlantic Canada (1988), Judith Thompson (2005), and The Masks of Judith Thompson. He is co-editor (with Joanne Tompkins and W.B. Worthen) of Modern Drama: Defining the Field (2003), and (with Monique Mojica) of Staging Coyote’s Dream: An Anthology of First Nations Drama in English (2003); author of The Theatre of Form and the Production of Meaning: Contemporary Canadian Dramaturgies (1999), Shakespeare and Canada (2004), and Reading the Material Theatre (2004); and general editor of the book series Critical Perspectives on Canadian Theatre in English, published by Playwrights Canada Press. Anne Lancashire is professor of English at the University of Toronto. She is author of London Civic Theatre: City Drama and Pageantry from Roman Times to 1558 (2002), and has edited Christopher Marlowe: Poet for the Stage by Clifford Leech (1986); The Second Maiden's Tragedy (Revels Plays, 1978); and John Lyly’s Gallathea and Midas (1969). She has published numerous essays on Renaissance drama, pageantry, bibliography, and popular American film. Jill L. Levenson is professor of English at Trinity College, University of Toronto, and fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. She has edited Romeo and Juliet for the Oxford Shakespeare (2000) and (with Barry Gaines) Romeo and Juliet 1597 (Malone Society, 2000). She has published many articles and essays on early modern drama, and several on modern drama (the most recent being the chapter ‘Stoppard’s Shakespeare: Textual Re-visions’ for The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard [2001]). She is presently writing a book on Shakespeare and modern drama for Oxford University Press’s Shakespeare Topics series. C.E. McGee is associate professor of English at St Jerome’s University. He has recently edited Middleton’s ‘The World Tossed at Tennis’ for The Complete Works of Thomas Middleton (2008), and, with Jill Levenson, Ed Pechter, and Joe Porter, is co-editor of the Variorum Othello. With Rosa-

298 Contributors

lind Conklyn Hays, he is the co-author of Records of Early English Drama: Dorset (1999). Helen Ostovich is professor of English at McMaster University and has published numerous articles on Jonson and Shakespeare. She has edited The Magnetic Lady for The Cambridge Works of Ben Jonson (2005); Every Man Out of His Humour for the Revels Plays (2001); and Ben Jonson: Four Comedies for the Longman Annotated Texts series (1997). She is the founding editor of the journal Early Theatre and editor of the Ashgate series Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama. R.B. Parker is professor emeritus of English at Trinity College, University of Toronto, where he served as founding director of the Graduate Drama Center, head of Graduate English Studies, and Vice Provost of Trinity College. He edited A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1969) and Volpone (1983) for the Revels Plays and Coriolanus (1994) for the Oxford Shakespeare; has published widely on Shakespeare, Jonson, Tennessee Williams, and other dramatists; and he frequently lectures and provides program essays for the Stratford Festival. Katherine West Scheil is associate professor of English at the University of Minnesota and the author of The Taste of the Town: Shakespearian Comedy and the Early Eighteenth-Century Theater (2003). She is currently working on two book projects, one on women and reading groups of Shakespeare, which she began as a fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC. Her second book project looks at connections between fairs and theatres in the eighteenth century, particularly through the thread of the actor. Her publications have appeared in Shakespeare Survey, Philological Quarterly, Restoration, Shakespeare Bulletin, and Critical Survey. G.B. Shand is a Senior Scholar at York University’s Glendon College (Toronto). In recent years he has guest-edited issues of Canadian Theatre Review and has served as a text coach and dramaturge at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London. He is currently working on actorly reading as a critical strategy and has edited several non-dramatic texts for Oxford’s Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works (2007). He has published widely on Marlowe, Middleton, and Shakespeare. Alan Somerset is professor emeritus at the University of Western

Contributors

299

Ontario and has published widely on various aspects of Renaissance drama. Editor of Records of Early English Drama: Shropshire (1994), he is now at work on the records of Staffordshire and Warwickshire. He is also general editor of Studies in Early English Drama, and with Sally Beth MacLean, co-director of the Patrons and Performances Website project. Suzanne Westfall is professor of English and theatre at Lafayette College. Recent publications include Theatrical Patronage in Shakespeare’s England, co-edited with Paul W. White (2002), and Patrons and Performance: Early Tudor Household Revels (1990). She is the author of several articles on household theatre and is currently writing a book on performances for Edward VI. Sheldon Zitner (1924–2005) was for many years professor of English at Trinity College in the University of Toronto. He published widely on Shakespeare and Renaissance drama. After his retirement in 1989 he embarked on a second career as a poet and wrote three volumes of verse: The Asparagus Feast (1999), Before We Had Words (2002), and The Hunt on the Lagoon (2005). In 2001 Trinity College named him Doctor of Sacred Letters (honoris causa) in recognition of his brilliant teaching.

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Index

Abbey, Graham, 230, 231, 233 Accession Day tilts, 71 Achinstein, Sharon, 52n3 Ackerman, Alan L., Jr, xx, xxiv, 125n4 adaptation, theory of, 252–3 Addison, Joseph, 102 Aikens, James R., 220 Alardus, Johannes, 138 Alleyn, Edward, 34 Allott, John, 15, 17, 27n31 All’s Well That Ends Well (Shakespeare), 96; as comedy of remarriage, 241–2, 243; ending of, 176–7; and masculine failure, 80, 99; RSC production of, 177, 238, 244–5n16; seduction in, 99; and social mobility, 137 Alter, Iska, 261n14 American Repertory Theatre (San Francisco), 84 American Shakespeare Magazine, The, 58, 62, 63, 64n11 Anatomy of Abuses, The (Stubbes), 104–5 Anderson, Benedict, 128 Annals of English Drama (Harbage), 25n14

anti-feminism, 42–7, 63, 126, 134, 136–8, 144, 182 anti-Semitism, 126–41, 152n1, 153nn8, 10, 248–50, 254–9, 263–72, 272n3 Antony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare), 71 Apology for Actors, An (Heywood), 108, 109n5 Aristotle, 104 Armstrong, Gareth, 249–50, 261n4 Artaud, Antonin, 252 Ashcroft, Peggy, 238 Aspinall, Dana E., 242 Astington, John H., xix As You Like It (Shakespeare), 8, 40, 60, 73, 76, 100, 147; cross-dressed heroine in, 73; educative role of heroine in, 91–3; love at first sight in, 214, 215, 220–3; maturation of hero in, 68; read by women’s Shakespeare club, 57; at Stratford Festival, 220– 2, 223; title of, 41–2 Atkinson, Brooks, 210 Atlee, Clement, 255 Auberlen, Eckhard, 261nn11, 14 Auden, W.H., 142, 145

302 Index Avon Shakespeare Club (Topeka), 58 Bacon, Francis, 30, 33, 53n11 Baldwin, William, 53n11 ballads, 30; advice to bachelors in, 44–6, 49; anti-matrimonial warnings in, 44–6, 53–4n23; composition of, in Much Ado, 37–41; conflicting gender ideologies in, 44–8; as cultural scripts, 35–7, 42–8; husband’s complaint about his wife in, 44, 47– 8, 54n24; ‘mad couples’ in, 48–9, 54nn25, 26; popularity of, 31–2; scholarly devaluation of, 33–4; ‘wronged virgins’ in, 44, 46, 49 Barber, C.L., xvi, 156 Bard on the Beach Shakespeare Festival (Vancouver), 249 Barton, John, 203, 204, 210, 212n9 Bate, Jonathan, and Russell Jackson, 228 Bawcutt, N.W., 261n12 Bedford, Brian, 217–18 Bell, Charlotte J., 61 Bensussen, Melia, 271 Berger, Harry, 97n4 Berger, Thomas L., et al., 24n4 Bergeron, David, 7, 24–5n10, 28n36 Berkowitz, Joel, 247, 248 Berkshire Theatre Festival Playhouse (Stockbridge, MA), 248, 267 Berliner Ensemble, 193 Best, Wayne, 230 Bevin, Ernest, 255 Bevington, David, xvii, xix, 97n1 Billington, Michael, 232, 237, 240 Birth of ‘Shylock’, The (Wesker), 256, 257, 259, 260, 261n9 Bishop, Mrs C.B., 61 Bishop, T.G., 102

Bissell, Emily (pseud. Priscilla Leonard), 63 Blair, Karen J., 56, 64nn3, 8 Boleyn, Anne, 26n21 Boose, Lynda, 236, 240–1 Booth, Brutus Junius, 131 Booth, Edwin, 131–2 Boothroyd, Basil, 201, 204 Bosch, Hieronymus, 217 Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Le (Molière), 193 Bradbrook, M.C., 23n1, 27n29, 29n44 Branagh, Kenneth, 95 Braunmuller, A.R., 25n12, 26nn23, 25, 154n11 Bray, Alan, 128 Brecht, Bertold, 70, 116, 193, 262; and Marowitz, 252–3, 261nn11, 14 Britton, Jasper, 233–6, 242, 244n12 Bronstein, Herbert, 153n8 Brook, Peter: collaboration with Marowitz by, 252; production of Love’s Labour’s Lost by, 197, 198, 203, 207, 208, 210; production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream by, 217 Brown, John Russell, xv–xvi, xxiv– xxvn3, 109n7 Brown, Nettie Arthur, 61 Brown, Pamela Allen, 53n11 Bryden, Ronald, 195 Buckingham, 1st Duke of (George Villiers), 154n13 Budra, Paul, xix–xx Bueler, Lois, 257 Bullough, Geoffrey, 177 Bulman, J.C., 246, 247, 248, 261n11, 267–8 Bulman, J.C., and H.R. Coursen, 97n3 Burbage, Richard, 108, 109n11, 129 Burke, Peter, 33

Index Burns, Helen, 197, 207 Burton, Richard, 227n3, 233, 244n9 Caldwell, Zoe, 204 Callaghan, Dympna, 167, 222–3 Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Comedy (Leggatt), 170 Campbell, Oscar James, 53n15 Canterbury Tales (Chaucer), 80 capitalism, 114–15, 146, 225–6, 256 Case for Shylock, A (Armstrong), 261n4 Catherine (of Aragon), Queen, 142 Cavell, Stanley, 244n15 Cervantes, Miguel de, 207 Chagall, Marc, 217 Chalice and the Blade, The (Eisler), 229 Changeling, The (Middleton and Rowley), 134 Chapel Royal (Westminster), 196, 211n4 Characteristics of Women (Jameson), 55, 56 Charney, Maurice, 99 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 80, 129, 271 Chicago Shakespeare Theater, 80, 81 Chicken Soup with Barley (Wesker), 256 child actors, 3, 21, 29n42, 196, 197, 203, 211n4 Christmas, Eric, 207 Christ’s College (Cambridge), 25n12 Chronicles of Froissart, The (Bourchier), 28n34 Chrysanaleia (Munday), 27–8n32, 28n36 Ciceri, Leo, 204 Clark, Sandra, 38, 52n8

303

Clarke, Mary Cowden, 55, 64n2 classroom performance, xxiii–xxiv, 262–6, 269–70, 271–2 Cockayne, William, 3 Coddon, Karin S., 164–5 Cohen, Derek, 152n1, 269 Coleman, Everard Home, 22, 25n15 Colicos, John, 202, 204 Collington, Philip D., xviii–xix, 53– 4n23, 54n27 Collinson, Patrick, 32 Columbus, Christopher, 116, 117 Comédie Française, 193 Comedy of Errors, The (Shakespeare): family reunions in, 178–9; love at first sight in, 213–14 commedia dell’arte, 129 Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love (Ficino), 111, 112, 118, 125 Confessio Amantis (Gower), 180 Cook, Carol, 97n4 Cook, John, 209 costume: in Lord Mayor’s Shows,13, 19, 28n39; in Love’s Labour’s Lost, 198–9, 206, 208, 209; in The Merchant of Venice, 129, 149, 250, 263, 265, 267, 268; in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 217–19; in The Taming of the Shrew, 84, 229, 233, 237–9, 244n13; transvestite, 77, 106–7, 109nn8, 9, 229; in Twelfth Night, 77 Coyle, Martin, xxiv–xxvn3 Crane, Mary Thomas, 160 Creaser, John, 175, 177, 178 Croly, Jane Cunningham, 61, 64n3 Cronyn, Hume, 218 Crosby, Joseph, 58–9, 60, 64n9 cross-dressing heroines, 73–8, 94, 137–8, 170–3 Crow, John, 193

304 Index Croxton Play of the Sacrament, 129, 271 Crump, A.K., 98 Crutwell, Patrick, xxiv Crying Game, The (Jordan), 187 cuckoldry, anxiety about, 30–1, 45–9, 82, 91, 182 Cupid, xix, 30, 32, 40, 43, 45, 47, 70, 73, 78–9, 82 Cushman, Robert, 196, 207, 208 Cutter, Josephine Heard, 60 Cymbeline (Shakespeare), 73, 76, 108, 109n12; as comedy of remarriage, 241–2, 243; family reunions in, 182–4 Dachau, 248 Dafoe, Christopher, 210 Danson, Lawrence, xvi Davenport, John, 195, 204 David, Daniell, xv, xxiv Dekker, Thomas, 25n16, 176 Descensus Astraeae (Peele), 5, 8–9, 10– 15, 24nn6, 8, 26n23, 28n38 Desplaines Street Theater (Chicago), 133 ‘Device of the Pageant Borne before Wolstan Dixi’ (Peele), 4–5, 7, 9, 18– 9, 24n5, 28–9n40 Dexter, John, 260 Dinicol, Keith, 223 Discourse of Marriage and Wiving (Niccholes), 30, 51n1 Discovery of Guiana (Raleigh), 125n3 Dixi, Wolstan, 18 Dixon, Ed, 250 Dogget, Thomas, 129 Dollimore, Jonathan, 128 Donkey Show, The, 247 Donne, John, 116

Doran, Gregory: directs The Taming of the Shrew, 231–43, 243nn6, 7, 244nn8,10, 11, 12; production of All’s Well That Ends Well by, 177, 244–5n16 Doughty, Louise, 232 Dowland, John, 53n17 Draper, J.W., 156 Driver, Christopher, 195 Dubblestyne, Ken, 218 Duffin, Ross W., 31–2, 34–5, 40, 41, 53n14 Dusinberre, Juliet, 97n1 Dutton, Richard, 7, 8, 24n3 Eastwood, Clint, 230, 243n2 Edelman, Charles, 270–1 Edward I, 128 Edward VI, 22, 29n46 Egan, Robert, xxiv Egervari, Tibor, 248–9, 260n2 Eisler, Riane, 229, 236 Elderton, William, 40 Eleanor (of Aquitaine), Queen, 143 Eliot, T.S., 71 Elizabeth I, 270; and The Merchant of Venice, 146–7; and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 120; and Twelfth Night, 165 Elizabeth I, represented in Lord Mayor’s Shows: as Astraea, 11–12, 14, 26n23, 27n28; as Pandora, 12– 14; as Peace, 16 Elsom, John, 228 emblematic performance, 7–23, 69– 70, 73, 76, 79 English Civic Pageantry (Bergeron), 24–5n10 Epstein, Alvin, 268 Erickson, Peter, 97n1

Index Erten, Yücel, 228 Ervine, St John, 250 Essex, 2nd Earl of (Robert Devereux), 270 Ewbank, Inga-Stina, 27n28 Fairbanks, Douglas, 233 Familiar Talks on Some of Shakespeare’s Comedies (Latimer), 56 Fay, Gerard, 195 feminism, xxii, 60–3, 231 feminist criticism, xviii, xix, 228, 232, 236 Festival Theatre (Chichester), 194–5 Festival Theatre (Stratford), 194, 224; design of stage at, 197–8, 211n5, 220–1 Ficino, Marsilio, 111, 112, 118, 125 Fiennes, Joseph, 147 Fischlin, Daniel, 260n2 Fishmongers’ Company, 9, 15–17, 27– 8n32 Fleming, Juliet, 63–4n1, 64n2 Fletcher, Anthony, 52n8 Fletcher, John, 97n3, 243n6, 271 Foakes, R.A., xxiv, 178 Ford, John, 134–5 Fortnightly Shakespeare, 61 Fortnightly Shakespeare Club (New York City), 58, 61–2 Fox, Adam, 38, 52n8 Foyster, Elizabeth, 52n8 Fraser, Antonia, 154n13 Friedman, Michael, 97n4, 245n17 Friends, The (Wesker), 256 Frye, Northrop, xvi, 140, 156 Fulgens and Lucrece (Medwall), 137 Furness, Horace Howard, 52n2, 53nn14, 15 Furnivall, Frederick J., 26n21

305

Galileo (Brecht), 261n11 Gallathea (Lyly), 7 Gamble, Sarah, 229 Garner, Shirley Nelson, 86 Gascon, Jean, 193 Gelder, Ian, 152n3 George Peele (Braunmuller), 25n12 Gere, Anne Ruggles, 64nn3, 4 Gheeraerts, Marcus, 238 Ghetto Nuovo (Venice), 248, 257–8, 259, 261n14 Gilbert, Miriam, 193, 244n13 Gilbreath, Alexandra, 234, 237, 238, 239–40, 242, 244n12 Girard, René, 106 Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines, The (Clarke), 55 Glickman, Ellis, 133 Glover, Jamie, 244–5n16 Gold, Jack, 262, 269 Golding, Arthur, 41, 53n21 Goldsmiths’ Company, 15–16, 27n31, 29n46 Goodman Theatre (Chicago), 270 Gould, Thomas, 131 Gower, John, 180 Goya, Franciso, 217 Graff, Gerald, 64n6 Granville, George, 129–30 Grass, Günter, 252 Greenberg, Harvey, 152n1 Greenblatt, Stephen, 103, 116–17, 226 Greene, Robert, 31, 52n5, 187, 271 Gregory, Tim, 81 Grimald, Nicholas, 25n12 Grocers’ Company, 22, 28–9n40 Gross, John, 130, 153nn5, 6 Grossberg, Lawrence, 102, 109n3 Grotowski, Jerzy, 252

306 Index Gute Mensch von Sezuan, Der (Brecht), 116 Guthrie, Tyrone, xxii, 203, 212n7, 220; designs Festival Theatre, Stratford, 197–8; and Michael Langham, 196– 8, 208, 210 Hagon, Garrick, 203, 208–9 Haigh, Christopher, 29n46 Halio, Jay, 178, 270 Hall, Kim, 142 Hall, Susanna, 120 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 72, 112, 113, 124, 147, 186, 252 Hankey, Julie, 64n10 Hannaham, James, 270 Harbage, Alfred, 25n14, 193, 211n4 Harington, John, 164 Harper, William, 19–20 Hartford Stage Company, 152n1 Hawksford, Daniel, 239 Hayman, Ronald, 125n2 Hays, Janice, 97n4 Hedbäck, Ann-Mari, 261n14 Heeley, Desmond, 194, 195, 200, 202 Herbert, William, 9, 15, 19, 22, 27– 8n32, 28n38, 28–9n40 Henry, Prince of Wales, 26n20 Henry IV, Part 1 (Shakespeare), 94 Henry IV, Part 2 (Shakespeare), 67–8 Henry V (Shakespeare), courtship in, 94–6, 101–2 Henry VI, Part 1 (Shakespeare), 101 Henry VI, Part 3 (Shakespeare), 101 Henry VIII (Shakespeare), 101 Henslowe, Philip, 198 Hercules, 59, 69–70, 71, 144 Herrera, Abraham Cohen de, 270 Heventhal, Charles, 60 Heyme, Hans-Günther, 267

Heywood, Thomas, 108, 109n5 Hibbard, George, 176, 219 Hickey, Paul, 152n3 Hickling, Alfred, 232 Hill, Wayne F., and Cynthia J. Ottchen, 98 Himmler, Heinrich, 153n10 Hirsch, John, 195 History of the Woman’s Club Movement in America, The (Croly), 64n3 Histriomastix (Prynne), 54n28 Hitler, Adolf, 153n10 Hodgdon, Barbara, 244nn8, 10, 13, 15 Holderness, Graham, 224, 227n3 Holocaust, 134, 247, 248, 250, 268, 272 Humphreys, A.R., 33, 42, 52n2, 53nn13, 15, 21 Hundred Merry Tales, A, 41, 89 Hunt, Hugh, 212n11 Hunter, Kathryn, 229 Hunter, R.G., 245n17 Hutt, William, 212n10 Imperial Eyes: Studies in Travel Writing and Transculturation (Pratt), 152– 3n4 imperialism, 18, 116, 125n3, 127, 130, 141–4, 146 Imperial Oil Opera Theatre (Toronto), 268 Importance of Being Earnest, The (Wilde), 175 I’m Talking about Jerusalem (Wesker), 256 Index of Characters in Early Modern English Drama, An (Berger et al.), 24n4 Ingram, Loveday, 152n3, 153n9 Irving, Henry, 129, 131, 246–7 Isaac, Dan, 268

Index James I, King of England, VI of Scotland, 146–7, 154n13, 165 Jameson, Anna, 55, 56 Jameson, Frederic, 102, 109n3 Jean Cocteau Repertory (New York), 154n12 Jew of Malta, The (Marlowe), 129, 254– 5, 271 Jew of Venice, The: A Comedy (Granville), 129–30, 246 Johnson, Samuel, 178 Jones, Ann Rosalind, 120 Jordan, Neil, 187 Jowett, Benjamin, 123 Juilliard School (New York), 195 Julia, Raul, 234 Kahn, Coppélia, 97n1, 154n15 Kaiser von Atlantis, Der (The Emperor of Atlantis) (Ulmann), 268 Kant, Immanuel, 102 Kean, Charles, 131 Kean, Edmund, 130, 131 Kempe, Will, 129, 200 Kermode, Frank, 156 Kernan, Alvin, xvi–xvii Kerr, Walter, 153n8, 196 Kidnie, M.J., 244n14 King, Robert L., 152n1 King, Rodney, 270 King, Walter N., 163 King Lear (Shakespeare), 73, 113, 121, 134; death of Cordelia in, 178 Kinnear, Rory, 239 Kinney, Arthur, xxi, 24–5n10 Kiss Me Kate, 98 Kittredge, G.L., 80 Kleinberg, Seymour, 153n10 Klenicki, Leon, 152n1 Knight, G. Wilson, xvi, 156

307

Knowles, James, 6, 9–10, 18, 24–5n10 Knowles, Richard Paul (Ric), xxvn5, 221 Kohler, Estelle, 238 Kott, Jan, 216–7 Kreyssig, F., 156 Krouse, F. Michael, 69 Kuhl, Ernest, 53n22 Lady of Belmont, The (Ervine), 250 ‘Lady Othello’ and Other Plays (Wesker), 261n13 Lamb, Charles and Mary, 60 Lamb, Michael, 267 Lancashire, Anne, xviii, 23–4n2, 26n24 Langham, Michael: as choreographer, 202; critical acclaim for work of, 195, 196, 202, 204, 209–10; on directing Love’s Labour’s Lost, 196– 7, 198, 203, 208, 210; directs Love’s Labour’s Lost, xxii, 193–212; influenced by Guthrie, 196 Latimer, Elizabeth Wormely, 56, 64n5 Lawrence, W.J., 50 Lebanon (Missouri) Shakespeare Club, 57 Leggatt, Alexander, 99, 107, 175, 207, 208; as audience, 193, 208; on comedy, 170, 176; on The Comedy of Errors, 213; on Love’s Labour’s Lost, 195, 97n1; on The Merchant of Venice, xviii, xx, xxiv,126, 127, 137, 142, 246, 272; on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 125, 126, 217, 219; on Much Ado About Nothing, 48–9, 97n4; on performance, 215, 222, 227n2; praised, xv–xvii, xxiv, 110–11, 125, 211; on The Taming of the Shrew,

308 Index 97n3, 228, 233; on Twelfth Night, xxi, 67, 157 Leinwand, Theodore, 24n9 Leiren-Young, Mark, 249, 261n3 Lely, Peter, 199 Lelyveld, Toby, 131, 132, 133, 153nn5, 6 Leonard, Priscilla. See Bissell, Emily Levenson, Jill L., xxiii Levi, Primo, 248 Levin, Richard A., 154n16 Levine, Laura, 109n9 Levinson, Jerrold, 109n4 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 136 Lewalksi, Barbara, 97n6 Lindley, David, 49, 50, 52n9, 53n16 Lloyd, Phyllida, 229, 231 Lobanov-Rostrovsky, Sergei, 24– 5n10, 26–7n26 Locke Richardson Shakespeare Club (Oakland), 56–7 London: mercantile wealth of, 5, 11– 12; non-European trade of, 11, 26n22, 29n47; personification of, 4– 5, 7, 18; relationship to court of, 5, 11; sociopolitical solidarity of, 4; status of Jews in, 270–1 London Civic Theatre (Lancashire), 23n2 ‘Londons Love, to the Royal Prince Henrie’ (Munday), 26n20 Londré, Felicia Hardison, 271 Loney, Glenn, 217 Long, John H., 33, 34, 39, 52n6, 53nn12, 16, 17 Loomba, Ania, 136–7, 142 Lopez, Roderigo, 129, 270 Lord Mayor’s Show: audience of, 7, 14; authorship of, 6–7; Moors represented in, 18, 26n21, 28n40;

participants in, 7; pastoral in, 11– 12, 14; processional route of, 3–4, 15, 22–3, 23n1; relationship to Shakespearean comedy of, 5, 23; scholarship on, 5–6; tradition of, 5 Love’s Labour’s Lost (Shakespeare), 147; at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, 80, 81; ending of, 177–8, 208– 10; at Festival Theatre, Chichester, 193–5; at Festival Theatre, Stratford, 193, 195–212; love at first sight in, 215–16; male immaturity in, 68–73, 83, 100–1; at Old Vic Theatre, 197, 212n11; at Stratford-onAvon, 197, 207; at Tom Patterson Theatre, 195 Low, Jennifer, 97n5 Lund, Blanche and Alan, 201 Lutzer, Erwin, 153n10 Lyly, John, 7, 8, 12–13, 26n24, 196 Lyon, John, 22 Machyn, Henry, 19, 22, 25n13, 26nn18, 20, 28n38, 29n47 Macklin, Charles, 130 Maclaurin, Mrs Lauch, 62 Macready, William Charles, 130 Maguire, Laurie, xxvn5, 232 Mallin, Eric S., 167, 168, 169 Manhattan, The, 60 Maningham, John, 109n11 Manley, Lawrence, 6, 26nn19, 22, 26– 7n26, 29n47, 103 Maori Merchant of Venice, The (Selwyn), 266–7 Marat/Sade (Weiss), 248 Mares, F.H., 35, 52n2 Marlowe, Christopher, 7, 129, 254–5, 261n12, 271

Index Marowitz, Charles, 247, 251–6, 261nn8, 10, 11, 12 Marowitz Shakespeare, The (Marowitz), 247, 252, 253, 255, 261n12 Martin, Helena Faucit, 55 Marx, Karl, 114 Mary (Stuart), Queen of Scotland, 146 Mary (Tudor), Queen of England, 22, 25n13, 142, 143 masculine development, 70–1, 78 materialist criticism, xix Matlaw, Myron, 260n1 Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (Spiegelman), 153n10 Mauss, Marcel, 114 McDonald, Russ, xxi McGee, C.E., xxi McKenna, Seana, 231 McKerrow, R.B, 27n30 McLuskie, Kathleen, 107, 109n10 McTeer, Janet, 229, 233 Meagher, John, 15–17, 26n17, 27n30, 28nn33, 35 Measure for Measure (Shakespeare), 34, 71, 96, 98; as comedy of remarriage, 241–2, 243; ending of, 176, 179, 182 Medwall, Henry, 137 Mercader de Venecia, El (Heyme), 267 Merchant Taylors’ Company, 19–20, 21, 22, 29nn41, 43, 44 Merchant of Venice, The (Gold), 262, 269 Merchant of Venice, The (Miller), 256, 262, 265, 269 Merchant of Venice, The (Radford), 132, 133, 141, 147, 249 Merchant of Venice, The (Shakespeare), xvii–xviii, xxiv–xxvn3, 8, 26n21, 76,

309

99–100, 115, 176; adaptations listed, 129, 132–3, 246–8, 250; adapted by Gareth Armstrong, 249–50, 261n4; adapted by Tibor Egervari, 248–9; adapted by Mark Leiren-Young, 249, 261n3; adapted by Charles Marowitz, 251–5, 261nn8, 10, 11, 12; adapted by students, 262–6, 269–70, 271–2; adapted by Arnold Wesker, 251, 156–60, 261nn7, 9, 14, 15; as comedy of remarriage, 241–2; heterosexism in, 147–51; at National Theatre, 256; productions described,129–33, 269–70; and Shakespeare clubs, 56, 58, 62–3. See also anti-Semitism Merchant of Venice Act VI, The, 133 Merry Merchant of Venice: A Peep at Shakespeare through the Venetians, 133 Merry Wives of Windsor (Shakespeare), 100 Metamorphoses (Golding), 41 Meyers, William, 153n5 Middleton, Thomas, 3, 25–6n16, 134, 176 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (Shakespeare), 8, 73, 100, 247; and generosity, 110–25; love at first sight in, 219–20; male anxiety in, 86–8; at Stratford Festival, 217–18 Miller, Jonathan, 256, 262, 265, 269 Milligan, Spike, 177 Miola, Robert, xxivn1 Mitchell, Warren, 269 Modern World Drama: An Encyclopedia (Matlaw), 260n1 Moiseiwitsch, Tanya: designs costumes for Love’s Labour’s Lost, 198–

310 Index 9; designs stage at Stratford Festival, 197–8, 211n5, 220 Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin), 193 Monette, Richard, 224, 225 Montaigne, Michel de, 117, 125n3 Montégut, E., 156 Montrose, Louis, 102, 109n2, 115, 117 Morford, Mary C., 61 Morocco, Sultan of, 270 Moscow Art Theatre, 193 Much Ado About a Merchant of Venice, 132–3 Much Ado About Nothing (Shakespeare), 99, 101, 147, 176; and ballad culture, 30–54; Benedick’s sonnet in, 39–41; as comedy of remarriage, 241–2, 243; editorial effacement of ballads in, 33–5; love at first sight in, 215; male selfeducation and male anxieties in, 88–91; songs in, 35–9; title of, 41–3 Mulcaster, Richard, 6–7, 20–2, 24– 5n10, 25n11 Munday, Anthony, 10–11, 25–6n16, 26n20, 27–8n32, 28n36 Mundus et Infans, 137 Myles, Eve, 239 Nashe, Thomas, 271 Nature of Comedy and Shakespeare, The (Tillyard), 145 Neely, Carol Thomas, 91, 228 Nehring, Neil, 103, 109n3 Nelson, Thomas, 9, 15–19, 26n17, 27n30 Neville, John, 195, 212n10 New Criticism, xvi–xvii Niccholes, Alexander, 30, 51n1 Nims, John Frederick, 53n21 Nine Worthies, 71; represented in

Love’s Labour’s Lost, 71–2, 83, 200, 207 Novy, Marianne, 63–4n1 Nussbaum, Martha, 113 O’Connell, Michael, 188 (Old Clothes) Merchant of Venice; or the Young Judge and the Old Jewry, The, 133 Old Ones, The (Wesker), 256 Old Vic Theatre, 197, 212n11 Olivier, Laurence, 194, 256, 265, 269 On Some of Shakespeare’s Female Characters (Martin), 55 Orator, The, 146 Orgel, Stephen, 34, 129, 130, 153n5 Ormerod, Oliver, 168 Ostovich, Helen, xxiii–xxiv, xxvn5 Othello (Shakespeare), 26n21, 100, 134, 143–4, 241, 252, 261n13 Ouzounian, Richard, 198, 200, 202 Oz, Avraham, 152n2, 272 Pacino, Al, 249 Page, Judith, 130 Palk, Nancy, 222 Palmer, Alan and Veronica, 34 Palmer, D.J., xxiv Pandosto (Greene), 187 Panek, Jennifer, 53n18, 54n24 Parker, Joy, 204 Parker, R.B., xxii Pattern of Painful Adventures, The (Twine), 180 Peasants’ Revolt, 17, 28n34 Peddler of Very Nice, The, 132 Peele, George, 4–5, 7, 8–9, 10–15, 18– 19, 22, 24nn6, 8, 25n12, 26n23, 28n38 Pennoyer, John, 195

Index Pequigney, Joseph, 150, 154n15 performance criticism, xxi Perrett, Marion, 271 Pericles (Shakespeare), 214; family reunion in, 179–82; at Stratford Festival, 181 Petruchio’s Widow, 133 Pettigrew, John, and Jamie Portman, 193 Philip II of Spain, 25n13, 143 Phillips, Robin, 220–2, 227n2 Pinter, Harold, 68 Plato, 110, 112–13, 123 Play of the Sacrament (Croxton), 129, 271 Poel, William, 198 Poetics, The (Aristotle), 104 Pollard, Tanya, 104, 108, 109n5 Pope, Alexander, 130 Popkin, Richard, 270 popular culture, xviii, xx; affective power of, 102–5 Porter, Cole, 98 Portia Reading Group (Brooklyn), 62 post-colonial criticism, xx post-feminism, xxii–xxiii, 229, 232, 236 Potter, Miles, 229–31 Pratt, Marie Louise, 126, 127–8, 138– 9, 140, 151, 152, 152–3n4 Prideaux, Walter Sherburne, 27n31 Prioress’s Tale, The (Chaucer), 129, 271 Professing in the Contact Zone: Bringing Theory and Practice Together (Wolff), 152–3n4 Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Graff), 64n6 Prynne, William, 54n28 Puttenham, George, 31

311

Queen’s Majesty’s Passage, The (Mulcaster), 24–5n10 Rabkin, Norman, 154n16 race: and Lord Mayor’s Shows, 18, 26n21, 28n40; and The Merchant of Venice, 128–45. See also anti-Semitism Radford, Michael, 132, 133, 141, 147, 249 Ragussis, Michael, 130 Rain, Douglas, 206, 217–18 Randall-Diehl, Anna, 58, 62 Randall-Diehl, Robert, 62 Rappaport, Steve, 29n41 Rasmussen, Mark David, xxivn2 Rayner, Alice, 244n12 Recycling Shakespeare (Marowitz), 261n10 Reddaway, T.F., 27n31 Reid, Kate, 207 Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements (Rasmussen), xxivn2 Richard II, 17 Richard II (Shakespeare), 7 Richard III (Shakespeare), seduction in, 102, 105–6, 107–8 Ridler, Anne, 79n3 Riggio, Milla Cozart, xxvn4 Roar of the Canon (Marowitz), 261n10 Robertson, Jean, 28n39, 28–9n40 Robertson, Jean, and D.J. Gordon, 19, 20, 21, 24n7, 25nn11, 12, 26n18, 28n38, 28–9n40, 29nn41, 42, 43, 45 Robinson, Robert, 227n3 Rollins, Hyder E., 52nn3, 7, 53n19 Roman Catholicism, 13, 142 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare), 79, 92, 98, 134, 154n12; love at first sight in, 213, 220, 223

312 Index Roots (Wesker), 256 Rose, Mary Beth, 97n1, 107 Rose, Richard, 224, 225–6 Roundheads and Peakheads (Brecht), 262 Rowe, Nicholas, 130 Rowe, Thomas, 21–2, 29n44 Rowley, William, 134 Rowse, A.L., 109n11 Royal Dramatic Theatre (Stockholm), 261n7 Royal Shakespeare Company, 193–4; production of All’s Well That Ends Well, 177, 244–5n16; production of Love’s Labour’s Lost, 197, 198, 203, 207, 208, 210, 212n9; production of The Merchant of Venice, 152n3, 153n9; production of The Taming of the Shrew, 229, 231–43 Ruggles, H.J., 156 Rutter, Carol, 223, 236, 243nn1, 5, 7 Saccio, Peter, 236 St Anthony’s school, 19, 29n42 St John the Baptist, 21–2 St Paul’s cathedral, 4, 9, 15, 26–7n26, 196 Saire, Rebecca, 223 Salingar, Leo, 97n6 Salters’ Company, 10, 28n38 Samson, 69 Saturday Morning Club (Boston), 57 Savage God, 249 Sayle, R.T.D., 29n41 Schafer, Elizabeth, 228, 230, 234, 239, 243n5, 244nn8, 10 Scheil, Katherine West, xix, xxii Schiff, Ellen, 256 Schlegel, A.W., 155–6 Schwartz, Maurice, 248

Scofield, Paul, 197, 204, 207–8, 211, 211n1 Scott, Brian, 224 Scragg, Leah, xxvn4 Second Part of Conny-Catching (Greene), 31, 52n5 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 147 Sedinger, Tracey, 109n9 seduction, 99–102, 105–7 Seduction by Shakespeare: Advice, Observations, and Quotes on Love, Lust, Beauty and Desire (Crump), 98, 105 Selimus (Greene), 271 Sellars, Peter, 270 Selwyn, Don C., 266–7 Seng, Peter, J., 36, 39, 53nn13, 14, 16 Shakespeare, Hamnet, 120 Shakespeare, William, 4; allegory and emblems in plays of, 7–8; comedies of, xv–xvii, 23; history plays, xx; remarriage in comedies, 241–3; romances, xxi. See also titles of plays Shakespeare and the Art of Verbal Seduction (Hill and Ottchen), 98 Shakespeare Club of Dallas, 62 Shakespeare Club of West Philadelphia, 60 Shakespeare Club of Zanesville, Ohio, 58–9 Shakespeare clubs, 55–64; and bawdy humour, 58–60; with co-ed membership, 58; educative purpose of, 56–57; limited to women, 57; and Shakespeare’s heroines, 60–3; theatrical performances of, 57, 61–2 Shakespeare and the Comedy of Forgiveness (Hunter), 245n17

Index Shakespeare and His Comedies (Brown), xv–xvi Shakespeare and the Jews (Shapiro), 272n2 Shakespeare and Music (Lindley), 49 Shakespeare in Performance: Love’s Labours Lost, 193 Shakespeare Revolution: Criticism and Performance in the Twentieth-Century, The (Styan), xxi Shakespeare and the Theatre of Wonder (Bishop), 102 Shakespearean Negotiations (Greenblatt), 103 Shakespeare’s Amateurs (New York), 60–1 Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love (Leggatt), xv–xvii, xxivn1, 4, 5, 10, 99, 107, 155; and The Comedy of Errors, 213; and Love’s Labour’s Lost, 97n1, 195; and The Merchant of Venice, xx, xxiv, 126–7, 137, 142, 246, 272; and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 125, 126, 219; and Much Ado About Nothing, 48–9, 97n4; and The Taming of the Shrew, 228, 233; and Twelfth Night, xxi, 67, 157 Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre (London), 152n1, 154n12, 229, 236, 238, 239, 243n4, 244n11 Shakespeare’s ‘The Merchant of Venice’ in Auschwitz (Egervari), 248–9, 260n2 Shakespeare’s Songbook (Duffin), 31–2 Shand, G.B., xxii, 227n3, 229 Shannon, Laurie, 97n6 Shapiro, James, 129, 139, 145–6, 152n1, 272n2 Shapiro, Michael, 268 Shaw, Bernard, 242

313

shrews, male anxiety about, 43, 45–8, 84–6, 92 Shylock (Armstrong), 249–50, 261n4 Shylock (Dixon), 250 Shylock (Lasry), 260n2 Shylock and His Daughter (Schwartz), 248 Shylock: A Legend and Its Legacy (Gross), 153n6 Shylock: or the Merchant of Venice Preserved (Talfourd), 132 Shylock: A Play (Leiren-Young), 249, 261n3 Sicher, Efraim, 261n14 Sidney, Philip, 102 Silvayn, Alexander, 146 Simmons-Donaldson, Lana, 267 Sinfield, Alan, 148, 154n14 Sisson, C.J., 270 Skinners’ Company, 3, 18, 28–9n40 Smith, Adam, 111 Smith, Bruce, 41, 52n3, 53n11, 128; on transvestite theatre, 109n8; on Twelfth Night, 164 Smith, Maggie, 222 Smith, Peter, 207–8, 209–10 Smith, Rochelle, 53n16 Smith, Warren D., 152n1 Smyth, William, 23n1 Snyder, Susan, xvi, xxiv, 241 social class, 256, 269; and audiences, 7, 128, 262–3, 272; and ballads, 31– 4, 49; and Shakespeare clubs, 56 Solomon, 69–70 Somerset, Alan, xxi Sonnets (Shakespeare), 67, 147, 148, 154n13 Sonnets. To Sundrie Notes of Musicke, 40 Spencer, Christopher, 129, 153n5

314 Index Spenser, Edmund, 142 Spiegelman, Art, 153n10 Stahl, Ken, 32, 37 Stallybrass, Peter, 120 State Federation of Literary Clubs, 62 Stevens, John, 50 Stevens, Paul, xvii Stone, Lawrence, 146, 165 Stow, John, 28n34 Stratford Festival, 181, 193; archives of, 217–8; production style, 238–9, 244n14; productions of As You Like It, 220–2; productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 217–18; productions of The Taming of the Shrew, 223–6, 229–31, 236, 238 Straw, Jack, 17, 28nn34, 35 Streep, Meryl, 234 Stubbes, Phillip, 104–5, 107, 108 Styan, J.L., xxi Symposium, The (Plato), 110, 111, 112– 14, 118, 120, 122–3 Tabori, George, 248, 249, 267–8 Tales from Shakespeare (Lamb and Lamb), 60 Talfourd, Frank, 132 Tamberlaine (Marlowe), 7 Tamer Tamed, The (Fletcher), 243n6 Taming of the Shrew, The (Miller), 85 Taming of the Shrew, The (Shakespeare), xxii, 79n2, 176, 247; adapted by Yücel Erten, 228; at American Repertory Theater, 84; BBC production of, 85; as comedy of remarriage, 240–3, 244n15; costumes in, 237–9; ending of, 239–43; at Globe Theatre, 229, 231, 236, 238, 239, 243n4, 244n11; and male anxiety, 83–6; at RSC, 229, 231–43,

243n6, 244nn8, 10, 11, 12; and Shakespeare clubs, 58, 61–2; at Stratford Festival, 223–6, 229–31, 236, 238, 244n11 Taming of the Shrew, The (Zeffirelli), 224, 227n3, 244n9 Tate, Nahum, 178 Taubman, Howard, 212n11 Teaching Shakespeare through Performance (Riggio), xxvn5 Teatro de la Abadía (Madrid), 267 Tempest, The (Shakespeare), 57, 98 Teresienstat, 268 Thompson, Ann, xxii Thompson, Ann, and Sasha Roberts, 64nn7, 12 Thompson, Emma, 95 Thorndike, Sybil, 194 Three Ladies of London (Wilson), 8, 271 Thrupp, Sylvia, 29n41 Tillyard, E.M.W., 145 Timon of Athens (Shakespeare), 111, 121–2, 193 ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (Ford), 134–5 Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare), 7, 25n14, 26n21, 228 Tomkins, Silvan S., 103 Tom Patterson Theatre (Stratford, Ontario), 195, 221 Traub, Valerie, 107 Tree, Herbert Beerbohm, 133 Trewin, J.C., 207 Triumphs of the Golden Fleece (Munday), 25–6n16 Triumphs of Integrity, The (Middleton), 25–6n16 Triumphs of Love and Antiquity, The (Middleton), 3 ‘Troia-Nova Triumphans’ (Dekker), 25–6n16

Index Troilus and Cressida (Shakespeare), 96–7, 101 True Chronicle History of King Leir, The, 178 Twelfth Night (Shakespeare), 99, 114– 15, 123–2, 147, 175–76; ending of, 175, 179; idealization of heroine in, 93–4; love at first sight in, 214, 220; revels in, 161–6; and time, 67–8, 74–8; unity of, 155–74 Twentieth-Century Woman’s Club, 63 Twine, Laurence, 180 Two Gentlemen of Verona, The (Shakespeare), xvii, 76, 87, 100, 106, 147; as comedy of remarriage, 241–2, 243 Two Noble Kinsmen, The (Shakespeare and Fletcher), 147 Tyler, Wat, 17, 28n34 Tyrone Guthrie Theater (Minneapolis), 195 Unfortunate Traveller, The (Nashe), 271 Van Dyck, Anthony, 199 Variations on ‘The Merchant of Venice’ (Marowitz), 252, 253–5 Velz, John, xxiv Venice: as exotic locale, 134; in sixteenth century, 257–8, 261n14 View of the Present State of Ireland (Spenser), 142 Villiers, George. See Buckingham, 1st Duke of. Walworth, William, 17, 28nn35, 36 Warhol, Robyn R., 104, 109n13 Watt, Tessa, 31, 33 Watteau, Jean-Antoine, 198

315

Webbe, William, 10, 13 Weiner, Annette, 114, 120 Weiss, Peter, 248 Wells, Stanley, xxiv Werner, Sarah, 228 Wesker, Arnold, 251–2, 256–60, 261nn7, 8, 9, 13, 14, 15 Westfall, Suzanne, xviii, xx, xxiv, 137 Westminster school, 29n42 White, R.S., xxiv Whitman, Walt, 131 Wiesel, Elie, 248 Wilcher, Robert, 261nn9, 14 Wilde, Oscar, 112–13 Williams, Gordon, 35 Williams, Sheila, 26n21 Williamson, Audrey, 197 Wilson, Jack (c. 1585–1641), 34, 35, 39, 53n15 Wilson, John (1596–1674), 34, 53n15 Wilson, John Dover, 197 Wilson, Robert, 8, 271 Wiltenburg, Joy, 52n8 Wimsatt, W.K., xvii Winter Gardens, the (Chicago), 132 Winter’s Tale, The (Shakespeare), 180; all-female production of, 57; as comedy of remarriage, 241–2, 243; regeneration in, 184–9; reunions in, 167–9; RSC production of, 238 Withington, Robert, 28n37 Woman in the Moon (Lyly), 12–13 Woman of Will, A, 261n6 Woman’s Prize, The, or the Tamer Tamed (Fletcher), 97n3, 243n6, 271 Women Reading Shakespeare 1660–1900 (Thompson and Roberts), 64nn7, 12 women’s clubs, 55–7. See also Shakespeare clubs

316 Index Worcester Shakespeare Club, 60 ‘World Must Be Peopled, The’: Shakespeare’s Comedy of Forgiveness (Friedman), 245n17 World Shakespeare Bibliography, xviii Worthen, W.B., 270 Wright, Louis B., 33–4, 52n10, 53n12 Wurzbach, Natascha, 52nn3, 5, 53nn11, 19 Yachnin, Paul, 102, 107, 109n2 Yaffe, Martin, 272

Year’s Work in English Studies, The, xv Yiddish Art Theatre (New York), 248 Yoke of Love, The (Oz), 152n2 Young, Alan, 71 Youth, 137 Zahav, Ari Ibn, 248 Zeffirelli, Franco, 224, 227n3, 244n9 Ziegler, Georgiana, 64n10 Zitner, Sheldon P., 35, 37, 42, 43, 52nn2, 6, 53nn13, 21, 54n26