SOURCE: Introduction to Love and Society in Shakespearean Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Content, University of Delaware Press, 1985, pp. 13-29.

[In the following essay, Levin contends that in his romantic comedies, Shakespeare explores the conflict between romantic and antiromantic values, such as the opposition between love and the desire for fortune. Levin stresses that this conflict was apparent in Elizabethan society and in other literature of the time, and that in part the tension deals with the perceived failure of Elizabethan society to live up to the values extolled in medieval romance.]

The Stage is more beholding to Love, then the Life of Man.

Francis Bacon, Essays

Love gives . . . counsel
To inquire for him 'mongst unambitious shepherds,
Where dowries were not talk'd of: and sometimes
'Mongst quiet kindred, that had nothing left
By their dead parents.
John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi

Along with As You . . . Like It, these plays [The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, and Twelfth Night] represent Shakespeare's maturest and perhaps best work in romantic comedy. Although critics occasionally stress the differences among the comedies, a great deal can be gained by trying to understand what the plays have in common—that is, by attempting to discuss them as expressions of a single theory of comedy.¹ In an effort to interpret the plays in light of such a theory, I limit myself to the three comedies that are most alike, and mention only in passing As You Like It, which is distinguished from the others by extensive use of pastoral.

The subject matter of Shakespearean comedy is society or, more precisely, man and woman in their social relationships. The dramatic focus is certainly no narrower, for although the young in these plays fall in love, woo, and marry, much of the action is only tangentially related to courtship. Leo Salingar makes this point while defining what he takes to be the attitude towards society expressed in the plays. Shakespeare's comedies, he writes,

are essentially celebrations of marriage . . . which [Shakespeare] presents in a social as well as a personal aspect. Not content with a single love story, he usually contrives to bring several couples together for common rejoicing in the final scene. . . . Again, the marriage plot in his comedies is often entangled in social or moral considerations affecting society at large, but in such a way that by the end of the comedy marriage appears as the resolution of the broader tensions, as the type or focus of harmony in society as a whole.²

Salingar avoids specialized approaches to the comedies caught in such adjectives as "romantic" and "festive," while isolating essential features that they share; and he speaks for what has until recently been the twentieth-century mainstream when he says that the marriage celebrations symbolize achieved social "harmony." There have always been dissenters, however, and today many critics question whether the comedies characteristically resolve social "tensions."

One way of summing up the current discontent with romantic-festive criticism is to observe that such criticism relies too exclusively on the melodramatic contours of the plays; this is Ralph Berry's point when he laconically observes: "To overstate the matter crudely, the comedy is supposed to move from Bad to Good; and the social situation at the end of the play is the victory of Us over Them."³ Melodrama may at first seem like the wrong word, for not many critics emphasize the dependence of these plays on medieval and Renaissance romances, which often made important use of melodrama. Nevertheless, mainstream twentieth-century accounts have tended both to divide the characters along clear moral lines and to establish sympathies with a virtuous group, which (as in melodrama) prevails. For example, in Shakespeare's Festive Comedy, the most influential modern book on the comedies, C. L. Barber praises for their social virtues the characters who marry; in Twelfth Night, Viola possesses "perfect courtesy" and exhibits "undaunted, aristocratic mastery of adversity," while Sir Toby is "gentlemanly liberty incarnate" and Maria has "perfectly selfless tact." Malvolio, on the other hand, is "self-absorbed" and vain.⁴ Barber regards the faults of the "good" characters as only venial, indeed, as mere festive excesses; hence, he refers to a "communion embracing the merrymakers in the play and the audience, who have gone on holiday in going to a comedy" (pp. 8-9). This melodramatic element in festive criticism, though subtly handled, has nevertheless come to seem problematic in two related ways.

In the first place, Shakespeare's rich portrayal of character and society tends to break down clear-cut moral distinctions between one character and another and between socially ostracized or marginal characters and the predominant society. Second, this moral blurring tends to render ambiguous the affective structure of the comedies. The outsiders are far more than killjoy spirits; at times, at least, they attract interest and sympathy, and seem "notoriously abus'd," to use Olivia's description of Malvolio at the end of Twelfth Night. The audience feels that these characters are not merely absent from the celebrations, but are excluded, and perhaps unfairly; the situations are complicated and elicit conflicting emotions.

The revisionist tendency in comedy criticism has been somewhat slower to assert itself than have related innovations in the study of Shakespeare's history plays and tragedies. The reason, I think, is that of all the dramatic genres, comedy seems best approached by employing the assumptions of earlier twentieth-century scholarship. Elmer Stoll and his successors rejected what they saw as the confusion between life and literature in nineteenth-century "character analysis," and they argued, instead, that Shakespeare wrote for the popular theater and made his meaning unambiguous by drawing upon character types and a variety of other dramatic conventions: "By the comments of good characters, by the methods pursued in the disposition of scenes, and by the downright avowal of soliloquy, [Shakespeare] constantly sets us right."⁵ A contemporary exponent of these views asserts that Shakespeare's meaning is generally evident from the "basic form or structure" of his plays, and he warns against subverting clearly rendered judgments of character and action.⁶ As far as comedy goes, these critics do seem to believe that good wins and bad loses.

In view of the confident assertion that such interpretations are supported "by the overwhelming majority of viewers and readers down to the present,"⁷ it is worth noticing that in fact the newer trend in criticism has significant historical precedents. I want to review some of this record, beginning first with claims about Shakespeare's freedom from convention in presenting character, and turning then to his interest in the point of view of outsiders. Because nineteenth-century examples of such criticism are the best known, I turn to still earlier illustrations.

In 1609 Troilus and Cressida appeared in a Quarto edition with a first and second issue, and to the latter was added an anonymous preface.⁸ The writer, who regards Troilus as a comedy, introduces it by referring to Shakespeare's earlier comedies, which, he says, are not to be styled "vanities"; quite the contrary, the public should "flock to them for the maine grace of their gravities." They are "so fram'd to the life," he proclaims, "that they serve for the most common Commentaries, of all the actions of our lives."

This defense of Shakespeare's verisimilitude echoes traditional arguments about the nature and purpose of comedy. Later in the century, Shakespeare's characterization gets more distinctive praise. In 1664, Margaret Cavendish published a letter defending Shakespeare from an attack casting aspersions on his lowlife characters. No ordinary knockabouts these, she replies; Shakespeare can "Express Properly, Rightly, Usually, and Naturally, a Clown's, or Fool's Humour, Expressions, Phrases, Garbs, Manners, Actions, Words, and Course of Life."⁹ Cavendish elaborates by saying that Shakespeare is distinguished by his ability to portray the broad spectrum of society: he has "so Well . . . Express'd in his Playes all Sorts [classes] of Persons, as one would think he had been Transformed into every one of those Persons he hath Described." She then lists some of Shakespeare's successful characters and includes many from the comedies. Hers is a remarkable tribute to the Shakespeare many writers have undoubtedly responded to over the generations; perhaps only Coleridge is as eloquent when he says that Shakespeare "darts himself forth, and passes into all the forms of human character and passion."

The rise of neoclassicism did not do much for Shakespeare's reputation. As Brian Vickers remarks, "the canons of criticism were tested against him, and he was found wanting."¹⁰ Nevertheless, his grasp of life is occasionally praised inadvertently, as when Rymer rebukes him by saying that "history and fact in particular cases . . . are no warrant or direction for a Poet," and goes on to fault Shakespeare for showing the world as it is and not as it ought to be. Other critics do mention Shakespeare's ability to portray manners and thus to distinguish one individual sharply from another, but in general one must wait for the dean of neoclassical critics, Dr. Johnson, to find Shakespeare measured for his command of nature, not literary rules. "His drama is the mirrour of life," Johnson declares, and embellishes the thought with striking imagery: from Shakespeare "a hermit may estimate the transactions of the world, and a confessor predict the progress of the passions."¹¹

Johnson explains Shakespeare's ability to break down the barrier between life and art by observing that Elizabethan plays did not often conform to strict definitions of genre. Shakespeare's plays, Johnson writes,

are not in the rigorous and critical sense either tragedies or comedies, but compositions of a distinct kind; exhibiting the real state of sublunary nature, which partakes of good and evil, joy and sorrow, mingled with endless variety of proportion and innumerable modes of combination; and expressing the course of the world, in which the loss of one is the gain of another; in which, at the same time, the reveller is hasting to his wine, and the mourner burying his friend; in which the malignity of one is sometimes defeated by the frolick of another; and many mischiefs and many benefits are done and hindered without design. (P. 66)

Interpreting this remark as it affects comedy, one can say that while a play superficially conforms to comic practice (ending happily for the "reveller"), a full response will actually collapse melodrama along two fronts. First, "good and evil" are "mingled," or, as Johnson puts it later in the Preface, Shakespeare is not "always careful to shew in the virtuous a disapprobation of the wicked; he carries his persons indifferently through right and wrong" (p. 71). Second—and here Johnson contributes to an understanding of the affective structure of the comedies—neither one's attraction nor sympathy belongs exclusively to the reveller; one is impartial towards the winner and the loser.

Concerning this second question of audience response, the historical record is inevitably less clear, since early critics did not often pause to make finer discriminations. Yet these writers occasionally noted the plight of outsiders and marginal characters.

The Merchant of Venice was first entered in the Stationers' Register in 1598 with the title: "A booke of the Merchaunt of Venyce, or otherwise called the Jewe of Venyce."¹² A subsequent entry, along with the two Quartos of 1600 and 1619, call the play "the booke of the merchant of Venyce" or "The most excellent Historie of the Merchant of Venice," and they sometimes add a running title that mentions the "extreame crueltie of Shylocke the Jewe towards the sayd Merchant" and "the obtayning of Portia by the choyse of three chests." Whether Shakespeare's or not, these titles are of interest. Antonio, the merchant, is the title character, though he has only a subordinate role in the main plot and never weds. Many of the conventions of comedy function to throw attention on the romantic plot; the title helps to make Antonio a competing center of attention. The alternative title provided by the Stationers' Register entry introduces still another possible focus, Shylock, who is physically absent from the celebration, having left the stage in act 4 distraught and unwell. The title suggests that even original productions may have given Shylock some of the importance he subsequently received.

In his copy of the Second Folio, King Charles I wrote in titles for three comedies: he called Much Ado, "Beatrice and Benedick"; Twelfth Night, "Malvolio"; and All's Well That Ends Well, "Parolles." Early court records also refer to "Beatrice and Benedick" and "Malvolio," but whether or not the king knowingly followed precedent, one can still wonder whether he assigned the titles frivolously or, with literary tact, realized the names would help bring the plays into focus.

Curiously, Leonard Digges, a poet and translator (and perhaps Shakespeare's acquaintance), seems also to draw attention to unexpected characters when in 1640 he contrasts Jonson's failure to draw crowds as successfully as Shakespeare:

Let but Falstaff come,
Hal, Poins, the rest you scarce shall have a roome
All is so pester'd: let but Beatrice
And Benedick be seen, loe in a trice
The Cockpit Galleries, Boxes, all are full
To heare Malvolio that crosse garter'd Gull.

¹³

Shakespeare's characters steal the show. The characters Digges names here all belong to the subplot or are engaged in subplot action. Is Digges also saying that these characters, even Malvolio, gain the audience's affection, perhaps at the expense of main plot characters? It is impossible to pin down precisely how Digges responded to the play as a whole.

The most intriguing early discussion of Shakespeare's intentions in comedy comes in a single paragraph in Rowe's 1709 preface to The Works of Mr. William Shakespeare.¹⁴ All but three of the comedies, he starts out by saying, should really be classed as "tragi-comedy." The best indication of what Rowe means comes with his mention of The Merchant:

Though we have seen that play received and acted as a comedy, and the part of the Jew performed by an excellent comedian, yet I cannot but think it was designed tragically by the author. (P. 453)

For Rowe, Shylock's "deadly spirit of revenge" "cannot agree either with the style or characters of comedy." Rowe believes that Shakespeare intentionally disturbed the comic mood, for he calls The Merchant "one of the most finished of any of Shakespeare's" plays. How Rowe interprets Shylock's effect on the play is hard to determine, but it is interesting to note that he also observes that "there is something in the friendship of Antonio to Bassanio very great, generous, and tender." Rowe seems to have anticipated subsequent interest in the "outsider" in Shakespeare.

Though the focus of Rowe's long paragraph is somewhat blurred, he keeps returning to characters who are what he calls "diverting"—such as Malvolio, Jaques, and Parolles. Whether they elicit sympathy as well he does not say. Only with regard to Falstaff, discussed as one of Shakespeare's great comic creations, does Rowe anticipate Maurice Morgann's general approach as well as his specific conclusions about the Henry IV plays:

I do not know whether some people have not, in remembrance of the diversion [Falstaff] had formerly afforded them, been sorry to see his friend Hal use him so scurvily when he comes to the crown. (P. 452)

Rowe questioned whether Henry IV, Part 1 and 2, had clear dramatic "emphasis," to use Stoll's term. He perhaps had the same doubt about Much Ado, because he mentions the attractiveness of Beatrice and Benedick and he includes in his edition Charles Gildon's comment on the play, with its damaging assessment of Claudio. Since the Preface was reprinted in editions of Shakespeare all through the eighteenth century, Rowe has been called "the most disseminated Shakespeare critic before Johnson" (Vickers, Critical Heritage, 2:9); it is therefore plausible to think that well before Morgann readers were considering the problematic tone and structure of the comedies and other plays.

Any sketch of early remarks on the emotional structure of Shakespeare's plays should indeed turn to Morgann's "An Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff."¹⁵ Though Morgann never discusses the comedies, they were written in the same years as were the two parts of King Henry IV, making his argument pertinent. While asserting the apparent paradox that Falstaff is no coward, Morgann raises a profound question about audience response to Shakespearean drama.¹⁶ One response, he alleges, is a product of the rational mind or "the Understanding," while another depends on subtler "Impressions, " many of which are unconscious (p. 146). In real life, Morgann claims, we make the latter judgments all the time—and trust them—and we do the same with Shakespeare because of the way in which he creates character. Alone among dramatists, Shakespeare not only gives prominence to certain features in order to comply with the needs of dramatic form; he also creates "a certain roundness and integrity" in the characters (p. 167n). Hence, if criticism is to convey audience response accurately, it must sometimes be willing to consider his characters "rather as Historic than Dramatic beings," and, "when occasion requires, to account for their conduct from the whole of character, from general principles, from latent motives, and from policies not avowed" (p. 169n).¹⁷ Finally, the result of such a response may be to disturb the ostensible structure of the plays; though Falstaff has his faults—Morgann's is not a sentimental account—when Hal rejects him at the end of 2 Henry IV, "we can scarcely forgive the ingratitude of the Prince in the new-born virtue of the King" (p. 149).

More than a century after Morgann's essay, A. C. Bradley says of it that "there is no better piece of Shakespeare criticism in the world," and draws on Morgann in his own discussion of "The Rejection of Falstaff." Moreover, all through the nineteenth century, critics, often working under Morgann's direct influence, focused on Shakespeare's characterization and the point of view of such outsiders as Shylock, Malvolio, and Jaques, who were often praised at the expense of an intolerant conventional society.

What lessons can be drawn from the existence of polarized attitudes in comedy criticism from the earliest times to the present? Some critics imply an answer by seeking to integrate the countervailing tendencies in a single syncretic approach, treating one alternative as dominant while giving the other a subordinate and qualifying role. For example, a tempered romantic-festive theory draws upon the notion that Shakespeare's plays are often self-reflexive. The action of the comedies, it is alleged, evolves only under highly artificial circumstances; while the comedies work their way to a satisfying conclusion, we are to notice comic form holding at bay more threatening forces, reminiscent of the "real" world. Such a theory, offered by Anne Barton and Alexander Leggatt, among others, gives a fairly prominent place to the darker forces in the plays, and yet, in my opinion, ultimately mutes them by removing the festive celebration from all adverse scrutiny.¹⁸ This celebration becomes an image of art and is unrelated to life.

Scholars who suggest that Shakespeare often builds into his plays divergent and even incompatible points of view offer another possible approach to the comedies. Norman Rabkin, for example, adopts from modern physics the term complementarity to describe the phenomenon whereby Shakespeare allows for two "equally valid, equally desirable" alternatives that yet seem to contradict one another.¹⁹ Likewise, Raymond Powell sees in many of the plays either "complex" effects that enrich initially simple responses or "contradictory" signals that simply cannot be reconciled with one another. Both critics find Shakespeare truer-to-life because he includes these ambiguities, and again, both critics, taking The Merchant of Venice as their sample romantic comedy, find competing visions that conform to the two conflicting critical traditions that I have described.

While I am in general agreement with these critics, my strategy is in certain ways distinctive. I develop only the antiromantic alternative for each of the plays I discuss. I have little to add to current romantic-festive accounts, whereas I think the full integrity and coherence of the antiromantic outlook in the plays has not been appreciated.²⁰ The antiromantic point of view does not appear only fitfully—for example, when Shylock confronts his enemies, or when Malvolio suffers in a dark cell. Rather, every element of these plays contributes to an antiromantic interpretation. To see that this is so, and to realize, also, the possibility of far more heartening glosses of the action, is to become newly alert to the range of meanings these plays contain.

My readings therefore take for granted the fact that conventional signposts, if followed, would lead to a romantic-festive interpretation. But I respond instead to the accumulation of psychological and social detail that guides us past the conventions until the melodramatic contours of the plays become blurred. All the characters, insider and outsider alike, are found to be part of one world; they shed light on one another, and the influence they exert on each other tends to suggest how much they all have in common.

According to the festive-romantic account, the celebration at the end of the comedies commemorates the emergence of an ideal society. The alternative I am suggesting is that the plot of the comedies traces the struggle for inclusion into society and that the celebration merely establishes the identity of the winners. In this interpretation, success depends on such considerations as birth, wealth, good looks, intelligence, cunning, and on occasion the willingness to forsake ideals—not to adhere to them. Failure does not necessarily depend on one's evil nature, but on such things as the disadvantages of birth, the prejudices of society, lack of cunning, and one's unwillingness or inability to adapt to the prevailing winds. The plots define, in the language of Lear, "who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out," and as the king's handy-dandy rhythms suggest, it is no easy matter distributing moral debits and credits among the winners and losers.

This interpretation relates to certain changes that have taken place in the understanding of Renaissance England. A few decades back, literary scholars (historians were more cautious) presented the Elizabethan age as a conservative one in which Tudor orthodoxies won wide acceptance. The disruptions and dissent of the period were isolated and idiosyncratic phenomena. The intellectual ferment on the continent was said not to affect England until the seventeenth century; likewise, the social and political tensions that eventually led to civil war in England were judged not to have been significant until early Stuart times. And, finally, Shakespeare appeared as almost an apologist for the Tudor regime, a traditionalist who either ignored the ferment that grew up around him or else stood against it.

Contemporary scholarship, on the other hand, has followed the advice that Herbert Howarth offers in his chapter title, "Put Away the World-Picture,"²¹ finding in the period greater detachment from, as well as more opposition to, Tudor pieties. No secure status quo put to rest questions about economic or social or political or religious matters; balancing optimistic endorsements of Tudor life are contrary tendencies, expressed, for example, in harsh strains of satire, in philosophical scepticism, and in a tendency to contrast sharply the ideals people espouse with the reality that they live.

Positing such a milieu helps us to understand the comedies. We should note especially that the darker portrayal of people and society was sometimes presented in the period as a failure to live up to the values applauded in medieval romance. Are men and women able to serve selflessly a cause higher than themselves, or are they unable to put self-interest aside? For example, Michael Drayton, in Piers Gaveston (1593), defines contemporary times through a series of negative comparisons with the Middle Ages when "Machivels were loth'd as filthie toades" and "true gentilitie" flourished.²² Such a contrast between medieval and Renaissance times is also implied in The Spanish Tragedy, where the villain, a Machiavellian schemer, has murdered Horatio, a courtly lover and chivalrous knight. And in The Jew of Malta, another play from around 1590, Marlowe curtly dismisses the notion that ideals are anything more than camouflage. Taking aim at the hypocritical claims of constituted authority, the Machiavel declares in the prologue: "Many will talk of title to a crown; / What right had Caesar to the empire? / Might first made kings." An unvarnished view of events, Marlowe alleges, will always show a competition for power.

Though one expects Shakespeare to portray people and society more subtly than Marlowe, he is just as blunt in King John, probably written just prior to The Merchant, the earliest of the three comedies I am considering. With Marlovian vigor, King John depicts a world where self-interest rules in politics, a self-interest so strong that it must always be cloaked in professions of generosity, morality, or honesty.²³ In the Bastard's soliloquy exalting "commodity" (2.1.561-98), Shakespeare shows how fully he had absorbed the antiromantic point of view.

Apparently for reasons of conscience, the King of France has supported Arthur's attempt to seize the English throne from King John. As the English and French armies ready for battle, both lay siege to Angiers, demanding the town's surrender. A citizen comes forth with the proposal that the two kings should make peace by marrying John's niece, Blanch, to the French Dolphin. The speaker colors his real motive, which is of course to save himself with the city, by describing Blanch and the Dolphin as romantically matched: "If zealous love should go in search of virtue, / Where should he find it purer than in Blanch?" (2.1.428-29). The strategy works. To rid himself of Arthur's threat, John offers lands to go with Blanch; the French king quickly agrees, thus betraying Arthur. In the soliloquy that follows, the Bastard, adopting a pose of the contemporary satirist, "rails" against the kings, who have embraced "commodity" or "advantage"—that is, self-interest. The Bastard develops a comprehensive indictment—from the top of society to the bottom, everyone is susceptible. He imagines "commodity" as "that sly devil" who tempts man to forsake noble enterprises and betray the promptings of conscience. His speech gets to the heart of antiromantic thought in the nineties: dedication to self-interest replaces dedication to society; everyone boasts of ideals while seeking personal advancement.

The conflict between romantic and antiromantic values is fully developed in the Renaissance literary topos that debates the relative strength of love and fortune. Both terms are elusive. Fortune refers, first of all, to change in the external world as it affects the well-being of an individual. However, because a social structure provides advantages and also stands as a bulwark against adverse fortune, fortune frequently meant social position or privileged social position. Fortune receives further definition when used in conjunction with love, while love itself is frequently defined in terms of fortune, as Shakespeare's Sonnet 1.16 testifies: "Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds." The opening of Lear repeatedly defines love and fortune as opposites: Albany, rebuking the Duke of Burgundy's interest in Cordelia's dowry, says, "Love's not love / When it is mingled with regards that stands / Aloof from th' entire point" (1.1.238-39). And Cordelia echoes him by sneering at Burgundy "since that respects of fortune are his love" (248). Love and fortune are conflicting motives, one selfless, one selfish; by the end of the sixteenth century, the prevailing view makes fortune's hand by far the stronger.

Such is the Player King's assessment in Hamlet, when in the locus classicus for this theme in the Renaissance, he anticipates his wife's remarriage after his death:

'tis not strange
That even our loves should with our fortunes change:
For 'tis a question left us yet to prove,
Whether love lead fortune, or else fortune love.
The great man down, you mark his favorite flies,
The poor advanc'd makes friends of enemies.

And hitherto doth love on fortune tend,
For who not needs shall never lack a friend,
And who in want a hollow friend doth try,
Directly seasons him his enemy.

(3.2.200-209)

The Player King maintains that fortune dominates all relationships: between husband and wife, king and subject, friend and friend. Actions that at first appear haphazard have a clear pattern, as soon as it is evident in which direction fortune lies; the world moves as one, abandoning ideal commitments and flocking after fortune.

The Player King's speech defines the antiromantic plot of the comedies. All the characters seek to take an advantageous place in society. In spite of their ideals, the world proves too tempting; hence, the journey is one that involves moral compromise. Shakespeare reflects contemporary custom in making marriage the main symbol of social cohesion; Elizabethan attitudes towards marriage also shape the choice characters make in these plays.

Most of the marriages portrayed in the comedies take place near the top of the social scale. In Elizabethan life, such marriages were heavily influenced by considerations of fortune—by the desire, that is, to effect "the economic or social or political consolidation or aggrandizement of the family."²⁴ Lawrence Stone identifies three other "personal" motives for marriage during the period. One, the desire for a compatible mate, becomes important, but not until the end of the seventeenth century. And he minimizes the role of sexual attraction and love: "Bacon was right when he said that 'the stage is more beholding to love than the life of man.'" Though Stone probably underestimates the influence of love and attraction on marriage arrangements, a substantial conflict no doubt existed between life and romantic literature, which, true to medieval courtly traditions, idealized love over all mundane interests. If, then, Shakespeare wished to bridge the gap between literature and life, he would show fortune playing an unexpectedly large role.

The sonnets help to clarify how Shakespeare's mature comedies draw on the theme of love and fortune. In these poems, most of which Shakespeare probably wrote in the same years as the comedies, the speaker is closely involved with two people, the so-called dark lady and a handsome, well-born young man.²⁵ The speaker's attitude towards the woman is anything but courtly; G. Wilson Knight describes his feelings for her as "finer than lust and cruder than love." The young man, on the other hand, is the "master mistress" of the speaker's "passion"—he, and not the woman, is idealized in this sonnet sequence, and theirs is the relationship that violates social conventions. The nature of this violation is elusive, though the men are certainly of markedly disparate social rank and the speaker's conduct has somehow exposed him to scandal, which he fears will taint the friend. In any event, the speaker responds with a soaring affirmation: love is tested by hostile fortune, and true love not only survives, it grows and becomes purified. The sonnets contrast such an attachment with relationships formed under fortune's influence and therefore subject to erosion.²⁶

In the three comedies under discussion, and in As You Like It also, one character loves—or at least tries to love—with the purity described in the sonnets: the two Antonios of The Merchant and Twelfth Night, Don Pedro of Much Ado, and Celia in As You Like It. In each instance, the beloved disengages himself or herself, sometimes quite crudely. It is hard to avoid the impression, for example, that Bassanio taps a rich friend for money so he can court a woman "richly left." In Much Ado Claudio asks Don Pedro, his friend and patron, not merely about Hero's dowry, but rather, about her inheritance, meanwhile avoiding the prince's hint that it will pain him to help Claudio to a wife. Rosalind, a princess in exile, does not concern herself with Orlando's status, though before expressing love for him she learns he is a son of a man who in his lifetime had been her father's ally. The friends who detach themselves all marry, whereas with one exception, Celia, the friends making the sacrifice remain single. The implication would seem to be that marriage represents a betrayal of affection for self-interest.

E. K. Chambers noticed these parallels between the sonnets and one of the plays, The Merchant, but he concluded that they were inadvertent and that a personal note had intruded.²⁷ While many readers probably do feel a distinctive poignancy in Shakespeare's handling of such instances of friendship, I believe the main theme of which they are a variation—namely, the conflict between love and fortune—is fully integrated into the comedies. Fortune is a constant temptation.

Most of these marriages would readily appear to an Elizabethan audience as the sort which permits the aggrandizement or consolidation of fortune. Sometimes, as we have seen, money is expressly mentioned. However, since Renaissance society was "even more obsessed with status than with .money," it is generally necessary to weigh wealth and status together in a complicated equation;²⁸ thus Count Claudio marries somewhat beneath him and in exchange gets a wife who brings a dowry and an eventual inheritance. When a marriage does bridge a social gap and no money is involved, it is usually because one of the partners is situated at the pinnacle of society and can afford to be self-indulgent. Orsino is one such partner and Olivia another, although the latter is not above making rudimentary inquiries about Cesario's birth before falling in love with "him."

Those seeking wealth and status are usually conscious that they do so. Their friends and families can help to make them aware by treating the nuptial more or less as a business arrangement. Claudio and Hero's courtship is an example. On the other hand, Gratiano makes an opportunity for himself by tagging along when Bassanio sails for Belmont.

Sometimes more elaborate subterfuges are undertaken, and in Twelfth Night they affect the basic development of the plot. Three characters maneuver for advantageous marriages. The steward Malvolio makes an amateurish effort to win Olivia's favor and become "Count Malvolio." Maria, Olivia's lady-in-waiting, hopes to marry Sir Toby, Olivia's uncle. Since Malvolio and Sir Toby are antagonists and the rise of one would mean the fall of the other, as part of Maria's campaign to win Sir Toby she sets out to destroy his rival. Recognizing Malvolio's ambition because it parallels her own, she skillfully exposes it and humiliates him. Meanwhile Viola (as I hope to show) schemes to win the bachelor duke, and like Maria, she is willing to sacrifice a third party, in this case Olivia (a potential rival for Orsino) to get what she wants. If I am right about Viola, an important result follows: the detection of hidden scheming contributes to the collapse of the "melodramatic play"—even the "romantic heroine" shares antiromantic motives with other characters.

The foregoing examples probably underestimate the desire of human beings to believe that they act for laudable motives; Claudio and Bassanio seem to forget fortune as they warm to the language of love; they thus anticipate the results of a worldly Renaissance proverb, "Marry first and Love will come after."²⁹

Shakespeare's appraisal of the motives for marriage extends far beyond the obvious pursuit of wealth and status. He offers subtler motives that arise from social pressures and that always remain unconscious to some degree. Beatrice, in Much Ado, makes the most resolute attempt to understand these pressures—and to resist them.

When at war's end the soldiers approach Messina, conversation in the household of Beatrice's uncle turns to marriage, and Beatrice implies that although her cousin might marry, she herself will not marry any man until he proves himself worthy of her. However, no sooner is her cousin's betrothal announced than Beatrice candidly confesses to altered feelings:

Good Lord, for alliance! Thus goes every one to the world but I, and I am sunburnt. I may sit in a corner and cry "Heigh-ho for a husband!"

(2.1.318-20)

Beatrice wants to marry and take a place in society. Not to marry puts one at a disadvantage; Beatrice calls herself "sunburnt" not because she is unattractive—Benedick boasts of her "beauty"—but because, according to a Renaissance proverb, to suffer adverse fortune is to become exposed to the sun.³⁰ Beatrice's "alliance" describes a marriage that essentially fits Stone's first category: an arrangement that allows for the consolidation of social position. Nevertheless, her desire for such a marriage has little to do with crude ambition for wealth or status. She expresses a subtler feeling: that marriage is the sine qua non of social acceptance. In effect, society spreads its protective umbrella for those who marry; those who do not marry are left like wallflowers at a dance, to be stared at by others. Beatrice identifies a key fear in the comedies, the fear of exclusion and ostracism.

To all outward appearances, Beatrice is comfortably situated. Far from being neglected, this amusing and clever young woman is commonly the center of attention. And only her cousin is about to marry, not, as Beatrice says, "every one." Her sense of alarm therefore calls for an explanation. It is partly the product of social pressure; others constantly remind the independent-minded Beatrice that she is "odd, and from all fashions" (3.1.72). The voice of society, though strong, has tremendous influence only because of a primitive fear of isolation in the human soul; social disapproval seems to forbode a severing of the ties that bind the individual to the community.

These emotions probably vary in intensity over the centuries. Today, the primitive fear is presumably unchanged, but society does not speak with as strong a voice. In Shakespeare's England, society had a firm structure, and it enforced rules of conduct; as a result, inclusion and exclusion were decisive events. Furthermore, since in that hierarchical society only a few privileged positions existed, the possibility of exclusion and the fear of exclusion were correspondingly greater than they are now.

As a result, Shakespeare's audience would have been extremely well prepared to notice the influence of irrational forces as characters seek a place in society. In each play, the plot is shaped by two chain reactions, the first of which may be termed the "ripple effect": as soon as one courtship is announced, others get underway. Jaques comments on the phenomenon when, in the fifth act of As You Like It, Touchstone and Audrey enter to join others in a multiple marriage ceremony: "There is sure another flood toward, and these couples are coming to the ark." Beatrice herself is an example: within a "sevennight," she joins her cousin in a double wedding. In The Merchant, after Bassanio discloses his plan to woo, Lorenzo promptly elopes with Jessica, and Gratiano tells Bassanio that he "must" accompany him to Belmont.

A fear strong enough to send characters scurrying towards the altar has other consequences as well. The fear is in part experienced as the thought that some deficiency warranting exclusion will be discovered in oneself. To protect against this self-doubt, characters employ an unconscious defense: they locate a critical lack in another person; he should be excluded, and not they themselves. It might be thought that the target of attack would be a social equal or superior with whom one competes for inclusion; however, because social pressure discourages such behavior, the hostile feelings are deflected onto a person society agrees to leave at least partially unprotected.

Aggression against the precariously situated character intensifies his fears, and he consequently projects and finds reasons why someone else should be excluded. The pressure exhibited by the ripple effect thereby elicits a reverse movement as well—so delicate is the social mechanism, in Shakespeare's view. Whereas the ripple effect shows one character after another exerting an influence that leads all of them towards marriage and social inclusion, the reverse effect portrays a desperate attempt to avoid exclusion by pushing another character out.

The ripple effect is primarily represented by several children of privilege, all without serious impediments to success; the reverse effect focuses on two characters—both made vulnerable by social attitudes, but one far more so. In Twelfth Night, for example, Sir Toby's hand is stronger; though an unruly drunk, as uncle to the Countess Olivia, he is likely to remain a hanger-on in her household. On the other hand, the steward Malvolio, though occupying a responsible position in the same household, is not "to the manner born," and social prejudices, for the time being covert, may be activated, especially if he is seen to be ambitious. In The Merchant, the opponents are Antonio and the Jewish usurer Shylock, and in Much Ado, Don Pedro, a prince, and Don John, his bastard brother. The desire of Antonio and Don Pedro to keep their male friends and not court women makes them vulnerable in society.

Invariably, the better-connected character gains the upper hand and makes the other "odd man out." The excluded character promptly strikes back at his immediate adversary and the society protecting him. This attack can take the form of attempted revenge or an appeal for justice or both. In responding, the social "insiders" sometimes consider punishing the marginal character, but as his life is too closely intertwined with theirs, they keep guilt at a safe distance by rejecting the outsider's claim and blaming him both for his own suffering and the difficulties he has caused them.

At the celebration, the one or two characters who know more about the antiromantic forces that have been at work keep a discreet silence; the rest remain unconscious of their complicity and assuage their consciences by interpreting life as if it resembled a romantic comedy where the rewarded are the virtuous and the punished are the evil.

Shakespeare unsentimentally portrays the ostracized man as a bitter man. Nevertheless, through adversity he arrives at a measure of understanding; stripped of his own hypocritical pretensions, he penetrates society's as well, thus suggesting to the audience crucial questions about the plays.

The epigraph to this book alludes of course to Lear's mad but illumined ravings on the heath (4.6.150-72). Handy-dandy is a game, named after a formula spoken when a child presents to another two closed hands, one containing a hidden object and the other empty. The object may "change places" (153) so confusingly that it becomes impossible to identify the correct hand, except by chance. Similarly, Lear suggests, only a blind man, who cannot see and therefore cannol be misled by appearances, knows how impossible it is to identify who in reality is the "justice," who the "thief." Lear finds moral equality between "the great image of authority" and the beggar or outcast, an equality often obscured because "thorough tatter'd clothes small vices do appear; / Robes and furr'd gowns hide all." Lear alleges that only the act of condemnation provides telltale evidence of guilt; the justice who with bloody hand whips the whore, "hotly lusts to use her in that kind" for which he whips her.³¹ Similarly, in the comedies, society's condemnation of the outsider suggests that they have concealed likenesses. Through both deliberate and unconscious acts, blame passes to the outsider. Though his transgressions have been the most serious, he was exposed to the greatest pressures, and other characters have succumbed to similar temptations with far less excuse. The point, of course, is not that an absolute moral equality exists between the outsider and society; were this the case, the collapse of one "melodramatic" play would give rise to another. Instead, the audience learns to avoid complacency and to consider both the romantic and the anti-romantic aspects of experience.

Notes

¹ For rejections of an attempt to develop a consistent interpretation of the comedies as a group, see Ralph Berry, Shakespeare's Comedies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 3-4, and Alexander Leggati, Shakespeare's Comedy of Love (London: Methuen & Co., 1974), xi-xii.

² Leo Salingar, Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1974), 17.

³ Ralph Berry, "Shakespearean Comedy and Northrop Frye," Essays in Criticism 22 (1972): 39.

⁴ C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), 248-52.

⁵ Elmer Edgar Stoll, Shakespeare Studies, 2d ed. (1942; reprint, New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1960), 263. For Stoll's influence on Barber, see Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy, 169, 178, 198. Stoll also is an influence on Northrop Frye, who develops a theory of comedy comparable with Barber's; see especially A Natural Perspective (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), chap. 1, where, for example, Frye (p. 26) echoes Stoll's warning that Shakespeare is a "score to be played" and not "a book to be read" (Studies, 408).

⁶ Richard L. Levin, New Readings vs. Old Plays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 199. Related views are expressed by Harriet Hawkins, "'Conjectures and Refutations': The Positive Uses of Negative Feedback in Criticism and Performance," in Shakespeare, Man of the Theater, ed. Kenneth Muir, Jay L. Halio, and D. J. Palmer (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1983), 105-13.

⁷ Levin, New Readings, 199.

⁸ The "Preface" is reprinted by E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1930), 2:216-17. A recent critic perhaps alludes to this preface when rejecting its approach to the comedies: A. P. Riemer writes that the plays "refuse to relate to the world of mundane reality in a direct manner; they are incapable of being treated as explicit commentaries on or critiques of life" (Antic Fables [New York: St. Martin's Press, 1980], 11).

⁹ Margaret Cavendish, Letter 113, from CCXI Sociable Letters; reprinted in Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, ed. Brian Vickers (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974-75), 1:42-44. I quote below from Coleridge's Biographia Literaria (1817); reprinted in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 7, Biographia Literaria or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, (2 vols.), ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 2:27.

¹⁰ Vickers, Critical Heritage, 2:1. Thomas Rymer's A Short View of Tragedy (1693) is reprinted in abridged form by Vickers, Critical Heritage, 2:25-85, and I quote below from p. 53.

¹¹ Dr. Johnson's Preface to Shakespeare (1765); reprinted in The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, vol. 7, Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Arthur Sherbo (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1968), 7:65.

¹² The entry in the Stationers' Register and the quarto and Folio titles for The Merchant are reprinted in Chambers, Facts and Problems, 1:368-69.

¹³ Leonard Digges, "Upon Master William Shakespeare, the Deceased Authour, and his Poems" (1640), 11. 55-60; reprinted in Vickers, Critical Heritage, 1:28.

¹⁴ Nicholas Rowe's "Life of Shakespeare," reprinted in The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare, ed. James Boswell (London, 1821), 1:450-54.

¹⁵ The essay is reprinted, with Morgann's manuscript corrections, in Maurice Morgann: Shakespearian Criticism, ed. Daniel A. Fineman (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1972), 141-215.

¹⁶ Though critics reacting against nineteenth-century character analysis made Morgann notorious for his failure to consider the plays as theater, he in fact attempts to define audience reaction. This aspect of Morgann is noted by E. A. J. Honigmann, Shakespeare: Seven Tragedies: The Dramatist's Manipulation of Response (London: Macmillan & Co., 1976); see especially chap. 2, "Impressions of 'Character.'"

¹⁷ Morgann's passage is discussed by J. I. M. Stewart, Character and Motive in Shakespeare (1949; reprint, New York: Barnes & Noble, 1965), 117-22, esp. 118, and by L. C. Knights, Explorations (London: Chatto & Windus, 1946), 12. A. C. Bradley's praise for Morgann,mentioned below, and cited by Knights, p. 13, is from The Scottish Historical Review 1 (1903): 291; "The Rejection of Falstaff" is in Bradley's Oxford Lectures on Poetry (London: Macmillan & Co., 1920), 247-75.

¹⁸ See Anne Barton's introductions to the comedies under discussion in The Riverside Shakespeare, gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974); also Leggati, Shakespeare's Comedy of Love. Anne Barton's Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (London: Chatto & Windus, 1962), published under the name Anne Righter, has influenced most discussions of Shakespeare's plays as self-conscious "artifice."

¹⁹ Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Common Understanding (New York: Free Press, 1967), 12. Rabkin develops his thesis further in Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). Below I mention Raymond Powell, Shakespeare and the Critics ' Debate (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1980), 7-8. Two other recent writers who have explored how Renaissance interest in paradox and debate affects the literary forms of the period are Joel B. Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978), and Robert Grudin, Mighty Opposites: Shakespeare and Renaissance Contrariety (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979).

²⁰ The fullest antiromantic reading of the comedies is Elliot Krieger, A Marxist Study of Shakespeare's Comedies (London: Macmillan Press, 1979).

²¹ Herbert Howarth, The Tiger's Heart (London: Chatto & Windus, 1970), chap. 8.

²² In Patrick Crutwell, The Shakespearean Moment (New York: Random House, 1960), 33.

²³ I develop these ideas further in "King John's Bastard," The Upstart Crow 3 (1980): 29-41.

²⁴ Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage: In England 1500-1800 (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 271. Stone's conclusions about Elizabethan motives for marriage have been modified by, for example, Keith Wrightson, English Society: 1580-1680 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1982), 66-88.

²⁵ The assertions in this sentence are about disputed matters. The sonnets have never been satisfactorily dated; an important effort to establish verbal and thematic links between these poems and Shakespeare's plays of the mid- to late-nineties is made by Molly M. Mahood, "Love's Confin'd Doom," Shakespeare Survey 15 (1962): 50-61. Critics also disagree about whether the speaker has more than one male friend and on the social status of the friend addressed most frequently; in his edition of the sonnets (Boston: Ginn & Co., 1904), H. C. Beeching argues that this friend was "of good birth and fortune" but not necessarily of the nobility (p. xxi). Below I quote G. Wilson Knight, The Mutual Flame (London: Methuen & Co., 1955), 15.

²⁶ This paragraph puts the relationship between the friends in the positive light in which thespeaker desires to see it. Events nevertheless force the speaker to question his and his friend's conduct. The two of them are certainly swayed by fortune. In Sonnet 62, the speaker holds up for antiromantic analysis his reasons for desiring the relationship in the first place. Is it "sin of self-love," he asks, which explains his desire to bask in the reflected glory of the friend?

²⁷ E. K. Chambers, Shakespeare: A Survey (London: Sedgwick & Jackson, 1925), 117.

²⁸ The quote is from Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy: 1558-1641 (Oxford: At the University Press, 1965), 223.

²⁹ Tilley, L534. Quoted by G. R. Hibbard, "Love, Marriage, and Money in Shakespeare's Theatre and Shakespeare's England," in The Elizabethan Theatre VI, ed. Hibbard (Hamden, Conn.: Shoe String Press, n.d.), 139.

³⁰ In a note on this passage, Dr. Johnson (p. 366) points out that in All's Well, 1.3.18, "to go to the world" means "to marry." Although Johnson finds the passage in Much Ado somewhat obscure and suggests an emendation, he at one point provides the metaphoric reading I give to "sunburnt": "I am left exposed to wind and 'sun.'" Modern scholarship has discussed the proverbial association of exposure to the sun with adverse fortune; see P. L. Carver, "Out of Heaven's Benediction to the Warm Sun,'" Modern Language Review 25 (1930): 478-81, and John Dover Wilson, What Happens in "Hamlet" (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1935), 32-33. Shakespeare uses the proverb in Lear, 2.2.163 and, in the opinion of both Carver and Wilson, in Hamlet, 1.2.67.

³¹ With the thought here, compare Tim. 5.1.39: "Wilt thou whip thine own faults in other men?"; and MV 1.3.160-62: "O father Abram, what these Christians are, / Whose own hard dealings teaches them suspect / The thoughts of others!"