[In the following excerpt, Holbrook discusses Shakespeare's dramatic inversion of social hierarchy in A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Taming of the Shrew.]

"To begin, then, with Shakespeare. He was the man who of all modern, and perhaps ancient, poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul."¹ Dryden's tribute resonates in many ways, but for this study we may single out one implication—the social. We can credit Dryden with the identification of a characteristic quality of the Shakespearean text: its capacity to comprehend vast social differences, its sheer sociological inclusiveness and richness, and it is in this sense that one may, still, be allowed to speak of the "universality" of Shakespeare. Again, Dryden's praise reminds us of that other quality traditionally attributed to Shakespeare and variously signified: his "myriad-mindedness" (Coleridge)² or "multidimensionality" (Robert Weimann),³ his complementary, open, or profoundly dramatic technique (essentially an art of contrast), his dialectical approach, where, as Germaine Greer has put it, every play is in the nature of an "experiment" and every idea receives "full imaginative development."⁴ Thus much seems implicit in Dryden's "comprehensive." Of course the two senses of the word drawn out here—the sociological and "philosophical"—may not be unrelated: if particular social strata can have exclusive values, ideologies, or "structures of feeling"⁵ attributed to them, then the dialectical energy of Shakespeare's art and thought may be grounded in the seeming rich mimesis of Shakespearean drama, its tendency to convey the effect of a total representation of social life.⁶ Obviously, this would not be the whole story—not every conflict in a Shakespeare play is ideological or the expression of a social contradiction (in particular, distinctions within a social group may be dramatically, let alone historically, as or more important than those marking it off from other strata). Nonetheless, there seems nothing inherently implausible in attempting to relate the dialectical method of Shakespeare's art to the plays' social dialectics—seeing a many-sidedness of viewpoint as produced by the poetic evocation of a complex, various, differentiated social scene. Clearly, this approach would be related to the far more ambitious project of a Marxist criticism of Shakespeare, whereby the richness of his drama would be grounded in an interpretation of the age as one of fundamental—indeed, epochal—historical transition. But while such a total synthesis of economic, social, political, and cultural factors in the period has obvious, immense appeal, the problems involved in conducting an argument of such generality are also immense, possibly insuperable.⁷

I propose to take a narrower approach than this Marxist one, considering social complexity in a few Shakespeare plays selected because . . . they seem especially interested in social differences, turning "degree" into poetic subject matter, and because their interest in playing with radical social contrasts tends to involve the complication or problematization of literary mode. I shall anticipate the argument a little by suggesting that where these plays seem preoccupied with social differences, they are correspondingly self-aware about the social meaning of literary modes and "art" generally (and, vice versa, that literary self-consciousness is accompanied by attention to social distinctions). Thus the extremely complicated social character of these plays (they are all "mixed" in some sense) induces, I suggest, a certain self-consciousness about form, literary forms being conspicuously implicated within (indeed, unthinkable outside of) broadly social or "nonliterary" distinctions. To put this in more concretely dramatic terms: interplay between high and low characters or milieux throws the work into an attitude of critical self-awareness about the social character of its modes. (. . . [I have observed elsewhere] how Nashe's work—like Shakespeare's in its tantalizingly various and complex social affiliations—is also highly self-conscious about literary form as social form, deliberately adopting and playing off against each other putative popular and elite modes, or exploiting their social ambiguity. Certainly, in respect of such "comprehensiveness," Nashe is as dialectical as Shakespeare: a key element in many texts by both authors is a rich interplay—among, of course, every other kind of contrast—between supposed aristocratic and nonelite manners, attitudes, modes of expression, and so on.) I should add that, as with claims for the individuality of Shakespeare's characters (such as Pope's),⁸ claims for the social diversity of Shakespeare's texts are apt to be exaggerated: not every Shakespeare play is equally interested in manipulating or playing with social hierarchy, or in exploring the social symbolism of modes. Of course, social differences exist in all the plays, because all have some commitment to a rhetoric of mimesis or representation. But not all such differences are as vividly or profoundly evoked as they are in, say, A Midsummer Night's Dream or the Henry IV plays—works that would be unrecognizable were the social contrasts in them diminished or erased, their structure and meaning hinging upon a to-and-fro between noble and common spheres of life. But in a play such as Much Ado About Nothing, while the resolution of the Hero-Claudio imbroglio turns upon the discoveries of the lower-class watchmen, we need not suppose the play to be developing a really significant contrast between the nobility and the Dogberry group. Other distinctions are just as important, one of the most obvious being that between one kind of heroine and another. Again, Ralph Berry has pointed out that there are important scenes involving, or passages alluding to, the common people in Richard II (the "poor groom" and his description of "roan Barbary" [5.5.72, 78], for instance, who now bears Bullingbrook rather than Richard), but, except for these brief glimpses of the common people, the play concerns itself almost exclusively with nobles and is not concerned to elaborate detailed social contrasts.⁹ Instead, the real focus of interest is the aristocratic power game, and popular characters, the allegorizing gardeners of 3.4, for example, are subordinated to it.¹⁰ So the play does not aim at the impression of a complete, dialectical anatomy of society. It is where this interest in comprehensiveness occurs, I think, that there may arise a critical self-awareness about the social functions, meanings, and limitations of literary modes. But before turning to the plays, it will be useful briefly to consider why some of the period's drama should register a sensitivity to social hierarchy and to the social symbolism of modes of writing. It will be necessary, then, briefly to touch again upon the question of how to formulate the social meaning of the English Renaissance stage.

Marxist critics, working on the sociology of the Elizabethan stage and its complex relation to populace and elite in the period (a line of inquiry originally opened up by such scholars as Alfred Harbage, Muriel Bradbrook, and C. L. Barber) have tended to stress the contradictory social character of Shakespeare's theater.¹¹ Although there are substantial problems with this formulation, especially in the area of who precisely attended the theaters, and although the term "contradiction," implying some notion of class struggle, is most likely misleading about the character of early modern social relations, the basic emphasis on the social complexity and heterogeneity of the institution is probably correct. A part of this complexity involved the relatively humble origins of the writers. One needs to stress "relatively": in Stratford terms Shakespeare's family was, as Samuel Schoenbaum has reminded us, an important one, with aspirations to gentility.¹² Nashe . . . —like Peele, Greene, and Marlowe—was able to tread a more conventional path to respectability than Shakespeare's: the university degree. Still, each of these writers improved his situation while contending with the uncertain status of the professional writer. (Greene's anxiety about this ambiguity is especially clear: witness the defensiveness of "Utriusque Academiae in Artibus magister" on the 1591 title page of Greenes Farewell to Folly, as well as his snobbish attacks on the "upstart crow" and on players in general.)¹³ Professional men of letters, then, were, like the players, another gray area in the traditional or ideal hierarchy of Tudor-Stuart England.¹⁴ The important point here, however, is that, given the ambiguous position of these writers, it would not be strange if they displayed in their works a special interest in rank (we may note emblematically that the play that might be taken as beginning the modern movement in Elizabethan tragedy, Tamburlaine, is the story of a shepherd turned conqueror-king),¹⁵ and the wager of this book has been that in certain texts this interest informs the manipulation of literary modes, which are themselves understood in terms of social hierarchy. Indeed, the marginal, anomalous social position of the commercial stages suggests the possibility of their writers enjoying a certain freedom in their handling of hierarchical relations, as C. L. Barber has argued: "The stage . . . was a middle-class property and point of vantage. In the commercial theater, Shakespeare could use the power of dramatic form to develop aggressive, ironic understanding of the court world."¹⁶ I proceed, then, from the assumption that Shakespeare (like Nashe and, in all probability, those professional playwrights considered above) did not, like a Sidney, inherit art as his birthright—that is, the high modes of literature that were in his world the symbolic property of the aristocratic elite.¹⁷ Thus these "bourgeois" professional writers do not live a simple relation to the institutions or modes of literature,¹⁸ but manipulate the forms of elite culture more as outsiders than insiders; and this ambivalent, complicated relation to literature may itself be articulated in particular works—we may find, that is, that certain works register an awareness of the sociocultural meaning and force of literary modes or that they register the author's own sense of outsiderness with respect to the institutions of art. None of which implies that, because these writers do not naturally inhabit the aristocratic modes they manipulate, they are therefore on the side of the angels and to be identified with an oppositional "popular culture"—literature after all being precisely the means by which they advance, or seek to advance, themselves. We should not suppose that their ambiguous position with regard to elite culture requires that they have (as Barber in the quotation above too readily assumes) an interest in attacking, ironizing, or generally subverting it. (Perhaps the opposite, in fact—their real interests lying in manipulating elite modes as effectively as possible, so hitching their wagon to the court's.) Yet we can expect that the relation of such outsiders to the modes of elite culture is bound to be complicated.

A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595-96; pub. 1600) is one of Shakespeare's plays that works with a radical social contrast and that is also deeply self-conscious in its use of dramatic form and art in general. I shall suggest that the play's sensitivity about differences of rank is the basis for its consciousness of genre and the potential social uses of art. This is a play notably ambivalent about social hierarchy, soliciting from its audience both pleasure and alarm at the confusion of social boundaries.¹⁹

"Bless thee, Bottom, bless thee! Thou art translated" (3.1.118-19). So Quince on Bottom's metamorphosis. A Midsummer Night's Dream is a play about "translation," or change, and this has from the first a conspicuous social dimension. Bottom moves from the human to the fairy world, but he is also transformed, apparently, into a gentleman: "gentle mortal," "gentleman" are Titania's titles for him (3.1.137, 164). And of course Bottom's fancy language upon his elevation ("I beseech your worship's name. . . . I pray you commend me to Mistress Squash. . . . I shall desire you of more acquaintance" (3.1.179-80, 186, 188-89) is preposterously refined and gentle—or at least attempts refinement and gentility. The comedy of these scenes depends on the incongruity between what Bottom is (a weaver) and what he becomes (a courtier, and an especially favored one at that). The play can, then, be characterized as delighting in the promiscuous mingling of rank in the Bottom/Titania complication. Puck's voice, at any rate, is gleeful: "My mistress with a monster is in love. / Near to her close and consecrated bower, / While she was in her dull and sleeping hour, / A crew of patches, rude mechanicals, / That work for bread upon Athenian stalls . . ." (3.2.6-10). The tantalizing force of this is all in the idea of the proximity of the mechanicals to the "close and consecrated bower." Clearly the play has some fun (we might call it its Utopian aspect) with the upsetting of hierarchy and decorum: there is excitement and pleasure in this suggestion of the bottom becoming (for a time only, of course, and with every qualification) the top. But Shakespeare's presentation of this reversal is nonetheless ambiguous. First, it is only by virtue of Oberon's manipulation of events (admittedly bungled in one important respect) that the play can have its fun with hierarchy: we know, in other words, that order will be restored, that "Jack shall have Jill; / Nought shall go ill: / The man shall have his mare again, and all shall be well" (3.2.461-63), that social prerogative and "degree" will once again be in place. Seen thus, comedy takes on a conservative appearance, effectively guaranteeing the social structure: it is because Bottom's ascent is so temporary that it can be allowed to be enjoyable—indeed, that it can happen at all. Second, the nature of this elevation is itself ambiguous. It is, after all, an as(s)cent: in proportion as Bottom is exalted he is humbled. We might think of this particular humiliation, the "ass's nole" (3.2.17), as the price of promotion: a control on the potentially destabilizing implications of Bottom's career. By making Bottom even more ridiculous than he already is, any threat in this suspension of normal hierarchical relations is defused. (Against the notion of this suspension being reduced to absurdity must be balanced Bottom's supreme, victorious confidence in his role, his ability to take us along with him, or that general buoyancy of his which disarms a belittling, condescending laughter. I shall return to this point later in a comparison with Shakespeare's Christopher Sly; for now we may note that, to the extent that Bottom is a figure of fun, we find the idea of his elevation correspondingly ludicrous.) Further, this revolution in the social system takes place in an enchanted, exotic wood, in a play striving for a lyrical and fantastic atmosphere, and consequently, it might be argued, there can be no danger in imagining such an upset, since there is no pretence of addressing reality. (By comparison, we might note the revulsion social rising generates in the tragic and politically realistic context of King Lear, where the "finical" Oswald is sinister proof that the time is. out of joint [2.2.19].) Even so, from the first our delight in Bottom's change is mingled with less pleasant feelings. For Oberon it is part of a grotesque disorder, a "hateful fantas[y]" (2.1.258) properly evoking pity rather than pleasure ("Her dotage now I do begin to pity" [4.1.47]). But Bottom's and Titania's liaison looks different from Bottom's humble position, and the play is careful to include this perspective. For him it has been ineffably lovely, "past the wit of man to say what dream it was" (4.1.205-6). But Titania, restored to reason, can only exclaim, "O, how mine eyes do loathe his visage now!" (4.1.79), and Oberon observes that when Titania adorned Bottom's head with flowers

. . .that same dew which sometime on the buds
Was wont to swell like round and orient pearls,
Stood now within the pretty flouriets' eyes,
Like tears that did their own disgrace bewail.

(4.1.53-56)²⁰

From a ruling-class perspective (here identified with Nature), Bottom's "translation" can only ever have a "tragic" significance—or rather tragicomic, since things are put right in the end. Merely by including this conservative attitude, however, the play can once again be said to attempt the "containment" of the radical possibilities of translation.²¹

If A Midsummer Night's Dream takes an ambivalent pleasure in complicating hierarchical relations, we are more or less always aware that these are to be reinstated by the end. But the text's playful attitude to hierarchy is also obvious with the lovers' time in the wood, likewise a "translation" though, in contrast to Bottom's, one that moves downward. For there is a general suspension of gentle behavior: Demetrius is rude to Helena, Lysander can abandon Hermia, Helena thinks the others cruelly mock her: "I thought you lord of more true gentleness" (2.2.132, to Lysander), and later:

If you were civil and knew courtesy,
You would not do me thus much injury.

If you were men, as men you are in show,
You would not use a gentle lady so;

None of noble sort
Would so offend a virgin . . .

(3.2.147-60)

It is easy to see in the lovers' bewilderment and unhappiness how far they have come from the polite, sophisticated court of Theseus. There is a sense in which the move from Athens to the wood is a move from a relatively idealized and (in the terms of this play and of other texts we have considered) thus an elite or aristocratic milieu, to a less cultivated one. For the wood, while it is sociologically a various place, is in part, and in the aspect in which the lovers encounter it, seen as a place of naïve, folkloric wonder and surprise. Of course it is impossible to fix the character of this wood in sociological or in any other terms: it is at once Ovidian and literary and the setting of old wives' tales, beautiful and ugly, incomparably charming and terrifying as well.²² The noble Oberon and Titania are at home in it, the craftsmen frightened out of it. Nonetheless, for the aristocratic lovers it is an obscure locale utterly different from the urbane, enlightened Athenian scene, presided oyer by a self-styled connoisseur of the arts. We can read the lovers' discomfiture partly in terms of a "translation" to a folk realm of fancy and superstition. The important point is that this translation is unpleasant, that in contrast to Bottom's dream it is more akin to nightmare, and that in this play whether something is tragic or comic seems to depend quite a lot on which social level you belong to: Bottom's sojourn with the Faerie Queene is exquisitely pleasurable, but the lovers experience the wood's uncertainties as tragical, and comedy may be said to mean their restoration to themselves, or, perhaps, to truer versions of those selves, a crucial aspect of this restoration being reinstatement in a courtly, aristocratic milieu. The comic end of the play thus involves a return of the lovers not only to themselves and their true desires, but also to a leading place in the social hierarchy after a disturbing period of estrangement from it. "Playing" with social hierarchy, "playing" with social position—this adequately describes some of the play's interests, so long as we keep in mind the different emotional contents such "play" can have, contents that tend to divide along social lines, as we have seen.

If the various loosenings of social order are open to different generic constructions—tragic or tragicomic from the point of view of elite characters, intoxicatingly comic and splendid from the point of view of the major plebeian character—then the figure who embodies the text's fascination with social interplay is Puck. His social character, as we have noted, is extraordinarily difficult to pin down: he is a "shrewd and knavish sprite" (2.1.33) who, like Nashe's personae, combines in himself the perspective from above and from below.²³ On the one hand, Puck is linked with common village life, is given a homely speech, and is less ethereal ("thou lob of spirits" [2.1.16]) than the other fairies. His role as servant and jester also separates him from the elite of the play. Yet equally plain is his feeling of difference from the "hempen home-spuns" (3.1.77), as well as from the unseen but vividly evoked cottagers and "villagery" (2.1.35) inhabiting the nonelite social space of the play.²⁴ But if he is a richly complementary figure, neither strictly high nor low, and thus an instance of the play's social dialectics, his radical indefinability in terms of hierarchy, his anomalous and mixed social character, is presented not as threatening but as overwhelmingly delightful. Of course, we may feel that it is precisely because he is presented as a figure of fancy that he is unthreatening. The unreality of A Midsummer Night's Dream thus begins to appear as the means by which a liberated social interplay is both licensed and contained.

The temptation, then, to concur unreservedly with Elliot Krieger's assessment of the play—that its movement overall is conservative, leading toward the reaffirmation or regrounding of hierarchy (a hierarchy all the stronger and more inevitable and necessary for its temporary upsetting)—is compelling. (In line with this assessment, we may suppose that what Krieger calls the "second world" of the play, the green wood, performs a crucial function in naturalizing this hierarchy, a legitimation achieving its richest expression in Puck's valedictory blessing of the house and couples at the end.) Krieger is surely right to see the playlet of Pyramus and Thisby performing an important role in this conservative reordering ("putting the mechanicals in their place" by virtue of their awkwardness in the aristocratic setting).²⁵ Yet there are certain problems involved with assuming that the play's overall cast is therefore conservative. I shall argue with this interpretation in subsequent pages; for the moment, following Krieger, I should like to consider the function of genre and tragedy in the reimposition of hierarchy in the play.

Perhaps the first thing to notice about the playlet is that it is another form of "translation," this time plebeians translated into the conditions of noble life and story. At least, such is the intention—in fact, the effort of the mechanicals to assimilate themselves to elite society is so inept as to reemphasize their proletarianness, as Krieger shows. Secondly, we should notice the social role of the performance itself, for it is through its clumsiness that the court group reaffirms its own solidarity (originally threatened in the opening, quasi-tragic, scene). Thus the play presents a true knowledge of art, of genre and of decorum, as a not insignificant factor in ruling-class unity. (The mechanicals' ignorance underscores their exclusion from this class, but it does more than that: their amateur miscomprehensions in art reaffirm their incapacity in politics, a knowledge of one implying competence in the other. The implication is that the principle of decorum and fitness, involving notions of subordination and degree, is as fundamental to politics as to poetics.)²⁶ Thirdly, A Midsummer Night's Dream is clear about the social meaning of tragedy, because though the poetry and performance of Pyramus and Thisby are incredibly poor, it is not only the badness of the piece that is in question. What is also felt as ridiculous is the connection of the idea of tragedy with plebeians. Tragedy is consciously taken to exclude lower-class experience, and the juxtaposition of the two is clearly an incongruity to be savored: plebeian tragedy is comical tragedy. In short, social and poetic categories are not separated out. Finally, for the courtiers one of the silliest aspects of the entertainment is simply its generic incoherence:

"A tedious brief scene of young Pyramus
And his love Thisby; very tragical mirth."
Merry and tragical? Tedious and brief?

That is hot ice and wondrous strange snow.
How shall we find the concord of this discord?

(5.1.56-60)

This orthodox, neoclassical assertion of the purity of genres is, I think, the assertion of a social, as well as aesthetic, conservatism: it reasserts ideals of order, stability, and decorum, after the "discord" of those scenes of radical social mixing and translation (confusion, from one point of view) in the wood. (We may note that Theseus's aesthetic language just before the lovers' return to the city and the official recognition of their loves "in the temple" [4.1.180] also expresses this apparent restoration of the status quo, with its talk of a "musical confusion / Of hounds and echo in conjunction" [4.1.1 10-11]—that is, of an order robust enough to include and contain "confusion.") The social symbolism of A Midsummer Night's Dream may thus be thought of as describing dramatically a contradiction between disorder and order akin to the stylistic opposition between Nasheian variety and Lylean order: the contrast is similarly imagined as between what is essentially a court aesthetic and ideology and something potentially undermining it. In any case, we may see a tension in the play between the "impure," discordant, dialectical impulse toward translation, involving a promiscuous interplay between social groups, and the opposed ideal of a hierarchy of genres and ranks inhibiting this impulse. Although, as we have seen, the conservative ideal is perhaps dominant by the end of the play, its middle scenes exhibit a heady interest in social translation.

We can appreciate the daring of the social dialectics in the wood of A Midsummer Night's Dream by comparing the more conservative version of metamorphosis offered in the induction to The Taming of the Shrew (1593-94; pub. 1623). Like Bottom the Weaver, Christopher Sly the tinker is temporarily translated into a gentleman. A nobleman finds him dead drunk outside a tavern, and decides to play a joke on him. "What think you," he asks his huntsmen,

. . . if he were convey'd to bed,
Wrapp'd in sweet clothes, rings put on his fingers,
A most delicious banquet by his bed,
And brave attendants near him when he wakes,
Would not the beggar then forget himself?

1 Hun: Believe me, lord, I think he cannot choose.
2 Hun; It would seem strange unto him when he wak'd.
Lord: Even as a flatt'ring dream or worthless fancy.

(induction, 1.37-44)

This reference to dream, as well as the lush, richly decorative rhetoric singing the delights of the new life Sly has entered upon ("Wilt thou have music? Hark, Apollo plays, / And twenty caged nightingales do sing" [induction, 2.35-36]) in some ways anticipates Bottom's idyll with Titania. While Sly is thus translated, so is the lord, taking on the role of a servant. Clearly the nobleman's fascination with this social experiment is the play's too: the reversal of social status is itself felt as dramatically interesting (an interest in such social translation perhaps helping to explain, as suggested in the Introduction, the pervasiveness of humble disguises in both comedy and tragedy in the period).²⁷ As in A Midsummer Night's Dream, this scene of elaborate social interplay is at the same time occasion for a certain artistic consciousness, especially an awareness of genre. A messenger tells Sly,

Your honor's players, hearing your amendment,
Are come to play a pleasant comedy,
For so your doctors hold it very meet,
Seeing too much sadness hath congeal'd your blood,
And melancholy is the nurse of frenzy.
Therefore they thought it good to hear a play,
And frame your mind to mirth and merriment,
Which bars a thousand harms and lengthens life.

Sly: Marry, I will, let them play it. Is not a comonty a Christmas gambold, or a tumbling-trick?
Page: No, my good lord, it is more pleasing stuff.
Sly: What, household stuff?
Page: It is a kind of history.

(induction, 2.129-41)

Here the allusion to comedy is at once a formal definition ("a kind of history") and a crucial separating out of high and low milieux, seeming almost to safeguard hierarchical difference against the mixing that has, albeit in a highly restricted sense, taken place.²⁸ If the crossover of Sly and the lord momentarily (and playfully) upends distinctions of degree, making them appear manipulatable and open to change, it is in this moment of aesthetic self-awareness that they are reinstalled: Sly's immovable plebeian-ness is emphasized in his ignorance of the nature of comedy, just as the mechanicals' low status is affirmed through their ignorance of the nature of tragedy. Thus "art" is, it seems, in either play deployed to consolidate social hierarchy. What is remarkable about this scene from the Shrew and Pyramus and Thisby is that formal self-consciousness is so closely implicated in an awareness of rank, and emerges out of a scene of explicit interaction between ranks. Thus the meeting with the drunken Sly is followed by the entrance of the players and the lord's Hamlet-like Compliment to them, displaying his own discrimination in such affairs: "that part [Soto's] / Was aptly fitted and naturally perform'd" (induction, 1.86-87; compare Philostrate's disparagement of the plebeian players in the Dream: "not one word apt, one player fitted" [5.1.65]). The important thing to note in both plays is just how the discourses of art and hierarchy merge.²⁹ Yet the social dialectics of the Shrew's induction are in no way as intense as those of the Dream, for where in the former the reversal is safely stage-managed by the nobleman, in the latter the young aristocrats' bewilderment and Titania's sense of disgrace toward the end of the play are genuinely felt and powerfully disorienting emotions. Moreover, despite the fact that the mechanicals are to some extent "put in their place" by Pyramus and Thisby, we feel no compulsion to second the smugness of the aristocrats, whom we have watched behave in ways scarcely less absurd than Bottom and his friends.³⁰ The elite characters of this play, then, are more challenged by translation than in the Shrew induction. Bottom, in addition, does not cut the purely buffoonish figure Sly does: apart from his possessing a realistic, commonsensical wisdom (his philosophic remarks on reason and love, for instance [3.1.142-47]), as well as an imaginative impressionability of which the tinker shows scant evidence, Titania's election of Bottom is an intense, ecstatic experience of a different order altogether from the mirthless, deliberate practical joke played on Sly. And where with Sly we are conscious only of his unsuitability for the greatness thrust on him, the harsher, more disciplinarian comedy of that play inviting us to laugh with the lord and servants at him, with Bottom as courtier we register the incongruity, but are amazed at the capacity almost to bring it off: there is a sense in which he manages to convince despite everything. In any case, both plays are remarkable for their showing social hierarchies and art to imply each other: both imagine intriguing scenarios of social mixing and interplay, but art counts as a deeply conservative check to this imagining.

In A Midsummer Night's Dream, I have suggested, art appears as a means by which basic social distinctions are rediscovered after a potentially disturbing (or liberating—the play allows for both evaluations) interval in which they have been suspended, an interval of topsy-turvydom or translation, and I have also suggested that a similar thematization of the conservative social role of art occurs in The Taming of the Shrew.³¹ In this play, it seems, the theater and poetry are represented not in terms of any liberatory or subversive potential, but as means for enforcing social norms and hierarchies. Thus the disorderly Sly, who "will not pay for the glasses [he has] burst" in the tavern, defies the town constabulary, and is "fourteen pence on the score for sheer ale" (induction, 1.7-8, 11-15, 2.23) is made to watch a "pleasant comedy" (induction, 2.130) whose moral is intensely conservative, and which enforces the familiar analogy of patriarchal and political authority, or "aweful rule, and right supremacy" (5.2.109).³² The lord enlists, we should remember, professional players in this "pastime passing excellent" (induction, 1.67); what is notable about this scene is its self-consciousness, with the theater presented as enforcing social order.³³ It is true that the experimental, open element of play—of social translation, whereby a tinker becomes a nobleman and a nobleman a servant—is also present, and this is what makes the Shrew a companion to A Midsummer Night's Dream. But the central difference between the two works lies in the overriding emphasis on "art" in the Shrew, on the lord's virtuoso, illusion-making art (indeed, the art of the theater-poet), and the consequent closing down of social possibilities such an art seems to imply. It is this social power of art that is emphasized, its ability to control and manipulate appearances and thus social relations, even to create subjects whose self-understanding is fantasized by the powers-that-be. We have seen that, by comparison, the translations in the Dream are more vertiginous and apparently unpredictable (not even Oberon gets everything right first go round), and this lack of control suggests a corresponding measure of possibility. This is the case even though, as suggested above, the very daringness of the play's manipulation of hierarchy is predicated upon the comic guarantee that "all shall be well" (3.2.463). (For about even this supposed restoration of decorum at the close of the play there is, as we have also seen, a striking irony, as the courtiers condescend to a play almost as unreasoning as their own love adventures.) But in the induction to the Shrew, the emphasis is all on the nobleman's control and skill, on a virtuosity, including a powerful eloquence, capable of overcoming Sly's resistance to manipulation. The induction, then, figures the theater as a social force, in a fantasy of total authority: the nobleman possesses a Prospero-like power for manipulating others, which is founded upon theater and capable of fashioning the very identity of his auditors:

Sly: Am I a lord, and have I such a lady?
Or do I dream? Or have I dream'd till now?
I do not sleep: I see, I hear, I speak;
I smell sweet savors, and I feel soft things.
Upon my life, I am a lord indeed,
And not a tinker, nor Christopher Sly.

(induction, 2.68-73)

What this passage and the scene as a whole suggest is a role for the theater in the ideological formation of subjects: the outsider Sly is through theater led to identify with aristocratic culture.³⁴ And it is specifically the theater, with its duplicitous techniques of impersonation, which effects this "false consciousness," or mystified experience of social reality: thus the directions to "Barthol'mew my page," who must be "dress'd in all suits like a lady" to impersonate Sly's noble wife, and who will be able to "rain a shower of commanded tears" by "An onion . . . / Which in a napkin (being close convey'd) / Shall in despite enforce a watery eye" (induction, 1.105-6, 125-28). Art is represented as a mode of elite social authority, employing fancy or the imagination for orthodox ends.³⁵ (By contrast, the Dream sets fancy in powerful opposition to social orthodoxy, as a mode for its—temporary, perhaps, but in no way easily forgotten—undoing.) What is crucial is the emphasis in the Shrew on technique or manipulation. Where in A Midsummer Night's Dream the disruptions of the social system have a magical or uncanny authority, so that they cannot be dismissed as merely illusory—at least not by the audience, Bottom, or the lovers—in the Shrew there is no such suggestion of an alternative, more fluid social reality; instead we see art serving authority, and we realize, even if he doesn't, that Christopher Sly is only a tinker and will remain one. The translations in the Dream, however, are not nearly so obviously unreal, so simply the result of technique—it is not clear that Bottom is now a mere weaver, for in an important sense he remains the consort of the Faerie Queene, able "to discourse wonders" (4.2.29); nor are the social translations of the play engendered, and so contained, by an aristocratic "art," but are on the contrary imagined as profound alternatives to the rigidity and conservatism of art: art is brought in to recontain and close down the dizzying possibilities for social relations, felt as fearful and delightful all at once, which are released by the play.³⁶ The disturbingly frank (for modern taste) identification of the art of the poetic theater with aristocratic authority in the Shrew turns upon genre: it is because what Sly watches is not "a Christmas gambold, or a tumbling-trick"—not a naïve popular entertainment but an example of deliberate and socially sophisticated art, a "kind of history"—that ensures that the lesson of the drama is essentially conservative. It will be useful to turn now to this "kind of history" itself, for it too, in the context of play with social distinctions and hierarchy, seems to recognize the power of art, its functioning as a mode of elite social symbolism and control.

It was suggested some pages back that the unreality of the Dream was necessary for its pleasurable loosening of the social structure, and thus that its fantastic aspects must be regarded as functioning conservatively, rendering the notion of social translation an "antic fable" or harmless "fairy toy" (5.1.3). Yet a comparison with the undoubtedly conservative Taming of the Shrew has shown that such a reading too easily accepts Theseus's complacent and facile dismissal of what has occurred in the night, and it is by now a critical truism that "the story of the night . . . / . . . grows to something of great constancy" (5.1.23, 26), and that the play throws into disarray ruling dualisms like reality and dream.³⁷ Thus, "strange and admirable" (5.1.27) as the play's envisioning of social translation might be, it is not canceled out by the end of the play; and its exoticism, fancy, and magic is to be compared with the contemporary and, in the body of the play, harshly materialistic and urban setting of the Shrew, which imposes, it seems, its own limitations on the idea of social translation—or at least gives this notion a conservative meaning. What I am suggesting is that upsets of social relations in the Shrew are more anxiety-producing affairs than in the Dream: to the extent that the play experiments at all with such reversals they are invariably the occasion for cuffs and blows, for verbal sparring and comic anger, and in general for the aggressive high spirits of slapstick. Vincentio's stupefaction, rage, and bewilderment at Tranio and Biondello's non-acknowledgment of him are typical (see 5.1.45-111). We are, of course, still in a comedy, even if, by comparison with the Dream, a highly realistic, unromantic one, so these instances of complication and reversal of traditional relations are not equatable with the anguish, disbelief, and shock that social translation gives rise to in, for example, Lear, where even the impudence of an Oswald is implicated in a narrative of cosmic ruin—yet the connection with comic versions of the same process is there, and Lear exploits it. An undercurrent of violence and tension pervades the social relations of the Shrew: "Was ever man so beaten? Was ever man so ray'd? Was ever man so weary?" complains Grumio on arriving at Petruchio's country house (4.1.2-3). Yet in their turn the servants are incorrigibly saucy: Grumio and Biondello are maddening quibblers and logic choppers (see, for example, the exchanges with Petruchio and Baptista at 1.2.5-44 and 3.2.30-41). These playful yet aggressive "sets of wit"³⁸ underscore one's impression of social relations characterized by a tendency toward force and violence (Kate's shrewishness has to be seen within the context of this generalized aggressivity), and this competitive, tense atmosphere clearly sets limits to the kinds of social translation imaginable. Nonetheless, the play does experiment with certain reversals of degree: "Tranio is chang'd into Lucentio" (1.1.237) so that the latter might have access to Bianca (the stage direction at 1.2.217 giving us "Tranio brave" and, at 2.1.38, "Lucentio in the habit of a mean man"). Still, such translations of social role do not suggest the profound renovation of social hierarchy hinted at in A Midsummer Night's Dream; and the reason for this reluctance of the play to press the idea of translation seems connected, once again, with the role of the foregrounded dramaturgical principle of "art" as a conservative check on this process. Thus the play's emphasis on "counterfeit supposes" (5.1.117), or on the "mystaking or imagination of one thing for an other" (prologue to Gascoigne's Supposes)³⁹ as a result of deliberate counterfeiting (such as Lucentio, Tranio, Biondello, Hortensio, Gremio, and Petruchio all engage in), is an emphasis on deft technique entirely absent from the Dream. This stress on the artful, theatrical manipulation of social reality lacks the implication of a thoroughgoing (and lasting) revision of the social structure that we encounter in the Dream; for the Shrew, with its emphasis on clever deceit, or the strategic trickery of art, preserves the notion of an unchanging social reality only temporarily distorted by these fictions and subterfuges. The reversal of role Tranio and Lucentio engineer ultimately only confirms the "truth" of the established order: finally, Tranio is Tranio and Lucentio is Lucentio; and when this is not so, it is because of the feigning of art—but what Bottom experiences in the woods, whatever it is the lovers undergo, is not a mere "suppose." Rather it is something that transcends or is more mysterious than "art," in something of the same way that the enigmatic, remote Hippolyta is a stranger, more alluring figure than the day-lit Theseus. In the Shrew, therefore, social translation operates in accordance with a technical rhetoric, or in terms of clever impersonation and the crafty manipulation of appearances; in the Dream it involves a far-reaching enchantment and wonder and poses, briefly but memorably, an alternative social reality. The notion of art is central: for in the Shrew the emphasis is on strategy, intrigue, and the manipulation of other people and social situations or, at a higher level of abstraction, of the plot by an author. (A manipulation Petruchio figures: obviously, he uses, along with physical force, a histrionic-poetic power to subdue Kate, even as Sly is subdued by this faculty in the nobleman's hands: just as Sly is made to identify with aristocratic life, so is Kate with patriarchy). This calculating, unillusioned rhetoric of art, characterizing the Shrew's version of social interplay, seems appropriate to the "realistic" atmosphere of a town and its life of unapologetic getting and gaining: Athens and its wood is finally an ampler, less crowded place, its social structure less defined and constricting, than Padua. We may think of the change in Kate as like the translation Bottom undergoes—but unlike Bottom's, its logic is conservative, toward the reassertion of a hierarchical social relation rather than its unorthodox overturning or problematization. What we seem to see in the Shrew is Shakespeare's recognition of art's role in backing up "aweful rule, and right supremacy"; in the Dream art is similarly represented as a conservative force, but the play is more dialectical than the self-satisfied courtiers at its end, and they and their art do not have the last word. The point, then, is that none of the rearrangements of social role in the worldly, metropolitan comedy of the Shrew (the lord's, Lucentio's, Petruchio's—who is "mean apparell'd" at his wedding, so that it is "shame to [his] estate" [3.2.73, 100]) suggest that quality of wondrous, revisionary enchantment experienced in the apparently artless mix-up of social relations in the Dream.

I have suggested that the social dialectics of particular Shakespeare plays underlie or provoke a formal awareness—that their complex social makeup fosters an attitude of self-consciousness about form and that this involves an awareness of the social provenance, meaning, and potential uses of modes and of art generally. This suggestion can be further explored in a play with some striking similarities to A Midsummer Night's Dream: George Peele's The Old Wives Tale (ca. 1588-94; pub. 1595). Describing this work's social character is difficult, since it unites the most diverse material. On the one hand it is, in Muriel Bradbrook's words, a fantastic popular "medley," derived from folktale and naïve tradition; on the other hand, its use of this material is sophisticated, knowing, and literary.⁴⁰ This sophisticated viewpoint is located in the three pages of the play who, lost in a wood, are welcomed into his cottage by Clunch the Smith, and who persuade his wife Madge to pass the night by telling them an old winter's tale:

Antic: . . . methinks, gammer, a merry winter's tale would drive away the time trimly. Come, I am sure you are not without a score.

Fantastic: I' faith, gammer, a tale of an hour long were as good as an hour's sleep.

Frolic: Look you, gammer, of the giant and the king's daughter, and I know not what. I have seen the day, when I was a little one, you might have drawn me a mile after you with such a discourse.

(lines 85-90)

The tone is witty and aware, yet sympathetic rather than merely condescending. Like the . . . Shakespeare of A Midsummer Night's Dream or some of the late plays, Peele's play is consciously double in its social affiliations, both of and not of a "popular tradition." The meeting between Antic, Fantastic, and Frolic, and Madge and Clunch, is a socially inclusive scene, but the important thing about it is that this meeting between a nobleman's clever pages and simple country people is also a scene of aesthetic self-consciousness, as is evident from the device of the frame itself (once Madge has actually begun her tale this frame does not play much of a role, though it is in the theater a potentially continuous visual presence). As Patricia Binnie observes,⁴¹ the beginning of Madge's tale is a veritable catalogue of folk motifs—clearly Peele wants to make these particular (popular) conventions as visible as possible:

Madge: Once upon a time there was a king or a lord or a duke that had a fair daughter, the fairest that ever was; as white as snow and as red as blood; and once upon a time his daughter was stolen away, and he sent all his men to seek out his daughter, and he sent so long that he sent all his men out of his land.

Frolic: Who dressed his dinner, then?

Madge: Nay, either hear my tale, or kiss my tail.

Fantastic: Well said! On with your tale, gammer.

Madge: O Lord, 1 quite forgot! There was a conjurer, and this conjurer could do anything, and he turned himself into a great dragon, and carried the king's daughter away in his mouth to a castle that he made of stone, and there he kept her I know not how long, till at last all the king's men went out so long that her two brothers went to seek her. O, I forget! She (he, I would say) turned a proper young man to a bear in the night and a man in the day, and keeps by a cross that parts three several ways, and he made his lady run mad. Gods me bones! who comes here?

Enter the Two Brothers

Frolic: Soft, gammer, here some come to tell your tale for you.

(lines 113-34)

The first thing to say about this passage is that it is under conditions of social mingling that these conventions are recognized as such. (This attitude of self-consciousness is maintained in the rest of the play, where, as in Madge's introduction, fairy-tale motifs are foregrounded by their very abundance.) Moreover, these conventions are not treated as if they were poetic only—we are not dealing with a merely formal self-consciousness—but instead are presented in terms of their putative social character, that is, as conventions of popular narrative. The pages can enjoy such tales as Madge's, but the play is concerned to represent their distance from them as well (Frolic's "Who dressed his dinner, then?" is a reminder of this distance).⁴² Again, artistic self-consciousness is predicated upon social- or rank-consciousness. We may call this particular attitude of the text a "realism," because conventions are viewed realistically, from outside, in a detached, critical way, and because artistic conventions are referred to social, economic, and political reality (instead of simply responding to the story, it is itself contextualized, and we apprehend it as popular). The techniques of "epic theater" are relevant as a modern parallel to this sixteenth-century dramatic "realism," but Maynard Mack has also set out the terms for its discussion in his analysis of that "fine poise" in the Elizabethan theater "between elements making for engagement and those making for detachment."⁴³ Thus The Old Wives Tale can be analyzed in terms similar to those we have brought to bear on other Renaissance works, where the text's complicated social situation is seen as precipitating a formal self-consciousness or a distancing of particular discursive modes as social-cultural forces: so-called bourgeois tragedy, in attempting a serious treatment of nonaristocratic life, develops a critical distance on tragic conventions, and Nashe, in a move interpretable as articulating his own ambiguous social position, plays off against each other elite and "popular" discourses to produce a socially undecidable, ironic, and elusive body of writing. Realism is an appropriate term for describing the characteristic stance of these texts, for each sees modes and conventions as aspects of social reality or as articulations of degree, and art as expressing elite social authority. In this respect The Old Wives Tale forms something of an exception to the texts examined so far, its self-consciousness regarding the social character of literary modes being directed not at art but at the naïve notion of the tale.

Notes

¹An Essay of Dramatic Poesy, in Dryden, Essays, 1.79.

² "The myriad-minded man . . . Shakespeare": in vol. 1 of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Shakespearean Criticism, 2d ed., ed. Thomas Middleton Raysor (London, 1960), 89.

³Shakespeare, 246; see also 177.

⁴ Greer, Shakespeare (Oxford, 1986), 18, 85, 125. Shakespearean "negative capability" has been formulated diversely. Margot Heinemann in "How Brecht Read Shakespeare" (Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield [Ithaca, N.Y., 1985]), observes Brecht's modeling of his epic theater on "the many-sided, dialectical, argumentative style of Shakespeare" (211). W. R. Elton, "Shakespeare and the Thought of His Age," in A New Companion to Shakespeare Studies, ed. Kenneth Muir and S. Schoenbaum (Cambridge, England, 1971) sees Shakespeare's dialectical art as giving appropriate form to a contradictory, transitional age, articulating the "complexity and variety, inconsistency and fluidity" of Renaissance thought (180; see 197-98). Otto Ludwig's comment that "Shakespeare's entire art is based on contrast" is cited by Weimann, Shakespeare, 245; Clemen, "Characteristic Features of Shakespearian Drama," stresses contrast and the combination of "opposite and diverse material in order to form a new unity" as essential (202; 202-3). Rossiter, Angel with Horns, formulates the dialectical spirit of Shakespearean tragedy less as an argument than as a matter of "diabolical" irony and "Gothic" grotesque (292): in Shakespeare's "comic-ironic" universe "the tragic includes its seeming opposite"; the "view is the double-eyed, the ambivalent: it faces both ways" (270, 272, 292). Norman Rabkin in Shakespeare and the Common Understanding (New York, 1967) analyzes the "principle of complementarity" in the plays and finds that the "true constant" of Shakespeare's texts is their "dialectical dramaturgy" (27, 11, and passim); see also his Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning (Chicago, 1981) on the irreducible "existential complexity" of the plays (32 and passim).

⁵ See Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford, 1977), 55-75, 128-36: "structure of feeling" is a concept intended to "go beyond formally held and systematic beliefs" to include "meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt" (132). See also Peter Erikson, "The Order of the Garter, the Cult of Elizabeth, and Class-Gender Tension in The Merry Wives of Windsor," in Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, ed. Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O'Connor (New York, 1987), 117-18.

⁶ The social "inclusiveness" of Shakespearean theater in general, but above all of the Henry IV plays, is stressed by Barber in terms of the dramatic use of popular custom and ritual: see Shakespeare's Festive Comedy, 192 and passim.

⁷ Influential Marxist accounts of Shakespearean "comprehensiveness" are Weimann's Shakespeare and Cohen's Drama of a Nation. Both emphasize the period as an age of transition from feudalism to capitalism: see Weimann, 161-69 and passim; Drama of a Nation, 82-84 and passim. See also Szenczi, "Shakespeare's Realism." Bristol, Carnival and Theater, accepts that "the theme of transition" from feudalism to capitalism remains generally "a valid interpretive strategy for elucidating social change in the Elizabethan period" (47), but argues that it needs supplementing by an awareness of the conservatism and relative permanence of the forms of popular culture—"what Fernand Braudel has called longue durée' or the 'structure of everyday life'" (48). Cohen defends "the quest for totality" (21) of Marxist modes of criticism in Drama of a Nation, 21-22.

⁸ In his edition: "every single character in Shakespeare is as much an Individual as those in Life itself: see vol. 2 of Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, ed. Brian Vickers (London, 1974), 404.

⁹Shakespeare and Social Class (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1988), 75-77.

¹⁰ Cf. Puttenham: "many a meane souldier and other obscure persons were spoken of and made famous in stories, as we find of Irus the begger, and Thersites the glorious noddie, whom Homer maketh mention of. But that happened (and so did many like memories of meane men) by reason of some greater personage or matter that it was long of; from Arte of English Poesie, in Elizabethan Critical Essays, 2.45.

¹¹ See Harbage, Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions (New York, 1952); Bradbrook, Elizabethan Comedy and Rise of the Common Player; and Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy. "A pervasive mixing of popular and elite elements . . . characterized the immediate institutional context of the drama" (Cohen, Drama of a Nation, 19; also 405 and passim). The major contemporary statement of this position is Weimann's Shakespeare: Elizabethan drama was "neither farcical nor learned nor courtly," but a theater universal "in its social and aesthetic appeal" (173 and passim). Both writers, however, formulate this social-cultural mingling in terms of a larger contradiction between ruling and subordinate classes: "in the Renaissance theater . . . the popular tradition was free to develop relatively independent of, and yet in close touch with, the conflicting standards and attitudes of the dominant classes" (Weimann, Shakespeare, 169, my emphasis). For Cohen the essentially "artisanal" (181) social character of the Elizabethan playhouse suggests "the inherent subversiveness of the institution" (183): even in a play with an overtly aristocratic outlook, "the medium and the message were in contradiction, a contradiction that resulted above all from the popular contribution" (183). Weimann, "Shakespeare (De)Canonized," has similarly argued for tension between dramatic content and performative context on the Elizabethan stage: see Introduction, n. 32.

¹² See William Shakespeare, 227-32. On John Shakespeare's public career, see 33-39.

¹³ For Greene's attack on Shakespeare: ibid., 151, and 143-59. For the title page to the Farewell, see vol. 9 of Greene, Life and Complete Works, 225.

¹⁴ Even by 1640, when their status had been much improved, playwrights were still not very highly regarded, according to Bentley, Profession of Dramatist, 43.

¹⁵ For a sociological reading of Tamburlaine and other plays in terms of the special position in society of the "University Wits," see G. K. Hunter, "The Beginnings of Elizabethan Drama: Revolution and Continuity," in Renaissance Drama, n.s. 17 (1986): 29-52.

¹⁶ C. L. Barber and Richard P. Wheeler, The Whole Journey: Shakespeare's Power of Development (Berkeley, 1986), 63.

¹⁷ Danby compares Sidney (as archetype of the aristocrat-poet) with "the tradesman's son from the country," Shakespeare, in Poets on Fortune's Hill, Ti.

¹⁸ For a conception of the forms of literature as "institutionally objective," see Fowler, Kinds of Literature, 260.

¹⁹ Snyder, Comic Matrix of Shakespeare's Tragedies, shows that the upsetting of normal social arrangements can be comic or tragic in Elizabethan drama; thus the convention of social inversion in the romantic comedy of the 1580s and early 1590s, in which "women and servants" are commonly elevated above "their betters" (27), has a dark, ironic significance in King Lear (140-46).

²⁰ I am grateful to Ay e Agi for drawing my attention to the different ways Titania and Oberon evaluate the Faerie Queene's infatuation.

²¹ "Shakespeare's plays are centrally, repeatedly concerned with the production and containment of subversion and disorder": Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, 40; see also Arthur F. Kinney, Renaissance Historicism: Selections from "English Literary Renaissance, " ed. Arthur F. Kinney and Dan S. Collins (Amherst, Mass., 1987), xi.

²² On the play's synthesis of courtly and popular materials and its use of social contrast generally, see David Young, Something of Great Constancy: The Art of "A Midsummer Night's Dream " (New Haven, Conn., 1966), 15, 30, 58-59; H. B. Charlton, Shakespearian Comedy (London, 1938; repr. 1959), 120; K. M. Briggs, The Anatomy of Puck: An Examination of Fairy Beliefs among Shakespeare's Contemporaries and Successors (London, 1959), 44; M. C. Bradbrook, "The Fashioning of a Courtier," in Shakespeare Criticism: 1935-1960, ed. Anne Ridler (London, 1963), 377-80; and R. W. Dent, "Imagination in A Midsummer Night's Dream," Shakespeare Quarterly 15 (1964): 125.

²³ The fairies in general "are a fantastic 'mingle-mangle' blending classical and Germanic mythology with native folklore" (Weimann, Shakespeare, 174), and "Shakespeare's Puck . . . at once a product of the popular imagination as well as a part of the more literary traditions of Cupid and Ovid's Metamorphoses" (196).

²⁴ Compare with Puck's superiority to, yet association with, the common people, Diccon in Gammer Gurions Nedle, whose mischief drives the play's complications: cleverer than his rustic victims, he nevertheless participates in much the same sphere of life as they.

²⁵ Elliot Krieger, A Marxist Study of Shakespeare's Comedies (New York, 1979): "the play furthers the aristocracy's fantasy of its absolute social predominance" (61). Krieger proposes an ideological analysis of the "two-world" structure of much Shakespearean comedy: the "secondary" world (Arden, the wood outside Athens, Belmont) is a mystification of the class conflicts of the historical, "first" world of the plays; see his introduction, 1-8. This two-world theory of Shakespearean comedy (a movement from a "normal world," into a "green world," and back again to the "normal world") derives from Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, 1957), 182; see also 182-85.

²⁶ Cf. Spingarn, Literary Criticism in the Renaissance: "the principle of decorum" necessarily entails the "much deeper question . . . of social distinctions": "The observance of decorum necessitated the maintenance of the social distinctions which formed the basis of Renaissance life and of Renaissance literature" (87).

²⁷ On the popularity of disguise in both genres, see Bradbrook, Themes and Conventions, 17.

²⁸ Sly' s reference to "a tumbling-trick" seems designed to signify a popular entertainment, as different as possible from the sophisticated "history" (or "story represented dramatically" [OED, sb. 6a]), of reasonably complex plotting, which the Shrew proper offers. But it is relevant to any discussion of the relations of "popular" to "aristocratic" culture in the period, and underscores the slipperiness of such distinctions, that tumbling or acrobatic performances were court fare as well: the Office of the Master of the Revels Account Book (1 November 1582 to 31 October 1583) records that "Sundrey feates of Tumbling and Activitie were shewed before her majestie on Newe years daie at night by the Lord Straunge his servauntes"; and the Book for 31 October 1584 to 31 October 1585 notes that "Dyvers feates of Actyvytie were shewed and presented before her majestie on newe yeares daye at night at Grenewich by Symons and his fellowes": see Documents Relating to the Office of the Revels in the Time of Queen Elizabeth, ed. Albert Feuillerat (Louvain, Belgium, 1908), 349, 365.

²⁹ A similar status-consciousness is, of course, discernible in Hamlet's advice to the players: the speech Hamlet heard once "pleas'd not the million, 'twas caviary to the general" (2.2.436-37); there are the distinctions between "the judicious" and "the unskillful" (3.2.25-26), or "the groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise" (3.2.10-12). Aesthetic matters are thus discussed with a casual automatic reference to degree. Nonetheless, drama does not in Hamlet have the essentially conservative function it has in A Midsummer Night's Dream or, as I shall show, The Taming of the Shrew: in Claudius's court holding the "mirror up to nature" (3.2.22) is necessarily a disruptive act; the resources of theater are, as in Lear's scorching mocktrial of his daughters, the weapons not of the powerful, but of those striking back (from a position of vulnerability) at injustice.

³⁰ G. K. Hunter discusses this irony in William Shakespeare: The Late Comedies (London, 1962), 14, 20.

³¹ The best-known study of a "Saturnalian" tradition of misrule or "topsy-turvydom" in English Renaissance theater is Barber's Shakespeare's Festive Comedy. An early consideration of Shakespeare's indebtedness to traditional pastimes and festivals (especially in the comedies but also in Lear) is Spens, An Essay on , Shakespeare's Relation to Tradition, 35-52: thus Sir Toby in Twelfth Night recalls the Lord of Misrule of the court, an office, along with the play's title, suggesting the play's "link with a folk-festival," the Feast of Fools (43, 41-43). Weimann's political interpretation of the tradition, whereby "the inverted vision of the world" is "a means of criticizing society" (Shakespeare, 40) has been influential. Thus Bristol, Carnival and Theater, in an analysis of carnivalesque popular culture derived from Bakhtin, stresses the capacity of festivity to act as a mode of resistance to the dominant elite and its "power structure" (4). But topsy-turvydom has a learned history too: see E. R. Curtius, "The World Upside Down," in European Literature in the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, 1953), 94-98.

³² On the "parallel between domestic patriarchy and absolute monarchy" in the thought of the period, see Belsey, Subject of Tragedy, 144, 137-48. If the concluding Christopher Sly scene in The Taming of a Shrew (possibly a memorial reconstruction of Shakespeare's play) reflects an ending originally in some version of the text, the notion of Sly being subjected to order becomes less satisfactory—for, as a man, he also benefits from it, "know[ing] now how to tame a shrew": "I'll to my wife presently and tame her too an if she anger me"; see The Taming of the Shrew, ed. H. J. Oliver (Oxford, 1982), 235; on the textual problem of Sly, see 28-29, 40-43. But the play Sly watches still promotes order; and the Sly awakened by the Tapster, after the "dream" of being a lord (235), has certainly been put in his place.

³³ Leonard Tennenhouse understands English Renaissance drama as an extension of elite power, or "a vehicle for disseminating court ideology," in Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare's Genres (New York, 1986), 39. Stephen Orgel's "Making Greatness Familiar," in Power of Forms, ed. Greenblatt, is a salutary reminder of just "how little we really understand," from a sometimes perplexing historical record, of "what must have been a very complicated and ambivalent relationship" between government and players in the period (46).

³⁴ Cf. Tennenhouse, Power on Display: the induction "calls attention to the role of the dramatist and his power to produce and shatter the illusions in terms of which one understands identity" (46). One would have to qualify this by distinguishing among spectators: Sly is an especially naïve one, and the play explores such social differences; we may suppose that the lord would not be as vulnerable to the power Tennenhouse specifies.

³⁵ Not only the art of the theater, either: note the ravishingly beautiful "pictures" (induction, 2.49) offered Sly, all Ovidian subjects (Adonis, Io, Daphne), and done with exquisite skill and workmanship (56, 60). This aesthetic language introduces a note of control and discipline into Sly's social metamorphosis that removes it from the more natural changes in the Dream.

³⁶ Even Oberon's manipulation of Titania seems significantly different from the lord's playing with Sly, for here too, as with the other translations in the Dream, there is the strong suggestion, in an enchanted natural scene, of the disclosure of certain unobvious or paradoxical truths; but Sly-as-lord is a mere distorting trick.

³⁷ Thus according to Young, Something of Great Constancy, the play undoes "conventional Elizabethan dichotomies" (115); see "Bottom's Dream," 109-67.

³⁸ Bradbrook uses this term (Themes and Conventions, 110-11) to describe a conventional mode for orchestrating the speech of elite characters like Beatrice and Benedick, yet it is applicable to Grumio's quibbling.

³⁹ Quoted from vol. 1 of Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffrey Bullough (London, 1957), 112. On Shakespeare's use of Gascoigne, see Kenneth Muir, The Sources of Shakespeare's Plays (New Haven, Conn., 1978), 19-20, and Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, 1:66-68.

⁴⁰ "Shakespeare's Primitive Art," in Interpretations of Shakespeare: British Academy Lectures Selected by Kenneth Muir (Oxford, 1985), 53, 60. See also Patricia Binnie's introduction to her edition (Manchester, England, 1980), 25-29.

⁴¹ George Peele, The Old Wives Tale, edited by Patricia Binnie, 43.

⁴² I spoke of a "popular" realism in Nashe's work challenging elite idealism. Such realism, as this passage shows, need not be "popular": the deflationary realism here comes from Madge's superiors (who, however, are still not to be identified with the elite). For Bakhtin, medieval and Renaissance folk culture expresses a "material bodily principle" at odds with elite or official idealism: see Rabelais, 18 and passim.

⁴³ "Engagement and Detachment in Shakespeare's Plays," in Essays on Shakespeare and Elizabethan Drama in Honor of Hardin Craig, ed. Richard Hosley (Columbia, Mo., 1962), 285. The Elizabethan audience of S. L. Bethell's Shakespeare and the Popular Dramatic Tradition (London, 1944) is similarly "alert and critically detached" (39): "Elizabethan playhouse psychology" is characterized by "the dual consciousness of play-world and real world" (41).