[In the following essay, Moisan investigates three comic exchanges between members of differing classes in Shakespeare's plays, which he suggests hint at social inversion but ultimately leave the standards of social privilege unquestioned.]

As sites in which to ponder the representation of "class" in Shakespeare's plays—and at the dual risks of making much of little and offering less a single thesis than a collage—I propose here to examine three moments from three plays that stand as three variations on a familiar form of Shakespearean comic business: the exchange between a social superior and his inferior wherein verbal misprision produces a comic impasse that momentarily renders the superior thwarted, his inquiries and commands deflected, the basis of his superiority questioned, and the inferior ultimately left beaten or silenced or dismissed from the stage, more serviceably docile, the basis of his inferiority forcibly reaffirmed. In tracing this configuration in the exchanges between Petruchio and Grumio in The Taming of the Shrew (1.2.5-46), between Lorenzo and Launcelot in The Merchant of Venice (3.5.27-70), and between the tribunes Flavius and Murellus and the workmen in Julius Caesar (1.1.1-62),¹ I would suggest that the collisions these scenes inscribe are of interest surely not as rigorously definitive commentaries on the taxonomies of class in Tudor England but as evocations of the social anxieties and antagonisms, along with the myths and contradictions, by means of which classification in Tudor England gets nourished and even "mystified." Differences notwithstanding, central to the comic "confusions" of each exchange is a disruption or blurring of distinctions between superior and inferior, master and subordinate, that the former in each pairing can only resolve through an appeal to radical differentiations of the kind to which the hierarchies of a class system respond. And if, at a glance, the scenarios enacted in these scenes offer little to contradict Keith Wrightson's account of the emerging, economically driven class consciousness of the era, so too in the hints we hear in each of a paternalist bond between superior and inferior are we reminded of the familial, affiliative bond Peter Laslett takes as controlling his envisioned patriarchalist, "classless," or, rather, "one-class" society.² In turn, in the comic crisis initiated by the inferior's failure to obey and the superior's failure to exact obedience, we are reminded of the talismanic, mystificatory, and ultimately circular role of "obedience" in the enforcement of contemporary social distinctions, whereby obedience becomes both the means to an end and the end itself, in semiotic parlance both signifier and signified, at once the object and guarantor of social distinctions.³

Here it might be objected that the grouping I have made for this discussion on the one hand capriciously elides significant distinctions of genre and on the other overlooks the numerous occasions in which comparable verbal impasses occur in other plays by Shakespeare, in contexts as ostensibly disparate as the confusions squared of The Comedy of Errors and the graveyard interrogatories of Hamlet. To which I would respond that it is precisely because they are familiar and do, indeed, blur prescriptions of genre that the trio of moments I have chosen seem at once a convenient, representative, and yet intriguingly problematic set to consider. Spanning much of the Elizabethan half of Shakespeare's dramatic career, the trajectory traced by these moments fuses class consciousness and comic dramaturgy in an interesting nexus, punctuating the most feckless of comic business with the inflections of class consciousness, ameliorating and suppressing the asperities of class division within the inflections of comedy.

Hence, inseparable from our inspection of these moments is the question of what light, if any, they may shed upon our sense of the ways in which Shakespearean theater negotiates and mediates the social realities to which it gives dramatic life and in which it is implicated, a question that has been rendered ever more problematic by the brave and bouncing debates over the nature of Shakespeare's audience, the coloration of his ideological affinities, and the relative weights assumed in his plays by the competing impulses of "subversion," "containment," and "recuperation." Nor have I made this question easier to address by looking away from those moments in Shakespeare where issues of class arise with conspicuous and confrontational directness, as in the violent irruptions of Jack Cade in 2 Henry VI, or, in Coriolanus, where class consciousness appears at once to be a nutrient of the eponymous hero's character and a source of his undoing. Instead, in choosing as the textual foci for my discussion moments that are ostensibly but marginal bits of comic business and where issues of class must at times be teased to the surface, I have also chosen to make the very marginality of these moments a point of inquiry and to raise the possibility that Shakespeare gives voice to the tensions inhabiting contemporary class relations and stages comic challenges to authority only to marginalize them, only to contextualize them as minor, diversionary moments in which the social subordinates are effectively reduced to the harmless, recuperable status of clowns, and in which the issues of class can easily be sublimated and read as metaphors for "larger," more central, and ultimately less socially disruptive issues.

In examining this possibility—and while seeking to evade the Scylla-and-Charybdis-like reductivism of casting all interpretative options as a choice between recuperation and subversion, a binarism Theodore B. Leinwand has recently diagnosed as the pervasive and constricting strategy of new historicist analysis—I would argue that within the dynamics of the exchanges themselves, or what Leinwand might call these "micro-encounters,"⁴ Shakespeare strikes a characteristically canny and playful balance. On the one hand, he pays obeisance to the "higher" laws holding the hierarchies of class intact, while simultaneously putting those obeisances in the mouths of those who use them to deflect commands from those to whom their obedience is due; this, in effect, leaves the prerogatives of social privilege unquestioned, while leaving those who would enforce those prerogatives unpropitiated. On the other hand, to the degree to which these moments do invite us to read them as exemplary, and as reflections of or metaphors for other, more central issues and relationships, their effect is at least gently subversive and admonitory. For with their momentary levelling of intellect and parity of misunderstanding, and in the curious dialectics they enact, wherein the protocols of status are invoked to ensure compliance only to give way to blunt applications of force, they put in comic perspective the claims to authority made when the scenes shift to the main action of their plays and to the struggles for power in the domains of hearth, heart, and state.

Certainly we get a vivid rehearsal of that dialectic in the approximately fifty-line exercise in misunderstanding that marks the entrances of Petruchio and "his man," Grumio, in The Taming of the Shrew. Here Petruchio's simple command, "knock" (1.2.5), elicits from Grumio a "strong" but flawed effort at semantic disambiguation, a "rap" on the responsibilities and concerns of servingmen, and a "knock" at capricious masters, but neither the "knock" nor "rap" at the gate of Hortensio's house it had been intended to produce; while Grumio's display of passive, non-violent non-cooperation elicits from Petruchio, in turn, a threat to teach by example and apply the errant "knock" to Grumio's "pate" instead (1. 12). In a play that so much calls attention to itself as theatrical contrivance,⁵ Grumio's professed inability to take the word "knock" in the sense in which Petruchio intended it, and in which it is most obvious to the audience, has, of course, an undeniable logic and highlights the audience's complicity in the perpetration of this theatrical illusion, since only the audience's own willing suspension of disbelief can put a house onstage and equip it with a "gate" on which to "knock" in the first place.⁶ Yet the transitive construction of "knock me" through which Grumio effectively deconstructs—in fact, "destructs"—Petruchio's command humorously responds to a deeper logic and reveals much about Grumio's vision of the relationship of servingman and master. From Grumio's sanguinary interrogations of "knocks" emerges a binary concept of service fusing devotion and terror, in which the servant's duty is to divert "knocks" from the master or absorb them from him—a professional worldview not out of line with Foucault's definition of "service" in the Renaissance as "a constant, total, massive, nonanalytical, unlimited relation of domination, established in the form of the individual will of the master, his 'caprice.'"⁷ Binding himself, for the record at least, to this notion of service, and justifiably wary of his master's "caprice"—as Petruchio's violence here and later in the play would attest—Grumio permits himself only two options: on the one hand, to take literally Petruchio's command to "knock me here soundly" (1. 8); and, on the other, to disobey that command, "I should knock you first, / And then I know after who comes by the worst" (11. 13-14). With Hegel, Grumio might well have agreed that "the fear of the lord is the beginning of wisdom,"⁸ though Grumio's fear of the lord is represented as, and comically confused with, fearer the lord: "Is there any man has rebus'd your worship?" (1. 7-8).

Hence, no small part of the comedy of this exchange derives from the degree to which Grumio appeals to a highly "subordinate," highly traditional notion of service in order to justify insubordination. In doing so, however, he incarnates the anomalous position "enjoyed" by servants in the social mythography of the times. For despite all the attention paid in Tudor England to assigning the various professions and occupations their respective places in the hierarchy of "estates, degrees, and sorts" and to regulating their wages,⁹ the social identity of the servingman in particular seems often to have eluded neat taxonomies and to have been assessed in patriarchalist terms as an extension of the master or house served. "A Seruing-man," Overbury observes, "Is a creature, which though hee be not drunke, yet is not his owne man."¹⁰ Cast adrift from service and into the flotsam, or "great swarms of idle servingmen," the dis-employed servant in William Harrison's Description of England ranks no higher than the "fourth and last sort of people in England," "profitable to none . . . enemies to their masters, to their friends, and to themselves."¹¹ In service, however, the servingman is idealized, not simply as a valuable employee but as an integral member of the family. Thus J. M., the author of A Health to the Gentlemanly profession of Seruingmen: or, The Seruingmans Comfort, even as he laments the materialism of the age and the decline of hospitality, and acknowledges that modern servants "are for the most part, though not all, of a baser mettali then they were wont to be," nonetheless rhapsodizes about the pre-lapsarian days of service, when the love between a master and his servant "was in maner equall with the Husbandes to the Wyfe, and the Childes to the Parent."¹²

In a sense, then, Grumio's performance in this scene only gives comic expression to contemporary stresses inhering in the servant's occupational role as employee and in his quasi-mythic identity as surrogate family member and extension of his master. Having so internalized the ideology of service and the best interests of his master, Grumio cannot compromise his principles for the mere sake of obeying his master and discharging his duty as an employee; nor, or so he pretends, can he understand why his master would want him to do so. In fact, so thoroughly does he merge his identity with—or confuse it for—his master's, that he even comes at one point to address Petruchio as a master would a truculent or incorrigible servant, complaining that "My master is grown quarrelsome" (1. 13). In turn, when Hortensio, aroused less by any knocks on his gate than by the knocking and shouting taking place at the gate, arrives to "compound the quarrel" and close the fissures that have been opened between Petruchio and the intractable yet indignant Grumio, his peacemaking implicitly pays homage to the ideal of the special, even familial, bond between servant and master, "My old friend Grumio! and my good friend Petruchio!" (11. 20-21), but reassuringly underscores Grumio's place in the relationship by ladling upon him epithets that could easily be bestowed upon an old family collie: "ancient, trusty, pleasant" (1. 47).

Yet focus as we may upon the servant or social inferior as the source and purveyor of confusion and its resulting disorder, what sustains the comedy of impasses like the one between Grumio and Petruchio is the mutual obtuseness of the combatants and the impression they convey that they are not speaking—or not choosing to speak—the same language. And though conventions of interpretation may readily lead us to identify Grumio as the clown figure who torments and teases language out of sense, we may still ask why it is that Petruchio plays so well the part of "straight man," and how it comes about that a character distinguished by his verbal adroitness, or what Grumio later in the scene calls Petruchio's "rope-tricks" (1. 112), cannot manage to talk his way around the obstructions and "rope-tricks" of his own servant. In looking at Petruchio's behavior in this exchange, we find a character whose verbal horizons are as much limited by his status as master as are Grumio's by his position as servant, so that Where Grumio hears in the word "knock" something to be deflected or received from his master, Petruchio can hear in the word only a command he has given, a command to be obeyed; and even as Grumio's vision of service leads him to resist giving the obedience he owes, so Petruchio's insistence upon obedience precludes his gaining the service he so desires, except, perhaps, by force. In turn, even as we chortle at Grumio's overlooking what we take to be the obvious valence of "knock," we cannot overlook Petruchio's inability to imagine that the word could have a meaning other than the one he has intended.

So verbally constricting, in fact, is Petruchio's insistence that Grumio obey him that no form of verbal remonstration occurs to him other than to repeat the command and couple it with an abusive epithet. Hence, having been rebuffed once, he retorts with "Villain, I say, knock me here soundly" (1. 8), a formulation so persuasive that he tries it again, with only minor variation, three lines later. "Through the rhetoric of abuse," Ralph Berry has recently observed, "one sees class absorbed into a moral system,"¹³ evidence of which we find here in Petruchio's apostrophes to Grumio, the villein turned, through the witting collusion of culture and etymology, "villain." Yet Petruchio's need to contextualize Grumio's insubordination in reassuring ways leads him to resort not only to a moral system of reference but to an intellectual one as well. "A senseless villain!" (1. 36) is Petruchio's most fully elaborated assessment of his servant, which he declares immediately before he invokes the ultimate privilege of the aggrieved superior to command the stage: "Sirrah, be gone, or talk not, I advise you" (1. 43). In the social relations sketched in the exchanges we are considering here, the labels of "villain" and "senseless" and their cognates get attached so casually to the uncooperative subordinates that they might well seem synonymous with each other and intrinsic to the status of being a social inferior. And yet, to use the example of Petruchio, the two epithets reflect significant but complementary emotions in the psychology of class differentiations: the convenience of "ideologizing" the disobedience of one's command as a transgression of a larger, moral order, and the need to dismiss as "senseless" anything the superiors' "sense" of their own status renders them unable or unwilling to hear.

Still, to listen to the stresses in the relationship between Petruchio and Grumio is to wonder whether or how they may affect our perception of the central relationship of the play, that of Petruchio and Kate. Surely an audience inured to hearing the prescriptions of gender and the hierarchies of class treated homologously and receptive to the proposition that the bond of the good servant and his master "was in maner equall with the Husbandes to the Wyfe,"¹⁴ would have little difficulty in seeing in Petruchio's master-ful treatment of Grumio a rehearsal of his relationship with Kate, a demonstration of hands-on shrew taming, a sneak preview of the strategy that produces the spectacle of Petruchio Triumphans at the end of the play, exulting in the prospect of "peace . . . and love, and quiet life, / An aweful rule, and right supremacy" (5.2.108-9). Indeed, if encouragement were needed to make this inference, it would come from the parallels and contrasts provided by the Lucentio-Bianca plot, where Lucendo's clear intellectual dependence upon his servant Tranio and his changing places with him might well be taken as harbingers of his ultimate inability to control Bianca.¹⁵

To the extent to which the exchange between Petruchio and Grumio does anticipate the relationship of Petruchio to Kate, however, it italicizes rather as an anti-masque the darkest elements of that relationship, highlighting with coarsened accents the "methods" by which Petruchio "tames" while rendering slightly more precarious the certitude with which he proclaims his final victory. In his insistence upon Grumio's obedience and upon having his words mean only what he takes them to mean, and in his ultimate resort to violence and a demand for silence to enforce his will, we can easily recognize here the Petruchio who will so peremptorily set "all this chat aside" to announce to Kate that, "will you, nill you," she is to be his wife (2.1.268, 271); who will torture Kate into submission; and who will insist that the sun above "shall be moon, or star, or what I list" (4.5.7). At the same time, for the master who would be obeyed, the spectacle of Grumio paying homage to the ideal of service even as he withholds his own service to Petruchio would surely emblematize the dangers of having a subordinate presume to articulate the terms of his, or her, subordinations, even, or perhaps especially, when they are articulated in so fulsome a discourse as Kate's notorious homage to the ideal of wifely service (5.2.136-79). In turn, even as Hortensio arrives to dispel and marginalize the spat between Petruchio and Grumio through the ameliorating paternalist rhetoric of servant-as-trusted-retainer, so we are reminded of the way in which the play is orchestrated to suppress, rather than resolve, the dissonances it evokes in the march to its festive close, where Kate will play the part of but a "shrewder" Grumio, coupling her paean to a husband's "aweful rule" with the capitulation and obedience Grumio's testimony to service had lacked. In sum, even as Kate gives Petruchio the victory denied him in his encounter with Grumio, so the earlier confrontation allows to come to the surface the obsessions and vulnerabilities of "mastery" that the ending of the play would exorcise by concealing.

If in The Taming of the Shrew polarities of class affix themselves to personages with clearly and mutually antithetical places in the social hierarchy, in other plays Shakespeare italicizes these same tendencies towards polarization by having them arise between individuals whose relative positions in society are less well defined. One such exchange occurs near the end of Act 3 in The Merchant of Venice (3.5.27-70) in a dialogue between Lorenzo and Launcelot Gobbo, when these two and Jessica find themselves left in temporary occupancy and custodianship of Belmont by Portia, who, with Nerissa, is secretly on her way to Antonio's trial in Venice. It is a scene the provenance of which has been disputed, and which may owe its very being simply to the practical need to allow Portia and Nerissa time to change into male clothing for their courtroom masquerade.¹⁶ Yet its very marginality reflects that of its three participants, none of whom "belongs" at Belmont, but all of whom have been for the moment accidentally thrown together to form a comic community of assorted lovers, friends, and Christians—and newly begotten Christians—in exile, subsisting on Portia's largesse. Like so much of the dramatic action in this play, this scene is shaped by arguments—albeit presumably good-natured ones. Immediately preceding the less genial argumentation of the climactic trial scene (4.1), Act 3, scene 5, presents all possible variations of argumentative pairings among its participants, opening with a contention already underway between Jessica and Launcelot, blending this with more presumably playful bickering between Launcelot and Lorenzo, and culminating in yet more supposedly playful disputation between Lorenzo and Jessica that goes offstage for dinner and Act 4 only to resume at the outset of Act 5. In its enactment of unresolved argumentation, the scene epitomizes the dialogic pattern informing the rhetorical structure of the entire play, which with consistent skepticism examines moral issues through the prism of dichotomous points of view that become less distinct as the play proceeds and are left notoriously unreconciled.¹⁷ At the same time, in the degree to which the scene exposes the tensions that at once bind and divide its comic community, making use of the evocations of class consciousness to produce those tensions, it glances at issues contested more ill-naturedly in the world of Venice and thus contributes to that erosion of the distinction between the worlds of Venice and Belmont that is central to our experience of the play.

Here, then, I will consider the second of the three dialogues in the scene, which commences with the entrance of Lorenzo just after Launcelot, in what Lawrence Danson has called "a wonderful confusion of carnal matters and spiritual,"¹⁸ has explained to Jessica that she cannot go to heaven since she is a Jewess, but that her conversion to Christianity would only succeed in hurting the "commonwealth" by decreasing the supply, and thus increasing the price, of pork (11. 21-26). Like the exchange between Petruchio and Grumio, the conversation between Lorenzo and Launcelot, or what Horace Howard Furness called "Lorenzo's unpleasant banter with Lancelot [sic],"¹⁹ will reach a comic climax when Launcelot, like Grumio a "rebuser" of language, engages in verbal "confusions" in such a way as to evade Lorenzo's direct command; indeed, like Grumio, Launcelot even invokes at one point a decorum of service in order to withhold service, misconstruing Lorenzo's command to "cover" the table: "Lor. Will you cover then, sir? / Laun. Not so, sir, neither, I know my duty" (11. 53-54). No less pointedly than in the exchange between Petruchio and Grumio, the impasse here reduces the nominal superior to—or reveals him to be—someone so obsessed with exacting obedience that he cannot or will not entertain the notion that the wording of his directive could bear multiple interpretations. When Launcelot quibbles on Lorenzo's successive attempts to get the household to prepare for dinner, the stymied Lorenzo chides Launcelot with,

Yet more quarrelling with occasion! wilt thou show the whole wealth of thy wit in an instant? I pray thee understand a plain man in his plain meaning: go to thy fellows, bid them cover the table, serve in the meat, and we will come in to dinner.

(11. 55-60)

Unlike the exchange between Petruchio and Grumio, however, where disobedience was the ironic by-product of Grumio's affirmation of social distinctions, here Launcelot's near disobedience serves very much to render those distinctions problematic. On the one hand, his disobedience reminds us of the fragility of Lorenzo's claim to authority in a household where, after all, he is only the designated, temporary master—and "master" over Launcelot, who, after all, is not his servant; on the other hand, Launcelot's resistance exposes the tenacity of the need to affirm social distinctions when their features have been blurred. Indeed, in this exchange the demand for obedience seems to arise less as something that social distinctions are to ensure than as something designed to demonstrate and ensure social distinctions, less a desired end than a means to an end. Lorenzo only issues his first command to Launcelot when Launcelot proves himself more than Lorenzo's equal at parrying verbal thrusts:

Lor. . . . the Moor is with child by you, Launcelot.

Laun. It is much that the Moor should be more than reason; but if she be less than an honest woman, she is indeed more than I took her for.

(11. 39-42)

This induces Lorenzo to resort not only to commands, which change the subject, but also to a variation on the frustrated superior's tactic of dismissing as senseless anything the sense of which he cannot see, while physically dismissing the subordinate in order to put him and his senselessness out of sight and earshot:

How every fool can play upon the word! I think the best grace of wit will shortly turn into silence, and discourse grow commendable in none only but parrots. Go in, sirrah, bid them prepare for dinner.

(11. 43-47)

Unable to tolerate the license to which Launcelot's status in the play as "fool" or "clown" conventionally entitles him, Lorenzo italicizes Launcelot's identity as servingman and in this way attempts to make Launcelot more responsive to commands.

In the course of this exchange, the limits to the paternalistic idealization of the servant as part of an extended family are sharply defined. At the outset of the scene, that idealization might seem to be quite in place, with Launcelot engaged in what we take—or hope—to be merry banter with the erstwhile daughter of his erstwhile master. When Lorenzo enters and receives the report of Launcelot's supply-demand spirituality—a conflation of things temporal and spiritual obviously subversive in this play in the degree to which it effaces the distinction between Christian and Jew—his response is not to counter what Launcelot has said but to marginalize Launcelot himself by putting him in his place, his class, impugning the propriety not simply of Launcelot's sexual conduct but also of his choice of company. With a non sequitur that has struck commentators as "topical"—and, therefore, elusive—Lorenzo deflects Launcelot's barb that, in having Jessica convert to Christianity, Lorenzo is hurting the commonwealth with the taunt:

I shall answer that better to the commonwealth than you can the getting up of the Negro's belly; the Moor is with child by you, Launcelot.

(11. 37-39)²⁰

As the exchange develops, any hint of cordial jocularity one might have been tempted to posit in Lorenzo's opening greeting to Launcelot ("I shall grow jealious of you shortly, Launcelot, if you thus get my wife into corners" [11. 29-30]) is dispelled by the inflections of social differentiation and distancing, inflections we hear even in Lorenzo's choice of second-person pronouns, with the more formal, more impersonal "you" being displaced by the more intimate and therefore more presumptuous and patronizing "thee" and "thy."²¹ From this exchange Launcelot takes his leave, perfunctorily submissive but intoning his own variation on the "caprice" of masters:

For the table, sir, it shall be serv'd in; for the meat, sir, it shall be cover'd; for your coming in to dinner, sir, why, let it be as humors and conceits shall govern.

(11. 61-64)

In a play that pays so much attention to culturally canonized distinctions between Christians and Jews, the scene brings to the fore a sense of the invidious, economically constituted distinctions that may exist among and between Christians, while at the same time illustrating the paradoxically demeaning effect of asserting one's place in a social hierarchy. In the liminal world of courtships and elopements, after all, Lorenzo had hitherto passed as merely one more prodigally impecunious, because prodigally romantic, Christian lover, like Bassanio, vaguely "noble," perhaps, but on the whole curiously unaccountable to class in his very impecuniousness. From the moment Portia entrusts "into [his] hands / The husbandry and manage" of her household (3.4.24-25), Lorenzo is put into "service," and his "class" seems to become circumscribed by the very process that defines and enfranchises his authority. From the belittling with which he attempts to subordinate Launcelot, it is Lorenzo who emerges diminished, sounding very much like someone who with more practice could "grow" to become Malvolio, an officious steward and superior among inferiors.²²

Again, however, even as we listen to these exchanges for their interrogation of the psychology of class, we cannot dispel the sense that to listen to them at all is to give them a voice their plays would invite us to ignore or to treat proleptically and with an ear for the bigger issues the more important dialogues and relationships to come. If such a thought attends our experience of comically digressive moments within comic plays, as in exchanges between Petruchio and Grumio and between Lorenzo and Launcelot, all the more does it color our response to comic moments at the outset of tragic plays, as in the third and last case I will consider, the exchange at the opening of Julius Caesar between the tribunes Flavius and Murellus and, as the stage directions call them, "certain Commoners" bent upon taking a "holiday to see Caesar, and to rejoice in his triumph" (1.1.30-31). Here, our sense of the marginality of the exchange is actuated by its apparent incongruity, and even as we may derive pleasure from the comic impasse by which the exchange is sustained, our expectations as spectators awaiting The Tragedy of Julius Caesar are apt to lead us to want to get on with the "main" business of the play, and apt to bring us into a curious if unwitting alliance with the virulently anti-plebeian tribunes, who in Shakespeare's adaptation of his source emerge as far more anti-populist than they are in North's Plutarch and than they are likely to have been historically,²³ and who, from the first line of the play, attempt to sweep the "commoners" from the stage: "Hence! home, you idle creatures, get you home!" So with at least one eye cast towards what we take to be the significant action to come, we may well feel invited either to look past the low-comic exchange between the commoners and tribunes or to find ways in which to trope it and turn it into a metaphor for the main concerns of the play. And again, we hear our own impulses co-opted and echoed by Murellus, who puts the commoners in tropic perspective by reifying them as "You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things" (1. 35), and by turning them into an occasion for an aureate eulogy on the slain Pompey and a meditation on the fleetingness of fame (11. 32-55).²⁴

To look at, however, and not merely past the exchange between the tribunes and commoners in this opening scene is to put Murellus' speech itself in perspective as one more example of the fury of a superior—or, perhaps, would-be superior²⁵ —scorned, and to see it as another case in which the distinctions of class get invoked as a means of coping with and anatomizing behavior deemed objectionable. As in the other two instances we have examined, the attempt by the tribunes here to assert authority only prolongs the very conduct they would suppress, thus necessitating and sanctioning an ever more forcible "pulling of rank." So it is that Flavius undermines his opening attempt to send the commoners "home" by coupling it with the demand, "what trade art thou" (1. 5)—something of a redundancy since, even with their failure to dress appropriately and wear "the sign / Of [their] profession" (11. 4-5), Flavius has already inferred that they are "mechanical" (1. 3); moreover, it is a question that the commoners will, in turn, spend the better part of the next thirty lines not answering to the tribunes' satisfaction, thereby keeping themselves onstage a bit longer than Flavius had initially intended. As it unfolds, the comic misprision on display here offers yet another tableau of superiors who are unable to "read" those they would presume to command and thereby render inferior, and who in the very attempt to assert their power and manipulate the commoners give them conflicting and tactically questionable signals that, instead of dispersing and neutralizing the commoners, will reconstitute them as a class and, as subsequent events show, a force to be reckoned with. Hence, no sooner has Murellus finished his harangue condemning the Caesar-worshipping commoners for having forgotten their erstwhile hero, Pompey, than Flavius attempts to play upon what he would have them believe is their guilt by dispersing them—only, curiously, to order them, and all of their "sort," to regather en masse:

Flav. Go, go, good countrymen, and for this fault
Assemble all the poor men of your sort;
Draw them to Tiber banks, and weep your tears
Into the channel, till the lowest stream
Do kiss the most exalted shores of all.

(11. 56-60)

For Granville-Barker, as for Flavius, the sight of the commoners vanishing, "tongue-tied in their guiltiness" (1. 62), is evidence of their servility, a sign that "they are easily persuaded now, controlled and brought to silence."²⁶ And yet when we recall that it is not the commoners but Flavius and Murellus who will "vanish" shortly and be, as Casca informs us, "put to silence" (1.2.286), Granville-Barker's gloss acquires an ironic resonance, and we get our first hint in the play of how elusive that control is, and how limited even persuasive power may prove.

To the extent to which this opening scene bears adumbrations of later, greater things, we are likely to think first, of course, of that most "memorable scene" in the Forum (3.2) in which "the Plebeians" will once again listen to long speeches by their "betters" seeking by persuasion to subdue and control them. Even more resonantly, however, does the comic misprision that entertains us at the start of Julius Caesar reverberate and horrify us in what Granville-Barker calls "the devastation of the third act's end,"²⁷ where, in a violent inversion of the opening scene, the plebeians turn the tribunes' earlier interrogatories into a brutally peremptory round of "twenty questions" directed at Cinna the poet (3.3.5-12). And if in the opening scene the inability, or disinclination, of the commoners to discern the sense of the tribunes' questions had enabled them to deflect the tribunes' demands, here in 3.3 that same "mis-constructive" power the play of language warrants is transmogrified, permitting the plebeians not to distinguish between Cinna the poet and Cinna the conspirator—much to the former's chagrin and personal inconvenience: "It is no matter, his name's Cinna. Pluck but his name out of his heart, and turn him going" (11. 33-34).

Here, to be sure, it could be argued that the destructive force this scene dramatizes, serving most obviously to effect another shift in power in a play that is very much about the pendular character of power, functions principally as "exhibit A" of the "mischief set "afoot" by Mark Antony by the close of the preceding scene in the Forum (3.2.259-60), and as testimony both to the manipulative and demagogic powers of Antony's rhetoric, and, thus, to Antony's control and growing ascendancy. Yet if Antony has an insight into power that Brutus, most notably, lacks, it may lie in his momentary acknowledgement that the popular "mischief he unleashes and apostrophizes is ultimately beyond anyone's control: "Take thou what course thou wilt!" (1. 260). In turn, the genuine wantonness of the ensuing violence, epitomized in the plebeians' murderously "playful" dissociation of language from reference, and in the plucking of names from hearts, is admonitory on several counts. Underscoring both the power and caprice of language, it demonstrates the precarious life expectancy of any authority won by appeals to a word like "obedience," and it offers a sober assessment of the chance any leader—or demagogue—would have of remaining atop the wave he rides to power. More interestingly, the irony through which the quibbling power of language is turned destructively against none other than a poet conveys a warning—Shakespeare's disquieting admonition to himself, perhaps, and to other writers—of the perils that lie in the very "sort" of marginalization in which Julius Caesar would appear at the outset to engage, with its reduction of the divisions of class to harmless wordplays and diverting quibbles of the kind that mark the opening exchange between the commoners and the tribunes.

At the same time, then, the confusions on which the humor of the opening scene depends may be of special interest in the degree to which such confusions metonymize a dual focus in the play and reflect not simply the upheavals and social strains in ancient Rome but also stresses more contemporary and local. Indeed, from the opening words of Flavius to the commoners, and, therefore, well before the oft-noted clock has anachronistically struck (2.1.192-93), the play calls attention to its temporal distancing from the events it represents by having the tribunes and commoners speak to, and through, each other across a temporal and cultural divide, a divide that, even as it reminds us that this is an Elizabethan glimpse at ancient Rome, serves also to italicize certain social taxonomies and mythologies of Elizabethan England. Whatever, for example, Shakespeare's audience may have presumed about sartorial protocols and social stratification in ancient Rome, it is unlikely that they could have listened to Flavius and Murellus' insinuation that the commoners had transgressed i)y divesting themselves of the uniforms appropriate to their station and trade without being reminded of contemporary Elizabethan sumptuary prescriptions linking attire to rank.²⁸ Nor would Flavius and Murellus' attempts to disperse the commoners have seemed unfamiliar to an audience who had, as we know, been repeatedly admonished by the Tudor state about the dangers posed—and the penalties incurred—by idling itinerants and "masterless men."²⁹

In turn, much of the "logic" and humor of the colloquy between the tribunes and the Cobbler underscores this dual temporal perspective and turns temporal dissonance into the stuff of comic cognitive dissonance. So it is that the Cobbler repeatedly deflects and frustrates the interrogation of the tribunes by giving them punning answers that would have made far more "sense" to the Christian Elizabethan audience than to a pair of pagan Roman tribunes, who would not, presumably, have been able to make total sense of, or catch the joke in, the Cobbler's describing himself as, "sir, a mender of bad soles" (1.1.13). In his reiterated play on his profession as "mender," the Cobbler assumes a stance of comic moral authority and irreproachability similar to what the characterist Overbury would grant to the Tinker, whose "conuersation," Overbury maintains, "is unreproueable; for he is euer mending."³⁰ Not being "in" on the joke, and not having had the benefit of sketches like Overbury's, the Roman tribunes find the Cobbler's discourse quite "reproueable," and to the extent to which they find it at all comprehensible, they, like their counterparts in the other exchanges we have considered, deem insubordinate his appeal to a power at once spiritual and thus different from, higher than, and therefore, unaccountable to theirs: "What mean'st thou by that? Mend me, thou saucy fellow?" (1. 18).

In fact, there is a kind of insubordination in the spectacle of the jocular Cobbler lecturing his social betters on the moral excellencies of his craft, an insubordination of a genial sort that Shakespeare's audience might well have associated with what Laura Stevenson has described as the figure of the "gentle craftsman,"³¹ a figure popularized and incarnated in Thomas Deloney's and Thomas Dekker's representation of that "mad shoemaker of Tower Street" and eventual "mad lord mayor" and confidant of kings, Simon Eyre. As Stevenson's analysis suggests, the myth of the "gentle craftsman," while it ostensibly celebrated a bourgeois, egalitarian ideal epitomized in the figure of the wise, virtuous, and—most important—prosperous Eyre, may, in fact, have served a recuperative purpose by representing bourgeois aspirations as something that could be harmoniously reconciled with, and under, a beneficently paternalistic order, an order personified in Henry V, whose most famous victory, after all, had been fought and won on the feast of the patron saint of shoemakers.³²

In the opening of Julius Caesar, in a scenario that might well be subtitled "what really happens when shoemakers go on holiday," it seems that no such reconciliation is to be entertained, and that the myth of the "gentle craftsman" is evoked only to be peremptorily rejected by the representatives of legal authority—evoked, that is, just enough to be revealed as mere myth. Indeed, evoked and dispatched so summarily as to suggest that within the world of the play, at least, the division between higher and lower "sorts," between the "people" and those in authority, is something not to be bridged. And if, finally, it might be argued that it is only within the Roman world represented in this dramatic fiction that this yawning gap between the classes exists, the effect of the exchange between the commoners and the tribunes, like the exchanges we have examined in The Taming of the Shrew and The Merchant of Venice, is very much to leave unaffirmed the contemporary mystifications of the social order of Shakespeare's England to which it alludes, while giving voice to the discordancies of class those mystifications would suppress.

Notes

¹ All references to Shakespeare's plays are contained within the text and are from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), with Evans's square brackets removed.

² Keith Wrightson, "Estates, Degrees and Sorts in Tudor and Stuart England," History Today, 37 (1987), 17-22; Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost further explored (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1965), pp. 1-52. Admittedly, in any discussion of the term there lurks the disquieting thought that the very notion of "class"—especially if one conceives of it as an invention of Marxist economic theory—may be of debatable relevance to the discussion of Shakespeare's plays, which are literally "classless" in their total avoidance of the word. Yet, as Wrightson for one argues, though the operant vocabulary of social taxonomy in the Renaissance may have appropriated the terminology of medieval "estates," "degrees," and "sorts," the employment of these terms in Renaissance discourse may, in fact, have had more in common with the modern use of class to differentiate social caste and status group than with medieval usage. See Wrightson, p. 18. Indeed, in his De Republica Anglorum: The maner of Government of policie of the Realme of England (London: Henrie Midleton, 1584), Thomas Smyth even uses the terms interchangeably when, for example, he comes to describe "[t]he fourth sort or classe amongest us" (p. 33).

³ In fact the "confusions" these encounters perpetrate might be read merely as comedic representations of the chaos that Elizabethans were told would result if the bonds that held society together were sundered through disobedience. Hence, in a classic formulation, the anonymous author of the Homily on Obedience (1559) asserts the instrumental role of obedience in maintaining order in "[e]verye degre of people in theyr vocation, callyng, and office" and lands hard on Peter's admonition: "Servauntes obeye your Maistres with feare, not onely if they be good and jentle, but also if they be frowarde." See "An exhortation, concerning good order and obedience, to rulers and Magistrates" in Elizabethan Backgrounds: Historical Documents of the Age of Elizabeth I, ed. Arthur F. Kinney (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1975), pp. 44-70, esp. pp. 60, 64.

⁴ "Negotiation and New Historicism," PMLA, 105 (1990), 477-90, esp. pp. 477-79.

⁵ Most obviously, of course, by means of the fiction of the Induction, which contextualizes Taming as an entertainment and diversion for Sly, but also by means of the introductory speeches by Lucendo (1.1.1-24) and Petruchio (1.2.1-5), which, as successive announcements of where the scene of the play is laid, have the effect of calling attention to the scene as scene, as a placename the audience is to agree to accept as Padua.

⁶ The willingness of that suspension is underscored by Sir Philip Sidney in his Defence of Poesie when he asks, rhetorically, "What childe is there that coming to a play, and seeing Thebes written in great letters upon an old doore, doth beleeve that it is Thebes?" See The Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, 4 vols., ed. Albert Feuillerat (1912; rpt. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1968), Vol. 3, p. 29.

⁷ Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House, 1979), p. 137.

⁸ G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie (New York: Harper and Row, 1967). The passage in which this sentence appears reads,

. . . this bondsman's consciousness is not only this total dissolution in a general way; in serving and toiling the bondsman actually carries this out. By serving he cancels in every particular aspect his dependence on and attachment to natural existence, and by his work removes this existence away.

The feeling of absolute power, however, realized both in general and in the particular form of service, is only dissolution implicitly; and albeit the fear of the lord is the beginning of wisdom, consciousness is not therein aware of being self-existent. Through work and labour, however, this consciousness of the bondsman comes to itself, (p. 238)

⁹ See Tudor Royal Proclamations, ed. Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin, 3 vols. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1964-69), Vols. 2, 3, passim.

¹⁰ Sir Thomas Overbury, The "Conceited News" of Sir Thomas Overbury And His Friends, ed. James E. Savage (Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1968), p. 95.

¹¹ William Harrison, The Description of England (1577), ed. George Edelen (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1968), p. 119.

¹² fols. H4^v, C2^v (London: W. W., 1598). Clearly, the Shakespearean embodiment of the kind of servant and service J. M. finds conspicuous in their absence is Old Adam of As You Like It, who carries fidelity to the ideal of service to the master to the extreme of bestowing all of the "thrifty hire" he had saved during his years of serving Sir Rowland de Boys upon Sir Rowland's fugitive son, Orlando (2.3.38-55), and to whom Orlando offers the apostrophe, "How well in thee appears / The constant service of the antique world" (11. 56-57).

¹³Shakespeare And Social Class (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1988), p. xv.

¹⁴ J. M, fol. ; C2^v consider also the comments on the husband's rights over his wife in Smyth's De Republica Anglorum (cited in n. 2, above), pp. 102-3.

¹⁵ We are invited to read the parallels and contrasts between the relationships of Lucentio and Tranio, on the one hand, and Petruchio and Grumio, on the other, from the opening two scenes of Act 1, where the two relationships are juxtaposed and present themselves, first, as specimens of two distinct models of comic theater grafted from two distinct sources, and, in turn, as two distinct versions of relations between master and servant.

¹⁶ See, for example, the notes on this scene in The Cambridge Merchant of Venice, ed. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and J. Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1926), pp. 107-8, where it is argued that Act 3, scene 5, was written by someone other than Shakespeare. In The Arden Merchant of Venice, ed. John Russell Brown (London: Methuen, 1955), the editor acknowledges that "the authenticity of this scene has been doubted," but he notes that it "contains Shakespearian phrases and ideas" and "also marks the passage of time" (p. 98).

¹⁷ In no treatment of the play are its recurrent moments of irresolution more adroitly mapped than in Norman Rabkin, "Meaning and The Merchant of Venice" in Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1981), esp. pp. 4-32.

¹⁸The Harmonies of The Merchant of Venice (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1978), p. 97.

¹⁹ Cited in Quiller-Couch and Wilson, p. 107.

²⁰ See Quiller-Couch and Wilson, pp. 107-8; Brown, p. 99; and The New Cambridge Merchant of Venice, ed. M. M. Mahood (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987), p. 132.

²¹ Berry (cited in n. 13, above), pp. xvi-xvii.

²² Indeed, Lorenzo's social classification undergoes a definition comparable to the social identification of Gratiano. For Berry, Gratiano "can adequately be characterized as a determined social climber, intent on getting an invitation to the great house and exploiting what must seem to Nerissa his sexual charm so as to remain there" (pp. 46-47). Yet, rather like Lorenzo, Gratiano's social identity paradoxically shrinks as it gains definition from his efforts to enhance it, conveying the impression in his climbing of someone who has a long distance to "climb from."

²³ In Plutarch, after all, Murellus and Flavius are denoted by their full title, Tribunes of the People ("Tribuni plebis "), a reminder that tribunes were representatives of the plebeian class, affiliated with plebeian families either by blood or adoption, and chosen by the plebeians. In constructing his opening scene, Shakespeare pits Murellus and Flavius against the "commoners" who are on holiday "to rejoice" in Caesar's "triumph," whereas in Plutarch "the people" initially side with Murellus and Flavius in pulling down the images of Caesar and arresting those who had promoted the idea of Caesar's kingship. See Sir Thomas North, Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans Englished by Sir Thomas North in The Tudor Translations, 12 vols., ed. W. E. Henley (1896; rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1967), Vol. 5, pp. 62-63; also, Sir Paul Harvey, comp. and ed., The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937), pp. 436-37; and Catherine B. Avery, ed., The New Century Classical Handbook (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1962), p. 1113.

²⁴ So it is, for example, that Granville-Barker, affirming inadvertently but unquestioningly the italicizing of social distinctions through differences in rhetorical style, contrasts what he calls the "first full-bodied speech" (my emphasis) in the play, the apostrophe by Murellus on Pompey (32 ff.) to "the chattering prose of the cobbler," which Murellus' speech peremptorily displaces. See Harley Granville-Barker, Prefaces to Shakespeare, 5 vols. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1927-48), Vol. 2, p. 383.

²⁵ Again, though tribunes were legally empowered to be superiors among the class they represented, Shakespeare inflects the speech of Murellus in particular with the kind of anti-popular sentiment and class superiority Plutarch assigns to Cassius when he attempts to persuade Brutus that it is not "cobblers, tapsters, or suchlike base mechanical people" who have been urging Brutus to take actions against Caesar but "the noblest men and best citizens that do it." See North's Plutarch, Vol. 6, p. 191.

²⁶ p. 383.

²⁷ p. 383.

²⁸ Consider the minutely detailed and socially comprehensive royal decree of 6 July 1597, "Enforcing Statutes and Proclamations of Apparel" in Tudor Royal Proclamations (cited in n. 9, above), Vol. 3, pp. 174-79.

²⁹ See the royal decree of 14 December 1576, "Enforcing Statutes against Vagabonds," ordinances on "masterless men" in Tudor Royal Proclamations, Vol. 2, pp. 415-16, and that of 24 September 1590, "Enforcing Curfew for Apprentices" in Tudor Royal Proclamations, Vol. 3, pp. 60-61.

³⁰ Overbury (cited in n. 10, above), p. 124.

³¹Praise and Paradox: Merchants and Craftsmen in Elizabethan Popular Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984), pp. 161-213.

³² Hence, though, as Stevenson, pp. 192-93, argues, a work like Dekker's The Shoemakers' Holiday inculcates bourgeois virtues, it does so while leaving distinctions of class and the inherent supremacy of monarchs unchallenged. Thus, when near the end of The Shoemakers' Holiday King Henry intervenes to force Sir Roger Otley, the bourgeois Lord Mayor of London, and the aristocratic Sir Hugh Lacy to acquiesce in the marriage of Lacy's son and Otley's daughter, the event is treated less as an erosion of class distinctions than as testimony to the democratizing power of love and royal fìat, as evidence of the first of which Henry points to the willingness of the young Lacy to "stoop / To bare necessity" and don the guise of a shoemaker to woo his beloved (5.5.102-15). See Thomas Dekker: The Dramatic Works, 4 vols., ed. Fredson Bowers (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1953-61), Vol. 1, pp. 86-87.