SOURCE: Neely, Carol Thomas. “Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare's Comedies.” In Shakespeare's ‘Rough Magic’: Renaissance Essays in Honor of C. L. Barber, edited by Peter Erickson and Coppélia Kahn, pp. 61-72. Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1985.

[In the following essay, Neely suggests that Shakespeare's comic marriages demonstrate varied patterns of disruption, postponement, or dislocation brought about by feminine resistance, female fear of submission, or a male perception of marriage as a threat to masculine friendship.]

Marriage, no one doubts, is the subject and object of Shakespeare's comedies, which ordinarily conclude with weddings celebrated, re-celebrated, or consummated. But throughout these plays broken nuptials counterpoint the festive ceremonies, manifesting male and female antagonisms and anxieties which impede the movement toward marriage. The notion of “broken nuptials” is appropriated from Leo Salingar, who finds it the distinctive feature of a number of Shakespeare plays which have Italian novelle as sources.¹ I extend the implications of the expression, using it to refer to all of the parodic, unusual, or interrupted ceremonies and premature, postponed, or irregular consummations which occur in nearly every comedy from Love's Labor's Lost's deferred weddings to Measure for Measure's premature consummations. The centrality of the motif is reinforced by the fact that Shakespeare added broken nuptials when they are absent from his sources, altered the meaning and increased the significance of those he found there, and imbued them with more complex and wide-ranging functions than they originally had.²

The existence of the motif has implications for study of the comedies' relationships, continuity, and development. The pervasiveness and patterning of the motif may provide a way of looking at them no less useful than those provided by C. L. Barber's implicit distinction between festive and other comedies, Sherman Hawkins' division between green world comedies of extrusion and closed heart comedies of intrusion, and Salingar's categories of farcical, woodland, and problem comedies.³ Exploration of the motif will show that the most important impediments to comic fulfillment are within the couples themselves and not, as Northrop Frye has influentially argued, within the blocking figures and repressive laws of an anti-comic society in need of transformation.⁴ The broken nuptials are one means of achieving the release of emotion moving toward clarification which C. L. Barber has explored in the festive comedies. I argue, extending Barber's insights, that release of emotion is necessary in all of the comedies as is some transformation of released emotion although not precisely the sort which Barber finds characteristic of the late romances.⁵ Within the continuity of the comedies which the motif manifests, overall development is likewise apparent. In earlier comedies irregular nuptials identify and release conflicts, engendering their resolution. In later comedies in which conflicts are severe and anxieties deeply rooted, nuptials are more severely disrupted and resolutions increasingly strained.⁶

In Shakespearean comedy, if wooing is to lead to a wedding ceremony and consummation of the marriage, separation from family and friends must occur, misogyny must be exorcised, romantic idealizing affection must be experienced and qualified, and sexual desire must be acknowledged and controlled. Only then can subjective romance and urgent desire be reconciled in a formal social ceremony. Resistance to marriage is variously manifested and mitigated and is different for men and women. Women bear a double burden. Once released from their own fears, usually through the actions of other women, they must dispel men's resistance and transform men's emotions. The irregular nuptials in three early comedies reveal and remove different impediments to the comic project: Kate's resistance to romantic affection in Taming of the Shrew, which is transformed by Petruchio; the men's vacillation between misogyny and romanticism in Love's Labor's Lost, which is mocked and countered by the ladies; and the capricious, aggressive action of desire in Midsummer Night's Dream, which is experienced and manipulated by both men and women and which transforms them. I will examine the significance of the broken nuptials in these three plays and trace the development of each one's version of the motif through later comedies. Then I will focus on the central instance of broken nuptials in Much Ado About Nothing, showing how this thematically pivotal comedy extends earlier uses of the motif and anticipates its darker configurations in the problem comedies and contemporaneous tragedies.

In The Taming of the Shrew Petruchio's disruptions of his and Kate's nuptials—the mocked ceremony, interrupted feast, and postponed consummation—while arrogant and misogynistic reveal and mitigate the sources of Kate's resistance to affection and marriage. His mockery of the wedding rituals implies that a formal ceremony does not guarantee mutual commitment. His removal of her from the feast parodies the authoritarian possessiveness which constitutes a genuine threat to Kate. At the same time he celebrates the sexual bond generated in their first bawdy exchange, romanticizing it by picturing her as a threatened damsel with a devoted protector. His seizure of her likewise exaggerates the separation from her family which is necessary if she is to move beyond the restrictive role of shrew through which she has defined her relation to them. Kate, gradually shifting roles in response to Petruchio's bullying, commits herself to him through their verbal games, their public kiss, and her concluding affirmation of marriage. Her new-found pleasure in giving and receiving affection is confirmed in her final speech, a celebration of reciprocity that brilliantly reconciles patriarchal marriage with romantic love and mutual desire. She defines marriage not just as a hierarchical social institution in which an obedient wife dutifully serves her lord, but, conversely, as a playful Petrarchan romance in which an ardent lover courageously serves a beautiful woman;

Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,
Thy head, thy sovereign—one that cares for thee,
And for thy maintenance commits his body
To painful labor both by sea and land,
To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,
Whilest thou li'st warm at home, secure and safe;
And craves no other tribute at thy hands
But love, fair looks, and true obedience.

(5.2.148-55)⁷

Underlying both fictions is a reciprocal sexual bond in which the woman is a clear, life-giving fountain, responsive to her husband's “honest will” (5.2.160). Following this joyous reassertion of her marriage vows and the re-celebrated wedding feast, the couple can go off to bed for the belated consummation of their marriage.

Female resistance to wooing and wedding is rare in the comedies and is not elsewhere dispelled by men. But other women—Beatrice, Phebe, Olivia, Diana, and Isabella—do “usurp” themselves, as Viola puts it to Olivia (1.5.185); their withdrawal from men has something in common with Kate's. It is characterized by unsparing attacks on male pride and romanticism and by the self-pride and suppression of desire most thoroughly manifested in Isabella. Olivia and Isabella, like Kate, must loosen constricting bonds to family. All of these women are released by vehement attacks on their pride and beauty, and by the preliminary movement into temporary, inadequate, or counterfeit relationships—Kate's farcical marriage, Beatrice's “wars” with Benedick, Phebe's and Olivia's adolescent attachments to the disguised women who attack them, Diana's pretended acquiescence in Bertram's seduction of her, and Isabella's pretended participation in the bedtrick. All but Kate are urged toward their release by other women. The attacks on Beatrice by Hero, on Phebe by Rosalind, and on Olivia by Viola, and the bedtrick substitutions of Helena for Diana and Mariana for Isabella engender in each of the women partial identification with the situation of the woman she is paired with. The resisting women are transformed or potentially transformed, and the women who attack pride or are humiliated through the bedtricks must confront their own defenses and anxieties in preparation for their own commitments.

Male resistance to marriage is more pervasive and persistent; it typically takes other forms and is dispelled in somewhat different ways. Men's conflicting bonds are not usually to family but to male peers. Instead of withdrawing, they defend themselves against women and protect self-esteem by aggressive misogyny or witty romantic idealization. The men are released in the early comedies by women's mockery, designed to reveal the men's absurdity and the limitations of the women they worship. In Love's Labor's Lost the women mock the men's wooing and postpone the weddings until after the play has ended. In the original academe scheme the men banish women in order to cement their fellowship and to overcome “devouring Time” and the “disgrace of death” by warring against “the huge army of the world's desires” (1.1.3-4, 10). Their facile shift from misogyny to romanticism is incomplete and reveals the similar functions of the two poses. The formulaic wooing, like the ascetic retreat it replaces, continues to protect the men from women and sex and time and strengthens their bonds with each other; their untimely marriage proposals deny, once again, the reality of death. The women, responding to their own desires and to the threat posed by male arrogance, rigidity, and misogyny, abort the expected festive conclusion—“These ladies' courtesy / Might well have made our sport a comedy” (5.2.873-74)—and refuse the offers. They impose on the men separate, year-long penances which are to be a fruitful transformation of the “little academe” to which they were originally pledged. Through these, romance, wit, and male friendship, having had their season, will give way, in time, to the fulfillment, the prosaic familiarity, and the heterosexual “binding” and “breaking” (AYL, 5.4.58) imaged in the seasonal songs. Oaths once sworn to each other against women will now be sworn to their beloveds. Wit, once tested against a world of “frosts and fasts” (5.2.799) and disease, will be discarded if it proves inadequate. Awaiting the men's growth, the women undergo a complementary withdrawal to mourn the king's death; in later comedies and in the tragedies, female withdrawal becomes increasingly defensive and involves greater risks.

In The Merchant of Venice and As You Like It the threats of male friendship and idealizing romance are again confronted, not in interrupted nuptials but in parodic ceremonies imposed by the women on the men they love: at the end of Merchant, Bassanio must reassert his wedding vows and receive again Portia's ring before the mid-play marriage can be consummated, and Orlando must rehearse his vows with Rosalind/Ganymede/Rosalind in preparation for the actual wedding which concludes As You Like It. Portia and Rosalind use the pseudo-ceremony to mock the conventionally extravagant commitments of the men; both assert the possibility of female infidelity to emphasize the sexual dimension of women and marriage not fully acknowledged by their beloveds. Bassanio's bond with Antonio—for which he leaves Portia and gives away her ring—has constituted a genuine threat to his marriage. In the last scene he is brought to recognize this and to recommit himself more fully to Portia. Antonio must also pledge himself to the marriage, in effect giving Bassanio away with the return to him of Portia's ring, which has come to represent Portia's faith and chastity, Bassanio's lapsed and reaffirmed fidelity, and the sexual consummation of the marriage which will follow their re-wedding. Orlando's romantic pledge to die for love is likewise transformed by means of a mock ceremony into a realistic commitment to marry, knowing that the sky will change and the wife may wander. Portia and Rosalind, in disguise and in control, can playfully use the fantasy of female infidelity to qualify romance because neither their sexuality nor their potential infidelity is perceived as a real threat in these plays.

But in Midsummer Night's Dream desire, symbolized by the operations of the fairy juice, is urgent, promiscuous, and threatening to women as well as men. Its effects mock protestations of constancy by Lysander and Demetrius and exaggerate the patriarchal possessiveness of Theseus and Oberon: “every man should take his own. … The man shall have his mare again, / and all shall be well” (3.2.459, 463-64). All is made well in part because the erratic or aggressive desires of the controlling men are “linger(ed)” (1.1.4) by the chaste constancy of Hermia and Helena and the poised detachment of Hippolyta or tempered by the inconstancy of Titania with Bottom. Oberon, engineering this union, imagines it as an ugly, bestial coupling “with lion, bear, or wolf, or bull” (2.1.180), an apt punishment for Titania's multiple desires and intimacies. But from Titania's perspective (and ours) it is a comically fulfilling alternate nuptial—and was staged as such by Peter Brook, complete with streamers, the wedding march, a plumed bower, and a waving phallus.⁸ The union is a respite for Titania from the conflicts of her hierarchical marriage. She and Bottom experience not animal lust, but a blissful, sensual, symbiotic union, characterized, like that of mother and child, by mutual affection and a sense of effortless omnipotence. Their eroticism, the opposite of Oberon's bestial fantasies or Theseus' phallic wooing, is tenderly gynocentric: “So doth the woodbine the sweet honeysuckle / Gently entwist; the female ivy so / Enrings the barky fingers of the elm” (4.1.43-45). Although Titania disavows her “enamoured” visions (4.1.77-78), and Oberon misconstrues them, the couple's “amity” (4.1.88) depends on that prior union: freed by it to relinquish her other love object, the Indian boy, to Oberon, Titania's submission generates in him the tenderness she craves. The wedding festivities at the end of the play incorporate the union aborted by death enacted in the Pyramus and Thisbe play. This play's linking of parodic romance and bawdy innuendo brings comically into the festive conclusion the two dimensions of love—conventional romanticism and uncontrollable desire—which, converging, threatened the couples in the forest.

Later, in Twelfth Night, another dream-nuptial is similarly commanded by the woman and acquiesced in amazedly by the man. Sebastian, like Bottom, is the bemused recipient of female bounty. But the romantic and sexual attraction of Olivia and Sebastian is legitimized in a chapel by the priest, who describes the exquisitely formal and decorously conventional wedding: “Confirmed by mutual joinder of your hands, / Attested by the holy close of lips, / Strength'ned by interchangement of your rings; / And all the ceremony of this compact / Seal'd in my function, by my testimony” (5.2.156-60). While perfectly completed, this is, perhaps, the most irregular nuptial of all, for Sebastian both “is and is not” (5.1.216) the object of Olivia's desires. (More farcically and less happily, in The Merry Wives of Windsor, the sexual mismatches of Caius and Slender, whose brides turn out to be “lubberly” boys (5.5.186), break their nuptials and reflect the ludicrous impotence of their desires and of Falstaff's). In Twelfth Night the union is wondrous, not troublesome; the fortunate appearance of twin Sebastian “unties” all the “knots” (2.2.41) of the play, releasing Olivia from proud disdain into satisfied desire, allowing Orsino's free-floating fancies to anchor on Viola, his “fancy's queen” (5.1.389), and transforming Viola's romantic and self-sacrificing pledge to die for Orsino—“And I, most jocund, apt, and willingly, / To do you rest a thousand deaths would die” (5.1.131-32)—into a fulfilling sexual commitment. But the simultaneously regular and irregular nuptial points to the sheerly contingent connection of sexual desire with romantic affection and with wedding ceremonies and anticipates the more radical substitutions which are necessary to untie the tangles of the problem comedies.

As romance and desire are increasingly fragmented in later comedies, both pose greater threats. Misogyny and romanticism corrupt each other when, in Angelo and Much Ado's Claudio, idealization of women becomes a brittle, easily shattered defense against sexual desire and anxiety, and when, in Troilus and Bertram, romantic rhetoric is employed as a weapon of aggressive seduction, as foreshadowed in Proteus's arrested rape in Two Gentlemen of Verona. The desire induced in the earlier comedies to generate release—through the fairy juice, the witty mockery of the heroines, the bawdy of fools, clowns, and subplot characters—now degenerates into lust. This lust, untransformed, cannot be absorbed into the ritualistic conclusions as Touchstone's is after Jaques interrupts the fool's earlier attempt to contrive a quasi-legitimate union with Audrey. The comically irregular ceremonies and postponed consummations of the earlier comedies give way in All's Well and Measure for Measure to “cozen'd” and premature consummations which “Defile the pitchy night” (AWW, 4.4.23-24), consummations which feel like prostitution in All's Well and like rape in Measure for Measure. The submission of Helena and Mariana in the bedtricks is painfully humiliating, and in the last scenes of the plays Diana and Isabella must take this humiliation on themselves. The men are not merely mocked into acknowledgments of the risks of marriage and the limitations of the beloved; they are forced into marriages they dread with women they dislike.

Much Ado About Nothing contains the most clear-cut example of broken nuptials—Claudio's interruption of his wedding ceremony to accuse Hero of infidelity. It looks both forward and backward and has affinities with most of the other comedies. In it the threats posed by misogyny, romanticism, sexual anxieties, and social conventions are variously dispelled. In the Beatrice/Benedick plot, the couple are released by their mutual mockery and their double gullings which function like the mockery and trickery of Love's Labor's Lost, Merchant of Venice, and As You Like It to break down defenses and release affection. In the Claudio/Hero plot, however, anxieties are expressed and mitigated by the broken nuptials, Claudio's penitence and acceptance of a substitute bride, and Hero's vilification and mock death, motifs which anticipate Twelfth Night, All's Well, and Measure for Measure.

The witty bawdy of Much Ado About Nothing, more extensive than that of Taming, Midsummer Night's Dream, or As You Like It, but more lighthearted than that of All's Well and Measure for Measure, manifests sexuality as the central component of marriage and the source of radically different anxieties for men and women. Its primary subject is intercourse, persistently viewed as male assault: men “board” woman (2.1.138) and “put in the pikes with a vice” (5.2.20) while women resign themselves to being made “heavier … by the weight of a man” and “stuff'd” (3.4.26, 63); thus they belittle the “blunt … foils” (5.2.13) and “short horns” (2.1.22) which threaten them. They do not, however, see their own sexuality as a weapon; they joke about “lightness” (3.4.36, 43, 45) to warn each other against it, and even the term itself associates them with weakness rather than strength. Fear of male aggressiveness explains, I think, Hero's heavy heart on her wedding morning and her willingness to be the passive object of her father's negotiations, Pedro's wooing, and Claudio's low-keyed proposal; she, like Claudio, wishes to emphasize the social not the sexual aspect of their marriage. Beatrice's more aggressive, witty resistance to men and marriage is also rooted, not in deep-seated hostility toward either (indeed her mockery poignantly reveals her desire for both), but in her apprehensiveness about the sexual and social submission demanded of women in marriage. Wary of men's volatile combination of earthly frailty with arrogant authority, she does not want a husband,

till God make men of some other metal than earth. Would it not grieve a woman to be overmastered with a piece of valiant dust? To make an account of her life to a clod of wayward marl? No, uncle, I'll none. Adam's sons are my brethren, and truly I hold it a sin to match in my kindred.

(2.1.56-61)

Women fear submission to men's power; men, likewise perceiving their sexuality as power over women, fear the loss of this power through male submission to the “yoke” of marriage or through female betrayal. They defend themselves against betrayal in three ways: by transforming it, through the motif of cuckoldry, into a proof of virility; by anticipating it through misogyny; and by denying its possibility through idealization. All three motifs are prominent in Much Ado. As Coppélia Kahn suggests, cuckoldry becomes associated with virility by means of the horn which symbolizes both.⁹ The defensive function of cuckoldry jokes is made apparent in the extended one which introduces the final weddings. The scorn due the cuckold is ingenuously swallowed up in the acclaim awarded the cuckolder for his “noble feat”: “And all Europa shall rejoice at thee, / As once Europa did at lusty Jove / When he would play the noble beast in love” (5.4.50, 45-47). Cuckoldry, thus deftly dissociated from female power and sexuality, can be identified with masculine solidarity, authority, and virility: “There is no staff more reverend than one tipped with horn” (5.4.123). Benedick's misogyny is similarly self-protective. His cynicism about women—“I will do myself the right to trust none” (1.1.237)—coupled with the claim that all women dote on him, allows him to profess virility without ever putting it to the proof. The parallel defense against sex and risk erected by misogyny and idealization, implicit in Love's Labor's Lost, is made explicit in Benedick's admission that could he find an ideal woman, he would abandon the pose: “But till all graces be in one woman, one woman shall not come in my grace” (2.3.27-29). Claudio finds—or creates—“all graces in one woman,” but his defense is as fragile as Benedick's. Romanticizing rhetoric and patriarchal marriage conventions conveniently coalesce, enabling him to maintain Hero as a remote perfect object of possession, not to be touched, scarcely even talked to: “Lady, as you are mine, I am yours” (2.1.296).¹⁰

The witty verbal skirmishes comprising Beatrice's and Benedick's “merry wars” express, as Claudio's and Hero's silence does, anxieties about sexuality and intimacy. But the heterosexual hostilities released in the bawdy and, more violently, in the broken nuptials are dispelled with more difficulty than in earlier comedies. Beatrice and Benedick cannot transform themselves or each other, but their asymmetrical gullings resemble the ceremonies mocking men and the attacks on female recalcitrance already examined. The two deceits, invariably viewed as parallel, are quite different. The men gently mock Benedick's witty misogyny while nurturing his ego; they emphasize his virtues, not his “contemptible spirit” (2.3.180), and confirm his fantasy that all women adore him with a drawn-out exaggerated tale of Beatrice's helpless passion for him. Even such assurances of his power win from him only a grudgingly impersonal commitment: “Love me? Why, it must be requited” (2.3.19). This he must justify by relying, like Claudio, on friends' confirmations of the lady's virtue and marriageability, and by viewing marriage not as a personal relationship but as a conventional social institution for controlling desire and ensuring procreation: “the world must be peopled” (2.3.236).

The gulling of Beatrice by the women is utterly different in its strategy and effect. They make only one unembroidered mention of Benedick's love, praise his virtues, not Beatrice's, and attack at length and with gusto her proud wit, deflating rather than bolstering her self-esteem. Accepting the accuracy of the charges, Beatrice unhesitatingly abandons pride and wit and is released into an undefensive, personal declaration of her passion and an affirmation of the submission she had resisted: “And, Benedick, love on; I will requite thee, / Taming my wild heart to thy loving hand. / If thou dost love, my kindness shall incite thee / To bind our loves up in a holy band” (3.1.111-14). She views marriage not as a social necessity but as a ritual expressing affectionate, passionate, mutual commitment. Unlike Benedick, she trusts her own sense of his worth more than her friends' praise: “For others say thou dost deserve, and I / Believe it better than reportingly” (3.1.115-16). Subsequently, Claudio's slander, the broken nuptials, and Hero's mock death lead her to test Benedick's commitment further.

Claudio's defensive idealization of Hero, when shattered, appropriately by Don John's report that she has had “her chamber window ent'red” (3.2.108), easily turns into vicious degradation—as will happen later with Angelo, Troilus, Hamlet, and Othello. His former cautious silent worship inverted, Claudio denounces Hero in extravagantly lascivious rhetoric, perverts the ceremony which had protected him, and seeks from friends confirmation of her corruption as he had formerly sought proof of her virtue. Hero's response to his slander is a mock-death which extends the self-concealment practiced, through masking, disguise, or withdrawal, by women in other comedies. The women in Love's Labor's Lost mask themselves and go into seclusion at the end; Kate plays shrew and Titania evades Oberon; Julia, Rosalind, Portia, and Viola are disguised. The literal masks of Beatrice and Hero at the ball reflect their self-protective concealment behind facades of wit and silence.

But the strategies used in this play and later ones do not merely parody or postpone nuptials but mend ruptured ones. Necessary now to mitigate not idealization of women but their degradation, they grow bolder and more dangerous. Hero's play death is both an involuntary, passive escape from male degradation and a voluntary, constructive means to alter it. The “death” of the unchaste woman satisfies the lover's desire for revenge while alleviating his anxiety about infidelity. Then, as the friar explains, freed from the pain of loving her and the fear of losing her, the lover can re-idealize the woman: “then we find / The virtue that possession would not show us / Whiles it was ours” (4.1.219-21). Through the death of the corrupted beloved, the lover can repossess her, purified, as in Othello's “I will kill thee, / And love thee after” (5.2.18-19). Whereas in most earlier comedies female control brought men to their senses, in later ones, more disturbingly and less reciprocally than in Taming and Dream, female submission generates male affection. Women “die” of unrequited love as Beatrice is said to be doing; they “die” sexually, validating male virility as Helena and Mariana do; and they die, or pretend to, as retribution for their imagined betrayals. Helena, Cleopatra, and Hermione, like Hero, will voluntarily pretend death to transform their lovers' attitudes, and Ophelia's and Desdemona's actual deaths engender in Hamlet and Othello the penitent re-idealization the friar describes. But in Claudio the process is perfunctory and coerced, and his eagerness to “seize upon” (5.4.53) a substitute bride merely confirms his pragmatic romanticism. In the problem comedies Bertram's and Angelo's repentance is even less spontaneous than Claudio's and no more fully realized: the crucial presence of two women at the endings—one of the chaste object of lust (Diana, Isabella), the other the substitute bride and enforced marriage partner (Helena, Mariana)—emphasizes the unreconciled split between the men's idealization and degradation of women, between social convention and lust.

In Much Ado, however, the completed and festive nuptials are made possible not only by Claudio's penance, Hero's mock death, and their lightly sketched reconciliation, but also by Benedick's willingness to respond to Beatrice's demand that he “Kill Claudio.” (4.1.288). Extravagant and coercive as this demand may be, it serves as a necessary antidote to and transformation of the play's pervasive misogyny. Benedick's promise to serve Beatrice will reciprocate her willingness to “tame her wild heart” for him. His challenge will transform an aggressive male gesture into an affirmation of his faith in Beatrice and Hero, repudiating his former distrust of women and dividing him from the friends who shared and encouraged this attitude. Similarly, Berowne must redirect his wit, Theseus wed Hippolyta “in another key,” and Bassanio relegate friendship to “surety” for his marriage. Although the challenge comes to nothing, its delivery and the discovery of the halting sonnets which signal their release into the silliness of romance enable Beatrice and Benedick to marry “in friendly recompense” (5.4.83) with mutuality achieved. But when, at the conclusion, a double wedding is imminent, and threats of infidelity are raised one last time only to be laughed away, we should perhaps remember Beatrice's acute satire on wooing and wedding—and their aftermath:

wooing, wedding, and repenting is as a Scotch jig, a measure, and a cinquepace. The first suit is hot and hasty, like a Scotch jig (and full as fantastical); the wedding, mannerly modest, as a measure, full of state and ancientry; and then comes Repentance and with his bad legs falls into the cinquepace faster and faster till he sink into his grave.

(2.1.69-75)

Beatrice's description, which places marriage as a precarious beginning, not a happy ending, is anticipated by the many irregular nuptials of earlier comedies and embodied in the troubling open endings of All's Well and Measure for Measure. The culmination of “fantastical” romance and “hot and hasty” desire in a “mannerly-modest” ceremony does not preclude the repenting which follows in the problem comedies and tragedies. “The catastrophe is a nuptial,” as Armado proclaims with relish in his love letter to Jaquenetta (LLL, 4.1.78), but later nuptials prove to be catastrophic in a sense other than the one Armado consciously intends. And in Much Ado, there is one final nuptial irregularity: the dancing begins, at Benedick's insistence, even before the weddings are celebrated.

Notes

1. Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), pp. 302-5.

2. Love's Labor's Lost and Midsummer Night's Dream lack sources for the plays as a whole, and there are no clear-cut antecedents for the deferred weddings of the one or the Titania/Bottom union of the other. Merchant of Venice's postponed consummation is absent from its central source, the first tale of the fourth day of Ser Giovanni Fiorentino's Il Pecorone in which the return of the ring is a minor incident. The mock wedding ceremony in As You Like It's source, Thomas Lodge's Rosalynde, is a one sentence joke. The interrupted ceremony of Much Ado, the precipitous marriage of Olivia and Sebastian in Twelfth Night, and the bedtricks of All's Well that Ends Well and Measure for Measure derive from important plot incidents in the sources—Bandello's Novella, #22, “Timbreo and Fenicia”; the anonymous Gl' Ingannati; the ninth story of the third day of Boccaccio's Decameron; Decade 8, Tale 5 of Cinthio's Hecatommithi, “The story of Epitia”; and George Whetstone's Promos and Cassandra. But in these sources, the incidents do not have anything like the tone, weight, configuration, or significance that they have in Shakespeare's plays. See Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare's Plays 1 and 2 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966, 1968), for these sources and discussion of Shakespeare's use of them.

3. C. L. Barber in Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (New York: Meridian, 1963) gives extended discussion to Love's Labor's Lost, Midsummer Night's Dream, Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, and Henry IV. Sherman Hawkins in “The Two Worlds of Shakespearean Comedy,” Shakespeare Studies 3 (1967): 62-80 distinguishes between Comedy of Errors, Love's Labor's Lost, Much Ado About Nothing, and Twelfth Night, closed heart comedies of intrusion, and Two Gentlemen of Verona, Midsummer Night's Dream, Merchant of Venice, and As You Like It, green world comedies of extrusion, holding that Taming of the Shrew and Merry Wives of Windsor share characteristics of both groups. Leo Salingar in Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy distinguishes three groups of comedies: Comedy of Errors, Taming of the Shrew, Merry Wives of Windsor, and Twelfth Night, farcical comedies derived from classical or Italian learned comedies; Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love's Labor's Lost, Midsummer Night's Dream, and As You Like It, woodland comedies with sources in pastoral or romance literature; and Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, All's Well that Ends Well, and Measure for Measure, problem comedies with Italian novelle as sources (pp. 298-305).

4. In “The Argument of Comedy,” English Institute Essays, 1948, ed. D. A. Robertson, Jr. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), Frye's Shakespearean examples tend to assimilate Shakespeare to the New Comedy structure he outlines although he distinguishes Shakespearean green world comedy from the generic norm. Even in A Natural Perspective (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), where Frye looks more specifically at the three ritual phases of Shakespearean comedy, he continues to emphasize the anti-comic society which must be overcome (pp. 72-117).

5. Barber focuses on the release of emotion in Shakespeare's Festive Comedy and in “‘Thou that beget'st him that did thee beget’: Transformation in ‘Pericles’ and ‘The Winter's Tale,’” Shakespeare Survey 22 (1969): 61, compares this with the transformation of emotion required in the romances.

6. I am indebted to Richard P. Wheeler's Shakespeare's Development and the Problem Comedies: Turn and Counter-Turn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), which places the festive comedies and the late romances in relation to the problem comedies. See especially, pp. 12-19.

7. This and subsequent citations are from The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare, gen. ed. Sylvan Barnet (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972).

8. For a photograph of one moment in this scene, see Peter Brook's Production of William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream for the Royal Shakespeare Company (Chicago: The Dramatic Publishing Company, 1974), p. 103.

9. Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), p. 122.

10. Janice Hays, “Those ‘soft and delicate desires’: Much Ado and the Distrust of Women,” in 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), pp. 79-99 discusses in detail Claudio's fears of and defenses against sexual involvement.