Shakespeare's Bed-Tricks | Julia Briggs, Hertford College, Oxford
Shakespeare's Bed-Tricks
Julia Briggs, Hertford College, Oxford
Shakespeare's Use of the bed-trick has often given offence and so invited justification or apology. Its explicit content was sufficient to make Charles and Mary Lamb, rewriting the plot of All's Well That Ends Well for children, change Helena and Bertram's sexual intercourse into a midnight conversation. Twentieth-century critics have been troubled by the bed-trick's coarseness, its fictive or mechanical nature, its implausibility.1 G. K. Hunter considered it "irrelevant and tasteless", while acknowledging that Shakespeare's contemporaries did not apparently share his view, and admitting that 'in the literature of the time the trick is, of course, very common'.2 He instances R. S. Forsythe's list of twenty-one plays that make use of it: though incomplete, it includes two examples each from Marston and Heywood, three from Middleton, and others from Fletcher,...
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