All's Well That Ends Well (Vol. 38) | Mary Bly (essay date 1994)
Mary Bly (essay date 1994)
SOURCE: "Imagining Consummation: Women's Erotic Language in Comedies of Dekker and Shakespeare," in Look Who 's Laughing: Gender and Comedy, edited by Gail Finney, Gordon and Breach, 1994, pp. 35-52.
[In the following essay, Bly examines the role the bedtrick plays in defining Helena as an uncommon Renaissance heroine.]
Renaissance comedies of love are inherently both erotic and chaste. They must begin with desire in order to lead to marriage; they must end with love in order to qualify as comedy. The whole can be reduced to an echoing formula: "[they] no sooner met but they looked; no sooner looked but they loved . . . and in these degrees have they made a pair of steps to marriage."' The disturbing potential of turning this simple progression into a play has never been ignored. Sixteenthcentury critics warned of wanton speeches and lascivious delights; twentieth-century critics delineate the crucial erotic...
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