' the dark hotise and the detested wife:" Sex, Mamrge and the Dissolution of Comedy in Shrikesl>errels Pmblern Hays

Dianne Fagan Department of English

McGi 11 University, Montréal June, 1997

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfilment of the degree Master of Arts.

Q Dianne Sharon Fagan 1997

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Table of Contents

Abstract

Résumé

Acknowledgments

Note on the text

Introduction

Chapter 1 ï'roilirs und Cmssida

Chapter 2 A// 's Wei / Thar Ends Well

Chapter 3 hfeaszlre for Measzrre

Conclusion

Endnotes

Works Cited

This thesis attempts to resuscitate the use of the much-disparaged term "problem

plays" to describe Shakespeare's Tmilirs and Cvessida, A Il's Well Thot Ends Well, and

M e a s l m for Meusurr.; three works which, 1 argue, share a strong and unifying thematic

interest in the vexed relationship between individual sexual desire and social cohesion.

Although each of these plays offers a unique perspective on this confiicted interaction.

I attempt to demonstrate through close readings of each work that the broad trajectory

traced by the problem plays is a movement from the festive comedies' idealistic faith

in the possibilities of both romantic and generic "happy endings," to the bleak

cynicism which characterizes the great tragedies' depictions of sexual relationships and

social structures. Finally, 1 point to the romances, particularly The Winrer's T u k ,

which, 1 argue, rework the problern plays' interest in sexualiiy and social order in such

a way that the growing pessimism and inconclusiveness of these earlier works is

transformeci into aesthetically bdanced narratives of romantic reconci liation and social

integration.

Résumé

Cette thèse examine les relations entre le désir sexuel et les structures de ia société

dans des "pièces à thèse" de Shakespeare: Tmilirs and Cess ida , AIfk Well l'hm Ends

Wrll , et Meanrre Jor Measitre. Je vais essayer de démontrer, par des lectures en détail

de chaque oeuvre, que les conflits entre la sexualité et les besoins de la communauté

dans ces pièces deviennent de plus en plus difficile. Le résultat de ce conflit est un

mouvement de l'idéalisme des comédies, au cynisme des tragédies majeures.

Finalement, je suggère que les romances, particulièrement The Winter's Tale,

transforment les anxiétés sexuelles des "pièces à thèse" en récit de réconciliation

romantique et d'intégration sociale.

I wish to sincerely thank my advisor, Professor Michael Bristol, for his advice and

encouragement throughout this project. It was Professor Bristol's teaching which first

sparked my interest in Shakespeare, and his high standards and incisive criticism have

contributed immeasurably to the quality of my work. I also wish tc acknowledge the

ongoing assistance of Professors Maggie Kilgour and Tess O'Toole, whose

compassion, support and academic enthusiasm have made my studies at McGill a

nearly unmi tigated pleasure. Many thanks go to my family, whose intellectual,

emotional, and material support have been absolutely indispensable; and finally, to

Dave, who both sustains and inspires me in innumerable ways every day.

Note on the Text

All citations from Shakespeare's works are drawn from The Riverside Shakespeare.

edited by G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). The assumed

chronology of the plays is also that of the R i v e d e ' s editors.

The use of the term "probiem plays" to describe a group of works written in

the first years of the seventeenth century, roughly separating Shakespeare's festive

cornedies from the major tragedies and the later romances, has a history which is

nearly as cornplex and disputed as the plays themselves. Although the phrase itself

does not appear until F. S. Boas's coinage in 1896, Edward Dowden's 1875 study,

Shakesperc.: A Critical Srzrdy of his Mind and Art, introduces the suggestion that there

is something uniquely perplexing about Troiltrs and Ckssida, All's Well Thar Ends

Wcll , and Meart~re for Meaîzrm. Dowden remarks that, although Shakespeare

continued to write comedy after Jzrlizrs Caesar and H m l e t , "the genial spirit of comedy

was desemng him," and that. as a result, AI15 Wel l ï'hat Ends Well is "grave and

eamest," M e m m for Memtrre is "dark and bitter," and Tmilits and Crrssida represents

"the comedy of disillusiont' (Dowden, vi). In Dowden's thernatically-grouped

chronology of Shakespeare's works, these three plays are given a distinct position,

appearing alone under the label, "Serious, dark, ironical" (x).

Although Dowden was still inclined to view these works as cornedies, albeit

strained ones, F. S . Boas's Shakespere and his Predecessors introduces the notion that

this group of plays, to which Boas adds Hmzlet, must be understood to occupy a

unique place in the Shakespearian canon. Borrowing the term "problem plays" frorn

contemporary criticism of the works of such playwrights as Ibsen and Shaw, Boas

suggests that the link arnong these plays is neither exclusively generic nor thematic,

2

but instead results from a certain commonality of mood or spirit:

Al1 these dramas introduce us into highly artificial societies, whose civiiization

is ripe unto rottenness. Amidst such media abnormal conditions of brain and

of emotion are generated, and intricate cases of conscience demand a solution

by unprecedented methods. Thus throughout these plays we move along dim

untrodden paths and at the close Our feeling is neither of simple joy nor pain;

w e are excited, fascinated, perplexed, for the issues raised preclude a

completely satisfactory outcorne, even when, as in Ali's Weli Thar Ends Wef l

and Memure for M e m e , the complications are outwardly adjusted in the fifth

act. In Tmilzrs und Cressida and Hmler no such partial settlement of

difficulties takes place, and we are left to interpret their enigmas as best we

rnay. Dramas so singular in therne and temper cannot be strictly cailed

comedies or tragedies. We may therefore borrow a convenient phrase from the

theatre of to-day and class thern together as Shakespere's problern-plays (345).

Boas's andysis offers a number of significant notional insights, including the

observation that there is something both excessive and unpleasant about the societies

presented in each of these plays, and the claim that even the outwardly comic endings

of All's Well That Ends Weli and Memicm for Memrire offer none of the satisfaction

which similar conclusions provide in the earlier cornedies. Nevertheless, as Vivian

Thomas argues, Boas's inclusion of Hamlet in this grouping is ultimately

unconvincing, as the play's unequivocal status as a revenge tragedy negates much of

the thematic obscurity which Boas argues is essential to his classification (Thomas, 4).

3

In 193 1, W. W. Lawrence published the first full-length snidy of the problem

plays, adopting Boas's terminology but retuming to Dowden's original schema by

including only A Il's Weli, Measirre for Measrtue, and 7'mihrs and Crrssida (as

Lawrence explains, "when a problem play becomes tragedy, it is, 1 think, best

considered under that rubric" [ 5 ] ) . To Lawrence,

[tlhe essential characteristic of a problem play, 1 take it, is that a perplexing

and distressing complication in human life is presented in a spirit of high

seriousness. This special treatment distinguishes such a play from other kinds

of drama, in that the theme is handled so as to arouse not merely interest or

excitement, or pity or amusement, blrt to probe the complicated interrelations of

character and action, in a situation admitting of different ethical interpretations.

The "problem" is not like one in rnathematics, to which there is a single true

solution, but is one of conduct, as to which there are no fixed and immutable

laws (4).

Significantly, what Lawrence introduces to the phrase "problem plays" is a sense of

the ethical ambivalence engendered by the events of these works. Although an

aaitude of moral evaluation is insinuated by Boas's discussion of societies which are

"ripe unto rottenness," Lawrence's identification of the "complicated interrelations of

character and action" which characterize each of these works suggests the peculiar

combination of conclusive action and inconclusive psychology which is the hcus of

much recent criticism of the problem plays. Ironically, however, the structure of

Lawrence's study, which uncovers the plays' thematic origins in medieval fairy-tale and

folklore, works precisely against a reading of the plays in terms of their ethical

ambiguities, as such moral quandaries as the bed-tricks in AIlk Well Thut Ends Weil

and Measrirc for Meusrm are dismissed as merely modem retellings of ancient,

fantastic, and essentially unredistic tales.

In 1950, E. M. W. Tillyard restored Hamlet to the grouping in Shakespeare's

PmbIent Piays, a transcription of a series of lectures given at the University of Toronto

in the late nineteen-forties. Tillyard admits that he is uneasy with the term "problem

plays," and uses it "vaguely and equivocaily," so it is perhaps not surprising that his

treatment of the works centres around a somewhat obscure analogy (1):

There are at least two kinds of problern child: first the genuinely

abnormai child, whorn no efforts will ever bring back to norrndity; and second

the child who is interesting and complex rather than abnormal: apt indeed to be

a problem for parents and teachers but destined to fulfilment in the larger scope

of adult life. Now Ali's Weli and Meusrm for Meaîztre are like the first

problem child: there is something radically schizophrenic about them. H m I e l

and I'milris and Cressida are like the second problem child. full of interest and

complexity but divided within themselves only within the eyes of those that

have rnisjudged them. To put the difierence another way, Hamiet and Tmilrrs

and Cressida are problem plays because they deal with and display interesting

problems; AII's Wel l and Measrire for Measirre because they arr problems ( 2 ) .

Despite his dubious chiid psychology , the "schizophrenia" whicli Tillyard attributes to

A Il's Wdl Thut Ends Well and Meusurv for Memiire is an important crystallizaîion of

Lawrence's earlier description of the conflict between character and action which

occupies these plays. Although Tillyard denies that Tmilzrs and Cressida and H m f e t

are "divided within themselves," the phrase itself reveals a valuable intuition that it is

sorne type of interna1 contradiction or disjuncture, rather than simply a sombreness of

mood or unpleasantness of events, which distinguishes the problem plays from

Shakespeare's other works. Ultimately, however, although Tillyard makes some

perceptive observations about the character of the plays, he does so in a loose and

subjective manner which fails to establish any rigorous or substantive connection

among the four works.

In 1961 , A. P. Rossiter published Angel With Homs, a collection of lectures on

Shakespeare which inciudes individual readings of 7'milirs a d Cmssida, A l/'s Wel f

and Memtrm /or Meanrnt, as well as a short chapter addressing the more general

significance of the term "problem plays." Rossiter's argument centres around the daim

that the plays belong to the broadly-construed genre of "tragicomedy," which is

defined as "the art of inversion, deflation and paradox . . . marked by telling

generaiizations about the subject, man, of a seriousness which is unexpected in

comedy and may seem incongrnous with it" (1 17). Aside from their status as

tragicomedies, Rossiter identifies four signifiant features which are shared by the

three problern plays: a "cornmon evaluation of conventionaily accepted 'nobilities'," the

interpolation of "'ideal' figures who check Our prattle of 'cynicism', 'sntre' and

'misanthropy'," the involvement of the reader in "discoveries, always of a bad reality

beneath the fair appearances of things," and, finally, a profound concem with "seeming

and being" ( 1 26-27).

Although Rossiter's argument does not allow the problern plays an entirely

distinct status, claiming instead that they must be understood in the context of the

larger tragi-cornic movement which stretches from Henry I V to Othello, he does make

the extremely significant observation that "lust, 'the expense of spirit', is central to al1

of these plays. I must Say 'lustl because there is in every one of them a, to my mind,

pointed absence of normal sexiial love: a self-fulfilling mutual enjoyment of man in

woman (and woman in man) which is generative as much to mind and beîng as in

body, and the very opposite of frustration" (125-26). Although his individuai readings

of the plays do not always centre around this issue, the distortion of 'normal1 sexuality

in the problem plays which Rossiter identifies has formed the basis for a number of

recent, post-feminist analyses of the plays, including my own.

Wriaen in the same year that Rossiter's collection was published, Peter Urels

brief pamphlet on the problem plays moves from Boas's and T illyard's impressionistic

accounts of the drarnas' emotional properties to a more focussed and detailed analysis

of what makes these works distinct. Ure identifies a quartet of plays, excluding

Hmlet but including Timon of Arhens, which share the following features:

the probing of character under the test of situations which raise conflicting

ethical interpretations; the replacement of the strain of occasional melancholy

which is found even in Shakespeare's most festive comedies Dy an urgently

satirical and disfiguring temper; a willingness even in comedy to draw near to

pain and death; a curious intenveaving of romantic and even fantastic tales with

7

realistic characterization, which itself sometimes moves towards allegory and

symbol; an art whose occasional apparent conternpt and carelessness about

what W. B. Yeats called the 'wheels and pulleys' of drama, the machinery for

achieving consistency and smooth running, mediate the reach and pressure of a

mind profoundly aware that energy and meaning in the theatre may spring from

the attempt to embody in its forms the very resistance which life offers to

being translated into the expressive modes of art. In these plays, drama seems

to grow up into recognizing the stuff it is made form. just as the modem

sculptor consciousiy preserves the rougliness and accidental tlaws of metal or

Stone in order to signalize the obstinate survival of the material in the artefact

(7).

Ure's summary, the earlier part of which in particular reveals the author's indebtedness

to the insights of his predecessors, is distinguished by its illumination of the almost

metadramatic character of the problem plays. Ure's prescient revelation that "energy

and meaning in the theatre may spring from the attempt to embody in its forms the

very resistance which life offers to being translated into the expressive modes of art"

anticipates the writings of such post-modern critics as David Scott Kastan, who argues

that A Il's Well Thar Ends Weil "extend[s] the limits of comedy" by making "manifest

and urgent its concem that desire be civilized, be humanized, in its refusal to end well,

that is, in its refusal to allow the desires of the mind the victory comedj daims for

theml' (Kastan, 586-87). Ure's sculptural anaiogy for the way in which the problem

plays self-consciously reveal the limitations of the material out of which they are

8

fashioned makes a striking claim for the proto-modernity of these works; although Ure

stops short of suggesting that the problem plays are intentionally self-reflexive, his

forays in this direction signal a significant expansion of the framework within which

the plays can be evaluated.

Writing in 1963, Emest Schanzer rejected the conventional identification of the

problem plays, opting instead for a tram-generic group which includes Jirliirs Caesar,

Menrzi~v fo r Meanire, and Antony and Clcopaifm. Schanzer's argument for this

unusual selection derives from his sense that Boas, Lawrence and Tillyard. by straining

to include al1 of the later cornedies in their classifications, corne up with definitions of

"problem plays" which are too diffuse and equivocal to be critically productive.

Instead, Schanzer sets out to narrow the scope of the term "problem play", so that it

refers exclusively to "a play in which we find a concem with a moral problem which

is central to it, presented in such a manner that we are unsure of Our moral bearings,

so that uncertain and divided responses to it in the minds of the audience are possible

or even probable" ( 6 ) .

Altho ugh Schanzer's criticisms of his predecessors are sometimes persuasive,

particularly his claim that Lawrence's innoductory description of the plays is at odds

with the conclusions which his individual readings produce, his analysis suffers both

from the contentious nature of his definition (might not the moral problems presented

in some of the tragedies, notably OlhelZo, engender "uncertain and divided respsnses

in the minds of the audience"?), and from his complete disregard for genre as a

defining characteristic of the problern plays. By ignoring the particular difficulties

9

which emerge from A Il's Wei l Thal Ends WelI's and Meawre for Meantre's status as

cornedies, Schanzer exciudes from his study one of the most fruitful areas of inquiry

into these works. Finally, as Thomas suggests, the shared source material of the

Roman plays invites their treatxnent as a group, as does the common device of the

bed-trick in A il's Well and M e m m for Measim, so that, ultimately, Schanzer's

schema bas never gained acceptance among critics of the plays (Thomas, 10).

Among the most important recent treatments of the problem plays is Northrop

Frye's 1983 study The Myth of ileiivemnce: Heflecrions on Shukespearr 'i h b l e n z

Cornedies. As the significant modification of "problem plays" to "problem comedies"

implies, Frye's argument centres around the c l a h that, although Tmilzrs and Cressida

can be seen as an "experimental play in a special category," AU'S Well and Meusirre

for Mearzrre are "simply rornantic comedies in which the chief magical device used is

the bed trick instead of enchanted forests or identical twins" (3) . Through a

sophisticated argument which attempts to identifi what he calls "the myth of

deliverance" as the defining characteristic of comedy, Frye classifies the problem plays

in the following manner:

Two of Shakespeare's problern plays, then, are fairly typical cornedies in which

redemptive forces are set to work that bring about the characteristic festive

conclusion, the birth of a new society, that gives to the audience the feeling

that 'everything is going to be al1 right &ter dl ' . Such plays illustrate what we

have been calling the myth of deliverance, a sense of the energies released by

forgiveness or reconciliation, where Eros triumphs over Nomos or law, by

10

evading what is frustrating or absurd in law and fulfilling what is essential for

social survival. But comedy is a mixture of the festive and the ironic, of a

drive toward a renewed society dong with a strong emphasis on the arbitrary

whims and absurdities that block its emergence. There is much larger

influence of irony in Meastre for Measrm and A //'s Well than in, Say, Twelflh

Nzghr, and of course there are many comedies, especially in modem times,

where the ironic emphasis is too strong for the drive toward deliverance, and

where the play ends in frustration and blocked movement. In Shakespeare's

canon the play that cornes the nearest to this is Tmzlrts and Cressida, a play

that, whatever else it may do, does not illustrate the myth of deliverance in

comedy (61).

Frye's argument for comedy's "myth of deliverance" is. in general, a very

persuasive one, but seems strained in its application to M e m m for Memzrrr and A Il's

Weil. As generations of critics and theatregoers have observed, it is simply not

possible with these two plays to expenence the "characteristic festive conclusion" of

comedy in the unproblemahc manner which Frye describes. Although "the birth of a

new society" may be insinuated at the end of Shakespeare's final comedies, the degree

of moral ambivalence and social disorder in these communities is such that the

audience is ieft with anything but the feeling that "everything's going to be ail right

&ter dl ." As critics both before and after Frye have recognized, the forced and

artificial endings of Ail's Well and Meanire for M e m r e place the very genre in which

they are written into question, and invite an interrogation of the basic principles of

I l

order and rebirth on which comedy relies. To include these plays in an argument

which supports the commonality and integrity of comedy's central structures, then,

seems to both deny essential characteristics of the drarnas themselves, and weaken the

uni@ing claims for Shakespearian comedy which the study is designed to support.

Finally, Frye's rather desultory treatment of Tmilirs and C r e s s i h ("a kind of history

play" which "seems to be designed . . . to show us human beings getting into the kind

of mess that requires deliverance, a secular couterpart of what Christianity calls the

fa11 of man" [ 6 2 ] ) is hardly satisfactory, and raises questions about why Frye would

choose to inciude it in his analysis at all.

What emerges clearly from this brief (and necessarily selective) survey of

major criticisrn of the problem plays is the degree of uncertainty and disagreement

which characterize these discussions. Even the most basic questions raised by the

problem plays-- which drarnas belong in this category, what genre they fall into, which

characters are their protagonists and which events define their narratives-- have been

vigorously disputed, and attempts to identiQ the unifying features of the works seem

either rooted in subjective observation, or are insufficiently broad to comfortably

accommodate the disparate natures of the drarnas. Perhaps for this reason, recent

criticisrn reflects a declining interest in the inclusive term "problem plays", with its

broad claims for generic classification and its insinuations of a grand, unifying

narrative in the Shakespearian canon, tending instead to focus on closer readings of the

individual works. Although Meartire for M e m m and A ll's Well, with their obvious

narrative and thematic similarities, are still frequently analyzed together, Tmilirs and

12

C ~ s s i d a is most often either associated with another play for a particular critical

purpose (Janet Adelman's linkage of Tmilrrs and Cressida with Othello, for example,

which is designed specifically to illuminate similarities in the two plays' treatments of

rnamage and Oedipal desire), o r is interpreted on its own. Although criticism of the

plays has been immeasurably advanced in recent decades. particularly by feminist and

gender-oriented readings, even major studies of the works (such as Richard Wheeler's

highly influentid Shakespeare -i Developm enr and the Problem Con1 edirs, which

addresses only All's Weil and Measirre for Meantre) refuse to accept, or at least to

take seriously, the basic similarities arnong al1 three plays which earlier criticism took

for granted. '

My argument attempts to resuscitate the notion that there ir something

fundamental which connects Tmilrrs and Cressida, A II ' s Well That Ends Well, and

Meartrre for Memure; a thematic commonality which engenders the intuitive sense of

their similarity which their critical history reflects, and which invites their collective

analysis. At the h e m of my sense of this relationship is a basic. narrative event which

is shared by al1 three plays: the literal, physical exchange of a wornan's body for

another (Cressida for Antenor in Tmilirs and Cressida, Diana for Helena in Ali's Weil,

and Mariana for Isabella in Meas~rm for Mearirre). In each case, this transaction is the

fulcrum on which the action of the play balances, and its passage marks a significant

shift in the tone of the narrative, either producing conflict,

or resolving it, as in A Il's Weil and Memure for Memicrr.

Even more than simply advancing the narratives of

as in 7'miIrrs an J Cressida,

the problem plays, however,

the cornmodification of the fernale body which is inherent in these exchanges is

symptomatic of the debased sexual economies which operate within dl three dramas.

In al1 of the problem plays, extramarital lust has a greater presence than faithful

conjugal relations; seduction is undertaken covertly, and without the sanction of

figures of authority; sex itself takes place in disguise and darkness, and ofien under

false pretences; and romantic love appears secondary to an indiscriminate, and

sometimes coercive, physical desire, which takes no account of mutudity or

harmonious social pairings. The characters in these dramas appear betrayed by their

sexual impulses, which are metaphorically aligned with the destructive physical

processes of corruption and death, rather than the positive, generative images of

growth and fertility with which desire is associated in the festive cornedies.

Appropriately, the pregnancies which result from these assignations are presented

either as shameful symbols of incontinence, as with Juiiet's illegitimate conception in

Memire for Meaiire, or as expedient means to achieving one's strategic ends, as is

the case with Helena's irnpregnation in Ail's Well .

In the midst of these sordid affairs, men and women in the probiem plays seem

barely able to communicate at d l , with lovers either hardly speaking to one another

(as with Bertrarn and Helena), conversing only as tactical CO-conspirators (as with

Isabella and the Duke), or engaging in dialogues which are so filled with platitudes

and empty rhetoric that the transmission of genuine feeling is neariy impossible, as is

the case with Troilus and Cressida. Moreover, al1 of the problem plays employ a

figurative language in which the debased nature of desire is foregrounded through a

14

metaphoric association of love and sex with death, disease, war, and trade. Although

the most vicious and cynical manifestations of this discourse are uttered by the play's

clown-figures (in particular, Thersites of Iioiliis and Cressida), pestilent, martial, and

commercial representations of sexuality are nearly ubiquitous in the problem p[ays,

and emerge in the speeches of even the most admired and socially elevated characters.

Although both men and women are victimized by these derneaning

characterizations of Iûve and desire, it is women in the problem plays who suffer most

acutely, as the constructions of femininity around which domestic structures are

organized are stretched nearly to the breaking point by the impossibly polarized

symbolic meanings wîth which they are invested. In al1 three plays. the significance

of a woman's chastity is scrutinized, and is altemately represented as a virtue to be

protected at all costs, or a valuable commodity which c m be exchanged for material

and social gain. Correspondingly, the women who act in accordance with these

antithetical understandings of virginity are either valorized as near goddesses, or

vilified as indiscriminate prostitutes. While lsabella values her virginity more dian her

brother's life, Parolles urges Helena to lose hers as expeditiously as possible; and while

Diana is lauded for preserving her chastity in the face of Bertram's advances, Helena is

rewarded for orchesaating her creative deflowering through the bed-trick. In each

case, the rigidity of these incompatible feminine paradigms proves disastrous for both

the societies which maintain them, and the wornen whose individual desires canndt

possibly be accommodated by these behavioral models.

In this climate of eroded romantic values and transgressive sexualities, the

15

institution of marriage, which conventionally functions to contain and subdue

potentially subversive individual desires, is put under an extreme, and almost

destructive, stress. Simultaneously, the comic form, to which at l e s t A il's Well and

Memm for M e a î t m unquestionably conform, threatens to disintegrate, as the

marriages which emerge at its conclusion appear inappropriate and unconvincing. In

the beleaguered society of TmiIzrs and Cressida, marriage seems a forgotten institution,

as even the lovers for which the play is named make no mention of their intention to

marry; similarly, comedy itself seems abandoned as the play slides uncomfortably

between the comic, tragic, and historic genres. Helena's marriage to Bertram in Al l ' s

Well Thar Ends Wel l appears doomed from the beginning, and seems hardly less so

when the deception of the bed-trick is unravelled in the final scene; the characters'

tangible discornfort at the play's ending. as well as the unsettling repetition of events

which is insinuated by Diana's promised nuptials, signal widening gaps arnong the

psychological demands of character, the relational dernands of society, and the generic

demands of comedy. Finally, in Memitre for Memiire, the disjunctures which have

destabiiized the earlier problem plays threaten to explode both marriage and comedy,

as social institutions become impossibly restrictive, desire is increasingly transgressive.

and the pairings which conclude the play appear not only awkward, as in Ai l ' s WeU,

but tnily horriS.ing.

1 would argue, then, that the principal "problern" of the problem plays is a

concem with the relationship of sexual desire and social order, which is manifested

chiefly in four ways: first, a debased presentation of intirnate relationships and sexual

16

values, revealed through both action and language; second, an exaggerated polarization

of constructions of femininity, whereby women are pathologically divided into virgins

and whores; third, a questioning of the psychological and social integrity of the

institution of marriage; and finally, a corresponding interrogation of the limitations of

comedy as a medium for expressing the complexities of human relationships.

Furthemore, I believe that the pressure exerted by these issues increases progressively

over the three dramas, so that, although ?'milus and Cresszda is able to interpolate a

critique of its flawed socio-sexual framework into its nihilistic narrative, Measltre for

Mearzire is unable, neither structurally nor affectively, to withstand the destructive

energies of its degraded sexuality. Through a detailed analysis of each play, 1 hope to

dernonstrate the ways in which the problem plays sirnultaneously test what Kastan

calls the "limits of comedy," and the weaknesses of the conventional social models on

which the cornic genre relies (575). Findly, 1 wish to point to Hanifer and Othello,

the nearly contemporaneous tragedies in which these sarne issues are taken up within a

drarnahc form which, although capitulating to the pessimism which characterizes the

problem plays, is better able to accommodate their range of narrative concems; as well

as to the romances, particularly The Winter's T d e , which present a thoughtful and

creative reconciliation of the cleavages between sexual desire and social order which

the problem plays introduce.

Chapter One

Troilus and Cressida: 'ivar and iechery confound dl"

Tmilzcs md Ctvsstdn is a play in which whar Gayle Rubin has called the

"traffic in women" is given a unique narrative centrality (157). Not only is the

exchange of Cressida for Antenor the necessary precondition for the heroine's

notorious bebayal of Troilus, but the entire milieu of war and strategy in which the

drama unfolds is the result of an even more legendary sexual trade: Helen's

replacement of Menaleus with Paris. The disturbing elision of love, sex and

commerce implied by these events 1s much more, however, than simply a device for

the propulsion of the plot. In Tmiltis and Cressida, Shakespeare has crafted a society

in which the language of chivalric romance has fractured to reveal, at its core, the

sordid terms of sensual and material appetite; in which absolute moral value is

professed and then betrayed in the pursuit of glory and extemally-appraised successes;

and in which words are s h o w to be simply tools in the achievement of one's tactical

ends.

Cressida, with her manifest status as both sexual commodity and failed lover,

stands as this society's victim, its scapegoat, and its most enduring emblem. Dunng

her almost obsessively specufar assignation with Diomedes (her seduction is observed

not only by the audience, but by Troilus, Ulysses and Thersites), Cressida literally

embodies the debased, mercantile values privileged by her community, becoming, for

dl to see, the "whore" which the cynical Thersites has already named her (V-ii. 1 12).

18

The centraiity of Cressida's commodified body is further emphasized by the

positioning of her infidelity in the drama. The scene of Cressida's seduction is Tmiltrs

md Cresszdds thematic fulcrum: before it, the play's most powerful philosophical

sentiments are conveyed by Ulysses's famouç speech on order and degree in I.iii, and

by the proper, honourabie combat promised in the battle between Hector and Ajax;

after it, as is presaged by Troilus's apocalyptic response to Cressida's dalliance ("The

bonds of heaven are slipp'd, dissolv'd, loos'd" [V.ii.156] ), the prevailing spirit is one

of cynicism and disorder, as the slow, measured pacing of the earlier scenes is

replaced by brief, violent tableaux depicting Hector's gleeful pursuit of a soldier for his

amour, Achilles's cowardly slaying of an unamed Hector, and, finally, Pandarus's vile

epilogue.

Through an examination of the presentation of this pivotal scene, its content,

and its relationship to the material which precedes it, two possible readings of Troilrrs

and Cressida emerge. One, presented explicitly through the reactions of Troilus,

Ulysses and Thersites to the spectacle of Cressida's infidelity, holds Cressida solely to

blarne for her actions, and, by extension, "square[s] the general sex / By Cressid's

rule" (V.ii. i 32-33). It is this interpretation which, as Gayle Greene observes, has

formed the basis for many well-known readings of Tmilirs and Cressida, in which

critics, "taking their cues from the men in the play," respond to Cressida in terms

which are "overwhelmingly negative" (Greene, 13 9.' Buried beneath the politicd

rhetoric, military bravado and romantic melodrama of the scenes which precede

Cressida's seduction, however, is another, more subtly embedded reading, which

19

subverts this first interpretive stance through a radical underrnining of the language of

the play's male characters. This second critical strategy, by uncovering the profound

contradictions which underlie the play's patriarchal rhetoric, acknowledges both the

deeply problematic nature of Cressida's character, and the extent to which her moral

and behavioral choices are limited by the subaltem status of women in her society. It

is this second reading which, I would argue, not only provides a more consistent and

satisfiing interpretation of the events of the play, but is encouraged by die

characterizations and language of the drarna itseif. As 1 hope to demonstrate,

Shakespeare presents Cressida's infidelity (the event by which her character 1s most

frequently judged) in a manner which demands that it be re-evaluated in light of the

moral inconsistencies and debased social d u e s by which she is surrounded. To

simply accept the version of Cressida's character presented by the play's male

characters is, in effect, to be irnplicated in the very structures which result in Tmilirs

and Cressida's disasterous conclusion.

Through this sophisticated double composition of overt and covert meanings,

Troiltis and Cressida both motivates and comments upon its own interpretive history.

By both presenting and subverting a traditional understanding of Cressida as a

legendary slattem, Shakespeare here offers the problem plays' most idealistic

consideration of the dangerous patterns through which women are created, revered, and

reviled by the structures of paûiarchal society. In the cornmunity of T m h s a d

Cressida, the pemicious nature of sexuai stereotyping is s h o w to have implications far

beyond the suffering inflicted on its female subjects; to use the play's own recurrent

20

imagery of disease, the hollow categories of "merchant" and "merchandise" to which

men and women are relegated infect basic systems of value until, as the play's

unsettling conclusion confirms, the entire body politic is afflicted.

As was suggested previously, the scene of Cressida's seduction ofhy Diomedes

is staged in such a way as to appear overtly theatrical. Our uncornfortable status as

viewers of an intimate and pnvate exchange is aggravated by the presence of three

interna1 spectators, who, in their numbers and social diversity (Troilus and Ulysses

represent the elites of Trojan and Greek society, respectively, and Thersites the fool is

a çroundling of sorts), seem to mirror the extemal audience of the play itself As a

play-within-a-play, this crucial scene offers, through the reactions and conclusions of

its intemal spectators, a possible mode1 for Our own reading of Cressida's "benayal".

As Mihoko Suzuki suggests, the three men watching the unfolding of the

sexual drarna between Cressida and Diomedes have, over the course of the previous

scenes, demonstrated three distinct and familiar responses to the complexities of

intimate relationships (167). Troilus masks his sexual insecurities beneath the 10%

rhetoric of chivalry ("My hem beats quicker than a feverous pulse, / And al1 my

powers do their bestowing Iose, / Like vassalage at unawares encount'ring / The eye of

majesty" (III.ii.36-9); Ulysses attempts to contain human affairs within the confines of

a rigid hierarchy ("Observe degree, priority, and place, / Insisture, course, proportion,

season, form, / Office, and custom, dl in line of order" (I.iii.86-88); and T..srsites

reduces everything to the base terms of his familiar refrain: "war and lechery confound

a ! ( i . 7 5 ) Despite their apparent differences, however, al1 of these strategies,

2 1

when confronted with the lurid spectacle o f Cressida's infidelity. result in what is

essentially the same conclusion. Either, in Troilus's ternis, Cressida is not the woman

he professed to love ("This she? no, this is Diomed's Cressida" [V.ii. 1371); or, as

Ulysses speculates, she has always been inherently promiscuous ("She will sing any

man at first sight" [V.ii.9]); or, in Thersites's view, she has suddenly transforrned

herself into a prostitute (" [her] mind has now tum'd whore" [V.ii. 1 141). Regardless of

the phrasing, however, to each of these men, the sin of Cressida's incontinence is

entireiy attributable to her own moral laxity, and can be accornmodated only through a

radical act of redefinition which transforms her from a "goddess" (I.i.27) to, as Helen

has already been described. a "flat, tamed piece" (IV.i.63).

The eagemess of Troilus, Ulysses and Thersites to condemn Cressida, and the

ease with which they fundarnentally recast her identity, is mirrored in the reactions of

a generation of Tmihrs und Cresszdds critics; a group which, in other respects,

represents the same diversity of status and opinion as Troilus, Ulysses and Thersites

(Greene, 135). E. M. W. Tillyard's assertion that Cressida is "shallow, hard and

lascivious" (go), L.C. Knights's observation that she is "the wanton of tradition1' (154),

and Jan Kort's contradictory c l a h that, although Cressida is "one of the most arnazing

Shakespearian characters," she is also a "twt" (1471, al1 take at face value the

interpretation offered by the scene's internai commentators.

Despite the viscerally hostile response which Cressida's actions invariably

elicit in most readers, there is something (beyond their dated and "polincally incorrect"

language) which is essentially unsatis@ing about these interpretations. As Troilus's

22

anguished speech amply illustrates ("if there be rule in unity itself, / This was not she.

O madness of discourse, / That sets up with and against itselfi" [V-iii. l41-43]), it is

extremely difficult to accommodate a character who behaves in a manner as

contradictory as that ascribed by Tillyard, Knights and Kott to Cressida. If Cressida is

indeed a "tart," why would she demonstrate such genuine distress ("The grief is fine,

full, perfect that I taste ..." [IV.iv.3]) at the prospect of leaving Troilus for the Greeks;

a group of men who are, as Troilus himself points out, "full of quality ... and swelling

o'er with arts and exercise" (IV.iv.76-78)? Similarly, assuming that Cressida is the

paragon of modest chastity that Troilus initially describes, how could she, within

twenty-four hours of leaving her lover, fa11 into the arms of another man? If these two

categories, as they are presented by Troilus, Ulysses, Thersites, Tillyard, Knights and

Kott. arc indeed the only options available for an analysis of Cressida's behaviour,

then the only "logical" response to her act of infidelity is to split her neatly in two,

thereby accommodating both ferninine paradigms. This is, in fact, precisely Troilus's

reaction to the situation: "This is, and is not, Cressid! / Within my soul there doth

conduce a fight / Of this srrange nature, that a thing inseparate / Divides more wider

than the earth and sky" (V.ii. 146-49).

In order to avoid resorting to this schizophrenic division, which not only denies

Cressida a cohesive identity, but abjures her power of self-creation through the

demand that she conform, at al1 costs, to extemally-conceived categories, i t is

necessary to acknowledge both that Cressida's character possesses a complexity which

defies simple classification, and that the terms of this classification as they have been

23

traditionally presented -- "goddess" or "tutw-- are inherently flawed. As an

examination of Troilt<s and Cresszdds characterizations, use of language, and patterns

of imagery reveds, the play itself provides ample evidence to suggest that Cressida is

not the stereotyped, featureless woman described by the male characters, and that the

system of values which has given rise to these reductive categorizations must be

fundamentally questioned.

The second scene of the play vividly iliustrates that Cressida possesses a biting

wit and a keen insight which far surpass, in both sophistication and creativity, her

lover's sentimental reflection that she is a "pearl" of India (Li. 100). As Stephen Lynch

observes, Cressida's "animated sense of humour" and "refreshing originality of

expression" provide a welcome alternative to the "Petrarchan world of overworked

cliches" offered by Troilus (357). During her bantering exchange with Pandarus in

Lii, Cresçida displays astuteness, verbal agility, and a prudent discretion as she resists

her uncle's attempts to goad her into revealing the depth of her feelings for Troilus:

Pan. You have no judgement, niece. Helen herself swore th' other day that

Troilus, for a brown favour (for so 'tis, 1 must confess)-- not brown neither-

CES. No, but brown.

Pm. Faith, to Say truth, brown and not brown.

CES. To Say truth, true and not true.

Pm. She praised his complexion above Paris.

CES. Why, Paris hath color enough. . .

Pm. 1 swear to you, I think that Helen loves him better than Paris.

CRS. Then she's a merry Greek indeed. . .

Pan. 1'11 be swom 'tis nue; he will weep you an' 'twere a man bom in April.

CES. And 1'11 spring up in his tears an' 'twere a nettle against May.

(I.ii.92-99, 1 07-9, 173-76)

Cressida's apposite punning that Helen is a "merry Greek indeed," as well as her

twisting of the proverbial "April showers bring May flowers" to suggest that she has

the toughness and resilience of a nei-île, create the powerful impression that Cressida is

a woman of both strength and savvy.

With a similar critical intelligence, Cressida remains unimpressed by the

pageantry of the parading Trojan soldiers, which Pandarus uses as an opportunity to

hyperbolically extol Troilus as "the prince of chivals." (1. ii.229):

Pm. . . .do you know what a man is? 1s not birth, beauty, good shape,

discourse, manhood, learning, gentleness, virtue, youth, liberality, and suchli ke.

the spice and salt that season a man?

CRS. Ay, a minc'd man, and then to be bak'd with no date in the pie, for then

the man's date is out (I.ii.252-58).

By cleverly tuming Pandarus's culinary metaphor back upon itself, Cressida suggests

that, through his indiscriminate adherence to the codes of chivalric heroism, Trollus is

at nsk for becoming a "minc'd" man; and that, more broadly, exaggerated,

performative masculinity of the type displayed by the soldiers can, in fx!, be

construed as a kind of weakness. The remainder of the play provides numerous

illustrations of the accuracy of Cressida's assessrnerit. From Troilus's admission that

25

love has made him "weaker than a woman's tear" (I.i.8); to Thersites's description of

Ajax as "rurninat[ing] like a hostess" (m.iii.251); to Achilles's daim that he has a

"woman's longing" to see Hector after his battle with Ajax (ILI.iii.237), the male

characters' efforts at masculine heroism and achievernent are repeatedly either

presented, or perceived by others, in terms of a ferninine frailty (Spear, 412). In her

single, bantering rejoinder, Cressida illuminates this disturbing inconsistency in her

society's construction of masculinity of which, despite their own active participation in

its production, her male cornpanions remain entirely unaware.

During this scene, Cressida displays not only her skill at dodging Pandarus's

verbal mares, but a remarkable candidness about her own motives and weaknesses.

When her uncle describes her evasiveness with a military figure ("You are such a

woman. a man knows not at what ward you lie" [I.ii.258]), Cressida responds by

expanding the metaphor to represent more fully her strategy of sexual defensiveness:

"upon my back to defend my belly, upon my wit, to defend my wiles, upon my

secrecy, to defend mine honesty, my mask, to defend my beauty, and you, to defend

al1 of these; and at dl these wards 1 lie, at a thousand watches" (I.ii.264). Not only

does Cressida pointedly illuminate Pandarus's failure to fulfil the protective role

appropriate to their relationship, but she reveals that she holds few illusions about the

intellectually and physically guarded posture demanded of her by the predatory men by

whom she is surrounded. Cressida's dim view of men is unpleasant, but, as later

events reveal, realistic; her uncle has already displayed an unseemly appreciation for

her physical charms (I.i.40-45), her lover admits that he will "stalk about her door"

26

(III.ii.8) until he gains admittance, and even her own father, after forcibly separating

her from Troilus, offers his tent to Diornedes for her seduction, and proceeds to lead

the Greek soldier directly to her (V-ii. 1-3).

Cressida's philosophy of silence and dissimulation receives full articulation in

her short soliloquy which ends the scene, described aptly by Janet Adelman as "a

declaration of passion filled with calculation, a statement of love from which Troilus is

notably absent, replaced by abstract dicta about the typical behaviour of men, in

couplets so constricted that they suggest a fundamental niggardliness of the self' (121).

Although, with her willingness to view herself as a mere "thing" (I.ii.287,289), and her

reductive claim that, depending on the ease with which women allow themselves to be

seduced, men are either tyrants or supplicants ("Achievement is comrnand; ungained,

beseech" [I.ii.293]), Cressida proves herse1 f unable to rise above the martial strategies

initiated by her male counterparts, at least she is aware of what is demanded of her,

and, unlike Troilus, understands the harsh terms in which that demand is most

realistically couched.

This entire exchange, including Cressida's opening remarks to Alexander and

her closing soliloquy, takes up aimost 300 lines, of which more than a third are spoken

by Cressida. Both her dominmt presence throughout the scene, and the considerable

force of her words, create the impression that Cressida will play a major role in

shaping the language of the play. Yet, as many critics have remarked, this is far from

the case, as the remaining four acts reveal Cressida's steady retreat into silence and

opacity (Tiffany, 45). As E. Talbot Donaldson points out, Cressida speaks only one

27

hundred and seventeen times during the course of the play, with a hundred of her

speeches involving less than twenty words, and eighty containing iess than ten (74).

Cressida's only two soliloquies-- the means by which a character's mind is most

effectively revealed-- are the brief passage described above which concludes h i , and

a similarly constricted and aphoristic six lines spoken immediately before she yields to

Diomedes. Afier this, she vanishes from the drama altogether.

Even in the few words which Cressida is allowed in the latter portion of the

play, the assertive and unselfconsciously perspicacious woman of I.ii is nowhere to be

seen. In acts III through V, Cressida's lines reflect a variety of tractable postures,

including anxiety at appearing too forward ("My lord, 1 do beseech you to pardon me.

/ 'Twaç not my purpose thus to beg a kiss. / 1 am asharn'd. O heavens, what have 1

done!" [ZII.ii. 136-39]), concem that she is troubling her lover excessively ("Are you a-

weary of me?" [IV.ii.7]), and the agitated, fatalistic vacillation which characterizes her

submission to Diomedes in V.ii: "Well well, 'tis done, 'tis past. And yet it is not; I

will not keep my word. . . Ay, corne-- O Jove!-- do corne. -- I shall be plagued"

(V.ii.97, 104). Cressida's only attempt to revive the animated banter she had enjoyed

with Pandarus occurs in IV.iv, when she briefly engages her wit to try to avoid being

"kiss'd in general" by the Greeks (IV.iv.21). Despite her best efforts, Cressida is

unable to avert this demeaning violation, and her wordplay results only in Ulysses's

cruel admonition that verbal openness signifies sexual promiscuity, amplieing Nestar's

double-enrendre that she is "a woman of quick sense" (IV.iv.53): "There's language in

her eye, her cheek, her lip, / Nay, her foot speaks; her wanton spirits look out / At

28

every joint and motive of her body. . . set them down / For sluttish spoils of

oppominity, / And daughters of the game" (IV.iv.55-7, 6 1-3).

Whether, as Grace Tiffany asserts, Cressida's silence constitutes a deliberate act

of self-erasure, undertaken to recuperate a lfhorriS.ing negative control over her own

ontology" (45), or, as Adelman argues, represents a manifestation of Troilus's orvn

perverse male fantasies of ferninine submission (1 37), Cressida's verbal retreat is an

event which flagrantly defies the intemal logic usually demanded of a dramatic

character. Cressida's intelligence, which is given such forceful articulation in act 1, is

hardly essential to the movement of the plot. and could easily have been replaced by a

more subdued mien, thereby lending more coherence to her subsequent actions. For a

woman who proves herself so capable of using her "wit to defend [her] wiles," the

abrupt shifi in Cressida's mode of expression, and her eventual inability to express

herself at d l , constitute circumstances which are not easily understood.

Cressida's disappearance from the text not only challenges conventional

constructions of character, but frustrates efforts to place Tmilirs and Crcssida within

the framework of traditional dramatic genres. Although the presence of the lovers'

narnes in the play's title would suggest a tragedy akin to Romeo and Jttlier (a

connection which, as Rene Girard points out, is reinforced by the echo of Romeo's

aubade which is present in Troilus's romantic language the moming after his tryst with

Cressida), Cressida is denied even the tragic resolution offered to Juliet (189). Ever.

though it is clear that death awaits both Troilus and Cressida (dong with the rest of

the Trojans), and that a comedic reconciliation and marriage is highly iinlikely to

29

occur before that time, the absence of either of these events within the dramatic action

rnakes it dîfficult to categorize Tmiltls and Crrssidn as anything but a peculiar generic

hybrid of comedy, tragedy and history.'

Both the inconsistent presentation of Cressida's character, and the generic

ambiguity which results, serve to foreground the rift between what Trviltrs und

Cressida says that it will do, and what it actually does. Just as Cressida's retreat from

the text subverts the play's earlier intimations that she will play a significant role in

shaping the dramatk action, much of Tmiizts und Cressidds narrative centres around

the deferral and avoidance of circumstances which both its mythic sources, m d its

own dramatic action, have introduced. This pervasive strategy of misrepresentation is

evident even in the play's prologue, which contains no reference to the Troilus and

Cressida story, but instead focusses exclusively on the war plot; and it reaches its

narrative apex in the anti-climactic, aborted duel between Ajax and Hector in 1V.v.

Tmihrs and Cressida's title promises a romantic tragedy, and its prologue promises an

epic history of war; yet both its love story and its most vaunted battle scene

maddeningly thwart expectation by starting auspiciously, and then fiuling rapidly into

frustration and nonexistence.

As the critical history of Tmihs and Cressida reveals, the discrepancy between

language and action, between what is promised and what is delivered, has moved

many critics to concur with William Hazlitt's 1850 assessrnent that "this is one of the

most loose and desultory of Our author's plays" (cited in Martin, 3 9 . " And yet, as T.

McAlindon points out, such an evaluation "credits Shakespeare, at a point in his career

30

when he had dready written Mitch Ado, Jziiizrs Caesar, A s Yoic Like If, Twelfrrh Night

and, perhaps, Hamler, with having unwittingly added linguistic to dramatic discord; it

allows the mature Shakespeare practically no artistic sense at d l " (29). Moreover,

dismissing Tmilrts and Cresszdds discontinuities as accident or errcir ignores the play's

own persistent thematization of these very issues. From Cressida's initial anxiety that

"Men prize the thing ungained more than it is" (I.ii.289), to Troilus's concern that his

night with Cressida will not live up to his sexual fantasies ("expectation whirls me

round; / Th' imaginary relish is so sweet / That it enchants my sense; what will it be, /

When that the wat'ry palates taste indeed / Love's thrice-ruptured nectar?" [III-ii. 1 8-

22]), the language of Tmiltrs und C ~ s s z d u reveals a profound concem with the gap

between expectation and performance; between what words can express and what

actions will convey.

Through its disjunctions. both structural and linguistic, Tmzlz~s and Cressida

cunningly suggests that its own words cannot be taken at face value, and that, as was

demonstrated in the scene of Cressida's seduction, the systerns of value and behaviour

described by its characters are capable neither of containing the complexity of real

human interactions, nor of holding up in anything but the most emotionless and

theoretical of contexts. Extended even further, Tmilzcs and Cresszdds foregrounding of

the inadequacy of description to predict outcome undermines its own status as a re-

telling of a prescribed, legendary story. As Linda Chames suggests, the play's

"monstrosity" rnight be interpreted as a conscious grappling with the demands of a

well-known, over-determined narrative; an inevitable result of Shakespeare's "attempts

3 1

to package 'historic destiny' as 'persona1 desire"' (4 14, 43 8).

Nowhere is this breach between language and meaning more evident than in

the words of I'roilirs and C ~ s s i d d s "heroic" male characters. Not only do

Shakespeare's Homeric warriors rnake promises which they cannot keep, suggest plots

which are then summarily abandoned, and boast of attributes which their behaviour

flagrantly refutes, but their speech is founded on a system of appetitive images which

persistently undermines the elevated values they overtly profess to respect.

Invariably, the most frequent and emphatic appearances of these images (generally

divisible into metaphors of food and commerce) correspond with the male characters'

discussions of women. Whether it is Troilus's rapturous enurnerations of Cressida's

attributes, or Paris's impassioned plea to the Trojan Council not to retum his beloved

Helen to the Greeks, the imagery underlying lioilzts and Cressidds Io* rhetoric

reveals a disturbing perception of wornen as objects of either sensual consumption, or

mercantile barter.

These images of physical and rnaterial appetite first appear in the dialogue

between Troilus and Pandarus with which the play opens. After Pandams describes

the process of wooing a woman in terms of the preparation of a cake ("He that will

have a cake out of the wheat must tarry the grinding" [I.ii.14-15]), Troilus offers, in

soliloquy, the following metaphoric description of his pursuit of Cressida:

Tell me, Apollo, for thy Daphne's love,

What Cressid is, what Pandar, and what we:

Her bed is India, there she lies, a peul;

Between Our Illium and where she resides,

Let it be call'd the wild and wand'ring flood,

Ourseif the merchant, and this sailing Pandar

Our doubtful hope, Our convoy, and Our bark.

(I.i.98- 104)

Troilusfs representation of Cressida as a "pearl" is not only objectieing, but suggests,

through the image of the oyster which must be pried open to reveal its contents, an

unsettling vision of unsolicited intrusion, even violation. Moreover, the "merchant"

which Troilus fancies himself would have motives beyond mere possession of his

quarry; Troilus irnplies that he seeks to acquire Cressida in order to eventually trade

her for something else of value. When this circumstance is realized and Cressida is

bartered to the Greeks in exchange for Antenor, Troilus's resigned and surprisingly

complacent reaction to the news ("1s it so concluded?" [IV.ii.66]) suggests that the

mercantile terms in which he had initially described his relationship with Cressida

were not entirely symbolic. In fact, when Troilus is forced to summon up a more

appropriately distraught demeanour during his final moments with his lover, he retums

once again to the language of commerce: "We two, that wirh so many thousand sighs /

Did buy each other, must poorly se11 ourselves / With the rude brevity and discharge

of one" (IV.iv.39-4 1).

The culinary imagery initiated in Pandarus's earlier depiction of Cressidt as a

tempting dessert (Li. 15) is revisited during Troilus's disavowal of his love in V-ii.

Troilus describes the devotion that Cressida offers to Diomedes as table scraps; the

33

lefiovers of her gluttonous emotional consumption during his own affair with her:

"The fractions of her faith, orts of her love, / The fragments, swaps, the bits and

greasy relics / Of her o'er-eaten faith are given to Diomed" (V.ii. 1 5 8-60). Through

this grotesque inversion of Pandarus's metaphor, Troilus suggests that, as an object of

pursuit and admiration, Cressida is a cake, inviting and available for tasting; when she

takes on the subjective role of seducer, however, her passion is expressed as a

ravenous appetite which feeds itself into sickness. For Troilus, it appears, men are to

be the merchants or epicures, and women their pearls or pastries, with any disruption

of this pattern resulting first in confusion (I.i.146). and then in the demonization of the

offending wornan as a perverse and insatiable monster.

If it is Cressida who is the object of commercial and physical desire in Troilzrs

and Cressidds love plot, then it is Helen who fulfils a similar role in the war narrative.

As with her Trojan couterpart, Helenfs simultaneous status as object of male

reverence and subject capable of sexual choice engenders a series of multi-valanced

financial and culinary metaphors. During the Trojan council scene, Hector suggests

that Helen's "net worth" may be less than that of the Trojan soldiers killed on her

behalf: "Since the first sword was drawn about this question, / Every tithe soul,

'rnongst many thousand disrnes, / Hath been as dear as Helen; 1 mean of ours"

(1I.ii. 18-20). In Helenfs defence, Troilus offers an unsettling echo of his earlier

estimation of Cressida (and of Marlowe's Docror F i m ~ r ~ l s as well): "Why, she is a

pearl, / Whose price hath launched above a thousand ships, / And tum'd crown'd kings

to merchants" (II.ii.81-3). Later, in an ironic foreshadowing of the terms in which he

34

later rejects his own "pearl", Troilus mingles culinary and financial images to explain

why it would be dishonourabie to return Helen to the Greeks: "We tum not back the

siiks upon the merchant / When we have soil'd them, nor the remainder viands / We

do not throw in unrespective sieve, / Because we are now full" (II.ii.69-72). Even

Paris, in response to Diomed's aggressîve criticism of Helen, resorts to the language of

trade to vindicate his lover: "Fair Diorned, you do as chapmen do, / Dispraise the

thing that they desire to buy; / But we in silence hold this virtue well, / We'll not

commend, that not intend to sell" (IV.i.76-9).

Diornedes's virulent censure of Helen, to which Paris is responding, reflects a

valuation based not on her symbolic status as a prize gained in war, but on her sexual

assertiveness in giving up Menelaus for Paris. When Paris teasingly asks, "Who. . .

deserves Helen best-- / Myself, or Menelaus?" (IV.i.53-4), Diornedes scathingly

replies:

Both alike. . .

He rnerits well to have her that doth seek her. . .

And you as well to keep her that doth defend her,

Not palating the taste of her dishonour,

With such a costly loss of wealth and friends.

He like a puling cuckold would drink up

The lees and dregs of a flat tam'd piece;

You iike a lecher out of whorish loins

Are pleased to breed out your inheritors. (1V.i~. 55-6, 59-65)

35

As when Troilus denounces the " greasy relics" of Cressidats affection, Diomedes here

employs images of deformed appetite to suggest Helen's depreciated value. Because

Paris's palate is not sufficiently refined to detect the "taste of [Helen's] dishonour," he

is no better than Menelaus, who, like a desperate drunk, would sacrifice his dignity for

the "lees and dregs of a Bat tam'd piece." Unlike Cressida, whose libidinous hunger

made her an insatiable glutton, Heien is here portrayed as empty or used-up, as if her

own sexual "consumption" has left her " consumed". Despite the differing inflections

of their culinary images, however, the mercantile frameworks of bodi Troilus and

Diomedes produce the sarne evaluation: the woman who determines her own romantic

destiny is a "whore" (IV.ii.67).

As the metaphoric pattern underlying al1 of these discussions implies, women

in Tmzliïs and Cressida are valorized to the extent that they reproduce the terms of a

male-authored symbolic vocabulary (in Troilus's words, as long as they remain

"theme[s] of honour and renown" [ii.ii.199]), and vilified once they step from these

prescribed roles to engage in embodied, subjective choices. The terms of food and

trade to which the male characters obsessively retum suggest that the framework of

honour and chivalry which they openly commend is a most precarious one, in

constant danger of acceding to the baser physical and material appetites against which

it is pitted The role of women in this contest is to remain the hidden pearls and

untasted cakes of their lovers' imaginings, thereby preventing the fulfilment of any

elicit desires; failing this, they must absorb the societal castigation reserved for those

who enact these desires, in this way preserving, at least externally, the basic integrity

36

of the symbolic structure. As Tmzlzrs and Cressidu suggests, and as the perpetuation

of the Troilus and Cressida legend reinforces, once a woman is relegated to one (or

both) of these categories, she is destined to remain there for posterity. As Pandarus

decrees: "Let al1 constant men be Troiluses, al1 faise women Cressids, and al1 brokers-

between Pandas! Szy , amen" (III.iii.202-4).

The result of this debased rhetoric is, as C.C. Barfoot observes, a play which

suggests that "we can no more trust Our heroes, or even Our anti-heroes, than we c m

trust our words" (55). In Tmilirs and C ~ s s i d a , Shakespeare stretches linguistic and

dramatic structures until they are in danger of breaking apart, thereby exposing their

points of greatest fragility. The locus of this destructive energy is conventional

notions of femininity, which are astutely identified as sites of a culture's most

significant (and, often, most deiuded) symbolic investment. Through his exposure of

both the ways in which women are created and destroyed by patriarchd systems, and

the methods by which these systems are "canonized" through literature, Shakespeare

offers a critique of history and historiography which is strikingly modem in its self-

reflexivity. As Tmihts and Cressidds epilogue pointedly reminds us, this critique

applies not only to the long-dead society of the play, but to the "brethren and sisters"

in the audience as well, as Pandarus's "diseases" are bequeathed to the "traders in the

flesh" with whom he shares the theatre (V.x.56, 51, 45).

By uncovering the ways in which the play insidiously deconstmcts its own

sexist version of history, it is possible to see the chaos and turmoil of Tmzhrs md

Cmssido as vehicles for a profoundly idealistic critique of the patriarchd social order.

37

Ironically, as Shakespeare moves back into more conventional comic modes in A1I.i

Weil Thut Ends Well and bieaîirre for M e m r r e , this idealism will be replaced by an

increasingiy bleak vision of sexuai desire as an inherently destructive force; one which

is fundarnentally incompatible with the domestic institutions on which social

organization relies. While both A il's Well Thar Ends Well and Memure for Measirre

echo Tmikis and Cresszdds interest in the communal and personai ramifications of

sexual exchange, both the c o n t e m p o r q settings in which they take place, and their

more complex representations of the sexual and ethical forces which motivate

individuals of both genders, create outcornes which, altough they endeavor towards a

kind of reconciliation and social restructuring, appear in the end even more arnbiguous

and disturbing than Tmilus and Cressidds motiveless carnage.

Chapter Two

A115 Weil T'mî Ends Weil: "a young man rnanied is a man that's rnan'd"

After Tmilrrs and Crrssidds generic hybridization, A Il's Weli 7'hat Ends Well

marks a retum, at least ~ u p e ~ c i a l l y , to the forms and thematic concerns of the festive

comedies. As with the earlier comedies, it is the pursuit of a desired or promised

marriage which drives the narrative fonvard, and, as before, this marnage is eventually

achieved through what cm arguably be described as supematural or magical means.'

Despite these echoes of the festive comedies, however, the bed-trick is a narrative

convention which recalls, both inherently, but particularly in Shakespeare's usage. the

very issues of sexual cornmodification and corporeal exchange which are Tmiltrs mJ

Cmsszdds central preoccupations. The troubling questions about ernotional, physical

and sexual identity which are implicit in Helen's trading of Menaleus for Paris and ln

Cressida's substitution of Diomedes for Troilus are made explicit through the bed-trick.

where male sexual desire is assumed to efface the differences between women's bodies

until, as Helena bitterly remarks, "lust doth play / With what it loathes for that which

is away" (IV.iii.24-5). Moreover, the bed-trick reifies the problematic splitting of

women into either chaste goddesses or soited prostitutes which motivates the

bewildered Troilus to exclaim, "This is, and is not, Cressid!" (V.ii.146). While

Troilus, like Othe110 (in a nearly conternporaneous drarna which recasts many of the

problem plays' thematic concems), is unable to accommodate the CO-existence within a

single woman of both monogamous fidelity and potentially adulterous sexual desire,

39

the bed-trick allows for the negotiation of these competing impulses between two

separate women, thereby resolving, at least ostensibly, the paradox inherent in the

virgidwhore paradigm (Adelman, 77).

Far from assuaging the anxieties about social identity and sexual desire raised

by Tmihrs and Cressida, however, All's Well Thar Ends WelPs structural adherence to

the "rules" of comedy leads to a manifestation of these concems which is even more

provocative. When Troilus and Cressida's failed romance reaches a critical state, the

lovers themsehes vanish from the narrative, and the frustration of their aborted

courtship is redirected to the military violence which occupies the play's final scenzs.

In A /I!s Well, however, the energies of illicit desire and romantic conflict generated by

Bertram's rejection of Helena, his subsequent pursuit of Diana, and Helena's guileful

plotting must al! be subdued and contained by the tidy rnarriages with which a comedy

must necessarily conclude. The result, as generations of critics have acknowledged, is

an ending which is fraught with unease, and which seems unable to convince even the

characters thernselves of its appropriateness, as Helena's confident restatement of the

play's title in IV.iv degenerates to the King's conditional "Al1 yet seems well" in his

final speech (V.iii.333). As David Scott Kastan argues, it is precisely this disjunction

between the psychologicai vividness of the characters' desires, and the necessarily rigid

and artificidly theatncal structure of comedy, which creates the discomfort of AIik

WelPs ending; "[ilf AI15 Well Thar Ends Well is a problem comedy," Kastan explains,

"then, it is so because it sees so clearly that comedy is a problem" (586).

1 would argue, however, that what Ail's Well "sees clearly" is that comedy only

40

becomes a problem when it is confronted with patterns of sexual desire and

constructions of gender which challenge the relatively conservative institution of

marriage, and therefore the organization of comedy itself. In the festive cornedies, any

of the characters' romantic desires which transgress the boundaries of the socially

acceptable (Vioia/Cesario1s longing for Orsino, for exarnple, which appears to violate

cultural mores governing both class and gender) prove to be the result of deception or

misapprehension, and are easily recast as "marriageable" loves once the mith is

revealed. In Helena's pursuit of Bertram, however, A II5 Wcll presents a

transgressive passion which is not so easily defused, and which refuses to be

transformed even when the play's deceptions have been unravelied. Instead of

reinforcing the value of marnage by demonstrating how even the most intractable

circumstances can result in a "happy ending," Helena's dramatic manipulations

illuminate the exertions, both psychological and theatrical, which are necessary in

order to make an unconventionai, femaie-dominated relationship "work" as a marriage.

By setting up a direct confrontation between a wornanls sexual assertiveness

and a community which will accept only a passive, silent mode1 of femininity, Ali's

Well not only examines the means by which a traditional, marriage-based society

manages the potentiaily subversive incursion of ferninine sexual desire, but it explores

the impact of these conflicting pressures on the female psyche. Throughout the play,

Helena vaciilates between language which suggests a capitulation to the submissive

role which is expected of her as a woinan, and a more aggressive discourse which

projects both the force of her feelings for Bertram, and, more broadly, her status as

4 1

both the subject and object of sexual desire. Mirroring Helena's inconsistent seif-

representation, the play's other characters also describe a mode1 of womanhood which

is at one moment chaste and unassuming, and at another, sexually available and bold.

Like Cressida, whose purity and adulterousness are avowed nearIy simultaneously,

Helena's words and actions reflect the competing and incompatible feminine paradigms

with which women in the society of the play are repeatedly confronted. Unlike

Tmilrïs and Cressida. however, Ail's Weil, through both its particular plot and its

status as a comedy, places this dilemma at the centre of its dramatic action. As

Cressida evolves into Helena, the conflict engendered by society's need to

simultaneously glorify and contain fernale sexuaiity is foregrounded, and its resolution

becomes the focus of both narrative and genenc expectation. If myth and legend

detennine Tmilirs and Crrssidds events, then it is Helena who authors the story tord in

Ail's Weil, as she engineers the complex device of the bed-trick in order to secure the

ending which satisfies her needs.

As a cornedy, then, and as a narrative which is driven by the desires of its

female protagonist, Ail's Wcl? is uniquely qudified to examine the complex

rela~ionships among female desire, masculine constructions of feminine identity, and

marriage, and to interrogate the difficulties of represenhng these relationships within

conventionai genres. As AiIk W d ' s ambiguous ending suggests, there is no easy

resolution to be found to these psychological and representational quandaries; in

M e m m for Meantre, Ail's Weli's successor and Shakespeare's final comedy, the

seeming incompatibility of desire and marriage which disrupts the earlier problem

42

plays threatens to destroy both the romances upon which the narrative relies, and the

genre of comedy itself.

The degree to which Helena's nature is divided between the conservative

demands of her community and her own, more radical emotions is apparent even in

the first scene of the piay, where her two monologues demonstrate a nearly

irreconcilable split in her motives and intentions. In her first extended speech, Helena

reveals that the "tyranny of sorrows" descnbed by the Countess derives not, as is

imagined, from grief over her father's death, but from her unrequited yearning for

Bertram (I.i.50). Even in these opening moments, it is apparent that Helena feels it

necessary to disguise her sexual desire as the more appropriately chaste emotion of

daughterly grief. Helena's perception that her feelings are under scrutiny is not

entirely in her imagination; the Countess's third-person assessment of Helena's

upbringing and virtues suggests that the pressure Helena experiences to behave in a

manner appropriate to her age and sex is indeed justified (I.i.38-45).

When Helena first describes her feelings for Bertram, it is in terms which

suggest that she is prepared to remain entirely passive in her longing for a man who is

economically and socialiy inaccessible. Helena daims that she is "undone" by her

love for Bertran, that there is "no living, none" without him, and describes herself as

"[tlhe hind that would be mated by the lion" who must therefore "die for love" (I.i.84-

92). Although the almost exaggeraied pathos of Helena's lament makes it clev that

she is aware of the near irnpossibility of actively pursuing Bertram, her use of a

conventionally male chivalric rhetoric to describe her lover suggests that she may

already have another agenda in mind. Just as Troilus represents Cressida as an

unattainable "pearl" surrounded by a "wild and wand'ring flood" directly before

undertaking her seduction (TC I.i.100,102), Cressida describes Bertram as a "bright

particular star," in whose "bright radiance and collateral light" she must be content to

bask (I.i.86.88). Like Romeo's farnous paean to Juliet which opens the balcony scene,

Helena's rapturous association of Bertram with the unreachable stars recalls a type of

courtly flattery which is meant to precede a romantic conquest. Already, Helena's

language betrays the conflict between sexual passivity and aggression by which her

nature is essentially defined.

Just over one hundred lines iater, Helena has abandoned even the pretence of a

helpless, fatalistic attitude in favour of an overtly assertive posture: "Our remedies oft

in ourselves do lie, / Which we ascribe to heaven. The fated sky / Gwes us free scope,

only doth backward pull / Our slow designs when we ourselves are dull" (I.i.216-19).

In sharp contrast to the nearly spiritual language in which she had previously

characterized her longing, Helena's words now convey a sexual aggression which

extends even to the level of metaphor, when she describes the nature of her love in

suggestive, appetitive terms: "What power is it that mounts my love so high, / That

makes me see, and cannot feed mine eye? / n i e mightiest space in fortune nature

brings / To join the likes, and kiss like native things" (I.i.221-23). The dolrble-

entendre implied by these images of "mounting," "feeding," and "kiss[ing] like native

things" suggests that Helena's captivation with Bertrarn is at least partly motivated by

physical desire, in contrast to the less corporeal longing she has previously confessed

44

(McCandless, 45 1). Although the chivalric discourse recalled by Helena's earlier

speech subtly insinuates the possibility of achieving her desires, this potential is

carefully disguised behind the outward demeanour of a chaste, submissive orphan. In

this later soliloquy, however, Helena attempts no such dissimulation, and speaks

unapologetically as a confident, sexualiy assured woman who is entirely unconcemed

with the limitations of gender and class which her community would impose.

What intervenes between these fundamentally opposed attitudes is Helena's

lengthy, bantering discussion with Parolles about the nature and value of virginity. It

is clear even from the sarcastic greetings which open their conversation (Li. 106-9) diat

Heiena and Parolles are engaged in an almost ritualistic form of social banter; each

seems to anticipate the responses of the other in a manner which suggests that this

type of verbal intercourse between a man and a woman is not uncommon. Just as the

participants in this exchange seem to be speaking words which they have used before,

the dialogue aiso resonates with an eerie familiarity to the reader, as Helena and

Parolles represent sexuality through the very same symboiic vocabulary of commerce

and war which appears with such disturbing frequency in Tmihs and Ctvssida.

Helena first initiates the military metaphor with her query to Parolles, "Man is enemy

to virginity; how may we barricada it against him?" (I.i.112-13). After Parolles grimly

advises that "Man, sztting down before you, will undermine you and blow you up"

(1.1- 1 18- 19), Helena switches tactics and inquires, if passive resistance is useless, how

a woman might endeavour to "lose [her virginity] to her own liking?" (Li. 150-5 1).

During his evasive response ("Marry, ill, to like hirn that ne'er it li kes" [Li. 1 52-53]),

45

Parolles shifts to the language of trade with his daim that virginity is "a commodity

which will lose the gloss with lying: the longer kept, the less worth" (I.i.153-54).

Critics have registered a variety of responses to this exchange, ranging from

Richard Levin's vigorous condemnation of Helena for indiscretely confiding in a man

she has already identified as a "liar," a "coward," and a "fool" (134), to Carol Neely's

observation that the passage's repeated images of tumescence and detumescence reflect

the play's larger narrative pattern of gain, loss and eventual regain (68) . Given the

almost obsessive repetition of martial and commercial tropes in Tmilrrs and Cmsszda,

however, and their integral function in illuminating the profound flaws in that societ).'~

sexual values, I would choose to identiQ the significance of this passage as residing in

its employment of a nearly identical figurative language. By couching this dialogue in

metaphors of trade and battle, Shakespeare not only reinforces Helena's own

vacillating intentions (at one moment seeking to protect her virginity, and at the next

asking how she rnight lose it to the man of her choosing), but suggests that her

uncertainty is rooted in a cultural presentation of sexual relationships which is both

derneaning and contradictory. In a society where humour derives from the

representation of the relationship between a man and a woman as that of opposing

amies in a war, and in which virginity is alternately lauded and dismissed as a

commodity to be traded or sold to the highest bidder, it is not surprising that Helena

would be unable to achieve a stable or self-actualized understanding of her own

sexuality.

Helena's much-remarked-upon healing of the King reveals a similady

46

schimphrenic picture of the societal expectations of women. Pnor to her audience

with the monarch, Helena is described by Lafew as:

. . . a rnedicine

That's able to breath life into a Stone,

Quicken a rock, and make you dance canary

With spritely fire and motion, and whose simple touch

1s powerful enough to araise King Pippen, nay,

To give great Charlamain a pen in 's hand

And write her a love line. (n.i.72-8)

The King responds to Lafew in kind, continuing the obvious sexual innuendo with his

suggestian that "we with thee / may spend Our wonder too, or take off thine / by

wonderinç how thou took'st it (II.i.89-91). As the obvious phallic imagery of

"arais[ingJ King Pippen," giving Charlemagne a "pen in 's hand," and "spending our

wonder" make clear, the King and Lafew are interested in Helena for her sexud

attractiveness, rather than for any legitimate cure she may be able to offer.

Despite this lascivious enthusiasrn, however, when Helena is awarded an

audience with the King, she is at first unable to convince him to receive her remedy.

The King's Language suggests that it is Helena's youth and inexperience, as well as her

gender, which are causing his reticence; he repeatedly refers to Helena as "maiden" or

"maid," thus emphasizing her statu not only as a young girl, but as a virgin (g.i.114,

145). Oddly, however, the King irnplies that tu receive the cure from such an

inexperienced woman would be in some way to impugn his own virtue: "1 say we

47

must not / So stain our judgement, or corrupt Our hope, 1 To prostitute our pst-cure

malady / To empirics, or to dissever so / Our great self and credit, to esteem / A

senseless help when help past sense we deem" (1I.i. 1 19-24). The use of such terms as

"stain," "corrupt," and "prostitute" situate the King's concern very obviously in the

arena of the sexual, and suggest that, although it is acceptable to joke about an illicit

sexual encounter, the reality of such a liaison might have serious social consequences

for one in the elevated social and political position of a monarch. Finally, it is only a

promise from Helena that, should the cure fail, she will sacrifice her own spotless

reputation, which is able to convince the King to risk such "corruption": "Tax of

impudence, / A strumpet's boldness, a divulged shame, 1 Traduc'd by odious ballads;

my maiden's name 1 Sear'd otherwise, ne worst of worst-- extended 1 With vildest

toriure, let my life be ended" (II.i.170-74). The King responds to this emphatic vow

(which anticipates, both in its rnelodrama and its masochistic undercurrents, Isabella's

pleas to Angelo in Memrrre for Memurv) with great enthusiasm, claiming that Helena

has, through these words, become the instrument of some "blessed spirit" (Ki. ! 75).

What emerges clearly in even a cursory reading of this passage are the mixed

messages which both Helena herself, and the men which surround her, are sending

about her sexual status. At one moment Helena's virginity is cause for suspicion of

her skill and ability; at another, it is the only commodity she has which is valuable

enough to wager against the King's life. In an exchange between men, Helena is

represented as a being of almost supematural sexual power, able to raise the dead

through the potency of her physical charms; in her presence, these same men describe

48

her as a maiden whose willingness to sacrifice her honour for the King places her on

the same plane as the "blessed spirits." Like her Trojan namesake, whose rnerit

derives both from her "sweet delights" (TC 11.ii. 144) and from her status as a "theme

of honour and renown" (TC 11.ii. 199). Helena's value is divided between her present

physical desirability (her ability to "quicken a rock") and her enduring sexual

reputation (her "maiden's name"). The demands of these competing evaluative

systems place Helena in an intractable position; one which necessitates a radical

literalization of what has been suggested to her dl dong, and which she has

unintentionally foreshadowed in her earlier musing to Parolles that, "Tis pity . . . [tlhat

wishing well had not a body in't" (Li. 179-8 1) . Through the bed-trick, Helena

effectiveiy provides her wishes with a body (Diana's), and splits herself in two: she is

both Helen of Troy and Diana, adulteress and virgin, thereby fulfilling both of the

roles which society has prescribed for her.

As the central narrative event of both Ail's Well and Measzrre for M e m i r r . the

bed-trick has generated a mass of critical responses which divides broadly into two

categories. On the one hand, critics such as Northrop Frye have drawn upon W. W.

Lawrence's source-related analysis of the plays to conclude that the bed-trick belongs

to an ancient tradition of fantastic, fairy-tale plot devices (as, according to Lawrence,

do Ail's Well's heding of the King and fulfilment of seerningly impossible pre-marital

conditions), and for this reason cannot be understood as a "redistic," morally-inflected

event (Lawrence, 73-6; Frye, 3). More frequently, however, critics have found that the

potent ethical and erotic implications which underscore Shakespeare's use of this

49

convention make it impossible to view the bed-trick in such a transparent and

uncomplicated manner, and have instead chosen to interpret it as a real, sexuai

interaction demanding serious ethical and psychological consideration. Among this

second group of critics, both Richard Wheeler and Janet Adelman identie the bed-

trick's function as the nexus of a network of stresses which emerge in both Al15 Well

and M e m n for Memm between the competing demands of persona1 desire and

social cohesion. To Wheeler, " [s] exual conflict seems to separate individual desire

from the demands of the social order in each play; the bed rrick both dramatizes this

estrangement and points toward a possible resolution of it" (1 2). Adelman emphasizes

more forcefully the intense stress which the bed-trick places on dramatic action,

suggesting of the two final comedies that, "[tlhe psychic violence of their proposed

solutions merely illustrates the seriousness of the disease: the extent to which sexuality

is here a matter of deception on the one side and hit-and-run contamination on the

other underscores the deep incompatibility of sexuality and marriage" (78).

As my argument so far has anticipated, I believe that the profound conflict

between individual desire and the needs of the community which the bed-trick so

uneasily represents is dramatized throughout AIl's Well That Ends Well as the deeply

divided image of womanhood which Helena both absorbs and espouses. Just as

Cressida's duplicity is embiematic of Tmiliis and Cressidds inconsistent and two-faced

patnarchal culture, the cleavage in Helena's self-conception, and its eventual reification

through the bed-trick, constitute a powerful representation of the collision of individual

and social values which is the principal concem of the problem comedies. For this

50

reason, the bed-trick is presented in Ail's Well as the culmination of the process of

psychic disintegration which Helena has been undergoing throughout the drama. Like

Helena's description of her feelings for Bemam in scene one, and the peculiar rhetoric

surrounding the healing of the king, the bed-trick is an event of supreme ambivalence,

suggesting both presence and absence; sexud aggression and the preservation of

chastity; defiance of Bertram's desires and capitulation to his seemingly impossible

conditions; and death (both literal, as Helena would have her husband believe, and

figurative, in the sense of orgasm) and rebirth. It is not surprising, then, that the

events which precede Helena's orchestration of the bed-trick reinforce the already

powerful sense that she is irrevocably divided in her intentions, and must therefore

engineer a solution to her difficulties which is as contradictory as are her motives in

undertaking i t.

Helena's removal to Florence is ostensibly motivated both by sharne for her

excessively "ambitious love," and by concem for Bertram's well-being as he fights in

the French army (1II.i.S). In her highly melodramatic letter to the Countess, the

artificidity o f which is underscored by its tensely rhymed quatrains, Helena bids her

mother-in-law to inform Bertram that, "from the bloody course of war / My dearest

master, your son, may hie. / Bless him at home in peace, whilst I from far / his name

with zeaious fervor sanctiG. . . He is too good and fair for death and me, / Whom I

myself embrace to set him free" (1II.i. 8-9, 16- 1 7). Although this self-sacrificing

rhetoric has the desired effect on the Countess, who expresses her "greatest grief' at

the news of her daughter-in-law's plans and promptly dispatches a missive to Bertram,

5 1

Helena's soliloquy , which precedes her disappearance, reveals that her intentions are

not as transparently altruistic as her letter would suggest (III.t.32). Helena's speech

begins with a by-now farniliar enumeration of the shortcomings which make her

unsuitable for a man in Bertram's elevated position, followed by an expression of her

masochistic desire to lay down her life before him ("Bener 'twere / 1 met the ravin lion

when he roar'd . . .better 'twere / That al1 the miseries which nature owes / Were mine

at once" [iII.ii.l16-tO]), but concludes with the insinuation that these emotions are

secondary to a more forceful desire to make her husband regret his callous disregard:

"1 will be gone, / That pitiful rumour may report my flight / To consolate thine ear"

(ULii. 126-28).

Despite the fact that Helena claims that she only wishes news of her death to

"console" Bertram, it is reasonable to assume that she imagines, as the Countess does,

that the "pitiful rumour[s]" of her exile and irnpending suicide will soften her

husband's resolve, motivating him to return to France where they might then be

reunited (III.i.32-38). This reading is bolstered by Helena's actions upon encountering

Diana and her rnother in Florence, when, almost immediately after hearing of

Bertram's lascivious interest in the girl, she proposes to "buy [their] friendly help" in

organizing the bed-trick (III.vii.lS). If Helena were truly committed to freeing

Bertrarn from his nuptial obligations by ending her own life, it is unlikely that she

could have devised such an involved strategy in the short hours between her initial

meeting with the two women, and her introduction of the subject of the bed-trick

(Helena first encounters Diana and her mother in the street, and, as it is only a brief

52

conversation among Bertram, Parolles and the French Lords which intervenes before

their next meeting at dinner, it seems that Helena would have had little time to vastly

reformulate her position). As with her opening description of her feelings for Bertram,

Helena is here disguising a resolute intention to pursue her desires behind a facade of

chaste humility and servitude. Although Helena herseif appears unaware of her

rnercurial attitudes (as many of these inconsistencies are revealed in soliloquy, it is

unclear why she would feel it necessary to dissimulate in private reflection), she

nevertheless continues to engage in a process of disturbing linguistic duplicity,

whereby the rhetoric of subsenrience and self-sacrifice conceals a deeper impulse

towards sexüai and emotional assertiveness.

Like the dialogue which surrounds her treatment of the King, Helena's

vacillating approach to the bed-trick cannot be understood to be solely the result of her

own delusion or deceptiveness, but ernerges at least in part from cultural presentations

of women which remain alarmingly inconsistent. Parolles, who had cynically advised

Helena to "Get thee a good husband, and use him as he uses thee" (I.ii.214), later

describes to Bertram how marital and dornestic obligations sap a man's virility and

honour, which would be better expended in battle: "He wears his honour in a box

unseen, That hugs his kicky-wicky here at home, / Spending his manly marrow in her

arms, I Which should sustain the bound and high curvet / Of Mars's fiery steed"

(II.iii.279-83). In an echo of Tmihrs and Cressida, where war is both literally waged

over a woman, and figuratively aligned with the domestic sphere through Aeneus's

punning association of a woman's "arms" with the "armarnents" of battle ("If there be

53

one . . . That loves his mistress more than in confession / With truant vows to her own

lips he loves, / And dare avow her beauty and her worth ! In other arms than hers . . ."

[TC I.iii.265, 269-73]), Parolles here continues the linkage of sexual relations with

combat which he began in his earlier dialogue with Helena about virginity, only this

time, arriving at the even more categorical and disturbing conclusion that "A young

man married is a man that's marr'd" (II.iii.298). From the King's "blessed spirit" and

Lafew's alluring "Doctor She" (II.i.79), to Parolles's "kicky-wicky" and Bertram's

"detested wife" (II.iii.292). Helena is once again cast and recast in a variety of

disparate and inimical roles, al1 of which are to some extent appropriate, but none of

which she can ever adequately fulfil.

Helena's ultirnate response, then, is the bed-trick, which simultaneously

emblematizes the fracturing of feminine identity which is implied by much of Helena's

previous expression and experience, and suggests a startling means for reunifiing these

splintered female personae through a single sexual act. The bed-tric k's profound

duality is underscored by its unusuai positioning in the drama, which reflects what

Susan Snyder refers to as the recurring pattern of "displacement and deferral" in the

text (20). As several critics have observed, the very structure of A Il's Weil is riddled

with doublings, beginning with the bipartite structure which it shares with The

Winrer's Tale. In her exemplary discussion of the subject, Barbara Hodgdon explains

that each half of the play "contains a miraculous and sexually charged transformation,

and each transformation is doubled-- that is, each generates its own medium of

exchange" (51). Ali's Welfs first section includes the healing of the King, which is

54

"exchanged" for Helena's right to choose the husband she desires; and its second half

centres around the bed-trick, which not only achieves the terms of the first bargain, but

generates die oppominity for Diana to engage in a similar selection. Other

displacements and duplications in the play which have been suggested include the

Countess's replacement of Helena's deceased rnother (Snyder, 2 1 ); Lavatch's

supplantation of the absent Helena as the Countess's closest cornpanion (Hodgdon, 50);

and Bertram's use of the war in Italy as a means for deferring the domeshc conflict

which has been engenderel by his coerced mamage to Helena (Adelman, 81).

By far the most substantial of these doublings, however, occur in conjunction

with the bed-trick itself. Through more than just the obvious painng of Helena and

Diana, the bed-trick suggests a complex pattern of layering and substitution, whereby

the emotional resonances of one narrative event are juxtaposed with those of another.

This sophisticated structure begins with the curïous simultaneity of Helena's pretended

death (described by the first Lord in IV.iii.48-53), and Bertram's figura1 "death"

through the consummation of his desire for Diana (Hodgdon, 60). Through the

temporal conjunction of these two events, the division of Helena into martyred virgin

and accomplished courtesan is made powerfully literal. Helena's implication in the

bed-trick is further complicated by the on-stage event which replaces the off-stage

sexual act. While Bertram completes his supposed assignation with Diana, Parolles is

tricked and humiliated by the two French Lords (1V.iii). As Snyder observes, botii

Bertram and Parolles are the victims of premeditated plotting, both are "in the dark,"

both literaily and metaphorically (Parolles is blindfolded), and both mistake what is

55

actually familiar for something foreign and unknown (27). Through the replacement

of the bed-trick with the outwitting of Parolles, an emotional release is provided which

effectively defuses any potentially negative response to the more problematic erotic

deception. Seen in this manner, the very structure of the bed-trick's presentation, and

perhaps of the play as a whole, is designed to emphasize the doubleness, division, and

inconsistency by which Helena's character is defined, and from which her community's

collective vision of femininity suffers.

Similarly, the couching of the bed-trick's sexuai exchanges, both before and

after its occurrence, in the mythic language of fairy-tales might aIso be construed as an

attempt to defer the sexual tensions which are inherent in such an act. Although, as

McCandless remarks, "in appointing Helena her impossible tasks, Bertram sets up a

fairy-tale framework only for the sake of demolishing it" (by making the tasks nearly

unachievable in the concrete, realistic world of the play), Helena's solution manages, at

least superficially, to keep the folkloric character of Bertram's conditions intact (459).

The terms of Bertram's bargain each imply the replacement of a romantic or sexual act

with a tangible, material symbol: the ring from his finger to suggest maniage, and

Helena's pregnant body to signi@ its consummation (III.ii.57-60). Likewise, in her

coy dialogue with Bertram, Diana suggests that the ring she wishes to receive from

him is closely aligned with the sexual promise which she offers in retum: "Mine

honour's such a ring, / My chastity's the jewet of Our house, / Bequeathed down from

many ancestors, / Which were the greatest obloquy i ' th' world / In me to lose"

(IV.ii.45-9). By substituting a fantastic bargain for a sexual deception, and material

56

objects for the emotionally invested promises which they are rneant to represent, the

fairy-tale framework of the bed-trick suggests another means by which its more

incendiary, and potentially controversial, sexual resonances might be effectively

subdued.

In keeping with this pattern of replacement and substitution, Helena is able to

achieve the marriage she desires at the end of the play only by shifting the

implications of her erotic acts on to the character of Diana. Despite the fact that it is

Helena, and not Diana, who both enjoys the sexual pleasures of the bed-trick (she later

adrnits that she found Bertram "wondrous kind" [V.iii.309]), and reaps its ultirnate

rewards through her pregnancy, Diana is made to suffer the consequences imposed on

a sexually aggressive woman when she is publicly humiliated in the final scene by

both Lafew, who claims that "This wornan's an easy glove, my lord, she goes on and

off at pleasure" (V.iii.277-78), and by the King, who concludes that she is nothing

more than a "common customer" (V.iii.286). Even though, once the nature of the bed-

trick has been reveaied by Helena, Diana is excused by the King and receives

compensation through her choice of a husband, the resolution is a very uneasy one.

Like Helena before her, Diana is effectively cdled a strumpet and a saint within

several sentences; also like Helena, Diana is rewarded for her chastity with the

sexually assertive option of selectmg her mate.

Things have, it appears, corne full circle, with Diana absorbing precisely the

sarne paradoxical image of womanhood to which Helena was previously exposed.

AIl's Welk final moments are undermined by more than just their disturbing

57

recapitulation of earlier events; the language of the last scene suggests a deep

ambivalence about the miraculous resolutions which its own narrative have prepared.

Helena's resurrection after her supposed death (an event which, in its reworking as

Hermione's transformation from Stone to living flesh in The Winters Tale, constitutes

one of the most wondrous and affirming moments in al1 of Shakespearian drama) is

greeted with only mild surprise by the King, and is weakened by Helena's own morose

obsenration that, "'Tis but the shadow of a wife you see, / The name, and not the

thing" (V.iii.308-9). Similarly, Helena's vow that she has fulfilled the terms of

Benram's bargain in good faith is couched wholly in negatives ("If it appear not plain

and prove untrue, 1 Deadly divorce step between me and you! " [V.iii.3 17- 19]), and

Bemam's own promise of fidelity stumbles awkwardly, as if he is choking on the

words he speaks: "If she, my liege, can make me know this clearly, / 1'11 love her

dearly, ever, ever dearly" (V.iii.3 1 5- 16).

Although A Il's WeII recalls the festive comedies through both its folkloric plot

devices and the conveniently arranged nuptiais in its final scene, the irreconcilable

ferninine paradigms which Helena strives to unite through the bed-trick threaten to

disintegrate the basic structures of comedy itself. The confrontation between

marriagekomedy and an unconventional sexuality which Helena's assertiveness

introduces is pushed even further in Memiire for M e m r e , where it is not only female

desire which is suggested to be transgressive, but desire itself. In the last of the

problem plays, the cultural institutions which regulate sexuality appear too narrow to

accommodate the destructive multiplicity of human desires, just as these desires

58

become so perverse that they eschew even the nominal restraints imposed by faithful,

monogamous relationships.

Chapter Three

Memure for Memwe: "desire should meet the blow of jusf ce"

During Meastrre for Memure's long and notoriously troublesome final scene, a

veiled Mariana is brought in to corroborate Isabella's claim that Ange10 is a hypocrite

and a deceiver. While attempting to determine the credibility of the disguised

woman, the Duke first questions Mariana about her marital condition, and, when she

equivocates, offers the following sumrnation of the standards by which a woman's

public status c m be evaluated:

Dlikr: What, are you married?

Mariana: No, rny lord.

Dtike: Are you a maid?

Mariana: No, my lord.

Dtrke: A widow then?

Marimu: Neither, my lord.

Dtrke: Why, you are nothing then: neither maid widow nor wife (V-i. 171-9).

That a woman is "nothing" if she is neither married, a virgin, nor a widow

(Lucio later adds the category of "punk" to this equation [V-i. 1791) suggests the

restrictive and absolute standards of sexual behaviour to which women in the society

of the play must conform. Moreover, the examination of such intimately persona1 acts

in the communal arena of an outdoor court reveals the disturbing elision of "the

60

public" with "the private" which such standards create, not only for women, but, as

Claudio's imprisonment and the "punishments by marriage" irnposed on Lucio and

Angelo suçgest, for men as well.

Even more than its repressive taxonomy of womanhood, o r even its conflation

of public and private life, ho wever, the Duke's interrogation suggests a fundamental

anxiety about the constitution of identity; both one's own, and those of others.

Measim for M e a t m retums obsessively to the difficulty of knowing what is true and

what is not; of distinguishing between "seemers" (I.iii.54) and honest men, between

"justice" and "iniquity l' ( K i . l72), and between "sin" and "charity" (II.iv.68).

Although the Duke, as well as Angelo and Isabella, rnake bold da ims about the

possibility of knowing with certainty who and what one is, the action of the play

suggests otherwise. As the play's reiterated images of stamps and impressions irnply,

Measim for Meaîirrr. with its disturbing string of deceptions and betrayais, concludes

with the inescapable sense that hurnan nature is both rnalleable and contradictory, and

fits uneasily, at best, into the rigid categories which Viennese law, and, indeed,

conventional comedy, demand.

It is no coincidence that the Duke chooses to base his classification of

womanhood on sexual status (virgin versus monogamous sexual partner) as, in

M e m m for Meuwre, it is sexuality which presents the most consistent challenge to

fixed notions of subjectivity. T h u g h o u t the play, physical desire is perceived as a

threat to the stability of identity, with the body acting as a ternplate on which the

"character[s]" of illicit carnal experience are indelibly "writtl (1-ii. 155). While luliet's

6 1

swelling belly reveals her incontinence, Mariana's is visible proof of her consummated

marriage to Angelo; and while Lucio daims to be able to identi@ Isabella as a virgin

because of the blush in her cheeks (I.iv. 1 6 4 7), Angelo fears that desire has tumed his

own body to "carrion" which will " c o m p t with virtuous season" (II.ii.166-7).

Although, as in al1 of Shakespeare's cornedies, marriage is suggested as a corrective

for the insurgent effects of sexual desire, the marriages which Memtre for Meantre

offers at its conclusion are anything but satisfying, and seem unable to contain the

subversive energies introduced by the sexual tensions of its earlier scenes. Angelo,

after pleading with the Duke for "immediate sentence and sequent death" (V.i.372). 1s

instead wedded to Mariana, whom he had previously rejected; Lucio declares that hts

marriage to Kate Keepdown will be "pressing to death, whipping, and hanging"

(V.i.522-3); Isabella is speechless &ter the wholly wiprepared proposal by the Duke.

and even the union of Claudio and Juliet, which seems the only marriage that might

provide the festive resolution dernanded by the comic form, is undermined by the

lovers' unbroken silence during the final scene.

In Measirre for Mensure, his final comedy, Shakespeare seems deeply sceptical

that the regulations and rihials of public life have the power to reign in the darker

semai impulses which tempt both men and women. The rigidly polarized models of

behaviour and public identity demanded by Viennese society, extemaiized in the play's

opposing locales of convent and brothel; court and prison, are untenable in a world

where such protean shifis as the Duke's transformation from monarch to clergyman are

possible, and where bodies (Mariana's and Isabella's, Ragozine's and Cl audio's) are

62

interchangeable in the extreme physical states of lust and death. In Tmilris and

Cresszda, the erosion of "degree, priority and place" (TC, I.iii.86) is presented as a

political affliction, engendered by a lack of respect for the appropriate social and

military hierarchy; the play's deformed sexuality emerges as a result of these sarne

deeply flawed patriarchal social structures. In A il's Well Thar Ends Weil , although the

division of wornen into "virgins" and "whores" is presented as a more intractable

problern than in the subtiy idedistic Tmilus and Cresszda, the marriages at the play's

conclusion still suggest, however remotely, the possibility of reconciling sexual desire

with the needs of the community. In Measure for Memure, however, it is desire itself

which is the malevolent force, corroding social and ethical boundaries until even the

"magical" curative of the bed-trick is unable to provide a satisfactory resolution.

Unlike the earlier problem plays, Memm for Mear~ire offers little suggestion

of a subversive critique of male-dominated power structures, as the mode1 of sexual

relations on which it is based is not so simply dyadic in nature. Instead of implying

that social harmony might be achieved in a community where women's self-

conceptions are better realized, and in which male-female sexual dynamics are more

equitable, Memure for Memure portrays a world of conflicted sexual diversity, in

which traditional sexual patterns are undermined by a variety of destructive and

transgressive desires to which both men and women can fall victim. Moreover, the

play offers no healthy or "natural" sexual relations to counterpoint it's diseased libidos;

even that most sacred image of social and sexual consonance-- the womm's pregnant

body- is here associated only with physical corruption and social disarray. Unlike

63

those in Tmilits and Cressido and AZl's Well, the female bodies bartered within

M e m m for Memrlre's sexual economy are not simply emblems of a corrupt

patnarchy, but rather of a larger system of sexual desire which, in both personal and

social terms, is disastrously "out of joint." For this reason, as Kathleen McLuskie

observes, "[flerninist criticism of this play is restricted to exposing it's own exclusion

from the text" (97).' The forces at work behind Memure for M e m m ' s failed

marriages are generated by more than just the systematic oppression of women;

instead, they hint at a deeper social nihilism which anticipates Leur's "unnaturalness

between the child and the parent, death, dearth, dissolutions of ancient amities,

divisions in state, menaces and maledictions against kings and nobles, needless

diffidences, banishment of friends, dissipation of cohorts, nuptial breaches, and I know

not what" (Lear, h i . 144-49).

With its visceral alliance of desire and death, its obsessive anxiety about

procreation, and its presentation of marriage as nothing more than a punishment for

sexual transgression, Measztm for Measzrre suggests the final failure of comedy as a

medium for examining the complex relationships arnong love, lus:, and the social

institutions which are designed to harmonize them. As Carol Neely observes, the

unbroken string of tragedies which follows deals in large part with the disruption of

marriage initiated in Meustrm for Measztre, and it is only in Shakespeare's final works,

the romances, that rnarriage is re-established as the symbol of harmozy and social

reconciliation which it so effectively represented in the festive cornedies (1 ) .

At its opening, M e m m for Memure appears to present a positiveiy delineated

64

society of legislators and transgressors; the chaste and the sexually soiled. The Duke,

Escalus, Angelo and Isabella ciearly belong to the former category, introduced as they

are in the pristine environments of the palace and a convent; and Lucio, Pompey,

Froth, Elbow, Mistress Overdone and, in a slightly different manner, Claudio and

Juliet, belong to the latter. The stark contrast between the gravity and pomp of the

Dukels bequeathal of his authority on Angelo in scene one, and the bawdy slapstick of

Lucio, Pompey and the other Street denizens in scene two, supports the Dukels claim

that Vienna is a city where "decrees, / Dead to infliction, to themselves are dead, /

And liberty plucks justice by the nose; / The baby beats the nurse, and quite athwart /

Goes dl decorum" (I.iii.27-3 1). Even Claudio, whose oniy offense is to have slept

with the woman who is "fast [his] wife" (I.ii.147). suggests that his imprisonment is

the inevitable result of "too much liberty" (I.ii.125); and that, without appropriate

extemai restraints, human nature will "pursue, / Like rats that ravin down their proper

bane, / A thirsty evil, and when we drink we die" (I.ii.128-30).

The stnct moral polarity implied by these opening scenes is undermined,

however, not only by the later events of the play (of which Angelo1s fa11 from grace is

certainfy the most shocking), but by a language which subtly blurs the distinctions

between the chaste and the transgressive. Although Angelo's abrupt switch from

abstinent ascetic to sexual predator suggests the most pathological consequence of the

suppression of sexual impulses, in various ways both the Duke and Isabella d s o imply

that their intense repression of physical desire is the result of potentially unhealthy,

even deviant, sexual leanings. Although these alternative sexualities are subtly

65

presented, they reinforce the impression that, as Janet Adelman observes, "the very

distinction between licit and illicit sexuality on which Ail's Weli depends has broken

down" in Measrtre for Mearttrr (87), and that the system of authority by which desire

is regulated is, in fact, as "hollow" and "full of error" (I.ii.54, 56) as the transgressors

whom it is designed to control.

The Duke's assurance to Friar Thomas that the "dribbling dart of love" cannot

pierce his "complete bosom" (I.iii.2-3) seerns less a result of the monarch's

unimpeachable mords than of his strangely detached, even voyeuristic relationship

with his subjects. In defending his decision to absent himself from affairs of state. the

Duke twce suggests that he is better suited to a life of soiitude than to the constant

scrutiny of public office. To Friar Thomas he declares his love of "the life removed"

(I.iii.8). and to Angelo he daims, "1 love the people, / But do not like to stage me to

their eyes" (Lii.68-9). The Duke's use of the term "stage" is particularly apposite, as it

is precisely the "offstage" role of playwright or director which he seems to favour in

his dealings with the citizens of Vienna. The notion of the Duke as a theatrical

manipulator of events is one which a number of critics have proposed; in Anne

Barton's formulation, the Duke is a kind of "comic dramatist: a man trying to impose

the order of art upon a reality which stubbomly resists such schematization" (547).

Disguised as an anonymous clergymen, the Duke is free to direct his characters as he

will, setthg up the pious Angelo to test "if power change purpose" (I.iii.54). and

attempting to provide comedic resolution through the awkward marriages which he

hastily concocts in the final scene. The rather glaring moral deficiencies inherent in

66

impersonating a clergyman, orchestrating the bed-trick, and lying to Isabella about her

brother's death are completely subordinated to the Duke's iarger agenda of covertly

observing his subjects (as the scopic implications of the theatrical metaphor suggest),

and impelling their activities-- particularly their sexual activities-- to wards a

preconceived and artificiai conclusion.

Not only do the Duke's machinations suggest a need to control his subjects

through surveillance and deception, but his decision to invest in the strict and

unbending Angelo "ail the organs I Of Our own power" (a phrase in which the sexual

implication is obvious) intimates that the Duke will take vicarious pleasure in

watching the lawless be aggressively punished (I.i.20-1). There is something perverse

in the Duke's references to "biting laws" (Lii. l9), "fond fathers" wielding "threat'ning

twgs of birch" (I.ii.23-4), and "the baby" who "beats the nurse" (I.ii.30); his vision of

the punitive role of govemment is one which is not only harsh, but strangely domestic

as well. As with his disguise as a friar, in whom congregants will unknowingly

confide their most intirnate secrets, the Duke's analogies for the law suggest a

disconcerting and perhaps obsessive interest in the private and sordid affairs of

individuals. When Angelo remarks that, "Always obedient to your Grace's will, 1

corne to know your pleasure" (I.i.25-6), he may be aware that the Duke's "pleasure" is

voyeuristic, invasive, and potentially violent in nature.

If the Duke's sexual abstinence can be seen to derive from his preference for

watching and manipulating, rather than actudly participating in, acts of intirnacy,

Isabella's chastity is the result of an equally anornalous sexuality; one based on a

67

masochistic obsession with the value of virginity. Even more than the Duke, for

whom physicai consumrnation seems a mere afterthought in a cornplex psychosexuai

garne of observation and surreptitious control, Isabella views chastity as a profoünd

religious value; one which elevates her to the status, as Lucio perhaps mockingiy

rernarks, of "a thing enskied and sainted, / %y [her] renouncement an immortal spirit,

And to be talked to with sincerity, / As with a saint" (I.iv.34-7).

In keeping with her imagined role as a "saint," Isabella i s eager to align her

virginity with martyrdom, as if the value of her purity will increase if she is given the

opportunity to perish for it. When Angeio presents Isabella with the hypothetical

exchange of her chastity for her brother's life, asking, "What would you do?" (iI.iv.98),

Isabella responds with what Ruth Nevo aptly describes as an "erotically masochistic"

fantasy of her own demise (1 16):

As much for my poor brother as myself:

That is, were 1 under the terms of death,

Th' impression of keen whips I'ld Wear as rubies,

And strip myself ro death, as to a bed

That longing have been sick for, ere I'ld yield

My body up to shame. (II.iv.99-103)

Isabella's description of her own blood as a gem-like adomment, and her equation of

death with "a bed that longing have been sick for," are srartling in their evocation c?f a

vividly masochistic desire, perhaps foreshadowed in the novice's earlier request that "a

more strict restraint" be imposed on her by the notoriously austere votarists of Saint

68

Clare (I.iv.4). Moreover, this impassioned response evades Angelots real question, in

which it is Claudio's death, and not Isabella's, which is at issue. Even when she seeks

assurance fiom her brother that her virgînity is more important than his life (a request

which, under the circumstances, appears both selfish and highly unredistic), kabella

retums to her saange fantasy of self-immolation: "0, were it but my iife, / I'd throw it

down for your deliverance / As frankly as a pin" (III.i.102-4).

When it becomes clear that it is not her own life, but that of her brother, which

must be sacrificed in order to preserve her virginity, Isabella switches tactics and

invests CIaudio with the power to adopt the role of sainted martyr which she had

previously imagined for herself. Through a variety of strategies, including appeals to

his honour (III.i.71), and invocations of the memory of their dead father (XII.i.85-6),

Isabella temporarily manages to sway her brother to her own eroticized vision of

death: "If 1 must die," Claudio daims, " 1 will encounter darkness as a bride, / And

hug it in mine arms" (III.i.81-3). When fear overcomes him, however, and Claudio

delivers his farnously eloquent soliloquy on the terrible uncertainty of dying (1II.i. 1 17-

32), Isabella is infuriated, and lashes out at the condemned man with alarming

ferocity :

O you beast!

O faithless coward! O dishonest wetch!

Wilt thou be made a man out of my vice?

Is't not a kind of incest, to take life

From thine own sister's shame? What should 1 think?

Heaven shield my mother played m y father fair!

For such a warped slip of wildemess

Ne'er issued from his blood. (1II.i. 135-42)

Isabellafs outburst is telling not only in its vehemence, which reveals the

intensity of her cornmitment to the fantasy of glorious martyrdom, but also in its

highly peculiar sexual language. Beginning with the pun on "ma[king] a man," which

suggests both sexual conquest and conception, as wetl as the preservation of Claudio's

life, Isabelia continues by claiming that there is something incestuous about Claudio

gaining reprieve from his sister's sexual sacrifice. In an act of psychological and

linguistic slippage, Isabella seems here to conflate her sexuai tormentor with her

brother; when she sleeps with Angelo, it is Claudio who will be "made a man," and

who will suffer the ethical consequences of having committed the sin of incest.

Moreover, the polluting influence of Isabella's act of coerced sex will extend not only

to Claudio, but retroactively to their mother as well, whom she accuses of having

cockholded their father in order to produce "such a warped slip of wildemess."

For Isabella, the sex act in al1 of its manifestations, whether pleasurable,

procreative, or coerced, exists only in opposition to her valorized, sacrificial image of

chastity and martyrdom. Any violation of this fantasy is, as Isabella's renunciation of

Claudio suggests, tantamount to the commission of every imaginable sexual offense,

from rape, to incest, to adultery. As Nevo concludes, Isabella's virginity is not the

result of mere aloofness or frigidity, but of a profound fear, "not of sex as such . . .

but of the breakdown of her fragile ideology of a desexualized, an alternative ecstasy"

70

(1 16). This ecstasy, which is, as her erotically-charged description of torture and

death in II.iv suggests, as compelling in its own way as physical pleasure, is what

motivates Isabella to sacrifice her brother and her dignity (when she submits to the

Duke's humiliating interrogation in the final scene) in a way which seems, to many

readers, both deluded and unconscionable.

Like the Duke, then, for whom pieasure derives from the voyeuristic titillation

of disguise and observation, Isabella gains "erotic" satisfaction from an alternative,

non-sexual source: the masochistic fantasy of chastity, privation, and death. Viewed in

this way, both the Duke and Isabella, vaunted as the embodiments of the state's

sanctioned codes of sexual behaviour, appear more aberrant in their desires than even

the hedonistic Mistress Overdone. The result of these suggestions of deviance is not,

however, as one might speculate, a comedically appropriate reversal, in which the

social dominance of the ruling class is undermined, and authority temporarily

subverted, in favour of a cathartic and transgressive sexual ideology. As Jonathan

DolIimore points out in his examination of the play from the perspective of cultural

materialism. Meaîrm for Meosirre offers none of the productive social restructuring

inherent in the Bakhtinian carnivalesque (73). Although the sociaily marginaiized

characters in Mearirre for Memrre occasionally display a sympathy and reasonableness

which are absent in thzir superiors (as with Lucio's repeated condemnations of

Angelots harsh justice), the anarchic desire of bawdy-houses and prostitutes is hardiy

an acceptable alternative to the repressed and deformed sexudity of Viennafs

aristocracy. As DoIlimore observes, to suggest otherwise is to "simply rernain within

7 1

the sarne problematic [fonvarded by the play's intemal voices of authority], only

reversing the polarities of the binary opposition which structures it (order/chaos)"

(Dollimore, 73).

Instead, the overt and covert sexual perversions of Angelo, the Duke and

Isabella merely accentuate the disturbing sense in Meaîzrre for Memrm that sexual

appetite of al1 types is inherently subversive, and incommensurable with the

hierarchies which structure both political and social life. Although it is, of course,

possible to imagine a mode1 of sexual desire which is neither pathologically repressed,

nor dangerously unbounded, the play's only significant relationship which arguably

forwards such a model-- that of Claudio and Juliet-- is seriously undermined, both by

the severe penalties imposed on the lovers for their relatively minor act of

incontinence, and by the play's persistent anxieties about the dangers of procreation.

Juliet's pregnancy, even when it is legitimated by marriage in the final scene, is a

powerful symbol of the threat of unchecked sexual passion; her body is one on which,

as Claudio himself observes, the consequence of extramarital desire "[wlith character

too gross is writ" (I.ii.155). The use of the term "gross" is suggestive not only of the

exaggerated proportions of Juliet's swollen belly, but also of crudity or uncleanliness,

implying what the play elsewhere makes more explicit: that sexual desire and

mortality are intimately bound up, as are the making of life through conception and

the taking of life through murder. Not only does Memure for Measzrre present a

world of destructive and transgressive desires, but one in which even motherhood,

which had previously been offered as a solution to the problern of illicit sexuality, is

ciosely allied with dissolution and death.

Menrirre for Meaîirre's anxieties about conception c m be seen even in its

figurative language, in which images of pregnancy appear unusually frequently.

Escaius is "pregnant" (well-versed ) in the nature of the Viennese people and the laws

of the city (I.i.11); Angelo remarks that some of the guilty are "very pregnant"

(glossed as "readily perceived" in the Riverside edition), while others are more

cunningly disguised (II.i.23); while orchestrating the bed-trick, Isabella agrees to meet

Angelo "[ulpon the heavy middle of the night" (IV.i.3 5); and, while contemplating his

impending act of rape, Angelo refers to "the strong and swelling evil / Of my

conception" ( K.iv.6-7). The multiple significances ascribed to the image of a

pregnant body-- that which is full and prosperous, yet which also represents grotesque

physical distortion and even possession by an alien consciousness-- suggest the

contradictory resonances with which procreation is imbued in Measirm for M e a n m .

Like the act of coition which precedes it, pregnancy in the play is represented only in

terms of calamitous extrernes. On the one hand, Angelo's metaphoric status as an

"ungenitured agent" who is "not made by man and woman in this downright way of

creation" (In.ii.167-8, 105-6) suggests a monstrous solipsism, in which farnily and

sexual reproduction are replaced with an unnatural, self-initiated creation, while on the

other, Juliet's naturaily conceived but illegitimate child is described by the Duke as

"the sin you cany" (LI.iii.19); an abomination which must be "[borne] in shme,ll in

both senses of the word (II.iii.20). In either case, the act of procreation is so

seriously problematized as to make the notion of "rescue through irnpregnation," on

73

which the theatrical device of the bed-trick relies, highly suspect.

Ostensibly, Memiire for Memzire's concems with procreation derive from the

legitimate fear of a society overburdened with unwanted children. As Elbow remarks

to the Duke in an effort to incriminate the "wicked bawd" Pompey (III.ii.l9), "if there

be no remedy for it but that you will needs buy and sel1 men and women like beasts,

we shall have al1 the world drink brown and white bastard" (III.ii.1-3). Mistress

Overdonets compla.int that, "with the wu, what with the sweat, what with the gallows,

and what with poverty, I am custom shrunk" (I.ii.82-4) vividly demonstrates the

desperate circumstances of Vienna's marginalized population, to which many of the

cityts illegitimate children would presumably be bom; such appears to be the situation

of the prostitute Kate Keepdown, who, we are told, remains unmarried despite the fact

that her child by Lucio is "a year and a quarter old corne Philip and Jacobf1 (III.ii.201-

2). As Marilyn Williamson has persuasively argued, bastardy was a significant

problern in Renaissance England, suggesting that the play's harsh criticism of sexual

incontinence would have been keenly appreciated by the society for whom Meastire

for Memirrr was written (Williamson, 8 1-99).

Beneath this reasonable social anxiety about the production of illegitimate

children, however, lies another, more insidious fear, which is based on a visceral terror

of the body and mortality itself. Like sexual desire, which Ange10 claims has tumed

his body to "carrion" (II-ii. l66), pregnancy represents both a powerful physicd process

over which the intellect has little or no control, and a potent reminder of the

procreative cycle of birth and maturation which ends, inevitably, in death. This latter

74

association between pregnancy and the finite life-cycles of nature is suggested by the

play's insistent representation of the female body through images of gowth , ripening

and harvest. In their most positive manifestation, such images reflect the view that

human reproduction is a harmonious redization of the regenerative processes of the

natural world. This is the sentiment with which Lucio's description of Juliet's

pregnancy resonates, as he brings news of Claudia's irnprisonment to Isabella:

Your brother and his lover have embrac'd,

As those that feed grow full, as blossoming time

That from the seedness the bare fallow brings

To teeming foisin, even so her plenteous womb

Expresseth his full tilth and husban-. (I.iv.40-44)

The sense that the expansion of Juliet's "plenteous womb" is as natural and inevitable

a process as eating or farming the fields expresses an &rmative philosophy of

reproduction which is common to a number of Shakespeare's works. In representative

fashion, Sonnet 3 suggests that to deny an "unear'd womb" the "tillage of. .

.husbandry" is to refuse one's only chance for immortality: "Or who is he so fond will

be the tomb, / Of his self-love, to stop postenty? / Thou art thy mother's glass, and she

in thee / Calls back the lovely April of her prime, / So thou through windows of thine

age shah see, / Despite thy wrinkles, this thy golden time. / But if thou live remeber'd

not to be, / Die single, and thine image dies with thee. " (Sonnet 3, 5-1 2).

Lucio's pastoral description, despite it's farniliar resonances, proves highly

anomalous, both for the scathingly insulting and deceptive "fantastic," whose

75

worldview is rarely so optimistic, and within the play more broadly. Instead of

naturalising and legitimating Juliet's pregnancy, Lucio's words offer only an ironic

contrast with what follows: the use of images of ripening and harvest to suggest not

the positive, regenerative capacity of pregnancy, but rather it's corrupting effect on the

body of the woman who sacrifices her chastity in order to bear children. While

Isabella has the "cheek-roses" that declare her a fresh, unsoiled virgin, Mistress

Overdonefs name itself suggests that her body has become over-ripe with sexual use

(I.iv.16). Sirnilarly, Kate Keepdown is described as a "rotten medlar," or a fruit which

rots before it becomes ripe, irnplying that, in the case of sexually active and

procreating women, Lucio's "blossoming time" becornes a force which eschews organic

maturation in favour of an unnatural and premature decay (1V. i~ . 174). Lucio himself

later refers to "your fresh whore and your powdered bawd; an unshunned consequence,

it must be so" (UI.ii.57-8), reinforcing the sense that sex and pregnancy bring a

degradation to the fernale body which is as inexorable as the seasonal dissolution of

the natural world.

If M e u s i t ~ for Measitrr offers little hope for the women in whose bodies

illegitimate children are conceived, it is equally pessirnistic about the offspring which

result. To be bom in M e m r e for Memitre is to be "nurs'd by baseness" (1II.i. 15); it is

a death sentence of which one's very flesh is a constant and oppressive reminder. The

association between birth and death, between acts of creation and forces of destruction,

appears in a number of guises throughout the play; most notably, in links between

pregnancy and murder (or execution), and through references to aborted births. In

76

both cases, the inception of a new life is presented as the inevitable precursor to its

violent and premature expiration.

The sinful nature of Juliet's extramarital pregnancy is accentuated through the

play's insistence that bastardy is a crime of fatal gravity and consequence. This

correlation between illegitimate birth and death is first implied by the Provost's

euphemistic remark that Juliet has "blistered her report" through her premature

indulgence with Claudio (11-iii. 12). Although it is the official's intention to offer a

sympathetic view of the couple's circumstances (Claudio is "a young man / More fit to

do another such offense / Than die for this" m.iii. 13-15]), the metaphoric association

between Juliet's genitalia and the barre1 of a rifle creates the disturbing impression that

femaie sexuai anatomy is, dunng both intercourse and birth, an instrument of

destruction.

The straightforward Ange10 makes this relationship even more explicit when he

explains to Isabella why he refuses to exercise more lenience in Claudio's case:

It were as good

To pardon him îhat hath from nature stol'n

A man already made, as to remit

Their saucy sweetness that do coin heaven's image

In starnps that are forbid. 'Tis dl as easy

Falsely to take away a life m i e made

As to put metal in restrained means

To make a false one. (II.iv.42-9)

77

For Angelo, sex and procreation outside of legal boundaries are akxn not only to

counterfeiting, as the figure of coins and stamps suggests, but to murder. Creating

"false" life is as easy as destroying "a life true made;" but, as Isabella later concludes,

the former is a much graver offense than the latter: "1 had rather my brother die by the

law than my son should be unlawfully bom" (TI1.i. 189-91). Whichever crime is

considered the more heinous, however, the point is clear: in both material and ethical

terms, illegitimate birth is inextncably linked with the loss of life. In what is perhaps

its most perverse tum, M e m m for Measzm reifies this relationship when the bawd

Pompey, a man who is implicated in the births of perhaps hundreds of bastards, is

given the secondary occupation of executioner. Not only does Pompey's

transformation suggest, as Adelman points out, a "Iiteralization of the pun that

identifies death and orgasm," but it solidifies the play's insistent connection between

the conception of life, and its subsequent annihilation (87).

It is not only the termination of adult lives which is linked with procreation in

the play, but also the prernature death of children through abortion or miscarriage. As

Mario DiGangi observes, little attention has conventionally been given to the fact that

the Duke's executioner (and Pompey's new superior) has a name, "Abhorson", which

not only recalls "abhor," "whore" and "whoreson," but which is a virtual homonym for

"abortion" (600). With even more force than Angelo's earlier linkage of birth and

murder, Abhorson's highly suggestive name conflates the act of illicit sex, the

illegitimate birth which results, and the subsequent execution of the offender into a

single instance of death before birth. This is not the play's only reference to

78

terminated pregnancy; when Angelo describes the sins which his newly fortified laws

will punish, it is in terms of the forestalment of a generation of monstrous creatures:

". . .what future evils, / Either now, or by remissness new conceiv'd, / And so in

progress to be hatch'd and bom, / Are now to have no successive degrees" (n.ii.95-8).

Later, when he contemplates "the strong and swelling evils of [his own] conception"

(couched, suggestively, in another pregnancy figure), Angelo refers to the self-

destructive consequences of his impending rape of Isabella in the language of aborted

pregnancy (II.iv.7): "This deed unshapes me quite, makes me unpregnant / And dull to

d l proceedings" QV.iv.20-21). Whether it is his own sexual indiscretions, or those of

orhers, Angelo insists on ernploying a metaphoric language which, like Pompey's

change of occupation and the executioner's peculiar name, elides sex, birth and death

into a single figurative moment.

The result of Meanire forMeostrrels obsessive association of both coition and

procreation with transgression, corruption, murder and aborted births is, as was

previousiy suggested, the creation of a dramatic climate in which the magical, folkloric

bed-trick seems disturbingly out of place. In a world where all sex is illicit,

intercourse inevitably leads to pregnancy, and birth is the macabre precursor to

premature death, the notion of a sexual rescue, in which virtue is recovered and the

guilty are punished through a single sexual act, seems not only implausible, but grimly

ironic. This irony is foregrounded by the play's insistence on emphasizing not the

fantastic or self-consciously theatrical nature of the bed-trick, but rather the base

materiality of its sexual and procreative function. During Angelots dialogue with

79

Isabella, in which the deputy first proposes the exchange of her virginity for her

brother's life, he employs not only the expected ribaid banter (in response to Isabella's

introductory, "1 corne to know your pleasure," Angelo replies, "That you might know

it, would much better piease me than to dernand what 'tis" [II.iv.3 1-31). but also a

punning allusion to the pregnancy which will inevitably follow their assignation:

"Plainly conceive, 1 love you" (LI.iv.141). The suggestion that Angelo's "love" will

result in the conception of a child is, given what the play has already implied about

the nature of illegitimate pregnancy, a particularly hom@ing notion.

Even when Angelo's fantasy of coerced sex is transfomed into the more benign

bed-trick, references to intercourse and pregnancy abound. During her conversation

with the disguised Duke, Isabella echoes Angelo's earlier dotrbie-entendre when she

expresses her enthusiasm at the notior! of exchanging Mariana's body for her own:

"The image of it gives me content already, and 1 trust it will grow to a most

prosperous perfection" (III.i.259-60). Like Angelo's bilingual punning (as DiGangi

observes, "plainly conceive" also plays on the French plein), Isabella's metaphor

suggests not only the growth of an idea, but also an increase in her "content" in the

volumetric sense (597). After Isabella describes in transparently sexual terms the

"garden circummur'd with brickt' (III.ii.28) where she has agreed to meet Angelo

"upon the heavy / middle of the night" (LII.ii.34-S), the Duke completes the wordplay

with his self-satisfied observation that the plan is "well borne up" (nI.ii.48). From

the male intnider "mak[ing] his opening with this bigger key" (III.ii.31), to the

"heavy middle" which will "grow to a most prosperous perfection," to the issue which

80

is "well borne," every stage of the procreative cycle is covertly alluded tu during the

verbal preparation for the bed-trick. Although, as in AIl's Well, the trick itself occurs

offstage, the preceding dialogue ensures that it is the literal physicality of sex and

pregnancy, rather than the more appropriately comic elements of stagecrafc and

providence, which are forernost in the minds of the audience when, in the final scene,

the plot is brought to its uneasy resolution.

The marriages which comprise this resolution are, as was previously suggested,

even more unsahseing than that (or, if Diana is presumed to select a husband, those)

with which AZlk Well concludes. Although a chastened Bertram and an emboldened

Helena, having each endured the hardships which their individual choices have brought

about, might be seen as two maturing inàividuals whose rnarriage suggests a tentative

reconciliation between man and woman, the older generation and the younger, and

members of the upper and lower classes, it is impossible to make such optirnistic

predictions about M e m m for Memitre's promised nuptials. There is nothing

redeeming about the coerced marriages of a potential rapist and his abandoned fiancee,

a clown and his rejected prostitute, or a scheming voyeur and a latent masochist.

Although these categorizations are crude and certainly exaggerated, they foreground

the nearly impossible imaginative feat required to satisfactorily admit Measzim for

Mea~ure's transgressive and destructive sexualities into the narrow and socidly-

construed institution of marriage. Even more than in Ml's Well, where it is at leas?

possible to imagine that Bertram will eventually corne to value the marriage that has

been forced on him by the King (and, more obliquely, by the genre of comedy itself),

Measlrre for Memire exaggerates the force and idiosyncratic perversity of its

characters' desires until, by the final scene, the possibility that marriage can

successfully manage sexual drive seems as remote as the promise that comedy cm

adequately represent it.

Conclusion

Memcre for Meanrrr's bleak conclusion marks the end of Shakespeare's

comedic career, and, 1 have argued, the final stage in the focussed exploration of the

conflict between social institutions and sexual desire which is the central concern of

al1 of the problem plays. Using the shared trope of the "bartered bride" as a point of

depamire, Tmihcs and Cresszdu, A Il'r Well Thut Ends Weil, and Measire for Measicre

each examines a different facet of the vexed relationships among love, marriage,

desire, and the theatrical genres which have conventionally represented them. As the

progression from Tmilus and Cressidds idedistic critique of a rigid patriarchy to

Meuszrrp for Memiire's anarchic conflation of iegitimate and transgressive modes of

desire suggests, the trajectory traced by these three plays is a graduai movement from

the festive comedies' optimistic, teleological faith in the possibility of a "happy

ending," to the bleak and terrifying cynicism of the great tragedies.

Even more than their critical usefulness in bridging the diverse dramatic forms

of the Shakespearian canon, however, the triumph of the problem plays lies in their

masterfully juxtaposed interrogations o f both the intenial, psychological concerns of

sexuaiity, love, and marriage, and the extemal, generic challenges presented by the

comic form. In their recognition that comedy is inherently implicated in a set of

assumptions goveming not only social mores and romantic relationships, but sexual

preferences and constructions of gender, the problem plays reflect a remarkably

sophisticated understanding of the closely related diversities of human relationships

83

and modes of artistic representation.

Although the cynicism and inconclusiveness of the problem plays suggests a

limitation on Shakespeare's ability to imagine both a comrnunity more forgiving of

sexual transgression and failures of love and fidelity, and a form which might

accommodate such a narrative, the romances constitute just such an imaginative and

representative feat. In The Winter's Tale, the bipartite structure and foikloric narrative

of AN'S Weil Thm Ends Well, as well as Tmiitts and Cressidds anxieties about female

fidelity, are reworked in such a way that neither dramatic integrity, nor the emotional

resonance of a deeply-felt reconciliation, is sacrificed. Like the enchanted

metamorphosis with which The Winfer's Tale ends, the romances transform the

destructive sexual energies of the problern plays into a positive movement towards

individuaI evolution, social reconstruction, and romantic reconciliation. Thus, although

the problem plays themselves appear to conclude with only cynicism and disorder,

Shakespeare's final works offer a suggestion of how the fracturing of the comic

universe which these works represent might be understood as the necessary antecedent

to his most creative, balanced and idealistic dramatic vision.

Endnotes

1. A significant exception is Carol Neely, who, in an analysis which is closely

related to my own, argues that Tmiliis and Cressida, A II's Well and Mcaszrre for

Memzrtv should be considered together as plays which share a fundamental concern

with "sexuaiity and its vexed relation to social authority" (60). Neely's introductory

discussion of the connections among the problem plays is exceptionally insightful, as

is her reading of Allk Well Thai Ends Weil; she does not, however, explore Tmiftrs

and Cressida and Measrm for Measirre in the same depth as she does Ali's Weil, nor

does she accept the close relationship between the plays' debased sexualities and their

status as cornedies which is integral to rny own analysis.

2 . For a comprehensive survey of negative critical responses to Cressida, see

Grant L. Goth and Oliver H. Evans, "Cressida and the World of the Play,"

Shakespeare Strrdies 8 ( 1975): 23 1 -3 9.

3. Anne Burton provides a more throrough discussion of Tmilirs and Cressidds

generic ambiguity in her introduction to the play in The Riverside Shakespeare

(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974) 443-47.

4. Other critics who have historically found Tmilus and Cressida unsatisfiing

include Samuel Johnson ("it is not one of those [plays] in which either the full extent

of [Shakespeare's] views or the elevation of his fancy is fully displayed"), Charles

Lamb ("1s it possible that Shakespeare should never have read Homer, in Chapman's

version at least? If he had read it, could he mean to rmvesty it in the pans of these

85

big boobies, Ajax and Achilles?"), G. G. Gervinus ("This uncertain character of the

drama and the doubtful connection of the poet with doubtful sources, are the causes of

quitting this play with greater dissatisfaction, than any other of Shakespeare's" j, and

Georg Brandes ("It reads like the invention of a medieval barbarian"). AI1 of these

citations appear in the MucMilZm Casebook on Troilus and Cressida, ed. Priscilla

Martin @,ondon: MacMillan, 1974) 33, 43, 52, 59.

5. Both W. W. Lawrence in Shakespeam's Pmblem Cornedies and Northrop

Frye in The Myth of Del ivemce have advanced the view that the bed-tnck is the

sarne type of magical narrative intervention as those which resolve plot conflicts in the

festive cornedies. I discuss this argument in greater depth both in the intruduction, and

later in this chapter.

6. Although McLuskie argues that Mearum for Memirm precludes a feminist

analysis because its female characters are so absolutely dominated by patriarchal

structures, 1 feel that it it is the subversion of sexuality more broadly which makes the

play difficult to discuss in purely feminist terms.

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Dowden, Edward. Shakespere: A Criricd Srtrdy of his Mind md A H. London:

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Frye, Northrop. The Myrh of Delivemnce: Reflections on Shakespeare's Pmbieni

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Kastan, David Scott. "A Il's Weil That Ends Well and the Linzits of Comedy."

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Lawrence, W. W. Shakespem's Pmbienr Cornedies. New York: Frederick Ungar,

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Neely, Carol T. Bmken Nziptials in Shakespeare's Plays. N e w Haven: Yale UP, 1985.

Rossiter, A. P. Angel With Homs: Fgfeen Lectures on Shakespeme. Ed. Graham

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Schanzer, Emest. The Pmblcm PIws of Shakespeare: A Study of Julius Caesar,

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Thomas, Vivian. The Mord Universe of Shakespeare's Pmblent Plays. New York:

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87

Tillyard, E. M. W. Shakespeare's Pmblenl P l q x Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1950.

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Wheeler, Richard P. Shakespcarc 's Developnz ent and the Pmblenr Conz edics: Tirm and

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90

Measttm for Meusirre

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