The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Comedy (Oxford Handbooks) 9780198727682, 0198727682

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T h e Ox f o r d H a n d b o o k o f

SHA K E SP E A R E A N C OM E DY

The Oxford Handbook of

SHA K E SP E A R E A N COMEDY Edited by

HEATHER HIRSCHFELD

1

3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © The various contributors 2018 The moral rights of the authors‌have been asserted First Edition published in 2018 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2018931183  ISBN 978–​0–​19–​872768–​2 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to all the contributors who gave their time and energy to this enterprise. Many thanks are due to Arthur Kinney for inviting me to edit this volume and for supporting my efforts as it came to fruition. Many thanks are also due to the editors at Oxford University Press, particularly Jacqueline Baker and Aimee Wright, who offered guidance both practical and conceptual. This project has benefited from the generosity of the University of Tennessee College of Arts and Sciences, Office of Research, Humanities Center, and Department of English. English Department heads Stanton Garner, Jr, and Allen Dunn in particular offered great support over the time the volume took shape. I  owe special thanks to my research assistant, Emily Roberts, who proved an invaluable resource at critical moments in the process.

Contents

List of Figures  List of Contributors  Introduction: Encountering Shakespearean Comedy  Heather Hirschfeld

xi xiii 1

PA RT I   SE T T I N G S , S O U RC E S , I N F LU E N C E S  1. Encountering the Elizabethan Stage  James P. Bednarz

21

2. Encountering the Past I: Shakespeare’s Reception of Classical Comedy  Robert S. Miola

36

3. Encountering the Past II: Shakespearean Comedy, Chaucer, and Medievalism  Helen Cooper

55

4. Encountering the Present I: Shakespeare’s Early Urban Comedies and the Lure of True Crime and Satire  Kirk Melnikoff

69

5. Encountering the Present II: Shakespearean Comedy and Elizabethan Drama  Andy Kesson

86

PA RT I I   T H E M E S A N D C ON V E N T ION S 6. Shakespearean Comedy and Early Modern Religious Culture  Kenneth J. E. Graham

105

viii   Contents

7. Shakespearean Comedy and the Early Modern Marketplace: Sympathetic Economies  Amanda Bailey

122

8. Shakespearean Comedy and the Early Modern Domestic Sphere  Catherine Richardson

135

9. Place and Being in Shakespearean Comedy  Kent Cartwright

152

10. Shakespearean Comedy and the Question of Race  Geraldo U. de Sousa

172

11. Farce and Force: Shakespearean Comedy, Militarism, and Violence  Simon Barker

190

12. Water Memory and the Art of Preserving: Shakespearean Comedy and Early Modern Cultures of Remembrance  Julie Sanders

206

13. The Humours in Humour: Shakespeare and Early Modern Psychology  Matthew Steggle

220

14. Shakespearean Comedy and the Senses  Kevin Curran

236

15. Green Comedy: Shakespeare and Ecology  Steve Mentz

250

16. The Laws of Comedy: Shakespeare and Early Modern Legal Culture  263 Carolyn Sale 17. Comedy and Eros: Sexualities on Shakespeare’s Stage  Judith Haber

281

18. Queer Comedy  David L. Orvis

298

19. The Music of Shakespearean Comedy  Erin Minear

313

20. Gender and Genre: Shakespeare’s Comic Women  Michelle M. Dowd

328

Contents   ix

21. The Architecture of Shakespearean Comedy: Domesticity, Performance, and the Empty Room  Anne M. Myers

342

22. Poor Things, Vile Things: Shakespeare’s Comedy of Kinds  Laurie Shannon

358

PA RT I I I   C ON DI T ION S A N D P E R F OR M A N C E  23. Stage Props and Shakespeare’s Comedies: Keeping Safe Nerissa’s Ring  Lina Perkins Wilder

377

24. Shakespearean Comedy and the Discourses of Print  Frederick Kiefer

395

25. Imagining Shakespeare’s Audience  Jeremy Lopez

411

26. Comedy on the Boards: Shakespeare’s Use of Playhouse Space  Erika T. Lin

426

27. Adapting Shakespeare’s Comedies  Katherine Scheil

439

28. Brexit Dreams: Comedy, Nostalgia, and Critique in Much Ado About Nothing and A Midsummer Night’s Dream  Bridget Escolme 29. Shakespearean Comedy on Screen  Douglas M. Lanier

455 470

PA RT I V   P L AYS  30. Holy Adultery: Marriage in The Comedy of Errors, The Merchant of Venice, and The Merry Wives of Windsor  John Parker

489

31. Comedies of Tough Love: Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Taming of the Shrew, and Much Ado About Nothing  Joanne Diaz

504

x   Contents

32. Comedies of the Green World: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night  Lisa Hopkins

520

33. Problem Comedies: Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, and All’s Well That Ends Well  Oliver Arnold

537

Index

555

List of Figures

I.1 First Folio, Catalogue, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (London, 1623). By permission of The Folger Shakespeare Library.  3 4.1 Title page, A Notable Discovery of Coosenage (London, 1592). Courtesy of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. 

72

4.2 Title page, A Quip for an Upstart Courtier (London, 1592). Courtesy of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. 

79

8.1 Early modern urban houses in Faversham, Kent. Courtesy of Catherine Richardson.  144 9.1 Ptolemy’s world map. © The British Library Board. IC. 9304. 

154

9.2 Molyneux Globe. © National Trust Images/​Andrew Fetherston. 

155

11.1 Detail from The Arte of Warre, written first in Italia[n]‌by Nicholas Machiauel, sig. Ee1. Courtesy of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.  201 27.1 Sally Dexter as Titania in Henry Purcell’s The Fairy-​Queen. © Glyndebourne Productions Ltd/​ArenaPAL. 

442

27.2 In a peapod boat, in Henry Purcell’s The Fairy-​Queen. © Glyndebourne Productions Ltd/​ArenaPAL. 

443

28.1 Wedding of Claudio and Hero from Love’s Labour’s Won (Much Ado About Nothing), 2014. © Royal Shakespeare Company. Ref. 19094. 

458

28.2 Hero, Claudio, Beatrice, and Benedick from Much Ado About Nothing, 1976. © Royal Shakespeare Company. Ref. 78168. 

460

32.1 Detail of an embroidery depicting Diana and Actaeon on a framed cushioned cover in the Drawing Room at Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire. © National Trust Images/​John Hammond. 

523

List of Contributors

Oliver Arnold is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Third Citizen: Shakespeare’s Theater and the Early Modern House of Commons (2007) and the editor of Julius Caesar: A Longman Cultural Edition (2010). Amanda Bailey, Professor of English at the University of Maryland, is the author of Of Bondage:  Debt, Property, and Personhood in Early Modern England (2013); Affect Theory and Early Modern Texts:  Politics, Ecologies, and Form, co-​edited with Mario DiGangi (2017); Masculinity and the Metropolis of Vice, 1550–​1650, co-​edited with Roze Hentschell (Palgrave, 2010); and Flaunting: Style and the Subversive Male Body in Renaissance England (2007). Her essays have appeared in Criticism, Renaissance Drama, English Literary Renaissance, and Shakespeare Quarterly, as well as in numerous collections, including A New Companion to Renaissance Drama and The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment: Gender, Sexuality, and Race. Her current book project, tentatively titled A Natural History of Politics:  Shakespeare, Sympathy, and the Stars, examines early modern conceptions of political affinity. Simon Barker is Professor of English Literature at the University of Chichester. His books include an edition of John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore in the Routledge English Texts series; Thomas Deloney’s The Gentle Craft for Ashgate Press; Shakespeare’s Problem Plays for Palgrave Macmillan; The Routledge Anthology of Renaissance Drama (edited with Hilary Hinds); War and Nation in the Theatre of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries for Edinburgh University Press; and Literature as History for Continuum. James P. Bednarz is Professor of English at Long Island University, specializing in Shakespeare and English Renaissance culture. His work focuses primarily on issues of historical intertextuality concerning Shakespeare and his contemporaries. His first book, Shakespeare and the Poets’ War (2001), was selected as an ‘International Book of the Year’ by The Times Literary Supplement. His second book, Shakespeare and the Truth of Love: The Mystery of ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’ (2012), which explores Shakespeare’s collaboration on the Poetical Essays in Love’s Martyr, received the Krasnoff Award for Scholarship. His articles on early modern literary relations have appeared in a wide range of publications which include ELH, Shakespeare Studies, Shakespeare Survey, Renaissance Drama, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, Comparative Drama, The Huntington Library Quarterly, Spenser Studies, The Ben Jonson Journal, Notes and Queries, The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe, and The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s Poetry.

xiv   list of Contributors Kent Cartwright is Professor of English at the University of Maryland. He is the editor of The Comedy of Errors, Arden Shakespeare, Series Three (2017) and the author of, among other works, Theatre and Humanism: English Drama in the Sixteenth Century (1999). His academic career has included service as a trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America, department chair, and president of the Association of Departments of English. Helen Cooper is Emeritus Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge. She holds Emeritus and Honorary Fellowships at University College, Oxford, and a Life Fellowship at Magdalene College, Cambridge. She has particular interests in the cultural continuations across the medieval and early modern periods. Her books include Pastoral:  Mediaeval into Renaissance (1978); Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (1989); The English Romance in Time (2004); Shakespeare and the Medieval World (2010); and an edition of Malory’s Morte Darthur for Oxford World’s Classics (1998). She also co-​edited (with Ruth Morse and Peter Holland) Medieval Shakespeare: Pasts and Presents (2013). Kevin Curran is Professor of Early Modern Literature at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland and editor of the book series ‘Edinburgh Critical Studies in Shakespeare and Philosophy’. He is the author of Shakespeare’s Legal Ecologies: Law and Distributed Selfhood (2017) and Marriage, Performance, and Politics at the Jacobean Court (2009). He is the editor of Shakespeare and Judgment (2016) and co-​editor, with James Kearney, of a special issue of the journal Criticism on ‘Shakespeare Phenomenology’ (2012). In 2017, Curran was named Distinguished International Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the History of Emotions in Australia. He is the founder and Director of the Lausanne Shakespeare Festival. Joanne Diaz is Associate Professor of English at Illinois Wesleyan University, where she teaches courses in literature and creative writing. She is the author of two poetry collections—​My Favorite Tyrants and The Lessons—​and with Ian Morris, she is the co-​editor of The Little Magazine in Contemporary America. Her work on using early modern archives with undergraduates has appeared in Pedagogy. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation.  Michelle M. Dowd is Hudson Strode Professor of English and Director of the Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies at the University of Alabama. She is the author of Women’s Work in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (2009), which won the Sara A. Whaley Book Award from the National Women’s Studies Association, and of The Dynamics of Inheritance on the Shakespearean Stage (2015). She has co-​edited Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England with Julie E. Eckerle (2007); Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama with Natasha Korda (2011); Early Modern Women on the Fall: An Anthology with Thomas Festa (2012); and Historical Affects and the Early Modern Theater with Ronda Arab and Adam Zucker (2015), and her articles on early modern drama and women’s writing have appeared in such journals as Modern

list of Contributors    xv Philology, English Literary Renaissance, Renaissance Drama, and Shakespeare Studies. Her current book project is tentatively titled Shakespeare’s Working Words. Bridget Escolme is Reader in Drama at Queen Mary University of London, where she researches and teaches early modern drama in performance, histories of emotion, and histories of costume and clothing. Her published work, particularly Talking to the Audience (2005), has explored the relationship between performer and audience in Shakespeare production, and her monograph, Emotional Excess on the Shakespearean Stage: Passion’s Slaves (2013) examines the ways in which theatre reflects, produces, regulates and celebrates extremes of emotion. Her research is underpinned by theatre practice: she has published work on her promenade production of Coriolanus in Shakespeare Survey and has worked as a dramaturge, a director, and a Theatre in Education practitioner. She is co-​editor of two book series—​Shakespeare in Practice with Palgrave and Shakespeare in the Theatre with Arden Shakespeare. Her next book, Shakespeare and Costume in Practice, will explore how costume produces and critiques constructions of the past and will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2018. Kenneth J. E. Graham is Professor of English at the University of Waterloo, where he co-​organizes the Shakespearean Theatre Conference, a collaboration with Canada’s Stratford Festival. He is author of The Performance of Conviction: Plainness and Rhetoric in the Early English Renaissance (1994) and Disciplinary Measures from the Metrical Psalms to Milton (2016). With Philip Collington, he edited Shakespeare and Religious Change (2009). His current research focuses on Shakespeare’s religious language. Judith Haber is Professor of English at Tufts University. She is the author of Desire and Dramatic Form in Early Modern Drama (2009) and Pastoral and the Poetics of Self-​ Contradiction: Theocritus to Marvell (1994). She has published articles on early modern texts in numerous anthologies and journals, including Renaissance Drama, English Literary Renaissance, Representations, and Shakespeare Studies. She is currently working on a book-​ length manuscript, tentatively entitled Adoptive Strategies:  Imagining Paternity in Early Modern England. Heather Hirschfeld is Professor of English at the University of Tennessee. She is the author of The End of Satisfaction:  Drama and Repentance in the Age of Shakespeare (2014) and Joint Enterprises:  Collaborative Drama and the Institutionalization of the English Renaissance Theater (2004). Her essays have appeared in journals including PMLA, Shakespeare Quarterly, Renaissance Drama, ELH, The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, and The Review of English Studies and in collections including Shakespeare and Textual Studies and The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theatre. Her new Introduction to the New Cambridge Series Hamlet is forthcoming. Lisa Hopkins is Professor of English at Sheffield Hallam University. She is a co-​editor of Shakespeare, the journal of the British Shakespeare Association, of the Arden Guides to Early Modern Drama, and of Arden Studies in Early Modern Drama. Her

xvi   list of Contributors most recent publication is From the Romans to the Normans on the English Renaissance Stage (2017). Andy Kesson is a Reader in Renaissance Literature at the University of Roehampton, London. He is the author of John Lyly and Early Modern Authorship (2014) and, with Emma Smith, the co-​editor of The Elizabethan Top Ten: Defining Print Popularity in Early Modern England (2013). He is currently leading a project on London’s earliest Elizabethan playhouses: essays, documents, and films from the project can be consulted at www.beforeshakespeare.com. Frederick Kiefer is University Distinguished Professor at the University of Arizona. His work includes Fortune and Elizabethan Tragedy (1983), Writing on the Renaissance Stage (1996), Shakespeare’s Visual Theatre (2003), Masculinities and Femininities (2009), and English Drama from ‘Everyman’ to 1660: Performance and Print (2015). Douglas M. Lanier is Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire, where he teaches courses in early modern drama, performance and adaptation, literary theory, and film history. He is author of Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture (2002), as well as many articles on Shakespearean adaptation in modern mass media. From 2016–17 he served as the Fulbright Global Shakespeare Centre Distinguished Chair. He is currently completing two projects, one on screen adaptation of Othello, the other on The Merchant of Venice for the Arden Language and Writing series. Erika T. Lin is an Associate Professor in the PhD Program in Theatre and Performance at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is the author of Shakespeare and the Materiality of Performance (2012), which won the 2013 David Bevington Award for Best New Book in Early Drama Studies. She is currently writing a book on seasonal festivities and early modern commercial theatre, a project supported by an Andrew W. Mellon Long-​Term Fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library. In addition, she is co-​editing a volume of essays on early modern games and theatre. She serves on the Board of Trustees for the Shakespeare Association of America and as the Book Review Editor for Theatre Survey. Jeremy Lopez is Professor of English at the University of Toronto, and the editor of Shakespeare Quarterly. His publications include Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama (2003), Constructing the Canon of Early Modern Drama (2014), and numerous essays on the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Kirk Melnikoff is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and President of the Marlowe Society of America. He is the author of Elizabethan Book Trade Publishing and the Makings of Literary Culture (2018) and has edited four collections of essays:  Writing Robert Greene (2008), with Edward Gieskes; Robert Greene (2011); Edward II:  A Critical Reader (2017); and Christopher Marlowe, Theatrical Commerce, and the Book Trade (2018), with Roslyn L. Knutson. He is a 2013 winner of the Hoffman Prize for Distinguished Publication on Christopher Marlowe, and his essays have appeared in a number of journals and

list of Contributors    xvii essay collections. He is currently editing Robert Greene’s James IV for The Routledge Anthology of Early Modern Drama and Selimus for Queen’s Men Editions. Steve Mentz is Professor of English at St John’s University in New York City. His most recent book is Shipwreck Modernity: Ecologies of Globalization, 1550–​1719 (2015). He is the author of two earlier monographs, At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean (2009) and Romance for Sale in Early Modern England (2006), and also editor or co-​editor of four collections: The Sea in Nineteenth-​Century Anglophone Literary Culture (2017), Oceanic New York (2015), The Age of Thomas Nashe (2013), and Rogues and Early Modern English Culture (2004). He has written numerous articles on ecocriticism, Shakespeare, and maritime literature and curated an exhibition at the Folger Shakespeare Library, ‘Lost at Sea: The Ocean in the English Imagination, 1550–​1750’ (2010). He blogs at The Bookfish, www.stevementz.com. Erin Minear is Associate Professor of English at the College of William & Mary. She is the author of Reverberating Song in Shakespeare and Milton: Language, Memory, and Musical Representation (2011), and has written articles on topics including music and gender in Troilus and Cressida, memory and subjectivity in Shakespearean comedy, and eavesdropping and interpretation in Othello. Her current project examines the intersection of dramatic and narrative modes in Shakespeare’s plays. Robert S. Miola is the Gerard Manley Hopkins Professor of English and a Lecturer in Classics at Loyola University Maryland. He has edited Macbeth (2004) and Hamlet (2011), Ben Jonson’s Every Man In His Humour (2000) and The Case is Altered (2012), among other plays. On the reception of classical antiquity he has published Shakespeare’s Rome (1983), Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy (1992), Shakespeare and Classical Comedy (1994), an edition of Chapman’s Iliad (2017), as well as articles on Aristophanes, Homer, and the Greek tragedians in later incarnations. He has also published Early Modern Catholicism: An Anthology of Primary Sources (2007) along with articles on Robert Southwell, Mary at the foot of the Cross, Jesuit publications, and Catholic manuscript and print poetry. His second edition of Hamlet is forthcoming (2018). Anne M. Myers is Associate Professor of English at the University of Missouri, where she teaches courses in British Literature including Shakespeare and Milton, as well as Renaissance poetry and drama. She is the author of Literature and Architecture in Early Modern England (2013), and her essays have appeared in edited collections as well as ELH and ELR.  David L. Orvis is Professor of English at Appalachian State University. He is editor, with Linda Phyllis Austern and Kari Boyd McBride, of Psalms in the Early Modern World (2011), and, with Ryan Singh Paul, of The Noble Flame of Katherine Philips: A Poetics of Culture, Politics, and Friendship (2015), and author of essays on Shakespeare, Lyly, Marlowe, Herbert, and Milton. His current book project focuses on the legacy of Anteros in classical, medieval, and early modern literature and culture.

xviii   list of Contributors John Parker is Associate Professor of English at the University of Virginia. He taught at Harvard University (2001–​6) and Macalester College (2007–​8), and was a winner of the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome (2008–​9). He is the author of The Aesthetics of Antichrist: From Christian Drama to Christopher Marlowe (2007), along with several book chapters, articles, and reviews. Catherine Richardson is Professor of Early Modern Studies at the University of Kent. She has published books on theatre and material culture, including Domestic Life and Domestic Tragedy in Early Modern England (2006), Shakespeare and Material Culture (2011) and, with Tara Hamling (University of Birmingham), A Day at Home in Early Modern England: Material Culture and Domestic Life, 1500–​1700 (2017); with Tara she has also edited Everyday Objects: Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture and its Meanings (2010) and (also with David Gaimster) The Routledge Handbook of Material Culture in Early Modern Europe (2016). Carolyn Sale is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta (Canada). Her work on Shakespeare’s engagement with the law includes chapters in The Law in Shakespeare (2007; paperback, 2010), Shakespeare and the Law (2008), and Shakespeare and Judgment (2017). Her most recently published work is ‘The Literary Thing:  The Imaginary Holding of Isabella Whitney’s “Wyll” to London (1573)’ in The Oxford Handbook of English Law and Literature, 1500–​1700. She is currently completing the book manuscript ‘The Literary Commons: The Law and the Writer in Early Modern England, 1528–​1628’. Julie Sanders is Professor of English Literature and Drama and Deputy Vice-​Chancellor at Newcastle University. She has published widely on early modern literature and has previously edited works by Ben Jonson, James Shirley, and Richard Brome. Her monograph The Cultural Geography of Early Modern Drama, 1620–​1650 (2011) won the British Academy’s Rose Mary Crawshay Prize for international women’s scholarship in 2012 and she also co-​authored Ben Jonson’s Walk to Scotland with James Loxley and Anna Groundwater (2014). Her current project is provisionally entitled ‘Making Spaces in Early Modern Drama’ and aims to think through material objects and their modes of production to understand the presence of lived practice and experience on the page and stage in the period. She is co-​editor with Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr of the Oxford University Press series on Early Modern Literary Geographies. Katherine Scheil is Professor of English at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of Imagining Shakespeare’s Wife: The Afterlife of Anne Hathaway (2018); She Hath Been Reading: Women and Shakespeare Clubs in America (2012); and The Taste of the Town: Shakespearian Comedy and the Early Eighteenth-​Century Theater (2003). She co-​ edited, with Randall Martin, Shakespeare/​Adaptation/​Modern Drama (2011). Laurie Shannon is Franklyn Bliss Snyder Professor of Literature at Northwestern University. She has chaired the MLA Division on Shakespeare and served as a trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America. Her first book, Sovereign Amity: Figures of

list of Contributors    xix Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts, concerns Renaissance uses of the classical trope; her second book, The Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales, charts the creaturely dispensation against which Cartesianism intervened, arguing that early modern thinkers drew on natural history and Genesis to place animals within the privileged language of politics. In a new project entitled ‘Hamlet’s Kindness’, she is turning back to consider a dethroned figure of ‘human being’ from the comparative perspective afforded by early modern natural history. Geraldo U. de Sousa is Professor of English at the University of Kansas. His research fo­cuses on Shakespeare, early modern British Studies, gender and race, social justice, the Mediterranean region, and the cross-cultural experience. His publications include At Home in Shakespeare’s Tragedies (2010), Shakespeare’s Cross-Cultural Encounters (1999), and numerous articles. He served as editor of the journal Mediterranean Studies for ten years and has published on Luso-Brazilian, Mediterranean, and Global Studies. For many years, he also helped organize the international congresses of the Mediterranean Studies Association, and he has travelled extensively. Matthew Steggle is Professor of Early Modern English Literature at the University of Bristol. He has published four books on early modern drama, and worked as a contributing editor to scholarly editions including The Cambridge Works of Ben Jonson (2012) and the Norton Shakespeare, third edition (2015). He is co-​editor, with Roslyn L. Knutson and David McInnis, of the Lost Plays Database (www.lostplays.org); and co-​ general editor, with Martin Butler, of the AHRC-​funded The Complete Works of John Marston, forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Lina Perkins Wilder is Associate Professor of English at Connecticut College and the author of Shakespeare’s Memory Theatre: Recollection, Properties, and Character (2010) as well as co-​editor, with Andrew Hiscock, of The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Memory (2017). Her essays have been published in Shakespeare Quarterly, Renaissance Drama, and Modern Drama. Her current book project is on shorthand and recording technology in seventeenth-​century England.

I n t rodu ction Encountering Shakespearean Comedy Heather Hirschfeld

Since 1598, when Francis Meres compared him to Plautus and Terence and proclaimed him ‘the most excellent’ among English writers of comedies for plays such as The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Comedy of Errors, and Love’s Labour’s Lost, audiences have tangled with Shakespeare’s comic enterprises. They have attended to the plays’ experiments with mistaken identity, their manipulation of disguise and the gender-​disruptive possibilities of cross-​dressing, and their self-​reflexive meditations on the nature of acting. They have laughed at their wordplay as well as their antic clowns. They have observed the dramas’ insistence on the spiritual as well as secular rewards of festivity, their alignments and re-​alignments of friends and family members, their championing of witty heroines, and their nearly tragic flirtations with disaster, violence, and death. They have witnessed the plays’ presentations of antagonisms as well as affections across social class and their treatments of law and commerce in locales foreign and domestic, landed and marine. They have grappled with the plays’ promise of forgiveness and restitution, their visions of community formation and dissolution, and their exposure of human passions ranging from anger to fear to grief to love. And finally, juggling the expectations of form and language inherited from ancient traditions of comedy, they have noted, following John Dryden, both Shakespeare’s ‘irregularity’ as well as his ‘greater wit’.1 The contributors to this Handbook consider these and the other features of Shakespeare’s comedies that made them—​and continue to make them—​compelling, even urgent, to historical and contemporary audiences. They do so from multiple perspectives, representing some of the most recent methodological approaches to Shakespeare, genre, and early modern drama. Some essays take up firmly established topics of inquiry—​Shakespeare’s source materials, gender and sexuality, hetero-​and homoerotic desire, race, religion—​and reformulate them in the kinds of materialist,

1 

John Dryden, Of Dramatick Poesie: An Essay (London, 1668), 46, 50.

2   Heather Hirschfeld formalist, phenomenological, or revisionist terms of current scholarship and critical debate. Others explore subjects—​ecology, cross-​species interaction, humoral theory—​ that have only relatively recently become pressing concerns for sustained scholarly interrogation. Still others, informed by increasingly sophisticated approaches to the material conditions and embodied experience of theatrical practice, speak to a resurgence of interest in performance, from Shakespeare’s period through the first decades of the twenty-​first century. And others investigate distinct sets of plays from unexpected and often polemical angles, noting connections between the comedies under inventive, unpredicted banners such as the theology of adultery, early modern pedagogy, global exploration, or monarchical rule. The chapters that follow treat in detail thirteen of the plays that, since the publication of the First Folio in 1623, have been identified as Shakespeare’s comedies: The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1589–​91), The Taming of the Shrew (1590–​1), The Comedy of Errors (1594), Love’s Labour’s Lost (1594–​5), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595), The Merchant of Venice (1595–​6), The Merry Wives of Windsor (1597–​8), Much Ado About Nothing (1598–​9), As You Like It (1599–​1600), Twelfth Night (1601), Troilus and Cressida (1602), Measure for Measure (1603–​4), and All’s Well That Ends Well (1606–​7).2 (See Figure I.1.) This group excludes two plays categorized under the banner of comedy in the Folio’s Catalogue, The Winter’s Tale (1609–​10) and The Tempest (1610–​11), which are given their full due (along with Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Two Noble Kinsmen) in a Handbook on Shakespearean Romance, their more modern generic home. (Multiple contributors do, however, offer brief discussions of these so-​called late plays as they inform their arguments.) The volume includes some Folio-​identified comedies—​All’s Well, Measure—​ that are often treated separately by scholars as ‘problem plays’ due either to their later composition dates or to the ironies and tensions of their conclusions.3 And it addresses the enigmatic Troilus and Cressida, also considered a ‘problem play’, which does not appear at all in the Folio catalogue, is printed as the first of the tragedies, and exists in some quarto editions with the title of ‘history’ and a prefatory epistle that praises the play among Shakespeare’s comedies: ‘So much and such savored salt of witte is in his Commedies, that they seeme . . . to be borne in that sea that brought forth Venus. Amongst all there is none more witty than this.’4 The choice of texts for inclusion here reflects theoretical as well as pragmatic principles. The elimination of the romances sharpens the temporal range of the plays under consideration, concentrating on those framed by the last decade of Elizabeth I’s reign and the first years of James I’s succession. But the selection still showcases the fluidity 2 

Dates follow Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, gen. eds., The Oxford Shakespeare, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. ix–​x. All references to Shakespeare’s plays are from this edition. 3  For the problem plays, see W. W. Lawrence, Shakespeare’s Problem Comedies (New York: Macmillan, 1931); E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare’s Problem Plays (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1949); and Robert Ornstein, Discussions of Shakespeare’s Problem Comedies (Boston, MA: Heath, 1961). Oliver Arnold challenges this category in Chapter 33. 4  William Shakespeare, The Famous Historie of Troylus and Cresseid (London, 1609), ¶2r.

Introduction   3

Figure I.1  First Folio, Catalogue, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (London, 1623). By permission of The Folger Shakespeare Library.

and flexibility of Shakespeare’s work with the comic, including his tendency, as multiple contributors note, to linger on its tragic potential. At the same time, however, the Handbook’s authors often return to the structural and substantive consistency of this group of plays even as they chart fresh conceptual and performance patterns across eighteen years of Shakespeare’s career. They thus explain the plays in ways that challenge the standard developmental model (according to which Shakespeare’s earlier comedies ‘affirm that men and women can find happiness and that the world is a comprehensible and benevolent place’, while his later ones ‘come to seem less joyous and more inflected with irony and potential failure’).5 In the process, they expose untapped features of the long-​recognized categories of intrigue comedy and romantic comedy, or apprentice play, festive play, and problem play.6 Each chapter of the Handbook is distinct in its understanding of the meanings and cultural significance of the plays. None, like the volume as a whole, pretends to comprehensiveness. But all, again like the Handbook as a whole, are oriented by the concept of the encounter as either a hermeneutic for exploring the plays or as a feature of their 5 

6 

Russ McDonald, The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare, 2nd ed. (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 83. Lawrence Danson, Shakespeare’s Dramatic Genres (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 58–​9.

4   Heather Hirschfeld dramaturgy. In the first half of this Introduction, then, I look to recent work in critical philology to establish the semantic resonances of the ‘encounter’ in Shakespeare’s time and in our own. I then consider the term’s interpretive purchase for engaging both with Shakespeare’s comedies and with the critical tradition that has shaped our reception of them. I conclude by identifying the unique ways in which the term informs the approaches or arguments of each of the essays.

Critical Semantics A recent brand of philological study—​what Roland Greene calls ‘critical semantics’—​ has stressed the crucial relationship between early modern words, worlds, and world-​ views. Particular ‘key words’, that is, and ‘the concepts that shadow them’, serve as indices of the period’s explicit values and internal contradictions. As Greene explains, words are ‘dense with semantic and cultural implications’; they are ‘implicated in an intellectual fabric’, and ultimately ‘inseparable from the unresolved issues of the age’.7 In a related vein, Jeffrey Masten argues that the study of pivotal categories of early modern thought—​ in his case, sex and gender—​ is ‘necessarily a philological investigation’, requiring attention to ‘the etymology, circulation, transformation, and constitutive power of some “key words” within early modern lexicons and discourses’.8 And Paul Yachnin, addressing Shakespeare specifically, argues that the playwright is able to ‘give voice to the complex meanings inside words’, allowing him, particularly in his use of metaphor, to ‘project patterns from one domain of experience in order to structure another domain of a different kind’.9 This Handbook frames its multiple approaches to Shakespearean comedy as an issue of critical semantics, specifically the concept of the encounter. An encounter—​as its etymology suggests—​is a meeting or moment of contact marked by confrontation, opposition, or conflict as well as by the possibility or potential for future negotiation, amity, and even affection. (The English ‘encounter’ derives from the late Latin incontrāre, which combines the prepositions in, in or into, and contra, against.)10 Shakespeare’s own use of the term preserves the dynamism of its origins; he turns to it to identify interactions complicated by either (or both) amorous or aggressive intent. At the beginning of Much Ado, for instance, a play that delights in the correspondences of love and war, Don Pedro suggests that he woo Hero on Claudio’s behalf: ‘I will assume thy part in

7 

Roland Greene, Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 12. 8  Jeffrey Masten, Queer Philologies: Sex, Language, and Affect in Shakespeare’s Time (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 5. 9  Paul Yachnin, ‘Introduction’, Shakespeare’s World of Words, ed., Paul Yachnin (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 31. 10  OED, ‘encounter, n.’

Introduction   5 some disguise /​And tell fair Hero I am Claudio, /​And in her bosom I’ll unclasp my heart /​And take her hearing prisoner with the force /​And strong encounter of my amorous tale’ (1.1.304–​8). In a singular scene in Measure, a different Claudio, this time on behalf of his sister Isabella, imagines meeting death itself as a female lover: ‘If I must die, /​I will encounter darkness as a bride, /​And hug it in mine arms’ (3.1.81–​3). It serves as the term by which Shakespeare understands the complications of the bed-trick: in All’s Well Helena consoles Diana’s mother that she see it lawful, then: it is no more, But that your daughter, ere she seems as won, Desires this ring; appoints him an encounter; In fine, delivers me to fill the time, Herself most chastely absent: after this, To marry her, I’ll add three thousand crowns To what is passed already. (3.7.30–​6)11

In I Henry IV, Shakespeare uses ‘encounter’ to refer both to Hal and Falstaff ’s trickery at Gadshill (2.2) and to the clash of monarchical forces with the Percy rebels at the end of the play (5.1). And in a tragic instance with hints of comic possibility, Polonius proposes to Claudius that they observe Hamlet and Ophelia: ‘At such a time I’ll loose my daughter to him. /​Be you and I behind an arras then. /​Mark the encounter’ (2.2.164–​6). As these examples suggest, for Shakespeare an encounter refers to meetings of acquaintances, intimates, and recognized enemies. Or as the lexicographer Robert Cawdry puts it succinctly in his Table Alphabetical, the verb form means to ‘set against, or to meete’.12 But for late twentieth-​and early twenty-​first-​century scholars of Shakespeare and early modern England, the concept of the encounter has become a particularly significant, even polemical, way to name a range of meetings between strangers or others—​Europeans and non-​Europeans, Christians and non-​Christians, English and non-​English. Such contact, and the power dynamics it entailed, was of course enabled by increasing global trade and territorial exploration and expansion. As Lisa Bailey, Lindsay Diggelmann, and Kim M. Phillips write, ‘English speakers along with the inhabitants of all the countries of Western Europe were experiencing “encounters” with places and peoples across the shrinking globe, vicariously or through texts’.13 Such studies recall, either explicitly or implicitly, Mary Louise Pratt’s work on eighteenth-​and nineteenth-​century European colonialism and her language of the 11 

Encounter is also part of the vocabulary of the bed-trick in Measure; the Duke tells Isabella they will ‘advise this wronged maid to stead up your appointment, go in your place; if the encounter acknowledge itself hereafter, it may compel him to her recompense’ (3.1.251–​4). 12  Robert Cawdrey, A Table Alphabetical (London, 1604), D6r. 13  Lisa Bailey, Lindsay Diggelmann, and Kim M. Phillips, ‘Introduction’, in Lisa Bailey, Lindsay Diggelmann, and Kim M Phillips, eds., Old Worlds, New Worlds: European Cultural Encounters, c.1000–​ 1750 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2009), 1.

6   Heather Hirschfeld ‘contact zone’, the ‘space of colonial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict’.14 ‘Encounter’ for Pratt is part of a vocabulary meant to unsettle long-​held assumptions, underwritten by an earlier language of ‘discovery’, about the agency of cross-​cultural contact. Rather than privileging European hegemony in the Americas, as discovery does, the term ‘attempt[s]‌to invoke the spatial and temporal copresence of subjects preciously separated by geographical and historical disjunctures, and whose trajectories now intersect’ and to ‘foreground the interactive, improvisational dimensions’ of this copresence. Stephen Greenblatt shares this vocabulary in his Introduction to New World Encounters, in which he explains the unequal intersection of European and indigenous peoples as ‘an encounter between peoples who do not understand each other’ but who ‘tr[y] to make sense of the other’s actions’.15 More recently, Kumkum Chatterjee and Clement Hawes have argued for ‘register[ing] the limits of European agency’ as well as for the ‘unpredictability’ of the ‘slippery world of early modern encounters’.16 As all of these scholars make clear, the terminology is not meant to erase the imbalances, asymmetries, and inevitable potential for violence embedded in European enterprises in the New World; it cannot, that is, redress ‘the remorseless tide of dispossession and destruction that marked a large part of the relation between [European] and indigenous peoples’.17 Nor does it provide equal access to the subjective experience of each of the two sides—​particularly the indigenous side—​in any given contact. But the term is used both to emphasize new ways of thinking about agency as well as to call attention to the various intellectual and affective responses to the ‘stark incommensurability’, in Anthony Pagden’s words, of cross-​cultural interaction. European conquerors and colonizers, he explains, were ‘preoccupied with the difficulties involved in encountering other worlds and their often fiercely “other” inhabitants’,18 and their responses included wonder, fear, ambivalence. They also included a recalibrating of the past and the known in the fresh light of the novel and unexpected, the pre-​modern version of the ‘shock of the new’.19 14  Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), 6. 15   Stephen Greenblatt, New World Encounters (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), viii, x. 16  Kumkum Chatterjee and Clement Hawes, ‘Introduction’, in Kumkum Chatterjee and Clement Hawes, eds., Europe Observed: Multiple Gazes in Early Modern Encounters (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2008), 5, 6. 17  Philip D. Morgan, ‘Encounters between Britain and “Indigenous” Peoples, c.1500–​1800, in Mark Daunton and Rick Halpern, eds., Empire and Others: British Encounters with Indigenous Peoples, 1600–​ 1850 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 52. 18  Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 23. 19  See Anthony Grafton with April Shelford and Nancy Siraisi, New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).

Introduction   7 Because of the semantic range and affective associations of the term, scholars of early modern England have relied on it to discuss the place of the nation—​and its stage—​ in both colonial and non-​colonial exploration and trade. They are of course highly conscious that these exchanges are not synonymous; as Jerry Brotton warns, ‘it is not possible to emplot the narratives of encounter, conquest and domination, which have characterized the Renaissance story of the Americas’, across territories in the Mediterranean and other areas in the east. But they do rely on the idiom to express the frictions and energies of cross-​cultural contact. Jyotsnah Singh describes the development of English culture and commerce in ‘an expanding global world, one which includes the discovery of America to the west, growing interactions and encounters with the east ranging from the Ottoman Empire on Europe’s borders to the far east, forays into north and sub-​Saharan Africa, and even explorations to the North Seas’.20 Jean Howard identifies the pressure on English merchants to ‘travel to Spain, Aleppo, and to the Moluccas, . . . to live among strangers in these polyglot entrepots, and . . . to bring back to England the products of their trading encounters’.21 Alison Games chronicles the ways in which cosmopolitan English traders, travellers, and ambassadors were ‘often able to encounter those unlike themselves with enthusiasm and curiosity’ from the Mediterranean to Virginia.22 And Geraldo U. de Sousa, specifically addressing Shakespeare’s ‘interest in a multi-​cultural environment of foreign commercial transactions and cross-​cultural interactions’, places the dramatist ‘at the center of a cultural debate about Europe’s encounters with and colonial domination of foreign lands and alien peoples’.23 As this brief survey suggests, the modern scholarly use of ‘encounter’ depends upon, even as it shifts or expands the semantic emphasis of, the early modern meaning of the term. For Shakespeare, the encounter named a meeting between known entities, whether friends or enemies, involving various degrees of aggression, desire, wonder, and fear. For recent critics, the term has been used to refer to a variety of cross-​cultural exchanges, in which the constituents are often markedly different or alien, in which the principal affects are not only fear and wonder but also the shock of the new or incommensurable, and in which the positive potential of contact is undercut by potential calamity. Or as Brotton suggests: ‘the encounters with those territories depicted on the globe . . . produced a whole new range of social and political possibilities, as well as problems. How were such encounters to be incorporated into contemporary systems of knowledge? What were the mechanisms by which sovereigns legitimately laid claim to such territories? How were the immense and complex commercial ramifications of such

20 

Jyotsnah Singh, ‘Introduction’, in Jyotsnah Singh, ed., A Companion to the Global Renaissance: English Literature and Culture in the Era of Expansion (Malden, MA: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2009), 5. 21  Jean E. Howard, ‘Introduction’, Shakespeare Studies 35 (2007), 20. 22  Alison Games, The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion: 1560–​1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 9. 23  Geraldo U. de Sousa, Shakespeare’s Cross-​Cultural Encounters (London: Macmillan, 1999), 3.

8   Heather Hirschfeld encounters to be marshalled for maximum financial benefit, and what impact would the experience of these commercial exchanges have on early modern society?’24 The Handbook of Shakespearean Comedy is oriented by these various significations and questions. Such an approach to a set of canonical plays and their conventions may seem to risk ‘domesticating’ the term’s present-​day polemical implications. But the mentalité of the encounter was itself being domesticated in Shakespeare’s England and Europe. As Pagden attests, ‘it became increasingly difficult, even for Europeans with no direct experience of America, to ignore the sheer presence of its novelty’.25 The term thus effectively designates a conceptual horizon, what Joseph Loewenstein has called in a different context, a ‘range of possible thoughts and conceivable actions’ as well as the ‘fantasies made possible by the knowledge, the conditions, the full habitus’ of the period.26 This horizon depended upon the kinds of fictional and first-​hand reports and displays of the far-​flung that we recognize as the literature of travel and colonialism.27 It also depended upon exposure to—​and enjoyment of—​imported goods whose global origins and modes of production were simultaneously acknowledged and concealed in their consumption.28 Finally, it infused even mundane events and activities with a sense of the new or unpredictable. Or in Samuel Daniel’s formulation, ‘the opening of a new world’ in the sixteenth century ‘strangely altered the manner of this [one]’.29 The early modern English theatre spoke to this horizon in multiple ways, and not simply because, as George Puttenham remarks: ‘art is, as it were, an encounterer and contrary to nature, producing effects neither like to hers, nor by participation with her operations, nor by imitation of her patterns, but makes things and produceth effects altogether strange and diverse’.30 As scholars have long attested, the theatre of this period dramatized for its audience—​an audience which ‘for the most part do not travel much, but prefer to learn foreign matters and take their pleasures at home’—​a world of international exchange, exploration, and travel.31 In its stage properties and other 24  Jerry Brotton, Trading Territories: Mapping the Early Modern World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 21. 25 Pagden, European Encounters, 23. 26  Joseph Loewenstein, Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 12. 27  See for instance Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Travel and Colonial Writing in the English Renaissance, 1545–​1642 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). 28  Linda Levy Peck, Consuming Splendor: Society and Culture in Seventeenth-​Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 29  Samuel Daniel, The First Part of the Historie of England (London, 1612), A3v. 30  George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy: A Critical Edition, ed., Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 384. 31  Thomas Platter, Thomas Platter’s Travels in England, 1599, trans. Clare Williams (London: Jonathan Cape, 1937), 168. Platter’s observation follows his recollection of seeing a ‘play in which they presented diverse nations and an Englishman struggling together for a maiden’ (167). Singh offers a useful summary of the English stage as a ‘site for re-​enactments of . . . global issues and geopolitics’ (‘Introduction’, 23). Among the many important contributions to this field, see Valerie Forman, Tragicomic Redemptions: Global Economics and the Early Modern English Stage (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Claire Jowitt, Voyage Drama and Gender Politics, 1589–​1642: Real and Imagined Worlds (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003): and Daniel

Introduction   9 infrastructure, it also participated materially in this exchange.32 Used with care, then, the encounter offers a compelling vantage for thinking about the form and content of Shakespeare’s comedies:  their pointed interest in geographically diverse settings and allusions, their staging of unsettling contacts between characters of different classes, races, nationalities, genders, and species, their innovative uses of linguistic style and earlier sources, their place or function in the developing institution of the early modern theatre. Even more pointedly, the term offers the Handbook a historically apt interpretive strategy, a hermeneutic of defamiliarization meant to encounter—​to see anew, to see as new—​Shakespeare’s comedies.

Encountering the Critical Tradition Of course, seeing anew is always conditioned by the ways we, and others, have seen before. We have already witnessed two early modern instances of viewing Shakespeare’s comic output: Meres’s commentary and the First Folio Catalogue. Those samples took their cues from theories and practices of theatrical genre inherited from the ancients, according to which comedies are ‘composed to imitate life and resemble manners’.33 These practices were taught through the curriculum of the early modern schoolroom and reformulated by early modern writers and thinkers, who supplied relatively consistent definitions of comedy as didactically oriented fiction about private, often common, people and events.34 (Though modern scholars are careful to note that the plays were far less didactic in practice than in theory.) Sir Philp Sidney noted that ‘Comedy is an imitation of the common errors of our life, which [the poet] representeth, in the most ridiculous & scornefull sort that may be. So as it is impossible, that any beholder can be content to be such a one.’35 Similarly, Puttenham, in his Arte of English Poesie, explained that ‘comical poets’, among whom he names Menander, Aristophanes, Terence, and Plautus, ‘set forth, in shows [and] pageants accompanied with speech, the common behaviors and manner of life of private persons and such as were the meaner sort of men’.36 The anti-​theatricalist Philip Stubbes is far more judgemental, decrying ‘the matter and

Vitkus, Turning Turk: English Theatre and the Multicultural Mediterranean (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 32 

Jean Howard’s study of the performing monkey in Eastward Hoe observes the theatre’s ‘implicat[ion] in the cultural expropriation that accompanied the expansion of global trade and traffic’ (‘Bettrice’s Monkey: Staging Exotica in Early Modern London Comedy’, in Global Renaissance, 337). 33  Donatus, ‘The Fragment from On Comedy and Tragedy’, in Michael J. Sidnell, ed., Sources of Dramatic Theory 1: Plato to Congreve (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 79. 34  See Leo Salingar, Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974). 35  Sir Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesie, ed., Elizabeth Porges Watson (London: Everyman, 1997), 105. 36 Puttenham, Art of English Poesy, 115.

10   Heather Hirschfeld ground’ of comedies as ‘love, bawdry, cozenage, flattery, whoredom, adultery; the persons or agents, whores, queans, bawds, scullions, knaves, courtesans, lecherous old men, [and] amorous young men, with such like of infinite variety. If I say there were nothing else but this, it were sufficient to withdraw a good Christian from the using of them’.37 Despite their distinct attitudes, and despite their neglect of contemporary ‘court comedies’ that featured aristocratic characters, all three of these descriptions hint at what has become a standard definition of comic form and a standard recitation of its key practices and conventions. Comedy is a ‘problem-​solving story’ which, having tackled complications primarily of the domestic sphere or the marketplace, ‘ends in resolution and order normally symbolized by marriage’.38 Its principal tropes include:  intrigues of desire running up against familial and social obstacles; disguise or deceit leading to various complications of identity, which are sorted out in a moment of recognition; concern with the body so as to emphasize its materiality; linguistic experimentation with both sound and sense; active, witty female characters; juxtaposition of worldly accident with magical or divine intervention; and an atmosphere of holiday spirit, even transgression, that acknowledges the absurdity of human foibles at the same time that it promises their resolution.39 Subsequent editors, critics, and performers of Shakespeare have assessed his comedies in light of such definitions and against early English stage traditions. The result has been the massive widening and complicating of our understanding of the plays; in particular, scholars and practitioners have elaborated their signature elements and the ways in which these elements match, stretch, or violate generic expectations. They have also debated whether or not these elements present a unified comic vision (‘Shakespearean comedy’) and have argued about comedy’s ideological force, the ‘cultural work’ it does. Early versions of these interpretive tactics are visible in major eighteenth-​and nineteenth-​century editions and commentaries. As Emma Smith has carefully chronicled, these commentaries almost uniformly praised the comedies for the variety of their plots, the fully realized diversity of their characters, and, with their linguistic power and accuracy, the ability to leave a ‘powerful impression on the moral feeling’.40 Such analyses have been thoroughly reconfigured in the past century under the influence of theories and methodologies including Marxism, Russian formalism, structuralist linguistics and anthropology, semiotics, Foucauldian historiography, New Historicism and materialism, and feminism. These approaches have buttressed several signature accounts of the plays, and it is largely in relation to their paradigms and claims that we encounter Shakespeare’s comedies and comedy today. 37 

Philip Stubbes, Anatomy of Abuses, in Tanya Pollard, ed., Shakespeare’s Theater: A Sourcebook (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 120. 38  Alexander Leggatt, English Stage Comedy, 1490–​1990: Five Centuries of a Genre (London: Routledge, 1998), 4. 39  Penny Gay, The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare’s Comedies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 1–​15. 40  Emma Smith, ‘The Development of Criticism of Shakespeare’s Comedies’, in Emma Smith, ed., Shakespeare’s Comedies (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 4–​24, quotation on 16.

Introduction   11 Perhaps the most influential have been the accounts Northrop Frye and C. L. Barber. They apply to the shared elements of Shakespeare’s comedies’ anthropological and psychoanalytic sensibilities that converge in the notion of comic festivity: a drive toward communal celebration, the knitting together of individuals into a larger whole, and the reconcilement of this new social whole with an older one. As Frye describes in A Natural Perspective, ‘the structure [of Shakespearean comedy] begins with an anticomic society, a social organism blocking and opposed to the comic drive, which the action of the comedy evades or overcomes’.41 This structure is accommodated by a play’s movement into a ‘green world’, the opposite of the ‘normal world’ and understood as a real or imagined place of enchantment and dreams. Barber considers the arrangement ‘saturnalian’, the dramatization of holiday license that affords audience members ‘clarification through release’, or a recognition of their relationship to natural and social environments. The effects of such clarification can be seen as ideologically conservative: the revelry of festive comedy provides an outlet for psychological and political energies which, having been discharged, no longer threaten the status quo. As Barber himself notes, misrule mocks but also depends upon or even reinforces a sense of established, hierarchical order: ‘a saturnalian reversal of social roles need not threaten the social structure, but can serve instead to consolidate it’.42 It is possible to understand much subsequent criticism as encounters or negotiations with the festive model, as critiques of its substantive claims about individual plays and conventions, as antidotes to its blind-​spots, and as challenges to its depiction of a unified, conservative Shakespearean comedy that ends with the recognition of self in relation to others and the world. Relying largely on historicist and materialist methods, some scholars have rethought the nature of the festive itself, either by casting it as potentially destabilizing or by connecting it explicitly to Reformation religious controversy and thus to ‘mirth and revelry explicitly identified with early modern Catholicism’.43 Others have refashioned, using psychoanalytic paradigms, the festive emphasis on clarification, suggesting instead that Shakespearean comedy is a particularly rich source of psychological or social misrecognition rather than conventional anagnorisis.44 Students of Shakespeare’s language have made compelling cases for the ways in which the comedies’ 41  Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), 73. 42   C. L. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959), 245. 43  Phebe Jensen, Religion and Revelry in Shakespeare’s Festive World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 22. See also Michael Bristol, Carnival and Theater: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England (New York: Methuen), 1985; Francois Laroque, Shakespeare’s Festive World: Elizabethan Seasonal Entertainment and the Professional Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 44  See Barbara Freedman, Staging the Gaze: Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis, and Shakespearean Comedy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); Jonathan Hall, Anxious Pleasures: Shakespearean Comedy and the Nation-​State (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995). Ejner Jensen also challenges the interpretive emphasis on endings in Shakespeare and the Ends of Comedy (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991).

12   Heather Hirschfeld ‘extraordinary metadiscursive density’ is the real subject of the plays rather than festive release; and they push against earlier conservatism by insisting that Shakespeare’s ‘exploration of linguistic concerns . . . can be seen as a powerful response to the most important epistemological crisis of the Elizabethan age’.45 Others have critiqued the ideological underpinnings of what the earlier critics saw as Shakespeare’s largely benevolent green world, seeing in it threats and dangers that result from dark human drives or from socio-​economic or racial inequity.46 And others have addressed the kinds of social and sexual energies neglected in the conservative festive model, exploring the ways in which Shakespeare ‘discovered how to use the erotic power that the theater cou