The Pyramus and Thisbe episode at the end of A Midsummer Night's Dream is the threshold moment in a pageant of events that began with an early morning observance of the rite of May and will continue for a fortnight in nuptial solemnity and nightly revels. Between after supper and bedtime on the wedding night of Duke Theseus and his Amazonian bride, a group of artisans perform an interludic version of the popular myth of Pyramus and Thisbe. This story provides the site for court and commoners alike to “beguile the lazy time” before three newly married couples go off to bed. More purposeful than a mere diversion, this interlude occupies the liminal phase in ritual time when persons move between fixed points in the social structure. According to Victor Turner, this transition phase in the ritual process is “an interval when the past is momentarily negated, suspended, or abrogated, and the future has not yet begun, an instant of pure potentiality when everything trembles in the balance.”¹ Hippolyta, at this moment, is also initiated into Athenian culture. As an outsider, her ritual experience is more complex than that of the other characters who actively engage in this phase of the nuptial ceremony. In fact, her participation during the interlude checks the liminal release of the others. From moment to moment, all are aware that she can challenge or comply with the counsels of Theseus, that she can join in the revelry or threaten it with her disapproval. During the Pyramus and Thisbe episode, the bridegrooms and the artisan players transform the ritual efficacy of the wedding-night interlude as they press it to the service of Hippolyta's initiation. Thomas Greene finds such improvised ceremonial play both “benign” and “propitious for inventing meanings.”² As everyone participates variously in a version of “countercanonical play,” in anthropologist James Boon's sense of the phrase,³ they subject the myth of Pyramus and Thisbe to “orthodox and permitted iconoclasm,” which generates a new cultural text.⁴

Anthropologist Joseph Henderson illuminates the relationship between wedding-night revelry and nuptial solemnities. Noting that the marriage ceremony is essentially a woman's initiation rite, “in which a man is bound to feel like anything but a conquering hero,” he points out that societies organize “counterphobic rituals” that enable the man to cling to the remnants of his heroic role at the very moment that he must submit to his bride and assume the responsibilities of marriage.⁵ While Henderson does not find it surprising that in tribal societies, male counterphobic rituals often took the form of an abduction or rape of the bride,⁶ in early modern European culture this counterphobic purpose led to the development and incorporation of such mock-agonistic rites as the sword dance and the morris dance into the folklore of fertility festivals. In fact, Jackson Cope maintains that, within the context of wedding celebrations, the mock-agon complements and collaborates with the nuptial motif rather than conflicts with it.⁷ Within the particular context of Theseus's entrance into marriage with Hippolyta, the bridegroom's fear is implicitly intensified in light of the effects that an Amazonian mate may be imagined to have on him. Spenser, for example, graphically narrates such effects in his account of Radigund's effeminizing of Sir Artegall in book 5 of The Faerie Queene.⁸ Under such circumstances, the wedding night revel's counterphobic efficacy is especially desirable.

The counterphobic impulse perhaps accounts for Petruchio's behavior on his wedding day in The Taming of the Shrew. After carnivalizing the marriage sacrament in the church, Petruchio interrupts the evening's festivities by improvising a scenario in which he pretends to rescue Katherina from thieves.⁹ When he whisks his bride from her father's house, he carries her over the threshold and into a protracted phase of ritual-like liminality. Contained though it is within the framework of a play purported to be a curative for the deluded Christopher Sly, Petruchio's fully improvised scenario lacks the formality and communality characteristic of ritual. In comparison, the Pyramus and Thisbe episode is a model of ritual decorum.

Although the specific evolution of the wedding-night interlude as a distinct subgenre in England is difficult to trace, it owes its formal genesis to dramatic parodies that were devised as ornaments within a liturgical context. Glynne Wickham points particularly to the play of Balaam and his Ass in the Ordo Prophetarum and to plays relating to St. Nicholas during the Christmas season as illustrations of the earliest versions of these English parody festivals. Because such discordant elements presented a threat to the gravity of the original officium, the term ludus was adopted to distinguish these playful commemorative impersonations from dramatizations of a more devotional kind.¹⁰ Pre-Tudor interludes, Wickham maintains, developed alongside vernacular Corpus Christi dramas, morality plays, and saint plays during the fifteenth century, though “no representative texts of the genre in English have survived to us.”¹¹ While several Tudor and Elizabethan interludes invite speculation on the sort of text that might be suitable for a wedding-night interlude, Suzanne Westfall maintains, “None of the extant plays was clearly designed to be used for wedding revels.”¹² The scenes in which the mechanicals prepare and perform their version of the Pyramus and Thisbe myth illustrate the way in which an interlude might be fashioned from an available script and suited to the purposes of nuptial revelry. Counterphobic in purpose, the wedding-night interlude relates to the sacrament of marriage as the early ludus relates to the liturgical officium: It is a playfully parodic inversion festivity that permits a release of energy in action.

During the reign of Elizabeth, interludes designed for performance at marriage festivities were both popular and protected. Even when stage plays were the focus of heated public controversy and official censure, such interludes were repeatedly excluded from prohibition. For example, the Act of Common Council for 6 December 1574, which forbade “public plays and other idle pastimes,” specifically exempted certain private entertainments, including interludes “played or shewed … for the festivity of any marriage.”¹³ Ten years later, in reply to the Queen's Players' petition to perform within the city of London, the Privy Council maintained its prohibition of open spectacles, but excluded interludes designed to be played “at marriages and such like.”¹⁴

As a distinct component in a composite ritual, the wedding-night interlude of the mechanicals fills a specific space within the Duke's nuptial solemnities. Michael Bristol rightly describes the episode as “a noisy, burlesque counter-festivity” to the ceremonial formality of a wedding.¹⁵ As such, it provides an opportunity for the bridegrooms to engage in merriment as a way to cope with the anxiety that might otherwise characterize their liminal experience on the threshold of transition to the married state. By engaging in playful commentary and causing disruptions in the flow of the performance, they indulge in mockeries along the margins of the stage action. The bridegrooms, thereby, enjoy hilarious release from the prospect of their impending domestication as well as from the potentially sobering morality of a dramatized story on the dangers of romantic love and the consequences of its prohibition. At the same time, they divert their agonistic energies away from their brides and toward the artisan players. When Theseus chooses a play performed by “hard-handed men that work in Athens,” he invites the lowest end of the social hierarchy to furnish the pretext for nearly unrestrained mirth. The liminality of antistructure permits the Duke and the bridegrooms to enjoy the liberty and comradeship normally associated with the common folk at play. On the other hand, the artisan players have an opportunity to enjoy a different kind of escape. Victor Turner notes that participants in ritual who occupy diametrical statuses within the culturally defined socioeconomic structure seek different effects: “while the structurally well-endowed seek release, structural underlings may well seek, in their liminality, deeper involvement in a structure that, though fantastic and simulacral only, nevertheless enables them to experience for a legitimated while a different kind of ‘release’ from a different kind of lot.”¹⁶ What the mechanicals seek for themselves, then, is the liminality of pseudostructure in their enactment of a myth.

While the wedding-night interlude provides the Athenian bridegrooms with a focus for their indulgence in the mirth of ritual abuse, the mechanicals commit themselves to the discipline of their adopted roles. Glynne Wickham notes that because interlude performers were uncertain of their reception by celebrants in a festive mood, they routinely “defended themselves with apologetic prologues and epilogues” as well as “frequent ad lib exchanges”¹⁷ and were attentive to develop “devices to keep the audience informed of the character behind the disguise, the face behind the mask, the actor behind the character.”¹⁸ In both the casting and the rehearsal scenes, Shakespeare's mechanicals amend their script and make performance decisions that are consistent with those of interlude performers generally. Because their interlude is to be presented within the particular context of the Duke's marriage to a foreign queen, however, they show more than customary concern. In fact, even after their success in moving Philostrate to merry tears and loud laughter during their audition, they remain earnest rather than playful throughout the performance by staying alert to signs of misunderstanding or distress. As an outsider, Hippolyta is as unfamiliar with the wedding-night interlude as she is with the laws and social customs of Athens. Her presence, therefore, intensifies the anxiety of the mechanicals. It also checks the complementary liminal releases sought by participants at both ends of the social spectrum.

By trading places, the bridegrooms and the commoners implicitly seek to enjoy one another's accustomed liberty from the constraints proper to their positions within the cultural hierarchy. Under other circumstances, they might enjoy ritual effects similar to those described by McKim Marriott in his idealized reflection on the social function of the Holi festival (“the feast of love”) in Indian village society: “Each actor playfully takes the role of others in relation to his own usual self. Each may thereby learn to play his own routine roles afresh, surely with renewed understanding, possibly with greater grace, perhaps with reciprocating love.”¹⁹ In fact, C. L. Barber speaks of English festival tradition in similarly idealized terms when he describes them as “occasions for communicating across class lines and realizing the common humanity at every level.”²⁰ In the case of the Pyramus and Thisbe interlude, however, communication between the mechanicals and the court is a dialogue at cross-purposes. The obvious failure of the two communities to translate one another's system of signs, in fact, makes the court's mockeries seem insensitive, and the mechanicals' efforts to prevent tragic catharsis appear laughable or pathetic. Rather than illuminate what the court and the commoners learn about one another's customary roles, the episode reveals to the outside observer the implications of cultural difference and social separateness. Even before the play begins, Hippolyta expresses her reluctance to see “wretchedness o'ercharged, / And duty in his service perishing.”²¹ Theseus, however, appeals to her capacity to adopt and maintain the subjunctive mood proper to ritual. In doing this, he makes it clear that the evening's revel will provide an opportunity for her to comprehend the relationship that exists between the court and the common people in her realm.

According to anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff, the most successful rites of initiation transmit and communicate the culture, “not simply as an external, neutral set of principles, but as a motivational, internalized system.”²² In a preliminary instruction, Theseus sets up an analogy between the mechanicals who perform the interlude and “great clerks” who have welcomed him on state visits (5.1.93-103). By positing this analogy, Theseus evokes the fabled entertainments provided by Elizabeth's civic hosts during her many royal progresses. David Bevington, in his study, cites two royal entertainments that scholars customarily nominate in connection with this passage: “Shakespeare does seem to have had in mind the spectacular entertainments of Kenilworth (1575) and especially Elvetham (1591).”²³ Accounts of other royal entertainments, which were often subsequently published, provided Elizabethan audiences with a broad array of models by which they might comprehend Theseus's analogy.²⁴ More than its usefulness as a model for the appropriate critical disposition during a wedding-night interlude, Theseus intimates that this entertainment is to be pressed to the service of civic instruction. In the process of exerting transformative pressure on the interlude that is to follow, Duke Theseus also underscores the political efficacy implicit in state weddings attended by Elizabeth, which may evoke still other entertainments enhanced by the presence of the queen, as guest of honor.²⁵ In this respect, the Pyramus and Thisbe episode serves a central function of ritual, both for Hippolyta and for the offstage audience: namely, to achieve a shift of consciousness by dramatizing and rearranging fundamental assumptions about relationships within the social structure.²⁶ The conflation of nuptial revelry and civic instruction puts Hippolyta's marriage into a political frame of reference, which organizes her perspective on the implications of hierarchy. Furthermore, the Duke's prescription and modeling of an improvisational engagement with the interlude serves to define the earnestness of ritual as an occasion of playfulness.

Revelry of this sort is not incompatible with political and civic celebrations. However, as John MacAloon indicates in his study “Sociation and Sociability in Political Celebrations,” “We in the West typically fail to recognize such unity [between the serious and the playful] because of our tendency to separate the ‘core’ rite, its ‘serious business,’ from what we take to be the peripheral ‘carrying on,’ ‘letting loose,’ and ‘screwing around’ that accompany it.”²⁷ As one among several examples, he cites the Incwala ritual of the African Swazi as a rite that possesses “an irreducibly ludic aspect,” even though it engages “the most sacred, serious, and socially consequential features of Swazi life.”²⁸ If hierarch and subject alike feel good at these rites, he claims, “a fine augury for the future course of the leader's tenure and rule has been achieved.”²⁹ Louis Montrose, emphasizing “the purposefulness rather than the gratuitousness of play” in Shakespeare's romantic comedies, sees revelry functioning within a frame that accommodates both conservation and change by dramatizing the symbolic assimilation of “potential disorder by a normative system.”³⁰ The Pyramus and Thisbe interlude would appear to be well suited to the political purposes of the Duke.

From the start, the court playfully mocks the performers in a parody of ignorance and misrule. This permits abuse in the interests of counterphobic release. The mechanicals, on the other hand, earnestly tend to the enactment of a mirthful version of their cautionary tale, which satisfies their wish for pseudostructure. Initially Hippolyta joins the Duke and the bridegrooms in making fun of Quince's prologue. Later, however, she summarily complains, “This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard” (5.1.210). Perhaps detecting a sign of resistance in this remark, Theseus apologizes for the performance and casually recommends that imagination can “amend” the players' limitations. When Hippolyta deflects this suggestion (“It must be your imagination then, and not theirs” 5.1.213-14), Theseus instructs her in greater earnest. Clearly the active participation of Hippolyta calls for improvisations of a different order than those proper to revelry. The mechanicals, too, are so fully committed to not offending the ladies that they repeatedly depart from the script whenever they detect a sign of misunderstanding that might cause disapproval. As they dramatize their parallel commitments to assure Hippolyta's pleasure and enlightenment, the Duke and the mechanicals collaborate in complementary fashion as con-celebrants of Hippolyta's ritual passage. Without achieving effective communication themselves, they organize Hippolyta's perception of a mysterious rapport that exists between the highest and lowest ends of the social hierarchy. Like the story told by the lovers, it may witness more than “fancy's images” and grow to “something of great constancy … strange and admirable” (5.1.23-27).

In an ideal sociological world, Georg Simmel notes, “the pleasure of the individual is closely tied up with the pleasure of the others,” so that in principle, “nobody can find satisfaction … if it is at the cost of diametrically opposed feelings which the others may have.”³¹ In one respect, the comic incongruity between the Duke's playful ignorance (“The wall methinks, being sensible, should curse again” 5.1.182-83) and Nick Bottom's earnest intelligence (“No, in truth, sir, he should not. ‘Deceiving me’ is Thisby's cue … ” 5.1.184-85) provides evidence of mutual misunderstanding between the speakers. In another respect, it displays a lively sociability to the extent that each speaker's satisfaction is a function of the other's.³² The possibility of shared good feeling would seem to be precluded by the cultural gulf that separates Athenian brides from Athenian bridegrooms, the leisured nobility from the working craftsmen, the natives from the foreigner. However, the disposition of attention that Theseus explicitly prescribes for Hippolyta defines the liminal subjunctivity that permits her to comprehend the possibility of reciprocal pleasure without mutual offense: “If we imagine no worse of them than they of themselves, they may pass for excellent men” (5.1.215-16).

Whether Hippolyta needs to be instructed or simply plays her ignorance in a different key, she repeatedly draws out the discontinuities between her husband's expressed ideals and the apparent violation of them in his revelry. Though she displays no fear during the brief appearance of Snug's Lion, her openness to express herself throughout the performance regularly reminds the mechanicals that her displeasure may get them hanged as surely as her pleasure might earn them rewards. As an outsider, Hippolyta's precise experience is difficult for the native Athenians to know. Her initial mockery of the prologue and her later pity for Pyramus suggests that she is either deeply ambivalent or undergoing a noticeable transformation. Similarly, her expression of early distaste for Wall's silliness is counterpointed by her later commendation of Moon's graceful shining, which may be taken as evidence of her poised objectivity or her mellowing during the episode. The progress of her experience, however, is not simple, for in her last interruption she expresses renewed impatience, after an earlier weariness, rather than display her pleasure. By announcing her hope that Thisbe's passion be brief, Hippolyta challenges the Duke and the mechanicals to comprehend her and to act appropriately. Although Thisbe's swan song is not discernibly abbreviated, Nick Bottom grants Theseus the option to eliminate the prepared epilogue in favor of a Bergomask dance. And after commending the play in a final flourish of ambiguity (“Marry, if he that writ it had played Pyramus and hanged himself in Thisbe's garter, it would have been a fine tragedy: and so it is, truly, and very notably discharged” 5.1.357-61), Theseus chooses the rustic dance in a delayed concession to Hippolyta's expressed wish for brevity.

As the stage clears before the arrival of the fairies, the audience may already have begun to wonder at the most rare vision it has witnessed. Hippolyta's ennui and final expression of impatience evokes Queen Elizabeth's own occasional theatricality at the end of entertainments organized for her pleasure and her enlightenment. Under varying circumstances, Elizabeth had sometimes orchestrated a public instruction in a calculated gesture. At Oxford, for example, she had found the entertainment tedious, and “being something weary of it, sent twice … to cut it short.”³³ The orator, however, ignored the queen's request and thereby intensified her discomfort. The next morning, as Elizabeth was delivering her own farewell oration, she dramatically interrupted her presentation to call for a stool, so “the old Lord Treasurer Burleigh” would not have to stand on “his lame feet.”³⁴ While the official recorder emphasizes the queen's superior skill as an orator (“She did it of purpose to show, that she could interrupt her speech, and not be put out, although the Bishop durst not adventure to do a less matter the day before”),³⁵ Elizabeth's theatricalized corrective as well as her edifying solicitude were not to be overlooked. Similarly, Hippolyta turns the occasion of her cultural initiation into an opportunity to instruct the natives by inducing them to acknowledge her satiety and thereby respect the principle of sociation at the heart of ritual. Maintaining her distance on the threshold of incorporation into a newly reconstituted social hierarchy, she invites Theseus to comprehend the limits of his power and privilege in the very process of exercising his authority over the conduct of this revelry.

During liminal moments such as this, Turner suggests, ritual participants are reminded not only of their common humanity, but also of the “mystery of mutual distance, which is just as humanly important as the mystery of intimacy.”³⁶ When Theseus chooses the Bergomask dance instead of the epilogue, the wedding-night interlude ends on a note of appropriate mirth. Bottom does not specify, however, which two members of the company dance. This matters less than that all the ritual participants are not brought together in a final festive joining. Keeping the court and the mechanicals at a respectable distance from one another, this dancing provides a most fitting coda for an evening's revel that has taken place while everyone was temporarily betwixt and between and no one was his own. As Myerhoff notes of the liminal stage in rites of passage: “Moral choice, creativity, and innovation are possibilities that emerge from the agony of isolation and the joy of communitas.”³⁷ It is just such effects that the Pyramus and Thisbe interlude produces.

Notes

1. Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre (New York: Performing Arts Group Publications, 1982), 44.

2. In the context of his study of Renaissance examples from Boccaccio to Donne, Greene suggests that improvisations such as this “imply hopefulness about the continuity of past and present, suggesting that the patterns and repetitions we inherit can be accommodated to transpositions, can become flexible.” See Thomas Greene, “Ceremonial Play and Parody in the Renaissance,” in Urban Life in the Renaissance, ed. Susan Zimmerman and Ronald Weissman (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1968), 291-92.

3. Noting that in countercanonical play “the would-be subversive and the wished-for conservative may be complicit in each other,” thereby continually reopening the question does such play serve the political left or the right, Boon suggests that “genres and situations of performances may simultaneously implement subtler shifts and contestings across different statuses, roles, and systems.” See James Boon, Affinities and Extremes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 68-69.

4. Victor Turner maintains that instances of such iconoclasm “always take place in the liminal or marginal phase of major rites of passage, in the portion of institutionalized time assigned to the portrayal of anti-structure.” The particular appropriateness of the Pyramus and Thisbe story as an interlude subject may be explained by reference to Turner's addendum: “Sometimes they are associated with an act of sacrifice, but often they occur independently of such an act though they have a sacrificial character.” See Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974), 295-98.

5. Joseph L. Henderson, “Ancient Myths and Modern Man,” in Man and His Symbols, ed. Carl G. Jung and M.-L. von Franz (New York: Dell, 1964), 127.

6. Henderson, “Ancient Myths,” 127.

7. Jackson I. Cope, The Theater and the Dream (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 204. Cope, in fact, maintains that the mock-agon is as central to fertility festivals as nuptials themselves. In this connection, he cites Paolo Toschi's conclusion that “in spring rites the motif of struggle is no less petitionary and fecundative than is the sexual motif, and we see them both present in May festivals.”

8. Janet M. Spencer, in a letter dated 21 March 1993, called my attention to the Radigund/Artegall episode from The Faerie Queene, bk. 5, canto 5, st. 20-25.

9. The Taming of the Shrew, Riverside edition, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 3.2. 222-39.

10. Glynne Wickham, The Medieval Theatre (1974; reprint, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 43-51.

11. Wickham, Medieval Theatre, 170.

12. Suzanne Westfall, “The Entertainment of a Noble Patron: Early Tudor Household Revels” (Ph.D. diss., University of Toronto, 1979), 275-76. Although neither Westfall nor Wickham is able to identify a surviving example, the latter suggests that Shakespeare “obligingly supplies us with a vivid portrait in his Athenian mechanicals of A Midsummer Night's Dream who find themselves so unexpectedly required to bring their ‘brief interlude’ of Pyramus and Thisbe to Court.” About the interlude itself, Wickham notes: “scripts of that character probably represent the peak of what was attempted by ‘artisans in good towns and great parishes … to make people merry.’” See Wickham, Medieval Theatre, 191.

13. E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (1923; reprint, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951), 4:273-76.

14. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4:298-302.

15. Michael D. Bristol, Carnival and Theater (New York: Methuen, 1985), 176.

16. Victor Turner, The Ritual Process (Chicago: Aldine, 1969), 201.

17. Wickham, Medieval Theatre, 175.

18. Ibid., 189.

19. Turner, Ritual Process, 187-88.

20. C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), 111.

21. A Midsummer Night's Dream, Riverside edition, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1974), 5.1. 85-86.

22. Barbara Myerhoff, “Rites of Passage: Process and Paradox,” in Celebration, ed. Victor Turner (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1982), 118-21.

23. David Bevington, Tudor Drama and Politics: A Critical Approach to Topical Meaning (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), 16. See also, Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy, 119-24.

24. Matthew Wikander's more recent examination of Thomas Churchyard's A Discourse of the Queenes Maiesties entertainment in Suffolk and Norfolk (1578), for example, provides specific confirmation that actors, under the strains of performance before the queen, betrayed anxieties like those displayed by Shakespeare's mechanicals, which Theseus seeks to assuage. See Matthew H. Wikander, Princes to Act: Royal Audience and Royal Performance, 1578-1792 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 1-43. Wikander might also have cited Elizabeth's Entertainment at Oxford (1592), in which Matthew Gwin's “premeditate oration” wonderfully illustrates the kind of nervousness clerks have shown in their “premeditated welcomes” to Theseus. See John Nichols, ed., The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth (London: J. Nichols and Sons, 1823), 3:153. Two different versions of this particular entertainment were published: one by an Anthony Wood, an Oxfordian; the other by Philip Stringer, a Cambridge observer. Reference here is to Stringer's account.

25. Bevington cites three specific state weddings that various scholars have attempted to link to A Midsummer Night's Dream: “Stanley-de Vere, Berkeley-Carey, [and] Thomas Heneage and the Countess of Southampton (the Earl of Essex's dowager-mother.” See Bevington, Tudor Drama and Politics, 16. While Bevington finds the arguments for any one of these occasions, to the exclusion of the others, unconvincing and fruitless, each provides historical precedent for the kind of occasion dramatized at the end of Shakespeare's play.

26. Myerhoff, “Rites of Passage,” 128-29.

27. John J. MacAloon, “Sociation and Sociability in Political Celebrations,” in Celebration, ed. Victor Turner (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1982), 263.

28. MacAloon, “Sociation and Sociability,” 256.

29. Ibid., 263. Georg Simmel uses the term sociation to identify the feeling that derives from being with or for others in the construction of society out of contending interests, duties, and purposes. He calls the discrete sociological drive “sociability,” the “play-form of sociation.” MacAloon explains further: “Interior relationships between the antinomies we have been exploring—hierarchy and equality, social structure and antistructure, solemnity and festivity—are revealed in the properties of sociability in a way that throws light on political and civic rites. These performances are supreme acts of sociation, using differentiated rules, roles, and ranks to answer to sober, ineluctable material interests. Yet they depend just as fully for their efficacy on the generation of sociability, which is, according to Simmel, ludic and democratic in nature.”

30. See Louis A. Montrose, “The Purpose of Playing: Reflections on a Shakespearean Anthropology,” Helios n.s., 7, no. 2 (1979-80): 61, 67.

31. MacAloon, “Sociation and Sociability,” 264; Simmel further notes that “the democracy of sociability even among social equals [much less among superiors and subordinates] is only something played.” [In this note, the bracketed emendation is MacAloon's, who is quoting from Simmel's The Sociology of Georg Simmel, translated and edited by Kurt. H. Wolff (New York: Free Press, 1950). In addition, the word “played” is italicized by Simmel for emphasis.]

32. Wikander sees something of this in his own observation: “The rude mechanicals' incompetent playing, like the ‘great clerks” throttled mumbling, betokens a subject's love: the monarch's charitable apprehension of that love embodies a reciprocal gesture of generosity.” See Princes to Act, 23.

33. Nichols, Progresses, 3:146.

34. Ibid.

35. Ibid., 3:147.

36. Turner, Ritual Process, 139.

37. Myerhoff, “Rites of Passage,” 117.