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