[In the essay below, Hall describes the pursuit by the male characters of witty, erotic discourse as irresponsible, and contends that the patriarchal order is threatened through their actions, but ironically defended by the female characters.]

As this chapter introduces a new section and a shift in emphasis that will pertain for the rest of the book, it is useful to consider briefly its relationship to the arguments that have been made so far. I started my readings of the plays with a consideration of the merchant comedies, where the relationship between mercantilism and state power is relatively unproblematic in the sense that it enters into the theatrical representation itself. But in the other comedies, from Love's Labour's Lost and The Two Gentlemen of Verona onwards, this is not the case, though it hovers on the fringes in Twelfth Night, through the figure of Antonio. This means that either I must concede that mercantilism is not an issue if it is not represented in some way, or that a more symptomatic mode of reading is called for.

In chapter 1, I cited Franco Moretti's argument in Signs Taken for Wonders, that emergent capitalism and the collapse of feudal “status society” which it brought about, are the preconditions for a more developed theatricality on the one hand and the drive to restore the feudal order through a centralized absolute monarchy on the other. I would add that, even though the absolutist goal was never fully realized, and is indeed unrealizable, it is important to understand it as a set of imperatives giving rise to much legislation to maintain a precapitalist status quo, or even, in the case of family law, to increase patriarchal control within the family and to foment the ideological identification of the family as the microcosm of the state. From the point of view of the drive to restore identity-as-status, theatricality is a symptom of the chaos of the world because identity becomes a construct produced by what Stephen Greenblatt has called “self-fashioning.”¹ Renaissance self-fashioning in Greenblatt's sense is inherently theatrical because it is the freedom to construct a “self” through the manipulation of signs. Such a freedom has diabolical undertones, for self becomes author of self, and it implies an assault upon the divine author of all being and guarantor of all identity. This new freedom is also the freedom to entrap others who may be less alert to the way in which the sign is no longer an indicator of identity or status.

From the point of view of formal linguistics, a floating signifier is always a floating signifier. But from the point of view of those who experience the historical shift from a feudal “status society,” underpinned by land ownership, to a largely monetarized one, supported by the circulation of capital, the newfound freedom of the signifier is momentous. It is the scene of an immense expansion of possibilities, from psychic mobility of all sorts to imperial domination of societies where signs are still taken for wonders, but it is also the scene of the dialectical counterpoint to this dominant expansionism, a collapse of a former “being” fixed by status and a consequent reterritorializing nostalgic desire. My borrowed terms for this schizoid-producing historical psychodrama are Deleuze and Guattari's “deterritorialization” and “reterritorialization.” These are useful terms because, not only do they name an inherently contradictory dynamic introduced by capitalism, but they also point to the link between anxiety over lost identity and fixed property forms. “Deterritorialization” can be seen to denote the pleasures of release from established codes (not simply their transgression, which was always possible and always subject to retribution). Such pleasures permit expansion, mobility, and an exaltation in individual possibilities when the arbitrariness of the signifier stands revealed as such, and therefore loses its former automatic and unquestioned authority. This is the pleasure of wit itself, and the concept of “deterritorialization” enables us to understand why wit assumes such enormous cultural importance in the Renaissance, being not only practiced but endlessly commented upon. But the euphoric pleasure in words is itself caught in the anxieties over loss of status and former “being.” If the Renaissance court was typically the scene of the cultivation of wit, it was also (though less avowedly) the scene where wit was most dangerous, a potential threat to the very theatricalized center which cultivated it.

Shakespeare's first comedy, The Comedy of Errors, and the two comedies which followed shortly afterwards, namely Love's Labour's Lost and The Two Gentlemen of Verona, seem to belong to two different worlds. The first, which I have linked to The Merchant of Venice through a consideration of mercantilism, seems to have very little to do with the world of courtly wit. Yet I would argue that the obvious differences of genre and discourse are themselves misleading. It is not just a question of pointing to the often noted presence of romance elements within the merchant and the courtly plays alike, important though that is. It is rather that generic differences themselves can play an important role in ideological misrecognition. To be specific, the highly visible separateness of the world of the court from the world of commerce, carried over into modes of theatrical representation, is not simply a reflection of the difference between the real social spaces of the city and the court, but one of the major illusions of courtly representation itself. I call it an “illusion” rather than a discursive effect (although it is also that), because, while the ostensible function of courtly theatricality is the celebration of power by making its signs visible and putting them on display, nonetheless all the strategies of display are negations of the Crown's dependence upon the invisible but growing power of commercial capital.² Here we need a symptomatic analysis, which goes beyond or behind the representations themselves to focus critical attention on what the representations are called upon to negate.

The drive to concentrate power in the person of the sovereign at the center of the court involves a massive misrecognition of the dispersal of power, its anonymity and lack of organic centeredness, which mercantilism was making inescapable. Courtly drama, rituals, etiquette, and iconography must all be seen as the response of centralism to this threatening dispersal. The signs to which centralism entrusts its necessary misrecognitions, are not merely decorative or, in contemporary Puritan terms, frivolous. They are also aspects of the construction of the nation state, since they constitute a fictional invention of an organic center. (In any case, the Puritan critique of “frivolity” is itself a political challenge aimed at the aristocratic claim upon the national center.) The visible display represents the aristocratic side of the uneasy marriage with empty, virtually fatherless capital, which we have seen so precariously celebrated at the end of The Merchant of Venice. For example, the inventions in courtly literature of an ancient narrative linking the Tudor “blood” to King Arthur, or even to Trojan ancestry, begun at the behest of Henry Vlll and reiterated in Spenser's Faerie Queene, are part of an anxious restoration of “blood” filiations (i.e., phallic or male descent) at the center of the body politic. Against the new abstract power of monetary signs, the old powers get reinvented within a vast deployment of signs with a claim to represent “true values.” The same point can be made about the reinvention of “feudal” rituals and pageants. At the would-be center of these embattled signs is the patriarchal figure himself. The problem is that the patriarch in the age of mercantilism risks becoming too perceptible as nothing but a fantasy, a figure in a system of signs. And, of course, in the court of Elizabeth, this fate is even more threateningly visible because the defender and representative of traditional patriarchy has a female body.

Shakespeare straddles both city and court, and, as Walter Cohen observes, his writing is the product of the brief period when a consensual “national theater” was still possible, energized by tensions which had not yet polarized into opposing class factions with little mutual ground on which theatrical interplay could take place.³ Cohen's thesis is arresting, for it implies that the tensions of the theater of national consensus anticipate the polarization of Parliament and court, leading to the Civil War, which succeeded and displaced them. It also makes us aware that the last act of The Merchant of Venice does not merely represent a contemporary integration of landed aristocracy and bourgeois capital, but is in its own way an intervention in defense of a national consensus under the Monarch and, ipso facto an anxious anticipation of the dissociations to come. The various journeyings between Venice and Belmont, and the festive conclusion in Belmont, have the force of a desire for the avoidance of the polarization of city and court (economic and symbolic capitals) to the point of open conflict. Here it is useful to recall that the final narrative passage from Venice to Belmont, where harmony is installed, is a figure for the desired “forgetting” by the aristocratic court of the real conditions pertaining in the mercantile city. The court constructs itself as organic center precisely by such a negation of its real conditions of existence. But, unfortunately for this centralizing drive, the naive narratives that it requires tend to founder on the impossibility of sustaining the illusion.

.....

The pleasures of language in Love's Labour's Lost have often been noted. But I am concerned with the way in which the erotic pleasure of wit can be read symptomatically for the political anxieties which it both engenders and strives to conceal. All the male characters are swept along in the pleasures of verbal self-display and self-affirmation, but the one thing that cannot be displayed is precisely a centered “self.” To deploy verbal wit is to escape into the mobility of signs. But such “euphoric speech acts,”⁴ whose seductive power also attracts the ladies, introduce new anxieties at the same time. The lords are not only narcissistic but also seductive. And seduction is an aggressive challenge and bid for dominance. One should bear in mind that the princess of France in this play is the ambassador and representative of the king. Her figural relationship to Elizabeth is therefore very important, particularly when the king is reported to have died at the end. Then the question is not whether the princess and ladies are attracted to the lords, but whether the latters' words have a true substance. Seduction is a threat to the patriarchal power which the princess inherits, for seduction is also a power, working entirely through signs (mostly but not exclusively verbal in this play), that has displaced older, supposedly more direct forms of power. The safeguarding of this older power against that of signs (i.e., against its own pleasure) is as important for this play as it is for the Elizabethan court.

The seductiveness of wit is obviously important in the sexual combats which make up a large portion of the play. The opening scene, just like the opening of the later sexual combat play, Much Ado About Nothing, makes clear that the witty wars of love are replacing the real recent wars of arms. The warriors have become scholars, but under the “siege” of the ladies (i.e., of their own desires), they turn to amorous verbal combat. This turn is comically represented in the play as a betrayal of their oaths and themselves. Within the jokes which celebrate the power of love, therefore, there is an anxiety over the loss of a controlled self. The compensatory narcissistic self-affirmation is inseparable from a paranoiac drive to master the apparent “cause” of the disruption, namely the ladies. The latter have good reason to defend themselves. The lifting of inhibitions, which, as Freud says, constitutes the pleasure of wit, has a dangerous other side, for the lover remains the warrior:

KING.
Saint Cupid, then! and, soldiers, to the field!
BEROWNE.
Advance your standards, and upon them, lords!
Pell-mell, down with them! but be first advis'd
In conflict that you get the sun of them.

(Love's Labour's Lost, 4.3.362ff.)

The ladies, who are trained and led by a supremely witty future queen, know clearly what the stakes are. Berowne's advice to “get the sun of them” cannot be fulfilled in its metaphorical military sense, and therefore not in its physical sense of putting the ladies on their backs either. It is they who impose the conditions at the end, which prevents the triumphant comic ending expected by the males. We should not assume that the love/war metaphors of Renaissance discourse were as comfortably and conventionally stabilized as they have since become through familiarity. It is not certain here that love is the psychic truth and war a mere playful conceit. Even in this early play, Shakespeare disconcerts by probing the reversibility of witty amorous discourse. Male erotic triumph would be the victory of irresponsibility and loss of order. And the paradox is that the order which is threatened by the witty deployment of verbal signs is the patriarchal order, defended by the ladies against the lords who have lost themselves in signs.

The shift of combat into witty discourse obviously is metaphorical. But the dramatic metaphors should also be understood in terms of the broad historical development, through which the courtly skills of language were partly displacing the older and more direct forms of power. Of course, it is not the case that the courtier was actually replacing the land-owning warrior, but rather that the latter has to become, at least to a certain extent, accomplished in the verbal skills of the former. This already involves a certain self-betrayal (as Hotspur, in I Henry IV vigorously protests). The awareness of the power of language mocks the certainties of the erstwhile warrior class, and nowhere more so than in the erotic imagination. Thus the opening scene of Love's Labour's Lost, with its references to the end of war and the displacement of the warriors to become first scholars, and then lovers, figures a whole cultural situation, and not just the court of Elizabeth.

In Renaissance literature the numerous debates on the relative merits of Arms and Letters mediate an important shift away from the feudal warrior ethic and the definition of selfhood by deeds. Such discussions are constructed around a nostalgic myth of a lost plenitude, but they mark the real emergence of a new discourse, that of the Renaissance court, in which Letters (together with flattery, lying, or any verbal formality) represented new forms of power. The distance which separates Castiglione's Courtier from Machiavelli's Prince is not all that great. In this play the shift from Arms to Letters is parodistically registered in Armado's erotic enterprise. The braggart soldier of comic tradition has become the braggart poet:

ARMADO.
Adieu, valour! rust, rapier! be still, drum! for your manager is in love; yea, he loveth. Assist me, some extemporal god of rhyme, for I am sure I shall turn sonnet. Devise, wit; write, pen; for I am for whole volumes in folio.

(1.2.171ff.)

Armado is also the grotesque mirror of the speeches and actions of the king and the others. In an important sense they too are braggart soldiers turned poets. Armado brings the qualities of the miles gloriosus into this play about erotic language, so that instead of glorying in false exploits against a fantasized male enemy, he glories narcissistically in his verbal triumphs over women. When he writes to Jaquenetta in the posture of humble supplicant, as courtly convention demands, he also writes without any inhibitions being placed upon the form of pleasure that he is deriving from the verbal display. And that pleasure is the pleasure of rhetorical mastery over Jaquenetta. His narcissism demands a negation of his dependence upon her. The letter opens with worshipful praises of the mistress, but this yields rapidly to his fable of King Cophetua (himself) and “the pernicious and indubitate beggar Zenelophon (Jaquenetta)” (4.1.79ff.). The sinister side of this psychology of manic compensation for his enforced humble posture is revealed in the comically monstrous concluding verses:

ARMADO.
Thus dost thou hear the Nemean lion roar
'Gainst thee, thou lamb, that standest as his prey;
Submissive fall his princely feet before,
And he from forage will incline to play.
But if thou strive, poor soul, what art thou then?
Food for his rage, repasture for his den.

(4.1.89ff.)

This letter of wishful male mastery, inadequately concealed within the supplication of love, is read aloud to the princess in a scene where she has been enacting a huntress role, shooting deer and praising women's resistance to male domination (4.1). So a complex dramaturgy shows an Artemis or Amazon queen listening, outraged or amused, to the normally hidden truths of the conventional declaration of submission to love for a lady. Armado's love letter is itself an act of war against the “base wench,” although she eventually wins. Armado is then disarmed (desarmado), and goes sub iugum to put his hand to the plow for three years. In a word, he is comically castrated, and this mirrors the main action. The queen and court ladies impose a similar penance on their disarmed warriors. It is a milder response than Diana's revenge on Actaeon, but its connotations of death and castration are similar.

The same psychic process is explored in Berowne. Berowne's speech of submission to love and to his lady contains the same compensatory deflation of Rosaline. Being more tactful than Armado, he keeps his aggressive and resentful feelings for soliloquy. So they find no outlet in the beautiful canzonet which he subsequently sends to her. But the audience of this comic soliloquy hears the resentment which the conventional canzonet conceals:

BEROWNE.
Nay to be perjur'd, which is worst of all;
And among three, to love the worst of all;
A whitely wanton with a velvet brow
With two pitch balls stuck in her face for eyes;
Ay and by heaven, one that will do the deed
Though Argus were her eunuch and her guard

(3.1.189ff.)

This is a comic reversal of conventions, from the lover's constancy to the “praise” of the mistress' body parts and chastity. And indeed the conventionality of Berowne's speech, preserved even in the inversion, is most important, because it is a discourse shared with the other lords and the king, as well as with its unrestrained, unconscious parodist, Armado. The greater visibility of Armado's ego enables all, the ladies and the audience, to understand that the pleasure of wit is the pleasure of reassuring mastery. That is why it must provoke resistance here, as well as pleasure.

Rosaline's praise of the power of Berowne's wit is fulsome, but also guarded:

ROSALINE.
His eye begets occasion for his wit;
For every object that the one doth catch
The other turns to a mirth-moving jest,
Which his fair tongue (conceit's expositor)
Delivers in such apt and gracious words
That aged ears play truant at his tales,
And younger hearings are quite ravished;
So sweet and voluble is his discourse.

(2.1.69ff.)

This praise of the power of the tongue is a confession to being attracted by its seductions. But there is an undertone of fear too, at being “quite ravished.” Berowne's begetting eye, supplemented by his witty and seductive speech, destabilizes objects, but there is a threatening power in the speech which arises from the pleasure of that very destabilization. The princess and ladies' employment of wit in this play meets the destabilizing challenge of the lords' wit and resists it. They too are witty, but against wit. Similarly, they reverse the Muscovite masque, in which the lords seek an advantage through the control of visual appearances, by disguising themselves more effectively than the lords. In the mutual combat of uncovering gazes, the ladies are not deceived by signs, and they penetrate the lords' appearance whereas the lords are effectively taken in by the ladies' disguise. In effect, the ladies have the last word on every occasion, and turn seduction back against the seducer.

However, it is not only the ladies who are afraid of the power of signs. Or to put it another way, their fear is granted a certain truth, and is not marginalized as mere “female” timidity. The supremely witty Berowne is viewed with great suspicion by the king and the other lords as well, because his wit seems to free him from his word even as he gives it. He assents to the king's law only because he is able to find a loophole:

BEROWNE.
Necessity will make us all forsworn

.....

For every man with his affects is born
Not by might master'd, but by special grace.
If I break faith, this word shall speak for me,
I am forsworn on mere necessity.
So to the laws at large I write my name;

(1.1.148ff.)

So, to “write [his] name” to the law is not to commit his being. Only “special grace,” after all, gives mastery over “affects.” Freud could not have put it better. The function of Berowne's wit is to release the lords and the king from their self-imposed “law,” in the name of the libidinal truths which they seek to deny. Speaking wittily in defense of these countertruths, Berowne redefines their oaths as “Flat treason against the kingly state of youth” (4.3.289). And in so doing, he is responding to a call from them which they nonetheless continue to mistrust, with comic duplicity:

KING.
Then leave this chat; and good Berowne, now prove
Our loving lawful, and our faith not torn.
DUMAIN.
Ay, marry, there; some flattery for this evil.
LONGAVILLE.
O! some authority how to proceed;
Some tricks, some quillets, how to cheat the devil.
DUMAIN.
Some salve for perjury
BEROWNE.
O! 'tis more than need.

(4.3.280)

Berowne then sets out in formal terms the desired justification for the breaking of their oath. Thanks to his rhetoric, the “self” is separated from its word:

BEROWNE.
Let us once lose our oaths to find ourselves,
Or else we lose ourselves to keep our oaths.
It is religion to be thus forsworn;
For charity itself fulfils the law;
And who can sever love from charity?

(4.3.357ff.)

When all the ladies reenact the test of constancy of the code of chivalry at the end by imposing various forms of penitential abnegation upon their submissive lords, they reverse this separation of self from word. This enables the lords to demonstrate in ideal form the unbreakable bond between themselves and their word. To that extent the penance is a gratification. The renunciation of their vow to abstain from love has, after all, thrown that bond between word and self into doubt; so abstinence in the name of love will restore it. The penance offers reassurance (therefore a gratification) in terms of a return to idealized feudal modes of recontainment.

The penance imposed upon the lords by the ladies is a recognizable historical archaism, very similar to Don Quixote's self-imposed penances to prove his love for Dulcinea in the solitude of the Sierra Morena.⁵ Yet in Shakespeare's play this anticipated demonstration of the link of word to being is not itself a source of laughter, as it very definitely is in Cervantes' novel. In fact, it affords its strange gratification by putting a stop to laughter. If there is any pleasure here, it involves an end to the wit and the destabilizing effects of euphoric laughter. For there is an anxiety that shadows the pleasure of laughter, and this anxiety is served by the ladies' resistance to manic male domination, but it is also more general: since the power of witty language threatens identity, deeds will restore it. This pleasure in restabilization is historically regressive. Shakespeare invokes earlier discursive modes, (including popular ones, as Barber has demonstrated)⁶ but the end is not simply an achieved regression. It is more like the reinvention of discursive traditions, comparable with the fiction of “feudal” ceremony reinvented for the Tudor Court. The pleasures of wit, when they run out of control, threaten not only excessive polarization and the reemergence of warfare from within the love/war metaphors, but also a loss of self too radical for the social order to bear. The ladies are agents of a fantasy of regressive reterritorialization, for they both defend sovereignty over themselves in their resistance to the seductions of language and restore the same possibility to the lords.

At the same time, however, the ladies' triumph over the men's desire for verbal mastery is associated with the conquest of men by death. This emerges explicitly at the end in Rosaline's challenge to Berowne to prove his wit, no longer in games of sexual seduction but in seducing death itself:

ROSALINE.
You shall this twelve month term from day to day
Visit the speechless sick, and still converse
With groaning wretches; and your task shall be
With all the fierce endeavour of your wit
To enforce the pained impotent to smile.
BEROWNE.
To move wild laughter in the throat of death?
It cannot be; it is impossible:
Mirth cannot move a soul in agony.

(5.2.853ff.)

Rosaline too doubts that it can be done, and looks forward to Berowne's “reformation.” Although I have talked of the gratifications of closure, because of the containment of the threatening power of seduction in the wit, this can in no way dispose of the strong note of castration and death at the end. There is an uneasy division in the dramatic discourse, because the investment in order and recontainment stands disturbingly revealed as a death wish. In a sense, the submission to the ladies at the end is Petrarchan, but without the necessary displacements and misrecognitions to make it acceptable. That is to say, the closure announces itself too clearly. The sovereign lady is a castrating figure, but only because the lords themselves have a strong investment in their own subordination to law, to the mastery of their own affects, and to the consequent reconnection of word to being. Castration and penance serve the patriarchy against the play of signs and the irresponsible transitory identities which subvert it.

Similar anxieties return in the sexual politics of A Midsummer Night's Dream, where they are more deftly managed and more thoroughly explored. But in the romances, Shakespeare employs another strategy. The mobile heroine becomes an active agent in the restoration of patriarchal order because she stands beyond its crises of language and identity (rather like the women in The Comedy of Errors, but with an independent initiative which they lack). Female mobility, like the wit or psychic mobility of the heroines in this play, is deployed against the male mobility which threatens the decentered patriarchal order. Two Gentlemen of Verona is more markedly Petrarchan than the later All's Well That Ends Well, but in both plays the heroine performs a therapeutic role for patriarchy. In the end, of course, this is merely a further displacement of anxieties, since the rescue of patriarchy by a woman contains a covert acknowledgement of subordination and dependence.

Notes

1. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).

2. Leonard Tennenhouse, Power on Display: the Politics of Shakespeare's Genres (New York and London: Methuen, 1986). My argument is in effect a critique of the idea that power can be unequivocally secured by display.

3. Walter Cohen, “The Crisis of the Public Theater,” Drama of a Nation: Public Theater in Renaissance England and Spain (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985), 255-281.

4. Ruth Nevo, Comic Transformations in Shakespeare (London and New York: Methuen, 1980), 77.

5. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha (Madrid, 1605) 1, chapters 23-26.

6. C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form in Relation to Social Custom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 113-118.