SOURCE: “The Difficulties of Closure: An Approach to the Problematic in Shakespearian Comedy,” in Comedy from Shakespeare to Sheridan, edited by A. R. Braunmuller and J. C. Bulman, pp. 113-28, University of Delaware Press, 1986.

[In the essay that follows, Howard challenges theories of comic structure which assert that Shakespeare's comedies inevitably conclude with the restoration of social order and the harmonizing of disruptive or contradictory elements. Focusing on the final scenes of The Taming of the Shrew, Measure for Measure, and The Merchant of Venice, Howard proposes that in these scenes Shakespeare interrogates comic conventions to demonstrate the hazards audiences will encounter if they ignore or suppress features of a play that cannot be reconciled with a single, all-inclusive interpretation.]

For those of us schooled on the work of C. L. Barber and Northrop Frye, the phrase “Shakespearian comedy” is probably forever linked in our minds with “green worlds,” “idiotes figures,” and “transformed societies.”¹ Frye and Barber taught an entire generation of Shakespearian critics a way of comprehending Shakespeare's comic practice, and it was with an immediate sense of understanding that I recently read an article by Charles Sugnet that began with the author's assertion that he found it comparatively easy to teach Shakespearian comedy because its generic features had been so well defined by prior critics such as Frye, Barber, and Kott, whereas he did not feel that so clear a map had ever been provided for Shakespeare's handling of the tragic genre.²

Most readers of the present essay, I am sure, are familiar with the specific theories of Frye and Barber. What I propose to do here is neither to rehash nor to refute those theories but, rather, to reflect on some of the implications of their large-scale adoption as a frame through which to see individual plays. In particular, I want to consider how reliance on certain premises of Frye and Barber can lead us to minimize some aspects of the comedies, most notably the degree of unresolved turbulence and contradiction present in these plays and present in the audience's aesthetic experience of them.

Of course, the work of Barber and Frye differs in many ways, and to group these critics together can be misleading; nevertheless, it does seem to me that they both share an inherently conservative and relatively unproblematic view of the comedies. For both, these plays are primarily vehicles for testing and confirming social order and sexual difference by a purely temporary confounding of both.³ Turbulence, misrule, and Saturnalian confusion erupt within the plays only to give way before the reimposition of order and traditional values. Barber quite explicitly suggests that the social stability of Shakespeare's Elizabethan rural background—a stability profound enough to tolerate temporary disruptions in the form of holiday inversions of order—was the origin of the balanced aesthetic vision he sees in the festive plays, an equilibrium disturbed only in the problem comedies of the early Jacobean period.⁴ Frye, by contrast, emphasizes the mythic and universal dimensions of the comedies, not their relationship to a specific culture, and he tends to homogenize the entire comic canon, finding more similarities than differences among the early comedies, the problem comedies, and the romances, while privileging the romances as Shakespeare's highest achievement in the genre.⁵ Both Barber, however, in studying the festive comedies, and Frye, in considering Shakespeare's entire comic oeuvre, treat the plays as a mechanism for containing the eruption of the chaotic and the disorderly within a social and aesthetic system. Not only do characters move from confusion to clarification, but so does the audience, as challenges to traditional modes of thought and belief are played out and defused before its very eyes.

What I would like to question is the adequacy of this serene view of Shakespearian comedy, even of the so-called festive plays. Without wishing to suggest that all comedies are uniformly problematic, I do think that criticism of the comedies has not sufficiently acknowledged their problematic dimensions, that is, the presence within them of conflicting generic codes and cultural norms that resist easy harmonization. Some of the most interesting recent work on the comedies has shown, for example, that these plays are not solely concerned with the mythic realm of man's timeless and collective existence, as Frye has suggested; nor, as Barber has argued, are they related to the larger culture simply as dramatic transformations of the rituals of Elizabethan holiday; rather, they are inextricably bound up with the contradictions and discontinuities of the Elizabethan cultural matrix, sometimes mediating or harmonizing conflicts and sometimes merely reflecting them.⁶ Consequently, rather than problem-solving mechanisms that express turbulence only to tame it, even the festive comedies frequently function as problem-posing structures that produce aesthetic experiences marked as much by rupture and discontinuity as by the serene harmonization of contradictory elements. It is with the problematic dimensions of the viewer's experience of the comedies that I wish chiefly to deal in this paper, in part by making use of the work of Wolfgang Iser on the way texts are assimilated by readers. It is my contention that the wrong kind of reliance upon generic approaches to Shakespearian comedy, such as those developed by Frye and Barber, can result in our projecting upon these plays an image of harmony that masks their discontinuites and the instability of the viewer's imaginative closure of them. To support this contention I wish in particular to look at the endings of several comedies and evaluate the difficulties they present a viewer attempting to assimilate all of the final elements of a particular work into a satisfying gestalt.

Before turning to specific plays, let me say a word about Iser, whose theories concerning the assimilation of texts by readers seem to me of interest to Shakespearians, even though Iser writes primarily about novels and not about drama. For Iser, all aesthetic objects have only a virtual existence and are the products of the controlled interaction between text and reader.⁷ He argues, correctly I believe, that rich texts, as opposed to those that are trivial or propagandistic, require readers to complete the aesthetic object by themselves supplying what is unsaid within the work itself. In constructing meaning, the reader is guided by the strategies of the text in his attempts to create a consistent and coherent image from the welter of literary norms and cultural perspectives present in the work. All rich texts involve the reader in the process of producing a sequence of new images or gestalts as the reading of each new textual segment reveals information that alters the significance of what has come before. The reader is driven along in the reading process by the desire to “close the gestalt,” to bring all the pieces of the text into a satisfying configuration in his mind. If closing the gestalt is too easy, that is, if the text is too explicit in laying down instructions for the production of meaning, the reader feels cheated, uninvolved, or bored. If, on the other hand, the text strongly resists closure, the result may also be boredom or frustration or, ironically, the production of rigid interpretations that block out the intrusion of new and disturbing information. Iser most often cites modernist texts, such as those by Joyce and Beckett, as works which resist closure, but he acknowledges that such texts can exist in any era; and he does not assume that “good” literary works necessarily produce in the reader a state of equilibrium and harmony. For him the only literature that is deficient is that which leaves the reader with little to do and which leaves open no possibilities for change in the reader. Such change, Iser argues, occurs when the reader confronts the literary and cultural norms of his own or another culture “depragmatized” by their inclusion in a literary work, that is, removed from the everyday context in which their validity is assumed, so that they can be held up for interrogation. The result may be a change in the reader's attitude toward or relationship to these norms.⁸

While I doubt that there are many Shakespearian dramas that are unsatisfactory in the sense that they are too easy to assimilate, I do believe that a good number of the comedies are more difficult to reduce to a satisfying coherency than has generally been acknowledged. By way of example, consider The Taming of the Shrew, a very early play, but one that reveals in a relatively simple fashion how difficult it is to establish a single interpretative perspective from which to master the turbulence of the text. Initially The Taming of the Shrew sets for the audience the task of examining, by way of ongoing juxtaposition, two women who seem to sum up two competing cultural conceptions of the female. The fair Bianca is described by all as everyman's dream of Petrarchan perfection; the shrewish Kate as everyman's image of the female harpy. The genius of the play is to make the audience progressively more aware of the insufficiencies of these conceptions of the female to accommodate the reality of either woman (Kate finding it in her heart, for example, to protest the wanton abuse of servants, and Bianca finding in her gentle heart the capacity to deceive her father and flout her husband's wishes); gradually, the audience reverses its initial assumptions about the relative value of the two women. One need only experience, in sequence, the initial wooing of Kate in act 2, scene 1 and the wooing of Bianca in act 3, scene 1 to realize that Kate, even in her untransformed shrewish condition, summons up the wit and energy of the male, while Bianca evokes supine obeisance and contrived love rhetoric. In short, the shrews of the world may be worth the winning and the “good” girls may not. To use Iser's terms, contemporary cultural conceptions of the female have been brought into the literary work in order to depragmatize them and open them to the audience's reexamination.

But, of course, the destabilization of the audience's easy assumptions about shrews and princesses, and about Kate and Bianca as examples of these types, is only one of the play's strategies. If the shrew in this work clearly becomes the more vital and interesting character, nonetheless, the middle portion of the play prevents the audience from a reverse romanticization of the shrew, as it is forced to assimilate, through Petruchio's instructive assumption of the traits of the shrew, the pernicious consequences of the unbridled exercise of selfish willfulness. Though the farcical tone of Petruchio's actions in his country estate mitigates our sense of their brutality, certainly they are meant to show Kate—and to show us—how unsatisfactory is a relationship based on the perpetual assertion of personal will and the reflexive defiance of others. As Petruchio exclaims in frustration: “Evermore cross’d and cross’d, nothing but cross’d!” (4.5.10).⁹ Nothing can come of a relationship based solely on personal willfulness. The task for the audience is to imagine, and for Kate and Petruchio to embody, a more perfect male/female relationship than that based either on shrewish combat or the artificial and deceptive posturings of Petrarchan courtship. The last actions of the play tentatively help the audience construct such an image as we see Kate and Petruchio playfully exercising their wits together upon the hapless Vincentio, negotiating together in the streets of Padua for the mutual fulfillment of their desires (he gets the kiss he seeks; she the chance to follow the Vincentio party to her father's house and to her wedding feast); and teaming up together to win a match against the world in the play's closing moments. Watching these actions, we begin to sense that two strong-willed people can play with and not against one another in the fulfillment of separate, but mutually accommodated, desires.

As everyone knows, however, the last events of act 5, particularly Kate's final speech, raise disturbing questions about the exact nature and the exact value of this new image of mutuality. It is as if this last speech deliberately foregrounds contradictions that are inherent in the play from the beginning but that are repeatedly displaced from the center of the audience's attention: for example, the inherent contradiction between comedy's typical emphasis on conformity and this play's emphasis on individuality, and the potential conflict between personal sincerity in the presentation of self and this play's emphasis on the social mastery to be gained through successful role playing and disguise. These contradictions come to the fore as one realizes that there are, and traditionally have been, two quite contradictory ways to interpret and deliver Kate's last speech. Each implies a different way of synthesizing all the divergent perspectives of the play into a final gestalt. To use Richard Lanham's suggestive terminology, in part what is at issue is whether the speech is a reflection of a serious or a rhetorical being—that is, whether it is a straightforward expression of belief by a stable, unitary self speaking with sincerity—or whether it is a playful manifesto delivered by a woman whose true self is unknowable or a fiction, being no more than the sum of those roles assumed in different circumstances.¹⁰ By examining in some detail the function of the speech in the audience's imaginative closure of the drama, we can see how Shakespeare makes difficult an all-inclusive harmonization of the play's diverse materials.

Certainly the speech can be delivered “straight,” as Kate's unironic summation of what she has come to believe about men and women. Frye and Barber have argued, for example, that in comedy the highest wisdom is found in the eschewal of idiosyncracies and the embrace, on a heightened level of awareness, of communal norms. By such reasoning, when Kate's antisocial humor has been exorcised, her unironic acceptance of a socially approved, hierarchically subservient relationship to Petruchio simply signals her increased maturity and her ultimate difference from Bianca, who never really accepted such a role but only appeared to do so.¹¹ Such a reading, however, is unsatisfying in so far as it forces us to ignore or suppress aspects of the play that previously received great weight. In short, we close the gestalt by surpressing what will not fit. For example, a sincere and straightforward delivery of the speech makes of the vital and energetic Kate a simple reciter of truisms. Embedded in the speech is a dense tissue of Renaissance commonplaces about proper hierarchy in family and state and about the mutual duties, within that hierarchical relationship, of husband and wife. In a play that so richly debunks conventional perspectives on experience, this speech propounds conventional wisdom, cultural clichés.¹² Delivered straight, it suggests that even the least conventional of couples—and Kate and Petruchio have surely seemed that—finally finds fulfillment by embracing the common wisdom of socially inscribed roles: he the benevolent prince/husband and she the adoring subject/wife. Further, the speech thus delivered suddenly short-circuits the audience's meaning-making activities. We are handed a “message,” rather than being invited, as elsewhere in the play, to create meaning from partially rendered perspectives. Perhaps most significant, such a delivery ignores the enormous emphasis the work has heretofore placed on self-conscious role playing as an aspect of maturity and an expression of self-mastery.¹³ From this perspective, it is only if Kate is now the playful mistress of her public role and of the power that successful manipulation of it brings that her growth is complete and she becomes the normative figure her centrality implies she is intended to be.

The alternative reading of the speech, of course, stresses just its ironic or playful potential. It can be delivered to the stage audience in a tone of triumphant comic vengeance. If a playful and exultant Kate speaks the lines to onstage beholders who are miffed and amazed by turns, we infer that she who was once the self-destructive prisoner of the role of shrew has learned how to discomfort old enemies by the ostentatious manipulation of a new role, that of obedient and subservient wife. She has become playful and self-conscious about roles as Petruchio has been playful throughout the drama. Such a reading draws together different strands of the drama than does the “straight” reading, but it, too, must ignore or beg certain issues to achieve coherence. First, such a delivery leaves Kate's “real views” opaque. We simply cannot know how great or how small is the distance she places between her private views and those she publicly espouses. Second, a playful reading of the speech blurs the distinction between Kate and Bianca that the play has heretofore so carefully maintained. Bianca is, after all, the play's great mistress of self-serving disguise whose sincerity is ever in question. Such considerations argue for a Kate sincere, at least, in her love for Petruchio and her willingness to undertake the accommodations that would make a marriage work. But if sincere in these regards, why not in all?

While I myself feel that what I have called the “playful” reading of the speech is more interesting and more ideologically acceptable to me than the “straight” reading of it, I nonetheless am forced to admit that neither reading allows me to synthesize in perfect harmony all elements of the aesthetic experience; and I am less concerned to argue that one view is more correct than the other than to highlight the way the speech functions to complicate the play's entire exploration of the relationship of men to women, individuals to social roles, and of role playing to sincerity. The interpretive crux is deceptively simple to state: at the play's end the audience must come to terms with a perplexing foray into commonplaces and preachiness by a heroine previously noted for neither in a play that heretofore has undermined the sufficiency of simplifying schemata. The difficulty arises as we attempt to assimilate these anomalies, which requires a conscious interpretive act, an attempt to make the speech consistent with what we expect from comedy and with what this play has previously revealed to us about Kate and Petruchio, about conventional perspectives on reality, about the benefits of role playing, and about the dangers of seeming. That neither directors nor critics have ever been able to agree about whether the play is best closed by an ironic or a straight rendition of the speech is only surprising if one subscribes to the view that Shakespearian comedy is primarily a vehicle for problem solving and that the ending of such a comedy should leave the audience serenely in possession of simple truth. Choose we must, but the very act of choice with which Kate's speech confronts us is one that makes us self-conscious about the contradictions that are embedded in the play: for example, the inherent tension between comic expectations concerning conformity to socially prescribed roles and this play's emphasis upon the human impulse to play with roles and to assert individuality through their subversion or self-interested manipulation. It is, I think, difficult to link Kate's last words to the rest of the play in a way that lets the Kate-Pertruchio relationship take shape in our minds as a happy harmonization of all competing perspectives and desires. As we wrestle with the speech, trying to tame its potential to disrupt our desire for a perfectly harmonious conclusion, we are led—not away from the problematic—but into it.

Now what I wish to argue is that the local difficulty we experience in assimilating Kate's final speech, which challenges our consistency-making strategies and makes us self-conscious about the difficulty of creating a final synthetic gestalt from materials that are partially opaque and potentially contradictory, is writ large in many of the comedies and not just in this early play and not just in the problem comedies. Often the very conventions so well mapped by Frye and Barber that invite us to approach the comedies with a strong set of interpretive expectations are the very features undermined or challenged within the plays themselves, resulting in a troubling and open-ended theatrical experience for the audience. By way of demonstration, I wish to compare the meaning-making tasks facing the audiences of The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure, the former grouped by Barber among the festive plays and the latter a text generally agreed to be problematic both in terms of its handling of certain psychological and thematic issues and in terms of the aesthetic experience it evokes. My point will be to underline for both works those elements of discontinuity or rupture in the audience's assimilation of the theatrical event that make it hard for us to interpret it solely in terms of a single generic code and that make the experience of both works something infinitely more troubling than a serene march toward clarification.

Measure for Measure is a problem for readers and audiences in large part because it repeatedly evokes comic expectations only to make us aware of a gap between those expectations and features of the play (structure, characterization, and even style) that refuse to fit within the comic frame. Invited to assimilate the play's action in terms of a dominant generic code and yet unable to do so without strain, critics have handled the resulting tension in various ways. Some have denied that the play is problematic and have argued that it is a straightforward comedy if properly viewed; others have complained that it is a botched comedy; others, finding their attempts to read the play by comic codes meeting strong resistance, have argued that the play best fits into yet another generic category, such as tragicomedy.¹⁴ Who is “right” seems to me a less important question than asking why this text evokes such divergent responses and what relevance our critical struggles with the play may have for the study of Shakespearian comedy in general.

I feel that Measure for Measure deliberately toys with our expectations about comedy in order, in part, to make us aware of our desire for an interpretive framework with which we can in some fashion master the intractable aspects of the text. In this regard, Measure for Measure puts the audience in an analogous position to those great seekers of ordering systems within the text: the Duke, Isabella, and Angelo, each of whom wants life to be tidier and more tractable to human design than it proves. In the end what the audience may be forced to recognize is that truth and rigid formulas seldom keep company and that vital art refuses to yield the truth of its turbulence to a reified schema.¹⁵Measure for Measure thus constitutes a perfect opportunity for considering whether our rage for a totalized textual meaning and a harmonious aesthetic experience does violence both to the Shakespearian artifact and to the theory of art implied by it.

The assimilation of Measure for Measure by the audience is from the start conditioned by comic expectations. As Michael Goldman has argued, Measure for Measure at first looks very much like a comedy.¹⁶ A city is diseased; lawlessness and unrestrained sexual appetite run rampant; and the legalistic surrogate ruler installed to quell disorder is himself suspected by the real Duke to be a seemer. What we expect is that, vice having run its course and the surrogate ruler having been exposed as a hypocrite, the benevolent father figure, Vincentio, will step in to redeem Vienna from disorder. And in a certain broad sense, that is what happens. The last scene of the play returns Vincentio to power, unmasks the hypocrite Angelo, redeems the city from lawlessness by calling the guilty to account, while tempering legal excess by mercy and redeeming sexuality from lust through marriage. However, time and again critics have found the last scene false and unsatisfying. As I hope briefly to show, this response results from the fact that here, as elsewhere in the play, a gap opens between our comic expectations and the textual details that should confirm those expectations, leaving us unable to trust the sufficiency of the comic gestalt we have been invited to construct.

To take but a few examples from early in the play, consider the characterizations of Angelo and Isabella—characterizations that have struck many readers as somewhat discontinuous. On the one hand, Angelo appears at first simply to be the antisocial idiotes figure: legalistic, puritanical, and self-righteous. But his is not the comic folly of a Malvolio but, rather, a monstrous vice that leads him to the threshold of rape and to the supposed execution of Claudio for sleeping with a woman out of wedlock, though this is exactly what Angelo intends to do with Isabella. In the middle sections of the play, under the pressure of Angelo's tyrannous lust, both Claudio and Isabella face decisions and must cope with emotions of genuinely tragic scope. But just as their situations are at their most intense, in comes the disguised Duke, deus ex machina fashion, and begins his abortive series of attempts to fix what is disordered, in the process halting the psychological dynamics unfolding within and among Angelo, Isabella, and Claudio. Quite justly one might ask: What am I watching? Is this a comedy, a tragedy, or neither? Are Isabella and Angelo primarily to be regarded as full-fledged psychological portraits of repressive personalities or simply as two-dimensional counters in the Duke's chess game? It is as if the comic situation had grown beyond predictable proportions and then had been abruptly and self-consciously returned to a comic course by means of the Duke's intervention, an intervention stylistically signaled by a sudden descent into prose and even into doggerel. But the very abruptness of the transition, the emergence of the Duke as comic dramatist, and the subsequent marginalization of the psychic traumas we have been watching unfold merely serve, in Iser's terms, to depragmatize the very norms of comedy and make them conscious objects of examination. Are they, for example, sufficiently inclusive to handle the psychological turbulence that we have glimpsed in the fictive world of Vienna? What truths of experience can they not capture? When are they formula and not vision?

A further feature of the play that stands in the way of an unself-conscious imaginative realization of it according to comic codes is its insistent polarizations. Richard Fly has called it a play of failed mediation in which no figure emerges to bridge, in true comic fashion, the divides that separate the social community and the psyches of individuals.¹⁷ Characters, for example, who speak the wordless language of the body, such as Juliet, are rendered nearly speechless in the play's action or deal in lies (Lucio) or gibberish (Elbow and Froth); those whose tongues are eloquent, such as Isabella and even Angelo, either do not understand the language of the body or speak it only in the idiom of lust. Characters either brook no restraint or are hamstrung by a neurotic inner system of prohibitions. Either utter lawlessness or tyrannical legalism holds sway in Vienna. And the character Vincentio, upon whom, much more than upon Isabella, devolves the task of synthesis and healing, remains, as Richard Wheeler has recently argued, inadequate to the task.¹⁸ That audience and critics need to have him serve as the play's regenerative healer is signaled by the elaborate defenses for his actions assembled in the literature on the play, but the fact remains that as a comic redeemer he all too often replicates in his failed schemes the rigidity and the lack of human understanding characteristic of Angelo, that as a merciful dispenser of justice he overreacts to the jibes of Lucio, and that as a promulgator of marriage his professed disinclination for women makes perplexing his own unanswered marriage proposals and his very view of marriage, since it seems as often a punishment as a celebration in his hands.¹⁹ In the end, the audience is prevented from seeing embodied in any one character a convincing norm of behavior, that comic synthesis of divergent perspectives so richly embodied, for example, in Rosalind of As You Like It.

The last scene of the play is simply the final example of both the constant reflexivity of this play and the problems it poses for its harmonious assimilation by the viewer. I would argue that in the last scene the marriages and marriage proposals, the doffing of disguises, and the apparent mingling of justice and mercy, passion and the legal institutionalization of passion in marriage, are gestures toward a comic conclusion evoked, not for our uncritical assent, but for examination. Persistently, details and omissions disturb or call in question our hope that the intractable human problems broached in the work have been solved: Isabella has spoken eloquently for mercy for Angelo, but she has not embraced marriage and the life of the body that implies; Angelo has confessed his great crimes, but he, too, seems unenthralled by his rapid marriage and pleads, self-punishingly, for death, rather than life; the Duke, open now to marriage and actively “staging himself” in the people's eyes, still cannot rise above his anger at the lying, but insightful, Lucio; and the low-life characters of the work give no evidence of a repentance that will make unnecessary the subsequent reimposition of the law's full rigor or another descent into moral chaos. Such details make the comic ending seem half a lie, a wish, more than a fact; and they force the audience to recognize how hard it is to reconcile the great polarities of this work: body and soul, mercy and justice, scope and restraint, passion and its control.

This conclusion does not necessarily mean an artistic failure on Shakespeare's part, but it does force the audience into a self-conscious examination of the generic codes it relies upon for its meaning-making activities and of its need for art to provide a tidier world than experience generally affords. Form and matter are at war throughout the play in a way that forces the audience to participate in the struggles of the characters to reconcile, usually unsuccessfully or unconvincingly, the discontinuities of their own natures. The gaps between scope and restraint, chaotic passion and the rigid codification of experience by moral and legal codes, are mirrored in the theatrical experience by the gap between the harmonizing comic perspective and the intrusive details—such as Isabella's speechless silence in the face of the Duke's unanticipated marriage proposals—which undermine that comic perspective. The work remains resistant to harmonious totalization with the viewer's imagination much more profoundly than does The Taming of the Shrew. It invites the audience to feel a tough-minded skepticism about the tractability of our deepest social and psychic dilemmas, but also to feel a heightened awareness of the potential gap between the coherent paradigms we seek to impose upon art and the untidy challenges to those paradigms that art can pose.

Many readers would agree with what I have been saying about the play and about the difficulties that face an audience attempting to harmonize the literary codes and the thematic polarities deployed within it. But what about one of the truly festive comedies, one of the plays written between A Midsummer Night's Dream and Twelfth Night? In order to talk about what is problematic in the assimilation of these texts, I have somewhat arbitrarily decided to focus on The Merchant of Venice, though others, certainly Much Ado about Nothing, also bear special examination. At first glance The Merchant of Venice certainly appears much more congruent with Barber's notion of a coherent festive comedy than does Measure for Measure. It has, for example, in Belmont a “green world” lacking in Measure for Measure, unless one counts the misty unreality of Marianna's moated grange, and in Portia the typical wise and accomplished heroine we are accustomed to encountering in the early comedies and whose function is largely usurped in Measure for Measure by the enigmatic Duke. In fact, the most recent full-scale study of The Merchant of Venice, Lawrence Danson's The Harmonies of “The Merchant of Venice”, indicates by its very title the congruence of his approach with that of Barber.²⁰ Both read the play as an indictment of legalism and greed and a celebration of the riches of love and Christian mercy as they receive their fullest embodiment in Portia and her estate at Belmont.

On the other hand, not all responses to the play have been so certain of its moral vision. Danson begins his book by discussing at length what he calls the Janus-faced criticism the play has evoked, especially since the arrival on the nineteenth-century stage of not a grotesque and comic Shylock but of a tragic Jew, victim of Christian oppression.²¹ Critics who find Shylock's victimization at the heart of the play focus on the flaws and hypocrisy of the Christians and on the pathetic plight of an alien abused by an intolerant majority, stripped of his identity, and tricked by a woman most notable for her arrogant delight in controlling others. The difference between the two readings is that one emphasizes every instance of Christian goodness (such as the mercy granted Shylock, Portia's reverence for her father's will, the generosity of both her and Antonio) and every instance of Jewish evil (such as the blood bond, Shylock's confusion of his daughter with his ducats, his vengeance), while the other emphasizes every instance of Christian cruelty or hypocrisy (such as Gratiano's responses at the trial, Antonio's spitting upon Shylock, Bassanio's fortune-hunting instincts) and every instance of Jewish victimization and nobility (such as Shylock's “I am a Jew” speech, his emotion at the sale of Leah's ring, his forced conversion).

Of course, neither approach to the play—the celebratory or the cynical—necessarily casts all issues in the black-and-white terms I have been suggesting. Those who see the play celebrating Christian virtues often acknowledge that many Christians in the play are flawed, as does Danson himself, and those who stress Shylock's victimization frequently acknowledge the monstrosity of the emotions that emerge in him as a result of his ill treatment. Nonetheless, both approaches to the play save the audience from the anxiety of incoherence by establishing a dominant interpretive perspective from which to view the play's action. Neither approach is on the face of it absurd; each reveals above all, however, the truth of Iser's assertion that the audience's desire to build a consistent perspective upon the textual action can lead inevitably to the disregard or distortion of elements that do not fit neatly into the developing gestalt which the audience constructs during the theatrical experience. And, as Iser has noted, a text strongly resistant to harmonious totalization leads often to the imposition of the rigid formulas of allegory such as we find, for example, in Barbara Lewalski's reading of the play in terms of Old Testament Law and New Testament Grace.²² Indeed, there is about much interpretation of the play a strangely defensive or strained cast, as when Danson, in arguing for the harmony of the play, asserts that there is absolutely no reason to believe that Portia and Antonio are rivals for Bassanio's love, or when he asserts that to believe that Portia “tips off” Bassiano in the casket scene is simply to make nonsense of the play's comic structure.²³ Certainly Danson is right to assert that the play's status as comedy creates the expectation of the noble heroine and a selfless Antonio, though Danson himself argues that Antonio is intolerant and lacking in Christian charity toward Shylock until the trial scene. But to argue that because the play is listed among the comedies means that all local cruxes in the play can be resolved by recourse to comic theory is false unless one assumes that individual comedies are simply particular embodiments of a Platonic ideal comedy and that Shakespeare's master idea of comedy precludes the possibility of contradition and discontinuity within the aesthetic structure. I prefer to see the evocation of comic conventions in the work as one important textual element feeding into the reader's actualization of the aesthetic object, but not the only element; and with James Kincaid I would argue that the generic approach to literature, obviously of immense value in the interpretation of texts, too often founders on the assumption that any work is an unmixed manifestation of any genre and that the function of literary criticism is the ferreting out of the true generic code and the suppression or marginalization of conflicting codes.²⁴

Clearly the dominant generic code in The Merchant of Venice is comedy, but as in Measure for Measure, it is not always easy to assimilate all the action of the play in terms of that code. The two plays, however, do not cause identical problems for the viewer or reader. What is striking about The Merchant of Venice, considered as comedy, is how difficult it makes the establishment of definitive differences between characters, locales, and motives—differences upon which the creating of harmonious comic perspective must rest. If Measure for Measure is an example of a play that lacks mediation, The Merchant of Venice is overly mediated in the sense that apparent differences continually reveal an underlying sameness. In the Vienna of Duke Vincentio warring elements in the human condition are never successfully bridged by a higher synthesis. In The Merchant of Venice everything turns into its opposite at some point so that meaningful differences are obliterated. As a result, the reader's efforts to create satisfying distinctions between Jew and Christian, the selfish and the generous, the harsh bonds of law and the gentle bonds of love, are repeatedly thwarted in ways that stymie those consistency-building strategies which are based on the expectation that comedy celebrates the triumph of redeemed mankind over the pernicious and antisocial impulses which divide and debase it. If, in the simplest terms, Christian and Jew remain largely indistinguishable throughout the play, then the reader at the very least may be driven to conclude that the harmonies of heaven are impossible to achieve with the deformed instruments of earth, or, put more archly, that the notions of difference upon which societies and audiences base their categories of good and evil and their codes of exclusive privilege, can be simply defensive fictions created to mask a frightening sameness. The experience of the text thus becomes problematic in that it confronts the reader with the inadequacy of strategies of meaning-making based on pervasive notions of differences within the fictive world of the play and hallowed by the comic conventions so often evoked to explain away the puzzling aspects of this particular text.

Take, for example, the play's distinctions concerning money's worth and value. At first view, Christians give and Jews hoard; Christians value people over money and Jews do not. Hence Antonio hazards his very life to supply the needs of his friend and Shylock ruins widows and orphans to increase his wealth. But, as the play unfolds, overt Christian generosity begins to appear as a disguised manifestation of selfishness. Antonio gives Bassanio money in order to bind the young man to him. Witness the guilt-inducing note he sends to Bassanio at Belmont and his martyr-like behavior at the trial where he quite explicitly establishes a love triangle with Portia for Bassanio's affection: “Say how I lov'd you, speak me fair in death; / And when the tale is told, bid her be judge / Whether Bassanio had not once a love” (4.2.275-77). Portia, in her turn, having been pursued by Bassanio to recoup his fortunes, reminds him after the casket scene that he has been “dear bought” (3.2.313) and then uses her bounty to bind him and others to her.²⁵ At the play's end, having stripped Shylock of half his gold and determined the ultimate disposition of the rest, she feeds Jessica and Lorenzo the “manna” (5.1.294) of gold and gives Antonio “life and living” (5.1.286) with the return of his wealth. Shylock, though he would not give Leah's “for a wilderness of monkeys” (3.1.122-23), remains the play's most overtly avaricious figure, but gold is Christian sustenance as well, and a mighty source of power and obligation.

Take, too, the play's crucial distinction between Christian mercy and Old Testament legalism. In the trial, Portia fittingly shows Shylock the pernicious consequences of legalism untempered by humility and then evokes mercy from the Christians. What they offer feels very like vengeance disguised as its opposite. The Duke grants Shylock his life but calls attention to the fact that he does so to show the difference between Jewish and Christian spirits. A pardon so self-righteously granted seems more a gesture of pride than of spontaneous mercy arising from a sense of man's universal folly in the eyes of God; and a minute later the Duke's pardon is made conditional upon Shylock's conversion to Christianity. That conversion, technically effected for the salvation of Shylock's soul, strips the Jew both of his identity and of the opportunity to embrace willingly the promise of grace. Shylock is compelled to convert, to forfeit half his wealth, and to lose ultimate control of the rest. That he “deserves” such torment may be true, but if every man is treated as he deserves, who would escape whipping? Christian charity should drop more sweetly upon the court of justice.²⁶

Finally, consider the play's distinction between fallen Venice and the graced Belmont. That Venice is degraded by mercantilism and legalism is clear; that Belmont is different becomes more difficult to believe as the reader moves toward the play's final act. Not only does money figure prominently in Belmont's life, but so do bonds. Portia's father has bound her to observe the terms of his will, and she binds Bassanio to the terms of his pledge with rings. Shylock's merry bond was meant by him in deadly earnest, and so is Portia's sport in act 5, for by it she confirms that her dearly bought husband will be hers and not Antonio's. Her mercy and bounty can flow when the literal import of the ring pledge—thou shalt have no other Gods before me—has been insisted upon and confirmed.

Repeatedly this play offers distinctions that upon examination turn out not to constitute differences. The play's structure, with its insistent alternations between Venice and Belmont, implies differences between these locales. The play's generic codes imply differences between antisocial forces of disorder and comic forces of order. The play's language is studded with oppositions: Christian/Jew, mercy/law, bounty/greed. But the experience of reading the play confounds these categories and expectations of difference, making it hard for the reader to achieve a perspective on the play by which either the liberal or purist concretizations of the action can be maintained without strain. In the end, it is the ironies and not the harmonies of the play that are its most striking feature.

Not all Shakespearian comedies, of course, make the task of closure so difficult for the audience as the particular plays I have chosen to discuss. And yet there are a number of comedies, both written early in Shakespeare's career and written late, that yield readily to the kind of analysis I have undertaken in this essay. I think, for example, of the anti-comic entrance of Marcade and the deferred marriages of Love's Labour's Lost that prevent the viewer from enjoying the expected satisfactions of seeing each Jack with his Jill and invite us to reflect on the gap between desire and fulfillment so familiar both in the world as we live it and as it is so often represented in Shakespeare's comic creations. Or I think of the more severe disjunctions of Pericles, a play that simultaneously invites the audience to interpret its events as a confirmation of a benevolent providential order and as a revelation of the fictiveness of such an order. Or I think of Much Ado with its unstable intermingling of romance and realism, which invites actualization in terms of competing conventions and expectations. To deal in detail with these or other plays is beyond the scope of this essay, but I suggest that there is still much work needing to be done before we understand fully the complex nature of the aesthetic experience Shakespearian comedy affords.

By indirection I have also been arguing that it is not sufficient to use a reified conception of how the comic genre typically works to explain away anomalies that contradict our expectations. In my view Shakespeare frequently uses comic conventions in order to problematize them, that is, to test their efficacy to embody convincingly the full range of human situations he wished to dramatize and to make his viewers aware of the dangers of relying upon any formula to interpret material that feels like a vision of truth precisely because it resists schematization. When we experience most of Shakespeare's comedies, what we experience are aesthetic objects that resist our desire to domesticate their energies by a too easy synthesis of their fundamental discontinuities and contradictions, whether those discontinuities are expressed, as in The Taming of the Shrew, as a gap between man conceived of as a serious or as a rhetorical being; or, as in Measure for Measure, as a gap between an idealized notion of order and concrete manifestations of continuing disorder; or, as in The Merchant of Venice, between abstract systems of difference and concrete manifestations of sameness. As the reader tries to bridge the discontinuities, he can fall back upon an ordering perspective that suppresses incoherence through an act of will bolstered most often by recourse to arguments about how comedy must work, or he can confront with heightened awareness his own need for such coherence and perhaps transcend it. In any case, for me the challenge afforded by these, as by all great texts, is their ability, not to solve problems, but to make us live with a heightened sense that the problematic is the inescapable element in which we live and move, even in the theater.

Notes

1. The fullest statement of each man's views is contained, respectively, in Barber's Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959) and Frye's A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance (New York: Harcourt, 1965).

2. Charles Sugnet, “Exaltation at the Close: A Model for Shakespearean Tragedy,” Modern Language Quarterly 38 (1977):323-35.

3. While Barber quite explicitly sees Shakespearian comedy, like Elizabethan holidays, as serving the social function of releasing and exploring chaotic impulses in order to clarify, by contrast, the value of traditional order (Shakespeare's Festive Comedy, pp. 3-15), Frye severs Shakespearian comedy and romance from a specific social context and purpose. He is concerned with the way the events of comedy serve a dramatic end: enact a story. Yet for Frye, too, though he denies that comedy is either didactic or even very concerned with “the real world,” comedy serves to reveal and affirm an irrational desire for a world in harmony with nature and desire, and triumphant over the forces that threaten its realization (see A Natural Perspective, esp. pp. 121-24).

4. Only in the character of Falstaff does Barber see a threat to the old verities too profound to be exorcised easily. He argues that Falstaff's banishment is a failure precisely because the sophisticated London world of Henry IV, Part II is too far removed from the values of the countryside and too permeated by the opportunism Falstaff represents for the reconstitution of traditional values magically to be effected by his banishment. See Shakespeare's Festive Comedy, pp. 213-21.

5. Frye, A Natural Perspective, p. viii.

6. I am thinking, for example, of such studies as Robert Weimann's Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimensions of Dramatic Form and Function, ed. Robert Schwartz (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), which argues that the Shakespearian public theater was an arena for the negotiation of complex conflicts arising from a society in rapid transition. His book was first published as Shakespeare und die Tradition des Volkstheaters; Soziologie, Dramaturgie, Gestaltung (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1967). Pursuing similar ideas are Louis Montrose, “‘The Place of a Brother’ in As You Like It: Social Process and Comic Form,” Shakespeare Quarterly 32 (1981):28-54 and Leonard Tennenhouse, “The Counterfeit Order of The Merchant of Venice,” an essay included in Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, ed. Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), pp. 54-69. Montrose and Tennenhouse see in plays such as As You Like It and Merchant of Venice reflections of Elizabethan uneasiness about primogeniture, patron-artist relations, the relationship of court to country, and the place of wealth in a society based on venture capitalism and on Christian ethics. Similarly, contemporary feminist and psychoanalytical criticism of the comedies has seen in them reflections of the age's contradictory attitudes toward women. See The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980) and Representing Shakespeare, ed. Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn. Such studies represent a convincing challenge to the notion that the relationship between the plays and Elizabethan culture is either unimportant or simple.

7. For the fullest statement of Iser's views see The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1978), first published as Der Akt Des Lesens: Theorie ästhetischer Wirkung (Munich: Wilhelm Frank, 1976), and also his subsequent article, “The Current Situation of Literary Theory: Key Concepts and the Imaginary,” New Literary History 11 (1979):1-20.

8. For a discussion of how extratextual systems of thought or paradigms are incorporated in a literary work in a state of suspended validity so that their premises can be examined, see Iser, The Act of Reading, pp. 68-79.

9. All quotations from Shakespeare's plays are taken from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

10. For his extremely interesting discussion of the ongoing tension in the Western literary tradition between “serious” and “rhetorical” conceptions of the self see Richard A. Lanham's The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976).

11. Irene G. Dash, in Wooing, Wedding, and Power: Women in Shakespeare's Plays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), pp. 33-64, discusses how the play has been repeatedly adapted for the stage in ways that make of Kate simply a boisterous and unsympathetic shrew whom we wish to see tamed and whose final speech thus requires presentation as a sincere reflection of a fundamental and necessary change of attitude. It is not, however, only pre-twentieth-century productions that present the speech in this fashion. In Joseph Papp's 1978 version in the Delacort Theater in Central Park, Meryl Streep, who played the role of Kate, also delivered these lines “straight,” attesting to the continuance of this particular theatrical tradition in our own time.

12. For an insightful discussion of the way in which this play mocks convention, see Alexander Leggatt's Shakespeare's Comedy of Love (London: Methuen, 1974), pp. 41-62.

13. In Shakespeare's Comedies of Play (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), pp. 58-93, J. Dennis Huston argues that the drama is a celebration of “the power of play” and that Petruchio liberates Kate from her humor by teaching her to play.

14. Roy Battenhouse in “Measure for Measure and Christian Doctrine of the Atonement,” PMLA 61 (1946):1029-59, and Robert Hunter in Shakespeare and the Comedy of Forgiveness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), are two critics who stress the play's unifying Christian themes and really do not see it as a “problem.” Harriet Hawkins in “‘The Devil's Party’: Virtues and Vices in Measure for Measure,” Shakespeare Survey 31 (1978):105-13, sees the play as a failure because the second half of the work does not resolve the sexual and psychological issues broached in the first half. Arthur Kirsch in “The Integrity of Measure for Measure,” Shakespeare Survey 28 (1975):89-105, sees the play as a tragicomedy enacting the happy fall in which tragic experience leads to comic salvation. The differences among these critics are indicative of the continuing debate over both the play's success and its generic status.

15. For a fuller exploration of the metadramatic aspects of the play and of the Duke as a schematic dramatist who is the object of considerable irony in the play see my article, “Measure for Measure and the Restraints of Convention,” Essays in Literature 10 (1983):149-58.

16. Michael Goldman, Shakespeare and the Energies of Drama (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), esp. pp. 164-65.

17. Richard Fly, Shakespeare's Mediated World (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1976), esp. pp. 63-74.

18. See Richard Wheeler's Shakespeare's Development and the Problem Comedies: Turn and Counter-Turn (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 122-24. Having indicated a number of interpretations offered of the Duke, Wheeler argues that each view “seeks an order of inner coherence in Vincentio as the dramatic center of Measure for Measure that is not fully realized in the play's comic movement” (p. 123).

19. Clifford Leech in “The ‘Meaning’ of Measure for Measure,” Shakespeare Survey 3 (1950):66-73, argues at length the case against Vincentio as Godlike redeemer. Both Battenhouse, “Measure for Measure and Christian Doctrine of the Atonement,” and Hunter, Shakespeare and the Comedy of Forgiveness, muster defenses in his behalf, arguing that his role as Duke, and therefore as God's agent on earth, justifies both his assumption of the disguise of Friar and his persistent meddling in the lives of Isabella, Angelo, Claudio, and Marianna. Donna B. Hamilton in “The Duke in Measure for Measure: ‘I Find an Apt Remission in Myself’,” Shakespeare Studies 6 (1970):175-83, argues that Vincentio is a flawed character who must and does come to terms with his limitations in the course of the drama, an argument in some ways analogous to that of Louise Schleiner in “Providential Improvisation in Measure for Measure,” PMLA 97 (1982):227-36. Schleiner argues that the Duke is fallible but well-meaning in his quixotic attempts to imitate Providence.

20. Danson, The Harmonies of “The Merchant of Venice” (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978).

21. Ibid., pp. 1-18.

22. Barbara Lewalski, “Biblical Allusion and Allegory in The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Quarterly 13 (1962):327-43.

23. Seeking to discredit the notion that Antonio and Bassanio's love for one another is of a homosexual nature and to discredit the idea that Antonio and Portia are in competition for Bassanio, Danson writes: “Now The Merchant of Venice is a play in which harmonies are discovered where only discord had seemed possible, and its dominant figure (whether in details of imagery or in the implied shape of the fable as a whole) is the circle, ring, or round. The love of Antonio and Bassanio chimes in that harmonious round, as does the love of Bassanio and Portia. But to suppose a competition between Antonio and Portia introduces a discord more intractable to resolution than that of Shylock, the unmusical man, himself. So it is not the realism nor the humanness, but the consequent introduction of this irreconcilable competition, that leads me to reject the psychosexual explanation for Antonio's sadness” (Harmonies, pp. 38-39). In other words, such possibilities are impossible because they would destroy the harmony Danson postulates as a given of the play. Again, in arguing that the song sung as Bassanio chooses is not a deliberate clue to the choice he should make, Danson writes: “if the play is to remain a romantic comedy rather than a farce or a neatly disguised satire, then the idea that Portia tips off Bassanio has got to be dismissed. It is an idea contrary to the expectations properly aroused by the dramatic and literary conventions the play exploits” (p. 118). Again, the appeal to the dictates of an overarching comic intention is used to explain away details that do not fit.

24. James Kincaid, “Coherent Readers, Incoherent Texts,” Critical Inquiry 3 (1977):781-802, esp. p. 784.

25. Harry Berger in “Marriage and Mercifixion in The Merchant of Venice: The Casket Scene Revisited,” Shakespeare Quarterly 32 (1981):155-62, argues that Portia constantly strives to gain power in this play by showering others with gifts that put them under obligation to her.

26. R. Chris Hassel, Jr., in Faith and Folly in Shakespeare's Romantic Comedies (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980), argues that The Merchant of Venice is anomalous among the romantic comedies in that its chief characters are remarkably lacking in humility and in the true Christian charity that comes from the recognition of man's universal folly. See esp. his chapter “‘I Stand for Sacrifice’: Frustrated Communion in The Merchant of Venice,” pp. 176-207.