SOURCE: “Crowning the End: The Aggrandizement of Closure in the Reading of Shakespeare's Comedies,” in Shakespeare and the Ends of Comedy, pp. 1-21, Indiana University Press, 1991.

[In the following essay, Jensen contends that late twentieth-century commentators have placed too much emphasis on closure in Shakespeare's comedies. He believes they have evaluated Shakespeare's comic endings more rigorously than those of his predecessors and contemporaries, tied the plays' meanings too closely to their endings, and disregarded complexities in the final scenes that run counter to a unified interpretation. In the course of his argument, Jensen provides a detailed review of orthodox positions regarding the “festive” endings of Shakespeare's romantic comedies, and recent critical emphasis on the dark or problematic conclusions of these plays.]

Over thirty years ago, John Russell Brown reviewed the course of “The Interpretation of Shakespeare's Comedies: 1900-1953.” In doing so, he located the central critical tendency of the works he surveyed in the “constantly repeated dictum … that the heart of Shakespeare's comedy lies in its characters.”¹ This emphasis on character, he found, led to summary judgments about the plays' merits, including the view that “the endings of The Two Gentlemen, Much Ado, and Twelfth Night are … precipitous and unsatisfying.” Faced with such evidence, his conclusion was a sort of wistful challenge: “There does seem to be something wrong with a theory of Shakespeare's comedy which implies that all his successes are so considerably blemished” (7).

Since that time, critical discussion of the comedies has been both abundant and varied. In 1979, Wayne A. Rebhorn reported that thirty-five books on the subject had appeared in the years after 1957, and the flood of interest has shown no sign of abating since that time.² But given all this activity, it remains curiously true that in the critical perspective afforded by most writers on Shakespearean comedy the plays are regarded as somehow falling short of the full glory that the form itself promises. In the most familiar readings, the comedies appear tainted by a sort of aesthetic original sin, a fault from which there is no redemption, since their shortcomings are measured against an ideal form that has declined to incarnate itself in the actual world of texts and theatrical representation.

If there is one root cause of this difficulty, it lies in the fact that the dominant approaches to comedy over the last three decades have attached extraordinary importance to the ways comedies end. Closure—and in this term I include the final disposition of characters, staging, tone, the completion of patterns of language and imagery, the characters' (or actors') relation to the audience, and any other matter that may be said to affect our final perception of a play's events—has become the focal issue in the criticism of Shakespeare's comedies. For some of the comic dramas this emphasis is of course not new at all. Dr. Johnson, one remembers, could not reconcile his heart to Bertram. But then he saw Shakespeare as generally content with unsatisfactory endings: “When he found himself near the end of his work, and in view of his reward, he shortened the labour, to snatch the profit. He therefore remits his efforts where he should most vigorously exert them, and his catastrophe is improbably produced or imperfectly represented.”³ The problem plays as a group, however large that group may be, have usually been faulted for not bringing their comic dilemmas to a satisfactorily comic issue; and Brown was simply acknowledging established practice when he treated them in a separate category in his review of critical interpretations.

But preoccupation with the endings of the romantic comedies has also been an insistent focus of criticism over the last three decades, with the result that nearly all the plays have been labeled as “problematic.” Few readers today would willingly associate themselves with the emphatic cheeriness of J. Dover Wilson in his assertion that “the quality the first ten comedies have in common is happiness, a serene happiness, liable to develop into merriment in the conclusion.”⁴ It seems necessary, however, to divide the issues surrounding this emphasis on closure, to see that declaring the importance of the comedies' conclusions need not entail the view that the endings are dark or problematic or otherwise disturbing. To begin such a task, one need only look closely at the development of the critical situation in the years since Brown's survey. The focus on Shakespeare's characters has been replaced by other approaches, nearly all of them concerned in some way with dramatic structure; and at the source of these approaches stands the work of two key figures, C. L. Barber and Northrop Frye.⁵ Although the particular emphasis of their analyses differs considerably—Frye focusing chiefly on literary antecedents, Barber taking a more “anthropological” way to his view of the comedies—both writers throw the weight of their observations on comic outcomes, the social reconciliation Frye discovers at the moment when “a new social unit is formed on the stage” (“Argument” 60) and the “clarification” Barber sees as the product of the characters' experience of “saturnalian release” (6-10).

For both Frye and Barber, then, closure stands for the comedies as “at once the source, and end, and test of Art.”⁶ Over the course of some years, Frye has refined and developed his interpretation of the comedies. In A Natural Perspective he offers not merely a fuller account of his understanding of the plays but an explanation of the critical logic that enables us to function as interpreters. In this view, our critical activity is in suspension during our experience of a literary work: we are in a “precritical” state, participating in a direct experience of the work's movement. Only when its structure becomes accessible to us can we engage in criticism proper. Thus Frye argues that “the point at which direct experience and criticism begin to come into alignment, in a work of fiction at least, is the point known as recognition or discovery, when some turn in the plot arrests the linear movement and enables us for the first time to see the story as a total shape, or what is usually called a theme” (9). One could hardly find a more definitive statement of the importance of closure. Barber's view, while similar, is in some ways more attentive to the complexity of a theatrical experience of the comedies; he pays more attention than does Frye to the mingling in Shakespeare of complementary views that are yet in some measure opposed, a quality of the plays defined recently with great skill by Norman Rabkin.⁷ At nearly every stage of his discussion, Barber is careful to avoid overstatement. Thus he detects the problem one faces in concentrating on structure, he knows the sort of falsification it requires, yet he persists: “every new moment, every new line or touch, is a triumph of opportunism, something snatched in from life beyond expectation and made design beyond design. And yet the fact remains that it is as we see the design that we see design outdone and brought alive” (4). For both Barber and Frye, then, “the end crowns the work” is not merely an adage well suited to justify a critical procedure; it becomes instead the guiding principle of their criticism and enables them to find in the structure of Shakespearean comedies a teleological design.⁸

The influence of Barber and Frye on subsequent criticism is so widespread and profound as to make illustration nearly supererogatory. And even those critics whose aims are quite different from the aims of these two dominant figures tend to follow them in basing their assessments of the plays on the issue of closure. Thus Ralph Berry, who opposes himself directly to the “festive” readings of Barber and Frye, nevertheless makes closure the key element in his reading of the comedies: “I should prefer to see the conclusions of the middle comedies less as ‘clarifications’ than as provisional re-groupings of situations that will continue their complex development.”⁹ Similarly, Elliot Krieger, whose Marxist reading of the comedies emphasizes tensions and antagonisms undreamed of in the social worlds described by Barber and Frye, nevertheless finds the strongest confirmation of his thesis in Shakespeare's management of the plays' conclusions. Thus he says that the conclusion of Twelfth Night “confirms the aristocratic fantasy (Maria is, discreetly, kept off-stage) that clarification is achieved when people are released from indulgence and restored to the degree of greatness with which they were born.”¹⁰ Anthony B. Dawson may stand for all those critics who view comedy as a process whose end lies in some sort of discovery. For Dawson, “it is as if the characters must arrive, within the movement of the plot, at an understanding of, and response to, the nature of drama itself.”¹¹ This emphasis on process, whether it leads to unmasking,¹² self-discovery, or some perception about the limitations of the theatre (as Philip Edwards would have it),¹³ is clearly grounded in a teleological view of comedy: it is purposive, and its purpose is revealed in its close.

The comic dramatist described by W. Thomas MacCary is a very different figure from the Shakespeare of the critics I have just been discussing. MacCary's Shakespeare focuses not on marriage as a goal but on a passage through the stages of object-choice appropriate to a developing male; not on social integration but on narcissism. And yet this playwright, too, focuses his comedies on a clear end: “the primary goal of the comedies, their teleology, is a definition of love, and this involves a consideration not only of stages in the development of object-relations but also some attention to pathology.”¹⁴ William C. Carroll, whose attention to metamorphoses in the comedies uncovers new insights on nearly every page, is likewise led to acknowledge that the changing shapes of love are finally brought to a static condition: “love is always harnessed, as Proteus was by Menelaus, into a single shape—into marriage, the final cause of comedy.”¹⁵

The critics I have been discussing differ from Frye and Barber in a variety of ways. Some, such as Ralph Berry, deny the celebratory element in Shakespearean comedy in order to replace it with an emphasis on the problematic nature of the plays; yet such an approach still appeals to a reader's or spectator's perception of the individual comedy's end in an effort to establish its validity. Others, such as MacCary, wish to focus on something other than the social experience of the comedy, its communal meaning, and direct attention instead to the individual comic journey, the development of the central figure—in MacCary's case, the young male hero. But though MacCary takes note of stages in this progress, his chief concern is with the results at journey's end, the wholeness and personal integration of the hero.

It is even more clearly the case with those who accept the Barber-Frye position (if I may so label their views, conflated here for my immediate purpose) that the emphasis on closure so crucial to that position has been equally important to their refinements, extensions, and modifications of the outlines of “green world” and “festive” comedy. Among these writers I might include, following Rebhorn, critics of widely differing originality and importance: Blaze Bonazza, Charles R. Lyons, Patrick Swindon, and Leo Salingar.¹⁶ Perhaps the most helpful illustration, though, appears in a recent book by Edward Berry in which he argues for “the romantic comedies as an unusually tight-knit genre based on specific ritual structures—those of initiation, courtship, and marriage.”¹⁷ Without wholly rejecting the insights of Barber and Frye, Berry insists on the primacy of personal rites over seasonal rites as the basis for our response to the comedies. His design, based on the studies of the anthropologist Arnold Van Gennep, nevertheless shares the general outline made familiar by his predecessors, for he sees rites of passage and comic drama illustrating “a common evolutionary form—a form in which periodic forays into chaos lead to new kinds of integration” (8). Moreover, Berry emphasizes early in his book that he shares with Suzanne Langer a belief in the high significance of structure for an understanding of comedy, and he quotes approvingly her dictum: “Destiny in the guise of Fortune is the fabric of comedy” (7).

Because Berry presents his views with such elegance and subtlety, he affords the best starting point for illustration of what has often seemed a corollary to critical emphasis on closure in the comedies: the idea that Shakespearean comedy leaves us dissatisfied, unfulfilled, doubtful about the future of the comic protagonists and the world they inhabit, or simply aware—in a resigned, melancholy way—that the achievement of art is necessarily incomplete and insufficient for our needs in the world waiting outside the theatre. For Berry, though the “rite of incorporation” which is marriage provides an appropriate comic conclusion, “it is important to remember that the significance of a wedding lies in the full event, not merely in the abstract ideal it embodies. Since ideals are never actualized, weddings, like all ritual events, are inescapably ironic” (171). Later, he emphasizes the tonal complexity such endings provide: “We experience not only the delight that arises from comic communion but the detachment that accompanies our awareness of its incompleteness and fragility” (197). In support of this view he quotes an equally subtle critic, Philip Edwards, who claims that “the ‘festive comedies’ do not really end in clarification and in a resolution of the opposing forces of holiday and everyday. A strong magic is created: and it is questioned” (197, Edwards 70).

But if Berry and Edwards approach the issue of comic closure gingerly and analyze the presence of tonal richness with elegant tact, others are less subtle. The darkening of Shakespeare's comic endings has become a phenomenon not merely of critical discourse but, perhaps inevitably, of theatrical practice as well.¹⁸ Perhaps no one has contributed to these linked tendencies with more energy and single-mindedness than Jan Kott. In the “Bitter Arcadia” he attributes to Shakespeare, Kott finds in every disguise a “diabolic invention” and “a call to orgy”;¹⁹ and nothing is more revealing of his emphasis on comedy's darkness than this summary of the mechanicals' play in A Midsummer Night's Dream: “The lovers are divided by a wall, cannot touch each other and only see each other through a crack. They will never be joined together. A hungry lion comes to the rendezvous place, and Thisbe flees in panic. Pyramus finds her blood-stained mantle and stabs himself. Thisbe returns, finds Pyramus's body and stabs herself with the same dagger. The world is cruel for true lovers” (190).

For Clifford Leech, this darkness is a progressive matter, shadowed only fleetingly in the early comedies but growing to such a point in Twelfth Night that “the most interesting thing” about the play “is its drawing back from a secure sense of harmony.”²⁰ This reluctance to claim perfection—a reluctance that seems to be shared by the playwright and his comic dramas, functioning almost as autonomous creatures—manifests itself “alone among the early comedies” in Love's Labour's Lost, which “has a disturbing quality which we shall meet later: a recognition of unappeasable suffering, of death and recurrent destruction, of an imperfection that is not easily faced. As this strain grows in his comic writing, it makes Shakespeare's hold on the idea of comedy a precarious one” (25). Thomas F. Van Laan sees a similar evolution in Shakespeare's growth as a comic writer; thus “as Shakespeare's comedy reaches its full complexity, it also begins to take on some of the sombre colouring normally associated with the so-called dark comedies.”²¹ Less concerned with questions of the playwright's development, Richard A. Levin is forthright about his intention to develop only the antiromantic alternative of each of the plays (as though criticism were simply a matter of selecting alternatives). He does so by such dubious means as asserting that in Much Ado about Nothing “Shakespeare uses Margaret to develop the dark background against which Messina moves toward marriage.”²²

One final example may close this rather brief look at those critics who take an “antifestive” position on closure. Ralph Berry does so explicitly and with more than a touch of shrillness. He attacks with rhetorical questions: “What sort of double marriage is it that is thrown together at the end of Twelfth Night?” And lest some inattentive reader miss the point, he reiterates it with the aid of heavy sarcasm: “One can scarcely acclaim as the apotheosis of festivity a final dance from which the local lord of misrule is unavoidably absent, expiating in hospital his addiction to the pleasure principle” (13, 14). What Berry and others who share his view insist on is a Shakespeare far too knowing and wordly to support by his art the easy patterns of escape and fulfillment advocated by Frye and Barber and their followers. This Shakespeare is a doubter, a playwright who asks questions, a realist like Feste who knows all about change, about wind and rain, about mortality.

My object, though, is not to mediate these two commonly opposed ways of reading Shakespeare but to emphasize their common origin, to argue that it is precisely in its emphasis on closure that modern criticism of Shakespearean comedy has gone seriously off course, and to suggest by example a means of adjusting critical perceptions in order to correct this mistaken focus. Enough has been said, here and elsewhere, to show how completely the Barber-Frye position has become the orthodoxy of those who have written about Shakespearean comedy since that position was given its first statement. It is equally clear that those who have taken the opposite position have been forced to do so, for the most part, in a fashion that acknowledges their view as a heretical departure from an established system of belief. The cornerstone of that system, as I have tried to show, is the importance of structure, and especially of a design that issues in life-enhancing ceremony and clarification about the meaning of life itself. Thus both the followers of Frye and Barber and those who set themselves in opposition to their critical line have attributed to closure a signal importance.²³

In the current critical situation, the description I provide cannot possibly cover every effort to come to terms with the comedies. What I am describing are the ways in which the dominant influences of Frye and Barber emerge in an emphasis on closure, and my focus therefore does not take into account critics who ignore altogether issues of design and structure. Nevertheless, the tendencies described here are both wide and deep. Even in cases where the critical method is little concerned with structural matters and therefore unlikely to stress closure, one still finds the influence of Frye and Barber. That influence is fully acknowledged by Peter Erickson, even though his larger concern with patriarchal structures would seem to ally him with forms of criticism that are less attentive to endings.²⁴ Marilyn Williamson, like Erickson focused on matters of patriarchy, has little apparent concern with structure. “The aim of [her book's] criticism,” she writes, “is to demonstrate the contingency of the representation of power in the comedies and thereby to contribute to the feminist controversy about Shakespeare's representation of women and hierarchy.”²⁵ Still, like most thematic critics, she does occasionally use language that locates meaning primarily in closure, making the comedies seem essentially teleological. Thus she describes what happens “as the comedies drive toward marriage” (36, italics mine); and she is even more explicit about the relationship of closure and meaning when she describes the end of Measure for Measure: “By reverting to the pattern of romantic comedy with the multiple marriages at the end, but with the marriages divorced from desire, Shakespeare makes even more striking the basic instability and tenuousness of the relationships, which exist by the ruler's order and trickery” (103).

Similarly, Adrian Louis Montrose is a critic whose attention to sociopolitical issues and whose general method associate him with the critical practices of the so-called new historicism; yet his reading of As You Like It depends heavily on detailed attention to closure and its thematic significance. In his formulation, comic form mirrors social process, enabling growth and change. Thus he argues that “the form of As You Like It becomes comic in the process of resolving the conflicts that are generated within it; events unfold and relationships are transformed in accordance with a precise comic teleology.”²⁶ R. S. White, in Shakespeare and the Romance Ending, finds that Shakespeare, throughout his career, “worries away … at the problem of how to adopt into his dramatic endings the potential endlessness of romance.”²⁷ This “constant worrying” is especially problematic for Shakespeare just because, in White's view, the comedies are, “in orthodox terms, defined in terms of their endings” (13). Thus the critical orthodoxy shaped by the work of Barber and Frye is seen retrospectively as a controlling aesthetic consideration for Shakespeare as he works to accommodate the pattern of romance with its “ancient endlessness” to “the dramatic necessity for a firm ending” (12-13).

What are the consequences of attaching such weight to closure? There are several, so varied that arranging them in a neat order presents some difficulty. Perhaps the most general consequence appears simply in the aggrandizement of the comic ending itself. By making the endings of his plays answer for so much, critics have imposed on Shakespeare an extraordinary burden. Bardolatry is not dead; it merely assumes, over the years, different forms. The bardolatry of these last decades, so far as Shakespeare the comic dramatist is concerned, grows out of the insistence that his comic endings be answerable both to his stature as our greatest playwright and to the full complexity of the plays as that complexity appears to the scrutiny of twentieth-century literary criticism and theory.

The simple fact is that Shakespeare, who has more to offer than most playwrights, is therefore asked to give us more than any playwright can legitimately be asked to give. He is in the position of the star pupil who so far outshines the others in the class that he is given not deserved praise but more difficult tasks. Pedagogically, and perhaps critically, such a procedure makes sense, but only to a certain point; after that it becomes not merely unfair but counterproductive. If we ask which comic writers could meet the standards imposed on Shakespearean closure, we could find, from the Renaissance to today, few names that any critic would advance with full confidence. Shakespeare's greatest rival in comedy, Ben Jonson, would surely not measure up. In Every Man in His Humour, Edward Knowell wins a bride who is a dramatic nullity, and Bobadill and Matthew are excluded from the final ceremony. In Epicoene, Dauphine dismisses Morose with the promise that he will not trouble him “till you trouble me with your funeral.”²⁸ Jonson himself recognized that the close of Volpone might occasion criticism: “my catastrophe,” he writes in the Epistle to that play, “may in the strict rigour of comic law meet with censure”;²⁹ and Coleridge found that Jonson had erred in not making Celia Corvino's ward, so that she would be eligible for marriage to Bonario at the play's close. But Jonson, of course, wrote comedy of a different sort from Shakespeare's; his acerb, satiric comedy can hardly be faulted for not giving us festive endings.

What, then, of Lyly or Greene, Shakespeare's predecessors in romantic comedy; or what of Dekker, his contemporary? Gallathea comes to mind at once, for this play of sexual disguising, with its prominent threat of sacrificial death, its witty management of transvestism, and its touching allusions to absent siblings, contains many of the elements that Shakespeare capitalizes on in his plays. But Lyly's solution to the dramatic problems he creates for his characters is so patently artificial—one of the young women, we aren't told which, is to be metamorphosed into a young man—that we find in the comedy's close not an occasion for festivity but justification for assigning the play to a separate category, for thinking of it as masque or spectacle or show. Lyly fails to play the game by our rules; thus however delightful the close of Gallathea may be, it remains a feat of magic rather than a successful ending within the terms of the dramatic world that playwright has led us imaginatively to inhabit. It is as though Shakespeare, in The Winter's Tale, had allowed Paulina to reveal not a statuelike Hermione but an actual statue and had then allowed her to bring that statue to life.

Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay ends on a grand celebratory note. The play's final scene begins with a magnificent procession: “Enter the Emperor with a pointless sword; next, the King of Castile, carrying a sword with a point; Lacy, carrying the globe; Ed[ward]; Warr[en], carrying a rod of gold with a dove on it; Ermsby, with a crown and scepter; [Princess Eleanor], with the Fair Maid of Fressingfield on her left hand; Henry, Bacon, with other Lords attending.”³⁰ It continues with a chorus of mutual congratulation and self-congratulation among the members of the wedding party, then moves on through Bacon's prophecy to a closing note that unites wedding festivity with patriotic fervor:

                                        the time
Craves that we taste of naught but jouissance.
Thus glories England over all the west.

(16.74-76)

Greene has written a wonderfully successful romantic comedy. But we should not forget that it includes the deaths of four minor figures (Lambert and Serlsby, fils et pères), the snatching off of Miles to hell, the arbitrary cruelty of Lacy to Margaret, and Margaret's disappointingly spiritless capitulation (“The flesh is frail”) when faced with the choice between “God or Lord Lacy” (14.85, 83). Again, one sees in such a brief summary elements that will reappear in Shakespeare's comedies: the caddish male who nevertheless gains a bride he has willfully injured, a young woman whose acceptance of his hand is as sudden as it is unmotivated, and an atmosphere suffused with mistakings and deaths that would seem to question the very possibility of a comic end. Held to the requirements imposed on Shakespeare, Greene would be judged to have written a comedy whose festive end is insupportable—a failure on both moral and aesthetic grounds.

The Shoemaker's Holiday, Dekker's finest play, appeared in 1599, just at the point when Shakespeare was fashioning the greatest of his romantic comedies. A glance at the bare outline of the play reveals how similar it is to the mature achievements of Shakespeare in the genre. Like them, it involves a story of lovers separated by parental opposition and the demands of a harsh society; like them it mirrors the trials of those central lovers in the difficulties of another pair who are different in style and status; like them it includes a good deal of fooling by inventive and bawdy clown figures; and like them it involves a movement from one locale to a place of freedom and confusion, and then a movement back to the original locale, now transformed as it shapes itself to accommodate a changed set of values. But Dekker's play, for all its bumptious optimism, begins and ends with references to warfare. The second male lead, wounded in battle and changed beyond recognition, regains his wife through an elaborate stratagem designed by his fellow shoemakers and in the process dupes her suitor of both goods and money; and the ebullient Simon Eyre, with his egalitarian cry of “Prince am I none, yet bear a princely mind,” gains his position as Lord Mayor and supports his princely style of entertaining with the help of inside information that might well be the envy of some of today's shadier Wall Street operators. Yet few critics would claim that Dekker's play is other than successful. On its own terms, and on the terms that we are likely to apply to its playwright, The Shoemaker's Holiday is a charmingly energetic comedy, peopled with characters who command our feelings of interest and affection and filled with incidents that seem nicely calculated to exploit and reward those feelings. Judged by the criteria ordinarily applied to Shakespearean comedy, however, the close of Dekker's play would come under more detailed scrutiny; and the play itself, victimized by a critical synecdoche that takes the part for the whole, would be judged to be flawed or problematic.

Thus one major consequence of a narrow focus on closure is the imposition on Shakespeare's comedies of an artificially high standard, one that no other comic writer is asked to reach. No doubt Shakespeare is a surpassing genius. As a comic dramatist, however, his is the same enterprise that other writers of comedy have engaged in over the years. Like Molière or Sheridan, Shaw or Alan Ayckbourn, Shakespeare in his comedies endeavors to fulfill the perennial aims of comedy. To fault him because in closing those endeavors of art he snatches his reward too hastily or artfully evades the moral or logical difficulties in his way is merely to bind Shakespeare in the chains of a bardolatry disguised as critical rigor.

The second consequence of the focus I have been describing exists on a different critical plane from the first. While the first concentrates attention on questions of achievement (How successful is Shakespeare as a comic dramatist?), the second directs scrutiny to questions of meaning (What is Shakespeare's final judgment about the issues he raises in this play?). This connection between closure and meaning is made strikingly clear in the words of Northrop Frye, quoted earlier, describing that point “when some turn in the plot arrests the linear movement and enables us for the first time to see the story as a total shape, or what is usually called a theme” ( Natural Perspective 9). Almost any critic who follows Barber and Frye or who, in rejecting their views, bases a dissenting opinion on a differing interpretation of Shakespeare's handling of a particular comedy's end will be led to posit a similar connection between closure and meaning. The product of such a connection is not a matter of speculation; it is the assertion of “meanings” of the sort deplored by Richard Levin in his book New Readings vs. Old Plays.³¹ For my purpose it is less important to record instances of such criticism than to show that, as they arise in discussions of Shakespearean comedy, they often (perhaps inevitably) grow out of a critical procedure that directs excessive attention to closure.

A remark by Joseph A. Bryant, Jr., focuses these issues very effectively. Writing of Shylock (but levying a requirement he clearly intends for the entire play), he says that “we can and should experience a series of widely differing reactions during the course of the play”; then he adds, “but if Shakespeare has done his work properly, the end should find them all focused in a single impression.”³² This is teleological comedy in an emphatic form. The playwright's job is to mirror life in its complexity but, at the play's close, order it so that it may be read. Comedy is a puzzle to which closure provides the answer: “the end crowns the work.”

Bryant's remark is especially useful just because critical responses to The Merchant of Venice offer striking documentation of what happens when closure is made to carry the whole burden of a comedy's meaning. A. D. Moody, in his short book on the play, declares an unwillingness to offer a simple, cynical view of The Merchant of Venice, one that would see it as being “‘about’” the way Christians succeed “by not practising their ideals of love and mercy” or “the essential likeness of Shylock and his judges.”³³ Yet so exercised is he by those critics who, in his judgment, offer an opposed view that is equally simple in its romanticism or idealism that he seems driven to assert the cynical rebuttal in an aggressive fashion. Among the “romantic or idealizing” critics who are the villains of his piece, Moody numbers Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, Frank Kermode, E. C. Pettet, C. L. Barber, and John Russell Brown, all of whom he cites for their falsification of the play's close. But Nevill Coghill, who finds in the play “the triumphant reconciliation of justice with mercy,” earns the largest measure of Moody's scorn. Quoting Coghill's account of the comedy's final scene—“We return to Belmont to find Lorenzo and Jessica in each other's arms. Christian and Jew, New Law and Old, are visibly united in love. And their talk is of music, Shakespeare's recurrent symbol of harmony”³⁴—Moody, equally persuaded that its meaning must be derived from its conclusion, challenges the romantic and idealizing critics on that ground. He does so by making Portia's fifth-act entrance a signal for the cessation of the music that Lorenzo calls for at 5.1.66-68. “With Portia's return,” he argues, “we are brought back from thoughts of heavenly harmony to the sublunar world of mortals”; and further: “There is a harshness and dissonance in her devaluing the lark and the nightingale. … In the context just established this must make her ‘fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils’—which indeed is pretty much what she has been up to in Venice” (47).

Moody's detailed attention to Shakespeare's ending of The Merchant of Venice reinforces the trend in recent years of seeing all the comedies as incomplete or tinged with difficulty that may approach darkness. A. P. Riemer takes note of “a relatively recent orthodoxy … claiming that the final moments of Shakespeare's comedies represent an ironic, almost bitter commentary on one of the traditional ingredients of comedy: the insistence that all should end happily, that the characters, or at least the sympathetic ones, should be promised a life of perfect felicity” (10). Ralph Berry, viewing the same phenomenon from a different critical angle, remarks that “the leading theatrical practice of recent years … stresses the ironic and problematic aspects of the texts” (15). When that tendency merges with the practice of finding the plays’ meanings crystallized in their closing moments, we have arrived at a critical situation answering to Frank Kermode's description: “The point is that all the comedies are ‘problem’ comedies; that The Two Gentlemen of Verona is a legend of Friendship … A Midsummer Night's Dream of love, As You Like It of courtesy, and The Merchant of Venice of justice”—where “legend” is assigned its Spenserian significance, and where the play's purpose in each instance is to move to a close that articulates its meaning.³⁵

It happens that Anne Barton works out this stage of interpretation in an essay that employs Kermode's observations in another area altogether, the universe of prose fiction. Barton makes a primary distinction between the closure of tragedy and that of comedy. In tragedy, she claims, “In terms of individual consciousness, … fifth acts are true.” Comedy presents a different case altogether: “Artistic forms which dismiss their characters into happiness … are far more problematic. Such endings … are a kind of arbitrary arrest. By means of art, the flux of life has been stilled.”³⁶ The development Barton traces in Shakespearean comedy finds the plays up to Twelfth Night “essentially teleological”—i.e., they are “works of art in which a retrospective view from the final scene is encouraged, and alters our understanding of the play as a whole” (178, 179). But the withdrawal of Jaques at the end of As You Like It causes a “tremor in the balance of comedy” after which Shakespeare cannot sustain his earlier pattern. In Twelfth Night, then, we witness “a world of revelry, of comic festivity,” fighting “a kind of desperate rearguard action against the cold light of day” (176). In this outline, Barton sees two sorts of endings: those before Twelfth Night, endings that, in Kermode's phrase, “frankly transfigure the events in which they were immanent” ( Sense 175); and those found in Twelfth Night and the problem comedies that face us with a “divided fifth act” that “admits the fictional nature of the comic society” and forces the characters (some of them, at least) and spectators alike to confront the real world. It is clear, however, that both sorts of endings put strong pressure on closure: the first, Kermode's “immanent” ending, as it draws both events and their meanings to a point; and the second, Barton's, as it insists on meanings both within the play's world and in the world outside the theatre, “the world as it is” (179).

Intense scrutiny of comic closure has as its second consequence, then, the expectation that endings somehow encapsulate a play's meanings. Thus Gratiano's final pun in The Merchant of Venice, Malvolio's parting threat and Feste's song in Twelfth Night, Benedick's remarks to Don Pedro as the reformed bachelor initiates the marriage dance in Much Ado about Nothing, and the opposed songs that end Love's Labor's Lost all have been seen as the focal points of comprehensive—and contradictory—interpretations of those plays; and the list could be extended to include all the early comedies.

On one level, this desire to find encapsulated meaning at the plays’ endings seems critically flawed when radically opposed meanings can be found emerging from the same textual materials. On another level, the didacticism of this approach almost always insists on the textual source of meaning and thus reduces the importance of the theatrical experience that ought properly to be seen as both the body and the soul of the comedy.

A third consequence of the habit of “crowning the end” appears in the mismatch between what might be called critical unitarianism (a desire to find in the comedies a tidy thematic focus, the “unified impression” of Bryant) and the sometimes unruly multiplicity of the plays themselves. As is usually the case, the problem comedies, especially Measure for Measure, illustrate this difficulty most strikingly. To accommodate the diversity of characters—with their weaknesses, obstinacies, unawarenesses, willful disobediences, and silences—to the Duke's self-assured remediation seems an overwhelming task on the stage. To gather such complexities within the boundaries of a single critical design seems even more difficult.

… Here, it may suffice to say that as the comedies move in the direction of realism—as their worlds correspond more fully to societies in which men and women must work and live, and as those men and women seem to be judged appropriately by standards of psychological credibility—the reductionism of such teleological criticism seems less and less valid.

Measure for Measure, a critical hard case, is different only in degree from the earlier comedies in this respect. Yet precisely because of the play's multiplicity and felt complexity it urges the need for an alternative view of comedy. Such a view would not be teleological and focused on closure. Instead, it would allow consideration of the totality of Shakespeare's comedies, attending to them in their moment-by-moment release of comic energy and attending as well to the variety of characters and concerns they offer in such profusion. Readers of Alexander Leggatt's fine book on the comedies will see that I agree with him about the danger of seeking some “inner unity of the work of art.” In such a search, “when everything is seen as contributing a central idea, a single pattern of images, or a particular kind of story, then individual scenes may be understood from that point of view alone, and thus denied their full life.”³⁷ Freed from the unitary limitations of teleological criticism, one may find a wider and more generous, a more fully comic, perspective. In this perspective, it is possible to see that Much Ado about Nothing is, at some fundamental level of plot, “about” a variety of matters. These include the courtship of Claudio and Hero with its attendant mistakings and deceptions, the merry war of Beatrice and Benedick, Don John's villainy, the deception played out by Borachio and Margaret, Dogberry's maladroit efforts as watchman and reporter, Leonato's self-centered raging at his daughter's disgrace, and the fussy ineffectiveness of Antonio. The Merchant of Venice comes to a close in Portia's Belmont; but the city, with its inexplicable moods and its pervasive mercantilism, will not be denied. Shylock remains an almost palpable presence, and Antonio's ships are the subject of the title character's final speech. Lorenzo, having brought Jessica into the haven of a Christian community, nonetheless describes the comforts of Nerissa and Portia, “a special deed of gift, / … of all he [Shylock] dies possess’d of,” as “manna” dropped “in the way / Of starved people” (5.1.292-95).

Given such richness, it is not at all surprising that unitarian critics are driven to extraordinary shifts as they try to fit the complex endings of Shakespeare's plays to their desire to see “the story as a total shape.” A great many factors militate against this desire for order, beginning with Shakespeare's fondness for multiple plots. Thus Twelfth Night, sufficiently complicated in its chief romantic line with the interweaving of the affairs of Orsino and Olivia, Viola, and Sebastian, is made even more complicated by the very different courtship of Toby and Maria, the failures of Sir Andrew as wooer and duelist, and the duping of Malvolio. Viola is wise enough to realize that only time can untie her knotty difficulties; unitarian critics, less diffident, look to the play's closure to find a point where all of its complexities are resolved. The result in each case is intense critical pressure on a narrowly circumscribed set of data: the absence of Sir Toby and Sir Andrew (after 5.1.208), Maria's total absence in the final scene, Malvolio's exit line, the fate of the captain, Orsino's reluctance to allow Viola the hard-earned right to put “Cesario” behind her, and finally, Feste's song. One measure of the greatness of a play like Twelfth Night resides in its ability to endure and even to nourish such narrowly focused scrutiny. It seems worth pointing out that equally problematic and valuable critical issues present themselves in this play's early acts: Feste's absence from the letter scene; Olivia's easy forgetting of both her father and her brother; the curious fact that Orsino can seem, at one and the same time, to be a hopelessly inadequate suitor for Olivia and an ideal partner for Viola. On the other hand, the fact that honest and responsible critics can advance not merely opposed readings but a wide range of interpretations from the smallest details of the play's movement to an end seems to imply something about the fecundity of critical invention rather than about the inexhaustible richness of the text.

Shakespeare's plays are not merely texts, of course, as any number of stage-centered critics have demonstrated over the last twenty years or more—i.e., a period roughly coinciding with the critical emphasis on closure I have been describing here.³⁸ The widespread acceptance of the notion that we can understand plays more fully by attending to their theatrical elements than by concentrating on their verbal structure is often endorsed by critics who stress the importance of closure. Indeed, many of them employ such criticism as a key to interpretation of particular moments in a play's ending. But it seems difficult to ignore the irony involved in such a procedure; for while the two critical methods are not mutually exclusive, they are considerably at odds.

They are so because a play on stage (even if that stage is the critic's theatre of the mind) is a succession of dramatic moments involving the experience of all the theatrical resources that can affect its presentation. It is emphatically not a progress toward an end, especially in comedy. If the ending has a special importance, it remains firmly within the terms defined several years ago by Bernard Beckerman: “The finales of Shakespeare's Globe plays often fail to produce a climactic effect because the completion of the narrative does not arise from the conflicting forces of the theme or action. By the time the last scene began, the Elizabethan audience knew how the story would end. But it satisfied the Elizabethan sense of ritual to see the pageant of this conclusion acted out.”³⁹ Critics who aggrandize closure, then, even if they acknowledge the need to consider the play's stage qualities, unnecessarily distort its shape and movement. What seizes our attention in the theatre is not a movement of plot or a progression of ideas but an actor's specific realization of a character's reason for being; the orchestrated perfection of a spying scene; moments of psychological and even physical sport released in a spirit of unrestrained exuberance. Examples are available in abundance: Launce and his dog in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (2.3.1-32); the academicians turned sonneteers in Love's Labor's Lost (4.3); the conclusion of the letter scene in Twelfth Night (2.5). For each of these illustrations Shakespeare furnishes many more in the same category, and the categories themselves only begin to suggest the sources of arresting theatrical pleasure everywhere available in the comedies. Such moments are scanted when critics throw the weight of their analysis on closure. Crowning the end, they undervalue the rich variety of event and character that gives to Shakespearean comedy its enduring appeal.

The consequences of emphasizing closure discussed up to this point are primarily matters that remain securely within the limits of critical discourse. One important result of that emphasis, however, breaks through those limits and leads to a fundamental confusion. Because a focusing on closure often implies formal resolution of a play's difficulties, it may lead to judgments about the settling of accounts, a sort of moral bookkeeping. How is Shylock left at the end of the play? Is Antonio's stipulation—that a more lenient punishment than the Duke's be pronounced if Shylock will convert—a gesture of mercy or a final cruelty imposed by the Jew's Christian tormentors? What are we to say of the marriages that close Twelfth Night? Can Maria have a reasonable hope that Sir Toby will reform, or Viola even imagine that Orsino will be mature and decisive enough to deserve her love, or Olivia put her faith in the still-dazzled Sebastian? Or, more important still, how can one acquiesce in Malvolio's banishment when even his mistress finds that he has been “most notoriously abused”? How can Hero accept Claudio, and how can we? What are we to make of Kate's abject capitulation, or Valentine's treating Sylvia as property when he offers to convey her to his treacherous friend Proteus, or the improbable repentance of Oliver?

Such questions are in some measure inescapable for anyone who takes the comedies seriously; but for critics who emphasize closure they are aggressively insistent, and they create special difficulties. In addressing issues of justice or raising supposititious questions about the future lives of comic characters, critics inevitably confuse the task of the playwright with other roles: moralist, counselor, psychologist. Only a short while ago, it seems, this point was so widely accepted as to seem self-evident. The work of art, self-contained and complete, did not and could not depend for its understanding on matters whose existence lay outside itself. The life of the characters in a fiction was understood to be coterminous with that fiction: one didn't ask if Claudio and Hero enjoyed their honeymoon or if Jessica eventually left Belmont, tired of the condescension of her Christian neighbors. But to observe all this is not to call for a return to an earlier and more comfortable critical faith; it is merely to say that a departure from such principles leads to confusion between the spheres of aesthetic design and moral judgment, between, in short, art and life.

And that is precisely the effect of much of the criticism that focuses on closure. What Shakespeare has joined together, critics willingly put asunder. Jessica is sure to awaken from her moonlit dream, and Portia is bound to recognize the mercantile basis of Bassanio's love. Kate will be herself again (if indeed her great speech is not a mere ruse), and Maria will grow tired of Sir Toby's drunken nonsense. A. P. Riemer has written effectively on this matter, and to persist at any length would be to cover ground that he has already traversed (5, 71, 110). It may be worth pointing out, however, that in this joining of the issues of closure and judgment all the comedies are likely to seem, as Frank Kermode has found them to be, essentially problematic. Taken to its critical extreme, an interest in closure may even lead one to believe, with Zvi Jagendorf, that “a study of comic endings is really a study of the mode itself.”⁴⁰ Understanding the consequences of aggrandizing closure should not lead one to deny the importance of the way Shakespeare's comedies end. Revenge, in Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, pronounces “a version of one of the commonest sayings” when he mollifies the impatient ghost of Andrea with the assurance that “the end is crown of every work well done.”⁴¹ But to elevate closure further, to crown the end rather than to see it as a necessary and inevitable part of the total work, is to pervert a commonplace and to distort both the nature and the function of Shakespeare's comedies. These comedies are not driven toward their endings; they are, rather, driven by their ends. It is no mere pun to say that these are very different matters. …

Notes

1. John Russell Brown, “The Interpretation of Shakespeare's Comedies: 1900-1953,” Shakespeare Survey 8 (1955): 1-13, p. 7.

2. Wayne A. Rebhorn, “After Frye: A Review-Article on the Interpretation of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance,” Texas Studies in Language and Literature 21 (1979): 553-82, p. 533.

3. Samuel Johnson, “Preface to Shakespeare,” Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Arthur Sherbo, vol. 7, the Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. E. L. McAdam, Jr., et al. (New Haven: Yale UP, 1968), p. 72.

4. John Dover Wilson, Shakespeare's Happy Comedies (London: Faber and Faber, 1962), p. 36.

5. Frye's influence dates from as early as 1948, with the publication of “The Argument of Comedy,” English Institute Essays 1948, ed. D. A. Robertson, Jr. (New York: Columbia UP, 1949, 58-73), and has continued, in such works as The Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957) and A Natural Perspective (New York: Columbia UP, 1965). Barber's contribution is, of course, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (1959; Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972).

6. Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Criticism,” I, 73.

7. Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981).

8. Interestingly, Frye uses the term teleological to contrast Jonson's comedy to Shakespeare's. But it seems clear that in the ordinary significance of the word it describes the approach to the comedies taken by Barber as well as by Frye.

9. Ralph Berry, Shakespeare's Comedies: Explorations in Form (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972), p. 13.

10. Elliot Krieger, A Marxist Study of Shakespeare's Comedies (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1979), p. 125.

11. Anthony B. Dawson, Indirections: Shakespeare and the Art of Illusion (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1978), p. xii.

12. See Joseph Summers, “The Masks of Twelfth Night,” University of Kansas City Review 22 (1955): 25-32.

13. Philip Edwards, Shakespeare and the Confines of Art (London: Methuen, 1968).

14. W. Thomas MacCary, Friends and Lovers: The Phenomenology of Desire in Shakespearean Comedy (New York: Columbia UP, 1985), p. 79.

15. William C. Carroll, The Metamorphoses of Shakespearean Comedy (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985), p. 31.

16. See Blaze Bonazza, Shakespeare's Early Comedies: A Structural Analysis, Studies in English Literature 9 (The Hague: Mouton, 1966); Charles R. Lyons, Shakespeare and the Ambiguity of Love's Triumph, Studies in English Literature 68 (The Hague: Mouton, 1971); Patrick Swindon, An Introduction to Shakespeare's Comedies (London: Macmillan, 1973); and Leo Salingar, Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1974). Rebhorn's analysis is more detailed than mine and more judgmental, as is appropriate in a review essay. He does not see Frye and Barber as I do, for he finds Barber far less concerned with structure than Frye, more interested in tone and mood.

17. Edward Berry, Shakespeare's Comic Rites (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984), p. ix.

18. A. P. Riemer, Antic Fables: Patterns of Evasion in Shakespeare's Comedies (New York: St. Martin's, 1980), p. 10.

19. Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, trans. Boleslaw Taborski, 2nd ed. (London: Methuen, 1967), p. 323.

20. Clifford Leech, Twelfth Night and Shakespearean Comedy (Toronto: Dalhousie UP, 1965), p. 38.

21. Thomas Van Laan, Role-Playing in Shakespeare (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1978), p. 84

22. Richard A. Levin, Love and Society in Shakespearean Comedy (Newark: U of Delaware P, 1985), pp. 20, 215.

23. The attention given to closure in discussions of Shakespearean comedy is not at all an isolated phenomenon. Barbara Herrnstein Smith and Frank Kermode are perhaps the most conspicuous and influential among critics who have focused on the issue of closure in other genres. See Smith, Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1968), and Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (New York: Oxford UP, 1967).

24. Peter Erickson, Patriarchal Structures in Shakespeare's Drama (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1985). It should be obvious that there are certain critical practices that do not work within the terms I am using here. “One of the many lessons to be learned from Derrida's … practice of reading and writing,” says David Hult, “is that the temporality and topology of the text are such that it is impossible to disentangle its literary and philosophical moments.” If this position is accepted, then obviously the notion of closure as critical concept is rendered all but useless. For an extended discussion of this issue from a variety of viewpoints, see Concepts of Closure, Yale French Studies 67 (1984), ed. David Hult, from which the quotation just cited is taken (22). It is also obvious that for most writers on Shakespeare's comedies the concepts of closure and ending are not merely viable but essential to their understanding of how the plays work.

25. Marilyn Williamson, The Patriarchy of Shakespeare's Comedies (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1986).

26. Adrian Louis Montrose, “‘The Place of a Brother’ in As You Like It: Social Process and Comic Form,” Shakespeare Quarterly 32 (1981): 28-54. I discuss the work of Montrose and Erickson, and to a lesser extent that of Williamson, in my chapter on As You Like It [in Shakespeare and the Ends of Comedy, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991], when I elaborate on the point made here.

27. R. S. White, Shakespeare and the Romance Ending (Newcastle: Tyneside Free P, 1981), p. 23.

28. Ben Jonson, Epicoene, or, The Silent Woman, ed. L. A. Beaurline, Regents Renaissance Drama Series (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1966), 5.4.195.

29. Jonson, Volpone, or, The Fox, ed. R. B. Parker, The Revels Plays (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1983), p. 75.

30. Robert Green, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, ed. Daniel Seltzer, Regents Renaissance Drama Series (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1963), p. 94.

31. Richard L. Levin, New Readings vs. Old Plays: Recent Trends in the Reinterpretation of English Renaissance Drama (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1979).

32. Joseph A. Bryant, Jr., Shakespeare and the Uses of Comedy (Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1986), p. 84.

33. A. D. Moody, Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice (London: Edward Arnold, 1964), p. 10.

34. Nevill Coghill, “The Basis of Shakespearean Comedy,” Essays and Studies 3 (1950): 23.

35. Frank Kermode, “The Mature Comedies,” Early Shakespeare, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 3, ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris (London: Edward Arnold, 1961), pp. 220-21.

36. Anne Barton, “As You Like It and Twelfth Night: Shakespeare's Sense of an Ending,” Shakespearian Comedy, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 14, ed. Malcolm Bradbury and David Palmer (London: Edward Arnold, 1972), p. 167. Barton employs ideas developed by Frank Kermode in The Sense of an Ending.

37. Alexander Leggatt, Shakespeare's Comedy of Love (London: Methuen, 1974), p. xi.

38. See, for example, John Russell Brown, Shakespeare's Dramatic Style: Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It, Julius Caesar, Twelfth Night, Macbeth (London: Heinemann, 1970), and John L. Styan, Shakespeare's Stagecraft (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1967).

39. Bernard Beckerman, Shakespeare at the Globe (New York: Columbia UP, 1962), p. 39.

40. Zvi Jagendorf, The Happy End of Comedy: Jonson, Molière, and Shakespeare (Newark: U of Delaware P, 1984), p. 1.

41. Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, ed. Phillip Edwards, The Revels Plays (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1959), 2.6.8 and note.

Works Cited

Barber, C. L. Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom. 1959. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972.

Barton, Anne. “As You Like It and Twelfth Night: Shakespeare's Sense of an Ending.” Shakespearian Comedy. Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 14. Ed. Malcolm Bradbury and David Palmer. London: Edward Arnold, 1972.

Berry, Ralph. Shakespeare's Comedies: Explorations in Form. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972.

Brown, John Russell. “The Interpretation of Shakespeare's Comedies: 1900-1953.” Shakespeare Survey 8 (1955): 1-13.

Edwards, Philip. Shakespeare and the Confines of Art. London: Methuen, 1968.

Frye, Northrop. “The Argument of Comedy.” English Institute Essays 1948. Ed. D. A. Robertson, Jr. New York: Columbia UP, 1949. 58-73.

———. A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance. New York: Columbia UP, 1965.

Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending. New York: Oxford UP, 1967.

Kernan, Alvin. The Cankered Muse: Satire of the English Renaissance. New Haven: Yale UP, 1959.

Kott, Jan. Shakespeare Our Contemporary. Trans. Boleslaw Taborski. 2nd ed. London: Methuen, 1967.

Leech, Clifford. Twelfth Night and Shakespearean Comedy. Toronto: Dalhousie UP, 1965.

Moody, A. D. Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice. London: Edward Arnold, 1964.

Riemer, A. P. Antic Fables: Patterns of Evasion in Shakespeare's Comedies. New York: St. Martins, 1980.

Williamson, Marilyn. The Patriarchy of Shakespeare's Comedies. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1986.