The Two Gentlemen Of Verona
In The Two Gentlemen of Verona, the character who in many ways appears the most vulnerable is not Valentine, whose good faith leads him into banishment, nor Silvia, distressed and frightened though she undoubtedly is by the attempted rape, nor even Julia, forced to witness the faithlessness and villainy of her lover, but Proteus himself, the man who causes the suffering of all of them. Proteus says of himself, 'I do as truly suffer, / As e'er I did commit'.27 These lines, and Proteus' part in general in this scene, have often been considered badly underwritten, but Barry Lynch's moving delivery in the 1991 Swan Theatre production by David Thacker at Stratford-upon-Avon showed that they can in fact be seen as more than adequate to the situation, since what they suggest is that Proteus' own suffering is directly proportional to that experienced by all the other three lovers in combination. Indeed, it could even be argued that he has undergone more than they have had to do: for whereas they have throughout the play been firmly locked into stable, unshakeable identities, Proteus has undergone a most violent and radical attack on his very sense of selfhood, bordering almost on what might now be termed a form of schizophrenia.
This is seen clearly in II, VI, where, like Richard III before Bosworth, Proteus effectively falls apart. Given, in modern editions, the whole scene to himself, he soliloquises:
I cannot leave to love; and yet I do;
But there I leave to love, where I should love.
Julia I lose, and Valentine I lose;
If I keep them, I needs must lose myself;
If I lose them, thus find I by their loss:
For Valentine, myself; for Julia, Silvia.
I to myself am dearer than a friend,
For love is still most precious in itself,
And Silvia (witness heaven, that made her fair)
Shows Julia but a swarthy Ethiope.
(II.VI. 17-26)
Underlying the apparent arrival at a decision here is a terrifying sense of the dizzying relativity of all available senses of identity. The first line sets up a logical impossibility which the balanced syntax can do no more than leave as paradox. It may be glossed over by the sophistry of the second, but that also introduces another, equally worrying, idea: Τ is no longer absolute, standing unbounded as subject of the sentence, but modified and compromised by its physical location—'there', 'where'.
'I' finds itself even further destabilised in the third line when both Julia and Valentine successively usurp the apparent subject position of their respective phrases, and in the fourth line the issue is explicitly addressed when Proteus admits to himself the awful possibility that he may 'lose myself. This is hastily dismissed when a swift change of object alters the situation to losing not himself but 'them'—a safely demonised, externalised group which leaves his own sense of identity apparently unthreatened and intact. But Proteus, as his Protean name suggests, has exposed a far more radical possibility than that of simple self-loss: lurking behind the exchange of persons which he now proposes is the spectre that he may have no self to lose. If Julia can replace Silvia and Proteus Valentine, and if Julia's former self is indeed modified and devalued by the mere existence of Silvia, as suggested in the two closing lines, then in what sense can any of these people be presented as a 'self? In this sense Proteus' 'I do as truly suffer / As e'er I did commit' is a statement which is both admirably expressive and a profound psychological restorative, for in it...
(This entire section contains 2991 words.)
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he has finally achieved an assertion of the coherence of the two parts of his previously shattered self: what 'I' has done, Τ is also paying for, and the payment is small price for the reintegration of self which the language enables him to assert. Looked at in this light, the 'marriage' which seals the end of the play is less one between Proteus and Julia than between Proteus and his estranged selfhood, or perhaps with Julia as a manifestation of that former, regretted state of psychological unity.
The play does end with the promise of other, more conventional marriages. Valentine assures his regained friend:
Come, Proteus, 'tis your penance but to hear
The story of your loves discovered.
That done, our day of marriage shall be yours,
One feast, one house, one mutual happiness.
(V.IV.168-71)
All is apparently well that ends well, and Valentine's extraordinary offer of his own interest in Silvia to Proteus could also be read as indicating that the friendship of the two gentlemen will, despite all the strains to which it has been subject, survive and even prosper. Nevertheless the darker notes are there. The ring which Julia produces as a token both of her own identity and of Proteus' former affection for her may serve to remind us that bonds sealed by rings have been broken before and could be again. Moreover, while the two women have shown themselves eager for marriage throughout the play, the behaviour of both Proteus and Valentine can be seen as registering a rather more ambivalent attitude. When we first meet them, in I.I, love is already a force which threatens to pull their friendship apart: Proteus will stay at home because of it, losing the chance of adventures and finding himself separated from his friend. And it remains throughout the play the single greatest threat to male bonding, not only disrupting the relationship of Proteus and Valentine but also falsifying and eventually undermining their interactions with the male authority figure, the Duke.
It would be plausible to see Proteus' sudden switch to Silvia as operating effectively as a continuation of that movement away from love which has already been inaugurated by his decision to leave Julia: subconsciously, he has chosen the most inaccessible of all possible females, the beloved of his friend. It is a move guaranteed to precipitate the crisis which has until now been only latent, to force a radical choice between the two parts of his fissured identity. As in The Two Noble Kinsmen, so much later in Shakespeare's career, what we see here is the crippling psychological cost in terms of the loss of personal and social selfhood which men may fear will be the price of marriage.28
Another fear, too, can be seen as lying behind both this play and others of Shakespeare's apparently 'happy' comedies. Finding himself unable to persuade Silvia to yield to his advances, Proteus decides to rape her. This is not only his own lowest psychological point; it is also devastatingly revealing about his attitude to marriage. Obviously no modern feminist can admit any sort of defence of his act, but it may be possible to look at in a light rather different from that in which it is customarily considered. If Proteus himself regards marriage as a threatening, dangerous state, he might well project such feelings of reluctance onto his female partner—and this could lead him to regard not only Silvia but all women as quite simply needing to be raped in order to make marriage possible at all. We can read his action less as an individual, isolated act of violation than as the emblem of his views of all relationships, in which either others or the self must always be lost; in one sense, it is himself that he tries to rape. The idea of female reluctance to marry, which had figured so threateningly in A Midsummer Night's Dream, thus recurs here, raising the question of whether it could be that the universal assumption of women's desire to cuckold their husbands by incessant sex actually masks in general the repression of a deeper fear too threatening even to voice—that female participation in sex is reluctant.
Frigid women, who are at the same time impossible to keep chaste; fragmented men in danger of losing their selves, their honour and their friends; incompetent or unavailable priests and defective ceremonies; savage uncivilised settings in which wild beasts roam as the fitting emblem of the human condition—the makings of marriage in Shakespearean comedy are not promising ones. But it is, of course, precisely the innate instability of its personnel and character that make the institution such a vital one. The radical fissuring that splits selves and societies can be kept from cracking only by the constant repetition and reduplication of social and ideological bonds that marriage alone is seen as capable of providing, forming as it does the one framework in which the behaviour of each partner is constantly visible, constantly subject to policing by the other. The Shakespearean 'happy' comedies do not celebrate marriage: they reveal its crucial functioning in the maintenance of society and also the internal stresses and contradictions to which it is constantly subject—an instability instanced by the repeated structural decentring of marriage from its supposed position of comic closure. And contrary to so much of the misogyny and the marital ideology of the time, they powerfully reveal that outside the institution of marriage both men and women are adrift, while inside it both must pay a high price for their security.
Notes
1 See Ejner J. Jensen, Shakespeare and the Ends ofComedy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 2, on the importance attached by the critical tradition to the ends of comedies.
2 This is noted by Nigel Wood ('Endpiece', in Theoryin Practice: Hamlet, ed. Peter J. Smith and Nigel Wood [Buckingham: Open University Press, 1996], pp. 24-54, p. 137), in response to Brian Vickers' assertion to the contrary.
3 For the Elizabethan expectation that the birth of a child would inevitably result from sex, see Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (Brighton: Harvester, 1983), p. 130.
4 William Shakespeare, As You Like It, ed. Agnes Latham [1957] (London: Routledge, 1987), I.III.11. All future quotations from the play will be taken from this edition and reference will be given in the text.
5 Katharine Eisaman Maus, in 'Transfer of Title in Love's Labour 's Lost: Language, Individualism, Gender', in Shakespeare Left and Right, ed. Ivo Kamps (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 205-23, sees Navarre's academy as an attempt to repress 'the involvement of women in the process of title transfer' (p. 215).
6 The extent to which As You Like It is generally perceived as a play riddled with marriages is interestingly indicated by the Oxford and Cambridge Ό' level board question on the play cited by Alan Sinfíeld, 'Write an editorial for the Arden Gazette on the recent outbreak of marriage in the district' ('Give an account of Shakespeare and Education, showing why you think they are effective and what you have appreciated about them. Support your comments with precise references', in Political Shakespeare, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985], pp. 134-57, p. 150).
7 William Shakespeare, As You Like It, ed. H.J. Oliver (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), V.4.104s.d.
8 That there is a genuine ambiguity here is something that has become very clear to me when teaching this text, and an assumption either way can produce very different readings, as in Malcolm Evans' discussion of the play in Signifying Nothing: Truth's True Contents in Shakespeare's Texts, 2nd edition (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), where it is taken for granted that it is indisputably the god Hymen who appears. (Evans does not discuss the performance aspect.)
9 Diane Elizabeth Dreher, Domination and Defiance: Fathers and Daughters in Shakespeare (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1986), p. 123.
10 Dreher, Domination and Defiance, p. 122.
11 See Richard Wilson, Will Power: Essays on Shakespearean Authority (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), p. 75.
12 See Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, pp. 13-14.
13 Barbara J. Bono points out, however, that the forest of Arden echoes the maiden name of Shakespeare's mother Mary Arden, and that the play encodes a recognition of human origin in a maternal body which precludes knowledge of the father ('Mixed Gender, Mixed Genre in Shakespeare's As You Like It', in Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation, ed. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986], pp. 189-212, pp. 194 and 211). On absent mothers in Shakespearean drama generally, see most particularly Mary Beth Rose, 'Where are the Mothers in Shakespeare? Options for Gender Representation in the English Renaissance', Shakespeare Quarterly 42:3 (Fall 1991), pp. 291-314.
14 See Richard Wilson, Will Power: Essays on Shakespearean Authority (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), p. 76, on the patriarchal values encoded in 'thy father's father'.
15 See Louis Adrian Montrose, ' "The Place of a Brother" in As You Like It: Social Process and Comic Form', Shakespeare Quarterly 32 (1981), pp. 28-54, p. 50. Montrose also offers a brilliant analysis of the workings of male bonding mechanisms in the play in general and in the horn song scene in particular, which he terms a 'charivari' (p. 49). He sees the play as a whole as working to diminish the power of women. For additional comment on the snake and lioness, see Valerie Traub, 'Desire and the Differences it Makes', in The Matter of Difference, ed. Valerie Wayne (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), pp. 81-114, p. 105.
16 William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream, ed. Harold F. Brooks (London: Methuen, 1979), I.1.1-11. All further quotations from the play will be taken from this edition and reference will be given in the text.
17 For the argument that Shakespeare might be alluding here to the presence of actual dowagers in the audience, see Steven May, 'A Midsummer Night's Dream and the Carey-Berkeley Wedding', Renaissance Papers (1983), pp. 43-52, pp. 46-7.
18 For an ingenious reading of A Midsummer Night'sDream as structured around the fear and avoidance of older women, see Terence Hawkes, 'Or', in Meaning by Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1992). On the absence of mothers in Shakespeare's plays, see Carol Thomas Neely, Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare's Plays, 2nd edition (Urbana, IL: Illini Books, 1993), p. 171.
19 See Paula Louise Scalingi, 'The Scepter or the Distaff: The Question of Female Sovereignty, 1516-1607', The Historian, 41:1 (1975), pp. 59-75, p. 64. Semiramis is referred to twice in Titus Andronicus (II.1.22 and II.III.118), and so is Pyramus (II.III.231), which increases the probability of an allusion to her in Dream.
20 On lesbian desire in the play, see Valerie Traub, 'The (In)significance of "Lesbian" Desire in Early Modern England', in Erotic Politics, ed. Susan Zimmerman, pp. 150-69, p. 157. For an argument that all Shakespearean comedy is fundamentally informed by homoeroticism, see Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters, pp. 20-9.
21 For discussions of the difficulties of ascertaining whether, in this and similar situations, the sympathies of the audience would be engaged on behalf of the unruly lovers or of the patriarchal order which they challenge, see Michael Hattaway, 'Drama and Society', in The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama, ed. A.R. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 110, and Richard Levin, New Readings vs Old Plays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), pp. 151-3.
22 For an account of some pertinent aspects of the cult, see Roy Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977); Susan Bassnett, Elizabeth I: A Feminist Perspective (Oxford: Berg, 1988); and my own Elizabeth I and Her Court (London: Vision Press, 1990). On its potential implications for the play, see particularly Louis Adrian Montrose, 'A Midsummer Night's Dream and the Shaping Fantasies of Elizabethan Culture: Gender, Power, Form', reproduced most conveniently in New Historicism and Renaissance Drama, ed. Richard Wilson and Richard Dutton (Harlow: Longman, 1992), pp. 109-30. For discussion between the relationship between the cult of Elizabeth and comic closure in general, see Peter Erickson, 'The Order of the Garter, the cult of Elizabeth, and class-gender tension in The Merry Wives of Windsor ', in Shakespeare Reproduced, ed. Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O'Connor (London: Methuen, 1987), pp. 116-40, p. 130. Philippa Berry comments on the tension between the strong emphasis on marriage in Protestant ideology and Elizabeth's refusal of it, and offers a reading of A Midsummer Night's Dream as attempting to restore Elizabeth to 'the control of the patriarchy' (Of Chastity and Power: Elizabethan Literature and the Unmarried Queen [London: Routledge, 1989], p. 143) and as mounting a 'challenge [to] the Platonism of Elizabeth's cult by its emphasis upon female heterosexuality and the subordination of woman in marriage' (pp. 143-4). My own reading would agree that women are shown to be subordinated in marriage but would suggest that the implications of this fact may be a possible locus for debate, and hence that it is not being uncritically endorsed.
23 Hawkes (Meaning by Shakespeare, p. 20) comments that 'a motif of disfiguring, translating change is all-pervasive'.
24 Though Stephen Greenblatt suggests that the Fairies' use of fielddew at the end of the play is indeed evocative of the marriage blessing ('Resonance and Wonder', Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 43 [1990], pp. 11-34; reprinted in Stephen J. Greenblatt, Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture [London: Routledge, 1990], p. 163).
25 Christopher Brooke, The Medieval Idea of Marriage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 231.
26 The importance of directing critical attention to the male characters as well as the female ones, even and perhaps especially for a feminist reading, has been stressed by, amongst others, Walter Cohen, who characterises as one of the achievements of American feminist criticism 'a psychoanalytically inspired sensitivity to the costs repeatedly exacted in the course of the plots not only from women but, given the constricting norms of male identity, from men as well' ('Political Criticism of Shakespeare', in Shakespeare Reproduced, p. 23). He goes on to question Linda Bamber's division into comic women, tragic men (p. 24).
27 William Shakespeare, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, ed. Clifford Leech (London: Methuen, 1969), V.IV.76-7. All further quotations from the play will be taken from this edition and reference will be given in the text.
28 For a discussion of this as a central concern in TheTwo Noble Kinsmen, see Kathleen McLuskie, Renaissance Dramatists (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1989), p. 13, and Bruce P. Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England: A Cultural Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 72.
Source: "Marriage as Comic Closure," in The Shakespearean Marriage: Merry Wives and Heavy Husbands, Macmillan Press, 1998, pp. 16-33.
