[In the following excerpt, Haslem analyzes the significance of Shakespeare's use of female friendships and communication in a largely patriarchal setting, such as that presented in The Two Gentlemen of Verona.]

Whenever women meet privately and talk, says Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex, they construct a “counter-universe” which privileges female values not normally accorded a place within a patriarchal-valued universe.¹ To explain the purpose of such private conferences, de Beauvoir borrows a metaphor from the theater. “Confronting man,” she says, “woman is always play-acting,” but “with other women, a woman is behind the scenes …, polishing her equipment …, getting her costume together, preparing her make-up … before making her entrance on the stage.”² And yet, when de Beauvoir's metaphor of women being behind the scenes is counterbalanced with her notion of a privately empowered female universe, a considerable paradox emerges, a paradox which de Beauvoir herself acknowledges.³ For if the understanding among the conferring women themselves is that they are always and eventually to reject female-dictated values in favor of adopting the usual female roles of a patriarchal drama, then the female “counter-universe” really operates more as a “sub-universe,” and what passes for female counteraction is ultimately revealed as an illusion of counteraction.

In a related way, Dale M. Bauer studies ways in which female values are both voiced and silenced in several nineteenth-century American novels, but does so by involving Bakhtinian concepts. Thus instead of identifying an apparent paradox whereby women both counteract and support the male realm, Bauer considers whether female voices in these novels participate in what Bakhtin calls a truly open, dialogic community—that is, one in which both dominant and countercultures speak out with legitimate and never fully reconcilable voices—or to a closed, monologic community stamped with final ideological consensus.⁴ Bauer contends that in literary works which use feminist dialogic—even those which close with “typically romantic resolutions”—the women in the text

assert their otherness not by surrendering, but by forcing their language into the context/contest of the dominant languages. That is, not by erasing but by highlighting their otherness can they do battle with patriarchal codes.⁵

Bauer's and de Beauvoir's observations both raise the question of what women in a patriarchal world—fictional or real—truly gain by asserting their values, whether privately (in the margins) or publicly during a period of Bakhtinian “carnival.”⁶ Any answer, as they both suggest, hinges on what becomes of the countervalued female voice upon closure, upon a return to a patriarchal community or with the schematic romantic closure of much early literature. But if one considers de Beauvoir's point alongside Bauer's, the matter begins to sound rather like the proverbial dilemma of the cup being half empty or half full. When closure involves initially disruptive female values nevertheless giving way to male values, has the disruption been erased or highlighted? Has female counteraction “behind the scenes” been a true counteraction or an illusion of counteraction?

To explore such questions further I want to ground them in a couple of Shakespeare's romantic comedies where the achievement of harmonious, monologic closure is ostensibly central. In Two Gentlemen of Verona, I will argue, the private talk of female characters operates not only dramaturgically as a compelling illusion of counteraction to the patriarchal-valued world of the plays but also ideologically as an occasion for exorcising female values and thereby gaining romantic closure. With Merchant of Venice, I will contend, the cup is instead half full: while the main of the play works dramaturgically toward a surrender of the female counteractive realm, in act 5 Shakespeare also reasserts and revalues the female voice and thus allows for a dialogical resonance not possible at the close of Two Gentlemen. In other words, as Bauer might put it, female values ultimately defer to male values at the romantic close of each play, but Shakespeare comes closer to highlighting female “otherness” in Merchant and to erasing it in Two Gentlemen.

Much of the work completed on female friendship and communication in Shakespeare does indeed center on the “otherness” of the female world of the play. Juliet Dusinberre argues that not only Shakespearean but all Elizabethan drama is largely about “excit[ing] interest in what a woman's conscience would dictate to her if she were freed from subjection to the male conscience.”⁷ But while Dusinberre maintains that in Shakespeare this other, female conscience is placed largely with heroines who suffer tragic “isolation” and “solitary sorrow,”⁸ other feminist scholars—noting not only the existence of female communicative networks within the plays but also the complicity of the bond that such communication and friendship create—have stressed that Shakespeare's heroines are anything but isolated. Carolyn Asp points to a “conspiracy of women” that tends to “organize itself around female desire.”⁹ Carol Thomas Neely argues for the importance of the friendship between women that “dominates” the final scene of Othello.¹⁰ And Carole McKewin, who examines numerous plays where women converse privately, draws upon de Beauvoir to describe the realm of female discourse as a place where “women together can express their own perceptions and identities, comment on masculine society, and gather strength and engage in reconnaissance to act in it.”¹¹

In broaching the matter of what female complicity does or does not gain for certain Shakespearean women, I will begin by focusing on a single and recurrent form of female conversation in the plays, namely, a ritualized catechetical comparison of men as potential lovers and/or husbands. Throughout Shakespeare's plays women frequently enact versions of the ritual when they discuss and debate the relative worth of specific men. Just after Emilia sharply criticizes Othello to Desdemona, the two women join in praising the virtues of Lodovico. The Nurse tells Juliet that Romeo is a “dishclout” compared to Paris. The ladies of Love's Labor's Lost ridicule the comparative worth of each suitor's love letter. Cleopatra's “girls” protest to her that her former lover Caesar is at least as worthy and valiant as Antony. And act 2 of The Taming of the Shrew—presenting a more sadistic twist on such moments of female bonding—opens with Kate binding Bianca's hands and demanding that she tell “Of all thy suitors … / Whom thou lov'st best” (2.1.i.9).¹² But when the catechetical ritual is played out to its fullest—as it is in Two Gentlemen of Verona and Merchant of Venice—it involves one woman naming a series of men while the other woman responds to each in turn with an evaluation. In its fullest form, the ritual culminates with the women agreeing upon and selecting the choicest man available to the heroine, and I call the ritual “catechetical” not only because of its question-and-answerlike format but also because the whole of the ritual implies that the man to be selected has somehow been predetermined, pre-sanctioned by the women. As during the saying of catechism, the ladies' answers come off as rather routine, as though the ritualized process of naming the selected man is more central than is an actual debate over the merits of several men.

That variations of the ritual occur with some regularity in Shakespeare is perhaps of sociohistorical as well as literary significance. In Friendship and Literature: Spirit and Form, Ronald Sharp argues that rituals are basic to all friendships and that especially among women exchanges of secrets and other intimate matters are “highly ritualized and conventionalized activities.”¹³ It is not really surprising, then, that female characters in Shakespeare—and in other later English Renaissance drama—frequently talk together about men and sex. Still, as Linda Woodbridge warns, the women of the drama are indeed literary depictions and so we cannot know how accurately they reflect the behavior of actual women. Perhaps, as Diane Bornstein says of the courtesy books of the Middle Ages and as Woodbridge says of later drama, the frequency with which women are depicted as gossiping together is but evidence of men's (and perhaps especially the male authors') fears—and fancies—that women talk almost exclusively about men when outside of their company.¹⁴

Whether or not Shakespeare is projecting subconscious fears and fancies with these ritualized female exchanges, his conscious aim probably goes beyond a desire to replicate faithfully the private discussions of female contemporaries. For the usual position of such talk in the plays demonstrates Shakespeare's understanding of the dramaturgical use (especially in the comedies) of having two or more women in league against whatever obstacles—whether psychological or social—impede one or more of the women involved.¹⁵ Shakespeare put the private female alliance to particular dramaturgical use by implementing a well-worn theatrical trope (or “theatergram,” as Louise George Clubb has termed it) that dates back to Roman comedy: the young woman in love paired with a female confidante, encourager, and/or messenger.¹⁶ In As You Like It, Rosalind's female confidante is a cousin. But more frequently Shakespeare's women have maids or waiting-women for confidantes, as with Julia and Lucetta (Two Gentlemen of Verona), Portia and Nerissa (Merchant of Venice), Desdemona and Emilia (Othello) Juliet and the Nurse (Romeo and Juliet), Hermione and Paulina (Winter's Tale). Sometimes the maids offer actual assistance in helping their ladies to their lovers (as does Juliet's Nurse), but more often the maids offer the kind of psychological and emotional support found in de Beauvoir's notion of counteruniverse.

In both Two Gentlemen of Verona and Merchant of Venice such a counteruniverse is suggestively constructed by the catechetical ritual's reversal of more traditional, patriarchal literary structures—found often, for example, in fairy tales—in which the woman is the chosen and not the chooser, the object rather than the subject. Yet within larger structures operating in these plays, I will argue, such choice is only temporarily privileged, thus seeming to credit female choice without actually legitimizing it. The female communicative realm is posited as one which must be passed through successfully (i.e., to the satisfaction of the women involved) before a love relationship betwen the hero and heroine can be achieved in the play at large. But a key movement toward romantic closure in each play also involves the heroine's eventual dropping of the pretended empowerment she experienced during private talk with her waiting-woman.

Ostensibly, it is during the catechetical ritual in act 1 of Two Gentlemen that Julia discovers for herself that she has feelings for Proteus, feelings which her maid first helps to illuminate and then encourages. Julia initiates the ritual: “But say, Lucetta, now we are alone, / Wouldst thou then counsel me to fall in love?” (1-2). Lucetta seems willing enough to take part in the exchange, and so they proceed:

JUL.
Of all the fair resort of gentlemen
That every day with parle encounter me,
In thy opinion which is worthiest love?
LUC.
Please you repeat their names, I'll show my mind
According to my shallow simple skill.

(1.2.4-8)

Julia then lists the names—the fair Sir Eglamour, the rich Mercatio, the gentle Proteus—and Lucetta obligingly recounts in turn each man's virtues and failings. When Julia asks Lucetta about her hesitation to criticize Proteus along with the others, the maid answers simply that she thinks Proteus is best because he seems to love Julia best. All of this talk—and some intervening witty stichomythia between the two ladies—culminates in Lucetta's revelation that she has all along carried a love note for Julia from Proteus. Rather unexpectedly, Julia turns quite testy, and the catechetical ritual abruptly ends as Lucetta—at Julia's angry behest—departs with the letter.

The rest of the scene presents a Julia torn between an impulse to behave like the properly scornful courtly mistress (as Silvia does elsewhere in the play) and an impulse to admit and embrace her own inclinations toward Proteus. Julia's struggle between these two impulses is figured outwardly in her ambivalent behavior toward Lucetta, who encourages her to entertain advances from Proteus. One moment Julia welcomes Lucetta's information and advice; the next she chides the maid for impertinence. As such, the tenuous nature of their communicative bond becomes itself the focus of the scene and acts as a kind of gauge for Julia's vacillating feelings not only toward Proteus specifically but also toward the more abstract question of what role she as a woman ought to play in a love relationship.¹⁷ In varying her responses to Lucetta, Julia in effect tries on the two roles she might play before Proteus: should she be cold and disdainful or warm and aggressive? No sooner has Lucetta returned and have the two women engaged in more witticisms regarding the probable content of the letter than Julia grows testy once again. Before it is over, Julia again dismisses her maid, shreds the letter, and throws it to the wind—a gesture she regrets almost immediately. Significantly, it is with one impulse that she breaks off communication with Lucetta and more literally breaks up the communication (the letter) from Proteus. Equating the torn communication between the women with Julia's torn feelings regarding Proteus, Shakespeare suggests that it is only by mending her communicative relationship with Lucetta that Julia can gain an understanding of herself and her feelings for Proteus.

As Julia chides herself one more time and begins to gather the torn scraps of the love letter, Lucetta reappears and the two reach a quiet understanding on their way in to dinner. Some directors have closed this scene with the two women together picking up the pieces of the shredded letter, a gesture which underscores the idea that by reconstructing the communication from Proteus Julia simultaneously refortifies her bond with Lucetta and reconciles her former ambivalence toward how to play her role with Proteus.¹⁸ With this reconciliation, Lucetta is transformed from a perceived antagonist into the very “table wherein all my thoughts / Are visibly character'd and engrav'd” (2.7.3-4). For her part, Julia gains a private, female-dictated sanction to pursue her relationship with Proteus in an unconventional, noncourtly way—by disguising herself as a page and undertaking a journey to Proteus.

If, as Carole McKewin says, Shakespeare's women talk together as a way of gathering strength to oppose the strictures of identity placed on them by masculine society, then surely Julia—with Lucetta's help—is initially quite successful in opposing the rules of social decorum and female identity which govern the world of the play. For when Julia dresses up like a page, codpiece and all, she seems once and for all to be throwing off the role of the cold, disdainful courtly mistress, a role which the two gentlemen clearly expect their ladies to play. Apparently, then, the scene involving catechetical ritual has empowered Julia not only to choose her lover but also to respond to him in the way that she deems suitable.

But at this point in the play we are still in the realm of private female choice, and the authority Julia gains when conversing privately with Lucetta is subsequently shown to be only an illusion of such authority. As Julia moves out of the female into the male-dominated realm of discourse, male values—and thus male choices—increasingly hold sway. Warning Julia that disguising herself as a page might not have the desired effect on Proteus (“I fear me he will scarce be pleas'd withal” [2.6.67]), Lucetta reminds us that women's bold private resolutions are customarily downplayed when the women move into and perform in the ostensibly more important public realm. But Julia has been too emboldened by her exchanges with Lucetta to fear that her audience—her Proteus—might not receive her well in whatever form she has decided to appear. Having once left Lucetta behind, though, Julia both symbolically and actually leaves behind her license of authority. For when she arrives in Milan only to discover that Proteus has quite abruptly shifted loyalties to Silvia, it is made stingingly clear to Julia that her choice in Proteus depends entirely on his continuing his choice in her. Ironically, then, Julia's private choice to play an aggressive role precipitates her having to play a passive role, to work behind the scenes in her disguise as the page Sebastian. In this state of “active passivity,” as Anthony Lewis calls it, Julia pre-figures other Shakespearean heroines who are “outwardly active and yet harbor within a stultifying vision of themselves as passive, or dead, buried beneath male clothes and frozen in time.”¹⁹ As involved in the plot as Julia is throughout the rest of the play, she can in fact do little more than wait and hope to be chosen—indeed, rechosen—by Proteus in the end.

That Julia is reduced from subject to object, from being the chooser (in the private, female realm) to be the chosen (in the male realm) becomes most painfully obvious at the problematic close of the play, whereupon Valentine—wanting to demonstrate his forgiveness of Proteus's overtures toward and attempted rape of Silvia—offers up Silvia, trophylike, to prove his sincerity to Proteus. At this moment, both Julia (still disguised) and Silvia are utterly powerless. It is as though they are indeed behind the scenes—with no equipment left to polish—observing the male-centered drama in which they play no active part.

Thus disempowered, Julia swoons. And it is only at this significant moment, when Julia's very body emblematizes the degree to which her earlier insistence on self-assertiveness has collapsed, that the love relationship with Proteus becomes possible. It becomes possible precisely because the swoon, as Catherine Belsey puts it, “reaffirms [Julia's] femininity.”²⁰ As she falls back into her proper position as object, Julia can only wait for Proteus to repent of his shabby behavior and choose her once again. Indeed, both she and Silvia are noticeably quiet in the play's final moments, a quietness which emphasizes how far we have moved from a legitimization of the saucy, impertinent voice of Lucetta. The female communicative bond is in effect discarded, erased, en route to achieving the male-female love relationship, an “achievement” which is marked by Julia's loss of the authority she exercised during the earlier female conversation. Thus while the play seems to privilege female choice in the earlier acts—in the scene of catechetical ritual between Julia and Lucetta and in Julia's decision to undertake a solitary journey with a new-fashioned identity—the whole of the play suggests that female choice gives way inevitably to male choice.

Seemingly at the center of many of Shakespeare's romantic comedies is the necessary transformation of the hero: a witty, wise, and devoted heroine must educate her erring lover on the nature of true love and its place in the achievement of community.²¹ The scheme which I have just outlined, however, suggests, that there is perhaps likewise an education for some of the comedic heroines whom Julia prefigures (Viola, Rosalind, Portia). The young lady must learn that playing at unconventionality is acceptable only insofar as she agrees that there will be an eventual return to patriarchal norms.²² Within such a design, female autonomy becomes but a temporarily granted frivolity. As Dale Bauer, drawing on Foucault and others, spells out so lucidly,

Inclusion [in a community] requires playing by the rules of the community, although rejecting the rules can also be part of the game; resistance can be appropriated …, depending on whether that resistance can be manipulated or reabsorbed into community.²³

And surely Julia's resistance to conventional authority is appropriated by and reabsorbed into the community in just such a way. …

A main ideological thrust in both Two Gentlemen and Merchant, then, is that in a happily romantic world it is somehow “safe” for women to be empowered with choice when conversing privately or to play at making choices when publicly disguised as men so long as their pretenses of authority are ultimately made known and rejected. In fact, these manifestations of pretended female choice are presented as valuable because they engage the heroines in the processs of learning—through role-playing—that women may publicly perform only certain roles and may only privately indulge certain desires.²⁴ Marianne Novy has noted that when the former playacting of female characters is revealed at the end of the comedies “no shadow falls on the celebration” whereas the exposure of female pretense tends to prompt great anxiety in the tragedies.²⁵ I suggest that this is true of Two Gentlemen and Merchant exactly because the women's dropping of male roles symbolizes the voluntary (in the case of Portia) or constitutionally unavoidable (in the case of Julia) surrender of female claims to unconventional, male-centered forms of power. Although the plays end with obvious emphasis on what the hero has learned, there also is an unspoken emphasis on and celebration of what the heroine has learned, namely, that in some sense she either wants or needs to drop the pretense of being other then conventionally “female.”

To say Shakespeare acknowledges that unqualified female choice is not a viable option in the romantic world of each of these plays, however, is not to say that Shakespeare himself fully endorses such an outlook. The question must be, as Erickson puts it, how “heavily invested” Shakespeare is in the “patriarchal solution of his characters,” how ironic and critical his stance is toward the purportedly happy ending.²⁶ Indeed, I have been tracing the ways in which Julia and Portia similarly come to put away disruptive desires to choose for themselves, but in view of what happens in act 5 of Merchant, one can by no means level Shakespeare's treatment of these two heroines. In a significant dramaturgical way, Portia toward the end “dwindles into a wife,” to appropriate Belsey's turn of phrase.²⁷ But it is also in act 5—during what Belsey elsewhere calls “a coda to the main plot”—that Shakespeare reasserts the female voice and reprivileges the private female communicative bond he established in act 1.²⁸ With the play's final scene, female values seemingly about to be erased are instead highlighted and given legitimate status in the ongoing dialogics of the play.

It is hard to miss Shakespeare's great emphasis on musical harmony—including the mythical music of the spheres—in the play's final scene, and the metaphor seems naturally to refer to the resolution of the love relationships.²⁹ And yet there are two very different ways to construe the condition of harmony, both of which inform the play's final scene. While on the one hand harmony may be said to constitute a whole, a single blending of multiple parts, on the other hand harmony is its parts, a correspondence between multiple entities, a nexus of relationships. And in the final scene of Merchant, I maintain, the juxtaposition of these two ways of hearing harmony attaches metaphorically to the dilemma of female values being either erased or highlighted. As such, the dilemma becomes whether in the end the female “voice” sounds as a distinguishable entity—a distinct other—or whether it is utterly subsumed by the whole of the romanticized close.

To describe harmony as a never fully blended relationship among multiple voices is in a sense also to articulate Bakhtinian literary theory. In fact, Bakhtin uses the lyrical metaphor itself to indicate the “problems” of truly dialogic—indeed polyphonic—literature:

The image of polyphony and counterpoint … points out those new problems which arise when a novel is constructed beyond the boundaries of ordinary monologic unity, just as in music new problems arose when the boundaries of a single voice were exceeded.³⁰

For Bakhtin, in dialogic literature individual voices remain disparate even in closure; they are “linked rather then merged.”³¹ Essentially because of such “linkage,” moreover, the meaning of each voice (indeed the meaning of all language) is for Bakhtin unfailingly relational. That is, the meaning of each voiced expression “lies on the borderline between oneself and other.”³² Or, as David Carroll explains it, any two voices “exist, function, and take shape only in their interrelationship, and not on their own, the one apart from the other.”³³ Every voice is defined—but also continually redefined—by its interaction with, its dialogue with, “other” voices.

In the final scene of Merchant, Shakespeare first presents such an interrelational view of harmony, or polyphony, when Portia enters and notes at length that all things become significant only in respect to their surroundings. Context, she observes, is all:

POR.
                                                                                                                        Music, hark!
NER.
It is your music, madam, of the house.
POR.
Nothing is good, I see, without respect;
Methinks it sounds much sweeter than by day.
NER.
Silence bestows that virtue on it, madam.
POR.
The crow doth sing as sweetly as the lark
When neither is attended; and I think
The nightingale, if she should sing by day
When every goose is cackling, would be thought
No better a musician than the wren.
How many things by season season'd are
To their right praise and true perfection!

(5.1.97-108)

Portia's observation that meaning is determined relationally recapitulates the main plot, in which justice and mercy gain meaning in terms of each other. But it also bespeaks her special position as a woman who has several times in the play shifted her own context and has thus shifted the perceived meaning—the perceived authoritativeness—of her “voice.” She shifts out of a patriarchal context when enacting the catechetical ritual with Nerissa; she shifts back into a patriarchal context during the casket scene; she shifts back out of it again when playing Balthazar. Along the way, she has realized how differently “seasoned” she was in Bassanio's eyes (and maybe in her own) as she shifted her context, a realization which prompts her to shift contexts one more time as Bassanio and Gratiano return without the rings.

When Portia scolds Bassanio for giving her ring to “some woman” (5.1.208), she enjoys apparent female authority by posing as the wronged wife. In assuming this role, Portia is not necessarily shifting out of a patriarchal context, of course, nor is she necessarily achieving any kind of real authority. For the scold was a negative fixture in early modern misogynistic literature, where abusive words afforded wives only “a semblance of power.”³⁴ A more compelling reason for hearing male and female voices as distinguishable and resilient “others” in the romantic harmony of the final scene comes when Portia resecures her relationship with Nerissa and in a sense carries on a private conversation with her right there in front of the husbands. Portia shifts out of a patriarchal context at the same time that she remains in it.

The two women communicate with each other mainly by using double entendre: they swear their marriages will be consummated only when they see the rings again; they accuse the men of giving the rings to women; they threaten to go to bed with the judge and clerk and then admit they already have. And so Portia and Nerissa's way of communicating in this final scene recalls the earlier catechetical ritual in that once again the two women are asserting an authority they privately understand they will not publicly achieve. They know that as soon as the pretense of their feigned accusation is dropped they will assume less authoritative roles as wives. But the very fact that in the final moments of the play Shakespeare highlights private female communication as a powerful and ongoing force suggests that the female voice, that female authority itself, will continue to assert itself—even when it has to insinuate itself to do so.

I say “insinuate” because Shakespere implies, somewhat paradoxically, that although the unconventional assertion of female authority is mainly relinquished in the play's final moments, it is not yet entirely put away—as it surely is put away in the final moments of Two Gentlemen. That is, the stipulation at the end of Merchant remains, as it did with the close of Two Gentlemen, that female choice can only be validated when women are in private or when they temporarily play at being men. Still, Portia's in cognito conversation with Nerissa suggests that the women will not only continue to work, as de Beauvoir would say, behind the scenes but also that they will never completely abandon their subversive backstage work when it is time to perform in the patriarchal drama. That Portia and Nerissa in this scene talk privately and publicly at the same time, in fact, demonstrates just how much more verbally skillful—and thus how much more potentially subversive—these conversing women have grown since the earlier catechetical ritual. To apply de Beauvoir's formulation, the women seem to have finessed operating backstage and onstage simultaneously.

Thus Shakespeare at least in part casts the achieved harmony between the men and women as dialogic rather than monologic by implying that women will keep on talking and subverting. However, the dialogics of the play's close are even more complex than this. For by the end of the play it is also increasingly difficult to identify Portia and Nerissa's voices themselves as singularly or exclusively “female,” especially as they riddlingly scold their husbands about the rings. That is, as Belsey notes, “the full answer to the riddle of the rings is that Portia has more than one identity.”³⁵ Throughout the play much of Portia's language and behavior indicates that she has all along possessed these multiple identities (some “male,” some “female”), but

her marriage in conjunction with her Venetian journey (and the deferred consummation confirms them as inextricable) invests her with a new kind of polysemy. The equivocations and doubles [sic] entendres of Act 5 celebrate a sexual indeterminacy, which is not in-difference but multiplicity.³⁶

Any purportedly seamless romantic closure, then, is also strained by the suggestion that what it is to be male and what it is to be female will itself continue to be contextually determined. Indeed, in view of Portia's record of shifted identities, one has to recall the earlier riddle and wonder whether Bassanio can ever entirely “know” Portia as they meet again and again. At the very point of the play's resolution—conventional in part as it is—it also becomes possible to glimpse romantic harmony as an ongoing set of never fully blended “male” and “female” voices, as a series of dialogic moments which keep shifting the relationship between femininity and masculinity and thus keep shifting the meaning of gender itself in a patriarchal world.³⁷

And so one reaches the important final matter of Shakespeare's own stance toward gender issues in these two romantic comedies. Claire McEachern, in a very well-informed essay, eschews the common polarization of Shakespeare as either affirming patriarchy or rejecting it. Because patriarchy is itself not monolithic but “founded in a profound contradiction,” she recommends instead a focus on historical shifts and progressions in notions of and responses to gender.³⁸ For as she points out, not only in Shakespeare but also in Renaissance culture itself,

the subversive impulse of a play (or a person) is not always re-subjugated to the orthodoxy of power, but is instead an agent of change.³⁹

McEachern therefore proposes analyzing Shakespeare “in the act of reading, in his sources, his culture,” an approach which would, she contends, “take the measure of Shakespeare's difference from his patriarchal culture in his examination of it.”⁴⁰ To conclude my arguments on the position of female voices in Two Gentlemen and Merchant, I wish to unite Bakhtinian thought with McEachern's approach to suggest the value of examining Shakespeare in the act of reading, in his own plays, his culture and especially his own perceptions of that culture. By Shakespeare's “reading” here I mean his engaging in what Bakhtin calls the “great dialogue.”⁴¹ That is, according to Bakhtin, it is possible for an author to have a dialogic relationship with his or her own characters, provided that the characters are invested with autonomous consciousness and that these characters' perceptions and the author's own perceptions “participate with equal rights.”⁴²

I contend that to examine Shakespeare's relationship to these two comedies is to discover an author who is in dialogue with—and whose own perceptions are thus being redefined by—both the patriarchal and the subversively feminist voices of his characters. More precisely, by moving from Shakespeare's representation of private female talk in Two Gentlemen to that in Merchant, I believe, one can see—or perhaps hear is the better verb—Shakespeare initiating such an author-character dialogue. While his dialogue with Julia is less than fully valid by Bakhtinian standards, one cannot but feel that it is in Julia's temporarily assertive voice, in conjunction with Lucetta's, that Shakespeare begins to hear and eventually to converse with the more autonomous voices of Portia and Nerissa. And it is the very initiation of this conversation, I maintain, that serves as the “agent of change” McEachern mentions. For this author-character conversation not only gains a legitimate voice for Portia and Nerissa at the end of an otherwise patriarchal dramatic scheme but also partially redefines for Shakespeare himself—at least for the dialogic moment—the nature and viability of romantic closure itself.

Notes

1. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, ed. and trans. H. M. Parshley (New York: Knopf, 1971), 542.

2. Ibid., 543.

3. De Beauvoir sums up the paradox as follows: “[Women] band together in order to establish a counter-universe, but they always set it up within the frame of the masculine universe. Hence the paradox of their situation: they belong at one and the same time to the male world and to a sphere in which that world is challenged. … Their docility must always be matched by a refusal, their refusal by an acceptance” (ibid., 597).

4. Dale M. Bauer, Feminist Dialogics: A Theory of Failed Community (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988), 8-9. Bauer is careful to note that Bakhtin's formulation of dialogism refers to a competition between cultures whereas Bauer herself casts dialogism in gendered terms (10-11). For Bakhtin's explanation of dialogic voices being ultimately unreconcilable, see Mikhail Bakhtin, The Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 26.

5. Bauer, Feminist Dialogics, 10.

6. For Bakhtin, literary “carnival”—which is rooted in early modern social practice—is a limited period during which subversive cultures rise up, and thus inevitably speak up, in a revelatory public debunking of dominant strictures. See Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).

7. Juliet Dusinberre, Shakespeare and the Nature of Women (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1976), 93.

8. Ibid.

9. Carolyn Asp, “Subjectivity, Desire, and Female Friendship in All's Well That Ends Well,” Literature and Psychology 32, no. 2 (1986): 60.

10. Carol Thomas Neely, “Women and Men in Othello: ‘What should such a fool / Do with so good a woman?’” in The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Green, and Carol Thomas Neely (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), 225.

11. Carole McKewin, “Counsels of Gall and Grace: Intimate Conversations between Women in Shakespeare's Plays,” in The Woman's Part (see note 10), 118-19.

12. All citations of Shakespeare's plays are to The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

13. Ronald Sharp, Friendship and Literature: Spirit and Form (Durham: Duke University Press, 1986), 64.

14. Diane Bornstein, “As Meek as a Maid: A Historical Perspective on Language for Women in courtesy books from the Middle Ages to Seventeen Magazine,” in Women's Language and Style, ed. Douglas Butturff and Edmund L. Epstein (Akron: Conference on Language and Style, 1978), 135; Linda Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1504-1620 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 237.

15. See McKewin, “Counsels of Gall and Grace.”

16. Louise George Clubb, “theatergrams,” in Comparative Critical Approaches to Renaissance Comedy, ed. Donald Beecher and Massimo Ciavolella (Canada: Dovehouse Editions, 1986), 19.

17. See McKewin, “Counsels of Gall and Grace,” 121.

18. One production which concludes the scene in this way is the BBC film of Two Gentlemen, directed by Don Taylor.

19. Anthony J. Lewis, The Love Story in Shakespearean Comedy (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1992), 6.

20. Catherine Belsey, “Disrupting Sexual Difference: Meaning and Gender in the Comedies,” in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis (London: Methuen, 1985), 179.

21. Cf. Lewis, The Love Story, 7, 151-52.

22. On the capitulation of comedic heroines to subordinate roles, see esp. Linda Bamber, Comic Women, Tragic Men: A Study of Gender and Genre in Shakespeare (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982); Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1983); and Carol Thomas Neely, Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare's Plays (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).

23. Bauer, Feminist Dialogics, xi. …

24. Here I differ from Bamber, who contends that “in the comedies, the women tend to avoid making choices” (see note 22, p. 114). My feeling is that at least in the cases I study here the women do indeed choose but do so in a patriarchal-approved, channeled way that in fact bespeaks the inconsequence of their choices.

25. Marianne Novy, “Shakespeare's Female Characters as Actors and Audience,” in The Woman's Part (see note 10), 256.

26. Peter B. Erickson, Patriarchal Structures in Shakespeare's Drama (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 35.

27. Belsey, “Disrupting Sexual Difference,” 187.

28. Catherine Belsey, “Love in Venice,” in Shakespeare Survey, no. 44, ed. Stanley Wells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 42.

29. See, e.g., C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: A Study in Dramatic Form and its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), 187.

30. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, 22.

31. Ibid., 26.

32. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 293.

33. David Carroll, “The Alterity of Discourse: Form, History and the Question of the Political in M. M. Bakhtin,” Diactrics 13, no. 2 (Summer 1983): 71.

34. Jardine, Still Harping, 107.

35. Belsey, “Love in Venice,” 48.

36. Ibid.

37. Belsey describes this point in the play as “a specific cultural moment when the meaning of marriage is unstable, contested, and open to radical reconstruction” (“Love in Venice,” 48).

38. Claire McEachern, “Fathering Herself: A Source Study of Shakespeare's Feminism,” Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (Fall 1988): 273.

39. Ibid., 271.

40. Ibid., 272.

41. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, 71.

42. Ibid.