Rome En-gendered

There don't seem to be many women in the Rome of Julius Caesar , only Calpurnia and Portia, and they seem to exist less as characters in their own right than as opportunities to see into the private lives and decisions of their husbands. Caesar's willingness (at least at first) to be swayed by Calpurnia's premonitions, deciding to stay at home because of a woman's "humor", stands in contrast with Brutus' reluctance to give in to his wife's entreaties to know his thoughts. Keeping one's thoughts to oneself is manly, while women are considered unable to govern their tongues -- a commonplace in Shakespeare's England and not just in Rome.

It is only when Portia gives a sign of her own 'manliness' (which in this play is equated with 'Romanness'), that Brutus gives in and promises to share with her the secrets that he has already yielded to his male friends. Interestingly, the sign that Portia gives of being a manly Roman woman, able to keep secrets, is a voluntary wound to the thigh (2.1.301-2). This is a sign of her Stoic self-control. But it is also an act of self-penetration: like a man, she wields the sword, but suffers for it as a wounded woman.

Roman manliness is in fact associated with health. Immediately after the scene in which Portia reveals her wound, Brutus receives his sick friend, Caius Ligarius, speaking with "feeble tongue" and with a "kerchief" on his head. But when he joins the conspiracy to restore manly republican virtues to Rome, he throws off his sickness. Julius Caesar, with his epilepsy, his deafness, and his barren wife, symbolizes the weakness and effeminacy that sets in when those republican virtues are abandoned. (Cassius' mean-spirited story of his sickness on campaign, crying for something to drink "as a sick girl" is intended to make this same point.)

Thus, Republican Rome can only be governed by men, and can only admire women who are like men. It's opposite, called 'tyranny', is associated with feminizing degradation, as when Cassius exhorts Brutus with this passage of inflaming metonymies:

... our fathers' minds are dead,
And we are governed with our mothers' spirits
Our yoke and sufferance show us womanish ....
(1.3.82-84)

The popularity of Julius Caesar

Shakespeare's Julius Caesar seems to have been extremely popular. It was the play that the Swiss tourist Thomas Platter crossed the Thames to see in September 1599, reporting it acted "very prettily in the house with the thatched roof". Nearly forty years later, the poet Leonard Digges recalled the hit made by Shakespeare's Caesar, Brutus, and Cassius:

So have I seen, when Cesar would appeare,
And on the Stage at halfe-sword parley were,
Brutus and Cassius; oh how the Audience
Were ravished, with what wonder they went hence ....

It's striking to think that Shakespeare's audiences might have found the quarrel between Brutus and Cassius before the battle of Philippi 'ravishing'. What particularly might they relish in it? Perhaps the complexity of these "honourable men", whose high principles and touching friendship combine with pettiness and irascibility?

Another draw would simply have been the title character, Julius Caesar. As well as a key figure from Roman history, whose writings were standard fare for Elizabethan grammar schools (one of which Shakespeare attended), he also featured in the popular culture of the period. In Richard III, one of the doomed little princes asks about the ancient story that Julius Caesar built the Tower of London. A stranger story about JC from medieval legend was that he was the father of the fairy king Oberon by the Morgana, the fairy half-sister of King Arthur!

Shakespeare may also have drawn on the widespread tradition of performing the downfall of Julius Caesar (there were a number of contemporary plays on which he might possibly have drawn, and it was a favorite subject for university students to dramatize). Although Shakespeare definitely used historical sources for his play which located the assassination in Pompey's Theatre, he may have bowed to another old popular tradition that located his murder in the Capitol. In Hamlet, Polonius recalled the time when he "did enact Julius Caesar" (probably as a student) and "was killed in the Capitol". As David Daniell, editor of the Arden Julius Caesar, notes, "Elizabethans wrongly understood ‘the Capitol’ as the citadel of ancient Rome, where the Senate met".

(For more information on the kinds of dramas, histories, and legends on which Shakespeare might have drawn for JC, as well as his other Roman plays, see volume V of Geoffrey Bullough's Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare. You can download this in its entirety -- as well as the other seven volumes of Bullough and other neat stuff -- from playShakespeare.com

http://www.playshakespeare.com/library/cat_view/509-reference-documents?orderby=dmdate_published

On the Wheel of Fortune, going down

In The Tragedy of Julius Caesar (as it is titled in the Folio of 1623), as in The Tragedy of King Richard the Second, Shakespeare is concerned with the downward swing of the Wheel of Fortuna, and even with what happens after a great historical ruler has reached bottom. After all, as Stanley Wells points out in his introduction to Julius Caesar, "Caesar is dead before the play is half over".

So in Richard II, the King's headlong fall takes place in the exact middle of the play, in 3.2. This is a highly compressed scene which begins with Richard's return from Ireland and his bold assertions that the very English stones and the angels of heaven too will fight for his divinely given kingship. But almost immediately after these assertions, by around line 150, Richard is dramatizing his fall by inviting his astonished court to sit upon the ground with him and "tell sad stories of the death of kings," all deposed by the various means of war, poison, murder. (Some are haunted by the ghosts of the rulers they've killed, as we'll see Brutus is in Julius Caesar.)

To an audience sensitive to the proper physical deportment and position of a king -- he is literally to be above his subjects -- this sitting on the ground is a stark gesture of abdication. (Remember there are very few stage directions in the early texts of the plays; but the Bishop of Carlisle's reproach, "My lord, wise men ne'er sit and wail their woes," suggests that the actor playing Richard really did sit down on stage, in all his 'kingly' robes.) It looks forward to the highly symbolic gesture of Richard coming down from the "walls" of Flint Castle in the very next scene -- from the balcony above the stage to the level of the other actors on the stage. This kind of physical enacting of high and low points in the career of a ruler also resonates through the more metaphorical allusions to "mounting Bolingbroke" and to Bolingbroke and Richard as "two buckets" in 4.1.189-90:

That bucket down and full of tears am I,
Drinking my griefs, whilst you mount up on high.

Puritans and Marriage Contracts

Angelo may have some of the characteristics of the stereotypical Puritan. Historical Puritans of the Jacobean period were, however, much more in favor of marriage than Angelo seems to have been. The Puritan preacher William Gouge, for instance, published an enormous tome on marriage and other household matters, titled Domesticall Duties, in 1622. Gouge, unsurprisingly, affirms that the husband is the ultimate "head" of the household. Less expected, perhaps, is his emphasis on mutuality and reciprocity in marriage. (He argues, for instance, against the common view that adultery in men is less serious than in women -- against the so-called 'double standard'.)

William Gouge is also very clear that the sort of contracts that seem to have existed between Claudio and Juliet, and between Angelo and Mariana, were virtually as binding as marriage itself. Here is what Gouge writes about such contracts in his enormous domestic manual:

Of a Contract, What It is?
... The right making of a firm contract consisteth in two things:
1. In an actual taking of each other for espoused man and wife.
2. In a direct promise of marrying each other within a convenient time.
So as a form of contract may be made to this purpose:
first, the man taking the woman by the hand to say, I, A. take thee, B., to my espoused wife, and do faithfully promise to marry thee in time meet and convenient. And then the woman again taking the man by the hand to say, I, B., to take thee, A., to my espoused husband, do faithfully promise to yield to be married to thee in time meet and convenient. This mutual and actual taking of one another for espoused man and wife in the time present, and a direct promise of marrying one another afterward, setteth such a right and property of the one in the other as cannot be alienated without licence had from the great Judge of heaven, who hath by his divine ordinance settled that right ...

By this formula, it seems then that the "great Judge of heaven" overrules Angelo in the case of Claudio and Juliet, and judges Angelo himself, in his alienation of Mariana.

It's clear too that both parties are supposed to promise, to speak, to make the contract binding. If one recalls the "espousal" passage in The Taming of the Shrew (2.1 -- where Baptista says to Petruchio and Kate, "give me your hands"), only Petruchio speaks and promises, and yet the contract is treated by all as binding. At the end of Measure for Measure, we also hear only Isabella's silence, although she is prompted twice by the Duke to give her hand and her promise. At 5.1.503: "Give me your hand and say you will be mine"; then, at 547-8, perhaps feeling that the public offer of a hand is premature, the Duke proposes, "... if you'll a willing ear incline, / What's mine is yours, and what is yours is mine."

At least the Duke ends by recognizing mutuality and reciprocity, but the actual contract is still in question, an if.

The letter of the law

Laws and contracts are plot generators in both The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure. It is Antonio's (perhaps unaccountable) willingness to enter into the bond with Shylock that generates the crisis of the trial scene in 4.1, providing incidentally the occasion for Portia's tour de force performance as a "young and learned doctor" of law. In Measure for Measure, the long-deferred performance of the contract between Angelo and Mariana provides the legal premise for the famous plot device of the 'bed-trick'. The disguised Duke assures Mariana of the contractual basis of her sleeping with Angelo when he says "Nor, gentle daughter, fear you not at all. / He is your husband on a precontract" (4.1.70-71).

Both plays seem to suggest, by their plots, the wrongheadedness of sticking to the letter of the law. Shylock condemns himself by sticking to the terms of his bond, by craving only "the law" and nothing more. Angelo likewise insists upon the law, thereby preparing judgment for himself. Justifying his rigorous condemnation of Claudio, Angelo declares, "When I that censure him do so offend /Let mine own judgment pattern out my death" (2.1.29-30). It will only take Angelo until the next scene -- his first meeting with Isabella -- to reach that when.

And yet, laws and contracts aren't exactly cancelled by the comedic endings. Those with secret or super-clever knowledge, like Portia and the Duke, seem to be able to insist on super-literal meanings of the law which magically dissolve difficulties. So, Portia sticks even closer to the literal terms of Shylock's bond than Shylock, insisting that he may take his pound of flesh but no blood. And Angelo in fact hasn't condemned himself by his own rigor against fornicators, since he isn't a fornicator himself. In Shakespeare's time, a betrothed couple who had consummated their betrothal by sleeping together would indeed have been regarded as legally married.

Fairy Tale Endings

You may have noticed that when Bassanio makes his choice of the leaden casket, he falls at the end of his speech of deliberation into one of those rhyming couplets that seem to signal a transition into a different mode -- perhaps one that it is more magical, more fraught with significance, more like a mythological than a realistic action.

Thy paleness moves me more than eloquence,
And here choose I -- joy be the conseqence!

Sigmund Freud, in a classic essay on the "The Theme of the Three Caskets", links this choice between three to a similar choice in another of Shakespeare's plays. Lear, however, makes the wrong choice, preferring the shiny flatteries of his two elder daughters to the silent love of Cordelia, his youngest. Freud interprets Bassanio's choice between three caskets as a choice between three women as well. (For Freud -- as you might expect! -- caskets, boxes, any sort of container stands in for woman.) But the choice of the third isn't a choice: it's inevitable that the third is chosen. Freud connects both Cordelia's silence and the pale lead of the third casket with death. Death is the inevitable third. But for Bassanio, a supremely desirable woman substitutes for death, putting off the inevitable. This is the wild wish fulfillment of dreams and of all comedies.

The wish-fulfillment woman, though, still retains something of death, and thus of the uncanny, about her. And this is something that might adhere to Portia, and make it difficult for us to picture what life will really be like for Mr and Mrs Bassanio of Belmont.

What's so funny about The Merchant of Venice?

The play definitely begins on a dreary note, with Antonio's "In sooth, I know not why I am so sad. / It wearies me, you say it wearies you." And however you respond to the character of Shylock, you can hardly say that what happens to him is funny. In fact, the humanity of Shylock ("If you prick us, do we not bleed?"), which Shakespeare emphasizes even while playing with the anti-semitic stereotypes that his audience would have taken for granted, makes one wonder if the play shouldn't be reclassified as a tragedy.

So what makes the play a comedy? It was definitely classed with the comedies, coming right after Midsummer Night's Dream in the first complete publication of Shakespeare's plays, the posthumous "First Folio" of 1623.

It depends of course on how one defines a comedy. The Canadian Oxford Dictionary defines comedy as "a play, film, etc., of an amusing or satirical character, usually with a happy ending." This is certainly an operative definition for us when we go looking for a comedy to rent in the video store.

The literary critic Northrop Frye, however, defined comedy rather differently (and he had Shakespeare's comedies, including his late comedies or 'romances' specifically in mind). Frye's definition is this:

A comedy is not a play which ends happily: it is a play in which a certain structure is present and works through to its own logical end, whether we or the cast or the author feel happy about it or not.

So, Frye's definition of comedy is not about happiness or amusement or satire but about a certain kind of inevitable, driving structure -- as inevitable as spring following on winter. Frye in fact sees the structure of Shakespearean comedy as "natural," just like the progression of seasons.

In his 1965 book, A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance, he outlines the structural stages of a comedy thus:

Stage I: irrational law, obstacles, obstinate father, winter
Stage II: disguise, veiling identity (especially sexual), confusion, misunderstanding
Stage III: clarification, metamorphosis, fertility, spring, forgiveness

It is easy to see how The Merchant of Venice ends with the clarification of veiled identities (e.g. Portia and Nerissa). But forgiveness?

Kate as Griselda

After his verbal tussle with Kate in 2.1., Petruchio remakes her with words, claiming the "she's not froward, but modest as the dove" etc. He also makes some ominous predictions about her, including the prediction that she will prove a "second Grissel" (l. 292).

The story of patient Grissel or Griselda was well-known in the early modern period --retold by Chaucer as well as glanced at by Shakespeare (not only in this play but also in The Winter's Tale ... so keep an eye open for it). It's not a pretty story. It goes something like this:

A nobleman named Walter chooses to marry a peasant girl called Griselda, effecting her change in social status by stripping her naked and reclothing her in fine robes. Griselda bears two children, a boy and a girl, and Walter 'tests' her by taking both away, pretending to kill them, giving her low origins and unfitness to be a mother as reason. He further 'tests' by sending her back to her father, stripped to her 'smock' (i.e. her underwear). As a final humiliation, years later, Walter announces he is marrying a younger, aristocratic woman. Griselda bears all of this with super-human obedience and patience! For this, she is finally 'rewarded': the new young wife turns out to be her daughter, and Griselda is reinstated as Walter's proper wife by being re-clothed in fine clothes.

In her essay "Controlling Clothes, Manipulating Mates: Petruchio’s Griselda" Margaret Rose Jaster argues that the old tale of Griselda underlies the play, Petruchio's taming of Kate in particular. On this reading, the stripping of Kate in the "tailor scene" (4.3) is not innocuous fun, but rather a brutal deconstruction of Kate designed to elicit total Grissel-like obedience.

The question for us to consider now is whether this deconstruction is successful.

Full reference for the link:
Margaret Rose Jaster, “Controlling Clothes, Manipulating Mates: Petruchio’s Griselda,” 29 Shakespeare Studies (2001): 93-108.

"The apparel oft proclaims the man ..."

So says Polonius, giving his son good advice in Hamlet. If we want to understand the assumptions of the ordinary playgoer in Shakespeare's theatre, we should pay attention to Polonius, the spouter of clichés. In this case, Polonius draws our attention to the close relationship between what one wears and who one is in Shakespeare's England.

On Tuesday, we started to think about how social status is not just proclaimed but even determined by clothes. When the tinker Christopher Sly is "wrapped in sweet clothes," he becomes a convincing member of the aristocracy. (At least he is able to convince himself.) Similarly, when Tranio swaps outfits with his master Lucentio, no one is able to distinguish master from man -- to great comic effect.

One could even say that early modern people fetishized dress in the sense of attributing magical signficance to it in its power to impart identity. This anxiety over the relationship between dress and social status even realized itself in law. The Elizabethan "Sumptuary Laws" were enacted to prevent wasteful economic extravagance and to make sure that the signs of status in costume corresponded to 'the reality'. Certain rich fabrics, for instance, were restricted to people of high status, so that no one could wear "cloth of gold" or "fur of sables" except "duchesses, marquises, and countesses". "Velvet in gowns, furs of leopards, embroidery of silk" were also restricted (although you could get away with these if you were the wife of a baron's son or of a knight).

Of course, the existence of such laws suggests that there was a lot of dressing up -- above one's station!

So, when the real Vincentio comes upon his son's servant Tranio in "silken doublet" and "velvet hose" (5.1.61-62), he knows that things are seriously disordered.

My next blog entry will be about clothes proclaiming the woman -- particularly the wife.

Can this cockpit hold the vasty fields of France?

More on cockfighting and unseemly theatres. We might note that the 'Chorus' introducing Henry V explicitly reminds us that the heroic action of the play will take place on an "unworthy scaffold" in a space that could double as a "cockpit". (Remember that the playspaces immediately preceeding the permanent theatres of London made use both of temporary scaffolds and of amphitheatres that could double as theatres of torment for animals.)

Shakespeare seems to draw attention to the poverty of material resources in his theatre. He won't let us forget this, making jokes at the expense of his "wooden O" -- which glances not only at the theatre's round shape and its small size but also at its nothingness, its status as a cipher.

Yet this is a bareness, a nothingness that has great potential. The Chorus to Henry V makes this clear in a metaphor from accounting:

O pardon! since a crooked figure
Attest in little place a million;
And let us, ciphers to this great accompt,
On your imaginary forces work.

Just as a series of 0's added to 1 can make a million -- 1,000,000 --- so too the imperfections of Shakespeare's theatre, pieced out with the imagination, can create grand scenes, kingdoms, princes.

Of course, this is a self-deprecating boast. It is not just the audience that makes something from nothing: their thoughts are shaped in the crucible of Shakespeare's dramatic art. So "O pardon!" is really "See what I can do!"

What is the effect of these metatheatrical moments in Shakespeare's plays? These are the moments which playfully jostle us from any state of suspension of disbelief, reminding the audience of itself and of the world underlying the one conjured by the play. "This green plot shall be our stage" (MND); "the groundlings ... capable of nothing but inexplicable dumbshows and noise" (Hamlet); "If I were a woman I would kiss as many of you as had beards that please me" ('Rosalind' in AYLII). These reminders that the play is a play seem not to detach us but rather to draw us further in.

The noisy, smelly enjoyments of Shakespeare's London

A Swiss tourist, Thomas Platter, gives us a rare eyewitness account of what Shakespeare's theatre -- and Shakespeare's London -- was like. Platter writes in his travel diary of 1599

On September 21st after lunch, about two o'clock, I and my party crossed the water, and there in the house with the thatched roof witnessed an excellent performance of the tragedy of the first Emperor Julius Caesar with a cast of some fifteen people; when the play was over, they danced very marvellously and gracefully together as is their wont, two dressed as men and two as women.

This account suggests that the audiences of the brand new Globe Theatre found nothing incongruous in a merry jig to close off a tragedy. Nor did audiences sit in a reverent hush. Platter remarks that during the two or three afternoon performances in London theatres (each vying to be the most popular), audiences could buy the food and drink that were carried round for sale, indulge in the notorious English habit of taking tobacco, and perhaps even make overtures to the "great swarms" of prostitutes who frequented the playhouses.

We should not forget that the London theatres in which Shakespeare worked and for which he wrote were primarily about pleasure. Yet the "pleasure" experienced by Shakespeare's audiences might not necessarily be familiar to us. Platter also gives an account of a rival diversion -- cockfighting -- where spectators watch "with eager pleasure the fierce and angry fight between the cocks, as these wound each other to death with spurs and beaks." The master of the cockfighting told Platter of the practice of giving the cocks brandy before they fought, "adding what wonderful pleasure there was in watching them."

To read a more extended account of Platter's pleasures in London, see The Norton Anthology of English Literature's "Norton Topics Online" http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/16century/topic_4/tplatter.htm

Blogging the Bard

Welcome to my Shakespeare course and my blog for English 399. I'll be updating this blog at least twice a week, roughly corresponding with our Tuesday/Thursday meetings.

My aim will be to offer you short reflections on our readings and discussions. I'll also use this space to answer -- and ask -- questions or offer factual tidbits that might be of interest to all. Feel free to make comments on postings and to offer suggestions for what you'd like to see here.

See you tomorrow!

Sylvia Brown