[In the following review, Holmberg praises the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama production of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, noting that elaborate costumes and stage backgrounds are not necessary to enjoy an enthusiastic performance of this play.]

Drama is the one literary genre that cannot be properly appreciated in either a classroom or an armchair. It is conceived as a spectacle and written to be seen, and the word theater derives from the Greek verb to look at. I always begin lectures on Shakespeare or any other dramatist with an exhortation to my students to see plays in performance as often as possible. All wise saws, however, tend to lose their edge of truth, and Dr Johnson once remarked that men “need not so much to learn as to be reminded.” A recent production of The Two Gentlemen of Verona demonstrated to me once again how essential the theatrical experience is to our understanding of any dramatic text.

Some enclaves, however, still exist in the academic community that consider going to the theater intellectually irrelevant. Not long ago I overheard one of the leading authorities on Shakespearean texts express chagrin over the fact that US Public Television in collaboration with the BBC would screen all thirty-seven Shakespearean plays. “Shakespeare's plays should be read,” he contended. “In production they seem silly and vulgar.”

Perhaps no play has struck so many viewers as “silly and vulgar” as The Two Gentlemen of Verona. In comparison with Shakespeare's other works, it has received relatively little scholarly attention and few major productions. Critics usually dismiss it as an early work of apprenticeship which promises much for the future but delivers little for the moment. Dr Johnson asserted that it was not one of its author's “most powerful effusions.”¹ Caroline Spurgeon finds evidence for “haste of a kind we so rarely find in later plays,” and deduces that it was written “in a considerable hurry.”² Mark van Doren calls the work “a slight comedy” that “minces uncertainly to an implausible conclusion,”³ and D. A. Traversi believes that the play “has some claim to be considered Shakespeare's most tedious.”⁴ The play's only justification, it would seem, is that it was the author's first faltering attempt to adapt the conventions of pastoral romance to the stage and that it blazed the trail to As You Like It and Twelfth Night.

Lest I seem to mock this prevailing critical tradition from a position of assumed infallibility, let me hasten to add that until recently my voice also joined this chorus of universal censure. The only raison d'être I could perceive for the play was the air sung in Silvia's honor. After all, it did inspire one of Schubert's loveliest Lieder. A recent production presented by the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama at the Edinburgh Festival, however, quickened my pulse, uplifted my heart and accorded me a deeper understanding of Shakespeare's early comedy.

This production, an all-student venture from design to direction, illuminated a work that I had never really appreciated and made me realize again the necessity of witnessing plays in performance. The particular kinds of insights I gained by seeing this student production would never have come to me in the normal course of reading and studying the text itself. The printed word is merely a point of departure. Total theater is a synergistic conflation of both literary and non-literary elements, and sensitive actors and directors bring a mode of knowledge to a play which scholars and critics cannot afford to ignore.

One of the reasons this production was so enjoyable and so poignant was the small size of the auditorium. Each one of the hundred-odd spectators who fitted into this tiny hall had a close and direct relationship with the players on the stage. Tyrone Guthrie once observed that “the theatre will not survive unless the fact is faced—and that right soon—that live acting is not indefinitely expansible. It is my belief that anything subtle or intimate cannot be projected much beyond fifteen rows.”⁵ And Irene Worth, one of the preeminent Shakespearean actresses of our time, maintains that

Huge theaters make you go beyond the design of the work. It was grotesque, acting The Cherry Orchard at the Beaumont. There are no acoustics there at all, and you use all your energy trying to be heard instead of using it for acting. … Imagine having to face an audience with your voice amplified by a microphone—you no longer have control of your own voice. It's like having your voice dubbed into another language; it is not you acting any more. The most perfect theater I ever acted in was in Montevideo, Uruguay, where I did my Shakespeare recital with John Gielgud. It was an old-fashioned theater with millions of little boxes, and you could see the ladies there, with their shoulders bare and fans and flowers. And all we had to do was whisper. It was divine.⁶

Many productions of Shakespeare's early comedies are lost in the cavernous dimensions of monstrous stages. Further, they are encumbered and ultimately toppled by epic proportions and high pageantry that the plays cannot support. Much of the important action in Shakespeare—even in the histories and tragedies—occurs in private moments when a sense of intimacy shared between audience and actors can heighten the emotional impact of a scene. The grand opera approach and proscenium stage often militate against this type of relationship and lower the dramatic intensity.

In this small classroom in Edinburgh, however, there was no distance between performers and audience and no alienating proscenium stage—only a slightly raised and temporary scaffold platform. Similarly, sets and props were absent. The wall was covered with a dark purple hanging whose texture and hue conveyed the impression of a sensuous richness. On either side of the playing space two white picket constructs were placed whose whimsical forms refused to be reduced to anything specific in nature and which when moved or joined together could indicate by turn a palace in Milan or a wild greenwood. Chekhov was not the first to discover that the cherry trees in the audience's imagination are more beautiful than any a set designer could paint on a canvas. Many decors—particularly those with a naturalistic bent—fetter the imagination and hold it earthbound. Less in the theater is often more.

The costumes in this performance were standard Renaissance weeds—the kind any American university has tucked away in its theater wardrobe. Obviously working on a shoestring budget, these students convinced me how unnecessary expensive furbishings are to Shakespeare. Imagination and taste are more important than bank accounts.

Recently, great emphasis has fallen on costume design in Shakespearean production. Stratford, Ontario, for instance, labors under the delusion that to make a play visually interesting all one needs is pretty clothes. Modern dress has become old hat, and Edwardian frocks now enjoy an unprecedented vogue. In addition, there have been a rococo As You Like It, a Caroline Measure for Measure, a Civil War Macbeth, an ante-bellum Hamlet, and a Rough Rider Much Ado About Nothing. Given the current fad for science fiction, I fully expect to see King Lear rigged out in space suits in order to demonstrate the play's timelessness.

It had been such a long while since I had heard iambic pentameters dressed in straightforward Renaissance garb that when Valentine and Proteus appeared in doublets in the Royal Scottish Academy's production, delight soon vanquished my initial shock. Apparently designers and directors are hard pressed to prove their originality and creativity, and the easiest and most obvious way is to stitch together costly and outlandish costumes. No one enjoys lavish spectacle more than I, and yet in Shakespeare's comedies it often becomes a distracting gimmick that serves only to promote the director's commercial viability. Actors who know what they are about can hypnotize an audience without exorbitant trappings. As Harry Levin points out with his characteristic lucidity, “No amount of expensive professionalism can equal a small band of amateurs with a purpose.”⁷

Another reason the Royal Scottish Academy's performance lingers in my mind as particularly enjoyable was the buoyant spirit of the troupe. A special kind of energy often drives amateur productions. The actors obviously relished the play itself, and nothing is quite so infectious as good humor. It was a holiday for the performers, and it soon became the same for the audience. Huizinga asserted that theater is above all a playful activity,⁸ and Barber signaled the close connections between Shakespeare's comedies and seasonal festivities.⁹ And yet a festive mood is rarer in the theater than one might suppose. Roland Barthes speaks of an “obscurantism of pleasure.”¹⁰ Nowhere is this obscurantism more apparent than in productions of Shakespeare's early comedies. They are generally approached with a paradoxical mixture of piety and doubt. More often than not they turn up in a company's repertory not because some director is animated by an urgent artistic vision or believes in their potential as dramatic pieces, but because they are Shakespeare's fledgling efforts and one has a moral responsibility to dust them off from time to time and drag them before the public. Hence morbidity rather than joy hallmarks most productions of the early comedies.

The high spirits of the players in this production can also be attributed to the fact that they are just on the eve of their professional careers, and their enthusiasm for performing has not yet been frittered away by years of toil in the theater. Hume Cronyn once remarked that the professional actor's hardest task was maintaining the magical illusion of the first night, of making the audience believe that what they are witnessing has never happened before. This “magical illusion” is crucial to successful comedy—nothing stales so quickly as a joke, and nothing is quite so morose as watching technically proficient but blasé actors go through their paces with naught but disciplined professionalism. This attitude ravages many evenings in the theater, and it is a problem of no small magnitude. Maintaining a sense of joy and excitement about one's chosen profession requires enormous inner resources, and actors are certainly not the only ones to succumb.

Yet another reason this production stands out was the youth and beauty of its performers—qualities which used to be considered minimum requirements for anyone hoping to play romantic leads. Alas, physical charm has all but vanished from Shakespearean performances, and production after production is ruined by the seeming impossibility of finding attractive young men and women to play attractive young men and women. There appears to be a worldwide shortage of jeunes premiers, and what one usually encounters are actors who are either too old or too unprepossessing to assume these roles with anything approaching conviction. This complaint is not the “petty cavil of a petty mind,” but addresses itself to the cardinal problem of miscasting.

The lords and ladies who inhabit Shakespeare's romantic comedies have a noble and well-documented lineage. They come from a long line of literary forebears elaborated in the pastoral romances of Italy, France and Spain,¹¹ and if anyone has doubts about how they behaved, all he has to do is read Castiglione's The Courtier, which encourages its audience to learn how to please others by cultivating its burnished surface. The world which Shakespeare transposed to the stage, therefore, is one of heightened beauty and ideal grace.

Shakespeare, of course, does not take this world at face value. As Harold C. Goddard indicates The Two Gentlemen of Verona is an “excellent burlesque of ‘gentlemanly’ manners and morals,”¹² and the pattern of satire established in this early work continues intact through As You Like It and Twelfth Night. Although the conventions of pastoral romance are mocked, miraculously they survive. Rosalind does not believe in love, but she falls in love—by her own reckoning, several fathoms deep. Shakespeare's genius lies precisely in his ability to express through drama the ambiguity of this double optique.

If the models of Petrarchan love, however, are destroyed visually, the verbal and dramatic irony no longer has any point. A parody of a parody loses its edge. Yet this is precisely what one sees on the major Shakespearean stages today. Recent RSC productions of The Tempest and Measure for Measure were sabotaged because the actors chosen to assume the roles of Ferdinand, Miranda and Isabella were not so much inept as visually in-appropriate and vulgar. In fact, they looked like refugees from the Living Theater. Exactly the same phenomenon occurs every year at Stratford, Ontario. There Marti Maraden, a fine actress but who was never meant by her creator to play Juliet, Perdita or Miranda, habitually undertakes these parts and thereby distorts and limits an important aspect of the play's resonance. An affecting Sonya in Uncle Vanya, she can never persuasively portray radiant beauty or youthful grace.

A recent production of Love's Labours Lost in Stratford-upon-Avon presents a perfect example of this deliberate attempt to destroy visually the models of courtly love so that the verbal irony is emasculated and pointless. One of the most stringent rules of classical drama was decorum—that kings should look and act like kings and not like peasants. In this production, however, the Princess of France lumbered about the stage barefoot, and when the King of Navarre, a corpulent version of one of the Three Stooges, came to address his amorous discourses to her, she proceeded to pare carrots. Perhaps the director was afraid that the audience would miss Shakespeare's travesty of the conventions of romance and felt that he had to make sure no one could take these characters seriously. If so, he fell far below the mark. Sean O'Casey observed that “Laughter tends to mock the pompous and the pretentious; all man's boastful gadding about, all his petty pomps, his hoary customs, his wornout creeds, changing the glitter of them into the dull hue of lead. The bigger the subject the sharper the laugh.”¹³ In the RSC production—and it is typical of a current trend in the Anglo-Saxon world—the objects of the satire were already so small and petty that there was nothing left to deflate. Everything was lead to begin with.

Evidently directors feel that it is unfair and even frivolous to ask actors auditioning for these parts to be attractive. Shakespeare, after all, is not A Chorus Line. But physical grace is important to these plays, and an actress who is ungainly has absolutely no business playing Miranda no matter how technically proficient. Fortunately, there are many parts in the repertory which do not require youth and beauty. But there are others which do, and one can only lament the gross miscalculations in casting that mar so many productions on both sides of the Atlantic.

To some these remarks may seem blind subservience to hidebound boulevard traditions. Actually just the opposite is true, for only if the romantic leads are embodied by young men and women possessed of undeniable comeliness is a director free to experiment with a highly personal and contemporary vision. The Munich Kammerspiel's recent productions of Schiller's Kabale und Liebe and A Midsummer Night's Dream afford a perfect example. These abrasively modernistic productions not only épatent les bourgeois but also force to their extreme limits the conventions of tragedy and comedy in order to see if they can survive a desperate, nihilistic, avant-garde interpretation. They do. And one of the main reasons these literary classics withstood such violent yet sensitive lacerations was because the romantic leads were young and beautiful. This physical presence anchored the savage perturbations wrought on these plays and rendered the final moments of reconciliation and illumination meaningful in a twentieth-century context.

Historically, the relationship between youth and beauty and effectiveness in these Shakespearean roles was not of paramount importance. Garrick, Kean and Macready were hardly ideal portraits of Petrarchan love; nevertheless, their audiences swooned.

Audiences, however, have changed, and whereas they used to listen attentively to words and relished nothing more than a long tirade, the modern public, conditioned and pacified by movies and television, tends to fidget unless it is entertained visually. In fact, there has probably never been a visually more acute audience in history, and any Shakespearean director must confront the difficult task of making highly verbal plays reach and touch an audience disinclined to words and overly sensitized to jittery visual images. And the vessel which incarnates the Shakespearean verb remains the actor. Sets and costumes are less important in Shakespeare than in many other great dramatists, but the actor retains his primordial role. It is through the actor's voice that Shakespeare lives, but a modern audience will resist that voice unless the image is believable. On the other hand, few young actors have the vocal discipline, breath control or rhythmic sense to wend their way through a long iambic soliloquy. Finding appropriate players to portray Shakespeare's romantic leads, therefore, poses problems galore.

Thanks to the presence of two ingratiating young actors as the titular gentlemen, the Royal Scottish Academy's production evoked the proper reaction of ironic mocking and compassionate understanding of the conventions of love and friendship. Auden once noted that “Sex is a sphere peculiarly rich in comic possibilities precisely because of its sacred nature, its size as a social fact, and the intense personal relationship it involves. A special comic possibility in the sex relation comes from the contradiction between man as a natural creature and man as a historical person.”¹⁴ This “sphere of comic possibilities” becomes unnecessarily impoverished, however, if one is not immediately taken by the protagonists. Proteus must be as amiable and fetching as he is odious.¹⁵ Not everyone is called upon by fate and heredity to play these parts, and unless a company has young actors and actresses imbued with physical grace and refinement, they would be well advised to leave Shakespeare's comedies—and his romances as well—in a top drawer.

Perhaps the main reason the Scottish production of The Two Gentlemen of Verona proved so illuminating was precisely the youthfulness of James Telfer as Valentine and Tom Mannion as Proteus. Students at the Royal Scottish Academy, both were barely twenty years old, and their adolescent presence made it quite clear that Shakespeare was writing a parable about the ordeals of growing up and the turmoils that attend this difficult transition into adulthood. There is a graceful awkwardness about late adolescence which no mature actor can ever recapture or hope to convey, and it is an important aspect of Shakespeare's comedic vision in this play. Unto actors, as indeed unto everything, there is a season.

The behavior of the two gentlemen has impressed many readers as both inconsistent and outrageous. Indeed it is, and as archetypal representations of adolescence it should be, for this period of emotional upheaval and somatic transformation is the most fluid time of one's life-cycle—replete with uncertainties, ambiguities, and rapidly shifting role-playing. Erik Erikson points out that “the danger of this stage is role confusion. Where this is based on a strong previous doubt as to one's sexual identity, delinquent and outright psychotic episodes are not uncommon.”¹⁶ Despite the critical abuse heaped on the characterizations of Proteus and Valentine (often using inappropriate criteria based on the psychological “realism” of the nineteenth century with its obsessive search for rational motives), no one has yet called them either psychotic or delinquent, yet interestingly enough the three tasks that Erikson identifies as the main developmental hurdles that must be confronted before one can elaborate a sense of identity in late adolescence are all major themes in Shakespeare's comedy: vocational anxiety, intimacy and the dual problem of competition and competency.¹⁷ In addition, Julia's disguise as a page raises the question of sexual ambiguity and gender identification.

Falling in love at this stage of the life cycle is not, as Erikson mentions, primarily a sexual matter. “To a considerable extent adolescent love is an attempt to arrive at a definition of one's identity by projecting one's diffused self-image on another and by seeing it thus reflected and gradually clarified. This is why so much of young love is conversation.”¹⁸ Converse the two gentlemen certainly do, and each one in turn makes disclosures that bear out Erikson's observations:

VALENTINE
And why not death rather than living torment?
To die is to be banished from myself;
And Silvia is myself. Banished from her
Is self from self: a deadly banishment!
What light is light, if Silvia be not seen?
What joy is joy, if Silvia be not by?—
Unless it be to think that she is by,
And feed upon the shadow of perfection.
Except I be by Silvia in the night,
There is no music in the nightingale;
Unless I look on Silvia in the day,
There is no day for me to look upon.
She is my essence, and I leave to be,
If I be not by her fair influence.

(III, i, 169-83)

PROTEUS
I cannot leave to love, and yet I do;
But there I leave to love where I should love.
Julia I lose, and Valentine I lose.
If I keep them, I needs must lose myself;
If I lose them, thus find I by their loss
For Valentine, myself, for Julia, Silvia.

(II, vi, 17-22)

Besides the intense lyrical quality of these lines, Shakespeare has just succeeded in loading the conventions of courtly love with a new meaning and a wider context. Valentine's speech reflects the traditional impulse of romance towards a complete identification with the love object and a loss of self through a total merger with one's ideal. “Nelly, I am Heathcliff,” the heroine exclaims in a novel which many consider the literary culmination of this theme.¹⁹ In Proteus' soliloquy, on the other hand, love is seen as a means of self-definition and of erecting rather than suppressing ego boundaries. Thus Shakespeare establishes a tense dialogue between the opposing pulls of human love: a desire to lose the self and a desire to reaffirm the self.

These two moments were heightened in the Scottish production, for neither actor was abashed by the sensuous beauty of the poetry. Both, in fact, revelled in it, and it was music to soothe a savage ear. The current tendency in Shakespearean production is to rush over and minimize the opulent sonority of the verse. To many actors and directors aural splendor seems not only self-indulgent but also beside the point. In Shakespeare, however, it frequently is the point.

In addition to love seen as a quest for an ideal and also as a means to limn one's identity, The Two Gentlemen of Verona is also a student play²⁰—a Bildungsroman as well as a sentimental education. Shakespeare broaches this subject in the opening conversation between Valentine and Proteus: “Home keeping youth doth ever have homely wits” (I, i, 2). Each must venture forth into the world in a movement away from his family of orientation in order to learn the skills and crafts necessary to advance in society. Proteus' father recognizes his son's need to acquire competency²¹ and sends him to Milan:

There shall he practice tilts and tournaments,
Hear sweet discourse, converse with noblemen,
And be in eye of every exercise
Worthy his youth and nobleness of birth.

(I, iii, 30-33)

All of these themes are united, of course, in the overall movement of the play from adolescence into maturity. Van Gennep indicates that rites of initiation are often followed by those of marriage which signal one's total acceptance into society as an adult.²² In the last scene all the various conflicts—both inter- and infra-generational—have been resolved, and society is reunited and reconstructed on a jubilant tone of forgiveness and unity:²³

One feast, one house, one mutual happiness.

(V, iv, 173)

But there is a significant difference. Valentine has the last word, and he now speaks with the assurance of a man and is treated as such by the Duke. There is a new-found confidence and authority in his voice; he gives commands easily and banters with the Duke as only an equal can. He has successfully endured the ordeals of initiation which often include a form of banishment into the wilderness to test a young man's mettle. He has grown and matured. Events befall him and he turns them into experiences. The end of the play, therefore, can be seen as a festive celebration of the new adult status conferred on the eponymous gentlemen.

This understanding of the play as a symbolic rite of passage from adolescence into adulthood occurred to me only because I witnessed a particular performance which gave it this focus, thanks to the intelligent direction of Alexander Bartlette and the youthfulness and skill of the protagonists. All directors and actors, in fact, are literary critics, constantly making choices based on their own perceptions and vision. At times they are very bad critics and the work in question becomes circumscribed and distorted by a narrow or erroneous interpretation. At other times, through a combination of literary sensitivity, visual imagination and artistic craft, they can breathe new life into insubstantial shadows. Like Prospero they offer a passing vision which can entertain us for a few hours and perhaps, if we are attentive, teach us as well. When that miracle transpires, all we can do is clap our hands and exclaim with Ferdinand:

This is a most majestic vision, and
Harmonious charmingly. May I be bold
To think these spirits?

(The Tempest, IV, i, 117-19)

Notes

1. Walter Raleigh, ed., Johnson on Shakespeare (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1925), p. 74.

2. Caroline Spurgeon, Shakespeare's Imagery and What It Tells Us (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1968), p. 268.

3. Mark van Doren, Shakespeare (New York: Doubleday, 1939), p. 41.

4. D. A. Traversi, An Approach to Shakespeare, 1 (New York: Doubleday, 1969), p. 78. Francis Fergusson dubs it a play about “four silly lovers” in Shakespeare: The Pattern in His Carpet (New York: Delacorte Press, 1970), p. 42, and Donald Stauffer dismisses it as “a light sketch, its lines hasty and undeveloped” in Shakespeare's World of Images: The Development of His Moral Ideas (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1973), p. 38.

5. Tyrone Guthrie, “For the Theatre,” New York Times Magazine, 29 April 1962.

6. Irene Worth, quoted in the Boston Sunday Globe, 28 January 1979, p. c4. The perceived intimacy of Shakespeare's theatrical environment remains an open question and depends on much more than just the dimensions of the Globe and the size of its audience. The following books offer some valuable information: Alfred Harbage, Shakespeare's Audience (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1969); C. Walter Hodges, The Globe Restored (New York: Coward-McCann, 1954); Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage 1574-1642 (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1973); and Glynne Wickham, Early English Stages 1300 to 1660 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963).

7. Harry Levin, Shakespeare and the Revolution of the Times (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1976), p. 312.

8. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), pp. 142-45.

9. C. L. Barber, “Holiday Custom and Entertainment,” in Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972).

10. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), p. 46.

11. Thomas Perrin Harrison, “Concerning The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Montemayor's Diana,” Modern Language Notes, XLI (1926), 251-52.

12. Harold C. Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 46.

13. Sean O'Casey, “The Power of Laughter: Weapon against Evil.”

14. W. H. Auden, “Notes on the Comic,” Thought, XVII, 104 (Spring 1952), p. 60.

15. W. K. Wimsatt, Hateful Contraries: Studies in Literature and Criticism (Lexington: Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1966). On p. 100 Wimsatt mentions the “unreliable tendency” of laughter “to slide from the aloof to the sympathetic.” See also p. 94.

16. Erik H. Erikson, “Identity versus Role Confusion,” in “The Eight Ages of Man,” in Childhood and Society (New York: Norton, 1950), p. 262.

17. Erik H. Erikson, “The Life Cycle: Epigenesis of Identity,” in Identity, Youth and Crisis (New York: Norton, 1968), p. 129. Erikson also underscores the adolescent's ardent search for “men and ideas to have faith in” (p. 128-29). The conflict between love and friendship presents Proteus—and his name by itself suggests the special dynamics of adolescence—with his first painful encounter with the problem of competition and a clash between his ideals and his own behavior.

18. Erikson, “The Life Cycle,” p. 133.

19. Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (New York: Signet, 1959), p. 84. The same trope appears at the end of the second act love duet between Tristan and Isolde in Wagner's opera:

    TRISTAN:

    Tristan du, ich Isolde, nicht mehr Tristan!

    ISOLDE:

    Du Isolde, Tristan ich, nicht mehr Isolde!

20. Leo Salingar, Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1974), p. 225.

21. Erikson, “The Life Cycle,” pp. 129 and 132.

22. Arnold van Gennep, “Initiation Rites” and “Betrothal and Marriage,” in The Rites of Passage (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1975).

23. Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965), pp. 72-75, 87. On page 118 Frye writes,

    We have been trying to characterize the nature of the comic drive, and have called it a drive toward identity. This is essentially a social identity, which emerges when the ascendant society of the early part of the play, with its irrational laws, lusts, and tyrannical whims, is dissolved and a new society crystallizes around the marriage of the central characters. It has also an individual form, an awakening to self-knowledge, which is typically a release from a humor or a mechanical form of repetitive behavior.

    In Coming of Age in Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1981), Marjorie Garber explores the process of maturation in Shakespeare with great subtlety and depth.