To paraphrase a statement made about K. in The Trial, I make it a point not to learn from experience: this time, we will again combine three plays into one post,
not to preserve any sort of continuity but more simply to hide the fact that I
don’t have much to say about them. These plays constitute some of Shakespeare’s
earlier comedies (i.e., not the "big four"), and while I might have interesting observations if I were
more of a poet, as this was the time when he really honed his technique, there
isn’t as much philosophical heft to these plays, at least in the way that
interests me. Of today’s plays, Midsummer
has the most of what I would consider “Shakespearean”: long passages pregnant with meaning, characters
who seem out of place in their world, metafictional aspects. Taming
lacks most of these features, as does Merchant.
Additionally, discussions around Taming and Merchant
usually focus on political rather than literary or philosophical matters. Critics make attempts to save
Shakespeare from being a sexist or an anti-Semite, hoping that he was as
forward-thinking in his politics as he was in his art. Whether or not they are
right, the discussions are pretty uninteresting (although we will touch briefly
on that discussion in relation to Taming).
In the sections below, we’ll take the plays one at a time,
an approach that will hopefully prove more fruitful than our Henriad
hodgepodge.
Taming of the Shrew
One undeniably “Shakespearean” feature of Taming is the play-within-a-play, which
turns out to essentially be the entire play. In the opening, the vagrant Christopher Sly is duped into
thinking he is an aristocrat, and the story of Katherine’s taming is told for
his entertainment. We notice that this framing device is very similar to
Arabian nights, and not only because of the story-within-a-story: one of the
people duping him is a page pretending to be his wife, and Sly tries to have
sex with him; the page convinces him to watch a play instead. Interestingly, we
never return to Sly’s story. He gets a couple lines after the story begins, in
act I, but then he’s gone. As far as I can tell, there’s no good explanation
for his disappearance, and I'd rather not waste time speculating.
The story itself is well-known in the sense that everyone
remembers what the title promises: a shrew, Katherine, is tamed by a man,
Petruchio. What’s so great about Shakespeare, though, is that the story is
considerably more complicated than this. I’m not going to try to save him from
charges of sexism, because that seems even more useless than speculating about
Sly, but it is worth noting that his presentation of the “taming” is more
subversive than it seems at first blush. As the introduction notes, for all
Katherine’s famous temper, “She turns out to be remarkably pliable, doing exactly as
her father… wish[es] her to do. Her younger sister, Bianca, on the surface all
sweetness and good nature, is in fact the willful one, getting what she wants
by pretending to be pliable. In a sense the taming of Katherine consists of
turning her into Bianca—revealing to Katherine that she can get what she wants
out of her husband by simply telling him what he wants to hear.”
And indeed she does, proving herself to be a "better" wife than Bianca and the weird prostitute or whatever that Hortensio brings, and along the way convincing Petruchio that she has been tamed.
Speaking of the taming, the descriptions of Katherine’s
ordeal at Petruchio’s hands vary in intensity. The introduction says that
Katherine “is wooed by bullying, invective, and physical mistreatment” and
elsewhere accusations of starvation and torture are levied as well. In a way,
these characterizations are true—Katherine does complain at one point about
Petruchio not letting her eat—but that doesn’t stop them from being misleading.
In casting Katherine as traumatized and helpless, we miss two key
points. The first is that Petruchio, for all his torments, is giving her a
taste of her own medicine: Petruchio “kills her in her own humour.”
Of course the notions of taming and domestication are
abhorrent to us now, but viewing them simply as despicable distracts us from
the second point, namely that Katherine’s wooing is the complement of Bianca’s.
The introduction notes that while Katherine is wooed through mistreatment,
Bianca is wooed “by impersonation, rhetoric, and charm,” and that “the two
suitors’ methods have more in common than appears on the surface” as both
depend on “misrepresentation, costume, and playacting.” Though the content is
disturbing, the doubling, the shifting of offices, the subversion of expectations, is all very poetic. In that
regard, Taming is a nice play.
(Besides, the “physical mistreatment” seems funnier than critics make it out to
be; there are worse atrocities in Married…
with Children.)
- Tranio to Lucentio on why to study: “Only, good master, while we do admire / This virtue and this moral discipline, / Let’s be no stoics nor no stocks, I pray, / Or so devote to Aristotle’s checks / As Ovid be an outcast quite adjured. / Balk logic with acquaintance that you have / And practice rhetoric in your common talk. / Music and poesy use to quicken you. / The mathematics and metaphysics, / Fall to them as you find your stomach serves you. / No profit grows where is no pleasure ta’en. / In brief, sir, study what you must affect [like].”
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Midsummer, one of Shakespeare’s few original creations, was
written around the time of Richard II,
and to me, the two plays bear a good deal of resemblance to one another. For
one thing, they both deal with big questions: Richard, about the relationship
between power and mortality, Midsummer, about the boundary between reality
and fantasy. Moreover, they address these questions with an intellectual seriousness that adds great enjoyment to the plays. As the introduction puts
it, the play “marks the beginning of [Shakespeare’s] artistic maturity.”
At issue in the play, as we noted, is the relationship
between reality and fantasy: “The Athenian court, where the action begins, is
associated with the law, with reason…the wood outside Athens…is the realm of
magic.” Yet thinking in such terms is detrimental to an understanding of the
play, which emphasizes the fluidity and interdependency of the two: for all the
incursions the fairy-world makes on the “real” world, the fairies are not all-powerful
guardians of another realm, but fallible beings that have close cousins in
Athens. Think of the domestic squabbling between Titania and Oberon vs Theseus
and Hippolyta; think of the way Titania falls for Puck’s spell just as Lysander
does.
Where the relationship between of reality and fantasy figures in is rather
in the stubbornness of the humans, who, save for Bottom, have no knowledge of
the fairy world; though we get the feeling that some characters—Hippolyta,
notably—are amenable to the existence of such a world, others, like Theseus,
are far too dull for such knowledge. In addition, the young
lovers are just as guilty of privileging reality over fantasy. When Lysander wakes up loving Helena instead of Hermia, he says, “The will of man is by his reason swayed / And reason says you are the worthier maid.” Though the fairies
are the cause of “those twists that the lovers attribute to logic[,] their efforts to
rationalize their changing affections ironically expose the inadequacy of reason
to explain much human perplexity.”
The mortals are not the only dull ones. Oberon, who
literally has a means of making people fall in love, rebukes Puck after he
makes a mistake, saying he “laid the love juice on some true love’s sight.” Bloom notes, though, that the youths lack such personality that they must be “a Shakespearean
irony that suggests the arbitrariness of young love, from the perspective of
everyone except the lover.” Though Oberon's sentiment is heartwarming, we haven't seen much to suggest that the love between any of these crazy kids is "true." Puck, by the way, sounds an awful lot like Theseus when he says,
Returning to the idea of love, what are we to make of this play's attitude toward love? We have noted the seeming randomness of it. When Demetrius
says he “will not know what all but he do know,” namely that he loves Hermia
over Helena, we scoff a little; when Lysander says to Helena “when I vow, I
weep; and vows so born, / In their nativity all truth appears. / How can these
things in me seem scorn to you, / Bearing the barge of faith to prove them
true?” we may pause before we dismiss it; yet when Demetrius says to Lysander
“disparage not the faith thou dost not know,” who can laugh? For all the
arbitrariness that love seems to take on, we must not dismiss as Theseus does
its importance and reality. Hermia says to Theseus, “I would [Theseus] looked
but with [Hermia’s] eyes,” to which her father responds, “rather your eyes
must with his judgment look.”
Shakespeare convinces us easily that there is
little factual basis to any of the claims of love in the play;
he could’ve accomplished it even just by depicting Titania in love with Bottom
as an Ass (there are so many double entendres there). Yet having been guided
away from Scylla, we must not content ourselves in sailing into Charybdis, for
to dismiss claims of love because we see no basis for them is to be dull like Theseus. The love we see on display may not be true, and it may be as random as Bloom says. But who can deny the reality of a love that speaks these words: “Things base and vile,
holding not quantity, / Love can transpose to form and dignity. / Love looks not
with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is winged cupid painted
blind. / Nor hath Love’s mind of any judgment taste: / Wings, and no eyes, figure
unheedy haste. / And therefore is Love said to be a child, / Because in choice
he is so oft beguiled.” You can thank plain, boring Helena for that number.
We haven’t spoken yet of Bottom and the players. Much is
made of Bottom being the only character who communicates with the fairies as
well as the mortals, and indeed, his part is symbolic: I mean, he literally
says “the wall is down that parted their fathers.” He might as well have ripped
the curtain in the temple.
He and the players worry about
the line between fantasy and reality, whether fair ladies will take the clothes
of a lion to be an actual lion, which, by the way, is another paradox the play
presents: the lion is both real and fake, just like love. In its fantasy,
it exists in the world of fairies; in its admission of playacting, it is
“practically a parody of Theseus’s view of reality,” as Northrop Frye puts it,
and indeed, Theseus does enjoy it: “The best in this kind are but shadows; and the
worst are no worse, if imagination amend them.”
The lighthearted fancies of Midsummer are not to last,
though. Frye continues: “When we come to King
Lear, we shall suspect that it takes a madman to see into the heart of
tragedy, and perhaps it takes a fool or clown, who habitually breathes the
atmosphere of absurdity and paradox, to see into the heart of comedy.” Indeed,
another critic, Meredith Skura, argues similarly: “The affection and indulgence
with which Shakespeare depicts Bottom will turn to self-loathing in the
tragedies, where the player merely struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
where imagination is self-annihilating, and where the world is so dark that
illusion is always deceptive and usually fatal.”
Stray Observations
- Theseus’s great pedantry: “More strange than true. I never may believe / These antique fables nor these fairy toys. / Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, / Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend / More than cool reason ever comprehends. / The lunatic, the lover, and the poet / Are of imagination all compact. / One sees more devils than vast hell can hold: / That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic / Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt. / The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, / Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, / And as imagination bodies forth / The form of things unknown, the poet’s pen / Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name. / Such tricks hath strong imagination / That, if it would but apprehend some joy, / It comprehends some bringer of that joy; / Or in the night, imagining some fear, / How easy is a bush supposed a bear.”
- A thought from Northrop Frye related to the above quote: “What the poet apprehends are moods or emotions, like joy, and what he uses for comprehension is some story of character to account for the emotion.”
Merchant of Venice
Merchant was a
very weird play to me. In some ways, it has rather traditional features of
Shakespeare: play-acting, a brilliant female lead, anti-Semitism (wait, nevermind). In other
ways, however, it feels so little like what we expect of Shakespeare. For
example, Harold Bloom notes that Shakespeare generally dislikes plots in which
young people get the better of old people, which was a common theme in his day
(as in ours); yet that is what happens here. For another, the plot is extremely
conventional. There are few twists, few subplots, few hidden motives; everyone
seems to act exactly the way they are expected to. Which doesn’t make the play
bad by any means, but it does make it a little boring.
Which is unfortunate, because it had a very promising opening.
Portia and Nerissa are two fantastic characters, and their banter at the
beginning is wonderful. Consider this speech of Portia’s:
“If to
do were easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and
poor men’s cottages princes’ palaces. It is a good divine that follows his own
instructions; I can easier teach twenty what were good to be done than to be
one of the twenty to follow mine own teaching. The brain may devise laws for
the blood, but a hot temper leaps o’er a cold decree; such a hare is madness
the youth—to skip o’er the meshes of good counsel the cripple. But this
reasoning is not in the fashion to choose me a husband.”
Bloom puts a high premium on the “liveliness” of Shakespeare’s characters, and
he gives Rosalind the highest place among the heroines. If I had a vote, it
would be for Portia, but perhaps only the Portia of the first act.
And…
yeah. That’s about all I have to say for Merchant. It was a pretty entertaining
play, with some reprehensible anti-Semitism, but like I said for Taming,
there’s no reason to either condemn Shakespeare or save him from our 21st
century maligning. (Plus, everyone addressing Shylock as “Jew” made me think of Borat, so that’s pretty funny.)
Stray Observations
- Gratiano: “You have too much respect upon the world; / They lose it that do buy it with much care.”
- Gratiano: “All things that are / Are with more spirit chased than enjoyed.”
- Antonio: “You cannot better be employed, Bassanio, / Than to live still, and write mine epitaph.”
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